YC RFS5: An Accidental Case Study - <AUTHOR> http://carlos.bueno.org/2009/11/ycombinators-rfs-5-accidental-case.html

<comment><USER2> I have a Nokia n800 (previous model was the n770, follow on is n810, now n900) with an iGo bluetooth keyboard (folding - great for portability, not great for typing). The display is 800x480 so it is vertically challenged, but usable (with good bifocals ;-).

I've used it with ssh into a remote machine and also at meetings to take notes on. If I were doing extensive typing, I would get a compact non-folding BT keyboard - I hear the Apple one is pretty good for size and touch-typing.

The n800/n810/n900 has enough horsepower to do light weight lifting, including a SD/microSD slot that give "unlimited" storage space. The n810 and n900 have built in keyboards (not a replacement for a BT keyboard) and the n900 does "TV out".

\- <http://maemo.nokia.com/n900/>

\- [http://usa.nokia.com/find- products/phones/nokia-n810/specifi...](http://usa.nokia.com/find- products/phones/nokia-n810/specifications)

The problems are obvious...

\- The screen is tiny

\- Keyboards that you can touch-type on are big

By the time you bundle in a keyboard, the recharger, various wires, etc., you might as well lug around a netbook. On the other hand, I carry my n800 everywhere in my pocket - it may be difficult to do something on the n800, but it still beats a netbook that was left at home.

I also have an Acer Aspire One that is touch-typeable and has a larger display at 1024x600 (still cramped) and an OLPC - display is interesting but the keyboard is not touch typeable, the CPU is pretty slow, and the battery life isn't very good :-(.

<comment><USER3> Pocket-carry is qualitatively different. I have ideas all the time but don't want to carry around a backpack with my laptop. Once I need a backpack or bag, there isn't that much difference for me between a netbook and a "real" laptop.

From your description, the n900, a decent BT keyboard, and video display glasses work well. All those pieces can be carried in coat pockets. Might be a little hard with a rigid BT keyboard. I regularly carry the cables etc. for display glasses, a folding keyboard, and an iphone or touch pro 2 in my coat pocket without problems. Unfortunately, this doesn't work for the development I'm doing now -- I use it mainly for displaying and responding to e-mail & twitter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> 1\. _do_ hackers all have smartphones now? i'm just curious to see the mobile device statistics. sometimes i feel like people are emotionally responding in the same way that folks confuse twitter's recent growth and hotness with facebook's sheer size.

2\. hackers have always had access to terminals and remote servers. i would never want to code anything serious on a random machine. hackers take customized l33t setups seriously. even if i had access to my code (a quick repo checkout would solve that...no need to carry usb around) most random machines don't even have the necessary hacking tools (ff with sqlite manager? preffered .bash_profile and .emacs?)

are you instead suggestion that the entire dev environment is on the smart phone, and i simply dock into the keyboard, screen and mouse to start coding? that would be hot. it's exactly like connect to a remote server except that the server is not remote and is portable.

3\. i've already forgotten why hackers is a reasonable market to care about.....aren't most people not hackers? i'm not even sure i consider myself a hacker [and all i want to do is make things. i'm just not the conventional hacker in that i don't want to waste time on IT and i don't have a non- collaborative ego problem].

<comment><USER5> In order to make a living, Hackers must write software that people want. So where ever hackers goes, their customers follow?

If hackers find the environment to be hostile and a pain, they probably will consider a different market that isn't so hostile to their entrepeneural effort. Given time, the inertia of the previous hostile platform will flip toward what hackers want.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've been thinking about different kinds of coding interfaces for a while. I do think that code is represented better as a graph/tree of connected text blocks rather than a series of large files. I want to be able to drag things around more easily.

Unfortunately, I don't have any concrete designs to go along with these vague notions. I'll come back when I do.

</comment><comment><USER7> Perhaps it's worth considering chorded keyboards? They're smaller than regular keyboards, and the rate of input is much faster. For a certain segment of the population the tradeoff could be worth it, but you can't find them in the right form factor -- for now.

<comment><USER8> _They're smaller than regular keyboards, and the rate of input is much faster._

That is demonstrably false [1].

[1] <http://www.cc.gatech.edu/fac/Thad.Starner/030_research.htm>

<comment><USER7> I'm referring to two handed chorded keyboards, for example of the type used by stenographers: stenotype machines.

"A stenotype, stenotype machine or shorthand machine is a specialized chorded keyboard or typewriter used by stenographers for shorthand use. In order to pass the Registered Professional Reporter test, a trained court reporter or closed captioner must write speeds of approximately 180, 200, and 225 words per minute at very high accuracy in the categories of literary, jury charge, and testimony, respectively,.[1] Many users of this machine can even reach 300 words per minute and per the website of the California Official Court Reporters Association the official record for American English is 375 wpm."

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stenotype>

<comment><USER8> Those keyboards are only suitable for typing shorthand.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> they already have those mobile keyboards which are projected onto a flat surface and then use sensors to detect what keys your fingers are pressing right? So why not just have that as the input, the actual device size could be arbitrarily small and still allow you to have a full size keyboard whenever needed...

real development is a long process that requires concentration and endurance, not some quick 1 hour hack, i highly doubt programmers are going to fundamentally change the way they code just so they can do it on their iphone while theyre on the train or at a bar.

as for the screen, im sure eventually we'll have either something similar to the keyboard ( a high quality projected screen ), or some e-paper type screen which when unfolded is full size but folds up into the device.

</comment><comment><USER5> You could probably cobble up an arduino with an input system and attach it to your smart phone. That's probably the fastest way to get a prototype.

The hard part is designing the method of translation that's efficent enough to rival QWERTY in speed.

</comment><comment><USER10> Has anyone tried Yahoo Pipes on a phone? Though I personally found pipes a bit hard to use.</comment>


Apple pulls cloned games from App Store - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2012/02/07/apple-pulls-cloned-games-from-app-store/ <comment><USER2> Bet they aren't pulling the games Zynga have been ripping for sometime now.

<comment><USER3> Definitely a good point, but they're such a cash cow that you have to figure they will mysteriously avoid this new policy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Policing seems like a good way to spend a little of the $100B in cash Apple has lying around. The happier their developer community, the healthier that ecosystem will be, and the more phones and tablets will be sold.

</comment><comment><USER5> They pulled "Temple Jump" because it received too much negative press coverage. However, "Eclipsecraft" and all the other scam games by "Top Best Adult Entertainment" are still available...

</comment><comment><USER6> "with titles like Plant vs. Zombie, Angry Ninja Birds, and Temple Jump"

This doesn't surprise me.

</comment><comment><USER7> Apple isn't just removing clones: It's removing clones that use the trademark of the original app to confuse.

An important distinction.

</comment><comment><USER8> A while ago, I was playing with a Playbook tablet... opened up their app store, and the top free and paid apps were a pair of games both called "Fruit and Ninja". (Not Fruit Ninja.) All kinds of classy.

</comment><comment><USER9> One can only wonder how many Apps would have to be purged in order to live up to this promise. Now imagine how many non-game apps would be under the same campaign; their entire App industry would collapse.

<comment><USER10> Except that the App industry is not a direct profit maker for Apple at all. It is an ecosystem that boosts hardware sales. What matters is not the number of apps or the cash handed out to developers, it is end-user happiness. That's what leads to such seemingly incoherent decisions.

Anecdotally, the apps with good ratings that I saw in the App Store charts have never been rip-offs.

<comment><USER11> Define "ripoff", angry birds is a rehash of a concept that has been very popular in flash games since pre-2000.

<comment><USER10> Was the Flash game called "Disgruntled Ducks" and featured blue boars as the enemies? If yes, then it would be comparable to the OP.

As far as I can see this is not about protecting gameplay concepts, rather than brands.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Meanwhile, in Android... [https://market.android.com/details?id=com.wikilibs.fan_templ...](https://market.android.com/details?id=com.wikilibs.fan_temple_run_fan_2_app)

<comment><USER13> There is one paragraph, and it clearly says "Please note this is not the actual Temple Run game". There's plenty of real examples of people trying to confuse players into purchasing screenshots, this is not one.

<comment><USER12> Have a look at this[1] e-mail. Would you say that it's not a scam because it clearly says "this notice is not (...) associated with a continuation of services for domain registration"?

[1]: <http://i.imgur.com/1fJAh.png> (via reddit <http://www.reddit.com/pbvtg>)

<comment><USER13> No, I'd say that's clearly a scam. I don't believe that malice is involved in the app above, where it is obviously the case in the phony domain notice.

I've seen them myself, it's why I apply WhoisGuard to my domains.

<comment><USER12> Well, you're right, it's not the best example: one steals money from the user, the other doesn't.

But why would anybody make an app called "<popular app> Fan App" if it's not to take advantage of its fame, confuse users and make quick money (with ads or affiliate links or whatever)?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Next: Zynga! Please.

Restore balance to the force!

<comment><USER15> >>>Temple Jump, however, was a scam intended to trick customers into thinking the app is related to Temple Run. It had a similar icon, vague description, and a single screenshot that did not show any gameplay.

Zynga does clone games (like nearly every studio does). However, their games are clearly distinct and not intended to trick customers of a competing product.</comment></comment>


Privilege-free side-channel attacks on x86 [video] - <AUTHOR> https://media.ccc.de/v/33c3-8044-what_could_possibly_go_wrong_with_insert_x86_instruction_here <comment><USER2> Nice talk, there are many similarities to the memory deduplication attacks previously posted (also from the CCC).

They present a few cache based attacks. The first is a method to setup a covert communications channel between 2 processes by using cache misses and hits to communicate (basically timing to determine if an address is in cache or not).

Next is attacking crypto. In some AES implementations the T-table sits in a precomputed array in memory. By flushing and probing to see if entries have been added to cache you can find out which parts of the table have been recently accessed. This allows you to extract the key.

I assume you need to probe the whole of memory as you won't know where the table is. I also assume, though not explicitly mentioned that it doesn't matter if you have access to the pages or not, as long as you attempt an access it gets loaded into the cache?

Finally they show that you can monitor keystrokes via the cache, using a method similar to the crypto breaking.</comment>


Microsoft Cloud Outpaces Amazon - <AUTHOR> https://seekingalpha.com/article/4216303-microsoft-cloud-outpaces-amazon <comment><USER2> Money quote:

 _" [...] Amazon's market share for its AWS has slipped to 41.5% this year, compared with more than 60% share that it held at the end of 2017. During the same period, Microsoft's Azure's share has steadily climbed to 29.4%."_

</comment><comment><USER3> Cloud also means = Server Licenses and Office365. It's a very broad word for Microsoft. Not purely apples to oranges.

<comment><USER4> That's how Microsoft reports its earnings, but these outside analyses of market share are hopefully not doing something nearly that dumb, it would make the whole thing pointless.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Heck I am in middle of a migration to Azure from AWS right now. It's not huge ~50k/mo but it adds to the story.

</comment><comment><USER6> sidenote seekingalpha is semi popular in investment/finance circles</comment>


How script kiddies turns Linux box into a Zombie - True Story - Andrew-Dufresne http://blog.larsstrand.org//article.php?story=HollidayCracking

<comment><AUTHOR> _"Let's execute command 382 to see what it does."_

Oy. Not the best idea, generally speaking.

Edit: I used to read the localized paper version of <http://xakep.ru/> several years ago, and practically every hacking story/tool roundup they had mentioned the annoying problem with ls --color, it was apparently present in almost every public rootkit at the time. It's kinda interesting to see that idiots still use outdated tools years later.

</comment><comment><USER2> Great story. As a developer-but-not-sysadmin, it's interesting to read how someone more knowledgeable does this sort of analysis and remediation.</comment>


Mailbox.org – Privacy made in Germany - <AUTHOR> https://mailbox.org/en/ <comment><USER2> "Privacy oriented" is something I strive for in my own dealings, but centralized service privacy is and always will be lip service. What does "privacy oriented" actually mean? It must be very clearly defined.

Let me give an example. A government entity sends a subpoena to receive all data on an email account. If the service provider is legally mandated to respond with data or face prosecution, what happens? In this case, Google might actually be better for "privacy" because they at least have the economic capability to push back against Doe subpoenas. A small provider won't have the resources to defend against a frivolous subpoena and will hand over everything.

Something to keep in mind when considering this stuff. I really think the only way to at least control the option to defend your privacy is to run your own servers.

<comment><USER3> The country where the company and servers are located makes all the difference IMHO. Many things that government can push in US under Homeland Security and similar acts, they can't in Germany. Their privacy laws are much more protective against mass and/or unsubstantiated surveillance, legal services are not that ridiculously expensive as in US, etc.

<comment><USER4> for now

<comment><USER5> Currently there are no plans to to extend the jurisdiction of US law to Germany.

But if you ask nicely, the German intelligence service might give you the information you seek.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I really hate the kind of "Privacy made in Germany" way of marketing, especially since I am german.

Mailbox.org seems decent from what I've heard but products advertised like this are mostly sheer bullshit. I don't know why transferring a "quality" label from (oldschool) engineering products to IT even works.

<comment><USER7> It resonates with me. I don't think it's just a reference to engineering quality, Germany is more privacy conscious than some other countries. Whether it's the cypherpunk & privacy-tech scene of Berlin, or the awareness of the consequences of surveillance resulting from the GDR days.

Even in little things: like Germans using cash because they don't want to create an electronic credit card trail of where they were, or walking through Munich train station and seeing Snowden in all the news headlines (in 2013), while back home he was getting nowhere near as much news coverage (and certainly not the front page headline).

I don't know if any of this applies to Mailbox.org, but as a marketing phrase it works for me.

[I'm Australian, but an 'aspiring German'.]

<comment><USER8> > like Germans using cash because they don't want to create an electronic > credit card trail of where they were

... and then using their Payback loyalty cards at every opportunity.

Don't get me wrong: many Germans hold out on loyalty cards and some people may indeed use cash to avoid a paper trail, but you make us Germans sound like mythical privacy-minded creatures which the vast majority of us is decidedly not.

<comment><USER7> It's a relative thing - I know most Germans don't see themselves as privacy- minded, but the bar is so low everywhere else that the little things in Germany add up & make it stand out.

One example is browsing Google Street View and seeing how many buildings & houses are blurred out in Germany due to people sending privacy requests. I don't think I've ever seen that in Australia, but I keep encountering it when planning my trips to Germany. 3% of Germans opted-out of their house being included in Street View - a low percentage of Germans, but still crazy high compared to the rest of the world:

[https://googlepolicyeurope.blogspot.com/2010/10/how-many- ger...](https://googlepolicyeurope.blogspot.com/2010/10/how-many-german- households-have-opted.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> A month or two ago I sent them an encrypted (gpg) mail to their support address but they replied in plaintext and even citing my original request in full.

<comment><USER10> Thanks for sharing that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Don't France and Germany want to put backdoors in encryption? > [http://www.wsj.com/articles/france-germany-push-for- access-t...](http://www.wsj.com/articles/france-germany-push-for-access-to- private-internet-messages-in-terror-probes-1471976815)

<comment><USER12> And Germany looked the other way for NSA surveillance for years...

<comment><USER13> For decades.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> After the fastmail fiasco (they increased prices, and now old packages no longer have access to the newest features), I started looking for an alternative and came across mailbox.org... I've been trialing for a few days and they do seem interesting.

I just wish we could use an unlimited number of aliases in our own domain, it doesn't make sense to me otherwise..

They do have some interesting features, such as mailbox encryption as well as calendar/contacts encryption. It's client-side encryption, though it's in the browser.

An alternative to mailbox.org is mailfence.com.

<comment><USER15> Do you have some citation for this "fiasco"? They did change the plans but I was unaware of any significant unhappiness. (And existing users can keep their old plans anyway.)

<comment><USER16> There's a 17-page discussion here: [http://www.emaildiscussions.com/showthread.php?t=72032](http://www.emaildiscussions.com/showthread.php?t=72032)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm a mailbox.org user since a few months.

I like the product it supports open standards, imap, caldav, carddav. If you want you can lock down pretty much everything with pgp. Data is in Germany/EU and the pricing is really fair stars with 1€/month with 3 mail aliases and 2 GB.

The guys behind it seem to be IT people with Linux/open source mindset and good ethics as far as I can judge.

I feel very comfortable with mailbox.org

<comment><USER18> I use them as well, they have custom domain and two factor authentification support. The only complain is that sharing in their online Office can be buggy, i hope Open-Xchange will fix that, but that's more of a side feature for me. At least their business model seems more honest than Proton Mail.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> How is it any better than ProtonMail? [0]

[0]: [https://protonmail.com](https://protonmail.com)

<comment><USER20> Mailbox.org runs [http://open-xchange.com/](http://open-xchange.com/), so besides email you also get a calendar and (rudimentary but functional) online word processor and spreadsheet, with team collaboration. You can try a demo of the software on the Open-Xchange site.

I've also been a happy customer for about a year now.

<comment><USER21> Funny they call themselves open exchange with the tag line 'stay open' and they are not actually open source.

edit: maybe they are? [http://oxpedia.org/wiki/index.php?title=SourceCodeAccess](http://oxpedia.org/wiki/index.php?title=SourceCodeAccess) Why is there no link on main website?

<comment><USER20> Definitely open source, although no public code development process (~GitHub) from what I gathered. Java backend, BackboneJS frontend.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I think we need more of these types of companies, or at least more competitors in this realm. I've also heard so many good things about FastMail too. We need more mail providers who are: * trustworthy * secure * reasonably priced * etc.

If running my own mail server was not so laborious and headache-inducing, i'd love to move away from google for apps/domain. I have no functional complaints of google; i am happy with their performance without a doubt. Its just that, as every day passes, I keep getting creeped out; its the "ick" factor. And for me it started well before the Snowden disclosures.

<comment><USER23> If you want to stop using Google for email, but want to keep the domain in Google Apps for whatever reason, you can set up a FastMail account and then configure Gmail to forward all of your email to FastMail. Yeah your email still goes through Google's servers so it's not completely ick-free, but at least you don't have to deal with using Google for email on a day-to-day basis anymore.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Oh, it's bullshit made in Germany again.

>> _When e-mails go unnoticed because of being redirected to a spam folder that you never check, you are in fact still legally liable for such e-mails – as you cannot disprove having knowledge of them. This is a danger that our users can safely ignore: We check for spam and viruses before the e-mails are accepted and reject anything that looks suspicious. This way, you always know exactly what e-mails you have received and read._

How does that even work when they GPG encrypt content. Are they escrowing the private keys?

what a timing of this post. Just as I was ranting about this old 30C3 talk[0] and pointing out what a scam "DE-Mail", "e-brief" and "Trusted-Cloud", etc. is, ... then this is trending on HN. Hilarious.

[0] [https://www.linkedin.com/hp/update/6175253192402563072](https://www.linkedin.com/hp/update/6175253192402563072) \- or:

[1] [http://www.amara.org/en/videos/y1Gk3maFbvNQ/info/bullshit- ma...](http://www.amara.org/en/videos/y1Gk3maFbvNQ/info/bullshit-made-in- germany/) (select English subs)

<comment><USER25> Please show me an e-mail SPAM / Virus that is sent GPG-encrypted to you. I do not think that this will ever happen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I've been using mailbox for about two years and am now switching to fastmail. The UI is vastly better and works great on mobile. It's also the base for the mobile app which mailbox doesn't have (well, the OX one). And that's the other thing. Having a dedicated app with search integrated and push notifications on iOS is awesome.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Full disclosure: I'm a new user of mailbox.org, but not otherwise affiliated.

I find its approach to useable security features interesting, especially considering the entry-level price points.

edit: typo

</comment><comment><USER27> Some weeks ago, I was looking (again) for a privacy-oriented alternative email provider. I stumbled upon mailbox.org and some others (like protonmail, and startmail).

I decided to go for mailbox because 1) I know that Germany at the moment has still one of the best regulations about data protection (although I fear this is going to change in the next few years), 2) it provides some features others don't (like protonmail, and startmail). It was worth a try at least, so I decided to use the 30 days trial account.

It looked really good and promising: nice UI, clear documentation, cool domain name if you don't want to use your own. It provides also Office-like, calendar, and storage features. Therefore, I made up my mind, and I was determined to become one of their paying customers. So, I put 12 EUR(1 EUR/month) on the account. A few hours later I found out[0] that mailbox.org is offered by a politically motivated provider called JPBerlin [1]. I sent the cancellation request, and so far my account is still on hold - I could revoke the cancellation, though. An email received after the cancellation request says "please allow us a couple of days". Sure. It's just they took 1 EUR from the account, although I had the cancellation request sent like 10 days before the end of the trial period.

In the end, I would like to say that as a service it looks promising. However, until they stop with their political involvement, I think, not many people will use it.

[0]: [http://www.emaildiscussions.com/showthread.php?t=68527](http://www.emaildiscussions.com/showthread.php?t=68527) [1]: [https://www.jpberlin.de](https://www.jpberlin.de)

<comment><AUTHOR> Regarding your mention of the "politically motivated provider", this [1] is relevant:

Using Google-translate + some tweaks by myself:

"What does political Provider mean?

Even if JPBerlin is a political provider, that does not mean that we ourselves are politically active.

We give politically and socially active organizations the technical infrastructure they need to enable them to work with modern tools such as groupware systems or mailing lists. They should be able to focus on their content rather than vexed with the technology and its implementation.

The JPBerlin itself represents no own political content or opinions. We see ourselves only as a reservoir and implements of the assets from [politically] left, environmental and social areas. And so it is not surprising that we accommodate almost all well-known organizations, foundations, communities and other groups from those circles. Of course we also have non-politically- motivated individuals and organizations as customers.

Our customers have no relationships to each other. The same applies to our position in relation to our clients and their views and work.

Our only position is to be clearly distinct from the [politically] right edge!!"

[1] [https://www.jpberlin.de/hilfe/allgemein/was-bedeutet- politis...](https://www.jpberlin.de/hilfe/allgemein/was-bedeutet-politischer- provider/)

<comment><USER27> Thanks for clarification. I am just worried about the possible implications. My main concern is the message you send whenever you share this email account online, e.g., on a résumé, with a job application, or with a government agency.

If this company has this history, or even worse, it recognizes itself as "kind of left-wing" (and not funded by a left wing party), you never know how people see that. We should have freedom of speech, yet you can't say certain things publicly.

Ah, I don't understand the downvotes in my parent comment. It would be great if people could clarify that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I have been using them for about a year and have been quite satisfied. They also support using your own domain at no extra cost.

<comment><USER29> 2 years here, nothing to complain. While the service is relatively new, the people behind it have been in the business way longer. Years ago I set up my first own mail server using their books ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I've been customer of mailbox.org for just over a year now. I can't assess the quality of their security, or the lengths they'd go to protect customer privacy, though they seem to know what they're doing. We had a Linux consultant from Heinlein Support at the last place I worked for, and he did his job very well.

I'm also pretty happy with the Card+CalDav-offerings from mailbox.org.

With their customer support, however, im rather disappointed:

mailbox.org offers what they call "Familienaccounts" (non-commercial accounts, meant to share, among other things, calendars and contacts with one another [0]).

Grouping existing accounts into "Familenaccounts" by means of contacting their support team used to be a feature that was offered (and advertised) by mailbox.org, and a feature that I've used for two of my family members in the past.

For some technical reason or other, mailbox.org is unable to convert existing accounts into Familienaccounts any more. This wouldn't be that much of a problem (workaround was to backup data, cancel one account, get that account's credit refunded, ask them to remove that account from their list of blocked accounts, recreate that account as a "Familienaccount", pay for the new account and restore the backed up data).

What rubbed me the wrong way was that it took a month of to and fro emailing with mailbox.org support just to get that information (while they still advertised being able to convert accounts on their website).

When we decided to implement the workaround, it took another month from cancelling the old account to getting the new one working, with my wife unable to receive emails for some time inbetween.

I will continue to use mailbox.org, but in my opinion they really need to improve their support.

[0] [https://support.mailbox.org/knowledge- base/article/familien-...](https://support.mailbox.org/knowledge- base/article/familien-accounts-alle-fragen-antworten)

</comment><comment><USER31> If so, and german data protection laws apply, why isn't the TLD .de?

<comment><USER8> Because TLDs mean nothing? You don't see every US service use .us either. Plus .org has certain connotations (at least in Germany): non-commercial, activism, open source, etc. It's a bit ingenious considering this is a paid service, but they were probably proud they were able to get such a premium domain name.

Also, at least to Germans .de generally implies it's primarily German language and/or limited to a German (speaking) audience.

<comment><USER32> Actually, your choice of TLD has a huge impact on jurisdiction.

The USoA asserts super-jurisdiction [1] over .com/.net/.org and will seize such domains at will [2], and therefore personally I will never use those TLD's as a non-US citizen. What legal recourse do non-Americans have in such a situation? They would probably have to fight it through US courts which significantly raises the bar for non-American entities.

Another thing to consider is DNSSEC when it comes to TLD's. Domain records are signed top-down.

The ccTLD's fall under the jurisdiction of their respective countries.

I don't even know under what jurisdiction the other/new TLD's fall under, it's probably based on where the owning company is headquartered?

[1] [https://yro.slashdot.org/story/12/03/06/1720230/us- asserts-s...](https://yro.slashdot.org/story/12/03/06/1720230/us-asserts- super-jurisdiction-over-dot-com-dot-net-and-dot-org-domains)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_name#Seizures](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_name#Seizures)

<comment><USER25> You can use your own domain with mailbox.org and not be affected by any .org issues you may think exist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> E-Mail privacy in a 14 eyes country ?

</comment><comment><USER34> People in this discussion are mentioning subpoenas and compliance with same. Are we talking civil as well or just criminal? If I'm sued in Nevada civil court for defamation or something does a German company give a shit?

</comment><comment><USER35> I am not sure if having my data in mailbox.org is any more private that Microsoft or Google. My gmail doesn't even show any ads.

<comment><USER18> If you use gmail and don't pay google for Apps account, you are not their customer, that's the difference. How much does Microsoft charge for its email service?</comment></comment>


Obama's parting gift to foreign entrepreneurs: A new way to stay in the U.S - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2017/01/19/obamas-parting-gift-to-foreign-entrepreneurs-a-new-way-to-stay-in-the-us/ <comment><AUTHOR> And for anyone interested in the topic, the article is already out of date, as entrepreneurial parole is currently blocked due to a regulatory freeze: [http://www.politico.com/story/2017/01/white-house-orders- imm...](http://www.politico.com/story/2017/01/white-house-orders-immediate- regulatory-freeze-233951)</comment>


Facebook is fighting fake news ahead of South Africa elections, failed in USA - <AUTHOR> https://www.iafrikan.com/2019/04/19/facebook-focuses-on-election-integrity-ahead-of-south-africas-national-elections/ <comment><USER2> The problems in South Africa are Mich worse than Fake News at this point I'm afraid.</comment>


Depp to Star as a Supercomputer in Christopher Nolan Film About the Singularity - <AUTHOR> http://betabeat.com/2012/12/christopher-nolan-johnny-depp-transcendance-supercomputer-movie/ <comment><USER3> > Johnny Depp may seem like a strange casting choice, but given his penchant > for bizarre roles, we imagine he'll play a mad scientist quite convincingly.

Actually it seems like a really predictable casting choice. When will people get tired of seeing Depp playing a weirdo? I don't even have to guess that Helena Bonham Carter is going to be bug-eyed with big crazy hair in this one too...

<comment><USER4> The man is a really good actor.

But thank you.

There are some celebrity actors who have stopped playing new roles, and made the roles they take on into studies of their public personas rather than explorations of a character.

If he gets along with Nolan and gets pushed in the right ways he might not phone it in, but all of his recent work points to him being emptily encouraged to do the same thing repeatedly.

I want some art, dammit.

<comment><USER5> Yup. I really like his more "normal" roles-- like his lucid moments (which were most of the movie) in "Secret Window" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0363988/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hopefully it will make an entertaining movie, but man, I really hate all things associated with "The Singularity". Nothing fills me with more irrational (impotent) rage than people babbling on about the Singularity.

<comment><USER7> Ok, I'll bite. Why do you care?

<comment><USER6> Oof, Comcast died as soon as I made this post.

I have two major contentions. First, I'm a neuroscientist by training, so hearing anything related to "upload my brain" just makes me weep. The only realistic way to "upload your brain" is to pump your body full of fixatives (paraformaldehyde), section it on a cryostat and then perform electron microscopy across every single slice. Then put it all back together (fixing skewing artifacts, etc) on a computer.

THEN make a simulation out of it, where _every atom_ of your body is replicated with pristine accuracy. Otherwise you are not yourself anymore.

I'm not saying it's impossible. I'm saying it's so far from likely that being near-immortal due to bio-enhancements is almost certainly more practical. Or you can develop some "scanning ray gun" which does the same thing without killing you first, I suppose.

Second, the whole notion of "exponentially increasing intelligence" I find silly. Are we more intelligent than homo sapiens 3000 years ago? Perhaps more scholarly, more literate, more capable of engineering complex systems. But our inherent, base intelligence is not any different. Just applied to different problems and starting at different bases of knowledge.

Edit: Musing on this, I find a "Matrix"-style hostile takeover of highly intelligent AI much more likely than humans "transcending" into some super- computing cloud of blissful hyperintelligence. That's seems much more likely than humans ever fully shucking our meat bag bodies.

<comment><USER8> You seem very confused about what "Singularity" denotes.

You also seem to be confusing "the only way with current technology" with "the only way, ever".

You also seem to be claiming that highly intelligent AI couldn't solve the upload problem. And that it would necessarily be hostile - this is likely if we were to sample randomly from mind-space, but hopefully we will be careful about which highly intelligent AIs we create...

<comment><USER6> Well first, I'll quote myself:

> _I'm not saying it's impossible. I'm saying it's so far from likely that > being near-immortal due to bio-enhancements is almost certainly more > practical. Or you can develop some "scanning ray gun" which does the same > thing without killing you first, I suppose._

Seriously, I see near-immortality due to bio-engineering to be way more likely in the remote future (next few hundred years) than uploading your brain. Similarly, I see strong, general AI to be way more likely.

I'll even say that I see full, human brain simulations to be way more likely than the ability to upload your own into the net.

I'm all for being hopeful and optimistic, but sometimes physics is just not on your side.

<comment><USER9> If you described the way modern internet works to an engineer 100 years ago, they'd pull their hair out too trying to understand such a system using the technology of their day.

For brain uploading, my money is on pure algorithms. Throw a lifetime of data on top of base human emulation software, possibly influenced by known genetic data, and then iterate through an insane number of possible brains using an insane quantity of CPU until you get a virtual brain that most closely matches up with the provided data. It'll be at best a crude approximation of the original human, but just like with MP3s, nobody will really care as long as their departed loved one _feels_ like the same person.

The "singularity" is just a mathematical abstraction, as with dark energy or string theory. The math is highly likely to describe a real phenomenon, but anyone extrapolating further detail based on that math is basically just guessing.

<comment><USER10> Similarly, if you were to ask an engineer 100 years ago to predict the changes in technology that would shape the future, he would be completely off track as well. This is another reason Singularity pushes seem so out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Christopher Nolan is only producing this film. Wally Pfister, Nolan's longtime cinematographer, is directing.

<comment><USER12> This should go at the top. I was really annoyed to read this.

His career as a producer seems fairly limited, but it's worth considering that Steven Spielberg was a producer on Transformers.

I didn't see much of a Spielberg touch on that movie.

<comment><USER11> It will certainly be interesting to see how much of the "Nolan" aesthetic is present in this film. I'm definitely excited.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Still waiting on that Ian M. Banks Culture movie. Or miniseries. Or TV show. _slow droool_

<comment><USER14> I hope I live in the universe where this happens.

<comment><USER13> Until 'Cloud Atlas' happened out of the blue, I'd no hope.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Hopefully Nolan rehires Hans Zimmer for the soundtrack. I could use some more epic coding music.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0kGAz6HYM8>

<comment><USER16> Agreed, Gladiator is my favorite soundtrack of all time, and I've never heard a soundtrack of Zimmer's that I didn't like. I'd put him right up there with John Williams even though he's only received a fraction of the awards.

<comment><USER17> I actually like Hans Zimmer a lot more than John Williams - the latter has a very distinctive style that can seem very in-your-face, more like an "Oh hey, this was done by John Williams" than something that best fits the film. Harry Potter, Star Wars, and Indiana Jones are all recognizable as Williams soundtracks, even though they're very different films.

Zimmer seems to vary his music a lot more to fit the needs of the film - it's just universally good, it's not universally Zimmer. The Lion King is very different from Crimson Tide, which is very different from Gladiator, which is very different from The Dark Knight and Inception.

BTW, I think Basil Poledouris (The Hunt for Red October, Wind) was another underrated film composer whose music is much better than his reputation.

<comment><USER18> > more like an "Oh hey, this was done by John Williams" than something that > best fits the film

Really? I would be tempted to argue the opposite. The theme for Jaws, for example, is instantly recognizable and well known precisely because it fit the movie so well. Star Wars is near-impossible to separate from its music - <USER2> the main theme, to the imperial march - and his use of choral music in Phantom Menace had a big impact in the years that followed, much the way the "Inception sound" has been showing up all over the place in the last few years.

And citing the bigger action-adventure movies doesn't really make a good point. Williams has done a wide variety of music for movies, all of which is very good (Hook, Schindler's List, ET, etc.)

I do think music has changed over time in how it's used in film, and that Zimmer has a more "modern" style, where the soundtrack ties more closely to the emotional ups and downs than Williams does. (Nothing wrong with that, I like them both.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> "...a scientist whose brain is uploaded into a supercomputer' while trying to create the first ever sentient computer"

It's hardly creating sentience if you're just installing an existing intelligence on another piece of hardware...just sayin'....

<comment><USER20> It says that he goes on to continue his research once he is uploaded. So perhaps him being uploaded to the machine is distinct from him trying to create the first sentient computer.

He is trying to create a sentient machine before he dies and his uploaded self is continuing his research along those same lines.

<comment><USER19> Ah that makes more sense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Given what's happened with the last two Batman films, I think Christopher Nolan deserves the benefit of the doubt for all of his casting choices.

When Anne Hathaway was chosen to play Selina Kyle, everyone thought she would flop. After the movie, many were saying that she had the best performance.

I don't even need to drive home how incredibly, colossally wrong people were about Heath Ledger being cast as the Joker.

</comment><comment><USER22> Oh please tell me the movie will end up being titled Lawnmower Man 2.0.

<comment><USER23> As there's already a "Lawnmower Man 2: Beyond Cyberspace", that title is unlikely. :)

<comment><USER24> My old music teachers favourite claim to fame was that he is in the choir who made the soundtrack for that movie.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I am not a Nolan fan, but I respect him for consistently choosing challenging projects.

<comment><USER25> >I am not a Nolan fan

I say this in all seriousness: how? I can't imagine the last 12 years of film without Memento, Inception, and the Batman trilogy.

<comment><USER12> I think The Dark Knight Rises is a great litmus test for people's opinion on Nolan.

If you think the movie is a masterpiece or remotely close ... agree to disagree.

<comment><USER25> Well, it's relative. Within the context of superhero films, I think it _is_ a masterpiece if for no other reason than the bar already being set so low. Outside of that, it's a really great action movie.

I think his films are methodical almost to a fault. They feel like puzzles to me. I could definitely understand if someone didn't find much value in that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> And what role will Helena Bonham Carter play? ...they come as a pair, right?

</comment><comment><USER27> This should be entertaining, if nothing else.

Nolan seems to bring a complement of actors between projects (e.g. Inception vs. Batman trilogy). Will be interesting to see if he continues this trend.</comment>


Maine Supreme Judicial Court rules ranked-choice voting unconstitutional - <AUTHOR> https://bangordailynews.com/2017/05/23/politics/maine-supreme-judicial-court-rules-ranked-choice-voting-unconstitutional/ <comment><USER2> I didn't realize that the Maine constitution went into such detail about how to count votes and how to resolve ties etc. Looks like this really should be an amendment. I wouldn't be pessimistic about the chances of such an amendment passing though. The people seem to be in favor of changing their voting system.</comment>


A Tour of iCloud's Error Pages - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/p/6e5e8c8cc795

<comment><USER2> First time I see these - they are really great!</comment>


.museum domains held in the US - <AUTHOR> http://index.museum/land.php?country=US&lang=uk

<comment><USER2> I noticed [http://northcarolina.history.museum/](http://northcarolina.history.museum/) in the listing. I clicked it, and it resolves to an IP that is no longer routable. [http://asheville.art.museum/](http://asheville.art.museum/) suffered a similar fate, and [http://ncmls.durham.museum/](http://ncmls.durham.museum/) immediately redirected to [http://lifeandscience.org/](http://lifeandscience.org/).

I imagine a lot of these were purchased as "Hey! There's a .museum top-level domain! Let's buy it! ...You know, we should probably write this down somewhere."

<comment><USER3> This is similar to .travel top-level domain. Someone thought it was a good idea, just like .museum.

Since 2006, the travel.travel registry has sold 200,000 .travel domains. I am a heavy user of travel sites (Expedia, Hipmunk, hotel sites, etc). I have never, in the course of my online usage, ever run into a .travel site.

This is why gTLDs are likely to fail. At least for users and for purchasers of subdomains, not necessarily for the registrars.

EDIT: added Wikipedia link [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.travel](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.travel)

<comment><USER4> The national tourism bureau where I live recently switched to [http://www.fiji.travel/](http://www.fiji.travel/)

Strangely enough, they kept the www

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I never got why .museum was created, it's way too long and obscure to be effective for domain names. Even shortening it to .mus or something would be a big improvement, but it seems like a lot of museums are using the more commonly known .org or .edu anyways.

<comment><USER6> As others pointed out, this was a different era - more the Yahoo era than Google's, when organizing the Web still seemed (to some) an attainable goal. I worked for the guy behind this at the time, though not on this project, and it seemed very odd to me even then... this is not only a product of its time, but very much a product of the unique and quirky museum technology culture.

Shorter names weren't seen as necessarily good - at least within some of the conversations around this TLD's inception there was some scorn for the overly techie, terse TLDs and domain names.

<comment><USER7> I wasn't aware the museum technology culture was even a thing. It definitely seems... quirky, though: just look at the list of domains for the JFK museum:

        thesixthfloor.jfk.museum
        dallas.jfk.museum
        dealey.plaza.museum
        dealeyplaza.kennedy.assassination.museum
        dealey.plaza.assassination.museum
        dealey.plaza.jfk.museum

<comment><USER8> Seems pretty similar to the usenet naming.

[http://usenetstats.com/top100reads.php](http://usenetstats.com/top100reads.php) (NSFW). Please also note the non-binary channels.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is the longest one. national.healthandmedicine.washingtondc.museum It redirects to a real estate site in Spokane.

</comment><comment><USER10> The 'lang' param at the end of the url is interesting. The English content is 'uk' not 'en' or 'us'. The values seem to be country codes.

Changing the param to a different country only changes the name of the country, nothing else:

country=US&lang=es ==> .museum names held in Estados Unidos:

country=DK&lang=it ==> .museum names held in Danimarca:

</comment><comment><USER11> Given that it already has a completely unique domain name (si.edu), smithsonian.museum seems overkill.

<comment><USER12> From a technical POV. But from a human POV, having 'smithsonian.museum' on their signage or advertising could be a win (assuming it's obvious it's a Web address).

<comment><USER13> Something like this has always worried me with ICANN's idea of opening up TLDs. It feels like a decade ago, most advertisements contained the "www." prefix to signify a web address. Nowadays, you rarely see them, since most people know what to do with a .com, .org, etc.

Once the TLDs open up, will we need to go back to using a "www." to signify this is a domain?

<comment><USER14> I've been curious about this too. I never know quite how to communicate that something is a web address if my audience is both technical and non-technical folks.

I wonder, though, if a better solution than going back to prepending www would be to prepend // instead. Shorter than [http://](http://) (or [https://](https://) as the case may be), but doesn't assume that www is a valid subdomain.

<comment><USER15> > prepend //

Then the technical people think it's a comment, not a web address. Maybe :// would be better? Wait, that looks like some weird emoticon...

I like [http://](http://) because it's precise. EDIT: Wow, HN highlights that as a link. It goes to about:blank (on my browser at least).

<comment><USER16> _> Then the technical people think it's a comment, not a web address._

They would be wrong. URLs beginning with // are scheme-relative -- [http://www.w3.org/TR/2012/WD-url-20120524/#resolve-a- string-...](http://www.w3.org/TR/2012/WD-url-20120524/#resolve-a-string-as-a- scheme-relative-url)

<comment><USER17> Which actually makes it a _worse_ substitute for [http://](http://) for a combined technical/non-technical audience that something merely _potentially_ confusable with a comment by a technical audience.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Calling All Startups: We Want Your Two-Minute Pitch - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2010/10/25/fast-pitch-2011/

<comment><USER2> Though I am replying late, but the day you posted this link, the deadline for this had already passed, in this way you are degrading the quality of HN, so please don't do it from now on.

</comment><comment><USER3> The deadline for this has already passed.</comment>


Warp Directory (wd) unix command line tool for any shell written in ruby - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/kigster/warp-dir <comment><AUTHOR>
           wd add proj   # add current directory as a warp point
           cd ~/
           wd proj       # jumps to proj
           wd list       # lists all points
           wd rm proj    # removes proj</comment>


Jungledisk has been down since Saturday - Mosso Cloud Files Fail - <AUTHOR> http://forum.jungledisk.com/viewtopic.php?t=22348

<comment><USER2> "We've been working continuously throughout the weekend with the Cloud Files team to help ease the capacity constraints we previously discussed and restore full access to to Jungle Disk users of Cloud Files. Through our investigation we've determined that a significant cause of _the problem was a bug in Jungle Disk 2.60a that prevented the directory cache system from working properly_ and resulted in an excessive load on the Cloud Files system even under normal operation. We have corrected the error and Jungle Disk 2.60c is now available for download."

Sounds like it _was_ a Jungledisk problem, not a Mosso problem.

</comment><comment><USER3> You need to back up to two or three services, all run by different organizations. Disk redundancy buys you little -- you need organizational redundancy. The chance of any particular service failing for business or technical reasons is much higher than the risk of disk failures.

Personally, I back Anybots up to:

       - a 3 TB ReadyNAS in the building (everything nightly)

       - rsync.net (important stuff nightly)

       - dropbox (important stuff instantly)

       - USB drives I keep at home (mostly everything monthly)

</comment><comment><USER4> Wow, this is most definitely quite an embarrassment for JungleDisk, transparency is nice, but doesn't offer much solace to those needing their files. Incidents like these are all one needs to convince themselves that switching to the cloud isn't reliable. Hopefully they'll be able to resolve the issue soon and save face.

</comment><comment><USER5> Just like having one backup anywhere, it's not a reliable setup. Using multiple backups is always better, and frankly, easy. Just backup to JD and a few other services or even locally and you're good to go.

Personally, I'm working on setting up a local backup and backing _that_ up to the cloud.

<comment><USER6> I set this up to backup my Macbook. I setup a RAID 1 mirror on two external USB drives on a Mac Mini, shared the drive, and I back up to it as a time capsule using this trick: <http://www.readynas.com/?p=253> Then I ran a nightly backup of that volume to Jungledisk. It was very emotionally satisfying.

Unfortunately my up tube is too small, and the data won't fit. The initial 100GB upload was gonna take 40 days, so I stopped it after 10 with slow internets.

If you have the tubes, I do recommend it though. Its a really solid backup setup.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I was going to build a service based on cloudfiles over the weekend, but it was pretty much unusable, because I got timeouts all the time.

It was certainly disconcerting to see the failure of a component that was supposed to be the core of my infrastructure. Cloudfiles just moved out of beta about a week ago, and for growing pains the outage was pretty long.

According to their status updates, data integrity was never at stake, just availability. CDN files were always accessible.

I'm relieved to see that the Jungle Disk integration seems to be to blame for this, since this hints at a one-time peak load event rather than an overall infrastructure failure.

I think the ease of use of the CDN and low latency of delivery for many small files is a big win. Is anyone else here (thinking of) using them?

<comment><USER8> I've got little love for Mosso and their offerings. Rackspace as a whole has never done me wrong but I have wasted many hours working with their techs dealing with some of their server problems on Mosso (this is for hosting not cloudfiles). I eventually had to ask for my money back which they gave me but not before they tried everything in their power to keep me working with them. (Which by that point I considered a waste of time and migrated clients over to SliceHost which later got bought out by Rackspace...)

So while I may be biased - I'd like to point out that a bug in a end user product brought down their entire cloudfiles platform and that the same bug also effected S3 and had no noticeable effect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Looks like they're working hard to bring it back.

<http://status.cloudfiles.mosso.com/>

</comment><comment><USER10> So, at the risk of asking a stupid question, does this mean the tag line on the front page ("Multiple datacenters to ensure high availability") is bunk?

I use S3, but not JD, so I don't keep up with it much. I thought that when they added Mosso, it was in case S3 went down -- am I misunderstanding how it works?

<comment><USER11> _I thought that when they added Mosso, it was in case S3 went down -- am I misunderstanding how it works?_

Yes. With Jungle Disk you pick where you want your files stored.

As far as I can tell Jungle Disk added support for Mosso simply because Rackspace bought JD and were embarrassed to not be using their own cloud storage system.

<comment><USER8> Well, they bought JD because they wanted to market their cloud storage system. Its a powerful tool for gaining non developer users.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask PG Formatting suggestion. Please can > denote quoting (and be italicised) - <AUTHOR>

A bit trivial, and maybe it's just because I do it. But I think it'd help readability if the > character could be treated as a formatting instruction.
It seems to be widely used on HN to quote a previous post.
Thoughts? <comment><USER2> The asterisk already does this:

 _This text is enclosed in asterisks_

<comment><USER3> I was going to say the same thing.

In addition, I would really hate to lose the < and > characters to formatting.

<comment><USER4> we could escape them!</comment></comment></comment>


Can you make a 10-year malt whisky in weeks? The chemistry says yes - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2017-11-year-malt-whisky-weeks-chemistry.html <comment><USER2> Here's two things that science can't deliver for us:

1\. The x-factor. Contrary to their claims, chemists and food scientists don't have it figured out. They are only 99% of the way there. It's true that people won't be able to tell the difference, but it is different. This is similar to the science claims that we can make a drink that delivers all our nutritional needs but a pure Soylent diet leaves many people with headaches or cravings. Sometimes the tiny 1% x-factor ends up punching above its weight.

2\. Authenticity. Honestly, I like the taste of cheap Japanese blended "scotch" more than any $500 bottle of 23 year old from the highlands. However, that Japanese blend isn't an authentic scotch. I still buy expensive scotch. I _want_ to be able to tell people that my whisky sat in a barrel for decades, using water from a specific river and distilled according to an archaic set of rules. Lab aged whisky, no matter how good, will just be plain whisky and not part of a historic identity. This is similar to people not wanting to buy a lab grown diamond, even though the lab grown diamond is just as pretty and isn't responsible for child soldiers dying in Africa.

<comment><USER3> _" I like the taste of cheap Japanese blended "scotch" more than any $500 bottle of 23 year old from the highlands."_

Really? I've found whisky unique in regards that its price correlate with quality quite uniformly as opposed to majority of other products (wine and cheese comes to mind first). At least to the medium price range (~500$), can't comment about high end whisky as I haven't tried a bottle of 10000$ or similar[0].

0\. [http://www.liquorista.com/most-expensive- whiskey/](http://www.liquorista.com/most-expensive-whiskey/)

<comment><USER2> No, price correlates with the number of "features" that a wisky has- brand prestige, single barrel, single-malt (not a blend, but possibly multiple barrels), aging time, etc.

Taste is subjective, and I find that Hibiki Harmony is supremely drinkable- there's no need to optmize the experience like with an expensive scotch- just pour it and enjoy. It also helps that it doesn't hurt my wallet to share it, so I drink it with friends more.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm still skeptical about such claims. I've also seen "scientific" claims that chemically smoked meat/fish is identical to naturally smoked one. Hell no, I've done plenty of blind tests to disprove that -- while differences are somewhat minor, but certainly not hard to tell apart and important enough (at least for me) to pay extra.</comment>


How FZF and ripgrep improved my workflow - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@sidneyliebrand/how-fzf-and-ripgrep-improved-my-workflow-61c7ca212861 <comment><USER2> Fuzzy down selection (fzf) is the big win. In Emacs that would be Helm of swiper. Instead of local completion (tab tab tab ;) do a global search, and narrow down interactively using fuzzy selection. It's really a different experience, a bit disconcerting at first (tab built into muscle memory), but it quickly becomes a one way change. No way I'd let go of fuzzy selection now.

The connection with ripgrep is that fuzzy selection works well when getting all the possible candidates is fast. And ripgrep (or sd) is good for that. So there's a connection, but the big change is really moving to fuzzy down selection. When dealing with large context it really makes a difference in productivity in my experience, because it helps a lot discoverability in a smooth and efficient way.

For a GUI alternative to fzf, one can look at rofi.

<comment><USER3> > but it quickly becomes a one way change.

I've been using Helm for a couple of years, and it has crippled all other editors and IDEs for me.

I never read the manual, I have no idea how Helm works, or what it does, or what it is supposed to do. Yet I do use it all day every day. I just type, and Helm delivers what I meant, blazingly fast.

I've tried Atom, VSCode, Eclipse, CLion, Visual Studio, Xcode... I can't use them. You have to click on tabs to switch, you have to click dialogs to open views of the file system, and then navigate them to where you want to go, manually search for the file you want, actually use search boxes somewhere... they all feel super ancient UI wise. Sure, Atom, VSCode, Sublime, they all have some magic box where you can do anything, but that box just isn't Helm.

With Helm I know there is a file or a buffer or anything somewhere containing something that I might need and I don't even know what it is, and I just start pressing keys and Helm goes from showing me the whole universe, to pin pointing me the grain of sand that I didn't know I wanted, by interacting with me.

I have no idea how to even start Helm, nor which keys I press there. Do I press Tab? Sure. What do I press to start interacting with helm ? I don't even know, it just happens. Best tool ever.

<comment><USER4> Sounds amazing. Would [https://github.com/emacs- helm/helm/blob/master/README.md](https://github.com/emacs- helm/helm/blob/master/README.md) be the correct starting point for learning more about Helm?

<comment><USER5> Yes. I also like

\- [http://wikemacs.org/wiki/Helm](http://wikemacs.org/wiki/Helm) and [http://wikemacs.org/wiki/Helm-swoop](http://wikemacs.org/wiki/Helm-swoop)

\- which link to an extensive tutorial: [https://tuhdo.github.io/helm- intro.html](https://tuhdo.github.io/helm-intro.html)

and +1 for Spacemacs: [http://spacemacs.org/](http://spacemacs.org/) (see other starter kits: [http://wikemacs.org/wiki/Starter_Kits](http://wikemacs.org/wiki/Starter_Kits)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I also use fzf as git branch picker :)

In my fish_user_key_bindings.fish (but surely adaptable to other shells), I bind it to Alt+G:

        function fish_user_key_bindings
            bind \eg 'test -d .git; and git checkout (string trim -- (git branch | fzf)); and commandline -f repaint'
            bind \eG 'test -d .git; and git checkout (string trim -- (git branch --all | fzf)); and commandline -f repaint'
        end

This goes neatly with fzf's default Alt+C binding to navigate to a directory: Alt+C -> go to a git repo, followed by Alt+G -> pick a branch

<comment><USER7> In Bash/Zsh you can do it with `git config --global alias.cof $'!git for-each- ref --format=\''%\\(refname:short\\)\'' refs/heads | fzf | xargs git checkout'`

and then do a checkout with `git cof`

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I can't really fault both of these tools at all. They have good defaults and are easy to configure and are well documented. Of course they are very performant too, but if you take the time to configuring your wildignore, learn how to use find's and rgrep's flags (maybe script some of this with shell or vimscript if necessary) you can get close to the performance of these tools and define your own usability if needed. Basically I'm saying two things and can I just state that this is what works for _me_ ; that learning the included tools is worthwhile and not having to install and setup additional tools is good, especially when you are using lots of different machines. Again for Vim specifically, I'm enjoying having a small amount of keybindings for built in functionality (:b*, :vimgrep) than having a ton of plugins. I just have to move a single .vimrc around or failing that I understand how it all works by default anyway.

(Edit: typo)

<comment><USER9> Not to argue with you as I see where you're coming from (all things being equal I too usually go with the defaults) but the argument about "not having to install and setup additional tools...on lots of different machines" is very weak in these days of:

git clone [https://gitlab.com/myaccount/mydotfiles](https://gitlab.com/myaccount/mydotfiles)

followed by an optional:

./deploy_stuff_if_required

which for me I have working on any number of linux boxes as well as the odd windows one. I've got a bunch of other config, such as bash aliases/functions etc anyway so if I'm going to want that everywhere it doesn't matter what else comes with it; I only need to perform the above once and it takes under a couple of seconds; there's just literally no reason not to do it.

One advantage of using vim-related config is precisely so you can do the same thing on different machines, including windows and linux. One thing that article doesn't touch on is tmux, and there you can have config for vim, tmux and bash so that you can effortlessly and identically move between panes in tmux as you do in vim; copy text between panes, ssh sessions and vim buffers etc. Without this system I'd be running multiple ssh sessions in little windows and copying text between them (using the mouse!) like a doofus.

<comment><USER10> Note that not every machine I SSH into has git installed or provides me with permission to install it.

Disclaimer: I recently made one of these "dotfiles" repositories anyways, to take of that what you will.

<comment><USER11> Assuming it's hosted on something like GitHub, you can just as easily download a zip/tarball of the repository instead.

<comment><USER10> A copy is, so I can grab my bashrc if I need it. However, it's still impossible to install things on certain systems…

<comment><USER12> If it's the "too complicated to bother" sort of "impossible" as opposed to "denied by the company security policies", you can always use linuxbrew or nix.

[https://docs.brew.sh/Homebrew-on-Linux](https://docs.brew.sh/Homebrew-on- Linux)

[https://nixos.org/nix/](https://nixos.org/nix/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Fun fact about ripgrep: it's built into Visual Studio Code - it's why the "find in files" feature runs so fast.

Which means that if you run VS Code on OS X you actually have ripgrep installed already - just run the following:

        /Applications/Visual\ Studio\ Code.app/Contents/Resources/app/node_modules.asar.unpacked/vscode-ripgrep/bin/rg

</comment><comment> Avi-D-coder Shameless plug FZF even works well as a dictionary/word autocompleter. [https://github.com/Avi-D-coder/fzf-wordnet.vim](https://github.com/Avi-D- coder/fzf-wordnet.vim)

<comment><USER14> Neat. I use it for all kinds of stuff in Rails Feb, from searching routes and rake tasks to finding Cucumber step definitions.

I'd recommend using fd for listing files as it offers lots of filtering options right out of the box - much more useable than find imho.

[https://github.com/sharkdp/fd](https://github.com/sharkdp/fd)

<comment><USER14> I can't edit now, but that was typed on my phone and it autocorrected 'dev' to 'Feb'. Amazing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> See also Skim (fzf-a-like written in Rust):

[https://github.com/lotabout/skim](https://github.com/lotabout/skim)

I like the result ordering better than fzf, and it has a neat interactive mode.

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm pretty junior at coding but I find FZF great.

      Ctrl-r for shell history
      Ctrl-t for file search

Especially writing `code` and then ctrl-t, finding the file and then enter to open it in visual studio.

Game changer.

<comment><USER17> Ctrl-t is a game changer, thank you for sharing this, I only knew the <star><star><TAB> notation.

<comment><USER18> export FZF_COMPLETION_TRIGGER='' and you don't need <star><star> just <TAB>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> fzy[1], which is written in C, seems to be slightly faster:

        $ hyperfine --warmup 2 -r 10 'rg --files | fzy -e hello'  'rg --files | fzf -f hello'
        Benchmark #1: rg --files | fzy -e hello
          Time (mean ± σ):     153.6 ms ±  57.9 ms    [User: 399.2 ms, System: 96.9 ms]
          Range (min … max):    85.9 ms … 244.3 ms    10 runs

        Benchmark #2: rg --files | fzf -f hello
          Time (mean ± σ):     210.5 ms ±  61.6 ms    [User: 443.3 ms, System: 90.9 ms]
          Range (min … max):   123.3 ms … 315.5 ms    10 runs

        Summary
          'rg --files | fzy -e hello' ran
            1.37 ± 0.65 times faster than 'rg --files | fzf -f hello'

[1] [https://github.com/jhawthorn/fzy](https://github.com/jhawthorn/fzy)

<comment><USER2> There's a big difference in how their matching works, that made me prefer fzf. It's related to how they deal with spaces.

With fzf, and also helm in Emacs, rofi... a space is a separator between matchers, and the order of the matchers does not matter. So if you type "foo bar", it will select a path "/bar/bla/foo" just fine. This is important to me for discoverability: very often you know quite well what keywords to look for, but you don't know or are not sure about the order. So order irrelevance is very important.

fzy treats the space as a literal. So the order matters. And that's a killer for me. Plus in my experience the speed difference is not important, all are fast enough in practice.

<comment><USER19> Thanks for pointing this out. I guess fzy's primary goal is path matching which might explain this behaviour.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Fzf is one of those tools I learned about and instantly became one of the things you can't go without anymore.

</comment><comment><USER21> Been using linux for 15 years and I never found any use case for all these fancy grep/ctrl+r/find replacements.

Honestly I just feel like the authors of these tools were just too lazy to learn grep/find/cut/tr/bash/awk/etc and decided to implement everything in their own toy program, which always

The list of "features" in the article lead me to the same conclusion

> no need of googling the right command

Yeah right but if you spent time learning the existing tools you would not have to google it. And this new tool should require time to accomodate too.

> no need to look around for the right line in the output

I feel like the author just don't understand the unix philosophy. Instead of having 1 tool with a quadrillion options, you just have to incrementally plug and use all the available tools that are already part of linux distributions since dozens of years. You don't need to "find the right line in the output", you just grep/cut/awk the output, after some time it becomes second nature / muscle memory.

<comment><USER22> > I feel like the author just don't understand the unix philosophy.

The unix philosophy isn't magically better and faster than other software philosophies

<comment><USER21> Maybe, but has been used since dozen of years successfully and productively by millions of programmers. It may be worth learning instead of reinventing...

<comment><USER23> Your complaint seems to be people are writing new tools.

You have provided absolutely no evidence that these tools don't fit the Unix philosophy (and you cannot, because the 2 tools mentioned actually do a great job fitting the Unix philosophy). In fact, the first example is piping the output of ls into fzf. I'm not sure what could be more Unix philosophy like than that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> FZF is also very nice for Ctrl-r history search in the shell.

</comment><comment><USER24> May be of interest:

The author creates small wrappers to kill processes, search files, etc.

The concept could be extended to recognize certain object types. E.g. if you select some files with search then you could choose from a list of operations on files (delete, grep, copy path, etc.)

If you select from processes then after selection you could select from process actions to perform on the selection (killing, sending some other signal, etc.)

So this way you don't implement separate wrappers for every kind of usage, you just create actions for certain object types and connect selections to object types.

This is how Helm works in Emacs, and probably there is a VIM equivalent too.

</comment><comment><USER25> FZF/rg combination is so much snappier than Ctrl+P on my vim setup!

</comment><comment><USER26> I use workflows in Alfred[0] for finding files, navigating to pages, and searching around a multitude of other customized datasets. The advantage I have with that over a fzf, at least for me, is being able to search instantly with a Cmd+Space without having to switch to the terminal.

[0] [https://www.alfredapp.com/workflows/](https://www.alfredapp.com/workflows/)

</comment><comment><USER27> Using FZF to search the shell history is great until you don't find the command you were searching, you need to abort and what you typed is canceled. That's my only gripe with it.

I've tried to play with Zsh's Zle but wasn't able to find a way to abort FZF and retain the input, I suppose I need to modify FZF itself.

If there's a way to do it with Zsh I'm all ears...

<comment><USER3> In Helm you can go back and forth as much as you want. Sometimes you end up in a dark alley, and you are just key press away from stepping back out and trying somewhere else.

<comment><USER27> Emacs Helm? I'm so used to ido... ^__~

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> > _It performs amazing even in a larger code base._

Doubt ripgrep it will beat indexing, line GNU id-utils. (mkid to build ID file, lid to query).

If you're using git, "git grep" is useful; it searches only files indexed in git, which provides a useful speedup.

<comment><USER29> > Doubt ripgrep it will beat indexing, line GNU id-utils. (mkid to build ID > file, lid to query).

Does it provide the same user experience? i.e., Does it keep the index up to date for you automatically? If so, that's something a lot of users aren't willing to pay for.

If you want a pre-indexed solution, I'd recommend checking out qgrep instead: [https://zeux.io/2019/04/20/qgrep- internals/](https://zeux.io/2019/04/20/qgrep-internals/)

> If you're using git, "git grep" is useful; it searches only files indexed in > git, which provides a useful speedup.

Depends on what you're searching. In a checkout of the Linux kernel:

        $ time LC_ALL=C git grep -E '[A-Z]+_SUSPEND' | wc -l
        3707

        real    1.033
        user    5.769
        sys     0.592
        maxmem  63 MB
        faults  0

        real    1.033
        user    0.000
        sys     0.008
        maxmem  9 MB
        faults  0

        $ time LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 git grep -E '[A-Z]+_SUSPEND' | wc -l
        3707

        real    3.624
        user    21.910
        sys     0.404
        maxmem  64 MB
        faults  0

        real    3.623
        user    0.000
        sys     0.008
        maxmem  9 MB
        faults  0

        $ time rg '[A-Z]+_SUSPEND' | wc -l
        3707

        real    0.138
        user    0.767
        sys     0.704
        maxmem  21 MB
        faults  0

        real    0.138
        user    0.003
        sys     0.006
        maxmem  9 MB
        faults  0

This is even despite the fact that `git grep` already has a file index (ripgrep has to process the >200 `.gitignore` files in the Linux repo for every search) _and_ the fact that `git grep` is also using parallelism.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> This looks interesting and I'm going to play with it, but if you still still pipe PS into grep before killing, 'pkill -f' will do exactly what you want 80% of the time.

<comment><USER31> pgrep is pretty handy too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> There are a bunch of similar tools. I use [https://github.com/peco/peco](https://github.com/peco/peco)

</comment><comment><USER33> How does ripgrep compare to silversearcher-ag for performance?

<comment><USER29> I did an extensive comparison a while ago: [https://blog.burntsushi.net/ripgrep/](https://blog.burntsushi.net/ripgrep/) \--- It should still largely be pretty accurate (and ripgrep has only gotten faster).

More generally, if someone can find a non-trivial example of ag being faster then ripgrep, then I'd love to have a bug report. (Where non-trivial probably means something like "not I/O bound" and "not so short that the differences are human imperceptible noise.")

<comment><USER34> I'm currently working on a searcher on my own: [https://github.com/elsamuko/fsrc](https://github.com/elsamuko/fsrc)

When I started, I didn't know ripgrep, now I use it as reference. Of course it's still slower for regex searches and it has less options, but in some cases (e.g. simple string matching search), it is faster than rg (PM_RESUME in 160-170ms), mostly thanks to mischasan's fast strstr: [https://mischasan.wordpress.com/2011/07/16/convergence- sse2-...](https://mischasan.wordpress.com/2011/07/16/convergence-sse2-and- strstr/)

If you want, let me know, what you think about it.

<comment><USER29> I don't see any build instructions, so I don't know how to try it. Sorry. I did run `./scripts/build_boost.sh`, but that didn't produce any `fsrc` binary that I could use.

I would also caution you to make sure you're benchmarking equivalent workloads.

<comment><USER34> There are no build instructions yet, you need to build boost with build_boost.sh and then open qmake/fsrc.pro with Qt Creator. There are binaries available here, too: [https://github.com/elsamuko/fsrc/releases](https://github.com/elsamuko/fsrc/releases)

And I know than benchmarking is hard, a coarse comparison is in scripts/compare.sh. More detailed performance tests are in test/TestPerformance.

<comment><USER29> I don't know what Qt Creator is. Please provide tools to build your code from the command line.

I did some playing around with your binary, but it's pretty hard to benchmark because I don't know what your tool is doing with respect to .gitignore, hidden files and binary files. Your output format is also non-standard and doesn't revert to a line-by-line format when piped into another tool, so it's exceptionally difficult to determine whether the match counts are correct. Either way, I don't see any evidence that fsrc is faster. That you're using a fast SIMD algorithm is somewhat irrelevant; ripgrep uses SIMD too.

On my copy of the Linux checkout (note the `-u` flags passed to ripgrep):

        $ time /tmp/fsrc PM_RESUME | wc -l
        41

        real    0.143
        user    0.330
        sys     0.474
        maxmem  67 MB
        faults  0

        $ time rg -uuu PM_RESUME | wc -l
        17

        real    0.149
        user    0.564
        sys     0.690
        maxmem  13 MB
        faults  0

        $ time rg -uu PM_RESUME | wc -l
        17

        real    0.112
        user    0.481
        sys     0.675
        maxmem  13 MB
        faults  0

        $ time rg -u PM_RESUME | wc -l
        17

        real    0.118
        user    0.507
        sys     0.701
        maxmem  13 MB
        faults  0

        $ time rg PM_RESUME | wc -l
        17

        real    0.142
        user    0.749
        sys     0.726
        maxmem  21 MB
        faults  0

I originally tried to run `fsrc` on a single file (in order to better control the benchmark), but I got an error:

        $ time /tmp/fsrc 'Sherlock Holmes' /data/benchsuite/subtitles/2018/OpenSubtitles2018.raw.sample.en
        Error  : option '--term' cannot be specified more than once
        Usage  : fsrc [options] term
        Options:
          -h [ --help ]         Help
          -d [ --dir ] arg      Search folder
          -i [ --ignore-case ]  Case insensitive search
          -r [ --regex ]        Regex search (slower)
          --no-git              Disable search with 'git ls-files'
          --no-colors           Disable colorized output
          -q [ --quiet ]        only print status

        Build : v0.9 from Jul  5 2019
        Web   : https://github.com/elsamuko/fsrc

        real    0.005
        user    0.002
        sys     0.002
        maxmem  9 MB
        faults  0

<comment><USER34> I included qmake and added a `deploy.sh` in the main source folder, which generates the deployed zip file. Let me know, if this doesn't build.

      * gitignore behaviour: If there is a .git folder in the search folder, it uses git ls-files to get all files to search in
      * a .git folder itself is never searched
      * hidden folders and files are searched
      * binaries are ['detected'](https://github.com/elsamuko/fsrc/blob/f1e29a3e24e5dbe87908c4ca84775116f39f8cfe/src/utils.cpp#L93), if they contain two binary 0's within the first 100 bytes or are PDF or PostScript files.
      * pipe behaviour is not implemented yet
      * it supports only one option-less argument as search term
      * folders are set with -d

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Emacs has something similar to FZF called ido or ivy

</comment><comment><USER36> Can this be hooked in <shell> kinda like pagers ? so ever long listing gets piped automatically to fzf ?

<comment><USER37> Yes. The composability (in usual Unix way) is the best thing about fzf.

I use it for a slew of git subcommands for example, e.g. if they expect a ref and I don't provide one, open log and fzf a SHA.

I also use it in vim to find files or lines within them.

I also use it with my password manager to find the one I want if what I specify isn't an exact match.

fzf is great.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> See also pgrep & pkill

</comment><comment><USER39> ripgrep is great, all of the cli options are very memorable and it has sane defaults for everything that I want to use it for. The one thing I add to a ripgreprc is --smart-case

</comment><comment><USER40> I'm getting one

</comment><comment><USER41> I see these Vim-enhancment posts a lot. If you need to install a mountain of plugins just to make it usable, why not use a more modern editor? Seems like nostalgia for the Unix greybeard era, possibly some eletism for when someone who isn't intimately familiar with their config has to ask for help to use their machine.

<comment><USER42> Exactly. I use a modern editor whenever I'm working on one of my main computers, and the only time I use vim is when I'm working on a remote server and can't mount the drive remotely (or where mounting would just be a pain). Because of that, I don't want any plugins when I use vim as I'll probably be using it on a new machine every time, and setting up my environment would be a waste of time.

<comment><USER43> Setting up your vim environment is as cloning a git repository that contains your .vim files. Takes me about ~60 seconds to have vim up and running with all my favorite plugins. That's faster than you can download and install any other text editor. It's what I've been doing on just about every machine I've used for the past 5 years.

There are situations where git is not installed or I can't download those files for security reasons set by administrators, but those situations have been pretty rare for me.</comment></comment></comment>


Lisp - <AUTHOR>

hi
I'm new in lisp I have a question Any interpreter I Choose????? <comment><USER2> A widely used LISP dialect is Common Lisp. So if you want to hack using Common Lisp, Steel Bank Common Lisp (SBCL) is a good compiler to use.

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

Thanks jme

</comment><comment><USER3> sbcl or clisp are good.</comment>


How do you rid your iPhone of the malicious "Duh" worm? - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2009/11/24/malicious-duh-worm-hits-jailbroken-iphones/

<comment><USER2> i bet apple is loving this.

"see what happens when we don't have control over the apps that run on your iphones? you get viruses!"</comment>


Finally, A Way Everyone Can Keep Their Data From the NSA - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcolabs.com/3021919/open-company/finally-a-way-everyone-can-keep-their-data-from-the-nsa

<comment><USER2> It's an OS you can run on a Raspberry Pi. There's little-to-no details in this blog or on their website as to how exactly this keeps data safe from the NSA.</comment>


The Cost of Not Understanding Probability Theory - <AUTHOR> http://math-blog.com/2009/08/24/the-cost-of-not-understanding-probability-theory/ <comment><USER2> _if we've just observed the coin appear as heads 29 times in a row, what are the odds that the same coin will land on heads on the 30th toss?_

 _Many people would argue that the chance of this happening is less than one in a billion, as we just calculated. However, that answer is blatantly wrong._

Bullshit.

If a coin lands heads 29 times in a row, Bayesian analysis tells us that the chance of the coin not being fair, the experimenter lying to us, aliens influencing the outcome, etc. are all a lot higher than we might have expected a priori.

If I saw a coin land head 29 times in a row and was offered a bet on the next flip, I'd put some real money on it turning up heads.

<comment><USER3> You're nitpicking unnecessarily. When asked a 'do the trains collide?' math question, do you point out all the safety precautions in place that would prevent the collision?

<comment><USER2> You're missing my point.

The original post was arguing "people are stupid and credulous".

I am arguing that, no PEOPLE ARE NOT STUPID - they are finely evolved to operate in the real world. If you present people with a REAL WORLD PROBLEM and they come to EXACTLY THE RIGHT ANSWER (as opposed to the "desired" theoretical answer) then the problem is with your ability to quiz people, not with people failing to be smart.

<comment><USER4> _You're missing my point_

I think you are missing your own point. Faced with 99 head tosses, you think the 100th should be heads because it proves the system is gamed (eg. the coin is biased).

The article addresses people who believe that faced with 99 head tosses, they think the 100th should be _tails_ (because it is "due").

In other words, the people in the article behave as if they believe that the system in independent ( _not_ gamed) but reach the wrong answer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Using coin flips gives a terrible example. The odds are actually pretty high that the coin will be heads next.

Suppose there are 1 billion coins in circulation, 100 of which are double sided [1] (due to magicians accidentally spending them, etc). Then:

P(double sided) = 10^{-7}.

P(30 heads in a row) = 10^{-7} + (1-10^{-7}) x 9.31 x 10^{-10} ~= 10^{-7}

P(double sided | 30 heads in a row) = P(30 heads in a row | double sided) x P(double sided) / P(30 heads in a row) = 1 x 10^{-7}/ 10^{-7} = 1

(Via Bayes rule.) So the coin is probably double sided and the gambler is right. The mathematician who lacks common sense is wrong.

<comment><USER6> When does the author talk about double sided coins? The example is based on the premise that the coin is fair and each toss is independent of the others.

<comment><USER5> I'm disputing the premise. The author has a prior, namely "fair coin". I'm suggesting that it's likely that the prior is wrong.

<comment><USER7> So, what's the alternative? Give up the concept of "fair coin" when trying to teach statistics? This seems unlikely to be a useful pedagogical move! How is anyone supposed to understand Bayes Theorum before they even understand probability?

Mathematicians _have_ to be able to specify priors. Insisting they are unrealistic rather misses the point that the entire reason the phrase "fair coin" appears in the first place is an _explicit acknowledgment_ of the unreality of the situation.

If you want to more rapidly move to a Bayesian system when teaching, I'd understand completely, but we still have to start with "fair coins" before we can get around to considering how to prove they aren't fair. (I will be first in line to say many school teachers, being generally poorly trained in mathematics, completely fail to understand this point, and correspondingly ask the "gotcha" question about "what's after 29 heads?" without fully understanding the issue themselves.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The chances that there are two bombs independently on a plane are utterly, utterly miniscule, and that's why when I travel I always carry a bomb with me. I can be certain there won't be another one, and since I won't let mine explode, I'm safe.

And so are you.

</comment><comment><USER9> Yep, the gambler's fallacy is quite well known. The "heuristics and biases" field of psychology thinks it's caused by the representativeness heuristic.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamblers_fallacy>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representativeness_heuristic>

Minor quibble: if a coin fell heads 29 times in a row, my credence for it falling heads a 30th time is higher than 0.5 because I now have reason to believe the coin is biased. How much higher depends on how many biased coins there are, as yummyfajitas said.

Here's another epic example of people failing to use basic probability theory: <http://lesswrong.com/lw/13i/shut_up_and_guess/>

<comment><USER10> I'll quibble with your link as well. Did Yvain actually test to see whether his guessing increased his score over the semester? Or did he just 'prove' it?

Like the presumption of a fair coin in this page, his presumption is that the questions are fair. If they were trick questions, such that the seemingly improbable answer is correct more often than not, guessing based on partial knowledge may not be a benefit.

I think he's right, but I'd trust his results more than his abstract reasoning.

<comment><USER9> Yes, guessing based on partial knowledge might make you worse off. But as Yvain's footnote 1 says, replacing 30 "I don't know" answers with 30 purely random coin-flip guesses has a 98% chance of improving your score. (I'd like to go on record saying emphatically that this statement doesn't need to be "tested". Recalculated, at most.) So if you have a coin in your pocket, it's pretty hard to rationalize answering "I don't know" to many questions instead of flipping the coin.

<comment><USER10> I appreciate your response and voted it up. But I disagree that there is no benefit to actually testing his hypothesis. The mathematics don't need to be 'tested', but perhaps the priors do? For example, how certain are you of the assumption that the questions that we need to flip the coin for are evenly distributed between true and false?

It seems plausible that a test might have a bias whereby the harder questions are predominately one answer or the other. How large would this effect have to be to overwhelm the 2% probability? Would you trust your grade on the presumption that this effect can be ignored? What about your life?

For the record, I agree with Yvain's advice. I did just fine on the SAT's, partly because I followed the mathematically correct advice that one should guess if one can eliminate at least one of the 4 choices. But I wouldn't proclaim that this strategy needs no testing just because the mathematics are correct.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The difference between trying to determine events statistically and performing an empirical experiment is very important for understanding why people believe in this fallacy.

If you are physically observing a coin land heads up ten times in a row, you might expect that the mechanism for flipping the coin is so regular that it is repeating the same non-relativistic physical interaction every time.

The thought experiment fundamentally relies on people reconstructing the physical experiment in there head. If you instead described a physical experiment where the randomness was more prevalent (and the fairness of the coin was demonstrated explicitly), I think fewer people would believe the fallacy.

</comment><comment><USER12> Understanding something and applying that knowledge are two very different things. Plenty of perfectly sensible people have strange superstitions that defy all common sense.

I won't argue that teaching better probability skills would not be beneficial to society. Still, it's not going to stop people from making stupid bets. Some people just have a crazy need to gamble.</comment>


Tracking the reasons many girls avoid science and math - <AUTHOR> http://esciencenews.com/articles/2008/09/05/tracking.reasons.many.girls.avoid.science.and.math

<comment><USER2> Yeah, OK, maybe.. But so what? The article, the studies and the supposed solutions seem to ignore the most brutal obstacle. The reason that there are so very few female coders is because working alone is not natural for a woman. Many adult woman who enter the fields mentioned in the article quit high paying jobs later on in life for this reason. And untold millions quit earlier or never start. The irony is that women would be great in these fields if the environment was more conducive. This book will shed some light on it.

[http://www.amazon.com/Female-Brain-Louann- Brizendine/dp/0767...](http://www.amazon.com/Female-Brain-Louann- Brizendine/dp/0767920104/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1220652277&sr=8-1)

A more effective solution would be to create a more nurturing CS/engineering environment to draw young women in. For instance; female only programs so girls can be girls at the same time that they are learning how to code. They could be encouraged to gossip or talk on the phone or whatever young girls do.. Also, these girls should remain clustered together when not in these classes because the streagnth of the group would overcome the conflict of the deeply singular task of coding and the female brain. I'm not really explaining it clearly but if anybody is interested in this it would be helpful for you if you read the book.</comment>