Once - <AUTHOR> http://nbashaw.com/post/22658840550/once <comment><USER3> > Normal people are pessimists [ _about new ideas_ ]

It's not that they're pessimists, it's just that they aren't interested in new ideas.

I'm reading _Guns, germs and steel_ , and it notes one advantage of European civilization was that it had access to large mammals that were easily domesticated, and one of the ways in which they were easy to domesticate was that they are hierarchically organized socially, and "follow the leader". This helps, because humans just needed to insert themselves at the top of the hierarchy to control the herd/pack.

I'd realized some time ago that we ourselves are also domesticated, but just this morning, in watching a dog cross the road following its owner, I realized that human beings themselves are socially hierarchical, and this makes us easier to domesticate, and _easier to control._

We have been controlled by gods/priests, within militaries, within corporations, within sports, taste in movies, TV, reddit memes, pop music, pop psychology, political movements, the habit of obedience we have towards the law, scientific paradigms, by intellectual ideas, by principles - even free- thinking intellectual radicals have leaders they read and follow. Marketers try to identify influencers, thought-leaders, trend-setters. If you control the top of the hierarchy, the rest will follow.

So it's not that normal people are pessimists about new ideas, it's just that they follow what the leader of their hierarchy follows. It takes time for an idea to get to that point, and by then it's no longer "new". Even within startups, there is a great deal of this - people follow the _popular_ companies, brands, products, personalities, from Apple to vim to lisp to Alan Kay. They have religious wars.

The human being who really does follow a new idea for its own sake is rare and in a straightforward biological sense, is not normal.

<comment><USER4> Have an upvote, which in this case does not specifically express agreement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> That's only true when the cost of failure is low. That's a small, but very important caveat.

That being said, I don't buy the "entrepreneurship is very risky" line. I think it's a lot less risky than many other careers that are commonly considered "safe".

<comment><USER6> Yep, easy to say failing is cheap on paper. But once you experience it, it feels morally excruciating. Hard to come back from a couple of failures

<comment><USER7> True that. Losing money hurts, and will always be connected psychologically to that 'failure'.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb (<http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com>) in his book "The Black Swan" talks about one of his friends, a stock trader, with a very specific strategy. This strategy involves losing lots of small amounts over time, and once every 6 years or so, one enormous win. He explained that his trader friend needed to check his track record continuously to remind him of the actual benefit of this strategy, because even the small losses were eating away at him. Up to a point where he wanted to give up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It is incredibly difficult for me to express how much I hate this kind of smug startup boosterism. There are hundreds, thousands, millions of reasons not to start a startup that don't have a goddamned thing to do with pessimism. It's like you've never met, talked to, or considered the possibility of the existence of anyone who isn't caught up in the silicon valley echo-chamber.

Your dreams do not make you morally superior. Your ambition does not make you a better person. It does not make you smarter than everyone else. It doesn't make you immoral, a bad person, or stupid either. Having the maturity and humility to recognize that everyone chooses their own path for their own reasons, many of which are beyond their control, is the only way we can possibly relate to other human beings and live a humane existence.

<comment><USER9> I agree with almost everything you have said, with the exception of one principle.

The drive/desire/ambition to do 'better' DOES make you a better person. The people with that quality are the ones who've provided every major improvement in quality of life around the world.

<comment><USER8> _note_ : had a totally different answer here which I decided I did not like. Apologies.

I had a lot of difficulty replying to your comment. I feel intuitively that it's wrong, but it's hard to articulate why.

I guess there are a couple of problems:

a) ambition often drives both good and harmful behavior. Because of this, I feel that ambition is morally neutral.

b) I rankle at the notion that people can be "better" than one another, except in extreme circumstances. Is Mark Zuckerberg better for inventing Facebook, or is my dad better for making a career of healing people's marriages and personal problems through psychotherapy? My dad likes what he does, and is successful, but those who know him would not describe him as ambitious per se. Personally, I believe that Mark Zuckerberg and my father do what they do for their own reasons, and not out of altruism or a desire to make a better world. Or maybe they both do what they do out of a desire to make a better world. I don't think either of them is better than the other.

<comment><USER10> Do you think someone can be worse than someone else? That someone can be selfish, inconsiderate, have only interests in making things better for themselves, regardless of how it may negatively impact others? Do you think there's different degrees of how much worse someone can be? I'd suggest that _if_ you do, then this also implies that people can be better than others to varying degrees.

<comment><USER8> Well, my main point in my comment is that choosing a different occupation or choosing a different company to work at doesn't make you a better person.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I appreciate and believe in the message, but perhaps it's time to consider the quote:

 _a startup exit is opium for ambitious techies_

That's not to say you shouldn't go for it, just make sure it's not your opium in life.

<comment><USER12> You also have to go into it with your eyes open, because your deal is not going to improve from what you negotiate at the start. Not all startup exits are life-changing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> There are lots of real problems actually. I think this is a better explanation:

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

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

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

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm sorry - I just don't understand (a) why this is a blog post, and then (b) why it was submitted here. This reads like a comment on someone else's blog, or a "note to self", or a Facebook status update. And yet, here we are - <USER2> has 33 upvotes as I write this. I wish there was some way we could say, "only count votes from accounts older than 1 year" in the "points" so we could see just how much influence the newbies have in story votes.

<comment><USER15> "only count votes from accounts older than 1 year"

I think pg indulged us in this experiment. IIRC the front page was pretty much the same.

<comment><USER16> It's available at: <http://news.ycombinator.com/classic>

<comment><USER17> and note this post is front page there as well...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I don't think the statistics are accurate. They may apply for most of us out there but once you're on the train, the odds could be better for you (or worse of course).

I've seen people succeeding in several areas two or three times in a row, which means they don't apply to the 99% of failure each time. Maybe it's a matter of starting to know things from the inside and the odds could easily switch to your favor.

Besides, pessimism is rarely followed by success.

</comment><comment><USER19> Unless you run out of liquidity before you are right once.

</comment><comment><USER20> I'm approaching finding employment the same way. You only have 1 career, after all. Sending your resume to fifty places you wouldn't enjoy working at serves no purpose other than diluting your efforts. Put 100% of your time and mental capacity into only a small number of paths is best. Being wrong a few times is fine, but being wrong without giving it your best shot is what you'll regret.

</comment><comment><USER21> Companies like instagram, when they hit high profile exits, only add fuel to the fire that is hordes of decent people that would otherwise be excellent, productive, happy employees, wanting to play the startup lottery.

I don't know much about startup financing economics, but when it comes to talented people, it seems to me like there is a huge bubble.

Thought experiment time. Suppose you have a 1% chance of cashing out spectacularly enough to live off the proceeds for the rest of your life, and provide for your children too. You need to get 69 "at bats" before you have more than a 50% chance of winning (.99^69 is about .49983). Are you going to start 69 startups before you die? No? Then please, unless you really have a good idea, just go work for someone else (even if it's a startup), you'll be happier. I know, I know, execution is everything, but you _do_ need a good idea to execute.

</comment><comment><USER22> My dad asked me once why I would ever leave my good paying Finance job to start a company with a 1% statistical chance of success. I told him that if you want to belong to the top 1% you have to take the 1% chance of success.

<comment><USER21> Your company has a 1% chance of success? Where do I sign up?

<comment><USER22> haha we're still on stealth mode but we're building a system that will open online payments to the rest of the world. We mean EVERYONE!. 80-90% of people in emerging market economies have no access to online payments because they don't have bank accounts or credit cards. Our system will bypass that requirement and just enable people to accept payments immediately, it's that simple. Of course we are willing to discuss/brainstorm our ideas with other entrepreneurs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> i expanded on this idea in a recent blog post: the psychology of tackling hard problems

<http://davidvaldman.com/post/20027940591/psychofhardproblems>

</comment><comment><USER24> This is an okay blog. I am enjoying the entries.

</comment><comment><USER25> Gambling is generally considered bad.

<comment><USER26> You think so? I think Gambling irresponsibly is considered bad, but Gambling if you can afford it is pretty fun.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> That's true, you only need to be right once. But you may end up being right zero times.

<comment><USER7> Try naught, get naught.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I don't click on any links that are not descriptive enough, mr nbashaw. Please, when you submit your link please describe or hint at what exactly I will see if I will follow the link.

<comment><AUTHOR> "Once" isn't a news story. It's something you already know but need to be reminded of from time to time. Giving it a functionally descriptive title would spoil the effect.</comment></comment>


What is the best open source Hamachi alternative? - <AUTHOR> Have tried tinc, OpenVPN, SocialVPN and few others. None seem to have the NAT traversal abilities of Hamachi. Is Hamachi still the best? <comment><USER2> I'm not sure of the others, but it should work fine in OpenVPN. The configuration for it documented, if a little bit of work to get going. I've been using it for many years, having switched from Hamachi back in 2007 or so.

<comment><AUTHOR> The problem I've always had with OpenVPN is that it seems to break down when you are behind the router running the OpenVPN server. I can get an 10.0.0.1 IP on the WAN but not on the LAN. I've asked this question in the OpenVPN forum, but never got a response so I am still using Hamachi. Still looking...

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I haven't used it yet, but check out [http://www.freelan.org/](http://www.freelan.org/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Have looked at it but configuration behind NAT router is a bear. Guess there is a reason LogMeIn bought Hamachi. Not trivial to authenticate and tunnel behind NAT.</comment></comment>


MIT dean to start new university: "No majors, no lectures, no classrooms" - <AUTHOR> http://tech.mit.edu/V135/N38/ortiz.html <comment><USER3> I think what we need are apprenticeships. I.e. a prominent research group hires kids after the remedial first two years of traditional college curriculum (or something like it plus a couple of years in an entry level job), and has them work on the actual problems at hand, filling the knowledge gaps as needed. It is no longer possible to know much of anything, so we should specialize and diversify at the same time, meaning that these students should be working at the seams between the fields: EE/CS, CS/Statistics, CS/Genetics, CS/Mechanical engineering etc. Further specialization should occur along the lines of whether the student would like to be a researcher, or have a more employable and practical set of skills. I never got much value out of lectures: few people can sustain rapt attention for hours a day. Most of what I know comes from the books. What I did get a lot of value from is working with people who know what they're doing, and from doing things myself, perhaps with their guidance and help. If this is heavily emphasized in this new model, I'm all for it.

<comment><USER4> I could not possibly agree with you more, having basically lived through this. When I look at the current tuition rates for my alma mater, Northeastern University, it makes me cringe. However, the fact that the default experience at Northeastern requires a student to undergo multiple "co-ops", 6 month paid internships, is genuinely a smart thing in my mind.

By the time I had graduated, I had work experience in embedded systems, a criminal justice stats analysis lab, the Red Sox, and a counter terrorism research center in DC. And that's all well and good, but the most important thing I took from it was that it taught me very quickly which sectors I _did not_ want to work in.

You often come out of high school with this idealized version of what it would be like to work in X field. To learn what that field is really like, and to learn if it's something you truly want to pursue, is a huge win in my mind for an undergraduate.

<comment><USER3> Another thing that could be helpful is not forcing kids to go to school when they're 18. They have no clue whatsoever what they want to do with their lives and by and large motivation to truly learn something is very much lacking. Or at least I lacked it. My MSc with honors is a feat of willpower more than anything else, I ended up using maybe 10% of the knowledge I acquired in those years. Now if my career started in some kind of an apprenticeship situation, you can bet I'd have plenty of motivation to master the field. That's more or less what happened after college, except it's completely backwards from what it should be, and it's extremely wasteful: I ended up learning (and then, of course, forgetting) a ton of not even remotely useful stuff in hopes that I'd need it when I actually have a proper job. Some might say this is well rounded education, but I'd rather do it by choice, and not arbitrarily. The meta point is, traditional education is really broken, and it has been for decades. It's good that someone has the guts to go against the flow and do even a modicum of rethinking. Academic community is extremely clique-y and conservative, so it takes non-trivial courage to pursue something like this.

<comment><USER5> At 18 most kids have extremely strong passion about what they want to do. I know I did. I was wrong (maths vs computer science). But persuading them to take a break from that is going to be hard.

<comment><USER6> > most

My experience says the opposite.

<comment><USER7> In my experience, there are three groups of kids in high school, at least concerning future studies/employment.

One group maybe wants to do something because it pays well, with no motivation because they aren't passionate.

The next group is very passionate about one or two things, and have lots of motivation. However, they seem to view that as the only option, even though more likely than not it will change and shift.

The third group has motivation to do work that is interesting, but they have know idea what to specialize in and have a few things they don't want to do. They aren't necessarily good at it all, and it's overwhelming to think about plans for the future because of the open-ended nature of that question to them.

This is what I've observed. And of course, people change between these groups all the time.

<comment><USER8> The first group are mercenaries. They usually end up in finance, management, law, sales or some other (mostly) boring job, then politics.

The second group are crusaders. They begin a quest for fulfillment of their working potential, usually despite their parent's advice, in anything they deem challenging (even in the same management or law as the first group, but for different reasons).

The last group are peasants. These will either be stepping on their parent's footsteps (or following anything they are being sold by their entourage actually), or will feel themselves lost and helpless.

...and I noticed that people change between these groups too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The only point of a modern day university is that they are (a) exclusive, and (b) "guarantee" that students "know" what they are "taught". That's at least what people who hire think.

I remember someone saying "It wouldn't matter if MIT only taught basket weaving as long as they still had such a thorough selection process". This holds true here. People only care about the pedigree of your degree, it's substance comes second in my experience.

<comment><USER10> _" guarantee" that students "know" what they are "taught"_

That used to be the case, but now corporations require you to pass their own exam before they hire you. Let that sink in a moment. No longer are the universities taken at their word about their product.

For some of you it has never been any different, but this change came about more or less when I was teaching at university/college. Some of us saw this as a quite profound change.

In my view, that was the first signal of the beginning of the inevitable disruption of modern higher ed.

<comment><USER11> It's surprising that it's taking so long. The wealthiest have always found ways to preserve their wealth and Ivy League institutions have played a role in that. Take some smart people, a lot of people that are good at fitting the mold that looks best, mix your rich kids in there and call the paint one color.

Remember, George W. Bush (all politics aside, just looking at him in terms of intellectual prowess) graduated from Harvard and got his M.B.A from Yale. That's one easily identifiable example but you can find many. And then you ask yourself, if you can take a bus that size through a fortress wall, can you still call it a fortress wall? And then it's clear for what it is -- decoration. Worse: it's signalling, which is the opposite of a meritocracy.

<comment><USER12> What do you _really_ know about George W. Bush?

[http://keithhennessey.com/2013/04/24/smarter/](http://keithhennessey.com/2013/04/24/smarter/)

<comment><USER13> If Bush is that smart, what does that tell us about his questionable decisions on other things? Why start a war in Iraq based on WMD's that weren't there, and a government that was not in league with Osama bin Laden? Why start dragnet surveillance? Why let the CIA torture people? Why do the ridiculous tax cuts at the same time we're spending big dollar on a war?

If Bush is that smart, he must have good motives for those things, or if not good motive, hidden motives.

<comment><USER14> you should really parse the WMD stuff over again. The history on this is as follows: Post Iran-Iraq war Hussein had a WMD development program, and then the UN inspections regime came and put several of them "under seal". In the runup to the Iraq war, the US repeatedly asked where these sealed WMDs were and Hussein refused to disclose where they were or allow inspectors to see them, and the US spun that as implying that he COULD use them to supply terrorists with WMD (technically true, unlikely to actually happen). Ultimately, after invading the US found them, and they were still "under the UN seal", unable to be used in any military context.

The US also never argued that there was a direct connection with Bin Laden, just that Iraq was covertly supporting terrorism. Which is similarly flimsy, limitedly true, and definitely manipulative of the US public.

So, the Bush administration was incredibly deft at taking minor truths and spinning them in the public's mind as molehills that justified bigger action. Not to justify their actions, but in the strictest sense, Iraq did have WMDs, and Iraq did support terrorists.

<comment><USER15> And why did Hussein refuse to disclose where the WMDs where or allow inspectors to see them? Because he wanted to bluff neighboring countries (primarily Iran, I believe) into thinking that he had them and would use them in a pinch. But that bluff ran into the US's desire to control who had WMDs, with disastrous results.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The current system was created for a reason: because for most people, it works.

I ran a language learning group for a couple of years and we tried many different styles of learning.

With no structure, most people flounder. Unless you already learned the material and just need it for review, it really doesn't work well.

The best was complete structure: tests, lesson plans, and homework. Most people are passive. They want a teacher to lead them and guide them through the learning process.

No structure will work with people that have the same discipline required to start a company, because they don't need someone telling them what to do.

<comment><USER17> > Most people are passive. They want a teacher to lead them and guide them > through the learning process.

Bull. Most people have any interest in learning beaten out of them by our crappy factory/prison like educational system. Because you know what's not conducive to learning? Having no choice as far as subjects; having no choice how long you spend on them; having no choice on who to learn from; having no choice who you learn with.

PG has a classic essay on makers vs managers on scheduling, and he places emphasis on how for work like programming, getting into the material takes time. I see no reason this wouldn't apply to learning. How much work would most developers get done if they had their day broken into 50 minute segments, five minute transition times, and six different projects they were required to work on every day with equal consistency?

My mother runs a Montessori preschool. Consistently, the kids that go off to first grade come back with stories of attending traditional school and wondering when they get to start doing something instead of sitting at their desk. Or when they can do something new instead of going through material they already know with the class. This is not to say Montessori is a perfect system - but it was actually designed with the education of children in mind, rather than efficiency from a bureaucratic perspective.

It bothers me greatly when someone blames the nature of people for problems that are systemic in nature - it feels no different from the ridiculous number of ADHD diagnoses we have these days, which seems to largely stem from not giving kids space to be kids.

<comment><USER18> I disagree. I think most people need structure. It may be from personal issues or life issues, but most people need that guidance.

<comment><USER19> Structure and motivation are needed to learn about subjects you are not passionate about. For those things that make your heart race faster, structure is a hindrance.

However, to have real mastery of a subject (say, Computer Science), will require you to suffer through parts of the curriculum that don't seem interesting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This kind of hippiesque, free-spirit approach sounds fine for MIT-level students, but I have my doubts that this model can be effective beyond those highly driven individuals.

Also, while I agree that you don't need a college degree to be a successful programmer or business person, most other science professions require some sort of structured learning environment and equipment to effectively teach students.

Maybe I'm dumb and this professor is onto something. She has a degree in material sciences, so perhaps she knows first-hand that all the knowledge you need to learn advanced chemistry can be gained by someone with a garage and aspirations.

<comment><USER21> > I have my doubts that this model can be effective beyond those highly driven > individuals.

C.f. Punished By Rewards.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I like the idea of project based learning. I think it will end up being a more lasting method of instruction.

I am interested in how they will still teach the breadth of the subject matter.

For example, you can get a lot of work done with linear algebra without really understanding vector spaces.

I assume this method of instruction would require more teacher-student interaction to be effective. The teacher could review the student progress on a project and make a note of where the application of a new technique would be helpful. Guiding the student towards a more complete understanding of a subject.

<comment><USER23> Yes you are right. This sort of teaching is very effective, but very expensive. The reason we have the current system we do is because it is the cheapest solution that somewhat works.

<comment><USER24> Except our current solution has become very expensive. Perhaps we need to move out of our local maxima of education if people are willing to pay so much.

<comment><USER23> You can basically do this now if you really want. There are heaps of adjunct lecturers who will provide one-on-one or small group tutorials for cash. Wave a few thousand dollars a term in front of some starving adjunct and you will get exactly the education you desire.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Maybe I'm wrong - and I kind of hope I am, as there's a noble motive behind this movement - but I always feel that people are focusing too much on IT and the stories of a guy who became a full-blown IT professional learning by himself, Google and open courseware.

I think this kind of approach to learning works for IT, because a) the logistics to learn it are easier to handle; but mostly because b) most IT jobs actually don't require a degree - or "degree-deserving" knowlege; most programming is "trade-school"-like knowledge.

<comment><USER26> So all of those people with psychology and business degrees are going into jobs that require "degree deserving knowledge"? If you're going to say something special about a particular field, at least compare it to something else otherwise the statement is meaningless.

<comment><USER25> I didn't mean to talk about the field in general. Computer science is, beyond doubt, "degree deserving knowledge". I just meant that most IT jobs don't require such knowledge and, in my opinion, would benefit from a more flexible approach to teaching. Something more trade school-like.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> We don't need a "new" university system. We need to update our expectation about higher education and the work force. Let's start but dropping our mantra that everyone should go to college.

Here's another: Maybe not everyone should even go to high school.

<comment><USER28> But everyone should go to high school. Hell, if you aren't going to college I do hope there is an extended high school. I don't care if its taxpayer sponsored but even high school is not enough to foster a critical thinking process.

I picked that up somewhere between high school and end of college. Some people may be faster than me but that skill is really important.

Either that, or you don't get to vote.

Edit: The last statement was more about the ability to think critically and less about if you finished high school/college.

<comment><USER26> >Either that, or you don't get to vote.

What? Graduating from school (highschool or university) is about learning how to follow directions and play the game. To say that a degree somehow guarantees that a person knows how to think critically is ludicrous.

But you're not even making such a modest claim, you're actually claiming that it is the only way to assure people can think critically (even though it's not even a valid way to begin with). Some of us can think critically as children. Do you honestly believe just because you couldn't think critically until you were an adult, that means that hundreds of millions of people that you've never met should be forced into the same fruitless, and arbitrary indoctrination you had to undergo to become adequate in your own eyes?

Are you aware of how absolutely stupid school seems to people who are really, really smart? [http://www.lambdassociates.org/blog/bipolar.htm](http://www.lambdassociates.org/blog/bipolar.htm)

<comment><USER29> I can't say I've ever been convinced that those who rant against school are "really, really smart". Mostly they just sound like people who are insecure in their choices.

<comment><USER26> I'm not talking about people who "rant against school". I also hope that you realize that my post was not a "rant against school", but a rant against taking away millions of people's right to vote just because they didn't learn how to shut up and do what they're told. The people I'm referring to would likely not rant about school, because they likely wouldn't have graduated or even attended in the first place. When I see people ranting it is usually people who have taken on debt via student loans.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> It's exciting to see some thought and movement at this level.

The existing system is broken when it comes to actual student knowledge. A lot of systems are to fault, but as the modern university has bowed to their corporate overlords in filling the pipeline of modern corporate key punchers, college has essentially become tech school for Power Point and Excel in a lot of cases.

So many of our current college students would be so much better served by tech school.

Heck, so much of this community often ends up eschewing college at large to go build something - often because the value proposition of the university model right now simply doesn't make sense.

We're always going to need people who can think - maybe a bifurcated path where a lot of our university experience returns more to a true liberal arts education.

This experience-based model wouldn't have been out of place historically. That it appears so revolutionary to us today shows how broken the current model is.

Something has to change. I'm excited to see some movement around the borders.

</comment><comment><USER31> The "42" (school) seems very promising, it's a private French computer programming school created and funded by Xavier Niel.

To apply, there is no degree or diploma requirement, and it's completely free.

The training focuses on project-based learning via a peer-to-peer pedagogy and allows students to set their own pace for learning.

IMO The 42 school is not research-oriented, but rather emphasizes practical training suited to the needs of startups.

www.42.fr

</comment><comment><USER32> Sounds quite a bit like a more radical version of Olin College of Engineering not too far from MIT.

From what I've seen that sort of education is more accepted by industry than academia so its a good solution for me. Having an expansive portfolio to show is a very powerful thing.

</comment><comment><USER33> It would be interesting to compose your own 'major' program out of smaller granularity subject modules. So e.g. if one were interested in majoring in robotics, you could assemble a study program of something like basic CS, basic MechE, basic EE, then stack some other intermediate level subjects modules on top... Controls, Visual processing, etc...

<comment><USER34> Interesting, but maybe not all that useful. The purpose of a major is to give others an implicit idea of what you studied. If I say I have a major in Robotics, then everyone can infer what that consisted of, even if it varies across universities (in which case that knowledge usually disseminates). What happens when I say I majored in robotics, but I failed to actually include anything on the hardware side of it and only really studied AI and control algorithms?

<comment><USER33> A company hiring someone out of this new kind of university would look at projects the student worked on as well as their subject modules. But large projects can get fuzzy as to what the specific contributions might be, and the subject modules then give you an idea of that candidates background skill spread. So if the company were looking for someone in robotics for more of the software side, then it would be apparent from the studied modules that they might be a good fit.

But more than that, it would give universities a model to continue creating a range of advanced or specialized subject modules. This would allow students or employees to come back and pickup new subject modules in a more integrated way to how the whole university operates.

<comment><USER29> Unless it becomes the norm, what's more likely is that they'd just ignore people from that university unless they had a good reason not to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I wonder how she plans to teach them mathematics. I've yet to see anyone learn math on the job. The difference between a technician and an engineer is the latter knows the math.

</comment><comment><USER36> Something that concerns me, unless I missed it, is that there is no mention of the liberal arts. What is described here is closer to my view of what a university should be. (I'm in year 14 as a professor.) I think it would be a huge mistake, though, to not have a liberal arts core.

</comment><comment><USER37> Sounds like a hacker house. Why call it a university if it doesn't grant degrees?

<comment><USER38> Honestly it probably makes it more acceptable to the "everyone needs to go to college" crowd. Trade schools have been around for a while, but for some reason people think you need a "university degree" to get anywhere. I assume they are trying to bridge that mental gap by using similar language to that of traditional colleges / universities.

Also "trade schools" and / or specialty schools rarely have the same social aspects of a traditional school, which (even if you personally don't value that) is a big selling point for traditional schools. Maybe they are trying to capture some of that and mix it with the specialization of a trade school.

All speculation of course, but seems reasonable I think.

<comment><USER9> Honestly, I wish there were major respected trade schools that taught CS/Software Engineering/IT/IS. The university environment, in my opinion, is adverse to the development of good CS knowledge.

Most of us on here, I'd say, have learned through trying and experimentation and that is why we are fairly good at what we proclaim to do.

University doesn't foster that kind of understanding.

I also hate that currently I need to take 5 physics classes, an accounting class, a social sciences class, and 3 "study" classes to get my major.

<comment><USER39> I think you're missing the point here.

Those physics classes will teach you to think about problems abstractly. In my experience, my knowledge of physics has helped me think about algorithmic problems significantly. Even if you don't use the physics itself, it's good to learn.

The accounting might not help you so much for CS, but it could be useful. And a few liberal arts classes are always good for breadth of education, and making you realize that you can always pick up a good book and read it, and that not everything you do has to be so math and science oriented.

Also, for the record, what you would learn at a trade school would be "programming". What they teach at university is "computer science". There is a pretty serious distinction, and I don't really believe you can learn computer science properly without a formal education (even if that comes from self- studying formal books - but teaching yourself javascript is _not_ computer science).

<comment><USER40> >Those physics classes will teach you to think about problems abstractly

So do the classes on computer science and algorithms. The reason universities choose to teach those things using physics classes instead of logic class or algorithms class are just historical accidents.

>And a few liberal arts classes are always good for breadth of education, and making you realize that you can always pick up a good book and read it

You can get that for almost free at a bookstore or a library.

<comment><USER39> Yes, the traditional courses do teach you that as well - to some extent - <USER2> the point is it's important to see how different fields do it. I think my classes in algorithms are as useful to my research in physics as my classes in physics are to my research in algorithms.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I love projects, I hate school. Lots of details to work out (and questions of scale), but still sounds very promising and exciting. Not sure I understand the "no majors" bit though.

</comment><comment><USER42> A one year sabbatical to start a new university, where her long-term commitment depends on its progress after just one year.

Doesn't inspire much trust to prospective students...

</comment><comment><USER29> Sounds like a cool idea, and I wholeheartedly support attempts to distribute education so that all can benefit and contribute to the sum of human knowledge.

However, one of the primary reasons for higher education (for better or for worse), is to get a job. Currently, most places are going to ask for your degree, or experience. What's someone coming out of this program going to have? And how long until most employers accept it?

</comment><comment><USER43> I personally think that's a highly interesting project. Is there any way to get regular updates on the progress?

</comment><comment><USER44> Sounds similar to Hampshire College in western Massachusetts.

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

The College is widely known for its alternative curriculum, socially liberal politics, focus on portfolios rather than distribution requirements, and reliance on narrative evaluations instead of grades and GPAs. In some fields, it is among the top undergraduate institutions in percentage of graduates who enroll in graduate school. Fifty-six percent of its alumni have at least one graduate degree and it is ranked 30th among all US colleges in the percentage of its graduates who go on to attain a doctorate degree (notably first among history doctorates).

</comment><comment><USER45> Personally I love this idea. If I could send my high junior there I would in a heartbeat. But I learn by doing. Pattern for me is do, learn, do learn, repeat until complete. Never cared for the learn learn learn, forget 90%, now do.

</comment><comment><USER46> "I'm looking at a new model, where the whole sort of vocabularity is different"

Impressive! Creating a new word in the same sentence you declare you'll be using new words. Assuming I understand her cromulent new word.

</comment><comment><USER47> I have had the idea lately that liberal arts universities should be replaced with a year or two of critical thinking, logic, and emotional intelligence training.

These are the skills necessary to enter the "modern" economy outside of STEM and trades, where the most valuable skills are thinking and emotional intelligence (relationship development and management).

Link up with progressive employers who recognize the value of this training and are willing to take on young graduates and unleash them on their own internal domain knowledge for a couple of years.

</comment><comment><USER48> This sounds overly dreamy. At the very least, their new "university" should bother to award degrees when specific breadth-and-depth levels of knowledge are adequately demonstrated.

<comment><USER49> Do you have an email address I could use to get ahold of you. I have a question about a post you made a few years back.

<comment><USER48> I do think my HN profile lists my email address, but if it doesn't, it's "$firstname.lastname@example.com".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> ...So long as she wasn't the one that killed SICP.

</comment><comment><USER51> Everything about this sounds like how an university use to work. I for one will back this idea. Nothing will stop a person from getting a 'real world' job after completion of the program. But it is clear that the program is not just specialist training, but geared to moving up the abstraction and generalization layers.

</comment><comment><USER52> Founding a new university can't be cheap. Who's going to pay for this? Does she have funding lined up?

</comment><comment><USER53> Now project based learning is fine, but CS for example has lots of wonderful theory, where does that fit in?

<comment><USER15> How much of that theory do you have to understand in order to be a competent professional programmer? Some, sure. The more the better, sure. But much of it can be learned independent from much of the rest of it - you don't need one mammoth 4-year curriculum to "master" CS.

<comment><USER53> I learn a lot faster from the people who teach it well at university, and from focusing on the subject. But yes if you're goal is to become a competent programmer it is not strictly necessary.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> I think degrees and accreditation are fine, but the classroom should be inverted. Universities should be a place for labs, socializing, and individual tutoring and exploration. Not lecturing. Unless it is just to give a talk that will later be put online.

</comment><comment><USER55> They are talking about this, right? [http://4pt0.org/programs/startup-weekend- education/](http://4pt0.org/programs/startup-weekend-education/)

 _EDIT: No, probably not. Different Christine Ortiz..._

</comment><comment><USER56> The only point of a modern day university is socializing

</comment><comment><USER57> So... Y Combinator?

</comment><comment><USER58> these days you can learn from online and books and forums if you're a self- driven learner, however the best universities do still provide a place for the like-mind people to get to know each other, which is important and hard to replace.

</comment><comment><USER59> ... "no grades, no teachers, no students, no books, no learning!"

</comment><comment><USER60> "You are a product of your environment." \--Clement Stone</comment>


Zero Knowledge Proofs: The Secret Santa Protocol - <AUTHOR> https://boompig.herokuapp.com/blog/secret-santa-protocol <comment><USER2> This is not a Zero Knowledge Protocol because the other party has the same information as you do.

Furthermore, this algorithm is equivalent to a DH key exchange between A and B followed by a HMAC(key,M), with the advantage that message size is not limited to the group size.</comment>


Fitbit Firmware Modifications and Data Extraction [video] - <AUTHOR> https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-8908-doping_your_fitbit <comment><USER2> Fitbit's software makes it very hard to get logs of heart-rate and step count data at smaller than a full-day granularity. I think this is because they know that if people looked at that data, they'd realize it was horribly inaccurate and complain. That's certainly been my experience when I've tried to spot check data from my Fitbit Blaze.

<comment><USER3> I think there's probably something to this. Plenty of people complain about the HRM, myself among them. Weird things like spikes of 170+ bpm while doing nothing but walking, while at the same time recording 100 bpm while doing sprints? Pretty normal on the Fitbit, in my experience.

<comment><USER4> The step counts are completely inaccurate. I have the flu and haven't left the house all day. My Charge 2 HR tells me I've done 4,044 steps. Not likely.

What I've always wondered is if it is consistently inaccurate. I really don't care if it thinks I've done 4,044 steps today, when maybe I've done 200 if I'm lucky. However, when I do go and do 4,000 steps, does the cumulative total then show 8,044, or some other figure?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The biggest problem with fitbit is the DRM. If there is a means to prevent the firmware from encrypting the data it collects from the wearer that would be fantastic, otherwise we're really just accepting fitbits analytics without independent verification of the data.

<comment><USER6> It's worse than just having to trust their metrics. Last time I looked, you can't access your own realtime heart rate no matter what - it was only available to 'registered partners' or some shit. When I was looking, their partners page had a demo video of a crowd watching a football match, and had that overlaid with the heart rates of the fans. So basically, next level sentiment monitoring and advertising capabilities.

So actually, Fitbit is in the business of collecting high resolution fitness data which they onsell to 'partners', and they've managed to convince the public to PAY to have this data collected about them in exchange for really coarse aggregated statistics which are an order of magnitude less useful than what Fitbit extracts from the raw data and keeps for themselves.

Fitbit's marketing strategy is the work of evil geniuses.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I just got a fitbit for my birthday and I would like to program apps for it. I'd like it to know when I meditate, for example. I find it a pity that it's so locked up as it is. If people know a good alternative instead of fitbit (i.e. Something more programmable and on your wrist), I'm happy to take suggestions.

<comment><USER8> There once was Pebble.

You could write dev apps in a straightforward easy to program no lock-in no review workflow.

And then guess who buys them out and flushes all that dev goodness in the toilet?

Yes, fitbit.

<comment><USER9> There was once Pebble.

They went out of business and their assets went up for sale.

Then guess who buys some of their assets and keeps some of that dev goodness alive?

Yes, Fitbit.

<comment><USER10> "Principal Software Engineer, Fitbit, Inc."

Common practice here is to disclose that when making comments...

<comment><USER9> You can find many examples in my comment history where I mention that I work for but don't speak for Fitbit. I don't feel it's necessary to mention it for extremely basic fact correction as in this case. The details of what was and wasn't acquired are public and widely known.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Awesome. All I want is a hackable Fitbit HR.</comment>


Ask HN: Best way to accept CC on behalf of 3rd party vendors - <AUTHOR>

Let's say I wanted to build a marketplace with multiple vendors selling their goods. What is the easiest way to incorporate a payment system that accepts credit cards on behalf of the vendors?
I know my scenario is a little vague, but do I need a merchant account of my own to accept the credit card payments from customers, then "reimburse" the vendors after taking my cut?
Or is there a way to extend the vendors' existing merchant account functionality to the online/mobile space? E.g. a comic book store that normally processes credit card payments in store can now get credit card information electronically through the marketplace.
Does my question make sense? <comment><USER2> You would have to get your own merchant account and then distribute the vendor's share. Another option might be to force the vendors to sign up for Stripe and provide their API key to you. You could then make charges to their Stripe account. The first options is a lot more seamless and gives you the potential of charging a commission.

</comment><comment><USER3> Make sure to consider the cut the processors take (usually a flat rate + %).

The best model for e-commerce is cash upfront.

You take your cut then pass the money on does work, but friction ( processing/transfer cuts ) can amount to quite a lot.

Be very aware of the costs involved in doing this and related convenience type scenarios like delivery.</comment>


Two Universes - <AUTHOR> http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2012/05/09/two_universes.html

<comment><USER2> Something not really mentioned in the article is that Portal is very funny.

The voice of Glados is constantly messing with you: asking you to bring your daughter to work with you for testing over the acid pits, lying to you about obvious things, etc.

This personality and sense of humor helps drive things forward and keeps you entertained while you're fiddling with what are essentially logic puzzles.

I've never really seen a website or app pull off humor to the level that Portal achieves.

The closest thing I can think of would be something like the "You Suck at Photoshop" tutorials on YouTube:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_X5uR7VC4M>

</comment><comment><USER3> One thing the author never mentions is _how_ Portal teaches you how to play the game. Yes, the player has to _play_ , as the author points out, but Portal's designers created very deliberate sandboxes in which to play. They created rooms with distinct features that make it likely that if you play enough, you'll discover the correct thing to do - even if it's just by accident.

That is the design part: understanding the rules of the environment you've created, understanding how people are likely to behave based on prior knowledge when put into that environment, and creating scenarios which lead them down certain paths without _telling_ them about those paths. It's a probabilistic thing. You have to create a scenario where the most likely outcome is that the user learns what you want them to learn.

Another neat thing about Portal that may apply to applications is that the spoken lesson doesn't come until _after_ you've discovered it on your own. The explicit tutorial doesn't so much teach as reinforce.

<comment><USER4> And of course the designers of Portals did extensive testing to get feedback on what worked! Those brilliant designs weren't plucked out of thin air, but came from watching how real players interacted with them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> How could the designers of Photoshop actually apply this criticism? This is what has always bothered me about gameification, even the "good" kind of gameification this article espouses. When I launch Photoshop, I already have a goal in mind, and it isn't a goal that the designers of Photoshop have any control over. In Portal, the goals, and thus the tools necessary to achieve them, are small and additive and picked by the game designers. When I launch Photoshop, I'm usually thinking something like "I want to make a button that means add a song to a playlist". Could you imagine if, like in Portal, when you first launched Photoshop you only had a paintbrush and an eraser? If the app waited for you to master those tools before presenting others? That's madness.

This kind of analogy usually leads me toward thinking that an app like Photoshop should provide an extensive tutorial where they could teach you how to use the app by asking you to create increasingly complex images with increasingly complex tools. That has the potential to directly apply the lessons gleaned here from Portal, but doesn't actually affect the end design of the product. And it doesn't help me because I have not yet said to myself, "I should put many hours in to learn how to use Photoshop properly" I always come to it with a specific goal in mind. Plus, how is that so different than how things are now? All I see here are guidelines for how to make a great Photoshop tutorial, not design principles to guide the making of a more accessible Photoshop, which for me seems to be what the OP is trying to get at.

Another random thought: a paintbrush is the same tool more or less that a beginner and a master use to create very different qualities of painting. How can that tool be so simple and yet allow for such complex mastery?

<comment><USER6> > Could you imagine if, like in Portal, when you first launched Photoshop you > only had a paintbrush and an eraser? If the app waited for you to master > those tools before presenting others? That's madness.

Not if everything was locked from the beginning with no recourse--but then, that's bad game design, too. Nobody wants to come over to play a friend's fighting game (or Photoshop) and find that their favorite characters/tools aren't available. Instead, well-designed games have a "story" or "campaign" mode, where things _are_ slowly unlocked, and then an "open play" mode where everything is available.

<comment><USER7> > and then an "open play" mode where everything is available.

Games like Mario Kart Wii and Smash Bros. Brawl seem to do well with the the `open play' mode that doesn't have everything unlocked from the start.

<comment><USER6> They _seem_ to, but that's really one of the main reasons you won't see those games as much in professional competitive-gaming. As it is, a lot of players have trouble setting up tournaments just because you have to input a _password_ to unlock certain characters; imagine if, say, there were better characters (strictly better, as in "everyone is playing them right now until someone can devise a counter using another character") which were only available as _DLC_ \--such a game would probably never get tournament play at all.

<comment><USER7> Maybe. The games of the Smash Bros. series are party games. Nintendo doesn't care about professional competitive gaming for them, and designed them for a casual audience. Mario Kart Wii is similar, though surprisingly hard for such a seemingly casual game.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Game designers have known this for years. For a (hilarious) examination of how Mega Man X employed the same philosophy, check out Egoraptor's video on it: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FpigqfcvlM>

<comment><USER3> Super Mario Brothers also did this. SMB was one of the first games that scrolled, so very soon after starting, a goomba appears from the right to tell you that you can move to the right. If you don't jump over or on it, you die, learning that lesson. Once you learn that lesson, you are under some blocks, and another goomba appears. You jump over it, but in doing so, you are forced to hit one of the blocks above you, which causes a mushroom powerup to appear and flow above you in the same direction. It falls down, hits a pipe in the way, and comes in your direction. This is timed so that it's unlikely that you will avoid touching it - which you have so far been taught to do, since it's quite similar to a goomba.

The first two screens of SMB are deliberately designed to teach you the basic rules of the game without actually explaining them to you.

<comment><USER4> Anna Anthropy has an older blog article about exactly that:

<http://www.auntiepixelante.com/?p=465>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> A great article, and Valve does this so very well.

On a related note, Valve launched the 'Perpetual Testing Initiative' for Portal 2 yesterday ( <http://store.steampowered.com/app/620> ) , which is an amazingly easy-to-use level editor and shared content community, which should add much longevity to the game.

People learn to build levels, and get feedback votes from players. The options are slightly limited, but you can take your level over to the full hammer editor after.

An interesting move in the context of the article, essentially teaching their community to be makers.

<comment><USER10> It's on sale today for $7 if anyone is interested.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's an interesting take but I don't buy the relationship between Portal and Photoshop. Portal has a defined end point to each level, the routes you take are often limited as well. Photoshop has no predetermined end, it's in the mind of the user sat in front of it. I am guessing (haven't played it) that Minecraft may be a better example in that is offers creative freedom.

<comment><USER12> Not necessarily. I haven't played since before the Adventuring update, but back then I had to keep the minecraft wiki open on my other monitor to get anywhere with redstone.

<comment><USER13> You still have to do this. Minecraft is a bad example.

<comment><USER14> I think it's a great example of a game with a bad learning experience. Something you can do in Minecraft to improve the learning experience could be applicable to productivity applications.

The problem with comparing Portal to Photoshop is that Portal has a fixed goal for the user: Get to the end of the level. How is the designer supposed to teach the new Photoshop user in the same manner?

A possible answer is to provide a simulated training ground that with only a few Photoshop tools "unlocked". By completing tasks you unlock more tools. The problem still exists in that it's still difficult to determine what mastery the user will require. And let's face it - in and of itself, using Photoshop isn't very fun.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> One of the most cunning ways I've ever seen of getting someone to read about how much Photoshop sucks - by making them think they're reading about how much Portal rocks.

</comment><comment><USER16> The obvious example of this philosophy in action is the iPhone. Remember the first time you played with one? You start out knowing just a few basic facts like that you can touch things and pinch to zoom, then you find yourself poking around looking for other nifty interactions you've never tried before (because you're actually curious), and before long the entire interface is second-nature.

</comment><comment><USER17> Designer like myself have been thinking about this for decades literally.

The problem is not photoshop. The problem is that playing a game is not the same as using photoshop.

Why?

Think about it it like this.

I could in theory create every possible frame of portal in photoshop sans the interaction.

I can't create photoshop in portal in any shape or form.

One is a world the other creates worlds.</comment>


The Implacability of Things: stories told from an object's point of view (2012) - <AUTHOR> http://publicdomainreview.org/2012/10/03/the-implacability-of-things <comment><USER2> Couldn't resist the opportunity to share this: [http://tymar.com/requiem_for_cih.html](http://tymar.com/requiem_for_cih.html)</comment>


Yahoo Announces Resignation of Jerry Yang - <AUTHOR> http://www.marketwatch.com/story/yahoo-announces-resignation-of-jerry-yang-2012-01-17

<comment><USER2> More discussion: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3476665>

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a good thing for Yahoo! Jerry Yang was a good founder and entrepreneur, but he doesn't have the skills or knowledge to run a Fortune 500 company. His decision not to sell to Microsoft and hiring Carol Bartz are some of his most fatal mistakes as Chief Yahoo!

<comment><USER4> Agree. Turn down $33/share from MSFT, you'd better have a killer plan to get your valuation higher. Never saw anything indicating a better plan.</comment></comment>


Modern life halted as Netflix, Pinterest, Instagram go down - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-57464342-71/modern-life-halted-as-netflix-pinterest-instagram-go-down/

<comment><USER2> Since i dont use Any of those my life is fine.</comment>


Ask HN: Where to switch from Gmail? - <AUTHOR>

Hello everyone,
I would like to switch from Gmail to another email provider with a bit more privacy. I know it won't change anything but as they say "Be the change that you wish to see in the world.". I have no problem to pay if it's not so expensive. I don't care much about external things like calendar but I would need some import to import all my old emails. I would like also to make my parents switch at some point if it works well for me, we will see.
Do you have any recommendations for a new email provider ? I would like to have some advice on this and your recommendations if you have done this in the past. Changing an email address is not something to take lightly and I would like to switch to a provider who is likely still going to exist in the next 5 years. <comment><USER3> I am using [https://www.fastmail.com](https://www.fastmail.com) with great results. They do have some features in there interface to ease the transition like being able to both send and receive mail from your old address directly from there interface.

<comment><USER4> I also switched to fastmail from gmail. I setup gmail to forward all emails to my new address, and then running the gmail importer in fastmail. So i have all my emails in fastmail, and receive all emails sent to the old address. I'm using a custom domain for my emails.

<comment><USER5> This is exactly what I did. Also of interest is that Yubikey OTP is directly supported, you can host static websites (I generate my site with Jekyll and then rsync it to fastmail's web server), and you can have a ton of other aliases for your mailbox (I've got like 12 addresses right now that all point to fastmail).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Zoho.com is not bad.

But I switched to [https://runbox.com](https://runbox.com) a few years ago. 30 euros/year for 5 gb, 100 aliases, a very good hotline and the option to put your mails on a server without backup, which means that when you delete a message, it's deleted, not stocked on a backup (yes, if their servers fail, you lost everything you didn't backup yourself, but for now, it has never happened :)

And they can get you your own domain name for 15 bucks/year.

And they're green and in Norway and if you use their roundcube webpage, it manages GPG keys and yes, I sound like a fanboy :).

</comment><comment><USER7> Run your own mailserver - postfix + roundcube.

It'll take you some time to set it up, but it will be educational!

<comment><USER8> I'd use opensmtpd instead of postfix. Mostly because you'll learn how to configure the former in a matter of tens of minutes when reading the man page, and the config format is basically English. The latter. Not even close.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Are you in control of your own domain?

Perhaps Gandi.net, if you're in control of the domain. Email is included as a perk of domain registration, and more options as paid.

</comment><comment><USER10> I have switched from Gmail to Zoho sometime back. But problem is people I am emailing use Gmail, majority of them. Last time I checked, I had sent about 85% of my emails to Gmail. So, my emails are anyways being ended up on Gmail servers. I am trying to get my friends and family to switch to Zoho, but they always end up back using Gmail :(

</comment><comment><USER11> It is always exciting to see more people leave the NSA bobby traps to reclaim their privacies.

You may want to try [https://www.hosteurope.de/E-Mail- Hosting/#Vergleich](https://www.hosteurope.de/E-Mail-Hosting/#Vergleich)

It's in Germany. I am not in full support of services in the US. I however understand that there is not guarantee that they/NSA/BB can't get an order/subpoena to access your server though.

Here are the product details: Mailboxes: 1 Storage per mailbox: 5 GB Webmailer Pro: Yes POP / IMAP: Yes Daily backup: Yes Mobile Sync: Yes Shareable calendars, address books and tasks: Yes One-time setup fee: € 9.99 € 4.99

You can get up to 5 mailboxes by paying $5-$10 more I think.

</comment><comment><USER12> In case you're a German speaker, there are some native German Email providers that afaik are pretty good on privacy (our laws are very strict there, and there is what is known as). And as their servers should be in Germany, the NSA will have a slightly more difficult task of sniffing.

Examples are gmx.de and web.de. (Although I'd caution you with the latter - <USER2> use their free version and am not impressed with their customer service: nonexistent. Also, they send you their own advertising. I don't know if their paid tier is any better, I haven't tried it.)

</comment><comment><USER13> I switched to mailbox.org. Also posteo.de is good. Booth are email hosters for several yeahrs now.

I think booth are awesome but only if you use a mail client like thunderbird.

</comment><comment><USER14> My advice is if you manage to encrypt your email with good encryption, stick with a popular provider (i.e. gmail, hotmail, yahoo etc). A privacy-aware email provider called Lavabit was shut down a while ago. Thankfully I hadn't lost much but some people did.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, privacy is a lot harder than you think. For example, gmail probably has > 50% of my email, since the recipients use gmail. And other compromised providers.

If you really need privacy, try going the gpg way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> You email is as private as your addressees's email provider.

So if many people you are communicating with are using gmail - it won't buy you much to switch.

<comment><AUTHOR> I know that it's not going to change much, I've mentioned it but it's still better than nothing. I respect other people choices and that's why I need to switch. In the same way, I've installed Textsecure, even if just one person I know is using it, maybe one day, some other people will contact me through it, it does not hurt me to keep it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> protonmail.ch</comment>


Functional programming in sh - <AUTHOR> http://quasimal.com/posts/2012-05-21-funsh.html?utm_source=Coder+Weekly&utm_campaign=a6889de9de-Coder_Weekly_Issue_17&utm_medium=email <comment><USER2> Along the same lines: <http://geophile.com/osh>

Except that instead of bash, it's based on Python. So instead of everything being a string, you have the Python type system. E.g. 50 factorial:

        z@minizack:~$ osh gen 50 1 ^ red '*' $
        30414093201713378043612608166064768844377641568960512000000000000

This red(uce)s using multiplication the stream of integers 1..50.

Find the pids of python processes:

        z@minizack:~$ osh ps ^ select 'p: "python" in p.commandline' ^ f 'p: p.pid' $
        (2094,)
        (2394,)

This pipes process objects from one command to the next. First select the processes whose commandline contains "python", then run a function that maps the process to its pid.

<comment><USER3> Which is along the same lines as

<https://github.com/pixelb/scripts/blob/master/scripts/funcpy>

<http://code.google.com/p/pyp/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The nightmare of writing any kind of serious program in the shell was the inspiration for PBS <https://github.com/amoffat/pbs>

<comment><USER5> You shouldn't write anything serious in shell or python, use serious language for serious jobs, please.

(But if you do, use bash-modules, please).

<comment><USER6> Care to explain why?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The shell gives this kind of behaviour already through pipes and commands like awk, sed, and dc. More natural translations of the calculations given might be

        $ seq 100 | awk '{s += $0} END {print s}'
        5050
        $ seq 20 | awk -v s=1 '{s *= $0} END {print s}'
        2432902008176640000
        $ seq 5 | awk -v s=1 '{s *= $0} END {print s}'
        120
        $ seq 3 |
        > awk -v s=1 '{s *= $0} END {print s}' |
        > xargs seq |
        > awk '{s += $0} END {print s}' |
        > md5sum
        fe9d26c3e620eeb69bd166c8be89fb8f  -
        $ seq 400 500 | awk '{s += $0} END {print s}'
        45450
        $

</comment><comment><USER8> Better yet, SCSH

<http://www.scsh.net/>

</comment><comment><USER9> >>Simplest type system in the world: everything is a string!

This is an extremely important, yet most unrealized statement in the history of computers. Data is actually Text, and it strange so many people are unaware of Data/Text/String processing utilities and tools.

In my opinion everyone must learn how to use Unix text processing utilities along with Perl.

Often I see so many programmers, write small buggy sub set implementations of a few features of tools like awk, sed all the time. Especially if you are coming from a ecosystem like Java, its a habit to keep writing code for everything. Re inventing and writing code for things like what you can do in a line of sed or awk.

I've seen these problems more in XML heavy, and in general projects that don't involve a database. If only you would know how to represent your data in a more field based format like tsv, csv or even other record based files which can handled with some separator. You can save yourself writing several hundreds to thousand lines of code, by just using unix text processing utilities.

Of course if you know Perl you can move mountains like you move feathers.

Lastly, I would say those who don't understand Unix(and its ecosystem) are condemned to re implement it badly.

<comment><USER10> I agree that programmers should learn the 'Unix philosophy', but lumping Perl in there doesn't make much sense. Perl is just a scripting language, like Python or Ruby, and one of which I'm not particularly fond. It does not espouse 'one tool, one task' — "those days are dead and gone and the eulogy was delivered by Perl." Definitely learn shell, awk, sed, and co. But avoiding Perl won't do any harm.

<comment><USER9> >>Perl is just a scripting language

And its amazingly great at that. I don't know any other language which as powerful as Perl for back end work. There is whole world inside that 'Just' which many other languages suck at.

>>"those days are dead and gone and the eulogy was delivered by Perl." Definitely learn shell, awk, sed, and co. But avoiding Perl won't do any harm.

The only harm you will incur is never understand what Perl offers and try to recreate the same magic in some other language. Often writing highly verbose pieces of code to do what Perl offers in a more neat, concise and better way.</comment></comment></comment>


The Stress of Remote Working - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@madewulf/the-stress-of-remote-working-38be5bdcf4da <comment><USER2> There are two important aspects for successful remote working:

\- Your company culture

\- Your personality

For example, there is no way I'd participate in "very, very chatty" non-work meme sharing. First, people in my company don't expect this from anyone. Second, for me, it's easy to ignore these types of chats or just let them die off.

I just read the author's bio... he describes himself as as a "talkative full- stack coder." So for me, a quiet introvert, remote working is the opposite of stressful. No small talk, no pressure to participate in "office spirit," no "degradation of social skills" when my social skills are already at a set baseline, no desire to leave the house everyday for external stimuli, and no loneliness because all I need is my dog and close friends.

<comment><USER3> Yeah I fit into the same mold as you do in that respect. How do you feel about the career development aspect? To me it seems difficult to grow my career further than the nebulous "senior engineer" title -- especially while working remote.

Building great code doesn't seem to matter much from what I've experienced in the last 8 years. That being said, I've always worked at startups and small companies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've been working remotely for 12 years and I agree with the OP.

While I like not having to go to the office everyday and the more flexible arrangement there are a lot of challenges:

1\. You miss out on a lot of socializing. 2\. You lose visibility within the organisation. 3\. Things that would be solved in 10 mins if you could ask for help face to face take hours. 4\. Timezones can be a problem for some, but luckily not for me. 5\. Other family members don't understand you still work and just think you're available whenever for whatever. 6\. I knew I'd have to give up my team leader role when I went remote - it made no sense for a remote worker to do that.

I started going to a coffee shop every morning years ago just to have people to talk to.

It's a hard way to work, but it has its advantages as long as you're not trying for a promotion.

</comment><comment><USER5> Compared to the stress I had before with a 6 hour a day commute in brutal LA and Ventura county traffics for an under-market startup gig working remote for a bigger, stable company is a dream come true. I do have to be up pretty early to connect out of state with the rest of the team, and I'm at an expert level in my field so those help. We're also slack-centric, which helps as well. It can be isolating and stressful but compared to the stress of commuting and trying to then concentrate in an open office this is like paradise.

</comment><comment><USER3> Everything has it's pros and cons. I've been working remote for about 2 years now. Really, what it comes down to is the company culture around remote workers, and your personality. Luckily, the company I work for is very clued in to remote/async communication styles necessary to collaborate with remote employees.

Personally, I'm not a huge fan of getting caught up in the social stuff that comes with working in the office. At times, I feel left out because the team in HQ goes out to lunch often, or they have special dinners and other events I obviously cannot attend, but overall I'm happier with my own personal life outside of work.

The only downside I can see is that career advancement seems more difficult. It's easy to become that remote developer black box depicted in the article, where your team views you as a means to an end. Almost like you're a genie in their computer. It becomes difficult to lead initiatives, and ultimately position yourself for advancement. I think that's why a lot of remote developers choose contract work.

I've considered contract work in the past, but I was never able to find a steady stream of work that paid well. It was always people trying to get work done as cheaply and quickly as possible.

</comment><comment><USER4> One of the really important things I miss is being able to get a measure of how you're performing. When you're in the office you can pretty constantly see how you're going compared to your team mates and whether you're 'doing enough'. Working from home you don't get any of that and it's quite stressful wondering if you're doing enough or falling behind or what people think.

I've had to ask my boss a couple of time whether he's satisfied with my performance, output, etc.

</comment><comment><USER6> Man, remember when in the 90's real estate values were soon to collapse because everyone would be working remote, and Class A office space was going to be useless?

Funnily enough, they are saying the same thing now about AR/VR. We will see.</comment>


London Launches 5-Year Plan to Entice More People to Fall in Love with Cycling - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/carltonreid/2018/12/17/london-launches-5-year-plan-to-make-more-people-fall-in-love-with-cycling <comment><USER2> It would be great to allow electric scooters as well, but this is a legal matter out of the hands of the London Mayor.</comment>


Voyager's 'Cosmic Map' of Earth's Location Is Hopelessly Wrong - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2017/08/17/voyagers-cosmic-map-of-earths-location-is-hopelessly-wrong/ <comment><USER3> Because it's a forbes article, I guess this may be a pain for anyone using Adblockers. In summary:

The Voyager disk contained a "map" showing where Earth is. They used pulsars to identify Earth's location. However, since the launch of Voyager we've discovered that there are probably a billion pulsars in the Milky way. We've also discovered that they somewhat unpredictably change the direction in which the pulses are directed. Making it unlikely that Earth's location can be identified using this map.

Nice article, shame about the invasive Ads Forbes uses...

<comment><USER4> worked fine with ublock origin firefox 53

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wouldn't they just look at the nearest star first? On the scale of light years, it's so close to us it's extremely obvious where it came from, and will be for many thousands of years. Just backtracking it's course should be enough for a much longer time after that. Sure, millions of years from now it might be harder to figure out, but we'll be long gone by then. They can come bother our descendents, whatever form they might take. For the period of time our civilization is likely to survive if aliens stumble upon it, they will be able to find us rather quickly.

<comment> rm_-rf_slash Depends on how far it goes and if any other gravitational forces act on it along the way.

Sometimes I wonder if the decision to turn Voyager around to produce the photo of the "pale blue dot" will someday end up fucking with aliens who couldn't imagine another species who would launch a deep space probe backwards.

<comment><USER6> Reaistically once you go far enough the only things to see that you couldn't see before are behind you. There isn't much blocking the view of the distant objects (and we're never going to get a close-up of them) once you leave the earth's atmosphere so once you reach the edge of the solar system the only things that are interesting to look at are behind you.

<comment> rm_-rf_slash That's a good point. It would be nice to have an actual photograph of our Oort Cloud, after all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm fine with that!

[0]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Body_II:_Dark_Forest](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Body_II:_Dark_Forest)

[1]: [http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/Space/stephen-hawking- alien...](http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/Space/stephen-hawking-alien- contact-risky/story?id=10478157)

<comment><USER3> Yep, after reading the three body series I feel like I'm much more skeptical about sending out Earths location indiscriminately.

Spoiler: One of the central tenets of this book is that the most logical course of action for any alien discovering another life form, is to destroy it immediately. The story is pretty coherent, but if anyone has references to any scientific/theoretical work on this I'd be very interested in reading it.

<comment><USER8> I don't buy it, at least not as stated in the book. The axioms in the book are flawed, and there are some unspoken axioms that aren't explicitly laid out.

1\. Destroying a civilization isn't risk free. If you destroy a nearby star system that harbors life, you better be sure that your weapon can't be traced back to you, by either any observers, or by the survivors. (See Forge of God & The Anvil of the Stars[1] for a study of the latter.)

2\. If you do subscribe to the Dark Forest game theory, and do have what you believe is an untraceable weapon of some kind, there's no reason not to sterilize _every_ star system around you. Why would you wait until you've detected life? Send out self-replicating Saberhagen Berserker[2] probes and sterilize the galaxy. (Be sure you've got a good Friend-or-Foe system in place.)

[1] [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/464609.Anvil_of_Stars](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/464609.Anvil_of_Stars) [2] [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/582675.Berserker](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/582675.Berserker)

<comment><USER9> Trying to spin up axioms and theories about the game theory of whether or not to destroy alien species seems hopeless to me. There's so many parts of it that hinge on what is or isn't possible to know and do in the first place. It could easily swing either way based on countless factors we know nothing about.

I'm far from saying for sure that something like that is definitely true, or even more likely than not. But it seems reasonably cautious to me to not arbitrarily broadcast out to the universe our location and rough technology level. We have no idea what might be out there or what its capabilities and thought patterns might be. Or rather, it seems hopelessly naive to me to just go ahead with such broadcasts, confident in our theories that nothing could possibly go wrong.

<comment><USER10> It's a bit anthropocentric to ascribe human utility calculus to alien behavior motivation.

<comment><USER9> Indeed, even if our "game theories" are perfectly reasoned by our logic and the technology available to us, there's no telling what kind of logic and thought patterns an alien civilization might use, and what different types of technology they might have.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I don't think "hopelessly wrong" is correct, but we live in the era of clickbait titles, so of course it's not correct. Also, how "long term" is he talking? Because sure, in a billion years, provided Voyager isn't swallowed up by a star, the map is not going to be useful. I actually designed (and got) a tattoo based on this design, except that I updated the data on my version with data from newer astronomical catalogues, in particular a 2002 Australian survey that updated most of the p-dot values for these pulsars. Decoding the original period/p-dot values and locating the pulsars from the catalog data wasn't too hard, and some time after that effort but before I actually got the tattoo, I discovered a work online in which someone else had also decoded the p-dot values and found which pulsars they used. I compared his list to my own and was happy to discover we'd found the same. I also re-encoded the p-dot values which originally had Voyager's "launch date" with the value of my birthdate. I dropped a couple of the pulsars because the 1969 data was very far off from the 2002 data, crossing some imaginary error threshold in my mind enough to be dropped from the map. I personally believe the p-dot values are sufficiently precise as to be uniquely or nearly uniquely identifier data for the pulsars, I mean in the fantasy universe in which this actually amounts to something. It's estimated there are 200,000 pulsars in our galaxy. Surely ET has a computer he can use? Again, in this imaginary universe where ET finds Voyager (or me) and really sets out to crack the code, and we're not using some stupid scenario in which it's found in a billion years...

<comment><USER12> It's not that ET doesn't have a computer, it's that without omniscience they won't know which of those 200,000 pulsars were pointing at one of 100 billion stars way in the past.

Unless they already orbit all 100 billion stars, but even then it's 100,000 years to collect the data.

Basically with 200k pulsars sprinkled among 100B stars sprinkled over 200,000 light years it's very easy to get lost. A list of frequencies gets less useful over time. You saw a pretty big difference in the data between 1969 and 2002. Imagine the differences in 100k years.

Even a single unknown gravitational interaction could throw the probe way off in speed/direction.

<comment><USER11> Well, I should be clear that the difference in data between 1969 and 2002 was due to measurement error in the original surveys, not due to some kind of actual movement. I have already conceded that over hundreds of millions or billions of years, the map becomes a jumble, but for the next few million years (or from a few million years ago), the map is definitely not "hopelessly incorrect" as the guy states. And actually the whole point of choosing 14 pulsars was so that you had plenty of elbow room for errors arising from e.g. one of the pulsars being flung far and wide by a rogue black hole.

With a computer and observations of "a fair percentage" of the 14 original pulsars, it would still be "fairly easy" to determine which pulsars we're talking about, because from the period alone, you can reduce the total number of candidates to a handful. And so from 200,000 pulsars, from the original 14 period measurements (or 11 in the case of my tattoo), you should be able to reduce the total pulsar pool down to perhaps a hundred or so candidates, _just from looking at reasonable possible pulsar periods_. Then you can permute through all combinations using a computer to determine _which_ of the pulsars all shared the particular recorded period values at the same time. These values are so precise, and so varied in nature, that you could easily take all 200,000 pulsars in the galaxy, and sort out which 14 you were talking about, if you also could guess that the 14 values were all measured at the same time, that the precise moment chosen to record the period value had to coincide with the precise moment chosen for the other 13 pulsars. Only this select group of 14 pulsars will have had these precise period values at one time, _even if many other pulsars in the galaxy have had a specific period value at some point in their history_ , and this is the genius of Carl Sagan's idea, since you then also can encode a specific time in the data (which happened to have been Voyager's launch date on the golden record, and my birthdate in my tattoo). I still concede that along enormous time scales, it would not be possible to do this, but Carl Sagan's original assertion is definitely not unreasonable across the span of a few million years or so, and a reasonably large enough survey of the galaxy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Not to be anti-science, but it is worth taking into account that there are a lot of things we think we know now that may turn out to be wrong. Particularly things that are far away in space and time, where the points of data are few. Popular articles discuss the latest theories as "now we know this to be true." I'm thinking articles about details of the Dinosaurs or the size of distant planets. It may be right, but it could be revised with new knowledge.

<comment><USER14> That's not anti-science, that's the whole point of science. It's the willingness to incorporate new information. The current understanding is always understood to be based on currently available information. I'll take it over religion any day, which is: there is nothing more to be learned about our origin, nature, purpose and future, the founding documents do not get changed or updated as new information is acquired, we can only invent new excuses for the ever increasing incongruence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The titles is wrong. The map is still in fact accurate, and not wrong as the titles suggests. It's just that it's totally useless because it's ambiguous. A more appropriate title would be "Voyager's 'Cosmic Map' of Earth's Location Is Hopelessly Useless".

<comment><USER16> It's like burying treasure in a forest, and using a dozen or so trees as your landmarks.

If you're standing on top of your cache, sure, the map makes sense, but if you're anywhere else at all, you would need to map every tree in the forest, and run a pattern recognition algorithm on them, hoping that none of the key trees have blown down or burned since the map was made.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm not anywhere near being well-versed in astronomy, so I cannot judge how hard that problem actually is, but let me present a counterpoint/food for thought:

40 years ago, we launched a probe with what we though as of then as being a nice, permanent map of our location. Since then, we learned that there are many more 'beacons' in the universe than those we have chosen and pointed out in our 'map', and they change randomly or pseudorandomly, so with our current knowledge, receiving such probe with such map, we would be SOL to decode it.

But, 40 years ago, there was a term 'supercomputer' which meant an 80 MHz, 5 ton, >100 kW-eating monster. Nowadays, we carry billions of 150 gram glass slates in our pockets with 100-times the computing power, use it to play games, and we throw around desktop/rig computing power to shift balances between virtual bank accounts (PoW-based cryptocurrencies). What would be an unthinkable feat on the planet-wide energetic and hardware level back than, a grad student can do on their gaming device (CUDA etc.) nowadays as a semestral project, building on existing open-source libraries and published reproducible research.

What will be possible [on our humanity scale] in another 40 years? 400 years? 40000 years?

Wouldn't _they_ just intercept the probe and immediately think, oh, species 5618 thought back then that a dozen of pulsars engraved on a metal disk would make a good map, how cute, let's run a configuration-search on our astronomical recordings and on next orbital period, a PhD student presents an interstellar-conference paper on three possible locations in the known history where and when the species 5618 would observe just this specific pulsar configuration recorded on the probe... Ok, what if _they_ started recording the observable universe only after we recorded our map? They may not have the exact stellar configuration in their big data clouds, but using SETI-like- network, in another orbital period, they will simulate historical pulsar configurations back before they started recording them and extrapolate similar results. This is just a 'linear' prediction on our technology, but what about a complete paradigm shift? What if _they_ can browse in a block universe just like we page through a book and can just rewind and fast forward looking in the spacetime searching for the configuration recorded on the probe?

Or, we will develop FTL in tens/hundreds/thousands of years, overtake the Voyager with spacecraft just like taking off a private Cessna at a local hobby airport, grab it as a historical artifact for the museum and launch a better map, or, we would know better by then and rather quietly destroy it, remain silent and be thankful it wasn't seen by _anything_ (Hawking's position on contacting alien life).

An earth bound semi-fictional example: Say a secluded culture thinks that recording rains, droughts, good and bad harvests will benefit their children. Some time later they will find that they have a full Library of Alexandria of records and noone, never ever, in many human lives would sift through all the recordings to find anything useful. Some more time later they will even find about climate zones and think that their collected records are truly worthless and useless. On the other hand, if our current selves find such records - <USER2> they are fairly recent, we have complete satellite imagery of the place. We have pretty nice worldwide temperature, rain, air pressure recordings. If it is a bit older, we still have more sparse weather records, so with some effort, we can still search for their rain-drought patterns. We can carbon date it. We can or cannot see our atmospheric nuclear tests in their smelting. We can digitally cross-reference digitized historical written records from many cultures (probably not now, mind you, semi-fictional). We can manually cross-reference their observations with known folklore from around the world. We can drill Antarctica/permafrost layers to evaluate climate back then. We can date it before/after/around great extinction events, geological eras at least...

Just because we just realized that the IRL situation is much more complex than we thought, it doesn't mean that what we recorded back then and sent out is "hopelessly wrong" [and useless].

<comment><USER18> I agree with you, completely. In fact, more than completely -- it's likely that there are a large number of signals that we didn't even think of as signals that a reasonably intelligent, resourceful alien detective could use to find us. My mind immediately jumps to the specific chemical composition of the metals, for instance. Or perhaps remnant zodiacal dust grains that will certainly be on it. Even simple orbital backtracking is likely to be successful on any reasonable timescale (and for unreasonable timescales, who's to say we won't be very obvious in ways that are much, much faster to be received than Voyager).

<comment><USER17> Excellent point, in the heat of many discussions whether even a studied being of the same species [human] would get the hydrogen state reference, it never occurred that even without decoding anything nor putting any styluses anywhere, just the mere possession of the record and, for example, analyzing primordial traces could give us away... And I mentioned the C14 earth-bound analogy, damn! :)

<comment><USER18> I'm picturing an alien researcher saying:

"well, clearly it comes from a solar system orbiting a G-class star. There are 45,000 of those within a reasonable range based on the rate of micro-pitting on the protected vs unprotected surfaces. It seems to have been launched with an engine powered by hydrocarbons, and clearly they have been recently experimenting with nuclear weapons. Let's identify a candidate star with a habitable zone planet that shows signs of a run-away greenhouse effect and global thermonuclear exchange. Because clearly they have self-extincted, otherwise we would have already contacted them through other means."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> It's only a matter of time until someone notices we have a very weird spectral emission peaking around the TV and FM radio broadcast frequencies...

<comment><USER20> The free space path loss from Earth to Alpha Centauri (4.4 ly) is ~345 dB at 100 MHz (FM broadcast). Our broadcast signals, with their relatively non- directional radiation patterns, are well below the thermal noise floor long before they reach anyone who might be listening for them.

UHF television broadcasts fare even worse because they have a much wider bandwidth and an even greater free space path loss.

<comment><USER17> While I cannot put a label on it right now (but surely it has a name, read about it somewhere), it is some kind of paradox that sufficiently advanced civilizations will broadcast themselves openly and detectably only for a very very tiny fraction of time (tens of years are nothing on intergalactic, interstellar or even planetary scale).

We quickly learned that blasting long-wave analog voice signals to the skies and expecting the reflection behind the horizon is pretty inefficient and moved to shorter, shorter and shorter waves. Not only you don't need to blast local radio stations in local language to the other side of the planet, having hundreds of computer wireless networks in one apartment building means that it actually _shouldn 't_ broadcast more than a few walls away in order for multiple networks to coexist even with time-division multiplexes and collision avoidance magic.

So, in about a hundred years, we discovered RF, we then started by blasting long-wave radio stations using ionosphere as a mirror, gradually moved to more and more local frequency bands, we then launched satellites to wirelessly ping across the ocean, only to hide the signals back under the sea and ground using fiber optics for practical reasons (bandwidth, latency), we went from analog to digital and we started encrypting just about everything. In the end, we will produce mostly random noise with ultrashort reach.

Next step - we will enclose Sol with Dyson sphere and disappear completely :)

<comment><USER21> It's not a paradox but it's based on our own techonlogical progression which is weird.

We are as a species 200-250,000 years old. For most of that time we did absolutely fucking nothing as it seems. Even for the recorded history which if we take the past 10,000 years then we still didn't made much progress as we did in the past 100. And the weird part is that we still have small pockets of population living like our ancestors 200K years ago.

In 100 years we went from horses to cars, to rockets and spaceships to the internet and computers small enough to fit in our pockets.

The 20th century was weird as fuck as far as scientific progression goes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Good. I'm not sure giving other species a map to our planet was such an awesome idea in the first place. Although, what if we just pissed them off more by giving them wrong directions? They might be like "we were going to come in peace, bu then you wasted so much of our time with those shitty directions that now all you base belong to us."

</comment><comment><USER8> On a long enough timescale, isn't our own solar system expected to change? It's not exactly proven to be stable, and several theories of its formation include radical changes after periods of stability. (Jupiter is supposed to have wandered all over the place.)

</comment><comment><USER23> I think this would make a good basis for "The Orville: The Motion Picture".

V'ger is found in the middle of space utterly lost.

</comment><comment><USER24> I have faith that they could decode it if they were sufficiently advanced.

<comment><USER25> It'll probably land on some planet filled with ape like creatures that use it to beat each other but hey, we tried.

<comment><USER26> If by land you mean 'burn up re-entering their atmosphere' then sure. But of course, then those same ape like creatures will just use the meteor omen as a means to justify beating each other ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Good, Why would we want potentially dangerous aliens to easily find us?

</comment><comment><USER28> Hopelessly wrong. Why? Does it assume parsec is a unit of time instead of distance?</comment>