Middle-aged prodigies: Seven poster children over 40 - <AUTHOR> http://www.newscientist.com/gallery/dn21559-middle-age <comment><USER2> I love articles like this. It reminds the 99% of us who didn't "hit it big" in our youth that it's never too late.

Hopefully someday...

"edw519 toiled in obscurity writing software for over 30 years before he hit it big when his proprietary NFL Play Calling Software enabled the Pittsburgh Steelers to win 7 consecutive Super Bowls (American football). The string was only stopped when Paul Allen put together a team to reverse engineer the software, enabling the Seattle Seahawks to win their first Super Bowl in 2020."

<comment><USER3> While your post was in jest, it is (somewhat) unfortunate that the NFL bans this sort of technology from the game. I wonder if the top quantitatively skilled talent would be more highly prized to NFL teams than a top-flight QB.

<comment><USER4> No way. Playcalling isn't the limiting factor in the NFL. Top teams don't lose because they fucked up their gameplan — they lose because the receivers drop passes, the quarterback overthrows, or the linebackers don't tackle low enough. And what you can do with playcalling is limited or expanded by the limitations and abilities of your players.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The profile of Raymond Chandler is a bit misleading and over-simplified. It suggest that he lost his lucrative oil company job due to the depression. That was not the case.

Chandler is a very good example for the suggestion that one has to try to do what one loves for a living. He was initially a very successful and well liked oil company executive. But his own success seemed to cause him unhappiness. He eventually started drinking showing up late for work, flirting with all women in the office, etc. Eventually, even though the company owners liked him and had a lot of respect for his abilities, they had to fire him.

He then returned to a life of poverty trying to hack it as a writer. But eventually he became the brilliant writer who with Dashiel Hammett basically defined the noir style. He never quite kicked his alcoholism but he was much more fulfilled and productive than as an oil company executive.

</comment><comment><USER6> I especially enjoyed Mary Midgley's quote: _"I wrote no books until I was a good 50, and I'm jolly glad because I didn't know what I thought before then_

I wonder how many of these folks were "big thinkers" just without the proper stimulus? Or in other words, did most of them come up with various other ideas throughout their life -- perhaps in various fields -- and it finally just worked out where all the pieces were in place at the right time? Or did these people undergo a personality change in their middle years? I suspect the former. Midgley's and Kroc's stories especially sound like people who were "accumulating" and working out ideas for many, many years before it finally gelled, but it's just a guess.

When the 22-year-old hits it big with some idea we all say something like "Look at that awesome kid! He was born for greatness" but when a 44-year-old does the same thing, we can no longer use the "he's so special it's no wonder he succeeded" rationale. Something else is at work.

<comment><USER7> Perhaps it just takes a long time to work through the mistakes and mis-steps. Or perhaps just something as mundane as having the kids grow up thus giving you more free time.

<comment><USER8> Mostly you just look back in slack-jawed amazement at all the silly thoughts, philosophies, and epiphanies you've had throughout your younger years, and wonder what your future self will think of your present self.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> While some of these examples are rather remarkable, like the ultramarathoner, it's kind of a reflection on the media's obsession with youth that this seems like an oddity now, and I say this as a young person. Probably most serious achievement in any field will be by older people, just because it takes time to gain experience, knowledge, and wisdom. What's unusual is people achieving very much in their 20's, unless they're professional athletes.

</comment><comment><USER9> Cliff Young would be a good one to add to this list: <http://www.elitefeet.com/the-legend-of-cliff-young>

More on him here: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliff_Young_(athlete)>

Summary: 61 year old sheep farmer, shows up at an 875 km (540 mile) ultra marathon and enters. No sponsor, no fancy running equipment--he's in overalls and work boots. He won, setting a new record for the race, knocking almost 2 days off the old record.

<comment><USER10> _"... No sponsor, no fancy running equipment--he's in overalls and work boots. He won, setting a new record for the race, knocking almost 2 days off the old record. ..."_

I saw Cliffy Young during that run. I was on a bus on the way to Canberra for school when we passed him going up a hill. The way he won was by taking very few rest stops, sleeping at most 2Hrs every 24. I'm pretty sure he had runners on but did train in gumboots at home.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> King Gillette is another patron saint of late bloomers.

While walking around the Boston harbor recently I read the bio of him on a plaque at the site of the first Gillette plant.

He was a middling salesman when he came up with the idea for disposable razors. When he was 48 years old he sold 51 razors and 168 blades, 12 years later he was selling 70 million per year:

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

</comment><comment><USER12> I hate slideshows masquerading as articles. I hate them so much.

\- Raymond Chandler, author

\- Harry Kroto, chemist

\- Anton Bruckner, composer

\- Mary Midgley, author, scientist

\- Ray Kroc, founder of McDonald's

\- Jean Dubuffet, painter

\- Marco Olmo, runner

<comment><USER13> You forgot image 8 of 8, which is an ad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The first thing I thought of when reading this is the 10000 hour rule. These people didn't come out of nowhere. Most of them appear to have been honing their craft for a while prior to becoming famous/wealthy (or at least getting practice in a similar field).

Malcolm Gladwell's article on late bloomers is also relevant [http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/10/20/081020fa_fact_...](http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/10/20/081020fa_fact_gladwell?currentPage=all)

<comment><USER15> I was going to write something similar but I don't think it's most. Of the 7, only the Nobel Laureate, Ray Kroc and the runner seem to have been working on their "art" for lack of a better term for years beforehand.

Bruckner and Midgley seem to have at least been in related fields though the difference between being a lecturer/teacher and an author/composer is more vast than I think we might think.

Chandler and DuBuffet seem to be the most likely to be deemed prodigies. Chandler especially having been in a completely different field could be considered a prodigy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Each "page" in this multi-page article is literally 1 image, about 50 words of text, and 3 ads. The article content is fine, but there is no reason it has to be spread across 7 different pages. Publishers chasing pageview and ad impression counts make the web a shitty place.

<comment><USER17> There is an article you can read.

You just need to sign up. And then they send you spam to make you think "I'm sure I ticked the no email box".

<comment><USER18> And if you don't want to register, you can use bugmenot to sign in.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This article was encouraging. Being over 40 myself, I am very appreciative of this post and was worth waiting for the page reloads to view all of it. I know that those at younger ages have more mobility as they often have no families or real roots established yet. While this is a benefit to them, I am grateful for those who value the contributions that those a couple of decades older or more can make.

</comment><comment><USER20> My favorite is Tolkien. The Hobbit was published when he was 45.

To points made by others though he was a professor of English at Oxford for many years prior and wrote copiously during that time.

<comment><USER21> Yeah, I wouldn't call Tolkien a middle-aged bloomer. His books were extensions of what he had already been doing that entire time, AFAIK: the stories were part stories for his kids and part riffs off his philology work.

I guess you could point at his ambition to create an English mythology as his middle-aged success, but I'm not sure he was actually successful at that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Roy Thomson, Canadian founder of what is now Thomson Reuters and the 1st Baron Thomson of Fleet, was essentially bankrupt in his mid-to-late 30s, having failed in a number of enterprises. At age 40, he bought the first of the hundreds of newspapers he eventually would own because it was downstairs from his fledgling radio station.

[http://www.scotsman.com/news/the-men-who-made-the- scotsman-p...](http://www.scotsman.com/news/the-men-who-made-the-scotsman- part-two-1-718332)

</comment><comment><USER23> Don't forget Rabbi Akiva: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akiva_ben_Joseph>

"A reliable tradition (Ab. R. N. l.c.) narrates that Akiva at the age of 40..."

</comment><comment><USER24> When he crossed the Rubicon river, Gaius Julius Caesar was 51.

Earlier, when he was 31, Caesar allegedly cried upon seeing a statue, in Spain, outlining the accomplishments that Alexander the Great had done before he died at 33.

Great deeds are done at all ages.

The only reason we obsess over the great deeds of the young is because it is _exceedingly_ rare to achieve greatness during youth.

<comment><USER25> Our society also worships youth like few others in the past have.

<comment><USER26> Or, our society has learned how to take advantage of the energy and enthusiasm of youth before those people get wise enough to figure it out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> That's one thing I love about ultrarunning. The old guys can compete with the young guys. In what other sport is that possible?

<comment><USER28> Cycling. (Jens Voigt, 40 y.o., just arrived 2nd at today stage on Paris-Nice).

<comment><USER25> Aren't drugs wonderful? :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> How old is Edward Kmett? He has been a major force in Haskell (fancy type/algorithm stuff) in the past few years, but did not start his contributions around age 20 like many top Haskellers of the past 15 years (folks who were not on the original committee).

</comment><comment><USER30> As a life expectancy is much longer than it was 100 years ago (~30 years difference - <http://demog.berkeley.edu/~andrew/1918/figure2.html>) we will see more and more "older" people doing stuff which was not imaginable just a half century back.

<comment><USER31> Not really. Life expectancy numbers were always skewed by the large number of childhood deaths. If you lived past 5, you've always had a pretty good chance of living a long life.

<comment><USER32> I don't suppose you might have a link to a study to support this statement? The way variations of this comment always appear without any sort of evidence or substantiation has made me think that it might me a popular misconception...

<comment><USER33> Here's the first one I found by searching for 'life expectancy by age'. You can see that child mortality was indeed very large, but adult mortality has also declined sharply e.g. a 20-year-old white male today can expect to live 15 years longer than his counterpart in 1900:

<http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005140.html>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I'd like to think that most people are more successful later in life. We obsess over young prodigies, but many work hard to achieve great things way past their 40's

</comment><comment><USER35> Inspirational quote of the week: "Middle-aged people are arguably the pinnacle of human evolution: they can do more, earn more and, in short, they run the world."

</comment><comment><USER36> 40 seems like about the time you've got enough experience under your belt to build something extraordinary and enough comfort with money (or access to money) to realize your vision.

Steve Jobs would be an interesting one for this list.

He didn't change digital production history until he was 40 years old w/Toy Story in 1995.

He didn't return to Apple until 1997 and turn it into the world's largest consumer electronic's business.

Everything before that was marginal by comparison.

<comment><USER37> The personal computer was not "marginal".

<comment><USER38> It's true they made a decent contribution early on, but I hope you aren't implying they invented the personal computer. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_computer#History>

<comment><USER37> Apple up to the Mac is practically the prototype of the Silicon Valley young- founders-in-a-garage startup. To depict Steve Jobs as a late bloomer who did nothing big before 40 is silly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Hey pg, why don't the guidelines have something about submissions behind paywalls / sign-in-walls?

<comment><USER40> An interesting read is an interesting read, there are occasionally nuggets of gold even on the most poorly designed slideshow ad trap. I like to imagine that the "inverted pyramid" technique frontloads the best stuff on the landing page and this discussion page (a man can dream, can't he?).

Etiquette might suggest a heads up in the submitted title (paywall, slideshow, obnoxious popover ad that breaks the article on mobile, &c). If the article is in fact paywalled then it's unlikely to rise far enough to get in many peoples' way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> As someone who just turned 40, I resent the use of the term "middle-aged" here :)</comment>


Elon Musk: Tesla 'would be interested' in GM's idled factories - <AUTHOR> https://www.freep.com/story/money/cars/general-motors/2018/12/07/elon-musk-tesla-jobs-general-motors/2245631002/ <comment><AUTHOR> Living in Michigan as much as I think this is great news I'm pretty certain Musk would chose either Windsor (Canada) or Cleveland plants over the Detroit one.

There are two reasons for this happening:

1\. Why would Musk add to his investment in Michigan, a state where he cannot sell his cars? Tesla already owns a tool and die shop in Grand Rapids.

2\. Even though Michigan is now a right to work state the current Governor- elect has said she wants to reverse this law. Musk has always been anti-union and there is no place harder to do that than in Detroit where the United Auto Workers is located

It's my personal opinion that the Canadian government would make Musk an offer with government subsidies that neither Michigan nor Ohio could match. Unless President Trump who famously promised Detroit he'd help during the election steps up with federal subsidies.</comment>


Latest Sexting Scandal Shows Many Adults Have Some Growing Up to Do - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2015/04/28/liberty_high_school_sexting_scandal_focus_is_on_consent_and_adults_are_irate.html <comment><USER2> Crazy seeing what kids get away with today. However I think the medium has just changed:

Nothing like this ever happened when I grew up, we were not passing photos of girls around. If you wanted to see someone nude, it would have to be done in the basement of the school or the backseat of a car.</comment>


Sarah Hörst Creates Exoplanet Atmospheres in Her Lab - <AUTHOR> https://www.quantamagazine.org/sarah-horst-creates-exoplanet-atmospheres-in-her-lab-20190408/ <comment><USER2> It's refreshing to see a successful PI with such a strong focus on the well- being of her students and community, and yet I'm annoyed that I'm refreshed by this.

One day, when nobody wants to be a graduate student anymore and the academy is suffering, people will start to wonder whether they should start treating trainees like humans and expecting PIs to be competent managers.

<comment><USER3> My grad school experience was very positive wrt my PI, and the same was true for the vast majority of my peers with whom I interacted. That's not to minimize the problem of PI's who mistreat their underlings, but to point out that in internet discussions, mostly it's unhappy people who are motivated to share their experiences, and that can create a distorted perception of [insert topic] as a whole.

<comment><USER2> Certainly, I'm glad to hear of the positive experience of you and your colleagues. But, isn't there something to be said for the call-out of the topic in the article? If the issue of work-life balance and quality mentorship wasn't an issue, it seems to me that this article would stop short of asking Dr Hörst about it.

<comment><USER3> Oh yeah, absolutely! No question that it's still an issue: the vast majority of my peers had great experiences with their PI's, but I'd say 10-20% were less happy at times. Even within my department, we all knew of at least a few professors who should be avoided as advisers because of how they treated their students. So if that's anything close to a representative sample, a problem for 10-20% of people is a big problem that needs to be addressed, but that still leaves 80-90% of people pretty happy.

<comment><USER2> Well, it's comforting to hear about those low percentages (10-20%, as you mention) in your experience. However, empirical results [0] have demonstrated percentages of mental illness among PhD students more in the range of 43-46%. Lest we assign some sort of "well, it's better here" thinking, those results are from Berkeley.

I remain pedantic about this only because, despite some anectodal experiences, there's a serious problem in academic training which is having strongly detrimental effects on student development, quality of life, and retention.

[0]: [https://www.nature.com/articles/nbt.4089](https://www.nature.com/articles/nbt.4089)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> oh wow, I took her class at JHU. she's awesome!</comment>


The official term for the smell after it rains - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrichor

<comment><USER2> I love this smell. I've been fighting with the wife, who claimed it was from asphalt, and I knew it wasn't, since I've smelled it in the middle of nowhere. Turns out, she was actually pretty close, since it's hydrocarbon based.

Somebody should make a perfume based on this. It should be possible to extract the specific oils responsible.

<comment><USER3> I love this smell too. Smells are emotionally charged to begin with, and this is one of the more powerful ones in my experience. The fact that it's so intermittent and fleeting (small correction to the title: it's the smell after it's _just begun_ to rain) adds to its mystery. Because of that, I kind of hope it doesn't get extracted into a product. Perhaps I'm being too nostalgic, though, sitting in just about the darkest day of winter when it's been -20 for most of the past month...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've always been able to smell something distinctive BEFORE it rains. Don't know what causes that, but I've always thought it was actually change in air pressure that my nose is misinterpreting as a smell.

<comment><USER5> Are you thinking of a smell with a kind of sharp, metallic or chemical odor, right before a heavy thunderstorm?

If memory serves me, that's due to the voltage between the storm and the ground turning O2 molecules into O3 (ozone), which gets spread around by the storm's winds.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, I think that describes it pretty well. I don't think I've met anyone else who claims to be able to smell it.

<comment><USER6> That is, in fact, ozone. You're not alone. I often smell it ahead of big storms as well. Of course, I also smelled it after watching the maple tree in my front yard get zapped 20 feet away with nothing but a window screen and air between my face and $DEITY knows how many kilovolts.

<comment><USER5> There is some variation in how sensitive people are to individual odors. Picking up the ozone smell before storms seems to be sufficiently rare that a lot of people end up wondering if they're the only one.

Anyway, as I said, the ozone is produced by the electrical activity in the storm--if you're curious, you can get a smell of ozone off of artificial sources of high-voltage electricity as well. Hanging around a Tesla Coil or Van de Graff Generator ought to do the trick.

And hey, look at it this way, it's not the storm itself you're noticing-- you're actually _smelling lightning_. How cool is that?

<comment><USER7> I've always been able to smell this before a storm as well. I remember when I was a kid and I would tell my parents, friends, whoever, this fact and they would just think I was crazy because no one else could smell it.

I have very poor eyesight, so my hearing and sense of smell are extremely acute.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Triple J radio in Australia (the government funded "youth" radio station) has a science show with a guy called Dr Karl.

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

"He holds degrees in mathematics, biomedical engineering, medicine and surgery. He has also studied astrophysics, computer science and philosophy. He has worked as a physicist, labourer, roadie for bands, car mechanic, film- maker, hospital scientific officer, biomedical engineer, TV weatherman, taxi driver and medical doctor."

He also written a ton of books and won an Ig Noble prize for his extensive research in to belly button lint colouring.

He is clearly totally awesome.

Anyway, petrichor is old news to listeners of his radio show, as it's been discussed there numerous times. I highly recommend listening to his podcast, it's full of all sorts of random sciencey stuff presented in an easy to digest way:

<http://www.abc.net.au/science/drkarl/scienceontriplej/>

</comment><comment><USER9> In Tamil, we call this 'manvasanai', which literally translates to the smell of earth.

<comment><USER10> <digression>

As this involves rain and earth, This poem immediately springs in the mind.

The red earth and pouring rain.

Red earth and pouring rain[1] What could my mother be to yours? What kin is my father to yours anyway? And how Did you and I meet ever? But in love our hearts have mingled as red earth and pouring rain

[Translated by AK Ramanujan (Kuruntokai - 40)

</digression>

<comment><USER11> Titled: "What He Said"

On a side note, poetry isn't poetry without proper spacing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I knew we sprayed bananas and tomatoes to ripen during transit to market but never figured plants used the same technique to delay a process (spraying the ground with an oil) to retard seed germination until it rains. Pretty neat if I read the article correctly.

<comment><USER13> I don't think that the article infers that but it could be a plausible explanation for the effect of the oil seeping out but it could also be that the moisture seeps out first and then when there is none left the oil seeps out as a last resort.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I remember a childhood friend told me that it was the smell of ozone and I guess it always just stuck. Seems kind of silly now that I think about it.

<comment><USER15> Not so silly. As elsewhere noted, you will smell ozone when thunder storms are around. The high voltages involved create 03(ozone) from O2(oxygen).

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I sort of doubt plants have much to do with the smell. I used to live in a basement apartment with lots of exposed brickwork and a shitty heating system. Every Fall when the temperature started dropping, there would be moisture condensing on the brick, and it would give off the "rainy earth" smell.

<comment><USER2> Wrong smell!

Depending upon where on earth you live, I think it's possible that you haven't smelled this smell. I now live in the Pacific Northwest. I rarely smell it here, and I miss smelling it. It has to be a hot summer rainstorm, not a winter drizzle.

The smell you're describing, I think, is just "wet earth smell", which isn't nearly as pleasant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I learnt this (and dozens of other interesting words) years ago from Anu Garg's AWAD mailing list. <http://wordsmith.org/awad/archives/0404>

</comment><comment><USER18> I have never heard any one who has ever said that they do not like this smell. I wonder what is it in the that makes us so refreshed and happy. My spirits just sore at this smell.

</comment><comment><USER10> The likable smell caused by the bacteria <http://science.howstuffworks.com/question479.htm>

</comment><comment><USER19> Surely negative ions have got something to do with it?

</comment><comment><USER20> I thought the smell after it rains was ozone, or perhaps something else oxidizing the inside of my nose.

</comment><comment><USER21> I have always had a dream of making a perfume out of this smell. Simply refreshing!

</comment><comment><USER22> What about the smell of asphalt after it rains?

</comment><comment><USER23> A nice article for the solstice, thank you :)

</comment><comment><USER24> smells like worms

<comment><USER6> There was a calvin and hobbes in the 80s that stated the very same.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> However, experts believe that "petrichor" will not replace "October rain" as a term of endearment.

<comment><USER26> I've never heard the term "October rain" before, but had to look it up. Quite a few poems with that title it seems. I thought you were referring to the Gun N' Roses song "November Rain" there for a second :)</comment></comment>


Why your middle-class salary is better than you might think - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/06/15/the-big-problem-with-one-of-the-most-commonly-cited-numbers-about-the-economy/

<comment><AUTHOR> _Try this thought experiment. Adjusted for inflation, would you rather make $50,000 in today 's world or $100,000 in 1980's? In other words, is an extra $50,000 enough to get you to give up the internet and TV and computer that you have now?_

I think the more import trade-offs are around availability of free time, which probably has been reduced for a lot of workers by the internet and smartphones as well as technologies that allow individuals to do things that would be either labor intensive or have high capital requirements. I can do things today on a middle class salary that only a millionaire would have been able to do in the 1980's.

</comment><comment><USER2> I had a dream where I was looking at my 3D color holographic watch app, while sitting naked in a grass hut on a beach somewhere, cooking out of old tin cans. Not a bad life (at least in the dream).</comment>


Offer HN: I'll photograph anything in Europe - <AUTHOR>

Two weeks ago, I started traveling around the world. I'll be in Europe for ~2 months, and plan to visit Asia, Australia and South America afterwards.
I'm traveling with my photography gear, and would be happy to shoot anything you need photographed - your team, your office, a prototype, etc. For free, of course!
I'll be visiting most major cities, so let me know if you're interested! <comment><USER2> Well if you're offering, I'm always on the lookout for interesting cover pics for groovymag and jsmag PDF journals. <http://jsmag.com> would give you an idea - looking for cool b/w photos. email@example.com if you have anything you want to send in. Thanks :)</comment>


Monadic parser for CSS in Clojure - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/kachayev/b5887f66e2985a21a466

<comment><USER2> _it 's easier to work both with monads and parsers in dynamically typed language_

I'm asking a genuine question. I'm certain other people have had a different experience to this. Could you expand on what makes it easier? (And would you deliberately distinguish between 'easy' and 'simple')

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice question!

It "easy". Cause it takes less characters in your code: you don't need "type classes" of any form, you don't care about liftings etc. You can start from 2-3 lines of code and see immediate result.

But it's really not that "simple", cause without constant thinking about type of each expr it becomes very hard to trace long chains of monad operations very quickly. Plus types are great for verifying that you didn't break anything inside your "do" block (which is painful in dynamic env).

<comment><USER3> "Cause it takes less characters in your code: you don't need "type classes" of any form, you don't care about liftings etc. You can start from 2-3 lines of code and see immediate result."

Considering you linked directly to the roughly-equivalent Haskell, which contains neither of those things, that's a strange statement.

You will still need to care about liftings if you do monad transformers in a dynamic language, and if you implement your own monadic value in Clojure you may not literally type in an "instance" but you're still going to have to implement it.

You may have attained parity with Haskell's ease-of-parsing, but you certainly haven't shown it to be "easier". That _is_ saying something, though... few languages can implement a monadic parser without horrid syntax. (Assuming you actually have... it's a common problem to think one has implemented something monadic without actually having done so. [1] But that's just a general comment, I'm not familiar enough with Clojure to have an opinion.)

However...

"Plus types are great for verifying that you didn't break anything inside your "do" block ( _which is painful in dynamic env_ )."

Emphasis mine. This tends to suggest that it is still not _easier_ in a dynamic environment. Again, getting to even "almost as easy" is still a big win, though.

Interestingly, I'd suggest that the biggest problem with monads in a dynamic language is that when you do screw up, it's going to be harder for the _human_ to understand it, and in the process, it's going to be harder for the human to come to understand monadic patterns in general. If someone is already very fluent in monadic patterns from Haskell experience, the craziness that might come out of a mistyped (in either sense) dynamic expression will probably be something they can handle in stride, but my guess is that it will be substantially more difficult to obtain that fluency in a dynamic language. In my personal experience, the fact that dynamic languages allow for more sloppiness comes out in code in a very real and profound way.

(And by "personal experience", I mean that while it is beyond the scope of this text box to elaborate further I've noticed that my own work in API creation between static and dynamic languages has noticeable differences in correctness and clarity-of-thought when I'm working in static and dynamic languages. I encountered another example just this last week of a confusion I'd made in an API of mine between two different entities that the dynamic type system had allowed me to conflate into one that a static type system would never have let me get away with. And I'm not even talking about Haskell's level of static typing... even conventional manifest typing would have prevented this mental error.)

[1]: [http://www.jerf.org/iri/post/2928](http://www.jerf.org/iri/post/2928)</comment></comment></comment>


BBC News - The top 100 sites on the internet - <AUTHOR> http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8562801.stm <comment><USER2> Can anyone else not find Myspace? Has it really shrunk that much?

<comment><USER3> I think they must be grouping it under Fox Interactive Media which has a large chunk on the graph and encompasses things like MySpace and probably IGN.

<comment><USER4> Except Picasa, YouTube, etc. are not part of the big Google square. Weird.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Surprised that Livejasmin is bigger than Linkedin.</comment>


Google Research Football: A Novel Reinforcement Learning Environment - <AUTHOR> https://ai.googleblog.com/2019/06/introducing-google-research-football.html <comment><USER2> If I read correctly, the agent only controls one player at a time. On offense it controls the player with the ball, and on defense it controls probably the player closest to the ball. The other players are controlled by the built-in AI. Controlling a single agent kind of takes away from the appeal of deep-RL: that entire teams can learn to coordinate in novel and optimal ways.

<comment><USER3> > Modeled after popular football video games, the Football Environment > provides a physics based 3D football simulation where agents control either > one or all football players on their team, learn how to pass between them, > and manage to overcome their opponent's defense in order to score goals.

It looks like the AI agent can control one or all of the players on their team.

<comment><USER2> You are right! From the paper:

> by default, our non-active players are also controlled by another rule-based > bot. In this case, the behavior is simple and corresponds to reasonable > football actions and strategies, such as running towards the ball when we > are not in possession, or move forward together with our active player. In > particular, this type of behavior can be turned off for future research on > cooperative multi-agents if desired.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I guess I don't get it... What does this game have that SC2/Dota doesn't?

As far as I can tell, the main goal for reinforcement learning is to make it so that it doesn't take 10k learning sessions to learn what a human can learn in a single session, and to make self-training without guiding scenarios feasible.

<comment><USER5> Should be much cheaper to run despite being a physics simulation:

"The Football Engine is written in highly optimized C++ code, allowing it to be run on off-the-shelf machines, both with GPU and without GPU-based rendering enabled. This allows it to reach a performance of approximately 25 million steps per day on a single hexa-core machine."

Also has some features geared towards generalization, and benchmarking:

"With the Football Benchmarks, we propose a set of benchmark problems for RL research based on the Football Engine. The goal in these benchmarks is to play a "standard" game of football against a fixed rule-based opponent that was hand-engineered for this purpose. We provide three versions: the Football Easy Benchmark, the Football Medium Benchmark, and the Football Hard Benchmark, which only differ in the strength of the opponent. "

"As training agents for the full Football Benchmarks can be challenging, we also provide Football Academy, a diverse set of scenarios of varying difficulty. This allows researchers to get the ball rolling on new research ideas, allows testing of high-level concepts (such as passing), and provides a foundation to investigate curriculum learning research ideas, where agents learn from progressively harder scenarios."

So, as compared to SC2/Dota, you can train much faster, with good baselines to benchmark or compete again, and already built-in support for curriculum learning. SC2/Dota weren't designed for RL, so they're just harder to work with in RL - SC2 has a curriculum which was added on afterwards, for example (the minigames), but Dota2 still doesn't.

Soccer is also more popular than either SC2/DoTA2 as well, so that may be a draw for researchers. More interesting to work on something you like and already know about.

Dunno if all of that together is enough to make it a worthwhile testbed, but it's not obviously worthless or redundant.

<comment><USER6> > This allows it to reach a performance of approximately 25 million steps per > day on a single hexa-core machine."

That is 24 steps per second per thread (or 48 per core).

This doesn't seem that impressive: much more complex games run at that frame rate? FIFA games from the 90s don't look much worse and certainly achieved those frame rates on much older hardware.

<comment><USER5> Most of them aren't necessarily trying for realistic physics simulations (they're games, not simulations).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> ur-whale "real bayesians" vs "frequentists united" at 0:33 in the video :D

</comment><comment><USER7> I bet that ai's will find a lot of physics bugs to exploit early on.

</comment><comment><USER8> Perhaps this will be used in live sports in the future. Giving real time feedback to players for optimum positioning. Would be a cool test but I still prefer to watch sports played the 'traditional' way.

<comment><USER9> Tell me about this 'traditional' way you talk about. Professional sports has always been about competition/winning (within the rules). If technology can give a team an advantage, it's only a natural progression!

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Wonder if they use the same tech to predict the outcome of football matches. I've seen them show it on the Premier League games.

</comment><comment><USER11> Do all the players have the same skill set?

Interesting to see how things like faster players change optimal play

</comment><comment><USER12> Any chance for Google Research Rugby?

</comment><comment><USER13> > The Football Engine is written in highly optimized C++ code, allowing it to > be run on off-the-shelf machines, both with GPU and without GPU-based > rendering enabled. This allows it to reach a performance of approximately 25 > million steps per day on a single hexa-core machine.

Missed opportunity to use Rust for memory safety.

<comment><USER14> What? Do you have evidence there's a memory problem with the code as is?

Blind language allegiances are useless. All of them have their advantages and it makes no sense to claim one is superior.

<comment><USER15> Well, to be fair, statically guaranteed memory safety _is_ a completely separate category from potential memory safety of well-written code. That said, the meaningless calls for Rust at each possible opportunity are a bit unnecessary.</comment></comment></comment>


Researchers say U.S. Internet traffic was re-routed through Belarus - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/11/20/researchers-say-u-s-internet-traffic-was-re-routed-through-belarus-thats-a-problem/

<comment><USER2> Meh... "By default your neighbor just believes you, and doesn't have a really reliable way to tell if you are actually telling the truth" \- while this is not 100% true with regard to most peering configurations via tier 1 carriers, there is a slight nugget of truth here. You can't just order a circuit from AT&T/Verizon/Sprint and inject whatever you want. First you have to have an AS assigned to you (if you're to have the ability to announce anyway) and then beyond that it's generally a process of negotiating sane terms of what you're presenting to them and what they're presenting to you (generally as the customer you want the entire table, but there are exceptions). At that point the config on the far end will mimic what was agreed upon (prefixes advertised and general length protections such that you don't spam out thousands of /30s from your transport or something horrid like that). While there is no way to truly validate the authenticity of the update - there is generally a decent chain of custody.

BGP is a great playground for injection research. The best part is via looking glass sites it's very trivial to target specific, and core, platforms.

That being said... Regardless of BGP itself beyond certificate validation and pinning we should also be doing path checking. I mentioned this to Moxie for a potential addition into Convergence, and from the page:

"Convergence trust notaries use network perspective to validate your communication by default, but can be extended to use whatever methods the notary operator would like. This might include DNSSEC, BGP data, "SSL observatory" results, or even CA validation."

...AS path should be looked at more closely in all secure communications we're delivering. It's trivial to get the AS path for the hops and, since it is generally static from known origination networks it would be relatively easy to build history of known AS path order and vet with regionalized crowd- sourcing.

Huge path swings should be obvious, today they're not to most. Some good resources are: * Team Cymru - [https://www.team- cymru.org/Monitoring/BGP/](https://www.team-cymru.org/Monitoring/BGP/) * Colorado State BGPmon - [http://bgpmon.netsec.colostate.edu/](http://bgpmon.netsec.colostate.edu/) * Cyclops (UCLA) - [http://cyclops.cs.ucla.edu](http://cyclops.cs.ucla.edu)

...and there's also BGPMon (the service), but it has turned into a more paid for service (although you can monitor 5 x AS for free). * BGPmon - [http://www.bgpmon.net/](http://www.bgpmon.net/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Original article from two days ago: [http://www.renesys.com/2013/11/mitm- internet-hijacking/](http://www.renesys.com/2013/11/mitm-internet-hijacking/)

</comment><comment><USER4> As I said in the other article on this...

Also the author shouldn't rule out Halon's razor[1]. Advertising the wrong AS is often caused by incompetence or mistakes of network engineers. Note that I'm not a network engineer (I'm a linux monkey by trade), but know you can do BGP AS path filtering[2] ala ACLs to prevent a rogue/incompetent entity from advertising routes that dont' belong to them. If more ISPs would simply lock down their routing infrastructure a bit more, a lot of these types of attacks would be rendered mostly void.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor)

[2] [https://ftp.apnic.net/meetings/22/docs/tut-routing-pres- bgp-...](https://ftp.apnic.net/meetings/22/docs/tut-routing-pres-bgp-bcp.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER5> i have long suspected that BGP routes can be altered on-demand to push domestic traffic outside national borders and justify its recording and use by intelligence services.

it is entertaining to see this done in the wild.

<comment><USER2> It's not that they can be altered - it's that the path can be manipulated so that the path "looks" better. Generally there needs to be some collusion in that regard however since it's oft easy to steer traffic by AS-prepending (making ingress swing across multi-homed AS), but harder to control the egress.

If you can announce a relatively concise prefix of traffic you know you want and nobody notices it's pretty easy for this to go unnoticed for a period of time. As the prefix gets smaller that's harder to control however (since more specific routes will generally be installed in the routing table over less specific).

That being said it shouldn't be trivial to announce networks you don't own. This is where the people process oft breaks down.</comment></comment>


TIL humans have consumed 9.2b tons of plastic. 6b will never meet recycling bin - <AUTHOR> https://www.lemonade.com/blog/the-plastic-problem/ <comment><USER3> This article doesn't really cover the main questions about recycling plastic, like does it have any negative impact on the environment when you throw away plastic.

The case for "no": [https://medium.com/@robertwiblin/what-you-think-about- landfi...](https://medium.com/@robertwiblin/what-you-think-about-landfill-and- recycling-is-probably-totally-wrong-3a6cf57049ce)

<comment><USER4> I've noticed this weird pattern where articles that try to put you off recycling often don't actually support that thesis. I guess it's admirable that they usually stick close enough to the truth that it's obvious they're trying to spin things, but what leads someone with sufficient integrity to do that to write it in the first place?

Is it some kind of game to convince people to do silly stuff while literally telling them that it's a bad idea?

E.g

> But for some kinds of plastic in some places recycling is indeed the better > option, even if the net gain isn't that huge.

With a link to this:

[https://ourworldindata.org/faq-on-plastics#recycling- landfil...](https://ourworldindata.org/faq-on-plastics#recycling-landfill-or- incineration-which-should-we-choose)

Which says:

> Recycling had the lowest global warming potential and energy use across > nearly all of the studies. From an environmental perspective, recycling is > usually the best option

It lists 37 comparisons and landfill beats recycling in 2 of them (they also tied in one), with recycling nearly always beating both landfill and incineration, and landfill often being the worst of the three. I've read other meta studies that agree with this, it's the real consensus view.

But, I don't understand why they would link to this source and still overall try to imply the the opposite argument is true, it makes no sense to me? Why not just not link to it if they don't want to accept the findings? Why not link direct to the two studies that claims recycling doesn't beat landfill? If you're going to argue something not supported by science then don't link to the science. This seems basic but it's a definite pattern.

And I guess that recursively applies to you, why would you link to an article that debunks the very point you're trying to make?

<comment><USER5> I'm not sure "debunks" is the word here, because reading that meta-analysis doesn't get me very far.

There's not much to it other than a simple table and it's hard to interpret. What is "global warming potential" and "total energy use"? In the studies that say recycling is better, on what grounds do they conclude that, and are the conditions they're assuming realistic?

The next step would be reading the individual studies and figuring out how they work, which is more than I'm going to do for a casual Internet conversation. The links and references would be a good starting point for someone willing to do the work, though.

And to answer your question, sharing links is generally pretty useful for people who want to dig deeper, and we should do more of it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> On a first take, I assumed the title was referring to microplastics (e.g., the literal consumption of plastic), but then I realized we probably have no idea how much microplastic is inside humans (and all other animals), and what the long-term consequences will be.

I'm fine with the idea of plastic, but single-use plastic has got to go. We shouldn't accept the disposal of plastic into our waterways and food chain without scientific researching proving that microplastics are safe-- though it's doubtful they are. Why do we invent new physical things without first considering the consequence of the lifecycle of the product? If plastic was invented today, no regulatory body would allow us to use it as we do.

</comment><comment><USER5> The article assumes there is a problem without talking about landfills or incineration.

If you want to make sure plastic never gets into the ocean, disposing of it properly should do it. If it doesn't, something is wrong with how garbage disposal is done and that needs to be fixed.

<comment><USER7> How do you dispose of plastic properly? Even landfill doesn't cut it - <USER2> stuff just breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces. These microplastics then enter the groundwater, and from there find their way into almost every part of our environment.

<comment><USER8> This is true, landfills aren't perfect. However it's better than our current "Recycling" which just ships the plastic off to 3rd world countries to be burned or buried.

To be honest, I think micro-plastics are the among least hazardous things that can leak from a landfill. Also a landfill is usually local as possible and doesn't require much energy.

The answer will always be "Use less of the junk." But I feel guilty putting plastic in the recycling bin.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Not mentioned is the use of plastic by health care. In a hospital, each patient generates a large stream of plastic for disposal.

<comment><USER10> This is a great example of an important and valid use for plastic! For the number of lives this saves - and _one_ is enough - this is an achievement to be proud of.

With promising new startups such as Commonwealth Fusion Systems (this is the talk to start with: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkpqA8yG9T4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkpqA8yG9T4)), I'm not going to worry about the garbage problem. My bet is that we'll see proof of fusion's viability within the next decade. In the era that follows, people will be literally mining landfills for raw materials to separate into perfect piles of feedstock. A 1e8 C plasma will strip the electrons off of any atoms you place inside it, and you can magnetically separate the charged nuclei.

And if I'm wrong about any of that, a few more decades of landfill use isn't going to change anything anyway. [http://jmc.stanford.edu/commentary/progress/index.html](http://jmc.stanford.edu/commentary/progress/index.html)

<comment><USER8> The answer has always been a source of cheap, clean, abundant, and safe energy. But I'm not very optimistic about seeing it in my lifetime aside from maybe next generation fission plants. It WILL happen, just not anytime soon. We may see a fusion plant going positive soon, but probably not for a price we can afford commercially.</comment></comment></comment>


Twitch unleashes scorched-earth attack to unveil malicious spambot creator - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/04/twitch-unleashes-scorched-earth-attack-to-unveil-malicious-spambot-creator/?comments=1 <comment><USER2> Between the alt_uscis Twitter suit and recent changes in ISP legislation it seems like there are going to be more and more of these "give up the anon!" pushes.

What a great time to be a VPN service.</comment>


Facebook removes the Status Box... who directs UI over there - <AUTHOR>

Checking out Facebook a few minutes ago, I noticed that the Status Box on the wall was missing. Now you need to choose Status, Photo, Link, or Video before getting a status box. Instead of typing a status and clicking a button, you now click a button, enter the status, and then click another button.  From 2 Steps to 3!
On the new profile, if you want to see the person's email, phone, or website links (for example), you need to click on their profile and still click info to see the rest of the details. I'm not sure that is an improvement either.
Who makes the UI decisions at Facebook? What were they thinking???? <comment><USER2> so far noone is addressing what i imagine is the utter uselessness of a majority of status updates. maybe making it harder to find will affect those who update their status just because the box is on the screen first. another potential benefit might be better organization of your datastreams in that updates are more strongly typed; i.e. urls are links, text is text, and images are images. i imagine it's very difficult to determine what's supposed to be a URI vs bad typing. whatever it was that looked at your status update and then got info from the URL (thumbnail, desc) has been pretty terrible for a while now, so maybe this will make it better. if not, i won't miss status updates from anyone who can't figure it out.

</comment><comment><USER3> They created the status box in response to Twitter. Now they realize people connect on many extra things including pictures (Instagram) or videos. I am kinda surprised too.

<comment><AUTHOR> While that is true, in the old method it had the status box, with the other links (photo, video, link, etc) below it. It was still a 2 click process.

I would think that most people enter a personalized status message most of the time, regardless of whether they are just posting a simple status, a photo, or a link.

Just seem dumb to me, and of no benefit, to make it a 3 click process.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The status box auto-focuses, so it's still only two clicks.

<comment><USER5> good point. on the other hand, however, perceived cost has always been more important than actual cost, and that's when it comes to absolutely anything, including UI.</comment></comment>


Show HN: DailyHN – Daily top five Hacker News Stories - <AUTHOR> https://dailyhn.com <comment><USER2> Another one at [http://www.daemonology.net/hn- daily/](http://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/)</comment>


Why Do the Airlines Need a Bailout? - <AUTHOR> https://slate.com/business/2020/03/airlines-bailout-coronavirus.html <comment><AUTHOR> Step 1: Make money for 10 years. Step 2: Spend 96% of that money on stock buybacks. Step 3: Encounter difficulty Step 4: Ask for $50 Billion in grants and loans so you don't go broke.

Imagine if you or I tried to pull something like this.

<comment><USER2> Note that the stock buybacks were favored because they were a more tax favorable way of returning money to investors than via dividends as I understand it; and if the corporation did build up a rainy day fund, shareholders may have justifiably been upset at the lack of dividend.

In short, it may be more complicated than it necessarily seems at first blush; then again, what I just typed is a cargo cult parrot of the current business zeitgeist.

I will admit that I too ascribe to maintaining a rainy day fund as part of responsible operational stewardship given I see the purpose of a corporation to be providing a societal solution first, and generating/disseminating profit second, therefore I favor strategies that result in an operation that can keep chugging along even if something unexpected hits vs an absolute min/max on profit.

Then again, I don't have many successful individual business ventures to my name, so... yeah. Take it with a grain of salt. I can definitely tell you a handful of ways _not_ to do it though!

<comment><USER3> Stock buybucks and dividends are OK. But when company needs money it is up to shareholders, bondholders, credit markets to re-capitalize the company (if they think it makes business sense).

<comment><USER4> This is exactly why low to zero interest rates are always a terrible idea. It incentivizes reckless borrowing, doing dumb things with the money like buy backs, then when money dries up, we have a major problem. All entirely predictable. All these companies should go bankrupt. No more 0% rates.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As someone who does keep cash on hand, I find it frustrating when those who don't are bailed out. That said, hasn't almost every bailout the government has give returned a big profit? So (grants aside) isn't this just the lender of last resort seizing a good business opportunity? And as tax payers, that's good for all of us right?

If we decline, then there will be big disruption (bad for us as consumers), supply will contract unnecessarily driving up prices (bad for both consumers and taxpayers) and some private lender will make a killing selectively bailing out or investing. Sound better?

<comment><USER6> Since this is becoming a recurring theme, of "too big to fail". I think, from now on, any company that is "too big to fail", should have to pay a "too big to fail" insurance tax to the government (perhaps a certain percentage of their revenue). they can't just keep getting free bail outs, without paying the insurance premium. If I opt to not get drivers insurance and then crash into someone, i can't just ask for insurance coverage after the fact.

<comment><USER5> Isn't that exactly what the bailout is? We lend them 100bn, they pay back 120bn, that's 20bn in to-big-to-fail insurance premiums...

<comment><USER6> well, the premium they're paying is less than the market rate, otherwise the market would have given it to them. Hence, if they're going to get a subsidized loan, they should have to pay into that, along with everyone else that is elligble for it

<comment><USER5> There is no market rate for this because it can only be provided by government and because these events are basically unique.

The key here should be for the insurer (government) to recover a little more than their expenses in the medium term. That's a correctly priced insurance policy. That's exactly what tarp did. It's actually very impressive that the managers of the program were able to price the policy so correctly if you think about it...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Let them sell off that stock they bought back and/or fail. New airlines would emerge... when/if the demand ever picks back up to what it was end of '19.

</comment><comment><USER8> If the government invests that much money they should receive shares in turn. Then distribute those shares to taxpayers. Same for any subsidy or bailout. Otherwise you are just giving money to existing shareholders who benefitted from stock buybacks that led to the problem.

<comment><USER9> What percentage of shareholders are retirement funds - owned by retired people that saved rather than spent?

<comment><USER8> Does it really matter? What is the difference between propping up someone's retirement fund and giving them the money directly?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think we should bail then out but with just one unitranche facility that they can draw upon to pay wages and debt, but we accrue interest in the form of equity. The more they borrow, the more equity we end up owning effectively wiping out existing equity holders and most likely bond holders. We can then sell shares once it is operating smoothly again. It might make management think harder before they award bonuses or spend lavishly.

</comment><comment><USER11> "This country has socialism for the rich, and rugged individualism for the poor."

-Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, 1968

Do we need to rescue the airlines? I'm gonna guess that's pretty essential to the economic recovery at large. But it's hard to ignore the fact that in this country, when poor people make mistakes [or, in this case are the victims of circumstance], they typically eat those mistakes. Medical bankruptcies, unable to cover a $500 emergency, etc.

So, ok, let's rescue all the industries that juiced their share prices over saving for a rainy day – but, for the love of god, can we _please_ also bail out 'main street' this time around?

<comment><USER12> " But it's hard to ignore the fact that in this country, when poor people make mistakes [or, in this case are the victims of circumstance], they typically eat those mistakes. Medical bankruptcies, unable to cover a $500 emergency, etc"

This may be the case. But would you rather have thousands of people without jobs in the airline industry and the many other jobs that will be lost as a result of the bankrupt airlines?

Bailing out these industries out is in essence allowing many people to keep their job.

<comment><USER13> one option is to bail them out but _with strings attached_. Demand concessions that are good for labor and for the consumer public in exchange for the bailout. Don't just let them put all savings into pockets of executives and shareholders (while promoting "ration and save/pull yourself by bootstraps" ideology to the poor, of course) then run crying to the taxpayers because they're too big to fail.

<comment><AUTHOR> Or to just nationalize them, many other countries have government owned airlines.

<comment><USER14> best time to do something like this too

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> An insider's view (note: not mine): [https://aviationweek.com/air- transport/airlines-lessors/opin...](https://aviationweek.com/air- transport/airlines-lessors/opinion-covid-19-end-may-most-world-airlines-will- be-bankrupt)

</comment><comment><USER16> First, they'll have to cut down on flights over time to help with climate. I haven't heard one idea out of the airlines over that problem. This would be a good time to demand that they explain how they're going to contribute to a solution ... and not have until 2050.

Second, they have been THE major contributor to the spread of this pandemic. No apparent recognition of that. This would be a good time for them to start planning how THEY - not government agencies - are going to be protect us the next time.

So we should just wait until we hear their plans. Boeing had to wait for a year - why not them?

</comment><comment><USER17> Having worked at an airline in the past 3 years, here's my opinion:

1\. Margins are extremely thin, so for many airlines break even for a flight is 80-90% of tickets sold.

2\. Regulations such as requiring airlines to fly their routes or risk losing the slot, ends up in empty flight (pure loss) just so they don't lose the slot.

3\. Airlines are high cashflow businesses which are then highly leveraged with loans and long contracts. Disruption to cashflow screws up everything.

Honestly 2.5 years with the airline and I have no idea how we stayed operating.

</comment><comment><USER18> Why do we need airlines?</comment>


U.S. conducted biological weapon field tests in Okinawa: documents - <AUTHOR> http://english.kyodonews.jp/news/2014/01/265571.html <comment><USER2> It turns out this has been uncovered along with a huge list of other horrifying practices on Okinawa by the USA in Sheldon Harris' book Factories of Death ([http://www.scribd.com/doc/91284707/Factories-of- Death](http://www.scribd.com/doc/91284707/Factories-of-Death)).

It was part of the more wide-ranging chemical and biological weapons program, Project 112 ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_112](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_112)).

There's a huge community of veterans who have served at Okinawa who research this stuff online and on the island in order to help process compensation claims and lawsuits against the US government (e.g. [http://vets.yuku.com/forums/74/Agent-Orange-Heart-Disease- Pr...](http://vets.yuku.com/forums/74/Agent-Orange-Heart-Disease-Prostate-and- Parkinsons#.UtJpdGRdVCI)).

So this isn't new, but it is absolutely disgusting.

</comment><comment><USER3> Here's a non-paywalled article:

[http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/afp/140111/us- biolog...](http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/afp/140111/us-biological- weapons-tested-okinawa-60s)

        The US army conducted field experiments of biological weapons,
        which could harm rice cropping, in the Japanese island of
        Okinawa in the early 1960s, a press report said Sunday.

        The same experiments were also conducted on the US mainland
        and in Taiwan, Kyodo news agency reported, citing US military
        documents it said it had obtained.

        [...]

        The obtained documents mention test sites including Nago
        and Shuri, both in Okinawa, but it is not known whether the
        experiments were conducted within the premises of US bases
        there, Kyodo said.

        In the field tests, the army "used a midget duster to
        release inoculum alongside fields in Okinawa and Taiwan,"
        measuring dosages at different distances and the effect on
        crop production, the documents said.

</comment><comment><USER4> Note from a FUD standpoint how well the reports avoid discussing the topic of simulant substances being used. Follow the money (lawsuits).</comment>


NASA scientist finds evidence of alien life - <AUTHOR> http://news.yahoo.com/s/digitaltrends/nasascientistfindsevidenceofalienlife

<comment><USER3> Best way to deal with these discoveries is just to forget about them and in a few years time look back and see if anyone stood up to challenge them. Reviewers can only look at the sanity of the paper, not at its truth. Even if they are very sceptical, they typically decide that a paper should be accepted because it is interesting and opens discussion. It is not the first time that structures like these have been found and published [1].

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Hills_84001>

</comment><comment><USER4> Full paper can be found at <http://journalofcosmology.com/Life100.html>

<comment><USER3> Did they have to make it look like a conspiracy website?

<comment><USER5> It is weird the sites design, maybe it's one of the reasons they are going out of business, people arriving there from a search engine may not find it much of a reputable journal at first glance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Finding fossil microorganisms and observing that they look very similar to those found on Earth would be an indication to me that the rock may not be a meteorite after all, or that it may be a meteorite _from Earth_ (i.e. blasted out into space by an impact, then fallen back to Earth some time later).

<comment><USER7> Second that.

Altough

"There are some that are just very strange and don't look like anything that I've been able to identify, and I've shown them to many other experts that have also come up stump."

makes me a little curious. I'm not a biologist, so someone who is, how often do you find organisms/fossils completely different from known organisms?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This was published in a crockpot journal and is likely fake:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2294516>

<comment><USER9> The "analysis" presented there is heavily laden with emotion, which reduces its own credibility in short order.

I know nothing about the Journal Of Cosmology, but the tone of this blog entry prevents me from accepting it as useful information, it comes across more as axe-grinding.

But let's assume JoC is a crackpot journal. Why is a NASA scientist publishing there?

Did he decide that NASA's credibility on alien life discoveries has not been damaged enough and he wanted to make it worse?

<comment><USER10> NASA employs many people. I worked there once myself. That there are crackpots and other less-than-credible folks working there is not only not surprising, but something I witnessed first hand. Despite popular culture's imagery, NASA is not some elite group of the world's finest intellects. It is really no more big a deal than working for a giant military contractor. In fact, most of the workers at NASA _do_ work for a giant military contractor.

That said, I have nothing to offer on the actual subject at hand - <USER2> validity of the claims.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Ever get the impression that NASA is doing a disservice to the scientific process with these sensational media pushes? Arsenic based life anyone?

<comment><USER12> Second that, the so called "astrobiology" is one of those fields which we don't know if the study is at all scientific or meaningful until we meet the alien in person. I remember watching a video of the 80's featuring a Professor of "Supernatural Studies".

These are, as one may call the study of "unknown unknowns"

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> In older news, the Journal of Cosmology is going out of business:

[http://daviddobbs.posterous.com/journal-of-cosmology- going-o...](http://daviddobbs.posterous.com/journal-of-cosmology-going-out- with-big-bang)

David Dobbs's Wired article on the "meteorite life" story is worth reading:

[http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/03/aliens-riding- mete...](http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/03/aliens-riding-meteorites- arsenic-redux-or-something-new/)

<comment><USER14> Please submit this! I'd love to read qualified commentary on many claims this blog post makes.

<comment><USER13> I submitted the Wired story:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2293947>

and then realised that was probably not the link you meant, since it was not the blog post. If you are wondering about the validity of the press release, I trust David Dobbs to quote a press release correctly; I'm guessing the journal is making another go of things.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > _"Given the controversial nature of his discovery, we have invited 100 > experts and have issued a general invitation to over 5,000 scientists from > the scientific community to review the paper and to offer their critical > analysis ... No other paper in the history of science has undergone such a > thorough vetting, and never before in the history of science has the > scientific community been given the opportunity to critically analyze an > important research paper before it is published."_

Seriously? That seems... sad. Borderline pathetic, that they're apparently that insular.

<comment><USER16> It does say "before it is published". Presumably you would want to vet a paper with trusted colleagues before releasing it even semi-publicly.

<comment><USER15> But once it's published, it's (seemingly) most-often behind a paywall, blocking further access to those who could analyze or benefit from it.

<comment><USER5> Journal of Cosmology is open access on the internet. Given the field though, I doubt anyone that could really add to these findings is going to be held back by a subscription, I assume it's very hard to get access to these rocks and without the evidence to experiment on your just taking the authors word really.

Very different from say an algorithms paper where anyone can implement and run the code and possibly find improvements.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Robin Hanson has an interesting take on (and links to) some criticisms of the paper, from evidence and philosophy of science pov, here, [http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/03/alien-life-info-but- no...](http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/03/alien-life-info-but-not-status- found.html).

</comment><comment><USER18> this is bad. If we're the only life in neighborhood it is evidence that life is rare and we might already be past the great filter. If life is relatively common it makes the fact that the sky is silent fucking terrifying.

<comment><USER19> elaborate please, I'm not following entirely

<comment><USER18> you'd be better served looking at Hanson's posts on the subject.

[http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/11/at-least-two- filters.h...](http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/11/at-least-two-filters.html)

<http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/03/very-bad-news.html>

[http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/11/beware-future- filters....](http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/11/beware-future-filters.html)

[http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/11/brain-size-is-not- filt...](http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/11/brain-size-is-not-filter.html)

[http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/12/berserker- breakout.htm...](http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/12/berserker- breakout.html)

<comment><USER20> Off-topic but I'm not sure where else to ask: Does Overcoming Bias have any organized index of posts remotely similar to LessWrong's sequences[1]? I'll probably just dive in and navigate via tags, but a more directed approach would be preferable.

[1] <http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Sequences>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm not impressed. The evidence backing the Martian microbe claims for meteorite ALH 84001 were far, far more robust than these seem to be and yet at the end of the day succumbed to the onslaught of criticism.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Claiming that you've found life inside a rock that has sat in a stew of micro-organisms (the Earth) for thousands of years is one thing, claiming that such life must be extra- terrestrial in origin is another thing entirely and requires a higher standard of evidence.

<comment><USER22> From what I've read, CI chondrites are extremely fragile and don't last very long on exposure to liquid water, which is why about half of the recovered CI chondrites on Earth have been witnessed falls (with the other half found in Antarctica). The two he analyzed for the paper were witnessed falls from 1864 and 1938.

I'm not saying this isn't just a case of pareidolia (it probably is), but the meteorites haven't been sitting in a stew of microorganisms for "thousands of years".

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> if they were sure bout that, they would post it on nasa.gov i guess

</comment><comment><USER24> I hope that it is really true and that this is only the first of such discoveries.

</comment><comment><USER25> So, in a few centuries we will have finally opponents and maybe then we will stop to kill ourselves.</comment>


The Instagram-Husband Revolution - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/article/580033/ <comment><USER2> The popular viral video from 2015 making fun of this is mentioned in the article, it's pretty funny: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFzKi-o4rHw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFzKi-o4rHw)

> Having an Instagram husband is also a smart financial move...

*smh

> Stevens said he has lurked on the #InstagramHusband hashtag on Instagram and > connected with other men that way after interacting with their photos. "It's > almost this silent brotherhood right now,"

This sounds terrible. I just feel bad for these dudes. Ha

<comment><USER3> What is there to feel bad about? It's like a modeling agent/photographer job, with the only difference being that you have a singular client who also happens to be your wife.

<comment><USER2> The difference, and why I feel bad for them, is this is occurring outside the context of a job. Would you want to work the whole time you're on a "vacation"? Probably not. That sounds miserable. I feel bad for these dudes that they cannot just go out and enjoy their free time with their wife without having to play photographer the whole time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> There's a BroScience youtube video called How to date a fitness chick. One of the jokes I always think about from it is, someone needs to take all those instaphotos, and that sucker is going to be you

</comment><comment><USER5> The most surprising thing for me is how Instagram became such a big success. I never thought it would take off that well. Now it's so big it can support lifestyles like these.

<comment><USER6> My biggest failure in life is not knowing what people really want out of the internet/web/apps. I'm constantly surprised at how things became such big successes.

Instagram? eh, that'll get used by 100 people. Snapchat? That'll be forgotten about in 2 months. Facebook, meh, seems boring. And so on...

I'm wrong so damn often because I just can't imagine wanting to do what other people get super excited about. I don't think there's anything wrong with all that they do, my brain doesn't work like that though, I really wish it did! All these successes are obvious in hindsight.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I thought for sure this would be a post about Instagram destroying marriages. I'm sure that's more prevalent than the "husbands" profiled in the article. As it is, this is just blind promotion of a fairly toxic lifestyle.

</comment><comment><USER8> Totally OT: I must have agreed to the Atlantic privacy thingie a hundred of time. But they keep asking me to allow them to rape my privacy by telling me they value it. I had enough. If the adtech industry doesn't know how to use cookies to store settings I am available for freelance work. And I can make powerpoints with funny GIFs, random pictures or use an MS theme. /s

<comment><USER9> Running AdNauseam - no such irritations when opening the link, and it's likely at least marginally more efficient at annoying the adtech industry than sarcasm (not mutually exclusive, of course).</comment></comment>


The Myth of the War of the Worlds Panic - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/history/2013/10/orson_welles_war_of_the_worlds_panic_myth_the_infamous_radio_broadcast_did.html <comment><USER2> For context, the _Mercury Theatre on the Air_ site has a full recording of Orson Welles's staging of The War of the Worlds available at [1][mp3]. It doesn't sound to me like the cast were trying to make it particularly realistic. Commercial radio broadcasting was still relatively novel in 1938, but its hard to understand now how anyone thought it was real.

The site [2] also has a brief recording of a conversation [3][mp3] between Orson Welles and H. G. Wells (which I haven't listened to). I hadn't realised that their adult lives overlapped.

[1] [http://sounds.mercurytheatre.info/mercury/381030.mp3](http://sounds.mercurytheatre.info/mercury/381030.mp3)

[2] [http://www.mercurytheatre.info/](http://www.mercurytheatre.info/)

[3] [http://sounds.mercurytheatre.info/mercury/401028.mp3](http://sounds.mercurytheatre.info/mercury/401028.mp3)

<comment><USER3> The explanation I read was that this show was not very popular, at least at the time. Most people were listening to another station. Then, when it went to commercial, they switched to Mercury Theatre. This means they missed Orson's introduction, which says explicitly that it is just a drama. So the first thing they heard was the series of fake news flashes.

<comment><USER4> That's specifically addressed in the article.

<comment><USER3> I noticed that later, though it seemed to be in response to the amount of people who were listening, not the fact that they missed the intro.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Radiolab War of the Worlds episode:

[http://www.radiolab.org/story/91622-war-of-the- worlds/](http://www.radiolab.org/story/91622-war-of-the-worlds/)

<comment><USER6> I caught this on the radio this weekend, and couldn't stop listening. It included a story about a radio station re-doing War of the Worlds in Quito, Ecuador, only they really tried to fool people. I don't want to give away the result, but it's worth a listen. The Slate article doesn't mention it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> >The legend of the panic, however, grew exponentially over the following years. In 1940, an esteemed academic solidified the myth in the public mind. Relying heavily on a skewed report compiled six weeks after the broadcast by the American Institute of Public Opinion

American Institute of Public Opinion, huh? Considering this is the artist who brought us Citizen Kane, I suspect a submarine job:

[http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html)

<comment><USER8> AIPO is a pre-runner to the Gallup polling organisation.

([http://www.trumanlibrary.org/hstpaper/amerinst.htm](http://www.trumanlibrary.org/hstpaper/amerinst.htm))

> _The American Institute of Public Opinion was founded by Dr. George Gallup > in 1935. The stated purpose of this organization was "impartially to measure > and report public opinion on political and social issues of the day without > regard to the rightness or wisdom of the views expressed."_

> _The institute conducted "Gallup polls" on a wide variety of issues. The > results of these national surveys were then distributed to subscribing > newspapers in the form of press releases._

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> There are thousands of these stories which are so commonly repeated that most people refuse to accept them as myths.

See also JFK's famous "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech, which is often (falsely) claimed to be German for "I'm a Jelly Donut". [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ich_bin_ein_Berliner#Jelly_doug...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ich_bin_ein_Berliner#Jelly_doughnut_misconception)

<comment><USER10> Claiming that it means "I am a Jelly Donut" is not false, just claiming that it doesn't also mean "I am from Berlin". It has both meanings.

<comment><USER11> Eddie Izzard made the best comparison to help it click: if a resident of Frankfurt were to hear "I am a Frankfurter", it still makes perfect sense, even if it also means "I am a hot dog".

<comment><USER12> Funny how it works perfectly fine for "I am a Frankfurter," but I can't see it working for "I am a Wiener."

<comment><USER13> A Wiener might be a person from Wien, Osterreich (which translates to Vienna, Austria in English).

<comment><USER12> I know, but at least when rendered in English, "I am a Wiener" does not work to indicate a city.

<comment><USER14> The correct English transliteration would be more like "vienner" which pretty closely follows the common English practice of adding an -er suffix to denote someone's place of origin.

[http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/british/er_4](http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/british/er_4)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> For what it's worth, here's Orson apologizing and/or answering for the broadcast, as I understand the very next day.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uuEGiruAFSw](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uuEGiruAFSw)

If this is an irrelevant story that is overblown, it must have been overblown immediately.

<comment><USER15> If a few dozen or hundred people were fooled and called in to complain, that would be worth an on-air answer. It's still a long, long way from the "over a million" that was claimed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Meh, it's a question of scale.

In the 1980s, there was a TV program on in the US (I think it was Countdown to Looking Glass) which depicted what a hypothetical escalation between the US and USSR might have looked like, culminating in a nuclear exchange. It was complete with actors as news anchors, Newt Gingrich apparently played himself (don't remember that part), etc.

My poor grandmother, who was staying with us for a few days, started watching in the middle of it, unaware that it was fiction. A little later she walked grimly into my room to announce that we'd just traded nukes with the Soviets in the Middle East.

So, yeah, I'm sure a number of people were fooled by War of the Worlds and its descendants. Whether it rose quite to the legend doesn't strike me as a particularly interesting question.

<comment><USER15> Really? You don't see a notable distinction between "over a million people panicked by fictional news" and "one grandma panicked by fictional news"?

<comment><USER16> That's not the distinction drawn by the article.

The problem with this article, which isn't completely the fault of the authors, is that it's unsatisfying. They're saying, "Hey, we have a strong case here that it wasn't anything like a million people," but then they don't go lay it on the line and make a firm case for it having panicked X people. And that's probably the best they can do, given the lack of historical data, but it's not enough to deliver the kind of hard-hitting, conclusive punchline that's frequently necessary to kill off widespread myths. (Assuming, of course, that they really are myths. Some historical facts derided as myths have come back to haunt their doubters.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> If stories like this one intrigue you, you should check out Joseph Campbell's myth-busting at [http://mediamythalert.wordpress.com](http://mediamythalert.wordpress.com) and buy his book: [http://academic2.american.edu/~wjc/mythsbook/](http://academic2.american.edu/~wjc/mythsbook/).

<comment><USER18> Someone named Joseph Campbell doing myth-busting is actually kinda funny ...

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Campbell](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Campbell)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Single page link: [http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/history/2013/10/orson_wel...](http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/history/2013/10/orson_welles_war_of_the_worlds_panic_myth_the_infamous_radio_broadcast_did.single.html)

</comment><comment><USER20> I like the idea of the newpapers of manufacturing a huge lie that proves that they can be trusted.

</comment><comment><USER21> For another perspective on this story, see

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03f86lh](http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03f86lh)

You probably can't listen to it unless you are in the UK, but it seems that there _were_ panics, just localised ones. There have also been repeats of this event when similar programs were broadcast in other countries. For instance, see here:

[http://www.war-ofthe-worlds.co.uk/war_worlds_quito.htm](http://www.war-ofthe- worlds.co.uk/war_worlds_quito.htm)

</comment><comment><USER22> Side note: I found that top fixed bar so distracting on the mobile / iPhone view I stopped reading. Just me of bad ui?

</comment><comment><USER23> More people were listening to a radio ventriloquist. lol

<comment><USER18> For the Chase and Sandborn Hour, Edgar Bergen was actually just doing multiple voices (being a radio ventriloquist was just a humorous hook). You can hear some episodes here:

[https://archive.org/details/BerganMccarthy](https://archive.org/details/BerganMccarthy)

Mel Blanc (of Looney Tunes voice acting fame) did much the same thing for the Jack Benny radio shows and also had his own half-hour long radio show, which you can hear here:

[https://archive.org/details/OTRR_Mel_Blanc_Singles](https://archive.org/details/OTRR_Mel_Blanc_Singles)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> _This just in:_ media hypes influence of media, turns out to be full of itself, film at 11.

EDIT: Downvoted, _really?_ Why are we pretending that the media doesn't _love_ to cover itself?

<comment><USER25> I don't think anyone's disagreeing with you, they perhaps just don't like the sarcastic, snarky tone of your otherwise empty comment. Personally, I enjoyed it, but I suspect many in the community would not have.</comment></comment>