If Your Vibrator Is Hacked, Is It a Sex Crime? - <AUTHOR> https://gizmodo.com/if-your-vibrator-is-hacked-is-it-a-sex-crime-1820007951 <comment><USER2> The headline sounds like a Philip K Dick title.

<comment><USER3> Hahaha nicely done

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Being a relatively kinky person myself I'd still. consider shoving quite a sizable Li-Ion battery into my body a way bigger potential problem than some foreign person activating my buttplug.

But yes, the question is interesting.

I can imagine situations where unknown people taking control is part of the play.

</comment><comment><USER5> An interesting question. I'm inclined to say yes, insofar as the device is identifiable as a sex toy rather than just 'adjustable thing #73'. As to which sex crime, that depends on both the circumstances and the degree of information about them available to the remote abuser.

Those inclined to offer defenses of the form that 'it was just a prank, 1337 h4x0r5 couldn't have known how it would impact the victim' should brush up on the 'eggshell skull' rule in tort law, which basically says the person who commits a tort is liable for all consequences, not just easily foreseeable ones, and the concept of strict liability, which can mean you're fully responsible for the outcomes of some criminal acts even without proof of intent. Judges often pieces of existing conceptual frameworks when presented with a novel situation on which they have to issue a ruling.

<comment><USER6> If sell a laptop bundled with pornography/livecam software and market it as a "sexual entertainment system" would any hack of that system also be elevated to the level of sex crime? Even if all the attacker saw before launching the attack was the ip address?

<comment><USER5> I don't think so, but I'm not an attorney. You'd have to some prior awareness, I bring up the strict liability idea just because if you did know that you were hacking some stranger's sex toy, your lack of complete knowledge about what they doing with it at the time probably wouldn't be enough to avoid liability.

I mean, otherwise you could grope strangers on the subway while keeping your eyes closed and claim that you weren't looking at them so you didn't know that your groping was causing them distress. Then again pretty offer some pretty wacky defenses, especially where sex is concerned.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> rm_-rf_slash I think the CFAA statute is appropriate, but as to whether it would be a sex crime, I think it would have to depend on the context.

If a vibrator was hacked and messed with but nobody was using it, then it's just hacking.

But if someone was using it, then I think a sex crime charge is fair, especially if the hacker knows its being used intimately, which would be akin to being a peeping Tom, but creepily closer.

<comment><USER7> CFAA is hilariously overly broad.

Charging it as a sex crime seems a bit off, least of all because of all of the treatment of sex offenders in the US. There seems to be a qualitative difference between turning on a publicly-exposed vibrating buttplug and forcibly inserting something into the rectum of an unwilling participant.

Like, is it really reasonable to say that somebody should lose the right to vote and bear arms because they issued a POST request to an unsecured web server in their neighborhood that happened to be a sex toy?

EDIT: I don't want to sound like I'm blaming victims here, but using toys that are properly locked down is the responsibility of the participants--much like making sure they're sterile.

<comment><USER8> > I don't want to sound like I'm blaming victims here, but using toys that are > properly locked down is the responsibility of the participants--much like > making sure they're sterile.

Despite your "I don't want to sound..." prefix, that is literally the definition of victim-blaming.

Just because I leave the door to my house unlocked, it doesn't mean people have the right to enter it without my permission, and it's not my "fault" if they do.

Engaging in sexual contact requires consent. I expect it's legally debatable if remotely turning on a vibrator that's already inserted into someone counts as "sexual contact" (I would say it is, or if not, should be), but if it is, it requires consent.

I think intent and foreknowledge does matter here: if someone just found a random web server and sent some requests to it without knowing what it is or what it does, I'd say that's unwise, but not criminal. But if it's obvious from the name advertised by the device and/or the names of the endpoints accessed, or requires knowledge of a protocol specific to a connected sex toy, I'd say that should be enough to establish nefarious sexual intent.

<comment><USER9> There is nothing wrong with blaming the victim as long as one does not absolve the perpetrators from any guilt.

People need to take back some shred of personal responsibility if I get piss drunk and pass out on a bench and wake up without any of my stuff sure the assholes who stole my phone and wallet are still criminals but i also was a moron for getting piss drunk and passing out in public.

If you get robbed because you didn't locked the door then it's just as much your fault.

We don't live in a vacuum we know exactly how to avoid various situations which is why we don't leave a laptop visible in the backseat of a car when we park it in public, why we secure our bikes, lock our doors and don't use 123456 as a password.

<comment><USER8> I agree with you, but I don't think to the degree you'd like. Yes, people need to take responsibility for taking risks (intentionally or otherwise) when those risks result in bad consequences.

I think the concept of "fault" is really just not useful here. Sure, if I forget to lock my door, and I get robbed, I share some of the fault ("just as much", though -- hell no), but... so what? The result is the same as if I did lock the door and they broke in anyway. I certainly screwed up, but that doesn't somehow make it more moral/legal/ethical for the thief to come in and steal.

> We don't live in a vacuum we know exactly how to avoid various situations > which is why we don't leave a laptop visible in the backseat of a car when > we park it in public, why we secure our bikes, lock our doors and don't use > 123456 as a password.

The problem is that this is a super cynical view of society. We are actively making society worse by thinking this. I've been in countries where people park their scooters on the sidewalk and leave their helmets unsecured on the seat for hours. No one steals, because that _just isn 't done_.

And what's so magically different? If I go and park my car in a safe suburb in the US, I can leave my laptop visible in the backseat without consequence. If I do that in certain parts of a city, well, there goes my window and my laptop. Do we really want to teach people that they have to be paranoid about everything? Do we really want it to be accepted and ok that your belongings aren't safe inside a locked car? That's a pretty shitty society, if so.

I hesitate to use this example since it's a sensitive topic, but you can easily extend this to the tired "well if she had been dressed mode modestly, maybe she wouldn't have gotten raped". Obviously getting a bike stolen because you didn't lock it is nowhere near as bad. But you're muddling cause and effect here. "The bike got stolen because it was unsecured." No, the bike got stolen because there are assholes who steal bikes. "That woman got raped because she wore suggestive clothing." No, she got raped because there are piece of shit assholes who rape women.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Well I think it depends on the degree of control which the attacker is exerting on the device and the type and quantity of information which they extracted from the device during its use.

As an actuator, a vibrator has a very limiting set of features for an attacker to exploit and act upon. As a sensor, I don't think they're very advanced.

</comment><comment><USER11> This brings a whole new meaning to the phrase "penetration testing".</comment>


On civil disagreement and why Prop 8 is different - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/p/a28c7f243ba9

<comment><USER2> Yup. A friend of my mother worked on the No on Pro 8 campaign and the subsequent challenge. It was an uphill battle most of the time to protect the right of those some feel others shouldn't have. Too much of a false moral panic by those with too much time to invade other people's lives.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think we shall see more of this all over the place.

<comment><USER2> I think we should call it what it is:

distributed fascism.

But I'm hearted by the long-term trend of progressive gains... Check out Pinker's [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Natur...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Nature)

<comment><USER3> Let me say some truth here.

Thompson Coburn, LLP is behind a lot of this.

It is liberal tyranny, not distributed fascism. It is Liberal Democrats who have been indoctrinated into a system that rejects logic, reason, and critical thinking. A system that tells them what to believe and what to do. It has been used in public schools, colleges, and universities, and it is MKUltra level brainwashing.

It brings out the evil nature in human beings and then calls it good. It rejects ethics and morals and replaces them with a liberal ideology. It reject the idea of a God, and worships the Earth instead. It has become a secular religion that worships nature and materialism. If you ever read George Orwell's works of "1984" and "Animal Farm" it is the very things he warned us about.

ThoughtCrime, Newspeak, MiniTrue, MiniLove, and a fake democracy that is no different from a tyranny but called a democracy.

Conservative Republicans are no different than Liberal Democrats, they both do the exact same things. I have rejected them both and become a Pirate Ninja, and formed a Pirate Ninja party.

This is our future: [http://www.amazon.com/America-The-Enslaved-Neurochip- ebook/d...](http://www.amazon.com/America-The-Enslaved-Neurochip- ebook/dp/B007LAX6YY)</comment></comment></comment>


Iowa to launch smartphone driver's license - <AUTHOR> http://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/politics/2014/12/08/iowa-digital-smartphone-drivers-license/20114979/

<comment><AUTHOR> Seems like there would be fewer regulatory hassles to let you carry your registration and proof of insurance on your phone but to my knowledge no state allows you to do that.

<comment><USER2> The article mentions that 30 states accept proof of insurance shown on the phone (probably for similar reasons to my other comment, the information on the phone is likely used to look up the insurance on whatever systems the police use).

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Am I the only one who has a serious problem with the idea of handing my phone to a police officer?

<comment><USER4> No. Obviously. It's a trap.

Also, doesn't this make forgery absolutely trivial?

<comment><USER2> I imagine that for situations where it matters, the ID number on the phone license will be used to access a central database.

<comment><USER3> And while they're waiting for that they can go through your emails and texts.

I handed my phone to a customs agent once. Learned my lesson.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


What Happens When Millennials Run the Workplace? - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/20/fashion/millennials-mic-workplace.html <comment><USER2> This has a real crappy and dismissive tone. There surely are some good points to be made here, but the NYT keeps it cartoonish. Note the three (one photo, two intratexual) mentions of "hoverboards".

<comment><USER3> ... which makes it harder to understand why this is its third posting in the past _hour_.</comment></comment>


Deepfake version of Travis Scott - <AUTHOR> https://genius.com/a/this-fake-travis-scott-song-created-by-artificial-intelligence-sounds-almost-like-the-real-thing <comment><USER2> Since all of his music is R&Bish auto-tuned, not that hard for a computer to generate that sound. (I have to admit, I've hit the "get off my lawn" phase, missing the "good ole days" of "real music" ie 90's hip hop)

<comment><USER3> They generated the lyrics and melodies using AI. Everything else was done by a person, including the vocals.

<comment><USER4> Do you have a link on that? I can't find it in the HN link.

<comment> squeaky-clean The Adweek source linked goes into a little more about it, but not much. Specifically mentioning a model was used for lyrics first, then the AI created a melodic and percussive arrangement. It doesn't say much more about how it was done.

I found another article that states they had a real human voice sing the lyrics (then auto-tuned it to Scott's style), but there's no actual sources here, or on any other articles I can find.

[https://musebycl.io/digital-data/agency-used-ai-make- travis-...](https://musebycl.io/digital-data/agency-used-ai-make-travis-bott- bogus-travis-scott)

<comment><USER4> I did follow through to Adweek, but given that it is Adweek and not NME, I wasn't sure how literally to take the word "arrangement" there :-) Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If we take created by AI to mean: machine learning generates a crazy amount of some things and then humans pick and release the most interesting one, then AI can create some pretty amazing stuff.

</comment><comment><USER6> Imagine a GPT2-like algorithm trained on all the world's music. It could then generate practically any style and probably quite creatively.

Then fine-tune it on a particular artist's style. It will then mimic that artist. Depending how strongly you fine tune it, you can bias more strongly towards the target artist or towards general music.

You could then generate music in the same general style as an artist but taking any amount of inspiration from the rest of the world of music. I imagine with enough data and the right algorithms it would work very well and sound fantastic.

The same applies to visual works which I'm sure the reader is familiar with.

Just remember the algorithms we have today are the starting point not the ending point.

<comment><USER7> > It could then generate practically any style and probably quite creatively.

Mimicking a style... easy. Delivering a coherent message or story... harder. Emotional impact... even harder. IMO. But I think these are great goals for an Artistic Turing Test.

<comment><USER8> Most popular music doesn't deliver a coherent message or emotional impact.

Some genres (i'm looking at you mumble rap) don't even require coherent _language._

<comment><USER9> You don't need interpretable language for emotional impact or even narrative. Have you ever felt moved by a song in a language you don't know a word of, or a purely instrumental song? The same's true of paintings, movies without dialogue, etc.

Mumble rap is a totally legitimate art form. I just tend to not be a huge fan of most of the song structures and compositions, personally.

<comment><USER8> It may be art, but being art doesn't make it deep or emotionally impactful. Even the people who like mumble rap often say they just care about the beat, not the vocals.

That, to me, means it could probably be generated by an AI. And I'd say the same of any genre for which repetition matters more than lyricism or storytelling. I could see a machine coming up with Lil Pump's Gucci Gang[0] much more easily than Wu Tang's Triumph[1].

[0][https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LfJnj66HVQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LfJnj66HVQ)

[1][https://youtu.be/cPRKsKwEdUQ?t=51](https://youtu.be/cPRKsKwEdUQ?t=51)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> There isn't any resemblance to Travis Scott besides the obvious "It's lit"-adlibs to be honest.

I loved the parts where they showed some PHP echoing some HTML to give the video that hacker vibe.

</comment><comment><USER11> The voice was re-recorded and mixed to sound close to Travis's real vocals; no digital voice reconstruction. However, the reconstruction of his cadence/melodic style is cool to hear!

<comment><USER12> Yeah, if it was like that it would be truly impressive. There project is still cool nonetheless.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Check out AI made black metal, it's not fantastic but also well above garbage.

[https://dadabots.bandcamp.com/album/coditany-of- timeness](https://dadabots.bandcamp.com/album/coditany-of-timeness)

</comment><comment><USER14> I feel like it probably took a lot of tweaking and overlaying the more cogent things it generated to make this (?). Very impressive though.

<comment><USER15> If it takes enough tweaking then how do you know it was by AI?

If you don't see the model or any of the source code or any other process then aren't you just cherry picking input ?

<comment><USER14> I guess there's an argument that the creative process is automated but the production is not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm certain that as the famous musicians die off or retire from performing, there will be a huge business of recreating their sound and generating new material.

<comment><USER5> This will be kind of sad since this will limit the market for new musicians and new styles. We will get so caught up with preserving the past, that we will ignore opportunities of the present.

<comment> 52-6F-62 I like to give humanity the benefit of the doubt in these cases.

I'm not sure if that's right, but I'd certainly rather not let it taint my appreciation of music.

I don't think it will stop people from creating either.

But you might, unfortunately, be onto something with regard to the market. Maybe less because of what people appreciate, and more because the suits will pursue the lowest common denominator with the highest revenue potential.</comment></comment></comment>


Valuable Benefits of Domain EDA - <AUTHOR> http://weblog.madebymonsieur.com/valuable-benefits-of-domain-eda/

<comment><USER2> It's a shame i cannot decide these things in the place i work.</comment>


Why Is Cancer More Common in Men? - <AUTHOR> http://harvardmagazine.com/2017/03/why-is-cancer-more-common-in-men <comment><USER2> So is the second X chromosome in women supposed to be an exact copy of the first or do they differ? That's fascinating to me all by itself, and more so that some genes in the dupe can reinforce the first even though the rest of the chromosome is suppressed.

EDIT: Ah, wikipedia explains that the two X chromosomes in a standard-issue woman come from the mother and paternal grandmother, and then ... "Early in embryonic development in females, one of the two X chromosomes is randomly and permanently inactivated in nearly all somatic cells (cells other than egg and sperm cells). This phenomenon is called X-inactivation or Lyonization, and creates a Barr body. If X-inactivation in the somatic cell meant a complete de-functionalizing of one of the X-chromosomes, it would ensure that females, like males, had only one functional copy of the X chromosome in each somatic cell. This was previously assumed to be the case. However, recent research suggests that the Barr body may be more biologically active than was previously supposed." Which must be related to the EXITS that the OP refers to.

Being a male, I'm troubled by the fitness of the Y-chromosome over the generations. It seems to me that it can only accumulate errors and mutations. However, I suppose the same could be said about the mitochondria that come exclusively from females. This partial double-X scheme seems like a useful way of mixing up traits intrageneration and maybe strengthen healthful cell behaviors.

<comment><USER3> _> It seems to me that it can only accumulate errors and mutations._

Except some of those mutations can be _useful_ – some deadly, but some could be selected for as one's environment/niche shifts. That's evolution and selection in a nutshell. Not all mutations are bad and not all bad mutations are always bad.

<comment><USER2> Yes, truly over the long haul, the fittest survive - helpful mutations account for all survival thus far.

I just envy what I interpret as an intragenerational bolstering of genetic traits that females have, assuming the EXITS thing is truly what's going on. They don't have to wait a generation to perhaps select out the bad, they get to do it on the fly.

<comment><USER3> It's a conservative strategy -change from one generation to another will likely be moderated/averaged by the influence of the second X chromosome for female offspring. Alternatively, single copy governed traits (as in males) mean greater ability to adapt (at a higher mortality rate) and those successful remaining males can propagate their single X chromosome (new and improved, thank you) to their daughters. It's a cool pattern of balances, IMHO.

<comment><USER2> Hmm. Are you saying that men's imputing of adaptations to their one X chromosome is somehow more concentrated/effectual than the adaptations a woman imputes to her 2 X chromosomes? What is the mechanism and how did you draw that conclusion? Because she only passes one along?

It seems to me that chiefly the non-suppressed X chromosome in females would see action by its workings and thus accumulate adaptations.

<comment><USER4> Females have both X chromosomes active, but only one copy per cell due to Barr body deactivation. Some female cells have one copy active, others utilize the other copy.

This scheme can lessen certain X-linked genetic disorders in women since not all cells will be affected.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Although the title seems more appropriate for a ponderous meditation on a great mystery, the article is pretty concise and does cover the case for a specific mechanism. I think the HTML title ("A reason why cancer is less common in women") is better.

<comment><USER6> I agree, but only because questions so often go bad in titles that I now avoid them on principle. This is a rare situation where the question asked in the title is answered in a non-obvious way, so I can't actually point to anything wrong with titling this with a question.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Does anyone know how the X-inactivation thing works with the popular explanation for why women are less likely to be color-blind than men (ie: They have two copies of the gene for sensitivity to light of that wavelength, so both copies must be mutated in order to be insensitive)?

<comment><USER8> I'll take a hack:

1\. Imagine the retina as a field of neurons that are receptive to light. Imagine different types of neurons are sensitive to different types of light (RGB). Each person has two copies (or alleles) of the R, G, and B genes. The R & G genes are on the X-chromosome.

2\. In a color-blind person, the R & G genes merge to form a R-G allele that is sensitive to some red-green combination. Thus, men who carry this R-G gene have cells that express B and R-G genes and thus are red-green colorblind (they can't distiguish between the two because they only have one type of receptor for the two). Remember they only have one copy of these R and G genes.

3\. Women might carry the R-G allele, but in those cases their retina as a whole display R, G, B, and R-G. These people are known as heterochromats can can distinguish colors better than normal people. Note that X-inactivation leads to cells even having R-G allele, or R or G gene.

4\. It's rare for a woman to have two R-G alleles. When they do, they are red- green colorblind.

<comment><USER9> In (3), are you describing what I've sometimes heard called tetrachromat? Is that now confidently considered extant? Last I'd heard, it was an exciting, but only slightly substantiated, theory, but I'd love to see more about it!

<comment><USER8> Yes, I think you are right. I thought I remember it being heterochromat, but looking online all references seem to be to tetrachromat. In terms of evidence, I think prevalence is there, but there were some papers where they actually tested color perception differences (at least from wikipedia).

<comment><USER7> Heterochromia iridum is the condition of having two irises of different colors, you may have blurred the name of that condition with tetrachromacy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> More money is spent on preventing cancer in women in treatment, research, and preventive medicine.

Google the history of the brca gene, research and tests around it. Its quite amazing.I hope all cancer research gets the pipeline it got.

<comment><USER11> The breast cancer movement was started because at the time, male-only cancers (such as prostate and testicular cancers) were getting far more funding and research, while breast cancer was essentially being ignored despite being at least an order of magnitude more common.

That it's more common has probably made it easier to do research on once it gained sufficient visibility and funding.

<comment><USER12> Breast cancer was not an order of magnitude more common than prostate cancer:

[http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.3322/caac.21332/full#c...](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.3322/caac.21332/full#caac21332-fig-0003)

<comment><USER13> Prostate cancer isn't as big of an issue fatality-wise.

Right now breast cancer has a disproportionate amount of money spent on it, but I don't think comparing it to prostate cancer is fair.

<comment><USER14> _Prostate cancer isn 't as big of an issue fatality-wise._

Are you sure? It looks like they're both about 21 deaths per 100,000 people:

[https://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/prost.html](https://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/prost.html)

[https://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/breast.html](https://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/breast.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I immediately guessed that this would be the explanation before reading the article. An important corollary hypothesis (that would exclude things like androgen effects) would be to do a statistical analysis on XY-women and see if they have similar cancer rates as men.

<comment><USER16> That is, if they can round up a representative sample. If the lack of Swyer syndrome (XY-women) published works is telling of anything, it's that cases are very rare.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> ... and because men have more cells in their body and so more tickets for the cancer lottery.

<comment><USER18> If this increased cancer rates, whales should be completely consumed by cancer at a young age.

However, there are few cases of whales being found to die of cancer.

<comment><USER19> Human men are pretty similar to human women, whales are kind of different. So the number of cells alone is quite a good way to differentiate men and women, not so much humans and whales.

<comment><USER20> Then it's not about gender, other than the gender being a proxy for a skewing of the "weight" of the individuals involved.

But, if the GP's hypothesis were to be empirically tested, I guess they could correct for the weight or volume of the individuals being sampled.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Here are a couple of other facts:

1\. Autoimmune diseases are more common in women

2\. The immune system kills tumor cells

<comment><USER22> Then Cancer should be more common in women, isn't?

<comment><USER23> The implication is womens' immune system is more trigger happy, which would make cancer in women less common.

<comment><USER16> My first thought was that the opposite was true. The immune system attacks healthy cells, increasing inflammation, thus stress. Thereby lowering the normal immune system and allowing cancer cells to flourish.

Unless you're talking about all-encompassing diseases (I can't think of any off the top of my head). Otherwise, I don't think Celiac/MS/Diabetes is fighting any cancers.

<comment><USER23> The problem is if your immune system is too permissive it's leaving around damaged DNA lines that can later become even more damaged in a cancer kind of way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Hypothesis: it's socially more acceptable for men to not care for their body as much as women do, eat worse, drink more soda and beer, etc. leading overall to more sugar(y) foods and more inflammation?

<comment><USER16> Social conditioning and less general sensitivity, more like.

<comment><USER24> Social conditioning ~= socially more acceptable, would you agree?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Because men receive worse medical treatment. Just compare how prostate and breast cancer are promoted. It also corresponds with other statistics like life expectancy, medical expenses, disposable income...

<comment><USER26> >Because men receive worse medical treatment.

What about an alternative... Men are less likely to seek medical treatment?

<comment><USER27> Are you suggesting men don't seek medical treatment therefore it's their fault for getting sick?

Girls often don't _want_ to become programmers, and, as I know it, we don't say "It's their fault". We just raise the issue and everyone is fighting to make them want to become programmers.

It's way past time we apply the same reasoning to men's problems as women's problems. Males not seeking medical treatment could be because they're not aware of it (i.e. not enough funding for male diseases as female preventive programs). Or it could be because males are more suicidal about life, because they get the short end of the stick in pretty much all countries, despite the way it is framed in statistics, and we should equally fight for that. In any case, any statistics which leads to 6-year-shorter life expectancy denotes a very acute problem, for which funding should be given in equal level as for women's equality.

<comment><USER26> >Are you suggesting men don't seek medical treatment therefore it's their fault for getting sick?

I made no attribution of fault... simply an alternative primary cause to the person I responded to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I found a really excellent answer to this question in one of my university evolution textbooks [1]. The fact that men generally die sooner than woman (in humans) has been well studied and we've come to a fairly decent answer.

\--

Why do people die?

The answer to this mystery has been partially solved by senescence theory (Williams, 1957). Senescence is not a specific disease, but rather the deterioration of all bodily mechanisms as organisms grow older: Senescence theory starts with an interesting observation: The power of natural selection decreases dramatically with increasing age. To understand why this occurs, consider a twenty-year-old woman and a fifty-year-old woman. Selection operates far more intensely on the younger woman, since anything that happens to her could affect most of her future reproductive years. A gene activated at age twenty that weakened a woman's immune system, for example, could damage her entire reproductive capacity. If the same damaging gene became activated in the fifty-year-old instead, it would have almost no impact on the woman's reproductive capacity. Selection operates only weakly on the older woman, since most or all of her reproduction has already occurred (Nesse & Williams, 1994).

Williams (1957) took this observation as a starting point and developed a pleiotropic theory of senescence. Pleiotropy is the phenomenon whereby a gene can have two or more different effects. Let's say that there is a gene that boosts testosterone in men, causing them to be more successful in competing with other men for status early in life, such as in their twenties and thirties. But the elevated testosterone also has a negative effect later in life— increasing the risk of prostate cancer. This pleiotropic gene can be favored by selection-— that is, it increases in frequency in subsequent generations—because the early advantage in status gains for men outweighs the later cost in lowered survival due to prostate cancer. Through this pleiotropic process, we have evolved a number of genes that help us early in life but cause damaging effects later in life, when selection is weak or absent.

The pleiotropic theory of senescence helps to explain not only why our organs all wear out at roughly the same time late in life, but also why men die younger than women— roughly seven years earlier on average (Kruger & Nesse, 2006; Williams & Nesse, 1991). The effects of selection operate more strongly on men than on women because the reproductive variance of men is higher than that of women. Stated differently, most fertile women reproduce, and the maximum number of children they can have is sharply restricted— roughly twelve, for all practical purposes. Men, in contrast, can produce dozens of children or be shut out of reproduction entirely. Because men have greater variability in reproduction, selection can operate more intensely on them than on women. In particular, selection will favor genes that enable a man to compete successfully for mates early in life to be one of the few who reproduces a lot or to avoid being excluded entirely.

Selection for men's success in mate competition will be favored, even if it means that these genes have detrimental effects on survival later in life. Even though men can and sometimes do reproduce for a longer period of time than women. Senescence theory explains why these later reproductive events will have a much smaller impact than events occurring earlier in life for men. Genes will be selected for early success in mate competition more strongly in men than in women, at the expense of genes that promote survival later. This strong selection for early advantage produces a higher proportion of pleiotropic genes that cause early death. As one researcher noted, "it seems likely that males suffer higher mortality than do females because in the past they have enjoyed higher potential reproductive success, and this has selected for traits that are positively associated with high reproductive success but at a cost of decreased survival" (Trivers. 1985, p. 314). Men, in short, are "designed" to die sooner than women, and the theory of senescence helps to solve the mystery of why.

In summary, selection is most potent early in life because any events that happen early can affect the entire span of a person's reproductive years. As people get older, however, the power of selection weakens. In the extreme case something that happened to you in old age right before you died would likely have no effect on your reproductive capacity. This means that selection will favor adaptations that give beneficial effects early in life, even if they come with heavy costs later on. These heavy costs cumulate in old age, resulting in the deterioration of all body parts at roughly the same time. In this sense organisms can be said to be "designed" to die.

\--

The authors are pushing the X-linked recessive inheritance hypothesis [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-linked_recessive_inheritance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-linked_recessive_inheritance) , which by itself is fine but by itself does not paint the whole picture. The theory does not take into account how genes on the Y chromosome can affect the expression of other genes. For instance, a single gene on the Y chromosome can affect the expression of thousands of other genes across the whole genome.

[1] Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind (4th Edition) by David Buss, pages 101-102

</comment><comment><USER29> Exposure to various environmental factors.

</comment><comment><USER30> They have more iron in their bodies.

<comment><USER31> I agree. However, most of the info. I've read comes from "health journalist" Bill Sardi. Despite the sound ideas, he is still brushed off as a crack-pot. Nevertheless, I'm betting on the "over-mineralization" theory of aging.

I doubt it will ever become accepted. People seem to like to think in terms of genetics (because that's what the "experts" talk about most of the time) and "hi-tech" dreams (e.g.nano-bots killing off cancer). Even when epigenetics is mentioned, they still get it wrong when applied to age-related illnesses.

<comment><USER32> Bil Sardi is brushed off as a crackpot because he is a crackpot.

<comment><USER30> Why? It seems to be the only theory that actually fits the evidence, unlike SENS and similar nonsense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Shows just how much change can come from genetic tech. Nature's source code.</comment>


NYTimes using Google Cloud to find untold stories in millions of archived photos - <AUTHOR> https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/ai-machine-learning/how-the-new-york-times-is-using-google-cloud-to-find-untold-stories-in-millions-of-archived-photos <comment><AUTHOR> Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud (and with Sam!).

Don't skip the video at the end [1], it's got a lot of beautiful imagery as well as digs more into the "why" behind this.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPX-9bTzqZQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPX-9bTzqZQ)</comment>


China arrests former Canadian diplomat in retaliation for Huawei arrest - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/no-coincidence-chinas-detention-of-canadian-seen-as-retaliation-for-huawei-arrest-11544619753 <comment><AUTHOR> Alternative link [https://outline.com/paeH4r](https://outline.com/paeH4r)</comment>


I am a time-traveler from the future, here to beg you to stop what you are doing - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1lfobc/i_am_a_timetraveler_from_the_future_here_to_n/ <comment><USER2> The fact that he's come back from the future to ask us to change something means that he wasn't successful. If he'd been successful, he wouldn't have needed to come.

</comment><comment><USER3> I just realized this was posted 4 years ago. The "to 10,000 in 2017" was a pretty good guess.

</comment><comment><USER4> oddly compelling story</comment>


A Brief Brexit Lament - <AUTHOR> http://martin.kleppmann.com/2020/01/31/brief-brexit-lament.html <comment><USER2> > _Comparing Germany and the UK, I have noticed how Europe seems to be > perceived very differently in each country. In the UK, the relationship with > Europe is regarded mostly in economic terms, as a free-trade zone. In > Germany, it is regarded in the first instance as a peace project._

For one, that doesn't prevent Germany to treat the Eurozone as it furthers its own interests, and secures its trade dominance over it...

Second, if anybody need to have EU as a peace project, it is Germany, since the EU (and its predecessor bodies) were built with explicit mission (as openly said by British, French, etc leaders of those efforts) to contain Germany.</comment>


A great engineer of our times - <AUTHOR> http://www.ultraglobalprt.com/professor-martin-lowson-times-newspaper-120813/

<comment><AUTHOR> To add some context to this post -- Martin was a great mentor to me when I worked at Ultra, and one of the most passionate and driven people I've ever met. He continued to work on new ideas -- most recently looking at the aerodynamics of bird flight -- and it was an honour to have worked with him.

I hope his work will continue to inspire engineers and innovators for many years to come.</comment>


Propeller Gets $1.25m From A16Z, ffAngel, Levchin, Rabois - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/06/27/propeller-gets-1-25m-from-a16z-ffangel-everyone-good-basically/

<comment><USER2> I think this company is going to explode. Smartphone usage is becoming more and more ubiquitous, but a lot of organizations simply don't have the funds or the expertise to convert their old website into a responsive one, or make a native mobile app.

I just think back to my time in the Boy Scouts. We used to print out a sheet for every Scout every other meeting, showing them what requirements they had completed and which ones they still needed to advance to the next rank. We finally re-did our old, single page website into a more full-featured application. Scouts could now see the troop roster online, check requirements, access knowledge banks with packing lists, and more.

But no one brings computers to the meetings, and the site is just too complex to navigate on your smartphone. Propeller would be the perfect tool for them, because many of the Scouts have a smartphone and bring it to each meeting, and would be able to access the information just when they needed it the most.

I'm sure you all know of organizations like the one I just described. But do you know any mobile developers who are interested in helping them? The money just isn't there. The glamour isn't there. But these apps still need to be built. THAT'S why I think Propeller will sine.

</comment><comment><USER3> Cool! If anyone has an invite to this I'd love to try it out, the demo seems cool.

</comment><comment><USER4> Propeller is so cool!

</comment><comment><USER5> "... deploy those apps to others through the Propeller app on an iPhone ..."

This is explicitly forbidden in the iPhone app store. Actually distributing these apps will be a problem; code signing and adhoc and/or appstore distribution is a complex and distinctly non-user-friendly activity.

<comment><USER6> Don't worry, $1.25m buys a lot of pivots.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I did not know Ashton Kutcher was a tech investor. Color me tickled.</comment>


A Tiny Chip That Could Disrupt Exascale Computing (2015) - <AUTHOR> http://www.nextplatform.com/2015/03/12/the-little-chip-that-could-disrupt-exascale-computing/ <comment><USER2> Founder of REX here, and surprised to see this posted here. Happy to answer any questions, and you can check my comment history for some of my prior posts on REX.

We've had some really great progress that we hope to share in the near future, so stay tuned.

EDIT: Since this article is over a year old, we have made a lot of progress, and have recently taped out our first chip. We haven't officially posted a job opening, but we are very shortly going to be looking for software engineers that would love to work on our architecture. Feel free to shoot me an email if you're interested!

<comment><USER3> Did you stick with the parallel, SERDES-less interfaces for your interchip I/O? 48 GB/s implies a pretty high signalling rate to not have a CTLE, DFE, etc.

Why 3 interchip links? What network topology are you planning to use to scale to large numbers of chips? If you're still using parallel I/O, how are you planning to communicate beyond a single PCB?

What memory interface are you using? The article seems to confuse your interchip links with your memory controller.

<comment><USER2> We have partnered with a startup (we'll announce who soon enough) who shared a lot of ideas about chip to chip I/O with myself. While they call it a SerDes, it is infact a source synchronous (clock forwarded) link that is 5 bits over 6 wires. It is silicon proven, and is capable of up to 125Gb/s over 12mm while being a little over 10x more energy efficient (in terms of pJ/bit) than other available VSR SerDes. Obviously it is short reach over PCB, but we imagine (yet to be tested) we can extend that reach a bit more using a more exotic PCB laminate (Megtron, Rogers, etc), or going over wire (tested to go over 6 inches using a HuberSuhner SMA cable). Right now, we are only using it to go between chips in a Multi Chip Module, or under 12mm on a PCB. Big bonus is as of a month ago, it is a JEDEC standard!

Most of the information in the linked article is very outdated (~16 months old), so we have decided to ditch the idea of having a separate DRAM and "External I/O" and just have our chip-to-chip on all four sides of the chip. The chip-to-chip interface uses the same protocol as our Network On Chip, and expands in the same 2D mesh. We are also looking into (with a sketched out plan) on how to directly interface this I/O with HBM dies that can be in the same MCM package. As far as supporting other memories/IOs, we are leaning towards having "adapter chips" that would convert our chip-to-chip interface to DDR4, Ethernet, Infiniband, etc.

As far as bandwidth numbers, our aggregate bandwidth for this test chip we have just taped out (16 cores + 2 chip-to-chip I/O macros on TSMC 28nm, 12mm^2 in size) is 60GB/s though for the planned production chip, we will be over 256GB/s. I have a good feeling we will be a fair margin higher than that, but I would rather under promise and over deliver.

<comment><USER4> Would it be possible to interface with HyperTransport or QPI? Can you name the JEDEC standard?

<comment><USER2> I highly doubt that a direct interface would be possible with either of them, though if you really wanted it, you could make an adapter (though fat chance Intel would open up QPI enough to allow for it). We haven't officially announced the partnership, though I can point you at JESD247.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> From the article: "Caches and virtual memory as they are currently implemented are some of the worst design decisions that have ever been made," Sohmers boldly told a room of HPC-focused attendees at the Open Compute Summit this week.

As a lay processor designer, I couldn't agree more. I don't like VLIW, but this architecture makes a lot of sense. I think it took up to this point for compiler technology to catch up with what is possible in hardware.

Almost all the good ideas in computing were mined out long ago, the trick I think is to get the computing world to give up on those which are holding things back (cold dead hands if necessary).

</comment><comment><USER6> This is a 2015 story that I remember reading, then. Google news search shows only a couple articles this year about Rex Computing and only one tiny bit of news, that they're at tapeout. That's probably par for the course for a startup creating product (or prototype) one. [http://semiengineering.com/power-centric-chip- architectures/](http://semiengineering.com/power-centric-chip-architectures/)

also a speaking engagement: [http://insidehpc.com/2016/01/call-for-papers- supercomputing-...](http://insidehpc.com/2016/01/call-for-papers- supercomputing-frontiers-in-singapore/)

and a comment elsewhere that mentions another approach: the "Mill CPU of Mill Computing"

As I recollect (perhaps quite wrongly) Itanium (VLIW) failed because compiler- writers couldn't really be bothered or couldn't mount the learning curve. So I'm most curious about what progress is being made on the compiler side.

<comment><USER2> You are correct that we have already taped out, though we haven't made any announcements yet, though will be talking publicly about it in the future with a big focus on the "magic" on the software side.

You can read my comments on the Mill architecture elsewhere on HN (not a fan of stack machines), but my biggest disappointment in them is the fact that they have been working on Mill for ~10 years with a team ranging of 5 to 20 (from what I have heard) and have yet to get to silicon, while we have gone from a complete custom architectural idea to tapeout in ~11 months from closing our first seed funding.

The big technical failure point for Itanium (in my opinion) is the fact that Intel took the relatively pure VLIW research by Josh Fisher @ HP Labs and tried to add a ridiculous number of features (and attempted x86 compatibility) that impacted the ability to statically schedule instructions. The resulting bastard architecture Intel called "EPIC" (rather than VLIW) had a very difficult job in getting the compiler to generate instruction parallel code since Intel added a huge amount of indeterminism into the architecture that goes against the original VLIW tenets. If your compiler has to assume the worst case latency for all instructions and memory operations, you are going to have a bad time.

<comment><USER7> Itanium failed for the same reason every other VLIW failed as a general purpose CPU: there just isn't enough information a compile time to model the dynamic properties of a program. In fact many of Itanium additions (strange instruction packing, alias disambiguation hardware) were attempts at overcoming this issue.

The only moderately successful general purpose VLIW are Conroe and the related Denver, and they use a runtime translation layer to collect the required dynamic informations.

<comment><USER2> The vast majority of the dynamic parts of program that matter for scheduling (both when it comes to ILP/avoiding hazards within a core and when it comes to handling memory management for our scratchpad based memory system) are due to indeterminate latencies for memory accesses and executing instructions (due to variable length pipelines). Throw in horrible (for determinism) things like out of order execution and and branch prediction and no wonder a compiler can't determine things statically! While we are not really targeting general purpose (though I would say we have the capability to evolve to it in the future) it seems painfully obvious to me where these issues have been in any general-leaning VLIW attempts in the past, and I can't understand the clinging nature to bad architectural decisions in the past by hardware folks 30 years ago that could not imagine the ability of software in the future. </rant>

Targeting general purpose from the get go is a bad idea, but it NOT impossible to do efficiently and without sacrificing performance. You just need a well defined and constrained architecture, and a clean way to describe it.

<comment><USER7> You have your causality relations reversed: the reason that branch prediction and dynamic caches exist is that because jump targets and working sets are hard to impossible to compute statically.

Even in the restricted world of HPC, GPGPUs have been moving from statically scheduled exposed pipeline VLIW machies to more conventional SIMD with caches, virtual memory and branch prediction (no meaningful OoO yet as the large amount of thread parallelism can hide the memory latency).

Also GPGPU have the benefit of having the large, lucrative GPU gaming market to pay for their development. How can a pure HPC machine be competitive in this market? Even for Intel Xeon Phi is more of a prestige project than actually meant to make money.

<comment><USER2> I've spent a long time debating with VLIW haters (that I presume you are with), but I'd love to see any citations you have for your claim that my causality is reversed, as I have a ton of evidence (to be fair not published yet) going for my side. While not as generally applicable as our architecture, you can take a look at basically any DSP from the past 15 years and see that VLIW works great from a performance and efficiency standpoint when your data is in a constrained form. We're showing that a compiler can structure a lot of different types of data (and the code required to actually operate on it) effectively if there are enough constraints on the hardware. Fairly pointless to try to convince you without documentation on hand for all parties, but hope you'll take a look in a couple of months.

As far as market, we are going after a decent sized market where the customers care the most about efficiency and performance, and are not only willing but very eager to switch their current solutions for whatever is best. As the typical startup claims, we are able to do it for a fraction of the cost and in a fraction of the time as one of the big guys, and have a solution that is 10x better than is out there. NVIDIA boasts that they spent $1 Billion developing the Pascal architecture, with them selling the Tesla series GPUs for it at $5,000+ a unit. We've shown we can prototype something that can theoretically beat it for under $2 million, and our hope/bet is that we can take it to market (and actually beat it by an order of magnitude) for less than $25 million. That's just HPC, which doesn't include the very interesting high end DSP area that is now using very expensive and power hungry FPGAs for wireless baseband solutions which we think are a very good fit for us.

<comment><USER8> Just to clarify: are you trying to compete with Nvidia, or with Intel? If you're going against GPUs, is your chip something that can run neural networks (better than Nvidia)?

<comment><USER2> Short answer: If we were to implement SIMD FP16 support similarly to how we have a planned dual FP32 in our FP64 FPU, we would be able to easily match GPU performance by throwing more cores at the problem, while still being more efficient. While neural nets/machine learning is interesting, and we could potentially enable it in new forms as we can provide a desktop GPU's capability in a much smaller/lower power form factor, it is not our main focus. As the other commenter noted, there are ASICs that do a good job at that, though since we are more generally programmable than those sort of ASICs, we would be able to handle changes in algorithms over time while some may not be able to.

The more interesting problems for us are things that GPUs can't do well, such as level 1 (vector) and level 2 (matrix-vector) BLAS operations. While most GPUs (and CPUs when utilizing SIMD instructions) only get a couple of percent the performance on level 1 and level 2 BLAS compared to level 3 (matrix- matrix), we are equally performant across all three (and at a very high percentage of theoretical peak).

<comment><USER8> Interesting. Which applications require vector-vector or matrix-vector operations as opposed to matrix-matrix?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > there is no virtual memory translation happening, which in theory, will > significantly cut latency (and hence boost performance and efficiency). This > means that there is one cycle to address the SRAM, so "this saves half the > power right off the bat just by getting rid of address translation from > virtual memory."

In protected mode (i.e., what the kernel is using), will an Intel processor not also disable virtual memory lookup? Couldn't we just recompile scientific software to a protected mode environment to get those same benefits?

Also, I think it is more useful and fair to compare against a GPU than a general purpose CPU.

(As an aside, I don't see where the reduced latency gives such a big advantage. There will be latency anyway, so in any case your software has to deal with waiting in an efficient way (doing useful stuff in the mean time). Shaving off some latency will only help if your software design was bad to begin with.)

</comment><comment><USER10> It would just be great to get in a decent chip that does not have built in, and unblockable, back-door hacking, like those on Intel, AMD and probably ARM.

<comment><USER11> I see a good opportunity for government to make this a reality. Not per se a fan of gov regulation for many things but I don't see this moving forward very fast. There are initiatives left and right (e.g. Talos) but if a significantly large government body (EU?) would make it a requirement, that might change the game. Lobbyists would probably convince them otherwise (you need closed HW to catch terrorists... etc).

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm curious about the thermal issues.

From the article, the power density is (4 W)/ (0.1mm^2), or 40W/mm^2. Intel's Haswell chip has a TDP of ~ 65W, an area of 14.7mm^2, for a power density of 4.4W/mm^2.

Is this power density a cooling challenge?

<comment><USER2> First note: The article is ~16 months old, so is outdated on some measures. I've corrected the numbers below, but in either case, you seem to have been confused between the size of a core and the size (and power) of an entire chip consisting of multiple cores.

After tapeout of our first test chip, the final size for one of our cores is 0.27mm^2 (including the SRAM that makes up the scratchpad memory) on TSMC's 28nm process. We actually came in using less gates than originally anticipated, and our size without SRAM is a little less than 0.01mm^2.

Now, for just going by what is on the linked article: The diagram comparing sizes are for _single cores_ (0.1mm^2 estimate back then for a Neo core, 14.5mm^2 for a single Intel Haswell core). The power numbers in the table below that are for entire chips. You are quoting 65W for a single core, which is incorrect... The 65W Haswell chip I believe you may be referring to is the 4770S, which is 4 cores @ 65 watts, and looks like it has a die size of 177mm^2.

Calculating this out using our current numbers, our planned full 256 core chip has changed a bit (doubled the performance since last year, doubled the power due to adding more stuff) and we estimate the TDP to now be 8 Watts and ~100mm^2, which gives us a power density of 0.08W/mm^2. Intel would then have 65W / 177mm^2 = 0.367W/mm^2.

As would make sense in the case where we are claiming lower power operation, our power density is also lower.

<comment><USER12> Thanks very much for clarifying. That the 4W didn't apply to a single core fell through a cognitive crack.

The power density is impressively low, indeed. Looking forward to more info in Sept.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This chip was discussed on RealWorldTech a while ago: [http://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=151566](http://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=151566)

Let's say it wasn't well received.

</comment><comment><USER13> There is nothing to disrupt. Exascale computing is a haux perpetrated on the US government by unscrupulous hardware vendors. Kudos to Rex for grabbing a piece of that action.</comment>


Apple in Talks to Buy McLaren - <AUTHOR> http://jalopnik.com/apple-in-talks-to-buy-mclaren-report-1786894101?utm_campaign=socialflow_gizmodo_facebook&utm_source=gizmodo_facebook&utm_medium=socialflow <comment><USER2> ...Why? What could this possibly do for Apple? This doesn't seem to make sense.</comment>


How the IRS Helps the Rich Get Richer - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-09-29/how-the-irs-helps-the-rich-get-richer <comment><USER2> The middle get the least benefits.

The Alt Min Tax should be repealed or at least indexed for inflation.

That would be a good start to helping out the middle.

The standard deduction is another issue to consider. Not all places in the US have an equal cost of living, yet the standard deduction does not consider this.</comment>


Apollo 11 guidance computer vs. USB-C chargers - <AUTHOR> https://forrestheller.com/Apollo-11-Computer-vs-USB-C-chargers.html <comment><USER2> Comments moved to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22254719](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22254719), which was earlier.</comment>


How can i create a 3D physics based game? - <AUTHOR> I know this question must be asked already, I tried finding but didnt reach any satisfactory result. I can code in java and c++. And recently i came across ray tracing through a HN post. But it seemed to be used only to make images, right? i wanna make a 3d game based on physics like this one http://www.gravitysensation.com/trickytruck . The folder containing files of this game contains images which are used to create objects in the game. Is this how 3d objects created? what about live light, camera etc.? Ray tracing? can you please suggest how should i start? like a three dimensional box on screen which i can move around/about? <comment><USER2> try start with this: [https://github.com/bulletphysics/bullet3](https://github.com/bulletphysics/bullet3) there are others. google it. to perfect physics you must understand the real math of physics, but it probably won't fit in a game. game physics libraries are subsets of real physics.

</comment><comment><USER3> check out Unity3D</comment>


Call a function named in a string variable in C - <AUTHOR> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1118705/call-a-function-named-in-a-string-variable-in-c <comment><USER2> "While this isn't exactly a practical solution, I bet you could certainly call a function by a string by having a program read in it's own executable and parse the symbols table. The symbol table should contain the name of the function as well as it's first instruction address. You could then place this address in a function pointer variable and call it."

This is disgusting, but I like it.

Now I'm wondering if you could do something similarly gross with GDP.</comment>


All Clojure-Conj Videos Available - <AUTHOR> http://clojure.com/blog/2011/03/23/conj-talks-all-up.html <comment><USER2> Fantastic. Now I can watch the language-magpie part of my brain flit its way from Erlang, where it has been nesting for the past few weeks, back onto the JVM.</comment>


John Sculley On Steve Jobs, The Full Interview Transcript - <AUTHOR> http://www.cultofmac.com/john-sculley-on-steve-jobs-the-full-interview-transcript/63295

<comment><USER2> I appreciated this:

"Even when you look at software, the best designers like Bill Atkinson, Andy Hertzfeld, Steve Capps, were called software designers, not software engineers because they were designing in software. It wasn't just that their code worked. It had to be beautiful code. People would go in and admire it. It's like a writer. People would look at someone's style. They would look at their code writing style and they were considered just beautiful geniuses at the way they wrote code or the way they designed hardware."

Nice to see a non-technologist with such an appreciation for outstanding code.

</comment><comment><USER3> Link to the shorter version, if anyone is interested: [http://www.cultofmac.com/john-sculley-the-secrets-of- steve-j...](http://www.cultofmac.com/john-sculley-the-secrets-of-steve-jobs- success-exclusive-interview/21572)

HN discussion of shorter version: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1790566>

</comment><comment><USER4> > It's hard to conceive how he was able to accomplish so much with so little > in those days. So for someone to build consumer products in the 1980s beyond > what we did with the first Mac was literally impossible.

Hmm. I guess that Amiga 1000 we bought in 1985 ran on magic until the 90s.

</comment><comment><USER5> Apple's design is well known and impressive, but even more impressive IMO is their ability deliver it with such incredible operational efficiency. My favorite insight from this article was that Sony was the production role model for Steve.</comment>


Learning to Learn in TensorFlow - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/deepmind/learning-to-learn <comment><USER2> "Learning to learn by gradient descent by gradient descent"

[https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.04474](https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.04474)

<comment><USER3> Other equally exciting papers that relates to learning to learn in DL.

"Neural Architecture Search with Reinforcement Learning"

[https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.01578](https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.01578)

"RL^2: Fast Reinforcement Learning via Slow Reinforcement Learning"

[https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.02779](https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.02779)

"Designing Neural Network Architectures using Reinforcement Learning"

[https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.02167](https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.02167)

<comment><USER4> another one: Hyper-Networks [https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.09106](https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.09106)

and a blog post to go with it: [http://blog.otoro.net/2016/09/28/hyper- networks/](http://blog.otoro.net/2016/09/28/hyper-networks/)

<comment><USER3> This is why I love hackernews. Reading this tonight, thanks Eric :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What's a good explanation of Tensor Flow for someone living under a rock? I dismissed it as some machine learning library, but I read it is in fact a general computing framework. If I can use it for things like numerical integration or some numpy-type tasks, that would be interesting.

<comment><USER6> Tensorflow does general computation using data flow graphs; you assemble your graph from operations and variables (tensors, as they're called these days), and Tensorflow handles distribution of this computation over hardware which you make available.

A quick google gives these [1] impressive results for Tensorflow, at least for linear algebra operations.

Despite the advantages, I think you'll find many more readily available functions in Numpy for what you want, while Tensorflow remains quite 'low level', exposing building block operations rather than higher-level methods (the exception is machine learning/neural network stuff). That said, I don't imagine it would be too difficult to implement a fast quadrature method for integration, or whatever else your heart might desire. This [2] is a simple example solving a PDE.

\-----

[1] [https://simplyml.com/linear-algebra-shootout-numpy-vs- theano...](https://simplyml.com/linear-algebra-shootout-numpy-vs-theano-vs- tensorflow-2/)

[2] [https://www.tensorflow.org/tutorials/pdes/](https://www.tensorflow.org/tutorials/pdes/)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Video related to library...

Nando de Freitas - Learning to Learn, to Program, to Explore and to Seek Knowledge (NIPS 2016)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPWGGwmgwG0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPWGGwmgwG0)

<comment><USER3> Same topic presented at KDD, with timestamp that cuts to the results.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1kf4Zojtb0&t=1h8m46s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1kf4Zojtb0&t=1h8m46s)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Can someone explain to me the benefits of using TensorFlow over Theano?

<comment><USER8> I've heard that Tensorflow is built to take advantage of multiple GPUs automatically, whereas Theano (by default at least) can only make use of a single GPU.

<comment><USER9> "Automatically" isn't the best word, as TensorFlow won't make use of multiple GPUs unless you explicitly tell it to (at this time). That said, there are a number of benefits to using TensorFlow (including the ability to use multiple GPUs, if not automatically :) )

\- Several common gradient optimization algorithms (Momentum, AdaGrad, AdaDelta, Adam, etc) are implemented already, which makes it a bit faster to get your training logic in place

\- Going along with the above, there is more in the TensorFlow API focused specifically on training models, as opposed to being purely a math engine. Some might consider the extra funtionality "bloat", but I think it serves a good purpose

\- The afforementioned multi-GPU functionality is nice, once you get used to it. It's good for either training multiple versions of a model in parallel or doing data parallel updates of parameters

\- There are tools for compiling your trained models as static C++ binaries on mobile devices

\- The TensorFlow ecosystem is quite nice: TensorBoard for visualizing training, the topology of your model, and various statistics (most recently visualizing projections of embeddings). TensorFlow Serving for deploying trained models. TF Slim for a more Keras-like layer by layer approach to model building. Several pre-trained models to jump start your own work.

\- No compile times. There is a "no optimizations" option in Theano to remove the compilation, but many people's experience with Theano is having to wait to iterate on their code.

\- I think the community is pretty swell too :) The Google team does a good job of responding to and working with folks who open issues or PRs

Generally, I'd say TensorFlow is really good when you want to minimize the amount of time between researching, training, and deploying your model.

Edit: line formatting

<comment><USER10> > \- There are tools for compiling your trained models as static C++ binaries > on mobile devices

I'm looking for such tool but I haven't found anything apart from C++ libraries that also focus on training. Can you give me some pointers? Thanks.

<comment><USER9> In the contrib folder in the TensorFlow project, you'll find the makefile subdirectory:

[https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/tree/master/tensorf...](https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/tree/master/tensorflow/contrib/makefile)

The readme has a general overview of how you'll approach using it. Note that you'll want to optimize for inference (remove unnecessary operations from the graph) [0] and freeze your graph (convert Variables into constant tensors) [1] to drop in your own model for the pretrained Inception model that's used as an example.

[0]: [https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/blob/master/tensorf...](https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/blob/master/tensorflow/python/tools/optimize_for_inference.py)

[1]: [https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/blob/master/tensorf...](https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/blob/master/tensorflow/python/tools/freeze_graph.py)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> From the related article:

> The move from hand-designed features to learned features in machine learning > has been wildly successful.

Are the features here the "feature vectors" or the network architecture? Or something else? In other terms, does this project help normalizing data, or does it help tweaking hyper parameters?

<comment><USER6> Here the features are the feature vectors themselves, yes. It's been found that taking somewhat of a hands-off approach and allowing networks to engineer their own mid-level representations from raw data can be very beneficial.

This is the idea behind the learning to learn paper. Instead of taking our gradient and plugging it in to a hand-engineered (i.e. on paper) update rule, we feed it to a neural network, which is trained to find the optimal update rule, in some sense (neural networks are just function approximators after all).</comment></comment>


You're probably using the wrong dictionary (2014) - <AUTHOR> http://jsomers.net/blog/dictionary <comment><USER2> Thankfully Wiktionary imported wholesale the old Webster's dictionary (due partly to it being in the public domain). It has the same multitude of meanings and examples, including those from the article. On top, of course, it's updated for very modern language and with quotations from literature and journalism closer to us in time.

Which is why I have three different methods for quick lookup in Wiktionary in the desktop browser, and whipped up an extension for FF mobile to look up the selection with one tap.

Wiktionary's definition of 'pathos' omits the first variant from Webster's, however I'd say I've never seen it used in that meaning and it sounds more like the original Greek sense. (Though the relation to 'ethos' should probably be mentioned.)

Alas, for my love to Wiktionary, I'm having trouble _learning_ less-familiar words with it, because I'm hoping to use Anki for that purpose. Turns out, a scroll of different meanings is no good as an answer on a flash card since I'm yet to learn just the most prominent one. All points to me importing a simpler dictionary like the Oxford, and manually fiddling with subtler meanings where I need them.

I'm yet to find a thesaurus which would be as comprehensive and usable, with notes on the differences in meanings. For now, I'm employing thesaurus.com plus Wiktionary lookups—the thesaurus somehow just has more stuff and shades of meanings than other online ones, including established names like Merriam- Webster.

<comment><USER3> Wiktionary is great! I'm interested in etymology, and my mind frequently wanders to thoughts like "I wonder what the origin of the 'pseudo-' prefix is." or "I wonder if the english word 'sea' and the swedish word 'sjö' are related - they seem quite similar.". More often than not, wikitionary has the answer - and a good, detailed one at that!

<comment><USER2> In case Wiktionary fails, you can try [https://www.etymonline.com](https://www.etymonline.com) ― it's especially has more info on figurative phrases instead of individual words, and has dates when a word or a phrase entered the usage (according to records).

<comment><USER3> That looks like a nice second source. I miss the IPA pronununciations though, among other things, so wikitionary will remain my go-to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Back in 2014, this article inspired me to write an iOS app.

I took a few weekends putting most of my efforts into formatting and readability. Just when I was ready to release, I got really busy at work.

Weeks became months, and months became years. By the time I got back to it last year, Xcode wouldn't compile it anymore.

To my dismay, I also discovered that a number of other apps had been launched. After fretting a bit, I realized that most of the competition had done a poor job parsing the raw data and formatting the text.

So I released it anyway. Feel free to give it a try and let me know what you think: [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/id1397172520](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/id1397172520)

<comment><USER5> This seems to be a real labor of love for you.

It must be slightly traumatic seeing your first review of the app:

> 1/5 stars: Missing many basic words. Seems like a phishing app

I don't think your target audience is those looking for dictionaries. LoL

<comment><USER4> Haha, I try to stay above things :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> One of my favourite possessions is The Compact Edition Of The Oxford English Dictionary, which is the complete text of the multi-volume OED shrunk down into two volumes totalling about 4000 pages (it comes in a case with a drawer for a magnifying glass). I got it for next to nothing on eBay a few years ago. I don't use it every day but it's wonderful for browsing and inspiration in the way this article describes.

[https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-compact- oxford-e...](https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-compact-oxford- english-dictionary-9780198612582?cc=gb&lang=en&)

This is the single-volume second edition. Mine is the two-volume first edition.

</comment><comment><USER7> Fwiw, I've taken to always using the Collins dictionary, it explains words in a way that's meaningful and not entirely dry to me.

I think it has some of these 1911 Webster qualities.

Collins on flash: [https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/flash](https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/flash)

<comment><USER8> Vocabulary.com is nice too. [https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/flash](https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/flash)

<comment><USER9> I like the colored parts of speech

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Oh wow. I just discovered this dictionary recently myself, via the GNU Collaborative International Dictionary of English [0].

It turns out that this is the primary default for the cli dictionary tool `dict` [1], which has happily become my go-to.

[0]:[http://gcide.gnu.org.ua/](http://gcide.gnu.org.ua/) [1]:[http://sourceforge.net/projects/dict/](http://sourceforge.net/projects/dict/)

<comment><USER11> The Dictionary [1] program included with MATE also defaults to giving definitions from Webster's 1913.

This is because it is using dict.org [2], which serves _The Collaborative International Dictionary of English_ v.0.48 (GCIDE) as it's default dictionary [3].

[1] [https://github.com/mate-desktop/mate- utils/tree/master/mate-...](https://github.com/mate-desktop/mate- utils/tree/master/mate-dictionary)

[2] [http://www.dict.org/bin/Dict](http://www.dict.org/bin/Dict)

[3] [http://www.dict.org/bin/Dict?Form=Dict3&Database=gcide](http://www.dict.org/bin/Dict?Form=Dict3&Database=gcide)

edit: Newline formatting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Dictionaries are also useful for problem-solving. I tab-complete "dicto" in my editor and ten random dictionary words appear. I look for intuitive- metaphorical connections to the current problem. This has been very useful on coaching calls. "What if we look at this as a [carousel] amusement project. Where is the fun in it for you?"

One client reminds me every month that one of those random words solved his problem, so it's paid for itself! :-)

<comment><USER2> Very similar to the Oblique Strategies method, though with different means: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oblique_Strategies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oblique_Strategies)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The dictionary linked in this post has some formatting issues, so a kind soul improved upon it (Mac Dictionary.app dictionary):

[https://github.com/mortenjust/webster- mac](https://github.com/mortenjust/webster-mac)

<comment><USER14> Thanks for the link. After trying both this version and [https://github.com/aparks517/convert- websters](https://github.com/aparks517/convert-websters) linked elsewhere in this thread, I think I prefer this version of Webster's Dictionary. But I don't think either version is good enough to replace macOS's default New Oxford American Dictionary. See my comment under the discussion of convert- websters for details: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19763435#19784835](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19763435#19784835)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Previous discussion from 5 years ago with 138 comments: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7772557](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7772557)

</comment><comment><USER16> I like to make my own dictionaries for texts I'm studying. I sort all the words, uniq them, and create a word list containing every word in the text I'm studying.

Then, I pipe each word entry through sdcv, with my favourite dictionaries enabled, and create a glossary specifically for the text in study.

Then as I study the text, and encounter strange and unfamiliar words, I use my glossary to gain understanding. If something doesn't quite seem right, I consult other dictionary entries for the word in question - this is often because its a technical phrase or term.

This has helped me immensely to understand texts before I even start reading them.

<comment><USER17> Wow. This is super interesting. TFA and hearing methods like these and how people who write and read a lot work with language is mind-opening to me. I have recently fallen into the habit of browsing YouTube all day long and listening to some podcasts or documentaries while playing video games. I'm now reminded how much more writing and reading evokes thoughts than just blasting something from TV or a streaming service.

Reading is not just background noise. It demands your attention, or you will fall out of the text quickly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is a truly delightful dictionary!

I put together a tool to improve the formatting somewhat the last time this went around: [https://github.com/aparks517/convert- websters](https://github.com/aparks517/convert-websters)

And also an iOS app: [https://itunes.apple.com/app/id943993346](https://itunes.apple.com/app/id943993346)

I've also been collecting patches to correct typographical errors which I've been meaning to post somewhere. I've met lots of neat folks through this project!

<comment><USER19> The app isn't currently available in the UK, any way you can change that?

<comment><USER4> Try this app: [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/id1397172520](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/id1397172520)

<comment><USER20> Works in India too, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Back when I was writing my PhD thesis (in English, as a non-native English speaker) I remember looking for a more efficient way to find synonyms for certain word.

Usually when you are looking for synonyms, you know you already know the word but you just cannot find it. So the Idea I had was to make some kind of "graph" representation of Word relationships given their meaning.

I remember finding a huge list of words with scores related to their meaning like:

Fly 1, Soar 0.9, Float 0.8.

Think, Ponder 0.9, Muse 0.8.

Which really helped, however given the different "directions" of the meaning that a word can have, this is better represented as a graph.

I finished my PhD writing with the use of said list (saddly I could never find it again), and the graph meaning idea just "went away" (lacking a better word) as I finished my degree. But the need for an efficient and quickly way to find that replacement word is still active.

<comment><USER2> Thesaurus.com is similar—it has closer synonyms scored higher. But also separates different meanings of a word.

I think that it either has automated the process of finding synonyms, or started with a corpus like the one you're talking about.

I wish there was a quality open thesaurus, because Thesaurus.com's interface is annoying sometimes, and I could use some integration with a dictionary. Wiktionary's efforts aren't quite there yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> If you're interested in the same sort of beautiful, interesting dictionary for French, there's the classic Littré. It's not that the definitions themselves are colourful, but the quotes used as examples always are.

[https://www.littre.org/](https://www.littre.org/)

<comment><USER23> Other good choices for French are the Trésor de la Langue Française informatisé (1994) developed by CNRS, and the various editions of the Dictionnaire de l'Académie Française.

They can be accessed here (along with a few more dictionaries) [http://www.cnrtl.fr/definition/](http://www.cnrtl.fr/definition/)

There is also a decent iPhone/Android app to search the TLFi (not free, requires internet access) [https://dictionnaire.app/](https://dictionnaire.app/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I cant believe no one has mentioned the great secret of writers: Brewer's dictionary of Phrase and Fable. This is the dictionary you read for fun, the one which sends you on rabbit holes of cross referencing, the one that gives you new ideas, stories, characters. You are missing out as a writer without it.

<comment><USER25> Came here to add a comment about this as well. Got pointed in its direction by a Terry Pratchett essay, fantastically interesting. He said something along the lines of "it's not the dictionary you pull out to find a specific fact, but the one you pull out to learn something you didn't realize you were interested in," IIRC.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> While an interesting perspective, I do have to question whether this is simply a matter of the author preferring Webster's prescriptive nuances over more descriptive approaches, even when those nuances do not appear supported by use.

Taking the example they use, fustian, the OED does not include the idea that it refers specifically to a mismatch between topic and style, and gives numerous examples, from Marlowe onward, of its use without that aspect.

<comment><USER27> Is there any reason to attempt to capture, as you're seemingly describing, the _intersection_ of the usages of a word; the "beige" of definitions? Would it not make more sense to instead describe all the various _shades_ of usage that the word has had emplaced within it by various writers' hands—at least those put forth with enough force for those shades to be recognized and understood by readers today—even if those usages are peculiar and non-standard?

Analogously: if there were to be a book of acrylic paint swatches that described, for each pigment swatch, _what things that color resembles_ , I wouldn't care much for descriptions that held themselves to the standard of applicability in all possible lighting conditions. There are very few pigments that look the same no matter the lighting (maybe some really vivid reds, and Vantablack.) Rather, I would want separate descriptions of what the color would seem to best resemble under _various_ potential lighting conditions, even if those conditions are rare or even unnatural. As the artist doing the painting, I'm not necessarily constrained by a particular lighting condition; I can change the lighting to suit the pigment just as well as I can choose the pigment to suit the lighting (those being two different artistic projects; sometimes you really are painting the Cistene chapel and can't choose how it's lit, but that doesn't mean you can't find inspiration for a _different_ project in the middle of doing so.)

As the writer, if I find an inspiring, yet effectively-unknown definition of a word—well, that's a good opportunity to put that definition to work in my writing in a way that leads people to expand _their_ conception of the word to include my new pet definition.

<comment><USER28> Don't most dictionaries do this to an extent? A description, a pronunciation guide then an example or two?

In the world of digital books though, you would be able to freatpy expand upon those examples(and even including blurbs about the usage of said word).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Wow this is wonderful, thank you. I am wondering if something similar exists for German.

<comment><USER30> Potentially the Deutsches Wörterbuch started by the Brothers Grimm: [http://woerterbuchnetz.de/DWB](http://woerterbuchnetz.de/DWB)

<comment><USER31> That's a great find. I'm just wondering, why are all nouns lowercased in this dictionary's definitions?

> _l_ eibesübung als _s_ piel und zum _v_ ergnügen; ein englisches _w_ ort

<comment><USER30> The project slightly predates a standardized German orthography and the original manuscript used its own capitalization conventions: [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/84/Grimm_W%...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/84/Grimm_W%C3%B6rterbuch_Manuskript.jpg)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I remember taking numerous vocabulary tests and quizzes in grade school where the definitions given were of the 'modern' type in this article. I wonder if the change in the dictionary was driven by a test based approach to learning the language?

It's a nice, quantifiable thing to ask a student to define fustian prose as pompous. It's a lot harder to get the student to explain that fustian is when one tries to punch above the weight class of the idea they're conveying via flowery prose.

<comment><USER33> I remember vocab lessons in school. Near as I can tell from what my sister, who is raising a school-age son, tells me, they don't teach that anymore. The TDD (Test-Driven Didactics) implemented by No Child Left Behind leaves no room for vocabulary lessons in the curriculum; instead, pupils are expected to infer the meaning of unknown words from context. Even the Scientologists have it better: LRH's study tech at least asks you to look up the word on your own.

Anyway, the vocabulary lessons I had came from textbooks, some of which wrote entire short essays on each word, The one for "brogue" (meaning an Irish accent), for instance, goes into its etymology and notes a comparison with a kimd of shoe of the same name. The shoe, it turns out, has a _different_ etymology and the two twrms are not related. The essay concludes: "The idea that the Irish accent fits the tongue as comfortably as a friendly old shoe fits the foot is probably pure Irish fantasy."

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> If you enjoyed this article, you might also enjoy the novel The Great Passage by Shion Miura, a wonderful quiet novel about the creation of a Japanese dictionary.

<comment><USER35> Also an anime, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Passage_(TV_series)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Passage_\(TV_series\))

<comment><USER36> I've watched this series and can recommend it for anyone interested in the subject.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> A good dictionary and thesaurus are really useful. But you also want to surround yourself with reference books that reward idle noodling. Here are two of my favorites.

Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. You can pick up old editions dirt cheap on the usual sites. Here's the wikipedia entry. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brewer%27s_Dictionary_of_Phras...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brewer%27s_Dictionary_of_Phrase_and_Fable)

A Dictionary of metaphor. [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Metaphors-Dictionary- Comparative-in...](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Metaphors-Dictionary-Comparative- including-Shakespearean/dp/1578591376/)

</comment><comment><USER38> If you like Webster's, Garner's Modern American Usage will blow your head off.

<comment><USER39> The latest edition covers non-American English too, so it's now "Garner's Modern English Usage". I first learned of this book from David Foster Wallace's review of the first edition in Harper's Magazine:

[https://www.webcitation.org/6FU8Zx2N0?url=http://instruct.we...](https://www.webcitation.org/6FU8Zx2N0?url=http://instruct.westvalley.edu/lafave/DFW_present_tense.html)

I agree it is excellent, and Wallace's review is also worth reading.

<comment><USER40> Wallace mentions American Heritage, as strictest of the prescriptivists. Highly usable online version:

[https://ahdictionary.com/](https://ahdictionary.com/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I believe the definitions you get by googling "define $WORD" are especially horrible. In fact I have a whole diatribe about this...

[http://doc.dreev.es/dicked](http://doc.dreev.es/dicked)

As a teaser, here are some of the google definitions I've come across that I believe are all wrong:

      mitzvah
      mercenary
      bemused
      waif
      ancillary
      hinky
      quiescent
      commentariat
      poignant
      orthogonal
      dibs
      come out in the wash
      kibitz
      cull
      elide
      gird
      comport
      confabulate

</comment><comment><USER42> The power of LookUp is immense for writing well. But Grammarly often beats it. Those who write a lot, know that the dictionary is a second most valuable tool in writing after the chair.

</comment><comment><USER43> "Merriam-Webster's New Dictionary of Synonyms" is devoted to explaining shades of meaning among synonyms. For example, it explains why you might choose to use defer, postpone, intermit, suspend, or stay. Interesting if you're a writer, or if you're generally interested in suggestion, implication, and denotation. It's very browsable.

</comment><comment><USER44> Is there an Android App with etymology? I have seen few websites, is there a "recommend" website for this dictionary?

<comment><USER2> Wiktionary has good etymologies for many words, including separate definition- etymology sections for these words in other languages (them still being explained in English), thus sometimes letting you explore much of the relation tree. As a bonus, its English definitions are imported from the old Webster's plus it's updated for very modern language. So you could look for apps packaging Wiktionary, or it might be available as a package for a universal dictionary app.

Another good source for etymologies is the Etymonline site―in particular it's better for figuring out when some figurative meanings and sayings entered the popular usage. Might also be available as an app.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> > Recall that the New Oxford, for the word "fustian," gives "pompous or > pretentious speech or writing." I said earlier that that wasn't even really > correct. Here, then, is Webster's definition: "An inflated style of writing; > a kind of writing in which high-sounding words are used, above the dignity > of the thoughts or subject; bombast." Do you see the difference? What makes > fustian fustian is not just that the language is pompous — it's that this > pomposity is above the dignity of the thoughts or subject. It's using fancy > language where fancy language isn't called for.

That last bit is an excellent definition of fustian, and reveals Webster's definition to be (IMHO) a bit, well, fustian.

<comment><USER46> >using fancy language where fancy language isn't called for

That's not what "pompous" means but it is exactly what "pretentious" means. For some reason OP ignored that part of the definition.

<comment><USER35> "fustian" and "pretentious speech" and "pompous speech" can be similar/related but they don't map 1:1 to each-other.

Fustian is a type of cloth which was used as padding. If I say I just listened to 10 minutes of fustian from a politician that means they were filling time far beyond the direct content. I would characterize many business books as fustian. (Or at least, this has always been my understanding of the word.)

If I say the speech was pretentious that means it was artificially pretending to be something it wasn't, e.g. as if it were written by someone who looked up every word they wanted to use in the thesaurus and then chose the most obscure quasi-synonym without knowing its meaning and without bothering to check that the new word actually meant what they wanted to say. (There might be other types of pretension. For instance, someone might say that a highly-educated upper-class politician's speech is pretentious when he talks like a manual laborer, or that a political scientist's writing is pretentious when it reads like a physics paper.)

If I say the speech was pompous, that means it was affectedly grand; imagine someone giving a speech at a city council meeting about whether to add some bike lanes to a local street but sounding like a king's eulogy.

"Fluff", "stuffing", "padding", "bombast", "hot air", etc. are ways of expressing more or less the same metaphor as "fustian".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> I'll also mention the urban dictionary when looking up recently made up words.

Also, learning different languages usually reveals that you cannot think in the same way when using different languages. So you may end up creating new words to describe ideas the other language doesn't convey.

Anyway, languages keep evolving all the time ;)

</comment><comment><USER48> You can also find it here:

[http://www.websters1913.com](http://www.websters1913.com)

</comment><comment><USER49> _You can see why it became cliché to start a speech with "Webster's defines X as…": with his dictionary the definition that followed was actually likely to lend gravitas to your remarks, to sound so good, in fact, that it'd beat anything you could come up with on your own._

Not just cliché but entirely juvenile and formulaic. Public speaking teachers mislead their students by teaching them this bore of an opening.

</comment><comment><USER50> Did anyone else find the writing in this post almost unbearable? It's deliberately showy in a way while also seeming self-conscious about being perceived as pretentious. The predictable dig at modernist architecture is exactly what I expect from this kind of prescriptive aesthetic paternalism.

<comment><USER51> It is poorly written. Some writers confuse mental diarrhea with good writing. His style is overly wordy and needlessly punctuated.

He takes too long to push the informative points, all the while cloaking them in too much empty dross.

At first, I thought this was an example of something written by an AI program. It is lumpy and disjointed to the mind in the same way that the Uncanny Valley is disorienting to the eye.

I'm going to settle on it simply being a poorly written meandering of thought disguised as something that it isn't.

<comment><USER52> The information that writing can convey is not limited to an equation where the words used exist on one side and the meaning of the sentence on the other.

I hate to explain something someone else wrote, but the messy, tangential writing is mirroring the uncertainty that the author calls out in the dictionary definitions that they love. Their intent is to convey the joy that these words have for them when seen through the lens of Webster's 1913. Joy is not constrained to declarative statements marching in lock step to the beat of logical coherence. To remove the "over wordiness" and "needless punctuation" is to lose the human aspect of the post.

Sometimes conveying information is a secondary or tertiary purpose to a piece of prose.

Also, not everyone is Raymond Carver. Some people are Henry James.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> What can be said about some of the Wiktionary entries though?

<comment><USER30> Since Webster's dictionary is out of copyright, it was used as a source for many entries on Wiktionary. [https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Webster%27s_Dict...](https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Webster%27s_Dictionary,_1913)

There's a category for entries that were imported mostly unmodified, with 26,433 pages. [https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:Webster_1913](https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:Webster_1913)

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> (2014)

</comment><comment><USER55> So the idea here seems to be that the author prefers to write English that is about a century old, preferably more. This will be inteligible to a modern reader so I suppose that's fine but it's striking that they resist (unconsciously?) admitting to it.

<comment><USER32> That doesn't seem to be his point to me at all. Just because the definitions he is referencing are a century old, doesn't mean he will suddenly start writing in an anachronistic manner.

His point to me is the modern dictionary has lost a lot of nuance behind what words mean.</comment></comment>


Air Jordan and The 1% - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303649504577492300632472284.html

<comment><USER2> In Romania we have an saying that goes something like this: better to be first in the country than last in the city.

I mention it only to highlight how ridiculous it is for the article in question to argue that the bottom fifth of today's society have it better than the top 1% in 1790 ever did. Imagine, those poor top-hatted bastards living on their massive estates without any electricity or Internet. Without so much as an automobile to call their own; making do with only their chauffered horse- drawn carriages to get around.

Oh, the humanity!

</comment><comment><USER3> > .. perhaps a century from now low-income Americans will pity the living > standards of today's 1%.

This is by far the stupidiest article I've read this week.

<comment><USER4> "Certainly there are reasons for concern if lower-income Americans aren't able to save or acquire sufficient capital to pursue innovative ideas, or to see their children attend decent schools. They will suffer, and the country will lose out on significant intellectual capital and growth opportunities. But this should not be confused with inequality."

These things that are commonly understood to literally define the word inequality and are direct symptoms of it, yes those actually have nothing to do with inequality. Trust me, I own a dictionary. Don't look it up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> What is this? Basic economics conflicting with a pleasant narrative? BEGONE!

<comment><USER6> And why is today crack economics day on HN? Between this and the Economist opinion piece. I wouldn't mind some news stories (including the news story behind the opinion piece), but opinions of staff writers reading tea leaves or justifying their economic principles with sports stories is not what I come to HN to read.</comment></comment>