Erdogan threatens to flood Europe with refugees - sahin-boydas https://edition.cnn.com/middleeast/live-news/syria-turkey-military-offensive-dle-intl/index.html <comment><AUTHOR> It's really stupid of the EU that they don't really want to properly enforce their own borders and instead outsource this job to a semi-dictator.

<comment><USER2> It's not trivial to enforce a maritime border. What do you do if people come on boats? You can pick them up from the boats, but Turkey won't take them back. What then?

<comment><USER3> >You can pick them up from the boats, but Turkey won't take them back. What then?

<sarcasm>

Well... has anyone ever heard of Australia?

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

>Australia is the only country in the world with a policy of mandatory detention and offshore processing of asylum seekers who arrive without a valid visa.

Find some islands somewhere and send the refugees there. And then wait.

Oh, and make threatening videos like this:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvz3U-JOvOU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvz3U-JOvOU)

</sarcasm>

<comment><USER4> I'm curious how all this is different from what Trump has been attempting to do at the US border? So shipping asylum seekers to a country with a semi- dictator or an island somewhere is considered acceptable?

<comment><USER5> If having a dictator rules out a country, then according to this map, we'd have to take in nearly everyone: [https://planetrulers.com/current- dictators/](https://planetrulers.com/current-dictators/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> 3.6mn is so trifling that Turkey can deal with it. Europe could too, with proper organisation; I hope that we face up to our responsibilities if Erdogan follows through—at least then something good would come of Turkey's aggression against Rojava.

<comment><USER7> For Turkey, that's 4,5% of its population.

I wouldn't call that "trifling".

<comment><USER6> It's trifling for Europe as a whole, as shown by the fact that Turkey managed to process them alone. For Turkey or course it is not trifling.

<comment><USER8> > It's trifling for Europe as a whole, as shown by the fact that Turkey > managed to process them alone.

Considering the fact that 1 million refugees were enough to revitalize Neo- Nazi parties and cause a wave of right-wing terrorism and political assassinations, no, it is not trifling for Europe. I think some of you forget/don't realize how dire the situation was before the 2016 EU-Turkey refugee agreement. 5m would likely lead to the collapse of the EU.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Again, Europe is paying the "bill" and facing the consequences of the US- Russian-Turkish war on Syria. Europe is spending billions for the refugees but no one cared about. USA and Russian wanted to nuke the place for no reason and they didn't even spend a penny for helping all the refugees and immigrants. They're the most unethical countries right now.

</comment><comment><USER10> Can someone please explain the border and refugee system here? What exactly is he threatening to do? And if there are a lot of refugees, can't admission to EU be a separate decision?

<comment><USER11> The EU pays Turkey a lot of money. In return Turkey patrols its coastline to prevent migrants from boating across to the Greek islands. They can still get in by making the longer trip from north africa. Numbers of migrants are down since 2015 so perhaps it has been working?

<comment><USER12> I don't think the numbers are correct are down, situation in Greek Islands is critical. If you read the local press there are islands that are so overwhelmed that the locals are migrating to mainland cause they can no longer live there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Hindsight being 20/20, and all, the US withdrawing from Iraq (with some European pressure to do so) caused a lot of instability in the region. I doubt that ISIS would have been much of a concern without a power void in Iraq.

<comment><USER14> > I doubt that ISIS would have been much of a concern without a power void in > Iraq

I doubt that ISIS would even have _existed_ without the US invasion of Iraq.

I, and plenty others, saw this coming without hindsight.

<comment><USER13> I agree, but once the US was in Iraq, it was kinda committed. Except it wasn't.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I wonder why EU can't just strike back with economic sanctions if Erdogan follows through with his menace. I think the lira could go really really down...</comment>


Rust needs to run, and be easy to use, on every platform - <AUTHOR> https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/rust-needs-to-run-and-be-easy-to-use-on-every-platform/6935 <comment><USER2> I'm a big fan of Rust, used it for several projects already, loved it. Too bad much of the systems programming is currently tied to C/C++ infrastructure. There is only so far you can get with FFI. Most likely not far enough to write a Linux kernel driver and many other things, unfortunately. Here's hoping the situation changes now that Rust is attracting so much attention.

<comment><USER3> > Most likely not far enough to write a Linux kernel driver

Well... [https://github.com/saschagrunert/kmod](https://github.com/saschagrunert/kmod)

<comment><USER2> Heh, but it doesn't do anything, does it? Because to do anything, it needs to interoperate with native datastructures and functions. There you go...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> If not for Rust, I never would have believed systems programming would be accessible to me, at least not in any time frame I was comfortable investing.

</comment><comment><USER5> For the Rustaceans out there, are there any plans to start getting Rust libraries packaged for Linux distros?

Cargo is an amazing build system. But the last time I used it (which was maybe a year ago), I was struck by how tough it would be to use it for compiling a Debian package. At the time, it seemed like a big roadblock against wider Rust adoption.

<comment><USER6> We've long worked with distros, each of them has different policies, and so does things differently. For example, [https://crates.io/crates/debcargo](https://crates.io/crates/debcargo) is a tool created by Debian for this purpose. [https://pagure.io/fedora- rust/rust2rpm](https://pagure.io/fedora-rust/rust2rpm) is Fedora's.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The last time I looked at Rust platforms, I was kind of surprised that AIX wasn't on the list at all.

It looks like the Solaris port got a nudge from Oracle, so I'm guessing that the most likely path to AIX support is a similar nudge from IBM.

<comment><USER6> Does LLVM have an AIX backend? That'd be the major blocker.

IBM just published this today: [https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/library/os- dev...](https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/library/os-developers- know-rust/index.html?ca=drs-)

No idea what that means in general, but it's gotta be good in some sense!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I thought that without runtime rust would be easy to compile to bare webassembly (no emscripten).

But you lose stdout, backtraces. lto doesn't seem to be working. Which is okay except that there is no easy way to override/replace what's missing without hacks.

So wasm is an ideal exotic enough target to test if rust is truly portable and if libstd design isn't too coupled with Linux/Windows/macOS.

<comment><USER6> Wasm is an intense focus of this year. There's a _ton_ of activity going on. We'll get there!

I agree with you 100%, by the way. That's why I think wasm is important for Rust, even disregarding feelings about it as a specific technology. It's like a very small embedded platform.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> ... and strings need to be unified and fixed fast. Anything involving string manipulation is pure pain and is wasting a ton of time at the moment.

<comment><USER10> No thanks. Rust made the right call by distinguishing between owned (String) and borrowed (str) strings. Even C++ is moving in that direction now, by finally adding string_views ([https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/string/basic_string_view](https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/string/basic_string_view))

<comment><USER11> That's not the problem. There absolutely should be two different types (and I don't even care that the names are so poor). But half the rust APIs take one type and the other take another (even when the string isn't manipulated or stored in any way, shape, or form). Some interfaces are only implemented for string and others only for &str.

Deciding betweene two distinct types &str and &string (not mut &string) for your function's interface is nonsense. It makes no sense to have to _decide_ between which two views of a string that you can read-but-not-manipulate you want to use, and it makes zero sense that they can't unify the types with some simple compiler magic. A constant reference to a string should automatically decompose into a view of that string and that should be that. [edit: as in that view shouldn't be a separate type]

Additionally, that dereferencing a string returns a pointer... that makes no sense. That's the kind of nonsense we ran away from in the C++ world.

strings are the reason I regret not adopting rust back when as a user of a pre-1.0 language I could have joined in efforts to lobby against this insanity.

\---

As a sidenote, string_view is so late in coming to the c++ world that it's not even funny. Having a separate std::string with an "implementation-defined" in- memory representation in a world of c strings (char *) is inane beyond belief. (Yes, nulls in strings would still be a problem. But why do your strings have nulls in the first place? That data should probably be a vector of strings or a [vector|array] of uint8_t (even if just typedef'd to unsigned char) and C++ strings should have been mandated utf8, contiguous, and null-terminated. You should be able to compose a zero-copy, read-only, non-owned string from a character array and decompose automatically to it. And don't get me started on the fact that C++ doesn't have sprintf because of the obsession with sticking to the overly verbose and way too complicated streaming operators. Developers end up using c strings with sprintf to format text and then copy it back to a std::string just to work around that stupidity.

<comment><USER10> Anything implemented for &str is automatically implemented for String, because String implements Deref<Target=str>.

Most useful "String" methods are actually &str methods that you get access to through that deref trait.

Dereferencing a String doesn't return a raw pointer, I'm not sure where you got that idea.

<comment><USER11> Yes, anything implemented for &str is automatically implemented for String... except some API are stupidly implemented for &string instead. And you can't pattern match strings properly (think some `for in`) without first explicitly converting to &str.

Dereferencing a string does not return a raw pointer, that was exaggeration on my behalf. But a string is a container, so *string returns.... &str? But string.deref() returns str?

Don't get me wrong, I'm fully invested in the language [0], [1], [2], but it's got a lot of warts that could have been avoided by thinking bigger picture. So many APIs are restricted by thinking easy instead of big pre-1.0. Like str being hardcoded into APIs that should have been generic (FromStr vs From<&str>, .parse() vs .into()), shipping 1.0 without async/await, and the whole mess with strings.

0: [https://github.com/rust- lang/rust/issues?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=is...](https://github.com/rust- lang/rust/issues?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=is%3Aissue+author%3Amqudsi)

1: [https://github.com/rust- lang/rfcs/issues?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=is...](https://github.com/rust- lang/rfcs/issues?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=is%3Aopen+author%3Amqudsi+)

2: [https://crates.io/search?q=neosmart](https://crates.io/search?q=neosmart)

<comment><USER12> > But a string is a container

In the same way unique_ptr is a container.

> so string.deref() returns.... &str?

Yes? &str::deref() also returns &str, Vec::deref() returns &[], Box<T>::deref() returns &T.

That's literally how Deref is defined, Deref<Target=T>::deref() returns &T.

*String returns str.

> (FromStr vs From<&str>, .parse() vs .into())

These are not equivalent. From/Into are non-failing conversions, FromStr can fail.

What you're looking for is TryFrom/TryInto which are still not done 2 years into the RFC: [https://github.com/sfackler/rfcs/blob/try- from/text/0000-try...](https://github.com/sfackler/rfcs/blob/try- from/text/0000-try-from.md)

<comment><USER11> > * String returns str.

Typed that out too fast, yes, that's my problem. * String is one thing but String.deref() is another. But * is the dereference operator. Operator overloading ftw ;)

> What you're looking for is TryFrom/TryInto which are still not done 2 years > into the RFC: [https://github.com/sfackler/rfcs/blob/try- > from/text/0000-try...](https://github.com/sfackler/rfcs/blob/try- > from/text/0000-try..).

Sorry, yes, I actually opened an issue with my suggestions regarding that one with particular focus on the fallible vs infallible nature: [https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/issues/2143](https://github.com/rust- lang/rfcs/issues/2143)

<comment><USER12> > Typed that out too fast, yes, that's my problem. * String is one thing but > String.deref() is another. But * is the dereference operator.

They're the same thing, Deref::deref() is just the operation which underlies the dereferencing operator.

Either way I don't see what's problematic about a string buffer deref'ing to a string.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Asteroid that cohabits an orbit with Jupiter came from outside the solar system - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/21/science/asteroid-interstellar-jupiter.html <comment><USER2> Three space stories on the front page today. Makes me happy

</comment><comment><USER3> Why is originating outside the solar system the only explanation for a retrograde orbit? Couldn't a close encounter or several with other bodies reverse it's direction around the sun?

<comment><USER4> > Why is originating outside the solar system the only explanation for a > retrograde orbit?

From TFA:

> "But at the beginning of this investigation, we did not suspect BZ to be of > interstellar origin," he explained. "We developed a new method that allows > us to follow the asteroid back in time to see which part of the solar system > it came from."

> But as far back as they could trace the jigsaw parts of the solar system — > rocks and planets swirling and mixing — all the way to its birth, 4.5 > billion years ago, BZ kept going around the same wrong way. Which meant the > asteroid could not have been part of the swirling cloud of dust and gas from > which the sun and planets originally condensed so long ago.

In other words: in simulation runs, extrasolar was the only explanation for _this_ retrograde orbit.

<comment><USER5> That sounds a bit like starting with a smoothie and running the blender in reverse until the starberries put themselves back together. The n-body problem is chaotic and 4.5By is a long time. It's incredible.

edit: The actual paper is very readable and very interesting. Props to the NYT for linking it.

<comment><USER6> It's more like putting berries into the blender and running it to see how often a berry hits you in the eye. They found that coplanar planets and coplanar debris statistically won't produce this specific type of (high inclination) orbit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Jupiter's orbit is fairly circular (eccentricity about 0.05). How does an extrasolar obeject get captured into such an orbit?

I read somewhere that in-system asteroids could be captured into circular orbits (Phobos, Demos at Mars, lots of moons of Saturn and Jupiter) if they're originally half of a binary asteroid. The other half gets kicked away to circularize the remaining half's orbit. That doesn't seem like something that could happen to put an object into retrograde orbit around the Sun.

<comment><USER8> "Here we show that irregular satellites are captured in a thin spatial region where orbits are chaotic , and that the resulting orbit is either prograde or retrograde depending on the initial energy. Dissipation then switches these long-lived chaotic orbits into nearby regular (non-chaotic) zones from which escape is impossible. The chaotic layer therefore dictates the final inclinations of the captured moons" [http://sci- hub.tw/10.1038/nature01622](http://sci-hub.tw/10.1038/nature01622)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Does the fact we can find objects from others systems increases the likelihood of panspermia ?

<comment><USER10> I think so. Four billion years doesn't seem like enough time to evolve the the sophisticated encoding mechanism of DNA _and_ the level of complexity in individual organisms and the interdependencies they have on each other.

I really wish I could find a sort of statistical breakdown of the odds of this all working purely by chance (I'm definitely a fan of evolution and i'm not necessarily invoking woo or God here, just thinking that there are mechanisms at play we don't understand, and a head start would explain a lot for me)

This is how my hopelessly naive mind thinks about the problem:

Let's round up to say there is 10^15kg of biomass on the planet[1], and there are 10^12 cells per kg[2]. Let's assume that those cells have reproduced every hour for the last 4 billion years (or 35x10^12 hours). That's ~35x10^39 opportunities to pass evolved genetic material to the next generation of cell.

One of the organisms with the simplest known genome is mycoplasma genitalium[3], with ~588 genes expressed over 580,070 base pairs. Each base pair has four possible configurations (A,C,G or T).

I don't know much of anything, and I definitely don't know the rules around how the base pairs come together. I'm going to naively assume that these base pairs can come together any way they like, and that mutations in DNA express themselves as changes in these sequences. This leaves the DNA of mycoplasma gentalium with 4^580070 or 8.7*10^349236 possible configurations of their DNA.

Obviously only a small portion of those are viable. But how do you get from nothing to something of the complexity required to reproduce, and then how do you get from something of that level of simplicity to the genetic diversity that we have on the planet. How many generations from the first living organism are there to current people. Let's say it's a trillion generations. How does random mutation bring you from say a half a million base pairs at the beginning to 3 billion finely tuned base pairs[3] at the end? It just doesn't seem like enough time to me.

1\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biomass_(ecology)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biomass_\(ecology\))

2\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_(biology)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_\(biology\))

3\. [https://www.saylor.org/content/BIO_Kimball/users.rcn.com/jki...](https://www.saylor.org/content/BIO_Kimball/users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyPages/G/GenomeSizes.html)

<comment><USER11> Nature doesn't use arbitrary random sequences of base pairs, any more than we use random sequences of English letters. We can make them, of course, but that's as meaningful as 'bthdkekd'.

I am not sure we know enough about the correlation structure of the DNA code to do the calculation you propose.

<comment><USER10> In a way it is arbitrary, because anything else would imply meaning or intent. Mutations are, as far as we know, arbitrary.

Your last point is the thing that has stymied me to date. What is the range of mutation that would allow for a successful offspring _and_ convey (mal)adaptive changes.

<comment><USER11> I use 'arbitrary' in the sense of uniformly random. The point is it's not uniformly random. You can think of reproduction as a random walk in the space of DNA combinations, but it's not a uniform random walk. It has a structure that comes from the biochemical processes which perform the recombinations of DNA. Focusing on mutations ignores this point. (Also, as an aside, it's not settled that mutations occur at random positions. That may be a reasonable starting point, but it's likely that the way DNA folds into nucleosomes/chromatine/chromosomes biases the location of mutations.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Ok, ok , it's going to be hard to get used to but maybe, over time I can accept them and find rest again.

</comment><comment><USER13> Wouldn't there be as many alien asteroids orbiting in the same direction as against it?

I imagine there should be a few alien asteroids amongst the current contingent.

I take it isotopic Analysis can only be done with a sample. There are energy level differences in isotopes though...

</comment><comment><USER13> what sort of delta V would a probe need to shadow it?

Perhaps a Jupiter, solar transfer orbit could help...

<comment><USER14> It's orbiting the wrong way around, so you need to lose _all_ of your orbital momentum and add it _all_ back again. This is an extremely expensive maneuver to do in the inner solar system (i.e. from an Earth launch). The easiest way to do this is to achieve near escape velocity and adjust your orbit on the cheap at the edge of the solar system, but now you're talking about a mission which would span several decades.

<comment> gene-h Maybe we can take advantage of the fact it's orbiting the wrong way. Perhaps we can send an impactor and capture some of the ejecta. At the very least we can analyze the spectra of the impact flash to see what it's made of. Perhaps we can even fly through the ejecta plume and run it into a mass spectrometer to do isotopic analysis. If the time between the impactor and the probe is short enough, perhaps the ejecta will still be plasma which we can run straight through our mass spectrometer. It might even be possible to capture a small amount of ejecta if we use something like an aerogel particle collector like the Stardust mission used[0].

[0][https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/stardust/mission/index- ae...](https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/stardust/mission/index-aerogel- rd.html)

<comment><USER15> Problem with an impactor (besides any trailing analytical probes being sandblasted by ejecta) is that its a permanent expirement that can screw up any future passive observational experiments

That being said, if we do eventually find another retrograde asteroid that is otherwise unremarkable, I would be all for an extreme speed impact experiment. If it's close enough to the sun we may even get some low grade relativistic effects being observed

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> TIL the euphamism "cigar shaped" when something clearly looks like a turd.</comment>


Can data be evil? - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/05/magazine/can-data-be-evil.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&_r=1&

<comment><AUTHOR> In his study of meaninglessness, Donald Crosby writes that the source of modern nihilism paradoxically stems from a commitment to honest intellectual openness. "Once set in motion, the process of questioning could come to but one end, the erosion of conviction and certitude and collapse into despair" (The Specter of the Absurd, 1988). When sincere inquiry is extended to moral convictions and social consensus, it can prove deadly, Crosby continues, promoting forces that ultimately destroy civilizations. Michael Novak's recently revised The Experience of Nothingness (1968, 1998) tells a similar story. Both studies are responses to the existentialists' gloomy findings from earlier in the century. And both optimistically discuss ways out of the abyss by focusing of the positive implications nothingness reveals, such as liberty, freedom, and creative possibilities. Novak, for example, describes how since WWII we have been working to "climb out of nihilism" on the way to building a new civilization.

[http://www.iep.utm.edu/nihilism/](http://www.iep.utm.edu/nihilism/)</comment>


Show HN: Color Picker Pro, Open Source Color Picker for Mac Os X - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/oscardelben/Color-Picker-Pro

<comment><USER2> For the life of me I can't understand why Apple decided to remove hex values from their color picker with Lion. This is a great alternative, the copy shortcut is very handy.

<comment><USER3> They didn't, because, AFAIK it wasn't there in the first place. You probably had some plugin installed -- <http://wafflesoftware.net/hexpicker/> or <http://www.panic.com/~wade/picker/>. Also, some programs, like Acorn, loads their own hex color picker plugin inside the app.

<comment><USER4> The "DigitalColor Meter" program with the developer tools actually used to include hex values. I actually hadn't noticed the hex values are gone, so thanks lancashire for making me notice. I may need this app now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi guys, I'm the author of that app. You can choose which format you want to save by default (hex or rgb) as well as hiding the color preview in the menubar through the app preferences. Please let me know if you feel like something is missing.

<comment><USER5> Good work!

What is the preferred way to report bugs?

I've just stumbled upon two:

1\. when mouse cursor approaches top edge of the screen, preview stretches vertically so that it's still square, but pixels are twice as tall as they are thick. That's on an mbp5,5 running 10.7.1.

2\. Cmd+Shift+p uses physical location of _p_ key disregarding programmatically set keyboard layout. I've only noticed because I'm using Colemak.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, I'm working on both of them! If you find anything else, feel free to use Github issues

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There seems to be some strange behaviour with dual monitors.

I have a 27" iMac (2560x1440) and I have an external monitor hooked up (1920x1200) and positioned to the right of the main desktop.

When I move the cursor around on the second monitor, the picker preview window stops tracking and updating when I move close to the top edge (maybe 100 pixels?) or the right (farthest) edge (at least 300 pixels there) of the monitor.

edit: I'm running Snow Leopard 10.6.8

<comment><USER7> Yeah, this isn't showing the preview of the second monitor (Lion), but it still captures the color. This is a GREAT app!

Because it is open source, I can pick it apart and learn how to do certain programming things.

Thanks author

<comment><AUTHOR> There seems to be an issue with detecting the second monitor on certain cases. I'm looking into it but didn't find a solution yet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Thanks - I've been wanting something like this. One feedback idea would be to let me close the stay-on-top window with the keyboard instead of having to clicking the x or the eyedrop icon. It'd be great if hitting escape closed that window... so the workflow would be command-shift-p, get the color I want, then close the window with escape. Thanks for the app -

<comment><USER9> I've just been using cmd + h to hide the app once i've copied the color. Esc would be nicer, but hide works ok for now without having to use the mouse

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Great app. I only wish there was an option to exclude the # when copying, as then I could directly paste the color code into Photoshop.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll add an option for that. Thanks for the feedback.

<comment><USER10> Just saw the update - awesome! Thank you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> While I love this is FOSS, there's is a $1 paid-app that is almost entirely 1:1 with the Snow Leopard (plus features) called "Classic Color Picker". Totally worth it IMO.

[http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/classic-color- meter/id4516400...](http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/classic-color- meter/id451640037?mt=12)

</comment><comment><USER12> So glad for this. I used to use Pipette on a regular basis, but it seems to be half-broken in Lion. This saves my day(s).

Would be nice to have a copy-this-color mode that didn't include the #, as Photoshop doesn't like hex colors longer than 6 characters, but that's more of a nit than a real complaint.

</comment><comment><USER13> This is nice! I've been looking for a decent, lightweight colour picker since switching from Windows years ago, where I relied on the also excellent Pixie (<http://www.nattyware.com/pixie.php>)

<comment><USER14> Here's another one: <http://instant-eyedropper.com/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Quality program. Well worth the download and even a donation. I just opened kuler to poke around with it; I can definitely see this being a huge time saver on projects.

Any chance you will extend the clipboard capability so I can copy 4-5 colors at once?

Edit: To elaborate, I mean, have colors saved in some sort of list box or something so I can click them to get to my clipboard or something of that nature.

<comment><AUTHOR> Can you elaborate on that? If you could open a Github issue describing the functionality I'll do my best to make it in the next version.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Naming Product X Pro is the de facto for a version that requires payment...

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right, I chose that because colorpicker was already taken as a bundle name (if/when I'll submit to the AppStore).

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Thank you! I can't even count the number of times when I needed something like this.</comment>


Ask HN: Internships open to non-US students? - <AUTHOR> Hey HN.<p>I've been looking for Software Development internships recently and was surprised by how difficult it seems for non-US students, as almost all tech companies, based out of the US do not even consider international students, and those that do require an F1 visa. Also, and more frustratingly, very few of these companies document this fact on their websites. Does anyone know about good internship opportunities open to all, regardless of visa status and citizenship? <comment><USER2> Hi, former non-US student here, I got an internship (J1 visa) in a US university in a lab. I got it thanks to one of my teacher. He knew a US professor and gave me the opportunity to talk to him. The professor did not even need a new student in the lab, but I proved him that I could be useful (showed some of my projects). The university took care of most of the paperwork. I hope this can help you.</comment>


Using Metadata to Find Paul Revere - <AUTHOR> http://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/09/using-metadata-to-find-paul-revere <comment><USER2> Paul Revere, "in the Fall of 1774 and winter of 1775, I was one of upwards of thirty, chiefly mechanics, who formed ourselves into a Committee for the purpose of watching British soldiers and gaining every intelligence on the movements of the Tories."[1]

Paul Revere was essentially one of the founding members of this country's counter intelligence program against his oppressive government. He was the first in a long line of Mark Felts, Bradley Mannings and Edward Snowdens of this country.

If we have a system where these whistleblowers are stopped before they can leak information on the system that catches them before they can whistleblow there is no turning back. This would not be the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA without Paul Revere and Edward Snowden.

[1][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_in_the_American_Re...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_in_the_American_Revolutionary_War#Paul_Revere_and_the_Mechanics)

<comment><USER3> Did Paul Revere gather intelligence concerning both sides, and release everything he had to both sides, so that he would help his enemies as much as he helped his friends, and hurt his friends as much as he hurt his enemies?

If no, then the long line Revere is the first in does not include Manning.

<comment><USER4> Do you have any evidence that Manning hurt his enemies?

<comment><USER5> Manning's own statements to Lamo that the Army put him up for an award for his counterintelligence work which was used to identify and 'break up' insurgent cells.

<comment><USER4> So... The army said so?

<comment><USER5> I'll try to type slower this time.

Manning. Said. So.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Academic version: [http://db.tt/6UA1bXZq](http://db.tt/6UA1bXZq)

DIVIDE AND CONQUER: DISTORTED COMMUNICATION IN NETWORKS, POWER, AND WEALTH DISTRIBUTION Wilson Perez-Oviedo

Cornell University and Banco Central del Ecuador

Abstract In a society composed of a dictator and its citizens, what are the determinants of the political equilibrium between these two? What are the conditions for a successful citizens' revolt? What kind of strategies do governments follow to prevent such revolts? The situation of these types of societies can be understood as a game played between a leader, who has to decide the distribution of the aggregate income, and a group of citizens who have the opportunity to revolt if they are unhappy with the distribution. Coordinated action by citizens is possible because they form nodes in a communication network. However, communication through the network is distorted, which could preclude the emergence of collective action among citizens. The network structure and the distortion level are determinants of the political equilibrium and wealth distribution. The model explains how the dictator could use propaganda, cooptation, and repression to increase his expected utility. Finally, the model is illustrated by applying it to cases in Nigeria and Zaire/Congo.

<comment><USER7> Link to version that does not require signing up for and signing into drop box:

[https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=522362](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=522362)

Big brother's little sister is just as bad. Why not give the ssrn link?

<comment><USER6> I didn't check whether the paper was publicly available and not on gated publishers' websites, my apologies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So could we spoof bogus metadata to hide Paul Revere?

In other words, if a large enough number of people started start calling and texting random Verizon customers, tweeting with random people from the middle east, inviting random people with Muslim-sounding names to Google+ Hangouts, and commenting on every Facebook like with "This ____ is the bomb!"... could that tip the signal to noise ratio enough to defeat this type of analysis?

<comment><USER9> If you haven't read it yet, check out Cory Doctorow's book Little Brother ([http://craphound.com/littlebrother/about/](http://craphound.com/littlebrother/about/), [http://craphound.com/littlebrother/download/](http://craphound.com/littlebrother/download/)). He explores ways that average citizens could fight back against technology that watches our every move.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is very clever and all, but from the British perspective - this is exactly what they would have been looking for and Revere would be considered a revolutionary and a real threat, so this is the system working as it is supposed to.

This is the equivalent of saying that the NSA can use such metadata to find muslim extremists that want to kill your children and implement sharia law. (hyperbole courtesy of American media)

Changing the timeline such that "americans" are the underdogs rather than the establishment isn't really helpful... is it? Or is this attempt to stoke revolutionary sentiment?

<comment><USER11> It spins the story around in such a way that Americans can relate to the dangers of a surveillance state.

You're suggesting that the NSA is just looking for bad guys and that they _should_ be able to capture evil muslim extremists.

But now the US government decides to bring back alcohol prohibition. Drinking, they say, is immoral, and so are the people who drink. Do you still have nothing to fear?

Abortion gets outlawed, and its supporters are branded as immoral. Still got nothing to fear?

Creationism gets accepted as a viable, scientific alternative to evolution and gets taught in all schools, and people who believe otherwise are dangerous subversives.

Are you now one of the bad guys? Are the NSA now interested in you?

I find it interesting that Americans can believe that the right to bear arms will protect them from the world's largest military, should it ever be run by tyrants, but at the same time believe that the government will always share the same moral code that they themselves hold.

<comment><USER12> It's often been said during during debates about government waste and inefficiency, that citizens do not actually want an efficient government. The typical example is: would you want a boot to appear on your wheel, in your driveway, the minute your license plate expires? Because that would be efficient.

The average person feels that they are getting more benefit out of Google searches, Gmail, Facebook, cell phones, and credit cards for that matter, then they are being harmed by volunteering so much information to the corporations who run these businesses.

If you think the U.S. is headed in the direction of outlawing alcohol or teaching creationism is all schools, I respectfully suggest you find something different to worry about -- maybe pot... wait, we are becoming more lenient on it as well.

I find it a bit silly, that when the government adopts new technology to fight crime, everyone brings up their pet boogey-man to try to strike fear in their like-minded citizens. I honestly can't understand if you are in support of, for instance, using web surveillance technology to capture and prosecute abortion clinic bombers or not.

<comment><USER13> > The typical example is: would you want a boot to appear on your wheel, in > your driveway, the minute your license plate expires?

As long as they simultaneously provide the renewal for the license, why not? It would even be a service, since I would have less of hassle dealing with it and remembering to go to their office.

A government that is so efficient that it is basically impossible to even get into trouble with these kinds of administrative things can be a very good thing, as long as it is sufficiently good-natured.

The trouble comes in areas where there is more uncertainty, with laws that are so flexible that it's hard to tell whether you're guilty or not even when you know all the facts. If any prosecutor with an ax to grind can charge anybody with a crime, you have a problem. If, in addition, there are efficient databases that allow the prosecutor to find _evidence_ against anybody even long after the fact, you have a recipe for totalitarianism.

<comment><USER14> > A government that is so efficient that it is basically impossible to even > get into trouble with these kinds of administrative things can be a very > good thing, as long as it is sufficiently good-natured.

Indeed. One route (the one that I'm trying to keep echoing in my head these days) to thinking about such a nicely-efficient government is to ask how something would go in Iain Banks' Culture.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I don't know if David Simon's (creator of "The Wire" and "Treme") defense of the Verizon phone records request ever made it onto HN's page:

Here it is, if you hadn't seen it: [http://davidsimon.com/we-are-shocked- shocked/](http://davidsimon.com/we-are-shocked-shocked/)

Apparently it was so controversial that his site crashed from the traffic, and he had to tell everyone to chill out: [http://davidsimon.com/nsa-and-fisa- commentary-calling-it/](http://davidsimon.com/nsa-and-fisa-commentary-calling- it/)

Anyway, why I thought of that in relation to the OP was, that I think some defenders of the NSA and general government surveillance policies are just unaware of how technology can fundamentally change things...As Google leaders have been known to say, "Speed _is_ a feature"...and so it's not the finding of information that makes the establishment of Google time in human civilization, but how _fast_ Google allows us to do it.

So that said, Simon is one of the journalists I have the absolute highest regard for...I'll be one of the many who think "The Wire" is the best TV drama ever, both for its artistic take and for its illustration of how institutions -- the police, the schools, the drug trade -- corrupt even the best of individuals. "The Wire" is heavily based off of the year that Simon embedded himself in the Baltimore homicide department...the book (which spawned a network TV show) is the best book about the practice of journalism I've ever read. After a year following the detectives, you'd think Simon would be pretty much in cahoots with the police...but he followed up "Homicide" with "The Corner", in which he spent a year embedded with drug dealers and their customers...apparently most of the friendsships he made in the Baltimore Police department evaporated after he published a book bringing sympathy to Baltimore's downtrodden.

Anyway, I don't think Simon has a love for government or authority. But I do think he's a little naive when it comes to advances in technology and their consequences. When "The Wire" started, the police were focused mostly on tapping pay phones. By the time "The Wire" ended, the police were surprised at the advent of camera phones. So when Simon says he thinks the NSA and other law agencies won't abuse their wiretap authority, _I believe him_...because in much of his experience, the practical obstacles (such as, having to have an officer watch a payphone all day) made it basically impossible for blanket surveillance.

But technology is different...I think Simon's -- and others who I respect -- mistake is to think that the game is being played the same as it always is. It may be the case that the NSA is staffed with as people as good and conscientious as anywhere else...but it's naive to think (as was the primary lesson in "The Wire") that the power they have will lead them astray...and to those of us affected by it, it makes no difference if the violations were intentional or accidental.

Anyway, back to Paul Revere and the OP...I think it's a great example. But of course, what makes that educational scenario feasible is technology and the ability to record information (metadata or whatever you want to call it) in an organized way.

Frankly, I kind of thought anyone who read 1984 would understand how technology changes everything. But yeah, I do think there are some well- meaning people don't grasp the technology, and if they did, they'd have a different opinion about the dangers of unchecked surveillance.

* edit: misspelled conscientious as 'contentious'

* edit: as an example of how much Simon continues to challenge the police as a citizen, here's an essay he wrote after the success of the Wire, in which he tried, as a citizen, to get the basic details of a cop-involved shooting, something that has always been public record. He eventually succeeded, and the revelations about the officer involved ended up jeopardizing the prosecution: [http://davidsimon.com/in-baltimore-no-one-left-to-press-the-...](http://davidsimon.com/in-baltimore-no-one-left-to-press-the-police/)

But as you can see if you read the piece, Simon is not to thrilled with how the Internet has displaced newspaper journalism

<comment><USER16> In the words attributed to Joseph Stalin: "Quantity has a quality all its own."

<comment><USER17> Well, this particular quote might come from Stalin, but it's based on an old Hegelian idea, that of a surplus of quantity becoming quality (add enough mass and you get a black hole, temperature over 100oC and you get boiling water, etc).

(Makes sense, since Marx, Lenin, Stalin et co were heavy readers of Hegel).

From Wikipedia: "One important dialectical principle for Hegel is the transition from quantity to quality, which he terms the Measure."

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectic#Hegelian_dialectic](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectic#Hegelian_dialectic)

Also check the ancient greek notion of the "sorites paradox", which deals with a similar idea:

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is a really great counterpoint to the "if you have nothing to hide..." crowd.

<comment><USER19> Well, Paul Revere _did_ have something to hide.

<comment><USER18> Yes he did. The point is that having something to hide doesn't necessarily mean you're a criminal or a terrorist. Or that in some situations what our government today would classify as "criminal" or "terrorist" is in fact an act of patriotism.

We all know that history is written by the victors so I won't suggest that what Paul Revere and the other revolutionaries did was an unmitigated good.

But I will argue that needing to expend the resources it takes (salary, benefits, management, etc) to have one human being monitor another does put a pretty good check on the ability of those in power to stifle dissent. It also provides some kind of a critical threshold over which the revolutionaries can't reasonably be stopped. In many ways that's a good thing provided it's a high enough level. Once the public opinion swings the best thing to happen is for those in power to give up on suppression and start packing their bags.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> While being an interesting read, the "old world" scenario was kind confusing me every couple of lines. (Could be because I'm not a native speaker.)

<comment><USER21> If you're not a native speaker, you're probably also not as well versed in the folklore of the US revolution. Paul Revere is a popular hero of the US revolution, so using him as the target terrorist invokes "one mans terrorist is another mans patriot" argument at the same time as it demonstrates the usage of metadata.

<comment><USER22> And it cuts doubly, because a lot of the tactics of the rebels were what we would call terrorism these days - tarring-and-feathering is simple torture and terror tactics.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This is a lot of fancy math and graphics that don't differ all that much from what a very simple analysis can give you. Only Revere belonged to five of the groups of interest. Of the three who belonged to four groups, two of them are in "top scorers" on centrality, and the third, with one of the two in centrality, is in the final table.

<comment><USER24> It's an exceedingly simple example used to illustrate the technique. The methods included in the python library are robust enough to work just as well on much larger and more complicated data-sets but that would be too difficult to follow for someone who isn't familiar with the subject.

<comment><USER23> I think it's hard to understand what the point is without a result that differs from the naive solution. That is, my naive "who's an important terrorist" is "who belongs to the most terrorist groups".

<comment><USER25> While belonging to the most terrorist groups will usually give the highest score, it's not quite the same as what betweenness actually measures - belonging to the most terrorist groups that are each large but do not share many members.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> You ʃhould have uʃed the long ʃ in this article

<comment><USER27> The purfuit of happineff?

<comment><USER28> The character is ſ, and it doesn't go at the ends of words, so it would be: The purſuit of happineſs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> kjh the author of this link has a greatintroduction to emacs:

[http://kieranhealy.org/resources/emacs-starter- kit.html](http://kieranhealy.org/resources/emacs-starter-kit.html)

He also has a lot of good reference material on latex/org-mode/pandoc. Definitely a good resource to have handy if you ever have a less-techie friend who wants to get away from MS word and its ilk.

</comment><comment><USER29> Makes me think of the ramifications of false positives.

</comment><comment><USER30> This would mean the larger your network, the larger your likely hood of being a terrorist

<comment><USER31> From a predictive standpoint, that's not necessarily an error. Think of it as "the larger your network, the higher priority to investigate for terrorism."</comment></comment>


Google Employees "Outraged" Their Tech is Used to Build Better Killing Machines - <AUTHOR> https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/03/google-employees-outraged-their-tech-is-being-used-to-build-better-killing-machines <comment><USER3> I'm confused; would better image classification not reduce the potential for civilian casualties and other unnecessary collateral damage? I don't think the government would stop drone strikes if Google weren't involved, in any case.

<comment><USER4>
      would better image classification not reduce the
      potential for civilian casualties and other
      unnecessary collateral damage?

Richard Gatling, inventor of the first successful machine gun, wrote he hoped his invention would make war more humane, by reducing the need for large armies with the resultant exposure to battle and disease [1].

Fritz Haber, "father of chemical warfare", believed that deploying poison gas in WW1 would shorten the war, and thereby save lives [2].

It would seem people who work on military tech in the hopes of saving lives are often disappointed.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Jordan_Gatling#Gatling...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Jordan_Gatling#Gatling_gun) [2] [https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2016/sep/16/chlorin...](https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2016/sep/16/chlorine- the-gas-of-war-crimes)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> they are outraged because they all initially signed up to "make the world a better place" and obviously you do that by working for a megacorp which parks their 30 billion $ offshore cash on Bermuda

<comment><USER6> > they are outraged because they all initially signed up to "make the world a > better place" and obviously you do that by working for a megacorp which > parks their 30 billion $ offshore cash on Bermuda

And they are more in bed with Uncle Sam than pretty much any traditional "evil" company. They spent $18M in lobbying just last year. More than Northrop, Lockheed, Verizon or Comcast. If that's not enough the same Schmidt that wants to kill people "correctly" was prancing around Hillary's campaign events wearing a "staff" badge [https://www.politico.com/f/?id=00000158-6a12-d435-a9ff-7f5ae...](https://www.politico.com/f/?id=00000158-6a12-d435-a9ff-7f5ae4080001). He picked the wrong door of course, but had she won, they'd be no doubt Google would have gotten a decent chunk of the hundreds of billions spent on defense every year. I can just imagine a nice friendly voice interface: "Ok Google. Let's fly to such and such village in Afghanistan"

<comment><USER7> You think their staff are that naive?

<comment><USER6> >You think their staff are that naive?

Sorry, can you expand a bit. Not sure what you mean.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> In the article, a Google spokesperson states that "The technology flags images for human review, and is for non-offensive uses only." The "killing machines" statement in the headline seems like an exaggeration when it should really refer to "surveillance machines."

<comment><USER9> The reason for it currently to be "for non-offensive uses only" is NOT because making the machine to automatically kill someone is unethical, but because it's is not accurate enough to only hit valid targets (May hit deployer and friendly).

So yeah, may be now it's "for non-offensive uses only".

Few years in, it will be "human control the kill trigger".

Then, eventually, it will be "human deploy the device, then it fires and kills all by itself, just like a fire-and-forget missile, plus it can hit multiple targets and be reused."

The dark side of technical advancement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> They are outraged _now_? Do they know how much power Google concentrates by hording and analysing user data? And how much political/economical influence this introduces? IMO this is way more dangerous than the military exploring killer machines - because it's subtle and under the radar.

Related: if you decide to release your software as open source you give up any possibility to control who uses it. Licences like the GPL do not allow restrictions to civil usage only. And even if they would, how could you enforce it?

</comment><comment><USER11> Are any of the outraged employees actually doing anything about it, like, say, resigning from Google to work for companies that don't act as enablers for the military?

<comment><USER12> Not many companies in the bay pay provide google-level-of-interesting projects to work on or google-level total comp.

Yup, sadly, the yuppie Nuremberg defense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Google is planning to open a campus in the middle of Berlin's alternative Kreuzberg district, one block down from my office. There have been many protests and this will certainly be a boost for the protesters

</comment><comment><USER14> The sentiment in this thread is so odd to me. Whether you believe Google is a force for good or evil in the world, the fact that many of its employees demand that it be a good one should be positive, yeah?

(As a disclaimer, I worked for Google several years ago and generally feel that it walked the walk ethically. Of course, maybe that just means my moral compass is skewed...)

</comment><comment><USER15> > When news of the pilot project, which is the company's first with the > Defense Department's Project Maven, was circulated on an internal mailing > list, some Google employees were reportedly "outraged" and "concerned" that > the company would offer its services for drone-related surveillance > technology.

I worked for multiple government contractors in the DoD space up until a few years ago and Google worked with us on MULTIPLE contracts. They're outraged and concerned now? What were they 5 years ago?

Most of the large tech companies do government contract work for the DoD but it seems like Silicon Valley just forgets this over and over and over again.

</comment><comment><USER16> Here's the news started with a more pleasant and palatable headline - <USER2> lends it's AI to the entity that invented the internet, transistor, and many other fundamental technological breakthroughs, the DoD.

</comment><comment><USER17> This may be unpopular opinion, but nations are all researching, developing and even deploying automated 'killing machines' anyways. Turkey is already deploying kill drones against the Kurds in Afrin. There are automated, self- guided artillery weapons being developed. There is an arms race on and it doesn't make any sense to hold back unless there is world-wide treaty and embargo at the global level.

</comment><comment><USER18> If Snowden told us anything, it's that Google was accommodating direct feeds from their users private data to the NSA. Didn't hear of employees outraged at google's military involvement then.

<comment><USER19> I don't recall that particular revelation (a slide with an arrow from 'Google' to 'NSA' is not proof of collusion). Inded, wasn't there some kerfuffle about the NSA inserting taps into Google internal fibre lines? Why would they need to do that if they had access through the front door?

<comment><USER18> That was the first and most major revelation though: prism, which allowed the NSA to tap directly into its user data.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16532112](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16532112)

</comment><comment><USER21> Living in the bay, I have to say that I see more and more workers from those big companies as complete hypocrites without any sense of self-thinking.

When you speak to them, there is so much arrogance. They are convince that they are saving the world (give me a break, you are not).

And next to this you can see them earning a shitload of money, living in the posh-est neighborhood of SF, and looking up on all the homeless in the city that disturb their morning yoga.

Completely dystopian and hypocrite, That is what the big-co koolaid feel-good marketing message has created

<comment><USER22> I think you're exaggerating. There are definitely many people like tat, but this is not even majority. Many of us just want to live our lives, and can't do much about the situation in SF. No, honestly, what can each of us do? Even if we give some money, it will never solve the problem of homeless people in SF.

As for saving the world... I don't think anyone believes it. A founder must speak in a certain way to get investment and the interest of the press, but at the bottom everyone knows it's basically about making money. Of course it helps if you're working for a startup that has some positive ambitions, it creates good energy and makes work much easier, but that's pretty much secondary. It's not that we're hypocrites, it's more or less the same in all companies: you need to tell your boss you believe in the company values and all this bs, even though in fact you don't care at all. Cool tech is another thing: here you can really get excited if you're working on a really interesting project.

<comment><USER23> Don't give them money, give them houses. Homeless person + stable place to live = ~0 homeless. Your retort might be, well if we did that, then people would become homeless intentionally and we'd have to give them a house.

Well... yea, that's the idea. Without rent, the average family's budget would increase by probably > 25-30%. We could set up schemes to rotate good residences to people that need them (e.g. families with kids get 8 yr tenures near schools). For houses without long waitlists, people can trade at will. Decommodifying that sector of the market would do a world of good.

<comment><USER24> Good luck with implementing this policy. The problem typically was that with positive birth rates development was way behind demand.

Additionally where do you want to build those houses and how do you want to prevent these areas from becoming ghettos?

<comment><USER23> Birth rates are slowing. Build the houses all over the city so you don't have concentrated poverty. If you have too much poverty in your city, then it's time to start redistributing wealth more generally.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Outraged they lost the Faustian Bargain?

</comment><comment><USER26> Dupe

</comment><comment><USER27> I hope peace triumphs.

<comment><USER28> It's this kind of thinking that will destroy the human race.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Now all Google users should be outraged too!

</comment><comment><USER16> Hypocrites. Maybe they should stop paying taxes too, because the military is funded by tax income.

The military, just like Google, does the right thing an overwhelming majority of the time. Enabling them to do their job isn't a bad thing. After all, the military is the one providing defense against entities who'd take away Googlers right to be outraged, and other civil liberties that modern society enjoys, in a heartbeat.

<comment><USER28> People don't have the right to stop paying taxes, so don't pretend like that's an option.

The US military does not do the right thing in the overwhelmingly majority of situations.

Do you think the Vietnam war was a just war? What liberties were being protected there?

Do you think the Iraq war was a just war? Has it improved life for Iraqis? Has it made America safer?

<comment><USER16> You think the Vietnam and Iraq wars were perpetrated by the DoD/military? They were cooked up by your elected officials, at least get your blame-game right</comment></comment></comment>


Silicon Valley Software Engineer Uses AI to Find Your Perfect Rug - <AUTHOR> https://archadon.com/pair-room <comment><USER2> > Archadon is an affiliate of the Tibet Rug Company, which has been designing > and importing handmade fine Tibetan wool rugs for more than 25 years</comment>


Jetstrap Beta 2.0 - Projects, Screen Linking, New UI, and 2.3.0 - <AUTHOR> http://blog.jetstrap.com/2013/02/projects-screen-linking-new-ui-and-2-3-0/

<comment><USER2> Hadn't seen jetstrap before this. It's going to be a hit at hackathons! Nice work.

</comment><comment><USER3> Awesome new stuff guys. Here is my wish list for 3.0:

* Backend support (maybe via backbone+knockout)

* Themes

Thoughts?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! We definitely plan on adding this stuff. I'd love to be able to help people easily get past the "default bootstrap" look and have some really great looking sites.</comment></comment>


Journalism's Taylor Swift - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/thoughts-on-media/journalism-s-taylor-swift-9d9640fcc75a

<comment><USER2> Personally I think journalists are still missing the point the same way that the entertainment industry missed it for a long time. Each industry has enjoyed access to a wide and somewhat captive audience, and the accompanying profits, during a comparatively short period of time when they controlled the means of distribution. For music it was the era of the LP and CD. For journalism it was the era of the big print publications, and network radio and news. All that is done. Some other model for getting entertainment to people will emerge (is emerging), and some other model of letting people know what has happened will emerge as well (and perhaps is also emerging now).</comment>


Ask YC: Your workstation specs? (pc manufacturer, os, #monitors, size...) - <AUTHOR>

Dell, Windows XP, 2 monitors (19",24"), HP headset.<p>What I covet: a better chair, wireless headset, a bigger coffee cup. <comment><USER2> iMac 24 inch (refurbished, with Applecare) running Leopard, with two Win XP VMs and an Ubuntu VM available via Parallels.

Extra Viewsonic 24" widescreen monitor on the left, on an Ergotron arm. Macbook Air (refurbished, with Applecare) on the right, on an Ergotron arm, running Leopard and controlled from the desktop with Teleport or Synergy (I'm going back and forth on that one.)

Kinesis Advantage Pro keyboard on a very nice articulated keyboard tray that I scrounged from the side of the road in Arlington, MA. (The quality of the trash is one of Boston's perks.)

Primary backup using SuperDuper to a Drobo (FW800 version) stuffed with 1 TB worth of old hard drives. (The Drobo doubles as a large external storage device.) Secondary backup to a pair of external 750GB drives, one of which lives offsite. Tertiary backup of critical files to Amazon S3 using Jungledisk. Liberal use of Github, Dropbox, and unison for syncing between the desktop and the laptop.

Aeron chair (my oldest piece of hardware!)

</comment><comment><USER3> mac pro + 30" cinema display, apple wired keyboard, and the kensington expert mouse trackball, running windows vista x64 almost exclusively. thinking about getting something with a 1600 horizontal resolution and running it rotated 90 degrees, like [http://flickr.com/photos/blakespot/2371594617/in/set-7215760...](http://flickr.com/photos/blakespot/2371594617/in/set-72157604301199984/)

and for portable use, a macbook air also running vista x64.

</comment><comment><USER4> Dell Precision (650?), dual 2Ghz Xeons, 1GB ram, win2k, 2x17" LCD, Tektronix TDS3014 (!) to the side. Sun Ultrasparc 60 server in the floor.

</comment><comment><USER5> Two different workstations, one Linux one Vista.

Linux: Intel Q8200 Quad Core 4gb Corsair RAM BFG 9600GT Overclocked 320gb HD space 2 22" LCD's

Vista: AMD 5600+ 8gb Corsair RAM EVGA 9800GT 1 19" LCD 320gb HD Space

Servers: 4 Linux servers with 320gb to 1tb of space, all with dual core AMD's Athlon's.

I love my set up.</comment>


Guix: The Non-Aligned Universal Package Manager - <AUTHOR> http://www.ocsmag.com/2016/07/05/guix-the-non-aligned-universal-package-manager/ <comment><USER2> And then there were 15 competing standards.

I really, really want one single thing to succeed, but since the major distributions have decided to up and go there own way, there is no standard, and I don't see how we will be in a better place by adopting these.

Nix and Guix are awesome, but even there, we have two competing tools that operate similarly.

Do we need Torvalds to step in and throw a gauntlet?

<comment><USER3> No more than we need Torvalds to tell us which single web browser to use, or which text editor or programming language to use.

Speaking of Torvalds, git is actually a pretty good example. There was no top- down enforcing of which version control system everyone should use, yet git has become the defacto standard.

TCP/IP has become the universal networking technology, again without a top- down mandate. There are, of course, standards describing how TCP/IP works, but not one mandating its use.

Eventually, maybe there'll be a defacto, cross-platform package manager that everyone uses, but it's premature to settle on one now, as package managers are still quickly evolving.

<comment><USER2> Git is actually what I was referring to. If there was say a packaging model that Linux kernel decided to support for say distribution of kernel modules, I think I could see it becoming the defacto standard.

I didn't really mean that he would from on high dictate what would be used. And honestly, if something like that did happen, I bet I'd be unhappy. Git is a huge step forward, but it is one of the most complex SCM's in existence, for example.</comment></comment></comment>


A 3D printed house rises in Amsterdam - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2014/01/22/a-3d-printed-house-rises-in-amsterdam/

<comment><USER2> What kind of habitation shapes can 3D printing make that cannot be made using traditional methods?</comment>


Why the war on drugs has been made redundant - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2013/jun/16/designer-drugs-legal-highs <comment><USER2> This use of the term "redundant" is either ignorant or irresponsible. It implies that the author either doesn't understand the meaning of the word redundant or doesn't understand the public health implications of substance abuse.

By definition, redundant describes something that is not necessary, that can be removed without loss. That is definitively not the case in fighting substances abuse. We need to worry about the abuse of drugs in the same way we need to worry about the abuse of alcohol and tobacco. Would someone call "redundant" the fight against teenage alcoholism? Would someone say that we should stop paying attention the epidemics of obesity? Worrying about these issues is not redundant and worrying about drugs also isn't so.

There are things society must forbid (e.g. murder), there are things that it must discourage (e.g. driving without safety belts) and others that it shouldn't bother. I can accept that we move dangerous drugs use from the first to the second category. It is irresponsible to move it to the 3rd.

The proper term should be ineffective, not redundant.

<comment><USER3> "We need to worry about the abuse of drugs in the same way we need to worry about the abuse of alcohol and tobacco"

The war on drugs is not even remotely similar to the regulation of alcohol and tobacco. Soldiers do not invade your house because you are suspected of growing tobacco.

What is needed is for the war on drugs to end, for the DEA to be disbanded, and for a system that regulates quality to be introduced. If an adult wants to buy recreational drugs, nothing should prevent them from doing so. Mixing public health and paramilitary police is far more dangerous than any drugs people might consume (my Godwin senses are tingling...).

<comment><USER4> DEA is a jobs program, just like the TSA. You will never, ever convince any politicians to do anything about this because they're part of the program themselves. Just pay your taxes, live with it, and stay out of the way.

<comment><USER5> What's stopping the DEA from becoming a regulatory organization?

<comment><USER6> The Food and Drug Administration.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> New Zealand is preparing to introduce new legislation specifically to address the "whack-a-mole" issue that the article talks about:

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

It will basically set up a regulatory regime whereby any recreational drug which can be proven "low risk" can be sold to anyone over the age of 18. Not really all that different from how "regular" pharmaceutical drugs are tested and approved, actually.

<comment><USER8> It's a shame it doesn't cover things we already know are pretty safe (THC!), but baby-steps I suppose...

<comment><USER5> And what about the other compounds found in marijuana?

<comment><USER9> Because marijuana is a schedule 1 drug it's rather hard to study. Not that it should matter because any adult should be able to put whatever they want in their body.

[http://popsci.com/science/article/2013-04/why-its-so-hard- sc...](http://popsci.com/science/article/2013-04/why-its-so-hard-scientists- study-pot)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Designer drugs show why a proper system of regulation is needed to replace the irresponsible "war" on drugs.

But it's dangerous to think that the law cannot attempt to make whole classes of chemicals illegal and so we don't need to worry about the war on drugs any more. The law can do that, and cause even more massive damage when it does so. Designer drugs are also likely to kill a whole lot of people, bolstering politicians who want to keep the status quo.

<comment><USER11> Indeed. How about just making sure that the drugs people take are safe, of a high quality and available without feeding a criminal underbelly? Nah, that'd just be silly.

<comment> at-fates-hands You have to consider what the Mexican drug cartels would do if you regulated these drugs and essentially put them out of business. How do you think they would react??

<comment><USER12> I'd suspect if you gave a 15-year exclusive license to a few companies, Mexico'd get cleaned up really fast. Dealing with the DEA and what not is one thing; but dealing with Monsanto?

<comment><USER13> Since they're already dousing the place with herbicides anyway[1], they just need to release Roundup-Ready Coca plants!

[1] [http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Drug_War/Monsanto_DrugWar....](http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Drug_War/Monsanto_DrugWar.html)

<comment><USER14> Roundup-ready Coca is old news. [http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.11/columbia.html](http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.11/columbia.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Our Glorious Leader Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) is trying to keep us safe from consuming these drugs through the Protecting Our Youth from Dangerous Synthetic Drugs Act ([http://www.feinstein.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/press- relea...](http://www.feinstein.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/press- releases?ID=2ffa01a7-a73c-4016-aec7-07da34d9f230)). I'd say something about voting her out of office in 2016 (for this and for running intelligence committees which rubber-stamp NSA spying, among many other things), but she's already said she won't run again.

<comment><USER16> I do want to note that some of these drugs have dramatically worse side effects than the illegal drugs for which they substitute.

MDPV, in particular, has lead to a range of terrible effects, including psychotic states leading to cannibalistic attacks.

Even the strong and broad legalization proposals, in which I can see the wisdom, acknowledge the need to control substances which regularly cause users to behave violently toward persons or property. To me, the designer MDPV and PCP would be the poster drugs for this category.

<comment><USER8> Not to be picky but I think it's MDPV, not MPDV. Could be wrong of course.

IIRC most of the so-called cannibalistic attacks that were attributed to bath salts turned out not to be. For instance the famous Miami face-eating attack turned up no evidence of anything but pot in the guy's system - [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miami_cannibal_attack](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miami_cannibal_attack)

<comment><USER16> Quite right on MDPV. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methylenedioxypyrovalerone](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methylenedioxypyrovalerone)

The Miami incident was unrelated, but a casual googling will give you plenty of bath salts horror stories.

In the town where I grew up, bath salts became a large problem. At one point, a man on a two day binge broke into a local monastery, got into bed with one of the priests, and held him at knife point until morning. Just a month ago, the federal government busted a producer in a nearby house holding seven kilos of the stuff.

From work with community outreach and through relatives in law enforcement, I can tell you that one minor shift in the drug market radically altered the enforcement landscape. It was getting very bad for a while before the drugs were banned.

I don't know whether our experience was unique or rare as a community. I suspect our experience was simply an accelerated version of what would have happened elsewhere. For some reason, we had little enforcement, wide distribution, and a burgeoning market in the stuff. We were among the first areas in the country to pass a municipal ordinance to ban the substances, and request help from the Federal government.

I suspect that, as an area with harsh drug laws and strict enforcement of marijuana and cocaine, the balloon effect drove up interest in the designer chemicals. But that's just a hunch.

<comment><USER8> >> I suspect that, as an area with harsh drug laws and strict enforcement of marijuana and cocaine, the balloon effect drove up interest in the designer chemicals. But that's just a hunch.

I think you're probably right.

Imagine what we could do in a non-prohibitionist atmosphere, where mainstream labs could research into stuff that gives people a buzz without being addictive or harmful...

<comment><USER17> since all brain receptor become less sensitive as you expose them to their target chemical, doesn't it means that drugs will always cause some damage and be addictive ?

<comment><USER8> Not necessarily. Yes (AFAIK) receptors become downregulated when frequently exposed to drugs, but there are some drugs (LSD is usually cited) seem to be non-addictive, people don't typically use them chronically, and as a result damage is unlikely.

Addiction and habituation are not just down to this effect either. I know a variety of people who have been both daily pot smokers and daily tobacco users. The tobacco use was far harder to stop. (I'm not going to pretend pot doesn't have some addiction potential, and in fact it does seem to have minor withdrawals, just not anywhere near the level of tobacco, opiates etc). Receptors also recover after varying amounts of time.

So I don't see why we couldn't research things that are fun, don't compel people to chronic use, have minimal impact with occasional use, etc etc. It may not be possible to make the 'perfect' drug, but it may be possible to eliminate many of the harms. Particularly where some drugs are toxic over and above their primary effect, have toxic metabolic products etc

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The war on drugs is "obsolete" (or some other variant of fail) only insofar as we assume that the _purpose_ of the war on drugs is to reduce or eliminate drug use. But if you put its purpose into indirect terms - enforcing class distinctions, providing minor harassment charges to apply to social undesirables, encouraging the militarization of police forces, providing a funding firehose for certain government agencies, and making a convenient and simplistic boogieman for cheap politicians - it's a spectacular success.

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm not so much into chemistry, but shouldn't the number of production-viable cannabinoids with psychotropic effects be quite limited? Can the producers just run out of possible drugs? Or is that limit too high?

On the other hand, I don't think that this finding will change drug policy. Too much has been invested in the war on drugs, there is not going to be a 180° turn anytime soon. Especially not when the upturn in designer drugs does not come with an increased mortality...

<comment><USER20> To answer your question, the limit is just too high.

There is actually quite a lot of "flexibility" in terms of chemical structure for most drugs. You can replace a methyl with an ethyl, propyl, i-propyl and the activity is _usually_ comparable. Aromatic rings can be replaced with other variants. There are probably several thousand different structures that would acceptable psychotropic effects, if not tens of thousands.

<comment><USER17> I haven't got chemistry knowledge, but isn't the effect of say a THC analog is based on binding between THC and a certain receptor?

Wouldn't it be possible to offer kits or services for chemical manufacturers, to test the level of binding of their chemicals, and define that above a certain level of binding , you're chemical have to be regulated in some way?

<comment><USER13> It is perhaps possible, but currently neither quick, reliable nor cheap. You'd need to check that: (a) it's not immediately toxic, (b) there's no immediate metabolisation that renders it inactive, (c) it can enter the bloodstream, (d) it can penetrate the blood-brain barrier, and (e) it can either substitute for a particular neurotransmitter, act as a releasing agent, act as a reuptake inhibitor, or several other proposed and known methods of actually causing 'mind-altering' effects.

This is essentially the 'drug-discovery pipeline' that big pharma spends hundreds of millions on when developing new medications.

<comment><USER17> I think you're taking it a bit too far. If say i sell bath salts, which aren't supposed to be consumed, why would there be a need to check metabolism/toxicity and such ?

But if metabolism can transform said chemical , then sure, you've got to take it into account. But many of those drugs can be detected by pre-metabolism binding, i think.

<comment><USER13> Metabolism can go either way, for instance Codeine is thought to be mostly a prodrug[1], which is converted to morphine in the liver. So it's only really effective when taken orally, because it relies on the first-pass metabolism for its action. Morphine itself, on the other hand, is quite significantly converted into inactive metabolites when taken orally. So you end up with IV morphine being ~3x more active as the same oral dose, because it bypasses the first bit. Other drugs are exclusively one route because they rely on other processes for transformation or absorption.

This matters because it's not really appropriate to schedule chemicals which happen to trigger a response in a test-kit, but are not plausibly drugs of abuse due to side-effects, or lack of any reasonable mechanism of getting to the sites where they'd be active.

The "intended for consumption" is a convenient fiction for the head-shops and dodgy websites that sell such things, but actually having to test things which aren't intended for use in certain ways would be a massive imposition on, well, everything that uses chemicals[2].

There are heuristics that cover a lot of ground, and that's basically what the Analog Act tries to preempt, but there are still huge numbers of potentially active compounds we have no idea about. In-vitro binding studies are perhaps the next filtering step, but you still ought to have to demonstrate actual demonstrable plausibility of action for it to be a crime[3]. In addition, if you have something that feels like cocaine, but rapidly metabolises into a lethal neurotoxin or whatever in the same dose, it's not going to be a drug of abuse, except perhaps in suicides.

In terms of banning/restricting sale of things, _maybe_ binding data would be sufficient, but I'm not sure just what the implications for testing & compliance for everyone involved would be.

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

[2] Despite some TV adverts to the contrary, this would be _everything_.

[3] Leading to (IMO) the utterly bizarre world of fakes/illegal placebos, for which in many places you can be convicted for the same degree crime as the drug you purported to be selling, rather than say, fraud.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> It's funny how people still imagine the government plays by some rule book. They only pretend to. If they so choose, they will make it illegal to design or produce ANY mind altering substance without an express license. Of course, only big pharma will be able to afford such a license. Watch and learn how the fascists work and play in the fields of the lord.

<comment><USER13> How do you know it's mind-altering ahead of time though?

They're sold as "bath salts" or "incense" for plausible deniability. Actually banning any abusable chemical in any form would have a massive impact on a whole range of industries. Even heavy regulation of precursors and otherwise important chemicals hasn't stopped novel ways of doing without them.

So you're still playing catch-up, even if you make sure your analytic lab gets the sample on day 1, and presents you with firm evidence of both (a) what's actually in the thing, GC/MS/NMR etc, and (b) how & why you think it's "mind- altering". Sample $z acts as a dopamine releasing agent in the homogenized rat neural tissue[1]" is enough to publish a pre-clinical study on it, but I'd at least hope it could be challenged if it came to a court.

And of course, it doesn't have any impact whatsoever on abuse of pharmaceuticals, which is already on track to beat out most other drugs in terms of accidents & fatalities in the (near) future. According to [2], it may even have happened already to the USA.

[1] brain soup.

[2] [http://www.pewhealth.org/uploadedFiles/PHG/Content_Level_Pag...](http://www.pewhealth.org/uploadedFiles/PHG/Content_Level_Pages/Reports/PDMP_Full%20and%20Final.pdf)

(not read it yet, although there's a press release/summary at [https://generalstrikeusa.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/prescripti...](https://generalstrikeusa.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/prescription- drugs-now-kill-more-people-in-the-us-than-heroin-and-cocaine-combined/) )

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> _" The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers."_

So after 30 years we have replaced stuff with known effects that we knew how to cope with, with stuff that is more dangerous with lots of side effects, untested and people are getting high all the same.

Where should we put the "MISSION ACCOMPLISHED" banner?

<comment><USER23> Into your pipe and smoke it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> There is an evil hack that would get around this: pass a law which changes drug scheduling from a black-list to a white-list, with only FDA-approved substances allowed.

I'm uncertain whether this could be successfully passed, though. Support for the War on Drugs is on the bubble as it is.

<comment><USER16> Blanket prohibitions against have run up against legal infirmities. It's the reason the drug laws are drafted the way they are.

A whitelist law violates the requirement that the statute must be on its face clear enough that a defendant could know whether his conduct was in violation of the law. Most such blanket prohibitions are ruled void for vagueness.

Other statutes that run up against this problem frequently are the low level but extremely broad harassment and terroristic threat statutes.

<comment><USER24> There is the "I know it when I see it" standard for pornography, which is equally dubious. If it was drafted as "knowingly consuming an unapproved substance for the purpose of intoxication", I could see that slipping through. But again, I'm not sure the support is there, but it would be another win for state power.

The real shame is, many of those synthetic drugs are actually more dangerous than the real thing.

<comment><USER16> The obscenity ruling was a bizarre sideways move for the Supreme Court, given their usual intense protection of the First Amendment. The "I know it when I see it" was even said almost tongue-in-cheek.

> The real shame is, many of those synthetic drugs are actually more dangerous > than the real thing.

That, to me, is the real tragedy. These drugs are dangerous, and only going to get more dangerous as the "good" compounds are quickly banned, leading chemists to use less tested and more unusual compounds.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Here's a story about a grandmother selling "Bath Salts". She was arrested for selling some kind of drug. Even though the products she was selling contained the illegal chemicals she avoided a conviction because, well, who knows. It feels a bit random.

([http://www.thisisgloucestershire.co.uk/Grandmother-s- nightma...](http://www.thisisgloucestershire.co.uk/Grandmother-s-nightmare- arrest-selling-bath-salts/story-19546383-detail/story.html))

Some things that aren't obvious from that article: Her shop sells a wide variety of drug paraphernalia (scales, pipes, bongs, cannabis seeds, items with cannabis logos, cannabis magazines and books, etc etc.)

</comment><comment><USER26> The fear of designer drugs existed already in the 1980s. The comic strip Doonesbury even covered it - Uncle Duke hosted a designer drug conference in his 'medical university' in Haiti.

There already exist several ways to handle derivatives and analogues in drug prohibitions and restricted compound sales. Quoting from Wikipedia: "This then led the Health Committee of the League of Nations to pass several resolutions attempting to bring these new drugs under control, ultimately leading in 1930 to the first broad analogues provisions extending legal control to all esters of morphine, oxycodone, and hydromorphone."

</comment><comment><USER27> Despite the fact that legalisation would not only make drugs safer while simultaneously cutting funding to organised crime (lets not forget the tax revenue as well) the UK Gov still believes prohibition is the key. I'd love to see them give a detailed reason as to why alcohol is legal while cannabis is not - it's pretty damn obvious which is 'healthier'.

</comment><comment><USER28> typical story of disruption through innovation. Old, entrenched interests feel like the foundation gets washed away from under their feet while they try to apply more and more force (laws).

</comment><comment> at-fates-hands I have no idea why people would want to mess with this stuff. Here's an interesting article I came across a few years ago, when spice was starting to get popular. It convinced me never to touch the stuff:

[http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-terrifying-reasons-you- shouldn...](http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-terrifying-reasons-you-shouldnt- smoke-synthetic-weed/)

<comment><USER8> Most of those reasons are bunk. One of them seems to be "if you smoke it when you're driving, the cops might stop you and won't know what you're smoking is legal".

If you smoke it when driving _you are an asshole_.

Whether it's legal or not, whether it's real weed or not. Get off the road, get baked in your living room and stay there you dangerous, selfish prick. Also his 'hell' experience? Oh My God he took an unfamiliar substance along with TWICE his usual dose of dextromethorphan. I'm not f*cking surprised he had a hard time.

Most of the other reasons he gives there are to do with people purchasing 'blends' of unknown amounts of unknown chemicals on unknown plant matter. People who want to know what they're dosing themselves with buy the pure powders and measure carefully.

That all said, it's true that there's far more known about the safety profile of the 'real' stuff, and you probably shouldn't touch the synthetics. But not because of that huge pile of toss.

<comment><USER13> I've never really understood why drugs are often considered as mitigating factors in crimes, rather than (IMO) aggravating ones.

<comment><USER29> Do you have that backwards? Has drug use ever been considered a mitigating factor? If so, where and when? In the USA, alcohol intoxication is a strong aggravating factor in motor vehicle crimes.

<comment><USER8> I believe drunkenness has been considered under English law to be a mitigating factor where intent is concerned, though not where the question of the crime itself was concerned. However using drink in getting up the courage to commit a crime is also not allowed - [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intoxication_in_English_law](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intoxication_in_English_law)

I'm not sure how much this would fly now, as it all seems to have been debated 100 years ago.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Oh, you can still get high? Great! I guess it's not such a bad thing that we're throwing so many people in prison, then!</comment>


Providing Digital Provenance: From Modeling Through Production - <AUTHOR> https://blog.dominodatalab.com/providing-digital-provenance-modeling-production/ <comment><USER2> Hi! I'm the guy in the video. Happy to answer any questions!</comment>


Startup bus & mobile pad for sale - <AUTHOR> http://sfbay.craigslist.org/sby/rvs/3820027083.html

<comment><AUTHOR> I came across this listing today accidentally while looking for something else at CL.

It's strangely appealing (setting aside the paintjob!)</comment>


Marco Polo: Geographically Pinpointing Clients on Wireless Networks [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://web.cs.wpi.edu/~crtaylor/files/acsc_final.pdf <comment><USER2> This is awesome</comment>


OpenVPN Configuration Generator - <AUTHOR> https://www.sparklabs.com/blog/openvpn-configuration-generator/ <comment><USER2> The intent is good, but seriously though? C++ and Swift for a configuration generator? I don't speak C++ (Swift looks easy enough) though I have configured OpenVPN countless times: I can't even check what that thing does.</comment>


How much pee in a pool would kill you? - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/science/2014/03/ask-ars-how-much-pee-in-a-pool-would-kill-you/

<comment><USER2> If you just want to satisfy your curiosity without wading through the article:

      In the end, we need a pool that is two parts water to one part chlorine and would probably burn the
      eyeballs out of your sockets and make your skin peel away from your bones (this calls for a pool boy who
      can only be criminally sadistic). If you and three million other people could get at this pool and unload
      your pee into it before your bodies melted, before the crowd crushed you to death, and before you drowned
      from the massive tidal wave of pee... yes, you could feasibly die of cyanogen chloride poisoning
      originating from chlorinated water and pee.

</comment><comment><USER3> This article is about Uric acid + Chlorine producing Cyanogen chloride (NCCl), but a bigger concern in practice is Urea + Chlorine producing Trichloramine (NCl3). It has been suggested[1] that this reaction is responsible for the rise in asthma cases.

Also, it is responsible for some ignoble controversy around the new public bathhouse in my old home town. Apparently there was a perfect storm, in that the building both has a poorly designed ventilation system, _and_ inconveniently located restrooms which tempt people to...

No deaths so far, but several people complained about the bathhouse air making their asthma flare up, and when measured the concentration was above the health and safety limits [2].

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pool_chlorine_hypothesis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pool_chlorine_hypothesis) [2][http://www.sydsvenskan.se/lund/kansliga-personer-varnas- for-...](http://www.sydsvenskan.se/lund/kansliga-personer-varnas-for- trikloraminet/)

</comment><comment><USER4> This is actually pretty cool. I would love to see examples like this used in high school gen-chem courses. It would probably help to keep the students' interest in what could be either an incredibly dull or exciting subject, chemistry.

<comment><USER5> This is fairly reminiscent of xkcd's What If blog post series: [https://what- if.xkcd.com/](https://what-if.xkcd.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you enjoyed reading this article, xkcd's Randall Munroe publishes "what if" analyses on a sporadic basis at [http://whatif.xkcd.com/](http://whatif.xkcd.com/).

<comment> andrey-p It's not sporadic, it's updated every Tuesday. (But yeah, seconded.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Scale that down, and you have 2/3 liter of water, 1/3 liter of chlorine, and one person peeing to get the same deadly concentration.

I can't base it on any even remotely scientific argument, but to me, something seems wrong with that conclusion; it just seems weird that it would be that easy to get a poisonous concentration. I guess it is that the deadly concentration is of the gas in air, across multiple inhalations. If so, one needs much more of the gas.

But as I said I simply don't know. Can anybody else?

<comment><USER8> If you were to urinate straight into off the shelf bleach, bad things would happen. For maximum drama, let the urine age for a few days to build up ammonia levels.

[http://www.chemaxx.com/explosion16b.htm](http://www.chemaxx.com/explosion16b.htm)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> If you enjoyed reading this article, you might find The Straight Dope ([http://www.straightdope.com/](http://www.straightdope.com/)) interesting as well.

One of my favorites: [http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/113/the-story- of-sc...](http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/113/the-story-of- schroedingers-cat-an-epic-poem)

</comment><comment><USER10> About an inch if you're face down in it.

</comment><comment><USER11> The ocean is mostly fish pee.</comment>


HP Researchers Design Intelligent Social Network with Focus on "Real" Friends - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/hp_researchers_design_intelligent_social_network.php <comment><USER2> In addition to tracking the calls & durations, it should track the pitch and tone to provide more accurate results. E.g. did a user speak in a melodious voice or had to raise the tone, while speaking with another? Coupled with a statistical model of the specific user's tendency about the tone, will give very precise information.

A chilling scenario can be: serve ads to the user for improving pronunciation based on an analysis of their speech.

Not sure about the privacy implications, though. Technically, it may or may not be possible to achieve at this stage, since powerful hardware is required for such analysis.</comment>