Tabby's star is dimming at an incredible rate - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencealert.com/we-just-got-even-weirder-results-about-the-alien-megastructure-star <comment><USER4> Good ol' PV on Kinja (from the linked gizmodo article: [http://gizmodo.com/the-so-called-alien-megastructure-just- go...](http://gizmodo.com/the-so-called-alien-megastructure-just-got-even- more-my-1784883811)) has some interesting thoughts, as usual.

> _The biggest axe against it being an alien megastructure project is the fact > its an F-type star. F-types only live a couple billion years, depending on > mass._

> _But the drop in the radiant flux... a sustained drop. That could be > something far more interesting. If you could do stellar engineering... you > could draw the material off an F-type star while altering its core. You > could reduce the mass to a G or K star, greatly increasing its lifespan... > and gaining trillions upon trillions of tons of raw material with which to > build an alien megastructure..._

<comment><USER5> I'm sorry, I must've missed something important because I've seen pointers to this post elsewhere. Who exactly is "PV on Kinja?"

<comment><USER4> "PV" is a user's name on Kinja, which is the commenting system that gizmodo et al use.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Two reddit discussion that might be able to answer some questions we have here:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/Astronomy/comments/4waozn/new_paper...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Astronomy/comments/4waozn/new_paper_on_tabbys_star_no_known_or_proposed/)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/KIC8462852/comments/4w7qfi/ben_mont...](https://www.reddit.com/r/KIC8462852/comments/4w7qfi/ben_montetjoshua_simon_paper/)

They also contain links to the resulting paper itself

<comment><USER7> Reddit user sigbjoernwilderness's idea is pretty wild... can it be easily ruled out?

> _Is this the last remaining explanation after Montet /Simon?_

> _The dimming comes from the shadow of a spaceship traveling on an (almost) > straight line from KIC8462852 to Earth. The slow continuous dimming results > from the increase of the apparent size of the approaching ship while Earth > /Kepler is in the penumbra. The irregular dips happen when Kepler > accidentally passes the antumbra. A rough estimation by simple geometry > would suggest that the alien spaceship is quite big (> 100 km diameter), > significantly slower than light velocity (< 0.05 c) and has now almost > reached its goal (< 2 ly away), arriving at Earth within the next 100 years > after a journey of several 10,000 years. (cf. > [http://archimedes.soup.io/post/632873371/](http://archimedes.soup.io/post/632873371/)) > The c200 days of "rapid decreased flux" between Kepler-day 1100 and 1300 > (first half of 2012) which Monet/Simon reported, followed by a series of > large dips after day 1500, would suggest a course correction with the space > ship now on its final homing trajectory. -- Comments?_

\-- [https://www.reddit.com/r/KIC8462852/comments/4w7qfi/ben_mont...](https://www.reddit.com/r/KIC8462852/comments/4w7qfi/ben_montetjoshua_simon_paper/d65t063)

<comment><USER8> How can a ship 100 km in diameter cause any significant dimming of a star, which is 21,980,000 km in diameter? It would have to be pretty close to here and lined up just so perfectly.

Why even assume it's a spaceship and not an asteroid or a rogue planet?

<comment><USER9> The moon is smaller than the sun, and yet still we have eclipses. It's just a matter of perspective.

The object[s] _would_ have to be lined up. That's why an artificial object intentionally traveling to Earth is in some sense more plausible than an asteroid, which could be headed in any direction.

<comment><USER10> Why would it be only one object? It could be a belt of random sizes and shaped asteroids that is between us and the star?

<comment><USER11> Or the entire Vogon fleet?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Sunspots, debris and/or a distant cloud are not completely ruled out: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.01316](https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.01316)

Wiki:

The leading hypothesis, based on a lack of observed infrared light, is that of a swarm of cold, dusty comet fragments in a highly eccentric orbit.[12][13][14] Many small masses in "tight formation" orbiting the star have also been proposed.[9] The changes in brightness could be signs of activity associated with intelligent extraterrestrial life building a Dyson swarm.[9][15][16][17] The SETI Institute's initial radio reconnaissance of KIC 8462852, however, found no evidence of technology-related radio signals from the star.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KIC_8462852](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KIC_8462852)

<comment><USER5> Safe to say that a civilization that can build a Dyson structure isn't using any 20th-century coherent modulation types that SETI could detect.

SETI is only useful for catching civilizations in the ~100 Earth year- equivalent span between their development of wireless tech and information theory. There's nothing to listen to but white noise after that.

<comment><USER13> This is speculation. There are all kinds of examples we have of "ancient" technology that are still in everyday use today - knives, for example.

There's no reason to think that something else would abandon using EM as a transfer of communication.

<comment><USER5> That's not what I said. Tune a general-coverage receiver to the frequency of an HDTV station, and what you hear is what the SETI folks will hear, whether there's a signal there or not.

<comment><USER14> Also, from what I understand, the last several decades of our radio history were spent optimizing everything so that signals keep as much to the ground as possible - emitting TV into space is wasting money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> >What they saw was that, not only did the star's light output occasionally dip by 20 percent - the weird behaviour scientists first spotted last year - <USER2> over the course of the observations, its entire stellar flux actually dimmed.

It would be interesting if this turned out to be like the OnOff star from _A Deepness in the Sky_.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I really like mysteries like this one. They defy simple explanations and force us to work harder to learn more about our world. Sort of like the bright spots on Ceres, which are still pretty awesome.

</comment><comment><USER16> Reminds me of when quasars were first discovered and people thought they were part of some alien telegraph system.

</comment><comment><USER17> I find it funny that a clickbaity title like that bothers to tell people to "not get too excited" about the possibility of anything involving aliens. Further, you know what? I say this is something to be really fired up about. We've got a phenomenon here that matches nothing we can come up with theoretically. Live it up!

</comment><comment><USER18> It's not like this is right on our doorstep but I'd still be more comfortable if this was happening more than 1480 light years away.

<comment><USER19> Well whatever it is, we probably have 1000+ years to save ourselves right? If whatever caused it comes at us at 50% light speed, which sounds unlikely given how fast that already is, we'd still have 700 years.

I'm pretty sure that if human's resources were suddenly all turned towards getting the hell out of here, we could certainly pull it off for a good part of the population in a few hundred years. Whether we'd eventually survive, after decades or centuries in space (before we manage to find and arrive at a new planet, if any), is something I'm less certain about, but I'd still estimate the odds to be fairly okay, especially with 1000+ years to prepare.

<comment><USER20> "Well whatever it is, we probably have 1000+ years to save ourselves right?"

No. That time has already passed. If we see signs that the star will go nova "in one year", we have one year, not 1481.

The popular idea that we see "the past" in the sky is not really the best way to think about it. It is far more accurate to say that there is no such thing as "the" present, and what we see in the sky really is _our_ present. The view that we're seeing "the past" is ironically perhaps less sophisticated than the more naive idea that it is simply our present we are seeing in the sky. (And at the moment, there aren't any other "presents" that we much care about.)

The thing that really saves us is that even supernovas that far away can't really hurt us because of the inverse square law. A quick Google search shows one site estimating that a supernova would have to be 50 ly or closer or so: [http://www.howitworksdaily.com/could-a-supernova-destroy- ear...](http://www.howitworksdaily.com/could-a-supernova-destroy-earth/) Something would have to be beamed specifically at us, and the only natural phenomena I know that can do that are black holes and pulsars, neither of which seem to be what is at that star, and probably still wouldn't be powerful enough to hurt us at that distance.

<comment><USER21> From an intelligent life angle, what would really save us is that, aside from a number of planets to observe, we haven't really been all that interesting until the last 100-200 years; when we started actually emitting signs of intelligent life in to space.

<comment><USER22> Ah, but this is only true about we, humans rather than earth/solar system. It cannot be excluded that other sources of radio have been around here in the past :)

<comment><USER23> It also assumes that outside observers have the same difficulty understanding the make-up and probable evolution of a system as we do. If they were able to observe that Earth would have some properties they were interested in, or would be a likely candidate for such, then they wouldn't need us to announce our presence to guess it.

<comment><USER24> IMHO the aliens will not be specifically seeking life that is intelligent. Singularities and interstellar traveling alien civilizations share a problem. If one is in essence immortal the only purpose that can endure forever is the pursuit of new knowledge. Even if alien entities are able to learn all there is to know about all the other sciences, biology will be inexhaustible as the novel patterns that can be produced by evolution are effectively infinite. The biosphere of just our planet where the latest estimates are that there are a trillion species if you count all the microorganisms, probably contains more information than all the lifeless planets and stars in the galaxy combined. The aliens will value biodiversity more than we do. And if they arrive they will oppress us "only" to the extent required to counteract our propensity to cause species extinctions (including our suicidal alteration of the planet's climate). I actually would prefer that the Singularity or the aliens arrive sooner rather than later as I have less and less hope of our species getting its act together on its own.

<comment><USER25> >> biology will be inexhaustible as the novel patterns that can be produced by evolution are effectively infinite

But why do you assume they would be interested in observing the patterns that actually have been produced, instead of running high-precision evolutionary emulators that can generate patterns that could be produced at a much higher rate, and maybe even some automated filters to condense it down to "interesting" stuff? It's still knowledge, and there's no innate value scale for knowledge which says that things that have "actually happened" are more valuable.

In fact, how's that for Fermi paradox? Civilizations that are sufficiently technologically advanced to communicate, much less travel, across the stars, are also sufficiently technologically advanced to simulate the things they are interested about and get answers faster that way.

Basically, the end result of any civilization is creating, maintaining and expanding a simulation of the universe. Which, of course, goes recursive...

<comment><USER18> Thermodynamics still limits what you can compute and, given the output of a single star, you're still limited in what can be computed.

But I think it's a mistake to try to characterize any civilization by a single motivation. People on Earth do things for many different reasons and I think we should expect the same of alien civilizations even if single motivations tax our imaginations less. The questions is if _any_ of the motivations driving a stellar civilization would be enough to prompt the establishment of colonies. I don't think you can say that the answer will be 'no' reliably for every civilization that might arise and it only takes on to colonize a galaxy in short order (by cosmic standards). Hence sophisticated life is probably very rare.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> In her TED talk [1] Tabby explains how comets could be an explanation for this phenomenon, she even says that it is consistent with their observations, but then she goes on to say "but it 'feels' a little contrived". Sorry what did I miss here? I thought we were discussing science and coming up with theories that support our evidence using data, how does feeling fit into this picture?

Why would it be so unlikely that a big comet swarm happens to be between us and Tabby's star, a distance of 1500 light years!

Comets seem like a pretty good explanation, I haven't heard an argument against them.

[1] [https://youtu.be/IyIAjUuxNKw?t=7m17s](https://youtu.be/IyIAjUuxNKw?t=7m17s)

<comment><USER27> A lot of evaluating a theory means making subjective judgements on the probability of things if there's not perfect priors established. Like debugging: You end up with things that could have a few ways of happening. Nothing seems to line up perfectly. Different team members can make arguments on what the most likely culprit is. If something doesn't feel right, then you perhaps lean towards another hypothesis.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Could an astronomer weigh in as to why the dimming effect isn't due to a 'rogue' blackhole entering orbit with the star and both blocking light and draining material from the star? I haven't seen that hypothesis dismissed yet.

<comment><USER6> Not entirely sure why, but I suspect because they haven't been able to determine if there's any lensing going on of the star that you'd expect to see if something like that entered the system. But I do believe that they'd see higher energy (x-ray, gamma?) bursts if it was removing material from the star which would lead to a different kind of variability. We know roughly what that should look like because of other binary systems where one star is being consumed and I don't think I've seen anyone say this looks a bit like that.

Though I'd love to have someone that's actually knowledgeable on the subject to weigh in and tell me how wrong I have this.

<comment><USER29> There wouldn't be any observed lensing because you have to be the right distance between the lens and the source for that to be observed. (For objects of comparable mass, the lens has to be roughly halfway in between the source and the observer) But if there were a black hole accreting matter from the host star, there would be an accretion disk which would be visible in X-ray.

A black hole is also too small to explain the drop in brightness. That would require something planet-sized, but a black hole is only about the size of a city.

<comment><USER30> Black holes are uniformly sized?

<comment><USER31> Stellar ones have a soft upper boundary. If they are so old and massive that they become planetary or even stellar sized - well the'd start drawing stealing a good chunk of the host galaxy and form their own one - <USER3> blackjack and hookers. I.e. a flickering star would be the least of your worries ;-).

<comment><USER32> What causes the soft upper boundary?

<comment><USER33> The mass of the star before it went and formed a black hole. The bigger a star, the hotter it is, and the more evaporates from the surface, and the shorter it lives. Large blackholes grow through things falling into them.

<comment><USER32> Oh I read the parent comment as _black holes_ having a soft upper boundary. Is that the case? Or if more stuff falls in they just get bigger (minus Hawking radiation)?

<comment><USER33> So there is a complication, which is space is filled with vast amounts of nothingness. For a black hole to get bigger objects need to be on a collision course with it, which is somewhat unusual. A black hole doesn't behave any differently from the same mass as something not a black hole. So once a star turns into a black hole, the accretion disk is usually remnants/maybe more if it is in a nebula. Once that's gone, that's it for growth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Anyone else thinking of the beginning of the utterly excellent "Pandora's Star" by Peter F. Hamilton?

<comment><USER35> A Bit at the scarier end of the possibility curve one hopes!

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> What would it look like if a super dense object like a neutron star or black hole were feeding off the star? We only "see" those dense objects when they expel the material they were pulling in from their accretion disk as relativistic jets, right? So if an object were just leeching mass from a star but not (yet) expelling the material, would it just look like a dimming star?

This doesn't necessarily rule out aliens. It could be a post-singularity society of virtual aliens living in a quantum computer, leaching energy directly from the sun and periodically expelling waste material through relativistic jets. Of course.

</comment><comment><USER21> I don't recall the previous discussions, but without outright ruling out possibilities for things...

* If it is some structure being built at/around the star, has anyone done the math on the rate of such a structure occluding the star from us to match the observed rate of change?

* On a similar line of reasoning, what if the star were either being drained as a power source or caught in some kind of SG1 (that stargate TV series) level disaster?

To be clear, I don't think that they're likely, but I'd rather they were eliminated for an obvious actual flaw instead of simply being unlikely.

</comment><comment><USER37> Pretty cool that observed phenomena in space that can't yet be explained gets so much attention in the media. When you step back a bit and stop thinking about aliens

</comment><comment><USER38> Link to paper: [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1608.01316v1.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1608.01316v1.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER39> There is an epistamological conundrum involved in astronomy. In this case even Jason Wright admits that theories involving alien-action are

> a "perilous approach to science"—one > that could lead to an "alien in the > > gaps" fallacy, and unfalsifiable > hypotheses.

But on the other hand, if we always strain to find a non-alien answer to everything we are in danger of making them up and distoring our ideas of what can happen naturally.

</comment><comment><USER40> Could a extreme deforming by a another gravity corpus in a elliptic orbit reduce the pressure necessary for fusion so much that the observed luminosity drop could be explained?

</comment><comment> T-A It's obviously being eaten by black monoliths [1].

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010:_Odyssey_Two](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010:_Odyssey_Two)

</comment><comment><USER41> Could it have been hit by a large planet that lost its orbit somehow (perhaps from another system)? (And out of interest, is this an event that has been recorded before?)

<comment><USER42> Are you saying we looking the edge end of an Accretion Disk[0] ?

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

Two planets collide, forming a huge mess, that mess continues to collide with itself in a chain reaction. If the rings of saturn surrounded a star, what would that star look like when viewed edge on? Do the rings precess? What can we say about the size of the object in the ring and how will the ring structure evolve over time?

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> When Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos start building their mega structures around Mars, some far away alien species will report a similar sighting about us.

</comment><comment><USER44> > dimming at such an incredible rate that it can't solely be explained by any > of the leading hypotheses

So it must be aliens. That can explain anything.

</comment><comment><USER45> Being eaten from the inside out by a black hole?

</comment><comment><USER46> We thought pulsars were alien transmissions for a while.

</comment><comment><USER47> how about multiple nutating disks of debris who's centres are the star in question.

</comment><comment><USER48> Maybe its the On/Off star

</comment><comment><USER49> The dimming is probably a dark matter nebula passing between it and us.

<comment><USER50> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter)

> The name refers to the fact that it does not emit or interact with > electromagnetic radiation, such as light, and is thus invisible to the > entire electromagnetic spectrum.

<comment><USER51> Couldn't it bend the light enough that it looks to be dimming to us?

<comment><USER50> Gravitational lensing has pretty distinct other characteristics that would be noticeable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Would plasma cosmology explain this?

<comment><USER53> Not in the slightest.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> > In the meantime, we would remind you that it's very, very unlikely that this > strange flickering star has anything to do with aliens (and is even more > exciting if it doesn't - because, hello new space phenomena!).

I think aliens would be a _little_ bit more exciting... Might just be me though.

<comment><USER55> that headline though ?, online journalism at its worst, the chase for clicks, there really needs to be some solution to this problem journalism is dying and clickbait is where is at.

<comment><USER56> "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence", and this is the weirdest star we've seen. Your claims of clickbait are out of line, because we really don't know and alien megastructures is a reasonable theory.

And 'alien megastructures' isn't even the most ridiculous idea: [https://www.reddit.com/r/KIC8462852/comments/4w7qfi/ben_mont...](https://www.reddit.com/r/KIC8462852/comments/4w7qfi/ben_montetjoshua_simon_paper/d65t063)

<comment><USER57> This is an amazing theory. What could possibly be more out there than alien life? Alien life in a gigantic spaceship accidentally coming between you and a star.

<comment><USER58> Would it actually be a straight line?

Going from e.g. Earth to Mars does not consist of aiming for Mars and firing your rockets. It consists of hitting a parabolic _transfer orbit_ and then doing another burn to place yourself in Mars' orbit -- or just heading right in if you've got the heat shields and retropropulsion for that. Basically you do orbital mechanics like Wayne Gretzky: you don't go to where the planet is, but where it's going to be.

Would interstellar flight be that different? Wouldn't you be executing a "transfer orbit" about the galactic center? Or is the effect of galactic-scale gravitational pull negligible there and you just end up basically going straight from A to B?

Edit: turns out this came from an actual subreddit dedicated to this star!

[https://www.reddit.com/r/KIC8462852/](https://www.reddit.com/r/KIC8462852/)

Subscribed!

<comment><USER59> The galactic center is 100,000 lightyears away. Going from a location to another 1000 lightyears away via the galactic center would make the trip 200 times longer. A 10,000 year journey would thus take 2 million years. It's probably better to jump from point A to B, then.

<comment><USER60> no, @api is right - you're orbiting the galactic center for a while.

Similar how transfer from earth to mars works via a solar orbit.

So, yes, you have to include orbital mechanics, not just straight lines.

<comment><USER59> I didn't say there's no need to consider orbital mechanics. I said taking a route through the galactic center is not a realistic scenario.

<comment><USER58> I didn't mean through the center, just orbiting it. Look up a Hohmann transfer. I was just saying it wouldn't be direct.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> Please correct the title, it is about a Tabby's star, not alien megastructures.

<comment><USER62> Thanks, we updated the title. We're happy to change it again if someone can suggest a better one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> Pancreator deliver us, the suns fade.

</comment><comment><USER64> More accurately - it dimmed at an incredible rate ~1480 years ago and we are just now seeing the light from that event.</comment>


Show HN: My weekend project - Imgur for audio - <AUTHOR> http://awd.io

<comment><AUTHOR> Feedback would be greatly appreciated!

Also I wrote a chrome extension[0] to help consume direct audio links while browsing.

[0] [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hoverplay/hkbbcjmc...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hoverplay/hkbbcjmckhhnpniafekogpfonhiomnal)

</comment><comment><USER2> Is there a way to see what is uploaded by others?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not currently. This is an immediate goal for me. However, I just couldn't figure out how to make recent uploads visually interesting for audio files.

<comment><USER3> waveforms are the first, most obvious choice [http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=Waveform&FORM=HDRSC2](http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=Waveform&FORM=HDRSC2)

<comment><AUTHOR> I thought the same thing! I will probably do something like this, I was hoping to find a js library that would make waveforms from an audio file. I couldn't find something exactly like I wanted so I will probably end up writing my own.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Case Against Owning Cats - <AUTHOR> http://www.vox.com/2014/10/16/6982177/the-case-against-owning-cats

<comment><USER2> My cat is very adept at catching birds. Unfortunately (fortunately?), he's not so great at killing them. He's brought many over the years, and I've had to clean up plenty of feathers, blood, and poop over the years. We don't let him out on purpose anymore.

Your cat may or may not love you, but as long you enjoy each others' company, it doesn't need to. But please—keep your cats indoors. The billions number of dead birds is obviously crazy high, but cats are still doing damage to bird populations.

<comment><USER3> I have cats and a bird. So far so good...</comment></comment>


Could ibuprofen be an anti-aging medicine? - <AUTHOR> http://www.kurzweilai.net/could-ibuprofen-be-an-anti-aging-medicine?utm_source=KurzweilAI+Daily+Newsletter&utm_campaign=73cffdd08b-UA-946742-1&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_6de721fb33-73cffdd08b-281895037 <comment><USER2> Kurzweil's anti-aging medication thing has long ago taken a left-turn straight into pseudoscience. He has a thriving sideline selling unproven supplements as well.

If he hits anything with evidence to it, it's by accident.

To be fair, he appears to completely believe what he's pushing. But that doesn't make it any less pseudoscience.

</comment><comment><USER3> Well, it also unfortunately damages the liver. I know this because the military would hand out bottles of 1g pills like candy for every possible ailment you came to them with.

<comment><USER4> I AM NOT A DOCTOR OR PHARMACIST, but liver damage is more often caused by acetaminophen, it is quite rare with ibuprofen which tends to be associated with gastrointestinal bleeding or in extreme cases kidney damage (however ibuprofen is not as likely as other NSAIDs like Naproxen to cause kidney damage or failure)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibuprofen#Adverse_effects](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibuprofen#Adverse_effects)

Update: 1G pills mentioned by parent may be children's dosage of acetaminophen [http://www.drugs.com/imprints/1g-17321.html](http://www.drugs.com/imprints/1g-17321.html)

<comment><USER3> No, I'm sure they were Ibuprofen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Paper:

[http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgen.1004860](http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgen.1004860)

Every few years a new hot thing emerges in the field of drug candidates to slow aging. It was sirtuins for a while and then rapamycin and there will be others in due course. This happens because it is very possible to raise funding, start a company, and make a lot of money from this sort of thing even if - as is always the case to date - nothing of significance ever comes of it in terms of treatments that can actually extend life. As I've said in the past, this all seems like a really great cover story for the real scientific goal of amassing detailed data on the operation of cellular metabolism. The stated goals of slowing aging serve to draw in investment that would otherwise be hard to find at the needed levels: metabolism is ferociously complex, and trying to map it is chewing up billions of dollars. This is work that should be done, and the faster the better, but I think it disingenuous to talk of any real possibility that significant human life extension can result from it in the next few decades.

For real progress in treating aging an entirely different direction in scientific strategy is needed. Not mining the natural world for drug candidates that might slow down aging in poorly understood ways by altering poorly understood metabolic mechanisms, but rather deliberately aimed efforts to repair the known and comparatively well understood forms of damage that cause aging. We can bypass the need for a full and detailed understanding of how this damage interacts with every part of our metabolism to cause aging by taking the well validated and time-proven list of fundamental differences between old tissue and young tissue - a list of forms of cellular and molecular damage - and then repairing those differences. There is even a detailed set of research plans leading to treatments that can achieve this goal, which is a very large departure from the world of slowing aging through metabolic manipulation, where there is no plan to speak of and nowhere near enough knowledge to create one.

This is not even to mention the fact that slowing down damage accumulation can never be as good as repairing damage in terms of benefits delivered, and slowing further damage can do very little for old people who are already very damaged. The old need repair, and repair as a strategy is simply better overall in any case. It continues to amaze me that the clearly far worse, far more expensive, far less understood approach to treating aging is the one that dominates in this small research community.

In any case, every time a new overhyped drug candidate to slow aging emerges people get excited about it. Short memories, if you ask me. But the next time that someone you know in the community becomes fired up about early stage development of an age-slowing drug candidate that extends life in animal studies you can offer some needed perspective by saying "but so does ibuprofen." And what does ibuprofen do for life span in humans? Nothing meaningful enough to show up in five decades of trials, studies, and worldwide usage.

The goal of taking decades and billions to add just a few years to adult life expectancy doesn't fill me with glee. If that much time and money are to be expended, and I am to become old waiting, I want far better expected outcomes for success: decades of healthy life and rejuvenation, not pills to very slightly slow down the remaining decline. Fund research into repair biotechnologies after the SENS model, not the same old drug development programs that gave us a better knowledge of sirtuins and little else.</comment>


How Cookies Can Compromise Your Website Security - <AUTHOR> http://www.scanmysite.net/blog/how-cookies-can-compromise-your-website-security <comment><USER2> LOL. I read the site name as Scammysite.

</comment><comment><USER3> ferruh abi iyisin işinde :) tebrikler. Vote up!</comment>


New cheap VPS provider, based in Sweden - <AUTHOR> https://cloudroyale.se/

<comment><USER2> If I understand correctly this is a VPS offer which is $22/month. It's not even cheap _at all_. I have a real dedicated server for less than that. Also, their offer is not available outside of Sweden. And they don't have an English version of the website. This is not news, it's advertisement, and it's badly targeted. Flagged.

</comment><comment><USER3> Is this newsworthy? More cheap VPS providers here if you're interested: [http://www.lowendbox.com/](http://www.lowendbox.com/)

<comment><USER4> or [http://serverbear.com/compare/vps](http://serverbear.com/compare/vps)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Looks like a good offer. My Swedish is a bit rusty, though. They wouldn't happen to have an English or a German site, would they?

<comment><USER6> Thanks! Glad to hear you like the offer.

Unfortunately we don't have a English or German site yet. But we do plan to launch our English site later this year. I hope we'll see you then! :)

/Jonathan Gabor, Product Manager at Cloud Royale

<comment><USER7> Out of curiosity, what does the "tim" in "0.18 kr/tim" translate to in English?

I'm just trying to calculate how much it amounts to per month.

<comment><USER8> It is price per hour in SEK. 0.18 SEK per hour is 129 SEK per month, which translates to ~ $19 per month in USD with the current exchange rate (according to '129,6 sek to usd' in Google)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's not immediately obvious but they are an off-shoot of FS Data -- a fairly well-known (and old) Swedish hosting provider. It is in other words unlikely to be a "fly-by operation" in a niche where new companies pop-up very frequently.

</comment><comment><USER10> I have a really hard time taking hosting providers that claim 100% uptime seriously.

</comment><comment><USER11> Do you support NetBSD?

<comment><USER6> Unfortunately no. But if the demand is there, we will definitely consider it. And I know it's not exactly the same, but FreeBSD is on it's way…

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Do they have IPv6?</comment>


Sad fact - <AUTHOR>

The intersection of the languages I want to use and the languages software I'd like to have written were written in is the empty set. <comment><USER2> Time for law school!

\---

Not that the above suggestion was necessarily unserious, but seriously: You need to find a motivation for doing programming, or you need to find something else to do. You may be motivated to entertain yourself. You may be motivated to educate yourself. You may be motivated to educate or entertain others. Or you may have other specific problems that you'd like to solve. Let the goal determine the tools you use.

"I want to do perfect work without any compromises" is not a healthy life goal for an engineer. Engineering is all about compromise. That's why our hero figure is the hacker: A person who creates hacks. A perfectly elegant proof of a mathematical theorem is a glorious thing, but it is not a hack. A robot that convinces people that it is a mathematician by chaining together a plausible- sounding but ultimately random series of phrases from the mathematical literature is a hack. We celebrate hacks as a way of reminding ourselves that, at some level, nearly every real world system is a hack. They work well but not perfectly. They could be rewritten to be better, using a better language, but they usually aren't. Try to keep laughing.</comment>


A Sound You Can't Unhear (And What It Says About Your Brain) - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/sounds-you-cant-unhear/373036/ <comment><USER2> Since this is a technically inclined audience, here's a tiny bit of mathematical background.

When Ms. Das says that our brains constantly use prior information, she (probably) means prior in a certain specific, technical sense. Modern cognitive scientists often think about perception and cognition in probabilistic terms, so you might characterize the brain's task in interpreting that utterance as finding the most probable sentence ( _S_ ) given the acoustic input ( _X_ ), or P( _S_ | _X_ ). Bayes' rule says you can write this expression as P( _X_ | _S_ )P( _S_ )/ _Z_ , where _Z_ is a normalizing constant (don't worry about it for now).

Because these expressions are so common, we've come up with names for referring to their parts. The first part, P( _X_ | _S_ ), is called the likelihood, which tells us how probable the input we experienced would be given a particular interpretation. For instance, if the sentence actually read "competition center" rather than "Constitution center", the sound in the recording would be less likely (although maybe still possible, aka non-zero probability, due to noise, speaker variance, etc). The second part, P( _S_ ), represents the prior probability of the sentence. Given our knowledge of English, some sentences are simply more likely than others. For instance, the sentence "colorless green ideas sleep furiously" is grammatically well-formed but tremendously unlikely.

So, to conclude, when the presenter says we use prior information, she (probably, no pun intended) means that upon hearing what the correct interpretation should be, we increase the value of P( _S_ ), thereby allowing us to compute the proper perception.

Here's a nice and fairly readable overview paper (with a whole section on prior knowledge) if you think this stuff is as cool as I do -- www.indiana.edu/~kruschke/articles/JacobsK2010.pdf

*edits for clarity and formatting

<comment><USER3> The Bayes Model is certainly a nice way to combine old and new information in an optimal sort of way.

But is it _really_ a good model of what goes on inside the brain? Where? How? It seems too clean, too pat, too optimal. Biology is messy.

The paper says, "Bayesian models are not intended to provide mechanistic or process accounts of cognition." We deserve better.

<comment><USER2> This is a great point and one that cognitive scientists have a successful and productive way to think about. What you are after, and rightfully so, is an _algorithmic_ account of the mind. You'd like to know what steps our minds are actually taking to compute whatever it is computing. However, with something as mysterious and complex as the mind, even knowing what it is we're computing is far from trivial.

That's where the account I sketched above comes in, usually referred to as a _computational_ level explanation. It defines what the actual problem is that the mind is solving and gives mathematical constraints (and predictions) about behavior. The distinction between the two levels is subtle -- even published papers conflate or ignore it. However it's extremely important. Reverse- engineering the algorithm we use to perform that listnening/interpretation task is already extremely difficult, but it would be _even harder_ without having any of the above formalization. The computational account sets up the goalposts, so to speak.

Now, there's actually a third level as well. Even once you've written down your algorithmic-level account, that says nothing about how the brain implements that algorithm. That further explanation is referred to as the _physical_ level, the level of implementation by neurons.

If you want to read more, this paradigm is known as Marr's levels of analysis. [https://www.google.com/search?q=marr's+levels](https://www.google.com/search?q=marr's+levels)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is really interesting to me. I can't hear it and I am a native english speaker. I was just in a room of people and played it and everyone clicked into the meaning right away. I played it about seven more times and I guess I kind of hear it now, but still, not really.

I did horrible in elementary school and high school until I realized I was what I labelled myself a "visual learner". I excelled in college and am just about to finish my PhD in evolutionary biology, largely because I stopped attending lectures and decided to learn everything on my own. After listening to this illusion I decided to search for auditory dyslexia and sure enough there are disorders like this and I definitely fit the definition, especially central auditory processing disorder. Does anyone know if this test is correlated with audio disorders or where I can get more information on this?

<comment><USER5> I wonder if I have something similar. Often times when someone spells a word or recites a number, it's as if I'm completely "spaced out" and don't get any of the information (while actively paying attention) _unless_ I make a conscious effort to visualize the letters/digits as they are being spoken. I also frequently experience visual disturbance type dyslexia when reading and I always assumed the two phenomena were somehow related.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm not a native speaker and I feel a similar effect to have happened to me very often with song lyrics: Parts I could not understand clearly are like text that makes no sense, I hear other words than the real ones. Once I read through the lyrics, I always hear the right words, the real text.

<comment><USER7> I'm not a native speaker too and I often experienced what you described. Interestingly the "The Constitution Center is at the next stop." sample didn't work for me at all. Sounds like gibberish no matter how often I hear it.

<comment><USER7> I see my previous post twice, as regular comment and as dead comment. Does that mean I'm shadow banned?

<comment><USER8> It means you double-posted and the second post was killed.

<comment><USER7> Ok, thanks. I have no idea how I managed to double post but that is the most likely explanation.

<comment><USER9> Typical causes:

HN timing out on a submission of a comment, but it got saved anyway. Then you click 'back' or 'refresh' and it posts it again.

The second possibility is double clicking on the submission form (most browsers will not allow a second submission to be sent in that case).

In either situation one of the two comments will be dead, the other will survive because HN checks for exact duplicate comments and marks duplicates as dead.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The first time I encountered this effect was when I was listening to this TED Talk "Michael Shermer: Why people believe weird things" [https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=8T...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=8T_jwq9ph8k#t=566)

The whole thing is worth a listen ..but in the relevant clip he talks about audio illusions and gives a great example.

This just reinforces the lesson, it is the Brain that is Hearing!

<comment><USER11> Excellent link and now I'm a fan of Katie Melua (not her music just her for having the humour to redo her song).

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This article brings me back to a thought I have been having for some time now - could we use illusions (audio, visual) to distinguish between humans and bots?

If CAPTCHAs are becoming increasingly easier to break, could illusions give stronger guarantees because they use more inherent "human" features of our brain - things that bots will not easily decipher in the foreseeable future?

<comment><USER13> Not all illusions are universal, but what a fantastic idea, very clever.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> [SPOILER ALERT!]

The first time through, I heard "[jibberish jibberish jibberish] is at the next stop." (Perhaps I've spent too much time on public transport.) What does that say about my brain?

But yes, once I heard the whole sentence, I couldn't _not_ hear it.

<comment><USER15> Had you read the sentence prior to listening? I found that just reading the sentence once in the article caused me to understand the distorted version without having listened to the plain version.

<comment><USER16> Having read the sentence before listening to the jibberish version, I clearly understood each word. It wasn't more or less clear to me after hearing the non-jibberish version.

<comment><USER17> I had read the text beforehand, and could make out parts of the words but I was surprised how much clearer the distorted recording became once I heard the original.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> this might be a good lesson in why its so hard to have insights sometimes. in this case, you need to exert energy to _not_ hear the words after you know what the phrase is. in the context of problem solving, maybe this phenomenon can cause you to stick at a local maximum- your brain is forcing the information to conform to your best mental model, and that makes your search for a more optimal solution even harder. those visually ambiguous pictures that have two or more "sticking points" are another example. in any case, that audio example is an absolutely amazing example!

</comment><comment><USER13> It is really interesting and amusing how persistent certain 'illusions' can be even when one is exposed to it just once and for a short time.

Fun story, this was a long time ago: I was interning at Google at that time. One day I tell my then cube neighbor about an interesting experiment on visual perception that I had read about. A professor at MIT had carried out experiments on his class. Students were asked to wear prismatic goggles that shifted their vision and then try to catch objects. Hilarity ensued, but soon enough the brain adapted to the shift. Same with inverting glasses, soon the students would not even realize that their vision was inverted. The fun part was when they took their glasses off, their motor reflexes would still compensate assuming that they were wearing those glasses. Much hilarity again. I was telling all this to my cube neighbor Michael Riley, not knowing who he was, he says with a twinkle in his eye "Yeah, that was us".

The most remarkable thing about these experiments that I learned from him was that the professor would provoke an illusion on the students on the first day of class. I dont remember exactly what the illusion was, but it was some visual artifact, seeing patterns that werent visible a moment ago, much like the OP. At the end of the semester the professor would demonstrate that the entire class could still see that illusion, although they have not been exposed to it in the intervening 4 months !

I tried hard to find an articles on these experiments and phenomena, but my google fu is not working today. I distinctly remember wikipedia articles on it, but am not able to retrieve them. Either my keyword memory has gone down or Google's search quality/relevance.

Navigating Google was such a nerd minefield, but in the best possible way. The excited student that I was, I ended up lecturing about longest common subsequence to Thomas Szymanski not knowing his association with the history of diff on unix. Same thing happened with SVM's, I was explaining its merits and demerits to Corinna Cortes, my other cube neighbor, not knowing she was the first author of the paper on SVMs. Not only would they not take offence they would all keep indulging. Then one day I step out for a break, a senior person whom I knew had a cube on the row behind me, approaches me, apologizing profusely and ad infinitum that he had got locked out, could I please let him in. No big deal, but he just would not stop apologizing and thanking me. A few days later a co-intern asks me if I know that guy. I said sure, I let him in once. He says no, do you know who he is. He asked me to checkout the name tag on his cube. I saunter off, "Brian Kernighan" !

An important takeaway of this internship was to experience the humility of all these people, and the sense that you are surrounded by such iconic stalwarts in CS and you wouldn't even know it because they are so... normal.

Coming back to illusions, another visual/auditory one that does not stop working even when you know exactly what is going on is the McGurk effect [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-lN8vWm3m0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-lN8vWm3m0)

EDIT Ummm so many downvotes ? I did not see that coming, would greatly appreciate what you found downvote worthy. It is always insightful to know how ones comment may rub someone the wrong way. Feel free to reply, I promise no offence will be taken and I will learn something along the way.

@tbirdz thanks for the perspective, I did not realize that it could come off as bragging. IMO you can brag only about things that you have achieved using your own efforts. For me it was a mix of foot in the mouth and an important learning experience, especially in humility.

<comment><USER19> I would assume the downvote is for the extended discussion, bordering on bragging about your internship at google. The first comment was relevant to the story, but the part about how you got to work with famous people in computer science was not. I don't really have a problem with that myself, but I could see how that could cause someone to downvote.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> For some reason I can't seem to hear it. I just hear the general tempo and beat but not the words.

<comment><USER21> Same here. My brain can translate it due to the tempo and inflection, but I do not hear it in the way that I see a ghost image in the common optical illusion.

<comment> B-Con I got nothing. After looping the video twice, the third time I still had no association between the sound and the sentence. As I write this, I can't even remember what the sentence was.

Interestingly, I have a horrible auditory memory and have a dreadful time deciphering accents. I would guess that it's not coincidence.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I've read the description before listening to the sample and I've heard it the first time.

Not a native speaker. if that's important.

<comment><USER23> Same here. It felt like I ruined this whole experiment for myself ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Not really an illusion, but a case of pareidolia. Our brain is wired to recognize patterns in chaos, even the more so when _prompted in advance_. Another example is 'seeing faces' in everything that vaguely resembles a face.

There's a skeptoid episode about this phenomenon: [http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4105](http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4105), 'When People Talk Backwards'. Is has more audio examples, from the same researchers. They were using _" three-tone sinusoidal replica", or a complicated sine wave sound. They found that people were able to perceive speech, when in fact there were no traditional speech sounds present in the signal._ (from the skeptoid podcast transcription).

<comment><USER25> It is also similar to the well-known phenomenon of Mondegreens. My favorite being the Beatles phrase "the girl with colitis goes by" in Lucy in The Sky with Diamonds

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Doesn't really work on me, maybe because I'm not a native speaker?

<comment><USER27> Same here. It sounds like someone playing with a weird instrument and is not even close to a human voice. It reminds me of the beeps from R2D2 in Star Wars, but with less abrupt transitions.

After many tries still no comprehension.

<comment><USER28> I'm a native speaker who used to commute to work by train every day but have been living in Japan for 3 years (rural area, no other English speakers in my town). I was a bit curious because after hearing the phrase, I could only hear the resemblance and not the full phrase. So I did an experiment.

I replayed it a second time to try and remember the sounds. Then I went and did some work for 2+ hours before coming back to HN. I played the clip and the sounds became gibberish again until I reheard the phrase.

I'm going to try this again tomorrow (if I remember), but my guess is that the ability to hear & unhear the sound is dependent on how much natural English is used around you. The less it is used around you, the less your brain is actively trying to match sounds to an English pattern. In my case, my brain is most likely trying to map sounds to Japanese rather than English because that is all I hear around me.

<comment><USER28> Did it again a day later and same result. Though I noticed that the more I replayed the clip, the easier it got for me to "hear" the phrase within the distorted clip.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I think it is fascinating that I can hear it and my wife can't. The only difference I can imagine is that I play music and she doesn't so perhaps I've trained myself a bit to pick out structure. Conversely she can see those 3D images when you hold up the picture to your face and I can't.

It gave rise to another thought, is there an audio equivalent of color blindness? Not deaf so much as unable to process certain sounds?

<comment><USER30> Yup, Central Auditory Processing Disorder (CAPD). It tends to run in families, too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Once you understood the distortion, could you understand new words too? It would be cool to play around with recordings and distortions to try it out...

</comment><comment><USER32> Slightly bemused by the reaction. From what I can make out, this is is the same as when someone speaks in a thick accent and you can't understand them until something else prompts you as to what they are saying, then suddenly more of what they say becomes clear. Maybe here in the UK, accents are much wider apart than they are in the US.

<comment><USER33> It depends where in the U.S. For big swaths of the country you really only have to deal with 1 or 2 accents: the local and the mid-west neutral (used on the National News).

But on the coasts it's about (but not quite) as complex as London might be. New York may be the king of all accent centers in the U.S. (followed maybe by D.C. or L.A.) You get all the various New York accents (not unlike London's various native accents), various native ethnic accents (like AAVE, which even has accents within), regional accents, the various north East Coast accents (every city from Boston to D.C. all have different native accents) as well as rural accents, you also get all the various local accents from the U.S. and Canada since everybody ends up in NYC, then you get all the foreign accents (at various levels of English attainment) from immigrants and tourists and finally you also get all the various native-English accents, including many (but not all) of the ones from the UK.

To be fair, the distance between native accents in the U.S. is generally not quite as far as between native accents in the U.K. I've been in the U.K. and Ireland a few times and there really were places I ended up where the local accent was not intelligible to me, and I struggled at times in London. I also notice generally wider distance between the various accents in London that I assumed were native London accents than I've experienced anywhere in a single place in the U.S.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I'm a native speaker of English, and I speak a few other European languages. I'd like to add my experience. I listened to the recording and in both cases it sounded like gibberish. Hearing the translation did not help and I listened to it 8-9 times trying to get the effect. This result did not surprise me since, I tend to be quite pedantic on pronunciation when hear language being spoken, even languages which are my second or third. I've been known to correct native speakers of lanaguage I am learning. After reading this article I think that I am not very good at using prior knowledge to understanding phrases spoken in any language. If I were, I would not hold onto pronunciation as crutch for comprehension, hence my need for everyone to speak clearly and well for me to follow. It's just a thought.

</comment><comment><USER35> A Kalman Filter[1] keeps an internal model of the thing it is measuring to maximize the information it can extract from noisy sensory input.

Our brain likely does something similar for the same reason.

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

</comment><comment><USER36> This and the linked "you can't unsee article" are great example of how our perception is very far from a direct representation of the world, and instead is the end result of a complex processing happening inside our brain.

Another example of the same effect (although here actually there _is_ no real message) can be heard in songs when listened to in reverse (for example see [1]). One lesson to learn might be: be wary of our brain recognizing patters, it tends to err on the side of seeing patterns when there are none. I would argue that religion and superstition are examples of this.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlvFkws9PYY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlvFkws9PYY)

</comment><comment><USER37> You know when you learn a new word, and then you suddenly start seeing it everywhere? You've probably been seeing the word your entire life but you haven't noticed it because you didn't know what it meant. This is pretty similar.

</comment><comment><USER38> Great effect.

I would love to hear _another_ sentence distorted the same way, though, because I wonder if I just learned to recognize this particular sentence, or if I learned to separate the signal from the noise in this type of distortion.

<comment><USER39> Here's some more: [http://www.lifesci.sussex.ac.uk/home/Chris_Darwin/SWS/](http://www.lifesci.sussex.ac.uk/home/Chris_Darwin/SWS/)

Apparently this is called 'sine-wave speech' and is an example of 'perceptual set' ([http://www.simplypsychology.org/perceptual- set.html](http://www.simplypsychology.org/perceptual-set.html))

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> The processing that produced the masked audio sample is very similar to the processing behind low-bitrate lossy voice codecs. I wonder what sort of program they used to produce it.

Perhaps one method of doing this would be to compute the lapped discrete cosine transform of the input signal, and then turn that into power spectrum density over time. For each time interval, take the N most intense frequency bins, and then create N sine waves at those frequencies.

It's kind of like having a set of beeping noises that follow the pitch of the loudest component of the sound.

</comment><comment><USER41> This reminds me of when people talk about hearing demonic messages in popular songs when played backwards. I think Stairway to Heaven is one of the more famous examples

<comment><USER42> It reminded me of the Ghost Hunters show, where they are constantly playing spooky audio that they recorded and finding words and sentences in it. It's almost _always_ the same format as in this article: play some spooky sound, then say what they think it says and then play it again (with subtitles). You can almost _always_ hear the words after they are suggested. But then they treat this like _actual_ evidence of ghosts :-/.

Also, this phenomena is occurring to me frequently as my 2 year old nephew is learning to talk. He tries to communicate with me, saying a word over and over and it doesn't click until he points at the object he's talking about or my sister tells me what he's saying and then his mangled speech suddenly makes complete sense.

Our brains are so cool.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> If you like Game of Thrones, do _not_ watch the South Park - Black Friday trilogy. There's a .... _rendition_ of the opening song, where they add in some lyrics to the song. It becomes almost impossible to listen to the original song again without your brain humming in the South Park lyrics, which really detract from the mood of the song, to say the least.

</comment><comment><USER44> When I was a kid I used to love listening to black and death metal. In these genres of music the vocalists do not... sing but more like growl or yell which makes deciphering the lyrics very difficult.

But after reading the lyrics first then you can make sense what they 're saying without a problem.

If you 're looking for such "audio illusions" try it yourself :)

</comment><comment><USER45> I noticed if i imagined hearing. "they can't if you should sell her, is that the next step" instead, and told myself it was that. I went through similar mental processing. This probably fits into the memory/prediction model explained by Jeff Hawkins. the mind is a layer of interpretation over the world but also fills bits in.

</comment><comment><USER33> My wife is not a native English speaker and couldn't hear the sentence in the distorted version even after listening to the whole thing a few times. I suspect that this is tied in deeply with our native language faculties.

I'd be interested in how this works for other non-native speakers here as well as "native" bi-lingual speakers.

</comment><comment><USER46> Listen to Eiffel 65's Blue (Da Ba De) song and when you here this:

      I'm blue da ba dee da ba die...

Think this for one pass through the song:

      I'm blue,

      I bleed, I will die, I be-lieve I will die

      I bleed, I will die, I be-lieve I will die...

Now rewind and try NOT to hear that.

</comment><comment><USER47> This is the basis of a popular radio segment in the Netherlands (Mama Appelsap). Someone calls in claiming to hear a specific dutch sentence in an English song. They tell you what to hear, they play it and you can't un-hear it. It's always funny. If you're dutch, Google "Mama Appelsap".

</comment><comment><USER48> I remember this talk by Michael Shermer: Why people believe weird things. It has exactly what the article is saying. [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8T_jwq9ph8k#t=572](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8T_jwq9ph8k#t=572)

</comment><comment><USER49> Okay - any bets on which company or advertising agency will be the first to apply this research to generate an irresistible earworm?

As many have already noted, this works best with native speakers. Sounds like (no pun intended) built-in demographic targeting.

</comment><comment><USER50> [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlvFkws9PYY](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlvFkws9PYY) It's just like this.

</comment><comment><USER51> But the rythm pattern is identical, of course your breain will regognize that, and to prove that point to you, overlay your recording and the gibberish.

</comment><comment><USER52> Did anyone else find the only part of the jibberish they heard was "...next stop" and they heard it on the first pass?

<comment><USER53> FYI the normal spelling of that word is 'gibberish'.

Seems odd that that site would let an article through with a repeated spelling error, but it's an easy one to make.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> This is interesting, but I don't see how it is news. Our brains can take gibberish and impart meaning to it if we are looking for it (as our brains are primed to in the example in this article). Maybe I'm missing the new insight, but this seems like a very old and already known thing. This is basically why you can see faces in clouds and things as weird as moldy bread--because your brain is looking for faces.

</comment><comment> dav- Wow, that's so cool - are there any other examples of these audio illusions?

<comment><USER55> Yes, thousands of them in the context of listening to songs:

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> nooooo i cannot unhear it! #foreverstuck

</comment><comment><USER57> I really don't like the philosophers anecdote about cognition and perception. Why is it so shocking that perception is simply a chemical reaction to sensory input and cognition is an identified repetition of such?

<comment><USER58> > simply a chemical reaction

Simply? Really? Don't seem remotely simple to me.</comment></comment>


The wealth gap between young and old people - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2015/07/29/millennials-should-no-longer-dream-of-ever-becoming-millionaires/

<comment><USER2> The biggest problem with this article is that the data in their core graph[1] doesn't actually match up with their claims.

What that graph shows is what families were worth over a 14 year periods for a bunch of cohorts. And the data makes... a pretty smooth graph. There's lots of overlap and no obvious discontinuities, and no reason at all to think that there's any change in trend over time.

The only apparent effect that even possibly shows that younger people are worse off comes in the last two data points of each young person's line. But that's a totally obvious artifact, because that's the 2008 recession, which was the worst event of the 1989-2013 period graphed. (The 2000 dot-com bust was not nearly as huge.) EVERYONE'S line goes down at that time, including the oldest cohorts.

If the graph had more data, and showed what the 1901 cohort were like at age 31 (in the throes of the Great Depression), it would almost certainly be obvious that those 2008-driven dips aren't especially bad, comparatively. And yet, that's the old-person generation that is supposed to be the envy of the young.

This is just terrible interpretation of some unsurprising data.

[1] [https://img.washingtonpost.com/wp- apps/imrs.php?src=https://...](https://img.washingtonpost.com/wp- apps/imrs.php?src=https://img.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/files/2015/07/whoa2.png&w=1484)

</comment><comment><USER3> Speaking only for myself and my parents - the factor here has been land. They both inherited several hundred acres of farm and ranch land, and purchased some land in-town when it was (inflation adjusted) $90,000, and is now in the $2-3 million range.

They're both terrible at saving, their combined income was never over 50% of what I'm currently making, yet they have both been retired and comfortably living off these "investments" for 20+ years now.

I, on the other hand, am just hoping that I can move to part-time work somewhere in my 60's. I'm hopeful, but it means keeping my current income levels for another 20 or so years, and avoiding any major health or other emergencies.

<comment><USER4> I assume the housing market is the majority of this wealth disparity. The nations northern cities have seen huge increases in property values. For those who bought cheaply before the run up, the benefits are clear. You buy a house for 150k in Palo Alto, CA in 1981. And in 2015 it's worth 1.5 mil.

For millenials, we are stuck in a market where you got to pony up 1.5 mil to buy a family sized house.

Maybe the market will just keep going and going. But I don't think our economy can support that sort of thing. At least not the extremes that happened since the 70s.

<comment><AUTHOR> And the person who bought the home in Palo Alto in 1981 is only paying 1/5 of the property taxes as the person in a comparable home who bought recently. California is really the epitome of having a tax code favoring land owners and the older generation over those relatively new to the job market.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There is a huge generational disconnect between the boomer-driven media and political establishments and the X'ers and millenials.

My prediction/hope is that the stereotype of millenials as relatively happy socialites will end up reversing, with them falling in with us burn-it-to-the- ground X'ers once they are old enough to realize how screwed they are.

<comment><AUTHOR> True, but there is definitely a lot of staying power in those currently of retirement age, kicking the can down the road, with a growing proportion of the population over age 65 (20% in 2020 versus 9% in 1970) receiving the benefits of Social Security and Medicare which are largely unfunded.

There will have to be a number of cut-backs in retirement benefits for future retirees, including means-testing, removing the maximum wage for Social Security contributions, and higher Medicare premiums.

<comment><USER6> > removing the maximum wage for Social Security contributions

This sounds like a great idea to me. It's absurd that only the first $118,500 of earnings are subject to to social security tax, and it means that our tax structure is much less progressive than it appears at first glance (which is one reason certain people strenuously avoid talking about any taxes except Federal Income Taxes).

<comment><USER7> It's not absurd: Social Security's benefits formula has significant "bend points" that make it an increasingly bad "investment" for higher income workers. Eliminating the wage cap would remove any remaining fig leaf covering its essentially redistributive nature: High income workers would have to live to 140 to get back what they "paid in" even without interest.

<comment><USER8> Why do we need to keep a fig leaf to cover up what everybody already knows is there? We should either accept that Social Security is a form of welfare and rationalize it accordingly (my preference) or we should overhaul it to actually be the mandated savings scheme that it's said to be.

<comment><USER9> Because welfare isn't popular, it makes it more subject to the political climate, and because as a mandated savings scheme, social security isn't terribly performant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> A couple of factors that play into this over the last 100 years: The prevalence of credit cards that increase the amount of depreciating goods young people can buy, and the long-term power of 401(k) investing.

Expanded consumer credit, and it's appurtenant high interest rate cost, would tend to keep young people less wealthy towards the last half of last century. As credit card debt skyrocketed, savings rates plummeted from almost 11% in 1982, to 1.5% in 2007 [0].

Similarly, the power of 401(k) investing is really only coming into it's own in the last decade or so, since 401(k) accounts have had 30 years to mature, total retirement assets now total well over $3 Trillion nationally.[1]

[0] [http://www.americanhistoryusa.com/give-me-liberty-or-give- me...](http://www.americanhistoryusa.com/give-me-liberty-or-give-me-debt-a- history-of-credit-cards/)

[1] [http://www.nber.org/bah/fall02/changingCharacter.html](http://www.nber.org/bah/fall02/changingCharacter.html)

<comment><USER11> Don't forget wage stagnation over the last 40 years and the increased cost in college education (funded, yet again, by cheap credit backed by the federal government).

<comment><USER12> This. There's been a massive shift of wealth away from the middle classes.

And college loans are just taxation by the back door - with the difference that instead of a graduate tax paid to the government, you pay a loan "tax" to the shareholders of the loan fund.

In fact, taxation is increasingly privatised. Instead of paying taxes to government you pay a profit-surcharge on almost everything. This goes to corporate shareholders but provides little or no returned value.

The result is that trillions of dollars are rotting uselessly in offshore tax havens, when they could have been invested in future economic development. And spending power has been suppressed, when it could have been driving the economy from the other end.

<comment><USER13> Dollars are illusory so they cannot rot. The government can always stimulate actual productivity by printing dollars to pass around.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> _One of the most important points that the paper makes is that everyone's income and wealth tend to follow a kind of natural pattern during their life. [People under 40] haven't been working for many years, so they don't have an opportunity to save as much; they also need to make investments in things like education and new home ownership. [People in their 40 's and 50's] have worked long enough they start to accumulate wealth rapidly._

I don't mean to SHOCK you, but did you know there's a massive age gap between young and old people? Also, an experience gap. Something Must Be Done About This!

</comment><comment><USER15> A large reason for that is a leveraged economy.

I still remember how hard it was to build up enough credit to move beyond prepaid cellphones.

</comment><comment><USER16> The answer (which is the same as it has always been) is buried at the end:

 _If young people want to increase their chances of being wealthy, one strategy is to emulate the behavior of older people: keeping an emergency fund, paying down debt, avoiding high-cost credit, and putting money into higher-returning investments_

<comment><USER17> It's a sound premise, but young(er) people will never see the kind of boom that their parents experienced.

Younger generation is permanently hosed.

What this article fails to mention is all the privatization and regulations that have caused capital misallocation and favored certain classes of people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Well...at least the young are rich in 'youth'.

<comment><USER19> Unfortunately, this kind of richness does not use to last really long.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> So living in expensive cities like NYC/SF and London when you are younger is also becoming impossible. But we still do it... Heaps of us.

</comment><comment><USER21> >If you're over 62, your odds of having at least $1 million in net wealth (your total assets minus your total debt) are relatively achievable -- about 1 in 7. But if you are under 40, your odds are low: 1 in 55.

So the older you are the more time you have had to grow wealth. The younger you are the less time you have had. This is then forcibly tied into median family income?

this is huffington post tier article.

<comment><USER22> > _Young people (generally defined here as those under 40)_

What is with the media and this strange concept of "young people" now being the 28-40 age bracket? Back in my day, "young people" meant 8-18 year olds.

This isn't the only article making this bizarre wordplay. One of the previous USDS "submarine" articles referred to "young people" on a team as the members who were over 28.

<comment><USER23> Clearly they are talking about 'the workforce' as 'people'. 'kids' are not considered anything but a cost center in their equation.

<comment><USER24> 'kids' used to work and earn money. That used to be a real category. It's not anymore. A lot of people don't learn how to really manage their money until after they've graduated from college and realize that they're going broke and that there are no new loans.

Is that irresponsible of them? Sure! But how were they supposed to learn if they couldn't get a job and make some of their own money?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


If I think someone else YouTube video will get popular, can I monetize that? - <AUTHOR> If I think a youtube video will get popular, is there anything I can do to buy ads/sell ads to monetize that. Or any other way? <comment><USER2> You could offer the owner a fixed payment in return for the rights to future ad revenue from that video.

This assumes the owner is less confident that the video will be popular than you are.

</comment><comment><USER3> If you have an eye for what videos will work, the consulting industry might be a good fit.

Just think, you too could become a growth hacker. If you dream it, you can do it, reach for the stars and take it to the max...:)</comment>


Why It's Time to Reinvent Blogging Comments - <AUTHOR> http://tomtunguz.com/a-letter-to-the-editor <comment><USER2> I think the author has an interesting proposal in his idea of "Letters to the Author"; however, one thing lacking in such a scheme is that the "Letters to the Editor" tend to come at the start of a publication, which itself can be thought of as a fairly linear medium. Blogs (and websites in general) tend to be non-linear in use, as hyper-linking disrupts any flow intended by authors. So while the idea is sound the implementation isn't there yet for the web based medium.

Perhaps starting off each post with a small "Letters to the Author" subsection might satisfy the goal.</comment>


Man arrested in Greece for mocking monk's prophecies in a Pastafarian FB page. - <AUTHOR> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/24/gerontas-pastitsios-pastafarian-facebook-greece-elder-paisios_n_1909511.html

<comment><AUTHOR> The arrest was pushed in parliament by far right political party Golden Dawn. Facebook has taken down the page.</comment>


Why installing software on the Mac is really confusing even for advanced users. - <AUTHOR>

Ideally, software installation should work the same way every time and require no thinking on the part of the user.  This is generally true on Windows but not on the Mac.
On the Mac, you have several cases and the user needs to recognize and understand them then take appropriate action:
Case 1: you have an executable that you are expected to copy to a suitable directory (e.g., Applications)... not hard but requires the user to recognize this case and think about where to copy the file
Case 2: you have an installation program that you run... which could be just as easy as Windows except for the fact that such programs typically expect you to drag the app icon to the Applications directory from the install program (!) essentially giving us a roundabout case 1
Case 3:  the software comes in the form of a dmg file.  A user would probably have no idea what this is or what to do with it.  It's not clear whether one should extract the contents of this file or use it as is.  One might wonder about whether the app would even run correctly without extracting the contents of the file (e.g., it might attempt to write to a directory in the file).  When double clicked, the file is mounted -- not an obvious notion for users to understand.  The mounted file also clutters the desktop.  Clicking on the mounted file icon will not start the app but it may start an install program OR show the contents of the image. Quitting the app will not unmount the file. The file can be unmounted manually (e.g., to reduce desktop clutter), but it's not clear what this does -- will it delete the app?  Will it just stop the app from running?  Can you unmount the file while the app is running?  What happens if you attempt to run the app again after you have unmounted its image?  Not only will the app start, but you will also see the contents of the mounted image OR have the install program run again.
The Mac version of Open Office is particularly bad when it comes to understanding its installation.  It comes in the form of a dmg file, but it also requires you to drag the app executable to the Applications directory.  Even more confusing is that it runs its install program to tell you to do this when you mount its dmg file.
Exactly what problem(s) does this dmg file address and why is it not needed in Windows? <comment><USER2> Case 1: the application is not an executable. It is a bundled package. There are significant differences. Meanwhile, it can run from _anywhere_. I run applications from my Downloads folder. And Spotlight still recognizes it as an application. The Applications folder is merely a convenience.

Case 2 does _not_ require you to drag the file. If you run an installer package it automatically adds the program to the right folder.

Case 3: DMG files auto-mount when Safari downloads them (and they should for other browsers, too). This lets developers add a shortcut to the Application folder.

 _The Mac version of Open Office demonstrates the worst of all cases._

OpenOffice is a terrible program. It's bad on Windows, it's bad on Ubuntu.

That said: there's some terminology you need to know. A DMG is a disk image. That should be simple. It's a virtual disk. An application is an app. An installer is an installer. Apple doesn't bullshit you. Unlike Windows, they don't refer to something by vague, nebulous terms. They tell you EXACTLY what something does.

So when I boot the DMG, it contains an application. That app IS the app. It tells me to drag the app to the applications folder, as a courtesy. I don't have to. I can move the app to my root folder, or to my Movies folder, or I can mount the disk image every time. That's like putting a CD in to run a program, only virtual. That's a logical spatial metaphor unless you deliberately misread everything.

Now, Apple had a problem, which is: "How do we help people organize their apps?" They allowed for multiple solutions to this. The first is the installer, which is overkill. (Windows overuses this because they think usability isn't worth their time. As a result, users install crap on their computer.) The second is that an application can, with permission, move itself. The third is that they let developers modify the Finder window. That means you can write instructions telling people to move an application to the App folder, which you saw.

Isn't that great?! No password. Nothing special. They just gave you a disk that shows you both the application and the folder it ought to be in, and they let you drag it. It's brilliant!

 _Exactly what problem(s) does this dmg file address and why is it not needed in Windows?_

Amichail, I don't know you, so forgive me if this is impertinent, but you don't seem to have a clue about how Macs work. You don't seem to have put any research into the ideas behind OS X. You also exhibit an irrational pro- Windows bias.

I used Windows for seventeen years. In that time, I suffered no small amount of horrors thanks to the fucked-up system that is the executable file. Files that auto-execute slow up my computer. They run without asking and copy themselves all over my system. They release viruses. They encourage sloppy coding habits. Don't you _dare_ suggest that Windows' system doesn't require thinking. Get an 80-year-old, direct them to the download page for, say, Google Toolbar, which has a GOOD installer, and say nothing. See if they figure out how to download the executable, run it, and get it working. Internet Explorer has a fix by asking you immediately to run an EXE, but that leads to lots of nasty things getting executed by accident.

The Mac system is beautiful in its simplicity. I'll go so far as to accuse you of deliberately misunderstanding things to paint an anti-Mac situation, which is pretty irrational on my part, because I have such a love for the system, which works like this:

* You have a dock entry for Downloads for things you download. This bounces when you get a new downloaded item.

* Click that stack and it opens up so you can click the newest thing.

* If it's an app, it runs. It doesn't mess things up like an EXE because an app can't write to certain parts of your computer than an EXE can. That means that even if you launch an app, it can't do much to screw up your computer.

* The Applications folder is not magic. It just has a label for you to dump things. You don't ever need to use it. That said, the fact that there IS an Applications folder beats the pants off of Program Files.

* Some programs need more access to system files. They have an installer, which gives you more information about the application and asks you to enter a password.

* Programs that need more than a single package use a disk-mounted image, which is LIKE the shitty fucking programs that use shitty fucking zip to bundle a ReadMe on Windows. The difference is that on Mac, this fulfills a very useful work metaphor. Think of it like inserting a CD into your computer, only virtually. Just as your computer mounts the CD, so too does it mount the disk containing your various files.

Applications aren't DMGs. Applications are applications. The problem is that WINDOWS is fucked up. They let executables be both installers and actual programs, and their file handling is so appalling that people are never certain just where a program is. Is it that original exe? Is it somewhere in Program Files, which is a veritable wasteland? People get used to it after a decade of learning this twisted, bizarre, sad system, but that doesn't make it any less fucked.

So if I put in a CD and there's an application, and it gives me a big window with a shortcut to the Applications folder with an arrow saying "Drag this to this folder," and I do so, and then I eject the CD, wouldn't I be pretty damned stupid to assume that the application was broken? (Well, maybe in Windows, where it's still good work habits to make programs that require CDs to run, but in the rest of the world?)

DMGs don't add clutter. They're a Finder window. If I close it, they stay plugged in, because Apple's idea is that a window and an application should not be one and the same. Same goes for DMGs. If I close a CD's browser window in Windows, does that eject the CD? No. That would be very stupid.

Either you're very, very deluded thanks to overuse of Windows, or you're deliberately casting the Mac in a bad light, which I find despicable. I'm sorry for ranting - it's rude and possibly offensive to you - but at the same time, I simply can't imagine how you could find something wrong here unless you were going out of your way. You seem to have a thing for Windows 7, and I have sympathy for you, but in your last post and in this one you're going out of your way to disparage a very good system that makes things simple, and your defense is ignoring the fact that the Windows alternative to the Mac system is _exactly why Windows is as bad as it is._ You could have attacked the many failings of OS X, but you instead insulted something that it does better than Windows in every way.

<comment><AUTHOR> Expecting people to research how the Mac works just to install software is asking a bit too much.

Instead of taking my comments as an attack on the Mac, why not view them as first impressions that may be shared by potentially many other people?

<comment><USER2> I don't expect you to. I expect you to intuitively understand it, like pretty much everybody I've seen using a Mac does. The spatial metaphor is pretty easy to grasp, unless you're convinced that the executable is the only way to go, in which case your viewpoint is twisted.

 _Instead of taking my comments as an attack on the Mac, why not view them as first impressions that may be shared by potentially many other people?_

Because you're not making useful lists. I'm sorry if this offends you, but from my perspective you've been writing little half-posts about small things you don't like, without any backup. You're not giving screenshots or any sort of information, you're posting small snippets, and I don't consider that to be worth an HN post - even if you _are_ using this site for your blog.

Furthermore, I'm irritated that you posted this as a new post rather than as a comment on your last post, which could have been posted as a comment on your post before that. If you've got gripes, take your time and make a single good post, get pictures, phrase your ideas in a good way, and then post it all in one, so we can have one single discussion rather than a fractured one across a bunch of posts that come close to being flag-worthy by my standards.

<comment><AUTHOR> FYI, I still think dmg files are a bad idea.

BTW, vista and windows 7 won't let programs mess up the OS without your permission. And most programs -- properly written -- don't need to access any critical parts of the OS.

<comment><USER2> Funny, because my family Vistabox got pretty badly virused in a month's time. We thought we'd try to run it without antivirus.

Meanwhile, I'm nearing my year anniversary with my Mac, which has no viruses and still goes as quickly as it did on Day 1.

How are DMGs a bad idea? They do no wrong.

<comment><AUTHOR> Macs are great if you don't want to deal with viruses. No need to even run an antivirus program.

On Windows, you should run one and there are some excellent commercial ones you can use.

I've already explained why DMGs are bad. They are confusing and cause clutter.

<comment><USER2> Do DMGs cause more clutter for applications than Program Files does on Windows? If I want to find a specific program's exe then it's extremely time- consuming, versus opening either a DMG or the app folder and clicking the icon that's very prominent. No app has two app icons; some programs have multiple exes.

I'd argue that the need for commercial protection on Windows is a bad thing in and of itself, but I'm a little tired of this argument. We've each made our respective points.

<comment><AUTHOR> Finding stuff including executables is very easy under Windows. Just search for it just as you would with spotlight under the Mac. No need to browse through a start menu.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Just the other day I had to walk my mom through installing Firefox on a Mac. Trying to explain what to do was very enlightening.

As a power user I very much like the standard way of "installing" apps on OS X by dragging them from DMGs, but for the average user a basic installer would be easier.</comment>


Cryptome for sale with access log files from 1996 for $50M - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/Cryptomeorg/status/654512191148826624 <comment><USER2> _" Donate $10,000 for the authentic Cryptome Archive of 100,000 files from June 1996 to 14 October 2015 on 2 USBs (42.0GB)."_

1\. For $10,000, they can't afford one 64GB USB flash drive?

2\. Cryptome refers to USB flash drives as "USBs"?!</comment>


Ask HN: Have you used a virtual assistant? was it helpful? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Plenty of times. Absolutely. I think everything comes down to process. I always make sure I do the everything in the process a few times so I fully understand how it goes, and then from that I like to draft up an SOP (Standard Operating Procedures) for the assistant.

<comment><AUTHOR> let me know if you ever write an article on your process etc.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why did you take a first engineer role in a startup in the Bay Area? - <AUTHOR> It seems pretty common that first employees of a startup get ~1% of equity in the new company.
That 1% is easily diluted to ~0.5% after a few funding rounds, and even if the startup has an exit of 100m (within an optimistic 3-4 years), those first employees get ~500k, before taxes, and probably not all-cash. An even bigger exit is highly unlikely, but let's say 5%.
So my math says that a quite optimistic return is ~125-175k/year in 3-4 years (+ startup salary), for a 100m exit.
Assuming that really good engineers can get a senior/staff job at Google or other large corp, they can easily(?) get an offer that's 250-300k per year and that is guaranteed.
Working probably crazy hours for a startup, having more responsibility, and having only <5% chance of a financial win vs large corp doesn't really make sense to me, or at least doesn't seem rational.
So my question to first employees is what was the reason behind your decision? Is it only the small-company startup culture that's much more appealing, or is my math wrong?
disclaimer: I'm working as a first engineer in a European country, where salaries are nowhere close to the Bay Area salaries, but startup returns could be similar, probably chances are thinner. Also I'm well above 1% in the startup. <comment><USER3> I did this before and it made sense and was fun at the time.

1) I wasn't able to get a job at Google, was a freelancer working out of coffee shops in Portland, would fail any algo test. A six figure windfall was a big deal to me at the time (2012), and still is.

2) Got an opportunity to work on a startup with a close knit group who was easy to work with, fun to party with, was able to work remotely and fly to SF periodically to sync up and go out. The people involved had a great track record. No BS.

3) The hours weren't that crazy, the project was not that complicated, and it only took a couple years. It was an overall fun experience that I have fond memories of. YMMV.

</comment><comment><USER4> Remember that also the company has a 98%+ chance of failing or exiting without a huge growth in valuation.

Unless you're spectacularly good at picking them, doing this on a repeated basis is not going to give good financial returns. But that's not the only reason people choose to do things.

Taking a first employee role once or twice is a great way to learn a LOT about business and leadership and architecture and a ton of other things. It's also a great way to get a title on your resume that you might not otherwise.

Some folks do so repeatedly because they prefer the environment or the green- field work or would rather build MVPs and explore new possibilities than extend or polish software that needs to be stable and well tested, etc.

Occasionally someone deeply buys into the mission.

</comment><comment><USER5> I haven't done it but I would say dreaming of a scenario like this, [https://www.businessinsider.com/ryan-graves-uber-tweet- caree...](https://www.businessinsider.com/ryan-graves-uber-tweet- career-2017-8), would motivate a lot of people.

Also when you are building something new, there is a rush that is hard to quantify.

</comment><comment><USER6> The order of magnitude is important. In your example it's a windfall. But considering the dilution with exits at 1b or 10b it's a different story - <USER2> exit will surely be millions.

</comment><comment><USER7> 1% is not common. 1% is quite the upper band.</comment>


Multiple New Polls Show Americans Reject Wholesale NSA Domestic Spying - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/06/multiple-new-polls-show-americans-reject-wholesale-nsa-domestic-spying

<comment><USER2> >"....In the 1950s and 60s, the NSA spied on all telegrams entering and exiting the country. The egregious actions were only uncovered after Congress set up an independent investgation called the Church Committee in the 1970s after Watergate. When the American public learned about NSA's actions, they demanded change. And the Church Committee delivered it by providing more information about the programs and by curtailing the spying."

It seems late to bring up the original NSA charter for the first time I've seen this past week, but since it's origin, isn't this what the NSA was defined to do? My understanding was the NSA watches offshore, the FBI our home turf, and for other domestic surveillance while staying within its charter, the work-around was we had the Brits do it.</comment>


Ask HN: What's your take on using ads for non-paying users? - <AUTHOR>

I'm working with a startup on rolling out a sweet product. In our last meeting we spoke about differentiators for premium accounts and what we could offer to make it worth the money. Obviously, the notion of ads came up for free accounts (which would be disabled if you had a paid account).
I'm not a fan or flashy ads or crap like that. I feel it breaks the "feel" of the simple and clean website we have. I was thinking about using a service which allowed me to use text-only ads and style them in such a way that they fit into the website a lot more. Then I realized I've never seen a startup website that had ads at all.
Is this a good idea? The ads aren't meant to be a major revenue stream, they would pretty much only be introduced to "sweeten" the paid plan. <comment><USER2> No, thats a bad idea if the only reason you're adding ads is to make the free plan worse.

If you're developing a SaaS there should be plenty of ways to introduce new features for paid users, otherwise, drop the free plan and let users try out your service 30 days for free.

</comment><comment><USER3> If you can tell us about your customer segment, we would be better able to give you suggestions.

As an example, ads do not work very well for a highly technical crowd, like the ones using HN, but might work wonderfully for others.</comment>


Ditching the Shared Login - <AUTHOR> https://segment.com/blog/ditching-the-shared-user <comment><AUTHOR> Before anyone asks why we didn't use SSH certificate authentication, it's because it doesn't provide for separate identifiable logins with respect to the target. A certificate authority can be a choke point for access control, but in every setup I've ever seen (e.g. Netflix BLESS) the access is still granted to a shared user.

You can still audit this way, but it involves joining audit logs with login logs; we found this less appealing than having the user's individual login ID directly in the audit trail generated by auditd, sudo, etc.</comment>


Papers Facing Worst Year for Ad Revenue  - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/23/business/media/23paper.html?_r=1&ref=business&oref=login

<comment><USER2> I am one of two web developers hired into The Palm Beach Post newsroom since August 2007. Since then, the paper has also procured (received?) a new Publisher (think President/CEO) and a new Internet General Manager (think CIO). I can't really say much more than that, but I can say that it's been a really great learning experience as I watch the company go through this 'change'.

The upside for myself and my colleague professionally is that we are in fact the _only_ two web developers here at this point, and we've been given incredible liberty to develop new products (we're using Python/GeoDjango to do so). Traditionally, all web products have been created by a sister company, but the tendency now is for newspapers to take matters into their own hands, as the corporate mothership's Java engineers fail to keep up with the demands being placed upon them (and really, is it any wonder?).

In short: want a lot of freedom and opportunity? Consider a declining newspaper.

</comment><comment><USER3> Newspapers could have a significant competitive advantage over Craigslist. For one thing, since they charge, they are more spam-proof. If I were a paper, I would develop a web app that would easily and painlessly post an ad in both the newspaper, the newspaper's online site, and on Craigslist simultaneously.</comment>


Scientists pull an about face on global warming - <AUTHOR> http://www.calgaryherald.com/business/Scientists%20pull%20about%20face%20global%20warming/2010571/story.html <comment><USER2> oh! which school did this scientist study? he is bad at physics! If ice on poles starts melting what else does he expect? it is obvious that temperature of sea will decrease! point is water level is increasing and not that "temperature is increasing"</comment>