The Fall of Mexico  - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/12/the-fall-of-mexico/7760/ <comment><USER2> Please legalize all drugs while banning all middlemen with prior convictions and requiring they be US-made.

Portugal has shown legalization actually reduces both crime and drug abuse: [http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2009/03/14...](http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2009/03/14/portugal)

Plus we will no longer be funding political instability the world over with the money of addicts. Better yet we can tax and treat the addicted.

<comment><USER3> The downside is this: after the so-called war on drugs has Mexico has seen an increase in muggery, abduction and extortion. There is a whole _criminal working class_ whose way of living is crime and have no respect for human life. So, if legalization ends the drug traffic _business_ , this people will have to either learn to work honestly or find more creative ways to profit from crimes.

The truth is: Mexico is screwed.

It's sad because I live here and I love my city and some aspects of México, but I don't want to live here anymore. As soon as I get married I'm going to fly away.

<comment><USER4> Man that's sad, but I think you're right. This article is scary. In the US we're naive if we think that's a very tall fence down there.

<comment><USER3> What? It is all your fault! You are the freaking consumers! We have the misfortune to be the obliged way for Colombian drug dealers to pass the drug to USA, where the rich dumbasses drug-addicts live and are willing to pay.

Now you are going to take the moral high-ground here and say "eew! make that fence taller!"?

<comment><USER5> This is not just caused because of the USA. We also have addicts that increase the demand for drugs in Mexico. No one is putting a gun in the head of this people to become drug traffickers. People in Mexico are poor but I don't see anyone that is not a drug trafficker dying of hunger because they don't have money. This people just like the easy live they can get by becoming drug traffickers.

This criminal culture in Mexico is a very complex issue and it's not like it can be magically fixed if the USA and Mexico legalize drugs. To fix this we need to make profound changes in all aspects of our culture & society and it will take time if it ever happens.

I believe in sovereignty. The USA can do whatever it wants in its territory same as China(Google respect local laws or GTFO) same as Mexico.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have a friend who is a retired Scotland Yard detective and he has an interesting take on the US war on drugs: we effectively put hundreds of billions of dolars a year into the hands of organized crime, and the possibility that there are payoffs to the US Congress to keep this money flow going is a real possibility.

<comment><USER7> When that kind of money is involved, it's impossible not to have affected the highest levels of the legislature, executive, and judiciary. I believe there have already been documented cases of folks with dubious affiliations funneling money to various PACs. That has to be just the tip of the iceberg.

<comment><USER8> Suggestive: the bailout and drug money. [http://www.correntewire.com/was_bailout_largest_drug_money_l...](http://www.correntewire.com/was_bailout_largest_drug_money_laundering_operation_history)

(I originally saw this story at some less-biased site, but this is what Google brought up.)</comment></comment></comment>


LLVM's Clang going into FreeBSD's base system - <AUTHOR> http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.compilers.clang.devel/8784

<comment><USER2> If FreeBSD does replace GCC, will there be any GNU software left in the base system?

<comment><USER3> On my FreeBSD 8 machine, grep is still GNU grep. Last I knew, bsdgrep wasn't quite finished, but was close. diff is from GNU diffutils, but patch appears not to be a GNU variant. bc/dc are GNU.

Getting really close though. The compiler was the last really huge piece of the system that was GNU dependent.

<comment><USER4> _The compiler was the last really huge piece of the system that was GNU dependent._

I think you're forgetting about binutils and gdb. It sounds like there might be a replacement for binutils coming up soon, but I haven't heard anyone seriously talk about writing a new debugger. There's also texinfo (hopefully this can die in 10.0) and groff (hopefully this can be replaced by some new NetBSD code in 10.0).

But we're definitely moving in the right direction.

<comment> X-Istence FreeBSD has the libelf project, along with the elftoolchain that is attempting to write replacement versions of binutils tools that are BSD licensed:

<http://wiki.freebsd.org/LibElf>

More information:

[http://elftoolchain.sourceforge.net/for-review/libelf-by- exa...](http://elftoolchain.sourceforge.net/for-review/libelf-by- example-20100112.pdf)

<http://wiki.freebsd.org/LibElf/ImplementationStatus>

<comment><USER4> That's what I meant by "there might be a replacement for binutils coming up soon". :-)

<comment> X-Istence And I just noticed you are Colin Percival ... yay for paying attention, off course you'd know about the ELF projects for FreeBSD :P.

BTW, your slideshow on the encryption stuff, very cool! Enjoyed it tremendously.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


(An ((Even Better) Lisp) Interpreter (in Python)) - <AUTHOR> http://norvig.com/lispy2.html

<comment><USER2> If you like this sort of thing and want to learn Haskell, consider looking at "Write Yourself a Scheme in 48 Hours"[1]. Of course, writing a Scheme interpreter in Scheme is also classic; SICP[2] is also worth perusing.

[1]: [http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Write_Yourself_a_Scheme_in_48_H...](http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Write_Yourself_a_Scheme_in_48_Hours)

[2]: <http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/>

<comment><USER3> I have been having a lot of fun hacking together a simple Scheme interpreter in C. This is my guide: [http://michaux.ca/articles/scheme-from-scratch- bootstrap-v0_...](http://michaux.ca/articles/scheme-from-scratch- bootstrap-v0_1-integers)

The implementation of an interpreter has always interested me, but I never thought it was within my reach as a weekend project. Norvig's original lis.py post made me look around for other implementations. This follow-up is a real treat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> My favorite HN posting of the year so far.

There's no good reason for the label "lambda"!

<comment><USER5> The footnote was interesting. Instead of (lambda (x) (* x x)), Smalltalk writes [:x | x*x]. Apparently Church's original lambda notation was very close to that.

This helps more than you'd think. For example, (if condition (lambda () foo) (lambda () bar)) is too verbose, but (if condition [foo] [bar]) is fine. Simplifying lambda gives you lazy evaluation, and then you don't need syntax for conditionals.

<comment><USER6> An alternative solution: if you're willing to allow non-ASCII characters into your source code, then DrRacket provides a keyboard shortcut to insert a λ character. I'll illustrate with anonymous recursion.

      > (define sum
          (λ (n)
            ((λ (f) (f f n 0))
             (λ (f n total)
               (if (zero? n)
                   total
                   (f f (- n 1) (+ n total)))))))
      > (sum 10)
      55

<comment><USER7> > if you're willing to allow non-ASCII characters into your source code

Blasphemy.

<comment><USER8> You could use any letter, really. Perhaps l or f.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> A sequel to this article, where Norvig explains how to make a really minimal (but ridiculously clear and elegant) Lisp interpreter in 90 lines of Python:

<http://norvig.com/lispy.html>

<comment><USER10> From the URLs, it looks like a prequel.

<comment><USER11> just looks like "this" needs to be properly disambiguated :)

<comment><USER9> Wow, that's kind of embarrassing. To eliminate ambiguity, here they are in order:

<http://norvig.com/lispy.html>

<http://norvig.com/lispy2.html>

<comment><USER8> 2 comes after? I don't know...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It doesn't implement real call/cc and continuations, which is what I want to learn. Still great stuff.

<comment><USER13> Lisp in Small Pieces covers call/cc and much more, and I highly recommend it. It's deep and rich, so be warned that it may completely devour your time.

Another look at call/cc is in Marc Feeley's 90 Minute Scheme to C Compiler:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2633841> (submission that incudes a link to slides and video)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I feel like:

Interpreter in C: an implementation. Interpreter in Python: an exercise.</comment>


Survival of the Prettiest - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/18/books/review/evolution-of-beauty-richard-prum-charles-darwin.html <comment><USER2> What's most incredible about Darwin is how readable and essential (and fundamentally correct) his two major treatises, _Origin_ and _Descent_ , have remained.

It's like Newton not only discovering calculus but also inventing its modern syntax and writing the best textbook on the subject.

<comment><USER3> > What's most incredible about Darwin is how readable and essential (and > fundamentally correct) his two major treatises, Origin and Descent, have > remained.

Fundamentally correct? Evolution is neither demonstrable nor falsifiable, so it's not scientific.

Disclaimer: I'm an atheist.

<comment><USER4> I think you are making evolution sound less scientific than it is.

One thing that is a certifiable fact is that species are not fixed. As shown by the fossil record, new species can show up and old species go extinct. And in a smaller time scale, the artificial selection that happens with domesticated plants and animals shows that there can be significant changes in species.

Once we realize that some sort of evolution must be happening the question becomes to explain what mechanism is behind it. One of the initial hypothesis was the Lamarckian theory that animals can pass on to their offspring traits that they acquired via their lifestyle. This was eventually proven false when we found no evidence that this is not how genetics actually works. Darwin's theory of natural selection is still with us because it withstood the test of time, not because it is unfalsifiable.

This is very clear if you read Darwin's books. He was aware that there are many things that would contradict his theory if they were true and he spends lots of chapters refuting them.

A more modern source I like to point to is Talkorigin's list of 29 evidences for macroevolution. It covers many of the things known to Darwin and more recent developments such as genetics, molecular biology and new fossil finds. [http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/](http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/)

<comment><USER5> > Lamarckian theory that animals can pass on to their offspring traits that > they acquired via their lifestyle. This was eventually proven false when we > found no evidence that this is not how genetics actually works.

Lamarckian theory might not be _completely_ false. There is definitely epigenetic inheritance, in which traits (reflecting the state of a parent) can be passed on without being explicitly encoded by nucleic acid. Whether epigenetic inheritance is a _stable-multi-generational_ way of transferring traits is a little up in the air. But I wonder if Lamarck will get a modicum of vindication from the biology textbooks in the long run.

That being said, epigenetic inheritance does not falsify evolution by mutation.

<comment><USER4> I tried to keep the comment short but yes, Lamarck does get too much off a bad rep nowadays. His theory wasn't on the mark but he played a big role in making evolution be an accepted theory in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It seems like Prum is taking many interpretational liberties and often engages in anthropomorphization.

" _The other evolutionary answer is the aesthetic route — the resolution of differences between male and female needs and desires by behaviors and rituals that respect the other sex's priorities and their decisions about how to pursue them._ "

The thing about beauty is that it is in the eye of the beholder. It is still subject to the fundamentals of natural selection. Those animals that have an eye for asthetic (phenotyipic) traits that signal something about the environmental and sexual fitness of their mate will have hearty offspring. For example it is possible that Bower birds who make the 'prettiest' nests are great scavengers in general, a trait that can also be used to collect food for their children.

Further, I doubt it has much to do with the male Bower "respecting the female's priorities and decisions about how to pursue them". The male that fails an attempt to court a potential mate is not thinking "well dang, if i dont respect her for not appriciating my nest. After all it was a half-ass attempt and dont i know it".

It is probably thinking at most, when she flys away - 'do not follow; waste of energy; reengage collecting red bobbles and find worm'

Lastly I think 'oddity' is being interpreted as 'beauty'; an animal might have something unique going on - maybe some allele that codes for a protein variant resulting in some funky red spots on its feathers; more importantly that same protein variant confers some pathogenic immunity. Now, a female bird that chooses this mate might also have a genetic predisposition that makes her more attracted to that red spotty hairdo. Two important things happen here. First these two will have offspring that probably will, if female, like those red spots, or if male, have those red spots (and the immunity); and secondly there is a phenotype - 'an odd visual asthetic' \- that can be used to indicate what this birds genes are (specifically that it has this good immunity allele). Simply having the immunity allele would make it more fit, but the females would have no way of knowing. Having a phenotype that indicates something to the female will in my estimation likely increase the rate at which this allele proliferate since these beautiful red spots confer a nice environmental adaptation

<comment><USER7> Right, but that's "the adaptationist view that beauty is an "honest signaling" of evolutionary fitness," and which he explicitly rejects.

<comment><USER8> I don't think his basis for rejecting that premise is fair.

That's like rejecting the premise that certain vegetables taste good to us because they are good for us! Our senses evolved to pick out things that are good for us.

<comment><USER7> But according to the article, Darwin himself said it "constituted an evolutionary mechanism separate, independent, and sometimes contrary to natural selection," not merely a signal for it.

<comment><USER6> I feel like that quote might be out of context. If not, well then Darwin is wrong. After reading this article more carefully, one thing I'm certain is that Richard Prum lacks a fundamental understanding of evolution and natural selection.

To me it seems clear that females' aesthetic preferences are subject to selection bias, no different than the male aesthetic, or any other physiological or behavioral quality that makes two conspecific animals slightly different.

Also did anyone else notice the reviewer seems like Prum's book is literally getting them off..

" _Prum seeks to prevail less through brute force of attack than by making his case with clarity, grace and charm. His attention never strays far from nature, and his writing in these bird passages is minutely detailed, exquisitely observant, deeply informed, and often tenderly sensual. When describing, say, the "throbbing" display of the lavishly decorated argus bird, he delivers a feathery brush of the erotic._ "

The fuck.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Hm...

I guess there's no particular reason a species has to _optimize_ its fitness beyond a certain level. It just needs to find a niche and occupy it.

At that point, the mechanisms, cycles, and patterns of life for the species continue, but no longer need to select for improved fitness. So I guess it makes some sense that selection would then go down an arbitrary path, of a complexity commensurate with the life form.

Let's say humans (or our ancestors) achieved our base level of fitness (a stable and thriving species with a well-established niche) as social, tool- using primates. Our achievements of language, abstract thinking, civilization, culture, art, complex tools, religion, science, etc. might be the result of pursuing that arbitrary, aesthetic path. The species would have done just fine without any of that, but we did it all anyway.

Interesting. I don't know how much I buy it, but it is an interesting direction I haven't thought about before.

<comment><USER10> Evolution doesn't work on species level, but on individual level. There's still an in-species competition.

Probability of gene A to fixate is roughly equal to 2s, where s is increased relative fitness. (e.g. 10% for gene that gives 5% increase). Such genes will spread even if species as a whole has a niche to populate.

I would recommend reading [1] - a series of essays on evolution and math behind it.

[1] [https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Evolution#Blog_posts_.28sequ...](https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Evolution#Blog_posts_.28sequence.29)

<comment><USER11> That's not entirely true. Evolution acts at the level of populations as well as individuals. A trait that neutral or even slightly negative for the individual having it but highly positive for the population will tend to increase because the population as a whole will select for its continued existence, since populations having it will out-compete other populations without it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Evolution of Beauty was a great book, but it was a little depressing how the author had to face a ton of entrenched academic prejudice to get his theory out.

That aspect alone is more interesting than the actual book, which focuses on Darwin's The Descent of Man arguments that have been marginalized due to their implications rather than their accuracy. Lots of interesting bird trivia, too, if you're into that.

<comment><USER13> Even in 2017, mankind is still trying to move from eminence-based science to evidence-based science.

<comment><USER14> Eminence helped slow down science down enough to be digested throughout the community in the pre-internet era. Eminence was a proxy for a level-0 filter on good science.

As the world moves to become more connected than ever, eminence is too slow and inefficient. Hopefully we can come out of this with evidence as the new king and not some other proxy. We're gonna have to make some changes to get there. (Publication bias, replication prejudice, preregistration, better statistics, reporting accuracy...)

<comment><USER15> I really like your thinking and believe that there is an eminent truth behind it. Such that loose social connectedness naturally procreates the development of such proxies as a form of stabilization mechanism.

What I'd really like to understand and see visualized are the non-linear social dynamics presented in manifold theory.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I clicked on this expecting a review of Nancy Etcoff's _Survival of the Prettiest_ (2000), another work in this area.

The New York Times review of Etcoff's book is _called_ "The Beautiful People" <[http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/03/21/reviews/990321.21lehrm...](http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/03/21/reviews/990321.21lehrmat.html>), but the review is _about_ _Survival of the Prettiest_. Lewis Carroll would be happy with this. I wasn't able to find an NYT review of the Marilyn Manson album.

</comment><comment><USER17> What explains why the females like what they like? Perhaps I'm just lost, but could it be that natural selection explains sexual preferences, which has a subsequent impact on evolution?

> this "aesthetic" courtship, says Prum, creates an environment, temperaments > and rituals — a sort of culture — that give the female sexual choice, > autonomy and safety

Maybe natural selection at a species level (notice the word 'safety') selects for individual-level sexual preferences? If that is true, the theories aren't substitutes, but complements.

Again, maybe I'm just lost.

</comment><comment><USER18> Without passing judgment on the book itself, which I have not read, I find key elements of the argument as presented in this review to be unconvincing.

> Consider, for instance, this handful of well-known distinguishing human > traits: [...human mating behaviors...] none of these traits evolved in our > fellow ape species. Prum argues that they evolved in humans because they > help women evaluate men's prosocial-pleasure potential.

Wait but, if they're so helpful, why didn't they evolve in our fellow ape species too? Our mating behaviors aren't any more evolved than apes, the apes of today have had exactly the same amount of time to evolve as we have. Shouldn't this case be made based on archeological species that we've since outcompeted?

An a separate note, this review makes it sound like no one else has done significant work on sexual selection. Isn't Fisherian runaway, for example, a well-known instance of sexual selection? And Ronald Fisher was a key figure in the modern synthesis.

<comment><USER19> > Wait but, if they're so helpful, why didn't they evolve in our fellow ape > species too?

Apes have vastly different social structures than humans. Those structures do not encourage those traits. Apes have strict ranking and group around families.

In chimps, females emigrate after puberty and permanently relocate to other groups. Fertility is used as a passport to join a new group. Constant fertility would be disruptive.

Humans want to have sex constantly because it helps form large communities. The possibility of mating bonds together many nonfamily groups. Humans do better in large groups, so attractive features are selected for much more strongly. In ape groups it doesn't matter, because they simply accept or reject new apes based on the size of the group and availability of resources.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Ultimately natural selection dominates, of course.

But sexual selection is a real evolutionary force and has the ability to either greatly increase the evolution rate (which is why gender evolved in the first place) or at times regress it.

I wonder how often sexual selection back-fires and why, but I imagine thats the exception not the rule.

<comment><USER21> > which is why gender evolved in the first place

You mean as a social construct? Because if you mean that in the biological sense, then sex has probably more to do with sharing beneficial mutations, and error correction against the bad ones:

[https://www.quantamagazine.org/missing-mutations-suggest- a-r...](https://www.quantamagazine.org/missing-mutations-suggest-a-reason-for- sex-20170713/)

<comment><USER20> That's the same thing as what I said. It augments the evolution rate. Gender allows us to evolve faster/better because it allows the brain/choice to influence evolution at a higher level.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> And this is why sperm banks require donors be at least 5'9" tall.

<comment><USER23> I thought you were joking, but that's actually true. Wow.

[http://www.spermbank.com/sperm-donor-faqs](http://www.spermbank.com/sperm- donor-faqs)

<comment><USER24> Read that link as "sperm-donor-fags" and was expecting troll post.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Haha, what a mischeviously written article. The author appears to have learned a lesson or two :-)

</comment><comment><USER26> The best book sort-of about Darwin is _This Thing Of Darkness_ by Harry Thompson.

</comment><comment><USER27> .

<comment><USER13> Being good looking also helps coders, though to a lesser degree than Instagram models. Better looking job candidates tend to get hired more and get more promotions.

Personally, it doesn't amaze me at all how important good looks are for a model. I know I'd prefer to look at a lithe college coed bounce around in Ibiza rather than a frumpy mother of three work in a textile factory. It's programmed into my animal brain.

It helps to keep in mind that "influencers" are a product of a lot more than good genes. It takes a large investment into beauty products, hair stylists, clothes, camera equipment, travel, etc. These people are constructed using their fit bodies as a foundation to build upon. Taylor Swift is a product, not merely a person. Her development costs surely tally into the millions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Nobody chooses who to reproduce with for purely sexual reasons. We choose who to have kids with based on a very complicated array of factors like who the person is, what they do, how much they earn, is there good chemistry and of course also physical appearances.

Human evolution seems to no longer be driven by nature, but I don't think it's true to say selection is purely sexual in the modern world. The term "agency" from the article best describes it I think. In essence humans are now self- selecting the path of their evolution through conscious agency. Pretty trippy to think about actually

<comment><USER29> > Nobody chooses who to reproduce with for purely sexual reasons.

People are most definitely making mate selections (at least on Tinder) on physical attractiveness, primarily. We won't even scratch the surface of the argument that prettier people have it easier in life for this thread's purposes.

"This study was conducted to quantify the Tinder socio-economic prospects for males based on the percentage of females that will "like" them. Female Tinder usage data was collected and statistically analyzed to determine the inequality in the Tinder economy. _It was determined that the bottom 80% of men (in terms of attractiveness) are competing for the bottom 22% of women and the top 78% of women are competing for the top 20% of men._ The Gini coefficient for the Tinder economy based on "like" percentages was calculated to be 0.58. This means that the Tinder economy has more inequality than 95.1% of all the world's national economies. In addition, it was determined that a man of average attractiveness would be "liked" by approximately 0.87% (1 in 115) of women on Tinder."

[https://medium.com/@worstonlinedater/tinder-experiments- ii-g...](https://medium.com/@worstonlinedater/tinder-experiments-ii-guys- unless-you-are-really-hot-you-are-probably-better-off-not-wasting- your-2ddf370a6e9a#.u9kjjrno3)

(emphasis above sourced from Medium highlights)

EDIT: HN throttling kicked in, can't reply to replies to this:

My personal opinion (insert enormous disclaimer here) is that Tinder is providing the illusion of choice (hundreds, thousands of profiles you can swipe through in an hour) and higher "quality" (top percentiles of both sexes shown to everyone) that is not within the grasp of most users.

I don't want the Whole Foods/Amazon of dating apps, I want the Aldi: average looking people who are decent human beings who share an interest or two with me.

<comment><USER30> I agree and all dating apps(though Match.com isn't as superficial i've found) and life in general your going to have it a lot easier purely based on your looks. From dating being a feast for you where you sign onto an app for example and filter each day through dozens of suitors to people wanting to get to know you/give you things (better job, invest in your startup, etc) based on looks.

How many of the highest paid actors or actresses are deemed unattractive?

<comment><USER31> This is why plastic surgery is so big in Hollywood. It's literally a career investment.

In countries like South Korea plastic surgery is extremely routine, especially for girls - their parents will give them plastic surgery as a birthday gift. You can read that as shallowness in society, or simply a greater willingness to accept, pragmatically, that people in every society are shallow.

[http://www.businessinsider.com/south-korea-is-the-plastic- su...](http://www.businessinsider.com/south-korea-is-the-plastic-surgery- capital-of-the-world-2015-9)

The problem is, once everyone gets plastic surgery, if you're one of the few who don't your natural looks will stick out like a sore thumb.

<comment><USER32> Plastic surgery also doesn't confer anything to one's offspring, other than by perhaps improving one's chances to get a better-looking mate (who might also be surgically altered, so maybe not).

<comment><USER31> Exactly, if everyone's plastic surgeried, then it's a complete lottery who in the next generation gets attractive genes.

Without plastic surgery, there's more assortive mating which preserves attractiveness from parents to children.

<comment><USER33> Either way, people are just trying best their chances. Naturally or otherwise, they (we) know what is attractive, and some are more willing to go to extremes to get there and be more like what they want. [https://www.britannica.com/science/positive-assortative- mati...](https://www.britannica.com/science/positive-assortative-mating)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Beefing Up Dull Text in WebKit - <AUTHOR> http://css-tricks.com/beefing-up-dull-text-in-webkit/ <comment><AUTHOR> follow up - <https://twitter.com/chriscoyier/statuses/223122688258998273></comment>


Economic signs in Apple's bond sale to pay for dividend? - <AUTHOR> http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/markets/2013/04/30/apple-17-billion-bond-offer/2124791/

<comment><AUTHOR> Apple is selling bonds to pay for their upcoming dividend. Perhaps this is a precursor to raising interest rates. Otherwise, they may have waited longer to for interest rates to go lower.

From the article: "Last week, Microsoft sold nearly $2 billion in debt."</comment>


The New NoPhone - <AUTHOR> https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/nophone-usa/the-new-and-unimproved-nophone

<comment><AUTHOR> Best new feature is real-time selfie. Now I want one!

</comment><comment><USER2> there may be a market for this...tweens</comment>


Email Sign-Offs Employers Will Fire You for If You Happen to Be a Woman - <AUTHOR> https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/email-sign-offs-employers-will-fire-you-for-especially-if-you-happen-to-be-a-woman <comment><USER2> Honestly, I don't know how women can deal with these societies we've created. Between all the judging and ridiculous nuanced bullshit they've had to wade through simply to work, I'm disgusted with the whole situation.

Probably hits me harder now that my wife is done with grad school and is in the professional world (well government at the moment, so not really professional after her prior private industry work).

Just realized these were satirical. Living in a fervently Red State, these are probably closer to reality.

</comment><comment><USER3> Please tell me this is a joke. If this is true then women are way more amazing than I ever realized - amazing they're not homicidal!</comment>


Ask HN: Where do you keep your ideas? - <AUTHOR>

Where do you keep all of the ideas you come up with - and if you decide to work on an idea where do you keep everything related to it?<p>Right now I email everything to myself and have a GMail label, but I'm sure there are much better strategies out there. I'm keen to see how HNers keep there ideas (e.g. writing them in a moleskin, using Evernote, etc), and how they work on side-projects/ideas (e.g. if you decide to start researching one of your ideas where do you keep it all). <comment><USER2> I literally wrote an entire app just for this exact use case.

<https://www.marginalia.io>

There's a REST api and an email API. You email ideas to a special address and it creates notes for you. You can append further refinements when it replies with a note-unique email address.

You can sort notes into projects, add tags, search, sort, and export to plain HTML or PDF.

<comment><USER3> I recommend putting at least a screenshot on your landing page. Whenever I'm looking for software, I'd like a quick look at the UI to decide I want to try or not.

If there are a lot of competing services, I tend to pick one that has UI previews to save time.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the tip. I have some screenshots on the tour page but you're right, there should be one on the homepage too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Workflowy (<https://workflowy.com/>), which is a web-based outliner. Good because it's fast.

<comment><USER5> Me too. I'll second the opinion of others and mention that paper is hard to beat, but for me paper happens at either end of the idea (jotting a quick note in my notebook/whatever paper is around, and later sketching layouts/business models/user flows/etc to flesh things out) while Workflowy happens in between.

Most good ideas happen when I'm in the middle of another project. By the time I'm able to devote any serious thought to it I've already gone through five notebooks and oodles of scrap paper, so I make a point of entering at least the basic elements of every idea into Workflowy the same day that I initially write it down on paper. Then I have a searchable record, and it's really easy to expand on various points in five-minute chunks or on sleepless nights. That way, whenever I'm looking for a new project I have a bank of ideas to pull back out onto paper.

I also use Workflowy to keep track of goals and sort of the "big picture" TODOs.

<comment><USER6> This looks like a great tool.. but for these kind of sites, I always feel uncomfortable to signup and then store my personal information in their databases. I could easily end up giving them my personal ideas and my professional work related stuff.. We really don't know who is looking at our data on other side and what kinda security measures(if any) they are taking to secure the same. Your thoughts?

<comment><USER7> Interesting point about privacy. Does anyone else have similar concerns?

I am of the opinion that life is too short to worry, plus people generally aren't able to steal ideas. Execution is always very different. Look at the Xerox-Apple-Microsoft implementations of GUIs... All very different.

My ideas start on napkins or Notes on the iPhone, get translated to Workflowy and then fully drafted and edited into a blog post: <http://rayhano.com>

The hope is others take the ideas and use them with their own. Ideas should be free, only then can society benefit.

<comment><USER6> Sharing explicitly versus gaining access to your data are completely separate things. Moreover, how about pushing your professional data to these sites? I don't want to use separate tools for ideas which I'm fine if someone steals them and which not..

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think a Trello board works perfectly for this.

Whenever my business partner or I have one of those "WE SHOULD MAKE A GITHUB FOR BIOLOGY!" moments, we put it on a Trello card in the "Someday" pile, tag it with the appropriate categories, and write all our thoughts on the card. We've also got "soon," "doing," and "done" categories, but we mostly use the board as an idea bank for those "Somedays."

We call it the "Vox Industries Ingenuity Bin."

<comment><USER9> +1 for Trello.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> All my best ideas are on paper. I find a pencils far more effective than any digital tools for sketching out ideas.

<comment><USER11> I agree. Paper is under-rated by geeks. I use a Muji A6 dotted paper notebook because the grid helps me draw boxes but is light enough to also let me ignore them when I feel like it. Some of them come with an elastic band on the cover to help keep it closed. The paper is cheap enough that I don't feel like the ideas have to be important to write down. I find that I am a bit reluctant to write in a super nice notebook.

[http://www.muji.us/store/stationery/notebooks/pp-cover- doubl...](http://www.muji.us/store/stationery/notebooks/pp-cover-double-ring- note-a6-dot.html)

I keep a Frixion erasable pen hooked in the spiral part of the notebook.

<http://www.pilotpen.us/Brands/FriXion.aspx>

The only downside I have found is that if you freeze the notebook your erased writing will come back! I thought that the friction from rubbing destroys the ink, but it seems like it just transforms it into a new stable state. It's a really interesting fluid.

<comment><USER12> I used to consider pen(cil) & paper as the only medium worthy (and secure) enough for transcribing the ideas that popped into my young head, although now I use an iPad, a Bamboo stylus, and either Paper or Penultimate to record all my thoughts.

I think my preference for paper stemmed from a childhood experience I had with keeping my first journal on an old DOS/386 in a password-protected WordPerfect file (and I still remember that password! :-) Originally, my intention was merely to try to use up all the memory on that machine, but I soon had a fond habit of taking 15-30 minutes per day to write about the world around me. What I wrote would likely be mundane from an outsider's perspective, but there was a sort of innocent joy in noting all the tiny insights and observations I had that were important to me at that age.

One day, I went to update my journal, which was entitled MY LIFE, and discovered it and its backup had been erased from the drive. My father must have found this strange document that he could not open taking up loads of space on his computer and deleted it without a moment's hesitation.

I was devastated. I swore to never save anything of personal value to a computer again. I think this bad childhood experience actually engendered a deep technophobia that I harbored from high school throughout college and didn't really overcome until the last five years. This same experience also seems to be the root of a lifelong passion for writing.

In any case, I began keeping a more "formal" handwritten journal in the latter years of college up until a few years ago. It was written in pencil (preferably 0.5mm) on lined looseleaf paper contained in a large, unmarked 3-ring binder. I wrote in it daily, not really trying to distinguish "good" ideas from "bad" ones, but just concentrating on getting at least one complete thought on paper per day. Though I used pencil, I only erased obvious errors (like misspellings) choosing to strike through parts that didn't seem to fit at the time. I did this because when I looked back on what I wrote after significant periods of time, it often gave me further insight into how I had come about thinking what I was thinking at the time I wrote it.

It wasn't until about two years ago that I switched to using an iPad and a capacitive stylus for jotting down my ideas. Although it certainly doesn't have the same feel as working with pen and paper, I really like having a compact, infinite canvas to work with that I can take anywhere, and am reasonably confident that when the tablet grows up, it will transition from disrupting the PC to doing what it was meant to do in the first place — make paper obsolete.

In the event I get nostalgic for paper, I prefer using a blank 9x12 sketchbook — for the most part, I can't stand to be restricted by lines anymore — and my favorite Zebra multi pen:

[http://www.jetpens.com/Zebra-Clip-On- Multi-2000-4-Color-0.7-...](http://www.jetpens.com/Zebra-Clip-On- Multi-2000-4-Color-0.7-mm-Ballpoint-Multi-Pen-0.5-mm-Pencil-Black- Body/pd/4191)

Ultimately, I agree that paper is vastly underrated by geeks, but let's face it — after thousands of years, we're always trying to eye something better.

*Note: Safari quit unexpectedly before I could post this and I had to rewrite everything from scratch. Talk about coincidences!

<comment><USER7> If you have that original hard disk, have you thought of using recovery software to see if fragments of your file still exist?

<comment><USER12> I might give that a try sometime (I'm sure it's around somewhere) just to see if I can get something back. I vaguely remember a little of what I wrote, but it would be intriguing to reread what I was writing all those years back. Thanks for the idea.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Emacs, org-mode, org-capture, and a global keyboard shortcut that pops up an org-capture buffer when I have an idea. I just type it in, hit a few keys, and it goes into a nicely-formatted file with all my other ideas. Hitting slightly different keys will capture appointments, todos, read-this-later links, book recommendations, and the like.

</comment><comment><USER14> Honestly, and sadly, MS Word.

I have a template for startup ideas that is many questions long. It is still easiest to fire up that document and go, where everything is set up with well- laid formatting and bullet points. I am probably biased from many years spent in word processing programs coming from a writing heavy non-technical background originally, but that template gets everything out of the way for me so I can just write. Maybe eventually I'll write a Rails app for myself but I don't think I'd gain much over the current process except version control.

Nothing else works as well locally, which is a lot of the problem. Gmail is getting closer to being able to serve purpose as a general idea store for me, but I am not always online, and the migration cost at this point is not worth switching for, even if Gmail worked flawlessly offline.

<comment><USER15> "I have a template for startup ideas that is many questions long."

Just curious, can you share that?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Paper or plain text files. If neither is available, then I email myself using my phone.

Paper is the best option because of the limitless possibilities. I can use pencil, pen, color pencil, watercolor, scotch tape bits of junk to it, rip it out, fold it up, and burn it.

</comment><comment><USER17> Evernote and sketchbooks. (I'm a graphic novelist.)

Sometimes big projects end up with a sketchbook pretty much devoted to them. More often they just sprawl across all the books I use during the course of the project.

Also there's a pile of index cards with a core dump of one story I've been carrying around for a long time. I made it shortly after losing a bunch of sketchbooks in a hurricane because I wanted to preserve every bit of that story I could.

Also my advice is to avoid Moleskines, I find them overpriced and the paper sucks for the way I like to draw. I like the similar form factor books from Hand*book. And softcover books from Cachet. And of course the classic black hardcovers.

</comment><comment><USER18> I use a wiki I wrote for the purpose. I'm surprised that so many people are talking about text files and outliners. Hyperlinking is really important! Ideas are naturally hyperlinked.

I just looked at workflowy, and I don't see a good way to link from one place to another. That seems to put it more in the realm of TODO list rather than a place for real ideas.

Compare to paper (which I used to use), the wiki has the drawback that you can't draw pictures easily. But it has the advantage of being searchable.

I have 1300+ wiki pages from the last 8 years or so. It's been one of the more useful things I've done since it's allowed me to tackle bigger and bigger projects.

</comment><comment><USER3> I keep a lot of notes, recipes, code snippets, lists, ideas, etc in _Notational Velocity_. I keep them in a folder on my Dropbox. That means I've always got access to them, provided I have access to a computer with internet and a simple text editor.

Notational Velocity has an amazingly simple interface. And it's fast. It deals just with text, which is all I need.

To ease online access, I've dived into my first Ember.js adventure and am writing a simple web application that mimics Notational Velocity. It accesses files trough the Dropbox API. It's not done yet, but it's on its way :)

Linky: <http://notational.net/>

</comment><comment><USER19> I don't use a notebook anymore. Now I start with a small document containing what need the project is supposed to solve, some design notes, and I use omniGraffle to sketch out diagrams. One tip: I save copies of all of my "idea diagrams" in a folder and I often start by grabbing an old file and copying parts of it. I find that using a diagramming tool is almost as fast as sketching with pencil and paper.

I also rely on Evernote (happy paying customer) for storing resources, random thoughts, photos taken with my cellphone of receipts, etc. I don't use Evernote for project materials however, just general resources and a history of what I have found interesting and useful.

</comment><comment><USER20> I created a notebook called Projects in Evernote and I keep one note to all the ideas that I could summarize in a sentence. For more mature idea I create a separate note to keep all links and notes related to the project there.

</comment><comment><USER21> Evernote and moleskines.

My everyday todo and notes are taken in a black a5 moleskine. I go through one every 3 months and have a shelf that I keep all the old ones on, organized by date.

Fleshing out ideas happens in evernote, as well as writing blog posts and longer emails.

I have a couple of notes that I think are relevant to this discussion. 1 is the list of ideas for products or businesses that I would do if I wasn't doing what I am doing right now (and which I might do in the future) and 2 is the list of things I can do if everything ever goes to shit.

</comment><comment><USER22> I have a stack of notebooks that goes back over two decades. Anything worth writing down goes in the notebook. No postits, scraps of paper or backs of envelopes unless I'm willing to throw the note away immediately.

One of the things I learned in high school is that taking notes helps me to organize and remember my thoughts - even if I never look at the notes again. I don't refer to my notebooks much, but writing ideas down helps me triage ideas for things worth following up on.

</comment><comment> Link- I keep a moleskine notebook with me all the time where i sketch and write my ideas on the spot. I use mindjet's mindmapping software to elaborate on those ideas and store the files in a brainstorming folder on my portable harddrive and laptop. A copy of that folder is also in Google Drive to have access to the files and documents whenever i need them. I frequently use evernote and flava and sync them both, especially when i take snapshots with my mobile.

</comment><comment><USER23> Ideas end up everywhere in my workspace; in my physical notebook, in a moleskin that's always in my jacket, on the whiteboard (which I sometimes take snapshots off), on index cards, in my homebrew webbased project/life tracking app (I have tons of product ideas stashed in a category), in mindmanager and onenote. Each format has it's strengths and all of them are pretty fun to use. I'm looking to add the Galaxy Note as yet another input tool.

</comment><comment><USER24> I use Dokuwiki <https://www.dokuwiki.org/dokuwiki> and keep them in a GTD style someday/maybe list.

</comment><comment><USER25> I find paper to be the best - I keep both a personal notebook for anything I do on my own time whether it be startup ideas, shopping lists, a short TODO, etc; I also keep a work notebook for any drafting I do in the office. It's great to keep things backed up in an electronic sense, but I find it easier to expand on a thought if I just have it in front of me on paper.

</comment><comment><USER26> I use a combination of Google Docs and Springpad <http://springpad.com/about>

</comment><comment><USER27> I use Springpad and its Chrome extension.

Whenever I have an idea, I would add it in an already existung "idea" notebook and if that idea develops then I would create a new notebook just for that project.

Whenever I found content related to the project on an Internet, I would use the chrome extension to pin it to that notebook.

</comment><comment><USER28> I keep my ideas in <https://AES.io> \- one of the reasons I created the service.

</comment><comment><USER29> A folder in Dropbox, containing each idea as either a text file or a folder of its own.

Sometimes the whole idea is one line as the file name. The content of the text file is the details of the idea. If I wrote some script or collected some information for this idea, it'll be in its folder.

</comment><comment><USER30> Fake tool: I write everything down on whatever paper is nearby, but the act of me doing that somehow tricks me into remembering it.

Actual tools: Evernote (on all my devices, plus the email address that I send them to), the iPhone reminder app, Google Tasks.

</comment><comment><USER31> I developed Task Science (<https://taskscience.com>) to manage, categorize, and collaborate on ideas and tasks. The goals were to remain quick and responsive so you can add the idea and get back to work.

</comment><comment><USER32> I use workflowy primarily.. Basically what helps is anything that you can always have quick access to.. Like I use workflowy on my android mobile coz I can scribble on it anytime.. on bus.. while in class.. while jogging..

</comment><comment><USER33> I run a custom site that I share with a limited group of partners/friends with a rating system where everybody can rate/comment on my ideas. I'm not the only one who posts ideas though.

P.S. Wanna invite? Email me why.

</comment><comment><USER34> I keep an evernote notebook for ideas, and drop photos and various ideas into it over time. I revisit every few days to organize and cull the really bad ideas. The ones I keep returning to seem to bubble up to the top.

</comment><comment><USER35> I use plain paper most of the time. It's convenient, and I've been used to it.

Sometimes I use the iOS's native Notes app for that. It's pretty basic for writing but that's exactly what I want.

</comment><comment><USER36> We keep it simple, and use a Google docs spreadsheet. We split the ideas between the ones that we quickly jot down with almost no research, and the ones where we have done thorough research.

</comment><comment><USER37> I keep them in a private folder on Dropbox. I can easily sort them by their names and I can access it across all my devices as Dropbox has a client for all popular platforms.

</comment><comment><USER38> I keep them in a page called Notes and Thoughts: <http://kibabase.com/articles/notes-and-thoughts>

</comment><comment><USER39> I'm a huge fan of Evernote! I use it almost everyday whenever a new idea pops into my head. I have installed it on my laptop and my mobile. Highly recommended.

</comment><comment><USER40> ...sometimes I publish ideas that I think have potential (at an early stage, of course) on my blog: if they get commented, then there is REAL potential...

</comment><comment><USER41> I use a document in Dessk, autosaving and its a really nice blank canvas to work with. Easy to assign to tasks and share with other people to brainstorm

</comment><comment><USER42> I currently use Apple Notes (iMac, iPad, iPhone using iCloud sync).

I've previously used Devonthink, personal wiki, Basecamp, Asana, GTD, and others.

</comment><comment><USER43> Ideas are on one of the greatest apps ever made: Evernote

Then I start a folder in Google Docs to keep everything related to the project.

</comment><comment><USER44> Old notebooks from school or my head.

I figure if I forget it probably wasn't that important in the first place.

<comment><USER45> Yeah, same here. Raw ideas come to me in such an unorganized manner, it makes no sense to try to write them down. I won't know what I meant when I look at them later.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Gollum, which is a markdown powered wiki system. In fact, it has all my notes (programming, lifehacking, etc).

</comment><comment><USER47> I keep all my Ideas in Gmail Draft with subject Name "I.D.E.A.S". I keep appending all my ideas into it.

</comment><comment><USER48> iPhone and text docs, and when I want to think a bit more about the idea, Google Sites. The latter has a wiki-like structure with lots of useful structures (e.g. headings, LHS hierarchy, some widgets, lists) and I can share it with others very easily. Keeps version history.

</comment><comment><USER49> If good enough, with other people.

</comment><comment><USER50> I use my own weekend project(look in my submissions) and tag 'em "#ideas."

</comment><comment><USER51> Notes file on my phone. I need backups! :)

</comment><comment><USER52> Google Drive.

</comment><comment><USER53> Google Docs</comment>


Facebook's Open-Source Reinforcement Learning Platform – A Deep Dive - <AUTHOR> https://xaviergeerinck.com/facebook-horizon <comment><USER2> Also unrelated, but hopefully not flamebait: the code blocks run off my screen on an iPad because they're too long. Having just fixed this issue on my own website yesterday, a bit of unsolicited advice: add "overflow: auto" to them and constrain them to the standard margins for your article.

<comment><USER3> This makes me so happy to see other delevopers help!!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why is Facebook getting into reinforcement learning? Are there applications of RL to improving social connections or extracting more data to sell to advertisers?

<comment><USER5> If you take a look at the announcement post for the framework, you can see some discussion about that: [https://code.fb.com/ml- applications/horizon/](https://code.fb.com/ml-applications/horizon/)

One application that they mention related (at least loosely) to social connections is deciding whether or not to deliver a notification to a user.

<comment><USER6> That makes sense. At Twitter, I redesigned the notifications system to explicitly allow for ML based decisions such as this.</comment></comment></comment>


Facebook Shouldn't Fact-Check - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/29/opinion/facebook-shouldnt-fact-check.html <comment><USER2> Not in today's entitled world. People don't have the time to fact-check for themselves... we need to make sure that everyone can just consume whatever information with no effort on their own part to think about or verify said information. We're entitled to that, right? From a private company? Right?</comment>


Cambridge spin-out starts producing graphene at commercial scale - <AUTHOR> https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/cambridge-spin-out-starts-producing-graphene-at-commercial-scale <comment><USER2> Can someone ELI5 why graphene, defined as "a sheet of carbon just one atomic layer thick", can be sold as a "chip"? Of what use would be a one-atom-thick "chip"?

Also, "graphene-based chips could deliver speeds more than ten times faster than silicon chips" \-- wut? The basic reason (I thought) silicon could be used to make integrated circuits is that it is mostly NON-conductive, but can be made conductive in part, so as to form e.g. capacitances, insulated conductors, diodes, etc. But in my ignorance I thought the one thing that graphene has to be, is conductive, completely conductive in all directions. So how can you make the various parts of a circuit in a material that is one big short circuit?

<comment><USER3> I think they means the graphine as the conducting wires. Someone probably told them wires/bands 1-atom thick connecting parts = smaller chips = faster chips. Id also be interested in what happens in terms of heat. Such small structures conducting electricity Would graphine parts on a chip get hot enough to combust?

<comment><USER4> Graphene is a better heat conductor as well, so heat ought not to be as big a concern.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is their graphene going to be a real graphene? If I read Lowe[0] correctly, the primary problem in this space is that you can't really buy _actual_ graphene from any of the vendors.

\--

[0] - [http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2018/10/11/gra...](http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2018/10/11/graphene- you-dont-get-what-you-pay-for)

</comment><comment><USER6> Has there been any research on the health risks? I'm sure graphene dust isn't great to be breathing in and if we're thinking of using it to improve a good amount of products and materials I feel this should be studied before that cat is out of the back. I feel like this will be asbestos all over again except much, much worse.

<comment><USER7> The saying is letting the cat out of the bag.

<comment><USER8> And yet lots of people use "cat out of the back". Was suggested in the eggcorn database forum in 2010 - [http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/forum/viewtopic.php?id=4367](http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/forum/viewtopic.php?id=4367)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> So they're producing the basic materials but have concluded there is no long term business related to supplying graphene wafers. That means there are other companies already in that race or soon to come out with capital. Exciting times indeed.

</comment><comment><USER10> > graphene could increase (sensor) sensitivity by a factor of more than 30

A *factor of 30 would be unreal. Anything more than 2 in the real world would be amazing.

<comment><USER11> They mean 30 times as sensitive ie. sensing 1/30th as much stuff. That's what "a factor of n" means btw. Maybe you had in mind "a power of".

<comment><USER12> If previous sensors required 300 photons and new ones require 10, that would be an absolutely incredible achievement. (Scale that to whatever current state of the art is for camera sensors, of course)

That's what I think of when I hear "30x improvement", at least.

<comment><USER11> Yeh that's the plain meaning. They will be referring to a particular sensor type. Amazement is no cause to say the claim is "unreal"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The article says they worked around the copper impurities, but I wonder if they overcame the silicon impurity issues that cause low performance and "disappointing results" in most applications.[1] Summary[2][3]

[1] [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-07396-3](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-07396-3)

[2] [https://phys.org/news/2018-11-full-potential- supermaterial-g...](https://phys.org/news/2018-11-full-potential- supermaterial-graphene.html)

[3] [https://www.createdigital.org.au/graphene-performance- reveal...](https://www.createdigital.org.au/graphene-performance-revealed- silicon/)

</comment><comment><USER14> As a material scientist, I'm reminded of a joke from college which has changed only a little: What's the only thing graphene (used to be carbon nanotubes) can't do? A: Leave the lab

<comment><USER15> As a former Slashdotter, I've seen this joke on every single article about "nanotubes".

<comment><USER16> As a former nanotube research grad student, I have to wholeheartedly agreee though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I find the little differences between U.S- and U.K.- English interesting.

In U.S. English, "spin-out" usually refers to an automobile spinning while out of control, for example when it hits a patch of ice and gets uneven traction.

</comment><comment><USER18> What's the cost vs chip grade silicone waffers? Even if they can, they would then need commercial scale process to print the electronics, tip of iceberg right there

</comment><comment><USER19> No "buy now" button... ie. still vapourware

<comment><USER20> Why? Do you also have the need to buy silicon online?

<comment><USER21> Well, if he's from a research lab that uses graphene I imagine that option would be useful. As of right now, there are plenty of places to buy semiconductor wafers of which silicon is the most basic and cheapest (and even some forms of graphene like aqueous).</comment></comment></comment>


NYC's New Apple Store Previewed - <AUTHOR> http://www.geek.com/nycs-new-apple-store-previewed/ <comment><USER2> Walked by last night. Article neglected to note the spiral, glass staircase that is going to have iphone junkies snapping naughty pictures all summer long...

Place is big, open and fits in well with all the galleries in the neighborhood.

</comment><comment><USER3> Good, I hate having to fight through throngs of tourists to get to the big piano in FAO Schwarz...

It's interesting that Apple's brand fits in all of these distint neighborhoods. SoHo, Meat Packing district, and Fifth Avenue... Next up, Alphabet City and an outlet in Shea Stadium!</comment>


GitHub code search: "filename:.gitconfig email" - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/search?o=desc&q=filename:.gitconfig+email&ref=searchresults&s=indexed&type=Code <comment><USER2> Their email address is already attached to all of their commits, so I don't see why this is supposed to be interesting.

<comment><USER3> [https://github.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=filename%3A.gitco...](https://github.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=filename%3A.gitconfig+password&type=Code&ref=searchresults)</comment></comment>


Outlier Detection in SQL - vive-la-liberte https://www.periscopedata.com/blog/outlier-detection-in-sql.html <comment><AUTHOR> I've recently been doing a bunch of stuff with sports stats, which involves lots of GIS data. This sort of thing comes up a lot - trying to find a player's 'territory' based on coordinates of their actions in a game, without including outlying events that cause you to overestimate the area.

There's a concept in animal behaviour called a 'home range' which is more or less the same thing - GPS attached to tigers in the wild etc. Some of the algorithms there are quite interesting, from simply drawing a bounding box around the the data points, to working out the probability density, to things like LoCoH, which sort of recursively build up convex hulls from nearest neighbours.

All of these things are pretty much possible in SQL to one degree of performance or another. But ultimately I'm fascinated by things like SQL Server's R support - you can get far simpler, more natural implementations of these things in R (or indeed in custom aggregates or functions in other languages). I think in the long term, database engines that offer this sort of extensibility are going to thrive for analytics work, be they SQL based or otherwise.

<comment><USER2> I hope it works out but they need to do a lot of work on it between these CTPs and RTM. They've made a critical mistake in the way they've marketed and documented it.

* They call every use a "data scientist". This is fun and assuredly deserved for R experts but is going to scare a hell of a lot of potential users away.

* The installation notes give you a lot of steps but zero insight into why you're doing them. Install these two packages; okay but what exactly are they doing? We need to know this kind of thing. R people might know...

* There's very little troubleshooting documentation either on the installation/initial setup (and there are a LOT of bugs in getting it going; trust me I spent most of last week digging through them) but also once it's operational how it's going to be tracked and managed within the context of everything else that's going on in the SQL instance. Like the memory pools, wait states, resource governor pools, etc. We kind of need to know this stuff. Otherwise we see a server that gets reported as slow, we know it uses R, but we don't know where to look to determine whether R is causing it or not and what we can do about it.

* AFAIK it's single-threaded. Considering most places have super-downsized their CPUs and are going for massively threaded servers these days (which is arguable given Microsoft's 2012+ per-core licensing model; but I'm talking about servers in very big enterprises that have unlimited licensing agreements), that's not going to end well. It's very possible this will be fixed before RTM though.

* And finally, because they've bought revolution and rebranded it as Microsoft R a few days ago, and now it's split into SQL and non-SQL products, there's going to be a lot of confusion and a long wait for appropriate training materials to catch up for all of us non-R users.

* I haven't been impressed with the current tutorial materials. As a non-R user we're going to need a lot more to really understand how to use it. I'm sure there are fantastic R resources available but if you want to understand it with a Microsoft SQL Server background then it's a slightly different story...

<comment><USER3> Can you easily fit things like glm across a view or large table with the SQL Server R addon?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is it just me or is Periscope allergic to saying what databases it supports? I can find nothing on the website, and I am really hesitant to sign up for more info once companies started actually calling my phone after I did that.

Also, none of those queries will work on MySQL.

<comment><USER5> They support Postgres, Microsoft SQL Server, Redshift, and Oracle I believe.

<comment><USER6> I know that they also support MySQL. We have Periscope connected to a MySQL database.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I would like to know about more sophisticated techniques for outlier detection. These are stat 101 level. Z scores? You can get into a lot of trouble assuming a normal distribution.

What are credit card companies doing? What's the best way to combine multiple variables that are predictive of an event for outlier detection? Is there a simple framework to automate reporting of these events in real-time?

One way to model this might be to treat the outcome ("Is this event an outlier?") as a 0/1 variable and use one of the many ways to model that type of data–random forests, logistic regression, neural networks, etc. The problem is that this isn't really "outlier" detection anymore.

<comment><USER8> Anomaly detection is very different across different domains. For CC fraud / risk, you have discrete transactions so the problem is one of classification, and generally approached with supervised learning.

I don't know what you mean by combining multiple variables. Do you mean analysis methods that work with multiple variables (instead of 1-dimensional z-scores) or do you mean methods that combine multiple variables into 1, to reduce input dimensions (i.e. principal component analysis)

Because data and data reporting platforms are so different across companies, there's no 'simple framework' to do reporting. You probably want something like [https://github.com/etsy/skyline](https://github.com/etsy/skyline).

You also describe an ensemble method for outlier detection, which is what Skyline uses. I want to note that there is no reason to consider ensembles "not" outlier detection.

<comment><USER7> I meant using multiple variables to categorize outlier events. What was shown here are also techniques to categorize discrete events ("Does this day cross some threshold?"). I guessed supervised learning methods.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> These are some cool SQL tricks! I like it.

The big caveat with the standard deviation technique is that it assumes a normal distribution. Many datasets are not actually distributed normally (power-law, Poisson, beta, etc, etc) and so the technique won't work. It's a much harder problem to 'generically' detect outliers without knowledge of the underlying distribution.

I don't have any idea how to do it (though a former colleague came up with nice idea of building a histogram and searching for values that occurred after some number of empty bins, implying an outlier). Is there an accepted state- of-the-art for general-purpose outlier detection? Or is that such a broad question as to be meaningless?

<comment><USER10> Other than normal distribution assumption, there is another assumption that doesn't hold true for most time series related to human activity, nature, or scheduling. If heteroscedasticity is present, you cannot use the same standard deviation for the entire series. A more practical approach is to compute variance for each calendar period separately.

Here's an example - expected variance for the number of SWIFT payments processed during non-banking hours is 0. Transaction counter greater than 0 is an outlier.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Standard deviations assume normal distributions... but ultimately when you look for some two standard deviations from the mean, you're just look for an event that only occurs 95% of the time. A technique that works regardless of distribution is percentiles. Postgesql supports these now as well.

<comment><USER2> I wish they went into more detail within the context of what we're discussing. I've looked at the wiki pages and my eyes glazed over.

Trying to pick out "bad" stats from the gigabytes of information I gather from the servers I manage is always a top-of-the-list thing that I want to do.

But when we're talking about 95%; well I mean it's fine for showing on a graph but how can you run alerting for something like that?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Maybe I'm just unfamiliar with some of the Postgres syntax.. but shouldn't there be a GROUP BY in the first query?

<comment><USER13> Thanks! Fixed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> More please.

<comment><USER8> try using moving statistics, looking for outliers in more than 1 dimension, and so on</comment></comment>


How I ditched the security risks and lived without Java, Reader, and Flash - <AUTHOR> http://www.pcworld.com/article/2030153/how-i-ditched-the-security-risks-and-lived-without-java-reader-and-flash.html

<comment><USER2> Or get a Mac. No need to install 3rd party software.

Built in Preview and PDFKit handle PDF needs.

Run Safari with the iPad User Agent string and most websites figure out what to do without Flash.

Java can still be a stumbling block.</comment>


Ransomeware attack hits major US data center provider - <AUTHOR> https://www.zdnet.com/article/ransomware-attack-hits-major-us-data-center-provider/ <comment><USER2> Odd typo in the headline, unless it's an outbreak of software inspired by Fela Ransome Kuti[1].

1: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ransome- Kuti_family](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ransome-Kuti_family)

<comment><USER3> Fair amount of typos in the article itself.

"Teh ransomware caused on outage of FIA Tech cloud services."</comment></comment>


MeerKAT unveiled – clearest image ever of centre of the Milky Way - <AUTHOR> http://www.ska.ac.za/media-releases/meerkat-radio-telescope-inaugurated-in-south-africa-reveals-clearest-view-yet-of-center-of-the-milky-way/ <comment><USER2> Great desktop background</comment>


Debug a running node process - <AUTHOR> http://offthelip.org/?p=206

<comment><USER2> Initially thought this would have dove into debugging using Dtrace node.js probes, but oh well useful nonetheless.</comment>


Ask HN: Do you have specific industries that you would never work for? - <AUTHOR> Do you have any fields, industries or even specific entities that would you never consider working for?<p>If so what are your objections? <comment><USER2> The arms industry and intelligence agencies because in both cases it's impossible to even fathom if the work you do for them will be used for good or for harm.

I wouldn't necessarily have qualms working for the military as such (although I'd have to think about it in each specific case), which of course is at least somewhat paradoxical given that I wouldn't work for weapons manufacturers. While often politically controversial, the military also provides a useful - and probably and unfortunately necessary - service to society.

Gambling because the products and services the industry provides often not only don't benefit the customer but often are downright detrimental to their well-being. One could argue though that brick-and-mortar casinos at least sell an exciting experience, so the case might not be as clear-cut as with online gambling, for example.

Finally, scam industries such as homoeopathy (which unfortunately is rather widespread in Europe) because their products don't benefit the customer.

<comment><USER3> I like this list. I'll add advertising and porn to it for myself. Porn because of the social stigma (I actually think porn has provided some value to society), and advertising because on scales worth automating it is mostly lying.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Car manufacturing. This is the biggest industry here in Germany. The Diesel engine cheating scands in the last year's didn't improve much on their public image. In this industry, you shall like loud and powerful engines, luxury and expensive cars, the Blockchain... I hat all of that. I quit any job interview when I learn that the company makes b2b consulting for automobile related stuff.

</comment><comment><USER5> I have a few basic rules about what I want my code to do, and one of them is that I'll never write code that I _know_ will make other people's lives worse. That doesn't really explicitly rule out anything but it's hard to imagine a situation where I'd work in weapons manufacturing, gambling, porn, etc.

<comment><USER6> Is not the point of code to do automation? Is not the end result loss of jobs?

<comment><USER5> It's possible that I could work on something that would make jobs redundant, and I would have to ask myself whether or not that's something I want to do. Up till now I written a lot of code that automates parts of people's jobs, and they end up doing different, often much less tedious, work that their company needs instead. So far I haven't been responsible for anyone losing their job. Most of the code I've written to date has been to grow companies and create more jobs actually. That's one benefit of being in an industry from the early days.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Ceramic tiles. My family is in the business among the major producers in the world.

I hate the product, as a software engineer it's not stimulating, and I want to stay away from it as long as I can.

</comment><comment><USER8> In addition to those mentioned (gambling, adtech, military industrial complex), I'll add predatory lending companies. There are several in my city and my heart sinks a little each time a friend or coworker moves to one :/

to be fair I'm young and have no children so it's easy to say no to them. If I had kids or otherwise needed a job and those were the only options I might think differently. hopefully it never comes to that

</comment><comment><USER9> Meat & dairy Gambling Arms and defence

</comment><comment><USER10> Advertising.

<comment><AUTHOR> Why?

<comment><USER11> Long hours, fun when you young, not so much fun as you get older. I have worked year and a half in such company in Toronto, boss bring you beer, dogs running around (pet all you can, if you a dog person), cocktail hours every day (we called it flu shots). Worked like 15 hours for 6 months, found other job and left.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Well, it's not really a field as much as certain parts of said field, but anything government/military related associated with a dictatorship. In other words, the governments of countries like China/Russia/North Korea/Saudi Arabia/Iran/etc.

But I'm not against working for any government, just any that's involved in a non democratic society.

Obviously also any industry involved in pushing malware to the public too, since those adware programs have to come from somwhere.

And I guess scammers/pseudoscience peddlers as well. Would never get involved with a company pushing anti vax stuff, creationism/intelligent design, stuff like homeopathy and alternative medicine, etc.

</comment><comment><USER13> Will never work for the fur clothing business.

</comment><comment><USER14> Porn, advertising, social media. They're all detrimental to society (imo).

</comment><comment><USER15> Time share business. Usually a Complete ripoff.</comment>


Show HN: Hatch – A modern project, package, and virtual env manager for Python - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ofek/hatch <comment><USER2> The README.rst documents the `egg` subcommand like this:

> Creates a new Python project. Think of an "egg" as a new idea.

How does this differ from the egg distribution format [1] introduced by setuptools, which wheel aims to replace? If it's completely different, couldn't a distinct term be used? Python packaging is confusing enough as it is!

[1] - [https://packaging.python.org/glossary/#term- egg](https://packaging.python.org/glossary/#term-egg)

<comment><USER3> From what I can tell, the egg subcommand doesn't create any kind of egg file, just creates a new project.

But I agree. Creating a new distinct keyword for that command (why not just `hatch new my-app`?) would be far better. I've tried to get into Python packaging, and it's the biggest PITA I've dealt with as a dev.

<comment><USER4> I can recommend this great video from PyCon 2017 which demystifies a lot of Python's packaging process: [1]

But it's still a mess only Rube Goldberg could love.

[1] - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOH-h- EKKac](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOH-h-EKKac)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't want to be suspicious and negative but here is yet another needless dependency without any real value. mkvirtualenv is the best tool to manage venvs, pytest with pytest-cov to test and there is so much benefit to know original instruments but not some inferior wrapper. If you bothered by bugs in pip it's better to fix it in pip. All community will be grateful. But another wrapper is a complete shame.

<comment><USER6> what are the differences between these things:

pip

easy_install

virtualenv

mkvirtualenv

pipenv

pyenv

<comment><USER7> pip: Python's official package manager

easy_install: Forget it existed, substitute with pip

virtualenv: A virtual environment, providing an isolated Python and libraries

mkvirtualenv: A script to create a virtualenv

pipenv: Combines pip and virtualenv into an integrated solution, comes with a Pipfile not unlike Ruby's Gemfile for example

pyenv: Script that helps to install and manage different Python versions on your system, so you can have the full range of Python 2.x and 3.x installed without them getting in the way of each other. Allows you to set local, default and system Pythons allowing you to switch your Python interpreter depending on which project/directory you're in

<comment><USER6> pyenv also has pyenv-virtualenv...

<comment><USER8> By itself, pyenv is only responsible for isolating python versions (e.g. 2.6, 2.7, 3.3. this would be like rvm/rbenv/nvm).

pyenv-virtualenv is a wrapper to allow pyenv and virtualenv to work together

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've stopped using any other virtual env managers than asdf[0]- it has one simple API for pretty much everything.

You can define a .tools-versions file in the root of your project, which lets you install the correct versions with a simple `asdf install`. We even use this in CI for zero-config language version upgrades.

[0]: [https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf](https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf)

<comment><USER10> I read "asdf" and wondered, "Using Common Lisp to configure Python?" Then I followed the link and am curious whether or not it is a port of the widely used (in) Common Lisp tool.

[https://common-lisp.net/project/asdf/](https://common-lisp.net/project/asdf/)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> (Author here) I'm happy to answer any questions!

<comment><USER11> What does it do?

I started reading the readme, and after getting past general "this is awesome", I got to the doc of the config option...

How about showing an example usage, which does something simple and cool?

<comment><USER12> Agreed, a quick-start example at the top would be both helpful and engaging.

<comment><AUTHOR> Working on that now!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Nice to see Python 2 compatibility. I started using poet[0] recently, and faced issues once I tried adding Python 2 support.

[0]: [https://github.com/sdispater/poet](https://github.com/sdispater/poet)

<comment><USER12> Unless I'm mistaken, Hatch is only 3.5+, but contains a command line option to specify if a project is 2 compatible.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, the tool itself is 3.5+ but what you are working on matters not!

<comment><USER14> Oh, that wasn't clear when I originally looked. I'm glad you clarified that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> See also: pipenv :)

[http://docs.pipenv.org/en/latest/](http://docs.pipenv.org/en/latest/)

Very different tools, but they cover the same surface area, in spots.

<comment><AUTHOR> Friendly competition {^.^}

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Well I was in the process of writing my own tool to do this after starting to hit the limits of what I could do with cookiecutter... so I'm hooked.

I expect I'll be writing quite a few pull requests.

</comment><comment><USER17> This looks cool! Two things that leap to mind as things I'd like to know after glancing over the readme:

\- comparison with pipenv

\- how it handles things like `pip freeze` for, e.g., Heroku

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks and great question! As Hatch does a bunch of different things, I'll just speak to the package management.

More or less, hatch manages packages based on environments, whereas pipenv does so based on projects.

When pip supports Pipfiles, hatch will as well. At that point, project based package management will be supported too.

<comment><USER17> Cool, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Fyi, I just significantly uncluttered the readme

</comment><comment><USER18> Hmm, I'm not sure if I like the idea of a development tool dictating my folder structure.

<comment><USER19> Go does this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Looks very interesting! Are there any plans to support conda?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

Eventually, yes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> How is this better than using a Docker image?

<comment><USER22> Developing inside a docker image seems like needless complexity to me, especially when virtualenv takes care of the python environment isolation already without another layer of indirection. Virtualenvs are just file copies and PATH vars with some tooling.

<comment><USER23> Agreed. If you're on Windows/OSX, it also adds a VM between your host and your code and file sharing has terrible performance.

<comment><USER24> File sharing performance has gotten much better on OS X, at least: [https://blog.docker.com/2017/05/user-guided-caching-in- docke...](https://blog.docker.com/2017/05/user-guided-caching-in-docker-for- mac/)

<comment><USER25> It's still not /great/. I have had to switch from my mac to a new Win10 laptop for development because the app server in my docker container would take around 2 mins to detect a change and reboot the app server, which then would take a few minutes to reboot. Now it's much closer to realtime. I do hope that docker get's it sorted out soon, as the tooling on windows isn't as good as what I am used to on osx.

And by tooling, I mean command line. I am using Cmder with Linux subsystem for Windows, and it STILL isn't half as good as even the terminal built into osx, let alone iterm.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Looks like it does a bit too much. I like pipenv [https://github.com/kennethreitz/pipenv](https://github.com/kennethreitz/pipenv)

<comment><USER15> My thoughts exactly :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Aside : Can someone explain how HN rises topics to the top? (I'm genuinely curious)

As of writing this comment, this submission has 4 points in 3 hours, and is on the top half of the front page. (Not saying the project doesn't shouldn't be - looks pretty awesome tbh).

Does the reputation of the people upvoting it matter? (still surprising it'd rise given only 4 points in 3 hours). Does the reputation of the person submitting it matter?

<comment><USER7> Read the FAQ please: [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html). A quick Google would've gotten you to that answer too.

And don't use random topics to ask questions like these, that's what Ask HN can be used for: [https://news.ycombinator.com/ask](https://news.ycombinator.com/ask)</comment></comment>


Things to Avoid in a Demo - <AUTHOR> http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2009/09/5-things-to-avoid-in-a-demo.html

<comment><USER2> Actual link is here: [http://www.openforum.com/idea-hub/topics/the- world/article/s...](http://www.openforum.com/idea-hub/topics/the- world/article/stunningly-awful-demos-five-things-not-to-do-in-a-demo-guy- kawasaki)

<comment><USER3> Also previous discussion here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=808761></comment></comment>


Functional Programming Is Taking Over UIs with Pure Views - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@puppybits/the-revolution-of-pure-views-aed339db7da4 <comment><USER2> Good highlight of the next winning field of functional way of thinking. I'm wondering what's the most advanced framework that try to implements Pure Views on iOS</comment>


Founder of Snopes.com, a Facebook 'fact checker', accused of embezzlement - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4042194/Facebook-fact-checker-arbitrate-fake-news-accused-defrauding-website-pay-prostitutes-staff-includes-escort-porn-star-Vice-Vixen-domme.html <comment><USER2> I don't particularly care about this guy's alleged foibles (although it does sound kind of bad), but I do have issue with this site being portrayed as some authoritative source of pure objectivity whose only goal is the unadulterated truth. It hasn't been an unbiased site since they went away from a focus on researching urban legends IMO.

I encourage people to not take my word for it, but to search for terms like "snopes bias" and take into account a diverse set of perspectives.

</comment><comment><USER3> Let us know when this is on somewhere other than the daily mail.

<comment><AUTHOR> So which media outlet(s) would you consider to be 'real news'?</comment></comment>