Firefox Fixes Borked Extensions for Everyone but Legacy Users - <AUTHOR> https://gizmodo.com/firefox-fixes-borked-extensions-for-everyone-but-legacy-1834548155 <comment><USER2> Read:"Mozilla fixes extensions for all supported users"

Deprecated versions aren't fixed, but from what I've read the 'fix' is adding the new certificate to the browser.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is hilarious, breaking all the older versions, now they can finally kill off the holdouts. Good job, you beat me! I'll update to stinking Quantum now.</comment>


Ask HN: Best Books of the Decade? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Guide for the Perplexed - Werner Herzog [0] (conversations with and edited by Paul Cronin)

Great book about life and the drive of an artist.

[0] most known for his cameos in Parks and Recreation, Jack Reacher, and the Mandalorian. Just kidding...sort of.

</comment><comment><USER3> Why do we sleep - Matt Walker

Amazing insight on importance of sleep on the human body. Well explained with elaborate and engaging examples.</comment>


Google's 20% time would be more successful if interviews tested creativity. - <AUTHOR>

Google interviews test technical ability, not creative ability. This is suboptimal when it comes to innovation via 20% time.
One possibility is to also test creative ability via on-the-spot brainstorming during interviews.
I think the real issue here is that most people at Google think that people with strong analytic abilities are also creative, so there is no need to test for the latter. <comment><USER2> > Google interviews test technical ability, not creative ability. This is > suboptimal when it comes to innovation via 20% time.

The "uncreative" could recognize creativity and join creative projects. Better yet, both could join valuable projects.

As someone who is said to be quite creative, I think that creativity is usually mis-evaluated, that the problem isn't under appreciation or over appreciation. (Oh, and much of what passes for creativity isn't. It's merely different.)

Creativity is not a subsitute for other good things, even though it often gets the blame when the failure is with those things.

<comment><AUTHOR> _The "uncreative" could recognize creativity and join creative projects. Better yet, both could join valuable projects._

So you need a lot of uncreative people who would be happy to implement other people's ideas? Hiring too many creative people would be bad?

<comment><USER2> One finished project is usually worth more than seven half-finished projects.

> Hiring too many creative people would be bad?

Yup.

Focus matters.</comment></comment></comment>


Solo engineer trying to file patent: Can I get useful legal help for ~$1-2k? - <AUTHOR>

I'm a Silicon Valley engineer and I've developed a prototype for a computer peripheral.  I don't know if it's patentable but it might be. I work a full-time job unrelated to this patent so I have more money than time right now and I'd like to pay to have someone help me determine if this idea is worth pursuing.
I'm looking for legal assistance at a cost of ~$1-2k to help me determine if the idea is patentable and to help write a patent.
Does anyone know if this amount of money could allow me to sit down with a professional in the field of technology IP and talk over the idea to determine which, if any, of the aspects are patentable and how to best approach writing the patent?
Any and all advice and perspectives are appreciated! <comment><USER2> There are two groups of people who can legally hire themselves out in the USA to give advice on patentability and help write a patent application (and also deal with the patent office for you on all matters related to to your application, including appealing decisions of the examiner).

These are "patent attorneys" and "patent agents".

One becomes a patent agent by meeting certain background requirements in science or engineering defined by the Patent Office, and passing an exam on patent law and procedure given by the Patent Office.

One becomes a patent attorney by satisfying the requirements for a patent agent and by becoming an attorney.

Since a patent attorney is an attorney, they can give advice beyond just patentability and can do more than just deal with the patent office. They can draft contracts to license you invention. They can draft confidentiality agreements to make people sign that you hire to help develop you invention. Once the patent is issued, they can litigate for you against infringers.

This comes with a price. Patent attorneys will generally cost more than patent agents. At the stage you are at, it doesn't sound like you need anything done that requires an attorney. You just need patent advice and reprentation at the patent office. Thus, since you are on a budget [1], you should take a look at patent agents.

[1] People not on a budget should probably consider patent agents more, too. I think that a lot of people just assume that they need a patent attorney to get a patent drafted and filed.

</comment><comment><USER3> My recommendation would be to do a very simple patent search - I've always found the EPO Espacenet superior to the USPTO offering, Google's is even easier but less refined. Find a few applications for things in the region of your invention in the last few years and look at the patent documents. You'll see the names of the patent attorneys in the filing info. Contact them and ask them this question. If you can find the IPC code for your idea look at maybe 20 sets of metadata and look for similarities - some patent attorneys have specialisms.

Eg, [https://register.epo.org/application?number=EP13189587](https://register.epo.org/application?number=EP13189587) has BWT as their representative.

If you find the quoted prices too high and your offers of lower amounts are rebuffed then ask again here stating the offers you were given.

Ultimately you can submit a complete disclosure of your invention and then mould the actual application later so if you're doing this as a prelude to seeking funding then that is probably the cheapest way to go. A good patent attorney is likely to be able to get you a relatively useful patent that is actually more broad than your actual invention however.

[https://oedci.uspto.gov/OEDCI/](https://oedci.uspto.gov/OEDCI/) might be useful, it's a USPTO list of those registered to practice with the USPTO, you can query by state, for example.

If you're after a UK agent feel free to PM me for further info.

<comment><USER4> This is good advice. Prior art can torpedo your application, so it makes sense to do a cursory search on your own nickel before paying a lawyer. My patent lawyers have always advised me to do my own searches.

I'm not a lawyer, but it's been my experience that if your invention combines A and B, and the examiner can find A and B in separate patents, then you're pretty much cooked. If you find both A and B in a single patent, then you'd better hope the patent is expired. If you find prior art, then your options are to give up or narrow your claims. That can be a gut wrenching, if you're already in the hole to a lawyer when you have to make this decision. At best, narrowing your claims still lets you protect the important elements of your invention.

If you find a "close" patent, then following its citations, and the patents that cite it, is a good way to chase down more possible prior art.

Now, I've found that it's touch and go whether the examiner will look outside the patent literature. As it gets easier and easier to search for anything that's been written about anything, fertile ground for finding prior art will of course expand. It could include the academic literature, so if you're a student, you might be able to get some (free) help from your friendly neighborhood reference librarian.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> yes, $1-2k can get a lawyer to help you write a provisional but writing the full patent tends to be more like $5-10k, and that's assuming you do most of the work. a provisional gives you 1 year to write the full patent but at least starts the clock on first-to-file.

if you've formed a business entity around the patentable idea, a law firm may be willing to defer their compensation (if you pitch them).

but you only want to patent something if you think you can defend that patent in the future. otherwise it's an expensive paper trophy.

</comment><comment><USER6> I've recently gone through the patent process and had the benefit of working with one of the most prestigious IP firms in New York. I'd be happy to share the process we went through, the instructions I was given, etc...

LinkedIn is in my profile. Reach out and include your email or IM - glad to help :)

</comment><comment><USER7> Might want to check out [https://www.upcounsel.com/](https://www.upcounsel.com/), couple of friends used them for the startup incorporation process and said they loved them. Not sure if they deal with patent law but could be worth checking out.

<comment><USER8> [http://www.avvo.com](http://www.avvo.com) would be another great option. I have a few friends that work there, really cool office-space.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I haven't specifically dealt with patent lawyers before but most decent lawyers will give you a free consult just to go over the main points and give basic feedback. From there you can infer how much it will cost to go forward and what the process would look like.</comment>


Why Is the Modern World So Ugly? - <AUTHOR> https://www.theschooloflife.com/thebookoflife/why-is-the-modern-world-so-ugly/ <comment><USER2> > We take our cues from what the buildings around us 'speak about'. If they > speak of grace and charm, kindness and light, our mood will be buoyant, if > however they seem to threaten and intimidate us, we will feel humiliated and > cowed.

I don't think this totally captures the problem with modern architecture. It's not that the buildings are threatening or intimidating, but that they convey no emotion at all - they're utterly sterile.

</comment><comment><USER3> This kind of antimodern sentiment is typical for US architecture art- historians. Of course the argument is entirely flawed.

Old architecture with history has more owners and more tastes that a modern building stemming from a single vision. Beauty is not a mischmasch of different tastes and addons, beauty comes from a coherent and elegant design. You can have that in older buildings also, but generally it's the definition modern architecture which aligns with our definition of beauty. Which mostly contradicts the historical practice of postmodern architecture, a Mischmasch of envogue old styles, if baroque, renaissance, gothic, classic and so on to name the most prominent. With most buildings and cities having all these styles mixed together. In the end you end up with perl6 or C++. Everybody wants to add a new pretty corner there, and a new balcony there, and you need to say yes.

This is not beauty, beauty is Lisp or Forth, of Mies Van der Rohe. Modernism is the definition of beauty, postmodernism is the definition of warts. But you need to know and understand the concepts, or you dont get it.

</comment><comment><USER4> A lot of this reads as if it was written by a villain from an Ayn Rand novel:

"a troubling idea came to the fore: that the architect was a distinctive individual, with a unique vision...

... We lost our ability to say that what we really craved was buildings that looked a bit like they had always done; buildings that one wouldn't ever have to wonder who did them."

</comment><comment><USER5> > As Modernism declared: 'Form must follow function'

This is true, but there is nothing saying you cannot start with a functional baseline and add form on.

</comment><comment><USER6> No slave labor.

Or at least, it's been outsourced too far away or its too underground to have them sculpting gargoyles in the summer.

Well, I guess Dubai is kind of ugly too.

</comment><comment><USER7> tl;dr: modernism, sprawl, and aesthetics the author doesn't agree with.</comment>


We are out of 4 letter .com domains - <AUTHOR> http://whoapi.com/blog/1413/we-are-out-of-4-letter-com-domains/ For some it's old news, but it's good to remind ourselves. <comment><USER2> Just some promotional blog post for their Domain API.

"We just checked 456.976 domains with our API"

"I hooked up with 10 chicks last month"

In both cases, no one cares.

</comment><comment><USER3> Every 1, 2, 3, and 4 letter dot-com has been registered for ages. Why is this on the front page of HN?

</comment><comment><USER4> This has been known to be the case for many years now. What's the news?

</comment><comment><USER5> Are .com(s) really worth their value anymore? With so much success with companies using alternative domain extensions, I see the value of a .com dropping sharply in the near future.

<comment><USER6> I think so. It's still the _main_ domain and probably the only tld that should exist (outside of .org and .gov) to avoid confusion. Even before the most recent additions of tlds .com maintained its dominance with .co, .name, .info, .biz, etc. Personally I would trust an entity with a .com for a given domain name (even over .net). .menu, .uno? Wtf... ridiculous.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> And? so what? who wants AAAA.com? and if you do you probably have some other domains to choose.

</comment><comment><USER8> We've long been out of four-letter domains.

And don't custom TLDs render this moot (well, for companies that can afford 185k then 25k each year on it) anyway?

</comment><comment><USER9> I own Eibx.com :) - But I did have to buy it from another person.

</comment><comment><USER10> But still available some 4 letter-digit combinations</comment>


The U.S. economy's hidden problem: Men without jobs - <AUTHOR> https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-economys-hidden-problem-working-class-men-without-jobs/ <comment><USER2> They just need paid to play the Playstation.</comment>


Diplomacy Lessons from the Game Diplomacy - <AUTHOR> http://www.sebastianmarshall.com/?p=262

<comment><USER2> >Second, there is no luck involved. No cards, no dice, no randomness, no chance.

This is incorrect. The chaos of the "Well I'll do whatever/either are perfectly valid options" especially in opening moves is very luck centric.

It's like saying "There is no luck involved in yelling fire in a crowded theatre", when if you're the poor sot getting trampled, it's quite clearly a mishap of chance that caused you to be in that position.

This same sort of situation happens over and over in Diplomacy. There is no particular mechanism such as dice or cards injecting more chance into the game, but the random chaos of what will X do or Y do when both are equally valid is just as unpredictable, especially when you look at the bounce resolution rules.</comment>


Tech and mobile events of note in the UK - <AUTHOR> http://uk.techcrunch.com/2007/09/21/tech-and-mobile-events-of-note/

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm going to be at Future of Web Apps, MobileCamp and Future of mobile. Any other news.YC'ers at those and want to meet up?</comment>


Supercharging the Elasticsearch Percolator - <AUTHOR> http://underthehood.meltwater.com/blog/2015/09/29/supercharging-the-elasticsearch-percolator/ <comment><USER2> What are your memory settings for utilizing the 360GB RAM with ElasticSearch?

<comment><USER3> Currently running with three ES data nodes per physical machine, with 30GB -Xmx allocated to each instance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Can you explain how a positional query is a subset of boolean queries?

Intuitively it feels like the reverse would be true.

<comment><USER5> You're right, but the point here is that positional queries are boolean queries plus positions. For example, document that match 'a NEAR b' are a subset of documents matching 'a AND b'. So if 'a AND b' has no matches, there is no need to execute the more expensive 'a NEAR b'.</comment></comment>


Boston area Comcast DNS down? - <AUTHOR>

ive talked to about 10 different people, from boston to newburyport, everyones comcast internet is down. supposedly its a DNS <comment><USER2> Comcast DNS was not resolving several domains for me last week so I switched over to Google's DNS. Use 184.108.40.206 and 220.127.116.11 to switch if you can't resolve anything.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's back up for what it's worth .. confirmed with a couple of people .. was down for a couple of hours ..

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm having the same problem around dc. Change dns to use google: 22.214.171.124 or 188.8.131.52 . Problem solved.

</comment><comment><USER5> So switch to a different DNS server and see if it works.

</comment><comment><USER6> yes I have the same problem here in Cambridge

<comment><USER6> I can use skype but I cannot go on the web. Strange

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> same here, setup 188.8.131.52 and 184.108.40.206 as default on my router and its allset

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> it seems presistent connections wernt affected..</comment>


Grey Area Raises $2.5 Million To Turn Your City Into A Game - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/23/exclusive-grey-area-raises-2-5-million-to-turn-your-city-into-a-game/

<comment><USER2> Awesome to see our friends to get this investment. We started at the same office, guys worked hard and stayed focused on their long-term vision. The game is really awesome.</comment>


Ask HN: Any lessons learned from running a hacker space - <AUTHOR> Thinking about the new year and resolutions makes me also think of lessons learned.<p>This is Hacker News. So can anyone share any lessons learned about running or working with a hacker/maker space? Please share things that worked and more importantly things that didn't work. <comment><USER2> Okay, time to repost: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15998894](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15998894)

<comment><AUTHOR> Great reference. Thanks! Do you think those same things hold true 10 years later?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Things that worked: The projects I completed and shipped out/deployed.

Things that didn't work: The projects I kept adding features to.</comment>


Ask HN: Would anyone use a charitable payments API? - <AUTHOR> Recently built a tool providing a real-time, direct link between donors and recipients (living on ~$2 a day or less). Donors can send cash to very low-income people and exchange messages (e.g., confirmation message, a SMS indicating how the gift was used). Wondering whether it is worthwhile to make it open via API, so that anyone could integrate an option to make direct cash transfers to globally poor people into products, sites, etc.
My question is if people would use such an API, or more specifically:
a. What are the use cases / potential needs solved that would motivate developers to use the API (e.g., something for people to use for side projects to develop skills, a way to encourage more customer spending)?
b. Are financial incentives important (e.g., developers keep 1% of transfers sent through their application)?
c. What other motivations might be there for use?
Curious to hear thoughts. <comment><USER2> For me the question is how are recipients selected? The main drive to use that API would be to promote doing the right thing, but for that to happen, recipient selection is a key aspect. Look for example at Kiva, you know where your money goes, why these people have been selected, and even may know how to apply for these micro-credits. As for your questions, b) would be a demotivator to use it, and I think that 'feature' could kill the API easily on bad press.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the thoughts.

To your question:

1\. We get lists of low-income people from credible non-profits that already have relationships with them (e.g., through research studies, or offering training services).

2\. We conduct a number of remote audits to confirm authenticity of the list of potential recipients (phone calls, verifying account details, etc.).

3\. We do a random in-person audit of recipients to ensure the poverty criteria are met.</comment></comment>


Tic Tac Toe – Creating Unbeatable AI with Minimax Algorithm - <AUTHOR> https://towardsdatascience.com/tic-tac-toe-creating-unbeatable-ai-with-minimax-algorithm-8af9e52c1e7d <comment><USER2> Wouldn't it be better to just use a magic square[1]?

Is minimax more efficient or is the author simply using the game to describe the concept behind the algorithm?

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

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Magic square could be used there and it might be even faster but the goal of this article was to show the underlying Minimax algorithm.</comment>


10 Harsh Truths Every Millennial Must Know - <AUTHOR> http://greyenlightenment.com/10-harsh-truths-every-millennial-must-know/ <comment><USER2> For 4 (Your college degree is probably worthless): is the purpose of college to get a job or to learn? The traditional college curriculum is structured in a way that suggests it's the latter, yet we live in a society that expects the prior.

I'd argue that college is doing exactly what it always intended to do -- to create an environment of learning. The disconnect occurs because of how it markets itself. The focus on "job placement statistics" and "post college salaries" sends the wrong message to its customers.

</comment><comment><USER3> I dont intend to coddle my children.. At 12 I will make them fight Bangle tigers! Last one alive will be my new 'child', the other will be dinner.</comment>


Teen diving enthusiast's project has removed 50,000 golf balls from off CA coast - <AUTHOR> https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/01/23/pebble-beach-ecosystem-under-attack-from-golfers-hacking-mishits-into-the-sea <comment><USER2> How big of a problem is this actually? Do the balls harm the ocean?

<comment><USER3> Probably a lot smaller now that cruise ships can't use the ocean as a driving range. Most of the balls from the Monterey Peninsula come from just one golf course, and certainly a lot more than 50000 have entered the ocean from that course alone.

Edit: 50K golf balls is about 3000 square feet of surface area. So imagine three apartments' floor area worth of plastic surface representing that amount.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Project site:

[https://www.theplasticpick-up.org/the-golf-ball- project](https://www.theplasticpick-up.org/the-golf-ball-project)</comment>


Is Google evil? (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://unixsheikh.com/articles/is-google-evil.html <comment><USER2> Google is surprisingly non-evil given it's size. Both the moral conviction of its founders as well as the lack of pressure that comes with taking in gobs of money probably contribute to it. Look no further than Facebook or Uber to see the contrast.

Unfortunately, there's no guarantee those favourable conditions persist. So despite not being _evil_ , Google is _suspect_ just due to it's size.

And even though Google has been actively _good_ in many of the things it does (Summer of Code, their work with non-profits, Alphabet's various moonshot projects in the environmental or medical space), Apple has lately been giving them a run for their money in being actively and creatively a force for good in its core business, especially around privacy. It's not really something has the right to demand from them, but it does seem like they should have the potential to surprise us on occasion with technology aimed to solve the myriad problems societies are experiencing with the rising role of the web. A high- performant, hassle-free and verifiable alternative to TOR, say. Or a new paradigm that mends the growing conflict between advertisers and users, similarly to what Apple is doing with it's pseudonymous targeting scheme.

<comment><USER3> Moral conviction? No idea what you're talking about.

Lack of pressure? Whenever they get any orders from the government they operate under (like US National Security Letters or Chinese, uh, whatever it is the Chinese government issues) - they just comply with them.

"Apple a force for good"? Yeah, tell that to the Foxconn employees, I'm sure they'll be thrilled. Or, again, to the people whose data is made available to the NSA.

"mend the growing conflict between advertisers and users" \- much of advertising is (mostly) hostile to the users, aiming to achieve results which are detrimental to them. So there's not much mending to be done.

<comment><USER4> Google only complies with ~60% of government requests and frequently pushes back against suspect orders.

[https://transparencyreport.google.com/user- data/overview?hl=...](https://transparencyreport.google.com/user- data/overview?hl=en)

<comment><USER3> That's propaganda. I mean, it's probably true, in itself, but it's the 'small potatoes'. Why? Because, regardless of individual information requests, they funnel a copy of _everything_ to the NSA. All of it. Of course, regular government agencies have to go through semi-civilized procedures of spying on individuals, so they issue individual requests.

<comment><USER4> That's a pretty bombastic claim. Do you have any sources to back it up? Otherwise it's unadulterated conspiracy theory and FUD.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> So declaring that you are doing evil things makes you not evil? What a bizarre logic.

What is evil? The dictionary defines it as "profoundly immoral or wicked". It also states that morals are "concerned with or derived from the code of behaviour that is considered right or acceptable in a particular society".

So, as a society, do we consider it right or acceptable for a this private information to be collected and utilised in this way? If we deem it unacceptable (which I personally do, but I don't speak for society), then google is evil - along with all those others doing the same thing.

<comment><USER6> The article argues the information collecting people agree to isn't evil.

It then goes on to describe a whole other set of activities and their consequences, but doesn't characterize that one way or another. I don't need the author to draw a conclusion here, but it's odd they don't.

<comment><USER7> Well, then why complain about anything companies do? Its all buried in some Terms of Service document that people agreed to anyway.

<comment><USER6> I think that's a fair point; fwiw I was just trying to clarify the article.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> There are two questions here:

1) Is Google more evil than a hypothetical benchmark company producing similar products?

2) Is the product space Google works in fundamentally bad?

(1) is a pretty clear no, Google is about the best we could hope for given that a single corporation is in the product spaces that they are in and trying to sell ads. (2) is much less clear, there are many historical instances where the existence of a Google would have magnified the damage done. Realistically it isn't just them either, the radical dropping cost of surveillance was raised the other day and Google's work is only a small component of that.

<comment><USER9> It isn't at all clear that (1) is true. Until recently, no-one was particularly concerned about companies which link advertisers and purchasers. Unless you say the hypothetical benchmark company is a company which tries to track you and build a database on you and basically spy on you, Google seems to be overtly more evil than any hypothetical benchmark company.

Effectively you've defined yourself into a corner were the hypothetical benchmark company is Google, since they must be substantially identical in all relevant ways. It isn't sufficient that they are advertising mediators: no, they must be advertising mediators who track every detail of their users life.

But even if we decide to compare within their business methods - not just their product space - and say, "given that they're Big Brother, are they an evil Big Brother or relatively more benign", it's not clear that they're benign. I have heard stories that leave my concerned (trying to produce a censored version for China, for instance, and gagging former workers who don't feel comfortable with that). I cannot provide evidence that they operate an evil business in an evil way, but it isn't clear that they don't. The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Google worries me more and more, even though I'm tied to them more and more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> >The control and power of companies like Google and Microsoft is devastating to governments around the world because they have the power and the right to control whatever data they provide via their search engines.

Actually, it's the exact opposite. They are tools of control. Google and Microsoft happily provides the governments of the world with whatever information they want about their users.

</comment><comment><USER11> It's weird how we still attach ideas of morality to a corporation.

You could say google does evil but it can't be evil in the normal sense of the word. It's not a person.

And you could say a Corporation is amoral. They just care about nothing except profit. The CEO and board have no duty higher than that.

<comment><USER12> I'd like to point out that the idea that corporations "care about nothing except profit" is a fairly radical and new idea that would have been completely alien to anyone from more than a few decades ago.

It's a testament to the success of the propaganda of the people who pushed this idea that, whether a good idea or not, the majority of people today consider it fundamental and will probably be surprised to learn how new it is.

<comment><USER13> I'm genuinely interested, can you provide a source for this?

My understanding of companies is they have always been exploitative. Any large company from the gilded age is a good example (now almost a century ago).

Further back, the companies of the industrial revolution were legendary for their amorality. Another example I'm familiar with is coal companies in Scotland before WWI.

<comment><USER14> This is an interesting article on the subject [https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are- co...](https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-corporations- obligations-to-shareholders/corporations-dont-have-to-maximize-profits) (2015)

This is another one [https://www.hrexchangenetwork.com/hr-talent- management/colum...](https://www.hrexchangenetwork.com/hr-talent- management/columns/the-purpose-of-business-is-not-to-make-a-profi) from 2011.

The points are

* Serving shareholders' "best interests" is not the same thing as either maximizing profits, or maximizing shareholder value

* Profit, but not Profit Maximization

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> "Evil" is not a useful category.

But Google is definitely maximizing the narrow interests of its share-holders at the expense of users and (what I consider to be) fundamental social interests, such as privacy, avoidance of undue psychological manipulation, limitation of government power etc.

</comment><comment><USER15> Google is a large organization, and many large organization is both evil and not-evil. (Also, such things as "evil" and "not-evil" is not always so clear, anyways.)

But, often you can use services and software other than Google, anyways; or at least, I can.

</comment><comment><USER16> The question is not whether Google is evil or not. They have a business model that is mostly legal (there are probably some corners where they do not fully comply with GDPR and national data protection and consumer protection laws in Europe). So I wouldn't care how they run their business. If I don't like them I don't do business with them. The problem is that they are a monopoly and it's hard to avoid them. I know what I am talking about, because I use a Google-free mobile phone (not Apple either). I cannot rent e-scooters (which doesn't bother me) and I might have difficulties to buy/have to pay higher prices for public transit tickets in many European cities (which sometimes does bother me).

The big failure is lack of antitrust enforcement. Google needs to be broken up like it happened to ATT in 1984.

</comment><comment><USER17> on a scale from zero to Facebook.... I would say its an 7.

But is a 7 with lots of power, and plenty of people with good intentions. And the hell is full of people with good intentions.

</comment><comment><USER18> As long as it's either / or we're not gonna get anywhere with this conversation.

</comment><comment><USER19> Yes. Next!

</comment><comment><USER20> I would argue putting ads that pops up next to your emails is evil

</comment><comment><USER21> Author lists some potential solutions but fails to mention the Brave browser (brave.com), which I think is pioneering much of what they're talking about.

</comment><comment><USER22> Is being evil profitable?

</comment><comment><USER23> So google's not evil because they disclose that they're a wolf??

</comment><comment><USER24> The recent(?) screwing down of results page that do not allow jumping to the n-th page or do not disclose any results past the 2 or 3 pages of paid results impels me to believe Betteridge's Law has been broken.

</comment><comment><USER25> No, they simply function in an amoral capitalist system which demands the maximum amount of profit.

<comment><USER10> There's nothing wrong with the system. You're free to use any of the alternatives. You think you would have that freedom in a non-capitalist system?

<comment><USER3> > You think you would have that freedom in a non-capitalist system?

Obviously depending on which system, but - yes. Even kind of rotten systems like the state-capitalism of East Germany had different "freedom trade-offs". A local once described it this way: "Under the DDR you had an apartment, but you couldn't speak out on things. Now you can say whatever you like and nobody will care, but you can't afford an apartment."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This article predates the removal of "Don't be evil" from Google's Code of Conduct by about half a year.

[https://gizmodo.com/google-removes-nearly-all-mentions-of- do...](https://gizmodo.com/google-removes-nearly-all-mentions-of-dont-be-evil- from-1826153393)

<comment><USER27> It was not removed, still part of Code of Conduct.

<comment><USER28> So it applies to employees but not to the company itself?

<comment><USER27> Employees == Company</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Time zone database has new home after lawsuit - <AUTHOR> http://www.ajc.com/business/time-zone-database-has-1202359.html <comment><USER2> IANAL, but....

In the US, per the copyright act, data can't be copyrighted. Some compilations can be copyrighted, but the Supreme Court has said that the compilation can't just be a collection of data. It needs to posses even a small modicum of creativity in order to deserve protection. Your curated list of "awesome places to eat in NY" can be copyrighted. The yellow pages cannot.

See <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_v._Rural> for details.

My guess is that a world timezone database does not meet this minimum level of creativity.

The descriptions I've read about the lawsuit seem to indicate that the plaintiffs complain that some individual records were copied from their database, and that the database directly indicates that they did so. They would only have a case if they lifted major portions of the database and copied them enmasse, stealing their formatting, and the original was deemed to be more like your "curated ny restaurant list" than it was like the yellow pages.

Taking the information present in the records, and translating them to a different database format is likely not an infringement, per the copyright act. Even if it was though, the material in question likely isn't copyrightable anyways.

<comment><USER3> It's not the information that is copyrighted, it's the selection of what countries fall into what regions (and what to call the regions), which countries or cities to include, the order of the geographic regions, and even the order in which the geographic regions and their corresponding timezones are displayed. These are all choices that requires some amount of creativity (in the sense that they are not merely purely functional choices).

 _Feist_ stands for the proposition that _any creative choice_ made in presenting information is sufficient for a valid copyright as to the creative choices made (thought the underlying factual information itself may not be copyrighted).

If this were to go to court, the copyright owner would win. How could the database be changed to get around the copyright at issue? Get rid of the region assignments, broaden (or narrow) the selection of cities/states/etc. included, or even simply flip the order in which geographic area and the corresponding timezone are listed.

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure I follow that reasoning.

In Feist even copying made-up entries designed to detect copying was deemed to not be an infringement.

The statement that "this area is assigned to this timezone" is not a creative decision. It's an assertion of a fact. Even if it's a false fact made up by the author, it's still an assertion of a fact.

That information is not subject to copyright.

Perhaps the particular expression of the information is.... but I'm not sure how the tz database infringes on that.

Am I missing something?

<comment><USER4> _The statement that "this area is assigned to this timezone" is not a creative decision. It's an assertion of a fact. Even if it's a false fact made up by the author, it's still an assertion of a fact._

I think you are treading on thin ice with this reasoning. By the same token I might argue that "Harry said this to Ron and Ron said that to Harry" is an assertion of the fact that Harry and Ron had a conversation. What else is a novel except a collection of false facts made up by the author?

<comment><USER2> If you write a non fiction book that says "world war I was the cause of world war II" you are entitled to copyright protection for your expression. However, you don't earn a monopoly on the notion that WWI cause WWII even if you were the first to express that. Someone else can still write a book that conveys that fact.

The "creative work" isn't the fact that country a is in time zone b. That's just data. A description of the process and the reasoning used to reach that conclusion, and an analysis of available facts is an expression. A map visualizing the data is an expression. A formatted chart is an expression. The connection between regions and timezones is just data. It's not protectable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Although I think ICANN isn't the greatest body to be over seeing the tz database, I think it's a lot better than a single person. ICANN has the resources to distribute the database, facilitate new releases and obviously defend it from legal disputes.

</comment><comment><USER6> This article is rather misleading. The plan to move the TZ database to IANA is over a year old - see [https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-lear-iana- timezone-da...](https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-lear-iana-timezone- database/history/) \- though the lawsuit has sped the process up a bit. The TZ mailing list switched to IANA within a day of Olson shutting down the old list, and Robert Elz has been acting as interim maintainer. There has been no disruption to TZ database maintenance. IANA are not yet providing web or FTP sites for distributing the database and code.

<comment><USER7> <http://www.iana.org/time-zones>

It is linked off the IANA homepage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> To top it off the company who filed the lawsuit peddles astrology products, something that's completely worthless and contributes nothing to society, unlike the TZ DB which is a great contribution.

</comment><comment><USER9> I still don't understand why any country allows databases (simple collections of facts) to be copyrighted.

<comment><USER10> It doesn't. But that doesn't stop lawsuits from being filed.

<comment><USER11> Err, the US doesn't, but some countries explicitly do allow collections of facts to be copyrighted.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> At what point does a piece of technology become too essential to ever be allowed to disappear, even if it's under a legal threat that would otherwise kill it?

Or, looked at another way, even if the lawsuit succeeds and the tz database is judged a copyright violation, do you actually expect _anyone_ to stop using it?

<comment><USER13> That lawsuit is - as far as I can tell - dead in the water anyway because of the number of years that the situation has been going on. If you let a thing like that lapse for too long then you can't later on turn around and demand reparation.

They'd have a very hard time arguing they weren't aware of it for so long that a very large portion of the IT world became dependent on it without becoming aware of it themselves. And all that is assuming that the claims hold water, which remains to be seen.

It's an attempt at extortion from where I'm sitting, after all, the value of the database is only determined by the parties that are using it, recreating it from scratch requires some effort but nothing monumental.

The current timezones are not at risk anyway, it is just the historical data we are talking about here.

<comment><USER12> Still, if you ignore the facts of this specific case, which I agree is extremely weak, what do you think about my questions?

Also: This is a copyright case, not trademark. 'Use it or lose it' does not apply to whether copyright violations have occurred; it can, at most, modify the damages involved.

<comment><USER13> You're right about the 'use it or lose it', but the damages will likely be set to '0', especially in those cases where the value of the original copyrighted data is minimal (which I think in this case is fairly clear).

As for the question of appropriation, I don't think that that should ever happen, it would basically mean that anything is up for grabs given the right reasoning.

Governments have to jump through some pretty involved hoops in order to seize your property (ok, in some countries the hoops are not that complicated and abuse is rife), for corporations to do the same thing would be a bad development.

Say next year we all decide that the windows source code is something we can't live without any more so hand it over?

That's not a good development, even in those cases where you could make a strong argument for it.

In this particular case, there isn't even a strong argument, all it will take is a little bit of work if they should win their case and then they can keep their database and use it to light the fire after printing it out. It will have lost its value entirely after it gets re-created from original material.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


My first project Real-time news for your favorite NBA team - <AUTHOR> http://squadstream.com <comment><AUTHOR> I hope you guys find it useful. you can leave it open in your browser and it'll send you notifications about any breaking news. www.SquadStream.com

If anyone is interested in how it works or is interested in contributing, my github link is [https://github.com/ammark47/BballApp](https://github.com/ammark47/BballApp)</comment>


The merging of machine capability and human consciousness is already happening - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.co.uk/article/darpa-arati-prabhakar-humans-machines <comment><USER3> "The distinction between us (humans) and them (the machines) will become almost imperceptible."

... Absolutely nothing in the text substantiates any of the very strong claims.

</comment><comment><USER4> I would recommend anyone that is fascinated by this to read books from two universes; the Revelation Space universe, and the Culture novels. These feature two different looks at how AI & computers integrate or coexist with humans.

<comment><USER5> The Culture novels have both what is probably the best case for human-AI interaction in the Culture itself and what is possibly the worst case - societies using technology to implement virtual hells where uploads are tortured for eternity...

Edit: Are there any SF stories that give a more positive view of AI than the Culture novels?

<comment><USER6> I don't know if it's possible to have a more positive view of AI than the Culture books - the weakly godlike, (almost-)universally benevolent Minds are a bit too Mary Sue-ish and make Banks work hard to find interesting stories in the setting (which he does, and well, but he's forced to stick to the fringes of the Culture because most of it is too boringly perfect.)

I'm not sure that the Hells were particularly AI-heavy - the demons seemed to operate on a quite human level compared to the often-ineffable Minds.

<comment><USER5> Yes, one valid criticism is "one of the problems with the Culture novels as novels is that the central characters, the Minds, are too powerful and, to put it bluntly, too good."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture#Overview](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture#Overview)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> And you thought Silicon Valley was a free market Capitalist system. As the article notes, many of the big innovations have come out of Big Government spending of taxpayer dollars through agencies like DARPA. Yet most of the profits stay in private hands.

<comment><USER8> See the book The Entrepreneurial State by Mariana Mazzucato who covers this topic.

 _" Her book comprehensively debunks the myth of a lumbering, bureaucratic state versus a dynamic, innovative private sector. In a series of case studies—including IT, biotech and nanotech—Professor Mazzucato shows that the opposite is true: the private sector only finds the courage to invest after an entrepreneurial state has made the high-risk investments. In an intensely researched chapter, she reveals that every technology that makes the iPhone so 'smart' was government funded: the Internet, GPS, its touch-screen display and the voice-activated Siri. And in another chapter she argues that the green revolution is today is missing the kind of patient public sector financing, and de-financialized private sector, that got the IT revolution off the ground."_

[http://marianamazzucato.com/projects/the-entrepreneurial- sta...](http://marianamazzucato.com/projects/the-entrepreneurial-state/the- entrepreneurial-state-usa/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The specifics - molecular simulation feedback and prosthetic touch - are cool, but title is overblown. e.g. We've had REPLs and cochlear implants for decades.

</comment><comment><USER10> This seems to talk about a weak form of human-machine integration.

Nevertheless, there are some fascinating examples. I remember how a Wired article talked about how advanced computing has made chess players like Magnus Carlsen so much better because he now fights against a computer that can overpower most if not all humans. It's made the marginal cost of practice so much lower as a result: you don't need the best grandmasters in the room to play against something that thinks like them.

As a result, similar to how better nutrition and health practices have augmented sports performance, I can see even this weak form of human-machine integration leading to incredible spurts in cognitive proficiency -- though perhaps it will be domain-limited for now.

</comment><comment><USER11> The title of this article is click-baity in its abuse of the vague, subjective word "consciousness."

" _[blank] is already happening_ " is a trope, in wired's headlines, that gets reused frequently, to provoke exasperation. Wired probably advises writers with an internal style guide, since their tone has remained pretty consistent over the years.

The article is a lot of hype. There's a mix of several separate concepts brought into play, with anecdotal details, to produce an emotional effect.

Without explaining the differences between the peripheral nervous system and the central nervous system, ideas are presented to confuse such differentiation.

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

The article touches upon advanced ways to interface with the peripheral nervous system of the body, in particular the extremities, addressing paralysis and amputation.

The article is not about the brain itself, although witnesses within the article explain their personal experiences. It isn't about machines becoming alive. It isn't about replacing the mind with a computer.

It's mostly about advanced ways of restoring sensation and motor control, with computer systems that remap connections beween damaged nerves. The external stimulation of nervous tissue does not translate to a migration of human experience from a biological system to a machine.

<comment><USER12> Thanks for the summary.

I've noticed I started to avoid clicking links with titles I perceive as overly dramatic or emotional. I wish there was a browser extension providing community-sourced alternate titles and tl;drs for every news article on hover.

<comment><USER13> I'm pretty sure there was one made by a HN member. First result in DDG is this: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tldr/giepilabiomhl...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tldr/giepilabiomhlcmlefmbfkgeoccfhhhc)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> _and the mysterious hallmark of Homo sapiens - our capacity to experience insights and apply intuition_

AlphaGo demonstrated that it can find a better solution than players who spent their whole lives practicing intuition, which is limited by the brain's "capacity" and "computing power". If the problem is 'asking the right question', perhaps this can eventually also be brute-forced by machines faster.

<comment><USER15> That's not in any way the hallmark of Homo Sapiens. Animals of all sorts can improvise solutions in similar ways.

The real hallmark of Homo Sapiens is that culture and knowledge are externalised and persist outside individuals. So there's a social bootstrapping effect, because individual insights persist even after the humans who had the insights die.

Which means other individuals don't have to keep (literally) reinventing the wheel. Or quantum theory. Or technology in general.

If you take an individual human and don't expose him/her to culture or language, you get an animal with very ordinary and limited abilities.

This is one reason I think the current ML systems aren't necessarily looking in the right places. Learning is one thing, but systems teaching systems - <USER2> at least systems communicating insights via a common knowledge/abstraction framework/protocol might be something else again.

<comment><USER6> > If you take an individual human and don't expose him/her to culture or > language, you get an animal with very ordinary and limited abilities.

Can you suggest any research worth reading on this topic? I'd assume that a healthy human who was raised in isolation (if such a human could be considered healthy) would be seriously handicapped compared to properly raised humans but would still be significantly above all other animals in mental ability, but I'm really just guessing.

<comment><USER16> You want to read about Genie and other children raised without language.

The problem, however, is that these were also inherently abuse situations and the victims may also have had other abnormalities.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How Trump spent his first month in office, by the numbers - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2017/02/21/how-donald-trump-spent-his-first-month-in-office-by-the-numbers/ <comment><AUTHOR> Mainly submitting this because while I usually enjoy The Washington Post's reporting, I feel the chart created in this article is misleading.

It's disingenuous to group sleep into "non-work time". For example, 8 hours per night ==> 248 hours in Jan = 62% of "non-work time".

Burying that this was done separately from the other listed exceptions to the chart seemed intentional to me — it's effectively a mirage for the author to support his own thesis irrespective of data.</comment>


Why Americans don't trust government - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/05/26/why-americans-dont-trust-government/ <comment><USER2> What the article is pointing out is the problem caused by the fact that we never repeal anything. Some problem happens, some regulation is put in place to deal with it and now that regulation is permanent. Next year some other problem happens and some regulation is put in place to deal with it. Each seems reasonable on its own but after a hundred years when you put them all together it turns a $5 million project into a $5 billion project.

But it doesn't really address _why_ we never repeal anything, and it's in large part because we keep doing too much at too high a level of government. A thousand years ago a population the size of New York City would have been a _nation_ , but now it's a city inside of a county inside of a state inside of a union. And the union is inside of a set of international treaties.

It's too many layers of bureaucracy. People keep advocating laws at the highest level where they can get them passed, which both makes them harder to fix because they're further removed from the affected people and more likely to cause trouble because any flaws are amplified by the larger affected population.

The flaw seems to be that people think federal legislation is less complex than local legislation, under the theory that uniformity reduces complexity. But in practice what happens is that you end up with 10,000 pages of federal regulations instead of each city having their own 20 pages, and then not being able to fix anything because San Francisco and Houston can't agree which rule one should impose on the other when the sensible choice is to let each do what they want.

<comment><USER3> Your way has its own set of pitfalls, and I'm not sure that they're less than the alternative. If you do business in New York, Chicago, and Boston, then you have to worry about laws in all three places. The more you lean upon local lawmaking, then the more you risk adding a big layer of legal incompatibility once you start crossing borders.

<comment><USER2> > If you do business in New York, Chicago, and Boston, then you have to worry > about laws in all three places.

Which, first of all, you already do, the county/state/federal laws apply _on top of those_.

But you're also assuming that uniform national laws will be less complicated than dealing with different local laws, which doesn't seem to bear out in practice. California is going to care about earthquakes and Massachusetts is going to care about ice storms but not really the other way. If you do business in both California and Massachusetts then you have to care about both earthquakes and ice storms regardless, and if the relevant legislation is at the federal level then it will cover both. Which means local laws aren't more complicated for companies who do business in both places, they're _less complicated_ for companies who don't, because then if you only do business in Massachusetts you don't have to deal with earthquake regulations.

<comment><USER4> But does insurance, banking(mortgage, payday loans), transportation laws really need 50 different laws? even contract law could be ubiquitous and where lawyers can practice in all fifty states.

<comment><USER2> > But does insurance, banking(mortgage, payday loans), transportation laws > really need 50 different laws?

Sure they do. You're insuring against earthquakes in California and ice storms in Massachusetts. North Dakota has a much different banking environment than New York City. Trucks pulling three trailers make sense in big empty western states with wide open spaces but no sense in high traffic urban environments with tight corners.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> He missed the big picture. The mayor of Boston took care of the little things because the mayor of Boston realizes that at a municipal-level, the people hold their elected officials responsible.

Try to hold your congresscritter responsible. You can't. They blame gridlock for anything that doesn't get done, and stake their position on the right side of popular wedge issues to get reelected. This frees them up to be beholden not to the citizens, but to the party and the donors.

It's only at the very top and the very bottom that we even give a fuck at what our representatives are doing. That's why state governments are often the most corrupt. They're doing god-knows what down there in the state capitol, and chances are you don't even know their names.

</comment><comment><USER6> Top 5 reasons I don't trust the government

1\. Many of the regulatory systems which are supposed to protect the populace have been captured or have their effectiveness impaired by special interests, ie. the revolving door between the SEC and Wall Street, the FDA and Big Pharma, and DOE and Big Oil

2\. Even when our institutions are not captured there is a perverse logic supporting institutional missions that lead to abuse of power. The Tuskegee experiment makes perfect sense you've got to have a control group in order to better understand the pathology so you can better protect the populace.

3\. Poor execution or formation of government policies that would in any other profession be cause for malpractice or being disbarred or worse are routinely foisted upon the populace.

4\. Corruption

5\. Increasingly your rights and legal protections are seen by institutions as being granted by those institutions instead of being protected by those institutions. Your rights are correctly perceived by the institutions as hindrances to their institutional missions.

Better legal policies wouldn't even crack the top 5 reason for me to trust government. We are way beyond wonky tweaks to our legal system. All of the above essentially boils down to accountability. If policy makers and lawmakers could be held legally accountable for policy mistakes, possibly even financially responsible for the mayhem they cause I for one would feel a much closer allegiance to our government.

</comment><comment><USER7> I don't trust government because it is made out of people.

<comment><USER8> The problem has gotten infinitely worse lately. I think the 2008 recession from a rigged economy was the first half of the problem. The NSA surveillance state uncovered by Snowden broke the last half of trust in government. This is why voters didn't revolt in 2008 or 2012 elections, but they are in 2016 elections (with Snowden's release in 2013).

The wrong doing in the 2008 recession plus the illegal surveillance state combined to shatter trust in government. Evidence is seen in the Bernie Sanders voters and non-establishment republican voters in 2016.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think that the problem of complex laws will only get worse and worse. It is like code bloat when using test driven development. You say, "this interface is too complex, lets tear it out" and all of a suddent 200 tests break. Then you feel a sense of panic, "will the world explode if I just delete these test cases?"

</comment><comment><USER10> Massachusetts cannot build/maintain bridges or roads period. One example, within 3 to 4 months New Hampshire build a large bridge over the Merrimack to their airport. About 30 miles down river there is a 'temporary' bridge over the river erected around 1986, that was suppose to be replaced by a permanent bridge in 5 years, it is still there and causing massive traffic jams. There are many examples of this, another good one, a 20 foot bridge in Westford MA took 1 year to build. Mass. is the last place to base theories about Government keeping up infrastructure. Anyone remember how "successful" the big dig is :)

</comment><comment><USER11> While I find nothing objectionable in this particular light-fair essay, I would also suggest that the reason many people don't trust the government is because people like Larry Summers have such a large influence in it.

</comment><comment><USER12> I think Larry Summers is part of the reason why Americans don't trust government.

But yeah, in Ithaca there was a little bridge by the police station that took 9 months to fix. It makes me wonder if the GWB and Tappan Zee bridge were built by aliens, as some have alleged the Egyptian pyramids were. (No, just by Moses... Robert Moses)

<comment><USER13> _Tappan Zee bridge_

It's interesting that the article talks about bridges. The replacement for the Tappan Zee bridge demonstrates, in a microcosm, one big problem with today's government. From wiki[1]:

       The bridge was built on a very tight budget
       of $81 million (1950 dollars), or $796 million
       in 2014 dollars.

The replacement bridge, to be opened in a few years, costs at least 5x as much (in roughly equivalent dollars): [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Tappan_Zee_Bridge](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Tappan_Zee_Bridge)

Where the _fuck_ does all the money go? Fix that problem and Americans will start trusting government again.

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

<comment><USER14> The (San Francisco-Oakland) Bay Bridge replacement was first estimated at $400 million ($200 million to retrofit the existing bridge).

Actual spending is over $7 billion and counting for the new Eastern Span alone, and it is fraught with defects.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I went to a very liberal public school, where my teachers taught me to be an independent thinker, and to distrust authority. We were rewarded for solving problems on our own, and for investigating the evidence behind claims.

My middle school history course was taught to a backdrop of Beatles music. One of my High School history courses was taught in terms of Monty Python movies, which it turns out have a fair bit of historical accuracy to them.

A common refrain was "Why do we do things this way? _OLD DEAD WHITE MEN_."

When I went to college, I learned who funded the American Revolution. I took a philosophy class that taught us how to deconstruct sentences into logical statements. For practice we used political speeches, which amusingly enough, when diagramed out would often times turn out to be equivalent to null.

For me, the answer is, I don't trust the government because my government provided education deliberately taught me better.

This is also why I get upset when I see people insist that schools are "just indoctrination centers for our youth". Heh. Maybe all my schooling experiences from middle school on up were just serious outliers?

All that said, I do think people's relationship with the government in regards to infrastructure investment is a bit... different. Growing up with a father who worked Union Labor, I learned that the men and women who build this country up have a lot of pride and love for their job. I also learned that everything is far more complicated than I could possibly imagine, with far too many moving parts.

Working in software I know the overhead cost of communications between different teams, within the same company and across company lines. With the number of suppliers and vendors that come together for any given public works project, I am actually impressed that work gets done at all. To a large extent, I think a huge source of problems is organizational efficiency.

Yet the public demands a certain level of accountability and transparency for our public works projects. We want open and honest bidding, and that means dealing with all the overhead of having 20 different vendors win different contracts for different parts of a project. There is an inherent inefficiency there that would not exist if we could just trust "one person" or "one company" to completely execute on a project.

<comment><USER16> Yeah, your experience was an outlier.

Do you know what the biggest meta-lesson throughout my education was? The single thing that was hammered home in every single class? _Following directions._ I think that says a lot.

The learning experience was highly regimented and structured. Show up on time, do your work the way we tell you, get an A.

The actual content of any given class was a bit more varied but none of the classes had much flexibility. When they set out to teach or engage creativity, it was always in narrow, controlled ways: assignments and projects with specific, detailed instructions. The creative aspect was confined to how you fulfilled those instructions—the moral equivalent of coloring within the lines.

I think I had a grand total of two truly open-ended assignments _in all of high school_ : one in a CS class and one in a physics class. I built a single thing for both (with permission, of course), and it was easily the best thing I ever did in high school. But that was definitely the exception, not the rule; every other "project" was just a bigger homework assignment.

Maybe I'm being too harsh but, looking back, the experience absolutely _did not_ nurture independence—quite the opposite.

<comment><USER15> > The actual content of any given class was a bit more varied but none of the > classes had much flexibility. When they set out to teach or engage > creativity, it was always in narrow, controlled ways: assignments and > projects with specific, detailed instructions. The creative aspect was > confined to how you fulfilled those instructions—the moral equivalent of > coloring within the lines.

Ironically, a lot of my assignments were free form, and I hated it! I had to sit through so many poorly done video presentations other groups of students did that I eagerly wished for teachers to teach us how to make a proper presentation and make students stick to the format! There are some basic rules to structuring a presentation that I don't think ever got taught, heh.

But those were the monthly assignments. On a larger and more fun scale, both my Middle School and High School had free form graduation projects. My Middle School project was on the history of video games, my HS project was on LED lighting. A minimum report size was dictated, but we also had to come up with a presentation on our own, with no real guidelines given other than a minimum time we had to present for.

A lot of my English reports were open ended. Sure I was given a general topic to write about, but that is sort of the point of a classroom, to provide general structure for students to learn within.

I remember one middle school project were we had to design a life form. That was pretty much it for instructions, just go off and design a new life form and be prepared to present it to the class. I ended up with a scale model, a description of locomotion, vision systems, and a general outline of culture.

Another project was to write a children's storybook.

Then there was the student produced school news channel. We were given instruction on how to operate equipment, but everything else was left up to the students.

Biology class, open ended report with presentation, mine was on the quality of life enhancements that genetic engineering of humans would bring about.

Elementary school, second grade, students wrote and directed a play, we did Stone Soup, we ended up performing it at the Senior Center as well as in front of the school.

Countless classes writing poetry. Either structure or theme was dictated, rarely both.

My social studies class had multiple debate sessions throughout the year. I remember one of them, Rome vs. Greece. My team was arguing Rome, my counterpoint to their claim of philosophers was "You cannot claim the great philosophers that you killed! In Rome, even the lowliest of gladiators could rise up to be a powerful and respected man. You kill your wise men." Not logically sound, but appeals to emotion work.

I'll admit, my parents worked hard to get me into the best public schools that they could, but at all times these were just public schools! Thankfully I graduated before No Child Left Behind made testing all the rage, from what I gather, things have been going steadily downhill in regards to how much flexibility teachers have in their job.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Larry Summers needs a helicopter. The bridge he is talking about is a state/local problem, and while there are problems of trust and efficiency in all the government bodies that touch that bridge, none are readily applicable to "Why don't Americans trust government?" He would not have written this rant if he had a helicopter.

<comment><USER18> >Larry Summers needs a helicopter [...] He would not have written this rant if he had a helicopter

Can you elaborate? It's not clear to me why he would not have written this rant if he had a helicopter. Are you trying to tie his frustration with the bridge to his commute times?

<comment><USER17> > _Are you trying to tie his frustration with the bridge to his commute > times?_

Yes, for starters. He even says so in the article. I also doubt Larry Summers and the people who distrust government can relate to each other. So I conclude maybe there might not be larger lessons to be learned from talking a long time to rebuild an old bridge over the Charles in an area with insane traffic and no possibility of building a temporary bridge, due to the layout of the roads in the area.</comment></comment></comment>


How newlines affect Linux kernel performance - <AUTHOR> https://nadav.amit.zone/blog/linux-inline <comment><USER2> v8 (before v5.9) used to only inline functions that were under 600 characters (and 196 AST nodes). That was another fun way to add fuel to the tab vs. spaces fire: identical functions that used spaces instead of tabs could run significantly slower because they weren't inlined.

<comment><USER3> > The kernel compiler, GCC, is unaware to the code size that will be generated > by the inline assembly. It therefore tries to estimate its size based on > newline characters and statement separators (';' on x86).

Seems like a poor decision to use whitespace as a factor in estimating code size. Some people like to space out their code with lots of comments even if it is only a few lines long. This is my naive view, though - does anyone out there have any insight as to why semicolons alone aren't sufficient to estimate code size?

<comment><USER4> > Seems like a poor decision to use whitespace as a factor in estimating code > size.

It's a heuristic. It's always going to be more poor in some respect that doing something precise. You could probably make it better in a million different ways, but it's suppose to be quick and simple.

<comment><USER5> to inline the parsing must be done. Once parsing is done there is no newlines and semicolons, only AST nodes. Counting AST nodes is very quick and simple and provides for much better heuristic.

<comment><USER4> > to inline the parsing must be done

Yes... that's the point. For your metric counting AST nodes you need to have parsed the method. The other heuristic works on unparsed source-code. So you don't waste time parsing a method that you won't inline.

> Counting AST nodes is very quick and simple

But parsing is neither. And you need to have done that first. I think (there's a paper I'm sure but can't find it) that parse time for JS applications is very substantial.

<comment><USER6> You don't want to inline functions that haven't been parsed. If it hasn't been called by the time you are JITing, then it probably isn't going to be on a hot path.

<comment><USER4> If it's been JITed then the AST may well have been discarded after the JIT completed! Doesn't V8 work like that today? You'll need to pass it again even if you have already parsed it!

It's not hard to think of worst-cases. Think about an enormous function that you would not want to inline. It's been JITed, or it's running in a byte code interpreter, and the AST has been discarded. In your scheme you'll have to parse it to find it's too big. Huge waste of time, if you can see it's too large from the source code.

<comment><USER6> You can't throw away your interpreter bytecode, because the JIT code needs to be able to bailout if a guard fails (e.g. if you specialized a var as an int and you get a non-int).

So you can always use the size of your bytecode as an inlining heuristic (which is what Chakra does).

Of course that wouldn't work before v8 had an interpreter, but they could have used other heuristics. For example, they could have used the size of the AST as a heuristic and saved that even after the AST gets thrown away.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> __builtin_constant_p is a rats nest of edge cases. We're looking into differences between implementation from gcc and clang now for the kernel.

<comment><USER7> Also, we're working on getting Clang's integrated assembler to assemble the Linux kernel, but there's a long tail of syntactic sugar and simpler basic things Clang has to implement as GAS from binutils is a defacto standard for assembler.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'd really like to see a comparison with clang's inliner. In my cases [1] gcc constexpr support was always horrible and clang decent. So I'm not sure if using the builtin assembler would fix the gcc situation.

1: [https://github.com/rurban/safeclib/blob/master/tests/perf_me...](https://github.com/rurban/safeclib/blob/master/tests/perf_memcpy_s.c)

<comment><USER7> So I think the inlining decisions in a compiler are some of the most heuristic-y parts of the compiler. There was a paper from Jeff Dean and some other Googlers recently that hinted that machine learned models might be the next leap forward in compiler technology, as a potential means of replacing these heuristics.

<comment><USER8> Machine learning? If some logic, than precise and reproducible please. Prolog would be nice, not some neural nets. gcc already has some nice lisp. Jeff Dean usually has good ideas, but not this one. ML would be more useful for a JIT, dynamic optimization problems at run-time.

But the problem is only the botched architecture, with non-manageable interdependencies. Of course inlining is the mother of all optimizations, most other optimization should be applied after inlining. But for inlining to be effective it has to run after constant folding. And then after inlining you have to run most optimization passes again to get the real benefits.

This problem is much simpler: Missing as-integration and a botched constexpr API. They should just take it from llvm.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Seems like those competitions where people write one-liners have their merits.

<comment><USER10> [https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pull/437](https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pull/437)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Ugh, all external links in this article go through the Google click tracker. :-/

Here are ungoogled URLs:

[https://elixir.bootlin.com/linux/v4.17/source/include/linux/...](https://elixir.bootlin.com/linux/v4.17/source/include/linux/jhash.h#L70)

[https://elixir.bootlin.com/linux/v4.17/source/include/net/ds...](https://elixir.bootlin.com/linux/v4.17/source/include/net/dst.h#L442)

[https://elixir.bootlin.com/linux/v4.17/source/include/linux/...](https://elixir.bootlin.com/linux/v4.17/source/include/linux/thread_info.h#L121)

[https://c9x.me/x86/html/file_module_x86_id_318.html](https://c9x.me/x86/html/file_module_x86_id_318.html)

[https://elixir.bootlin.com/linux/v4.17/source/arch/x86/inclu...](https://elixir.bootlin.com/linux/v4.17/source/arch/x86/include/asm/bug.h#L33)

[https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-4.0.1/gcc/Extended- Asm.ht...](https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-4.0.1/gcc/Extended-Asm.html)

[https://www.embecosm.com/appnotes/ean10/ean10-howto- llvmas-1...](https://www.embecosm.com/appnotes/ean10/ean10-howto- llvmas-1.0.html#idp109760)

[https://patchwork.kernel.org/patch/10450037/](https://patchwork.kernel.org/patch/10450037/)

[https://lkml.org/lkml/2018/10/4/25](https://lkml.org/lkml/2018/10/4/25)

[https://elixir.bootlin.com/linux/v4.17/source/include/linux/...](https://elixir.bootlin.com/linux/v4.17/source/include/linux/slab.h#L699)

[https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Other- Builtins.html](https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Other-Builtins.html)

[https://elixir.bootlin.com/linux/v4.17/source/arch/x86/kvm/v...](https://elixir.bootlin.com/linux/v4.17/source/arch/x86/kvm/vmx.c#L9669)

[https://elixir.bootlin.com/linux/v4.17/source/arch/x86/kvm/v...](https://elixir.bootlin.com/linux/v4.17/source/arch/x86/kvm/vmx.c#L706)

<comment><USER12> I was wondering why that'd be the case (usually the only reason these urls even pop up was because someone was copying urls from a google results page), then I saw this at the bottom:

>Made with the new Google Sites, an effortless way to create beautiful sites.

<comment><USER13> The idea is to prevent you from leaking the URL of your internal google sites page through the referer header. Maybe Google does some tracking, but the idea behind the redirect was for privacy, as I understand it. (Disclaimer: former Googler.)

<comment><USER14> There's usually a good _justification_ like this for features like these. The fact that every single such feature results in Google tracking more of your life is a mere coincidence.

<comment><USER13> I mean, they could just inject Javascript that detected that you clicked the link if tracking was the only goal. The fact that they prefer an HTTP redirect means there's more than just tracking involved.

It would be nice if they put a link to the privacy policy on the redirect page, so the intent was more clear.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Need to declutter? Don't bother - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/aug/12/need-to-declutter-dont-bother-oliver-burkeman <comment><USER2> Detached from reality, this article is.

If you're to the point where you're frequently buying stuff twice because it's too much work to find the instance you stored, you need to act - sooner rather than later - because this problem will compound as the piles get higher and deeper. Specifically you must either:

1) Just clear the vast bulk of it out, dump it since it's no longer functional as a compedium of stored goods. (this counts as decluttering.)

2) Resort, regroup and defragment your storage, using the opportunity to introduce more transparent containers and push what you're likely to need toward the front. (this counts as decluttering.)

3) Go through nearly everything and thin out the piles, probably drastically. This process will both reaquaint you with where stuff actually is and will mean you can get to the stuff you actually need. (this counts as decluttering.)

4) Most likely, both 2 and 3 above. (this is what most people call decluttering.)

So yes, you're going to declutter or suffer from not doing so.</comment>


A Unified Theory of Garbage Collection [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~cs415/reading/bacon-garbage.pdf <comment><USER2> See also Michael Bernstein's articles and talks on the subject, including the paper linked: [http://michaelrbernste.in/2013/06/10/to-know-a-garbage- colle...](http://michaelrbernste.in/2013/06/10/to-know-a-garbage-collector- goruco-2013.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> Garbage collection is quite similar to view maintenance in databases (or more specifically reason maintenance / truth maintenance). Especially the fact that they found a least fix-point formulation of the problem hints at strong similarity with computing and maintaining fixpoints in deductive databases - that is computing and maintaining materialized views from some base facts and rules (a distinction that does not need to be made; base facts can be seen as special kinds of rules).

In view maintenance, there are various counting algorithms known since around 30 years - for example the PF (Propagate and Filter) algorithm, or DRed (derive-rederive) algorithm. One difference is that in garbage collection you always have the whole graph: edges and vertices, while in view maintenance you typically have only the vertices. That gives rise to the "proof traces" method of view/reason maintenance where you build up the whole graph and keep the edges even though they are useful only for maintenance (or for explanation).

The distinction of tracing garbage collection vs. reference counting garbage collection could be also seen as sort of analogous to the difference between forward chaining and backward chaining in datalog or rule systems in general.

It seems like another case where bigger awareness of results from different but related fields could help to bear fruit much faster. This paper in particular seems like something that could have been inspired by the old view maintenance research. Maybe there still are some opportunities left for transferring results from one of the fields to the other.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is a beautiful result that I've written up and spoken about a few times - [http://michaelrbernste.in/2014/02/24/papers-we-love- garbage....](http://michaelrbernste.in/2014/02/24/papers-we-love-garbage.html) \- it's surprisingly deep and foments a deep intuition that may developers have.

</comment><comment><USER5> There are some neat hybrids of GC and RC as well. This is probably state of the art in this area: [https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&ei=xkTDU- GU...](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&ei=xkTDU- GUCtOkyAT-4oKIDQ&url=http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/mckinley/papers/rcix- oopsla-2013.pdf&cd=5&ved=0CC8QFjAE&usg=AFQjCNF44hAyxlBLnQO2xh527_TGA7_vDQ)

Conceptually, the key insight is that both GC and RC involve tracing. In GC you trace from live roots to find survivors. In RC, you trace from newly dead objects to find others that should also become dead. This has interesting implications when you combine the algorithms in a generational collector.

Imagine the following steady state situation. You're allocating at X MB/sec, with a young-generation survival rate of 0.1X. Consequently, this is the allocation rate into the old generation. Since we're in a steady state, this is also the death rate in the old generation. If you use GC in the young generation and RC in the old generation, you'll trace 0.2X MB per second. This holds true even for an extremely large old generation live size. You'll never have to trace the whole heap during an old-generation collection, just the objects that die during that interval. And if you're in a steady-state, this will be proportional to your allocation rate, not your heap size.

Now, ideally, in a tracing GC you can get your work down to being proportional to your allocation rate, but this requires, even ideally, a heap sized at 2x the maximum live size. With an RC old generation, you can get away with a heap not much bigger than your live size.

There are also certain advantages in terms of concurrent collection. The nice thing about tracing dead objects is that they are never mutated. So you do it concurrently with the application without worrying about mutations of the object graph, like a concurrent mark-sweep collector has to. The downside is that the write barrier is more complicated. See: [https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&ei=wEnDU_23...](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&ei=wEnDU_23BZGwyATqpoGwDQ&url=http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm%3Fid%3D504309&cd=3&ved=0CCMQFjAC&usg=AFQjCNEhxDpi- _L4vd9bjlSEpBv_XIXc-Q)

<comment><USER6> It is strange, because you are almost exactly restating the central thesis of the paper, but phrasing it as though you are saying something different.

<comment><USER5> Posting a tl;dr of a theory paper you read years ago is low-hanging karma. ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> still of the opinion that this is not a problem to solve with algorithms but with just doing your god damned job and accepting that some of it is mindless chore work and that it requires some basic level of attention to detail and skill.

my software doesn't leak and it doesn't take forever to develop and its easy to debug memory problems because the architecture is trivial.

<comment><USER8> Some important programming paradigms are extremely hard or near-to-impossible without GC. See functional or concurrent lockless programming. Sure, for many imperative programs you can get away with simple memory management schemes like RAII.

<comment><USER9> I'd make your same observation. Like the parent, I'm proud of my imperative code and never used to consider memory management a particularly onerous task. I was brought up on it y'know, just a part of writing good code.

But then I started Lisp in earnest, found GC useful (necessary!) there, and more recently have gone functional with Clojure. Couldn't do without GC now.

One of these days perhaps we'll have concurrent collectors a la Azul, running on a specialized core/MMU on some multiprocessor SoC, and GC will fade into the background and nobody will care so much about performance.

Hey, I can dream.</comment></comment></comment>


FRT – A Godot "platform" targeting single-board computers - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/efornara/frt <comment><USER2> This seems to add support for the raspberry pi (and similar) to the Godot game engine.

Technically rpi mostly runs Linux and Godot already has full Linux support. I don't understand his description but I think he uses opengl without X for best performance on these low end devices.

<comment><USER3> We're still waiting for an explanation of what Godot is ...

<comment><USER4> For those who missed the joke ... [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waiting_for_Godot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waiting_for_Godot)

<comment><USER5> I've actually learned about the play because of all the references to it whenever this engine is mentioned :-P

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> You might want to avoid hosting files on Sourceforge since a lot of people tend to be wary of downloading anything from there.

<comment><USER5> Sourceforge changed hands in 2016 and was bought by someone who wanted to clean it up, see [https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/4n3e1s/the_state_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/4n3e1s/the_state_of_sourceforge_since_its_acquisition_in/) (2016) and [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17281879](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17281879) (2018).

TBH personally _as a user_ i prefer the Sourceforge UI to Github one since it is clearly user oriented. I wrote about it last year or so: [https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/7p9prs/introdu...](https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/7p9prs/introducing_the_new_sourceforge_ui_and_github/dsg0cu0/)

<comment><USER7> Eh, they should have announced that a little more publicly, as their reputation is still garbage for most people...And they still have download buttons for ADs that are styled like the real download, so how would we know ::rolls eyes::

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wonder if this is related: [https://twitter.com/w84death/status/1152511872001892352?s=20](https://twitter.com/w84death/status/1152511872001892352?s=20)</comment>


How to Brag at Work - <AUTHOR> https://www.careerfair.io/reviews/howtobragatwork <comment><USER2> This is very useful advice. Managers have a difficult time remembering all your accomplishments from memory - and often recency bias takes over. Having data that documents your wins is very helpful during performance reviews.

I would go one step further and say that if you collaborated with someone both should make it a point to jointly document the win - which also helps during with peer reviews.

</comment><comment><USER3> Better to communicate with co-workers as equals/peers. Bragging is not necessary if people are aware of what everyone is working on and for what reasons, because the group's overall goal is what ultimately matters, not the status of each member.

There is a very good book on leadership and how to be a team member by the astronaut Chris Hadfield ("An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth"): [https://www.amazon.com/dp/0316253030](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0316253030). It's a worthwhile read because if everyone tried to be as professional as an astronaut then most workplaces would be fantastic places to work. That book has generally good advice that is applicable in every workplace where teamwork is required to accomplish a bigger goal (which I figure is almost every workplace these days).

<comment><AUTHOR> 100% agree on communicating as an equal with coworkers - my article points more towards recording wins regularly as a way to do better work in the long run. Will check out the book! :)

<comment><USER3> Yes, taking good notes and having a good system of review and summarization is a very good skill.

Which note taking application do you use? I couldn't tell from the article if a specific application was mentioned.

<comment><AUTHOR> Didn't mention anything specific, but I use a regular google doc that I just update on a weekly basis. It does the job for me.

<comment><USER3> Makes sense. Most people I know do the same.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>