Neil DeGrasse Tyson's Eight Books Everyone Should Read - <AUTHOR> http://www.giantfreakinrobot.com/sci/neil-degrasse-tyson-suggests-books-intelligent-person-read.html <comment><USER2> What a ponderous, pretentious load. This strikes me very much as a list of "Books I want everyone to know that I think everyone should read" which is very different from the stated title. Is Origin Of Species really a better choice than almost anything on the topic by Dawkins or Gould for the general purpose of "[learning] of our kinship with all other life on Earth"?

<comment><USER3> They are selections for everyone, including 'beginners' which I assume is the reason he selected them. They would have very little quoting other sources with little explanations why.

Not a bad selection imo, though I would have thrown in the Torah/Koran as well as the bible to inform you of all the major religions and differences. And maybe remove Art of War for a maths primer like Euclid's Elements or somthing.

<comment><USER4> Just a note: the Torah is a subset of the Tanakh, which is itself a subset of the Bible. (Christians refer to the Torah as the Pentateuch and the Tanakh as the Old Testament.)

<comment><USER5> Sure, although if you want to read the Torah / Tanakh as Jews understand it, I wouldn't just pick up a Bible. Assuming you don't read Hebrew, I'd get the New Jewish Publication Society translation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've read some of those books cover to cover (Art of War, the Prince) & other's I've glazed over because they were, well, boring & laborious & I don't believe anybody should be recommending them as things to read for enjoyment (Origin of the Species or The Bible, for instance). So here's my list of 8 for things that you'll probably never finish, but extract huge value from anyway.

-Richard Feynman _Lectures on Physics_ \- religion

-Donald Knuth _Art of Computer Programming_ \- I can fuck around with manuals, other text books, but when I come to read the explanation of a particular concept in TAOCP, I always realise "this is the path of least resistance to understanding X" & then that scares me, because there is so much to know & it's really hard to understand _anything_ well.

-William James _The Varieties of Religious Experience_ For those that deny the possibility of spiritual experience within a naturalistic world view. A lot of atheism that is public today misses _empathy_ with religious experience.

-Martin Gardner's articles

-Douglas Hofstadter - _Godel, Escher, Bach_ & _Le Ton Beau De Marot_ \- for those that enjoy spending all day thinking about logic & languages (hello programmers) these two books are romantic pulp - you know you shouldn't be reading them, they are so hopelessly impractical, lofty & philosophical.

-Friedrich Nietzsche - _The Gay Science_ \- because it will infuriate people who are adverse to the sort of thinking you see in the humanities and they deserve to be enraged by this book. If you have an ethical system, think you can tell good from bad, right from wrong, read this book. Acid for the normative.

\- C.S.Peirce's notebooks - This hasn't been published in its completeness but deserves to be (I just hope saying this here doesn't mean I'll never be able to find a copy of some of his notes again). Another tragic of history that has been looked over in much the same manner as Tesla. Peirce figured out electrical gates could be used to implement boolean logic 50 years before Shannon, axiomatised the natural numbers before Peano, made the distinction of cardinal and ordinal before Cantor & nobody knows who he fucking was because he was a chemist. What else is in his books that we haven't managed to recognise the significance of yet?

<comment><USER7> The Bible, boring? I mean, it drones on with boring passages sometimes, but the stories are far from boring. I'd say terrifying, sickening, tragic at times.

I'll bump your Feynman Lectures (watch the videos), and add everything else (his books). Even laypersons can understand him.

Feynman wrote some lectures on computation too which has some gems in it. [http://books.google.com/books/about/Feynman_Lectures_On_Comp...](http://books.google.com/books/about/Feynman_Lectures_On_Computation.html?id=HAitoCyzAXIC)

I will try your William James The Varieties of Religious Experience. I feel it is one of the problems that works against a wider adoption or acceptance of atheism that there is no "community"

I keep trying to finish Pepy's Diary, but so far I've failed. <http://www.pepysdiary.com/>

With regard to The Prince, I was advised that there are many translations and most are not done well. YMMV. Unfortunately, I can't remember which one my philosopher friend recommended.

<comment><USER8> The "x begat y, and y begat z" chronologies that go on for hundreds of years can get pretty tedious.

The sub-books that involve lists of Jewish laws can be a little dull too, though some of the laws I'll admit are pretty funny.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is a horribly list to read, albeit a very nice list to put in to the front of a book shelf. Most importantly, if one reads only one book on any given subject, then one will only hear of one point of view. A problem that is made worse by selecting classics, which are usually written to make a point instead of summarizing the broader debate. The most obvious example from this list is probably _Origin of Species,_ a work where Darwin did not talk about the evolution of man, because he did not wanted to be drawn into a theological debate.

Additionally the classics carry context, which may or may not be obvious. Here the most obvious example from the list is Adam Smith, who did not write about abstract global markets, as the term is used today, but he did write about a collection of market stalls. Similarly, his thought about government and regulation was informed by his times, the first edition appeared in 1776, the same year as the declaration of independence and thirteen years before the French revolution. So Adam Smith did never write about a modern nation, with formal representation and a process for the transition of power, but he did write about a late feudal society, in which the political power was held by an unchecked former warrior elite.

[ The above does not mean that I am against reading classics, in fact quite the opposite. The problem is just, that trying to get an important idea x, then you should probably read "A modern introduction to x," not the classical book where it first appeared, in an convoluted way embedded into some discussion at that time.]

</comment><comment><USER10> I'll go ahead and claim that most of these books are pretty dry these days. Historically significant, yes, and everyone should definitely know of them and what they're about. But reading them probably won't make much of a difference to your life. The same information can be found in other places these days, in forms that are more comfortable for the brain to digest.

<comment><USER11> Reading large works like these may stimulate your thinking much more than getting the same information in a shorter format.

<comment><USER6> I think msvan may have been referring to books too. For instance: _Origin of the Species_ spends a great deal of time presenting evidence for why evolution should be believed. At the time this was of course necessary to convince all of the skeptics. Now, it can be sort of dry. Dry as in "not stimulating". It's much more interesting to follow a book that deals with things that are controversial _today_. Reading Dawkins for instance is likely to push some buttons even in those who accept evolution. It's also arguable that this sort of thing isn't science, it's just philosophy (the idea of the Meme, for instance) and if it is philosophy, how can we separate the philosophical import of evolution from the science of evolution.

Yes, saying this is likely to rile up some Dawkins defenders, but then I've proven my point, the issues it discusses are not dry the way that pages and pages of evidence presented for an argument you already accept the conclusion of is.

But I shouldn't really speak, I barely read these days.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> You too should read $classic-tome to learn $trite-lesson.

<comment><USER13> Just because it is trite doesn't mean it is not right: because even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> "The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith (eBook) – "to learn that capitalism is an economy of greed, a force of nature unto itself."" : Someone must have had problems understanding Capitalism, it seems.

<comment><USER15> >Someone must have had problems understanding Capitalism, it seems

An obtuse comment considering he's a leading scientist.

To call capitalism an 'economy of greed' isn't without merit. After all raw capitalism is about survival of the fittest where only the strong survive and the weak perish, if it were not for the philanthropy of others.

I think the great thing about reading Adam Smith is how seriously misunderstood his works are. For example, people cite Adam Smith as one who believed in no social safety net, taxes and zero regulation.

This is simply not true and if you think it is you should go back and read the book that you clearly have not read.

<comment><USER14> Adam Smith is not the only person to read to understand Capitalism. No need to be pretentious.

> An obtuse comment considering he's a leading scientist.

So what? Since when being recognized in one field makes you competent in another? A widespread fallacy.

<comment><USER15> You were being obtuse because since his opinion differs from yours he must have had problems 'understanding' capitalism.

<comment><USER14> Yeah, because Capitalism is a system that has put millions/billions of people out of misery and starvation throughout the world (and you can see that, proven again when Communist China started to inject some capitalism in its economy in the 1990s), and summarizing is as simply "greed" just does not do much justice to it.

<comment><USER16> > because Capitalism is a system that has put millions/billions of people out > of misery and starvation throughout the world

And meanwhile, it has systematized the misery and starvation of millions and billions of people itself, while – cruelly – being so opportunistic, so seemingly advantageous to the resourceful individual, that it teaches us to despise those who suffer, to see them as somehow beneath us. The contempt that was once the property of those few at the very, very top has become democratized, so that we may all join in in feeling it.

I'm not purely anti-capitalist, but your dismissal of the possibility that capitalism could have possibly done anything as horribly wrong to the world as its critics claim is pretty one-dimensional itself. There's a good argument to be made that capitalism hand-in-hand with the mass-production mindset of the Industrial Revolution led to a society in which the value of individuals is reduced rather than enhanced, and that this is one of the central crises of the 20th and early 21st centuries. Your abrupt dismissal of that possibility doesn't make it go away; it just makes you seem like you don't know what you're talking about.

<comment><USER14> > Your abrupt dismissal of that possibility doesn't make it go away; it just > makes you seem like you don't know what you're talking about.

Yet you write this on a computer, a smartphone or a tablet, which has been provided to you at a very low, affordable price thanks to this capitalistic model you seem to despise. And you are the one who is accusing me of not knowing what I am talking about.

<comment><USER16> Yeah, see, this is the sort of argument that even freshmen College Democrats think isn't worth arguing.

Yeah, my computer's a result of that capitalistic model. That computer was made in a factory that attracted a lot of controversy for having working conditions so poor that employees literally killed themselves. That factory is the result of a line of thinking that dates back to Henry Ford, which is: let's find _exactly_ the price that we can pay people to get them doing monotonous, soul-deadening work for eight to sixteen hours a day without them walking out. And the more these factories become the norm, the less we'll have to pay, because the fewer other places they can go.

What amuses me about this is that I am _not_ a radical critic of capitalism. As far as people who think capitalism's less than perfect goes, I am so far along being okay with capitalism that my radical friends make fun of me for it. Your treating me like I'm some idiot who doesn't know the first thing about history suggests you haven't had many conversations about this, because trust me, nothing I'm saying is controversial in the least.

The way I see it, capitalism is a very sensible model for creating new things, for innovating, for encouraging systematic change in the directions of optimization and consumer satisfaction. But this model is only as effective, basically, as the freedoms which you're given within it – same as any system, right? In capitalism, the biggest threat is basically that those with the means of production and wealth hold all the reins, and they can inflict horrible suffering upon lots of people without punishment. I'm not just talking about paying people cruel wages to work at factories – I'm talking TV networks producing terrible bottom-of-the-rung shows, and opposing competition from cable networks who'd like to offer quality programming. Or a music industry that is so determined to squeeze as much money as possible out of super-celebrity bands that it's hurt the ability of smaller, local bands to support themselves. The scale at which mass production operates is literally inhuman: that is, it is so large that we are mentally incapable of processing it without a whole lot of effort. And because of that, it's led to a lot of nastiness that's hurt a bunch of people, not even because the people inflicting the pain are evil, but because they can't comprehend the extent of their actions. And, of course, they have incentives to look only at the good their actions create, and not at all at the bad – much like you with your silly "YOU USE COMPUTERS TOO" argument.

Now, the reason I'm not a radical anarchist like some of my friends is that I feel people attempting to revise capitalism can still achieve something from within the system. I also think that capitalism is better enough than the old alternatives that its shittiness can be, not forgiven, but understood within the greater historical context. My radical friends would disagree with this: they'd argue that enough freedom was lost in the 20th century that we're worse off now than ever before. I suspect they're wrong. They'd also argue that capitalism cannot be fixed without outright revolution – I disagree with that too. But I think it's pretty obvious that "capitalism unto itself" is an outdated economic model with some blatant flaws, and that we'll see the world slowly adopting more humane systems. And again, this is not a controversial thought except among those who've rationalized the deaths and sufferings of all the people who go into making this comfortable system for we lucky few.

I'm conflicted about how stuck I am with the system that currently exists, about how little alternative I have. I hope that tech manufacturers figure out a way to offer me good products with much less human suffering behind their manufacturing; I'd pay a premium for that, in fact. And capitalism allows for that too, so I can criticize the state of our capitalist world today without rejecting capitalism outright and going to live in the woods. I like civilization. I just happen to think that capitalism is not quite so civilized as you'd like to believe it is for convenience's sake.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Agree with other comments here. I've flipped through Wealth of Nations, Origin of Species and others and couldn't keep my focus tethered down.

So let me ask you this: What are the top 10 essential reads of today for helping one develop a critical mind and a better understanding of the world around them?

<comment><USER18> This thread is filled with the "appeal to authority" logical fallacy and it's sad, so I can see where your question is coming from.

I personally like to read books from people who predicted things before they happened and try to understand their mindset.

Understanding finance...

One may not like its writing style but Nicolas Nassim Taleb's "The Black Swan" helped me understand how finance was indeed the crumbs of capitalism that Buffet hates.

Understanding economy...

Another one I love --but it's in french-- is Charles Gave. That economist (definitely not mainstream) did write, in 1999, that the introduction of the common currency in Europe (the Euro) would lead to: "Too many houses in Spain, too many industries in Germany and too many public servants in France. That Spain was going to state default, followed by Greece".

So he got the order wrong about Greece (which already default a first time and which is going to default again) and Spain, but besides that he was spot on.

And you cannot say: "If you take enough economists, one of them is going to predict the future". Because here the prediction was way too precise to be sheer luck. He did explain the precise mechanisms that would lead to that situation (and he did bet his money accordingly and made millions).

Basically after reading that you understand how wrong the Keynes school is and how Krugman totally lost it (yeah, let's mill a $1 trillion coin... Why not mill 26 of them and be done with the public debt right!?).

There are going to be more state defaults in Europe (it's not even opened up for debate), starting with Greece which is going to default again. There's going to either severe inflation or partial state default in the U.S. too unless public spendings are dramatically brought down. No way out.

I'd suggest not to read from people explaining the past or the present. It's not interesting. It's more interesting to take out older writings explaining what's going to happen in the future and why. People able to do that are the most critical thinkers ever.

These writers often use an aggressive tone but you have to bear with it: these people are right and they know it and hardly anyone is listening to them.

<comment><USER9> > Basically after reading that you understand how wrong the Keynes school is > and how Krugman totally lost it (yeah, let's mill a $1 trillion coin... Why > not mill 26 of them and be done with the public debt right!?).

I would suggest you read some Krugman ( or Keynes), the entire point of the $1 trillion as opposed to $26 trillion is, that the government owes roughly $1 trillion to itself. So you do not change anything, the coin is just to get around a law that is there to pretend that money is essentially the same stuff for a government as it is for a private citizen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Apart from what others said, I'd like to point art that The Art Of War is not really about killing, it clearly states that the best victory is the one won without fighting.

<comment><USER20> I agree. Likewise, I learned very different lessons from those books. For example, Machiavelli's Prince is a set of anecdotes on how to acquire power. If that is for good or evil, is up for interpretation [0].

[0] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prince#Interpretation_of_Th...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prince#Interpretation_of_The_Prince_as_political_satire_or_as_deceit)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> It's good to see the bible on that list. I should get around to reading it.

<comment><USER22> Why is it good? Only Christians should read it (to become atheists). For anyone else, I think it's a waste of time.

<comment><USER23> The Song of Solomon and Ecclesiastes are the shit, though.

But honestly, yeah, the Bible is the poorest written fiction I've ever not finished reading. It's not even worth the paper as a religious reference, surprisingly. Maybe reading something like Norman Cohn's "The Pursuit of the Millenium" would be more useful for someone wanting to understand (more deeper) christianity, though it's quite a heavyweight. And I understand Feuerbach's "Essence of Christianity" is a classic, though I'm yet to read it.

<comment><USER16> If you're going to read the Bible for pure enjoyment, _please_ avoid the King James. Versions exist which are indeed enjoyable to read, yet faithful enough to the original texts that you get something interesting out of them.

I think my favorite anecdote about the importance of translation comes from Jack Miles and is about the Book of Job. Translated the King James way, at the end of Job God reveals himself and Job says something like, "I know that you can do all things, and that I am an ignorant muddler before you. Now that I can see you truly, I despise myself and repent." So the story ends, basically, with Job saying that God is too big and awesome for him to comprehend, and that he is not worthy, he is not worthy!

But Miles argues that the original passage is cleverer and more word-play-y than the popular translation gives it credit for. He puts forth a far more fascinating translation, which paraphrased is something like: "You know you can do anything. Nobody can stop you. You think I'm ignorant, and scold me for talking of things beyond my comprehension. But now that I have seen you for myself, I shudder in sorrow for mortal clay." He judges God and _finds him wanting._ And God restores his money and good health, and then for the rest of the Old Testament, he falls silent. Nobody else speaks with God throughout that chronological narrative.

When God does show up again, it's as Jesus – a vessel through which God can experience human suffering for himself and try to redeem it, rather than merely judging it. And as Christ he allows himself to undergo even worse pain than he inflicted upon Job, in the hopes that mankind might one day rise above that suffering.

The Bible is a much smarter and better book than it's given credit for, both by atheists and Christians alike. In the hands of somebody insightful and informed, it is wise as fuck, and thought-provoking as anything. (It's no Bhagavad Gita, but then nothing's as wonderful as the Bhagavad Gita.) In the hands of somebody either trying to read it as a narrative that will somehow explain the existence of God, or, worse, as a series of rules for living that God gave us, it's dull and ponderous, but don't let the yahoos ruin a good thing. The day we respect the Bible as the slippery and subtle book that it is is the day religious fundamentalism will no longer have an excuse for being.

<comment><USER5> Really? The King James Version of the Bible has the most beautiful language of the batch and will help you understand much about modern literature. Compare that to something like the somewhat-more-accurate but dry-as-dust New Revised Standard Version, or the informal horrorshow of things like The Message - neither of which has anything like your Jack Miles anecdote. What version would you recommend?

I'm a little biased here, but if you want to explore the religious content of the Bible, just chuck out the Bible and go to Jewish commentaries on the Torah and Tanakh. Plaut's 'The Torah: A Modern Commentary' and Lieber's 'Etz Hayim' are good places to start.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The vast majority of comments here (and, I would guess most non-commenting readers) think this list is pretentious BS.

Though it's a tangent: I'm curious about why it has received this many upvotes?

<comment><USER16> Hacker News's upvote-only policy for stories means that unless a story is flagged so much mods remove it, it will hit the front page so long as a significant minority of users thinks it's interesting. There's no "critical" crowd control of users saying "No, this isn't worth my time, back down you go."

Sometimes this is good, and allows controversial opinions to hit the top of HN; other times we get the Reddit effect, and short, fluffy pieces rise to the top instead of longer posts that might take longer to read, assess, and upvote.

I find the set-up kind of ironic, because when I first joined HN I was a college freshman who posted some fairly fluff things I'd written in the hopes that people would read it and get to know me. Now that I'm working on more interesting things, I don't think I'll be bothering to submit them here, simply because I doubt they're quite easy enough to receive votes. All in all, I don't think it's that the system's broken – like I said, this allows controversial pieces to still hit the top – but it's a downside to the way HN handles voting that cannot easily be avoided.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> What is really awesome is that all those books are offered for free! Anyone has a better format to read "Newton's Principia : the mathematical principles of natural philosophy" ?

<comment><USER26> To start with, I think he should have linked to <http://archive.org/details/newtonspmathema00newtrich>, not to their .txt link.

It also is on [http://books.google.nl/books/about/The_Mathematical_Principl...](http://books.google.nl/books/about/The_Mathematical_Principles_of_Natural_P.html?id=Tm0FAAAAQAAJ&redir_esc=y), but 'not yet available in your country' for me, so I don't know whether that is good.

There is a free ePub on the iBookstore in the original Latin (also a paid one in English)

If you read anything by Newton, I would advise Opticks, by the way, to learn that, even for geniuses, it is all hard work to get there (TL;DR version: he did not order his lenses on the Internet and needed the sun (in England) for lots of his experiments)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'm ok with this list of books, but the whole "you should read this to learn X point of view" is obnoxious. How about I read it and derive my own point of view from the book!

</comment><comment><USER28> _> most of the time humans are Yahoos._

A human's relationship to being a yahoo is like a car's relationship to running off the road. Right now, deliberate steering is required. Also, it seems that one day soon, this will be automated.

</comment><comment><USER29> Basically he's saying that everyone should have a history minor.

<comment><USER29> The downvoting is suprising.

I have a history degree and that list more or less represents some of the required reading for an undergraduate history program.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Blogspam.

I agree with most of the comments that this was a rather lackluster list, but the actual link is [http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/ngd5e/i_am_neil_degras...](http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/ngd5e/i_am_neil_degrasse_tyson_ama/c38vowu?context=2)

<comment><USER31> This "blogspam" has the added value of links pointing to ebooks, so you are able to read them now. I prefer it to the original reddit comment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> should've made it 9 books

Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West by John Ralston Saul a critical essay of how the age of reason was distorted to trample all over modern democracy

<comment><USER33> Which sounds a bit like a riff off Hayek, who riffed off a long and illustrious line of skeptics of rationalism.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Neil DeGrasse Tyson has got to be the most artificial 'Smart' guy the media had put forward since Carl Sagan.

<comment><USER34> I should continue, Both Carl and Neil are delightful men, they inspire an interest in the world that surrounds us in a way that few are capable of. I simply see a degrade in their value once they attempt to push one dogma or another.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to setup an interactive dev environment with Emacs and Vagrant? - momo-reina I've been trying out Vagrant as my dev environment since Arch Linux performance on Virtualbox on my brand new MacBook Pro 2016 is horrendous.
Remote editing of files with Emacs on the host machine is no problem, but how do you go about setting up a completely interactive environment, e.g. Slime, with this setup? I tried setting up an emacs server on the remote and using emacsclient on the host to connect to it, but that didn't work out.
Right now it seems that I need to keep a copy of the dev tools that I use (quicklisp, numerous Lisps, etc.) on the host and the Vagrant box is just a dumb repository of the source files, which is not really what I'm looking for. <comment><AUTHOR> I didn't work with emacs.(Sorry there) For code editing, vagrant mounts volumes from the host machine, so you can edit the code from the host machine and it will update in the box too.

Suggestion: Almost the same thing you can achieve with Docker(containers). Because you have a Mac, you need to check the permissions to files that need to be written from both the host and the container.

Good luck.

P.S.: Not a DevOps, these are my 2 cents. P.P.S.: Don't kill me.

<comment> momo-reina I understand that the box reflects the file changes, however that does not really help me.

I need an Linux Dev environment, that includes all the tools for emacs. I used to just live in the VM, but current performance is terrible, so I'm trying to see what my options are with just connecting to the VM from the host and editing from the host. That means though that all the tools are on the VM (REPL, etc) so I need to find a way to connect running emacs instance in the VM

<comment><AUTHOR> Not a Lisp dev and I don't think I understand clearly what you want to achieve (as I have no knowledge of lisp envs).

Doesn't SSH help you?

Also came across this: [http://www.braveclojure.com/getting- started/](http://www.braveclojure.com/getting-started/)

First thing I came over regarding docker is: [https://hub.docker.com/r/daewok/lisp- devel/](https://hub.docker.com/r/daewok/lisp-devel/)

Sorry if this doesn't help.

Hope you succeed!</comment></comment></comment>


Speeding Tesla driver caught napping behind the wheel on Alberta highway - <AUTHOR> https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/tesla-driver-autopilot-alberta-ponoka-speeding-dangerous-driving-1.5727828 <comment><AUTHOR> Not only was the driver sleeping, the car was exceeding the speed limit by 40 km/h (25 mph).

<comment><USER2> And it _sped up_ when the police turned on their emergency lights, allegedly.

<comment><USER3> Because the cars in front of it got out of the way for the police vehicle, the Tesla could accelerate to it's preset cruise speed.

<comment><USER2> Its preset cruise speed is 150km/h?! Did it think it was on an autobahn?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Better napping than dead?</comment>


GUI in Terminal using Ruby - <AUTHOR> https://spacesword.in/2018/02/27/GUI-in-Terminal/ <comment><USER2> Back to days of ASCI and ANSI art. Those were fun times on BBS's.</comment>


Kevin Rose and Milk team joining Google - <AUTHOR> http://plus.google.com/110318982509514011806/posts/VriPoJ6pHbd

<comment><USER2> My hunch: Google's basically paying Kevin Rose millions to be a spokesman for Google+ in the Valley.

Probably not a bad idea at the end of the day. It at least somewhat neutralizes the increasingly bad PR surrounding G+.</comment>


Simple Rules for the Open Development of Scientific Software - <AUTHOR> http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pcbi.1002802

<comment><USER2> Rule 5: "Be Simple", is hiding a huge range of complexity, and I feel very underdoes this hugely complex issue.

I work on an C++ app, built with cmake with one dependency (boost). It still took me a day and a half to get it to build on Windows 8. I once spent two days trying to build a debian package before giving up.

Writing Scientific Software for distribution is a painful experience, with almost no gain for the developer unless you end up in the top 1% of 1% of programs.

I'm still going to do it, but let's not pretend it is easy, or a good idea.

Also, "Release Early, Release Often", and allowing users to identify problems in your code? I've found people, very reasonably, get very angry when they get wrong answers out of my program. We've had less than a handful of "wrong answer" bugs in releases, but that came from a huge testing undertaking.

</comment><comment><USER3> @Rule 2: Code Well

I recall our boss having a slide with a bullet that said "biologists can't code."

We deal with all kinds of scientific software and I thought this was mean. Then I got the programs, and features included crashing GCC (by doing something illegal with OpenMP), not using a BLAS, BubbleSort in tools.c, and an object oriented nightmare that should have been io limited but ran 100x slower then io.

I had a slide on my PowerPoint where I wrote "biologists can't program."

</comment><comment><USER4> Naive advice. It seems the author is paid primarily to work on a software package for the biology field, which I think skews his view on the applicability of his advice for other scientists, for whom software is usually just a tool rather than a goal in itself. Take for example

" If your software is too complex to obtain and operate or can only run on one platform, then few people will bother to try it out,"

Seriously? He expects people to run, let alone test, support and document their code on multiple platforms? There is no grant money in doing such mundane tasks, not to mention that maintenance of such is boring and orthogonal to the original research.

Most of his advice seems to stem from ideological views re: open source software rather than from an attempt to help scientists or science in general.

</comment><comment><USER5> The article is more concerned with "open development" than with "scientific software". Those interested in more specifically science-oriented advice might like the following, which is referenced in the OP: <http://arxiv.org/abs/1210.0530>. For example, this one mentions version control and testing against data.

</comment><comment><USER6> 11\. For #@!@s sake, use some form of version control. The number of scientist friends who don't is terrifying.

</comment><comment><USER7> Nice article. I think young scientists (I'm attributing myself to one of them) should contribute more to open/closed software. It allows to gain experience and also citation count ;)</comment>


Chute (YC W12) Unveils Avatars.io, Hosted Avatars for Apps and Web - <AUTHOR> http://betakit.com/2012/07/31/chute-unveils-avatars-io-hosted-avatars-for-apps-and-web

<comment><USER2> As part of this release, we added a number of features requested from developers:

* SSL Support for all avatars

* Auth-search method for avatars across multiple services (/auto)

* Pure Javascript Avatar Picker for Web Apps

Details can be found here:

<http://avatars.io>

<https://github.com/chute/avatars-io>

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm curious to see how this will monetize. The founders of Gravatar often shared anecdotes in meetups how Gravatar was painful despite being big as there was no money in avatars.

<comment><USER2> Monetizing is always a challenge for any service.

We definitely take to heart much of the advice the Gravatar folks have passed along. It's not as simple as it might seem from the surface. Managing connections to social services adds an even broader set of challenges.

That said, we do operate a media platform at heart which we are more focused on monetizing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why just Avatars.io, why not profiles.io? I'd love for my Twitter profile, Facebook bio, About.me, etc to be in sync.

<comment><USER2> That's an interesting, though a little beyond the core of what we do.

Sounds like a good opportunity to build something though.

<comment><USER4> Yeah that's true. I definitely think someone should build it.

<comment><USER5> has been done many times and the last great attempt was shutdown by facebook, I think they were scraping fb or something... cant remember the name

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I was somewhat surprised that they were able to get my profile picture from facebook, as all my settings on facebook were set to be very restrictive (at least last time I checked).

<comment><USER2> We definitely don't employ any tricks here. Facebook will return some data based on a username and we're able to use that public info to resolve the username.

Of course, Facebook seems to ease their privacy settings to the more lax version over time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Any demo?

I want to see what the UX is like before integrating it into my app.

<comment><USER2> The JS file doesn't expose a UI at the moment, it provides a method for directly uploading to us.

On the mobile side, we have screenshots at the specific repos. Here's how the mobile implementations look:

[ios] <https://github.com/chute/avatars-io-ios/>

[android] <https://github.com/chute/avatars-io-android></comment></comment>


Neuromodulation of spinal networks enables stepping after complete paraplegia - <AUTHOR> https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-018-0175-7 <comment><USER2> Is anyone familiar with the literature able to ELI5?

<comment><USER3> Essentially they're talking about using electrical stimulation to restore function in people with complete paralysis of the legs due to injury of the spinal cord in the lower back (lumbar region). In particular they're focused on injury to the junction of the lumbar spine and sacrum. The result has been a restoration of function such that people who previously had no control over their lower body could (when lying on their side) make motions as though walking, and walk while suspended from a support rig.

More exciting is that after 43 weeks of this stimulation and comprehensive training, they were able to walk on a treadmill unassisted bearing their own weight! It sounds like balance issues and strength remain potentially problematic, but it's still amazing. The last line of the introduction really sums it up:

 _To our knowledge, this is the first report of independent stepping enabled by task-specific training in the presence of EES by a human with complete loss of lower extremity sensorimotor function due to SCI._

SCI = Spinal Cord Injury

<comment><USER4> Something to add to this that most non-neuroscientists don't realize is that the spinal cord is not just a bundle of wires that connect the brain to muscles. The spinal cord is a complex circuit that contains "central pattern generators" (CPG) that can produce rhythmic movement. When activated, these networks can be pushed into a dynamic state where they repeat the same movement repeatedly, e.g. walking. For more, look up the work by Sten Grillner on stingray CPGs.

One approximate way of looking at this is that the brain's motor cortex sends a "go" signal to the spinal cords CPGs and these start generating the signals to the muscles to walk. You can also think of motor control as hierarchical where as you go up the hierarchy. The bottom of the hierarchy are the muscles/actuators, then the neurons that stimulate the muscles, then the circuits in the spinal cord that have these CPGs and other "primitives", then primary motor cortex and further up the cortical hierarchy. At the higher levels of the cortical hierarchy are representations of whole movements, like moving your hand to mouth. As you descend the hierarchy, the neural signals control gradually more details components of the movement. For more, look up the work by Michael Graziano.

<comment><USER5> Are CPG the source of "muscle memory", ie reflexive actions? So much of physical training is to achieve the vaunted muscle memory as it allows unconscious (ie faster) reaction times.

<comment><USER6> I would argue that muscle memory has less to do with speed or strength and more to do with 'remembering' motion. But of course this is just based off personal experience and intuition so I have nothing to back this up.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Here's what real transparency looks like - <AUTHOR> http://blog.scalyr.com/2012/01/03/transparency-in-cloud-services/

<comment><USER2> The basecamp page (<http://basecamphq.com/uptime>) tells me at a glance what sort of service I'm getting.

The scalyr page (<https://www.scalyr.com/monitor>) doesn't (even after three glances). The sort of data presented there may be useful in diagnosing problems, but the presentation is ill suited to tell me if "service is bad" at a glance.

I'd favor a service that offers both, with a high-level "basecamp" overview that offers the option to get the "scalyr" details when I need to.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed: the Scalyr page is very much a work in progress, and the presentation leaves much to be desired. Look for improvements in the fairly near future.

Thanks for the feedback!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Web site/service transparency is barely something new, have a look here for over 300 sites that have a public status page in some form: [http://www.transparentperformance.com/status-dashboard- direc...](http://www.transparentperformance.com/status-dashboard-directory/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the link. This ia a great resource I hadn't encountered before.

It's true that some sites provide some sort of status blog or dashboard -- more, I now see, than I'd realized. However, most of them provide very little information -- often no more than "service is currently [up | down]". A few go so far as to publish some sort of graphs (e.g. Twitter, Google App Engine), which is refreshing, but even here the amount of information provided is fairly limited.

Third-party monitoring (e.g. <http://api-status.com/>) is another interesting angle. There is more that could be done here, but ultimately the best information can only come from the service provider themselves. (As a hobby, I've been doing some monitoring of AWS and Google App Engine for the last 18 months, but have not done much to make the results accessible. I've occasionally blogged about it, e.g. [http://amistrongeryet.blogspot.com/2010/04/three-latency- ano...](http://amistrongeryet.blogspot.com/2010/04/three-latency- anomalies.html.))

Another approach would be crowdsourcing -- users of a given service could band together to aggregate performance measurements. I discuss this idea in <http://amistrongeryet.blogspot.com/2011/07/cloudsat.html>.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you're going to name a post "this is what [thing] looks like", consider including some screenshots, or graphs, or visual data of some kind.</comment>


Uber to Push for Arbitration in Waymo Trade Secrets Theft Case - <AUTHOR> http://fortune.com/2017/03/16/uber-arbitration-waymo/ <comment><USER2> Google doesn't sue often. If it sued Uber, it probably means it's on a _warpath_ against Uber, and it doesn't really matter if they'll spend a few more million dollars on lawyer fees (with a potentially more significant payout anyway). I don't see why Google would be interested in arbitration over a lawsuit at this point.</comment>


Breaking Down the Wearables and Internet of Things Ecosystems - <AUTHOR> http://stainedglasslabs.com/breaking-down-the-wearables-and-internet-of-things-ecosystems/ Infographic on the breakdown of the future of wearable devices and the Internet of Things <comment><USER2> Site is down. Google cache: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://stainedglasslabs.com/breaking- down-the-wearables-and-internet-of-things-ecosystems/)

</comment><comment><USER3> They're assuming 4 connected devices for every human on the planet in 2020. I'm guessing the lower half won't be able to afford any at all, they're lucky to eat and drink clean water and maybe have sanitation facilities sometimes, which boosts the sales load to maybe twenty for every upper middle class American, per year. However by a pigeon-hole principle its going to be difficult to wear more than one pair of shoes at a time, and my generation hasn't worn a wristwatch since the 90s, and probably isn't going to start again any time soon.

Its interesting tech, but exponential charts going into the indefinite future make it look more anti-propaganda by an opponent more than someone into it. For example if the smartphone growth curve of 2007 continued into today, I'd have to carry 850 cellphones in my pockets this year, and 2025 phones in my pocket next year, or whatever. Things that can't continue forever tend to stop after awhile.

As an early adopter type guy I find my fitbit to be completely useless, no actionable items or decision making is actually done (as opposed to "people should" type of talk). On the other hand, the scale I bought from the same place gets used every day and its nice and slow and clunky at taking measurements (intentionally?) so consciously or not it provides some actionable data / motivation. Although it varies in the short term by 2 to 3 pounds, I've lost about a pound per week since buying the scale over a long term because I don't like seeing the numbers go up consistently.

The problem with "smart underwear" or whatever wearable product is not so much to convince people that "people should care" in an abstract sense but get them as individuals to actually do something. In that way its an aspirational good like paper encyclopedias used to be, which were mostly sold to illiterate people who never read them. "People should care" about how many steps they take in a day. I'm a serious hiker/walker type and even for me my fitbit is much more a discipline tracker of how often I forget to wear it than anything else. The proper market to compare them to is the paper encyclopedia market, not the cellphone or social media market.

The other problem in the field is product fluff. Yes a magic star trek tricoder that sends my real time EKG to a doctor would be really cool, but all the industry is going to provide is a sorta inaccurate pedometer and you'll like it. Or more likely, not, and when the buzz dies down and the industry segment shuts down you won't even get that anymore, which is too bad.

The main thing my fitbit does is get triggered into sleep mode in my pocket, which annoys me. On the other hand taking it out of sleep mode is often my only interaction with it.

</comment><comment><USER4> nice! i didn't know about half of these.</comment>


WebP: A new image format for the Web - <AUTHOR> https://developers.google.com/speed/webp/

<comment><AUTHOR> I really wish - or anything better than JPG - would get some traction. I know that JPG is good enough for most uses, but considering how many JPG files exist in the world and how much bandwidth it takes to move them around, a 30% improvement in size would make a pretty big absolute difference, and as more HiDPI/'retina' images pop up, the difference should be even bigger.</comment>


LOONCUP – The world's first SMART menstrual cup - <AUTHOR> https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/700989404/looncup-the-worlds-first-smart-menstrual-cup <comment><AUTHOR> LOONCUP the "Smart" menstrual cup is a Kickstarter Staff Pick. A GYN says it's all wrong - [https://drjengunter.wordpress.com/2015/10/10/looncup-the- sma...](https://drjengunter.wordpress.com/2015/10/10/looncup-the-smart- menstrual-cup-is-a-kickstarter-staff-pick-a-gyn-says-its-all-wrong/)</comment>


What you can do with a rice-cooker - How a simple tool has been adapted in many ways - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/01/dining/01rice.html?pagewanted=1&em

<comment><USER2> Here's a good book on how to cook things besides steamed rice with your rice cooker.

I bought it for my sister and she really enjoys it.

[http://www.amazon.com/Ultimate-Rice-Cooker-Cookbook- Porridge...](http://www.amazon.com/Ultimate-Rice-Cooker-Cookbook-Porridges) /dp/1558322035/

<comment><AUTHOR> Hah. Interesting. Thanks</comment></comment>


Chrome OS Dev Update Brings File System Support, More Experiments - <AUTHOR> http://www.thechromesource.com/chrome-os-dev-update-brings-file-system-support-more-experiments/ <comment><USER2> This is not _that_ exciting: a malicious XSS or CSRF and PAF! an attacker writes on the user filesystem!

<comment><USER3> You seem to be implying that the browser that first made window, tab, and plugin sandboxing into a big deal won't sandbox such systems from normal operation.

ie, it's likely to be exactly as vulnerable as your computer. If you open a vulnerability in your extension and someone exploits it, it's the same as a flawed program that allows input being attacked. If they eval JS from arbitrary sites, that has nothing to do with the security of the system, only the security of what you installed.

<comment><USER2> Obvious difference: I expect not to get my HDD corrupted because I visited an arbitrary web _site_ , I understand it might be the case if I download AND run an arbitrary program.

<comment><USER3> If I'm reading the article correctly (and it's a bit vague), these are part of the experimental extensions API. They're accessible only to arbitrary programs you've downloaded and run, and they inform you that they use api X.

To make matters harder, experimental API extensions aren't allowed in the chrome extension gallery - you'll have to go _looking_ for unapproved, file- system-accessing extensions to expose yourself in the slightest to that danger.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


"Irregardless" is part of a penumbra of unorthodox English words - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2020/07/25/the-shadowlands-of-language <comment><USER2> I recall my mum, it must have been in the 1980's, engaging in much eye-rolling and tut-tutting at our (Australia) then prime minister, Bob Hawke, using the word 'irregardless'. Bob was ostensibly quite charismatic, but no one could accuse him of being an especially thoughtful communicator.

In retrospect it's fairly typical behaviour for less literate types to adopt a word that _sounds_ sophisticated beyond their standard repertoire , and assume it's sufficiently cromulent for formal use. (A very recent thread on HN was around the use of the word 'decimate' as an alternative spelling for 'destroy', for similar reasons.)

I think Boris Johnson is a profoundly bad force in the universe, but I do recall feeling the editing of one of his appearances on a UK TV show (Have I Got News For You) was patently unfair, as he was asserting that calling small four wheeled vehicles 'quad-bikes' was etymologically unsound. His point (I imagine - the broadcast did not include the justification) was that 'bike' is a corruption of bicycle, in turn rooted from 'bi', referring to the two wheels.

<comment><USER3> > In retrospect it's fairly typical behaviour for less literate types to adopt > a word that sounds sophisticated beyond their standard repertoire

This seems an excessively negative take on it.

How do we learn new words? Sure, we COULD look up the definitions, but (1) who bothers, and (2) we have plenty of evidence that definitions are so vague as to be useless. (I recall arguing with my high school english teacher about "moot", which we had as aa vocab word with a definition that didn't match my colloquial understanding).

So as adults, as teens, tweens, and before, most of our language is learned from contextual usage. Which is a terrible way to maintain accuracy. When I get stumped with newer terminology, my friends that USE the new words are often at a loss to explain them (one spent 30 mins trying to explain "kappa") because they don't know a formal definition, they know it when they see it.

We can be smug and superior about the "less literate" trying to be impressive, but honestly, that applies to all of us, we are just mocking those that get caught.

<comment><USER2> Yes, I concede it's a bit of a bugbear - apologies for the negativity.

The idea that not spending the requisite minute or so to look up meaning and usage of a new word is acceptable behaviour of adults seems depressingly defeatist. We don't consider this an acceptable attitude during a child's dozen or more years of formal education, and realistically most adults have easy & rapid access to authoritative sources.

That our languages should then be _(re)defined_ by these torpid users -- well that's just a horrible deal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The popularity of the word "irregardless" demonstrates a property of human thought and socialization that's very important to most people here: that the majority of people (at least those that speak English) are perfectly happy copying other people's behavior without asking why. More complex examples of this come from studies where people struggle to communicate the difference between Boolean operators (specifically OR and XOR.)

My point is that this is a reminder of why we have software engineers and why cheap contractors, AI, and easier to use tooling (such as "graphical programming languages) haven't been able to replace them: people think and speak too imprecisely to communicate even just software specifications correctly let alone implement them.

<comment><USER5> > copying other people's behavior without asking why

Yielding to a shared meaning is the entire point of language.

<comment><USER6> Indeed. If we didn't slavishly imitate the language of people around us, we'd have no languages at all. Even as things are, it takes a decade and a half for most people to master their own tongue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The author seems to claim that `irregardless' is all right and that caring about it is caring too much and vain. He compares it to other malformed words such as `television' and `flammable'. But there seems to be a significant difference between these and that. While recognizing the malformedness of these words require knowledge of Greek and Latin, recognizing that of `irregardless' is trivial for anyone who is proficient in current English: it is obviously a stupid word, and that makes it stupider.

<comment><USER8> > it is obviously a stupid word, and that makes it stupider.

This is the social signaling aspect of language at work, not the communication part.

Human brains can trivially digest the correct meaning of "irregardless". Using the word, however, marks someone as not having had a "proper" education, and would perhaps brand the speaker as "stupid", "irregardless" of whether the idea they were expressing was intelligent or not.

<comment><USER9> > Human brains can trivially digest the correct meaning of "irregardless".

It can also understand the meaning of "iregardles", "ireggardless" and "irregardlless". Is that really a sufficient condition for the word to be considered correct?

<comment><USER10> Given that the purpose of language is to convey meaning, I'd say yes.

<comment><USER11> if meerly "convaying meening" iz the bar then tihs snentenennce is currect english.

<comment><USER12> You'll find that people, even those without formal education in English like me, don't generally write like that. I think just reading and writing a lot makes one's spelling naturally converge to the most common one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> My favorite/worst example of language evolution is the word factoid. Factoid literally meant a thing _resembling_ a fact (i.e. a _false_ fact) which is believed to be true after being repeated in print. Now, those same writers who where presumably spreading factoids, have inverted its meaning to be 'a minor, but _true_ fact' [0].

[0] [http://www.doctoryourself.com/hoffer_factoids.html](http://www.doctoryourself.com/hoffer_factoids.html)

<comment><USER14> Would a more correct version of a minor, true fact be a _factino_? Kind of like a Plutino or Neutrino?

<comment><USER15> _factlet_ (like _piglet_ )

<comment><USER7> But that would be mixing Latin and English, just as bad as television!

<comment><USER16> factette then.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> "Dethaw" \- to unfreeze something prior to cooking. It's something my ex imprinted on my kids.

The court was quick to give me custody, once I brought that up.

</comment><comment><USER17> Language evolves. Use and meaning of words changes over time.

Logocentrists are surprised.

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

<comment><USER18> English evolves because it is polycentric. Other languages are held back by formal regulators from evolving (e.g. Association of Spanish Language Academies, Académie française, Council for German Orthography, China's State Language Work Committee, etc.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I feel the evolution of language reflects important details about the culture wielding it.

I think a strong example is the word 'cult'. It once referred to a small sect or faith - and that's all. Leaders of established sects so often demonized small, competing faiths that cult became redefined to refer to evil and dangerous groups of worshipers. Notably, no other word ever emerged to take it's place.

I really wanted a tool to evidence how changes in language reflected changes in society's beliefs. I figured an authoritarian source of English definitions would be that tool but there isn't any such thing.*

In the end I had to adopt the more difficult approach of finding examples that my audience could relate with.

* (For a time I believed that the Oxford English Dictionary was that source, due to the 60-odd years between the 1st and 2nd editions. I didn't realize tho that supplements were added on an ongoing basis.)

</comment><comment><USER19> The actress Jamie Lee Curtis complained about MW's addition of " _irregardless "_ because she misunderstands the _purpose_ of that dictionary: to document and describe _actual_ language usage. Therefore, if "irregardless" is in wide common usage, it gets added as an entry.

Dictionaries that are more descriptive than prescriptive: _The Oxford English Dictionary_ and _Merriam-Webster Dictionary_. (e.g. "whatevs", "chillax", other slang, etc added to OED: [https://www.google.com/search?q=newest+words+in+Oxford+Engli...](https://www.google.com/search?q=newest+words+in+Oxford+English+Dictionary))

A dictionary that is more prescriptive (more conservative and avoids adding new non-standard words): _The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language_ ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_American_Heritage_Dictiona...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_American_Heritage_Dictionary_of_the_English_Language))

tldr: most people don't know the _underlying rationale_ of dictionaries

some Youtube links...

deep link of Kory Stamper @ Merriam-Webster talking about adding nonstandard word "irregardless" to the dictionary: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLgn3geod9Q&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLgn3geod9Q&feature=youtu.be&t=4m20s)

Anne Curzan (advisor role on Usage Panel) for American Heritage Dictionary explaining _" what makes a word 'real'?"_: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6NU0DMjv0Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6NU0DMjv0Y)

[to downvoters: it would be helpful if you state what's incorrect in my post; I don't want to give out bad information. Thank you.]

<comment><USER20> I guess I'd just assume she had a prescriptive personality type and preferred the dictionary she happened to look at to have the same view of language.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Merriam-Webster labels the word as "nonstandard" and recommends that regardless be used, all the while assuring readers that "irregardless" is indeed a word that has been in use by English speakers for "well over 200 years" and by "a large number of people across a wide geographic range and with a consistent meaning".

And, note, that same dictionary makes no disparaging remarks about the abuse of "literally" as a generic intensifier; it simply cites that usage as one of the meanings. The abuse of "literally" is more recent than "irregardless".

That tells you that "irregardless" is quite the lexical pariah. A major dictionary like Merriam is not able to wholeheartedly accept it in spite of the word's age and stability.

<comment><USER22> > The abuse of "literally" is more recent than "irregardless".

It certainly is not. The _complaints_ are recent. This usage is hundreds of years old.

[https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/misuse-of- lite...](https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/misuse-of-literally)

<comment><USER21> I strongly suspect that a new class of abuse is recent.

 _literally_ is actually reasonable as an intensifer for a figurative situation. I.e. the speaker is asking you to forget that you're just using an extreme figure of speech for a situation that is actually mild, but instead imagine it literally happening. I.e. the situation I'm describing is in fact so intense, that please pay attention to the figure of speech, since it is utterly fitting.

What we have now is _literally_ just being applied randomly where there is no figure of speech, or not even a plausible figure of speech, as in:

> _I literally just moved here from New York last week; do you know where I > can get a decent bagel?_

Here, "literally" doesn't inform us that a plausible metaphor is actual ("moved here from New York" is not a common figure of speech with a special meaning, and is vanishingly unlikely to be interpreted as such), and doesn't ask us to get a more intense sense of a metaphor by imagining it as actually happening: the move actually happened, that's all.

The word is just a morsel of pure verbiage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> """(It's _regardless_ , Caroline, not _irregardless_ ," Lorena said gently. Caroline huffily replied that regardless was a footless, weak word and got you nowhere, that on the other hand you threw in the word _irregardless_ and won any argument hands down."""

Dawn Powell, _The Locusts Have No King_

</comment><comment><USER24> If it makes you feel better it's not widely used:

[https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=regardless%2Ci...](https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=regardless%2Cirregardless&year_start=1880&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=3#)

<comment><USER25> It's scarcely surprising that it's not used in print. Books are considered, written by those most proficient in English, read and re-read, and professionally proof-read.

The extent of its use in ordinary conversation is something else entirely.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wonder, are there any statistics on descriptivist and prescriptivist attitudes in various groups? Or any recent defenses of prescriptivism?

</comment><comment><USER26> [https://archive.is/0knTf](https://archive.is/0knTf)

</comment><comment><USER27> [https://archive.is/0knTf](https://archive.is/0knTf)

</comment><comment><USER28> Its ironic how upset people get over the use of "irregardless."

</comment><comment><USER29> "Disregardless" still gets no respect.

</comment><comment><USER30> paywall (didn't read). I had a co-worker who used to use irregardless. I didn't say anything. My own personal pet-peeve is the phrase "that begs the question...", and then the speaker raises a question. No. That's not begging the question. sigh.

At this point in "post post-modernism"? I guess my line in the sand is pronunciation of proper nouns. Cue the "gif" vs "jif" debate.

</comment><comment><USER31> Caring about grammar may indicate one stands with the wide soup rim assists.

</comment><comment><USER32> > "irregardless: a word that distinguishes people who do not care much about > English usage from those who care terribly—and want the world to know it."

In other words, a sibboleth?

Exercise for hackers: what are the minimal code sequences one can write to distinguish between various x86 versions? various python versions? etc.

<comment><USER33> Shibboleth

<comment><USER34> <whoosh></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: A React 3D library for fast prototyping - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Standard-Cognition/standard-view-core <comment><USER2> really cool! cant wait to have a use for this</comment>


So much Civilization; The Humble Sid Meier Bundle is here - <AUTHOR> http://blog.humblebundle.com/post/75606190436/so-much-civilization-the-humble-sid-meier-bundle-is

<comment><USER2> If only any of these would work on Linux.... I keep going back to the games from earlier bundles which were pretty much all usable on all 3 platform. I looked at the lineup and it works probably well for bundling, though me it feels it quite dilutes the mission of the original Humbles. Good luck for them anyways, let's see where future deals are headed.</comment>


Distributed Command Line Issue Tracking - <AUTHOR> http://bifax.org/bif/ <comment><AUTHOR> Just spotted this in another thread[1]. It seems like an interesting idea, although I don't know how I feel about maintaining Perl. (Not a Show HN because it's not my project).

1\. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16124357](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16124357)</comment>


Can art still shock? - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jan/23/can-art-still-shock-short-history <comment><USER2> I find the premise of the article rather silly, though I still enjoyed reading it. From my experience in interacting with college students, media workers and business executives we're living in an era of hair-trigger shock instincts, where a sizable minority of the population jumps at the chance to be 'offended' and 'shocked' on behalf of whatever is the oppressed group or social issue of the week, thereby gaining power for themselves by seizing a newly constructed moral high ground.

Want to shock the average person who considers himself an 'intellectual' or 'politically enlightened?' Say something inegalitarian (whether it's true or not doesn't really matter in terms of the emotional impact it will cause) about a population group other than southern whites.

Other fun hot topics include eugenics/dysgenics and the cultural attitudes and government policies that drive population quality, the concept of population quality itself, immigration and whether it should be restricted, whether the 2-parent family unit is important to society's long-run health and how feminism played a role in its decline, etc.

<comment><USER3> My wife took a class in "provocation theatre" during her masters degree in drama. An assignment was to do a "shock piece". There was the usual round-up of naked people, simulated excrement, etc.

As a trial balloon Heather said she was going to get a pastor from a local church to come up on stage and sing the Lord's Prayer with his seven-year old son. The outrage from her classmates and teacher at the mere suggestion of this was incredible.

The indignation came from two sources - those who claimed they were being judged for their art and she was trying to redeem them, etc., and those who thought it was basically child abuse. She was basically told (by her "provocation theatre" professor) it would be the end of her degree if she pulled such a stunt.

<comment><USER4> This brought to mind the documentary series Metal Evolution[0] and the episode on shock rock. The episode progressed from the origins of the genre to what we have today, from Alice Cooper to Marilyn Manson and to Rammstein. What would probably be the money quotes come from Alice Cooper and Till Lindemann, of Rammstein. Everyone was asked the question "what would it take to shock an audience today" \- Cooper said something along the lines of eating your own arm. Lindemann said killing oneself on stage might do it. Something that struck me when I started writing this comment is how I don't even consider Rammstein's schtick one bit shocking, and considering the finale of the last concert I attended involved Till riding a giant phallus cannon spraying white foam on the audience while singing a song titled "Pussy". Seeing that in an arena with 15,000 other people would probably have been inconceivable just a generation ago, and makes some of Manson's tearing up a bible look innocent, which in turn made Cooper's guillotine routine and boa constrictor look quite quaint.

It seems each generation has become "desensitized" and it would take an act more shocking than ever before to provoke a reaction. But in an age where you can pull up the most depraved acts of sex and violence at will, people are finding themselves (acting?) shocked at something so laughable it seems unbelievable.

[0] - [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_Evolution](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_Evolution)

<comment><USER5> If Rammstein really where dedicated to shocking their audience they would, without any warning, open their next world tour by having Till walk on to an empty stage lit by a single spotlight, sit on a stool and do a 1 hour, non- ironic solo acoustic guitar set, and then get up and leave. End of show.

<comment><USER4> What really made me think though, is that I never once thought of them as "shock rock" and even found their presence on the show, ironically shocking and misplaced. I'm in my early twenties, so I was a little late to the whole Marilyn Manson/Columbine show, and Cooper has always been a relic to me, but seeing a contemporary band I enjoy labelled shocking was rather odd to me. Of course I'm an American and Rammstein, though popular, was never in the spotlight so I was also never in a situation to have my parents question my choice in that particular band so that may factor into my lack of perspective.

The term is really just something for the previous generation to apply to something they find distasteful or scary. Sitting here writing about it really made me comprehend that term. I suppose +1 for rubber ducking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Of course it can. But A: the "masses" have simply become accustomed to the antics of the shock jockeys, and no, there probably are no longer any depth of depravity that an artist can sink to that will shock the masses any longer and B: the philosophical sensibility of modern art is also the philosophical sensibility of the modern elite.

So, err, who exactly are artists expecting to "shock"? The elite that already agrees with them, or the masses that have long since stopped paying attention?

You want to shock? You're going to have to attack the dominant philosophical sensibility, not echo it. I'm not sure the artists have been echoing the dominant elite sensibility so monolithically at any point in history since the Enlightenment.

<comment><USER7> >the "masses" have simply become accustomed to the antics of the shock jockeys, and no, there probably are no longer any depth of depravity that an artist can sink to that will shock the masses any longer

Just the other day there was an article on here about some guy outraged about big breasted women in comic books for adolescent boys, comics about as wholesome as Family Circus in the grand scheme of things. A certain group cheered as GTA V was pulled from stores in Australia on account of their petitions, and they almost got Hatred banned from Steam too. Respected news organizations like the BBC publish such articles without the faintest hint of irony: [https://a.pomf.se/odchri.png](https://a.pomf.se/odchri.png)

If common people are actively protesting, petitioning, and colluding to censor art for portraying elements of the human condition as banal as sexuality and violence, we still have a long way to go towards mass enlightenment.

That said, if you can name any sacred cows ripe for the slaughter, I'd be happy to listen.

<comment><USER8> You've mischaracterized that article.

(well, if you mean this one: [http://www.itinthed.com/16328/what-taking-my- daughter-to-a-c...](http://www.itinthed.com/16328/what-taking-my-daughter-to- a-comic-book-store-taught-me/) )

The author isn't outraged at all. He wants something different for his daughter than is available at the store, and he tells the tale as if he gained new perspective, but there is nothing resembling _protesting, petitioning, and colluding to censor art_ in the article I link.

<comment><USER7> I was more referring to ancillary incidents like the GTA V recall with the line about protesting etc, but come on. There has probably never been more comics available for young girls in history. That article reads as half "I took my kids to a seedy place because I'm a shitty parent that can't be assed to do any kind of research, and it's _your_ fault" and half "I'm wildly exaggerating my experience because it will make for a great piece of anti-sex feminist agitprop."

> "All their…" …and her voice dropped to a whisper… "boobies are hanging out, > Dad. These can't be for kids, and comic books are for kids, and kids aren't > supposed to see that. That Wonder Woman looks like she's in a video, and I > don't know who that is, but it's not Harley Quinn. Harley Quinn wears > clothes."

Yeah, I'm sure his kid said this.

EDIT: Damn, random anonymous downvoter on HN, downvoted within less than a minute of my reply to an article that fell off the front page hours ago. This is not the first time you've done that, either. Do you just sit there refreshing the comment pages of "problematic" posters all day? Do you have an RSS feed of my posts? Did you actually write a downvote bot to police a glorified reddit clone? I'm flattered to have made your list, but jesus christ, go outside or something.

<comment><USER8> The article is not anti-sex.

Lots of people surf [https://news.ycombinator.com/newcomments](https://news.ycombinator.com/newcomments), I wouldn't read too much into rapid downvotes.

<comment><USER7> You're probably right about /newcomments, but it seems uncannily common recently, even with posts that have nothing to do with politics.

As for the article, I would summarize it like so: "I'm drawing a link between mild fanservice in superhero comic books and male chauvinism and sexual harassment in the tech industry, and also think of the childrens." Seems pretty anti-sex to me.

<comment><USER9> Downvotes can be accidental; incorrect downvotes are normally corrected pretty quickly; commenting on your downvotes is risky because that can attract more downvotes; downvoting for simple disagreement is acceptable on HN.

<comment><USER7> I'm well aware of all that, but with all of the _intentional_ unjustified downvoting that goes on around here, I'm happy to burn some meaningless internet points calling people out on it from time to time.

Downvoting for disagreement is allowed, but I still think it's a dumb policy. I upvote people I disagree with all the time for moving discussion along with pointed questions, so it's saddening to see people downvoted or be downvoted myself merely for holding an opinion contrary to the hivemind. _Not_ because I give a flying fuck about internet points, but because it reflects poorly on the community and its capacity for debate. But then again, I think upvote systems are dumb to begin with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think stewart lee managed it with his 2006 show "90s Comedian," mainly for the last 30 minutes. The subject matter is pretty nasty, I'm not going to reprint it here for fear of bringing up peoples breakfasts, but the reason it was shocking was because _there 's no punchline._ He doesn't even look like he's enjoying himself, he just slogs through this half hour of stomach churning material, _with no payoff at all._ It's genuinely difficult to deal with, even if the subject matter doesn't "offend" you.

Lee can sometimes be annoying and pretentious, but that show is a masterclass in "shock" humor in a way that the likes of Boyle et al can't or won't do. Johnny Vegas is good at it too.

There's still a thick layer of irony covering it all though. I think the only way you could make truly shocking art now would be to cut your own throat live on stage or something.

</comment><comment><USER11> There are still things that can shock people. Anything can be called art. Therefore, yes, "art" can still shock people. QED

Here I'll give an example: create a vending machine which only accepts $100 bills. Then instead of vending anything, simply spray the face of the buyer with cold water. Watch, as they kick the crap out of that vending machine.

To be fair, I am not a fan of modern art. I prefer more quant things that require more skill. Painting a human face is difficult. Painting it such that it expresses an emotion that the viewer can recognize and sympathize with is orders of magnitude more difficult. Throwing feces at a wall or screwing a few boards together, for the most part, is not difficult or unique. IMO of course.

<comment><USER5> _create a vending machine which only accepts $100 bills. Then instead of vending anything, simply spray the face of the buyer with cold water. Watch, as they kick the crap out of that vending machine._

Would that really shock people? It might shock the first person who used it (although it would probably just anger them), but would it shock the people watching or someone who just read about it? I very much doubt it. If you read about the piece you described in a newspaper article about the latest exhibition at a local museum, would you be shocked? Most people would probably just roll their eyes at the banality of it.

Shocking or even genuinely and emotionally engaging with an audience at any real level is really really hard and doing so in a novel way that we haven't seen dozens of times before is an order of magnitude harder again and that is where the true challenges of contemporary art lies. And I'll be the first to admit that most artists fall very very short.

<comment><USER12> Now if the vending machine were to deliver an electric charge sufficient to be classed as a shock, or injure the buyer sufficiently so that they didn't die outright, but instead went into shock, then I think it could be classed as art which shocks.

However, it would obviously also be classed as either dangerous or illegal (depending on which one you got).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Can't say too much without giving spoilers, but the British scifi series Black Mirror touches precisely on this in one of its episodes. It was quite well done.

<comment><USER14> Do you mean the first episode? I think they can be viewed freely online [http://www.channel4.com/programmes/black- mirror/](http://www.channel4.com/programmes/black-mirror/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> When Galileo published "Sidereus Nuncius" it was shocking because if what it said was true, like it was, the entire social hierarchy built over false principles would collapse, like it did.

Great artists like Goya, Van Gogh, Renoir wanted to express something that they felt and they just did not care if it created scandal, but scandal was not the main objective. For example Goya wanted to express the horror he had seen in the Spanish independence war against Napoleon, even when some people suggested him not to do it.

The same happened with Michael Servetus, or Darwin,Voltaire, Freud, all those people were really shocking, but shock was not what they wanted.

But that great advances are shocking does not mean that anything shocking is an advance.

Artist started using "shock for profit" with the advent of the media. With Television and radio just shocking alone could be incredible profitable, and they started taking advantage of it.

People like Dalí(for me a great artist) started cultivating eccentricities not just in their art but in their lives because it sold very well(and it let him life very well doing what he loved to do).

In fact Dalí was very respectful with other people, he lived his life like he wanted but let other people live the life they wanted too.

But soon it became what everybody did, specially mediocre artist that believed they were genius for offending other people, and people developed anti bodies and started just ignoring them.

Just offending someone else does not make you Dalí.

Now evolution and Big Bag are the big dogmas. They are the status quo today. They are not teached as theories that could be improved or even replaced in the future with something better, but as what already happened, no doubt about them. You see people talking about the first femtoseconds of the Universe with absolute confidence.

<comment><USER16> _Now evolution and Big Bag are the big dogmas. They are the status quo today. They are not teached as theories that could be improved or even replaced in the future with something better, but as what already happened, no doubt about them. You see people talking about the first femtoseconds of the Universe with absolute confidence._

How did cosmologists acquire the confidence to speculate about the first moments of the Universe? By spending a century developing theories that were continously improved and replaced.

Nobody came down the mountain bearing stone tablets inscribed with the concepts of red shift, cosmic background radiation or cosmological inflation. These concepts were radically anti-dogmatic in their time. Today's theories will probably be overthrown by something similarly radical eventually.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> A more relevant question is "is it supposed to?" Is the standard of Duchamp the only or highest standard by which we assign artistic value?

The best art, I've found, lifts the soul and can even have a transformative effect on the observer. This does not preclude shocking art, but can be achieved even with purely abstract forms without a representative referent, let alone a shocking one.

I think it's time we open a discussion on what we hope to achieve with art, one that involves the Katy-Perry-listening, Marvel-movie-watching public and not just the "art world".

<comment><USER18> Exactly: did the author of the "Code of Hammurabi" shock? Did the sculptor of the see of Tutankhamen shock? Did Michaelangelo "shoc? Did Bach "shock"?

People did not resort to art as a path for shock. Even pornography (as Herculan and Pompey prove) was not "shocking".

Gore and sex are not important to art. It has other issues more relevant.

The question to me is... Can modern art please? It does not seem to.

<comment><USER8> You may be trampling jargon. I find plenty of the art here pleasing:

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

("contemporary" describes art currently being produced in a less ambiguous way)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Yes just draw Muhammad.

<comment><USER20> Also, yes: 2G1C. (That was supposed to be art, right?)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Yes, and no.

If an artist poops on a bible in a forest and there was no one there to see it, did it really happen?

The problem is with media shielding public from shocking/provocative/indecent content in fear of said public switching channel.

Im not even talking "The Aristocrats!" here, something as innocent as a nipple might shock quite a few people in US.

</comment><comment><USER22> A lot of 'shock' is taking something considered some form of 'sacred' (like sex, religion, etc) and making a mockery of that 'sacred' thing or way of thinking.

As jerf said, people are kind of used to shock-jockeys nowadays by being aware of that repetitive pattern, but there is still that potential laying all over the place. If nothing is deemed 'sacred', are we better off?

<comment><USER23> There's a lot of heterogeneity in what people consider sacred nowadays, and probably less illusion of a shared consensus. For example, the "shocking" comics in Charlie Hebdo are genuinely religiously offensive in the Moslem world, intellectually offensive to some liberals in the West who think that the comics are rude to a religious minority, and not offensive to a great many secular or otherwise non-Moslem people.

Similarly, art in the West that would have shocked as recently as the 1950s is now greeted with an eye roll and "this again? Probably just a stunt."

Furthermore, the chance to take offense and be a moral scold seems to have become equal opportunity - as concepts like feminism and multiculturalism gained influence over the past few decades, being offensive to left-wing taboos is increasingly "shocking". Whereas previously, a person might be tried for "obscenity" (against morality or Christianity or public order), now he might be tried for "human rights offenses" or "cultural insensitivity".

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Yes. In one word: BANKSY

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDIz7mEJOeA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDIz7mEJOeA)

</comment><comment><USER25> Viennese Actionism could be repeated with a good shock value in many cities today. It's vile but very effective in breaking tradition and creating a fresh start.

I am not convinced we have a lack of shock potential. People just seem to have less need for shock ... and probably too much cable news.

</comment><comment><USER26> Make an art exhibit about how the Holocaust (TM) is a political prop and you'll see whether art can still shock--in Europe you might see it all the way to your prison cell. Obviously, contemporary artists are almost top-to-bottom slaves to the politics of the day.

<comment><USER27> There's a distinction between "offend" and "shock".

<comment><USER28> Is there really though? I think not, personally, they seem like synonyms in practice as far as modern day "offence" and "shock" goes. See: any Twitter lynch mob.

<comment><USER5> If a Fox News talking head says something mildly islamophobic many people might be offended, but I doubt anyone will be shocked.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Sure. It could take all the scorn it's heaped on Christianity for the last seventy years, and heap it on Islam.

Dare ya.

<comment><USER30> Making fun of your own culture is very different than making fun of a different culture.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Answer: "yes, but when it does it's hardly ever elevated to reification as 'art'."

</comment><comment><USER32> ITT: Neo-reactionaries cutting themselves on their own edginess.</comment>


Image Processing with Comonads - <AUTHOR> http://jaspervdj.be/posts/2014-11-27-comonads-image-processing.html <comment><USER2> Why do Haskell programmers see it as a good thing to package their abstractions in syntactic sugar?

Stop doing that. It makes it incredibly difficult to participate -- you basically need to learn 3 syntaxes on top of Haskell's own to contribute to any non-trivial project.

I'm referring to the article the post's author recommends: [http://www.haskellforall.com/2013/02/you-could-have- invented...](http://www.haskellforall.com/2013/02/you-could-have-invented- comonads.html)

<comment><USER3> Which syntaxes are you referring to?

Without knowing which one's you mean, can I offer a suggestion: Instead of looking at these syntaxes and more overhead, (feeling that you need to somehow mentally parse them into whatever they de-sugar to) try to treat them more as a chunking [1] opportunity.

So for example, when you see code in a monadic do block, don't try to mentally de-sugar it to the function calls it results in. Rather think of it slightly like imperative code where x <\- someMonad ~ x = someMonad(). This of course isn't what's going on really, but in many cases it's close enough for you to use it and move on.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chunking_%28psychology%29](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chunking_%28psychology%29)

<comment><USER2> Thanks. I am referring to, for instance, the 'method notation' introduced in that article.

I think I know what you mean by chunking. It is my understanding that it is a counter-productive thing, though. Just like how with 'frameworks' imperative programmers lose perception of the technical debt they incur by not knowing what their code actually does.

Maybe this line of thought is not universal but I'd presume the majority of programmers would be afraid to submit code to a project where they don't really know the notational mix and syntactic sugar in use.

<comment><USER4> Syntax sugar in Haskell tends to be different than other languages. Since it's essentially just do-notation and do-notation follows monads and monads are required to follow a hearty chunk of behavioral laws... It's actually quite similar across the board what do-notation means. This makes chunking _far_ more effective.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Seeing as this was presented as an example of how comonads can be used in real-world scenarios: what's the performance like?</comment>


Mpemba Effect - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mpemba_effect <comment><USER2> Are there any real life applications?</comment>


Rakuten acquires mobile commerce startup Curbside - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/07/rakuten-acquires-mobile-commerce-startup-curbside/ <comment><USER2> Congrats to @curbside</comment>


The iPhone 5 is hardly a great leap forward - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/node/21562939

<comment><USER2> I wish I could downvote entire articles from the entire internet as that one is crap. Apple has never been about bringing out a revolutionary model every year, it's been about appearing in a market segment and going "Hey, look what we've done instead" to a captive audience, drooling on themselves. They then bank that success and begin the process of nailing it down until it's perfect (Apple perfect, not nerd in the world perfect).

Jeez, you'd think the Economist would have the backing to be able to get someone who's followed this sort of thing for more than a few years.

</comment><comment><USER3> Odd, the Economist is usually rather intelligent. Apple doesn't need great leaps forward, that was the first iPhone. "Steady as she goes" is now good enough. They mainly need to convince those whose contracts are expiring to renew their vows and show those without iPhones just how much they are missing

The "competition" is in no danger of catching up with the overall package no matter how hard they try to mimic and copy, so why squander advances?</comment>


Obama axes NASA moon plan in new budget - <AUTHOR> http://www.newsdaily.com/stories/tre6101xf-us-obama-budget-space/ <comment><USER2> Obama deserves kudos for this. Lowering the cost of access to space by introducing commercial rocketry is a step in the right direction, which will facilitate many other things in future. Going back to the moon in a craft almost identical to Apollo would have represented neither a science nor an engineering advance.

This could be the beginning of the end of grandstanding "national prestige" space projects, and the start of an expansion in human activities in space.

</comment><comment><USER3> Just to be clear: This announcement kills the entire Constellation program _including_ Orion, the spacecraft meant to replace the Space Shuttle.

In other words, after the last few shuttle missions this year, the United States will no longer have a manned space program.

Right or wrong, this is devastating news to me.

<comment><USER4> The budget is also increasing NASA support for (or dependence on) private spaceflight companies for their rocketry needs. SpaceX's Dragon space capsule has a manned configuration, and the Falcon 9 rocket is due to make its first orbital launch in the next one to three months. Manned spaceflight is not dying.

<comment><USER5> Why does everyone assume that NASA will turn to the small startup companies?

History indicates it's the Lockheeds of the country that NASA will turning to.

<comment><USER3> Actually, Lockheed is the company that is designing and building the Orion spacecraft. Which is why this whole thing is slightly confusing... NASA does very little design and construction of their own hardware. At least on paper, our manned space program _is_ privatized.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Humans should not be going to the moon at this point in time for exploration. We should focus on robots going to the moon - spending that money on developing robots will have a much larger benefit than spending the money trying to keep a human safe. We'll develop advanced controlling and communication systems for this.

You can send a robot to the moon and leave him there - a human has to come back. That's an uneccessary expense.

When we have enough robots on the moon they can build the structures neccessary to support human life there.

<comment><USER7> Indeed this is the logical choice.

But the beauty of humanity is we prefer to reach for extraordinary things. I bet a large number of people would still _love_ to send manned missions to the Moon.

<comment><USER8> Everyone loves the idea of it, just not the cost.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I certainly consider this bad news. I know there's a lot of people on here who poo-poo manned spaceflight as needlessly expensive and unnecessary. But let me say this, manned flight (both air and space) as inspiration is the number one reason that I'm an aerospace engineer today. I know I'm not alone in this. While moves like these make economic sense in the short term, I have no doubt that in the long term, they will rob this industry of talented and inspired people... in some ways, the lack of progress in aerospace in the last 30 years already has shown this to be true.

I'd rather the administration issue grand challenges in all fields (especially aerospace) in order to inspire us today and future generations. Having an inspired workforce is the most critical challenge and essential to continued success and growth in any field.

edited to add: In case it wasn't clear, my point is that there is no way I'd be an aerospace engineer today if the aerospace vehicles and missions in my youth were unmanned/robotic. Yes, robotics is "cool"... but it's not even in the same league as manned flight when it comes to inspiration for me.

</comment><comment><USER10> As a pretty die-hard Obama supporter and also a huge geek, this is a tough one for me. The change in funding priorities gives us another 5 years of funding for the ISS of course, which is by far the greater achievement than landing on the mood yet again. And the greater funding for private space flight is also an excellent idea.

Still: it would have been nice to go to the moon.

<comment><USER11> Maybe this is just me, but I was never terribly keen on another Moon landing. In general, I'm not interested in further manned space exploration unless it contributes to establishing an industrial presence in space.

Probes and robots are doing a pretty damned good job at exploratory science.

<comment><USER12> Not just you, give me more Spirit/Opportunity and Cassini-Huygens please.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> going to the moon was the first step in a potential Mars mission...this pushes back Mars by a decade at least

<comment><USER14> You have a cite for that decade number? Seems silly to me, given that we've already _been_ to the moon, and over 40 years ago at that. Surely we should be at Neptune at least by now, no? :)

More seriously: what is the value of a Mars mission that we should be paying for it? There's no meaningful science to be done there (vs. what can be done via much cheaper means, anyway), just lots of eye candy and fantasy material for wannabe astronauts.

<comment><USER13> yes.... <http://www.nasa.gov/exploration/home/orion_announcement.html>

The orion crew capsule was part of the Constellation program. Same technology and innovations to bring the astronauts to the moon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> $3 billion a week to occupy Iraq - _no problem!_

$8 billion over four years to go to the frickin' moon - _too expensive!_

Go figure.

<comment><USER16> We shouldn't be wasting $3 billion a week in Iraq. But, we shouldn't be wasting $2 billion a year to go to the moon either. AFAICT, there's no significant scientific justification for people to go to the moon or to Mars at this time. Robots can go instead. Previous robot-based Mars missions have been very successful--except for the ones that would have killed everybody on board if they were manned.

<comment><USER14> Absolutely. This was dumb, and quite frankly a cynical bread-and-circus idea in the first place. There was _never_ any meaningful scientific justification for the project (nor the Mars one that was announced simultaneously).

Although the grandparent post is right: relative to other wastes in our government (the Iraq war being by far the biggest discretionary one), this is small potatoes. But $8B is $8B, and it means it doesn't have to be cut elsewhere.

<comment><USER11> GAH, why does Hacker News cut off replies at certain points?

This is a response to the child of this post talking about Chinese moon missions:

My thoughts will entirely depend on just what space development we have done in the intervening years. If some company is beginning an asteroid surveying mission or there is an orbital construction platform, I'm not going to give two damns about what the Chinese are doing with flags. Good for them!

If we are going to spend money on space we should stop thinking in terms of spectacle.

<comment><USER15> Here's a trick: if you click the direct link to the post, you can reply there without any cutoffs :D

And hey, I agree. If Team USA is building orbital platforms and doing asteroid surveys by then, then I will be utterly delighted.

If, however, because of our lack of long-term vision and misplaced priorities, the space exploration arena comes to be utterly dominated by India, Russia, China, the EU and Japan, then I think I will be justified in lamenting the failings of leadership in my own country I perceive today. Well, I'm not even American actually (though I have family who are), but y'know, I feel a sort of inter-westerner kinship ...</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>