Ruling on Argentina Gives Investors an Upper Hand - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/20/business/economy/ruling-on-argentina-gives-investors-an-upper-hand.html

<comment><USER2> This article gives little attention to very major point. It says:

> But the courts say that interest may not be paid unless the country pays all > it owes on bonds it defaulted on years ago, something Argentina says it > cannot and will not do.

This is only true because of the terms of Argentina's debt agreement. Unlike the language of virtually every country in the world today except (I think) Jamaica, Argentina's agreements include what is called a "pari passu" clause and not a collective action clause. This fancy jargon just means this: under the pari passu clause, Argentina could not subordinate the debt to any future debt (that is, it cannot issue new debt that will be given a higher priority in making payments). All the courts have done is rule, sensibly I think, that Argentina has, in effect, subordinated the old debt by passing a law making it illegal to make payments on that debt while issuing new debt on which it will make payments.

Meanwhile, under a collective action clause, a country could force hold-out debtors to accept a restructuring. If Argentina had written such a provision into its agreement, this would have been over a decade ago. (Though, in fairness, when the debt in question was issued, such clauses were not widely used). The article does talk about this, but only briefly. It highlights arguments from a few nations that old bonds do not all have collective action clauses, and that, possibly, a creditor could buy enough of a single bond issue to block restructuring even with a collective action clause. What the article does not point out, however, is that it is entirely within a nation's control how it drafts its pari passu and collective action clauses (and whether it includes either of them). All the courts are doing today is enforcing the agreements the way Argentina itself drafted them. If Argentina, or other nations feel threatened by our courts' robust enforcement of those agreements, they should probably consider changing the terms that they commit themselves to.

<comment><USER3> Would anyone have bought the bonds without this clause?

I'm not sure, but keeping in mind that these bonds were issued at a time when Argentina was considered extremely risky to lend to, I'd imagine this was more than just an oversight on the part of some lawmaker or beaurocrat. If this clause makes it harder for Argentina to reneg on their promises (as they have done repeatedly in the past) that strikes me as crucial.

It's quite telling that they structured the deal in NY and not Argentina. I don't know why a country would agree to that unless they knew it was the only way foreign investors would consider lending them money.

<comment><USER4> No investor would accept exchanging a bond in Argentinian courts: the courts in Argentina dont have the same independence that the US court would do, so it would very likely screw over investors.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This article is very biased. One thing that's missing is the key fact that Argentina knew exactly what it was doing when it issued this debt: agreeing to pay it off no matter what. That is why it agreed to the most onerous terms possible. Otherwise no one would have lent them the money at the time. This is exactly what they agreed to.

If you run your country's finances like a drunken sailor, you should eventually expect your access to credit to be cut off. The government of Agentina has had ample opportunity to sober up but just can't resist buying another round of drinks for the entire country before every election. The Argentinian people deserve better but keep electing incompetent leaders.

<comment><USER4> What does it mean to agree to pay off no matter what? And how was that written in the bond issuing?

Every debt has in its nature the possibility of default, and owing 120 billion dollars would be giving up the next 10 years in exports just to pay that single debt, out of 7% of holdouts in one of the particular debts.

Always have to weight pros/cons for every decision. There are several scenarios: Argentina would pay the 1.5 billion for the hedge funds, but if that means having to pay 15 billion extra, it would be virtually the same as defaulting.

<comment><USER5> While the government of Argentina could not actually guarantee repayment they instead agreed to terms to eliminate every possible method to avoid repaying: denominated in foreign currency, cannot be subordinated, terms can only be changed voluntarily, subject to foreign law, etc. They knew exactly what they getting into but pushed ahead regardless because they wanted the money no matter what.

Rather than think carefully about how to best default perhaps they should have been thinking carefully about how to best borrow or even better how best to spend.

<comment><USER4> This whole situation arises from a clause in the bond restructuring deal that was common when it was made. If the exchange deal had a collective agreement clause, this would have been over 10 years ago, and contracts today normally have that clause (that if the majority of the bond holders accepts, the minority has to accept as well).

I am willing to bet that the whole reason the new clause became common, was because of Argentina's or Congo's case with default swaps and hedge funds that exploit that loophole intro a 10000% profit lawsuit.

Irresponsible spending is something that brought Argentina to its defaults, but not to the situation its now facing.

The change in courts and terms are not part of the original default debt, but of the default swap in 2005: before that, Argentina didnt have to answer to the US supreme court for those bonds or to a hedge fund. When Argentina had economic recovery, and wanted to get rid of debt, it proposed a default swap bonds, at a discount rate. To make the deal appealing to bond holders and give trust to it, they proposed the US courts as a trustable mediator.

93% of the debt was restructured this way, and has given hefty returns, up to 77cents on the original bond dollar. However, the remaining debt is all owned by the hedge fund, whose entire strategy is the pari passu clause. Without it or with a collective clause, this situation would not happen, and the debt on these bonds would have been done and over.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> You won't find this in any history book, not for the next 50 years probably. English ain't my language, and you could find glitches.

The external Argentinean debt matter is a very complex issue.

There have always been internal economical groups in the country culturally unaligned with the best interest of the nation. Along with external economical groups, they got by now aproximately 60 years of bad influence in Argentina. They controlled the media, the upper political, militar and clerical circles.

They managed to get full control of the country several times, those times are what you usually associate with the massive acquisition of new debt. The first move they did was done in 1956, then again, several times during the 70's, then in the 80's and finally, and taking debt to a record level, in the 90's.

The population has been thoroughly manipulated and controlled to support many of these economical plans, purposely beneficial for them, but actually assembled to enrich the upper circles, secure the control and giving the close supporters a cut. And then you have a full country fully controlled by plain hunger and long hours of work (+14), the population enough desperate they cannot get to assemble a minimal resistance.

Of course there was resistance, and it was labeled by international media as a whole "guerrilla", even when only a small minority of the resistance was actually violent.

Obviously the upper circles feeded and encouraged the violent resistance groups as a way of enforce their points of views and build support for "stronger action". Those "stronger" actions led to the dead of thousands of innocent eventually, and were the real motivation for the military coups during the second half of the XX century in Argentina.

Thousands were killed by straight violence, from the state o from the violent groups. But actually, the dead were a couple of millions during the last 50 years: the level of poverty were so high that these people have nothing, and they keep dying silently, in the background, thoroughly covered by the internal and external economical interests, the massive media, etc.

The resistance, the small minority of the upper economical, political, military and clerical establishment got another chance to take back the control of the country in 2001.

At last, after a long fight and millions of casualties, Argentina was free for the first time in almost 60 years.

Since then, the new order kept the rest of the upper classes under strong control, and started paying the debts (not taken by them), to take back the country to a status more related to a modern country than the Tortuga Island style management from 1956-2001.

Many of the economical actions of the new order had to be related with spending of vast economical resources, mostly given them back to the population by welfare state politics.

This is "giving back" as opposed to "giving a gift for not working", returning the wealth illegally and criminally stolen by the economical groups during decades.

This is what you could read in the mass media tagged as "populism". And now you could understand why that was not true.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Populism](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Populism)

The external economical groups did not like how Argentina escaped from their control, how the country got the their freedom back, because they begin to "lose" money, "their" money was actually economical wealth from the people of Argentina. With the "money" in their hands, the people was mostly incapable of getting a job, food, health attention (from the state and they couldn't get a job to pay for they own medical attention).

These dudes keep trying to trigger several economical, military and political chaos during the last decade.

Some american citizens like to think that the most powerful economical groups are "american", and they play for the best interest of the US, always, no matter what. That of course, is not true. Sadly, they already paid the price several times, just like Argentina did (60's > racism, 70's,80's,90's,2000's > military industrial complex).

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military%E2%80%93industrial_com...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military%E2%80%93industrial_complex)

These economical groups do not respect or are interested in keeping the nation-states in control of their fate, nor the actual freedom of people - i.e. not working 14 hours a day - is a high priority in their currently ongoing strategies of pan-national control.

The Argentina case in just another movement in much more, larger scale, long term, continued global strategy game for control. China and Russia don't let these boys play hard in their sand boxes, but the rest of the world is free- to-play.

And now you also know what exactly means "free-to-play":

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_surveillance_disclosures...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_surveillance_disclosures_%282013%E2%80%93present%29)

Or you still think terrorism what this is all about? More probably, just money.

</comment><comment><USER7> Tyler Cowen's perspective here rings true:

> Most likely, this means creditors have a stronger incentive to be holdouts > in the first place. I take that to be a negative and welfare-decreasing. If > creditor rights were weaker up front, as I would prefer, it would be harder > for nations to over-borrow in the first place, and ex post less of the cost > of that over-borrowing will fall on the taxpayers and citizens of the poorer > citizenry.

[http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/06/wha...](http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/06/what- does-the-argentina-supreme-court-decision-mean.html)

</comment><comment><USER8> > "We believe," he wrote, "that the interest — widely shared in the financial > community — in maintaining New York's status as one of the foremost > commercial centers is advanced by requiring debtors, including foreign > debtors, to pay their debts."

So I guess that means this judge never lets companies or individuals file for bankruptcy either.

The one policy you can always count on our government to enforce is "protect bondholders at all costs."

The article talks a lot about how it's hard to be sympathetic to the Argentinian government, a perspective I mostly agree with. But who's the bigger heel, Argentina, or the idiots who lent them money expecting to get any of it back?

<comment><USER9> > The one policy you can always count on our government to enforce is "protect > bondholders at all costs."

Unless of course those bondholders are institutional investors, and the other creditor is the UAW. When governments are so intimately involved in these kinds of proceedings, the only thing that we can be sure of is political expediency.

<comment><USER2> You must not have been following the Argentina saga very closely if you think the courts are ruling out of political expediency. The U.S. government has appeared in this case multiple times in support of Argentina, but the courts rule against them anyway. The U.S. government (the executive branch, that is) would clearly rather the courts allow Argentina to wipe out the bondholders and start over. This litigation has become a major point of friction between the U.S. and Argentina diplomatically.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I find the reporting on this interesting:

 _The United States government told lower courts that this could create big problems. It could lead to countries choosing to borrow under English law, rather than New York law..._

Most of those arguing for Argentina are arguing that it would be good policy to let them force restructuring. But:

 _There is no legal procedure to resolve debts of destitute countries. There is no court to approve a restructuring plan that will wipe out some debts and convert others to equity, as there is for companies._

The court essentially said that making policy isn't their job - only enforcing the law is.

I find it quite odd that the article and many of the parties involved almost seem to assume that the court should be making law from the bench. At least, that's the impression I get from the article.

</comment><comment><USER11> * Argentinian workers begin organizing, get better pay, get Argentinian resources into hands of Argentinian people * CIA and US military help organize a coup, help kill off opposition to dictatorship * Dictatorship loads on tons of debt * Decades later, US international powers invoked to force Argentinian people to pay off debts incurred by the dictator who the CIA and US military imposed on them

And people wonder why Saudi nationalists flew planes into the Pentagon and World Trade Center...

<comment><USER12> disregarding the last point, which I think is rather disrespectful, you have a good point. The open veins of latin america is a good read for those who are interested</comment></comment>


Another year of Clojure - <AUTHOR> http://spootnik.org/entries/2012/07/04_another-year-of-clojure.html

<comment><USER2> This article has a similar pattern like the other "we're trying a new language" articles.

Sometimes I do wonder why people decided to use a new language for a critical/important piece of their product while learning on the go as well.

<comment><USER3> I feel like the writer of the above article answers part of your question when they write:

"My experience is that when you tackle big problems, that go beyond simple execution but require actual strong engineers, hiring will be a problem, there's just no way around it. Choosing people that fit your development culture and see themselves fit to tackle big problems is a long process, integrating them is also time consuming. In that picture, the chosen language isn't a huge deciding factor."

As to the issue of change, you go with something else when the current stack is bad and/or unable to do something you need. Colin Steele wrote about this when he decided to switch Hotelicopter to Clojure. He first wrote about how the existing PHP stack needed to be re-written:

"For example, at that point, the site ran out of one ginormous subdirectory with hundreds of PHP files scattered like chunks of gorgonzola on your salad, sticking to one another with tenacious glee. There was a "lib" directory, which you think would hold much of the supporting library code, but a good fraction of that actually lived in "site", and some in "server". The previous programming staff had felt it good and worthwhile to roll their own half-assed MVC framework, including a barely-baked library for page caching (which broke and took the site down at regular intervals), and components for database abstraction that only worked with - wait for it - MySQL. Every single goddamn file was littered with SQL, like bacon bits on this demonic salad. There was a "log" directory, but the search logs weren't kept there, they were in "server". Etc., etc. It made you want to eat a gun."

[http://www.colinsteele.org/post/23103789647/against-the- grai...](http://www.colinsteele.org/post/23103789647/against-the-grain-aws- clojure-startup)

There are certainly situations where the codebase calls for a complete re- write, and, as the writer says in the quote above, finding good engineers is hard, and the choice of language is a side issue compared to the difficulty of finding good engineers.

<comment><USER2> Colin could've re-written it using Java. He didn't do that because he doesn't like Java ;)

Language may have not be a huge deciding factor until it does.

My question is focused more toward the existing team that probably has some pretty good skill in, let's just say, Java and OOP and now they're turning 180 degree to pure functional like Clojure as opposed to Scala (not that I'm a big fan of Scala or anything like that, but just as an example).

If it were that easy to learn new languages, we wouldn't have issue with hiring as most of the job opening requires the candidate to know specific language however we would like to believe it was not the case.

<comment><USER3> What do you think people will think when they read this?

"He didn't do that because he doesn't like Java "

Your words imply that somehow the preferences of the top engineers or CTO should not matter. But why should those preferences not matter? If we are talking about people who are talented, then we can start with the assumption that those preferences are probably the distilled wisdom of many years of experience with particular styles of development. We don't need to re-enact the millions of debates that have happened regarding whether Java is good or bad (One side shouting "It is verbose!" the other side shouting: "Type enforcement is good", etc, etc, until the last syllable of recorded time). It is enough to know that good engineers have preferences and those preferences probably have some benefits.

You also wrote:

"My question is focused more toward the existing team..."

What if the current team is terrible? Again, referring to Colin Steele, he fired/allowedd-to-leave the entire team that existed when he first arrived.

What if we turn your question around and ask it from the other side: is change ever justified? I'm guessing you would say "Yes".

<comment><USER2> By your statement that the preferences of the top engineers should matters is the time where "language does matter". It matters because it's a personal choice regardless whether it is the right choice or not.

"What if the current team is terrible" is not the focused of my question hence providing an example from Colin is arguably not in the right context of this discussion and I'm going to leave it to that because there's no point to discuss as anyone could have switched the underlying technology from Java to Ruby and fire all Java developers and hire Ruby developers.

Colin is a very specific example that is written by the man himself. The justification is sound. Having said that, I could pick some obscure language tomorrow (not that Clojure is these days) and forces my own preferences to go forward as long as I can reach the goal and claim in an article how my personal preferences were the best thing as well even though it may not be the case.

But nobody knows the truth... right?

I'm not trying to be negative here but at the same time no human willing to admit his/her mistakes to be honest. Especially when there are plenty at stakes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> If I am writing an OS, I will still go back to C without an iota of doubt. I need to touch the metal down there.

<comment><USER5> You could touch the metal in clojure, by implementing clojure on "bare metal"[0]

[0] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_machine>

<comment><USER6> In theory. In practice, doing that (with Clojure specifically) would be a bit silly. A lot would need to change with the language to make it suitable for OS development, at which point Clojure would lose a lot of the attributes that make it Clojure.

<comment><USER7> _A lot would need to change with the language to make it suitable for OS development_

I keep hearing this, or statements along these lines. But I never see an explanation for this. Performance? Managing memory from other processes? Bit twiddling required to create device drivers? Something else? Are these insurmountable?

<comment><USER8> To write an OS, you need to have a few things:

\- ability to manually access memory

\- ability to use assembly and translate said assembly into the high-level language

\- ability to install interrupts

You probably also want the ability to precisely constrain the amount of memory a block of code uses.

I suppose there are other nice to haves as well: e.g., GC will need to be fairly controllable.

I see no practical reason why a Lisp can't be used to write an OS, but that Lisp will need a few extensions from the usual modern Lisp capabilities.

<comment><USER5> > \- ability to use assembly and translate said assembly into the high-level > language

Not at all, lisp machines used custom silicon implementing lisp in hardware, I believe even the microcode was lisp.

> I suppose there are other nice to haves as well: e.g., GC will need to be > fairly controllable.

If you're coding the hardware to the language, parts of the GC can be hardware-supported directly.

> I see no practical reason why a Lisp can't be used to write an OS

Especially since it has been used to write OSes, multiple times.

<comment><USER8> Okay, I was making the assumption of using standard x86-style hardware. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If you were trying to build the world's next major operating system, would you go with Clojure as one of the core languages, specifically the one that developer-created apps are written in? And could Clojure be fast enough to power the actual OS itself too?

With all the new excitement around Clojure, I'm just trying to understand the theoretical and practical limits of the language.

<comment><USER10> Much of the excitement around Clojure seems rather buzzwordy. You should check out some of its criticism, such as [http://jng.imagine27.com/index.php/2009-08-19-011225_clojure...](http://jng.imagine27.com/index.php/2009-08-19-011225_clojure_the_false_lisp.html) and <http://www.loper-os.org/?p=42>

<comment><USER11> The author claims this first article is satire, but in case you were tempted to take it literally, allow me to rebut:

 _Why not simply add support for concurrent programming as a library instead?_

Clojure's concurrency primitives _are_ libraries. You don't have to use them; it's perfectly OK to use, say, kilim or java.util.concurrent, and many do.

 _Why not provide both immutable and mutable versions of the same data types?_

The mutable variants of these structures are already there in java.util, and the stdlib is designed to interact well with java interfaces like List, Map, etc. [1]

 _Also when writing real-world software, what about the effort required to align the multitude of Java libraries that assume an imperative environment with Clojure?_

I've used nontrivial Java libraries in Clojure: it looks about the same as the Java code, only shorter and with fewer parentheses. Yes, fewer.

 _Can these libraries be used easily, safely and with the same performance?_

Yes. Obviously the Clojure parts won't run quite as fast as the Java parts, but interop is complete, concise, and well-designed. InvokeVirtual is InvokeVirtual either way.

Meanwhile Clojure makes _obvious_ improvements over CL in reader forms for readability: the vector, set, map, and regex literals make it much easier to write and understand. It may not be as pure as some other Lisps, but it's a competent addition to the family.

[1] A property I miss in Scala. :-(

<comment><USER12> _Meanwhile Clojure makes obvious improvements over CL_

I would beg to differ. The features you note are pretty subjective and not _obvious_ improvements at all. I've done a few small non-trivial prototypes in Clojure. I cannot stand the syntax for literals. Or the mangled hell that is the literal for lambda. At least CL lets you define your own reader macros -- something that Clojure cannot do (yet). These features you mention are not improvements over CL IMO.

<comment><USER11> Huh, I find the syntax for literals a breath of fresh air--but I also grew up in languages with rich data structure literals and find the {}, (), [], #"", #{} distinctions make it much easier for me to understand, at a glance, the shape of a structure. I also prefer the vector notation for arguments in (fn [arg1 arg2 & friends])--the brackets make it easier to recognize the argument boundaries, especially in one-liners.

In general, Clojure code seems to have less nesting, which makes it easier for me to read and parse. You're honestly the first person I've heard express a dislike for the reader forms, so I thought it was universally liked.

I think you're right: a lack of configurable reader macros is a problem. I'd also point to the lack of tail recursion (and consequent mucking about with (recur) and (trampoline) as a notable flaw in Clojure. Its error messages are pathologically malicious. On the other hand, I think Clojure's packaging environment, thanks to lein and clojars, is quite good. There also seems to be more consistency in Clojure coding... style? preference? than in CL, which I attribute partly to its young age and small user base, but also, perhaps, to a more opinionated set of attitudes around mutability and types.

Regarding the #() form, I almost never reach for it, partly because it never seems to work as expected. (fn) and (partial) feel more natural to me, so I've never taken the time to understand how #() works.

I also prefer Lisp-1s in general, although I understand that's a more contentious differentiation.

Either way, my CL experience is minimal, so it was wrong of me to claim these as obvious improvements. I'll defer to your expertise here: it sounds like you've used CL enough to understand it better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Thought this article had a number of good tips and insights. Much appreciated.</comment>


New Evidence That Lead Exposure Increases Crime (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2017/06/01/new-evidence-that-lead-exposure-increases-crime/ <comment><USER2> > When lead was removed from gasoline, lead levels in the environment fell, > and kids avoided the lead exposure that caused these developmental problems. > About 20 years later, when those kids became young adults, crime rates fell. > This, proponents say, is what explains the mysterious and persistent decline > in crime beginning in the early 1990s.

> It's an intriguing idea — particularly since we don't have a better > explanation for the big changes in crime rates during this period.

Did not freakanomics come up with a famous (and to me more convincing) argument that it legalized abortion was the reason for the drop in crime? At they very least it dispels the arguments we don't have a better explanation and doesn't even mention it.

[http://freakonomics.com/2005/05/15/abortion-and-crime-who- sh...](http://freakonomics.com/2005/05/15/abortion-and-crime-who-should-you- believe/)

<comment><USER3> One of the interesting things about social science observations is there's a lot of noise.

Both the lead and the abortion hypotheses could be true. In fact they could both be true AND the papers indicating one explanation could conceivably throw out the other explanation. If you're interested in one hypothesis, you might not spend the time going through alternatives as thoroughly as someone investigating the other.

Looking specifically, the studies are always trying to isolate some effect, often using some sort of clever control derived from the proposed mechanism. So in this case there's a paper that points out how lead only goes into the water if the water is acidic, and they look at places with non-acidic water or non-lead pipes to control. For abortion, it's been a while since I read it, but there would be something along the lines of when abortion became widespread in a given community. You'd then look at differences in frequency and think about whether that came out in the crime stats when the kids got older.

The rabbit hole is where you can come up with ever more interesting corollaries and data that support or do not support some hypothesis. You see this across the social sciences all the time. There's also confounding problems, say you know people tend to move to the city when they grow up (I don't know if this is true), then how valid is your birth -> crime data?

Here's a load of random observations I thought up:

\- If abortion is the key, why do crime rates keep falling? Why is it not a step effect?

\- If it's lead, did crime rates increase 20 years after leaded fuel became a thing?

\- What if it's abortion AND lead? There are countries where abortion and lead are timed differently, how about looking at them?

\- What if it's neither, but both are caused by some other thing? Say economic development -> both?

<comment><USER4> >> If it's lead, did crime rates increase 20 years after leaded fuel became a thing?

Yes. The rise and fall of violent crime rates correlate very tightly to the rise and fall of leaded fuel, with a ~20 year gap. You see the same correlations in different countries that had different phase in / phase out times, and different U.S. states that had different timelines. (E.g. if a state phased out leaded gas 5 years earlier than average, their crime wave also started abating 5 years earlier than average)

<comment><USER5> Source? Crime in general decreased quite a lot after the depression, but the use of leaded gasoline was quite prevalent regardless.

<comment><USER6> Leaded gasoline was introduced in the 1920s but there weren't that many _cars_ until starting in the late 1950s. (Construction of the interstates started with the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956.) Then we saw the huge crime wave starting 20 years later, which peaked and started tapering off in 1993, 20 years after the phase out of leaded gasoline began in 1973.

There is also the point that the people who did have cars in the 1920s were the aristocrats, and twenty years after that...

<comment><USER7> > Then we saw the huge crime wave starting 20 years later, which peaked and > started tapering off in 1993...

This seems to correlate fairly well with the government's war on (certain) drugs as well.

<comment><USER8> It also correlates with population density, public housing, migration, and crack cocaine use.

I highly doubt there's one contributing factor to crime, and I highly doubt it is solely from leaded gasoline.

<comment><USER9> There are many things that influence crime, the question is how much of the total variance is due to gasoline?

And the answer from this research is _quite a lot_ , because the _timing_ of the rise and fall in crime match the timing of leaded gasoline (with a 20-year lag) across cities, states, and countries.

To say that 'other factors are responsible' would be to posit that there is some other factor that holds both across and within different cultures and countries that perfect accounts for the pattern in crime rates that we see. That seems much harder to believe than simply 'leaded gasoline causes crime', which we both have robust evidence for now, and for which we have a very plausible mechanism of action.

<comment><USER8> Ok, so I'm not disputing that peope born in the 60s had more lead in their blood than people born in the 80s/90s. Additonally, I'm not disputing that lead causes behavioral and physical problems. It definitely does.

However, I would like to see the specific data that says the following (because I'm not seeing it when I read the article):

"Regardless of the crack epidemic in the 1980s, regardless of the decline in public housing in the 1980s, regardless of the rise of police surveillance technology, we have indisputable evidence that lead in the blood causes an increase in crime locally and nationwide by XMeaningfulPercent".

I'd be surprised if one could ever make such a statement.

The data we currently have shows that someone born in 1960 and committing a crime in 1985 has been exposed to lead, but they also might have been exposed to crack. Additionally, declining government project housing provided strong protection for criminals to hide from police, and the police surveillance technology in 1985 was pitiful compared to the massive levels of surveillance now.

None of these factors exist anymore in 2018. Crime is much lower. How can we say which variable contributed in which amount?

<comment><USER4> Your standards are bullshit and you know it. We can't say such statements of indisputable evidence about anything that happens in the world. Should we throw our hands up and just say, well it could be invisible llamas, or tree gnomes, or the boogey man, or should we use the best available evidence to guide future decisions?

From one of the papers cited in the parent article:

"A growing body of evidence in the social and medical sciences traces high crime rates to high rates of lead exposure. Scholars have shown that lead exposure and crime are positively correlated using data on individuals, cities, counties, states, and nations. Reyes (2007) exploits state-specific reductions in lead exposure due to the Clean Air Act to estimate the effect of lead emissions from gasoline on violent crime. She reports that reductions in childhood lead exposure in the 1970s and 1980s accounted for more than half of the violent crime decline of the 1990s.2 Stretesky and Lynch (2001) estimate that, from 1989 to 1991, counties with air lead levels equivalent to .17 μg/m3 had homicide rates four times as high as counties with air lead levels equivalent to 0 μg/m3. Mielke and Zahran (2012) show that air lead and aggravated assault rates were strongly associated in a panel of U.S. cities. Longitudinal studies of individuals document a positive relationship between pre- and post-natal lead exposure and delinquency (Dietrich et al., 2001) and arrests for violent offenses (Wright et al., 2008). Cross-sectional research on individuals (Denno, 1990; Needleman et al., 1996, 2002) and counties (Stretesky and Lynch, 2004), studies using cross-national panel data (Nevin, 2007), and analyses of national time-series (Nevin, 2000) have yielded similar results."

Are each of these going to be able to factor for every possible confounder you can think of? No. But it's not like they aren't controlling for anything. That's the whole gist of the parent article - three studies using three new ways of controlling for other variables. Have you seen multitudes of studies that point to any of those other confounder you mention having better evidence, across time and geography, while controlling for lead and all the other possible confounders? Again, nobody is arguing that there are no other factors. And nobody has a precise answer on just how much, because it's impossible. But all studies point to: very large effects, still happening in some cases, and largely preventable: [https://www.dropbox.com/s/07z65p9a5wdppfl/LifeAfterLead_AEJ_...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/07z65p9a5wdppfl/LifeAfterLead_AEJ_Revision_3_16_17_wRevNotes.pdf?dl=0)

<comment><USER10> > _Your standards are bullshit and you know it._

Aggressiveness like this will get you banned on HN. Please read [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and follow the rules when posting here.

<comment><USER4> I mean I'd say that in civil conversation, face to face. Is swearing the problem? I was providing substantive contributions to the conversation, whereas conversant was, in my opinion, doing neither of these:

> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone > says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

> Please don't post shallow dismissals

But perhaps doing neither of them more "civilly"? I'm genuinely looking for guidance on handling of this thread, not trying to argue. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Half of Mexican children suffer from lead poisoning.

[http://latinalista.com/columns/globalviews/nearly-half- mexic...](http://latinalista.com/columns/globalviews/nearly-half-mexicos- children-suffer-lead-poisoning)

<comment><USER12> And we know there is a lot of violent crime in Mexico

<comment><USER13> Violent crime is Mexico is rather a consequence of cartel activity. Which has nothing to do with lead.

<comment><USER14> why is it so easy for you to rule that out? there are cartels in other countries, but mexico's are exceptionally, brutally violent

<comment><USER15> Suppose lead were to disappear from the earth tomorrow. It seems unlikely that it would have any effect on the Mexican cartel ecosystem.

The ecosystem is driven by demand from the US, and Mexico has the supply. The brutality is a consequence of a power struggle to control those resources.

<comment><USER9> > It seems unlikely that it would have any effect on the Mexican cartel > ecosystem.

How can you on the one hand so easily dismiss the evidence that lead causes violence, which is backed up by rigorous statistical analysis and medical evidence, and on the other hand assert so surely that you know the answer?

If you were consistent, surely you'd apply skepticism to your own explanations as well.

<comment><USER15> The fact that lead causes violence isn't in question.

Violence is caused by multiple factors. One additional factor is the billions of dollars to be made preparing and running drugs from Mexico to the US.

My assertion is that if lead were removed as a factor, this would not negate the other cause.

<comment><USER16> But is all that violence actually _necessary_ for cartels to profit? Some of it probably is, but all? There are many organized crime syndicates around the world, and they usually are involved in drug trade - but rarely you do see such open and extreme violence as in Mexico, including mass targeting of civilians (which is usually considered bad for business everywhere).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> One of the most dangerous forms of lead is Tetraethyllead, because of how fat soluble it is. It's been banned in nearly every country in the world because it moves through the environment at an alarming rate. One company in the world still manufactures it, and they're based in the UK[0].

They're entirely aware that they're killing people and have openly said in management meetings that they won't stop manufacturing the product until government regulation forces them to.

Mind you, lead levels don't only increase in the country the chemical is used; it moves through entire ecosystems and across oceans. Lead levels don't fall to below dangerous levels for decades. This isn't just poisoning the people nearby; it's poisoning the entire world in small, insidious ways. And chemical companies are profiting from that. The margin they're selling TEL for would make government contractors cry.

And to top it off, they have virtually no quality program surrounding their products because they don't need one; all of their deals are done with backroom handshakes and agreeing to take the blame if an issue arises. Their company is built around the idea that it actually costs less to just say "Yeah, we're terrible people, fine us" than to actually try and comply with government regulation. They've repeatedly been caught in corruption and environmental probes, and have changed their names in the states and in the UK multiple times. They were literally caught trying to bribe their way into selling TEL in Iran. [1]

[0]: [https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/leaded-petrol- alge...](https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/leaded-petrol-algeria- still-legal-innospec-cheshire-uk-sale-export-tel-tetraethyl- lead-a7907196.html)

[1]: [https://www.sfo.gov.uk/2014/08/04/four-sentenced-role- innosp...](https://www.sfo.gov.uk/2014/08/04/four-sentenced-role-innospec- corruption/)

[1]: [https://www.sfo.gov.uk/cases/innospec- ltd/](https://www.sfo.gov.uk/cases/innospec-ltd/)

<comment><USER5> Leaded gasoline is still used in aviation, so in fact it's not banned in every country of the world but Algeria?

Article is pretty low quality.

<comment><USER18> Note that most big passenger jets and such use kerosene, which is unleaded. In terms of leaded avgas, it's the smaller planes you've got to worry about.

<comment><USER19> The small old planes - typically hobbyist classic planes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> A was very skeptical when I saw the headline. Then I read the article. The evidence coming from these 3 studies looks quite compelling I have to say. Next I googled: "Countries That Still Use Leaded Gasoline", and I got:

Rank Location 1 Algeria 2 Iraq 3 Yemen 4 Myanmar 5 North Korea 6 Afghanistan

From [https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/countries-that-still- use...](https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/countries-that-still-use-leaded- gasoline.html)

Also I found this: [https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/12/prediction- te...](https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/12/prediction-terrorism- middle-east-will-decline-half-between-2020-and-2040/)

Very interesting indeed.

<comment><USER21> > Rank Location 1 Algeria 2 Iraq 3 Yemen 4 Myanmar 5 North Korea 6 > Afghanistan

I am hoping you are not attributing violence and instability in some of these countries to lead based gasoline. Sure, there may be correlation, but these places are centuries old. There are many factors like culture, religiosity, socio-economic status , history, contemporary culture, so on and so forth.

<comment><USER22> Since their use of fossil fuels is significantly lower than European countries it's not a direct comparison, but an interesting situation.

Lead affects impulse control and could be a factor in certain civil phenomena. It's easier to whip up a mob when there's a lot of lead poisoning.

<comment><USER23> That's a stretch. It's just as easy to say that national instability leads to both civil war and lack of modern technology like unleqded gasoline.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, which is why the data is backed up by multiple panel analyses that actually make the argument for causation. The US data shows that crime rates rose like clockwork approximately ~20 years after leaded gasoline is used en masse, and drops ~20 years after it was banned.

Different states introduced and subsequently banned leaded gasoline on different schedules, so this was a 'natural' experiment, unless you can think of some other causative factor that precisely explains the timing of the rise and fall of crime.

I don't understand this content-free 'correlation does not equal causation' argument.

Sure, in the _absence of other evidence and a mechanism of action_ , we should have healthy skepticism, but it's known how lead affects brain development, particularly how it screws up development of the frontal cortex, lowering both intelligence and social inhibition.

<comment><USER5> _Yeah, which is why the data is backed up by multiple panel analyses that actually make the argument for causation. The US data shows that crime rates rose like clockwork approximately ~20 years after leaded gasoline is used en masse, and drops ~20 years after it was banned._

Did they also account for changes in how crime rates are reported over time?

One would have to account for hundreds of different variables before you could ever conclusively prove a connection between lead and crime.

<comment><USER4> It would be impossible to 100% conclusively and with absolute precision determine the exact connection between the two. That doesn't mean it's not the best available theory at the moment, that fits the most data. There are international, interstate, and even local level analysis all pointing to the same thing. There are longitudinal studies on children pointing to the same thing. And there are established and direct casual mechanisms in the brain biology that explain it. So what does waving a hand and saying "Nah nah can't prove it" do? By your standards do we have zero knowledge on all sociological matters, since it's impossible to design and implement a perfectly controlled study?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Makes sense.

"Lead exposure in childhood linked to lower IQ, lower status jobs, as adults" [https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/03/170328145300.h...](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/03/170328145300.htm) Which also correlates with criminality.

</comment><comment><USER25> I was going to ask why the cited studies apparently didn't consider the phaseout of lead-based paint. But then I realized that the first study relies on data preceding the lead-paint problem, in that lead paint wasn't used as much indoors then, and arguably wasn't in bad shape. The third study just considers lead levels and interventions, and so subjects were exposed to multiple sources.

The second study[0] finds that distance to roads correlates with lead exposure. They do discuss relative contribution from multiple sources: flaking indoor lead-based paint, lead in soil around foundations (from maintenance of outdoor lead-based paint), and roadside lead.

0) [https://sci-hub.tw/https://www.nber.org/papers/w23392](https://sci- hub.tw/https://www.nber.org/papers/w23392)

</comment><comment><USER26> And of course, it's the gift that keeps on giving!

[https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/08/lead-in-us-school- wa...](https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/08/lead-in-us-school-water- disturbing-detroit-just-shut-off-all-fountains/)

</comment><comment><USER27> This 2016 Mother Jones article is a good treatment of this hypothesis:

[https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/lead- exposur...](https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/lead-exposure- gasoline-crime-increase-children-health/)

</comment><comment><USER28> "Lead linked to schizophrenia" : [https://www.nature.com/news/2004/040217/full/news040216-9.ht...](https://www.nature.com/news/2004/040217/full/news040216-9.html)

</comment><comment><USER29> I may have missed something but it looks like Europe is not taken into consideration in these studies. For example in France lead in gasoline was not banned until the 90's, and the violent crime statistics doesn't look very correlated.

<comment><USER30> Crime lags around 20 years behind lead levels.

Young people burning cars in Paris suburbs around 2010 may not be technically violent crime but it's pretty weird and special. And also in decline:

[https://www.google.pl/amp/s/www.thelocal.fr/20180102/is- the-...](https://www.google.pl/amp/s/www.thelocal.fr/20180102/is-the-famous- french-tradition-of-torching-cars-dying-out/amp)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Does anyone have any resources with concrete numbers about how much lead exposure is too much? I just moved into a new house that has a lead service pipe in from the city, and it concerns me. In addition, the federal action level is 15ppb, and my utility's water report last year had it at 8ppb, which seems kind of close.

I know there's no known level of safe lead exposure, but I don't have a good sense from a cost benefit perspective of how much to do to try to lower my exposure.

<comment><USER32> Water filters are cheap and effective and make the water taste better anyway. I think most people's exposure is from eating lead paint and breathing fumes and particulates (also from paint -previously from gasoline engines). None the less, the US is visibly decaying enough I always drink filtered water (google "big berkey").

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Without wanting to sound too snarky, wasn't this already pretty well- established knowledge? [0]

Imho one of the more infamous and recent examples of human hubris. Who knows what we are downplaying right now, that might end up really messing us up in another couple of decades? Only time will tell.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetraethyllead#Controversy_and...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetraethyllead#Controversy_and_phase- out)

<comment><USER4> I thought so, and I wish it were. But look at the threads here, and everyone who feels that they can just say "crack epidemic" and believe it is providing the same insight into the situation as scientific study.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> In Elizabethan England, didn't a lot of women wear lead based makeup? I'd be interested in seeing how that affected crime rates or other metrics, if that data were available.

</comment><comment><USER35> Could it be that there are other pollutants that could cause similar issues?

Some countries have banned lead even before the US, but crime rates are still growing(Brazil, for instance). Poverty alone does not explain this. There are countries just as poor (or more), with corrupt police forces and that do not have the same issue with violence.

<comment><USER36> Recent study showing that air pollution can impact intelligence equivalent to the loss of a year of education.

[https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/aug/27/air- poll...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/aug/27/air-pollution- causes-huge-reduction-in-intelligence-study-reveals)

<comment><USER19> It's very hard to separate the effects of airborne lead from other air pollution, since they tend to exist in the same places.

I wouldn't be surprised if the lead is the cause of both.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "single variable reductions" used to explain complex societal changes are hardly convincing.</comment>


Is remdesivir the drug that can kill the coronavirus? - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2020/04/17/is-remdesivir-the-drug-that-can-kill-the-coronavirus <comment><USER2> Previous discussion regarding how difficult it is to produce remdesivir:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22783363](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22783363)

</comment><comment><USER3> It's remarkable how a non-randomized study of Hydroxychloroquine is anathema, yet a non-randomized study of Remdesivir that's paid for by its manufacturer and written up by that manufacturer's employee is not. Hmm, I wonder why that is. To top it off, it might actually have the same QT prolongation issues, because some other antivirals have them.

That said, politics aside, I hope it works far beyond our wildest expectations so fewer people die.

<comment><USER4> I'd like to know if there was any evidence or indication of the value of HQNN before a certain president started spouting it. AFAIK the only reason we're talking about it is because he did. If that's so then there's no reason to pick HQNN as being special over any other drug. I suppose there's that very dodgy french study, perhaps that's what started it all off.

<comment><USER5> Virologists generally agree that it is a plausible drug to treat COVID-19, but will quickly point out that efficacy is unproven and we need to wait for better studies.

Also, a couple of doctors who are regarded as "cranks" started applying it early in the disease and presumably had success with. Trump picked up on that, so now a lot of people have reason to hate on it. Trump poisoned the well.

No "proper" doctor is going to administer a dangerous drug to a non-critical patient to prevent what might turn out to be a harmless course of the diseases. However, that also means if these drugs work, but only in the _early_ stages, then we won't find out any time soon.

<comment><USER6> > No "proper" doctor is going to administer a dangerous drug to a non-critical > patient to prevent what might turn out to be a harmless course of the > diseases.

This "dangerous" drug has been used in medicine for 60 years for probably more than a billion or two people. I'm sure that a "proper" doctor faced with a dying patient that is unresponsive to everything else is going to offer this drug. Its a good thing that congress approved the Right To Try law.

<comment><USER7> > This "dangerous" drug has been used in medicine for 60 years

Note that the doses required here are MUCH higher (one European hospital tried 1000mg doses) which is toxic. It can result in blindness, heart failure and other issues.

<comment><USER6> If I was dying and nothing else was working, I'd accept the risk.

<comment><USER7> But what if people died _because_ of the drugs??

[https://www.nicematin.com/sante/coronavirus-nous-avons- deja-...](https://www.nicematin.com/sante/coronavirus-nous-avons-deja-du- interrompre-le-traitement-de-hydroxychloroquine-azithromycine-au-chu-de- nice-489118)

<comment><USER6> Its all French to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > enough to supply more than 140,000 patients

> the firm has set an "ambitious goal" of producing more than 500,000 > treatment courses by October, and 1m by the end of the year

So no. Even if this is a cure, the pandemic gets worse before it gets better.

<comment><USER5> Global infection rate has stabilized, it's not getting "worse" in that sense. At that rate, there won't be much more than another doubling.

If 80% of those infected do not need treatment at all, that amount of courses may well be sufficient, or close to it.

<comment><USER9> I think this makes the mistake of thinking there is such a thing as a global infection rate. There are instead a couple of hundred separate epidemics, each with its own R0 and trajectory.

It's also dangerously wrong, but human nature, to look at the current state of epidemics and project their future state. Epidemics that have been suppressed rather than extinguished resemble unstable explosives. Just because they're sitting there nicely today doesn't mean they won't explode 3 seconds from now.

<comment><USER5> There is a global average infection rate. Of course it's just an average, but is representative of the growth of global cases. Of course you can arbitrarily divide this down from hundreds of epidemics to thousands of outbreaks, but we're talking about the _global_ supply of the drug.

> It's also dangerously wrong, but human nature, to look at the current state > of epidemics and project their future state.

I'm sorry, but in the real world you _have_ to make predictions in order to make decisions. If you never make predictions you can always be right, but then you'll always be useless.

> Epidemics that have been suppressed rather than extinguished resemble > unstable explosives. Just because they're sitting there nicely today doesn't > mean they won't explode 3 seconds from now.

An "explosion" in that sense will still take weeks to become critical, giving you time to react, assuming you have testing and tracing capacity.

<comment><USER9> > _I 'm sorry, but in the real world you have to make predictions in order to > make decisions._

I'll overlook the implication that I don't live in the 'real world'. What the statement means is that just because you're fine today you can ease up, because you really don't like the shutdown. You're still standing in an explosives factory, and now propose to shoot off bottle rockets just because nothing bad has happened today.

In the real world, you look at conditions as they are. In this case, those conditions are that the virus is still epidemic and there are none of the preconditions necessary to contain it present in the US, at least, and also in most of Europe.

> _assuming you have testing and tracing capacity_

Where is it that you are describing, since you are 'in the real world'?

Here in the US there is no where that I am aware of that has sufficient testing and tracing capacity to deal with a 3-week old exponential outbreak.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Like the article says, there have been some hopeful anecdotes, but that is a long way from an effective cure and rigorous testing phase. Aka to early to tell.

</comment><comment><USER11> what is dead may never die

</comment><comment><USER12> Probably not because it was suggested months ago already, so if it was a magical solution we'd know by now.

<comment><USER13> Actually no we wouldn't, because real clinical trials with thousands of subjects take a long time to wrap up, even when researchers are working at breakneck speed.

FWIW The anecdotal evidence from doctors and patients who have managed to get a hold of some of it has been very good so far.

<comment><USER14> yes but, if in a trial, if one arm performs substantially different than the control arm (e.g. 50% or even 100% lower death rate), the large difference between arms can lead to investigators ending the trial early

ironically, this happened in a previous 2019 trial of Remdemsivir, for a different virus, Ebola

in that trial, 4 drugs for Ebola were tested, including Remdemsivir. 2 non- Remdemsivir drugs succeeded substantially--the large difference between those drugs and Remdemsivir, was enough to cause the investigator to end the trial early and drop Remdemsivir

ironically, the investigator for that trial was none-other-than Dr. Fauci. Maybe that's why he hasn't mentioned Remdemsivir much on TV these days, based on his past professional disappointing experience with Remdemsivir

also, double ironically, Remdemsivir was initially designed to treat Ebola virus, not for flu or coronavirus type viruses. The fact that after the Ebola trial, Remdemsivir was declared not that effective for Ebola (the very virus Remdemsivir was created for), means there is even less of a chance Remdemsivir will prove to be effective for Covid-19 in the current trials

[https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/08/finally-some-good- ne...](https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/08/finally-some-good-news-about- ebola-two-new-treatments-dramatically-lower-death-rate#)

<comment><USER14> as an extreme example

if Remdemsivir cures 100% of all Covid-19 cases, halfway through the trial, they would have enough data to show a net positive benefit. They don't need to finish the whole trial to declare Remdemsivir useful

the fact that they are running the whole trial to finish, most likely means the effect of Remdemsivir is not too noticeable. They need more data to get to statistical significance. Hence, they want the trial to run to original planned finish date.

my guess is

Remdemsivir probably has some positive effect. Say, 10% lower death rate if used during 1st few days of infection. Still great, much much better than our current situation of nothing. It would not cure Covid completely, but it would help substantially, especially in large populations of infected

<comment><USER13> Looks like you may have been right. Oh well, I hope it at least helps people at the early stages of the disease.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


An experiment to allow different versions of the same web component on one page - <AUTHOR> https://open-wc.org/scoped-elements/ <comment><AUTHOR> Here is the release tweet as well [https://twitter.com/OpenWc/status/1219206578928279553?s=20](https://twitter.com/OpenWc/status/1219206578928279553?s=20)

== copy of tweet content ==

Today we are releasing our first official "Experiment". It potentially allows you to use different versions of the same web-component on one page

In your template it looks normal but under the hood tag names are auto registered.

To get there you need to import side effect free classes and create a special html template literal which will make sure a unique tag name gets used if need be

It comes with a long list of limitations like  You can not use self registering elements  Every (!!!) component that uses sub components need to use scoped-elements  You can not use tag selectors  Performance degradation of up to 8%  ... see docs

Let's take this as an opportunity start a discussion about nested/scoped elements. You are invited

The docs are quite detailed and should give an idea why this is needed and how it works. More details will follow in a blog post

<comment><AUTHOR> If that sounds interesting feel free to join the conversation [https://github.com/open-wc/open-wc/issues/1262](https://github.com/open- wc/open-wc/issues/1262)</comment></comment>


All style tags after the first 30 style tags are not applied in IE (4-8) - <AUTHOR> http://support.microsoft.com/kb/262161

<comment><USER2> The fact that 30 is suspiciously close to 32 makes the impression that there's some unholy C black magic in the background of the bug. I wish programmers stopped doing stuff like that unless they really have to.

<comment><USER3> Huh. A five bit range would give a max of 31, and if we assume that the default/built-in stylesheet knocks another off, that's 30.

I agree with you, though I think I'd prefer this to hint at the reason over it being an entirely arbitrary descision. Making such a choice for a bad reason is still preferable to making it for no reason.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, I'm hoping it's that. Purely arbitrary would just be... stupid.

<comment><USER5>
        struct Element {
            // Update: apparently 16 wasn't enough.  Raised to 30 to pass test #452
            StyleData styles[30]; // No one uses more than 16 style parameters anyway.
        }

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> also important to note: each stylesheet cannot have more than 4095 CSS rules, in IE. experiencing this limit makes for some mighty interesting debugging.

<comment><USER7> If you've got a stylesheet with more than 4095 rules, I bet you have some interesting debugging anyway.

<comment><USER8> It's not _that_ unreasonable. Scenario: You download the Fugue icon set (<http://www.pinvoke.com/>). You're working on a template, and want to be able to quickly try out different icons in different places. If you generate two rules for each of the 2500 icons, you're over the limit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Ouch, I always try to make limits be 0, 1 or many - where 'many' is the limit of physical resources.

<comment><USER10> A motivated, well documented, and standardized limit is sometimes appropriate. This is not one of those times.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This problem can be avoided by using @import statements within each style tag to import more than 30 stylesheets. Some discussion here: <http://drupal.org/node/228818>

Of course, you should avoid doing this in production anyway, and just asset package your stylesheets into very few stylesheets. I've made a fork of the asset_packager project to support this behavior after 31 stylesheets: <http://github.com/jamesyu/asset_packager_ie_css_limit>

<comment><USER12> There's a limit to the number of @import's you can have per style tag too, but the imported stylesheets can also include @import's, from what I remember.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> And I love the link at the top (when not viewing the page in IE): Upgrade your Internet Experience. Which links to IE, of course.

<comment><USER13> I laughed hysterically when I saw that at the top after reading the first few lines of the kb article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I've hit this problem before - I use a separate stylesheet for each logical (in my mind) group of styles - header, footer, main content, blog, and so on. This way, I only have a few styles in each file, and it's easier for me to manage (YMMV). I only combine them into a single stylesheet on production and staging.

It's annoying to have to run the stylesheet combine when testing as when I find problems, I have to sort through a mass of css and rerun the combiner in order to test fixes.

OR

[http://www.i-marco.nl/weblog/archive/2006/06/24/time_breakdo...](http://www.i-marco.nl/weblog/archive/2006/06/24/time_breakdown_of_modern_web_d)

(But without the red section).

</comment><comment><USER15> I would never defend Internet Explorer, but I don't think this is really a big deal. If you have more than 30 style tags on any page, something is very wrong. IE has plenty of bugs and limitations that are much worse than this. :)

<comment><USER16> Someone brought this point up on proggit, and it was debunked by someone else who pointed out that many developers break their stylesheets up into multiple components for development purposes and then compile and compress them for production. This bug prevents them from testing on IE effectively.

Genghis Khan might have had far worse faults than picking his nose at the dinner table, but that still doesn't excuse the behavior.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Hmm, odd limit. I've never had more than 5 style tags on a page, though, and fewer since I got into using yuicompressor.

Has anyone here actually run into this in practice? If so, how? Just curious.

<comment><USER18> Create a modular UI framework that allows modules to import their own stylesheets. You hit this problem really quickly.

<comment><USER19> Perhaps, but if you're including 30+ stylesheets in a given page you're doing it wrong.

Every stylesheet is an extra (blocking) HTTP request. 5 is already too many, but 30 is seriously impacting your user's experience.

<comment><USER2> This bug can be triggered by inline stylesheets as well which do not create additional HTTP requests.

<comment><USER19> Fair point, but in what case does including 30 inline stylesheets make sense?

I'm hesitant to call this a bug.

<comment><USER20> Well, with MS, its a feature.

<comment><USER21> At MS, it might be dictated by a coding standard.

More seriously, I was once treated VERY skeptically by an old-school programmer (not at MS, never worked there) when I replaced some of his fixed- sized buffers with resizeable ones. "If our customers are running workloads that create more than 256 frooble node objects, I want to hear about it." Via a bug report? Really? And then get a new bug report next year when the new limit is reached? But he was adamant, and if it was up to him we wouldn't have made the change at all. The way he worked, you _knew_ how many frooble node objects the customer needed, and if you were wrong then you fixed the code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm assuming this doesn't include the inline style="" params and only includes <style> tags. At first, I thought it did and didn't believe such a limitation went unnoticed by many for so long.

<comment><USER23> The inline style params are called attributes. Anything within the tag itself -- of form token="value" -- is called an attribute (unless there is some arcane SGML or HTML structure that I'm missing).

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Anyone want to guess why the number is 30?

<comment><USER25> _Somewhere in Redmond, WA_

PageStyleTagsW tags[

 _Thinks for 5 seconds_

PageStyleTagsW tags[30]; /* should be enough for any page _/

_ Goes and gets a free soda*

Sometimes imposing arbitrary limits in C is a lot easier than manually managing dynamic memory in the heap..

<comment><USER26> I've seen this where I work all the time. I've also seen code where the developer created _25_ different structures named _structure_type_ _X where X is 1-25, the size of the structure's internal buffer.

How do you deal with 25 different structure types with nothing different but the name and buffer size? Why, a switch statement of course...

<comment><USER27> Sounds like a problem for C++ templates.

<comment><USER28> Now you have two problems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Drupal's discussion of this (and with a workaround, I vaguely remember) ... <http://drupal.org/node/256802>

</comment><comment><USER7> "Resolution: To work around this limitation, combine multiple classes into a single style tag."

Um... don't they mean multiple styles into a single class tag?

<comment><USER30> No. What they mean is combining

      <style>
        .class1 { .. }
      </style>
      <style>
        .class2 { .. }
      </style>

into

      <style>
        .class1 { .. }
        .class2 { .. }
      </style></comment></comment>


Speeding up scikit-learn workflow using a high-performance Go proxy - <AUTHOR> http://ioloop.io/blog/hoverpy-scikitlearn/ <comment><USER2> interesting. normally I just save my model in sklearn, but I like how this does the caching transparently before even building the model.</comment>


Boiler control via e-mail and image processing - <AUTHOR> http://hackingbeaver.com/?p=97

<comment><AUTHOR> I have purchased a new house in the UK (well, my bank manager purchased it, I just live there) and it has some super dooper wireless boiler control system.

All I can do is walk downstairs and press the up or down buttons. No idea how it works and the manuals hurt my head.

I would happily have it ripped out for a raspberry pi and a python script, and that's without hooking it up to the mains

(PS - [http://www.hobbytronics.co.uk/4-channel-relay- board](http://www.hobbytronics.co.uk/4-channel-relay-board))</comment>


Crow: Flask based Microframework in C++ - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ipkn/crow <comment><USER2> flask _inspired_ , not _based_ (which would be an odd way of doing things)</comment>


Ask HN: What framework/language should I use? - <AUTHOR> I'm a product/business guy who studied computer engineering in college. I'm familiar with the basic concepts but haven't coded for a living at all.
I want to build a web application and am unsure which language/framework I should go with... I considered node/express/meteor or python/django or ruby on rails... how do I even decide?
Thoughts? <comment><USER2> Hey Pranav,

I started learning web dev about a year back. I was right where you are and I will try to shed some light on what I finally landed on.

___

Frontend- ReactJS

Backend - Google Firebase

___

React is amazingly simple to learn. You just need to know some HTML, CSS and JS as a base. Google Firebase is probably one of the greatest things ever made. As a beginner, it helped me do things in days that would have taken me weeks.

This stack took me months to find and I'm so glad I did. I can even code and deploy static sites in minutes.

1\. [https://www.codementor.io/yurio/all-you-need-is-react- fireba...](https://www.codementor.io/yurio/all-you-need-is-react- firebase-4v7g9p4kf)

</comment><comment><USER3> I would suggest Ruby on Rails. I am not familiar with other frameworks, so it might be that others have the same advantages as I will describe below.

For me the first and most important aspect is that for a new idea/project I just create a new Rails project, add Devise (authentication gem) and in very short time I can have login/signup and a welcome page. All of them with a decent level of security so that I don't need to think a lot about CSFR, XSS, SQL Injection (if you will follow Active Record guidelines) and many other things.

In Rails you can create your frontend directly in HTML/CSS/Javascript without the need to learn also React or Vue. And this "old" way of doing things will allow you to focus on the product and not on learning two frameworks (Rails + Frontend Framework). At least for me this is what it brings.

Also it is very easy to make your webapp expose an API and thus connect to the backend business logic from a Mobile App or some other client. This way you can re-write later your backend incrementally without loosing any downtime.

There is a healthy community of functionality packed as Gems and if you need a feature that is pretty common it might be that someone created a gem for it. Please be aware that not all gems are equal.

Also I like the language - Ruby - because for me it was very easy to pick it up and in the beginning I did not need to understand everything to have a prototype running.

I will add to this that the community is very supportive. I suggest RubyonRails.link Slack community where you can really address your questions and in general someone will help you with it.

</comment><comment><USER4> Literally use anything you want. The secret is that it _doesn 't matter that much_. Some options:

* node.js

* python with django/flask

* perl

* php (please don't)

* C# with asp.net

* Java

* lisp

* d with vibe.d

* Rust

* C with bchs[1] (please don't)

* ruby with rails

* Write your own framework in one of the tiny languages that doesn't have one; it'll become the de facto standard for that language, and all of the users of that language will thank you for increasing its potential market share.

Point is, it really doesn't matter. What matters is you pick something, _anything_ , look up a tutorial, and then start making your webapp. Don't like it? Pick another one! Don't like that one? Do it again! Language/framework doesn't matter that much, as long as you know it well.

1: [https://learnbchs.org/](https://learnbchs.org/)

<comment><USER5> This a good list, but with some exceptions. At work I use laravel (php) and it is reasonably pleasant, works well, and is fast to develop with. On the other hand, I have been working on a project with nodejs/express/sequelize, and I have to say I've been a little let down. I love JavaScript and I like node a lot, but the lack of features in very popular libraries is worrisome. I found myself really disliking sequelize, and express still doesn't support async/await natively.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> You probably can't go wrong with either Django or Rails. From my personal point of view I'd favour Rails. In the past at least, Django also was more about creating CMS-type applications whereas Rails' main focus always has been SaaS-type business applications.

There's an argument to be made for isomorphic / universal code as well, i.e. using JavaScript both in the back-end and the front-end. However, if you're fine with learning two languages I'd say that the productivity gains by mature frameworks such as Rails or Django outweigh the reduced cognitive load of having to work with only one language on both the server and the client.

</comment><comment><USER7> Couple of things to look for * Language preference * What is present out of the box * How easy it is to extend * Performance

I'd pick one among Django, Rails or one of the popular Js stacks for the backend.

For the front end the same criteria apply, however there is not much scope for language preference. I generally go for jQuery based site unless I have a requirement for a framework. From a framework perspective I liked React + JSX.

I'd say go for JavaScript in the backend too since you'll have to learn the best practices and idioms of a single language.

</comment><comment><USER8> I would recommend using Rails(Ruby) or Laravel(PHP).

Both have great communities to help you along the way.

Due to clients I have moved from Rails to Laravel. Both are similar.

Checkout Laracasts.com.

Laravel has some great tools. Valet (Local development environment) forge.laravel.com is a great tool for setting up servers and doing deployments.

</comment><comment><USER9> I would suggest Django over Rails. Python is powerful and beginner friendly and can be used for all sorts of stuff.

And whatever you do, don't go for JavaScript based frameworks. Setting them up is a pain and the plethora of options available for every single bit of the framework can be overwhelming for beginners.

</comment><comment><USER10> Since this is PG's website, take a more Bayesian approach:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_languages_used_in_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_languages_used_in_most_popular_websites)

ps: back end column/table

<comment><USER7> That'd place java at the top. I wouldn't recommend java for a starter website though.

<comment><AUTHOR> you're right... i think i just ignored java while scanning the list :P

<comment><USER7> Java is a great language for larger companies which need to focus on performance, cross platform support and high code quality. I have worked with python and Java for a living and when there is a project that is going to last for couple of years I'd choose Java hands down. However for a single or a few people startup Java is an overkill.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Check out Golang for the server, it's a statically typed language so it's fast and hard to introduce subtle bugs that can cause a lot of confusion. There is a ton of interest and mindshare moving towards Go and it's supported by Google so it's not going anywhere. Big projects like Docker and Kubernetes are written in Go.

For a web application I think most of the work will be in the frontend which basically means javascript. We've had a lot of success using Golang for the backend APIs and React for the frontend.

</comment><comment><USER12> It depends on your actual application. Given your lack of programming skills I have a hard time recommending any programming based technology.

As it stands you wi9ll not only need to learn the technology you are going to use but also the programming language.

When people ask me which programming language to learn, I recommend that with the best debugger. Screaming at the computer WTF! for an hour does not help sovle problems.

For a web application I am unsure which has a good debugger, although I am sure there is some variety.

I would also look for which ones provide plenty of learning material.

</comment><comment><USER13> [http://simplicity.ws/](http://simplicity.ws/)

</comment><comment><USER14> Node + Express on the Backend, Hyperapp + Bulma + Parcel on the Frontend.

</comment><comment><USER15> Rails. No competition if you want to get shit done.

<comment><USER7> Why would you put rails over Django? I have used Django in the past but don't have much idea about rails or ruby, could you shed some light?

<comment><USER15> To an experienced Python/Web developer I would most likely recommend Django. I personally spend my days writing Python, although my Python backends are Bottle+SQLAlchemy.

Rails has a large community with Gems that can solve most of a beginners needs, and also has full-fledged solutions for business ready to go (eg. Double Entry accounting systems, monetary exchange rates/handling, oauth/users, etc)

Perhaps I'm wrong and I should take another look at Django however :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Javascript and no framework.

</comment><comment><USER17> python/django is the best choice!</comment>


Wael Ghonim: A "One-Off" for Silicon Valley? - <AUTHOR> http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-501465_162-20031608-501465.html

<comment><USER2> The first comment on this article is the best:

 _I will not, NOT be using Google again until he is FIRED! Go to Egypt Wael Ghonim, you are no longer welcome here!! Going to Bling now, not Google._

I wonder what kind of features Bling has.

<comment><USER3> Gold, Lots of gold. and diamonds.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Best 20% time project ever.

<comment><USER5> I think it's more his 100% time project now.

(Or more realistically, his 300% time project.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> "There's one thing that you men will be able to say when you get back home. And you may thank God for it. Thirty years from now when you're sitting around your fireside with your grandson on your knee and he asks you what did you do in the great World War II, you won't have to say, "Well, I shoveled shit in Louisiana.""

\--Patton

</comment><comment><USER7> <http://twitter.com/#!/google/status/36521734542868480>

"We're incredibly proud of you, @Ghonim, & of course will welcome you back when you're ready - cf. <http://goo.gl/2BDGp>

I don't understand why anyone would think Google would fire Ghonim for taking personal time to help bring democracy to his homeland. That just isn't the kind of company Google is.

</comment><comment><USER8> US Companies, including Google involve themselves in politics (both domestic and international) all the time. I think it is a bit silly to say that "tech companies don't want to take political positions".

<comment><USER9> Agree. Also interesting that an employee protesting on his own time is considered a "political position", while selling equipment used by dictators to oppress their people is not. The article does imply that this is not always the case, but in my experience it seems much more acceptable to engage in the latter than the former.

<comment><USER10> If Google follows its internal policies it will have to fire him. (err let him go) And while I agree that he did it on his "own time" as you will recall all of the news reports pegged him as a "Google Executive" which certainly gives the impression that its Google sanctioned (which it wasn't according to the article). I've been on both sides of this question at various times in my career and it really requires the employee to decide which is more important to them and then to dedicate themselves to that and step away from the other. I think Wael made his choice, and I admire him for it.

(I find that he keeps getting demoted too, he started out in charge of everything in the middle east and now he is down to a mere product manager :-)

<comment><USER7> Which policy dictates that he must be fired?

<comment><USER10> When I was there the Code of Conduct required that all employees abide by the (US version) of the foreign nations laws which precluded (among other things) advocating for the overthrow of any legitimate government, colluding with government or non-government agencies in the public policy area without registering as a 'lobbyist' (there are different terms in different countries), doing anything that would suggest a conflict of interest between Google and the legitimate government. Responses available to the company when an employee had been found to violate the code included things like prosecuting the individual for damages and of course termination.

It was all pretty standard boilerplate kind of stuff. There were higher standards for managers than rank and file as well. But mostly I think it is in there to try to mitigate retaliation from countries against Google corporate.

But let me re-iterate, I don't claim that they would or should fire Wael, I'm just saying that a strict reading of it would make that their next step.

Imagine what happens if Mubarak sues Google for lost income, personal distress, Etc, because their employee lead the effort to displace him? Never under estimate the gall of a plaintiff lawyer if their target has a huge cash reserve.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'd love to see what could be done by some of Google's Chinese-speaking managers.

<comment><USER12> Not much, considering they're all in Hong Kong.

<comment><USER11> Wael Ghonim wasn't based in Egypt for his most recent position with Google.

[http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-egypt- go...](http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-egypt- google-20110212,0,7159629.story)

"A year ago, he moved to Dubai, United Arab Emirates, for Google. His mother, Iman, saw that he would be crestfallen by the poverty when he returned for vacations."

There are still plenty of Googlers who have family ties to China and who have occasion to travel there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I've seen a 45 minute interview[0] with him. His activism doesn't have much to do with his hackery. He's clearly an NF[1] (Keirsey's Idealist temperament). Most hackers are NTs (Keirsey's Rational temperament), say, about 75%[2] of them.

He's very emotional.[3]

[0] <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlBAzvX9Xw4>

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idealist_temperament>

[2] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=946249>

[3] <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kafxFOTepSo>

<comment><USER13> Not sure why I was down voted.

Here's clip [3] with subs (can't edit parent post).

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V690GO7YzgA>

<comment><USER14> Armchair psychology is inappropriate.

<comment><USER13> Fair enough, I guess.

I still think his activism is not related to any quality in the archetypal hacker personality.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How Airbnb Evolved To Focus On Social Rather Than Searches - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcodesign.com/1670890/how-airbnb-evolved-to-focus-on-social-rather-than-searches#1 <comment><USER2> Too little article to describe all the social stuff on AirBnb and the article seems unfinished in fact. As far as I know, AirBnB was originally more soical phenomena than any other booking site and that's why it wins them all.

There's a huge difference between the site that looks like some kind of lonely place without people and the one that looks like it's crowded with people you like and the AirBnb certainly looks like the 2nd type.

Saying all this, I have to admit that there are still some things to do in the social part but I guess Airbnb will eventually do it.</comment>


Q&A on Coronaviruses (Covid-19) - <AUTHOR> https://www.who.int/news-room/q-a-detail/q-a-coronaviruses <comment><USER2> > Coronaviruses are a large family of viruses that are common in animals. > Rarely, people get infected with these viruses which may then spread to > other people. For example, SARS-CoV was associated with civet cats and MERS- > CoV is transmitted by dromedary camels. Possible animal sources of COVID-19 > have not yet been confirmed.

Cats and camels. Not the animals I would have first thought of. I probably would have never considered camels as being a source for any disease.

<comment><USER3> They are referring to civets, which aren't cats at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > It is therefore possible to catch COVID-19 from someone who has, for > example, just a mild cough and does not feel ill.

Buckle up.

</comment><comment><USER5> It is not cat in your house. Do not generalise as lions are also in cat family. Camels are quite confirmed.

It is not these animals, but likely bat is the source.

Still can we trust who who seems to favour china, down to even the name is not like other cornoavirus tradition to name after outbreak - Spain, Hk sars, Middle East.

Wuhan virus.</comment>


Show HN: Tty-share ** share your terminal in the browser, over the Internet - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/elisescu/tty-share <comment><USER2> This seems pretty interesting. What would be the use-cases? I can't imagine that it would be a good fit for real-time (a screenshare app like Hangouts or Skype solves that) -- perhaps server logs in a browser tab?

<comment><USER3> The use case behind these kinds of terminal/editor sharing over the browser is to allow other individual to interact with your instance. This is good for remote debugging especially. Additionally video calls are susceptible to quality drops which make screens harder to read sometimes. This simply transfers the text as opposed to a screen grab.

While tools like zoom allow remote desktop control, it still has lag, and the requirement for both parties to install software as opposed to just the sender in the case of this tool.

<comment><USER2> +1 to the hard screen reading

Awesome, I didn't know that the other person could interact with it -- as in one person's terminal is now a shared browser tab that can have commands entered in? If so, that is really cool and I will check it out further.

Edit: I just viewed the gif again, this time a little longer, and this is really cool!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Did you know tmate? Looks pretty similar to that one</comment>


Life - <AUTHOR> https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/life/ <comment><USER2> I find autopoiesis ("self-constructing, self-maintaining, energy-transducing autocatalytic entities") to be the most satisfying definition of Life. But I find it weird that they would throw that term out there without citing Humberto Maturana or Francisco Varela, who came up with the concept.

They wrote mostly long essays in obscure philosopher's jargon, but one day decided to go ahead and explain everything very simply; they wrote The Tree of Knowledge, which summarizes their philosophy in the style of a children's book. Very worth reading if you're into these kinds of questions. I found a PDF here:

[https://www.cybertech.swiss/research/references/Maturana1988...](https://www.cybertech.swiss/research/references/Maturana1988/maturana-h-1987-tree- of-knowledge-bkmrk.pdf)

<comment><USER3> I'm put off the idea of investing much time in reading that because of the blurb by Fritjof Capra.

Should I be?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> To me, there seems to be a pretty straightforward line to draw between life and non-life: Life is that which undergoes Darwinian evolution.

If (a) it makes copies of itself, (b) the copies inherit traits from the original, (c) the traits are subject to variation/mutation, and (d) the success of the copies at making further copies depends on those traits which are inherited, then evolution _must_ occur.

Every other definition seems to me over-complex and ad-hoc; like specific things we have noticed which tend to be true about most life on Earth, but which might not be true for special cases, or for some other hypothetical extraterrestrial life which we might discover someday.

This definition is an unambiguous binary classifier, and it seems to correctly categorize everything we would intuitively call "alive". (Also, under this definition, viruses are unambiguously life).

<comment><USER5> Hmm. If Darwinian evolution is based on factors currently present around the species, wouldn't it basically be optimizing for short-term factors? So you could call Darwinian evolution a greedy algorithm, that optimizes for a local maxima. What about the global maxima, how can life evolve to that state?

<comment><USER6> If I understand your question, the answer might be something to do with what happened in humans; we developed brains large enough to be able to recognise patterns in our own behaviour and abstract those across all aspects of life.

Having said that, the long term stability of that path is definitely debatable!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> My definition of life: A forkbomb implemented in hardware.

</comment><comment><USER8> Recently I got interested in the origin of life. I found this 3 part talk which discusses how the simplest possible life form might have looked like.

My feeling after watching this is that we are slowly getting there (which will also mean jump starting in a dish a self replicating thing from inorganic matter).

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

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJ5jh33OiOA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJ5jh33OiOA)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfq5-i8xoIU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfq5-i8xoIU)

</comment><comment><USER9> I think we now know enough about the mechanics of life (molecular biology in particular) to conclude that we are simply _fantastically_ complex clockwork automatons.

It's awe-inspiring and impressive that it works, and that it likely evolved from goo, but I am legitimately curious if anyone actually disagrees with the statement above in a justifiable way.

<comment><USER10> The question is are we simply automatons?

Yes we are automatons ("a really smart meat" per Ready Player One) but is that all there is to human life?

1\. To me the mystery lies in the awareness.

Modern neuroscience/psychology/cognitive science/ are aware that subconscious accounts for most of brain's activity.

The aware part is such a small part that it is reasonable to ask whether it is needed at all.

Anecdotally we all have heard stories of people doing things on auto-pilot unaware of doing them(driving, blacked out shenanigans, etc).

Thus I can very well imagine a Chalmer's zombie which functions identical to most humans.

2\. The biggest problem with simple reductionist strategy into automatons is what it means for morals/ethics.

It's not only that everything becomes "vae victis" or localized majority consensus. No globals left not even the golden rule.

Even worse everything becomes almost nonsensical.

Nihilist ISIS suicide bombers trying to escape the matrix then make as much sense as Elon Musk trying to expand humanity to Mars.

Just some automatons trying to make sense of it all.

<comment><USER11> > The aware part is such a small part that it is reasonable to ask whether it > is needed at all. Anecdotally we all have heard stories of people doing > things on auto-pilot unaware of doing them(driving, blacked out shenanigans, > etc).

We know what someone without awareness looks like, we call them coma patients.

The anecdotal stories of people doing things and not remembering them does not mean they were unaware at the moment, it just points to the glitches in the memory processes. Alcohol interferes with ability to record short term to long term memory, among other things. As for driving on "auto-pilot", it is your brain tuning out all-too-familiar sights and not recording them as not containing any new information.

Your brain is very good at optimizing things, and the more routine-bound your life becomes, the less new information comes in that it considers worthy of recording - if it sees an instance of a pattern it has seen a thousand times, it categorizes that commute to work as that pattern and does not bother recording it unless something out of ordinary happens.

That also explains why time seems to pass faster as you get older - there are less and less genuinely new experiences and encounters coming in for your brain to record and remember as interesting, so time flies by faster and faster.

<comment><USER10> Coma patients are just a subset of people without awareness.

Awareness is not binary. My friend going into diabetic coma exhibits a degree of awareness until you realize her answers to my questions have stopped and you have to call the ambulance.

I do agree that the brain optimizes routine things, thus my question is it not possible to function without awareness (ie sleepwalking through life).

I am going from books like these: [https://www.amazon.com/Philosophy-Flesh- Embodied-Challenge-W...](https://www.amazon.com/Philosophy-Flesh-Embodied- Challenge-Western/dp/0465056741)

Here's a premise: Most(90+%) of our thought occurs subconsciously . Is it not possible function 100% subconsiously?

Think about sleeping on a math problem and the solution coming to you suddenly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> TL;DR: living systems may be defined as open systems maintained in steady- states, far-from-equilibrium, due to matter-energy flows in which informed (genetically) autocatalytic cycles extract energy, build complex internal structures, allowing growth even as they create greater entropy in their environments, and capable, over multigenerational time, of evolution.</comment>


I Spend 9 Months Developing an Algorithm That Can Draw - <AUTHOR> https://www.boredpanda.com/i-spend-9-months-developing-a-flexible-algorithm-system-that-creates-drawings/ <comment><USER2> was really excited about the title, but wow, why did this take you 9 months?</comment>


Throwback, The App That Sends Memories To Future You, Launches On Android - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/03/throwback-the-app-that-sends-memories-to-a-future-you-launches-on-android/

<comment><USER2> Interesting idea, but I can't see a lot of people keeping the same phone for 4-5 years in order to see the photo again.</comment>