iMessage + Apps - <AUTHOR> https://developer.apple.com/imessage/ <comment><USER2> I admit it, I don't get the draw of these things. I can vandalize people's messages with stickers now? And from the keynote, "Nothing beats a fullscreen moment!"? Ookay.

The amount of applause for "We made emoji bigger!" was ... surprising to me. I got on board the Snapchat train, but I just can't get excited about being able to tap words to turn them into emoji.

In the words of Principal Skinner: _Am I out of touch? No, it 's the children who are wrong._

<comment><USER3> I clapped for at bigger-emoji line. But I'm over 40 and have to squint to read the pictograms my wife and kids send me.

<comment><USER2> Ah that's a good point. My eyes are still at a point where one prescription works for near and far vision.

If it's an improvement it's an improvement and it might as well be as good as it can, but "we caught up to facebook messenger" doesn't feel that exciting to me.

I was really hoping for the iMessage on Android rumors to pan out, but now that they've gone and created an iMessage extensions system it seems a lot less possible moving forward.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Google wave was just too far ahead of its time. The world wasn't ready yet. And now look where we are. A clean UI and a little magic makes things so much different.

<comment><USER5> Agreed. It's looking more and more like we collectively screwed ourselves by turning our noses up at Wave.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Instead of selecting text I'd rather have a dedicated softkey to emojify what I type after. E.g. ⁂poop spits out pile of poo emoji. Tap and hold the button and the emoji menus show up.

<comment><USER2> HipChat uses parens for this, with (thumbsup) turning into a thumbs up icon even if you're communicating through the IRC bridge. It's a bit weird when you're using parentheses for a parenthetical and it pops up the emoticon search, but you get used to it.

<comment><USER7> The Slack equivalent, which wraps the keyword with colons, :+1: is less likely to happen on accident. I am surprised HipChat went with parentheses, honestly, but maybe they felt they were too subtle for mobile users (I like them, myself). It is nice to have a text-only method of mapping to emoji, though.

<comment><USER2> For extra fun you can add your own in-joke shortcuts within your organization.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It seems that there is no ability to create iMessage bots.

</comment><comment><USER9> in-messenger apps and payment system - Apple wants to be WeChat</comment>


Google Claims 30% Latency Reduction In Chrome - <AUTHOR> http://www.conceivablytech.com/7566/products/google-claims-30-latency-reduction-in-chrome

<comment><USER2> The False Start IETF draft (currently submitted to the TLS WG) is here: <https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-bmoeller-tls-falsestart-00>

Brief summary: False Start TLS makes it legitimate to send the payload of a connection before the handshaking is finished. This improves latency, apparently doesn't make keeping track of state more complex, but does have security consequences. False Start can be piggy-backed onto regular TLS fairly easily, with fairly few pathological cases.

<comment><USER3> What do you mean by security consequences? As far as I can tell, the IETF draft specifies the whitelisted ciphers and key exchange algorithms for which False Start has no security consequences; as long as implementations use False Start only for those whitelisted algorithms, security isn't compromised. I suppose the only security consequence then is that bad implementations might choose non-recommended algorithms in their whitelists, either out of ignorance or because they are consciously compromising security for the sake of being able to use False Start more often.

<comment><USER2> The security consequence discussed in the draft is that since handshakes validate, allowing the protocol to bypass them undermines authentication, giving more opportunity to construct, say, man-in-the-middle attacks.

There is no whitelist of algorithms. The discussion talks generally about how to patch up this authentication problem, but it doesn't go into much detail. Ignorance is really our default state when it comes to security.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Yeah, they say they reduced the latency by 30% for 90%, but they actually increased it for 90% of sites I visit. Canary seems to be better in many cases, but still incomparable to FF4. On win7.</comment>


Win Dropbox Pro (50gigs) for life. Whoa. That would be awesome. - <AUTHOR> http://appsumo.com/~llym

<comment><USER2> <http://appsumo.com/dropbox> for non-referral link</comment>


Use AWS Lambda to self-host your A/B tests - <AUTHOR> http://blog.gingerlime.com/2016/a-scaleable-ab-testing-backend-in-100-lines-of-code-and-for-free/ <comment><USER2> This is another weird use of the term 'self host'. It usually means something that you can host yourself on a platform you choose - being reliant on a service that only a single vendor provides is a pretty long stretch to "self hosted".

<comment><AUTHOR> Agree, but what _is_ true self-hosted these days anyway? You'd need an Internet connection? Power? Did you build your own computer? I can go on... :)

Compared to using an A/B testing service like VWO or Optimizely, I think this fits in the self-hosted category.

EDIT: the blog post actually mentions a few viable alternatives to AWS Lambda. It is developed primarily with AWS Lambda in mind, but porting it to another platform is actually trivial.

<comment><USER2> > Agree, but what is true self-hosted these days anyway?

Software that can be installed and run on computers that I choose, without outside dependence.

If someone can't run the software on a private network without internet access, it isn't self-hostable.

<comment><AUTHOR> As it happens, you can do this with gimel with tiny modifications to the code.

<comment><USER2> So, as I said. It isn't self-hostable.

It has the _potential_ to be made self-hostable, but potential is not the same as current state.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, but I don't really understand the negativity and nitpick here.

I, and I think many others, will consider it self-hosted. If it doesn't fit in your environment, then the code is dead simple to modify and make self- hostable.

<comment><USER2> > Sorry, but I don't really understand the negativity and nitpick here.

It's quite simple: you're claiming something that is factually incorrect.

Your second sentence is just confusing, because if it were truly self-hostable already, there would be no need to modify it, to make it self-hostable.

So, which is it, self-hostable already, or "dead simple" to make self- hostable?

<comment><AUTHOR> It _is_ self-hostable already in my book (and I believe many others).

For those who think it isn't self-hostable - I'm sorry if my definition somehow doesn't fit with your world view. You are still free to use the code and make it fit in whichever definition of self-hostable you believe to be factually correct.

I presented not one, but several alternatives to hosting it, and all of them require only minor modification to the code.

I think I was clear and upfront about the benefits and limitations of this solution. Splitting hairs over self or not self hostable seems like nitpicking to me.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Create & Deploy a Node.JS App on Nodester in Less than 2 Minutes  - <AUTHOR> http://youtu.be/1OdmF26_vmc?a

<comment><USER2> I really, really, really, REALLY, hate screen casts when the person who is in it has his cam up while coding. ITS SO ANNOYING! I don't want to see your face. I want to see the CODE!

It's alright in the beginning/end. I don't really mind showing your face for the intro. But while coding, please keep it off!

anyways, it was a good screen cast though, thanks.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, but Chris is just so damn handsome ;) I'd give him a pass

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Big fan of heroku for months, I've just became big fan of nodester in only a couple of days :) Screen cast is really good. Nodester is a real cool stuff, it's a real pleasure to do everything in command line. Good job Chris.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Nodester is also opensource which allows you to run it on your own Amazon EC2 instance or sent us pull requests if you have any ideas how to make it better!

<https://github.com/nodester/nodester>

<comment><USER5> Do you guys have plans to monetize this somehow? I'd gladly pay for a quality cloud based node hosting solution. I could create my own instance on EC2, sure, but for me it's more effective to pay than maintain my own server.

<comment><AUTHOR> Nodester will eventually develop a pricing model similar to Heroku when the platform matures. We are planning to always offer a free instance for less intensive node.js apps.

<comment><USER6> Have you sought any funding yet? Where are you based?

For some additional inspiration, you might also check out AppHarbor (YC W11) at <http://appharbor.com/> . They are Heroku for .NET.

You can also check out DotCloud (YC S10) at <http://www.dotcloud.com/> . They are also a platform-as-a-service.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Liked the presentation! I like the production quality with all the zooming. What apps did you use for the awesome picture-in-picture screencast?

<comment><AUTHOR> I used ScreenFlow Pro. It's awesome!

<comment><USER6> Have you also posted the video to ontwik ( <http://ontwik.com/> )? I think your video would be a great fit for that site.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Please put [video] in the title.</comment>


Help until 10 April to influence how 750Ms will be spent - <AUTHOR> https://k7r.eu/urgent-help-until-10-april-to-influence-how-750-millions-will-be-spent/ <comment><USER2> This is the linked survey:

[https://ec.europa.eu/eusurvey/runner/nextgen- internet](https://ec.europa.eu/eusurvey/runner/nextgen-internet)

It would be really great if they receive messages from as many people as possible.

750M can do much good, but as always there is a risk that this money is "invested" into very harmful projects.</comment>


Imagination Technologies can't resolve Apple IP spat, opens formal dispute - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/05/imagination-technologies-apple-ip-dispute-resolution-process/ <comment><USER2> Seems to be a bit of a cart before the horse issue, which is why they aren't going to court I suppose- no actionable issue.

Apple's big issue though is when they do actually ship they are likely to be highly exposed to patent suits from the incumbent video/3d IP holders. If Imagination/AMD/NVidia see that Apple is going to do what it seems to be doing- going vertical wherever they can to capture more margin- they'll feel free to sue without fear of loss of losing Apple as a customer.

Mac's are not a major revenue source for AMD and a non-existent one for Nvidia and Imagination.

Apple will have to come to some kind of agreement to keep shipping unless they have lots of patents they can enforce against the counter-parties.

</comment><comment><USER3> Good riddance. Their obnoxious licensing has made it all but impossible for Free Software interoperability with their GPUs to be written. I will not miss them, nor their chips, nor their patents.</comment>


Chatbot for your Facebook page 6 months free Sign up now! Manychat alternative - <AUTHOR> https://mapletechno.com/landing.php?id=hn <comment><AUTHOR> the chatbot is for ecommerce. displays products, prices, and allows users to buy. when you go to the page, please click on continue to facebook for sign up. you will get 6 months for free. better than manychat... unlimited users and messages for free!</comment>


You're paying too much to get a little more space on your iPad and iPhone - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2012/07/apple_profit_margins_you_re_paying_way_way_too_much_to_get_a_little_more_space_on_your_ipad_and_iphone_.single.html

<comment><USER3> I can't stand the "breakdowns" from iSuppli: as if raw components were the only cost! There are the massive teams of software engineers, not only to write the software, but to maintain it over time. There are shipping costs, labor for manufacturing and quality control, advertising, marketing, R&D for all the unshipped iterations, legal and compliance issues (for every single country), data centers, overhead, infrastructure, and more. Sure, some of these are fixed costs, and some can be absorbed by revenues from other product lines, but it's not like you can just subtract components and arrive at the take-home profit.

All that said, I'm sure that Apple still takes in a good profit on every low- end unit. But I don't see their overpriced storage as a gouge (or at least, an unreasonable one). Rather, it also acts as a subsidy: all the people who can afford a 64GB/3G iPad make up the difference profit-wise for the 16GB/WiFi, allowing them to offer it at a lower margin, both to entice users in and then up-sell, and also to grow the market share. Other industries do this kind of thing all the time, for cars, game consoles, etc.

Is Apple overcharging you on storage? Most certainly. But I don't think it's anything worthy of outrage. If it's not a good value proposition for you, don't buy it. There are plenty of alternate tablets which include micro-SD slots.

<comment><USER4> So because of that your takeaway is that the breakdowns are useless?

Take that data for what it is and don't expect from it what it isn't.

And they do estimate manufacturing costs BTW, plus boxing costs - <USER2> all the costs of making the widget. They don't claim to, and don't, estimate other costs, that's just not what they do.

<comment><USER5> It's a healthy dash of guilt by association; these iSuppli reports unfortunately lend themselves to sloppy reporting. This article is a typically wonderful specimen, which crosses lines freely with nonsense sentences like these:

"On the high-end Wi-Fi model, which offers you 64GB of space for $699, Apple's non-manufacturing profit margin shoots up to 48 percent."

As though you get to handwave away non-manufacturing costs and then call it a "non-manufacturing profit margin."

<comment><USER4> Certainly, but that's not iSuppli's fault.

<comment><USER3> Fair enough; I suppose it is the tech press who are dropping the ball here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is simply called segmented prices <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination>

By all accounts it's a good thing, since it lets those with lower budgets still get the device, and yet still allows the manufacturer to make a profit.

You want to make a device for every price point your customers are willing to pay.

Cars do it too - those extras you can pay for don't cost anywhere near as much as you pay, they are simply there to make extra profit.

That's why you have the high/mid/low models of virtually every device, and the price difference is not anywhere near the performance difference (look at intel CPUs for example).

When you go to a car wash do you really think that extra shine/wax/whatever spray really costs that much? It doesn't, it's simply a way to make a little extra from those who are willing to spend it.

</comment><comment><USER6> IMO this article is spot on. I've ordered the Nexus 7 and wondered if 8 GB would be enough, but then checked how much of the 16 GB on my Nexus phone I was using, and it's only a couple of GB.

In contrast, the PCWorld review of the Nexus 7 ([http://www.pcworld.com/article/258772/google_nexus_7_tablet_...](http://www.pcworld.com/article/258772/google_nexus_7_tablet_review_solid_but_not_revolutionary.html?tk=rel_news)) starts by harping on and on about the supposed storage constraints of the 8GB model.

Too many mainstream reviewers are still obsessed with specs. Normal people don't know or care about specs; they only care about the overall experience, which is why Apple is where it is.

IMO Android has caught up to iOS in terms of everyday usability but the hardware is generally much cheaper than Apple and improves faster. I think the Nexus 7 will mark a turning point in the Android ecosystem.

<comment><USER7> I don't know. The original 2010 7" Galaxy Tab came in 16 GB and 32 GB models. The lowest iPhone 4S model is a 16 GB. The smallest capacity iPad has been a 16 GB since the first one in 2010.

Personally, I'm using practically all of the 8 GB SD card that's in my Nexus One at the moment. (Much of it is music - I listen to fairly obscure stuff not readily available on streaming services.) I'm about to move up to a 16 GB card. Most people probably won't have 8 GB of music but 8 GB of video is very possible. Then there's downloadable content for media apps for the tablet.

I'm not going to buy a non-upgradeable device with storage space that's limited since yesterday, and paying a premium for what should be baseline kinda stinks. More than $15 for the 8 to 16 GB upgrade is just bad, as is no 32 GB option.

<comment><USER4> 8 GB of music is several days worth at least. I guess it's easier to just leave it all there, but it wouldn't be that hard to cycle it every day or so.

Maybe setup a streaming server on your own PC and download and cache a days worth each time you have wifi access.

<comment><USER7> Yes, or I could just use a $10 - $13 worth of fingernail-sized technology and never have to worry about syncing or cycling files.

I don't think it's uncommon for "normal users" to have more than 8 GB of music, video, apps, and downloadable content. Apple seems to agree.

<comment><USER4> Oh I agree. But you have to live with what's available.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's a technically easy way to create product differentiation and start capturing consumer surplus. It's also easy for their salespeople to explain the added value to a wide audience - "you can take more pictures and video, and run more apps on this version." Easy to do and easy to sell is a product manager's dream.

Production cost is irrelevant. People don't buy things based on how much they cost to make. It's all about value, and Apple knows how to sell it. I would be interested to see a breakdown of how much of Apple's profits have come from selling Flash upgrades. I'm sure it has proven to be a brilliant pricing strategy earning them untold billions.

</comment><comment><USER9> Regardless, people tend to make purchases based on the perceived value, not based on component cost.

I mean, is Slate going to do a car comparison and create an argument for consider horsepower per dollar (or cubic feet of storage per dollar, or seats per dollar, or whatever metric you fancy most) when purchasing a vehicle? I mean, does it really cost thousands of dollars more to produce a 6-cylinder engine over a 4-cylinder, plus a beefier transmission and driveline components? Of course not.

</comment><comment><USER10> While this is a totally valid point, the article is missing a fundamental piece of the equation. There is no way to upgrade an iPad for cheaper. If I need 64GB on my iPad, it's not possible for me to circumvent Apple's fees.

The necessity of going through Apple, who is charging too much, is what makes this a valid point of complaint and Slate totally misses that, which makes them look dumb.

</comment><comment><USER11> This is why I like devices to have a micro SDXC slot. My Galaxy Note 'only' came with 16GB built it, but I bumped it up to 80GB for a total of $70.

Flash memory of various types is not expensive these days, and it is small and low on power requirements. It's been easy to spot the price-gouging for a few years now.

</comment><comment><USER12> I really find the extra space useful (for podcasts, audiobooks, music, and a movie or two for that long flight). I wish the upgrades were cheaper. I know why Apple does it, but I don't like it; and contrary to Slate's POV, I'm not a sucker, I am just getting a raw deal on the upgrade.

</comment><comment><USER13> This is a strong reason to pick devices that let you use a microSD (or similar, hopefully non-proprietary) card for extra storage. I will never run out of memory on my smartphone for that reason, since most "bulk data" that I encounter is music, photos, etc.

<comment><USER7> This is a strong reason why manufacturers have been increasingly removing microSD slots from mobile devices. No microSD on Nexus devices since 2010, can't get an HTC One model with both microSD and NFC...

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Do these stats take into account device density? I wonder if the higher density flash chips are more expensive.

About a year ago 4GB DDR3 SODIMM's were about $50/each but 8GB versions which required twice as dense chips were around $500/each - there was a huge premium on the dense chips.

Now the prices have dropped to roughly $30 and $70 respectively, which is much closer to a linear price/size curve.

Does anyone know if flash pricing follows a similar curve?

<comment><USER4> Usually you leave an empty space on the board to be filled with extra memory for the higher version. (And for some devices there are services that will solder in a chip for you in that spot.)

It's not typical to use different density chips since then you have to tune the rest of the system to match, and that's more complicated.

<comment><USER14> If SSD logic boards are any indication, devices with fewer chips frequently have lower read/write speeds, as they're not using all the lanes on the controller.

I'm thinking this would be the case as well on a tablet, unless the flash is in a bus topology already.

<comment><USER15> > I'm thinking this would be the case as well on a tablet, unless the flash is > in a bus topology already.

There is no speed difference between 1 or 2 chips in this context, they are just treated as separate banks and mapped to different memory addresses controlled by the flash memory controller in the SoC.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> How much storage do you really need on a mobile device these days? I had the 64GB iPad 2, but with the new iPad I didn't feel the need to go beyond 32GB. I don't even fill that up. With iTunes Match and so many other streaming services, local storage with all its syncing issues isn't as relevant anymore.

</comment><comment><USER17> "Modern gadgets are meant to be disposable machines, not eternal repositories of all your stuff. "

I think that would be a better subject to get worked up about than the feeling you're getting conned because the profit margins on one (optional!) part of your gadget are higher.

</comment><comment><USER18> Good, the people willing to pay through the nose for the premium model can fund research into more products, heck, they can even make or break the success of the product as a whole. Meanwhile, if the lower spec options works for you, you are getting a deal.</comment>


Creating 3D Models from Light Fields - <AUTHOR> http://igl.ethz.ch/projects/light-field-segmentation/ <comment><USER2> This is very interesting. Segmentation is a very, very hard problem and the video indicates they have made it fast. 4000 images is a lot and at 21GB per model the processing overhead has to be massive. 60-100 minutes is also a pretty long time to recover one model, but not crazy, and will certainly get faster.

I don't see any scale reference markers or other reference material in the scene, so I wonder if it recovers scale from light field depth information alone.

Interestingly from the paper, they aren't actually using a light field camera - but rather creating a light volume through sequentially varying the depth of image taken and modeling the volume:

 _Key to our method is the dense spatio-angular sampling of video, which results in smoothly varying parallax between successive frames_

A hack for sure!

I would be curious to know if using a light field camera would even be useful in this scenario as much of what they do mimics the light field camera processes, only manually.

</comment><comment><USER3> Fun to see state of the art algorithms juxtaposed with 90's internet aesthetic (auto playing audio ;)).

Hopefully lightfield cameras / camera arrays will become more common in the near future.

<comment><USER4> Not just audio, but an autoplaying 219MB video file no less.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> THIS IS HUGE. They are creating/calculating the missing "dimension" based on statistical input. That is amazing. Physics experiments are all about trying to understand the unknown dimension(s) as well! This D to D+1 dimension transformation is mathematically likely to be solvable for any D value that is an integer too.

</comment><comment><USER6> Awesome results, but what is a light field? Are they not generating their models simply from a recorded video?

<comment><USER7> A lightfield is a way of recording an image with ray angle information as well

This means that you know _where_ the light has come from, which allows your to amongst other things alter the focus/depth of field after the image had been captured.

Because you can refocus and change the depth of field post capture, it allows you in theory to do better image segmentation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Sell software pl0x.</comment>


Last-ditch heritage bid launched to keep Apple out of Federation Square - <AUTHOR> https://www.theage.com.au/melbourne-news/last-ditch-heritage-bid-launched-to-keep-apple-out-of-fed-square-20190210-p50wu1.html <comment><USER2> If the planners had any balls they'd tell apple no. Fed square is fantastic. I miss the wedge.</comment>


Show HN: Feedback on my Resume? - <AUTHOR> http://resume.michaelcolenso.com

<comment><USER2> I'll start with a few things.

-To increase legibility, I would make the background image more transparent. The higher contrast will make it easier to read.

-Bring the content on top down a little bit, and bring the content on the bottom up higher.

-The animation on the rotating text is way too slow. Speed it up a bit.

-I would line up the large display text with the content on the bottom. Or center it. Right now it's kind of somewhere in between and it looks awkward.

Great start tho. Clean, direct and responsive. I hope this feedback helps.

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome. I really appreciate the feedback and the kind words. Cheers to you.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Which improvement introduced to replace headphone jack is useful to you? - <AUTHOR> Take into consideration that the headphone jack and Bluetooth (wireless) headphones were available and working well before manufacturers got rid of the jack in the name of improvements.
Consider that some devices still have the headphone jack and same improvements as those without the jack.
It is to my knowledge that ports provided for the headphone "jack-less" devices are not interoperable. Will you say this is good for the industry and importantly the consumer? <comment><USER2> Its terrible for the consumer. Instead of a thousand affordable options for whatever kind of headphone you want, there are far fewer options and even expensive wireless earbuds/headphones suffer from latency, making them almost worthless. I've never had a bluetooth device of any kind that was even close to 100% reliable where I didn't occasionally have to mess with settings to get it to pair properly.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd rather just have a proper headphone jack.

</comment><comment><USER4> water resistance.

<comment><USER5> Why is this dependent on removing the classic headphone jack? They can be made water resistant too.</comment></comment>


Pre-New-Year Check of PostgreSQL - <AUTHOR> http://www.viva64.com/en/b/0227/

<comment><USER2> OK, so I've fixed three of the bugs, not sure about how/if to fix the others.

[http://www.postgresql.org/message- id/CAASwCXe2rQX66Wzw10KMEh...](http://www.postgresql.org/message- firstname.lastname@example.com) [http://www.postgresql.org/message- id/CAASwCXfgFsMt31c1srj=Fs...](http://www.postgresql.org/message- firstname.lastname@example.com) [http://www.postgresql.org/message- id/CAASwCXeKeVpJi03mjzdY6A...](http://www.postgresql.org/message- firstname.lastname@example.com)

</comment><comment><USER3> This was a very interesting article for me. I find it amazing how even in a codebase such as PostgreSQL's, which is very mature and values reliability, data integrity, and correctness, errors like these could be found by a static code analysis tool.

Some of the rules seem brilliant, like successive assignment detection.

</comment><comment><USER4> Interesting

About the memset bug, I wonder if this couldn't be solved by some kind of compiler directive in the function signature saying "you can't remove this" (or something to that effect)

<comment><USER5> Thats why C11 has memset_s. [http://www.open- std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/docs/n1381.pdf](http://www.open- std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/docs/n1381.pdf)

<comment><USER4> This is a good writeup, thanks

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wish they would do a MySQL check so we can compare it with this one.

<comment><USER7> [http://www.viva64.com/external-pictures/txt/mysql- test.txt](http://www.viva64.com/external-pictures/txt/mysql-test.txt)

<comment><USER4> Interesting

Disclaimer: I didn't check the code

But maybe the sizeof(buf) is right? - if you want the size of the pointer (maybe if you're using wide chars?)

Especially since it's an 'Error_message_buf' type

EDIT: probably not, I'm thinking of sizeof(buf[0]), sizeof(buf) makes even less sense, it's a bug unless someone has a very good reason for it

Amazing that the tool detects collections of similar blocks, it's not wrong per se, but it's a common source of copy-paste bugs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> if they dont put the price online, it must be very expensive

<comment><USER9> I don't know this tool but I imagine they want to make very individual prices. They probably want to know who is interested in buying this tool before they tell you a price. Also they probably have lot's of (complicated) pricing models in mind and it would be too complicated to describe all the possibilities on the website.

I have worked in a similar project myself. We developed a very specialized tool for developers. Our boss decided that he did not want to mention prices on the website at first. Once we did some people complained publicly about the price although we invested months of development and the tool was pretty neat...

In general I think it makes more sense to tell the prices upfront and try to come up with a simple price model even if it means making compromises. You can always have something like this on your website: "If you think you do not fit in any price tier please contact us to find an individual price. The prices listed are meant to show what we have in mind for the general customers."

I would love to know the reason why some people think not having prices is a good idea. Care to elaborate?

<comment><USER10> Nutshell: Some clients expect a product with service and support behind it, and they expect to pay for it. In fact, if your price doesn't obviously include support you will be overlooked for not charging enough. Too low is not a plausible price. They will have to be charged more than a startup that wants to apply the tool using their own manpower and but for serious bugs, will provide most of their own tech support.</comment></comment></comment>


The Walkman, Forty Years On - <AUTHOR> https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-walkman-forty-years-on <comment><USER3> Reminds me of how much Sony (along with Braun) shaped Apple's hardware design language. And that in turn keeps on shaping many others.

And the walkman is arguably one of the classic cases of "build it, and they will come", where a product was well ahead of what consumers were already calling for. In my mind, that's the kind of thing actually deserving the _visionary_ label.

<comment><USER4> I remember feeling like I was living in the future every time I listed to music on my Sony MiniDisc player while friends where still using their portable CD players with easily scratched disks before mp3 players became affordable and ubiquitous in high school.

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

<comment><USER5> I remember when we were all rocking walkmans/aiwas and just accepted the mediocre sound quality of our mix tapes. CDs were ubiquitous but most portable players were prone to skipping and there was no economic way to create mix tapes on CDs for us. The day I bought a portable Sharp mindisc recoder and created the my first digital CD to Mindisc mix via an optical connection was eye opening. I cannot overstate what a game changer it was in creating portable CD quality mixes.

<comment><USER3> Quite ironically, these days you can get audio processing plugins for DAWs (digital audio workstations), which lower the quality of your audio to emulate the lower audio quality of cassette tapes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I recently had an opportunity to check out a drive-in movie theatre, and was very excited at the idea until I remembered that the FM radio in our car was messed up (we never use it). I dug through the garage and found my old Walkman still in a pile of high school stuff. Cleaned it up, installed batteries, cycled the volume rheostat until it was cleaned up and the static stopped...and POOF perfect FM radio again! I brought headphones and had a great time.

<comment> cbm-vic-20 My Walkman stopped getting security upgrades in 1984.

<comment><USER7> Was the firmware at that time complex enough that you can attempt an OTA brick? Are radios from 1984 mostly analogue?

<comment><USER8> They were made entirely of electrical and electronic parts, didn't need firmware , and almost always could be repaired.

<comment><USER9> Just to be a pedant, the android phone I am typing this on is also made entirely out of electrical and electronic parts as well. In fact, arguably this device contains a greater degree of those parts, as the only electromechanical parts are speakers, a vibration motor, and 3 tact switches.

A simple radio will have a speaker, slide switch for power, potentiometer for volume, and either a potentiometer or variable cap for tuning.

Although I do agree, the operative words there are 'simple' and 'no firmware'. ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> There's a big community of ambient/electronic musicians that are still using these things. They are popular for recording/playing tape loops and making tape delays. I bought some recently to convert into a makeshift mellotron (they still run ~$15 on ebay!). [1] Also there seems to still be enough demand to fund kickstarters for new fancy cassette players. [2]

[1]: [https://schollz.com/blog/tape-synth/](https://schollz.com/blog/tape- synth/)

[2]: [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/wearerewind/we-are- rewi...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/wearerewind/we-are-rewind)

<comment><USER4> Why not use a Sony MiniDisc player to record and loop?

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

<comment><USER11> More convenient digital samplers exist, avoiding those is the entire point

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Sony TC-50 is a cassette recorder that could be considered as a predecessor to the Walkman; it even went to the moon with the Apollo 11 crew [1].

[1]: [https://kottke.org/19/07/sonys-proto-walkman-that-went-to- th...](https://kottke.org/19/07/sonys-proto-walkman-that-went-to-the-moon)

Off-topic question:

Since this is a thread on Walkman I'd like to ask you on any dedicated music player that you'd recommend?

<comment><USER13> Cool link! Regarding music players, I personally switched to simpler/less- costly solutions because I do a lot of hiking and I can get caught in sudden storms or just end up dropping things. Along those lines I tried a lot of agptek devices and they've been really good.

[http://www.agptek.com/index.php/product-category/portable- au...](http://www.agptek.com/index.php/product-category/portable-audio/music- players/)

</comment></comment><comment> the-dude I got myself a WM-701C [0], which was considered to be the pinnacle of Walkman design at the time. Incredibly thin with a 'remote control' in the headphone cord.

Mine was heavily used as I did about 20km/day on a bike ( in NL this is just commute + paper round, nothing special ) for quite a few years.

I had some trouble finding it, but hey on the internet everything exists, the Walkman Archive!

[0] [http://www.walkman- archive.com/gadgets/walkman_sony_05_701c_...](http://www.walkman- archive.com/gadgets/walkman_sony_05_701c_v3.htm)

<comment><USER14> I won a WM-701C from WIQB in Ann Arbor, MI when I was a kid! Mine was the 10th Anniversary silver edition which was amazing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Was the Walkman any better than its competitors? I was only a toddler at the time but a few years later EVERYONE made personal cassette players, at way lower prices than Sony.

But it wasn't like with a generic "MP3 player", a generic cassette player wasn't really missing anything that the Walkman had (except for the very low end models that were in the cheapest price bracket). I remember one model that only had reverse and not fast forward, for example.

<comment><USER16> They were the IPhones of the time. More expensive, more fashionable, perceived higher quality, and had innovative features such as auto reverse. The average cassette player was the generic Android in comparison.

<comment><USER17> _perceived higher quality_

Wasn't it (also) _actual_ higher quality then most if not all of the competition in the same price range?

<comment><USER16> Yes that too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Pulling up some Walkman/Discman designs from Sony, Aiwa, Panasonic (etc) just makes me want to buy one.

Somewhere after the IPhone 4/5, phone designs started to homogenize into that mostly large screen, rounded corners, and mostly became uninteresting.

Business laptops have mostly settled on the MacBook design, Gaming laptops are still coming in weird interesting designs:

[https://www.amazon.com/ASUS-Zephyrus-i7-7700HQ-Processor- Pro...](https://www.amazon.com/ASUS-Zephyrus-i7-7700HQ-Processor- Professional/dp/B071XDXLPG)

<comment><USER13> I agree, a lot of the old designs really had something special. I was looking through an old emergency backpack recently and found an Aiwa HS-SP590, similar to a Walkman. For quite a few years it was kind of boring as tech, but now it's so unique that my kids are very intrigued. I'm thinking I'll put something else in the backpack and have a play. (Ideally there weren't any batteries left inside...)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> There was a post on HN the other day where the Instagram algo was discussed - look at something once and see it for the next three weeks.

Oddly, at some point it's decided I like to see pictures of old hifi equipment and Walkmans in particular. Turns out there's a massive community of collectors and displayers, and the pictures are actually pretty great.

It also reminded me just how great 'tech' was back then. I was a kid in the 80s and a teen in the 90s and it brought back memories of just how magical it all felt! Technology didn't feel like it was iterating as quickly, and things like a tiny Walkman with tiny earbud headphones playing a tape of a new band your friend had found, in a world that wasn't instant and connected - <USER2> _everything_.

...I remember when all this was fields... _Sigh_.

</comment><comment><USER20> Somewhat related.

How far are we on having wireless earpods/earphones streaming music directly from the satellites? No phones or internet required.

<comment><USER21> Why not use FM radio? [https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002HMH0ZC](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002HMH0ZC)

<comment><USER22> I don't know about where you live, but where I am in Canada the majority of FM radio is as bad or worse than cable television; constant ads, stale "radio friendly" music and DJ's with inane banter and making bad jokes. It's painful to listen to.

<comment><USER23> College radio stations remain interesting.

<comment><USER24> Sadly, with a coverage radius only slightly larger than the campus.

<comment><USER23> Yeah, not great for road trips...

On the other hand, you get a new one every 20 miles down the freeway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> TIL that the Walkman was sold as the Freestyle here in Sweden, which is why that word was adopted for any kind of portable music player.

It's one of those fun corners where Swedish contains an English word for something, which doesn't match the word actually used by people speaking English. :) This might be what linguists call a "false friend", but I'm not sure. I also love the German "beamer" (=video projector) in this category.

<comment><USER26> Japanese has lots of these. One of the most confusing is "consent", which means "electrical socket".

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I found my Walkman, a WMF-100 from 1988 or '89, last year while going through a box of stuff I had saved:

[https://i.imgur.com/d1RqfVT.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/d1RqfVT.jpg)

[https://i.imgur.com/11LWVnw.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/11LWVnw.jpg)

[https://i.imgur.com/PARDWpn.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/PARDWpn.jpg)

It's in very used shape, the battery leaked and the face plate with the tuning frequency is loose. I remember buying it at Crazy Eddie's in NJ to replace the yellow sports walkman I managed to destroy.

</comment><comment><USER28> I can't begin to describe how much I used to dread when the batteries would begin to get depleted which would slow down the motor turning the cassette and distort the sound being produced.

</comment><comment><USER29> Boom boxes have made a comeback. Some phones are pretty loud. You can buy a lightweight sound amplifier to add to a phone. People use these hiking, running, biking, at picnics, etc.

<comment><USER30> I understand at a picnic... I don't understand people by themselves wanting to project on to others their music choices after they've become adults. As a teenager I understand why we might have done that, but not grown adults.

<comment><USER13> I've come across lots of hikers and trail runners doing this, usually small groups of HS students. It's not really a big deal because they pass by in a matter of seconds, or you can let them pass you if they're going the same way. In some ways it's safer to use ambient audio on the trail rather than headphones.

<comment><USER31> > In some ways it's safer to use ambient audio on the trail rather than > headphones.

It is also good for warning the bears that there is a group of people coming so the bear doesn't get startled and attack.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I only saw four features which I thought added value to a walkthing

1) dual headphone output. Sharing is cool!

2) a microphone. This changed journalism from niche device with dictation cassette to street journalist. Democratisation of news followed a trend down from a five person crew to two or one as VHS came in.

3) l and r separated volume. Only saw it once but for cheap stereo it meant you could do music minus one and dial down vocals on one channel

4) tape speed change. Autotune for free!

<comment><USER33> 5) autoreverse

<comment><USER32> yea that was cool. drained your batteries if you fell asleep with the damn thing running but.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> One totally genius design feature of the Walkman was the fact that it had two headphone jacks. Together with music ripping and mix tapes, this was the beginning of music sharing, and eventually the downfall of the monolithic music industries. Truly a disruptive innovation.

<comment><USER35> My dad was sharing music on 10 inch tape reels long before the walkman, and the walkman itself was far from the first cassette player.

<comment><USER34> True.. it was not the first. But it was I believe the first portable one that was capable of playing an entire cassette tape from beginning to end. It was the new generation rare earth magnets that enabled this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I think they must be overstating the thing about headphones being unprecedented. Episode 1 of the sitcom "Dobie Gillis", from 1959, introduces Bob Denver's character by showing him listening to a transistor radio using an earpiece

<comment><USER37> That's an earpiece from a 1950s transistor radio. The sound quality is terrible and it only goes in one ear.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> 90s technology struggles (4 min comedy video) [NSFW] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23730689](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23730689)

</comment><comment><USER39> Frank Black's love song to the Ramones is as much a love song to the Walkman. ;-)

[https://youtu.be/oGbbwBET-p4](https://youtu.be/oGbbwBET-p4)

</comment><comment><USER40> [https://archive.is/0xYH4](https://archive.is/0xYH4)

</comment><comment><USER41> Still have my WM-2.

</comment><comment><USER42> I don't like that website. Do they really need fixed bars on the top _and_ bottom asking me to subscribe? Not to mention article is littered with ads and a half screen nag as soon as you start scrolling.

<comment><USER43> Interesting, this was not the case for me on mobile Firefox.

<comment><USER44> Desktop Chrome: [https://i.imgur.com/fehpJVk.png](https://i.imgur.com/fehpJVk.png)

Makes me feel like I'm reading through a small window. That was after I closed the obnoxiously large 'subscribe' box.</comment></comment></comment>


Why the iPad Pro needs Xcode - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@stevestreza/why-the-ipad-pro-needs-xcode-8335ee787a09 <comment><USER2> There is Codea ( [http://codea.io/](http://codea.io/) ) already which lets you make simple games and learn programming and I dont see tons of people using it. It's also less scary than Xcode.

I tried to "switch" to an iPad and the lack of a filesystem is its Achilles heel. You need to think of files if you are a developer or if you want to become one. iPad is anti-files so if you grow up using one you get brain damaged.

And no emacs so...useless.

<comment><USER3> If you want to use Swift or Objective-C look at [http://dringend.cc](http://dringend.cc)

Not sure how many actually use it but its been around for a few years at least.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Apple, just enable apps to allocate executable memory regions on the iPad (Pro). Then one could create something like that as an open source project (where any user simply self-sign their built to upload it onto their iPad).

</comment><comment><USER5> I was so desperately hoping that Apple would release something to go toe-to- toe with the Surface. But instead they just gave me something more powerful to play Candy Crush on.</comment>


Show HN: Recalll – Search Engine for programmers and developers - <AUTHOR> https://recalll.co/app/

<comment><USER2> It reminds me of an article from Paul Graham: [http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html)

"The way to win here is to build the search engine all the hackers use. A search engine whose users consisted of the top 10,000 hackers and no one else would be in a very powerful position despite its small size, just as Google was when it was that search engine. And for the first time in over a decade the idea of switching seems thinkable to me.

Since anyone capable of starting this company is one of those 10,000 hackers, the route is at least straightforward: make the search engine you yourself want. Feel free to make it excessively hackerish. Make it really good for code search, for example. Would you like search queries to be Turing complete? Anything that gets you those 10,000 users is ipso facto good."

<comment><AUTHOR> hahaha man, you made my day :) thanks

</comment></comment><comment> w-m Great project, a usable search engine for programmers would be a fantastic tool to have.

Realising that Google still delivers the most relevant results for the things I want to look up quickly I created [http://www.stacksnippet.com/](http://www.stacksnippet.com/) last year. It takes the first Google results from your query and displays stack overflow answers inline.

Recall seems exciting, I'll be sure to follow it.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks alot, stacksnippet.com is also a good tool.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is search engine for developers and programmers, it enables you to search across websites as well as cloud apps. I'm looking for feedback. Thanks

<comment><USER3> Cool efforts so far. I can see the use case for wanting to find information across multiple sites.

Couple feedback points.

1 - the ui in your screenshot on the home page ([https://recalll.co/theme/flat/img/search.png](https://recalll.co/theme/flat/img/search.png)), in the results section you have the title as blue. At least in safari, in real life its black. This makes the results all run together and visually be hard to quickly tell where one result ends and the next begins.

2 - if I was to use it for actual work, the search "nsfetchedresultscontroller duplicates" would be something that I have searched for recently. unfortunately nothing really useful came up on this recalll.co. Maybe a good example to test against google, stack overflow, and quora.

3 - not sure if the types of queries I want to put in to search asana or evernote, would be the same types of queries I would want to search the web / blogs / stack overflow. I suppose maybe the use case is, just use recall, and we'll figure it out. But sometimes I may want to search for something silly like "s3 credentials from bob", which might producer weird results in stack overflow for example, because there is probably lot of people talking about s3 credentials, but its completely out of context, and I would want the results from evernote or something. (whether evernote is a good place to store those of course is probably another discussion, but to illustrate the point)

4 - some people won't install chrome extensions. if I try to search right from your homepage, the animated help thing starts to overwrite my input. whatever I'm searching, if its not already open, I want to open it quickly, and execute the search immediately.

Great work though. The concept is cool. Maybe you could end up like duckduckgo, for programmers.

<comment><AUTHOR> thank man, for your valuable points.

For 1 - Ya I also think blue is good for title color. i changed it some time back to black will revert back to blue.

2 - due to lack of data results are not good, crawler is continuously running, once we have enough data, that wont be a problem.

3 - for cloud apps - you hit exactly on the point that's why we added cloud apps, to target specific site or app you can choose app name in query like "s3 credentials from bob evernote", it will do the trick for you until more usable is developed.

4 - Yes chrome extension installation is bit tricky but right now don't have anything more innovative will figure it out. Search form on home page is symbolic, its not actual search. Initial idea is to take user to search page, definitely club both the pages to single one, like most of search engines are doing.

<comment><USER3> Cool, keep hacking away. Bookmarked.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Searched for "javascript date", got the date. Didn't know what to expect. "Thu May 28 2015 16:41:46 GMT+0100 (WEST)"

"javascript while(1)" also gives interesting results

<comment><AUTHOR> there is broken code while searching for particular queries. will fix that. thanks for pointing out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm happy to finally find a search engine giving good results for `>=> haskell`[0] as I can never find good information on those symbols and never remember them.

One problem, the link to the browser extension seems to be broken [1].

[0] [https://recalll.co/app/?q=%3E%3D%3E%20haskell](https://recalll.co/app/?q=%3E%3D%3E%20haskell)

[1] [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/recalll/kimdaoebjj...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/recalll/kimdaoebjjibiloijimmadljadhcakpi)

<comment><AUTHOR> good to hear that, it answered your query. yes chrome extension link is broken, fix will be available soon.

<comment><USER5> Seems like it's fixed now. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Nice idea, nicely executed. Tiny suggestion: I'd put a little more white space between the search results. I'm finding it hard to distinguish between different results.

<comment><AUTHOR> sure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I was playing with async controllers in .NET last night and was looking up a lot of reference material. Recalll's results were surprisingly great- well done!

[https://recalll.co/app/?q=.net%20async%20controller](https://recalll.co/app/?q=.net%20async%20controller)

<comment><AUTHOR> glad to hear that. thanks

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I love the idea, so I immediately gave it a shot.

[https://recalll.co/app/?q=haskell%20fibonnaci](https://recalll.co/app/?q=haskell%20fibonnaci) doesn't give me any useful results. Same query on google gives me exclusively useful results (at least on page 1).

I wish you the best for your project, and I'm sharing my use case in the hopes you can continue to improve, not to discourage.

Edit: Doh; it's because I can't spell. Two c's and 1 n and I do get some relevant results. Google has the "fix it for me" hidden from me.

<comment><AUTHOR> will add query suggestion and "did you mean" functionality for more suggestive queries.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Searching for "racket parallelism" does not really give anything relevant. In this case I searched for something that is extensively written about in the actual Racket documentation, both in the guide and reference material, so I know what I would expect.

It's a very natural search to do if you're thinking about parallelism and concurrency (both of which are suggested by Google, for example), but I assume most Racket users use the excellent documentation search for Racket. If you indexed that you'd probably get great results.

<comment><AUTHOR> yes due to lack of data results are not relevent, definatally index documentation for racket. good points though. thanks

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I asked it what is Lucee? I got back some gibberish about JavaScript. The answer is an open source scripting language on the JVM.

The first ten replies on Google were correct as was Wikipedia: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucee](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucee)

Wondering just when you did your crawl as Lucee has only been around since January?

<comment><AUTHOR> the reason is we didn't crawl wikipedia yet, we are planing to do that very soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Google still finds way better results for "complex gamma function", for example. I have yet to see a search engine that can take on the Goog, let alone surpass it. I wonder what it would take to accomplish that...

<comment><AUTHOR> What you are saying is ambitious, this is first beta release of product, we do have vision to take on google at least for programmers but it will take time, right people and resources. I hope next release much better than this one in terms of speed, relevancy, technology, search algos and data. though very motivating points. thanks

<comment><USER11> I realise it's ambitious, but in the end, if you can't at least (have hopes to) compete with Google, what would be the point in starting a search engine project at all? Roughly, all your prospective users are Google users now.

You have my best wishes to succeed.

<comment><AUTHOR> totally agree with you. as i told you we have vision to acquire users from mainstream search engines, what i'm asking is more time. though thanks a lot for your wishes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> this looks interesting; though i think the design should be more search focused like how google's homepage is; with the searchbar at the top is good for results, but it should be more center for the homepage; like, there's a bunch of other stuff going on there that I don't care about; i'm there to search. It's distracting, really.

Otherwise, keep at it! the more diversity we have the better.

<comment><AUTHOR> good points, added to TODO.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Pretty neat idea! I think it would be really cool to declare my default languages though, so it only returns results from what I specified.

<comment><AUTHOR> good suggestion, added to TODO.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Great idea, will use.

One thing I'd really like to see is cheat sheets. For example, "regex cheatsheet".

<comment><AUTHOR> great suggestion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Or..

$ pip install howdoi

$ howdoi reverse string python

> 'hello world'[::-1]

> 'dlrow olleh'</comment>


OOD principles and the 5 elements of SOLID apps - <AUTHOR> http://zeroturnaround.com/rebellabs/object-oriented-design-principles-and-the-5-ways-of-creating-solid-applications/

<comment><USER2> This goes all the way back to Uncle Bob Martin!

<comment><USER3> Yeah - it seems like the principle has been around forever, yet everyday I see a Java code base in particular I see the principles lying in a shattered pile of procedural code. So it's definitely worth repeating the message!</comment></comment>


Fantasy Math Is Helping Companies Spin Losses into Profits - <AUTHOR> http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/04/24/business/fantasy-math-is-helpingcompanies-spin-losses-into-profits.html?referer= <comment><USER2> TLDR: By excluding some business expenses from a financial report, one can turn the report with losses into a report with profits. And everyone is doing that if that leads to some additional profits/investments.</comment>


Building successful online communities: Evidence-based social design - <AUTHOR> https://acawiki.org/Building_successful_online_communities:_Evidence-based_social_design <comment><USER2> I'm interested in this field, do you have any more recommendations ?</comment>


What Do We Want History to Do to Us? - <AUTHOR> https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/02/27/kara-walker-what-do-we-want-history-to-do-to-us/ <comment><USER2> Wow! At work, so can't read to completion, but what a deep and sympathetic look at some of the aspects of Kara Walker's very challenging body of work.

</comment><comment><USER3> For once, teach us to stop repeating it.

<comment><USER4> ROI is a beat weak methinks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Maybe teach us compassion.</comment>


CIA Releases Analyst's Fascinating Tale of Cracking the Kryptos Sculpture - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/06/analyst-who-cracked-kryptos/ <comment><USER2> Jim Sanborn, the artist behind _Kryptos_ has another sculpture in the same theme located at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte called _Cyrillic Projector_. It's a steel cylinder with inverted Cyrillic letters cut into it, with a lamp in the middle. At night, the letters get projected onto surrounding buildings.

It's encrypted text was decoded in 2003, and turned out to be a KGB text on psychological control.

Here's a close-up photo: [http://www.flickr.com/photos/84602957@N00/3435941990/in/phot...](http://www.flickr.com/photos/84602957@N00/3435941990/in/photostream/)</comment>


Built a fouondation in Java, now what? - <AUTHOR>

We built the foundation of our system in Java using Spring and Hibernate and exposing a nice service layer. We used a little bit of Struts for the early front end, but have only developed the tip of the front-end iceberg so far. Now we are at a fork in the road and would love to get your feedback.
When developing the front-end (a newspaper-like consumer site) should we: 1) Building it using Struts 2) Develop the site in PHP/Python/Ruby and have it talk to the Java service layer through some bridge technology (like http://php-java-bridge.sourceforge.net) 3) Dump what we've written so far and start from scratch (obviously a difficult one to choose)
Any thoughts?
Thanks, Jay. <comment><USER2> #2. In my experience, Java frontend development (particularly with Struts) is so painful that you'll almost always be better off with Django or Rails talking to a backend via some RPC technology. This also enforces a strict separation of UI logic from application logic. It'll slow you down at first, but your devs will thank you for that separation when they try to run analyses on the data you've accumulated in the app and have a nice API to work against rather than scraping HTML off the webserver. (If they're any good, they'll probably thank you for not having to work with Java web frameworks, too. ;-))

</comment><comment><USER3> Check out JRuby (<http://jruby.org/>) You can write a RoR front end and pull in/execute Java code (in Ruby's sugary syntax). No need for any crazy bridges...

</comment><comment><USER4> Just wondering, anyone using Django on Jython?

<comment><USER5> I tried it about 8 months ago. It definitely was not production ready. There are some memory leak issues, plus there is no good way to actually embed it as a servelet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> s/fouondation/foundation</comment>


99 independent genetic loci influencing IQ/brain health/structure (n=280360) - <AUTHOR> http://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/08/17/176511 <comment><USER2> "Genetic association results predicted up to 4% of general cognitive function variance in independent samples"

gwern, do you find that the effect predicted is too small? If these genes are "highly expressed", I would expect the predicted variance to be greater. Forgive my ignorance but this seems to point to the fact that other factors vastly outweigh these SMPs.

<comment><AUTHOR> 'Highly expressed' here simply means that the variants in question tend to be located in/affecting genes that are more active in CNS stuff, it doesn't refer to the variance explained. You could identify a gene which is active only in cells in a particular organ yet variants inside that gene might affect little in the way of differences from person to person. This is useful for giving mechanistic hints as to how the variants are having any causal effect; it's also a useful sanity check, as if the IQ GWASes were turning up SNP hits mostly in non-nervous-system expressed genes, it would be highly suspicious.

That said, one of the more counterintuitive aspects of GWAS is that it is possible to identify many variants which affect intelligence while explaining trivial amounts of variance - this is the central limit theorem in action on the thousands of variants, because on net in normal people most variants just cancel out and the genetic contribution to intelligence is relatively few variants (most people differ by only 10 or 15 IQ points, so even if most of individual differences are due to different sets of variants, and we know from GWASes that single variants typically explain something like 0.10 points...), you have to identify with great precision the effect of a great many variants before you start being able to predict anything in normal people (This is weird and counterintuitive and I don't yet have any good metaphors or examples which can make it immediately understandable.)

Finally, on the gripping hand, 4% _is_ weirdly small because the same people with a smaller sample (albeit boosted using MTAG/genetic correlations) were able to produce a PGS explaining almost double the variance, 7%, in "A combined analysis of genetically correlated traits identifies 107 loci associated with intelligence" [http://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/07/07/160291.1](http://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/07/07/160291.1) , Hill et al 2017, and just yesterday "Large-Scale [n=107k] cognitive GWAS Meta-analysis Reveals Tissue-Specific Neural Expression and Potential Nootropic Drug Targets", Lam et al 2017 [http://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/08/16/176842](http://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/08/16/176842) turned in the same 4% PGS despite different analysis & sample size, so I am suspicious that the validation sample being used is misleading in some way such as using lower-quality IQ measurements. (One of the problems in using independent validation samples rather than something like cross-validation.)</comment></comment>


Waymo teams up with Jaguar to intro a new, premium self-driving car - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/27/waymo-teams-up-with-jaguar-to-intro-a-new-premium-self-driving-car/ <comment><USER2> For those who are interested in specs of the I-PACE, I had to do a bit of seperate searching [1] for those. Hopefully the specs are somewhat similar. 300mi range isn't too shabby and it looks decent.

"As standard the car comes with a 90kWH battery pack which produces a total system output of 400PS and 696 NM.

It is powered by two electric motors which produce 200PS and 348Nm each and are mounted to both the front and rear axles, enabling four-wheel drive.

Due to the instant torque of an electric powertrain the car will be able to sprint from 0-60mph in just 4.5 seconds and on to a top speed of 124 mph.

The car will be able to travel up to 298 miles of range on a single charge."

[1] [https://www.express.co.uk/life-style/cars/937715/Jaguar- Waym...](https://www.express.co.uk/life-style/cars/937715/Jaguar-Waymo-self- driving-I-Pace-car-deal)

(edit: link)

<comment><USER3> Were you able to determine if the car is capable of being manually driven as well? Or is it self-driving only?

I chuckled a bit trying to imagine a situation where the SDC logic would conclude that it was necessary to floor the accelerator up to 124MPH.

<comment><USER2> The I-PACE is being by Jaguar sold to consumers (at 64k quid a pop, not cheap) so the answer must be yes, manually driven. It's in the article.

<comment><USER4> > not cheap

Well, if every Tom, Dick and Rajiv thinks it's being driven by a computer and they can cut it off ...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Here's Waymo's official blog post on the subject: [https://medium.com/waymo/meet-our-newest-self-driving- vehicl...](https://medium.com/waymo/meet-our-newest-self-driving-vehicle-the- all-electric-jaguar-i-pace-375cecc70eb8)

<comment><USER6> > We'll add up to 20,000 I-PACEs to Waymo's fleet in the next few years — > that's enough to drive about a million trips in a typical day.

This sentence feels marketing more than informing. Whats the initial release volume? Where etc. Up to 20k cars doesn't mean much and they think it will average 50 trips per car per day - seems hopeful.

A little disappointed in this announcement.

<comment><USER7> I wouldn't be surprised if "up to 20,000" just means Jaguar said they can't build more than that because it would interrupt their ability to meet their regular orders and/or it would require too much investment / hiring to expand their factories.

Although, if 10,000 were definitely enough, they might not have made an agreement for 20,000, so maybe it does sort of tell you something.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Probably should have waited a little longer - I know they're trying to catch the glow around Waymo's supposed safety in light of the Uber incident, but probably should hold off - the general public isn't on top of this like HN is.

I mean - I think all this talk of going live in 2018 should be stopped by officials until they create a TEST for SDVs. Also, it wouldn't be a bad thing for SDVs to run an internal offline unit test given a fake lidar scenario and make sure it doesn't kill people (every time before the car leaves the parking spot).

<comment><USER9> The problem is that as soon as you define a test then these companies will put an emphasis on making sure their cars work for the test instead of the real world. Then, when something happens in the real world they say well it passed the driving test.

It's one of the perpetual problems of regulation. As soon as you define a test or requirement companies will start gaming the system to meet them instead of addressing the purpose behind the regulation.

<comment><USER8> It still makes sense to have a test. We put every citizen through a driving test. Those are gamed too, but at least they learned a lot of basics... and they are probably better drivers than people not required to take a test. After that, market forces will hopefully go the rest of the mile.

I mean heck, this latest incident wouldn't have passed the original Darpa challenge that got us here.

<comment><USER10> Pretty sure that driving tests for humans do absolutely nothing - if you eliminated the whole process (and replaced it with a simple age requirement) it wouldn't show up in safety stats at all

On the other hand, any self driving company is running an extremely complicated and extensive test suite on their code. Developing these tests is a core engineering challenge to making a sdv and any test developed by a regulator will be a joke by comparison (unless we give the regulator billions of dollars to essentially replicate the work.)

<comment><USER11> I agree that the USA driving test system is insanely weak, but they definitely do something. I failed my driving test twice before passing it when I was a college kid in Arkansas. One thing I noticed is the examiners seemed to intentionally try to yell and stress me out. In retrospect, that was a smart way to ensure only someone who has become comfortable enough with driving that they have extra processing power left to handle dealing with passengers is able to become an unsupervised driver. It's a low bar, but it's still higher than "that's the brake pedal to stop, that's the gas pedal to go, have fun"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> 20,000 robtotaxis, a _million trips a day_ , my oh my. Go big or go home. Uber and Lyft do an estimated 170,000 trips a day in San Francisco, so if Waymo dumps just 1/5th of their fleet on SF, the rideshare companies may as well pack their bags and go home.

<comment><USER13> If prices decrease for AI drivers too, I could totally see myself selling my car entirely too. Granted, I live in a smaller city in Washington, ie not Seattle/etc, so it'll be a while for me I'm sure.

I'd be curious to see if a lot of people did a similar thing (giving up their cars). Price is the kicker here though. When I own a car, I can pretty much drive as frequently or infrequently as I want. Where as with Taxi's/etc, the cost would quickly rack up. So these AIs are going to have to be _cheap_ by comparison.

Man, the future of this tech is so exciting for me.

<comment><USER14> >Price is the kicker here though. When I own a car, I can pretty much drive as frequently or infrequently as I want.

if you've ever actually sat down and priced out how much each usage of your car costs you, it's not that good of a deal. Personal vehicles seem cheap because people treat them as a non-optional fixed cost, but between the cost of the vehicle itself, insurance, fuel, maintenance, and your time spent driving you can price a car service fairly high and still have it compare favourably to owning a car.

The trick will just be to convince people to start thinking about a car service the same way they currently think about their car payments or fuel costs. I'd be curious to see what a per-month subscription service would look like instead of a per-ride fee structure like taxis or ubers currently use. $300-400/mo for unlimited rides would be, for me, a better deal than owning a car. I'm curious if that could be profitable.

<comment><USER13> I have priced it out, as I don't like driving, and it was cost me _insanely_ more to taxi/etc. I didn't even get done pricing, tbh heh.

It's roughly a $50-$70 ride for me _every morning to work_. That already puts me over triple my car payment. The other random trips to the store/etc would be far cheaper, thankfully, but depending on usage I can't imagine it being less than my gas costs in a month (roughly $50/m). There's still repairs/insurance/licensing/etc, but I doubt they're costing me the $700 extra that just driving to work would be costing me via taxi.

The problem is I don't live in the city, so my distances are greater, and tend to be very anti-taxi.

I actually _want_ to take an uber to town on the weekends so I can drink/etc at dinner, but I usually don't because of how expensive it is.

Mind you, I don't think it's unfairly priced currently - but that still doesn't make it as cheap as I'd need it to be to use all the time.

<comment><USER15> Agree completely with you.

That being said, owning a car is still a must if you have anything close to an outdoor lifestyle. For example:

Leaving the car at the trailhead several hundred miles from home for the whole weekend.

With Uber and Lyft, I already see my friends living an Urban lifestyle completely dumping their car. When this will become automated, another portion will likely dump their car.

But for now at least, I cannot see the outdoor crowd, or the ones living in a real rural area (think opposite of the SF hipster) dumping their car.

<comment><USER16> I actually think rentable self-driving cars would be useful for the trailhead problem. For non-spur trails especially, organising a shuttle service is a bit of a pain and relatively expensive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Why would you choose an auto maker known to produce vehicles with high maintenance costs?

<comment><USER11> Because the target market is luxury customers who are not price sensitive and are willing to pay a bunch for what they perceive as the cool feeling of being in a cool car?

Listen, I don't understand why Gatorade comes in flavors other than orange, but if I was Gatorade, I wouldn't discontinue all the other flavors. Some people seem to like them for some reason.

<comment><USER18> I own an F-Pace, and it's all for the luxury, not the coolness. Riding in it and driving it is simply a luxury experience. I'd consider buying one of these, except it's quite ugly and has the same dumb wheel aesthetic that BMW put on their even uglier electric cars.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Premium title is misleading, self-driving car capability isn't something "already" available on a "budget" fiat 500

<comment><USER20> Waymo has several SDCs in its fleet, this is premium relative to those.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Isn't Jaguar considered "racing" car? How about not just automatic driving, but automatic _racing_?

<comment><USER22> Not really. It's really a luxury car brand. They have sporty fast cars (I'd kill for a manual F type) but they're by no means a race car company. They had an F1 team but it wasn't very successful and it looks like they only dabble in motorsports a little bit as of recent according to wikipedia. If I'm looking for really performance-focused cars I'm not looking at Jaguars. I'm looking at Porsches, Ferraris, Lamborghinis, McLarens, AMG Mercedes, M BMWs, etc. With Jags you're really spending a lot of $$$ for comparable performance from something like an M3 or a Z06 Corvette (an admittedly difficult to compete with package).

I think the primary allure of the Jaguar brand is that dignified, beautiful, English car exemplified by the old XJ (the car from Shaun of the Dead is an XJ). It's allure is not "I'm gonna hoon in this thing and hit 0-60mph in under 4 seconds."

<comment><USER23> Well they had a history of dominating at le mans in the 1950's. Then they had the E-type in the 1960's and 1970's which Enzo Ferrari called the most beautiful car in the world - it was also tough competition for a Ferrari at 1/5th the price.

So they _had_ a sporting history which like other car companies they're now resting on.

They _also_ had a history as being the car for the self made man. The MkII was _the_ car for bank and train robberies at the time. You'd meet a lot of Jag owners in jail...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I wish Uber hadn't failed like they did. Right now it seems waymo will be the only player in robo taxis for some time to come. Not good for me as a consumer.

<comment><USER25> Other companies that Uber and Waymo are working on this, and most don't have Uber's toxic culture.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> The big signal will be whether or not they launch this in a city that experiences a lot of rain, and what they do during bad weather.

<comment><USER27> The first gas car only had one gas station to use. Progress is made in small steps. We don't have to have the whole framework ready before anyone can use it.

<comment><USER26> I wasn't commenting on feasibility or logistics, more on the state of their progress and if they can fully replace current services in cities or if it will augment them. If, for example, they don't work during heavy rain, then they cannot replace Uber/Lyft in most East Coast or Northern US cities.

<comment><USER28> Actually, interestingly, perhaps that is "right-sizing" the cost of Taxi service?

Humans only at the beck and call of self-driving cars who cannot see well in the rain. Instead of "surge pricing" for high demand, it would be "human pricing" to pay for the "skilled" driver in the rain and snow.

ie: $1/mi during sunny days, $10/mi during snow days, instead of $7/mi every day of the year. Very interesting to consider, and honestly a bit scary thinking of so many people I've met who are using Uber to make a living. :-S

<comment><USER29> Labor is probably not fluid enough. I expect people to value steady income very highly. That might change if basic income was a thing though.

<comment><USER28> Very fair point and counterpoint! $100/day guaranteed is worth more than (rand()*200)/day. Consistency is worth more than variability.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> This seems silly. With self-driving cars, it doesn't make sense to own a car. Instead, transportation will become a service. And a luxury product doesn't fit in this space.

Unless, of course, they want to serve rich people first.

<comment><USER7> Their blog post says "built for Waymo's transportation service". To me that sounds like they won't be available for regular people to buy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> This is a bit of a let down and suggests to me that either they are not confident in the tech arriving at scale any time soon or they are not serious about directly challenging Uber. These are expensive vehicles and not custom- designed for a self-driving transportation service. I would be surprised if they were much cheaper per ride than Uber in cheap markets.

If they were serious about taking on Uber/Lyft soon I would expect them to be willing to make a bet on a long-life, extremely cost-focused custom vehicle. Maybe this is a stop gap to keep proving the tech until someone else (Uber?) gets impatient, licenses their tech, and spends the vehicle capital.

<comment><USER32> The cost of the kit Waymo will add to the cars is surely more than enough to make any vehicle choice quite expensive by conventional standards.

It shouldn't matter too much though, drivers are very expensive compared to cars. Not paying a hypothetical Uber driver $100 a day could easily finance a supercar, let alone a Jaguar. And the autonomous car can work triple shifts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Jaguar doesn't say "premium" to me. With all their electrical issues in the past, I'll be staying far away from an electric Jaguar.

<comment><USER34> You cannot compare Jaguar back then with today. Both Jaguar and Land Rover have been owned by Tata for a while now and today both companies produce state of the art vehicles with proper electrics. They mostly carry the name and a bit of the company tradition over from the past, but little else.

<comment><USER35> Tata's not exactly premium either

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

<comment><USER34> They are an industry giant (e.g. large steel production). Since they took control over Jaguar and Land Rover, both companies have produced quite high quality cars.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> "A self-driving car that _won't_ make you sick and kill you."

Edit: ok I'm sorry I made one joke comment referencing arrested development. Sue me.

</comment><comment><USER37> Compared to the rumors yesterday that the big Waymo announcement was going to be announcing expansion to NYC, this is a big letdown. Who cares what manufacturer they use? The only interesting part is the 20k number.

<comment><USER38> > Who cares what manufacturer they use?

The fact that they're trying to market premium self-driving cars is interesting, because as you say there is no obvious reason to care. After all if they're all going to be driven exactly the same way and have an almost identical safety profile, what difference does it make?

<comment><USER39> Potentially, high class events (e.g. the Academy Awards). I can certainly see the massive value of having a luxury self-driving car shuttle celebrities to an event millions of Americans watch every year.

It's marketing for Jaguar and Waymo. And also, Uber has premium categories, too. Its got virtue signaling potential for the users.

And, to be fair, people have aesthetic preferences. I do. If you said to me, "this cardboard box will autonomously take you anywhere you want to go without ever crashing. Or you can take this Audi S7 will do the same but there's a 5% chance you'll crash", I'd take the Audi. Personal preferences can't just be ignored, especially in the auto industry.</comment></comment></comment>


Lessons from a 45-year study of super-smart children - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/news/how-to-raise-a-genius-lessons-from-a-45-year-study-of-super-smart-children-1.20537 <comment> nils-m-holm Didn't finish reading the article because, like so many articles, (1) it equates achievement with intelligence (2) it does not actually seem to tell you how to "raise a genius".

I have seen a lot of lives of highly intelligent people go wrong, and this is the advice I would give: respect high-IQ children intellectually, prepare to lose arguments, but still give them emotional support. It's easy to imagine someone is an adult because they argue well, but in my experience intellectual capacity is not related to emotional stability. Both aspects need to be developed.

I'm the godfather of a _very_ intelligent young woman. She is at university now, but regularly drops by to discuss all kinds of things. Achievement is totally unimportant to her, but she is very curious about how the world works. Talking to her is just amazing!

<comment><USER2> It does not equate anything. It describes the correlation and steps to not waste huge talents. In fact it does say they do not know exactly why some highly intelligent people do not achieve much.

It is surprisingly easy to waste talent. For example, get a gifted person through standard school and they will likely never extend enough to achieve full potential, often by growing lazy and coasting. Or push them into a wrong field, they will do good but not exceptional.

See, if your niece was challenged enough, she would probably place more value on achievement and thus achieve more. It is a positive feedback loop. The correct approach is to give them as much challenge as they can take. Evaluating where this point is takes some major interpersonal skills and experience.

Emotional support is a necessary ingredient as well so that failures do not break them and they remain human.

<comment><USER3> IMO the whole idea of "potential" that can be "wasted" is toxic. As soon as you feel yourself falling behind -- which you always will -- that idea that you've wasted your potential shows up to make you feel bad.

This inevitably drives people toward easier kinds of achievement like awards, promotions, and degrees. But a lot of real progress happens outside systems like this! I think it's valuable to have smart people working on stuff for its own sake, not chasing any kind of achievement.

<comment><USER4> It depends on where the pressure is places. If the pressure is placed on kids, sure. If it's placed on schools, that's not toxic. The school system in most of the US works under an attitude that the smart kids will do okay, and don't need anything extra. Even gifted and talented programs are fading fast.

The truth is those school system are toxic, abusive torture to someone smart. There were plenty of smart kids I knew -- some smarter than me -- who got horrible grades going through one of these school. Many of them did not, in any real sense, succeed.

Imagine being placed in a room, today, and forced to listen to lectures on what you already know, and be given menial make-work tasks, like adding big numbers and copying letters, and doing that for hours each day. Some people are resilient enough to survive that. Others get pretty broken by it.

<comment><USER5> > Even gifted and talented programs are fading fast.

What's the evidence that G&T programmes achieve better academic or life outcomes?

<comment><USER6> Even if life outcomes are the same, if G&T programs make those kids happier while in school, the programs are worth keeping.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> As a child I was considered to jump a whole academic year by doing two at the same time.

I went through so many tests, visited so many experts and had to hear so many people talk about me that when we soon after moved town I made efforts to not show my real potential. I tried to be average and be just one more, which led to eventual laziness and bad grades. So bad that I had shifty final grades in high school and I never got to get a uni degree. Yet, most people that know me would say I'm extremely intelligent.

Too bad life is about effort and not intelligence :-)

What I'm saying is, leave the kids alone. Let them grow up and help them accomplish their intellectual needs. Just don't treat them as something different or special, it would lead to either self-entitlement or sense of not belonging and loneliness.

<comment><USER8> I didn't skip any grades because my dad wouldn't allow it. He had skipped two grades and hated it.

I know a few people who skipped grades, and they were always kind of outsiders. I say this from the standpoint of being part of a very nerdy clique in high school -- those who skipped grades were outsiders compared to us.

I think adults neglect the fact that education is more than just book learning. Youth need to learn social and emotional skills as well. There is more to learn at school that just academic skills, and this goes for all levels. For instance, you can spend 100% of your time on academics in college, but soft skills are at least as important as academic skills in the workplace.

Skipping grades isn't the only way to cripple children socially, and I'm not saying it's a social death sentence. Most of the kids I know who skipped grades are fine now, but some never really recovered, and some bear emotional scars from the experience.

On a similar note, a weird thing I noticed that is kind of similar, is that only children tend to be fairly poor at handling conflict. My theory is that if you are not an only child, you often get in fights with a sibling who you were then forced to be around. (For instance, sitting next to them in a long car ride.) Only children generally can leave situations when they get heated, so they never are forced to work though a conflict.

I might be totally wrong on that point, but I think there is something to the theory. My mom was an only child, and she could never understand how my brother and I could come to blows over one thing, and then be playing a game together ten minutes later. I didn't think much of it till I dated a girl who was raised an only child, and I noticed the same aversion to conflict. Every disagreement had to be resolved, any time we disagreed about something it was considered an argument.

Meanwhile, some of the calmest people I know during disagreements have like 7 siblings.

<comment><USER9> I skipped the 9th grade. My parents had the option of sending me from 8th directly into college but decided to only skip 9th because they felt I needed to mature socially.

In a way I resent them for it because am not satisfied with where I am in my life (figure I could have been much farther along by now in career/academia), even though I should be satisfied. On the other hand, I know they did what they thought was best....either way, I'm still socially a mess inside although I appear pretty charismatic when I try.

I guess I could have been a disaster without those high school formative years....it's up to me now at 37, I suppose.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> As I said last time, I have one major qualm about this.

There seems to be a confirmatory bias among the academic community that a measure of intellectual success can be found in the percentage of individuals who earn a PhD. Sure, it's true that you need to be reasonably smart to earn a PhD, but I think that someone can have a lot of intellectual success (potentially just as much or maybe more) if they don't earn a PhD.

I think you could even argue that, depending on the field of study, a PhD is the "easy" route for someone who is intellectually gifted - it's a simply a continuation of what you have been doing. I would be more impressed by the intellectual who not only realizes that they can conduct their own independent research, but also has the creativity to come up with a use case that can improve and contribute to the world (and presumably, make a living doing so).

My point here is that, given two gifted cohorts, one which has a 45% PhD graduation rate and one which has a 50% PhD graduation rate, I don't know that you can conclusively say that one is more gifted than the other without looking at other metrics associated with intellectual accomplishment."

<comment><USER11> I just had a really weird deja-vu when reading this as i wasn't sure if i hadn't read exactly this before, but yes, this article has been on HN just a week ago. But now i see you even mentioned it in the first sentence ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I was not a gifted child, but I remember the odd pressure of being told you were smarter than other children. It's paralyzing. You're so afraid to finish something because if that thing isn't amazing it ends up hurting your perceived value.

<comment><USER2> So someone didn't tell you that it is OK to fail sometimes, as long as a lesson is learned.

That is hard to convey but priceless if done right.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I understand why a parent would want to raise a super-smart children (which makes the title a click-bait) but from where I stand I'd wish to see more people being interested in raising socially responsible children. IMHO we are abundant in (technical) smarts but very low on social/emotional ones.

<comment><USER14> > I understand why a parent would want to raise a super-smart children

I openly don't (and I can't stand the narcissism that is involved in the reason). If you look at the parenting most parents do, they do it as if the child should be like them, just smarter or achieve more - but otherwise similar (as I said: narcissism).

On the other, here is an article (that has been brought up on HN some times in the past) about the life of a super-smart - it is easy to imagine how the life of the parents would be:

> > [http://www.worlddreambank.org/O/OUTSIDRS.HTM](http://www.worlddreambank.org/O/OUTSIDRS.HTM)

(BTW: If you look in the German Google News about "Höchstbegabung" (the German word meaning that your talent (in this case IQ) is at least 3 sigma above the average; FYI: "Hochbegabung" means 2 sigma above average) you will find more news about soccer than about "Höchstbegabung" in the sense of intelligence. This says a lot about the society, IMHO).

<comment><USER15> Very accurate wrt the narcissism. So much of this attitude of "raising children to rule the world" (literally, the claim of the article, which I found ludicrous) is to flatter the parents and educators. Same for children who are good at sports. Does anyone stop to wonder what it does to a child to spend their whole lives training e.g. in a pool? How much pain does it cause to people who have to live up to such expectations, when all they can do, their entire lives, is fail?

I was one of those gifted children; both my parents are extraordinarily smart and I was years ahead of my peers in reading and maths. I'm happy no-one paid much attention and I was left to my own devices. Maybe I didn't become a billionaire, or go to Stanford at sixteen, yet I was mostly happy, most of my life, and every time I accomplished anything I was grateful and happily surprised. And I don't think it was a wasted life at all.

Leading society? What an arrogance. Let kids be, give them open access to knowledge and freedom to learn from others, and structure where they need it. Leave the "raising geniuses" to totalitarian regimes.

<comment><USER2> Leading society is best done by leaders, not by followers told to train to be good. A leader trains because he wants to or perceives a need.

The whole trick is in instilling such motivation in gifted children instead of the opposite message.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm very glad there's a solidly researched counterpoint to the 10k hours and everything is possible stuff. Deliberate practice is still enough to get really good at everything (imo) but I'd say it's sort of like compound interest. If you start with more raw intelligence the learning will yield even bigger dividends.

What troubles me a bit is the underlying assumption that supergifted children are best steered towards becoming founders, scientists and whatnot. I don't think it's self evident that some wouldn't enjoy being a nurse or firefighter.

<comment><USER2> Probably the best nurse or firefighter. But it would still be better to be a researcher working on third world medical problems or designer of efficient fire fighting systems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Summary of decent complaints:

1\. Intelligence is mostly heritable anyway.

2\. Academic achievement doesn't have that much to do with intelligence.

3\. Different people have different priorities, you might find that after a childhood and adolescence of you trying to make them _" super smart"_, they will finally tell you that they don't give a damn and never will.

I think I'm probably fairly intelligent; but I honestly don't have enormous ambitions, I just want to have a child in the next 5-7 years, and not fail him or her.

</comment><comment><USER18> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12443629](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12443629)

</comment><comment><USER5> See also this article from a different source about the same study, posted here with lots of comments: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12443629](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12443629)

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm a bit surprised that the SAT was such an important metric for them. In my opinion it doesn't do that great of a job of characterizing intelligence.

<comment><USER20> the SAT is useful because it is strongly correlated with IQ and is administered for millions of children, creating a very large sample to work with

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I was in a "gifted" program but I got kicked out after I started skipping school all the time to play guitar and chase girls. Eventually I dropped out of high school and worked at Walmart. Now I have a math PhD and a 7 figure net worth

</comment><comment><USER22> Unlike some other experiences here, I always had weird ideas in my head. As a kid, I would question if I just have an overactive imagination or am I really smart. I had no problem with a difficult subject like chemistry like my peers. Still I thought I might be a little crazy.

Long story short, I got IQ test, scored really high. Never after I questioned myself. I still think I am crazy, but I consider this a good thing. It helped me great deal understand where I am in relation with others.

</comment><comment><USER23> Just posting to let everyone know what a genius I am and how I could have been the next Bill Gates if somebody had done something different when I was a kid.

<comment><USER24> I wonder if this is actually just some sort of statistical effect. Suppose intelligence is normally distributed in a high intelligence population and also in a low intelligence population but with two different medians. The guy at +2 sigma in the latter may be at 0 in the former. He may then reasonably conclude that he is extremely intelligent. If, on top of this, he doesn't then get the chance to mix with where the HI population resides (can't get into university, chooses to live outside of HI population centres), he's never going to be disabused of the fact that he's not really incredibly smart.

It's like being the best basketball player in your school. If you never go to the summer training classes, you'll never discover that there are thousands like you, and that the guys who didn't make the cut at a different school are way better than you are.

<comment><USER2> On the whole, ability is normally distributed, but when creating subgroups you are bound to hit small sample problems.

Even if you pick the cream of the crop researchers all over the world, even in niche field you will find hundreds.

<comment><USER24> Indeed, and that's what I mean. If you've never seen the world outside, you'd happily conclude that you're awesome.</comment></comment></comment></comment>