'Remote control' contraceptive chip available 'by 2018' - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-28193720 <comment><USER2> I'm holding out for Vasalgel. It was featured a while back in Wired and I've been following it since: [http://www.parsemusfoundation.org/vasalgel- home/](http://www.parsemusfoundation.org/vasalgel-home/)

That being said, I'm glad more options are being explored.

<comment><USER3> That's what I'm looking forward to. Being able to have more control over contraception without using condoms is great (I'm in a long term relationship with my very loving girlfriend, but we still worry at times) IMO.

What I'm interested in is whether this implantable chip will take off, considering that IIRC oral contraceptives are still used far more than other types (like the injections or the implant) despite being less effective?

<comment><USER4> You know, condoms aren't solely used as a contraceptive, there's thing called...HIV, you may have heard of it. Not to mention various other STDs.

<comment><USER3> Yes, I do know that which is why I qualified my own personal situation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is apparently a month-old announcement, and is available from many sources that don't inject quite so much editorial bias.

<comment><USER6> "What are your thoughts on this implantable chip? Does it raise concern? Do you think that this technology is a positive innovation? Do you think there could possibly be some ulterior intentions behind the production of this technology?"

Indeed, much better off going elsewhere to read about this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is pretty awesome. But do I wonder if something like this will be implanted by default at some point in human history and only removed when certain specifications are met.

I don't know if that would be bad or good. Looking around the world I'm not sure I feel it would be all bad. But yes.. abuse potential and _who decides... I know....

<comment><USER8> Implanting at birth, activating at a suitable marker point after puberty (a sensor which monitors normal progesterone levels would actually be fine for this) and de-activated when a women wants to conceive.

It'd be the most important bit of social policy in human history, seeing as how reproductive control and economic outcomes for women are very closely linked.

Something like this applied en masse in developing nations would also directly save a lot of lives.

<comment><USER9> <puts the tinfoil hat on> And then you need to get a deactivation code from the government to disable the implant to conceive. So the government gets the power to decide who can have children. This concept sounds very enticing and I think it would actually be a good idea,if not for the fact that I don't think anyone should hold that power over other people, even if it's in best intentions.

<comment><USER8> I see you've left out the implicit anti-tamper device that explodes and kills you. _Obviously_ we'd just put that in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The remote control bit worries me. Anything that can be wirelessly controlled can have a weakness that can be exploited at worst or monitored at best. It's not infeasible to have detectors to monitor emanations yielding a whole new swath of privacy issues. No one else needs to know what type of medication you're on.

<comment><USER11> That's what got me too. No matter what kind of encryption used, if someone records a person turning it off once, it can use that signal to turn off anytime he wants possibly sabotaging the whole thing. But it's not a problem with this product, it's just a general cryptography problem. Even military drones have it.

<comment><USER12> That's a drastic assumption to make. Replay attacks[1] are a well known problem, and countermeasures can be implemented relatively simply. To say that they would work "no matter what kind of encryption is used" is completely false FUD. I'd worry more about general incompetence.

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> there are a lot of things one would like to control from his/her Android. For example specific neurotransmitter level (right now it is done by drugs (legal and illegal)) by remotely commanding the chip to increase release or to stop releasing it. Reminds about Mr Data turning his emotions chip off.

<comment><USER14> We joke about intravenous coffee, but I'd actually kind of like a chip that gave me a little caffeine injection 20 minutes before my alarm went off in the morning.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Rather than releasing hormones into the entire bloodstream, isn't it possible to implant this closer to the reproductive system so that it can affect ovulation more directly? With the right sensors, it might even be possible to detect the ovulation event and activate only during that time period?

</comment><comment><USER16> Given our track record with securing other implanted technology like pacemakers and insulin pumps, the thought of this is pretty terrifying. What happens when someone hacks your chip and tells it to release the entire dosage at once?

<comment><USER17> Regardless of the security, pacemakers and insulin pumps have led to an enormous quality of life improvement for an enormous number of people so that is perhaps not the comparison you want to making for the affect you want to effect.

<comment><USER18> > pacemakers and insulin pumps have led to an enormous quality of life

Are you comparing the quality-of-life boost that pacemakers and insulin pumps give you to something like contraception? Maybe I'm just misinformed, but contraceptives can even come in pill form nowadays. How does going from "taking a pill" => "implanted pump" even compare (especially since the other two are about life-threatening issues)?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> what happens if the implant sustains physical damage due to injury, etc? then a 16-year supply of contraceptive gets administered in a single dose? pretty scary.

hopefully there's some form of neutralizer that can be triggered voluntarily and automatically if damage is sustained. one of those things that's gotta be failsafe. otherwise a trip to the ER for extraction?

</comment><comment><USER20> it's all nice until the protective seal bursts in someone, releasing "10 decades of a hormone" at once

</comment><comment><USER21> [edit] I've removed my comment as I'm not sure just how to express what I want to say.

<comment><USER22> There is not a single good argument to not tell them.

Altering someone's hormones so severely without their knowledge and consent is abuse plain and simple.

<comment><USER18> I'm not sure that the parent poster was being serious, but I imagine the view is that if you give such a thing to a teen, that they may feel it reduces the risks associated with sex enough that they will be willing to have loads of unprotected sex. I could argue that this is true to some extent[1], but probably no more so than with current contraceptives.

[1] Apparently things like oral sex and anal sex are infinitely more popular nowadays because they are seen as ways to have sex without getting pregnant (even though it doesn't reduce the STD risk).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> It's like DRM for your vagina!

</comment><comment><USER24> "Creates" is not normally used in the future tense.

</comment><comment><USER25> Blog spam, original article: [http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-28193720](http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-28193720)

<comment><USER26> Thanks. Changed to that from [http://earthweareone.com/bill-gates-foundation- announces-imp...](http://earthweareone.com/bill-gates-foundation-announces- implantable-remote-controlled-contraceptive-microchip-that-can-last-up- to-16-years/).

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Might seem pedantic but its the 'Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation', not the Bill Gates

</comment><comment><USER28> Am I the only one that thinks this is evil and scary?

I do hope governments rule against this kind of technology as extremely prone to the abuse of human rights. If you think arranged marriages are bad, what about 100% out-of-your-hands, in-your-parents 'arranged fertility'?

<comment><USER7> I'm not sure the freedom to reproduce as much as one wants under all circumstances is an inalienable human right. Others might feel differently.

<comment><USER13> >an inalienable human right

does such thing exists at all?

<comment><USER7> In biological reality... probably not. But in theory, yes.

For instance, the UN declaration of human rights.

[http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/](http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/)

It's interesting that this document states the ADULT individuals who are MARRIED have the right to found a family. So not even the UN believes people have a universal right to procreation at any age or under any circumstances.

My personal feelings are mixed. I'm not a fan of traditional marriage. It appears broken in the west at least. But, I think the initial idea, the one upheld in this document and in traditional civilization is valid. When people are in a position to support and care for children, yes, I believe they have a right to have them. Otherwise they do the children and society in general no favors by having them.

How many children should people be allowed to have? Should we have people like the Duggers taking fertility drugs to have 20 kids? What if a lot of people decided to do this? What if cloning became easy? What if someone decided to lab produce 10,000 children using sperm and eggs from a select group of doners? Do they have this right? The issue is complex and I don't know the answers. But I do see a lot of problems that result from wanton reproduction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> There are wonderful alternatives to pharmaceutical contraception, barrier methods and surgical sterilization, not to mention chemical and surgical abortion.

I would invite readers here to learn about modern NFP and to help spread the word:

[http://www.usccb.org/issues-and-action/marriage-and- family/n...](http://www.usccb.org/issues-and-action/marriage-and- family/natural-family-planning/what-is-nfp/nfp-basic-information.cfm)

EDIT: expanded my "alternatives to" list per the observation of another reader. Thanks, jjoonathan!

<comment><USER30> Alternative? Yes. Wonderful? Only if you stigmatize the sexual behaviors incompatible with NFP, conveniently making it impossible to complain about.

EDIT: You also forgot to mention condoms which don't alter the natural functioning of your body, allow for a wider range of sexual expression, and serve as a stronger barrier against STD transmission than NFP. What was your complaint against condoms again?

> Marriage is a gift from God

Oh, right.

<comment><USER29> Well, there are other good websites from which to learn about modern NFP. For example:

[http://www.thebillingsovulationmethod.org/](http://www.thebillingsovulationmethod.org/)

Just skip the USCCB's writeup if it's not your cup of tea.</comment></comment></comment>


How to Avoid Mediocre Co-Founders (2010) - <AUTHOR> http://ycombinator.posterous.com/how-to-avoid-mediocre-co-founders-0

<comment><USER2> Am I the only one annoyed by the whole A player, B player, C player mini-meme?

It's really, really hard to tell the difference between an A player and a B player unless you've worked with them or have known them a long-time. Even then, their contribution can be highly distorted by situation, perception, and personal bias (e.g. Moneyball).

So the advice only works in those few situations where you know someone is a B-player... in which case the advice really reduces down to the obvious: don't hire shitty people.

<comment><USER3> Agreed - i call it Inches vs seven league boots - it's easy to tell the difference between someone who makes regular marginal improvements (inches forwards) and someone who adds nothing, but impossible to tell the difference between a loser and a game changed until they change the game.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This always strikes me as great advice that runs slap bang into (her husbands) Blub Paradox. How can you tell someone is better or smarter than you?

I have worked out its about openness - in most modern corporate worlds fudging it till you get it is common and fear tends to rule - if they find out I don't know I will be fired.

But allow or force openness and suddenly there is an explosion of "we'll I don't know either let's experiment"

Take off the pressure of delivering arbitrary tasks and instead allow a coder to sculpt - cut away the bits not needed to reveal the hidden statue as it were and you have the makings of a team of A performers - even if thy looked b style before</comment>


Do we need a new PDF reader? - <AUTHOR>

I'm not satisfied with PDF readers specially on my linux machine and for academic work. Recently Mendeley and Readcube came to life but they focus on things other than the reader itself (Plus Readcube doesn't support Linux).<p>Are you satisfied with current readers? What are your needs? <comment><USER2> 1\. PDF's have become a nasty vector for exploits. Thank you Adobe. Need a viewer that can address this problem. My suggestion: a "viewer" that decompiles PDF's to Postscript, deletes any potentially harmful Postscript and then recompiles to a simple, safe early version PDF, all in one shot. I'm working something like this for myself using Ghostscript, but someone with more skill really needs to tackle this problem.

2\. Ever tried to read/skim 100's of PDF's in rapid succession? (A common task if you are doing academic research.) It's near impossible. By comparison to reading text documents or viewing images, reading lots of PDF's is SLOW. Need a viewer that can view PDF's as fast as we can view text documents in pagers like less or images in viewers like feh. My suggestion: a viewer that extracts each page as an image and then views the PDF's as a series of images. (Essentially making reading them the job of an image viewer.) The trick is getting the sizing and resolution right, and dealing with hundreds if not thousands of extracted images.

PDF is great for printing. It also looks great on a screen (e.g. for casual, occasional reading, or presentations to an audience). But for reading lots of academic papers or any sort of document in bulk, PDF is absolutely terrible.

Postscript development is really an underappreciated area, I think. How does Apple achieve such lovely text on their displays? I could be wrong but I have always had a hunch their expertise in Postscript plays a role. They were once Postscript pioneers... remember the LaserWriter?

</comment><comment><USER3> All my 'needs' are met so here are some wants. Rendering pdfs was solved long ago, so I'm not sure what distinction you see between Mendeley and 'the reader itself'. It's been a while since I used Mendeley, but it wasn't perfect.

References would be best done a la Wikipedia, hover to see details, click to follow [the coup de grace here would be taking the pdf footnote text, extract a URL/search query, attempt to download a pdf, auto-parse it, file it, open it, browse back and forward like a browser, maintaining scroll position].

A scroll marker that helps you keep position, a la Readability. Better integration w/ file managers would be good, but replacing features is okay. Managing pdfs is a more specific workflow than managing 'files': a tree- explorer to see all pdfs in which folders (no other files), a tree of recently viewed items (+ nesting for reference-hopping, etc). All the auto-parsing magic (Title, Author..) is great but I would not reinvent it.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not about rendering PDFs. It's about a good software that uses pdf rendering engines to deliver great functionality. Your `wants` reflects features missing in current readers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> My 2-cents: highlighting and extracting my notes is fundamental for me. The best PDF readers that I have found are:

OSX: Skim (with an honourably mention to DevonThink) iPad: PDFExpress

</comment><comment><USER5> For windows, SumatraPDF is great.

<comment><USER6> It's great, but it was a little greater before they added copy/paste protection ([https://code.google.com/p/sumatrapdf/issues/detail?id=461](https://code.google.com/p/sumatrapdf/issues/detail?id=461)).

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The only PDF reader I have installed is Chrome, and I'm pretty happy with it.

</comment><comment><USER8> Have you seen PDFjs ? (Javascript PDF reader from Moz)

</comment><comment><USER9> what specific needs do you have that aren't met?

<comment><AUTHOR> Among issues, I can point to two:

Usually I should scroll down to the end to see references and then back to top to continue reading, life could be a lot easier if readers could parse references and show them in the sidebar or split the view so I could scroll down the bottom pane.

I can not repeatedly select a portion of text, move to toolbar, click on Annotation, select Highlight, in order to highlight a sentence! I wish readers had better support for keyboard or at least used modern UI/UX techniques.</comment></comment>


Facebook Has Been Hacked. What Will You Do? - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook-has-been-hacked-what-will-you-do.php <comment><USER2> Looks like some guy trying to drum up traffic about something he knows nothing about, and can provide no information about.</comment>


Is It Legal to Fine Customers for Negative Online Reviews? - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2014/08/05/union_street_guest_house_is_it_legal_to_fine_consumers_for_negative_online.html

<comment> zenith-mf-1 This is a case happened recently in France: a Blogger Fined $3,400 for Her Negative Restaurant Review: [http://eater.com/archives/2014/07/11/food- blogger-fined-3400...](http://eater.com/archives/2014/07/11/food-blogger- fined-3400-for-writing-negative-restaurant-review.php)

[http://www.thelocal.fr/20140711/blogger-fined-for- insulting-...](http://www.thelocal.fr/20140711/blogger-fined-for-insulting- restaurant-review)</comment>


The gospel of dogfooding. Can I hear an Amen, brother? - <AUTHOR> https://read.acloud.guru/the-gospel-of-dogfooding-can-i-hear-an-amen-brother-1af4d82cf221 <comment><AUTHOR> Don't you dare inflict the software, the service, the product onto your customers until you have forced your own employees to use it to get their work done, until you've bet your own company, your own employees' success, on its quality. Put your money where your mouth is. Eat your own dog food.</comment>


Removal of remote screen control in Slack Calls - <AUTHOR> https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/360022908874#how-we-came-to-our-decision <comment><USER2> 1\. We used Screen hero for free 2\. Slack then integrated it and we had to pay to use the Screen hero feature 3\. Now they kill the feature we use everyday to pairprogram. The reason why we even pay for slack.

Could you at least enable Screen hero again?</comment>


Telize is shutting down - <AUTHOR> http://www.cambus.net/adventures-in-running-a-free-public-api/ <comment><USER2> This was the impetus to develop my own self-hosted GeoIP server: [https://github.com/kz26/balise](https://github.com/kz26/balise)

It seems that self-hosting is the way to go - there's simply no incentive to run a free public API due to freeloaders and the potential for abuse. Even if you charge for it I would be surprised if any significant amount of money was made.</comment>


Zork and the Z-Machine: Bringing the Mainframe to 8-Bit Home Computers - <AUTHOR> https://hackaday.com/2019/05/22/zork-and-the-z-machine-bringing-the-mainframe-to-8-bit-home-computers/ <comment><USER2> One can also try out the original mainframe/PDP-10 version of Zork, running the original MDL code, on a modern computer, see: [https://gitlab.com/emacsomancer/confusion- mdl](https://gitlab.com/emacsomancer/confusion-mdl) for relevant source for the MDL interpreter / [https://babbagefiles.xyz/zork- confusion/](https://babbagefiles.xyz/zork-confusion/) for discussion.

</comment><comment><USER3> > In Adventure, each room has a numeric ID, with an associated description in > a table. Another table defines its short description. Another table lists > which rooms lie relative to other rooms using their numeric IDs. This means > that in order to add a room, one has to modify all of these tables, taking > care not to cause any issues with those changes.

Our tooling is better now, but this basically describes the ECS model. There is nothing new under the sun...

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

</comment><comment><USER4> text-to-speech synthesis + voice recognition can revive text based adventures as lightweight audio only games.

the best immersion engine is human imagination. a world in which literary fiction becomes interactive content, and authors begin to write for their work to be performed - to be read out loud and be repeatable with hidden narrative structures - creates an interesting alternative to the current direction the video game industry is going (total artificial immersion).

imagine setting a game in a real city and having players play through a day, mixing real physical locations and objects with virtual audio characters and allowing for the relatively low-tech solution of only engaging the one sense artificially but all other senses in reality to create a type of spacial- temporal ambiguity, the inversion of immersion.

would also be great for guided tours, recommending people places to visit, as a teaching aid and a typical shift away from reading as the primary mechanism our civilization is geared around which is a specialized skill that requires years of training and teaches bad habits around attention, severely limiting memory retention and creating unrealistic freedom when it comes to conveying information, when in the world things only happen once one way, in the artificial world of permanent words time stops to flow and the authors intent can be masked and layered behind tricks and tactics difficult to discern, it is much harder to lie and distort things in person.

</comment><comment><USER5> I grew up in the era of the TRS-80 and Apple II. I was also an oddity among my friends who had computers, because I preferred the text based games from Infocom over the graphical games. I played a lot of Zork, and Wishbringer, as well as Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy, which was probably my favorite.

<comment><USER6> I'm still an oddity among my friends for playing Nethack, Dwarf Fortress, and various MUDs over the current graphical offerings. Something about those games and the level of detail afforded to being purely in text, without the graphical overhead, makes them endlessly entertaining and full of depth to me.

Not to say there aren't some great games out there today that manage both, like Rimworld for example.

<comment><USER7> Yea, I almost exclusively do text games these days.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I managed to get zork to run on an esp32. well, it got as far as printing the first room and then crashed.

</comment><comment><USER9> Haha that Zork TRS-80 cover art brought me back

</comment><comment><USER10> Stopped reading here, right at the beginning:

> Zork, a text-based adventure game, was the Fortnite of its time.

<comment><USER11> And what's your objection? Zork good Fortnite bad?

<comment><USER12> I didn't stop at that sentence, but I can understand the latter sentiment. Zork was a revolutionary game, Fortnite is a cartoon shooter. Other than both games being popular there is simply no comparison between the two in my mind.

<comment><USER13> Article author here. I get why people trip over that comparison. Unfortunately it wasn't added by myself, nor part of the original draft. The comparison is (somewhat) obviously intended to make it clear that it was a super-popular game.

That said, I'm glad that people like the rest of the article :)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


GOP wants you to retaliate against hackers, but should you? - <AUTHOR> http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/national/national-security/article91288252.html <comment><AUTHOR> A better title might be:

GOP platform calls for 'self-defense ("hack back") right' for hacked businesses.

edit: the platform language is at the bottom of page 53 of:

[https://prod-static-ngop- pbl.s3.amazonaws.com/media/document...](https://prod-static-ngop- pbl.s3.amazonaws.com/media/documents/DRAFT_12_FINAL\[1\]-ben_1468872234.pdf)

Anyone who has experienced a "joe job" will probably agree that this is perhaps one of the worst suggestions about computer security in recent years.

Backups, firewalls, and VPNs are defense.

Revenge is not defense.</comment>


Home Sec is to meet Facebook bosses to ask why it does not have a 'panic button' - <AUTHOR> http://news.sky.com/skynews/Home/UK-News/Home-Secretary-Demands-To-Know-Why-Social-Networking-Site-Facebook-Has-No-Panic-Button-For-Children/Article/201003315575730?lpos=UK_News_Carousel_Region_1&lid=ARTICLE_15575730_Home_Secretary_Demands_To_Know_Why_Social_Networking_Site_Facebook_Has_No_Panic_Button_For_Children

<comment><USER2> Is it just in the UK that people are increasingly unwilling or unable to take responsibility for their actions, or for their failure to educate their own children?!

Yes, protect the children and all that, but where's the common sense? Unless this is shoddy reporting by Sky, the idea of a panic button mechanism shows amazing ignorance of the internet and its ways by the Home Sec (now, there's a surprise!).

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> As always, the government seem to get everything completely wrong with regards to technology.

Certainly not shoddy reporting by Sky, in my opinion. The headline was even spoken with slight irony on TV. haha.</comment>


Ask HN: anyone here moved from academia to corporate? - <AUTHOR>

After a dedicated career in university I am now trying to get a job as assistant professor (neuroscience) but the market is a bitch and so far has been really difficult despite the fact I have a damn good CV.
I am starting to consider that maybe I should take this as opportunity to explore new ways in life. I am thinking doing something completely unrelated to acquire new skills (and maybe some money) and then start something by myself again. I met someone who works for McKinsey recently and I am tempted to give it a try.
Has anyone here done a similar step? Namely, realizing that a career in university may not be the best for them and explore new area? How did it  end up? <comment><USER3> Not sure it will help, but I had two three-year post-doc contracts. During the second I was doing external consultancy, and as my University contract was coming to an end, the company with whom I worked most closely offered me a job, which I took.

After many mergers, split offs and other coporate movements, I (and some colleagues) did a management buyout, so now I (part) own the descendant.

It's working well for me, but I think my position is a bit unusual.

Still, if you want to get into the commercial world, see if you can do some external consultancy while still employed by the University. They will want a cut, but it will give you a taste of what's wanted, and what it's like.

<comment><AUTHOR> I cannot really do that because I've _just_ finished my first postdoc. Despite scientifically it went extremely well, my contract got terminated pretty much the moment I told my advisor I wanted to look for a position as assistant professor (They don't like people moving on to become their competitors, I guess. Don't get me started with what are the things I hate about academia).

I have been thinking of starting an internet business of mine in the past year but did not get far yet because I though it would feel more like a "plan B" than a genuine choice and I wanted first to make sure I'd do it with the highest motivation.

Thanks for your view.

<comment><USER4> Hmmm; in the corporate world a position akin to a postdoc's would require no more than the standard two weeks notice.

Given the nature of the work and the theory of collegiality I'd expect things to be different, but what would you say is expected from postdocs? I guess seeking the position of professor is not something you'd be able to keep secret, if for no other reason than that the hiring institution would expect to talk to your current adviser and so on.

Maybe it's a good thing I got sidelined into a sordid life of programming ^_^.

Good luck! Finances forced me to change careers after my freshman year in college, but that was at a time when programming and system administration work was very hot (1980) and I had the skills for the former and the foundation for the latter. Today, I don't recommend a career in these areas unless you have a calling, and it doesn't sound like that's the case for you.

<comment><AUTHOR> Getting a job as professor can be difficult. There is a strong competition and it may take up to a year, sometimes more. Scientific etiquette usually says that your supervisor will support you during that time if they can, by allowing you to stay in the lab and keep doing research although at slower pace due to the traveling the job seek involves. In fact, advisors actually gain from postdocs finding good positions because it's the best publicity to attract good people in the future.

One thing that I learnd from my time doing research is that science is not moving so fast and so well because of the people; au contraire! It's because of the scientific method. The Galileian method is the best thing man ever came out with. Take a bunch of jerks, make them work in (at least loose) accordance to scientific method and they'll do amazing stuff.

<comment><USER5> Sounds like you had a bad experience. Unless you're completely fed up, I would try finding a lab doing stuff that truly inspires you. They are out there and with some folks pursuing ventures simultaneously - see folks like Ed Boyden and John Donoghue, for instance.

If you can't find any research you still find exciting, then it may be time to cut the cord and flee the tower.

<comment><AUTHOR> I did have bad experience(s) with people but it doesn't mean I don't love what I was doing. I am actually very good at my job and find excitement very easily. I am not keen at doing just another postdoc though, simply because I don't need it (unless I decide to switch field completely).

There are certain things in academic science that I think simply don't work the way they should. I'd be very happy to try to change them but I am not willing to cope with them anymore.

May I ask you what is your main job right now? Is it your startup? The lab? Or something else? I find your split position - academy and outer world - <USER2> interesting. I'll send you an email in the next days, if you don't mind getting in touch.

<comment><USER6> I can relate with you since a few years ago, after 5.5 years of Postdoc in Theoretical Physics I decided to leave academia. I was fed up with the system and tired of begging for a job. So I moved to IT and I am a programmer right now. I had to start everything from scratch again and throw out of the window 15 years of study. The good thing is that now I have a decent job, I got married and I am finishing to pay my mortgage. Most of my collegues are Physicists too so the environment I am working on is not really different than before. Of course the job is quite different but people are more important than the job, as you know. Good luck!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm in exactly the same boat - finished my PhD in cognitive neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania, now a postdoc, also at Penn, and want out. Funnily enough I'm also looking at things like McKinsey and BCG, but they hire on a yearly basis only - as in, I couldn't even get an interview until September 2010, and they wouldn't be making a hiring decision until January 2011.

I'd love to chat with you about this - send me an email to my username at 3e.org.

<comment><USER5> Small world on these pipes!

It all depends on your interests and tolerance for risk. I've never cut the umbilical cord because I still enjoy my research. Being a visiting scientist has allowed me to keep a toehold in the academy and still push out papers. But I have needed more extended periods for ideas I wanted to pursue that everyday research didn't allow. I'm biased but the Boston area is perhaps one of the best places to try to turn research into action but it's less a startup culture, it seems, than CA.

Where possible you might consider lateral moves into fields that could benefit from the skills and concepts you've been thinking about but that are closer to industry. A clean break might feel more freeing however. That's where your current interests come in. If you spin off of your current work you'll probably have an easier time landing on your feet into a related field (e.g., computational vision and robotics?) or startup (e.g., lumosity.com). If you stay in your current position you can try some classes in new fields. Rely on the strengths you have there. See if you're interested in the business/finance side by auditing courses at Wharton (or your business school, crocowhile). Or sample research in bioengineering etc. A big university is a great place to reorient and by connecting with like minds. After all, that's what got you on your current path. Then again, if you see that as part of the problem, then a clean break may be necessary.

Honestly, the more I've been talking to people outside of the bubble, the more I've been seeing the bubble. But it's been a slow process of self-discovery for me. How quickly you move will probably depend on how much urgency you feel for a change. And how cheaply you live will determine how long you can live free to pursue your own ideas. YC and similar programs (DreamIT in Philly) seem like a really good way to develop any ideas you may be interested in pursuing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Many good answers here already.

What I can add is that having learned, worked or teached other parts of the corporate environment, say management, accounting, economics, entrepreneurship, public relations, which can be found in the corporate world will make the entry much more easier.

Knowing something of the above will help you move faster and the hurdle 'to learn on the job' is not there. But still be able to apply insight of (say neuroscience) to your job.

And consultancies aren't the only ones who are looking for outsiders to their business. Small companies and start-ups are much more open to people (IMHO) with a different profile but obviously in the last third part of the IQ spectrum. Smart people with a can do attitude are always an asset.

</comment><comment><USER9> Consider applying here:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Wills_Neuroscience_Instit...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Wills_Neuroscience_Institute#Redwood_Center_for_Theoretical_Neuroscience)

They'll understand that the market is trouble, and Jeff Hawkens (and presumably many of his employees) have had one foot in both doors for a while.</comment>


To Kill an API - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@Bootstrapped_CEO/to-kill-an-api-1a7055002ee7 <comment><USER2> Anyone know if Stormpath is providing professional services to help with migration to Okta?</comment>


Digital exchange loses $137M as founder takes passwords to the grave - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/02/digital-exchange-loses-137-million-as-founder-takes-passwords-to-the-grave/%3famp=1 <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19060985](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19060985)

170+ points</comment>


Upcoming changes to our CDN for GitLab.com - <AUTHOR> https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2020/01/16/gitlab-changes-to-cloudflare/ <comment><USER2> Is anyone else getting worried about the amount of the internet that is proxied through cloudflare?

<comment><USER3> As opposed to the amount of the internet hosted by Amazon?

Like, I understand the argument, I'm just not sure why we get angsty about one type of market dominance and not another.

<comment><USER4> Amazon has no control over who can visit what website, for the most part. They just host your site. Cloudflare on the other hands acts more like a gatekeeper. They have more control over who can visit.

<comment><USER5> Unless you're managing the webserver process yourself, Amazon has the exact same level of control over who can visit your website as Cloudflare.

When you're managing the webserver yourself, they can still filter by IP as they run the network. With a bit more effort (but this feels unlikely to be happening wide-scale), they can still transparently MITM your connections as the private keys are still stored on their infrastructure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wonder how much Fastly's pricing impacted this?

OT but my clients are small players (10s of GB traffic a month); but they value availability and low latency for their dynamic content. Fastly (and varnish) are ideal for this, but every time I talk to Fastly about services beyond the PAYG-CDN it's "min $2k/month", "$5k/month + fees".

I'd rather use them than Cloudflare, I've been accused of being a walking advert for Fastly - but they are pushing me towards other providers and proving actively hostile to small clients.

Good for them if they are raking it in from enterprise customers. But AWS manages to cater for both ends of the market, and it's a shame to see good services price themselves into "enterprise-only" territory.

<comment><USER7> There's a comment below from a Gitlab employee that mentions the breadth of the Cloudflare feature set as being key: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22073753](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22073753)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Does this mean GitLab.com will become unusable via Tor?

[https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en- us/articles/203306930-U...](https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en- us/articles/203306930-Understanding-Cloudflare-Tor-support-and-Onion-Routing)

<comment><USER9> That is a very good question.

In general, what you can expect to see when visiting a Cloudflare site via Tor is a CAPTCHA challenge to authenticate your browser to show you're not a bot.

As to whether we can enable the `Onion Routing` setting, which would cause your browser to connect to Cloudflare via Tor and not via an exit-node, I don't know if we may enable it. There might be some compliance issues with that, which may prevent us from enabling that.

I have however created an issue on this for further investigation whether that might be possible: [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/gl- infra/infrastructure/issues...](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/gl- infra/infrastructure/issues/8954)

<comment><USER7> If you're using TBB then you should NOT expect to see a CAPTCHA from Cloudflare at all. Unless the customer specifically wants to challenge Tor users we do not challenge them just because they use TBB.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> What are the privacy implications of this? Will Cloudflare be able to see GitLab traffic? Was/is Fastly able to before? And is there any reason to trust one over the other?

<comment><USER11> I trust Cloudflare a whole lot more than Gitlab. CF makes all the right noises around privacy for their 184.108.40.206 service, for example.

Gitlab is still the team that didn't notice that three of their three independent backup mechanisms had not been working for weeks to months. And while wholly cloning Github is legal, I started having serious doubts about their ethical instincts when they repeatedly tried to incite people against Github for cloning minor features.

Beyond that: it depends. I tend to believe large vendors are worse for privacy of generic consumers, because they have the scale where it pays off to sell data or do "big data" analysis. They are better for individual high-value targets because they have more. to lose, and less to win, relative to whatever they could expect by screwing you over. Protection against rogue employees is also something that happens in larger teams, if at all.

<comment><USER12> > Gitlab is still the team that ...

I just don't get why the internet neither forgets nor forgives. A startup in it's early days makes mistakes, the only real mistake Gitlab made was be fully transparent about theirs.

You vouch for CF (and no beef against them), but you know nothing of their internal privacy or reliability pitfalls. That warm fuzzy feeling you have about CF is a result of their carefully groomed PR coupled with 0% opacity on internals. Again, not saying CF has any issues, but if they did, you wouldn't know

<comment><USER13> > I just don't get why the internet neither forgets nor forgives.

Trust takes a lifetime to build and a moment to collapse.

<comment><USER14> Humans in their first few years of life are totally untrustworthy, yet most adults can be trusted. That falsifies your theory of trust. Do you want modify it to accommodate young people and/or young companies?

EDIT: toned down

<comment><USER15> How does that falsify that theory of trust? I would take an extra set of pants for a long trip with a 5 year old even if they hadn't pooped their pants for a full year. It takes a long while before I let go of that preparedness.

<comment><USER16> The GP is saying that people (/companies?) change.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> via [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/gl- infra/readiness/tree/master...](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/gl- infra/readiness/tree/master/cloudflare#execution):

> 1\. Once traffic is ensured to flow though Cloudflare, we initiate > decommission of Route53.

> We would disable the transfer lock and generate an auth code.

> _immediately after, we move the domain over to the Cloudflare registry_

I love the overall plan but this part would worry me... The most obvious contingency plan when you're putting so many eggs into one basket is to keep a kill-switch somewhere like your domain registrar, where you can abandon ship entirely by switching nameservers in the worst of scenarios, right?

Correct me if I'm wrong but when the Cloudflare dashboard went down a few weeks (months?) ago, no sort of DNS-level changes would have been possible. (Either way, I don't think you can even set external nameservers for domains on Cloudflare Registrar yet?)

Just curious about the thinking behind this particular move and why the pros outweigh the cons of leaving the domain where it is.

</comment><comment><USER18> Oh - we're back to talking about trust & Cloudflare again.

Cloudflare have always hosted [ _] booter / stresser / DDoS-for-hire sites. Right now I can find 8 sites on their network when I search for "booter" (it's been higher). So Cloudflare are responsible for keeping criminal activity online, and defending them from visibility to their downstream hosts, who might otherwise cut them off.

Cloudflare also sell DDoS protection from the same criminals. Because they host them, they can see where attacks will happen next - an advantage other big CDNs won't tolerate.

That adds up to a protection racket - in the 90s this type of shady business wouldn't have been able to source connectivity. But now they're the good guys :( I don't get it.

[_] Cloudflare have tended to cry "we don't host anything!". But if they stopped providing service, these sites probably couldn't exist. I call that mission-critical hosting.

</comment><comment><USER19> wow you rarely see "tech" companies migrate in this direction (vs say enterprise or smb).

</comment><comment><USER20> _As a result of the complexity and requirements, we realized we would like to have a solution for CDN, WAF, and DDOS protection with one vendor._

Depending on your definition of ddos protection Fastly has those things along with granular and semi scriptable configurability via vcl. Granted it's been 2-3 years since I last did a comparison between Fastly and Cloudflare but I can't understand why a company with presumably a need for configurability at the edge would make this choice. Cloudflare's entry tiers are unbeatable in price but beyond that it's extremely bulky.

<comment><USER9> One of the key reasons we decided to utilize Cloudflare as our vendor for WAF and CDN was, that they uniquely offer to run SSH (or any TCP application, really) and HTTP(s) on the same hostname.

<comment><USER20> You're setting yourself up for some future and potentially hard to introspect problems for yourself and your users with this setup. There are good reasons to keep those endpoints separate. As an example, the anycast solution you'll rely on on that host, while great for short lived tcp sessions (https) will be problematic for your long lived sessions (ssh) which will be disconnected during routing changes in cloudflares network - ddos or operational changes. That is unless you establish sub flows for those sessions using a unicast IP address but now you're accumulating additional complexity for the sake of wanting it all on a single hostname.

<comment><USER9> From a technical perspective, you are right. Anycast IPs are more fragile when routing within an open session, as a route change might cause traffic to go to a different PoP and thus break the connection.

The point of argument here was, however, the usability side. We offer our SSH services on port 22 on gitlab.com and HTTP(s) on 80/443\. We do not want to change this. Because if we did, we would need to tell everyone to use a different URL to check out projects via SSH. And that is out of the question.

And to be honest, the complexity on our end is limited. And for the complexity within Cloudflare to handle routing, etc., we pay them. We will also work with them do debug any connectivity issues a client might have.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


New DNA Analysis Shows Ancient Humans Interbred with Denisovans - <AUTHOR> http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=denisovan-genome

<comment><USER3> Here's the key sentence in the article: "'We're looking at a very interesting population scenario'—one that does not jibe entirely with what we thought we knew about how waves modern human populations migrated into and through Asia and out to Oceania's islands."

Svante Pääbo was the pioneer of doing DNA sequencing on samples of old human tissues (he started with Egyptian mummies when he was an Egyptologist). I heard a lecture by Pääbo at the 2008 Nobel Conference

[https://gustavus.edu/events/nobelconference/2008/presenters....](https://gustavus.edu/events/nobelconference/2008/presenters.php)

and heard there from some of the other researchers who use DNA analysis to trace human origins.

One of the problems in the discipline so far, as you can well figure out for yourself by thinking about it, is that the sample sizes for defining what genome pattern is "modern human" are still remarkably small, especially when we get to full genome sequences of individuals with well determined geographic origin, and smaller still for Neanderthal sequences and smallest of all for Denisovan sequences. So much work still needs to be done to figure out what the usual range of free variation of genes that are not under strong selection pressure is in the hominin genome line.

Figuring out what genes actually do at the individual level in a genome as complicated as the human genome has turned out to be much harder than was first supposed (as mentioned in the submitted article), so while tracing lineages with gene markers that are not under strong selection pressure helps define geographical population groups with common founder populations, knowing even an individual's complete genome does little to show the traits of the individual. (The first human genome sequenced didn't even reveal that the sequenced individual has blue eyes, for example.)

Turkheimer, E. (2012). Genome wide association studies of behavior are social science. In K. S. Plaisance & T.A.C. Reydon (Eds.) Philosophy of Behavioral Biology (pp. 43-64). New York, NY: Springer.

[http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Turkheimer%20GWAS%...](http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Turkheimer%20GWAS%20EWAS%20Final.pdf)

"If the history of empirical psychology has taught researchers anything, it is that correlations between causally distant variables cannot be counted on to lead to coherent etiological models."

"Most Genetic Associations with General Intelligence Probably False Positives"

[http://www.arts.cornell.edu/econ/dbenjamin/IQ-SNPs- PsychSci-...](http://www.arts.cornell.edu/econ/dbenjamin/IQ-SNPs- PsychSci-20111205-accepted.pdf)

Johnson, Penke, and Spinath (2011) "Understanding Heritability: What it is and What it is Not"

[http://www.larspenke.eu/pdfs/Johnson_Penke_Spinath_2011_-_He...](http://www.larspenke.eu/pdfs/Johnson_Penke_Spinath_2011_-_Heritability_rejoinder.pdf)

"Presuming this is correct and, as Visscher and Keller appear to have implied, applicable to most behavioural traits, this indicates that literally thousands of genes are likely involved in each trait, with no single polymorphism having substantial effect, which is the quasi-in?nite model to which Munafo and Flint refer. Whatever would we as psychologists do with such information?"

AFTER EDIT: The interesting question raised by the top-level comment that was posted before this comment has received some good replies. The question, and the issue of defining a "species," reminds me of what Richard Dawkins points out about common descent. If you lined up in a line by order of descent with ALL of your ancestors, including the ancestors no longer living, as you looked at each individual in the line you could say "He is the son of the father standing next to him," going back as far as you want, even hundreds of millions of years, and yet at some point in the deep past the ancestors would not look anything at all like "humans," or indeed even like mammals or like tetrapods. At the individual level, OF COURSE you are part of the same species as your parents (by definition of "species"). Life on Earth today has a common ancestor, or at the very least a common set of one-celled ancestors, by general agreement of biologists, so all the species that have differentiated from one another over time can be traced to common ancestors of multiple species. You are undoubtedly related to your parents, who belong to the same species you do, but you have remote ancestors whom no one would call individuals of the species Homo sapiens. There simply isn't any definite line to draw between one species and the next, historically, and that was what was shocking about Darwin's idea of branching speciation from common ancestors, the only idea he presented visually in his book The Origin of Species.

For a book-length treatment of speciation as a scientific issue for the thoroughly curious, see Speciation by Jerry A. Coyne and H. Allen Orr,

<http://www.amazon.com/Speciation-Jerry-A-Coyne/dp/0878930892>

which discusses mechanisms of speciation and how theories about those mechanisms are tested by biologists.

ONE MORE EDIT: The questioner in the other top-level comment is coming back with follow-up questions, which is good. The simple answer to the basic question is that biologists properly do NOT define a "species" by looking at DNA sequences, but by looking at reproductive behavior. For individuals who are dead and long gone, out inferences about reproductive behavior, and thus species definitions, are weak, and we shouldn't rely on a single DNA sequence to say a sample of old bones belongs to a different "species" from another sample of old bones until we gather other forms of evidence about the possibility of the individuals mating and having offspring with each other.

<comment><USER4> Thank you for a detailed overview.

I am still confused over the mechanism used to identify a "species" via mtDNA. I understand that the meaning of species as it stems from Linnaeus is unlikely to be useful in the DNA age, and I grasp the impossibility of defining when one species stops being another, but I would like to understand the science first, then the more political side of how to apply a loaded word like species to a DNA result.

<comment><USER5> _I understand that the meaning of species as it stems from Linnaeus is unlikely to be useful in the DNA age_

Actually it is more useful than ever.

Genetically there is no line in the sand between one species and all others. That's how everything evolves.

Only practically do you have a chance to draw a line in the sand between two groups of animals. And keep in mind it is possible for A + B to have fertile offspring, and B + C too, but not A + C. Freaky, but that's biology for you.

That's why a practical kludge like "fertile with itself, but not with others" is the best definition to use.

<comment><USER4> I see, everything smoothes out.

But that makes my question more relevant

the article, and the scientists behind it seem to be saying there _is_ a line to draw, between Denisovia and Humans and Neanderthal. And they can draw that line with mtDNA

* how can we distinguish between three species 41000 years ago

* what are the metrics in DNA used (% of gene sequences different?)

* if we are saying that xmillion yrs ago there was a common ancestor and they diverged into three species who evovled down till 40k yrs ago, then how can we call them different species if we were still interbreeding 40k ago? If we were interbreeding then we were same species, so again what is the DNA based reason for saying seperate species?

One last thing - if the A+B scenarios imply that say humans bred with Neanderthal and their offspring had to breed with denisovians whose offspring then could bring DNA back to human line, (while human/denisovians could never produce fertile offspring) then I still see the same issue

if we interbreed we are same species, so what is the DNA based rationale for saying no we weren't

if we were not interbreeding ... It makes more sense but presumably the mutations in different trees got shared after common ancestor ?

Edit: tokenadult kindly re-edited and I did not spot it I time but makes the point that DNA definition of different species in Pre history is weak at best, and relies on other Indixators of breeding success. I shall assume that the "DNA shows a different species" to be poor science journalism rather than poor science and bookmark this for further Reading later apologies for any iPhone based typos.

Edit again:

Just checking: If we find two skeletons 250k yrs old, definitetly Neanderthal and human, sequence their genomes. Then find two skeletons at 150k one has acquired a random mtDNA mutation and then find the same mutation on both at 50k years ago - then can we estimate the odds of that being mutally independnt mutations? And is that what this branch of science is trying to do?

(I remember Leakey being quoted as saying we have only found enough ancient skeleton bones to fit in the back of his car, so the above convenient pairs of skeletons are understandably hypothetical)

pps HN and iPhones do not get on so if this editlooksawful I am justleaving it - thank you for the comments - always nice to have questions treated seriously - and thanks to tokenadult again for living upto your handle

<comment><USER5> _the article, and the scientists behind it seem to be saying there is a line to draw, between Denisovia and Humans and Neanderthal._

There is a line because you can differentiate between almost any two groups of people using DNA. Ashkenazim Jews versus other Jews for example. That obviously does not make them different species, it just means you can separate the two groups with enough math, like principal component analysis.

That's why the quoted scientist in the article says:

 _"It was the first time a new group of distinct humans was discovered"_

A new group of humans.

 _what are the metrics in DNA used_

That information is hopefully in their paper. Usually it's some fairly straightforward statistics.

 _how can we call them different species if we were still interbreeding 40k ago?_

I think we call them different species because the status quo used to be that we never interbred with them. We couldn't find any Neanderthal mtDNA in humans, despite the strong archeology evidence that we had contact with them.

As DNA technology kept improving, we were able to recover more DNA from ancient samples, and looked at the Y chromosome, and surprise you might have enough Neanderthal DNA to count as full grand, grand father!

So I think at this point, we can't call them a separate species any more. But inertia being what it is, we keep doing it. Also it makes for more eye catching article headlines.

 _while human/denisovians could never produce fertile offsprin_

That was just my example about how we define species. According to the article:

 _"...but the evidence also suggests that Denisovans and humans interbred."_

 _can we estimate the odds of that being mutally independnt mutation_

Yeah, that's kind of what they are doing. It is heavily based on statistical estimation and that's why when then guess the age of a sample it is between A LOT of years. They know their error margin is large.

<comment><USER4> Thank you, some reading to do, starting with the actual paper. Cheers

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The most obvious worry about the "new" science of defining species by DNA analysis, is that we will eventually "prove" humans are no longer one species.

I know its all just definitions, but fairly big wars get fought over less. (But only by those non-humans. We humans are peaceful)

A quick goolge does not tell me what are the actual differences in mtDNA genome that says "yes" this lot are not Homo sapiens, nor how much of a difference counts. Anyone?

<comment><USER5> _The most obvious worry about the "new" science of defining species by DNA analysis, is that we will eventually "prove" humans are no longer one species._

The official scientific definition of species is old and very well known and very well defined. A species breeds successfully with itself. If you can't produce fertile offspring then you are two species.

Horses and Donkeys are two species because mules can not reproduce. Even if A + B = C, and C + C = D, if D + D = nothing, then A and B are separate species.

So no matter who or what we interbred with, or how large our genetic differences are, we are obviously one species.

And or "large" genetic differences are actually tiny compared to what you can find in say chimpanzees.

<comment><USER4> Edit: Trying to be clearer

The official definition of species seems to be shifting. The article claims that humans interbred with Denisovans, implying that the offspring were viable and lead to us, and that they could distinguish between ancient humans and Denisovians via DNA testing.

That implies to me, that Denisovians and Humans are distinct species, and can be told apart by some DNA testing.

I am interested in the process of defining of species via DNA - <USER2> implications for that seem reasonable to infer given our unpleasant history.

What did they measure - which part of the genome did they say is human and which Denisovans. Are those sequences ever found in modern humans? Could they be? What would that human who had more Denisovian DNA than typical be called? Why?

There are two things here - the scientific metrics used, and the political decision to turn metrics into loaded words like species.

I can argue all day over the second but I have no infomration on the first.

<comment><USER5> _That implies to me, that Denisovians and Humans are distinct species, and can be told apart by some DNA testing._

You can tell apart almost any two groups of modern humans with DNA testing.

You can tell apart paternal twins with DNA testing, that doesn't make them two different species.

 _Are those sequences ever found in modern humans?_

Yes.

 _Could they be?_

Yes.

 _What would that human who had more Denisovian DNA than typical be called?_

Well today Neanderthal DNA in humans can range from almost nothing to as much as if your great grand father was pure Neanderthal. What do we call either extreme? Human.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Twitter buys a company, closes it, keeps its founder/engineer - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2008/11/24/twitter-buys-a-company-closes-it-keeps-its-founderengineer/ <comment><USER2> Why not just hire him? Unless there's some legal mumbo jumbo related to closing down his services I see no reason to close up shop ... my guesses would be legal, or tax related.

<comment><USER3> There are any number of financial and organizational reasons, but I think this could have a lot to do with the intellectual property Values of n holds. Both Stikkit and I Want Sandy make heavy use of natural language processing to turn short pieces of text into structured data, which has intriguing possibilities for extending Twitter's feature set.</comment></comment>


Why do Mirrors Reverse Left and Right (but not Up and Down)? - <AUTHOR> http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/General/mirrors.html

<comment><USER2> They don't; they "reverse" along the mirror's surface normal.

</comment><comment><USER3> Didn't Feynman do a talk on this, that mirrors are actually reflecting from inside out thus the reversal. The basically show you the inverse projection of rays of photons, so it is impossible for them to turn it upside down.</comment>


What an iPad Competitor Needs - <AUTHOR> http://brooksreview.net/2010/10/ipad-competition/ <comment><USER2> Nice footnotes...

Seriously though, I think companies are wasting their time getting into tablets. I see it as small niche market longer-term. Something that big without a keyboard just isn't practical for anything other than games and movies, at least until people start using a stylus with it.</comment>


Bitcoin stays crazy until traders learn it is not a currency - <AUTHOR> https://www.cringely.com/2018/01/24/prediction-4-bitcoin-crashes-booms-crashes-booms-2018-traders-figure-not-currency/ <comment><USER2> I think that a discussion of bitcoin's price today is incomplete if it doesn't talk about market manipulation, Bitfinex and Tethers.

<comment><USER3> I simultaneously hate them and am mildly impressed they have managed to print over a billion dollars.

<comment><USER4> It's over 2 billion now, and growing.

<comment><USER5> why are people accepting them?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > [..] almost exactly like a market that uses only U.S. one dollar bills and > doesn't allow exchanging those bills… ever. [..] And they aren't just any > one dollar bills: they are specific bills, each with its own unique serial > number that can be checked against a U.S. Treasury database to make sure the > money is real

This guy is talking complete bullshit, it sounds like he heard "bitcoin is trackable" and extrapolated from there (i.e. totally made shit up) without actually researching the specifics.

Bitcoin and all these other cryptocurrencies are fully-fungible, one bitcoin is the same as any other bitcoin and you can split and combine them up and down to whatever decimal places the protocol defines. There are no serial numbers.

What is trackable is the account number (public key) that the money is associated with.

</comment><comment><USER7> Yawn, bold opinion piece "Robert". This guy is a hack, he predicted IBM would be reduced to a 20B sales company (I laughed out loud), and apparently scammed a bunch of kids with a "Mineserver" crowd fund that never shipped which was just an extant Minecraft server installed on an ARM device.

<comment><USER8> What exactly is wrong with what he said?

<comment><USER7> The part on bitcoin is a trivial and common opinion; not newsworthy. The part on ripple is comically stupid. And then the fact that he himself is a con artist is too much.

<comment><USER8> Again, you're not really addressing what he said. You're just saying it's common opinion. Doesn't make it right or wrong.

(I'm talking specifically about the bitcoin part, don't care about the rest)

<comment><USER7> Because my opinion on that doesn't matter either. Not newsworthy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Right now your grandmother is considering to buy bitcoins.

This is the last stage of the Ponzi pyramid. By the end of 2018, people will have learned the lesson the hard way. No need to shout it, just wait.

This is actually a very smart part of the bitcoin design: make a lot of people get coins by expecting returns, then have them discover that it can only be used as a currency and watch them spend the one they have.

We need to have the lightning network working and easy to use by the time the crash happens.

<comment><USER10> Is USD a ponzi scheme or any sort of manipulative 2008 scheme in general? Or is USD great?

<comment><USER9> People who get USD do not expect it to gain value on the long term. They do not see that as a speculative investment. Some will use it as a reserve currency, most simply as a currency.

I guess you can argue some way or another that this is a scam, but certainly not of the Ponzi form, where the returns are funded through the new entrants.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum and a ton of others operate almost > exactly like a market that uses only U.S. one dollar bills ... if you need > less than a dollar then you and your counter-party have to agree how much of > a one dollar bill you each own.

I'm not sure I follow - can't I just send 700 Satoshis to someone's wallet?

(I don't use Bitcoin so may be missing something)

<comment><USER12> You can, I think the article alludes to the psychological issue of using whole numbers.

Also again, you can, but it'll take a while and/or you'll end up coughing up a big fee.

<comment><USER11> Yeah, but other currencies have minor units too, like pence and cents. If the issue is transaction times, then this is a really odd way of putting it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think bitcoin's explosive change in exchange rate triggered a lot of backlash. Fees became astronomical as a result of greater traffic and higher exchange rate.

Lots of articles underscored just how poorly suited bitcoin was for lots of regular purchases. Instead of focusing on the volatility, now they could also point to the enormous fees. Altcoins with faster blocks and lower fees became much more interesting.

But today transactions in the pennies (~$0.02 USD) will get cleared within a few blocks. We can benefit from the reduced congestion even if our wallets aren't using segwit or LN yet. It seems to me that this is probably not a coincidence -- that many players accelerated their plans to evaluate segwit and LN as a result of the last 8-10 weeks of activity.

Unfortunately major players like Bitpay, Coinbase, and blockchain.info aren't there yet.

</comment><comment><USER14> Not sure I follow the logic. I think most crypto "investors" already consider it an asset/a store of value that goes up over time, not a "currency". So if that is true, then I would expect Bitcoin to "remain crazy" for a long time (with the minor and major crashes in between, of course).

As for the currency aspect, there are some improvements coming to lower transaction fees and speed by orders of magnitude, but it may take a couple of years to fully realize that transition. It's still not clear if Bitcoin _should_ be the de-facto _cryptocurrency_ , though, even with those improvements coming. There may be better coins for that out there. It's still a wild wild west in that regards, with all sorts of new innovations appearing every year.

</comment><comment><USER15> Any article about volatility that fails to mention it is decreasing is an insufficiently researched article. Cringely didn't research his topic. Bitcoin's volatility has been slowly, but definitely, trending down for many years. And squinting at a price graph is not how you determine volatility. It can be and should be _objectively_ calculated like so:

[https://mobile.twitter.com/lsukernik/status/8649208737189519...](https://mobile.twitter.com/lsukernik/status/864920873718951937)

[https://news.bitcoin.com/volatility- decreasing/](https://news.bitcoin.com/volatility-decreasing/)

</comment><comment><USER16> I think alot of ICOs should be looked at as prepaid gift cards. If a new target store was about to open up in my area I might buy a few dollars worth of gift cards at X% off to help the store open, but I wouldn't invest my life savings in it.

<comment><USER16> I kind of feel the US/SEC should let people invest up to 1% of their annual income in what ever scheme they want to. gambling, lotto, other schemes/"investments". maybe even let it be tax deductible.

a lot would get flushed down the toilet, but I can dump unlimited amounts of money into being a bad consumer.

<comment><USER17> Good luck ever closing the floodgates if you allow 1%. People will then consider it a free for all and if they invest their whole account how are you even going to punish them?

<comment><USER16> maybe set up a special account similar to an IRA.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> " It's not backed by "the full faith and credit of the United States of America." It's not backed by, well, anything. In that sense of innate value cryptocurrencies are worthless. "

I take issue with this statement in this article. I would argue that in the same way that 'dollars' are considered to be irreproducible, and this is central to the 'full faith and credit' part of why people consider them valuable, the irreproducibility of crypto is their innate value.

<comment><USER19> I disagree that irreproducability is the key. The central part of "full faith and credit" is the fact that the US accepts US dollars as payment. Which is important, because it can place debt obligations on people. In short, the US guarantees that there will always be a buyer for dollars. Bitcoin does not structurally guarantee that there will always be someone else who wants to buy Bitcoin, you have to take that on faith.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I used litecoin when I transferred money from biterex to coinbase because of the transaction speed versus bitcoin.

</comment><comment><USER20> Simplifying in order to gain some clarity about bitcoin is good--and this is a good piece--but you can't make the bitcoin bros listen no matter how simple. They still need to chose to understand.

<comment><USER21> The other thing is enough bitcoin bros have made substantial coin from earlier investments, have sold off most of their holdings, and continue to evangelize BTC while they foray into altcoins.

And, I can't blame the people who fall for it. Its hard to argue with someone who cashed out $130,000 off a speculative investment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Just let me buy some put options with low enough counterparty risk and I won't mind.</comment>


Ember.js Persistence Foundation - <AUTHOR> http://epf.io/ <comment><USER2> > Epf is essentially an ORM for the web and gives you all the tools necessary > to define models and synchronize with your backend.

That line should be on the front page of that website. I've spent too much time trying to decipher the bizarre diagram and trying to figure out whether it was an inside joke I wasn't getting or an actual thing.

<comment><USER3> THIS! That diagram is just ...

<comment><USER4> Don't want to show off, but it seemed quite readable to me, once you notice that the arrows have numbers..

It shows many interesting details (the only API command seems to be Patch. There are two sync phases on the client, one to determine what to send to the server, one to determine what to merge upon server response). I quite like diagrams :))

<comment><USER5> What do the numbers represent?

<comment><USER6> Lifecycle of data as it changes, apparently.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is super cool - What method is used for continued client side updates? Websockets, polling?

<comment><AUTHOR> The readme says it works with any "persistent backend such as a REST API or socket connection".

It looks like it tries to be backend-agnostic, and do the sync work on the client side.

<comment><USER7> I'm assuming - and this could be a bad assumption - but based on the continuing updates architecture, if client a changes model a, client b will see an update on model a. How does client b get notified of the change? Does it have some kind of fallback system ala socket.io? Is this not yet part of the project?

<comment><USER8> Backbone took a REST opinion, I imagine if you want something like you describe, they (or someone) will implement something like backbone.io.

[https://github.com/scttnlsn/backbone.io](https://github.com/scttnlsn/backbone.io)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Now if this works, which Ember-data doesn't (not finished I guess). This is a bigger step towards using Ember,

<comment><USER10> I've been using Ember-data for the past few months on side projects and it's getting a lot more stable. I've rarely had issues with it in the past few weeks.

<comment><USER4> "weeks" ?? Damn... I remember when I had to choose between angularJs and other JS frameworks a few months ago. Reading your comment makes me feel really good with my choice.

<comment><USER10> I've played around with Angular quite a bit lately as well and I definitely prefer Ember. You should really try both of them out and give them both a fair chance.

Also, you don't have to use data with Ember, it's just a benefit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Is this supposed to be a framework for collaborative editing and synchronization? I would expect a lot more examples around merge conflicts and locking if so. "Models are never locked" make this sound like it is just an abstraction for abstraction's sake, why would I use this instead of just binding DOM elements to JSON?

<comment><USER12> It's made to be a generic ODM/ORM for use on the client side with Ember.js. It's a replacement for Ember Data, which has a ton of bugs and limitations.</comment></comment>