Paper Notes (2019) - <AUTHOR> https://macwright.org/2019/01/02/paper-notes.html <comment><USER2> This is great! I totally agree with the concept of just taking notes in sequence. Notes are a record of moments in your life. The act of taking notes quickly, without distraction, and moving on, is so important.

Organizing notes in any other way besides just a sequence (especially heirarchical folders, which is how most apps organize) gets cumbersome.

It becomes a combination of analysis paralyasis (which category best fits this note I'm about to take? What if it fits into multiple categories? Too bad, it can only live in one folder) and a quagmire of trying to keep the data organized and findable in the future.

It's a lot easier to just keep a log of every note and then add just enough tagging that you can find it later when you need it.

I was fed up with all the other note apps out there, and created one that accomplishes all the goals I have personally always wanted. Those goals are - make note creation front and center, work natively on every major platform, sync instantly to all my devices, and have a very powerful filtering and full- text search engine for retrieval.

Please sign up if you are interested, it is currently in alpha. [https://notebrook.app](https://notebrook.app) (ALPHA2020) gets you started in the browser right away. Create an account and sync your notes anywhere (native apps on every platform will be available soon).

Hit us up at email@example.com to sign up for the mailing list to get more information on future releases!

<comment><USER3> Looks really nice so far. I've been working on exactly the same thing actually, but it isn't nearly as polished as notebrook (yet?).

The only problem right now is that I cannot find a save button anywhere and it also is not autosaving?

<comment><USER2> gnur,

Thank you for the kind words!

While you are writing a draft note in the editor, the notes are auto saved in your browser every second. As soon as you submit the note (either by hitting enter 3 times at the end of the note, or ctrl+enter on desktop) it's marked up with metadata and saved in your browser. If you have an account, it will also sync to the cloud and back down to any other signed in devices (usually within a second or less). If you've taken notes in a browser and forgot to sign in, you can sign up or sign in at any time and all the notes locally on that device will get pushed to your account.

Let me know if you have any other questions! We will be adding a "submit" button as well as walkthrough in the future to make this process clearer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have a stack of about 30 Moleskine notebooks I've gone through over the past 10 years. I mostly work at the computer, so I keep the notebook open in front of me while I work and I usually wind up creating a checklist each day of what I intend to do, then use the pages to draw out ideas or sketch thoughts. Sometimes I find myself writing something to try to remember it. I try to look at the previous day for continuity but otherwise rarely need to look back. I also use it for meeting notes.

I put a unique sticker on the front of each one so I can sort of associate the time / topics with the notebook. Otherwise they all look identical.

It's not really that organized, but it helps me keep focused on tasks each day and sketch out ideas.

</comment><comment><USER5> I agree with the spirit of this post but I've found large page-count and portable notebooks that work fine for me. Hobonichi makes nice ones, so does Midori. I always do a few things:

1) number the pages and date the entries. 2) Place an index at the beginning of the notebook that I fill out as I go. This way I can flip to the index and find the pages where I wrote about a thing. 3) The Bullet Journal concept of moving incomplete tasks forward into collections has really helped me.

</comment><comment><USER6> I go through about one unlined pocket-sized Moleskine per year. Portability trumps all else. I agree that append-only is the way to go; I put a table of contents at the end of each notebook and a header line with the date at the top of each page. (I use the dates rather than page numbers in the table of contents.) I've been doing this since about 2005. Everything goes into the same notebook: notes on "virtual virtual memory" (2020-01-28), notes on foreign exchange rates here in Argentina (2020-01-28), notes on prices of laptops in the store (2020-01-28), a list of things to fix (toilet, clothing, remote control) (2020-01-30), designs for flexural dial indicators (2020-02-01), an explanation of Cantor's diagonalization proof (2020-02-06), thoughts on multitouch UX design (202-02-06), etc. I don't write anything private in the notebook, so I can show it to people. (For the same reason, I write it in Spanish instead of English.)

In order to have space for later commentary, I initially write the notes only on the right-hand pages — the left-hand pages stay blank, then get more stuff added to them later, which may be references to other notes I added later, extensions of the idea, or sometimes just random notes that don't seem to deserve their own note.

I initially wrote in rollerball, but I have the notebook with me all day every day; after a few unfortunate incidents with rain and spilled drinks, I switched to only waterproof markings. I'm using an 0.3mm mechanical pencil, which is my favorite, but I use plain ballpoint pens when that's all that's available. Their ink is oil-based, so it resists water, though not dry alcohol or grease. I can write much smaller with the pencil, so the notebook lasts longer.

I did try using a local brand here in Argentina that apes the Moleskine, called BRÜGGE. I greatly regret it. The cover came unstuck from the notebook after less than a year — apparently the shitheads used a pressure-sensitive adhesive like the one in Scotch Tape rather than traditional bookbinding adhesives like wheat paste or hide glue. A few years later, my girlfriend admired the BRÜGGE notebooks in a store; I warned her, but she wanted one. The same thing happened to her, so it wasn't just a temporary quality mixup — the company is really targeting that abysmal level of quality! Unfortunately BRÜGGE is displacing Moleskine from more and more stationery shops here. (I got mine from Librería Artística Catalinas for US$16; I think they have relocated now to Córdoba 746, Capital Federal. That's also where I got the mechanical pencil, although they didn't have any leads harder than HB.)

Lately I haven't been keeping my address book in the notebook, but when I did, I used a hash table with separate chaining; I numbered the lines in the address-book section, and had a "successor" column. At the beginning of the address book was the hash table itself, a matrix whose rows are groups of first letters (of the person's name) and whose columns are groups of third letters; so "María" whoever would end up in row LM, column QR. If she was the first person in that cell, I'd just write the line number there, but if not, I would add her as a successor at the end of the chain. Difficult to explain (especially to non-programmers) but easy to update and search. Insertion is not worst-case constant time because you can't insert at the beginning of the chain — the paper is WORM rather than strictly read/write.

Here's a sample page, in Spanish, photographed at 5 megapixels: [https://is.gd/nbshot](https://is.gd/nbshot)

Notes on my computerized notetaking practices are at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23388381](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23388381)

<comment><USER7> John Locke was famous in his day for his method of indexing journals.[1] It has been discussed here before.[2]

[1] [https://fs.blog/2014/07/john-locke-common-place- book/](https://fs.blog/2014/07/john-locke-common-place-book/)

[2][https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21143497](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21143497)

<comment><USER6> That's very similar to my address-book approach! It seems like he was allocating his linked-list nodes in page granularity, thus substantially improving locality of reference — I should probably try that the next time I do an address-book in this style, though maybe for an address-book a quarter- page or so would be a better granularity. Thank you for the reference!

I find that for notes that often grow to multiple pages, the table of contents at the end serves well enough to find them; I might have some 256 items in there at the end of a notebook, and I often remember more or less what date I wrote about something, allowing me to find it fairly quickly in the table of contents. I also include a little icon next to each one, about the size of two letters, which helps somewhat.

It's interesting to note in [https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/john- lockes-method...](https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/john-lockes- method-for-common-place-books-1685) that not only didn't Locke have separate entries for I/J and U/V/W (which were two letters at the time rather than five) but also omitted K and Y. (Also, he seems to have listed all the page numbers in the table rather than just the first one — perhaps he wasn't making a linked list at all? Perhaps with linking he could have gotten some advantage out of my two-dimensional approach.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I still take most of my notes in Google Keep. I can type faster than I can write. My notes are always on the cloud, searchable and editable from any device.

I also created Markdown Notes a few years ago, but haven't used it much after university.

I still use paper for disorganised thoughts, doodles and short-lived notes, but digital notes are hard to beat for everything else.

</comment><comment><USER9> I take notes serially on those $.79 spiral notebooks from the drugstore. When full, I scan them, and toss them.

<comment><USER6> How do you keep the spiral from getting crushed in your pocket? That's a big factor that keeps me using notebooks with sewn bindings instead of spirals.

<comment><USER9> I don't put it in my pocket, I use them at my desk. For my pocket, I use any of a number of pads of various forms, usually one I got for free for this or that reason.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The author notes an improvement in convenience going from Moleskine to Field Notes. I found it even better to use A7 size notebooks (from Japan). They are a bit cramped to write in, but fit better in a shirt pocket.

</comment><comment><USER10> I don't really like small notebooks, I've been using artist sketchbooks recently which have worked out pretty well. When I'm done with them, I slice through it and scan the sheets

<comment><USER11> Yes, I am finding when I go to a larger notebook I feel more free to write full, longer sentences, etc. Maybe there is some sort of landscape Field Notes notebook I would prefer....

He's quite right about passing on the Moleskine and other top-dollar notebooks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Writing notes is nice, but typing on a laptop is too convenient with all the editing tools. Great for class and meetings, but for project notes and other things where I will actually have to reference the material pretty repeatedly, can't beat rewriting your notes into a running text file and grep.

</comment><comment><USER13> Looks about 80% of the way to a zettelkasten.

</comment><comment><USER14> Paper notes...the ultimate way of not being hacked. Different set of risks, of course, but it's a certain sense of security if you know what I mean.</comment>


Wormholes in JavaScript - <AUTHOR> https://www.nearform.com/blog/wormholes-in-javascript/ <comment><USER2> This makes me think of the Array While hack to transverse faster.

Rather than using a for loop, do the following:

Var i = -1; Var len = array.length. While(++I < Len) { ...}

Uses the fact that CPUs branch predict forward in arrays, and runs faster through the arrays that a for loop which can actually run out of sequence as well.</comment>


USA added to list of most dangerous countries for journalists - <AUTHOR> https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/united-states-added-list-most-dangerous-countries-journalists-first-time-n949676 <comment><USER2> For what it's worth, the word "dangerous" never appears in the report, unless my Find feature isn't working well in the PDF.

"Dangerous" is a value judgment; the PDF is a report on journalists who were "killed, detained, held hostage, or missing." Note that this doesn't include harassment, another metric that could be possibly quantified and used to inform a theoretical "danger" ranking.

I guess what I'm leaning towards is that NBC News has a lot of spin in this piece. The headline makes you think it's about the US. The lede cites Khashoggi and tries to conflate it with general hostility towards the media in the United States, but his death was a very different situation (and different country!). Then it cites the global figure without saying "worldwide" in the paragraph, while never explicitly saying that the total death count in the US is 6. The report also shows that zero journalists were jailed in the US and zero were taken hostage.

I don't wish to minimize anyone's death. But the piece gives off a feeling that the US is becoming Saudi Arabia, yet the reason it's in this list at all is because of two events that don't really feel systemic: Capital Gazette, and hurricanes. (Could argue that mass shootings feel systemic in the US, but not mass shootings targeting journalists. No, I don't feel great trying to make that distinction.)

ADDENDUM:

How many people are working in the US as journalists? A quick search was tough to nail down. And, even with the mass shooting that hopefully proves to be a statistical anomaly, how does the deaths per 100,000 in the US compare to the 3.6 per 100,000 in the US's workplace at large?[0]

Also, edited this to remove my confusion about where Khashoggi died.

\</comment><comment>----

[0]: [https://247wallst.com/special-report/2018/01/02/25-most- dang...](https://247wallst.com/special-report/2018/01/02/25-most-dangerous- jobs-in-america/)

<comment><USER3> >Could argue that mass shootings feel systemic in the US, but not mass shootings targeting journalists.

I would argue that mass shootings in the US are a very good reason not to raise any kids here or send them to school here, considering many of those shootings were in schools, and many schoolchildren (or college students) have died in those shootings. In fact, I'd say students are the one group that should be most worried about mass shootings, just judging by evidence.

<comment><USER2> This comment takes us off-track a bit, but:

~130,000 K-12 schools in the US, public and private[0]

94 "gun violence" incidents in schools in 2018[1]. This is "each and every instance a gun is brandished, is fired, or a bullet hits school property for any reason, regardless of the number of victims, time of day, or day of week" \- so far more broad than mass shootings alone.

Let's say each incident happened at a different school: that's a 0.072% chance that _something_ happens with a gun at your school in a year. If those numbers are the same each year (and that hasn't been the case; 2018 is higher than normal), it's a ~1% chance that something happens at your school over 13 years of schooling. Without doing a ton of research, I'm sure the odds would be much more or less depending on the school you pick.

Is that enough for you to keep your kid out of school? That's for you to decide. But bringing it back to my point - evaluating the risk isn't as simple as giving a body count, making "dangerous" a subjective term.

[0]: [https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=84](https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=84)

[1]: [https://www.vox.com/2018/12/10/18134232/gun-violence- schools...](https://www.vox.com/2018/12/10/18134232/gun-violence-schools-mass- shootings)

<comment><USER4> Further, what is the variance across schools? If you don't send your child to a school in a dodgy neighborhood, can you expect a significant drop in risk? If so, how much?

<comment><USER3> Columbine High School was not in a "dodgy neighborhood". Nor was the shooting at that school in Florida a year or two ago. Nor was Virginia Tech in 2008.

In fact, I don't think any of the mass shootings in American schools have been in poor schools at all. Of course, they have their own problems with violence stemming from gang activity and poverty, but the mass shootings are in schools with pretty well-off students.

<comment><USER4> My question was posted in the context of its thread. Specifically, the figures we were discussing were about "gun related incidents", not mass shootings; the OP took the time to explain that these included things like brandishing a firearm or bullets striking school property whether or not there was a shooter on the property or someone got hurt. I would expect these sorts of incidents to happen more often in more violent communities; mass school shootings seem like they follow a different pattern than other kinds of gun violence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This list is by actual deaths during the year, not a prediction of future danger or government policies. The US is on the list this year because of a mass shooting at a newspaper.

The full PDF report is much more interesting than the article. [https://rsf.org/sites/default/files/worldwilde_round- up.pdf](https://rsf.org/sites/default/files/worldwilde_round-up.pdf)

The report also notes that worldwide journalist deaths are down, and for the first time in 15 years, no journalist deaths in Iraq.

<comment><USER6> >The US is on the list this year because of a mass shooting at a newspaper.

The Annapolis shooting to be precise.

>Meanwhile, the shooting deaths of five employees of the Capital Gazette newspaper in Annapolis, Maryland, in June propelled the United States into the ranks of the most dangerous countries for the first time.

<comment><USER5> [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_Gazette_shooting](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_Gazette_shooting)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Khashoggi was killed in Turkey so does that really count as an American death? Perhaps the fact that the USA didn't impose sanctions on the country alleged to be involved influenced that view.</comment>


Breaking Down Lululemon's $500M Mirror Acquisition - <AUTHOR> https://insider.fitt.co/issue-no-87-why-mirror-sold/ <comment><USER2> Reasonable explanation. Seems like $500 million might be over paying for one of many smart mirror workout solutions, but Lulu was already involved and hey... money's free now?

I do think people are really using these things. I've heard from _way_ more friends than I expected that they use and love their workout devices.

For me, I can't quite figure out why it's better than a bike and a tablet, but if it helps you get healthy... so be it.

<comment><USER3> > I can't quite figure out why it's better than a bike and a tablet

The mirror part is important I think; people like the feedback, or maybe just looking at themselves.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> >the company's five-year strategic plan, released in April 2019, charted the path forward: "double men's, double digital, and quadruple international" revenues.

Do men actually buy lululemon clothes? I didn't even know they made men's clothes. Honestly, I didn't realize they made anything other than yoga pants and bags with terrible slogans like 'children are the orgasms of life' or some shit like that.

<comment><USER5> Their ABC Pants are the only pants I'll buy now. Incredible.

<comment><USER6> Check out Public Rec's Men's All Day Every Day pants. Similar style, $30/pair cheaper.

[https://publicrec.com/products/all-day-every-day-pant- inseam...](https://publicrec.com/products/all-day-every-day-pant-inseam-30)

<comment><USER5> Looks interesting but I've never paid full price for ABC. Always $80-$90. Gotta wait for that sale.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> this all seems reasonable on paper, but why does it _feel_ like it's going to be a failure?

Maybe I've seen to many instances where a non-tech company tries to run a tech company.

<comment><USER8> Because lulu is judged on earnings and mirror is effectively a saas company that needs to achieve breakaway scale to own its market. My hunch is lulu doesn't have the stomach for the cost of acquisition required to get mirror there.</comment></comment>


China Hid Severity of Virus to Hoard Supplies: DHS Report - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-03/report-china-hid-coronavirus-severity-to-hoard-supplies <comment><USER2> AP here is only reporting that there is a US government document saying as much. Which was conveniently leaked to them.

Reading between the lines, this document seems to include a statistical analysis of Chinese trade patterns to conclude that its trade in medical supplies in January deviated from the past.

The idea that China was buying more medical supplies in January seems entirely obvious to me, and I'm pretty sure I have seen previous reports of this, extending even beyond January.

The Wuhan Lockdown happened on January 23rd. Do I believe that they were importing more medical equipment in the month where they locked down an entire providence due to the emergence of a new and deadly contagious disease? Yes. Does it take advanced statistics and p-values do convince me of that fact? No.

But, of course, including a bit of stats in such a paper might also induce people to put more stock into its other claims, namely that buying such materials was a motivating factor to hide the extend of the disease. Or that China was hiding the extend of the disease in the first place.

Here's the WHO's bulletin on the matter. This is based on information they were given by China _in December_. If you search any news, you'll also find reference to China briefing their US contacts on January 3rd, with similar information. The bulletin itself is from _January 5th_ : [https://www.who.int/csr/don/05-january-2020-pneumonia-of- unk...](https://www.who.int/csr/don/05-january-2020-pneumonia-of-unkown-cause- china/en/)

Quotes:

 _On 31 December 2019, the WHO China Country Office was informed of cases of pneumonia of unknown etiology (unknown cause) detected in Wuhan City_

 _Of the 44 cases reported, 11 are severely ill, while the remaining 33 patients are in stable condition._

 _National authorities report that all patients are isolated and receiving treatment in Wuhan medical institutions._

 _One hundred and twenty-one close contacts have been identified and are under medical observation;_

So they were hiding it, except they told WHO that they had severely ill patients which had been isolated? And that they were tracking >100 people that had been in contact with these patients, indicating the believe that the disease may be contagious?

<comment><USER3> On January 14, Chinese central authorities knew that COVID-19 spread readily between people. They continued to tell the world the opposite, as reflected by the infamous WHO tweet.

Also, the word you are looking for is not "extend" but "extent".

<comment><USER2> And on January 17th the US started screening passengers from China (here's a great source for that: [https://www.donaldjtrump.com/media/timeline-the-trump- admini...](https://www.donaldjtrump.com/media/timeline-the-trump- administrations-decisive-actions-to-combat-the-coronavirus/)).

Screening only makes sense if you believe the disease is contagious.

So that's what.. 3 days of misdirection?

Before that, on January 6th, the CDC issued a "Level 1 travel warning" and "established an incident management system".

And according to [https://www.washingtonpost.com/national- security/presidents-...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/national- security/presidents-intelligence-briefing-book-repeatedly-cited-virus- threat/2020/04/27/ca66949a-8885-11ea-ac8a-fe9b8088e101_story.html) the virus (and it's true extend) was discussed dozens of times in the president's daily briefings, starting in early January.

Not that any of it matters: Two months after the first warnings, and more than a month after the Wuhan shutdown that ended any possible efforts to hide anything, the President was publicly forecasting that the number of cases "within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero, it's like a miracle, it will disappear."

That's from _February 26th_.

Check his own timeline above to see how much use he made of that month. He's very proud of mentioning it in the SoU and chatting about it with the Indian PM, and various groups being briefed.

<comment><USER3> > So that's what.. 3 days of misdirection?

Oh! So, China only _intentionally_ lied to the entire world for a 3 days. Or, at least that's all your prepared to acknowledge, while bizarrely attempting to minimize it.

In fact, this is only one example in a pattern of behavior by the Chinese central authorities. You invite the reader to assume the opposite. Why?

<comment><USER2> > In fact, this is only one example in a pattern of behavior by the Chinese > central authorities

You're arguing for China's culpability by simply asserting they are always dishonest. That's just circular reasoning!

Look, I don't particular like dictatorships. I'll grant you all the standard complaints about China's human rights abuses, lack of freedom of the press, and their military leaders' terribly old-fashioned banana-republic-style oversized hats.

But the attempt here is to shift responsibility for 70,000+ US deaths onto them. In terms of causality, I believe that is wrong. As in: even if they were dishonest, it didn't make a difference. It's also wrong for the single purpose responsibility actually has, to avoid repetition: not only is it the US governments' (in)action that primarily influences the outcomes here, _that_ government is also far more responsive to any sort of pressure the US public can create.

A even if you can somehow browbeat China into handling the next such situation in a way that is more helpful, that only protects against a more-or-less exact repeat of this crisis. But if the US government improves, that improvement also applies if the next virus is the Canadian Maple-Fever. Or an earthquake, or whatever.

There probably was some Chinese obfuscation. But it seems to be entirely of the superficial, nationalism-inspired attempt at window-dressing many other, ostensibly more open, transparent, and democratic government engaged in.

Florida, for example, doesn't (or didn't, at the beginning) count out-of-state visitor's deaths in its statistics. Trump famously didn't want cruise ship passengers disembarking because it would ruin his numbers. Many countries were rather slow to start counting out-of-hospital deaths, etc. Even the exact same no-(local)-transmission lie China is accused of was recycled by Trump!

If you look at the graphs of cases and deaths, you'll note that China's data fits in rather nicely with that in other countries. Since they were always a few weeks ahead of everyone else, it seems their data was, by-and-large, credible. Or they are extremely good at guessing.

All this is such a transparently obvious attempt to whip up a bit of xenophobic furore to yet again ride a nationalistic wave to an election victory, it wouldn't be acceptable as the background plot for a politics- themed porn movie. To see it succeeding is just...sad

<comment><USER4> Thank you for writing this. You put exactly my thoughts in words. Just because China delayed telling the world about H2H transmission for 6 days from Jan 14 to Jan 20 does not make them culpable for 70000 US deaths.

It is not that once the US learnt of H2H transmission on Jan20th and knew that the virus was in US, it shut down all public events.

The US still proceeded to have the Chinese New Years parade in Manhattan, the LA marathon still happened on March 8th.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I hate China more than the next person, but it's hilarious we're blaming China for our system that's fucked people over.

Our economic system is not set up for natural issues like this. I would also like to propose another question. You know how we're spending a metric fuckton of money on the Military? What if this was, you know, actually a biological attack?

Is this where all of our preparedness has come to show itself? What if this virus was actually manufactured to be even stronger than this? If we're not even able to prepare for a pandemic through spending this much money, maybe we shouldn't spend this much money on the military and spend more on social systems that would lessen the blow of such an attack.

</comment><comment><USER6> 60 Minutes Australia did an interesting report on Chinese companies that stockpiled and shipped supplies back to China at the onset of the pandemic.

[https://youtu.be/T3s6kcXi4pA?t=305](https://youtu.be/T3s6kcXi4pA?t=305)

</comment><comment><USER7> Trying to blame China for the US govt ineptness and preparedness for this pandemic is a bit daft when you look at other countries who had much better outcomes with the same information.

Logic will work for the MAGA crowd but some of us are more cynical after the lies peddled to justify the mess that was Iraq.</comment>


Hey Zuck, we built your office A.I. solution - <AUTHOR> http://blog.algorithmia.com/2016/02/hey-zuck-we-built-your-facial-recognition-ai/ <comment><USER2> Cool article with a very clickbaity title. 'tis a shame.</comment>


The road from atheism - <AUTHOR> http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2012/07/road-from-atheism.html <comment> vezzy-fnord The author never makes the case for any particular conception of a deity. In fact, his indirect diatribe could just as easily be taken as an argument in favor of theological noncognitivism. He rejects "theistic personalism" (which is the overwhelmingly accepted understanding of God in Western societies and Abrahamic religions) in favor of "classical theism" \- that God is pure form, immutable (does not change), impassible (cannot be acted on), existing outside of time, yet also omnipotent and omniscient. Whether or not this God intervenes in human affairs is not stated, so for all I know the author could be arguing a deist position. Yet he seems to accept the Catholic tradition, which would require one to prove a whole additional set of properties beyond an abstract deity, but nonetheless it implies that he _does_ believe in an interventionist God. Actually, classical theism seems to imply this cyclic and self-referential belief of God being omniscient by the mere fact of his existence and that "miracles" and intervention are in fact the result of God being the sustainable cause of ordinary events by default.

Muddled, unfalsifiable, self-abetting sophistry, in my mind. But it's creative, I suppose.

<comment><USER2> Indeed, creativity is the inevitable conclusion I come to when I read diatribes like this. I could expend countless hours wondering, plotting, and diagramming any number of potential (non-scientific) explanations for life as we know it, as well as our eventual, mutual destination.

These explanations would also be _creative_ ; the primary reason I don't do this is because I have far more interesting and important things with which I choose to concern myself.

<comment> vezzy-fnord To be fair, I do respect him for his adeptness at being able to think abstractly, but his presenting these ideas to scorn on atheists as if they're somehow in the _absolute_ wrong because of not considering the more esoteric Aquinas ideas of God, is disingenuous. In all honesty, he would be rightfully dismissed by most atheists as begging the question.

As I said, theological noncognitivism - it's not worth debating God because there is no definition of him/her/it. Classical theist, pantheist, pandeist, panentheist, henotheist, deist, pandeist, maltheist, personal God... at any given point in a debate people will start backtracking on different interpretations with radically different consequences if they are valid, yet still somehow conclude Christianity must be true after all of them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The article takes a different tenor when you consider that is not a story about how the author came to logically prove that theism is more likely than atheism, but it is about how the author come to feel that being a theist is a better life than being atheist. Religion is a powerful idea, not because it is true (that cannot be proven) but because in its best form it is psychologically extremely useful.

<comment><USER4> Is it actually useful, though? Sure, people will say it is useful, but what can they do to demonstrate that?

<comment><USER5> From personal experience, very much so. I really miss the spiritual and mental calm and resilience that the faith of my youth brought me. I have several personal examples of where prayer brought me the calm and clarity I needed to focus my mind to get through tough situations.

Once I realize it wasn't true and stopped believing all that went away, and in some ways I still mourn that.

<comment><USER4> An anecdote isn't evidence. I was different when I was younger, too. One data point doesn't make a pattern. A bunch of data points don't make a pattern when you over-fit your description to match them. I'm asking for objectivity here.

You can't look at a bunch of planes, recognize that there are more dead people in planes lying on the ground than there are in those flying through the air and conclude that planes in the air are safer than those on the ground. What is unsafe here is a rapid transition, not the state of being. You can't ignore those kinds of possibilities and draw meaningful conclusions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I found this account of his intellectual journey from atheism very much like my own. However I am no philosophy Phd. But the early years of dismissing things because you "know" it all already or nobody is taking it serious so why would you. Yeah I think we can all relate to that in various contexts. Then getting deep into something and having it lead you where you never expected. Yeah had that happen a few times too, its amazing how often this does happen when I finally get over my ego and start to really listen and process what I learn, and boy am I better off for it.

It is a long read here is my TLDR;

It took this guy a decade to see through his and the fields biases and weak/uninformed arguments. My favorite bit on this is.

\- "Read it, read into it, dismiss it, move on. How far can you go wrong? Very, very far. It took me the better part of a decade to see that"

\- "the stock objections raised by atheists against the traditional arguments for God's existence are often aimed at caricatures, some of them do have at least some force against some of the arguments of modern philosophers of religion. But they do not have force against the key arguments of the classical theist tradition."

Begins to question the nature of what we can know through science.

\- "I came to see that existing naturalistic accounts of language and meaning were no good."

\- "Physics, which materialists take to be the gold standard of our knowledge of the material world, in fact doesn't give us knowledge of the intrinsic nature of matter in the first place."

\- "The usual materialist theories were not even clearly thought out, much less correct."

\- "A complete naturalistic explanation of intentionality is impossible."

\- "Introspection, ...gives us direct knowledge of our thoughts and experiences. ...it is matter, and not mind, that is the really problematic side of the mind-body problem"

Takes a serious look at Aquinas and Scholastics, finds it very solid to his surprise

\- "The way I and so many other philosophers tended to read the Five Ways was, as I gradually came to realize, laughably off base."

\- "when they did say anything about Aquinas's arguments at all, most of them showed only that they couldn't even be bothered to get him right, much less show why he was mistaken."

\- "Eventually it hit me: "Oh my goodness, these arguments are right after all!"

\- "a little philosophy leads you away from God, but learning a lot of philosophy leads you back"

My favorite part of this post is how he really captures what I am certainly guilty of and I am sure so many of us are. Rather than really listen we prepare our argument which is really a way of building up our wall of existing belief. Of course that makes sense if you're feeling challenged you want to see if they can knock it down (hoping they can't) but really we should respect each other a bit more and just listen with an open mind and heart. It would save a lot of time I suspect.

"...to read something is not necessarily to understand it. Partly, of course, because when you're young, you always understand less than you think you do. But mainly because, to understand someone, it's not enough to sit there tapping your foot while he talks. You've got to listen, rather than merely waiting for a pause so that you can insert the response you'd already formulated before he even opened his mouth. And when you're a young man who thinks he's got the religious question all figured out, you're in little mood to listen -- especially if you've fallen in love with one side of the question

You're pretty much just going through the motions at that point. And if, while in that mindset, what you're reading from the other side are seemingly archaic works, written in a forbidding jargon, presenting arguments and ideas no one defends anymore (or at least no one in the "mainstream"), your understanding is bound to be superficial and inaccurate."</comment>


How to Build a Successful Career in InfoSec - <AUTHOR> https://danielmiessler.com/blog/build-successful-infosec-career/ <comment><USER2> Kudos for a great article. I don't remember reading this blog before, but it is bookmarked now.</comment>


Jonathan Coulton strikes back by re-releasing his own song - <AUTHOR> http://www.jonathancoulton.com/2013/01/26/baby-got-back-glee-style/ <comment><USER2> I think it's important to realize exactly what Fox is (regularly) doing here.

Fox/Glee finds a popular song. Fox/Glee wants to do a cover. Fox/Glee searches the internet to find a popular cover of the song. Fox/Glee does their cover in the same style, by having musicians play/record a note-for-note re-creation of that popular cover. Fox/Glee pays mechanical royalties to the original songwriter/publishing-company, pays absolutely nothing to the arranger that came up with the stylized cover version, and refuses to acknowledge them.

This is 100% legal, no matter how creative the arranger was in coming up with their cover. If the cover artist was granted a mechanical license, the only copyright protection they were granted was to their _sound recording_.

This is also not the first time it has happened. In episode 1, Glee's cover of Don't Stop Believing was practically identical to a famous a cappella arrangement (from a college a cappella group that released a cd and won some awards from it). There was another "regionals" number that was largely identical to another similarly famous a cappella arrangement.

It's lousy behavior and I think they deserve every bit of blowback for being poor citizens, but it is technically legal.

(Big asterisk: There is reason to believe that Fox actually took Coulston's karaoke version of BGB and recorded vocals over it. This, in contrast, _would_ be a copyright infringement.)

<comment><USER3> Thank you for spelling this out.

This explains why there are so many god damn awful covers of John Cale's cover of Hallelujah.

<comment><USER4> The reason everyone covers Cale's version of "Hallelujah" is not licensing, it's that his arrangement is so compelling that he made it impossible to hear the song any other way. If he hadn't, few would know it existed. Cale reinvented that song. In the annals of aesthetic justice he gets a cowriting credit beside Cohen.

John Cale is a classic under-the-radar genius. Drastically reworking songs has been one of his specialties for decades; he did it to "Heartbreak Hotel" twice. But "Hallelujah" was a freakish success. It used to bug me that no one ever mentioned Cale when that song came up (only Jeff Buckley, who copied him) but that has finally changed.

What screwed Cale is that his version was replaced on the Shrek soundtrack by Rufus Wainwright's carbon copy, because the record label wanted to promote Wainright at the time. Your point applies to that maneuver.

Curious factoid: of the few covers of "Hallelujah" that existed before Cale reworked it, one was by Bob Dylan. It's easy to see why Dylan would have singled that one out, but still, kind of amazing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is not just a cover it's clearly a new arrangement. As an arrangement it is a derivative work. Derivative works, specifically including arrangements of preexisting compositions, are most certainly themselves copyrightable materials by their authors, which in this case is Coulton as he is the author of the arrangement.

<http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ14.pdf>

Coulton notes that he has bought a license from the Harry Fox Agency giving him the right to perform and distribute his original arrangement of Sir Mix a Lot's work, so that is all proper and legal.

There is no doubt legally that Coulton holds a copyright to his arrangement and that Fox is engaging in copyright violation since it is obvious the Fox piece is a cover of the Coulton arrangement, given there are almost no differences between their cover and his original arrangement.

The opinions of the Fox lawyers who contacted him are predictable, but incorrect regarding law.

<comment><USER6> If I remember correctly the _right to create derivative works_ is one of the five rights that can be licensed under copyright law.

IANAL but I would say _if_ Coulton has a license from Harry Fox Agency to create derivative works, and the license terms allow him to retain ownership of such derivative works, _then_ Fox may be infringing on Coulton's copyright. No?

<comment><USER7> If Coulton had rights to create a derivative, he'd be getting legal advice that he has a great (legal) case against Fox, if he's willing to spend the money and time. Though it isn't likely to make anyone fantastically wealthy.

If Coulton had a compulsory mechanical license to the original work, and just happened to create a unique arrangement and inadvertently created the derivative (he's no lawyer; how would he know a cover is only a cover until it isn't?) he'd be getting advice to let it blow over, because any action he happened to win against Fox on the grounds of their infringing his derivative would leave him open to suit from the original rights holder for not having had a license to actually create a derivative.

As Coulton termed the advice he received as "I have no case" I'm guessing he's not put off by the practical concern of time/money but by bad legal prospects. Particularly considering he went on to mention that he's still looking into whether they actually mixed in his original audio. (which, if they did, he could use to bring a copyright action against them without claiming that he created a derivative work.)

<comment><USER8> _> If Coulton had rights to create a derivative, he'd be getting legal advice that he has a great (legal) case against Fox_

Others are saying he paid for a license.

<comment><USER9> That's roc's point: Coulton's rights depend on what kind of license he paid for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Awesome response. I bought the song. I'm guessing that Fox/Glee either doesn't know how stupid this makes them look or they believe that any publicity is good publicity. Now all we need is the bear-luv inman cartoon for Adam Anders [1], the executive music producer for Glee.

[1] <http://www.imdb.com/name/nm2946490/>

<comment><USER11> "I'm guessing that Fox/Glee either doesn't know how stupid this makes them look or they believe that any publicity is good publicity."

What exactly do you predict this publicity will _do_ to Glee? Are its fans going to walk out on it? Will the Cyber Police come and take its producers away?

<comment><USER12> It will someday show up in some Congressional testimony as an anecdote "proving" that the media companies are not actually interested in artist's rights. It won't be logical, but such is the way of Congressional hearings.

I wouldn't be surprised this does get walked back over the next couple of weeks, or if the practice ends despite its legality, and I bet it won't be any fan outrage, but internal RIAA-based pressure. This is not an anecdote they want floating around where it can be easily verified.

<comment><USER8> _> It won't be logical, but such is the way of Congressional hearings._

When such statements are made routinely about an organization, it's time to move on to another one. (Roman Senate as precedent. I'm sure there are many others.)

<comment><USER13> Don't be absurd. Mark Twain was making jokes about Congress over a century ago, and he certainly wasn't the first.

<comment><USER8> The Roman Empire went on for a _long time_ after it had become a parody of itself. In fact, it went on for a long time after it became a dysfunctional meta-parody of the earlier dictatorial rubber-stamp-legislature parody of itself. It's just that competent individuals kept appearing and propping it up enough for it to keep going.

If there's anything absurd, it's the notion of a historical individual being able to find a non-dysfunctional part of the world to move to. However, we now have the Internet and air travel.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I don't understand the law here. Fox/Glee can separate two independently copyrightable components of a work -- the lyrics and the arrangement --, then pay off the lyricist and rip off the arranger with the law being none the wiser? Why do lyrics receive preferential treatment under the law? What happens if you take two popular songs, strip the lyrics from one and combine it with the arrangement of the other? What if you add your own lyrics to someone else's arrangement: do you now own the work? What if your cover of their cover is byte-for-byte identical to their cover, that's _not_ a copy?! Can this channel separation copyright hack be reused in other contexts (software, movies)?

<comment><USER15> My understanding is that the crux is that in exchange for a very simple and easy licensing of the original, Jonathan Coulton signed away all of his rights except for his rights to his actual performance/recording.

Weird Al gets more complicated (and presumably expensive) licenses of the originals, so that he full out owns his creations.

<comment><USER16> That can't always be true, because in the debacle over Amish/Gangstas Paradise he stated that he was misinformed that the original artist has OKed it as a matter of courtesy, but that he had parody freedoms anyway.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Glee isn't the only thing to do this sort of shitty move, either. Ludachrist [1] did a remix of Major Lazer's "Pon De Floor" vs the Beverly Hills Cop song, entitled Pon De Foley.

Several months later, DJ Hero 2 (same family as Guitar Hero) took the same two tracks and made one of their game songs the exact same remix [2]. Players have to mix both tracks together and if they successfully do it, it plays the arrangement that Ludachrist had come up with.

Activision had permission from both Diplo (Major Lazer) and Harold Faltermeyer (composer of the BHC song), and therefore had legal clearance from it. At no point did they acknowledge the arrangement as coming from Ludachrist and legally didn't have to.

It's really scummy but that's how the outdated copyright laws work. It's just another argument for large-scale copyright reform.

[1]: NWS remove the space if you want to view it: <http://www.youtube.com/watch>? v=9TYEgFfFdUY [2]: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M93Aji4MJBk>

</comment><comment><USER18> I haven't been paying much attention to the legal details but I love that Sir Mix is getting royalties from this (partly because this stops the debate from descending into a "everything should be free" tangent).

Edit: after taking the 30 seconds to find and listen to an excerpt of Coulton's song, I can reasonably weigh in on the debate: Fuck Glee

</comment><comment><USER19> Can someone give me some more context on what this is about and the backstory here? A link to something that explains whats going would be great!

<comment><USER10> Simple recap: Sir Mix-a-lot does a song, 'Baby's Got Back' which Jonathan Coulter does a cover of. Mixalot's more techno/rap and Coulter is more of a musical arrangement. Then Glee (TV Show) does a cover using Coulter's arrangement (music and additional lyrics) and doesn't so much as acknowledge his existence, much less pay the required licensing fees.

<comment><USER2> This has been covered elsewhere - there are no required licensing fees unless Glee actually used Coulter's _sound recording_. Fox is guilty of a dick move here, but as long as they recreated the instrumental track themselves, they are legally in the clear.

However, I think it's likely that Fox actually used Coulton's karaoke backing tracks, which would mean Fox infringed Coulton's copyrights. I'm hoping for someone to do a digital analysis showing whether this is true.

<comment><USER20> It has been done! In particular a look at the "quack" that Coulton used in his version (instead of cussing like Mix-a-lot did): [http://geeklikemetoo.blogspot.com/2013/01/about-that- quack.h...](http://geeklikemetoo.blogspot.com/2013/01/about-that-quack.html)

He also points to a great example indicating that the beginning was likely edited too: <http://imgur.com/a/F0HTP#1>

Also, if you're someone that trusts their own ears and has headphones, you can hear Glee's in your left earbud, and Coulton's in your right, in this pairing: <https://soundcloud.com/suudo/joco-vs-glee-baby-got-back>

<comment><USER2> Wow, those links are spectacular. Thanks for highlighting them.

Here's why this is an issue. Coulton released his sound recording under the Creative Commons, by-nc-sa . If they used his sound recording, Fox/Glee is infringing all three parts of that license:

\- They didn't attribute \- They released it commercially \- They didn't release it share-alike

A creative commons license is additive, so they could have worked around it by contacting Coulton and getting permission ($$).

Since they did none of that, Coulton has legal grounds here, specifically relating to the use of the sound recording. In my IANAL opinion. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> At the time of this writing there are 719 ratings for this single on iTunes. This isn't scientific, but I'd say the song is doing well. Ultimately, this whole Glee fiasco will undeniably end as a net positive for JoCo.

<comment><USER22> Depends on whether any of the people buying and rating it are actually new listeners, or if it's mostly just people who are already familiar with JoCo.

<comment><USER15> Right now, JC's song has 1,324 ratings, 1,314 of which are 5 stars. The ripoff has 1,472 ratings, 1,285 of which are 1 star. People are stepping up to bat for Jonathan Coulton. It just takes one person with media connections to step up to bat for this to get wide mainstream coverage. That's where the real upside for JC is.

Unfortunately, my only solid media contact works for a Newscorp company. It's time to think if any of you have news media contacts.

I also imagine there are a lot of Anons just looking for an excuse to rally against Fox/Newscorp. I'm not endorsing vigilantism, but Glee is one influential Anon away from wishing it had pulled its collective penis out of this hornets' nest and apologized before it felt the first sting. If the hive awakes, it's too late for apologies and Jonathan Coulton may be sucked into the media draft of Fox/Newscorp's supersonic pain train ride to Agonyville.

I don't see any situation where he makes retirement bank off of this, unless it turns out Fox actually used his recording. However, it's definitely within the realm of possibility that he comes out a few tens of kilobucks ahead on this if it gets picked up by mainstream media and/or some Anons use this as an excuse to go after Fox/Newscorp.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Coulton (or for that matter, you or I) could release an entire album of covers of Glee songs, and only owe money to the original author, not the Glee dudes?

Someone should make the "Low Rent Glee Ripoff Band" and do this.

<comment><USER24> It's been done:

<http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B003YYUSP6>

<http://www.amazon.com/dp/B005I88LY6>

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> While it would have been nice for Glee to acknowledge Jonathan's influence, an arranger can only claim copyright when the original songwriter has granted that privilege to said arranger, which I don't believe was the case when Coulton recorded his cover.

<comment><USER26> You don't believe it was the case, or you're speculating?

"Back when I released it, I bought the statutory license to distribute my version of this song through Harry Fox."

<comment><USER25> Speculating... but a statutory license is not equal to a copyright in this case.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> While it's a tad low to do this without any acknowledgment, this stuff happens all the time. Particularly with commercials. At least he has re-released his master and can monetize this way. This controversy will probably earn him more money than had it just been a 2 second blip in the credits.

<comment><USER28> He's donating all the proceeds after licensing fees to charity. It seems all he wants is acknowledgement that they used his mix.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I bought his version of the song. I hope he uses the proceeds to sue the shit out of Glee/Fox.

</comment><comment><USER30> Well, I never would have heard his version if it weren't for this fiasco. I don't watch Glee (I enjoyed the first few episodes, i'll admit... then it just got silly).

I'm not saying it's a good thing they did this - it's not. But hey, he did a great arrangement here, and i'm happy to have heard it now.

</comment><comment><USER8> The best revenge involves laughing all the way to the bank.

</comment><comment><USER31> How much does this cost on iTunes for those of you in the US? It cost me $1.69 in Australian dollars, but the exchange rate is 1 USD to 0.96 AUD.

<comment><USER31> Hey, why the down vote?

<comment><USER31> I've got points to kill. Whoever is down voting is a coward, or a censorious douchebag. Perhaps both.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It would be wonderful if JoCo makes more money off thissnafu than if Fox had give you him a gratuity or credit in the first place.

It would be beautiful if the above were true and the creative team did it on purpose, for example by intentionally preserving the duck sound after being told to swipe and wipe and the song.</comment>


Benchmarking Integer Compression in Go - <AUTHOR> http://zhen.org/blog/benchmarking-integer-compression-in-go/

<comment><USER2> Please, please use bar charts. Line charts are suitable only for data series where the X axis is scalar, not separate categories.

Also, the article has absolutely nothing about testing methodology. I'm guessing you're using Go's built-in benchmarking, but it still needs to be clarified; are the timings the mean, 95th percentile, or what? What about variance -- better CPU cache usage would lead to less variance, I would guess?

Interesting article, though. Thanks for writing it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for commenting!

And you are absolutely correct about the bar charts. Not exactly sure why I chose line but they have been replaced now.

The testing didn't use the built-in benchmark mechanisms but it did use the *testing.T mechanism. It's basically runs of different algorithms on the same set of pre-loaded integers. And then I recorded the time (ns) it took to run compression and decompression (time.Since(now).Nanoseconds() where now was time.Now()).

The caching effect should be pretty similar for all the algorithms since they work off the same LARGE slice of data, afaict.

I will update the article to reflect the testing methodology (may be a few days before I can get to it though.)

THanks

<comment><USER2> That's so much better.

PS. I noticed you have an article about bitmap indexing. I hope you realize that the algorithm you're using is based on WAH, which is patented by the DoE.

<comment><AUTHOR> The algorithm is EWAH, not WAH. It's also by Daniel lemire.

<comment><USER2> Last I checked (my Internet connection is wonky, so I can't verify right now), EWAH was based on WAH, so it's affected by the patent.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry for the late reply. I was traveling for the past week or so.

In any case, EWAH is designed to avoid the WAH patent. According to the author, the Apache people checked things out when they adopted it for Apache Hive and they were apparently satisfied.

If Apache is satisfied, I think we are safe. :)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How to Tell Who's Lying to You: Climate Science Edition - <AUTHOR> http://manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2016/12/22/how-to-tell-whos-lying-to-you-climate-science-edition <comment><USER2> If you take a step back and see the motivations of each side, you realise that one side is supported by an industry group with the aim to create doubt in the science of climate change.

Other industry groups have perpetuated similar lies. The tobacco industry that smoking may not cause cancer, the sugar industry that fat causes obesity and not sugar.

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://www.desmogblog.com/blog/john- mashey](https://www.desmogblog.com/blog/john-mashey)

John follows the money and the science!</comment>


Hyper Networks: An RNN that changes the weights of an RNN - <AUTHOR> http://blog.otoro.net/2016/09/28/hyper-networks/ <comment><USER2> Haven't read the article yet but back in the 90s/00s there was a thing for using Genetic Algorithms to evolve optimal NN topologies.

Edit: Cool, mentions it right out the gate.

<comment><USER3> Hybrid systems combining different ML techniques were generally in back then. These should be revisited with today's processing power and data set availability.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is an additional abstract dimension we add to it. As long as it helps, I encourage to go this road. But I also fear on the other hand that it gets harder and harder to understand NNs. Especially, if someone just starts with NNs.

<comment><USER5> > Especially, if someone just starts with NNs.

That goes for any new field you are interested in. If this bothers you I have a suggestion: pretend the present does not exist and go back to the beginnings of the field, then do a 'faster than realtime' replay to allow you to see the steps as they were made in the past until you catch up with the present. Typically this will take you anywhere from 1 to 5 years depending on how fast you work for something complex but you'll come away with a much deeper level of understanding than you'd get if you just looked at what is being done today.

It will also help you to not go down all the blind alleys of history because you are now aware of them.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I wonder if it can be applied a 3rd meta-time. E.g.: an RNN would edit the weights of another one which edits the weights of the main one. And maybe add the L2L meta optimizer in that?

</comment><comment><USER6> Lets go deeper, lets create a RNN that changes the weights of this RNN!

I fear someday we may accidentally discover (and disappoint ourselves) that consciousness (AKA the mind) its just a self-modifying binary system and not as magical as we like to assume... probably still centuries away even if that's the case.

<comment><USER7> I've also pondered this but I worry that there's a degree of magical thinking here.

Here's one thing too complex for us to understand (a conscious brain).

Here's another thing with superficial similarities (highly complex neural nets of one kind or another).

Maybe this complex thing is the same as this other complex thing!

However - I'm still stuck at the stage where I feel that p-zombies, qualia, the chinese room etc are pointing at a genuine explanatory gap. I know the more rationally minded think this is hand-waving or closet-mysticism but considering nobody has satisfactorily defined consciousness in a way that doesn't simply hide the problem one layer deeper then I'm going to stick to my gut feeling that the other side of the debate is doing just as much hand- waving as me.

It's homculi all the way down.

<comment><USER8> > I'm still stuck at the stage where I feel that p-zombies, qualia, the > chinese room etc are pointing at a genuine explanatory gap.

I can't shake the feeling that a lot of the arguments about qualia are begging the question. 'Qualia' is a name for something on our _map_ of a human mind. It doesn't necessarily describe something in the actual _territory_.

<comment><USER7> I did try to acknowledge the question begging in my comment. My point is that both sides are begging the question.

So neither side (false dichotomy acknowledged) can use question begging as an argument to dismiss the other.

What's left? Who has more to explain? Surely at this point Descartes kicks in. The _one_ undeniable piece of knowledge we have - the one that everything else is built on (precariously).

Isn't the burden of proof on those that want to reduce consciousness to something else - when consciousness is all we can be certain of?

I'm not dogmatic on this. I am pulled strongly in both directions and I had a youthful infatuation with Hofstadter/Dennett et al.

On the other hand I know my desire to imbue the self with something transcendental is driven by romanticism.

So here we sit.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Stop Misquoting Donald Knuth - <AUTHOR> http://www.joshbarczak.com/blog/?m=201501

<comment><USER2> The longer I work on performance teams, the more I agree with the "performance always matters" point of view[1]. In large binaries (or at least, in the large binaries I've worked on), we don't see a few tight loops taking the bulk of the time. Instead, there's a death by a thousand cuts in which many small inefficiencies add up, and have to be clawed back slowly and painfully, often by people with less understanding of the semantics of the code in question than the original authors. Most performance work I see isn't stuff like "write the tight loop in assembly; save 30% on execution time", it's stuff like "reuse the locale object to avoid construction penalties; save 0.4%".

For reasons like this I'm skeptical of e.g. python advocates who say the speed difference doesn't matter since you can always rewrite "the hot code" in C. That works when you're truly using python as a scripting language; the glue that ties you matrix multiplication routines or whatever together. But when you're going to have a large, flat, performance profile, you're better off just writing your program in C++ (or its friends) to begin with.

[1] So I suppose, you can take this entire comment as "person in specialty thinks everyone else should change to make his life easier". Maybe I just have a warped view of priorities.

<comment><USER3> The benefit of using Python to start out with is that you can get data on actual usage patterns _before_ committing to an overall system architecture. If you just rewrite individual hot segments of the code without considering the overall system, you're missing a lot of the point.

To pick on Twitter since their evolution of the product is fairly public - when they started, the product concept was "Oh, let's post a status through an SMS and it'll be visible on a webpage." A database-backed Rails architecture is perfectly reasonable for this. Except that then they were like "...and you can follow people", and then people started using it as a broadcast medium, and they wanted to search for trending topics, and then they opened it up to developers who all wanted an API, and then they closed it to developers, and now it's a big brand-advertising platform designed to engage directly with your customers.

They ended up switching to the JVM, and got a huge amount of flack in the meantime around "Why the _hell_ would you build a messaging architecture in Ruby on Rails?" But the point is that they _didn 't_ set out to build a messaging architecture; they set out to build a site where you could post your status update on a website. If they had built a site to do that in J2EE, they would've been equally fucked, probably even moreso. The reason they can build an efficient system _now_ is because they have a lot of data about exactly how it's going to be used, which operations need to be fast, which operations will be performed frequently, and how much data total will be flowing through the system.

<comment><USER4> You don't need to start off with an agonizingly slow language like Python in order to quickly and flexibly build your software.

<comment><USER3> What's the alternative? Go? I've used both Python and Go for prototypes and in terms of quickly and flexibly building your software, Go still falls very short.

(If you were about to say Common Lisp or Ocaml, you might have a point, but these often have library issues that make them much slower than a more mainstream language for getting a prototype out.)

<comment><USER5> ML.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _" We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil."_

As I've gotten older, I've developed the following interpretation of this statement:

Getting system architecture right is hard, but crucial. When it is right, there is very little code to it, as little as necessary for the job. Rather than sprinting ahead and micro-optimizing your initial architecture, you should go slow, focus on minimal-viable units within the system and then, once contact with the real world has occurred, step back and ask if your architecture is going with the problem, akido style, or fighting it, J2EE style. Then, and only then, consider the perf fixes appropriate to whichever situation you find yourself in.

<comment><USER7> As I've gotten older, I've read what you've written here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The author is very welcome to start a company that builds software according to these principles. In some domains (databases, network stacks, middleware), he could probably make a killing. In other domains (say, social web applications), he'd get clobbered.

I think this is the problem with appeals to professional ethics. Software is not one profession, and not one industry. It's labeled as such because the software industry changes much more quickly than the job categorization industry does. Nowadays, there's a huge difference between people who write software that helps planes stay in the air vs. those who let you search the web vs. those who write critical storage infrastructure for other companies vs. those who write software that lets you throw sheep at your friends vs. those who let you order from the grocery store with your phone. The best practices and rules of thumb for one industry don't transfer over to another industry. And it's not fair to consumers to make them deal with blindingly fast software that doesn't actually do what they want when they're quite willing to put up with slow, bloated software that does.

<comment> vezzy-fnord _And it 's not fair to consumers to make them deal with blindingly fast software that doesn't actually do what they want when they're quite willing to put up with slow, bloated software that does._

I'd dispute the "quite" part. Begrudgingly willing, certainly. I'm not sure of any consumers/end users who actually enjoy low performance and bloat, as those almost inevitably hinder getting the task in question done via wasted time and cognitive overload, respectively. Depending on use case, some people might prefer going through a few more hoops in a shoddier UI than gazing for long times as a slicker one, if total time spent is lesser, or even if merely the _perception_ of total time spent is lesser (e.g. when individual context switches are shorter, even if there's more of them)

If anything, it's programmers who are able to appreciate inefficiency far more, especially if it's their own doing that saves them some mental resources while having the trap of complacency with mediocrity at their side.

That said, you are correct about software being hugely diverse. Software is the mechanism, not the end goal. Even still, I believe that _no_ field employing software should value low performance as a virtue. Not social web applications, people actually spend lots of time on those.

<comment><USER3> Which is where the "Start a company to develop software along these principles" part comes in.

In _some_ industries, saying "It's just like [popular product you use] but much faster" is enough to make the sale. That's the value proposition behind uTorrent, Skylight.io, Apache Spark, Akamai, Cloudflare, and others. In other industries, people don't care. I suspect that if you created a messenger that's "Like WhatsApp, but faster", nobody would care - and making something like AirBnB or Thumbtack faster gives only a marginal improvement when most of the bottleneck is waiting for a human to respond.

By focusing on what _you_ can do to make a buck and exploit your technical advantages instead of what _other_ people should do, you end up teasing out the parts in the industry where it matters. That benefits everybody, while a blanket pronouncement of what everyone should do doesn't.

<comment><USER8> "Like WhatsApp, but faster"

Machine cycles are time; they are also energy.

"Like WhatsApp, but your battery lasts an extra day longer"

That would be a killer app.

It would probably be a lie unless someone knows some space alien technology I can't even imagine, but if it were possible it would be a killer app.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I couldn't agree more. It's rather alarming really, the mindset that most of the professional developers have on this matter. Making the life of the developer easier is the highest objective, low-level is derided, ease of use for the dev is readily bought with inefficiency, massive layers of abstraction and inefficiency and bloat are _everywhere_ , and above all performance in the end product is sacrificed for the convenience of the developer.

Now, I'm not saying to spend substantial amounts of time and money chasing small micro-optimizations. I'm saying it makes me think for a while that it seems like everybody just simply _stopped giving a shit about performance_ , and then we end up with orders of magnitude of crud on our software.

<comment><USER10> _Making the life of the developer easier is the highest objective_

It's particularly ironic when these developers themselves use software written by other, wasteful developers. Developers are users too. They're basically shooting themselves in the foot indirectly, but I could see how someone might think it's better to spend the day being paid to mostly wait for software than to be productive...

I think it's all rather selfish.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I thought it was a bit silly until I saw that he's talking about C++.

The smart-everything, RAII-everything approach that most C++ uses these days tends to make everything a little bit slow. In other languages, there's usually a small number of places that are slow, and everything else is inconsequential. In C++ you end up spending a lot of time spread among a million different bits of code twiddling smart pointers and RAIIing things that don't really need it.

I completely lost it at this paragraph, though:

"If you tell yourself, _it's only a malloc, it's nothing_ , and you do this often enough, you will end up with 25000 temporary allocs for a single keystroke. They may only take 50ns each, but I type 529 characters per minute."

That works out to 1.1% CPU utilization when typing at full bore. (50ns * 25000 * 529/minute = 0.011.) In the abstract, that's high. But in a practical sense, it's completely irrelevant.

Shaving CPU cycles off the keystroke handler of an app that only uses 1% CPU in the hands of a fast typist is a massive waste of the programmer's time. This paragraph is followed by:

"When these sorts of things are pointed out, people aught to respond by fixing the problem, so that they can deliver a better product. Instead, they typically start arguing with you about why it's not that big a deal."

Well yes, because it's _not_ that big of a deal. There are better places to spend your time. A product that uses 0.01% CPU while typing at full bore is not noticeably better than one that uses 1% CPU. You won't "deliver a better product" by addressing this, you'll waste a bunch of time you could have spent building a product that's actually better.

<comment><USER8> If my engineering estimates and mental math are correct (which is always suspect) that software bug you're describing that wastes 1% CPU on my 95 watt TDP desktop times 5 million users working full time jobs (some kind of keyboard driver I suppose) means 5 tons of CO2 emissions per year just from one little software bug.

Obviously most keyboard drivers have a lot more than 5 million full time users but as a crude engineering estimate (again assuming I didn't screw up the math) 1% of wasted CPU for a million users is a ton of CO2 emissions per year.

Little things add up... This is what leads to things like banning transformer based wall warts, each may only waste 10 watts but you eliminate them from the world and you can like, close an entire coal mine due to reduced electrical demand.

<comment><USER12> A ton of carbon sounds like a whole lot, but according to the EPA ([http://www.epa.gov/cleanenergy/energy- resources/refs.html](http://www.epa.gov/cleanenergy/energy- resources/refs.html)), a typical coal-fueled power plant puts out 3.8 million metric tons of carbon per year. Kinda puts it in perspective.

<comment><USER13> That's one of the major complaints about consumer-focused environmentalism. Sure, it helps to recycle your trash. But if you don't deal with industrial waste, you're beating a dead horse on the margins and letting all the live ones run by on a giant racetrack.

<comment><USER14> It's why I stopped recycling. The amount I contribute to the waste stream is insignificant. In fact I would wager that the fuel I use to drive to the recycling center more than offsets the environmental benefit. To say nothing of the wasted time, the hassle and low level stress caused by having bags of trash sitting around until there's enough to haul away.

<comment><USER11> Simpsons did it, of course:

"A half-ton of newspaper and all we get is 75 cents? That won't even cover the gas I used to go to the store to buy the twine to tie up the bundles."

I recycle a lot of stuff, but it's convenient for me, because my trash service picks it up weekly. I think we actually recycle more than we throw away at this point. But without people coming by regularly to pick it up for me, it's hard to see how it would be worthwhile.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm glad this article exists, mainly because calling any and all optimization work a "micro-optimization" has become highly fashionable among the lazy. For every 1 developer who actually understands what Knuth was saying, there are 5 more who think that concern for performance during implementation is "premature", and will take any opportunity to criticize others, loudly, so that they appear intelligent.

I recently had someone chastise me for micro-optimising, before even seeing the code, understanding the use-case, or knowing that my load-tests already established this as a bottleneck. I'd barely said more than "I'm looking for a more efficient implementation of this" before being shamed as a micro- optimizer. It's out of control.

</comment><comment><USER16> They keep telling you:

> "We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: > premature optimization is the root of all evil.

But they always omit the following part of the quote:

> Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%. A good > programmer will not be lulled into complacency by such reasoning, he will be > wise to look carefully at the critical code, but only after that code has > been identified

<comment><USER17> The issue is not in 3%. Whole system should be designed with "performance in mind". It's architectural decisions, not just 3% of code, hidden in few fancy functions. Web app should be designed to insert caching layer or replace logging tool or error handling or email sending. When all is hardcoded into one huge monolith "it works", it will not be so important where are these slow 3%. And when each piece is optimized to be as performant as possible, only then whole app will be awesomely performant. It's not always necessary on the beginning, but to make it possible, each part should be replaceable to more performant and whole architecture should be designed "with performance in mind".

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> The key part of the quote is the word "premature". Optimization is important, but you need to be optimizing the code that matters.

</comment><comment><USER19> > There is a whole class of developer out there who rejects any optimization > beyond occasional attention to asymptotic complexity. They believe that > their responsibility ends once they've picked the theoretical best > algorithm, and that at this point things are as good as they're likely to > get.

And there's also a whole class of developers that don't seem to care about asymptotic complexity. Take for example the React crowd: in React, in its rawest form, every little update to the DOM will require O(N) time to update the display, even though the update is usually fast because of the diffing algorithm. However, the O(N) complexity puts a strong limit on the maximum complexity of the DOM tree, and it is imprudent to just ignore that.

<comment><USER20> I strongly suspect you can't do much better than O(n) on the actual redraw of the DOM, so having an O(n) diff acting before isn't making the asymptotic behaviour any worse.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Couple of quotes comes to mind related to abstraction.

        Premature Optimization is like fart: Premature Abstraction is like a taking dump in another developer desk

More less blunt version of that

        Premature optimization, that's like a sneeze. Premature abstraction is like ebola; it makes my eyes bleed.

</comment><comment><USER22> One example is Skype on Windows. It now takes several minutes to load when it used to be a few seconds. Also I find mobile hard to use for everything because there are 10 second delays between every trivial task you want to do and it adds up.

</comment><comment><USER23> Knuth:

> The conventional wisdom shared by many of today's software engineers calls > for ignoring efficiency in the small; but I believe this is simply an > overreaction to the abuses they see being practiced by penny-wise- and- > pound-foolish programmers, who can't debug or maintain their "optimized" > programs

I think ignoring efficiency is bad, but ignoring efficiency is very different to not prematurely optimising. The author seems to be misquoting Knuth to a certain extent by equating them.

Give me the fast enough, no performance issues, no repetition maintainable code with those intermediary variables please.

</comment><comment><USER24> "premature optimization" is statement setting itself up for negativity. Of course "premature" optimization is bad - so is basically anything else that happens prematurely.

That's not to deny thoughtful optimization when logical, even before the program runs. I've often found Knuth's quote to be interpreted as "Performance doesn't matter - just get it to run".

Which as Knuth points out, for "one shot" programs is probably fine, but for anything in the longer term is damaging.

</comment><comment><USER25> Totally agree. I always read "but memory and CPU is not a concern" and i can cry.

</comment><comment><USER26> I would really love to hear if Mr. Donald Knuth could reclarify his quote 40 years later again.

<comment><USER27> He did, in one of those 'All Questions Answered' talks and I can't remember in which talk he answered it

[https://youtu.be/CDokMxVtB3k](https://youtu.be/CDokMxVtB3k)

[https://youtu.be/xLBvCB2kr4Q](https://youtu.be/xLBvCB2kr4Q)

[https://youtu.be/pa7sEVRYV7U](https://youtu.be/pa7sEVRYV7U)

Prof. Hegarty (Stanford) explains what premature optimization is and why you shouldn't do it to further clear this up. [https://youtu.be/mFhiaTW2jgg](https://youtu.be/mFhiaTW2jgg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> May I please have your faster than nlogn sorting algorithm

<comment><USER29> Sure thing: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radix_sort](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radix_sort)

<comment><USER16> Radix sort is amazing, but it's kinda O(n log n), see

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radix_sort#Efficiency](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radix_sort#Efficiency)

      > Radix sort complexity is O(wn) for n keys which are integers of
      > word size w. Sometimes w is presented as a constant, which would
      > make radix sort better (for sufficiently large n) than the best
      > comparison-based sorting algorithms, which all perform O(n log n)
      > comparisons to sort n keys. However, in general w cannot be
      > considered a constant: if all n keys are distinct, then w has to
      > be at least log n for a random-access machine to be able to store
      > them in memory, which gives at best a time complexity O(n log n).[2]
      > That would seem to make radix sort at most equally efficient as the
      > best comparison-based sorts (and worse if keys are much longer than
      > log n).

<comment><USER30> This is one of those cases where O(...) notation belies the actual performance on real systems.

The big advantage of Radix sort is not O(wn), it's that Radix sort linearly accesses its values in memory. This means that you can take full advantage of DDR read speeds since the prefetcher will run ahead of your cache misses to get you the data(or if you're smart you can prefetch yourself).

DDR fetch speeds are on the order of hundreds to thousands of cycles and that's where Radix's performance gain comes from.

<comment><USER16> Yeah, BigO is kind of dumb outside CS classes and interview questions. A Ludic Fallacy! Real top sorting records are most often based on radix (GPU) and merge (CPU+SIMD).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> "No." -Donald Knuth

Edit: Now, now, I'm pretty sure he has said that at least once in his life.</comment>


Show HN: EdgeCase — Fitts' Law screen edges for your OS X multiple monitors. - <AUTHOR>

Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/z1dfU.png
EdgeCase:
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/edgecase/id513826860?ls=1&mt=12
I made this app to solve the biggest annoyance I have with using multiple monitors.
EdgeCase stops your mouse at the screen edge, even when you are using multiple monitors. When you do want to move between screens, you can do so by holding [ctrl] or [⌘], dwelling for 1/2 second, or 'bouncing' on the edge. In-depth description below... <comment><AUTHOR> When you use one screen, your mouse stops at each screen edge. OS X is designed with this principle (Fitts' Law) in mind, so many frequently-used targets are located right on a screen edge or in the corner. [http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/08/fitts-law-and- infin...](http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/08/fitts-law-and-infinite- width.html)

These targets (such as your dock, menu bar, and hotcorners) are incredibly easy to click because you cannot "overshoot" them with your mouse. If you throw your mouse as hard as you can towards the top of the screen, it will always land exactly on the menu bar.

But when you're using multiple monitors, the cursor no longer stops at the screen edge. It bleeds through into your other desktop. This makes it much harder to click certain targets that are located on the shared screen edge. You now have to precisely pinpoint them.

EdgeCase stops your mouse at the screen edge, even when you are using multiple monitors.

When you do want to move between screens, you can do so by holding [ctrl] or [⌘], dwelling for 1/2 second, or 'bouncing' on the edge.

I find using EdgeCase is a huge improvement to my multiple monitors workflow. The app makes it much easier to click scrollbars and fling my mouse towards hotcorners. I hope others enjoy it as well. Let me know what you think.

</comment><comment><USER2> Pretty nice, though I don't use multiple monitors in OS X. I'd be interested to know how many people pay for it, if you felt like sharing.

<comment><AUTHOR> I launched late yesterday, so I don't yet have much data. From this morning's iTunes Connect report I know that one person bought it yesterday, and appears to have rated it already as well. Thank you anonymous early adopter!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Clickable Screenshot: <http://i.imgur.com/z1dfU.png>

EdgeCase [Mac App Store]: [http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/edgecase/id513826860?ls=1&...](http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/edgecase/id513826860?ls=1&mt=12)</comment>


A Universal Law for the 'Blood of the Earth' - <AUTHOR> https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-universal-law-for-the-blood-of-the-earth-20181128/ <comment><USER2> > At what angles do streams branch?

Do they mean merge? Streams tend to merge into larger (riverine) systems, or am i reading this wrong?

Unless they are framing this from a downstream to upstream PoV... (which is counter to the flow of liquid).

<comment><USER3> It's framed from the downstream perspective.

However, this idea does not seem that rigorous. They are trying to fit a pattern while ignoring the counter examples which is dangerous.

<comment><USER2> Yeah but they're hedging that by saying it is dependent on "rainfall" characteristics of an area. But you're right, it looks like they are trying to forve their hypothesis on the environment despite inconsistencies and gaps.

<comment><USER4> I don't think that's "hedging". Indeed, they're arguing that observed branching angles can distinguish wet climates (72 degrees) from dry climates (maybe ~45 degrees).

> Also interesting are the exceptions. In arid places like New Mexico, > networks branch narrowly, at around 45 degrees. That second angle "took me a > long time of trying and failing" to explain by theory, Seybold said. They > still haven't solved the specific angle, but the team argues that in arid > regions, occasional surface runoff carves steeper channels with narrower > junctions.

> That then opened up a new possibility. If wet climate might brand river > networks with the 72-degree signature of Laplacian growth, could that > signature's absence also reveal the existence of a different kind of > climate?

<comment><USER5> It doesn't rain often in New Mexico, but when it does rain, it is frequently torrential, with flash flooding. Perhaps that has something to do with it.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


A Spoon That Shakes to Counteract Hand Tremors (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2014/05/13/310399325/a-spoon-that-shakes-to-counteract-hand-tremors <comment><USER2> A relative of mine began developing hand tremors around a year or so ago. I got a LiftWare spoon for her as a birthday gift, and it has been absolutely amazing in letting her eat cereal for breakfast again. This is apparently a new highlight of her of life, much to my surprise hahah.

Funny thing that such a small thing was what she missed the most, but I guess it's always the little things in life that make the biggest impact.</comment>


Continuous Delivery Workflows on Modern Infrastructure - <AUTHOR> https://www.gocd.org/2018/03/21/continuous-delivery-gocd-kubernetes/#.W1J57VKDBRo.hackernews <comment><USER2> For those that wondering as well: GoCD is a continuous delivery server, but it's not written in Go. It's a Java/Ruby on Rails project: [https://github.com/gocd/gocd](https://github.com/gocd/gocd)

<comment><USER3> And it was originally developed by ThoughtWorks and looked fairly geared towards Enterprise and was not Open Source, originally. They open sourced it in early 2014 [0].

[0] [https://www.gocd.org/2014/02/25/go-moving-to-open- source/](https://www.gocd.org/2014/02/25/go-moving-to-open-source/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Fwiw I've been using GoCD (though not on Kubernetes) for around three years now, and quite like it. It might miss some convenience features, but it has very good quality, and a friendly and helpful community.

</comment><comment><USER5> Love some of the ideas in gocd, pipelines in xml I don't love though, currently enjoying those ideas implemented in a less purist way in gitlab.

<comment><USER5> If you are trying to test kube deployed apps in kube ci, gocd being a good example, use kind:

[https://github.com/bsycorp/kind](https://github.com/bsycorp/kind)

Disclaimer: I helped put kind together, trying to get the word out .</comment></comment>


How the French Foreign Legion teach French to 150 nationalities in 6 months - <AUTHOR> https://old.reddit.com/r/languagelearning/comments/g1vq8q/how_the_french_foreign_legion_teach_french_to_150/fnhvk96/ <comment><USER2> TLDR: « Va te faire foutre. »</comment>


Planets Discovered Outside Milky Way Galaxy for First Time - <AUTHOR> http://www.newsweek.com/milky-way-exoplanets-extragalactic-799419 <comment><AUTHOR> Actual paper published in the Astrophysical Journal - [http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/aaa5fb/m...](http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/aaa5fb/meta)</comment>


Instagram Launching Video Chat, New Explore Tab, and Spotify Story Integration - <AUTHOR> https://instagram-press.com/blog/2018/05/01/new-ways-to-share-and-connect-on-instagram/ <comment><USER2> Is there any way to get the functionality right now?</comment>


Ask HN: What is your sw dev hourly contract rate? - <AUTHOR> I'm seeking data points as I determine what my rate should be. Please indicate rate(s), years of experience, type of dev/skills, what rate(s) for what contract length(s), location, non-remote or remote, etc. <comment><USER2> In case patio11 is not reading this, I'll post a link to one of his old post: [https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/consultin...](https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/consulting_1)

> _What 's the difference between $100 an hour and $4,000 a week? Aren't they > mathematically equivalent? No. Weekly billing strictly dominates hourly > billing._

</comment><comment><USER3> 25 years professional experience. C/C++/Java/Python mostly in capital markets/trading. Mostly remote. USD1000/day.

If the project is FOSS, I'll take a steep cut on that.</comment>


Google developing heads-up display eyeglasses? - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2011/12/19/2647487/google-heads-up-display-eyeglasses-wearable-computer

<comment><USER2> I would happily pay for this kind of device. I only hope that they do not try to do too much with them.

I would probably pay just to use as a navigation tool, with maybe some weather.

<comment><AUTHOR> And reading email during meetings. And auto-prompting..</comment></comment>