Great Mathematicians on Math Competitions and "Genius" (2010) - <AUTHOR> http://lesswrong.com/lw/2v1/great_mathematicians_on_math_competitions_and/ <comment><USER3> As a former "successful" mathlete (never did IMO or Putnam, but consistently made the top five in state competitions), I agree that competitions won't help you develop mathematical maturity, but it is interesting how how they are viewed in the wider world. It's been a number of years since my math tournament days, but people are always very impressed if I mention that I won math competitions in middle and high school. It is odd to me, because I don't really care about my math medals anymore and I've since accomplished things that I value a lot more, but there you have it.

Also, even though competitions won't help you develop as a mathematician, I still think it was a good experience for me to get out of school for a day and hang out with a bunch of other math nerds. That part of it was a lot more valuable than the competition itself.

<comment> squeaky-clean > Also, even though competitions won't help you develop as a mathematician, I > still think it was a good experience for me to get out of school for a day > and hang out with a bunch of other math nerds. That part of it was a lot > more valuable than the competition itself.

I haven't done math competitions, but I feel the same way about programming competitions. I don't think I'm a better programmer because of the competitions. But I do think spending 4 hours, 2-3 days a week in a room with other programmers who were also there voluntarily made me much better. It's not like I stopped focusing on my own projects or coursework and did this instead. It was just an additional 12 hours a week of practice and socializing.

Some problems were hilariously artificial too. I still remember one, where 10-year-old Suzie had a lemonade stand and had been keeping track of her profits each day. You needed to find the 3 consecutive days in which she had made the most total profit. The catch? It needed to run in less than 1 second and the largest case could (which means it will) be n=9999999. (I may be off by an order of magnitude).

Little Suzie had been running her lemonade for well over 27,000 years apparently, but would throw a tantrum if it took more than 1 second to compute her answer.

<comment><USER4> > It needed to run in less than 1 second

I've always wondered how these competitions measure the program's runtime consistently. I guess the easiest way would be to specify the CPU the program will run on and use the bash `time` builtin, but that seems inconvenient for participants to obtain that CPU and controlling for the cache might be difficult (maybe a kernel module that clears the cache before the program runs and make sure the program runs fully in cores dedicated to that program and is consistent enough with memory accesses so L3 is comparable).

On the other hand they could just count instructions run, which would be completely deterministic, but might lead to some "optimizations" that don't make sense like using `rep movs` to zero memory instead of loops. Using a higher-level bytecode would have the same problems. They could also give different values to each instruction and possibly memory access, but even then students would be ignoring important real-world cache or pipeline optimizations.

But maybe I'm just overthinking this. This type of problem would be better suited for GPUs anyway.

<comment><USER5> The time limits are overkill except if you chose the algorithm wrong.

<comment><USER6> In fact, you can often get a good ballpark-estimate of what big-O runtime your algorithm needs to have, just from the time limit. This can work as a hint on how to solve the problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm from that world of math Olympics. Never reached IMO, only top places on regional competitions (math, physics, programming), and know a lot of people who been there and who never participated. Some won the medals, graduated with MSc from universities and gave up with science. Some were not so good in competitions, but became very smart scientists and great math teachers. There's no rule, and I don't think this system is just a selection of the best, discouraging children who did not succeed from choosing math.

It's just much easier and more natural to see the beauty of mathematics while spending enough time on learning, solving problems and engaging in competitions. Oh, yes, I'm still seeing it despite years in MIPT with some real math. There's a lot of fun in it. For example, we had "mathematical battles", when two teams had to present and defend their solutions and get score points from jury. It's also a very special and friendly environment, where you can meet people, connect to universities and build social network that will serve you for the whole of your life. I still have a lot of friends from summer math schools which I attended in early 90s. For many it's also a social lift, egalitarian by it's nature, where distinction between rich and poor is almost invisible (not like on the street or a schoolyard), it allows many children from small towns across the country to enter top universities and build successful career, not necessarily in science.

I will never blame this system for presenting math "in wrong way". It doesn't have to show the world of grown-ups. And, by the way, we never heard the word "genius" (except applied to Pushkin or Einstein).

</comment><comment><USER8> Like a few commenters on this thread, I participated in a lot of math contests in high school. Never made the IMO but placed at/near the top in regional and statewide competitions.

On the one hand, my experience mirrors some of what the article talks about: I learned very quickly that the things professional mathematicians work on are very different from math contest problems. (I went to college intending to major in math, but switched to CS as soon as I took a semester of abstract algebra.)

On the other hand, the article seems to imply that many great mathematicians look down on math competitions for not giving an accurate portrayal of math as a career path. I don't see why that is an issue. My high school was a math magnet school, and 100s of students participated in monthly contests like California Math League. Almost every participant that I talked to in those days did math contests because they were fun, or because they were an interesting challenge. I never met anyone who said "I want to be a mathematician, and contests are clearly the first step on that road."

For me, math contests are like high school sports or drama or anything else. They appeal to certain subgroups of kids, they're fun and hopefully educational/useful in some way, and they don't have to be more than that.

<comment><USER9> There's definitely an argument to be made that disgruntled, great mathematicians act as a barrier to entry. Being exclusionary hardly attracts anybody to an already difficult field. Besides, who's to say that whatever they describe as "the one prescribed path" must be what works for everybody? I think the will and drive to study mathematics is less cookie cutter than that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I was pretty good at math competitions (2x putnam fellow) but never that great at being a mathematician. But I still think math competitions are great experience. Winning at any sort of competition teaches you how to be persistent, how to work hard, how to recover from setbacks mentally, how to maintain focus for a long period of time, and how to gear up for critical moments where you need to perform.

For example, when I first went to the math olympiad summer program, I had trouble focusing on a single math problem that I had no clue how to solve for three hours straight. It's hard! The training program basically forces you to do that over and over, so I ended up learning a lot of how to focus for large chunks of time and do useful things to attack a problem that I didn't initially know how to solve.

I went into computer stuff instead of math stuff after college, and there's a lot of stuff I never used again. Algebraic topology, all the geometry theorems they don't teach you in high school, you name it. But the ability to work really hard on a single technical problem until you nail it, that's been constantly useful. Especially in startups.

<comment><USER8> 100% agree that learning focus and persistence was a very valuable result of doing math competitions.

Completely random: If you're who I think you are, I still remember seeing your name on the list of perfect AHSME scores in 1998ish. I think we met briefly at an ACM competition in '03 (we played Mafia for a while in a big group, and were briefly introduced by Po-Shen Loh who was one of my ACM teammates.)

<comment><USER10> Yeah that sounds like me! ;-) Although by '03 I was in grad school; ACM stuff was probably '01 or '02.

<comment><USER8> You're right! It was '02, in Honolulu.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> For me, this applies equally to programming competitions and white boarding algorithms in interviews.

<comment><USER12> I think some folks overdo the white boarding. But I believe it is needed - <USER2> be one or two problems on the whiteboard with the rest of the interview focusing on design & software engineering (metrics, resiliency, etc.).

I've seen folks who have a lot of _coding skill_ on their resume fumble simple white board problems. I have fumbled simple white board problems when I have also interviewed (It was for a s/w engg position but I had spent the past several years in architecture and away from any real code - so it was expected).

The point is white boarding is ok if you have a well defined problem solvable in 45 mins and if it is just geared to assess your familiarity with code. I don't think its a reasonable expectation to come up with new approximation algorithms for NP-complete problems and solve+prove them on a white board in 45 mins.

<comment><USER13> _I 've seen folks who have a lot of coding skill on their resume fumble simple white board problems._

Solving a coding problem on a whiteboard tests your ability to solve coding problems _on a whiteboard_. That's a bias. It makes people who get nervous standing up and being the centre of attention less likely to pass the test. If coding on a whiteboard is a part of the job then fair enough, but if it isn't then you're introducing something to the interview that filters people out based on something other than their ability to do the job - and that means you're not necessarily recruiting the best person. I believe that's a good reason not to use whiteboard tests very often.

<comment><USER12> To be fair - we don't look for syntactic correctness of your solution. You miss a semi colon here and there - that's cool. You invent your own method/function to abstract out things like creating threads, communicating between process - that's fine (in fact we provide examples of these and say feel free to use something like this).

What we are interested in is algorithmic correctness. I think for someone who develops for a profession writing an algorithm on a white board shouldn't really be a big deal. Agree on the nervousness... I don't know a good way around it though... We normally do interviews on the phone using collabedit so the candidate can sit in their own comfort zone. I also make it a point to mute my phone and not to talk unless asked to.

<comment><USER14> Doesn't matter. White-board-as-IDE can throw you off so much that you can't think right about the big picture idea, especially if talking in front of people you just met in a stressful interview. It's nothing at all like explaining an algorithm to a peer after you've been working there and feel comfortable, etc.

Whiteboard-as-IDE is just bad, all the time.

<comment><USER12> What would you use to ascertain good coding skill? It is impractical to provide someone with a problem set and have them come back after a week. To be honest - that's the approach I'd really love to do.

<comment><USER14> Why not sit with them at a computer, let them set up their own preferred working environment, let them have an interactive shell prompt within which to execute snippets of code while they tinker and develop the solution, etc.?

I don't understand your thinking -- it seems like you picture it as a dichotomy between asking trivia questions which must be on a whiteboard, vs. assigning an extensive college homework problem set -- both of which seem like terrible ways of assessing on the job skill to me.

The questions you would ask at the whiteboard are probably fine questions. It's the way you allow them to be solved that's the problem.

For example, if someone asked me to write some code in Python that computes the median of a stream of numbers, I would probably do something using itertools-based generators, and/or something using the heapq library for a heap.

I do not have the APIs of these standard modules memorized. I absolutely could not write down their usage on a whiteboard. It wouldn't just be minor syntax issues. It would be so much of needing to look up which function argument goes where, which thing has no return value but mutates the underlying data type, etc., that it would just totally and completely prevent me from being able to fluidly solve the problem or explain what I'm doing. The whiteboard nature of the discussion would be a total hindrance, alien to the experience of actual day-to-day programming.

And I've used both heapq and itertools for many years, time and again, in easily many thousands of lines of code each -- and I _still_ always need to look up some documentation, paste some snippet about itertools.starmap or itertools.cycle into IPython, test it on some small toy data, poke around with the output to verify I am thinking of the usage correctly, and then go back over to my code editor and write the code now that I've verified by poking around what it is that I need to do.

That's just how development works. It does not ever work by starting with a blank editor screen and then writing code from top to bottom in a straightforward manner. It doesn't even happen by writing some then just going back in the same source file and revising.

100% of the time, you also have a browser with Stack Overflow open, google open, API documentation open, and you also have some sandbox environment for rapidly either pasting code into an interpreter and playing with it, or rapidly doing a compile workflow and running some code, possibly in a debugger, to see what's going on.

I do not understand why you wouldn't replicate that same kind of situation when you're testing someone. What you want to know is if they can efficiently tinker around with the problem, use their base knowledge of the relevant algorithm and data structure to get most of the way there, and the efficiently use other tools on the web or in a shell or whatever to smooth out the little odd bits that they don't have an instantaneous recall or photographic memory of.

In fact, if they do solve some algorithm question start to finish, it just means they have crammed for that kind of thing, spent a lot of time memorizing that kind of trivia, and practicing. That's not actually very related to on- the-job skill at all. By observing them complete it start to finish, you're not getting a signal that they are a good developer (nor a bad one) -- only that they are currently overfitted to this one kind of interview trivia problem. You do not know if their skill will generalize outside to all the other odds and ends tasks that pop up as you're working, or as you face something you don't have 100% memory recall over.

Anyway, the point is you can still ask development and algorithm questions, but you should offer the candidate a comfortable programming environment that is a perfect replica of the environment they will use on the job, with their own chosen editor, access to a browser, same kind of time constraints, comfortable seating, privacy, quiet, etc.

And you should care mostly about seeing the process at work, how they verify correctness, how they document and explain what they are doing. If you're asking problems where _mere correctness_ is itself some kind of super rare occurrence, like some kind of esoteric graph theory problem or something, you're just wasting everyone's time.

<comment><USER12> My reply is about 2 days late. But thank you for the feedback... I am genuinely trying to improve the process since I've been at the receiving end of it at one time as well.

I'd definitely like to run something like this but I'd need folks to install a good screen sharing tool (join.me, webmeeting or some such thing...). But I'll definitely be open to asking the candidate's willingness to do so. That way they can get working code in an environment they are comfortable in...

We do most interviews remotely and offer a remote work setup as well. So its always not practical to physically have the person code in front of me.

<comment><USER14> One of my most enjoyable experiences as a candidate was when a company shared login information with me for SSH-ing into a temporary virtual machine they had spun up at Amazon S3 solely for the interview. They asked me what editor I'd like present, and separately made sure any environment details were taken care ahead of time.

Then I was able to simply log in with my shell here at home, and the screen was shared with the interviewers. The whole interview took place in console Emacs, with the interviewer pasting in a question, me poking around and asking clarifying questions, then switching over to IPython, tinkering, and going back and writing code incrementally.

I think all of the modern front-end services that do this kind of thing are pretty terrible, like Coderpad, HackerRank, TripleByte, or more UI-focused screensharing tools. Heck, I'd even opt for just a Google Hangout if we had to do it by UI screen sharing.

I think the low tech route of SSH is vastly superior.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> George Pólya claimed that the British emphasis on puzzle-solving had set British mathematics back a hundred years. He and Hardy tried to get rid of Cambridge's emphasis on the Tripos exam and the whole "Senior Wrangler" thing.[1] They didn't entirely succeed.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senior_Wrangler_(University_of...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senior_Wrangler_\(University_of_Cambridge\))

</comment><comment><USER16> When I got to Harvard, probably the best Putnam/puzzle types of solvers there (among the students) were Don Coppersmith and Angelos Tsiromokos. Don went on to do very important work in cryptology. Angelos went on to leave mathematics; his next gig was as a translator for the common market. (He was probably better in word games/puzzles -- Scrabble, crosswords, and so on -- in English than I was, even though it was his third language.)

Ofer Gabber and Ron (Ran) donagi also did very well on a semi-formal Putnam, and did so at very young ages. They went on to decent math careers.

I also took the Putnam at very young ages, but never cracked the top 100. I went on to leave mathematics.

Nat Kuhn was perhaps the best of the undergrads then. He went on to be a psychiatrist.

Andy Gleason was perhaps the best at that kind of thing among the faculty. Wonderfully nice guy, and my de jure thesis advisor, which was a bit awkward because he never got a PhD himself and didn't quite understand my stresses; I didn't realize the no-PhD part until after the fact, when I saw his resume in connection with his election as president of the American Mathematical Society.

<comment><USER17> Elder Harvard math professors who have PhDs don't really empathize either, because they are in the very high end of the talent spectrum, and they came up in the time when massive breakthroughs were told for picking.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Nowadays the word 'coach' usually applies to athletics, but it dates to the 1830s, when Cambridge University started awarding math degrees by competitive examination. A coach was someone who gave you a straight, smooth ride to your degree, just like a horse-drawn coach on one of the new paved roads that began appearing in England around that time. So coaching was hip.

The high scorers on the exam were a Who's Who of British science in the 1800s. In 1854, for example, the second highest scorer was James Clerk Maxwell, the greatest physicist of the century, who gave humankind its first look at a fundamental law of nature. The guy who beat Maxwell became a coach and spent the rest of his life teaching people how to do well on the exam.

</comment><comment><USER19> Note, however, that Grigori Perelman was very good at mathematical olympiads.

<comment><USER20> And Terrence Tao who is quated was also extremely good at olympiads. As I see it, the olympiads are a good cost-effective way of identifying talented kids, they are in a way just IQ tests.

<comment><USER21> I think the point being made is that the converse need not be true: kids who are _not_ good at these sports need not feel discouraged from pursuing mathematics.

<comment><USER17> But what does it mean when the people preaching this claim are all Olympiad winners?

The one math genius I know who despised Olympiads, ended up leaving academia over a famous but wrong proof.

<comment><USER21> I know plenty of very good mathematicians who did not participate seriously in this kind of thing. (Disclosure: I work as a mathematician at a research university.) I'm not sure why the only ones quoted here are mainly ex-winners. Indeed, while these competitions may have the positive effect of putting like minds together, it's possible that they have the negative effect of discouraging those w/o the aptitude for this particular kind of competitive sport (which is what it is), or who do not have access to the kind of coaching and practice that successful competitors often have.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Keep in mind you can get Fields medal only if you are under 40 years old. That's more likely when going into academia maths straight away, without enjoying relatively lucrative industry jobs like most of IMO contestants I know do.

</comment><comment><USER23> We also need to hear from an important segment of the math population: those who burned out or dropped out for reasons related to math perceptions engendered by the math-competition culture. We all know people who did great at math or science competitions in high school but just disappeared from the scene after that. One may say that there are other underlying causes that lead them to not live up to some hypothetical promises, but I strongly feel that success and failure at math competitions can be a cause in itself. A lot of space is dedicated to how math olympiad triple-gold medalists went on to become great mathematicians. We also hear about those like Grothendieck and Hardy who weren't big in the competition circuit.

But missing are the stories of those who didn't make it big in spite of great competition performance, and those who fell out of math because of failing at math competitions.

In India, for example, competition math is _everything_ at the high school level. This is because competitive exams like the famed IIT JEE, etc. are essentially variations on the competitive math theme. A few serious math enthusiasts do take up broader math-specific exams for math institutes, but those numbers are minuscule. The worst affected in my experience, are the talented and the enthusiastic who were discouraged and/or dropped out altogether because of failing at optimizing their skills and learning for competitions and similar exams.

</comment><comment><USER24> This seems like a more general portrayal of how innacurate tests demonstrate domain knowledge. It is true for Math Olympiads, but also true for a wide range of subjects. Nonetheless, this is stil relevant to provide a _hint_ of what that person might know.

</comment><comment><USER25> I participated in my state's math competition, but never made it to the finals. Yet it didn't discourage me from attending college and majoring in math.

I also participated in the music competition, called "solo and ensemble festival." Like the math competitions, music competitions are an artificial environment -- one student in front of a judge, rarely any audience. But in some sense they are "real world" because they mimic the auditions that are very much a real part of a music career, e.g., for getting music scholarships and entry into most orchestras. I never got that far.

</comment><comment><USER26> Qualitatively, it's the same problem that a lot of people have in grad school. Doing homework from a textbook isn't the same as the uncertainty of research.

</comment><comment><USER27> Success at mathematics requires staring at it until you can understand it, however long that takes

<comment><USER28> Well, no -- it's not enough to just _stare_ at the problem / thing.

What you have to do, effectively, is _become at one with its true nature_. Which in general is much more difficult than simply starting at it.

<comment><USER29> > become at one with its true nature

That's very vague.

<comment><USER28> It is. Which is why it's so difficult.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> pardon the shitpost, but that is a compilation of one of the most profound and useful quotes i've ever seen. the difference between superficial achievement and real contribution is profound, and most of our systems are designed to reward and reinforce the first at the expense of the latter.

"They've done all things, often beautiful things in a context that was already set out before them, which they had no inclination to disturb. Without being aware of it, they've remained prisoners of those invisible and despotic circles which delimit the universe of a certain milieu in a given era."

<comment><USER31> But it's very hard to design a feedback loop with a short enough cycle to properly reward the latter.

It makes me think of the line about raising children, that it's better to say, "I recognize that you worked really hard on that, it looks wonderful!" than "Good job! You're so smart!" [1]

because one captures the _reason_ why they did a good job. By calling that out, you can perhaps reinforce behavior with a longer view.

[1]: [http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/06/the- s-w...](http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/06/the-s- word/397205/)

<comment><USER32> Yeah, my parents and all my teachers told me I was 'gifted' from 2nd grade, and I really feel like it held me back, overall. Yes, I picked stuff up quickly, but I was also lazy as hell, and given no real incentive to learn how to not be lazy until it was too late to turn around my disastrous grades.

I have a son now, and I'm going to try to avoid calling him smart or gifted. Or at least not telling him that he's smarter than the other kids.

<comment><USER3> I had a similar experience: that kind of reinforcement encouraged me to try to do the least work possible to get the same results as others in order to prove how gifted I was, instead of working hard to go above and beyond. It was a rude awakening when I got to the point in life when I wasn't competing against my peers to complete set tasks, but rather competing against them to provide the most valuable contributions to a research group or company.

However, I also believe that this kind of explanation can be harmful because it puts the blame for my laziness on others. Even though the research supports the idea that this effect occurred, ultimately I got past it by focusing on my own agency.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why Are There So Few Female Magicians? - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/03/why-are-there-so-few-female-magicians/274099/

<comment><USER2> I grew up with a magician for a mother. We had pet rabbits instead of cats and dogs that she used for her shows.

</comment><comment><USER3> Because we burned them all.</comment>


Did the FBI Lean On Microsoft for Access to Its Encryption Software? - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2013/09/11/fbi-microsoft-bitlocker-backdoor/ <comment><USER2> This post links to the original Mashable article that Boing Boing excerpts: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6368367](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6368367)

[Edited to add: do read the Mashable story, because it is _much richer_ and features significantly more detailed conversations b/w the FBI and Microsoft.]

</comment><comment><USER3> Hmm.. are there any independent audits done on BitLocker? Since TrueCrypt's validity is so so and TPM modules cannot be fully trusted, may it be more secure to run Truecrypt and Bitlocker on top of each other? What other good encryption alternatives do we have?

<comment><USER4> > What other good encryption alternatives do we have?

If you don't trust TrueCrypt, I would recommend dm-crypt/LUKS (with cryptsetup front-end) for Linux and DiskCryptor [0] for Windows.

[0] - [http://diskcryptor.net/wiki/Main_Page/en](http://diskcryptor.net/wiki/Main_Page/en)

<comment><USER5> I don't mean to spread FUD about LUKS, because I think it's great software, but our team has ran a LUKS setup for a while in production and it gave rise to vague problems. If you plan to use LUKS, please do test it extensively on real hardware before going production.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> ...and it sounds like they didn't do it.

A bit of good news for once?

<comment><USER7> Still not news. This article is nothing new, it simply took a piece from another article, added a title and called it good. They didn't even really add any commentary, other than saying one of the sources was their friend.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> How long till we hear a similar story about TrueCrypt. Except no one even knows who is behind TrueCrypt. I hope there was some audited fork or another software with similar features(esp. hidden volumes) from a reputable company I could use.

<comment><USER9> Why is so important to "know" who is behind TrueCrypt ? They publish the code and you can inspect it and build it yourself if you don't trust the provided binaries.

<comment><USER3> The issue is that the source code is too complex to audit personally. Having no real identity behind it also removes the risk of finger pointing if a backdoor were to be discovered.

"There has been no known comprehensive review of the source code by a qualified cryptographer.[46][44] Thorough security code review and testing is hard, tedious, and painstaking work, and very few people have the skills to do it. There was, however, a functional evaluation of the deniability of hidden volumes in an earlier version of TrueCrypt by Schneier et al. that found security leaks." [1]

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truecrypt#Reasonable_paranoia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truecrypt#Reasonable_paranoia)

<comment><USER10> It's about time then that few qualified cryptographers make an audit. Kickstarter project maybe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Microsoft: Commoditizing the shaft since 1975.

</comment><comment><USER12> I don't get it. :(

<comment><USER3> Read the original detailed article: [http://mashable.com/2013/09/11/fbi- microsoft-bitlocker-backd...](http://mashable.com/2013/09/11/fbi-microsoft- bitlocker-backdoor/)

I don't know why the one from boing boing was even posted.</comment></comment>


Show HN: "Introduction to Encryption – Terminology and Technology" Free Course - <AUTHOR> https://www.udemy.com/introduction-to-encryption-terminology-and-technology/?couponCode=hn-2016 <comment><AUTHOR> Wow, I am sorry. I did not expect the coupon runs out so quickly. Here is another one:

[https://www.udemy.com/introduction-to-encryption- terminology...](https://www.udemy.com/introduction-to-encryption-terminology- and-technology/?couponCode=hn2-16)

</comment><comment><USER2> It costs 20 dollars actually.</comment>


There's No C in DevOps, but There Should Be - <AUTHOR> http://blog.xebialabs.com/2016/04/07/theres-no-c-devops/ <comment><USER2> There is a lot in this post I agree with, but the one thing that grates on me is the appeal to "us" in "why don't we change our culture?" The truth is that the people doing the work very rarely have much say in what their "culture" (i.e. the set of policies, practices, approaches, attitudes) will be. It's dictated by the decisions of managers. Perhaps if all software projects had great leadership then the curve the author illustrates would shift way to the right. I don't know. But what I do know is that aside from a few visible startups not that many large human organizations put their "culture" to a democratic vote. So if a project tanks, I think it's just as fair, and probably more productive to look at the managers and the decisions they made along with subjective notions like "culture."</comment>


Google's mapping cars discover hundreds of underground gas leaks - <AUTHOR> http://thescoopblog.dallasnews.com/2016/05/google-mapping-cars-show-locations-of-hundreds-of-dallas-underground-gas-leaks.html/ <comment><USER2> That's useful. The mapping cars could carry some other useful sensors. Air quality is obvious. Less obvious is RF leakage from cable TV cable, which can interfere with other spectrum users. Cable companies used to have to check this every two years, but they lobbied to not have to check it.

<comment><USER3> Google's mapping cars are the metaphorical nanites in the bloodstream we've been reading about in science fiction for decades, applied to the planet. Mingling with our other cells, traveling our veins, arteries, reporting on the general health of and providing a more complete picture of the system overall.

<comment><USER4> I, for one, am not keen on having nanites in my bloodstream supplied and controlled by the company who dropped from their code of conduct, and stopped using "Don't Be Evil" as their motto: [http://time.com/4060575/alphabet- google-dont-be-evil/](http://time.com/4060575/alphabet-google-dont-be-evil/)

(Top HN post in Feb 2021: "Alphabet Corp announces it's dropping support for GoogleBlood starting April 1st: A blogpost advises users to replace their blood with blood from alternative vendors and restore from backups as access to all blood functionality (not just the SmartBlood(tm) features) will cease at midnight Mar 31th. Advertisers with prepaid in-blood advertising bids will be pro-rata credited in their AdsInside account.")

<comment><USER3> I think perhaps you glossed over the part where I said "metaphorical".

<comment><USER4> Nah, I got that. I was just using your post as a setup for my GoogleBlood gag... It's probaby not as funny as I think it is… Sorry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Another hint at what is to come when Google starts organizing the world's _offline_ information.

Google Books and Google Streetview are just the tip of the iceberg.

I would be willing to bet that "massively distributed real-time data collector" was listed as a key business case by whoever pitched self-driving cars at Google.

</comment><comment><USER6> Is the collected raw data available? Would be interesting to cross-reference what the Google cars found with 311 complaints.

Here's NYC's 311 data: [https://nycopendata.socrata.com/Social- Services/311-Service-...](https://nycopendata.socrata.com/Social- Services/311-Service-Requests-from-2010-to-Present/erm2-nwe9)

...I recall there being a category for people calling in gas odor, but the Socrata site seems to be slow/down at the moment.

<comment><USER7> It looks like NYC is not in scope:

      > Dallas is one of nine participating cities, including
      > Boston, Los Angeles, Chicago and Jacksonville. This program
      > was developed with scientists from Colorado State Univ

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> More details on the program: [https://www.edf.org/climate/methanemaps](https://www.edf.org/climate/methanemaps) and the other cities they've mapped: [https://www.edf.org/climate/methanemaps/city- snapshots](https://www.edf.org/climate/methanemaps/city-snapshots)

<comment><USER8> Thanks for pointing this out. I understand that EDF was the driving force behind this initiative, but the fact that the sensors were mounted on Google cars seems to have diverted attention from that fact.

There's a growing effort to monitor CO2, CH4, and CO at very fine spatial scales, and to do inverse modeling to infer emission rates ("fluxes") from the snapshots. (E.g., [https://megacities.jpl.nasa.gov/portal/](https://megacities.jpl.nasa.gov/portal/))

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Why are these sensors not placed on garbage trucks or police cars?

<comment><USER10> police cars don't systemically go down every street, garbage trucks, not a terrible idea, but they are inherently .. very .. dirty. I wouldn't want to be the engineer servicing sensors on them.

Also, you would probably register unreasonably high levels of all sorts of things that are being released by decomp in the garbage.

<comment><USER11> CH₄ and H₂S in particular, you would think.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Slightly off topic, but one idea I had was for Google to share road usage stats with cities and businesses. Right now cities put out an air tube on the road that counts the cars. Google could provide much more insight given they already can tell you road congestion. They could give it away for free to a city and/or make businesses pay for it.

<comment><USER13> I think this is a service Strava offers, but for bicycles.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I wonder if accelerometer data would be useful to determine road quality? It may help cash strapped cities like here in Toledo prioritize the bumpiest roads to fix.

</comment><comment><USER15> This strikes me as an excellent IoT application, gas sensors are cheap and simple SMS texting could send a message from an IoT device that it detected gas and its GPS co-ordinates.

<comment><USER16> > gas sensors are cheap

I wanted to buy one to check my pipes for leakage, but the only inexpensive thing I could find was a go/no-go sensor, and nothing something with an actual reading.

<comment><USER15> This one ([http://www.seeedstudio.com/depot/Grove-Gas- SensorMQ2-p-937.h...](http://www.seeedstudio.com/depot/Grove-Gas- SensorMQ2-p-937.html)) is $7, Its sensitivity can be adjusted by the pot, so putting a digital potentiometer on the board and driving it remotely should give you some "range". It isn't designed as a precision instrument but in an IoT situation just watching sensors detect something over time, correlated with wind speed and direction, should give useful information for the gas company at least.

These guys ([http://lmsnt.com/applications/applicationideas/ch4/](http://lmsnt.com/applications/applicationideas/ch4/)) will sell you a sensor development kit. The commercial instruments are all several hundred dollars but my experience with specialty tools is that they have high prices to support high margins because they don't sell in very high volumes.

<comment><USER17> There are a few factors.

The gas sensors you can afford as a (poor) hobbyist tend to be resistive/heater devices. You heat up a catalyst and monitor its resistance which varies when a suitable gas is present. The downside is that typically they're sensitive to all kinds of gases - e.g. methane, ethanol other volatile organic compounds and so on. Either you can use them in a single-gas environment, or where you would only expect one polluting gas, or you can have a general threshold. Cheap and cheerful and nice for IoT home "air quality" sensors, but useless for real measurements.

Most of the very expensive sensors - like the one you linked - have much higher specificity. That methane detector is optical and is tuned precisely for the IR absorption band of the gas. Optics and filters are expensive, plus the driving circuitry and probably NIST-traceable calibration if you want it. EDIT: It also uses a fairly unusual LED wavelength which adds to the price (InGaS = money).

Other sensors, like Oxygen, have shelf lives of a few years and need to be replaced even though they're horribly expensive ($200 or so).

A filtered methane sensor is about $50 (Figaro make a lot of nice gas sensors): [http://microcontrollershop.com/product_info.php?cPath=301_42...](http://microcontrollershop.com/product_info.php?cPath=301_428_579&products_id=6786)

AMS also make some nice inexpensive general VOC sensors like this one: [http://www.digikey.co.uk/product-detail/en/ams/AS- MLV-P2/AS-...](http://www.digikey.co.uk/product-detail/en/ams/AS-MLV-P2/AS- MLV-P2CT-ND/5117220)

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

 _residents paid as much as $1.5 billion extra between 2000 to 2011 for gas lost to leaks._

Is anyone able to calculate approximate how much gas this is in volume or weight? 1.5 billion divided by residential gas price per unit?

<comment><USER19> Call it $10 per thousand cubic feet.

[http://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/hist/n3010us3m.htm](http://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/hist/n3010us3m.htm)

So 150 million units. Switching to the numbers I'm seeing quoted for pipelines, 150 billion cubic feet.

This pdf lists _many_ pipelines pushing 1 billion cubic feet or more a day:

[http://www.ferc.gov/CalendarFiles/20120830220205-primer.pdf](http://www.ferc.gov/CalendarFiles/20120830220205-primer.pdf)

So at most a couple months of normal usage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iyNeOKi2sO8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iyNeOKi2sO8)

</comment><comment><USER21> And all they had to sacrifice was personal privacy!

<comment><USER22> Like all great futuristic advances we've seen in the last two decades that REALLY put us into the "we're living in the future" category, there's a plus and negative side.

I love that I can wear a watch that doubles as a phone, health monitor, gps/mapping, mp3 player, etc.

The flip side of there being a loss of privacy would both be technological (weak or no security in the device itself or the apps and services it uses) and political (government saying "give me _all_ the data").

This cry of "but my privacy!" is nothing more than a useless complaint, and does nothing to address the problem. We as citizens and consumers of such great tech NEED to demand better device security as well as political reform. Changes in how things are done and why.

So be picky about which tech you buy and politicians you vote. Be picky with your time, money, votes.

Don't, however, waste time on comments that do nothing to address the problem. That includes providing no information to further advance your ideology: privacy. No product endorsements to sway us into purchasing or supporting something which WILL keep your private info out of nosy third-party hands, or info about politicians or policy we should be aware of?

That would be a pointless comment when you obviously care about something.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unintended_consequences](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unintended_consequences)</comment>


Independent Refactoring is Irresponsible - Digit-Al http://www.thekua.com/atwork/2013/01/independent-refactoring-is-irresponsible/

<comment><AUTHOR> Part of the criticism is about having a separate refactoring team, which is an awful idea for the reasons mentioned. It doesn't invalidate the value of a "refactoring task" for the core team though.

I think it's sometimes a good practice to declare every 2nd Friday (for example) a refactoring day. I realise that's the Anti-Lean, but it has merits for a larger team where things get complex and it's important to keep talented people happy, There's value in just saying "take some time out to weed out the things that annoy you most" and of course still taking into account which refactorings would be most strategic given future plans.

<comment><USER2> Refactoring as a separate task is a bad idea from good intentions. If you blow your schedule on some other higher-priority tasks (i.e., directly business- relevant), guess which task is the top candidate for deferral? Speaking from experience.

Paying down technical debt is business-relevant, but not _directly_ relevant. That means things on fire or new contracts or whatever will always supersede things of indirect benefit. Under sufficient load, this effectively means no refactoring, because people are then trained to wait until they are tasked with "the refactoring task".

What has served me well is following Fowler's advice, which is repeated in this article. Refactor when you want to do something else. I would add: Prefer modifying only code that will be QA tested anyway, so you don't explode your testing surface area. Do it as part of a directly business-relevant task. Build it into your estimates.

<comment><USER3> How would you approach, say, encapsulating a global static field that's used in every single file of a legacy application using Fowler's advise?

<comment><USER2> I wouldn't, unless it's hampering you from doing something else OR you've got a full regression test coming up (for example, during a major version increment).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> When I develop things I:

\- Make it work (but good lord is it ugly)

\- Make it pretty

\- Make it fast (if necessary)

Refactoring is step 2 in this process. Sometimes I write something and I already know a great architecture for it, so that code is, in a sense, "prefactored". But most of the time I'm solving a relatively new problem and have no idea what I'm doing or how I'll end up coding it. At these times, the "compulsive architect" is at a disadvantage because, in his quest for building things right the first time, he will stare at the IDE and have trouble getting started. That's why I force myself to take the architect hat off and give myself permission to create ugly hacks in step 1.

This same concept applies when I'm adding new functionality to an existing code base. I have to turn off the "but my beautiful architecture!" side of myself long enough to get something working, then remember to turn it on again so my code doesn't turn into a giant ball of mud.

Everyone has their ways of working, but I consider this an important principle of software development. In it, I think, is the reason that "scheduled refactoring" so often fails or, at best, hinders everyone on the team. Programming is more akin to painting or sculpting than to building roads and bridges. It is a deeply personal endeavor and the emotional and practical problems of combining the work of multiple creators into a cohesive whole is a task that should not be undertaken lightly. Ignoring this truth gets you situations like trying to gather nine women to make a baby in a month. It also explains why independent refactoring is often doomed to failure:

\- There are practical problems with having the entire code base in such a state of flux. Even with our much-improved merging situation vis-a-vis git, developers will dread merging their work into the radically refactoring branch. This adds a braking effect to the cognitive inertia we try so hard to maintain.

\- Refactoring teams dissolve code ownership. The resulting more homogenous code base may tick all the right boxes for management and architects, but it can also (subliminally if not explicitly) tick off the original developers.

\- Refactoring is a natural and integrated part of EVERY developers job, one that is best performed holisticaly in context with the rest of his or her tasks. Relegating it to a separate team or denanding that it he performed at a certain calendar time is antithetical to the natural flow of most hackers. Purposefully leaving things ugly so that there's stuff to be refactored later is a soul-sapping side effect of the "refactoring team", especially when the results are metricized.

\- The best refactoring happens spontaneously: either an individual developer will say "ok I can't stand how much this sucks one second longer" or a couple of devs will be chatting in the hall and remark how lame the interface between x and y is. These kinds of things usually result in positive refactorings because they stem from an aesthetic desire for beauty combined with a pragmatic quest to remove roadblocks in the code. It's hard to schedule and dictate these "moments of higher truth" in an application's life.

It takes a good team and talented developers to make this all work. It also takes management that understands the need to give developers time to clean up and polish, and that such effort does not, in fact, make the project slower. But then again, a large reason why such an emphasis had been placed on explicit refactoring in recent years is to counteract the tendency for management to throw large numbers of cheap developers at a problem rather than a small group of quality ones. The inevitable mess that results is, sadly but predictably, a titanic for which even the most disciplined refactoring efforts only serve as pumps to prolong the inevitable foundering.

</comment><comment><USER5> Refactoring is a dish best served warm. It only works as home cooking, where the cooks eat their own cooking hot off the stove. Start with a few beneficial small things to make the team's life easier, then once the team is sold on the idea, go on to more daring ones. Best done with automated tests and continuous integration.

</comment><comment><USER6> At my last position, we were told that it was expected to refactor every time we updated any module. However, we had no list of things that needed to be refactored, no real team programming patterns or standards, and we were rewarded almost solely on implementing new features quickly. Sure, someone could refactor code and make it easier for others in the future, but there was never a reward for that, and often there were questions about why it took extra time to implement.

Without team standards, a list of things to refactor (if available), and rewards or recognition for actually making cleaner, more maintainable code, most developers will do what gets them recognition, pay raises, and such. The thing that often gets recognized is implementing new, visible features.

</comment><comment><USER7> A quote: "Both Michael Feathers and Rachel Davies recently recently [sic] wrote about ..."

Does "recently recently" mean very recently? Second question: what happened to proofreading?

<comment><USER8> It means it is a little earlier than recently</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Suggestions for cutting down new account spam - <AUTHOR>

Hello, HN. I was just looking through the New page to see if there were any interesting articles. I have showdead enabled, so naturally I saw the large amount of [dead] submissions. (Out of 30 posts, 17 were killed, only one from a regular member.) Realizing that most of these were blatant spam posts, I checked out the profiles under which they were submitted, and I noticed a couple trends. The accounts had either been created within 24 hours for the purpose of the submission, or more common, the accounts were many days old (often over 100) but obviously used only for these spam posts, and only had 1 karma point.
If the server doesn't automatically identify and kill these posts, then it must be a lot of tedious work for admins to manually kill these posts (and maybe the server does find them on its own. If that's the case, then this post may be irrelevant). I thought about it, and came up with a possible solution. What if new users weren't allowed to post until after they earned 10 karma points? This would bring the level of work required for the spammers to make submissions above the potential return, reducing the number of attempts, clearing up the new page (for showdead users like myself), and hopefully ease the workload of our wonderful admins.
My questions for you:
Is something like this already in place? (I imagine not, because there are some users who create anonymous accounts just for a specific Ask HN post, but I could be wrong.)
Are there any other suggestions from HN users to clear up the number of posts from spammers? Is this a practical solution? Would it discourage new members? Would spammers just find another way around it? <comment><USER2> Posts are auto-killed after a sufficient number of flags by users. (I think the default threshold in news.arc is 7 flags or so.) This spreads the work out among many readers, and seems quite effective.

If you make participation a requirement for posting, you might just displace spam into comments...

<comment><AUTHOR> Is that auto-kill per post, or on the entire account? I don't think there's anything keeping comment spam from happening other than the downmod/flag system already partially applied to posts.

<comment><USER3> I've been reprimanded from on high for discussing how the ban system really works from the point of view of a banned person.

I now understand the motivation for keeping this under wraps as much as possible, please take that in to consideration while discussing this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> A data point.

I came to HN because I sent Paul Graham something that he thought was interesting, and he suggested I post it. If karma-less members weren't able to post, I probably wouldn't be here. That's just me, but I'm almost certainly not the only one.

Getting the majority of the work done by the members _en passant_ seems reasonable.</comment>


Ask HN: Idea for a minimal desktop email client – would you use this? - <AUTHOR> Hey everyone, I'm trying to validate an idea and would love your feedback.
I'm big into email but not big into clutter; and the more windows I have open on my desktop the more cluttered my mind is. To this point, I've built a very minimal email desktop client that helps me stay on top of my inbox without having to keep a dedicated window open.
Would you use this? If there is enough feedback, I'd be interested in finishing the code and releasing an MVP. It's customizable so you can choose fonts/bgs/sizes to your liking.
Overview:
https://www.getfractals.com/static/2017/Frame%205.png
Compact:
https://www.getfractals.com/static/2017/Frame%206%20(2).png
Compose view:
https://www.getfractals.com/static/2017/Frame%202.png
Read view:
https://www.getfractals.com/static/2017/Frame%203.png
Minimize view:
https://www.getfractals.com/static/2017/Frame%204.png
Thank you so much for reading. <comment><USER3> I use Heirloom-mailx. I made a status indicator to indicate how many email messages there are, so I need not keep a dedicated window open to know if there are any messages; rather, the same window is used for the system load, memory usage, and date/time. But, I have my own email server, and don't use Mac OS X. Maybe what you have might be useful for some people who use Mac OS X, but I don't. But I think if you like it, you can write it anyways even for your own use, and then you can also publish it even if it doesn't have the options used by other users; I write software for my own use (but also publish it) and so can you, if you like to do so.

<comment><AUTHOR> I do like to do that, yeah. I am a windows/mac user and actually spend more time on windows so I would be hesitant to neglect windows.

Sort of meta but I am sort of in between jobs right now and am just looking for purpose and meaning. The last product I built that was strongly received was 6 years ago and the failure to find product-market-fit since then has really eaten at me. So I want to spend my hours toiling away at things that people find useful, unlike most of my Show HN submissions. We humans are so deeply social and after a while I find there needs to be some external validation or I start to question why I'm doing what I'm doing. Anyways thank you for your insightful comment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> You may not need a dedicated window open, but it does look like you need dedicated _space_. It's unclear how your program would interact with other windows or a cluttered Desktop. It also doesn't seem practical for multiple accounts.

From your screenshots it doesn't look like I'd use it, even though I'm unhappy with essentially every email client out now (Sparrow was the last good one).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback, that's super helpful. I suppose in a way you are my target market since you're unhappy with current clients though. If I do go ahead and finish making it, would you be willing to try it in exchange for more of this valuable feedback?

Thanks so much.

<comment><USER5> I don't think he is the target market at all, the target is likely "extreme minimalists", people who theme their setup more than actually use it.

<comment><USER4> I've reread my comment multiple times and still have no idea what about it makes you assume I'm not such a user. I can unequivocally say you're wrong.

<comment><USER5> Your comment seemed to focus on the practicality of it.

And I'm saying that people who would love this care more about the style of it, not how it actually works to use it. I don't think you can have it both ways.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It borders on the line of maximal instead of minimal because it integrates into a greater interface instead of creating a fresh screen. I like that, I think it would be important to organize in some strong ways, like several "Visions" or "Aspects" (simply tabs) that could have thematic views on e-mail. What if I want to leave an e-mail unread but don't want it sitting on the desktop? I think that it's a nice idea but there should be preference for notes to myself rather than messages from others, so maybe you can add some fields for "notes to self" that could sit between e-mails, and e-mails could be grayed out until I mouse over them. Those are the kinds of features I personally would love to have.

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually these sound like the types of things that I would really like to have too. I remember for the longest time I was trying to find some sticky note app that had a transparent background rather than those god-awful yellow default backgrounds that draw way too much visual attention.

Just to make sure I'm understanding, you're talking about potentially having a few tabs, one possibly being email, another possibly being notes, etc? Would love to see if I could do something around that, maybe in a v2, a spinoff, or something or other.

<comment><USER6> Yes, for v2 that sounds perfect

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Would you mind adding those image links in a comment? The URLs in your post aren't clickable, but they should be if they are in a comment. Thanks!

<comment><USER3> Overview:

[https://www.getfractals.com/static/2017/Frame%205.png](https://www.getfractals.com/static/2017/Frame%205.png)

Compact:

[https://www.getfractals.com/static/2017/Frame%206%20(2).png](https://www.getfractals.com/static/2017/Frame%206%20\(2\).png)

Compose view:

[https://www.getfractals.com/static/2017/Frame%202.png](https://www.getfractals.com/static/2017/Frame%202.png)

Read view:

[https://www.getfractals.com/static/2017/Frame%203.png](https://www.getfractals.com/static/2017/Frame%203.png)

Minimize view:

[https://www.getfractals.com/static/2017/Frame%204.png](https://www.getfractals.com/static/2017/Frame%204.png)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Please don't put Show HN in the title if a thing doesn't exist for people to try out yet. This is in the rules: [https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html).

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry Dang. Was not aware of that. Have not broken that rule in the past, and won't do again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I have many problems with email but I don't see how this solves any of them. How do I see who these were sent to, or what mailing lists they come from? What do the chevron and gear icons do? How does it scroll when I have more than 4 emails? How does search work? How does composing work when I have more than one draft in progress? Does it just ignore my folders/flags/accounts? How do I move/minimize/etc these views if they don't have normal window frames?

This is the danger of judging any design by Lorem Ipsum. If it's not using real data, I don't trust it to be a real design.

JWZ said in 1998, "Mozilla is big because your needs are big. Your needs are big because the Internet is big. There are lots of small, lean web browsers out there that, incidentally, do almost nothing useful."

The standard window frame controls are not a problem to me. In fact, my #1 gripe with every program that tried to customize them (e.g., Pixelmator, Affinity, Firefox, 1Password) is that they screwed it up somehow and everything would be better if they'd just used standard controls.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I mean these things would all have to be figured out, and my guess is I have a decent enough understanding of UX to be able to create a solution that works well. Whether or not you and others feel the same way will determine whether the product becomes successful or not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> For home use and personal E-Mail I prefer a client that can be opened and closed. At the same time I disabled all notifications on my Desktop where possible. So I might not be in your target group. Although for work use I lean more towards a more present mail client.

In any case, I think that's a cool direction. I have a love-hate relationship with Thunderbird since it has so many features that I don't use and some features I need - at work for instance Exchange support or Encryption - <USER2> only flaky plugin support. Also I totally not use HTML mail, on the other hand console clients just don't work for me. So I end up using Web mail clients which is not super practical always...

</comment><comment><USER11> This is one of the most refreshing designs I've seen in months. It's absolutely beautiful. I'd be interested in a Mac version.

I don't know anything about the engineering behind an email client, so I'm curious about the security aspect – would my emails ever touch your server?

Side note: you could post this on Dribbble if you want more beta users.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks so much. Do you mind if I email you when it is ready and you can see if you like it? No emails would go through me, there would be no centralized server; you would authenticate and then your client would ping the mailserver that you authenticated to.

That's a great idea to post it to Dribbble. I never gave my Dribbble account much love, do you have any idea how to get it some exposure there? Thanks a bunch.

<comment><USER11> That's perfect. I'm glad you're not going through a centralized server. My email is at the bottom of my about page: zeph.co/about

About Dribbble – a Pro plan might help you get featured more often, but I'm not sure. I think it's basically a numbers game.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Edit: It is quite lovely to have gotten some people to look at this idea of mine. I think I will go ahead and polish the code up and try to release it this week. If you would like to try it out you can email me at email@example.com and I will send a link out when it is ready. Maybe spin up a landing page too. Thank you so much.

</comment><comment><USER12> How will it handle inboxes with 30+ emails in them? And the whole archiving / labeling / folders process? I'd love to see concepts for those. I am, on the lookoit, for a nicer email client.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have concepts for those that I think would work well. Not sure how much time I want to spend on an MVP but those items are probably necessary.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> It looks beautiful but how does it handle other windows on the desktop?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey thanks! In my imagination it would just be like a desktop widget so it would probably sit behind everything else, although; I suppose I could offer different options (pin-to-front) if anyone would be interested in that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I would love to use it but I wouldn't pay. I hope you continue development but I understand if you don't, since it's hard to compete with many free alternatives.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I wouldn't expect it to cost anything but maybe there would be some premium features, or something.

Thanks so much. This was the first comment I read that sort of validated the concept, and is very encouraging.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Hey none of your links are clickable nor they take me to relevant webpage if I copy them. The browser ends up searching the URL

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah burn. Strange because it's working for me. Thank you so much for letting me know. Probably because they are not URL encoded. I just changed them, do you mind trying again and see if it works. Thanks!!

<comment><USER15> Thanks. Those screenshots look beautiful. I would absolutely love something of this sort.

I believe this is only for Mac though.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! Actually I mostly use windows, so would be interested in releasing something at least for mac and windows. What OS are you on?

<comment><USER15> I'm on Ubuntu

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I need something for Windows so badly. Thunderbird is just so...meh...and there is nothing else that I know of.

<comment><USER17> Sylpheed[1] and its fork Claws Mail[2] is great email clients for Windows!

[1] [https://sylpheed.sraoss.jp/en/](https://sylpheed.sraoss.jp/en/)

[2] [https://www.claws-mail.org/](https://www.claws-mail.org/)

<comment><USER16> I will have to check these out. I noticed sylpheed hasn't been updated in 2 years though

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The interface looks too much like desktop notifications to me.

</comment><comment><USER19> Darn, I was looking for a telnet client that only connects to port 25.

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha. I'd agree that would be about as minimal as it could get.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Those are some huge image files.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right! I apologize. I was just trying to validate this ultra-fast and see if anyone was interested; I'll go ahead and resize them. I'm usually very scrupulous about that kind of thing.</comment></comment>


Can the wave function of an electron be divided and trapped? - <AUTHOR> https://news.brown.edu/articles/2014/10/electron

<comment><USER2> And here I thought there was only 1 electron in the entire universe [1]

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One- electron_universe](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-electron_universe)

</comment><comment><USER3> Why do they look for collapse. There's no evidence whatsoever that wave functions collapse.</comment>


Ask HN:  How would you introduce a 14 year old to programming? - <AUTHOR>

When I was in about 8th grade I downloaded a copy of Visual Basic 3, which was my first introduction to a higher-level language.  Before that, I had played around with basic on one of those toy computers.  How would you introduce a child in middle school to programming?  Does anyone know of any studies done? <comment><USER2> I got into it through HTML and javascript. This was in the Geocities and Tripod days. Websites were really the only application that I could create something cool easily.

I also played about with VB and Pascal, but stopped because it took too long to create anything usable. Although HTML and JS are not terrible complicated, it allows for simple development and it is very usable later in life. You could get them into server side scripting too.

Also, check out the Torque game engine. It is pretty easy to create a video game with no programming at all. When you want to get more advanced you can do some Lua scripting. When you want to get really advanced you can work on the C++ that the engine is built on. Torque is pretty well supported and you can even port the games to XBox.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't have direct experience, but I can share some of my favorite links on the subject.

This is my ultimate favorite:

[http://teachingkids.railsbridge.org/2009/08/15/teaching- ruby...](http://teachingkids.railsbridge.org/2009/08/15/teaching-ruby-to-high- school-girls.html)

I also like this guy's blog:

<http://blogs.msdn.com/b/alfredth/></comment>


A group of SV tech experts is raising money to help 500 Democrats in 2018 - <AUTHOR> https://www.recode.net/2017/10/10/16451026/silicon-valley-2018-campaign-democrats-virginia-north-carolina-michigan <comment><USER2> I'm not seeing how this will change or improve anything, but I do see how it will help maintain the status quo for the Dem Party which is nothing more than a shill for Big Corporate power.</comment>


Touchpad, Interrupted - <AUTHOR> https://jcs.org/2019/07/28/ihidev <comment><USER2> TL;DR: Initialization code in different modules had hidden order dependencies. OpenBSD had to switch to preorder device-tree traversal to fix a touchpad wakeup bug.

This is a rough summary, please correct me.</comment>


I'm not fond of domain extensions - <AUTHOR>

having somesite.com and somesite.net being two different things is something than can lead to confusion. the only difference is an extension which is easy to forget.<p>can someone explain to me why this system makes sense? <comment><USER2> The system was designed to be hierarchical: as you go further toward the left (assuming LTR languages), each part of the name would tell you something more specific about the server. The name "somesite.com", for example, would be for a COMmercial enterprise called somesite, while "somesite.net" was for a NETwork service called somesite. Country-code top-level domains would let you know that you were specifically dealing with that country.

The .com and .net top-level domains have pretty much lost their meanings, as have some country codes, like Tuvalu (.tv) and Christmas Island (.cx). Without their meanings, the system does indeed make less sense than it once did.

</comment><comment><USER3> neither is MIT right now.</comment>


Ask HN: How To Do Research? - <AUTHOR> I came across this fascinated research report on Covid this morning https://project-evidence.github.io/.
This poses the question on what are some of the resources that shows or teaches one how to do a deliberate and thorough research?
I have found one How to do Research At the MIT AI Lab? http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/41487/AI_WP_316.pdf?sequence=4&isAllowed=y
Are there any other good resources like this one? <comment><USER2> It depends on what type of research you want to do? For example, this is very good resource for medical research: [https://rise.articulate.com/share/soW5Pvyk3T4Ib-P4A7gS6AFqyO...](https://rise.articulate.com/share/soW5Pvyk3T4Ib-P4A7gS6AFqyOxsB2Eo#/lessons/5WUdZcHZv5ibu- qnLK7Sm8BoyMlFBvmW)

</comment><comment><USER3> For the report is more like a collection of cherrypicked information than good research. It was discused here yesterday [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22897708](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22897708)

One of the comments that I think is important was made by nicolas_t:

> _Haven 't read much yet. But the first point already doesn't inspire much > confidence. "This market is less than 9 miles away from The Wuhan Institute > of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences". 9 miles away means that it's at > the opposite of the city._

> _I mean, that text is trying to make it seem like they are close to each > other when actually it just means that both are in the same city. 9 miles is > not a small distance in a big city like wuhan._

> _It 's like saying that Queens is next to the Statue of Liberty._</comment>


Show HN: Serverless boilerplate to get started quickly - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/harijoe/serverless-boilerplate <comment><USER2> Hhmmm, I'm not really sure I see the point wthis: it's really only "get started quickly" for "the single exact case where you happen to be using JS and DynamoDB and Webpack". It doesn't seem to really offer anything over the base format that you couldn't add in like 2 mins flat anyway.

<comment><USER3> I disagree, as someone who has nominally used serverless (but never on Lambda) and nominally used webpack (but with little experience outside the context of building with webpacker in a Rails app), this actually looks like exactly what I needed.

And I likely won't use DynamoDB, but little depth has been spent on explaining anything at all about Dynamo, it works as an example of how to get to use serverless plugins. To me this looks like just enough tutorial to cover the top of one page without losing my interest.

Reading past the "serverless offline" part, I think I've just made up my mind and will try the serverless framework again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think you should just have your boilerplate set up middy with your middleware, that is the point of a boilerplate project after all.

You are depending on your own 'handly' project 'based on' middy but its really just middy without the option to pick what middlewares you want.

your readme for handly says to

      import handly
      const handler = /* a handler */
      export handly(handler)

where handly is essentially

      import middy
      const handly = handler => middy(handler).use(/*a bunch of middleware*/
      export handly

I don't speak for the middy project and I don't know how long you have been developer so I don't want to discourage you too much, but that seemed a little off.

unrelated: I tried to check out your website and got a certificate error.

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually handly is just here to allow a single import on every serverless handler. I haven't worked much on the readme yet, but the idea is to gather all the "mandatory" middy middlewares as well as some middlewares I find necessary into a single dependancy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> sls user (though not very frequent) here. Read the entire readme, still can't figure out what it does and why/if I need it. This is meant as constructive feedback - please put the "what problem it solves" section at the top. I don't know what "boilerplate" is.

<comment><USER3> I think it's sort of advertising for handly/middy and the other "getting started" things that the author uses himself.

If you're already using sls, you might not need it. I still haven't quite figured out how one is meant to use Serverless, so I think this was written for me. (I am a Rails dev with lots of Kubernetes experience, not that you'd need that...)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you prefer Webtask, check out this boilerplate I published last week. [https://github.com/semireg/webtask- webpack](https://github.com/semireg/webtask-webpack)

</comment><comment><USER7> isn't this already solved with serverless framework?

[https://serverless.com/](https://serverless.com/)

<comment><AUTHOR> The serverless framework does not offer the best developer experience out of the box, that's why serverless boilerplate exists.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> OT: Who has experiences with serverless and which providers/services could yoi recommend?

<comment><USER9> I do, and if you are building a large app, I would recommend against using serverless. At least the library, since it has a limit of about 20 endpoints unmodified.

<comment><AUTHOR> I did not know that, could you share a proof to back this statement ?

<comment><USER9> Try adding 40 endpoints to one serverless.yml file. You will quickly run over the 200 resource limit for cloudformation.

Actually, now that I think of it, since this is an AWS limitation, it may actually be fine on other providers.

<comment><AUTHOR> I guess the limit could be avoided by using only one endpoint and use the path and HTTP method to decide which logic to execute though.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Fork This Sound - <AUTHOR> http://paulosetinsky.com/writing/fork_this_sound.html

<comment><USER2> _Text-based interfaces trump any GUI-heavy ones like Ableton and Logic when it comes to making the musical creation process open and collaborative. Modern MIDI sequencers weren 't designed for portability or remote collaboration, they're simply what electronic musicians are accustomed to using for making their music._

Nonsense. If text-based sharing was so great, why do musicians depend so heavily on MIDI and its successor OSC? The whole point of protocols like these is that they're independent of DAW conventions. Hardly anyone outside of the academy likes writing code to make music; if they need seriously fine-grained control they use something like Max/MSP, Reaktor, PD or Kyma.

 _I don 't think we're near the point where it's common for musicians to be making music with code, but I think it's coming._

Supercollider is ~18 years old and Csound about twice that. Code-based composition made a great deal of sense when almost all DSP processing had to take place offline, and is still great for developing audio software, but I don't ever see code for compoasition appealing to more than a tiny niche of musicians because a) it is so hideously abstract and b) realtime tools are so good.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not saying that MIDI or DAWs aren't useful tools for making music, just that they aren't ideal for making music collaboratively. And if we're getting into the ages of these technologies, MIDI is in its 30s.

More and more young people are starting to code, so I don't think that code- based composition growing outside of the niche you say it lives in is too far- fetched, or far away.</comment></comment>


Uber pays –$29M/year for Google Maps - <AUTHOR> https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1543151/000119312519103850/d647752ds1.htm#toc647752_15 <comment><AUTHOR> Here is the actual contract [https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1543151/000119312519...](https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1543151/000119312519103850/d647752dex1024.htm) It includes other topics like Uber has to share their location data to Google and can not use any other 3th party provider at the same time as Google Maps.

<comment><USER2> Holy crud: "Android Devices. Within [ __ _] after the Maps APIs Addendum Effective Date, Customer will make commercially reasonable efforts to standardize on Android-based devices for at least [_ __] of new, Customer- purchased devices issued by Customer to Uber Drivers. Customer may select the specific Android-based devices, and they may vary by region. "

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Seems like they would want go the amazon route and bring a lot of that in house to cut costs and possibly create a revenue center.</comment>


Show HN: I'm self-publishing my first book on LeanPub - <AUTHOR> https://servercheck.in/blog/self-publishing-my-first-technical-book-leanpub

<comment><AUTHOR> I just clicked the big 'Publish' button on LeanPub, and version 0.3 of my first book, Ansible for DevOps, is now available for sale.

It's been an interesting experience so far, and without a service like LeanPub, I would've never pulled the trigger. I loved hearing others' self- publishing experiences here and elsewhere, so I'm happy to share mine as well.</comment>


KTH and Wikipedia develop first crowdsourced speech engine - <AUTHOR> https://www.kth.se/en/forskning/artiklar/kth-hjalper-wikipedia-borja-prata-1.631897 <comment><USER2> Interesting stuff. As a side note, I've always thought that if speech synthesis got good enough we could make much more immersive gaming worlds. Playing games such as Fallout, Witcher, GTA etc you keep hearing the same 10 sentences uttered no matter where you go and it really breaks down the immersion when it becomes so obvious how wooden the NPCs are.

So if the game instead contained thousands of lines of written statements, then a speech synthesizer could choose a line at random and play it and just by sheer probability you'd be unlikely to hear the same thing twice.

With all these recent advances in neural nets, could speech synthesis be made to sound more human by giving it a huge set of training examples? You could have 10-20 different voice actors, each training a different NN by reading through a dictionary out loud, and then at the end you could synthesis any sentence with one of the NNs and it would sound like the voice actor actually said it.

<comment><USER3> By the time we have generative neural networks capable of replicating human voice with emotion and nuance (way more difficult than neutrally reading a text on Wikipedia), I think it's fair to assume we'll also have decent "thought vector" networks that – much like how neural networks can turn words or even sentences into vectors and back (translation) – can turn the meaning a character wants to convey into multiple sentences arranged in unique ways. Basically taking your example a bit further.

<comment><USER4> An algorithm understanding enough about the text to infer the correct emotional inflection to give a speech may edge into the category of strong AI, but I would have guessed that it would be easier to create a neural network that, given a text spoken in one voice, could transform it into another with the correct stress, intonation, etc. Perhaps even that's a more difficult task than I assumed, although speech generation seems to receive a lot less academic and industrial attention than speech recognition and understanding.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, it's a bit more difficult of a task than you've assumed.

Speech synthesis receives a lot of attention, but it's _hard_ , so you rarely hear any news about it. People are throwing DNNs at it at the moment, but nothing earth shattering has come of it (yet). I have a couple of 'naturalness' filters that use DNNs and about 30% of the time, they drop all of their tones and I end up with an angry whisper as output. I don't work late too often.

<comment><USER6> For people interested in how hard it is, I recently read this [1] NYT article providing a comparison of synthetic speech that IBM experts tested for Watson in the Jeopardy competition.

[1] [http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/15/technology/creating-a- comp...](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/15/technology/creating-a-computer- voice-that-people-like.html?_r=0)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've started looking at using the pretty impressive speech synthesis in Chrome on android. Hopefully this work will feed into having other platforms and browsers get to the same state of usability, as well as directly benefitting Wikipedia.

I'm really interested in the higher level - how to manage navigation, and represent things like tabular and graphical info, and how to get articles to be written with the spoken alternative in mind.

I guess the ultimate for me on Wikipedia is a more multimedia presentation format, where articles are text for people who want that, and more like hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy where that works better

</comment><comment><USER8> I'd like to imagine a future where Morgan Freeman is reading me the recipe off of Allrecipes.

<comment><USER9> I think this wouldn't actually be terribly difficult if a company hired Morgan Freeman for a few hours of studio time, similar to how you can get Mr. T directions on TomTom. There aren't terribly many phrases or ingredients used in most recipes, so the total set of required recordings in manageably small.

<comment><USER10> In the Congress, Robin Wright sells a digital version of herself to a studio.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Congress_%282013_film%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Congress_%282013_film%29)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> BTW Some of recent voices of Festival speech synthesis engine are awesome.

Try "Nick - 2 (English RP)" and "Peter (English RP male)" at [http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/morevoices.html](http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/morevoices.html)

They are not publicly available, though.

</comment><comment><USER12> It's pretty amazing if they pull this off. It could mean education is revolutionised. A very time consuming part of educational videos is dialog and more importantly correcting errors. This is no small thing.

</comment><comment><USER13> Speech out, not in.

</comment><comment> th-ai anyone know of an open TTS speech synthesis engine that provides delay (duration) timings per word spoken? thanks

<comment><USER14> Any of them have this information available in some form - openmary, festival. For example in Festival, you can access synthesized utt markup with utt.something functions like this: (utt.save.segs (utt.synth (Utterance Text "Hello world")) "out.seg")

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I love <3 my university.</comment>


Visualizing parallel requests in Elixir - <AUTHOR> http://crypt.codemancers.com/posts/2016-01-15-visualizing-parallel-requests-in-elixir/ <comment> benwilson-512 Another very cool visualization tool for observing messages as they're passed between processes: [https://github.com/koudelka/visualixir](https://github.com/koudelka/visualixir)

<comment><AUTHOR> Visualixir looks interesting. I'll give it a shot and add some notes to the article. Thanks for mentioning :)

<comment><USER2> Drop me a line if you encounter any issues. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I used Ubigraph for erlang to visualize process linking in BEAM. [http://eddwardo.github.io/elixir/links/2015/11/04/links- in-e...](http://eddwardo.github.io/elixir/links/2015/11/04/links-in-elixir/)</comment>


What a Digital Afterlife Might Be Like - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/07/what-a-digital-afterlife-would-be-like/491105/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> If you copy your brain digitally and let that run while you yourself die, there's no benefit to yourself. You still die. You don't get to experience longevity. What would live on is a copy of yourself that believes itself to be the same person as you were. Your yourself would have no continuity of thought.

What would be needed is some way of merging yourself with a digital replica of your brain while you're still alive. I can't even begin to imagine what that would be like.

<comment><USER3> One version dies, the other lives on. The problem is that many people think only the one that dies deserved to be called "you".

To me a copy that "believes it is the same person as you were" is as good as it gets. How would you tell the difference?

Every morning when I wake up I am who I am because I believe so. If someone had scanned me last night while I was asleep and created a digital copy of my mind in a virtual, identical world, I wouldn't know. And if I was told someone was there and was capable of doing it, I could not even be sure he did not (seems like the same assertion, but it's not quite).

People who say "it's just a copy" are suggesting there is a difference between two things they have absolutely no way to tell apart, not even in a thought experiment.

They're chasing ghosts.

<comment><USER4> > The problem is that many people think only the one that dies deserved to be > called "you".

I see this as "well, yes, obviously, because there's no continuity of identity between the two".

If I die and a perfect copy lives on, the copy is well-suited to preserve my legacy, but it's still not me.

<comment><USER5> What do you think "you" are exactly?

* Are you a specific arrangement of atoms. If so, then you are constantly dying and being reborn.

* Are you a specific arrangement of neurons? If so you die and are reborn every time a memory is created or a brain cell dies.

* Are you an uninterrupted process of consciousness that evolves from one state to another? If so, you die and are reborn every time you fall asleep.

* Are you your soul? Give me a rigorous definition of soul.

Here's a question: What if, instead of a digital copy, an exact physical copy of your body and brain was constructed (down to the subatomic level) and then I woke you both up at once. Is one of you you and the other not? What if I didn't tell you which one was which?

"Identity" is a human abstraction, not a fundamental physical quality. We're examining hypothetical areas where that abstraction leaks.

<comment><USER6> I am currently replying to you. My eyes see my phone screen, my hands feel the phone vibrating, my brain is thinking about the words to type. If I go into a red box that makes a copy of me and puts him in a blue box, and we are awakened, my brain would say "According to my sense of sight, I'm in a red box.". There is another person in a blue box, which objectively is me as well, but subjectively..?

If I go to bed and my copy goes out to party, I can't say I experienced a party. Friends can say netsharc experienced a party, since the copy will behave 100% like me. If they ask "is that really you?", my copy will believe he is, he has my/his memory, etc... even if he asks himself if he is me, he will say yes. But I still would have missed the party!

Another theory asks you to consider this scenario: every week/month, they replace 1% of your brain with its equivalent, identically functioning electronic part. After 1 week, your brain is 99% biological and 1% electronic. Surely you'll still feel like the normal you. What happens after 100 weeks? And what will happen if the data in that electronic brain is uploaded to the cloud/a robot? Or copied to another e-brain?

<comment><USER3> > If I go to bed and my copy goes out to party, I can't say I experienced a > party.

Your copy can. Her experience is as real as yours, and from her point of view, everything happened exactly as if her consciousness had been transferred from the original body to the copy. To me she's just as legitimate as you are to use the word "I" : both points of view are two different future versions of what was "you" before the copy was created. I don't privilege any.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't think it will be a brain copying thing. I think we will have implants that connect us to a cyber body and a cyber neural network. We will come to rely on that part of our "brain" and we will spend part of our time in that body.

As we age, we will spend more and more time attending to our cyber half. As it grows, our flesh half will atrophy. The brain cells will quiet, our muscles will grow weak.

Eventually our heart will stop, long after we stopped using it for much. What is left will be purely digital, and to our friends it will seem like nothing has changed. But it won't be a clone. It will be more like a metamorphosis. The caterpillar gave way to the butterfly. It didn't die, but its body was used up and transformed into something else.

I do wonder if it will feel like death. In that moment, when we draw our attention back to our last remaining brain cells, and our last remaining heart beats, will our cyborg half really feel like part of us, or will there still be a sense that the machine within us is Other?

I suspect not. I suspect we will have long since spread our identity across the divide. But maybe that is a choice we will all have to make. Whether to see it as death or birth.

<comment><USER8> If you haven't yet read it, I highly recommend Greg Egan's short story "Learning to Be Me" ([http://will.tip.dhappy.org/revolution/Technoanarchist/plan/....](http://will.tip.dhappy.org/revolution/Technoanarchist/plan/.../book/by/Greg%20Egan/Learning%20To%20Be%20Me/)), a story with a similar take on this topic.

<comment><USER4> That's not really the same idea, though. The parent post is proposing more or less a ship-of-Theseus approach, while "Learning to Be Me" is more "make a new ship that's identical to the first one, then quietly destroy the first one and pretend the second one is a continuation of the first one".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The thing about the so-called "mind upload" is that it requires a particular view on concepts such as death and consciousness in order to consider that those who would undergo it would escape death in some sense, but ironically such view also implies a certain disregard towards death so that it becomes much less of a concern than it is for people who do not share this view.

</comment><comment><USER9> This idea of a soul that can actually be independent of the body is something that has been taught for millennia by various religions. It is interesting when science comes up with a previously religious idea.

Actually, viewing the brain as hardware, and the self/soul as software running on the brain, makes sense of a lot of theology.

<comment><USER10> Not really. If destroying the body destroys the soul, it's not a soul, but a mind.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Ok so if we can download our brains into some kind of system. Could we speed up time in there? What if we could live "one day" in a matter of milliseconds?

I imagine a world where we have armies of dead scientists working on tough problems for us, in a simulation or fake world. They could have hundreds of years to figure out solutions. Then report back to use in the real world. All in the matter days.

I could imagine some turmoil in this fake world though. Some would want to die or leave. Others wouldn't see the point in helping us in the real world. Fascinating idea.

</comment><comment><USER12> Tom Scott did an excellent Welcome to the (After)life video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFe9wiDfb0E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFe9wiDfb0E)

</comment><comment><USER13> I think this interview with Ray Kurzweil[1] does a good job articulating this question. I know Kurzweil can get way out there, but in this case I think he makes sense.

1: [https://youtu.be/v3f4pQOHKPA](https://youtu.be/v3f4pQOHKPA)

</comment><comment><USER14> Wow, completely not what I thought. I thought it was going to be some commentary on something like a virtual memorial ([http://virtual- memorials.com/](http://virtual-memorials.com/)) or facebook accounts of the deceased keeping the memory of someone alive long since they past.

<comment><USER11> I thought the same thing. I was very pleased though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Whedon's "Dollhouse" series was a pretty good take on this topic. The show opened with the premise that brains could be saved, generated, and overwritten digitally. The focus of the show was on a company that hired people to upload their consciousnesses to a drive, and then exist as "dolls" that had their minds written over with both synthesized and real consciousnesses and rented out to clients by the hour, as whoever the clients wanted them to be. Did a good job of exploring the broader implications of the tech from a relatively narrow application of it. Impressive acting from the main cast as well, each of the "dolls" had to demonstrate a huge range.

</comment><comment><USER16> See William Gibson's "The Winter Market", which deals with these issues in a still-interesting way -

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

</comment><comment><USER17> Bureaucracy wants to live forever as technocracy. And maybe the ones selling genetically modified food and intra-flesh GPS want to make it more acceptable.

<comment><USER10> Consciousness wants to live forever because it can't conceive of a world in which it doesn't exist - the thought is unthinkable and the idea is frightening. Brain uploading seems like a solution to that problem, until you realize there's no reason to assume that the uploaded copy once made is _me_ any more, and any number of excellent reasons to assume it isn't.

<comment><USER18> How do you know that you are not now, a simulation? In fact, once we have the technology to produce such a simulation, logically speaking, then, it is an overwhelming probability that we are a simulation, given that, you have at most one 'original' creature, and each subsequent creature can (eventually) create an artificial universe with artificial beings, for some definition of artificial. Thus you have (n-1)/n chances of being a simulation, which over time, as n-> infinity, means a certainty.

Even our reasons for thinking we are 'real' are flimsy. We say we have our senses! We open our eyes and see a blue sky and green grass. We reach down and touch each individual blade of grass, surely not a simulation.

But even that is bogus. There is no such thing as a blue sky, or green grass. That's all in your head. It's (at most) just different frequencies of energy. Same goes for this 'touching' bit. You don't touch anything, you just (again at most) have energy interactions.

So get used to it, you likely are a simulation.

<comment><USER19> I suspect people who believe in the "life is a simulation" have little experience in running molecular dynamics simulations. Even simulating a _single_ protein for a few microseconds takes a Linux cluster hours. The size of a computer that could simulate every protein on earth (let alone every other type of molecule) would be literally astronomical (as in larger than a planet; and no, plausible improvements in technology really wouldn't shrink that by much). Simulations of things like cities work because all the details of molecules and cells aren't simulated. But we can measure all these things, so either the simulation we are in is really that detailed, or, more plausibly, we aren't in a simulation.

<comment><USER18> how feasible something is, is irrelevant to this post. Ok, not feasible now. I'll come back in 100,000 years. Is it feasible then? If so then the logic still holds.

<comment><USER19> I'm talking feasibility _ever_. The absolute minimum hardware needed even in 100,000 years to simulate an atom in all its complexity would be more than one atom. So it would as infeasible as making a map larger than the territory.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> If a copy is allowed to live on, the ego will no longer fear oblivion, as nothing is lost in death.</comment>


Ethical Tech Giving Guide - <AUTHOR> https://www.fsf.org/givingguide/v10/ <comment><USER2> Giving someone else a poorly-supported device running a weirdo operating system as a "gift" seems pretty unethical to me.

</comment><comment><USER3> I like the idea behind this list. But is it seriously suggesting that I buy a Galaxy S3 in 2019? Does it even get OS updates anymore?

<comment><USER2> The FSF has long held the position that an OS that you and any hacker can modify is better than one that neither you nor any hacker can modify. (This position seems seriously flawed, if not actively reckless, to me.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't have a problem with offering a giving guide, but this headline really should be changed. I don't accept the ethical ideas behind Free Software Foundation, but the title implies that I am not an ethical person for disagreeing with them.

The FSF does not have a monopoly on ethics - in fact, they have some pretty serious ethical issues of their own which have come to light in the past few months.</comment>