Is Consciousness an Illusion? - <AUTHOR> http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/03/09/is-consciousness-an-illusion-dennett-evolution/ <comment><USER2> Yes consciousness is an illusion but the illusion is real.

We are pattern recognizing feedback loops (with memory) who simulate _a_ reality not _the_ reality.

This simulation happen to be calibrated in such a way that it allow us to navigate _the_ reality with some success by proxy of our simulation of it.

<comment><USER3> What is the reality?

<comment><USER4> Not OP, but of course physics. Not that this is necessarily the ultimate answer, there may as well be yet another layer, a layer explaining why physics is the way it is. But strictly speaking that would probably still be physics. This is of course also pretty dangerous, one easily ends up with an infinity of layers, each trying to explain the layer above.

It ultimately comes down to questions like why is there anything at all. But those seem way out of reach at the moment and maybe they will remain forever. Being part of what you are trying to study may obstruct your view in an unsurmountable way.

<comment><USER5> You could just as easily say that consciousness is all that exists and the physical universe is the illusion. There is no objective reality.

<comment><USER4> That changes just what reality is, what thing you are trying to understand. It is no longer something outside and independent of your mind but your mind itself and the things within it. Your mind would become the objectively real thing and you could still study the structure of your consciousness, of your experiences, what causes the regularities in them we call the laws of physics and so on.

We essentially just decided to ignore most of such possibilities most of the time, from solipsism as you mentioned over Last Thursdayism [1] to living in a simulation or the Matrix. They may seem interesting to ponder about at times but in the end they just prevent you from learning anything at all. You can always come up with a strange scenario in which anything you might believe turns out to be falls.

That certainly sounds kind of arbitrary and unscientific, but without some founding assumptions about reality you get nowhere and that is of course not helpful at all. We should certainly keep an eye on those assumption and we do, living in a simulation for example pops up quite frequently, but for the moment our success seems to justify our assumptions.

[1] The world came into existence last Thursday in precisely the state of last Thursday with all the memories and evidence of the time before last Thursday just to fool us.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> World Science Festival has a slew of really awesome talks etc on this subject posted to youtube:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4H9ul7pqezs&list=PLKy-B3Qf_R...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4H9ul7pqezs&list=PLKy-B3Qf_RDVn61ogKUR2lEHV0dGmWUc8)

And The Neuroscience of Consciousness – with Anil Seth is really great: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRel1JKOEbI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRel1JKOEbI)

Information, Evolution, and intelligent Design - With Daniel Dennett: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZX6awZq5Z0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZX6awZq5Z0)

<comment><USER7> That second talk is fantastic. Thanks for sharing.

One interesting note he makes is that (according to metrics they developed) the hallucinogens really do help you achieve higher level of consciousness. All those self-reports of reaching "awakening" and "enlightenment" could actually be supported by neuroscience. Unfortunately it's too hard to get proper funding for any research on subject.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It doesn't really matter what is running the physics, whether it's a "real" world doing that, or some other process that some then call "illusion" which imho the same anyway after all it's real enough that we're able to think inside of it. Whether it's an illusion or not, the fact is that the consciousness is still there. The process that makes us aware (not just the sensing, the ability to know you think about it etc...) of the information (the world, no matter how it works) needs to be explained.

Imho Douglas Hofstadter comes closest to trying to explain it without all that kind of pitfalls in "I Am a Strange Loop". Not that it actually truly explains it, but at least it acknowledges those things that make me normally dismiss theories that could explain consciousness.

<comment><USER9> >fact is that the consciousness is still there.

There is a small problem with this claim. Or, at least there is a problem if you happen to believe in popperian philosophy of science that says that claims that are not falsifiable are non-scientific.

Obviously, from popperian point of view that claim is about as unfalsifiable as is the claim that God created earth and everything on it. Which may be true or may be not, but the claim is not a claim in the scientific realm but in religious realm, and I would be a bit vary to consider claims in religious (or non-scientific if that is a bit less sensitive word) realm "facts".

I mean, it _feels_ obvious that I have conscience, but how do you prove or disprove that claim? I have no idea. It _feels_ obvious that earth is flat, but there are ways to prove that wrong.

<comment><USER10> _it feels obvious that I have conscience, but how do you prove or disprove that claim?_

Why do you need to prove the obvious?

 _It feels obvious that earth is flat_

It doesn't if you climb a mountain or see a ship under the horizon. It's a very thin layer of "obviousness" that disappears with very little reasoning.

There's nothing similar for consciousness, on the contrary every argument that has been tried against it feels terribly clumsy and artificial.

<comment><USER11> The question already has uses. It is worth asking ourselves wether other animals are conscious. It is worth asking ourselves whether a human phoetus is conscious. And sooner or later we will need to ask ourselves wether machines are conscious.

<comment><USER10> The first two questions are tricky. The third is really the reason we're reading about consciousness so often. But I'm not sure that questioning consciousness reality itself is so useful to replicate it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The very notion doesn't even make sense.

Illusion presupposes consciousness.

<comment><USER13> It sounds like you might have skipped over the part of the article that clarifies how Dennett is using that word. I excerpted it here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13791547](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13791547)

<comment><USER12> But there's nothing in that passage to counter what I said. Illusion still needs some conscious entity to be fooled.

Besides, the idea that: "The underlying reality, however, what exists in itself and not just for us or for other creatures, is accurately represented only by the scientific image—ultimately in the language of physics, chemistry, molecular biology, and neurophysiology."

That's again a certain, centuries old, epistemology. And not a very good one. I would be better if he would have said "is best approximated" rather than "accurately represented".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I came up with this analogy to think about prior and new knowledge: Aliens.

If aliens exist, they will have existed a priori, or before thought or knowledge. Granted, they wouldn't have existed a priori from their standpoint, but the logical conclusion, once you've found some aliens, is that there are always more aliens.

i.e. If life is a "thing" in the universe, it is a "thing" because of a priori knowledge.

If aliens don't exist, then that fact would also be a priori, given you could do an exhaustive search for aliens in the universe. As you probably can't do an exhaustive search because of size/energy constraints, you can look at the claim "there are no aliens" as one which is unprovable, and thus irrational.

i.e. If we never find aliens in the universe, it is a "thing" that can not be a priori (or a posteriori for that matter).

This "alternate fact" itself may be a priori, inasmuch as the state of being of some things may not be proved while being limited to observations (and perhaps perception) within the search scope.

Edited for logic errors. Also, the last statement here takes a stab at why the current administration's use of alternate facts can be considered a "tactic" in which the scope of observation and perception of others is greatly limited.

</comment><comment><USER15> One thing that always strikes me about this kind of analysis or discussion is that it presupposes we have reached some kind of evolutionary final state -- that humans now possess all of the "competence" and "affordances" that will be necessary to comprehend the true nature of our existence and experience. Personally, I think that's naive, and that we are still very far from true understanding. In the same way that a cat is very far from comprehending geopolitics or calculus.

Related to "final state" is the assumption that there will be no successor beings. Surely evolution will continue to create beings (bio or silicon) that are more competent than humans -- perhaps it already has. Cattle can observe humans and their actions, but the cattle do not comprehend that they are captive and food. I'm not sure why it would be any different between humans and successors.

</comment><comment><USER16> Dennett denies his own first person evidence of his own consciousness so that he can sustain his belief that all that exists is the materialistic world view. Motivated reasoning in the extreme and completely violating Occam's Razor which is quite ironic.

<comment><USER2> first person evidence doesen't lead you anywhere. Its a = a, true but quite trivial.

<comment><USER17> It does when the question is, "Does first person evidence exist?"

<comment><USER18> First person evidence obviously does exist (unless I'm responding to a philosophical zombie), the problem is that it is cannot be verified by an outside observer. I suppose you could say that something only becomes evidence when externally verified, but my response to that is that you have no way of knowing if that external verification is real or just a figment of your imagination, so that external verification doesn't really get you anywhere.

<comment><USER11> You could very be a philosophical zombie yourself, just one programmed by evolution to experience consciousness. That's the argument as far as I understand it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The user-illusion metaphor is a central idea in Donald Hoffman's work. I'm not sure who borrowed it from whom.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYp5XuGYqqY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYp5XuGYqqY)

</comment><comment><USER4> This still seems not to [try to] answer the really hard question - how does a bunch of quarks and electrons go from mindlessly following the laws of physics to saying »Look, we are a bunch of quarks and electrons!«? I admittedly found it somewhat hard at times to follow the argument of the article, but in the end it seems to argue that consciousness is just one of many models embedded in our brain, more specifically a metamodel of the other models. But, assuming that I did not misunderstand the argument, that seems not to help much to explain how the laws of physics manage to reflect on themselves and bring the the awareness of existence into existence.

<comment><USER20> The reason for this is solidly rooted in evolution. Having an internal model of your surroundings allows you to better interact with your surroundings. This is an evolutionary advantage. At some point, this expands to a model of yourself.

I can see 2 ways for this model to come about. The first is directly, where being able to anticipate your own reactions is advantageous. The second is socially. That is, you need to model others to better anticipate their reactions. When those others are similar enough to yourself, those same modeling procedures also start working on yourself.

This kind of modeling can get started by very simple correlations. Say you accidentally get some photo-sensitive cells. Over time, if their output starts affecting what direction you move (say away from the cells when less light falls on them) and all of a sudden you are capable of fleeing from predators.

<comment><USER4> That is certainly a point of view I would agree with, but that is not what I meant. I did not mean how the structure forms but how the structure becomes conscious and self-aware. Let me try to explain with a though experiment, assuming humans are purely physical.

You build a human-like robot with cameras, and microphones and actuators. You also build a gigantic mechanical computer out of gears and hook up the sensors and actuators of the robot to the mechanical computer. Finally you run a quantum mechanical simulation of a human brain and nerve system on the mechanical computer.

Shouldn't the whole thing now be equivalent to a human? Shouldn't it be conscious and self-aware? This then raises the question, when and how did the gears stop to just turn according to simple rules and became a mind capable of exploring and thinking about the world? There seems to be some kind of large jump between mindless rotating gears and becoming aware of you own existence. I have a hard time making really precise what I mean, but I hope you get the idea.

<comment><USER20> I'd say that such a 'philosophical' zombie would indeed be conscious. In fact, I'd call it human.

As for how it arose, I'd posit a theory: As an animal starts modeling others, at some point it's model includes the others are also modeling others. Now, combine this with that animal (and the others) also modeling themselves. At some point, probably during collaboration, it starts becoming useful to start reconciling these models with each other by communicating about them.

Now, reconciling models about a third party is already a big step, but essentially speculation. At some point though, someone might want to reconcile their model of you with your own model of yourself. After all, your model is probably a better source of truth. This requires phrases like: "I think that", "I wanted", perhaps even "I wondered".

Interestingly, this account of consciousness is rooted very deeply in the 'second-person'. It is very much a social construct. I'd also like to point out this is naught but a hypothesis.

<comment><USER4> There is probably some truth in the mind being a result of social interaction. If you read about feral children, a common theme seems to be that those children end up somewhat like animals lacking essential human characteristics.

 _I 'd say that such a 'philosophical' zombie would indeed be conscious. In fact, I'd call it human._

I don't think those two are compatible. A philosophical zombie lacks consciousness, sentience, and qualia, a human does not. And I don't see why this collection of gears should lack any of them, why it should be a philosophical zombie. Those gear should feel pain, and not in the sense that the positions of some of those gears indicate that there is pain, like a bit in a computer memory, but just like you and me experience pain.

And that seems, at least to me, a gigantic leap. I can perfectly understand how you could evaluate different sensor inputs, calculate a pain level, and store it somewhere in memory. And then you could easily create reactions, try to get away from whatever causes you pain, you could make the robot scream.

But that seems nothing like how I experience pain, I really feel it. Humans don't even need external sources of pain, we can experience pain from memories and thoughts alone. Admittedly that may be an artificial distinction, one could certainly imagine a kind of internal sensor input that does not sense external stimuli but the state of other parts of your brain.

But all that doesn't help, at least me, at all understanding why I can feel pain and what it means to feel pain in the first place. I can not make the jump from a physical and inanimate picture of a human made out of particles to how it feels to be a human. I can not understand how a collection of gears could possibly feel pain.

And when I say not understand I mean it in the most powerful way. It's not that I can not understand the details, it's not that I don't understand anything about it but know how I could learn about it, it's much worse, I can not even imagine how I could possibly try to understand it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The idea of the illusion is not really a new one: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_(illusion)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_\(illusion\)) .

<comment><USER22> That is completely different though. Hinduism states that other than consciousness everything else is an illusion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> As I read it, this is an argument about what it means to be 'real'. The argument goes along the lines of consciousness can only be described behaviouristically. Therefore it is a behaviour. Moreover, consciousness only is a 'metaphor' for the material world, rather than a description of the material world.

This is then taken to mean that it is so far divorced from the material world so as to merely be an illusion.

</comment><comment><USER23> No. It's not an illusion. It's an ability to perceive abstract meaning from raw data, evaluate and act in order to maximize future rewards and the ability to learn in order to improve perception and acting.

The article says that abstract concepts representing whole classes of perceptions are user-illusions. They are just patterns, and the concepts they represent are the best explainers of the data. The patterns exist in the data, they are not made-up as the article might imply. They are patterns discovered by experience, and learned.

Even if consciousness and abstract concepts were all "illusions", that would expand the meaning of illusion, they would become equal to the concepts of mind and soul of the past.

My position on consciousness is that we don't need the concept of consciousness. We should use the concepts of Reinforcement Learning instead. Instead of consciousness, we're concerned with an agent. The agent is just an entity embedded in a world, an external environment. It can sense the environment and act, trying to maximize its rewards. For humans, the ultimate reward is survival and reproduction (which is another kind of survival). So it's a loop of perception-judgement-action-reward.

We don't need the often mystical and imprecise concept of consciousness because it generates useless debates. It's too loaded, everyone means something else by it, the experts can't even define it in a way they can all agree upon. It's a legacy from the past, one step above the concept of soul, but one step behind that of autonomous agent optimizing actions and learning from rewards. The concept of agent is much more parsimonious, it can be easily defined, measured, simulated and studied from the 3rd person perspective, unlike consciousness.

</comment><comment><USER24> The question is incredibly ridiculous. Consciousness is the most first-hand evidence we have. Everything is experienced via consciousness. You could ask if neurons are illusions, or if matter and energy are illusions, but it's ridiculous to ask if consciousness is an illusion.

</comment><comment><USER25> If rats could talk they would say they have consciousness. This is not a human trait as even some philosophers seem to believe.

</comment><comment><USER26> If you ask me, the idea that consciousness is an illusion is an illusion...huh

</comment><comment><USER27> Doesn't an illusion imply a consciousness to experience the illusion?

</comment><comment><USER28> Betteridge's Law holds, and the author misrepresents Dennett's thesis. Dennett doesn't deny the existence of consciousness, animals, etc. as claimed, but rather says that our conceptions of consciousness, animals, etc. represent only the subset of existent phenomena that can be conceptualized with hardware that evolved via natural selection. Dennett posits that this effect favors conceptions that benefit the conceiver's chances of reproduction (either in a genetic or memetic sense) rather than conceptions that accurately represent the phenomena.

Dennett's work is much better than this review, and I recommend reading the book rather than the review.

<comment><USER16> That's just a wordy way of saying that we evolved according to Darwin and our consciousness was selected. Not terribly original or deep. Yawn.

<comment><USER29> Is that a critique of the few sentences in the post you're replying to, or a considered rebuttal of your reading of the content of the book?

<comment><USER16> It is a critique of the criticism of the review. If the review is wrong and Dennett's point is really just the standard materialistic worldview plus the trivial observation that consciousness evolved according to Darwin's laws, then it is really trifling.

<comment><USER20> I'd expect the book to contain well thought-out non-obvious conclusions from those rather obvious assumptions. Perhaps expanded by giving examples of potential underlying mechanisms.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> If it is, is this an indictment of consciousness? Or of illusion?

</comment><comment><USER31> If consciousness is an illusion, who is it falling for it?

<comment><USER13> We are, obviously. From the article:

"Nor do we have to understand the mechanisms that underlie those competencies. In an illuminating metaphor, Dennett asserts that the manifest image that depicts the world in which we live our everyday lives is composed of a set of user-illusions,

'like the ingenious user-illusion of click-and-drag icons, little tan folders into which files may be dropped, and the rest of the ever more familiar items on your computer's desktop. What is actually going on behind the desktop is mind-numbingly complicated, but users don't need to know about it, so intelligent interface designers have simplified the affordances, making them particularly salient for human eyes, and adding sound effects to help direct attention. Nothing compact and salient inside the computer corresponds to that little tan file-folder on the desktop screen.'

He says that the manifest image of each species is 'a user-illusion brilliantly designed by evolution to fit the needs of its users.' In spite of the word 'illusion' he doesn't wish simply to deny the reality of the things that compose the manifest image; the things we see and hear and interact with are 'not mere fictions but different versions of what actually exists: real patterns.' The underlying reality, however, what exists in itself and not just for us or for other creatures, is accurately represented only by the scientific image—ultimately in the language of physics, chemistry, molecular biology, and neurophysiology."

<comment><USER12> > _The underlying reality, however, what exists in itself and not just for us > or for other creatures, is accurately represented only by the scientific > image—ultimately in the language of physics, chemistry, molecular biology, > and neurophysiology. "_

They are also mediated by consciousness. Unconscious scientists rarely do experiments or interpret their results.

This is epistemology 101.

<comment><USER28> The underlying reality is absolutely not mediated by human consciousness, and I think the author's mistake here is even bringing up the human scientific fields, which muddies their point.

Dennett does end up explaining a lot of epistemology 101 because his audience isn't philosophy academia.

Dennett's innovation, which isn't described well by this book review, is to assert that epistemology is driven by reproductive pressure (both genetic and memetic).

<comment><USER16> How is that an innovation?!

Materialists have been asserting since forever that consciousness arises from the brain and that the brain evolved according to Darwin's laws. What is _new_ in Dennett's viewpoint?

<comment><USER28> Dennett goes into a lot more detail as to the processes by which evolution affects consciousness and the resulting properties of consciousness than anyone in my (admittedly limited) reading.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I think consciousness is a concept created by our brain. It likes the concept of 'angry'. We all know what it feels like. But there is no 'angry'thing, our brain created it too.

</comment><comment><USER33> Sam Harris disagrees, arguing "Consciousness is the one thing in this universe that cannot be an illusion" [https://www.samharris.org/blog/item/the-mystery- of-conscious...](https://www.samharris.org/blog/item/the-mystery-of- consciousness)

</comment><comment><USER34> >MARCH 9, 2017 ISSUE

That's from the future!

</comment><comment><USER35> No.

</comment><comment><USER36> No.

<comment><USER37> No, you're an illusion!</comment></comment>


A wireframe kit for Google Drawings and 4 reasons it beats Omnigraffle and Visio - <AUTHOR> http://mortenjust.com/2010/04/19/a-wireframe-kit-for-google-drawings/

<comment><USER2> I use Mockingbird for wireframing. <http://gomockingbird.com>

It doesn't allow collaboration but it is entirely focused on wire framing (unlike GDrawings, OmniGraffle and Visio). It provides a great experience.

For everything else, I use OmniGraffle.

<comment><USER3> And we should be getting collaboration soon - I'm going to start working on it tomorrow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I use paper and pencil for my mockups. They've got the unique property of not making you think about details, but allowing you to put them in at any level. You don't need any skill either. It works even if your drawings consist of lopsided rectangles.

<comment><USER5> > They've got the unique property of not making you think about details

Paper and pen is good too, but it makes me think about details like:

* Whether a line is straight

* Whether my writing is legible

* Whether my writing fits in the container

etc. I don't have to think about these when using a drawing app. Also I can send my render to an XML slicing service. On the other hand, connections are much easier to draw on paper.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Omnigraffle is a lot better than this for really making pretty diagrams, because it's connection aware and can do graph layout. Also, if you learn the Keyboard Shortcuts you can be really fast. It's one of the few applications I use as much as emacs, and it's worth learning.

People in this thread have been saying pen and paper, but it's (obviously) a pain to scan a bunch of pen/paper sheets for search later or remote collaboration.

FWIW, a new solution I've been using with some success just over the past few days is Penultimate, a really simple/nice IPad _notebook_ app -- as distinct from a sketching app.

<http://ipad.maccreate.com/2010/04/16/penultimate-ipad-app/>

Use that with a $15 Pogo Sketch (you can get it in the Apple Store) and a $11 pair of fingerless cloth gloves from Hot Topic ([http://www.hottopic.com/hottopic/Accessories/GlovesArmwarmer...](http://www.hottopic.com/hottopic/Accessories/GlovesArmwarmers/Gun- Fingerless-Gloves-135608.jsp))

The gloves are really handy as they turn off palm detection, so you can rest your hand on the Ipad surface while you use the stylus, just like a normal sheet of paper.

<comment><USER7> I'm far too entertained by the fingerless gloves. Clever setup, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> OmniGraffle has been circling the drain in my work-flow for a while now; pen and paper easily beating it out most of the time. Wire-framing should be fast, quick, and recyclable. I've been impressed with Google drawings: it's not bloated (unlike onmingraffle) and it's visually clean (unlike balsamiq).

</comment><comment><USER9> I see five reasons, and they are all advantages of being cloud-based, rather than a desktop application. There isn't much about _drawing_ itself.

<comment><USER10> And there are plenty of disadvantages related to the drawing.

Most annoyingly, the fact that you can't alt+drag or alt+nudge (arrow keys) to duplicate an object. For me that's the single biggest time-saver when doing wireframes and mockups. Otherwise you spend a lot of time repositioning and realigning pasted objects.

Most desktop apps get it right. I've yet to find a web-based app that does.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've been looking for something like this. Lately it seems that we're doing more and more wireframing at my work, and having to pull out illustrator, and then deal with large files and passing them all around into SVN and whatnot has gotten to be a huge pain.

I'm going to check this out.

I'm also curious how their flowchart handing is. I've still never found a decent flowcharting program made for coders. It was getting to the point where I was actually considering making one to fill my need...

<comment><USER12> You could use latex; either directly or using dot2tex.

<http://www.texample.net/tikz/examples/simple-flow-chart/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The only "advantages" here have nothing to do with wireframing, they're just the advantages of any hosted service. When it comes down to it, Omnigraffle is better than Drawings for doing wireframes, because that's what it's meant to do.

On the other hand, how about <http://www.gomockingbird.com>?

</comment><comment><USER14> Google Drawings have a long way to go. First, they need to add the ability to "connect" lines. This is a very basic ability and I was astonished when I discovered it was missing. Then they need to add some REAL way to make stencils and reuse them. Stencil gallery anyone?

</comment><comment><USER15> Nice. Just the other day I was contemplating the use of a specialized webapp that allows me to easily create mockups of new user-interface designs. However, Google Drawings now seems extensive enough to be able to fulfill most of my needs with regard to UI prototyping.

I believe I read about Balsamiq on HN a while ago; it must be tough for a small company to operate in an area that intersects with areas google might be(come) active in.

<comment><USER16> I think Balsamiq saw this coming, in the past two months or so they've been publicly progressing with their development. Templates with inheritance, online saving, and components (so you can say design the footer and headers for several pages and have them be the same element reused.) are all on their way.

My point is, even if you're now competing with a team from Google, you're not over and out yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I used to use Etherpad and Dabbleboard for rough collaborative specs and mocks because they're realtime. Now Google Docs will do nicely.

</comment><comment><USER18> Um....can anyone tell me how to use these? Do I have to slice them up?

<comment><USER19> Just copy them using File -> Copy</comment></comment>


Imagine Where 2 Gigabit Speeds Will Take You - <AUTHOR> http://corporate.comcast.com/comcast-voices/imagine-where-2-gigabit-speeds-will-take-you

<comment><USER2> 18 million homes within a year seems really fast-- and presuming that they target larger cities first, there's a possibility a lot of us could get it.

I don't care about 1Gbps vs 2Gbps so much as getting serious connectivity. I'm tired of 20mbps that is often 0bps for a minute or two every couple of minutes.

I'd love to see comcast make this real, even if it's prompted by google fiber...

One thing that's is for sure-- the next time I move, I'm moving somewhere with really good internet.

</comment><comment><USER3> Comcast's speedboost means the connection will be 2Gbps for for roughly the first .03 seconds of your download. Then it will be about 2Mbps for the entire rest of the download. The only way to sustain anywhere near that speed for more than a second or two would be to have like 500 torrents downloading at the same time.

</comment><comment><USER4> Only it's probably going to be twice as expensive as Google Fiber and it's still run by the worst company ever.</comment>


Gut Germs Appear to Play Role in Multiple Sclerosis - how-about-this https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/gut-germs-appear-to-play-role-in-multiple-sclerosis/?print=true <comment><AUTHOR> Please allow me go offtopic and ramble for a bit. This article feels like a punch in the gut.

So before my tech career, I did a 1.5yr Fellowship at a renowned research lab -- The Rockefeller University. Our entire programme of research was around the possible causes of multiple sclerosis. One of the reasons I decided to pursue Computer Science rather than clinical research was the slow discovery cycle in clinical research. I got so much faster (albiet smaller) victories in Computer Science.

That was 1996. This is 20 years later and sadly we're still trying to determine the etiology of the disease. My research advisor passed away, the other is deep in retirement. We're still trying to figure out the mess of genetic and environmental factors which cause MS (our theory was Human Herpes Virus 6.)

I owe so much respect to individuals who pursue clinical research for a generation despite how slow progress can be. I was pulling my hair out in 1996 when I worked on this, because it was so slow with so little signal to success/failure. ...In the meantime, I get antsy if my build takes longer than two minutes or if a scrum sprint goes over by a day.

PS this is also why I admire Craig Venter ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craig_Venter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craig_Venter)) so much -- he worked so hard to institute the practices of automation into biomedical research. It is also why im so excited by Mousera/Vium

<comment><USER2> Its only gotten worse in the last 2 decades. There are a myriad of articles that pop up on HN about how bad bio had gotten. No one can replicate anything anyone else is doing and it seems like ~45% of published research these days is p-hacking to graduate students. It used to be 'publish or perish' but now its 'funding or famine'. Why not fudge the results, who is ever going to check, let alone prove p-hacking? The researchers have mortgages, college- funds, and college debt too. _Nature_ came out and said that a P of 0.005 (not .05) is the way to fix it. Like, guys, the culture is rotten from the core on up, you need to fix that, not add a 0. It makes sense, the funding is (long- term) drying up relative to the number of researchers, there is less money to go around, so we get to see who is swimming naked.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Bacteriophages lost out to antibiotics in the 1950s. Designing bacteriophages for specific microbes is fairly straight forward so you could design a probiotic loaded with good bacteria to be delivered with a bacteriophage against bad bacteria to quickly adjust the microbiome ecology towards a desired state. The nice thing is that bacteriophages are dietary supplements so you don't need drug approval (unless cure claims are made).

<comment><USER4> I think this story was shared on HN a couple months ago about phages. Didn't sound that straightforward : [http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_5913414de4b05e1ca203f7d4/a...](http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_5913414de4b05e1ca203f7d4/amp)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> _the gut immune system has 70– 80% of the body 's immune cells._

[http://m.ajpgi.physiology.org/content/277/5/G922](http://m.ajpgi.physiology.org/content/277/5/G922)

It seems like a pretty obvious connection once you know that detail. If you have any kind of chronic medical condition, you would likely benefit from improving your gut health. (Hint: Dietary changes are a good place to start.)

<comment><USER6> What kind of changes? I have a hard time searching google about gut health without feeling like none of it's scientific, and all a scam for advertising or selling products.

<comment><USER7> I've recently watched a ton of Ted talks on the subject (thank you, autoplay), so you can call me a proper internet know-it-all. The consensus seems to be: nobody knows, but the SAD certainly is not the right answer. As diverse as you can get and as little processed as you stand seem to be popular ideas too. Dropping sugar and milk seem commonly recommended, but they can pry my ice- cream from my cold, dead fingers.

<comment><USER8> Small amounts of animal protein and lots of raw greens and vegetables, tubers and roots. Everything else is extra. Be careful though about making any specific recommendations here or else someone with a different idea will attack you for not backing it up with scientific data. Because you shouldn't try to figure out what to eat until you get a PhD.

<comment><USER9> What's the value in raw vs cooked vegetables? I thought cooking makes their nutrients more bio-available. Do you really eat tubers raw? I can't imagine eating a potato raw. Our ancestors even always cooked them.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, this books makes the case against raw diets very well:

[https://www.amazon.com/Catching-Fire-Cooking-Made- Human/dp/0...](https://www.amazon.com/Catching-Fire-Cooking-Made- Human/dp/0465013627)

That's the thing with diets. There is a real well reasoned argument for and against most anything...

<comment><USER11> Does the book really present evidence that a raw diet is worse for human health than cooked food? From the table of content and introduction it seems to present a strong case that cooking affected human evolution. But that does not mean that it made humans healthier. For example, cooking could have made long-term health worse, but other benefits coming from increased food availability and shortening time to get it outweighed that.

<comment><USER10> It's not the main point of the book, but it does describe how it's very hard to live a healthy life on only raw food. I remember it pointing out that about half of women on such diets stop menstruating.

This is something our bodies do out of pretty desperate lack of nutrients, and it's of course devastating from an evolutionary standpoint.

The thesis of the book is that we've cooked food for so long that our digestive system is adapted to it. It even speculates that the shrunken digestive system made our bigger brains possible. All that is far from uncontroversial, but it's a well written and argued text.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This seems like the key thing:

 _There was another intriguing connection: Acinetobacter are molecular mimics of proteins found in myelin, the nerve cell coating that the immune system attacks in MS._

It sounds like a very similar situation to PANDAS and PANS: [http://www.pandasnetwork.org/understanding- pandaspans/what-i...](http://www.pandasnetwork.org/understanding- pandaspans/what-is-pans/)

Some bacteria have evolved to trick our immune system into ignoring them, but an overactive immune system will attack that bacteria and the human cells they're trying to mimic.

</comment><comment><USER13> Much of the auto-immune related diseases seem to be vaguely arriving at a similar conclusion lately.

<comment><USER9> Auto-immune diseases and their link to gut bacteria is not new. The relationship between MS and gut bacteria alone goes back to at least 2006 [1].

To learn more about auto-immune diseases and gut bacteria, I highly recommend the book An Epidemic of Absence [2]. It's an impressively well researched book that doesn't skimp on the science.

I managed to get my eczema under control by learning about the relationship between gut, food, inflammation, and auto-immunity.

[1]: [https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=multiple+sclerosis+gut+...](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=multiple+sclerosis+gut+bacteria&btnG=&hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C33&as_vis=1)

[2]: [https://www.amazon.com/Epidemic-Absence-Understanding- Allerg...](https://www.amazon.com/Epidemic-Absence-Understanding-Allergies- Autoimmune-ebook/dp/B0061P2L5U)

<comment><USER13> >I managed to get my eczema under control by learning about the relationship between gut, food, inflammation, and auto-immunity.

And what did you do? Everyone seems to agree that dietary changes are the answer. What exact seems to vary.

<comment><USER9> What to do varies because human bodies, environment, and gut bacteria composition varies. It's more than diet. Inflammation due to lack of sleep, stress, or smoking is also a huge factor.

That said, the biggest factor for me was eliminating dairy. I used to drink more than a gallon of milk a week. I saw results after about two weeks of eliminating dairy. My dermatologist was shocked. She refused to believe there's any correlation between diet and eczema. Patches didn't start completely going away until I also eliminated wheat. They are basically gone when I regularly eat fermented foods, take a soil-based probiotic, and get good sleep.

You might want to try an elimination diet (starting with dairy, then wheat/gluten). If you want something more structured check out an auto-immune paleo protocol like Whole30. I wish that existed when I got started. Had to learn the hard and slow way on my own.

<comment><USER14> Do you have a recommendation for a soil-based probiotic? I've been looking recently and found them somewhat hard to research among all the lacto ones.

<comment><USER9> My research led me to Prescript-Assist: [https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0049NRWHS](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0049NRWHS). Here's a study validating it for IBS patients: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16117982](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16117982).

I also recommend a gut bacteria test like uBiome to see how it alters your composition. Do a before test, then another one after a month or two of use.

<comment><USER15> I would recommend against spending your money doing a uBiome tests. The research is showing that where you sample in the stool highly affects the results.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> While some searching might clear it up, the fact that the article doesn't even mention which type of MS they are talking about is a little vexing.

<comment><USER17> Can you expand on this for people not familiar with the types of MS that might exist?

I have an aunt with MS and got excited by this article, but still wasn't aware that it might be limited to a subset?

<comment><USER18> You might also want to have her CSF independently tested for nematode worms. (what I mean by this is to put it under a microscope). it surely won't hurt, as some pathologists (although not published yet in the medical literature AFAIK) are finding them in all the samples they have tested for.

More information: [https://youtu.be/aTPU87CKQLQ?t=6m30s](https://youtu.be/aTPU87CKQLQ?t=6m30s)

If this proves to be the case for your aunt, the good news is that anti- helmintics like Ivermectin, could efficiently treat the underlying cause.

You also might benefit from performing Metagenomic tests ( such as Digital Culture by Karius - kariusdx.com) to look for insidious pathogens that might play a role in her illness.

In other words, there are many different things that might cause the symptomatology described as "Multiple Sclerosis", Lyme disease actually being one of them, [https://youtu.be/Fy0ViOX7xNk?t=9m37s](https://youtu.be/Fy0ViOX7xNk?t=9m37s)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is very interesting, and I particularly like the causal test of inducing sensitization to the antigens present in the bacteria through exposure. It's probably the strongest causal link you're going to get in humans (you can't infect them with the bacteria to see if it induces nerve damage for real!).

The problem here seems to be that this doesn't measure how feasible it is to reverse the tendency for the immune system to attack the nerves. Even if you erradicate the causative bacteria, once the immune system has started to attack the nerves, it's possible that it won't stop. Maybe the presence of the antigens (the proteins that are attacket) in the bacteria is needed as the trigger that starts the attack, but once that's gone, the low level presence of the same antigens in the nerves might be enough to sustain the attack. On a more optimistic note, maybe the erradication of the bacteria leads to a lack of simulation that causes the aggressive cells tow ither and die. This must be tested experimentally.

If the autoimmune ttack doesn't stop after erradication of bacteria, maybe a case can be made for aggressive prevention with testing for those bacteria periodically, ,especially in families predisposed to the disease, and prompt erradication once they appear. Maybe there are correlations between diet and the presence of such bacteria, which we can exploit.

I think the long term impact of these studies will depend on how reversible the "state of war" between the immune system and the nerves is.

</comment><comment><USER20> > Acinetobacter are molecular mimics of proteins found in myelin, the nerve > cell coating that the immune system attacks in MS. That suggests the > bacteria might trigger immune attacks that hit myelin, too, as when soldiers > who inadvertently resemble the enemy get hit by friendly fire.

If this is true, could high dose antibiotics eliminate the gut bacteria and thereby halt the immune reaction associated with that type of MS?

</comment><comment><USER21> the researchers never heard of the Wahls protocol???? professor Terry Wahls was is a wheelchair with MS and cured herself. Now she is heading a hospital department where they cure MS

</comment><comment><USER22> It is very easy to find correlations between phenotypic traits (getting MS, developing cancer, autism etc) and "your favourite biological variable". See John Ioannidis talking about microRNA studies for example. Part of the reason for this is that high throughput data like gene expression measures, gene methylation or microbiome sequencing gives you p << n data which invariably is also low dimensional ie a few factors explain most of thr variation. It is therefore easy to find a variable or a 'signature' which correlates with one of these explanatory factors and the phenotype, but doesn't tell you anything much about what is going on, or how to treat the disease. But it does allow thousands of papers to be published with pvalues <0.05.

Not to downplay this data, but caution is required not to over interpret the results, and avoid making the sane mistakes over and over again.

<comment><USER23> Researchers in genomics are aware of this and that is why researchers are expected to correct their p-values for multiple testing, for example using q-values.

<comment><USER22> No that isn't the point. These variables are often associated with an outcome or phenotype in a statistically rigorous manner. The point is that knowing this doesn't get us anywhere.

<comment><USER23> Get us anywhere? That is research, small pieces to the larger puzzle. Biology is complex, a lot of molecules doing different things. We don't have perfect tools to study those molecules or their interactions. Genomics and statistics offer one path to their study, and they complement already existing methods.

<comment><USER22> I don't understand what you are trying to say. My point is also that the tools are imperfect, particularly when it comes to generating useful insights, as opposed to just correlations.

<comment><USER23> If your tools don't generate useful insights, then you are not using them right. A properly designed study, employing high-dimensional genomics data, can for sure generate mechanistic insights, not just correlations. It's all about your study design.

<comment><USER22> Some tools will never give you useful insights because they have inherent limitations, or the model being studied doesn't lend itself to an informative study design. Results get published anyway. Which is fine. My point was that many high throughput studies do not materially contribute to the advancement of knowledge. This is entirely compatible with your point that well designed high throughput studies can contribute.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> A good read:

       Gut, by Giulia Enders

[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23013953-gut](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23013953-gut)

</comment><comment><USER25> Makes me wonder if this could be related to leaky gut due to wheat protein and/or Glysophate

</comment><comment><USER26> I wonder if there's a similar correlation between the gut and something like ALS.

<comment><USER19> Probably not. Unlike MS, which is an autoimmune disease, ALS is not autoimmune. The exact cause is only known in some cases, but it seems to stem from problems with the machinery inside the cell, not an aggression by the immune system from outside the cell.

<comment><USER27> How about CFS?

<comment><USER19> Do you mean CSF instead (Cerebrospinal fluid)? I'm not qualified to answer that, sorry. But my best guess is that the problem is almost 100% intracellular.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Do we actually need gut bacteria? Do they serve other purposes that breaking down fibers?

<comment><USER29> I had my large intestine entirely removed about 8 years ago, so no gut bacteria for me! And i haven't noticed any change

<comment><USER30> Glad you've not noticed a change, that is probably good right! I think the Gut microbiome extends further than just the large intestine, you've probably got some bugs hiding out somewhere in the system :) [https://www.newscientist.com/round- up/microbiome/](https://www.newscientist.com/round-up/microbiome/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> My wife was recently diagnosed with MS. Luckily she studied biochemistry and is now a data scientists. She spoke immediately with a professional nutritionist at the hospital. Apparently at the current moment the best is to keep your PH value in the body neutral. It's particularly important to prevent "acidity". Which is not easy as a lot of food we eat is acidic. The reason why you want to not be acidic is: MS causes inflammation and acidity makes it worse. Or in other words, it slows down the bodies self healing "power".

<comment><USER19> > Apparently at the current moment the best is to keep your PH value in the > body neutral. It's particularly important to prevent "acidity"

If you're talking about a neutral pH as in pH = 7.0 (the usual accepted definition of neutral), these claims are contradictory. The pH of the human blood is usually between 7.35 and 7.45. This is usually way less acicic than the neutral pH of 7.0. Furthermore, a pH of 7 is usually associated with very serious disease (and yes, it is causal: if you inject/ingest enough acid to make the pH drop to 7.0 you're in pretty bad shape, especially because it means the regulatory mechanisms aren't working as they should). I don't know who that "professional nutritionist" is, but this sounds like crackpot-level science.

Also, to the best of my knowledge, it's extremely hard to change the blood's pH with diet... The body has a multi-layered system specifically dedicated to keeping the pH in the normal range (7.35-7.45), and that's independent of what you eat. Maybe you're mistaking it for changing the urine's pH, which is much easier to do, and can be achieved through diet alone. Unfortunately, changing the urine's pH doesn't seem to achieve much beyond preventing some inds of kidney stones...

<comment><USER32> I second the fact that this is crackpot-level science - you can basically only change the acidity of your urine with dietary modifications - not your blood. Btw changing the PH value of your body thing is endorsed by various charlatans for all kinds of stuff - from curing the flu to cancer.

<comment><USER33> Hmmm, a brief search reveals this; [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3195546/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3195546/)

I'm not really equipped to review, but it does make some interesting points that while the body strongly maintains blood PH of between 7.35 and 7.45 the mechanisms of doing this can cause more stress on other systems in the body depending on your diet. It's also interesting that we used to have pre agriculture a 10:1 rather than a 1:3 K:Na balance.

Anyway, the article is an interesting read - maybe supply some counter evidence that Alkaline diets have zero supporting evidence.

<comment><USER19> The K:Na balance is very interesting, especially because pre-agriculture societies usually have very low levels of hypertension, and this is probably the cause. Na+ and K+ balance does have something to do with acid-base regulation, because of urinary excretion of HCO3- and H+, but the benefits of a low sodium diet seem to be related to hypertension and not to acid-base regulation.

I haven't read the study, and I don't want to claim that Alkaline diets have zero supporting evidence. I just wanted to argue against the claim that your pH is "too acidic" or "too alkaline" or whatever. Any potential benefits of an alkaline diet are surely independent of the pH variation they induce, because the variation will be close to 0 in any case, if your body's working properly. The stress hypothesis is interesting (I'm not saying it's even remotely correct! only that it's an interesting twist on the crackpot claims I've heard elsewhere), but you'll never be able to gauge how stressed your regulation mechanisms are just by measuring the blood's pH. You'll have to find some upstream biomarker that measures "stress" directly.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Subscribe and create weekly 5-link-collection newsletters - <AUTHOR> http://www.refreshbox.co

<comment><USER2> Great concept with very cool content! UPVOTE</comment>


Netflix Says It Will Test Lower-Price Subscription Plans - <AUTHOR> https://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/18/11/12/1338236/netflix-says-it-will-test-lower-price-subscription-plans <comment><USER2> Love Netflix. Love their shows. Love it all, whole-heartedly. But barely watch. The lack of urgency to watch shows boosts my postponing abilities. Until the day I decide to cancel.

Lower-price subscriptions could make Netflix a background subscription that just keeps on running.

Although the slash in prices might just be in some poorer locales.</comment>


Education Pays: 2008 Unemployment, Pay, and Education Level - <AUTHOR> http://www.bls.gov/emp/emptab7.htm

<comment><USER2> Ooohh... It just dawned on me right now, why all the higher education hatin lately.

Lots of young kids just graduated from college and they can't get jobs, so they're thinking, "Aw crap... I just went $100,000 in debt and I can't get a job. What the hell did I just waste 4 years in school for? School sucks. I was lied to. This wasn't worth anything. I'm screwed."

My heart goes out to you. It's not your fault that the economy sucks. It's not your fault that the world told you you'd get a job if you went to college. It's a pretty sick carrot to dangle in front of you.

Your education though, does have a value. But so does work experience. Your degree does give you an advantage over those without degrees, but it doesn't give you an advantage over those with degrees _and_ work experience. Even those with work experience can't get jobs right now and they don't have parents they can move back in with. Imagine how screwed _they_ are.

The year after you graduate is often the scariest, most depressing you will have experienced thus far in your life. My friends from college a year or two behind me, they'd graduate and phone me depressed. They'd ask themselves and me, "Why did I just go through that? I'm lonely. All my friends moved away. I work with a bunch of old people."

It's normal. It's normal to feel this way. I think college creates a lot of hope in us. The world makes us think that if we just make it through college, life will be easy, but getting that degree is only the start. Don't look at Matt Damon, Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs and think you could have been like them, why didn't you drop out sooner. Those guys are the exceptions that prove the rule.

Make the most of your time now. Get experience. Keep your skills up to date. Go travel if you can afford it. Expand your mind. Keep working hard. It _does_ pay off.

<comment><USER3> That is why it's such a problem graduating into a down economy. If you can't get a job in your field, when the economy turns around, say it's in a few years, you will actually be at a _disadvantage_ compared to fresh graduates. Fresh grads get a lot of slack, especially at big firms, they get put onto "graduate training schemes" and "fast-track programmes" and so on. In many companies there are only two entry routes, graduate or experienced. The experienced hires do the work, and the managers are from the graduate scheme. If you miss the window of the first and aren't yet the latter, you're a bit stuck. It's not the end of your career, but it's a disadvantage that will take years to work out.

<comment><USER4> Why is this a problem? These people should just allocate their time to the new opportunities created by the downturn. I have several friends who are unemployed recent grads and they seem to be just sitting on their asses, sending out resumes, waiting for the economy to turn around. Why they aren't starting their own projects or seeking consulting work (I believe consulting / temping is somewhat counter-cyclical?) I can't quite figure out.

Seeking employment at a large company is only one investment strategy and perhaps not the best one right now given the fierce competition caused by the downturn.

<comment><USER5> Consulting/temping is very much pro-cyclical. The consultants and temps are the first to go when the economy goes down, and the last to be hired back.

Playing devil's advocate here (your suggestion is exactly what I'd do, and it's worked fairly well for me), but...

One reason they don't may be that it's almost _never_ rational to start a new project over sending out a resume. The resume offers the possibility of immediate monetary payoff for relatively little work, and while the chances are low (particularly in this economy), they're certainly higher than the chances that your new project will succeed. The latter has no immediate monetary payoff, requires lots of work, and has risks that are so varied that you don't even have a framework for evaluating them.

It's only when you put a lot of these risks together in sort of a "career portfolio" that it makes sense to take them. Any individual project will probably fail, but together they give you the skills and experience that will a.) get you hired and b.) let you succeed more often with these independent projects.

Alas, in my experience most people don't take such a long-term view of their careers...

<comment><USER4> That consulting is pro-cyclical surprises me - I always figured that large corporations had some people who weren't terribly efficient and that in a downturn they would be cut and their workloads would be outsourced to a 3rd party, whom the employer wouldn't need to offer perks and raises and who would have to pay full FICA him/herself.

<comment><USER5> It's a huge pain to fire an employee - there're dozens of potential "wrongful termination" lawsuit hitches, and if you run into any of them, you've just cost the company more in legal bills than you'll ever save in that employee's salary. For that reason, companies usually will keep full-timers even if they aren't quite as efficient as consultants or new hires, because the costs of getting it wrong and inviting a lawsuit don't outweigh the marginal benefits. Unless the employee is grossly incompetent, in which case you both save more in lost productivity, and there's a lower chance of a successful lawsuit...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Note to recent graduates about the value of your degree:

I graduated right after 9/11. Right after. I remember when I was in school that our local paper had 5 pages of jobs open in my field. Good paying jobs even for those with no experience. By the time I got my diploma in the mail, I had not had one single phone call. Those 5 pages of ads had been reduced to a single column on the back of the sports page.

I remember going over and over to the University career center week after week trying to polish my resume, going to mock interviews.

At one time, I had started calling companies up and offering to work as an entry-level engineer for minimum wage if they would just give me a place to use my skills.

No such luck.

In the end, I got a job working in a warehouse for very little money. Over just a few months, the economy go a little better and I ended up getting a job as an engineer for a tiny firm that went out of business.

After I did get some experience, I have found it easier and easier to obtain a job. Even to the point I am at right now where two groups at my current job are in a fight to win me over for a new assignment. Even in this terrible economy.

Here is my advice:

Your degree _is worth something_....

Don't take the economy personally. They don't want to hire you right now because they can get an expert cheap instead. This will change with time.

Right now is a great time to think about Graduate School. When you graduate you will be light years ahead of your peers. Promotions will come much easier for you later down the road with a graduate degree.

Please don't give up. Your loans can be deferred. Spend some quality time with your friends and family.

</comment><comment><USER7> You have to wonder how much selection bias skews this. It seems like "those who would complete more school" isn't that far off from "those who are ambitious and willing to work hard". Without schooling, I wonder how well that second group would perform. Pretty well, I'd think.

<comment><USER8> Similarly, there is no indication they have adjusted the results for IQ. According to some estimates "each IQ point raises worker productivity 1.76-2.38%" where I take "worker productivity" to mean lifetime earnings. [http://www.ehponline.org/members/2002/110p563-569grosse/gros...](http://www.ehponline.org/members/2002/110p563-569grosse/grosse- full.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The direction of causation may be wrong here, because economists of education, sociologists, and other persons familiar with the data are well aware that young people from well-off families are much more likely to begin higher education and much more likely to complete it than poor young people.

Here are some links about the issue. The overall picture in the past decade has been that high-ability, low-income students are at a clear disadvantage in the college admission process compared to low-ability, high-income students. (The links below are in approximate chronological order of publication, from oldest to newest.) Is anything changing recently about this?

[http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/03_27/b3840045_...](http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/03_27/b3840045_mz007.htm)

<http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ffp0621.pdf>

<http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ff0615S.pdf>

<http://www.tcf.org/Publications/Education/carnrose.pdf>

[http://www.tcf.org/Publications/Education/kahlenberg- affacti...](http://www.tcf.org/Publications/Education/kahlenberg- affaction.pdf)

<http://harvardmagazine.com/2005/05/a-thumb-on-the-scale.html>

[http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200511/financial-aid- leveragi...](http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200511/financial-aid-leveraging/4)

<http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=510012>

<http://www.equaleducation.org/commentary.asp?opedid=1240>

[http://www.jkcf.org/assets/files/0000/0084/Achievement_Trap....](http://www.jkcf.org/assets/files/0000/0084/Achievement_Trap.pdf)

<http://www.reason.com/news/show/123910.html>

[http://www.ihep.org/publications/publications- detail.cfm?id=...](http://www.ihep.org/publications/publications- detail.cfm?id=117)

[http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2008/11...](http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2008/11/10/colleges_reach_out_to_poorer_students?mode=PF)

[http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hkBGMsvJKR...](http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hkBGMsvJKRKaL67qxkOCaDByDJFAD94R70G02)

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm kinda wondering what the variance is on these numbers. I'd imagine that the doctoral numbers have quite a few tenured professors and industrial researchers making six figures, but the median is shifted downwards by a large number of postdocs making $30-40K.

If having a masters basically guarantees you a salary of $60K, but getting a doctorate means you have a 50% chance of making $30K and a 50% chance of making $100K, I think a lot of people would rather get the masters...

<comment><USER10> There aren't that many tenured professors making six figures. I suspect the PhD numbers are high due to the quants making 7-8 figures.

The Ph.D. distribution is probably concentrated towards the bottom with a few spikes (guys like D.E. Shaw) raising the average.

<comment><USER5> Well, this is a median, not a mean, so the quants can't raise it that much. A bifurcated distribution with a couple peaks could though, which is why I was thinking tenured professors + industrial researchers + Googlers on one end, with post-docs on the other.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm not sure if this should surprise anyone. Of course higher education is worth it for most people. It's just if you're a programmer, after you learn basic programming skills, a lot can be easily self taught.

<comment><USER12> But programming by itself is not knowledge. It's a means to solve problems. It's a very important and critical skill and like any other, it's difficult to become a master, but how are you applying it?

For example, let's say you are trying to solve a problem in crystallography. You need to be a good programmer to come up with a nice refinement algorithm, but without a fundamental understanding of the problem you're trying to solve, you're not going to be able to solve it. The same goes for financial modeling, or some other kind of optimization problem.

In any field you have to keep teaching yourself new skills, since the technologies and approaches change. Even the foundational knowledge changes, but what education helps you get is a core understanding of depth that allows you to adjust. There will always be those who can do it without getting a good education, but those are rare, and in the worlds I've lived in, almost non- existent.

<comment><USER3> Yes exactly. It's easy to learn a new language or API. But it's not easy to learn CS on your own. It's not like you can just sit down and read Knuth from cover to cover. And it's not easy to learn domain knowledge on your own either, you have to be around practitioners.

<comment><USER13> You can just sit down and read Knuth from cover to cover. The problem is most people that don't get a CS degree also avoid reading Knuth on their own.

I think one of the large gaps between those groups on average is those without a CS degree think theory is useless. When you are forced to learn the theory you end up using it constantly. However, when you see a theory without the associated experience it seems useless. So it's hard to know what to study on your own. For most people it's the rigorous nature of a good CS program that forces them to put forth the associated effort.

<comment><USER3> You go to Knuth when you have already learnt the vocabulary, tho'. If you can't frame your problem in the language everyone else in your field uses, reference materials and search engines are of very limited use. You might not even be able to discuss it with your colleagues except by them basically taking over the problem and studying it from scratch themselves.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's not the education that matters, it's how you use it.</comment>


SpaceX's fifth static fire test of its SN4 Starship prototype ends in explosion - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/SciGuySpace/status/1266442563852132358 <comment><USER2> For those that want a great history of the company, I recommend the most recent acquired episode. It might give a new perspective on the economics behind these kinds of tests.

[https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/spacex](https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/spacex)

</comment><comment><USER3> I hope they learn something from it, because they seem to be blowing things up at a prodigious rate.

I wonder how many more explosions we'll have to witness before Starship flies.

<comment><USER4> Still the very same tank welding issues I assume.

<comment><USER3> If this is really the case, SpaceX should take a step back and fix its quality control problems.

I mean, the aerospace industry has been using X-ray inspection for decades to check weld quality. Why isn't SpaceX doing this?</comment></comment></comment>


Boeing is facing fresh crisis after another airline found cracks in a 737 plane - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.com/boeing-737-ng-qantas-finds-crack-airlines-inspect-fleets-reports-2019-10 <comment><USER2> >It's the rear spar pickle forks which crack The cracks form in the outer chord of the rear pickle forks (Figure 1) and the behind lying safety straps, just where they pass from the rear spar of the center wingbox to the fuselage side of the aircraft, Figure 2.

>This is also the area where the fuselage side has a cutout to let the main landing gear strut fold in with its attached wheel.

>The combination of a wing center-wingbox pushing wing and landing gear forces into the fuselage in an area where the fuselage has a large cutout for the folded main landing gear makes this area complex regarding forces and how these work the parts during flights.

>The stress spectrum in the area can also have been affected by the later fitting of winglets on the NG, not foreseen in the original design of this area.

>Winglets change the pressure distribution of the wing to a distribution spreading further outboard, by it increasing the wing root bending moment.

[https://leehamnews.com/2019/10/08/boeings-737-in-another- pic...](https://leehamnews.com/2019/10/08/boeings-737-in-another-pickle- part-2/)

So Boeing also made changes from the 737 to the 737 NG without complete reanalysis of how the changes affected all the parts?

<comment><USER3> I don't think that's the case, and I don't think that's what the link you provided says. 5% of the pickle forks are showing cracks, after a minimum of 20k flights.

It's probably an incorrect analysis (maybe the didn't account for enough cycles in fatigue/failure testing given the extra load from the winglets, maybe the extra load is not well understood and they had bad assumptions). I am very harsh on Boening on how they handled the MAX development and crashes. The pickle fork situation is unfortunate but seems like it is likely an honest error that was caught in the right way and is being dealt with in the right way. I fly 737s frequently, too.

<comment><USER4> Reportedly a replacement costs 250_000$ and takes two to three weeks.

Far from ideal, and potentially very expensive for Boeing if they are liable, but considering a unit cost of 100M not that dramatic.

How the Max development continues seems much more important.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Not excusing anything about MCAS, but the "cracks in an aluminum airframe" thing is a VERY normal and established cycle/process. Well known and a normal thing. This news piece is just journalistic piling on to hot news.

There is "no news" here.

<comment><USER6> _Not excusing anything about MCAS, but the "cracks in an aluminum airframe" thing is a VERY normal and established cycle/process. _

Cracks can be a normal and expected thing. These parts were designed to last the lifetime of the airframe (around 90,000 cycles) and are failing in under 30,000 cycles.

This raises eyebrows for two specific reasons: 1.) Boeing was already installing subpar parts (edit: not pickle forks) from Ducommon in the 737 NG 2.) The wings fall off if the pickle forks fail completely.

 _This news piece is just journalistic piling on to hot news._

MCAS isn't the only fire Boeing is fighting right now (they're also battling poor quality control with their KC-46 and 787 lines among other things). Some guy on PPRuNe is claiming that the pickle fork problem was just improper manufacturing[1], which when put in context would make it appear as if Boeing has some major structural problems with its organization.

1: [https://www.pprune.org/showpost.php?p=10595986&postcount=258](https://www.pprune.org/showpost.php?p=10595986&postcount=258)

<comment><USER3> Yes, but it's very long cycle failures at low frequency, and people suspect it's because of additional stress caused by winglets. Winglets reduce drag and save fuel, it's an important change. It may have been very difficult to predict and test this failure. And most importantly, the FAA and Boeing are handling it properly.

<comment><USER6> _Yes, but it 's very long cycle failures at low frequency, and people suspect it's because of additional stress caused by winglets. Winglets reduce drag and save fuel, it's an important change. It may have been very difficult to predict and test this failure. And most importantly, the FAA and Boeing are handling it properly. _

Cracks have been found in NGs both with and without winglets, so that is almost certainly not the issue at hand.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I have to wonder how seriously Southwest and Alaska Air are reconsidering their relationship with the Boeing and the 737. Rumor is that SWA might be considering a switch to Airbus.

[https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz- boeing-737-ma...](https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz- boeing-737-max-southwest-earnings-20191024-avtvpfzm4rahrd5kms63jybdpe- story.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> I just want to let you know that there are concerns with Airbus also. Article in the Oct/19 issue of Flight International Magazine the following:

 __It is worthwhile mentioning that the Airbus A320 wing was designed 35 years ago for a 70t platform, and has remained the same on all versions, from the A318 through to the A321.

While unchanged, the wing has seen a steady loading increase: to 83t on the first A321, then 89t and 93.5t, and is finally expected to go up to 101t on the A321XLR. This increased wing loading has meant higher take-off speeds, reaching close to the maximum tyre speed limits, and a lower safety margin at altitude – in other words, a tighter "coffin corner", and lower stability protection.

Where and when would the civil aviation authorities stop manufacturers from creeping ever so closer to the performance limits of a product? __

<comment><USER8> > Where and when would the civil aviation authorities stop manufacturers from > creeping ever so closer to the performance limits of a product?

You hit the nail on the head. These manufacturers and the airlines are compromising safety for dollars: trying to put more people on a plane than it was designed for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Data on this is already out, as the FAA only gave planes with > 30000 cycles 7 days to inspect and 3 days to report findings after inspection.

810 planes were inspected; 38 of them have cracks (4.6%) and have been grounded until fixed. They are not airworthy. Only two of these were in the US.

The other 772 planes will have to undergo inspection after each additional 3500 cycles.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HprNMrjK6_I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HprNMrjK6_I)</comment>


Google Cutting 10 Percent of Jobs at Its Motorola Unit - <AUTHOR> http://allthingsd.com/20130307/google-cutting-10-percent-of-jobs-at-its-motorola-unit/

<comment><USER2> Good opportunity for Google to increase the competency level at Motorola. Get rid of the least productive workers now when Motorola's revenues are not great, keep the best ones around, the ones they would've hired anyway if they had the chance, and then start hiring really good ones when Motorola starts growing again.

<comment><USER3> What they really ought to do is do away with MOTOBLUR (and merge anything salvageable from it back into Android proper) and then concentrate on making first class _hardware_ running stock Android. All the other manufacturers are afraid to do it because they want to "differentiate" their products, which ironically leaves a huge opportunity for someone to "differentiate" by using stock Android on excellent hardware. People love the Nexus devices. Make a whole line of devices running that software under the Motorola banner and they've got a good hook into returning to profitability, meanwhile eliminating the development cost of redesigning the UI solely for the purpose of being different.

<comment><USER4> It's already starting, e.g. with the latest update: [http://www.androidcentral.com/motorola-swaps-stock-apps- droi...](http://www.androidcentral.com/motorola-swaps-stock-apps-droid- razrmaxx-jelly-bean-soak-test)</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Who Is Hiring Android App That Pulls Listing from HN, Angel, Lever, SE - <AUTHOR> https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.symisc.whois.hiring <comment><AUTHOR> Author Here: Basically, we pull listing from HN, StackExchange, Angel, Lever, etc. We index them by types (Remote, Fulltime, Freelance, etc.), Langaugaes (Ruby, Node, etc.), Frameworks, database, location, etc. so that you can filter & search for what you want. We also translate the location to GPS position (lat, lng) so that you got the listing nearby.</comment>


Show HN: Find the GitHub forks with the most activity - <AUTHOR> https://git.world/ <comment><USER2> The examples work, but when I try to enter other repositories, it displays the description and number of forks but then the list is not displayed.</comment>


Air pollution is a big deal - <AUTHOR> https://patrickcollison.com/pollution <comment><USER2> It is insane how we (as a society) have been so blind on this issue. In many countries, people have been debating why crime rates rose sharply from the 60's to the 90's. The explanation may have been simply that airborne lead particles caused brain damage in kids. In the 80's and 90'l leaded gasoline was phased out in most of the Western world so there is a clear temporal correlation between the crime wave and lead particles.

An euphemism for brain damage is "cognitive defects" but it is of course the same thing. Now imagine someone caused brain damage to your children (for example by causing a head trauma), would you be ok with that? Probably not. Not even a very small brain injury would be ok, but millions of cars doing the exact same thing, no problem!

<comment><USER3> Lead is still used in light aircraft fuel in the US: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avgas](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avgas)

The FAA says "more than 167,000 piston-engine aircraft operating in the United States rely on aviation gasoline (avgas)": [https://www.faa.gov/about/initiatives/avgas/](https://www.faa.gov/about/initiatives/avgas/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is pretty interesting, since the effect is _so_ big.

I did a bit of reading and it looks like the best thing to do is to run an indoor air filter _and_ have indoor plants that are effective at absorbing CO2 with indoor lighting[1] (not all are!).

Unfortunately recent research indicates plants aren't great at removing general particle pollution though.

[1] [https://www.matec- conferences.org/articles/matecconf/pdf/201...](https://www.matec- conferences.org/articles/matecconf/pdf/2017/17/matecconf_iscee2017_05004.pdf)

<comment><USER5> What plants are effective at absorbing CO2?

<comment><USER4> The linked paper has some. The top one they tested was the prayer plant, which lowers CO2 by 7% in 7 hours in 300 lux.</comment></comment></comment>


Quantum Computing: A Beginner's Notes and Overview of IBM's Quantum Experience - <AUTHOR> https://developer.ibm.com/dwblog/2017/quantum-computing-coding-ibm-q-experience/?social_post=950668007&fst=Discover&linkId=39105389 <comment><USER2> > But there is more to try–the Beginner's Guide has a number of different > experiments available—from Bit-flip encoders, to Grover's and Shor's > algorithms. Am I ready to understand a quantum score like this? Well, maybe > not just yet. Some day though…

The enthusiasm! I love it. However...

I remember reading a post from Algorithmic Assertions[1] which gave a wonderful example of the use of intuition in designing/transforming a quantum circuit. He walks through every step, starting with a simple swap circuit and ending with a proof of quantum teleportation. It was kind of magical to see all the tricks used. Inserting CNOTS in order to optimize out certain gates? Knowing that controlled-Z gates are equivalent if flipped around? Transposing H gates with X or Z gates to turn an X into a Z and vice versa?

I stress the importance of the steps here, because if your goal is to be able to build fancy quantum scores, it isn't enough, most likely, to just read the Beginner's guide and grok Shor's algorithm -- it's really important to have the intuition needed to write your own algorithms. It is exactly like learning how to code again.

[1]: [http://algassert.com/post/1628](http://algassert.com/post/1628)

<comment><USER3> The link you've posted is excellent too. I suppose its a bit more than just learning a new programming language. It feels to me like learning to code a new programming language in a foreign language. There's the mechanics and syntax of working the composer AND the actual meaning of the gates that have to be grepped. And I'm still a long way from knowing intuitively that "When a Hadamard hops over an X gate (a NOT), the X gets turned into a Z" :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If someone wants a more detailed explanation about the gates mentioned in the blog, consider reading the introductory chapter to 'Quantum Computation and Quantum Information' by Neilsen and Chuang.</comment>


The 'Gotcha' Immigration Policy  - <AUTHOR> http://www.ilw.com/articles/2011,0614-bashyam.shtm

<comment><USER2> The immigration policy under Obama administration is the worst. Its sad that many of the employees returning back been in the US have higher education and been there 5 - 6 years. Imagine you are being kicked out of home with no warning what so ever.</comment>


How Palantir Pushed Its Way into Policing - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/how-peter-thiels-secretive-data-company-pushed-into-policing/?mbid=social_tw_backchannel <comment><USER3> Previous discussion about this article:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14967371](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14967371)

</comment><comment><USER4> > on two separate occasions, police shot at trucks misidentified as belonging > to Dorner, injuring three civilians. [1]

> We used Palantir extensively to address that [1]

>A team of Los Angeles police officers protecting the home of a high-ranking officer in the 19500 block of Redbeam Avenue believed a pickup that stopped in front of the house matched Dorner's Nissan Titan. Police opened fire, wounding two women tossing copies of the Los Angeles Times onto porches. [1]

> a driver in another pickup that looked similar to Dorner's drove toward them > on Flagler Lane near Beryl Street. Officers, suspecting it was Dorner, > purposely collided with the truck and shot at him. [1]

[1] [http://www.ocregister.com/2013/02/08/police-confuse-truck- fo...](http://www.ocregister.com/2013/02/08/police-confuse-truck-for-dorners- shoot-at-3-in-torrance/)

</comment><comment><USER5> Interesting read. Sounds like some inefficient government bodies grappling with complicated software that they dropped tons of money on without fully understanding. And now they're using the insights from that software in a way that doesn't work well. That reflects more poorly on the police depts than Palantir.

For everyone's sake, I hope police are able to use data within reason to do their jobs better. That will either involve police depts getting smarter about spending on/using software, Palantir getting more user-friendly, or a company focused on doing this well specifically for police departments disrupting Palantir... all of these are good things which I hope happen in due time.

Also,

> "Palantir's customers must rely on software that only the company itself can > secure, upgrade, and maintain."

This is a weird thing to include. Were they hoping for open source?

<comment><USER6> > complicated software that they dropped tons of money on without fully > understanding. And now they're using the insights from that software

A complicated software telling cops where to start looking for suspects - <USER2> could possibly go wrong?

Political and racial profiling as-a-service.

> I hope police are able to use data within reason

...how? You either trust the software and follow the "insights" or not.

>> "Palantir's customers must rely on software that only the company itself can secure, upgrade, and maintain." > This is a weird thing to include. Were they hoping for open source?

In most countries the whole legal/judicial system is designed to be fully transparent and thoroughly auditable to ensure fairness and impartiality.

Even at the cost of having a lengthy, expensive (for the tax payers) and sometimes ineffective process. History shows that quick and cheap justice is no justice.

Do you see the problem with having closed source software telling cops which person / neighborhood / company investigate first?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Selling to police departments can be quite lucrative. I know someone who sells "forensics" software. I won't say what it does but it's both basic and snake- oil-y at the same time. They are raking in big bucks. It's also not a market many in the startup world thinks about usually.

> California's cops have become accustomed to the adrenaline rush of data and > analysis that Palantir provides, and the more departments that join, the > more addictive its products.

It's just a matter of making the software seem and look like like magic. Police departments traditionally are not very tech savvy, so they will readily throw money at stuff they don't understand. Well, not unlike enterprises but it's just more pronounced it seems.

<comment><USER8> > I won't say what it does but it's both basic and snake-oil-y at the same > time. They are raking in big bucks.

On the other hand in this case it seems like Palantir is providing some value- add by nearly-transparently integrating data across departments which would otherwise not be communicating with each other on this scale.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> While the article provides a lot of good info, it is a very difficult read due to the structuring.

Here's something which I found strange: "In fact, on two separate occasions, police shot at trucks misidentified as belonging to Dorner, injuring three civilians. "We said [to Palantir], 'We need an application that can span multiple units within an agency…multiple agencies within a county... and multiple counties within a state,'" says Jackson. "[They developed an application] based on lessons learned from Dorner." That application, called ClueMan, short for Clue Manager, has just gone live at JRIC."

Makes me wonder - Is software some day going to replace good police work?

</comment><comment><USER10> Software giant uses opaque pricing and vendor lock in to bamboozle overmatched civil servants. In the annals of government contracting, the fact that their software seems to be useful and work pretty well is notable in itself.</comment>


How to save $100,000 by the time you're 30 - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-save-100000-by-the-time-youre-30-2015-6?IR=T

<comment><USER2> Great article, other than the fact that one of the students in the photo has a nice Rolex.

<comment><USER3> Maybe it was a gift, with the recipient's name inscribed to discourage resale.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Live a life of greed" \- great mantra.</comment>


HN - Ranking prognose - <AUTHOR>

funny idea: a program that learns what kind of news get high rankings on HN and then evaluates the news you just want to submit with an estimated time and karma value. <comment><USER2> Sounds like a HN Minority Report!

<comment><AUTHOR> scary...</comment></comment>


What the Death of Google Labs Means for Innovation at Google - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/07/what-the-death-of-google-labs-means-for-innovation-at-google/242265/

<comment><USER2> Corporate labs are funny things. Where would the valley be without Xerox PARC or America without Bell Labs? But from the corporate view they are fairly inefficient. They are a very academic environment, working at a leisurely pace, not at all like startups or even the lean-and-mean among established companies. Self-education and publication is as much a goal as improving the bottom line. Eventually the suits take notice and start reorganizing things to bring the fruits of their labor immediately to market. It happened at Bell, at PARC and at a lab where I was resident. Unfortunately, the shift in focus doesnt really work. The researchers cant shift their timelines. Partially baked ideas dont easily become marketable products and the future becomes sacrificed to the immediate.

If you want short term results, the policy of engineers working on their own pet projects 20% time is really fruitful, but the promising ones then need time and resources to become fully realized. I think thats where Google failed.

Maybe Google is inventing something better than Google Labs. I can see a successful approach being to sprout mini-labs around promising projects where the developer(s) get resources like additional developers, designers, market researchers, QA and the like. This of course sounds a lot like internal entrepreneurial startups, which havent been notably successful. I can hope that Google has something more innovative up its sleeve than the bottom line.</comment>


Repository Search on all Repositories - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/blog/1492-repository-search-on-all-repositories <comment><USER2> Anyone using github search as a replacement for the discontinued Google code search service?

</comment><comment><USER3> One word: finally!</comment>


A year without God - <AUTHOR> https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/a-year-without-god-the-documentary

<comment><USER2> I would to see this documentary. Sometimes I wonder "What difference does God make?"</comment>


Ask HN: Bootstrap without JQuery on CDN - <AUTHOR> are there any really great forks of bootstrap that work with native JavaScript that you use that are available on the major CDNS? <comment><USER2> Bootstrap's styling does not need jQuery. Only some of the interactive parts require jQuery, like the tooltips, collapsibles and modals. If you happen to use Bootstrap requiring only the styling, grids and all, the JS is totally optional.

<comment><AUTHOR> the hamburger menu is one of those things I use</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do/would you deal with your website being hacked? - <AUTHOR>

I'm not super technical and it's not something I'll ever have to deal with but I'm curious; when a website is compromised how do you find out what they did and what data they took? Presumably the attacker will try and hide their tracks so I'm interested to know how you get a full understanding of what they did.<p>Additionally, is this something you prepare for, as part of a disaster recovery plan so to speak and what is your plan of action should an attack be carried out? <comment><USER2> The first thing to determine is if only write access to the web site's document root was achieved or if the operating system itself has been compromised.

If your site was only defaced, you need to patch or reconfigure your web stack so it doesn't happen again. And restore your content from known good backups.

If the OS was compromised, you must format and reinstall everything. This is because 'root kits' may be undetectable once they are installed by attackers.

Depending on the risk to other systems, if the OS is not open source I always format and reinstall.

</comment><comment><USER3> Unfortunately, unless you have a very deep understandning of your operating system AND you're logging audit to a REMOTE system, you should assume the worst and reinstall all reachable systems from scratch. Invalidate all ssh keys. Then check your databases for suspicious admin accounts before going live.

If not, how do you know if backdoors were installed, if the databases were modified, if local (known or unknown) exploits were used to gain root or if private ssh keys were stolen or used to gain access to other servers?

</comment><comment><USER4> See how bad the damage is and, if there is any chance they got access to the OS, format and reinstall everything.

<comment><AUTHOR> My knowledge goes as far as ~/.bash_history, how do you find out what they got up to?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: MarriageLaughs.com - <AUTHOR>

http://www.marriagelaughs.com/
I threw together a small site for people to submit funny/odd/interesting stories about their married life.
I could use some stories and some suggestions on improving the site.
Thanks <comment><USER3> I like the idea, and I think you're missing two tricks. I think you have two key metrics that if you grow will end up making the website grow nicely:

1\. Visitor engagement measured as time on site, pages viewed per visit, number of comments, etc. I say you're missing this trick because there is only one story as far as I can tell. Give me more! I really wanted to read more but there wasn't anything. Get a few (10?) stories up there as "seed" content.

2\. New stories posted: you want people to register and post stories. You have no massive call to action about this. Yes there are links to register but where is the Big Red Button that says "Post your story"? Make it extremely obvious how people can post stories and make it extremely easy to do so.

On making it easy: how about accepting anonymous submissions and then asking the user to sign up and when they do their anon submissions are claimed into their account automatically?

Or how about just making the site user-moderated with anonymous submissions without the need for accounts?

I'm not saying you should do these, but they are ideas to get you thinking about what you're comfortable with.

Edit: The contact page says "My Fieldset". Rename it :)

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm hoping that posting here would help with #1.

On #2... maybe I can throw some color in the 'Submit your story' block in the top right. It's already set to accept anonymous stories.

Thanks for pointing out the issue on the contact page. It has been fixed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Provide other ways for people to interact with the site beyond submitting lengthy stories. Right now, people might be put off thinking that their story isn't entertaining enough or long enough.

So, accept "quickies" - short items, one-liners, etc. Style them differently and encourage people to submit one of their own. Give some inspiration - <USER2> does your wife sound like when she snores? The best white lie told? The excuses given for buying chocolate (my wife came home and told me that she bought me a block of chocolate today - I don't really eat chocolate and never buy it)? Techniques used to hide evidence of shopping ("I've had this for ages."). Bizarre places/positions in which your husband has fallen asleep, etc. Items of clothing he refuses to throw out.

</comment><comment><USER5> First off, I love the idea, though I would extend it beyond married life to Relationship laughs, or even just "sharing space" or some such. Just stories about trying to live together and be together with people.

It's a solid implementation, though the design is nothing spectacular, it's not an eye sore either and does the job. The one thing I would suggest is allowing comments - but using a solid moderation hand.

One question though, will you allow stories of a non-pg nature?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm... I hadn't really thought about the non-pg issue. Not sure how to handle that. Let me think on that.

<comment><USER5> I would recommend allowing moderators to use their discretion and allowing material that is tastefully non-pg. IE, if the story is legitimately sharing a funny experience of coupled or shared space life and isn't just pornographic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I like the site too. I have to agree that the site's design isn't too captivating. My suggestion would be to highlight a random story on the front page, with a call to action to submit a story right below it.

Your site is one I can see myself spending time on for a good laugh.

</comment><comment><USER7> I like anything which makes light-heart out of things like relationships, politics. Its great to read other people's stories. Make the site more engaging so I feel compelled to contribute. I don't think accounts are a necessity for a site like this; anonymous posts are fine.

</comment><comment><USER8> Clickable: <http://www.marriagelaughs.com/>

</comment><comment><USER9> How about: "I'll post the site url on my blog, facebook, community page, and see what happens". My suggestion is find a way to drive traffic(me smiling). I like your idea and hope to see it grow. I'd post but I'm not married.....

</comment><comment><USER10> Simplicity is key for these types of sites. Right now your site looks like a standard blog. The other comments have some good ideas on how to influence users to submit

</comment><comment><USER11> You might want to limit the length of the posts. Some of the stories are funny, but it oftentimes takes too long time to get to the catch.</comment>