Navy sacks carrier captain, pulls another carrier off station over Covid-19 - <AUTHOR> https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/32871/navy-sacks-carrier-captain-pulls-another-carrier-off-station-over-covid-19-concerns <comment><USER2> So maybe I'm reading this wrong but it looks like Captain Brett Crozier fell on his sword to save his men and "Acting" US Navy Secretary Thomas Modly is just silencing anyone who makes the administration look bad.

<comment><USER3> You got it wrong. Leaking this was bad opsec and weakens the Navy.

China's been using this opportunity to seize up territorial claims in the South China Sea

> [https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/31/world/asia/Indonesia- > sout...](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/31/world/asia/Indonesia-south- > china-sea-fishing.html)

<comment><USER4> The Navy was already weakened if the vessel had hundreds of cases without sufficient support. Let's not blame the victim for yet another executive branch failure to act without the appropriate speed and magnitude.

If the chain of command fails you, you have no other choice but to go public when your crews' well-being is threatened.

> "It creates the perception the Navy is not on the job; the government is not > on the job. That's just not true."

I don't believe anyone is confident the government is on the job, and this letter did nothing to change that perception. It simply confirms what the public already believes.

<comment><USER5> > without sufficient support.

Do you have a reference for this? The letter [1] doesn't appear to mention insufficient support, just that the cases were accelerating.

[1] Letter: [https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Exclusive- Captai...](https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Exclusive-Captain-of- aircraft-carrier-with-15167883.php)

<comment><USER6> It looks to me like the captain made some poor judgement in addressing this by side stepping the chain of command.

<comment><USER4> It looks like public opinion backs his judgement.

[https://www.stripes.com/news/us/captain-crozier-captain- croz...](https://www.stripes.com/news/us/captain-crozier-captain-crozier- videos-show-sailors-sending-off-ousted-uss-roosevelt-commander-with- cheers-1.624732)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Navy vet here.

YOU DO NOT expose the readiness of the unit, medical or otherwise.

This was akin to putting private keys in the git repository.

<comment><USER8> As another commenter mentioned here, sailors usually have family and/or relatives that they call in addition to myriad other ways of communicating to the outside world. There is no way that a breakout of COVID-19 could remain a secret. What are sick sailors going to tell their families? And how would you prevent a news investigation from talking to those sailor's families and putting together 2 + 2?

<comment><USER7> When one enlists or takes a commission, one falls under the UCMJ[1]. One's 1A rights are constrained. Aside: this feeds the distaste of veterans for the authoritarian leanings of so many public figures.

Among the things sailors are ordered NOT to do is talk to the media without running the communications by a Public Affairs Officer. There is also regular OpSec[2] training.

[1] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Code_of_Military_Jus...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Code_of_Military_Justice)

[2] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operations_security](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operations_security)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Now the US version of coronavirus Whistle Blower has been punished and silenced.

</comment><comment><USER10> Original article on the topic posted here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22765355](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22765355)

</comment><comment><USER11> Why this level of concern about probably _the_ most healthy population that will ever be exposed to the illness? Mostly young, in superb physical condition. The safest thing for them _and_ the community is to keep them on the ship until the disease has worked its way through the shipboard population until they're no longer a risk to their families or the wider community.

<comment><USER12> Because this line of logic is nonsense for two different reasons.

First with how fast the coronavirus spreads and can last, this means essentially taking down the entire ship. Having an entire crew range from bedridden to slightly sick is not a good thing for opsec.

Second, the coronavirus is not just deadly to the unhealthy or the elderly. Even younger people can require ventilators or die as a result. You would be condemning those people to death.

<comment><USER11> I'm an ER physician treating patients daily, including COVID patients, so I have some experience and knowledge of the relevant pathology, and am exposed to the virus on a daily basis. I also have a lot of friends with experience of military medicine who agree with my position. There is no 'opsec' issue here, but there is a potential issue of operational _readiness_ \- but it's hard to suggest that operational readiness is _improved_ by standing down the entire crew of the vessel.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Don't embarrass the Navy or the Commander in Chief.

</comment><comment><USER14> More details: [https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/32871/navy-sacks- carri...](https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/32871/navy-sacks-carrier- captain-pulls-another-carrier-off-station-over-covid-19-concerns)

<comment><USER15> This story has much more information and context.

<comment><USER16> OK, we changed to that from [https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us- canada-52145230](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52145230).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> If he leaked it he should be sacked.

There will be a increase in wars over the next few years. The age of wars decreasing is on hold.

There is military action that might be needed at the moment. This is not a joke. We don't need skirmishes kicking off.

<comment><USER12> Okay, question: Do you think navy ships are black boxes? That zero information gets in and out? Because despite what you may think, sailors do call family and friends.

You're not going to keep the virus a secret on any ship. The solution is to try and get over it as soon as possible. Not act like it doesn't exist.

<comment><USER17> > Do you think navy ships are black boxes?

This is a silly point.

A Captain leaking a letter, is different to a country X trawling through thousands of accounts on social media for the truth.

At your point there would have been no point any high Chinese official calling alarm in January about the Coronavirus, we already know because China isn't a black box and people were seeing what happened so we all knew exactly what was happening in China.

> You're not going to keep the virus a secret on any ship.

Everyone knows the virus is on all ships (and many submarines) around the world. This was a Captain _allegedly_ writing up exact intel and undermining his command structure.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Facebook alternatives? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> It of course depends on what do you want. We don't want a new Facebook to take over for Facebook, as it would just recreate the same issues.

We need to rethink what social is and needs to be on the web. People are unwilling to pay for these services, yet spend hours on them every day. This is a big issue. People are unwilling to pay for the servers, and engineers, yet become frantic when they learn that indeed FB wasn't as free as they thought.

So that's issue number one. If you are unwilling to pay with your privacy, pay with your wallet. Right now, there is very little willingness from the people to pay for the services they use, but once newspapers start charging, and information on the web in general start to cost money, that's when we can rethink the product.

</comment><comment><USER3> Real life.</comment>


The first synthetic element - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00236-4 <comment><USER2> A somewhat lesser know fact is that technetium is naturally occurring in trace amounts in uranium ores, and its spectral lines have been found in some red giant stars.

</comment><comment><USER3> technetium video from Periodic Videos channel [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ud5c1TVkcnU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ud5c1TVkcnU)</comment>


UK faces 'significant' shortage of farmland by 2030 - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-28003435

<comment><USER2> I guess they already tried 'enclosure' 300 years ago. What next? Do what Holland does, and reclaim the sea?</comment>


Get Satisfaction Introduces Premium Services - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/get_satisfaction_premium_services.php <comment><USER2> The higher the price, the harder it is to find it. No wonder I couldn't find the price on their website.

<comment><USER3> It seems to be displayed only if you're logged in. For the curious: "The Basic services will cost between $120 and $149 a month (the introductory price for this week is $99 for three months), while the Pro package starts at $349."</comment></comment>


When Developers Are Afraid to Try Something New - <AUTHOR> http://www.datamation.com/data-center/when-developers-are-afraid-to-try-something-new-1.html Anecdotal article about someone trying to get their team to use Scala, and ways to help your team learn about new technologies. <comment><USER2> Can developers really affect change from the ground up? Didn't turn out so well for Jenna in this story, but I bet all the developers were better off having been exposed to new ideas.

<comment><AUTHOR> Definitely. Drives me crazy when people are closed-minded about adopting the right technology to address a particular problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It depends on the organization, but using a new language to solve a specific problem is a good way to get the foot in the door.</comment>


Is The Microsoft Stack Really More Expensive? - <AUTHOR> http://www.jondavis.net/techblog/post/2009/09/05/Is-The-Microsoft-Stack-Really-More-Expensive.aspx <comment><USER2> Microsoft's development products are not that good. I've used Visual Studio, and I found the interface so incredibly clunky that it was easier for me to mount a network drive to my Linux box, and use a real text editor, "vim", to modify the project XML directly to make changes. (And that is not a joke.)

And the set of downloads is irrelevant, because it shouldn't even be necessary. On Linux and Mac, most of what I need is already there; while I _do_ download other packages from time to time, they're for good reasons (like getting a new version). The base Mac and Linux installations already have _python_ and _perl_ and _a real shell_ and _a real terminal_ and _an SSH client_ and _a good web browser_ , and the list goes on. The number of things Windows completely lacks out of the box is mind-boggling, given the size of Microsoft's budget. And remember, you have the privilege of downloading and installing it all _again_ every 6 months when Windows' holes make your PC useless.

But it isn't even about the cost or quality for me. It doesn't take much of a history lesson to realize that the vast majority of Microsoft's wealth has come from questionable business practices; practices that resulted in "de facto standards" through which they gain even more undeserved business. At this point, they could have the best products imaginable (they sure don't), and they would still deserve no business.

The _entire computing industry_ has been set back _at least a decade_ due entirely to Microsoft (and a number of other IT-dependent industries have been harmed). Microsoft has destroyed entire companies through unfair means; Microsoft should receive no recognition whatsoever as a credible business, and should receive no new contracts. I know it's just wishful thinking now, but it's the absolute truth.

</comment><comment><USER3> _Microsoft SQL Server 2008 is, by far, a vastly superior RDBMS than most anything I have seen from anyone, in every respect_

I was willing to continue reading the article, up to the above line, at which point it became clear that there's no basis for anything said.

<comment><USER4> Which ones do you think is one a par with it, and why? "vastly" may be an overstatement, but it's very good.

The only issue is that for simple designs a smaller, free product (e.g. postgreSQL) may have all that you need.

A lot of the new stuff in SQL server seems to be Business Intelligence tools, which I don't pay much attention too. the SQL stuff where you "select * from ...." seems to be much the same for several versions now, and gets only minor updates since it's already done right.

<comment><USER3> Databases such as Oracle, and DB2 are either equal or better in certain respects. Furthermore, I personally find PostgreSQL to be on par if not better than MSSQL. Aside from PostgreSQL's inability to return multiple recordsets, IMHO it's easier to write stored procedures, functions, views, and triggers in PostgreSQL. In addition PostgreSQL is significantly more consistent syntacticly. Every so often my brother who works for an MS shop will ask me how to do something relatively complex in MSSQL, I'll show him how, but in addition I'll also show him how much easier it would've been in PostgreSQL.

One can argue that when working with SQL Server Studio you don't have to worry about how to do things since the IDE will create most of what you need. However, the same can be said of decent IDEs for PostgreSQL, such as EMS.

Personally, I like the ability to read my functions, views, and triggers, and be able to easily understand what's happening; which is not something I usually experience when working with MSSQL.

<comment><USER4> I last used Oracle circa 2002. The experience of using the SQL workbench tools, and installing a new server was far worse, just awful compared to the SQL Server equivalent.

<comment><USER5> Oracle's tools and installers are still not what you'd expect for the price. They are vastly improved from 2002 however.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Eww. Among his arguments:

1\. It's OK that the MS developer tools cost money, because there exists an IDE for Ruby, PHP, etc., that costs money. (No matter than Eclipse, NetBeans, etc., are free.)

2\. It's OK that IIS/ASP.NET costs money whereas Apache/PHP doesn't, because ASP.NET is more sophisticated than PHP. (No matter that, e.g., Rails is also more sophisticated than PHP but is also free.)

3\. You probably won't have to pay for Visual Studio, because typically your employer pays for it. (Apparently in Mr Davis's world costs don't count when they are paid by employers.)

</comment><comment><USER7> SQL Server Express is so limited that you really can't use it in production, and I've never had a case where Postgresql or Mysql couldn't handle the load (with enough architecture tweaks).

And you still need IIS. You can get that with Windows 7 Ultimate, but that's $319.95 for the retail price. And you pretty much can't get away without buying the retail version. We have deployed 8 HTTP servers, 2 MySql servers, another server with Varnish, 2 servers with Memcached and one for logging ... for one of the applications we maintain. Of course, we're using virtualization with Xen. But if we were to use Windows 7 Ultimate, then we'd have to shell out ... 13 * 319 = 4147 USD

On such a quantity you can probably get a discount, but let's be honest ... 4147 USD is almost the price we payed on the hardware, and I wouldn't run anything else than Windows Server in production which is a lot more expensive.

And if you're developing on top of PHP, Rails, Django, Mysql, Postgresql ... why on earth would you want to use a Windows server?

<comment><USER8> For reference's sake, Windows Web Server 2008 costs $469 and is likely the version of Windows you would use instead of Windows 7 to run IIS in production.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This article was all over the map in terms of numbers. Here at Expat, we develop on the Microsoft stack whenever we have a choice in the matter, including for our own products such as Twiddla, Blogabond, Rootdown, S3stat, etc. and here's the breakdown of what we pay for what:

Tools: $399 total. For Everything MS makes, for every developer in the shop, once every 2 years. That's what it costs for an MSDN license through the EmpowerISV program.

Servers: ~$2000 per production box. That's Small Business Server, which comes with production licenses for SQL Server, Exchange Server, and pretty much all the backend stuff you could want.

And that's it.

Assuming we buy a new server every 2 years, that means we pay about $100/month for the privilege of developing on the MS stack. Put another way, that means that the MS stack need only gain us 20 minutes worth of productivity every month to pay for itself.

Like I said up top, we build on the MS stack whenever we have a choice in the matter. It's just a no-brainer.

<comment><USER10> You failed to account for:

\- mandatory downtime for updates: every couple months your Windows server has a bunch of security updates that require a reboot. It's no problem for a development server, but just measure the wait SQL Server takes to start on a high-load environment. Compare that to Linux where the only reason to reboot is a kernel update and even that will be soon be history.

\- The added cost per server. As someone pointed out, if you have to scale to 10 or 100 servers (just imagine one of your apps got successful) you will soon have to deal with their account managers. And they will know exactly how bad your position is. And you are pretty much stuck with x86 hardware too. You just can't employ a a Sun Niagara server for front-end business (instead of 5 x86s) because it doesn't run Windows.

\- You are stuck with their licensing/core/memory limitations. You can't just pop a couple more gigabytes of RAM or a couple more processors in your servers without paying because neither Windows nor SQL Server will use them without - gasp - a reinstall.

Windows is cheap. It's not always inexpensive.

<comment><USER11> You're seriously telling us that when the hardware changes, instead of updating the license, you have to reinstall the entire stack?

Got a link for that?

<comment><USER10> If you go beyond the license limits of your Windows or SQL Server and has to install the next product on the lineup, that's pretty much what you have to do.

Let's suppose you just added a couple extra Opterons to your server at the same time you decided to max out the memory available in the box. You went from single-socket quad-core to four-socket 16-core and from 32 GB to 128 GB (it's your database server, after all). What are you supposed to do? You will have to upgrade in-place. Unless I am very wrong (I never faced this situation - I am a Unix guy)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> _On the Microsoft stack side, everyone knows about Visual Studio. The licensing cost for the Team Suite is $10,939. LAMP developers just love to point that kind of thing out. But folks, the fact is, that price is not measurable as the equivalent of LAMP freeware. It's for an enterprise shop that needs very advanced and sophisticated tools for performing every corporate software role in a software development lifecycle._

These arguments are walking tightrope of avoiding the obvious. Installing all of the Microsoft free tools will make the stack cheaper. But as soon as you want to do something even close to challenging you can bet you'd need support and a license for the real tools. Apparently it's the open source crowd that is subjecting the "market" to FUD?

<comment><USER13> Not to mention the subtle insinuation that the open source "freeware" is just a toy and everyone knows you have to pay for the real stuff.

I cannot imagine how Microsoft developers begin a project. "Today, I'm going to write this new web app to change the world! Right after I spend the day setting up Microsoft Team Studio and purchasing software licenses for every computer I plan to use!" How inspiring.

<comment><USER9> You realize that you can use the same copy of Visual Studio twice, right?

As in "Today I'm going to write this new web app, as soon as I install Eclipse, Django and SVN" would sound just as silly. It's just development tools.

Oh, and for what it's worth, Microsoft will give you 15 seats worth of MSDN Universal for $400 if you tell them you're a small business. Per seat, the MS tools are the cheapest part of setting up a new dev box for me. (CodeSmith, ReSharper and Ants Profiler are the ones that hurt!)

<comment><USER13> I guess I just don't like integrated mega-software like "team studio". Give me some nice, loose tools that work together well. Git is all the collaboration tool I need.

And, for what it's worth, the open source community will give you unlimited seats worth of all the best web development software in the world for $0.00 :D

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Scaling horizontally is considerably more expensive on the MS stack, as the StackOverflow folks discovered recently ("discovered" is a poor word choice maybe). I distinctly remember a blog post or podcast where Jeff basically lays out the numbers and says that the software costs make scaling up more enticing than scaling out.

</comment><comment><USER15> I don't trust a Windows server to provide reliable uptime. I have no other arguments that I wish to make.

<comment><USER16> We recently deployed a system (linux based on a windows server with vmware) on a huge infrastructure provider. Every week the box was going down, and we asked why - it's because they reboot ALL microsoft servers once per week, across the entire infrastructure. He claimed they were so unreliable it's good practice. WTF?

Uptime on my _first_ linux production server box was over 4 years.

<comment><USER17> Yes, in all large shops a weekly/monthly reboot cycle is a requirement. Duly note that this requires several hours of overtime from sysadmins, adding additional cost.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Of all of Microsoft's technologies, I have considered SQL Server, because from what I've seen it is an extremely powerful database engine with really good BI tools. There are two reasons I don't use it though: 1) it would be prohibitively expensive (for me anyways) to use across dozens of nodes and 2) it means introducing Windows into my environment, which quickly becomes very expensive and a nuisance.

<comment><USER19> I agree completely, Windows isn't that expensive (look at the difference in EC2 pricing) but SQL Server is where they get you. It's not Oracle bad, but for a small startup it might as well be.

<comment><USER5> I haven't really paid attention recently, but at a conference several years ago a former Microsoft sales rep said that nearly every "enterprise" product they sold required accompanying SQL Server licenses.

<comment><USER4> Most "enterprise" products are complex enough to need some complex backing store. A SQL server database is a natural choice for this in the MS world. Even TFS (source control and associated work item tracking, kitchen sink, etc.) is backed by one. This is not a bad thing, (e.g. you get atomic transactions from the DB), but it's interesting that most other source control systems are not backed by any relational database.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Yeah .. haha .. "The shell and all that fluff is a separate download" .. fluff :-)

</comment><comment><USER21> Yes.

<comment><USER22> For instance, let's measure it in terms of hacker news comments.

The fact that this is identifiable from the title as a MS PR piece means that most HN regulars completely lack the desire to respond.

The very idea that the question is being asked is enough to indicate that any discussion would be pointless. Clearly, this person has a diametrically opposed worldview, and is going to try and win me over with arguments based on that worldview.

Cost of my "stack": $0. A free OS, a free IDE (emacs), free tools.

Well, I guess I paid for photoshop. ;)

<comment><USER9> If your chosen stack slows you down by being more painful/cumbersome to develop on, set up and maintain, then it's costing you money. The fact that it's lost income rather than extra outflow doesn't change the fact that it's a cost.

Compared to PHP or Django (which we also do consulting in), ASP.NET is just plain faster to develop in. I can get my own stuff out the door quicker, which means that I can bill more of my time to consulting clients, which means that I'm net ahead at the end of the month.

So I guess you need to stick opportunity cost into that equation to see where you actually stand.

<comment><USER23> > Compared to PHP or Django (which we also do consulting in), ASP.NET is just > plain faster to develop in.

I'd love to see any info backing this up.

<comment><USER9> It's all subjective. Naturally, I've done my share of development across a wide range of frameworks and languages, and I've made my choice. The best advice I can give would be to do so as well.

Personally, I consider it a slight competitive advantage that so many shops avoid Microsoft stuff on ideological grounds. If they never try it, they'll never know. And we'll have that slight edge in getting things to market faster.

<comment><USER24> Uhh, just finished a week's intensive training in a supposed to make stuff more rapid .net based framework, and coming from a Django / Code igniter / Ruby on Rails / Grails background I'm utterly _stunned_ that anyone would claim that the basic asp.net environment is a productivity boost over a top of the line MVC framework like Django?

Maybe the problem is your competence rather than your tools? I don't mean to be blatantly offensive, but wow, asp.net > django? Really? ... Man..

<comment><USER9> Always be careful when talking about something that you only have one day's exposure to. I was pretty slow my first day of writing Django/Python too, but I stuck with it.

6 months later I was quite fast, and could compare apples-apples the things that Django doesn't quite do as quickly or elegantly as our home-rolled ASP.NET framework (which, to be fair, has been in development a lot longer than Django.)

So yes, having given both sides a decent shot, I went back to ASP.NET. As I said above, your mileage may vary. But until you've put in the time to build something big with .NET and get fully up to speed, you'll never know if you're right.

<comment><USER24> Ah, so you actually built some other framework on top of ASP.net and that's homegrown and that might be better for your purposes than something like django, that's a fair bit more believable.

You make cool stuff, I wish you all the best with it, catch you at a beach retreat some day. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I know as a student, it's waaaay too expensive. I could eithter get 4 months of rent, or a legal copy of some microsoft software. Guess which one I chose?

<comment><USER26> Except that as a student you get most everything on the MS Stack for free.

Enjoy your straw man.

<comment><USER25> They have student pricing for microsoft server and sql?

<comment><USER26> Yes. They are both free under the dream spark program.

To be clear, it's SQL Server express or developer edition, but if your goal is just learning the stack then it's enough.

<https://www.dreamspark.com/default.aspx>

<comment><USER25> What restrictions are there, exactly? I'm not familiar with licensing of these products, as I mainly use open source stuff at the moment.

<comment><USER27> Simply put, the restriction is that you cannot profit from it. I use all the 'Express' stack to develop at home. All free. Including the XNA lib.

<comment><USER25> Do they have an express version of windows I can hack on?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> _Windows can also execute all the Java and Ruby stuff that you see in_ nix platforms.*

Really? Hit any Ruby mailing list and every second post is a Windows user complaining that something doesn't work. Not just obscure things either - DataMapper doesn't work on Windows, or didn't a few months ago. Capistrano, the "official" Rails deployment tool, is not supported on Windows. And good luck with any gem that requires compilation.

Not to mention you lose out on all the command line tools. You'll need to install cygwin, of course. At that point you may as well just stop trying to run unix on a Windows box and just, you know, run Unix.</comment>


Obama health care act needs to change - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/03/us/politics/obama-health-care-act.html <comment><AUTHOR> Clinton: public option

Trump: encourage greater use of health savings accounts, allow insurance policies to be purchased across state lines and let people take tax deductions for insurance premium payments.

and create a marketplace for employers.

Not sure why a solution couldn't offer both.</comment>


Stealth Cell Tower Disguised as Printer - <AUTHOR> https://julianoliver.com/output/stealth-cell-tower <comment><USER2> I was walking around San Francisco the other day and suddenly noticed that my phone had switched from its usual AT&T provider to "China something" (maybe "ChinaNet"? I don't remember exactly what it was, and it was only there briefly). And then I got a text saying:

      Welcome to the test network.  Your IMSI is IMSI:  346234543252301

Not very stealth in this case. And I'm still not sure what it was. It went back to AT&T after I walked around some more.

<comment><USER3> Also illegal. Call FCC.

<comment><USER4> I filed a complaint with the FCC regarding a suspected jamming device. I'm pretty sure they didn't even read it. They forwarded the complaint to my wireless carrier, who sent a reply saying that the complaint had nothing to do with them and that my original complaint had reported a jammer. The FCC closed the complaint and considers it satisfied.

<comment><USER5> This is the gold standard example of the FCC's behavior towards cellular spectrum. They have a very different mission when it comes to HAM spectrum.

Cellular spectrum: Grandstand and extract cash from the carriers.

Ham spectrum: Antenna-laden vans canvasing neighborhoods for radio pirates.

It is despicable.

<comment><USER6> > Antenna-laden vans canvasing neighborhoods for radio pirates.

Got any photos, or links to accounts of these? I did a quick google image search because you think someone would have caught one in the wild by now, but no.

<comment><USER7> Here is a video of the inside of one. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIGAOLJh- XE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIGAOLJh-XE)

<comment><USER8> Wow. Well, thanks for that! That's pretty bizarre!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> And it's still only the _second_ worst modification made to HP Printers.[0]

[0]:[http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/09/hps- dr...](http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/09/hps-drm- sabotages-off-brand-printer-ink-cartridges-with-self-destruct-date/)

<comment><USER10> I don't know if it was HP, but my favorite malicious printer was one that scanned documents and then randomly changed numbers in them. This was the byproduct of an overly clever compression algorithm saving bytes by replacing parts of the image with other similar parts. God only knows how much important information was corrupted by that 'feature'.

<comment><USER11> You know, you could probably cripple a society over a few years with that bug (if the probability were tweaked right).

<comment><USER12> Excel is pervasive. If you consider every single spreadsheet used for financial analysis and then used to allocate resources has material bugs in it, you'll be so close to the truth as makes no difference.

Has it crippled society?

<comment><USER11> I think material but well known bugs are probably less dangerous because they're deterministic.

The true insidiousness of a random mutagen exploit is the fact that you can't pin in down. Hell, you could even specifically code it to be resistant to reproduction attempts. ;)

<comment><USER12> no no no. Not the many formula implementation bugs. I mean every survey of financial models done in excel has material error in their conclusions. Regardless of known bugs in excel that microsoft won't fix. I mean that merger you just read about where the financial model was done with excel - it has material bugs in it. Material by the GAAP accounting & attest definition. > +/-5% of profit. +/\- 10% of total assets. It's quite something...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I always wondered why these things weren't used in prisons. Maybe they are? Here in the UK there is a massive problem with smuggled phones in prisons, and since by definition their use is illegal in that environment then surely it's OK for law enforcement to jam or even intercept everything? Add to the mix the thick walls and total control of infrastructure and I see no good reason why every illegal phone can't be forced onto a fake network. Legal phones used by staff could be whitelisted.

<comment><USER14> I don't think jamming would really be reasonable in a building. If the walls can contain the jamming signal to their building then the walls will keep out the original signal anyways. I think just RF blocking paint would be a more reasonable solution but this would also interfere with any radios in use by the guards and wouldn't do anything for any prisoners that are outside during the day.

Having the cooperation of the cell service providers would be good, you could just have a small pico cell that tries to blackhole any phones in the building but if a prisoner can smuggle in a cell phone then they can probably smuggle in any other handheld radio as well.

<comment><USER15> > RF blocking paint

Isn't really a thing. These paints realistically manage 30 dB attenuation at around 1 GHz, which sounds great as a percentage ("99.x% reduction!"), but isn't sufficient to actually deny cellular service. [Paint also normally doesn't cover things like windows etc. which pretty much nullifies them anyway]

You can in fact dump a phone into a fridge or freezer, which (at least here) have steel sheets all over them. Phones still get cellular service.

What you would need is screen plating and windows with RF screening meshes (and of course special window frames and so on). This is a) extremely expensive b) can manage >60 dB attenuation.

<comment><USER16> With a fridge is the signal perhaps coming in through the door seals? This would make the cage incomplete.

<comment><USER17> Also, any cable that penetrates the "shielding" can make a great antenna unless it's specifically designed not to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Do phones not do any kind of cryptographic verification that the cell tower is real and that mobile data is sent securely between the phone and the tower?

In 2016?

<comment><USER19> For 3G/4G networks there is strong mutual authentication between the device and the network, for 2G(GSM) networks only the device is authenticated so these interception devices work by jamming the 3G/4G bands forcing the device onto the (fake) 2G network.

<comment><USER20> there's a feature in cell modems that can indicate radio link encryption/auth.. _put on tinfoil hat_...and it's disabled in pretty much all phone firmware

[http://www.jmeds.eu/index.php/jmeds/article/view/Enabling_th...](http://www.jmeds.eu/index.php/jmeds/article/view/Enabling_the_Ciphering_Indicator_on_Android)

[https://github.com/PrivacyCollective/Android- CipheringIndica...](https://github.com/PrivacyCollective/Android- CipheringIndicator-API)

<comment><USER21> What's the point of such a feature anyway? I don't want my phone to even connect to such tower, just tell me there is no service available.

<comment><USER22> Not even to connect in an emergency? Maybe "no service, click to attempt unsecure connection" would be better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Great project IMO.

But the conceit that cell towers are 'badly disguised' is incorrect; the goal is not to successfully hide, but simply to meet the much lower bar of obscuring a non-conforming shape in the environment, so that it doesn't trigger human perceptual interest.

You don't put duplicitously palm fronds on a tower to hide it; you put them so that someone scanning the cityscape from a mile away is not distracted by the utilitarian tower.

</comment><comment><USER24> > Masquerading as a regular cellular service provider, Stealth Cell Tower > surreptitiously catches phones and sends them SMSs written to appear they > are from someone that knows the recipient. It does this without needing to > know any phone numbers.

Pretty witty, but how does this work? Does it wait for the user to send a message and snoop?

<comment><USER25> No. The devices automatically connect to the base station with the strongest available signal.

<comment><USER26> That doesn't explain how the SMS message comes from someone the user knows. I would assume (and I think this is what GP was getting at) that the fake tower snoops on outgoing messages in order to collect numbers that the user has in their address book, and then spoofs a message from that number?

<comment><USER27> > SMSs written to appear they are from someone that knows the recipient

I don't think this means they are sent from numbers known to the recipient. Only that the content is written such that it appears to be from someone who knows the recipient.

I don't know if actual spoofing is possible.

<comment><USER25> Yeah, if you look at the codebase it just selects a random string from an array of prewritten messages and sends that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Monthly (daily?) reminder that you should use an app that encrypt your messages.

<comment><USER29> There are also apps that can tell you when you are connected to a new unknown tower.

<comment><USER30> Can you post some names and links? I'd like to check them out.

<comment><USER29> SnoopSnitch is such an app: [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.srlabs.snoo...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.srlabs.snoopsnitch&hl=en)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> So do cell phones automatically connect to the strongest 2G cell tower? Aren't they filtering for cell towers that only belong to their respective carrier?

<comment><USER32> The unlocked phones I've used can be put into auto mode (strongest signal, I guess?) or preference mode. Carrier locked phones do not switch to other providers unless there's no service. Then it'll switch over to another carrier but only allow emergency calls (911 in NA). I'm not sure what type of handshakes/communications happen in the background

<comment><USER31> But even carrier unlocked phones connect to other carries, hence what they call "roaming charges".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> In the same vein as Reddit's ELI5 (Explain Like I'm 5) For Us Laymen (FUL) on this topic, why can't Apple/Google currently default to a Full dropdown to 2G and give the option for _by choice_ users to never allow dropdown to 2G (or 3G/4G) at the OS Level?

Is there a legal mandate (911 Surface Area increase), a hardware impasse (phones physically can't) or is it a company decision to not allow (for whatever reason)?

<comment><USER34> I've had Sony Ericsson Android phones where you can completely disable 2G/GSM, so it seems to purely be a UI decision.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Perhaps a temporary fix might be to have a on-board verifiable hash map of cell tower addresses by location. Either that, or a way to block 2G on the device.

</comment><comment><USER36> First question/thing i wonder about is if this printers toner does last as long as expected instead of those you get with printers generally.

</comment><comment><USER37> Well, that was entirely pointless. The meat of the post (the photos of disguised cell towers) would have been exactly as relevant and impactful without that pre-pubescent "hacking". (ooh! we can run six year old software (an openbts fork) on a raspberry pi! we are so cool!)

<comment><USER38> It is an art installation. About the only thing prepubescent is your commentary.

<comment><USER37> Oh! It is art? Well, in that case it must be good.

<comment><USER39> That's not why it's good, that's why it exists in that state. A lot of people don't know about stuff like this and won't want to trudge through a heavy technical post.

But send them a fake SMS and maybe they'll start listening.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


No Dunkirk spirit can save Britain from Brexit defeat - <AUTHOR> https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/07/28/opinion/dunkirk-christopher-nolan-brexit.html <comment><USER2> After google got fined 6 billion euros for advertising on their own website, I'm shocked that The NY Times acts like the EU isn't a burden.</comment>


Chrome's HTTP/2 GREASE experiment results - <AUTHOR> https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/ietf-http-wg/2020JulSep/0202.html <comment><AUTHOR> For the unfamiliar, GREASE is a technique originally developed for TLS, to ensure that clients & servers correctly handle unexpected & unusual (but valid) inputs, and thereby that the protocol can continue evolve in future: [https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc8701#section-1](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc8701#section-1)</comment>


Trolley problem - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem <comment><USER2> Has anyone considered the first option? I.e. not actually touching the lever. At least, in the human example of the problem, and not the one related to autonomous vehicles. If so, what do you think of it?

I'm of the opinion that touching the lever would make you liable for the death/harm of the single individual. Sure, you "saved" 5 people and prevented them from coming to harm. But you knowingly decided to harm someone completely innocent in all of this. In my book, that's as good as letting go of the trolley in the first place. i.e. It's no longer an accident, but rather a deliberate (and arguably malicious) act.

<comment><USER3> This is precisely what the "trolley problem" aims to highlight, and why the question is interesting rather than just being answered "obviously you'll choose one death rather than five" by everyone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This parody of the trolley problem is amusing: [http://www.mindspring.com/~mfpatton/Tissues.htm](http://www.mindspring.com/~mfpatton/Tissues.htm)

</comment><comment><USER5> The problem with the trolley problem is that it discounts time. In the time between throwing or not throwing the switch and the trolley reaching the location of the potential victim[s], our experience gives us some small hope that the victim[s] might be rescued by others. themselves, or trolley malfunction. There is still time for good fortune to replace the bad. The problem does not account for our ordinary intuition in this regard.

This explains the apparent conundrum of divergence in the Fat Man version. If we push him off the bridge, there is no time for good fortune to save him, but there is time for the group to escape, self preserve or get lucky.

</comment><comment><USER6> I wonder how Tesla software will handle this problem.

Also who will get sued when it actually happens.

<comment><USER7> We're far far away from autonomous driving software being at a state where this is an interesting question. And, PR aside, Tesla's latest update is the same sort of assistive driving tech that's already in a number of high-end cars. It's not self-driving in that the driver is supposed to remain alert (and remains fully responsible for being in control of the vehicle).

We do seem to be rapidly heading toward an "interesting" place where assistive driving technologies are good enough that a lot of people realistically won't pay attention while driving (given that plenty of people text and use their phones even without such technologies).

<comment><USER8> You seem overly pessimistic about autonomous driving software; it seems to me like Google's driving software could easily already be at a point where it might be able to consider the choice between hitting pedestrians crossing the street, or purposefully crashing the car.

<comment><USER7> As a _general_ approach, I can certainly see assistive driving algorithms making decisions about whether to veer off the road vs. possibly hitting something ahead, i.e. how do you prioritize staying in the lane vs. avoiding a known/likely collision. One implication is that you'd sort of like to know what "off the road" means in a given location.

<comment><USER9> And what happens if you have an out of date map and the car thinks its swerving into an empty lot - but its now a kids playground.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> KILL FEWER PEOPLE.

What is the problem, here?

<comment><USER11> Overpopulation?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> ...only a real question if the identities of the people are known.

</comment><comment><USER13> Who needs karma anyway:

[http://xkcd.com/1455/](http://xkcd.com/1455/)

</comment><comment><USER14> A circle jerk of academics salaried for writing useless things about a hypothetical situation.

<comment> m_y-n_a_m_e "Sidetracked by trolleys: why sacrificial moral dilemmas tell us little (or nothing) about utilitarian judgment". Soc Neurosci. 2015 Mar 20:1-10. [Epub ahead of print] - [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25791902?dopt=Abstract](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25791902?dopt=Abstract)

tldr; ".... Sacrificial dilemmas therefore tell us little about utilitarian decision-making". Paper proposes to "studying proto-utilitarian tendencies in everyday moral thinking" \- seems a good option to choose.</comment></comment>


Rest in Peas: The Unrecognized Death of Speech Recognition - <AUTHOR> http://robertfortner.posterous.com/the-unrecognized-death-of-speech-recognition Speech recognition seems good on a cell phone but accuracy for conversational speech flatlined in 2001--and no one noticed. Computer understanding of language was supposed to lead to artificial intelligence. Now we have need AI to get computers to understand language. Catch 22. We just haven't recognized it yet. (Sorry, Ray Kurzweil.) <comment><USER2> This comment is voice posted to my nexus 1, without ed its.

I find that the speech recognition on my next 1 is adequate 4 basic search queries. I tried old freezes listed in the article as search query. Rest in peace high st correctly. Sb inspiration came out of sudan inspiration. Serve as the installation, remarkably, king out exactly correct. Saving 1 into the phone give me a number instead of a word. Saying recognize speech came out okay.

The problem with speech recognition of long passages things to beat that there is a large amount of information beyond the worst insults. This looks like that speak for example. Humans are also very sensitive to misplaced woods. That would be in the last sentence completely changes the meaning of this. I also found the speaking twin machine feels very natural. I have to stop and pause between each sentence because i can't remember what i'm thinking about.

As you can see from descon and, speech recognition has a long way to go to it. But you can at least sort of get the gist of the conversation.

<comment><USER2> I'm going to forget what I actually meant to say above by morning, so here's the translation typed out:

"This comment is voice-posted from my Nexus One, without edits.

"I find that the speech recognition on my Nexus One is adequate for basic search queries. I tried all the phrases listed in the article as search queries. 'Rest in peace' parsed correctly. 'Serve as the inspiration' came out as 'Sudan inspiration'. 'Serve as the installation', remarkable, came out exactly correct. Saying 'one' into the phone gave me a number instead of a word. Saying 'recognize speech' came out okay.

"The problem with speech recognition of long passages seems to be that there is a large amount of information beyond the words themselves. This looks like netspeak, for example. Humans are also very sensitive to misplaced words. The 'woods' in the last sentence completely changes the meaning of it. I also found that speaking to a machine feels very unnatural. I have to stop and pause between each sentence because I can't remember what I'm thinking about.

"As you can see from this comment, speech recognition has a long way to go before it becomes practical. But you can at least sort of get the gist of the conversation.

<comment><USER3> > you can at least sort of get the gist of the conversation.

Or: you can get the _opposite_ of the intended meaning, e.g., when you said 'UNnatural' it heard 'natural'.

<comment><USER2> The unfortunate part is that I didn't even know it made that error until I posted and re-read my comment from my laptop. The Nexus One's text boxes seem to have issues with a lot of text...when the page is big enough to scroll and the text is also big enough to scroll, it's hard to scroll the text without moving the page. So everything after the second paragraph basically happened off-screen with no visual feedback.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> For those who haven't dug into the audio analysis and synthesis field, it is really hard to understand why speech recognition is so complex. As living beings, we interpret sounds in a fundamentally different way than computers. Our brain has the ability to interpret sound-waves and provide meaning and context to them without us even realizing it. Once you hear a cat's meow, even if it happens in a different frequency range later, you can still associate it as a cat's meow.

This is what computers "hear": <http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/images/waveform.gif> \- in fact, this is ALL they can hear. When you hear 44.1khz, audio, that is 44100 bytes of information (a value between -128 to +127 per byte) per second. There is no hidden metadata behind the waveform. At 100% zoom-level, the waveform IS the audio. Theoretically, you can take a screenshot of a 100% zoomed waveform and convert that to actual sound with absolutely no loss of data (of course, you'd need a really high resolution to show a graph 44100x256 pixels in size. Now given such a waveform, how would you convert that to plain-text?

As an example, try recording "ships" and "chips" into a mic and view the waveform. See if there are any patterns you can identify between the two waveforms. I've done it over a hundred times. There isn't an easy way to discern if the letter was "sh" or "ch". Yet our brain does it so very easily thousands of times every day. So, failing easy pattern recognition, we have to use frequency analysis, DFT, and tons of AI.

My unscientific gut-feeling is that we're going about all of this the wrong way. We are using the wrong tools. Discrete, digital computers will never be able to tackle problems like pattern recognition in their current state. Switching to analog isn't going to improve anything either. I don't know what the correct instruments/devices will be but I know programming them will be very different.

<comment><USER5> As much as I agree with you in general... why this? " _So, failing easy pattern recognition, we have to use frequency analysis, DFT, and tons of AI._ "

It's not like we hear the waves really. We hear the pitch and volume mainly (proved nicely by playing simple impulses at >10Hz). So it's not like we fail easy pattern recognition on waves. I'd say that it's something we should not be looking at. Ever. Especially when you can have many representations which sound the same (they sound the same, because they look really similar in the frequency domain).

Using the frequency analysis, DFT, etc. is _the_ way to approach it.

<comment><USER4> > Using the frequency analysis, DFT, etc. is the way to approach it.

Indeed. I meant to say there is no shortcut that immediately makes speech recognition easy to solve. Hence, we have to use a lot of advanced math that works pretty well but like the article says, not as well as a typical human.

However, I don't think humans are that great either. The proof of that becomes evident when working on projects with people from around the world. Ask 10 people from around the world to dictate 10 different paragraphs that the other nine have to write down. I doubt they'll have the 98% accuracy that the article states, especially if there is no domain-constraint. Understanding what the other person says is hard. Put a Texan and South Indian in the same room and see what I mean. Of course, this doesn't mean it's not fun and interesting for computer scientists. It's just hard for most people to realize why the stupid automated voice-attendant can't understand they said "next" and not "six".

<comment><USER5> It works quite well if you don't have to care about the accent though.

Trivia: " _Automatic computer speech recognition now works well when trained to recognize a single voice, and so since 2003, the BBC does live subtitling by having someone re-speak what is being broadcast._ " (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed_captioning>)

But I'm pretty sure they started using it globally sometimes, because you can see the recognition quality fall when there's an interview with someone from outside UK.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think this article conflates two quite different things: speech recognition and understanding language.

The problem of speech recognition, it seems clear _now_ , is unsolvable without understanding language, because only with an understanding of language are the ambiguities inherent in speech properly resolved.

But having a workable understanding of language would seem to rely on us having some kind of model of a mind. Mere statistical relations between words or sentence structures aren't enough to map human language into mental models of the world, but having a consistent internal model of the world seems to be the key to understanding language. We disambiguate by minimizing the internal inconsistency.

Having a computational model for such an internal view of the world seems to be a Hard AI problem. We probably won't make much further progress with speech recognition until we've made headway there.

<comment><USER7> Actually most research effort in speech is more on the language side rather than the signal processing of the speech signal. So I think many people have a similar intuition as yourself.

Bear in mind though, that humans significantly outperform machines in tasks where isolated or streams of non-sense syllables are said: i.e. "badagaka" is said and humans can pick out the syllables whereas computers can have a lot of difficulty (in noise in particular).

Computers start approaching human performance most when there is a lot of linguistic context to an utterance. So it appears that humans are doing something other than using semantics.

<comment><USER8> Good points, but I think we underestimate how much situational context humans use when they interpret language. Sometimes we can communicate with very little language simply because we know what the purpose of the interaction is.

Another thing I keep wondering about is why so little emphasis is put on dialog. When humans don't understand something, they ask, or offer an interpretation and ask whether it's the right one.

Speech recognition systems don't seem to do that. They say "Sorry, I could not understand what you said. Please repeat". That's not very helpful for the computer of course. It should say: "Huh, Peas? Why would anyone rest in peas for heaven's sake??". Then the human could sharpen his SS and say "PeaCCCEE!!! not peas. I'm not talking about food, I'm talking about dying!".

<comment><USER9> Context is _huge_ for human interpretation. If you've ever have someone address you in a different language than you were expecting, you know what I mean. It's almost like you can imagine the search just going deeper and deeper without finding anything that makes sense until it swaps in the other language and go: Ah, you said "good morning"! :-)

<comment><USER10> Especially embarrassing when somebody addresses you in your native language, and you expected something different.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Two anecdotes:

First, I worked with a quadriplegic engineer who relied on speech recognition. While it wasn't perfect, he certainly did well with it. The trick is that he trained himself as much as he did the computer. He spoke more slowly, and enunciated the places where he knew of problem points. I don't even know how much of this was conscious - I only watched a few times and never asked him.

If we treat our voice recognition similarly, we get much better results.

2\. Due to a few too many loud concerts and bars, I have partial hearing loss and can miss words myself. The difference between myself and a computer is that the computer is expected to output immediately rather than being allowed to wait for more context clues, and the computer isn't allowed to interrupt to ask about words.

These two strategies, allowing for a more conversational flow, may be what we need to improve speech recognition.

</comment><comment><USER12> Surprising fact despite what your smartphone tells you: speech recognition in general situations hasn't improved since 2001. A good exposition of why Norvig and Google's approach of using statistical analysis may be approaching a dead end.

<comment><USER13> I think something must be wrong with Norvig's approach, because humans can learn a lot faster. We don't need one billion voice samples to learn understanding. So there must be a better way than the ginormous dataset approach.

<comment><USER10> Why? Perhaps your genes have been trained (=evolved) on big datasets to produces good speech recognizers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> But Hinton recently made significant advances in speech recognition using RBMs.

Google Tech Talk: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdIURAu1-aU>

<comment><USER7> He didn't make any advance that has made its way to a full word recognizer, he's merely recognizing phonemes (which are linguistic subunits of words) several researchers in the field have criticized his methods. Additionally, none of the top five phoneme recognizers have ever been deployed as a word recognizer, and there is little chance that they even will be in the next few years.

<comment><USER15> The concept of phonemes isn't undisputed either. When analyzing actual speech it becomes clear that there are no real steady states, but much coarticulation between the "segments". Of course, part of it could be attributed to the fact that speech sounds are produced by articulatory gestures, which necessarily overlap in time. On the other hand, these coarticulation patterns are not language-independent. So, a purely (articulatory/auditory) phonetical explanation of why these differences exists is rather unlikely.. I know this seems rather off-topic with regard to speech recognition, but the question of the basic building blocks of language is kind of at the heart of the problem.

<comment><USER7> I agree that its at the heart of it (and I'm presently writing a paper where I'm using articulatory-phonetic features rather than phonemes). Unfortunately, there is no large-vocabulary speech recognizer that uses articulatory phonetics (yet!). Every large scale speech recognizer and most small scale use phonemes and are trained using speech that has been transcribed into phonemes. There is almost no data that is annotated with articulatory phonetics (a problem I'm working on right now).

<comment><USER15> I guess that's in part because it's even more difficult to (manually) transcribe speech into articulatory-phonetic elements based on the acoustic signal (laryngeal gestures?? Clearly they are there in articulation, but their acoustic correlates are masked to some extent).

Automatic alignment methods are probably quite hard to implement, given the various coarticulation patterns in the signal depending on context/prosodic position etc.

Could you provide a link to papers or other materials dealing with articulatory features in speech recognition?

I guess I should take another look at Browman/Goldstein's Articulatory Phonology

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> While the article focuses on speech recognition for arbitrary speech, it misses the fact that speech interfaces for specific situations are now actually useful. Today, I told my car "play track 'severed head'," and it actually played the correct song. I asked my phone "what is my next appointment?" and heard my calendar. I then said "dial 206 421 8989," my phone dialed properly, and so on and so forth. This is all without any explicit training on my part. No need to read Mark Twain or anything like that.

There are still problems here, but the technology for speech interfaces has gone from terrible to OK in the last seven years. I'm looking forward to seeing where it goes next.

<comment><USER17> "But sticking to a few topics, like numbers, helped. Saying "one" into the phone works about as well as pressing a button, approaching 100% accuracy. But loosen the vocabulary constraint and recognition begins to drift, turning to vertigo in the wide-open vastness of linguistic space."

"As with speech recognition, parsing works best inside snug linguistic boxes, like medical terminology, but weakens when you take down the fences holding back the untamed wilds."

No, it did not miss it. It was a core point of its argument; the entire arc of the article is about how we made steady progress on the small cases but crapped out on the general case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Totally anecdotal, but I thought I'd pass this on.

Whenever I use Goog 411 or Dragon, my results improve if I speak like a standard radio announcer. You know, that kind of jokey, fake lilting voice that they use on car commercials? I hate doing it because I sound like such an ass, but whenever I've done so, Google understands what I'm saying. YMMV.

</comment><comment><USER19> Speech recognition is pattern recognition. Computers are inefficient and relatively limited in their capacity to discern relevant data from complex data sets when the size of these sets begins to soar exponentially. That's why weather prediction in many areas isn't worth much more than a week. Consider how well the human brain can synthesize disparate data in the relatively simple form of sentences with scrambled word spellings. Add to this, the nearly infinite combinations of vocabulary, grammar, voice tone and context of speech and we can begin to see the scale of the task of matching with programs and algorithms, what the human mind does unconsciously in real time with a high degree of accuracy.

<http://simplebits.com/notebook/2004/01/16/mipellssed-wdors/>

Mipellssed Wdors Posted on January 16th, 2004 at 1:44 pm

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a total mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh?

Filed in: misc

</comment><comment><USER20> MSR's MindNet, mention in the article, is online:

<http://stratus.research.microsoft.com/mnex/Main.aspx>

</comment><comment><USER21> It's not dead. It is in fact used a lot more than ten years ago. I've yet to get a voice message that google voice was not able to decode sufficiently, and most of the transcribed messages have been 100% accurate.

General speech recognition has a long way to go, but it will happen _last_ in speech recognition. Meanwhile, in the real world, speech recognition is noticeably better for everyday use than it was a decade ago.

</comment><comment><USER22> I have conflicting anecdotes: 1\. it's used heavily and successfully in medical dictation situations, ie medical professionals dictating case notes. 2\. I was so excited about speech control in OSX, and I tried it, and it was shit because I had to speak with a terrible impression of an American accent to get it to do anything.

<comment><USER23> I paid my way through college doing medical transcription. Throughout my time there, the hospital was experimenting with speech recognition, but the success rate was very low, and the doctors spent a lot of time going over and correcting the output. I believe they finally ditched the voice recognition software (though I do not know for sure).

I'm guessing that the reason the experiment failed at this hospital is that the language was non-English. In addition, most of the doctors were foreign, speaking with wildly differing accents. Also, many of the doctors would mix two languages when dictating, in addition to the usual Latin terms.

Basically, it was easier to just pay some humans to parse it.

<comment><USER22> the ones where it is successful invest quite a bit into training the software and the doctors use macros heavily.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I think the core difficulty to further speech recognition is semantic understanding.

One of the reasons computers aren't good at it yet is sheer lack of computer power. Which forces them to use less context to decide word meanings. There is a reason humans think and remember things mostly in the form of stories, it provides more context for memory and decoding cues.

The article talks about how much computer power has increased over the last decade without any increase in transcription accuracy ("freakish" is the word it uses) without mentioning the fact that it is still enormously behind human processing capabilities.

</comment><comment><USER25> Is the problem in guessing phonemes or guessing which word is being said based on the phonemes? I'd assume that phonemes are easy to guess at since it's such a small set compared to the number of possible words.

</comment><comment><USER26> I disagree. This is another example of underestimating how powerful the human brain is: it is an exquisitely designed piece of dedicated hardware with more power than even our super-compute-clusters. Hardware that's dedicated, to a large extent, to language processing. I think current statistical approaches, ramped up on future computing resources, will continue to chip away at 'word error rate'.

</comment><comment><USER27> My favorite hard-to-understand phrase is "Isle of Lucy", which is pretty tough to get right when spoken human-to-human.

</comment><comment><USER28> I wouldn't draw so much from what looks like a local minimum - especially when the abilities of people imply that there is a suitable algorithm. The problem is its no longer a successful marketing gimmick - it won't help to sell software/hardware anymore until it works as well as people do.

</comment><comment><USER29> So the question remains as to how to get that last 10-15% of transcription accuracy. It sounds as if existing methodology has run out of steam and that a paradigm shift is required to get to human-like speech recognition.

</comment><comment><USER30> Was speech recognition software ever any good for anything other than having fun with your kids?

</comment><comment><USER31> "It's hard to wreck a nice beach"

</comment><comment><USER32> Well, so much for HAL reading lips - he can't even hear what I'm saying. I call bullshit - HAL's way smarter than that!

<comment><USER10> Perhaps they had better (and now forgotten) techniques back in 2001?

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Great article.... Like a lot of things it all hinges on P=NP.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for reading. But I think a key take-away is that even with infinite computing power, you only increase the chance of being right a little. It's still a guess.

That's the real surprise. It's not a question of computing power.

<comment><USER34> Your articles seem to follow a theme of "no new ideas/breakthroughs". The anecdote of the NASA head imploring people to come up with ideas was striking. Any guesses as to why this is happening now? After all, we _were_ having critical breakthroughs through much of the last century.

<comment><AUTHOR> To some degree, I'm critiquing Ray Kurzweil who generalizes about progress. So, for better or worse, I take a lesson from that which is to be empiricist: look closely at each field to see whether it's vaulting forward or not.

It's not happening in space (although hypersonics seem to be getting more real). It's not happening in AI or speech recognition/understanding. It's not happening in medicine.

So the _net_ empirical situation looks like the opposite of what Kurzweil says. Only IT and Moore's Law are going totally nuts. One can conjecture about why, but I think that's conjecture and there aren't deep fundamental principles about scientific and technological progress, at least that we've found so far.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> A total horseshit article... I mean to conclude from a lack of progress for a couple of years that AI is impossible.

<comment><USER13> That was quote from the article btw.</comment></comment>


To Clone Or Not To Clone [iOS Games] - <AUTHOR> http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/HenryTruong/20120215/9451/To_Clone_Or_Not_To_Clone.php <comment><AUTHOR> Response from the publisher: <http://www.boardgamegeek.com/article/8517502#8517502>

Developer response: <http://www.boardgamegeek.com/article/8518401#8518401>

Both of those are from the discussion about the full situation on BoardGameGeek: [http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/766059/aborted- pandemic-...](http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/766059/aborted-pandemic-ios- project)</comment>


Ask HN: How do you manage your other half of life? - <AUTHOR> Started working in the field couple of years ago. I have trouble managing other aspects of life like socializing, hanging out with the family. Hell I even often get blamed for wearing the same types of outfit. How do you guys manage the other half of work? I just can't get enough time to complete my work. <comment><USER3> I guess everyone has a point in life they realise they are not in the same mental state they want to be in. Growing up with lot of issues in the family and financial trouble. I kind of dumped me into work head first and used that as a tool to distract myself from everything around me. No social life. No hanging out with the friends, family or co workers.

While I did good at work I was kind of viewed as the serious person whom you don't go to for small talk. On top of that added up more responsibility with our necessarily getting more benefits( since am not that fun person to hang out with or to be around) This put me in an eternal state of anxiety with every increasing load of work and my issues compounding.

It finally led to a burnout of massive level where I started hating my work and gave up reading or writing anything technical. I couldn't force myself to even write a small program. I constantly doubted myself. Kicked myself for all the small things and abused myself literally.

Then finally I came to terms and took a break. Accepted that work is just another part of the whole life. No one dies if I don't work for a day or fail to deliver the project. But, there are people in my life who get worried if I don't call them in a week. Its good to have the around and value them.

Again, don't have any practical solutions but you need to know the value of the things you are dealing with. You need to prioritise them at each level.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm in your situation couple times per year, when there's so much to do, that I basically work + sleep only. But imagine that's temporary and you'll get over it (e.g. you'll become better at your job, or make a significant progress with the difficult tasks you're assigned to currently - you name it).

If situation takes longer than you're actually able to manage it - <USER2> there's something wrong at your work part of life and maybe you should consider change?

Side note: This year I've decided to monitor my life a little bit, so I've decided to create notes at the end of each week ( [https://lukaszkups.net/notes/?category=lkweekly](https://lukaszkups.net/notes/?category=lkweekly) ) which summaries all aspects about my professional (technology-oriented) and private (social, free time) life.

After 32 weeks, I can say, that not these notes are helpful by any mean, but the process when I sit down and start thinking about what happened last week (& trying to find suitable words to describe it).

I really recommend trying this by yourself, it might be a little refresh and gaining a new perspective to your life.

Hope you'll find a way to improve your life as well, take care!

<comment><USER3> I think of journaling as a log to debug myself and it has helped me out so well in finding out lot of physical health issues and mental states which I want to cultivate and avoid.

<comment><USER4> yes, exactly this. You can always read and re-think about the past and try to find better solutions for the future problems that has happened in the past.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I can't parse your question. You say you have troulbe socializing and hanging out with your family and I presume that this is called "the other half of life" as stated in your title. Yet, the next sentence you call it the "other half of work". Do you feel like it is work to do so? If so, then there lies your issue: according to your experience, it might be the case that both work and the socializing aspect of life feels draining.

I don't think I can help you here as my experiences are completely different. I simply manage by not letting work get to me and feeling the urge to call friends and be with them. With regards to family, I have the same issue, but c'est la vie.

Consider finding a coach, if you have issues with this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ohkay, I'll consider getting a coach.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> >I have trouble managing other aspects of life like socializing

How so?

>hanging out with the family

What are you doing when not hanging out with the family?

>Hell I even often get blamed for wearing the same types of outfit

This isn't your problem at all it's someone else's.

>I just can't get enough time to complete my work.

Honestly, try cultivating Shamatha, which is meditative equipoise or calm abiding mind. Singled pointed concentration is relaxing and has the effect of increased mental stability over time. Check out this book on it [1].

[1] - [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/64084.The_Attention_Revo...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/64084.The_Attention_Revolution)

</comment><comment><USER7> > How do you guys manage the other half of work?

I'm guessing this is a typo.

Honestly speaking I don't manage it well. I go through spurts of either side, luckily alternating between social and work. There are weeks where I sort of disappear and even avoid my friends and loved ones. But either by design or by chance I get out of it only to fall on the other side of the wall. I have made my peace with this pattern, perhaps you can try this out? Now I am not saying when I am in my social manic phase I don't go to work but it is not a priority any more. No more trying things out because they sound fun, more coffee chats, say yes to less meetings, etc.

</comment><comment><USER8> Well how much do you work? If your work + commute is >60 hrs a week well shit ain't gonna work well unless you don't sleep.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, don't have to commute much, fortunate enough to live nearby, end up staying late nights.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> There is always more work to do, and your employer will take whatever you're willing to give.

</comment><comment><USER10> Spend other half to complete your work

</comment><comment><USER11> Poorly</comment>


1-stop destination for managing shopping wish-lists of one and all - <AUTHOR> http://www.clipjoos.com

<comment><USER2> Idea is awesome! working great as well , But guys change his cloths :)</comment>


A Pragmatic Guide to Getting Things Done - <AUTHOR> http://hamberg.no/gtd/ <comment><USER2> GTD is a great system; once you follow it (in some form), it quickly becomes difficult to imagine how anyone lives their life without it.

I have found Evernote to be a great tool to implement a GTD system. Evernote's greatest strength is its flexibility. It works on basically every platform and integrates with most other tools you use. It doesn't really tell you _how_ to use it though, which is where GTD fits in perfectly. (And it turns out to be really helpful to integrate as much of your system as possible into one tool.)

I found this site to be a great resource getting started with GTD and Evernote: [http://www.thesecretweapon.org/](http://www.thesecretweapon.org/)

My current system is very similar to what they describe, although I added a 'Waiting' status, which includes both things that need to be done at or after a given time, and things where I want to remember that I'm waiting on something outside my control (a reply to an email, for instance). I set reminders on everything in there.

The one other significant tweak I made is to use notebooks instead of tags for the 'when' portion. Since every task needs to have a 'when', and since every note has one and only one notebook, this seemed like a logical fit. So instead of the 'Current' notebook they recommend, I simply use a Current stack containing a notebook for each priority level.

I also use Powerbot to improve clipping emails from gmail.

Anyway, the details don't matter and are easy to change. The main point is, give GTD on Evernote a try, and you'll be glad you did.

<comment><USER3> The problem with GTD, IMHO, is that it's the organizational equivalent of nuclear fusion. Yes, once it gets going it's self-sustaining and will provide you with clear benefits. But, in my experience, it takes a lot of work in the beginning to spin up GTD and keep it going until it gets to that self- sustaining state. I tried going with the GTD system for two weeks and it felt like I was _constantly_ managing and updating all the various lists that it requires. I could never seem to get to the "promised land" where everything would stabilize and the system would become self-sustaining.

In the end, I just ended up reverting back to keeping a simple to-do list in a text file.

<comment><USER4> My favourite getting-things-done methodology is still: "If you have more things that you can remember, then you have too many things and you can safely drop some"

I've also noticed that most things I put off, or forget to do, are things are I don't actually want to do anyway and no amount of GTD-ing or tasklisting or anything will ever make me do them. They are just cruft that accumulates.

Better to just let them slip off your viewfinder. One thing I have to improve, though, is doing that consciously. Instead of letting things slip through the cracks, I have to start consciously pushing them through the cracks.

<comment> dj-wonk Interesting point, which I partially sympathize with. The core of it, as I hear it, is that you should focus on the most important things first and not worry about the rest. In any case, I think it is nice to write those "less important" things down. If you later renegotiate your commitment to doing them, you can add a tag or note that says, more or less, "This isn't really that important" and take it off your active list.

To make a counter argument to your "methodology": There are "small" things that don't seem important relative to other things, but as you get more organized, getting those "small" things done can be very satisfying. Also the energy needed to do them may be small when you remember them in the right context.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I used the GTD approach for many years, but one of the main problems was that I couldn't always maintain the weekly review and consistently stick with the system. And in GTD world, that's very bad.

At first I thought this mainly had to do with my own lack of discipline, but now I think it's mainly because GTD just doesn't work for every kind of task, project, or occupation.

The main problem, I think, is that GTD assumes: 1\. that you can always cut up a task into smaller actions 2\. that you can do a next action in one sitting, and 3\. that having 'stuff' in your head is bad.

I've found that for some things this applies, and in those cases one might use GTD. But for many other things these three items don't apply, and then GTD can actually be counter-productive.

For example, a creative task might not be doable in one sitting, but it might also not be concrete enough to split up into smaller next actions. Furthermore, for a lot of creative stuff it might actually be very useful to have it 'hanging around' in your head as 'stuff'.

Basically, I found that there's an inverse correlation between the effectiveness of GTD and the amount of creativity needed for a task.

I've settled on Mark Forster's AutoFocus (Final Version) (as mentioned elsewhere here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8629066](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8629066)) for most of my current stuff, as it's more organic and more fitting to what I do now. If I were to have more managerial-type work I might switch back to GTD though.

(and of course there are many principles from GTD that are useful to me even if I don't use the full system)

<comment><USER6> I started doing five year plans. Each five year plan I break into sizable chunks. And each chunk I break into single daily goals. Each individual goal lasts a month, and every day I try to achieve my goal. Since it's only one thing a day it's hard not to. And it's habit forming because of the month long period per individual goal.

Right now my five year plan is to stabilize all areas of my life (finances, living situations, self). I'm starting with self, and my first individual goal is getting out of bed the first time I wake up.

So far so good. And since theres no restrictions on what I do otherwise I get a ton of things done in the morning but I never feel stressed if, for instance, I don't get around to studying all the French I'd like to.

Somethings which are a bit more time intensive like keeping a journal I make alternate tasks. So instead of just keeping a journal, every day I'd make it a point to either write in a journal, record my dreams, or write down all of the fool things I've done in a day (on the recommendation of Dale Carnegie who found the idea from Benjamin Franklin). This gives me a bit more liberty, dreams tend to be recorded in the morning, journals can be written in anytime, and the introspection of a day takes place in the evening. Then if I go out and party I don't need to feel stressed about breaking a goal when I wake up in the morning.

It's simple. It's easy. It's positive habit forming. And it feels great.

<comment><USER7> How long have you been doing this?

<comment><USER6> Not long enough yet but a few months now and I'm sticking to it which is pretty good. It also keeps that five year plan in mind even though each individual day never feels stressed by some looming goal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> For people like me who enjoy a non-electronic way to organize all of this, I've found bullet journaling to be very helpful

[http://bulletjournal.com/](http://bulletjournal.com/)

<comment><USER9> I've been using bulletjournal since January 1st this year and it's been working wonderfully. Prior to it I used GTD with Things and Wunderlist, but they always ended falling apart.

<comment> dj-wonk Why did Things and Wunderlist fall apart? (Could it be that you did not schedule and do the weekly review? I've had that problem myself.)

<comment><USER10> Wunderlist had serious sync problems that made it impossible to trust.

I don't know if they solved the problem though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Why productivity systems fail? [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1p9U2Mu4Zth8Qa3buL3j2EQTf...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1p9U2Mu4Zth8Qa3buL3j2EQTfVA_tFUMkeQSzbuftiX4/edit)

<comment><USER12> > Is that so bad? Muddling through has probably gotten you further than you > give it credit for, why do you think you have to be mister super > productivity to get further?

I have an answer for this one, and I think the War of Art captures it- it's the pain of missed obligations, unfulfilled promises, etc. Anxiety, stress, difficulty sleeping, etc. 'Mr Super Productivity' is a bit of a strawman- I think most people would be happy just to say "I have regularly productive days and I am on top of my work and my commitments".

I know what it's like to think "it's not so bad, I can just waffle my way through life". It means upsetting parents, teachers, girlfriends, friends, the spouse. It means disappointing people.

<comment><USER13> It seems to me most of the pain comes from over promising, not being able to say no and the unreasonable expectations of people close to you.

<comment><USER12> That is actually very, very true. The single best way to get things done is to have less things to do. Underappreciated fact.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think Bullet Journal could be very effective to Get Things Done (TM), though I haven't used it in practice yet.

[http://www.bulletjournal.com](http://www.bulletjournal.com)

<comment><USER12> I've been using it for a while, it's pretty good. One of the best things about bullet journal that things like Asana, Trello, and all the digital tools are bad as doing is- you have to REWRITE tasks that you haven't completed yet. They don't just get lost under a pile of forgotten tasks. You have to revisit them each time you rewrite them. This does something for the memory. It works for me, anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I found Neil Fiore's "The Now Habit" a great complement to the GTD system. GTD tells me where to put a TODO and TNH helps when the neatly organized system of GTD inexplicably fails to function without my actions :-) Obviously both are only frameworks for solving problems, not magical solvers.

<comment><USER16> A summary of the book: [http://hashref.com/summaries/TheNowHabit.pdf](http://hashref.com/summaries/TheNowHabit.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Moving from what the book describes to a real workable system is a bit of leap. I remember hambergs.no article. It helped immensely and I ended up writing up my own system with a few personal tweaks. GTD has many interpretations and many implementations and it is hard to know what to pick. It is just as easy to lose site of the goal: Make your life easier and more productive.

This was my experience. The question I had were surprisingly hard to answer.

1\. What is GTD and does it work? 2\. If GTD is failing for me is it because I am not doing it wrong? 3\. If GTD is failing for me is it because my implementation is wrong (i.e wrong tool or badly designed app)

The problem with the GTD system, as much as I have enjoyed using it, is that there is no reference system to verify correct usage. The usual path taken, for those who are patient and motivated, is that of hacking your way through the books, tutorials and apps out there until it feels right. The 'it feels right' feeling comes if you actually feel like you are on top of your work load. The system you end up with that works for you (when you eventually get to this place), may look very different from what the book described or what you initially envisaged.

GTD is more like meditation than a system. It's hard to learn it by reading about it. You only know you are doing it right when your life feels lighter and more productive.

</comment><comment><USER18> GTD has some great side effects. I owe all my recent success to GTD. Apart from all the other goodies, The following things have been a game changer for me.

1\. Next tasks: Helps me identify new opportunities to work on. And take next obvious steps to any task, where others aren't seeing. In fact one would be surprised how many great opportunities lurk in the next tasks.

2\. Weekly reviews: Helps me take quick iterations of feed back on the week and immediately improve by applying the feedback to the next week. This at times over some months(When I'm working using GTD really well) has lead to runaway improvements in many areas of my work.

3\. Writing it down and prioritizing: I use a normal pen and paper. Tracking, drawing doodles, other things is very easy. Writing down tasks and prioritizing helps me eliminate an entire tree of unimportant tasks and pick up the important ones. This combined with the weekly review can be a very powerful tool.

Lastly the efficiency of GTD depends entirely on our efficiency to take things seriously and work on them.

And GTD is a framework, nearly all GTD practitioners I know of ultimately build something over GTD that works for them.

</comment><comment><USER19> GTD task prioritization works best when combined with Eisenhower matrix [1]. AFAIK the only tool that combines these two is TimeGT ([https://timegt.com](https://timegt.com)).

[1] [https://timegt.com/2010/07/14/what-is-the-eisenhower- matrix/](https://timegt.com/2010/07/14/what-is-the-eisenhower-matrix/)

</comment><comment><USER20> Is there space for (another) notes product that is purely focused on the GTD framework? Would people use this if I created it?

<comment><USER21> The space is actually unlimited.

Many successful entrepreneurs started by inventing a new to-do list. This is because it is the only way to come to terms with what it means to get things done at all.

There is literally no better use of a first-time entrepreneur's time than reinventing to-dos.

<comment><USER22> First time developer? Maybe. First time entrepreneur? Seems like a recipe for failure. I would have thought it is better to pick a (non-IT) niche that one has a deep domain knowledge in and have a go there.

<comment><USER21> Yes, you're right. I am so deep in the bubble that to me "first-time developer" = first-time entrepreneur!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Adding a "do NOT do today" section to my todo list has made a big difference for me in terms of staying focused on the real priorities. Start w list of all the important things and rank em, then drop all but the top 3 into explicit "do not do". Otherwise #4-N have an insidious way of taking precious time and energy away from the most important stuff, while feeling justifiable.

Also, tracking wins has helped me feel much better about my productivity. Good for a mood boost or shot of confidence, to glance through it.

</comment><comment><USER24> The issue with such system is that it does not allow you to plan for the future on the basis of your priorities and long term goals. It does allow you to get things done, but generally you'll be only getting urgent things done, while important but not urgent things are left behind (learning a new programming language or a technology, practicing) your guitar. Here is one trick that improved my productivity much and allowed me to concentrate on what is important. I extended such system with the ability of weekly planning (and not only review). At the beginning of each week I assign time for each of my project depending on its priority and its alignment with your long term goal. I start by stating my long term goals and my principles, then what projects I am working on, what short-term goals I want achieve. I then assign when and how long I will work on each projects.

<comment><USER22> Have you read the book? Because that's what horizons are about. And the second and third book in the series go into life-goals quite a bit.

But yes, it starts from the premise of building to that bottom-up, not top- down. Once you have your flow/sense of control, David Allen said, your brain is unlocked to think hard of the more important things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I like this workflow diagram, by Scott Moehring, of the Getting Things Done framework:

[http://gettingthingsdone.com/pdfs/gtd_workflow_advanced.pdf](http://gettingthingsdone.com/pdfs/gtd_workflow_advanced.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER26> Some people swear on "Final Version" as time management:

[http://archive.constantcontact.com/fs004/1100358239599/archi...](http://archive.constantcontact.com/fs004/1100358239599/archive/1109980854493.html)

The gist of FV is that it takes "psychological inertia" into account to a certain degree - something, that many other systems lack.

To be honest, I never tried it and I don't use any time management system, but maybe it's worth a try for people who don't like GTD.

<comment><USER27> Ah I used the very first version of that system a few years ago. Quite good, actually, I may give it a try again to get on top of everything once more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> There is also an alternative to GTD, it is Zen to Done ([http://zenhabits.net/zen-to-done-ztd-the-ultimate-simple- pro...](http://zenhabits.net/zen-to-done-ztd-the-ultimate-simple-productivity- system/)). It basically tries to be a simplification of GTD. Also the idea is to focus on 10 simple habits to improve productivity.

</comment><comment><USER29> > When reviewing the projects list, you will make sure that there is alway at > least one action on your next actions list for each project, thus making > sure that your projects aren't forgotten.

This part could be done automatically. I don't know any app, which does it, though. Is it a good idea to automate this or do GTD-users get some benefits out of doing it manually?

<comment><USER30> Org mode has a feature for that:

[http://orgmode.org/manual/Stuck- projects.html](http://orgmode.org/manual/Stuck-projects.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I would recommend personal wiki such as ZIM. It comes with diary, todo lists, git integration... They also have similar guide:

[http://zim-wiki.org/manual/Usage/Getting_Things_Done.html](http://zim- wiki.org/manual/Usage/Getting_Things_Done.html)

</comment><comment><USER32> What to you guys think about the arguments in this article? [http://www.centask.com/a-eulogy-for-the-manual-to-do-list- th...](http://www.centask.com/a-eulogy-for-the-manual-to-do-list-the-case-for- an-integrated-productivity-system/)

<comment><USER33> Interesting ideas about the reason productivity systems fail but I am skeptical whether this issues have a real solution

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Looks like it can be involved with the way we process email. Maybe even in combination with [http://inbox.google.com](http://inbox.google.com). Processing email has become a less pain in the ass thanks to Inbox for me.

</comment><comment><USER35> Anyone try "Getting Results the Agile Way: A Personal Results System for Work and Life" [1] ?

I just got the book from the library and the reviews seem a little mixed.

[1] - www.amazon.com/Getting-Results-Agile-Way-Personal/dp/0984548203

</comment><comment><USER36> GTD is great, I just wish I had the self discipline to follow it.

David Allen refers to the weekly review as the critical success factor.

And that's the one that I fall down on and then things slide and I get afraid to look in the 'bucket'.

<comment><USER12> Remove discipline from the equation if possible. Instead tie it to something you already do. Don't go to bed without first going through a nightly review, for example. And review it again before you leave for work in the morning. Manipulate your environment to prime yourself to do what you previously depended on discipline to do.

<comment><USER36> That's a good idea.

Actually it's a bit like Allen's "Put it by the door" technique. Doing stuff when you're smartest to help you when you're at your most dumb

<comment><USER12> Yup! I like to think of most of my writing as buoys I put out during calm seas so I can navigate during rough ones. Same fundamental idea.

<comment><USER36> I like that analogy!

It's a great feeling when you're dealing with a once in a blue moon task to discover that you've left some helpful notes for yourself in a place you'll find them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> You might want to take a look at our 4 minute video (and graphic) on GTD.

[http://www.brevedy.com/gtdgraphic/](http://www.brevedy.com/gtdgraphic/)

</comment><comment><USER38> There is a great application for GTD: [http://nozbe.com](http://nozbe.com).

</comment><comment><USER39> It's a great system. However, one should not forget the lost art of doing one thing at a time, for a time.</comment>


Tokens.com Reportedly Sold for $500,000 - <AUTHOR> https://domaininvesting.com/tokens-com-sold-500000/ <comment><USER2> token.com sold for more this year.

Historically domains like this have been bad investments; I almost purchased bitcoin.com for $2,000 in 2010, (beat out for $5k offer). The domain changed hands a number of times, eventually bought out by Roger Ver for over $1mm.

None of the purchases beat the bitcoin-denominated price I offered: $2,000 in Bitcoins was around 4,000 BTC if I recall correctly, or more than $40mm in today's dollars.</comment>


SVG animation demo - <AUTHOR> http://www.bahfrah.org.uk/florence/playviewbox.xml

<comment><AUTHOR> Context, via @ddailey at Ello:

<quote>

Amazing animation from Bob Hopgood.

It may take a minute to load in your browser (use Chrome -- Bob writes: "There is a very unobvious green square bottom right that you have to click to start it."), but this is what people do with SVG:

[http://www.iw3c2.org/svg_animation/svg_animation/WWW2013/pla...](http://www.iw3c2.org/svg_animation/svg_animation/WWW2013/play.svg) and [http://www.bahfrah.org.uk/florence/playviewbox.xml](http://www.bahfrah.org.uk/florence/playviewbox.xml)

Bob has done the graphics for the opening welcome at the International WWW Conference for the past umpty years, perhaps since CERN hosted the first one. They are meeting right now (today) in Florence.

[https://ello.co/ddailey/post/9HJhzeQ_gf_QyenXlNYd7w](https://ello.co/ddailey/post/9HJhzeQ_gf_QyenXlNYd7w)

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David frequently shares his own and other's experiments with SVG, particularly animation and other effects, I highly recommend his posts.

[https://ello.co/ddailey](https://ello.co/ddailey)</comment>