Guidelines for writing readable code - <AUTHOR> https://alemil.com/guidelines-for-writing-readable-code <comment><USER2> My one addition to this would be: comment what you intent the code to accomplish not what it actually does.

I can see what code does, it written there, in code! I want to know what its purpose is so I can decide if I have to remove/refactor/fix it.

Often code doesn't do what was intended (a bug) and by only commenting what it does the bug transpires into the documentation as well.

Compare "// loop over array of numbers and add them together" with "// compute sum of all product prices in cart".

The first is only helpful if you are explaining a language to someone or are not confident about the language. The second tells the importance of this piece of code in the greater whole.

<comment><USER3> And the second should, imo, not be a comment, but rather a function name.

<comment><USER4> That only works in simple cases. Most cases are simple, but the ones that matter most are the ones that are not.

There is sometimes a great deal that can usefully said, about what a function is for, that is only apparent in the context of its use. If the purpose of a() is accomplished by calling a1(), a2() and a3(), it would not be unusual for the purpose of a2(), for example, to only be understandable in the way a1(), a2() and a3() work together to satisfy the purpose of a(). If the only words you are allowed to write are the names of the functions, there is nowhere to document this interaction (especially if the name of a() is supposed to say what it does, not how it works.)

The more you break down a solution into functions, the more the satisfaction of the purpose of the program becomes a consequence of how the functions interact.

For an example, look at the comments to the function checkListProperties in christophilus' SQLite example [1], and consider how you would convey the same information through function naming. Then look me in the eye and tell me that's the way you write code.

[1] [https://www.sqlite.org/src/artifact/9711a7575036f0d3](https://www.sqlite.org/src/artifact/9711a7575036f0d3)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Number 6 (DRY), and number 9 (use libraries), both lead to problem 16 (leaking abstractions). Personally, I follow a rule I read in a blog some time ago and don't try to de-duplicate code until I've copy and pasted it three times. That way I know what the _actual_ pattern that's being repeated is, not just what _I think_ the pattern is.

As for number 9, I'll agree with this, so long as it's in the standard libraries (which are slow to change and unlikely to break/change functionality when they do change). But when you use 3rd party libraries, you are still responsible for that code in the long run. You'll have to ensure it remains up-to-date, ensure that you're testing that it's doing what you intend for it to do, and when it's eventually compromised or removed, you'll have to deal with that too.

See: Left Pad.

<comment><USER6> > Personally, I follow a rule I read in a blog some time ago and don't try to > de-duplicate code until I've copy and pasted it three times

Known as "Three Strikes and You Refactor"[0]:

\- The first time you do something, you just do it.

\- The second time you do something similar, you wince at the duplication, but you do the duplicate thing anyway.

\- The third time you do something similar, you refactor.

[0] [http://wiki.c2.com/?ThreeStrikesAndYouRefactor](http://wiki.c2.com/?ThreeStrikesAndYouRefactor)

<comment><USER7> The problem with this is the cases when you don't remember that you (or someone else) already used this same snippet twice. In large codebases with a lot of people working on them, this can expand to dozens of copies.

<comment><USER8> If you have dozens of instances of nearly identical code and not a single person knows of more than 2 instances of them, you've got much bigger problems.

<comment><USER9> This would be true if everyone on the team was equally involved from the very start on a greenfield project, and they aren't all already fighting other forms of tech debt.

Sadly the real world isn't so accommodating.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Very good stuff here. I totally agree with many of these points. Especially, these 5.

3\. Simplicity is king.

5\. Naming is hard, but it's important.

9\. Prefer internal functions over custom solutions.

11\. Avoid creating multiple blocks of code nested in one another.

14\. Split your classes to data holders and data manipulators.

To be honest all of them really feed into number 3. The lower the cognitive burden to reading your code the easier it will be the maintain and work with.

<comment><USER11> I disagree with no.11 ... I prefer nested code of if's because as a reader I learn which conditions are relevant and assumed, rather than check-it-all at the start.

<comment><USER12> If I put all my early exits at the start, for the remainder of the function I only have to remember the list of preconditions established by the early exits. With deeply nested code I instead have to keep a stack of currently fulfilled conditions in mind.

Sure, at any given point the stack is shorter than the list so there's less things to keep in mind, but for me dealing with mental lists is much easier than dealing with mental stacks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I also suggest _consider your data_. There are two main problems we face as programmers: _managing complexity_ and _transforming data_. The former gets the majority of the treatment in articles like this but I believe the latter is often more important. We must consider the shape of our data, the usage patterns of our data, and consider structuring our programs to accommodate such patterns and transformations.

An example of where rules of thumb about abstractions turn into poorly designed code is when processing large arrays or vectors of data. It is common to model your data in some kind of product type like a struct or union and process each item using some method of iteration. However if the main usage pattern of our data is to perform this transformation over the vector within an outer loop we've shot ourselves in the foot from the get-go. Our caches are constantly swapping data. This is called, _premature pessimization_.

So don't get trapped into thinking that our job is _only_ about learning SOLID principles or various aphorisms and mnemonics. The other side of our job is transforming and moving data.

</comment><comment><USER14> My personal documentation guideline is, just answer the five W questions:

* What it does: The code answers this in a clear manner

* Who: did it, the code repository answers this.

* Where: is used, your IDE should be able to show this

* When: was it made code repository, when is used stack traces

* Why: why does it exist? that is the only part that needs to be in a comment.

<comment><USER15> I like to know how well the author understood the problem. Unfortunately git allows people to rewrite history and hide the guess+check process many go through.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> It's a bit more meta than what this guide covers, but I wish something was said about treating writing code as fundamentally a writing process. Most documents like this focus on "what readable code is", and not "how do I achieve that product".

Brainstorm, outline, draft, revise, rearrange. Have a high-level structure that makes sense, clean up "sentence structure" and "word choice". Often the best path to "readable code" is "brain dump a mess, than revise" rather than "write a perfect first draft".

</comment><comment><USER11> I really don't agree with no 11. My reasoning is that the reader should know at each line what conditions are assumed.

Returning in the start is as anti-pattern for me as goto in the middle. both of them leave you with lines of code that only a debug session (in mind or in action) can tell you what lines will be called. I will choose nested code any- day if that means i can simply follow what `if`s are relevant rather than guessing.

<comment><USER17> > My reasoning is that the reader should know at each line what conditions are > assumed.

I don't get it. How do early returns not convey assumptions that can be made in the rest of the function?

> Returning in the start is as anti-pattern for me as goto in the middle. both > of them leave you with lines of code that only a debug session (in mind or > in action) can tell you what lines will be called.

This is really confusing to me. What do you mean by "in mind or in action"?

In any case, if you have runtime conditions you can't tell what code will be executed in general just by looking at the code regardless of whether you're looking at nested code or code with early returns.

> I will choose nested code any-day if that means i can simply follow what > `if`s are relevant rather than guessing.

Are the conditions for early returns not relevant or something? What about them leaves you guessing?

<comment><USER11> they are all gathered at once.the following lines could assume any combinations of those conditions. in simple examples it is not an issue but as the function get more complex I found it excruciating.

<comment><USER17> > the following lines could assume any combinations of those conditions.

Do you mind expanding a bit more on this? From what I understand, if you have early returns the only way you can get into the rest of the function is if _all_ of the conditions pass, not any arbitrary combination of them.

Also, do you have an example of a more complex function with early functions that you find difficult to read?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> d--b It's generally good advice. But some items do not acknowledge that there often if a trade-off to be made and the trade-off depends on the program you make.

Sometimes it is more readable to duplicate code or to have functions that do more than one thing. If I have a function and I need to follow four or five levels of function calls and piece things together to understand what that function does, then I can't read the code...

<comment><USER18> You can definitely go silly by splitting your functions too much. However, most times I hear this complaint, the real reason is:

> 5\. Naming is hard, but it's important.

In other words, you should be able to understand what a function does just by the naming of the function itself. When you have a function that "calls 5 other functions" you should be able to understand what it does by just looking at the 5 function calls, without needing to go inside those child functions to check it out.

The only case where this doesn't apply is when you are tracking a bug and the input/output of the function doesn't make sense. That's the only case I can think of to actually dig deeper...

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'd make the following addition, which I was surprised not to see:

24: Avoid the 'inner-platform effect' [0]

Make proper use of the machinery of the standard library.

This makes your code more readable, more portable, shorter, faster, and less error-prone, and it doesn't even take any real effort - indeed, it makes writing things _easier_!

The standard-library was probably written by someone smarter than you, almost certainly someone more familiar with the language than you, and it's definitely better tested, better documented, and, importantly, better known, than whatever you were about to write. This is a pretty basic point, perhaps, but most of them are.

Special case: use standard-library data-structures. If you're implementing your own hashset over a raw array, rather than using the standard HashSet class/template, you'd better have a very good reason.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner- platform_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner-platform_effect)

<comment><USER20> Isn't this #9 Prefer internal functions over custom solutions?

<comment><USER19> Oops, I missed that! Yes, it's pretty close.

I don't like the look of #10. I'm a believer in single-point-of-return.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > `3. Simplicity is king.`

Yes, this is true.

But for me, people get it the wrong all the time.

If you have an object which you have to check yeah don't check for everything you could ever imagine. Like I have seen code where the actual check was longer than the code after.

But if you are looping through a big array and I mean big not your little 1000 index array and you think any loop is good enough and suddenly you have a reactive system which was the simplest way to code but the thing is over reactive so your calling your function with a slow loop function all the time just because was simpler to read or to implement your just doing more harm with that rule than actual benefit.

This is also the reason why people use `.map()` in javascript to loop through stuff without ever knowing what map is actually for.

<comment><USER22> May I recommend watching "Simplicity is complicated" talk by Rob Pike:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFejpH_tAHM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFejpH_tAHM)

[https://talks.golang.org/2015/simplicity-is- complicated.slid...](https://talks.golang.org/2015/simplicity-is- complicated.slide#1)

<comment><USER21> Thanks, I will.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Number 3 has some merit. But. Number 3 is also the cause of much grief. I have had to deal with the consequences of "gun/guru" developers doing 3 because it is easy, without them considering the effects on those who use the systems in question.

It is our responsibility to look at what is needed and what complexities, if any, are required to achieve the results. Of course, the opportunities to actually talk with the end-user of any software system is rarely available in the normal course of development, especially for junior programmers. It would be a useful tactic to have all programmers have to deal with the end-users and actually face their complaints and have to learn what the code is doing to those end-users.

</comment><comment><USER24> Urgh, I was nodding away until I reached guide 16. Although the idea it expresses is fine, their example of parsing CSV files yourself is a terrible one, especially since they link to a previous article where they anticipate some issues that can be encountered when parsing CSVs, but ignore the legion of others (different separators, quotation characters etc).

If you're going to parse a CSV file, please, just use a standard library for your language - please don't just split on commas and call it done. The only case where it might be acceptable to do it yourself is if you have complete control of the input - but that would to me imply a static data that could be added to the code base instead of a CSV file.

</comment><comment><USER25> I want to expand on #2 - the right tool for the job might not be a flashy new library/framework/tool, but it might be one you don't already know. You shouldn't pick new technology _because_ it's new, but you should have a surface-level understanding of what lots of technology does so you might be able to connect the dots with your use-case and explore something foreign in depth. Equally risky to using flashy tools is over-reliance on the old tools you know, which may not be best suited to the task.

</comment><comment><USER26> I have a question about point #12. Are most people in agreement that the if else loop is preferrable over a ternary operator?

One of my worst professional programming experiences was having a senior developer who took apart usage of map, filter, reduce, and replaced them with if else loops, and sometimes breaking things in the process.

The idea that you would one day have a junior who would fail to understand a relatively simple concept seems like fantasy. Let them get stumped once, and then teach!

<comment><USER27> no, but it all comes to the complexity of the operation.

Like the article said, something like this is better than an if else loop: $variable == $x ? $y : $z;

But if you write stuff like this:

$variable == $x ? ($x == $y ? array_merge($x, $y, $z) : $x) : $y;

I am going to be annoyed. In the second case, please use if else.

<comment><USER26> You're correct. I didn't look closely enough at the finalized piece of code. I misinterpreted and thought the offer was unsatisfied with the original, appropriate use for a ternary operator ($variable == $x ? $y : $z)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> "Do not duplicate your code" rarely improves readability, unless the part that you dedupe is a simple semantic component of its own and not closely intertwined with the nonduplicated code it is embedded in. More often, it can lead to the hidden trap of abstractions mentioned in the OP'a post.

The primary reason to avoid code duplication is to improve maintainability and refactorability, not to improve readability.

</comment><comment><USER29> I highly recommend "The Art of Readable Code: Simple and Practical Techniques for Writing Better Code", by Dustin Boswell and Trevor Foucher. It's an easy read, and well explained with good examples.

</comment><comment><USER30> I'd add, beside obvious docstrings, comment to explain why the code does something when it's not obvious (say a corner case).

</comment><comment><USER31> Point 11. is called " return early".

</comment><comment><USER32> Disagree strongly with the comment about naming : "Names of variables and functions should be distinct and provide a general idea of what they do".

The clearest code that I have read used consistently single-letter variable names. If a variable name holds a meaning, you are then repeating this information each time you use the variable. It is better to name the variable "a", and put a comment upon its declaration. This is the convention used in mathematics and physics, and it works really well.

<comment><USER33> Maybe some of them, like in tight loops. But the most difficult code to understand for me is Matlab scripts written by physicists, naming variables a,b,c or i,ii,iii etc. Variables with longer lifespan should have more explicit names in my opinion.

<comment><USER32> Of course! I am talking about the names of local variables, not the names of externally visible functions or global variables.

<comment><USER34> There's a spectrum of how 'local' a variable is though. There's a big difference between a local variable whose uses span ~5 lines vs. ~30 lines. You're making a trade-off between repeating information (what the variable is) and forcing the reader to keep in their own (human) memory what each variable is for (or else forcing them to constantly go back and re-discover what the variable is for).

Go sometimes gets a lot of flak for its style here (partially because it's sometimes misapplied) but I think it works pretty well: it's fine to use a short non-descript variable name like `a` if its uses only span a few (~5-10) lines (or other certain special cases like `i`, `j` for loop indexes), otherwise use longer descriptive names.

<comment><USER32> This sounds more a problem about your total number of local variables than their names. If you have too many variables, using longer names is not going to help you as much as organizing your code differently.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Gorillaz – Andromeda Music Video in WebGL - <AUTHOR> http://yagiz.me/andromeda/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hey HN!

Author here. This is a WebGL recreation of the popular music video Gorillaz - Andromeda. I hope you enjoy it!

Project source: [https://github.com/yagiz/Andromeda](https://github.com/yagiz/Andromeda)

<comment><USER2> Amazing! How did you get into three.js and webgl development? Would love to hear good resources on building large three.ja apps like this!

<comment><AUTHOR> Whole process and story behind this is kinda ready on Medium. I'll comment the link soon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> It looks great. Just one detail my brain couldn't help but notice. The stars seem to be located in front of the back-side belt of asteroid of the planet.

</comment><comment><USER4> Hey nice, this is really cool!

This reminds me of some of the stuff on [http://shadertoy.com](http://shadertoy.com) . One of my favorite websites!

</comment><comment><USER5> super good job, man; I love it. thanks for taking the time to put together a nice write-up too.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

I wrote an article about whole story behind this. I'll comment the link soon!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Combine this with WebVR and you get a complete new style of music video :)

</comment><comment><USER7> Love it! but you should mention that you are using `three.js`

</comment><comment><USER8> My 2011 MacBook Air 4Gb ram, i5 could not run it :(

<comment><USER9> My Nexus 5 runs it well ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The world is spinning too fast

(this is awesome, great job)

</comment><comment><USER11> you did a great job.</comment>


A Brief History of Open-Source Code - <AUTHOR> http://www.kinvey.com/blog/3242/a-brief-history-of-open-source-code-infographic <comment><USER2> Amazing how the number of new languages grew, but now seem to be slowing.</comment>


Facebook running test for highlighted posts - <AUTHOR> http://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/digital-living/6904136/Facebook-running-test-for-highlighted-posts

<comment><USER2> Whoa... This is interesting and very Badoo-like. I am surprised that Facebook has stooped this low to monetize its userbase. Again, they are focusing on the interests of the nodes instead of the benefit of the edges (relationship).

This is an inherently anti-social feature because it allows asymmetry in the relationship. People want to see what is most relevant to them, not what their friends want to broadcast.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm really interested to see how this plays out.

There's currently no way to modulate your volume in social media posts. So "here's a cute photo of my cat" ranks the same as "I really need some help on this". FaceBook amplifies signals that friends like, but this feature allows the poster to amplify as well.

But it uses money, and it's weird to mix money and friend relationships, so... I'm really interested to see how this plays out.

</comment><comment><USER4> When I want to get a message out to friends that rises above the din of day to day chatter, I send an email. Or write a letter and drop it in the mail. Or make a phone call.

I will be surprised if this feature does anything but lower people's friends counts, as they quickly learn which groups they joined or people they friended are merely funded opportunists.

</comment><comment><USER5> 1\. Facebook would probably need to somehow indicate that a post has been "highlighted", lest they lose legitimacy and breed distrust.

2\. Users probably wouldn't want their friends to know they paid to highlight a post.

I'm not sure how those forces can be reconciled, unless people generally don't care about one [logical OR] the other.

</comment><comment><USER6> The people who are willing to pay for this are not going to be the people whose posts you actually want to see.

</comment><comment><USER7> I have to admit I'm a little confused. Is this so that a company you follow can pay for their message to be highlighted, or is it so my friend who _really_ wants me to know what he had for breakfast can pay for the privilege?

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm curious what the overlap between the following two sets is:

1\. Speech for which I am willing to pay to share/announce

2\. Speech for which I think Facebook is most appropriate venue

I suspect that overlap is quite small.</comment>


Huge iceberg breaks off Antarctica - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/news/2010/02/100226_iceberg_wt_sl.shtml

<comment><USER2> More info here: [http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1241059...](http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124105970)

In summary, B9B, a 97-kilometer long iceberg, crashed into the Mertz Glacier Tongue in the Australian Antarctic Territory on Feb. 20, 2010. The collision created a new 78-kilometer long iceberg. Those two are now drifting around, chilling out. Complicated ocean currents will most likely be affected, possibly depriving huge parts of the ocean of oxygen, interrupting millions of biological feedback systems we know nothing about, shifting them to newfound equilibria, making this little ecosystem of ours a lot more livable for obscure branches of bugs, and a lot less livable for us.

tl;dr: We're all going to die.

<comment><USER3> But, of course, Phil Jones wrote some rude emails and used the words "trick" and "hide", therefore global warming isn't real and poses no threat even if it is. So, nothing to worry about.

<comment><USER4> If global warming is a danger Mr. Jones has made it a little more dangerous with his illegal actions that have discredited climate research.

But anyway, I get the feeling that we're suffering a collective bout of climate hypochondria this century. Haven't icebergs been colliding and breaking apart forever?

<comment><USER5> I don't really know if we're reacting appropriately, overreacting, or underreacting to climate change; but I think your last sentence is kind of like saying "Volcanoes have been erupting since Earth began, who cares if a supervolcano is about to erupt?".

<comment><USER4> Is it a supervolcano or is it just supercharged perception of everything that might or might not have to do with climate change?

I can't bring myself to react to very long term potential dangers in the same way I would react to clear and immediate dangers like a volcano that's going to blow up in my face. That's why your analogy doesn't work for me.

<comment><USER6> Summer ice melts have generally been setting records year after year, both in the northern and southern hemisphere.

So, uncertain, but probably more on the "supervolcano" end of your spectrum there.

Experiment: Fill a glass with ice water. Take the temp. 32 degrees or so. Drop a thimble full of boiling water in, some of the ice will melt. Take the temp. Still 32 degrees. Repeat. What happens when we're out of ice? (Situation is slightly different for a planet as opposed to a glass but the fundamentals still apply)

<comment><USER4> So are you saying that the temperature up until now should not have been going up since we're not out of ice?

[edit] And my second question would be this. If all of this is so simple that it can be demonstrated with a glass of water and a few ice cubes, why is it that a minority of serious scientists has doubts? The same scientists would probably confirm that your experiment is correct.

<comment><USER6> Of course I'm not saying that, I even included a parenthetical to make it explicit -- you have higher temperature gradations on a planet than in a glass of water -- it's always hot in the tropics, always cold at the poles. But you still have an average.

The answer to your second question is that no legitimate scientists have doubts about whether the temperature's rising. It's an established fact.

What's uncertain is how much CO2 is related to the rising temperature. They correlate, CO2 is a greenhouse gas and it makes intuitive sense, but it's not "proven" and to certain levels of "proof", is impossible to prove because there's billions of confounding factors like sunspots, water vapor etc.

You're probably confusing this with uncertainty over whether the temperature is rising (which is proven), because paid shills and ideologues (who get paid in emotional satisfaction) deliberately conflate the issue. Confusion is on their side -- educating people will probably hurt their argument, even if they're right.

<comment><USER4> You're trying to refute an argument that I haven't made. The debate about the supervolcano was about our collective perception of the potential consequences of global warming, not whether or not warming takes place.

I don't know nearly enough about climate science to make any claims about it. What I do know about is scientific methods and I do know that there is no scientific method that can credibly make long term predictions about complex systems.

We had the Stern review tell us what the costs of climate change are going to be many decades down the road. It's not possible to make such predictions because it's not possible to know the social and scientific reaction to any change. It's that kind of government sponsored charlatanery that I don't like about this debate.

I am still in favor of reducing CO2 and changing our energy infrastructure in a moderate fashion, because by and large I do believe that we are causing changes in the athmosphere that we should try to minimise (There are other good reasons for doing this as well). I just think we need not have a collective bout of panic and I don't need politicised scientists present things in a way that suggests way more certainty than we could ever possibly have about goings on in complex systems.

<comment><USER7> > I don't know nearly enough about climate science to make any claims about > it. What I do know about is scientific methods and I do know that there is > no scientific method that can credibly make long term predictions about > complex systems.

Like the Solar System. Or chemistry. Or biology. Or evolution. Or medicine.

We're pretty much flying blind here. I'm not even sure if I'll be able to pay my taxes this year.

If you don't know anything about climate science, maybe you should do the rational thing and listen to the experts and the best scientific consensus of the time.

<comment><USER8> I find your comment interesting. Let's take a look at your list.

Solar System -- after 500 years of research, multi-body problem still not solved, many features still amaze and baffle, scientists have no idea how common the system might be

Chemistry -- in spite of having a great model with lots of reproducible experiments, issues remain: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsolved_problems_in_chemistry>

Biology -- where to start?

Evolution -- big vague term. Hard to critique this one. Do you mean natural selection inside a species? Speciation?

Medicine -- wonderful ability to find and fix many diseases. Lots of things work although we have no idea why. Lots of things that we think should work don't. Lots of medicine is so much of a mystery that only statistical analysis can give us rough correlations to begin to form theories. The reason it is so advanced? Billions of test subjects (as opposed to one climate for Earth)

And let's not even get into physics, quantum or otherwise. Or cosmology. Or the problems with the use of Cellular Automata as a modeling tool. I could go on.

Be careful with grand sweeping statements. Ignorance is a fine position and should be the default. Science is a humble questioning of the cosmos, always willing to correct itself and always looking for reproducibility. Be careful about putting so much trust in scientists that you forget what science is about.

Ignorant people have plenty of tools at their disposal to reason and understand the quality of the underlying science. The science itself may be complicated beyond belief, but the underlying meta-data -- how science is done -- is not.

<comment><USER7> > I find your comment interesting. Let's take a look at your list.

I find yours interesting as well, because you struck down a straw man. I didn't say these problems were _solved_ , only that we _CAN_ credibly make long term (which is of course relative to the field) predictions about these fields with reasonable success.

And then you proceed to strengthen my point by reminding me—as if I needed a reminder—that the scientific process is ongoing and our body of knowledge increases every day; new evidence overturns old and we revise predictions all the time.

If this is not a credible process, I think we are operating on very different definitions of "credible". And I see 0 evidence that the general body of knowledge amassed by the IPCC has been significantly tainted. Some of it will be overturned, and I'm sure much of it will be repeated and audited over time. That's not a black mark or a warning sign, that is _the status quo_.

<comment><USER8> poster -> _I don't know nearly enough about climate science to make any claims about it. What I do know about is scientific methods and I do know that there is no scientific method that can credibly make long term predictions about complex systems._

You ->(Provide examples, presumably, of complex systems that we can provide long term predictions about. _If you don't know anything about climate science, maybe you should do the rational thing and listen to the experts and the best scientific consensus of the time._

Me-> Provide examples about how in each of your examples, we are not able in many cases to predict long-term system state or reaction to stimulus. Trivial example in medicine: tell me how an individual is going to die by examining them as a baby. Original poster was correct to be skeptical. _Ignorant people have plenty of tools at their disposal to reason and understand the quality of the underlying science. The science itself may be complicated beyond belief, but the underlying meta-data -- how science is done -- is not._

You-> Straw Man! You're using a straw man!

I think we're done here.

<comment><USER7> So you're saying we can't make any sort of general long-term predictions about the Solar System? That's the core of your argument?

Maybe we are done here.

I mean, the crux of this absurd argument is that "our long term forecasts might be updated so they are never trustworthy!" Except that nearly every field of science is this way and it hasn't stopped us from using our knowledge to make meaningful predictions and incredible technological breakthroughs.

Basically a double standard has been applied. When it comes to quantum theory or multi-body problems, our best guess is all cool. But when it comes to the weather suddenly everyone gets all philosophy-of-science and asks what we _really know_. The absurdity is compounded by the suggesting that climate science is basically models and "long term predictions" rather than a huge array of physical evidence showing us what is happening _right now_ , a short- term trend leading up to it, and a long term contrast with multiple lines of evidence.

<comment><USER8> I feel awful. I really do. This is so simple yet somehow it's not getting through.

1\. We don't really know anything. So let's all get that out there and get over it.

2\. Some things we have a lot of examples of. Stuff like atoms, people, animals. Some things we have only one example of, like the climate. Those things that we have a lot of examples of, we can make better guesses about what might happen based on prior outcomes. Those that we don't, we can't.

3\. In the past, over hundreds of years, we have examples of two types of science, science that speculates by applying rules about structure and theory to unobserved phenomenon, and science that has no idea how things work but can make lots of measurements and guess what might happen. The second kind of science has done much, much, much better than the first, for lots of reasons (too many to go into here) The structure/rule/extrapolation guys do best when it's only a degree or two of extrapolation (which is not true in climate science to any degree)

There's no double standard, because we're not taking the same thing and looking at it two different ways. We're taking many different things and looking at them many different ways. Which is the way it should be, right?

EDIT: The reason we know where Pluto will be in 9 years is that _we've been watching the solar system for two thousand years_. Plus we have solid observations about all the theory that goes into predicting where Pluto will be. We have observations. We have falsifiable theories. They both agree. That makes orbital dynamics about a zillion times different than, say, psychology. Different kinds of science are not all the same. There are important differences to understand. Medicine is not biology is not physics is not sociology is not climate science. This is NOT about argument from ignorance versus science. It's about the true nature of science, a very important thing to grok. _sigh_

<comment><USER9> _The reason we know where Pluto will be in 9 years is that we've been watching the solar system for two thousand years._

How long do you think people have been watching the weather for?

<comment><USER8> Widespread watching and recording, like astrologers did with the planets? Maybe 150-300 years or so? And that's with varying degrees of precision.

It's interesting to note that there was a huge gap in time between observing the weather and recording it. There was a further gap before we started predicting the weather. For most of that time, people substituted superstitions about the weather for science. The sky gods were happy, the sun came out. The sky gods were unhappy, it rained. If we would only do the right thing, the sky gods would remain happy. If we want the weather to be agreeable, we must change our behavior.

With the worldwide climate, we are only about 20-50 years into simply observing and recording. It could be quite a long while indeed before global long-term climate predictions is anything at all like the 3-day local weather forecast.

Remember, three stages: abduction, deduction, and induction. Abduction: gathering data and spotting patterns. Deduction: taking patterns and positing relationships. Induction: taking those relationships and extrapolating to future behavior of the system.

Climate science is currently mostly abduction. But folks like to describe it in terms of induction because lots of pieces of the underlying physics _are_ at that stage. But it doesn't work that way.

I don't know if that strikes you as some kind of big hand-waving philosophy bullshit, but it's just the way things are, whether I point it out or not. I'm just the dumb schmuck stuck with trying to explain it.

<comment><USER9> You have got to be kidding. 150-300 years?

Agriculture dates back to at least ~10,000 BC (the "Neolithic revolution"). Effective farming (i.e., not dying of starvation) requires planning for changing weather conditions. If you think Neolithic farmers didn't have a vested interest in detecting patterns in weather cycles, you're sadly mistaken.

Hell, the term "meteorology" was coined by _Aristotle_... in a book he wrote... called _Meteorology_... _in 350 BC_.

<comment><USER8> Remember: abduction, gathering of data and spotting patterns.

Got the daily weather report for Athens for the years 150-100 BC?

Neolithic man had a deeply vested interest in the weather, but that doesn't change his advancement of weather science. The gods were useful for many thousands of years.

Sure, the general _idea_ of watching the weather -- long history there. But that just proves my point. There was a huge gap between _seeing and naming it_ , _recording it_ , _spotting patterns_ , _making falsifiable theories_ , and _making predictions_. We're just at the "seeing and naming it" stage with climate science. The use of computer models hide this fact, sadly.

<comment><USER9> Oh, ok. So it takes _making predictions_ to quality as real science.

Here's a real prediction, with actual confirming evidence: giving someone with a high MADRS score an SSRI will reduce their score.

That's beyond _seeing and naming_ depression, it's beyond _recording_ patients' reactions to SSRIs, it's beyond _spotting patterns_ in their reactions, it's even beyond _making falsifiable theories_ about its mechanism of action. It's making predictions which are confirmed on a statistically significant basis.

Does this mean you think psychiatry has the same epistemological standing as physics?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "It has been nuzzling and shifting alongside the Mertz for about 18 years before this month's dislodging" - so we kinda should have seen this coming.

</comment><comment><USER11> It appears here too: [http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/feb/26/antarctica...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/feb/26/antarctica- iceberg-global-ocean-circulation). This iceberg has a fresh water enough to supply a third world's population for one year.

</comment><comment><USER12> Maybe Monty Brewster can hitch a motor to it and float it up to the Middle East, where he'll make millions off the ice cubes!

<comment><USER13> Harry Broderick and his team already did this one, I know because I saw it on TV :)

[OK, that one will date several of us... but there was once a time when sci-fi on TV was so rare we would watch just about anything...]

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The Story also links to this: <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8539198.stm>

"I think on larger scales, it's not likely to have a very major impact on the global climate" -British Antartic Survey.

</comment><comment><USER15> I say, nuke that iceberg! It will melt like a marshmallow :-)

<comment><USER16> Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use nuclear bombs." Now they have two problems.

<comment><USER17> I'll admit that the first thought I had was "Why not drop some bombs on it?"

Maybe not nukes, but it doesn't seem like such a terrible idea if the giant sheet of ice is going to be so disruptive.

<comment><USER18> Maybe drop some kind of very low-albedo, non-toxic powder on the top (or as much of it as can covered) to encourage faster melting.

The fresh water will still cause disruptions to currents, though presumably not as much as a solid mass...

<comment><USER19> My recollection is that the Coast Guard tried quite a few different methods (paint, directed charges, etc) to break up small ice bergs before they entered the shipping lanes in the late 50's early 60's. The ice bergs proved to be exceedingly hardy. Efforts to dissipate them were abandoned in favor of simply detecting them and avoiding them.

<comment><USER18> Fair enough, but I'm thinking mainly in terms of making it melt faster than it otherwise would, not keeping it out of shipping lanes. As someone else on the thread said, this thing goes where it wants to go. :)

EDIT: Especially as this thing has a lot more exposed surface area relative to its mass than your average small 'berg.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> this is NOT worthy of the front page. this has happened before and it will happen again. nothing interesting to see here. moving on...

</comment><comment><USER21> Stake a claim and sell it.

[http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,915637,00.h...](http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,915637,00.html)

</comment><comment><USER22> I don't quite understand why it's such a bad thing to worry about, suspect, and try to fight climate change, even if it doesn't exist.

It's like Pascal's Wager, imho.

<comment><USER23> Because throwing a trillion dollars worth of resources down a black hole is stupid in a world with limited resources and billions of poor people.

Also worth noting: despite the writings of Pascal, you won't find many atheists in church. Most of them decide the cost is not worth the (odds- adjusted) expected benefits.

<comment><USER22> Funny, I always thought the best ways to fight climate change, if it exists, were to use less and make what is left more efficient. That is why I don't see it as a bad thing- in a world with limited resources and billions of poor people, increased efficiency and decreased consumption seems like a good thing.

<comment><USER24> OK, sure. So, let's say we develop technology that allows us to lower our emissions by a whopping 80% compared to today. OK, now imagine that India, rural China, the middle east, South America, and Africa develop into first world nations. The world CO2 emissions would end up back where they are today, despite the revolutionary technologies developed and employed.

By which I mean to say that forcefully curbing CO2 emissions is a very, very hard problem. And curbing CO2 emissions without forcing developing nations not to develop is even more difficult.

Personally I think that even if global warming is every bit its cracked up to be the Bangledeshis, for example, will probably be better off with higher sea levels _and_ first world wealth and infrastructure than they would be with existing sea levels and another century of poverty.

<comment><USER22> I'm not a climatologist, but rising sea levels are not the only problem. They are simply the most commonly selected problem to cite, as 'submerged cities' strikes close to home, and is a classical apocalyptic (and thus greatly feared) event.

There are far more consequences than just that. For example, all the coral of the entire ocean would be dead or dying. Not that I expect you to care about coral; that is just one example.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> It's OK, we found the remains. It landed on New York.</comment>


Portmaster - <AUTHOR> https://safing.io/portmaster/ <comment><USER2> Unrelated to the Livingston Portmaster:

[https://s3.amazonaws.com/ssllc_public_images/PI-52872-210640...](https://s3.amazonaws.com/ssllc_public_images/PI-52872-210640-full)

<comment><USER3> That's what came to mind for me as well. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Master"? Not a good idea to call it that.</comment>


Self-driving cars can be disabled with a laser pointer and a Raspberry Pi - <AUTHOR> http://www.alphr.com/cars/1001483/self-driving-cars-can-be-fooled-by-fake-cars-pedestrians-and-other-bogus-signals <comment><USER2> Human-driven cars can also be disabled with a laser pointer to the eye of the driver.

[http://www.livescience.com/21707-lasers-eye- damage.html](http://www.livescience.com/21707-lasers-eye-damage.html)

<comment><USER3> Human driven cars can also be disabled with funny sounds or women wearing short skirts or a bit of spray paint on the road.

We really need to remember that humans are atrocious at driving on average, and doing better than them is a pretty low bar. Not that we shouldn't strive to improve automation, but don't let perfect be the enemy of the good.

<comment><USER4> Human drivers, on average, are not "disabled" by any of that. Distracted momentarily, sometimes, perhaps, but not disabled - city driving is _replete_ with "bits of spray paint" and "funny sounds" and sometimes "women wearing short skirts." On average, human drivers manage a great deal of complexity without incident. We use the same visual acuity, adaptability and instincts to negotiate traffic as we did millennia ago to avoid predators and survive our climb up the food chain, and we're actually quite good at it, albeit obviously not perfect. Human drivers are capable of not mistaking the reflections of other cars _for other cars,_ and know the difference between a cardboard box, a human being and another vehicle.

The bar is actually quite high, if you want to do better than humans _on average_.

<comment><USER3> Humans usually aren't disabled by that, but sometimes they are. How often is a human distracted by one of these things, and before they can recover they drive into an obstacle? It happens with great frequency.

And in this particular case, humans not only can be disabled with a laser pointer, but they can be disabled _permanently_ , not just for that driving session, but for the rest of their lives. Can't swap out cameras in a human driver. Yet somehow this is not a crisis for manually-piloted cars.

<comment><USER4> > It happens with great frequency.

I doubt it happens that often, but I can't back that up with numbers, and I can't be arsed to try.

But, humans can vary in their driving ability. In the case of autonomous cars, you would have to assume any flaw in one is shared by all. The problem isn't the laser pointers, or that humans can also be disabled by laser pointers, but that autonomous cars aren't yet smart enough to deal with errant signals. If all the autonomous cars can be stopped by an ever increasing list of simple conditions that (with a couple of exceptions, like a laser pointer in the eyes) wouldn't stop an average human driver, then it implies that the current state of the art does not nearly live up to the hype.

<comment><USER3> We can come up with a long list of simple conditions that wouldn't stop an average computer but would stop an average human, too. For example, a computer won't have any trouble driving for 48 hours without powering down, or with a stinging insect in the cabin.

That's not to say that computers are superior to humans. It's quite clear that the current state of the art in autonomous driving is way behind what humans can do. My point is simply that comparing scenarios which one can handle and the other cannot is not very informative.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Google, Uber and even Apple's potential self-driving car can all be foiled..."

So two cars that haven't even been seen in public yet - one of which might not even exist - can be foiled by this technique?

Might be true, might not be - no way for anyone involved in this story to know though. Is this really what passes for journalism now?

In fact, according to the article, this was never even tested on an actual autonomous car's software - he just spoofed a commercial LIDAR system and extrapolated from there.

<comment><USER6> "Ultimately, this latest car hacking is yet another signal that industries usually disassociated from data security now need to start taking it seriously."

Garbage.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> _" Petit began by recording pulses from a commercial Ibeo Lux Lidar unit. Discovering the pulses weren't encoded or encrypted, he could simply use them at a later time to fool the unit into believing objects were there when they weren't." _

That appears to answer my longstanding question as to what might happen when multiple vehicles using lidar are on the road at the same time. (Pulse timing notwithstanding of course, but given enough cars and enough time it could be periodically problematic.)

However, regarding stopping a car with fake laser generated obstacles - that's nothing that can't be done with real "obstacles". A roll of paper or aluminium foil stretched across the road can't be discriminated from a solid object, and a a few empty cardboard boxes are as good as concrete blocks to a self driving car.

Or even just standing in the road yourself if you have sufficient faith in the technology.

<comment><USER7> I suspect that the lidar signals could be modulated in the same way that cell phone signals are, so that a population of cars can share a single laser wavelength without confusing one another.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Ever since I first played Need For Speed 2, I've fantasised about a real-life version of the ROADRAGE cheat code I could use to cause those doing the rest of us on the road a disservice to flip over with a mere honk of my horn. We're not there yet, but this is a clearly a step in the right direction.

</comment><comment><USER9> You can disable a human driven car the same way, and you don't even need the Raspberry Pi.

</comment><comment><USER10> You don't need the Raspberry Pi to disable a human-driven one.

<comment><USER11> Randomly pointing lasers at vehicles is a good way to get shot. Just sayin' ;)

<comment><USER12> USA, baby, USA! Feel threatened? Answer with deadly force, it's the only way.

<comment><USER11> Laser gun sights are very common in the US. So for some people, it's more than just "feeling threatened". They're arguably too paranoid. And irresponsible. But being right about that won't help if they shoot you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I remember how when laser pointers started proliferating there was a media panic over their potential use in downing aircraft and blinding people. Schools swiftly moved to ban them(I recall being in a few assemblies where someone brought in a pointer and caused some mild, easily ignored disruption).

Regardless, the world hasn't blown up. You can still legally own a laser pointer in most countries, subject to various power limits. The risks and responsibilities involved in their use are real, but have to be weighed against every other hazard.

</comment><comment><USER14> The police will crack down on you as hard or harder than if you just pointed a laser pointer at human drivers. You can get very long prison sentences already for doing this.

<comment><USER15> They already do to people who do this to aircraft!

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Who needs a laser? Self driving cars can be disabled with a three dollar box of roofing nails.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, but at least they're immune to two-dollar boxes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Who did the industrial design on these cars? What's the target market?

I love the tech, and I love the goal, but I might refuse to ride in one of these just because they look too retarded.

EDIT> This may seem frivolous, but I see it as a huge barrier to adoption. At least make them look cool, not like preschool toys.

<comment><USER18> >Who did the industrial design on these cars? What's the target market?

No one did the industrial design. It isn't a product, it is a prototype to test a technology.

<comment><USER17> Right, but someone had to create that image, even if it's CG. The image itself is a liability to the eventual product's marketing.</comment></comment></comment>


Bees trained by scientists can teach each other new skills - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2016/10/5/13171714/bee-trained-skills-teach-other-bees <comment><USER2> This is known as observational learning.[1]

I.e learning behaviours by observing another animal be rewarded or punished for a behaviour.

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

</comment><comment><USER3> Quite interesting to see this being done with bees, but the statement "The study [...] shows how animals may be able to able to pass on skills in a way we previously thought was largely exclusive to humans" is very misleading. Observational learning has been observed in many other animals before, humans aren't particularly special at all in that respect.</comment>


Steve Jobs left designer Jony Ive more power than anyone at Apple - <AUTHOR> http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/10/21/steve_jobs_left_designer_jony_ive_more_power_than_anyone_at_apple.html <comment><USER2> By comparison, John Lasseter has more power than anyone at Pixar. I think the situation could be similar.

Now, sure, he has to commit to budgets and timeframes but if he _really_ wants something you have to figure it's going to happen.

And of course, he's not the top manager, the CEO equivalent in charge of the studio itself — Ed Catmull is. And yes, everything creative gets picked apart by other directors so it's not like he's the only voice.

But you'd have to say John Lasseter has more power than anyone at Pixar, assuming you wanted to look at things that way.

You could also say he's the creative heart of Pixar.

It's sure nice that those two things match up.

Edit: I explored this subject in my Quora answer on Pixar, Valve and Blizzard for those interested.

[http://www.quora.com/What-are-some-commonalities-in-how- Pixa...](http://www.quora.com/What-are-some-commonalities-in-how-Pixar-Valve- and-Blizzard-are-run-as-organizations/answer/Zach-Baker)

<comment><USER3> Yeah, sometimes we get the toilet seat cover iBook and Cars 2, but by and large having a creative guru under nobody else's thumb seems to work well for both companies.

<comment><USER4> Actually, John Lasseter defends Cars 2: [http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/18/movies/john-lasseter-of- pi...](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/18/movies/john-lasseter-of-pixar- defends-cars-2.html)

Apparently the "critics" were far harsher than audiences.

<comment><USER3> Of course, Cars 2 is the low point in Pixar's streak but overall still able to capture an audience not to mention tons of toys sold. I understand Lasseter's point and given his fixation over the concept I'll just accept the fact it is a big deal to him personally just as I accept Jobs' enthusiasm about getting Beatles in the iTMS.

<comment><USER2> I think that's a very apt comparison. It's hard to overestimate how deeply personal _Cars_ and _Cars 2_ are to John, but it's also hard to overstate how tricky they were to pull off.

Sure, you can criticize _Cars 2_ for having a story that didn't hit the bullseye. Totally fair, by Pixar's own "story, story, story" standards. But don't think the Pixar Brain Trust didn't do so first (as mentioned in the article, things had indeed gone wrong) or that they didn't do heroic acts to make things work. Ultimately it's an artistic process within a movie studio and you sometimes have to put things into production and trust that you can work out the problems. Pixar will bend everything out of shape to delay that point but it still happens. It's the fact that Pixar had done so well rescuing movies from a burning story that makes the rest of us forget that sometimes.

Still, where _Cars_ and _Cars 2_ started from and how well the stories they had were executed — I think those things are hard to criticize. These movies are love letters to the automotive culture that came of age as John did, and they are both put on the screen with a huge amount of artistry, character, cleverness and humor.

<comment><USER5> The Cars storyline was offensive to begin with. People who compete professionally in ANYTHING demand the best performance from their peers. Anything less is disrespectful. Having someone throw a race out of sentimentality, and making that seem somehow honorable is despicable. And then they make the winner of the race out to be some kind of arsehole because he gave it his best? It doesn't make any sense.

The plot is the same as Lucky You and it physically made me sick.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Interestingly enough, there is a quote from the Jobs book, from Ive, that was tweeted by Bianca Bosker, who works at the Huffington Post:

<https://twitter.com/bbosker/status/127357233632788480>

"Jony Ive:'I pay maniacal attention to where an idea comes from...so it hurts when [Jobs] takes credit for one of my designs'"

As much as Jobs considered Ive a 'spiritual partner' there was still a power play that existed between the two.

<comment><USER7> Jobs has never taken credit for a design, has he? People who are uninformed just assume it's Jobs, and that perhaps is what Ive is referring to. He probably meant "it hurts when [Jobs] _gets_ credit..."

If you look at the Objectified interview, along with nearly every promotional video that Apple puts out, it's very clear that Ive is the design guy.

<comment><USER8> Could be an internal thing. I really can't remember Jobs ever publicly and personally taking credit for design. But maybe he did inside the company?

I guess we will have to wait for the book for more context.

<comment><USER9> That might be. I did read something on folklore.org about Steve Jobs often being told an idea, dismissing it as stupid, and, several weeks later, often coming back with the same idea thinking it was his own.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It staggers me that time and time again Apple lays out the reasons for it's unrivalled success for all to see, yet non of it's rivals seem interested in copying their methods and opt for simply copying their products.

Fortune favours the brave.

<comment><USER11> I personally think it's impossible to replicate what Apple have done. It's not just one thing that has caused a change but a series of changes starting when they introduced the iMac.

Apple is more of a "love mark" than a technology company. Back in 95, Microsoft was a love mark, people loved it when a new version of windows came out, now people dread it.

People started looking for an alternative and Apple was there, all different and shiny. It wasn't 1 year that turned them around, its the result of 12 hard years.

Microsoft released a tablet back in 2000, did anyone care? Apple does it and millions rush to buy it, they have created a following, this is not easily replicated. They innovate, amaze and move onto the next thing. There is nothing simple about this process.

<comment><USER12> You could take everything you just said and apply it to Sony in 1980. Then their founder, Akio Morita, retired with poor health and they diversified into lots of sensible business decisions about owning studios

Then some little computer company in California moved in on their territory and began making beautiful, simple, well made upmarket products.

<comment><USER11> Might I just add, I am not your typical fan boy for Apple. Quite the opposite actually. I am a Microsoft geek at heart, learnt basic when I was 13 and loved them since. They can do minimal wrong in my eyes (except for windows ME).

I appreciate Apple in a completely different way, I think how they have created their following in nothing short of amazing. The spot a market potential and they make it work, really well.

The iPod worked really well but it was really the iPhone that did it for them, they brought Apple to the absolute masses. I am still not 100% sure if the iTunes store was a fluke, I don't think it was on the first iPhone. If it was planned in it's entirety then hats off to Steve.

Look at the market share now, Microsoft should be scared. I don't think Microsoft has ramped up it's game much either, Ballmer is a bit of a joke so I'm going to find it hard to take him seriously but I think I will always be Microsoft at heart.

<comment><USER13> The iTunes Store came with the original iPod, and it was an integral part of Apple's strategy.

You probably meant the _App_ Store, which wasn't on the very first iPhone and was, in fact, a bit of a lucky strike. Jobs didn't want anyone installing anything on the phone (classic Apple control-freakery at its finest), so he insisted for months after launch that extensibility would come exclusively from sandboxed web-applications. Eventually they did release a SDK and establish a process to publish apps, but only after encountering overwhelming demand.

<comment><USER14> No, the iTunes store came in 2003, two years after the iPod.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> To those familiar with car history, there's a striking similarity between the Jobs/Ive duo and the Daimler/Maybach duo:

Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach lead the automobile industry in the late 1800s and early 1900s just as Jobs and Ive lead the computing industry in the late 1900s and early 2000s. Maybach was the engineering genius who pioneered countless innovations in engine design, while Daimler had the intuition to get the right products to market and do the industrial power play.

</comment><comment><USER16> Well, not THAT much power:

'Ive wants to spend more time in the UK where he wants his sons to go to school, the Times claims, but the Apple board has refused to support his relocation. The story quotes a family friend as saying that "they have told him in no uncertain terms that if he headed back to England he would not be able to sustain his position with them".'

From: [http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/pda/2011/feb/28/apple-j...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/pda/2011/feb/28/apple- jonathan-ive)

Sounds to me like HP-level stupidity from the Apple board.

<comment><USER3> Is not that just a story with no reliable source whatsoever?

And the true tabloid Daily Mail actually interviewed some of Ive's friends and they all said never heard of such a desire from Jony Ive himself.

[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1367481/Appl...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1367481/Apples- Jonathan-Ive-How-did-British-polytechnic-graduate-design-genius.html)

<comment><USER17> I guess we'll all find out on Monday.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Guess I'm buying this book. It'll be my first time to buy a book during first release. Good marketing by the publishers. This is sort of like Freemium model, no?

<comment><USER19> I'm afraid that i will know everything from the book by monday if this press coverage continues.

<comment><USER8> Turn all the sentences into separate news articles!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> But yet, you never see him up on stage... There's a cult of personality around Ive on the Internet—everyone wants him to replace Jobs as CEO, but is that even realistic? Sure, he can design, but can he _run_ a company?

<comment><USER21> Have you heard about the Peter Principle?

From Wikipedia: "in a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence", meaning that employees tend to be promoted until they reach a position at which they cannot work competently.

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

Knowing what somebody is _not_ good at is almost as essential as knowing what people _are_ good at. I guess both Ive and Apple know this.

<comment><USER22> If you believe in the Peter Principle, you might be interested in the Gervais Principle (<http://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/>) which uses characters from _The Office_ to wax philosophical about organizational structure. At the very least, the first part is worth a read. It diverges from the Peter Principle in a number of thought-provoking ways.

<comment><USER23> Highly entertaining (and insightful), thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This fact alone left me feeling quite a lot better. Now I know Apple is in good hands at least for the time being. Tim Cook is also brilliant at what he does, and I am sure he trusts Ive as much as Jobs did.

</comment><comment><USER25> Those are some damn nice CNC mills in the background of that photo. Wonder how much use they get.

<comment><USER26> If he is a designer who understands the manufacturing process, then that is awesome in my book.

My father owns/runs a CNC manufacturing business. Sometimes the designers/drafters (more the case they have a background in CAD) don't understand the subtleties of manufacturing and materials. I mean, they aren't big gaps or anything.

Best comparison is maybe coder vs tester. Both technical, but look at the same thing from two different perspectives.

<comment><USER12> It cuts both ways. There are designers who build things that can't be made - and especially things that can't be mass produced cheaply and easily.

But there are also people with 20years of manufacturing experience who don't what that we can do more things cheaply and easily with 5-axis CNC mills and hot-wire cutters than you can with a casting.

<comment><USER26> Sure it cuts both ways. I was just reacting to the picture of a CNC behind him.

If that is his design studio, it is awesome he has real equipment for making the stuff he designs rather than some art deco chairs from some snooty designer.

<comment><USER12> If you have a CNC mill or a 3D printer in the office you can certainly turn around prototype designs quickly!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Right now Ive has the best of both worlds, he has more power than anyone at Apple, and hes not the CEO. The CEO role comes with an extra layer of public scrutiny.

Knowing that Jony Ive has more power than anyone at Apple gives me a certain amount of relief about Apple being on the same trajectory for the next foreseeable future.

</comment><comment> brown9-2 Of course, any new CEO/board can undo what previous CEOs and boards have set in stone.

<comment><USER28> I think they all have too much respect for Steve to change anything like this for a while.

<comment><USER29> The hard part will be when reality rubs up against things set in stone. The big trick will be to determine exactly when change is needed versus when some people just want to change things to make their mark.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I think it's interesting that Jony Ive came to Apple before Steve returned. Jobs didn't have to recruit him, and he fit perfectly into what Apple became.

<comment><USER31> 'I often joke that my tombstone will say, "The Guy Who Hired Jonathan Ive",'

\- Robert Brunner, Apple's former Chief of Industrial Design

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> In some ways because Ive was the head designer he had more power than anyone else regardless of Steve's extra effort. His work would impact every level of the company so immediately regardless of peoples personal opinion.

</comment><comment><USER33> Who did they leave in charge of making sure people listen to him?

<comment><USER34> Tim Cook has been in charge for ages.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Where did the abbreviation "Jony" come from? It's Jonny.

<comment><USER36> Straight out of a keynote: [http://technology.automated.it/wp- content/uploads/HLIC/b08b7...](http://technology.automated.it/wp- content/uploads/HLIC/b08b727c9a90a9380c9942576a18ec4e.jpg)

<comment><USER35> I suspect then this is like Colin Powell being known as Coal-in... He's stated himself his mother calls him Colin!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I suppose Ive is Taste, now that Jobs is gone.

</comment><comment><USER38> It's interesting how the soul of Steve Jobs stays in Apple to control the company even after passing out. A company that functions through the power of will, creativity and beliefs.... it's different from all the corporate VP's and Executives we all see so organized at other companies!

</comment><comment><USER39> I wonder how Jobs' death affected Ive? I would think Ive must be hugely grateful for what Jobs saw in him.

</comment><comment><USER40> Interesting. And a Bloomberg Businessweek article has Scott Forstall as Jobs' heir-apparent at Apple.

[http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/scott-forstall-the- sorc...](http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/scott-forstall-the-sorcerers- apprentice-at-apple-10122011.html)

</comment><comment><USER41> This brings to mind a blog post published by Darryl Jonckheere in January that argued for making Jony Ive CEO:

[http://www.darryljonckheere.com/2011/01/24/why-jonathan- ive-...](http://www.darryljonckheere.com/2011/01/24/why-jonathan-ive-should- be-apples-next-ceo/)

</comment><comment><USER42> Jony Ive is just the Shigeru Miyamoto of Apple.

<comment> driftsumi-e ha, that's a great parallel to draw. miyamoto is behind many of the most iconic videogame characters AND game designs ever seen. so, in fairness to miyamoto, he's got a little steve in him as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Jony Ive? Yet another man behind the man.

</comment><comment><USER44> I'm not surprised - Ive deserves it. The designs he came up with were the driving factor in Apple's success.

</comment><comment><USER45> I think he gives Ive more power because of his experience with Paul Rand and the Nextstep logo.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xb8idEf-Iak>

In short Paul Rand tells Steve I will make you one design and I will solve your problem. Since then I believe he has given designers (Jon Ive in this case) their space to design whatever they want. Trust in the designer.

</comment><comment><USER46> Great, but... Ive only does industrial design, as far as I know.

The other side of the coin is the software, and if that declines, Ive's going to be creating very well-designed paperweights. So who does Apple's software design?

<comment><USER47> I've also wondered this. iOS and Mac OS both have a penchant for faux-realism and pastiche which always seems strangely incongruous with the austere industrial design. It's a trend that seems to be getting stronger, just look to the most recent version of iCal for example.

Apple's current industrial design patterns seem to have a solid foundation in quite traditional modernist values, such as 'truth to materials', so for instance you would never see Apple ship a product with a plastic case coated to look like brushed aluminium. They would always use real aluminium.

It seems the software design team isn't grounded in quite the same set of principles as the industrial design team.

I do wonder if the ID guys would rather see their designs running an interface such as WP7 (or even Plan 9, xMonad etc.), which isn't as tied to real world metaphors and in a sense show more 'truth to software' (or to put it another way, there is certainly no 'true' interface for digital information, but if there were one… I can't imagine faux leather would be it.)

<comment><USER48> > to put it another way, there is certainly no 'true' interface for digital > information, but if there were one… I can't imagine faux leather would be > it.

I've wanted to make this argument in favour of _sometimes using_ skeuomorphic (e.g. faux leather) design for a while:

All the other applications that come with Mac OS (say, iTunes, Mail.app, or iPhoto) have clearly-defined, strongly-typed content "atoms"—respectively, songs, messages, and pictures. The apps themselves just serve as magical databases with filters and specifiers to find and manipulate that content. They don't have to look like anything, because they're just "the box you put your music in" or "the box your get your mail from."

iCal and Address Book are the two main applications in the default set that break this pattern: they don't hold a clearly-defined type of content at all. It's just raw information: information about events, and about people, respectively. Because of this, you _could_ get away with simply using text files for the same purpose, and nothing of value would be lost. It would even be as easy to sort and search, if you have a good text editor.

So Apple needs to offer a value proposition that makes a user want to use Address Book rather than a text file: familiarity in function and ease of learning curve. In a more design-oriented view, in cases where the data itself is arbitrary (you could technically store anything in a vCard), the software must bring over the rules and constrictions of the physical medium to give the proper context for the controls in the UI to actually afford their proper use.

A set of overlapping boxes means nothing; a set of overlapping boxes on a screen that looks like a calendar suggests what you should use the boxes for. A set of blank index cards seems to suggest no use whatsoever, until you bind them into a familiar rolodex-like facade.

You can see the same thing play out with the iOS apps that Apple has given design awards: the kind that hold strongly-typed information tend to get the UI out of the user's way, and let the information stand paramount; while the kind that hold raw data retain a strong skeuomorphic metaphor to suggest use over-and-above "put text here."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> I'd fear giving Ive too much power/ego/etc, he needs to be grounded to do what he does. At the other end of the scale, it has been said he wants to be in UK more (duh :P), don't know what has changed there.

</comment><comment><USER50> There was one Steve Jobs. If only two people can replace him, it's a little miracle. A master manager, and a master designer. They can continue w/o the ego fights. Like Bill Hewlet and the other guy (JOKING! Please spare my carma). They will do it, we all need them to do it.</comment>


µTorrent for Mac released - <AUTHOR> http://mac.utorrent.com/beta/ <comment><USER2> µTorrent gets a lot of praise, and for all I know rightly so, but I am curious about the advantages of µTorrent on Mac over _Transmission_. Glancing at the feature list, it seems like they're pretty equivalent.

<comment><USER3> In my personal tests, uTorrent running in Crossover on my Mac gets about 25%-50% higher transfer speeds than Transmission, and connects to peers faster.

<comment><USER4> Hm. A sample size of one.

<comment><USER5> What did you expect, a double blind test published in a peer reviewed journal?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Nice release, but looks like there's a lot of features missing in this beta, like Labels, RSS, etc.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm using Opera's built in client. It doesn't have many bells and whistles, but I rarely download torrents and it's already there.

</comment><comment><USER8> that's nice but nothing beats newsgroups + unison

<comment><USER9> sabnzbd+ beats the hell out of unison.

<comment><USER10> Huh... you're right, it looks totally awesome. I've been using Unison for a while and have been... less than excited about it. I'll have to try this right away.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Don't forget that torrents are useless if an ISP blocks them, like Comcast did with BitTorrent (and is currently appealing).

Please remember to support the Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2008.

<comment><USER2> We have Comcast and I've found that if I limit the upload to less than 50% of the cap the system never reacts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I know very little about torrents, aside from having tried a client once or twice. Is there any aspect of the way the torrent-ing process deals with files that reduces the chance of also getting a virus with the download? It seems like "official" torrents of say intrepid ibex are probably fine, but is other random content just as risky as it was on kazaa, etc?

<comment><USER13> First, you download a small .torrent file. That small file contains the hash of the contents as well as a hash of each segment of the contents of the final data. If you trust the source of the .torrent file then it doesn't matter who you connect to to get any portion of the actual torrent. Each segment of the file you receive is checked against a hash and the entire final data is also checked against a hash.

<comment><USER14> But to answer the original question: yes it is just as risky.

But because people are all uploading and downloading the same file (if they used the same torrent), bad files are negatively reinforced and good files positively.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> How does "Limit upload rate automatically" work? What does it limit it to? What kind of algorithm do they use?

<comment><USER16> Newer versions of uTorrent have features designed to maximize its bandwidth usage while getting out of the way of other network traffic, so that it doesn't monopolize your connection. Not much has been written about that stuff so far, but some of it is pretty interesting technology. There's a little bit of info in this forum thread:

<http://forum.utorrent.com/viewtopic.php?id=49813>

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Doesn't work. Tried to associate my Torrent files to open in uTorrent, and when I opened them Finder locked up and just closed the file's window. Back to Transmission; I like the minimal UI in uTorrent, too bad it doesn't work yet.

</comment><comment><USER18> D'oh! Intel only! :/</comment>


Why Stack Exchange Data Explorer is moving off the Windows Azure platform - <AUTHOR> http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/12/re-launching-stack-exchange-data-explorer/ <comment><USER2> stackoverflow said: "There's also the 30 minute deploy cycle." ... "It is important to note that these issues are by no means specific to Azure; similar teething issues affect other Platform-As-A-Service providers such as Google App Engine and Heroku"

Deployment on Heroku takes seconds in my experience. Certainly not 30 minutes!

Also, db backups on Heroku are easy. And if you don't want to use Heroku's built-in PostgreSQL db, it's easy to use Amazon's RDS instead.

It seems strange to imply that Heroku currently has the same problems they attribute to Azure.

<comment><USER3> I think the claim is that PAAS has tradeoffs which you make versus "as simple as dedicated" host-it-yerself, which is true in my experience.

Heroku is wonderful, don't get me wrong, but it is _not_ all "I don't know anything about sysadminning and now I don't have too, _git push origin deploy_ OK now I can go back to making rounded corners and drop shadows" peaches and cream. I have a client product on it. Half of the gems/plugins that I used required me to either hack the source or do some deep spelunking to find out why they aren't working. For example, I used TinyMCE editor for that nice Wordpress-esque WYSIWYG feel. TinyMCE is written in Javascript, and the configurations for the plugin causes the Javascript to be written out on first access. Heroku is not quite so happy when you try to write things to the hard drive, and died hard on that.

This was for a site which is pretty darn pedestrian as far as Rails projects go.

<comment><USER4> I have always felt that Heroku's constraints are good for you, though. Yeah, it might be mildly annoying at times, but you really _should_ be putting static content on a CDN, and not have long-running processes, etc.

I also have yet to have a gem blow up in my face, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wow, kudos to the SO team for making the right choice for them. Too many companies/individuals fall for this type of aggressive sales pitch and end up paying for it in the long run.

Kinda a blow for Azure...can't give it away..

<comment><USER6> > Kinda a blow for Azure...can't give it away..

To be fair, the author did say this:

>It is important to note that these issues are by no means specific to Azure; similar teething issues affect other Platform-As-A-Service providers such as Google App Engine and Heroku. When you are using a PAAS you are giving up a lot of control to the service provider. The service provider chooses which applications you can run and imposes a series of restrictions.

So it's a "blow" to Google App Engine and Heroku as well.

<comment><USER5> Going into details about the problems a platform has, and then sweeping everyone else along is a bit weak. I've used Heroku enough (not too much though), to know that it doesn't suffer from most (any?) of the listed issues.

<comment><USER7> I thought it was telling that they linked to an article where someone discusses the shortcomings of App Engine but just linked to the main Heroku site.

Sweeping everyone else under the same rug (or attempting to) just feels like a "we're complaining about your Azure platform's shortcomings, but hey, we can still be friends, see, we'll try to throw everyone else under the bus, too".

<comment><USER8> The linked critique of App Engine dates from 2008 - many of the complaints are simply outdated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> My question: why was Stack Exchange</comment>


Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (Do You Have Asperger's?) - <AUTHOR> http://www.questionwritertracker.com/index.php/quiz/display?id=61&token=Z4MK3TKB <comment><USER2> Prediction: The average HNer will score significantly higher than the general average.

I hypothesise that the social issues geeks experience are predominantly caused by hypersensitivity to the emotions of others, rather than insensitivity; In keeping with the Dunning-Kruger hypothesis we tend to underestimate our ability to empathise, thereby causing us to overanalyse social situations, leading to anxiety and paralysis.

<comment><USER3> Spot on. 30 out of 36.

<comment><USER4> 35 out of 36. I've often thought I was hypersensitive about things/people, and I'm always concerned with what other people are feeling, even more than my (female) partner :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As someone else points out, without standard deviations it's hard to know how indicative this score is. I got 23, which is consistent with previous tests I've taken (on which I score somewhere between "autistic" and "not autistic").

For some of them I felt like I was doing it "in software", using rules that I know consciously instead of intuitively recognising the emotion. But I don't know to what extent that's actually true (or if it's even a particularly meaningful distinction).

I definitely felt like I had an easier time with some emotions than others. That's not surprising, but it would be interesting to see statistics for each individual face.

</comment><comment><USER6> As always, it should be noted that it seems likely that people who got high scores would be more likely to post theirs (few people like to show off as below-average!), which is one reason taking an average of the scores posted on this page isn't indicative of an HN average score.

(Me, I got 26. They don't call me Mr. Average for nothin'.)

EDIT: If I'd gotten 25, do you think I'd have included that last line?

<comment><USER7> 26 here too. I felt like on some of them I would project a choice onto the eyes. Some where easy (only one choice made sense), and some seemed completely arbitrary.

<comment><USER8> 27 here. I thought I would do better to be honest. I make a pretty decent amount of pocket money playing poker and I consider my biggest strength to be my ability to read people in an incredibly short period of time. Then again, I am a bit of an arrogant git.

<comment><USER9> 26 for me

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> m-photonic It would be nice if they'd tell us the standard deviation in addition to the averages. I got 19, which puts me below the mean for the Asperger/HFA population, but I'm fairly sure I'm not in that category. Really, the two averages are barely more than four points apart, which is a rather modest interval compared to the range of scores that's been reported in this thread so far.

Edit: It'd also be cool if they gave us more data than just the total number correct. Like, which emotions was I the best at recognizing? How well did I do with male faces as compared with female faces? Etc.

<comment><USER10> I'm also a little curious about the gender data from a different perspective. I don't know whether the eyes were randomized, but, when I took the test, all of the "romantic" emotions (e.g. flirtatious) in the test were displayed with female eyes. If that's the same way for everyone, I can't help but think that that would skew the results.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> People who made the test software, please, _please_ , don't resize my browser, send my info without telling me or redirecting to the site that built the test.

Other than that, I enjoyed the test. Simple, quick, painless and intriguing. I'm intrigued, can you see?

29 point something. I was expecting a lot less.

<comment><USER12> My feelings exactly. Got 29 points - in the ones that I got incorrect, it was usually the alternate that I had narrowed it down to that was the right one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I found that test extremely stressful, although I was on track for 33 / 36 when I stopped. Intriguing! Other HN'ers -- did you find it stress-inducing?

The first Turing test I've gotten nervous doing.

<comment><USER14> 33, which surprised me as I'm extremely introverted. I got the sense that the expressions fell into different categories based on where the tension around the eyes was, and the matching word had been randomly chosen from the category. The "1000 yard stare" category, the "happy" category, and so on. By the end I was enjoying this new match-the-category puzzle.

<comment><USER15> I'm also extremely introverted, and I got a 34. Asperger's and introversion are very different.

A lot of people get Asperger's, introversion and shyness mixed, but they are three completely different things.

<comment><USER16> The people I know with Asperger's are anything BUT introverted or shy. They overshare. They overtalk. They're oblivious to social norms. Shyness and introversion, if anything, to me, seem like an oversensitivity to social norms.

<comment><USER15> Well, you're more likely to know the sociable people with Asperger's than the antisocial ones, right? What you describe is not the case with all the people who have Asperger's. Some avoid social interaction because they know they don't understand the norms and prefer to avoid potential conflicts. You can't make a generalization there.

Shyness is all about anxiety about social interaction. Oversensitivity to social norms can cause it, yes, but also bad experiences or low self-esteem.

Introversion/Extroversion is about where you focus your mind. Introverted people are more focused on their own thoughts and mental processes, and extroverted people are more focused on interacting with the mental processes of other people. If something, introversion would imply caring less about social interaction and social norms, not oversensitivity. That doesn't mean introverted people don't care or follow social norms, or that they're not sociable. They just need more time with their own thoughts and feel less stimulated by petty social interaction like small talk. That doesn't mean introverted people are not sociable. Some introverts are very sociable and good at conversations, because they try to make their conversations interesting and stimulating. Some other are not interested in being sociable at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Is it only me who finds it difficult to label expressions _just_ in eyes, when it feels like an image of the overall face would be much clearer?

<comment><USER18> Weird bit of trivia: in photos of faces, the eyes carry most of the emotion, but in cartoon faces, the mouth does.

<comment><USER19> In cartoons - eyebrows are used to express a great deal of emotion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> 33/36. Found it stressful.

I felt like I was picking the desired answer, not reading an actual emotion. An artifact of the test maybe. The expressions read artificial to me--like pictures of actors or models. Not sure what that says.

</comment><comment><USER21> I'm amazed the message their eyes sent was so clear and nuanced.

<comment><USER22> When humans see a face, we apparently focus on the eyes and the lips. Once, for a summer job, I worked with our school photographer retouching the scanned images of the incoming freshman class. For efficiency, we just blurred the images to obliterate any scanning errors, and then restored and hand-retouched only the eyes and lips. Subjectively, the difference between blurred and blurred-with-original-eyes-and-lips was astonishing, while the difference between original and BWOEAL was comparatively rather small. I would assume that human expression and human vision evolved in parallel, in a complimentary fashion.

This also explains why humans so easily find faces in inanimate objects, or in three-character sequences like :-) and ^_^. We're just highly tuned to recognize and parse very particular physical features.

<comment><USER23> Yup, and this "built-in" face-reading circuitry can go wrong in interesting ways:

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

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I got just about average (26) but I would be interested to see if HN has an inordinate amount of people coming in around the low 20's.

<comment><USER25> I also got a 26. Apparently I'm not as good at reading people as I thought...

<comment><USER26> Also 26. The average on HN seems a bit higher. I wonder if there's some selection bias towards reporting higher answers.

<comment><USER27> Quite possibly. The test is also long enough that I probably would have bailed out long before finishing if I had felt I wasn't doing well enough to be curious about the end result.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> 34/36 I did not find it stressful. I think that was because of the instant feedback, though if I had been getting questions wrong, that would have made things much worse than just finding out at the end.

<comment><USER29> Same here (34/36)... I was kinda surprised because I felt some of them were really wild guesses and it usually turned out I guessed correctly...

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Does anyone else feel like the questions were strangely distributed? I'm not exactly sure why. I guess I would have expected many more suspicious or confused faces, and I don't think I found very many. (Ended up with a 27.) I also saw the word "puzzled" as a potential answer, but I don't remember choosing it as an option. For that matter, puzzled seems like an emotion in which one would rarely see the subject's eyes.

Or is this perhaps a part of the test, in which is is intentionally testing a subset of possible emotions rather than a wide gamut?

</comment><comment><USER31> 23 over here.

Of the ones I did get the majority were calculated guesses. I would have scored a lot lower if it wasn't multiple choice... or as my roommate pointed out if there was a fifth option: None of the above.

</comment><comment><USER32> I got a 24. As someone diagnosed with Asperger's Spectrum Disorder (Nonverbal Learning Disorder to be exact), this surprised me. I expected it to be lower. Granted, I've done some reading up on facial expressions so that might have helped.

@makmanalp asked a very good question about why they tested only looking at the eyes and not the res of the face, or the rest of the body. While looking at the rest of the face would have been helpful, much of the way we express ourselves is done just in our eyes.

Psychologist Daniel Goleman in his book "Social Intelligence" says that the eyes are, "...something akin to the poetic idea that the eyes are windows on the soul: the eyes offer glimpses into a person's most private feelings. More specifically the eyes contain nerve projections that lead directly… neuron to neuron, [to] three major regions of the brain: the cortex (or "thinking brain"), the amygdala (the trigger point for many emotional reactions), and the brain stem (the "reptilian" zones for automatic response) (63-64)."

I highly recommend Paul Ekman's "Emotions Revealed" if you're interested in this sort of thing. It's about reading facial micro-expressions - not about Asperger's. I recomend Goleman's books as well, but you'll probably find Ekman's more interesting.

I've done quite a bit of personal research on this stuff, and while I'm no expert I'd be happy to try and answer any questions that people have.

</comment><comment><USER33> 19\. I thought the test was a joke until my wife took it and got 31.

</comment><comment><USER34> I've been diagnosed with apsergers and got a 32, nice!

<comment><USER35> Also a 32 here, and (at least when it comes to reading social cues) I've got all of the classic Aspergers symptoms. For example, my wife had to train me to make eye contact during conversation.

I think that training boosted my score a lot. You might say I've studied for this test...

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Ah 26, always a bit disappointing when you get the average score. One issue for me was that since english is not my native language I had to look up quite a few of the words describing different emotions.

Even so I was actually a bit amazed by my own ability to read the different emotions quite quickly since I'm worthless at reading people in real life.

</comment><comment><USER37> For the first half of the test, I was kicking myself over the number I got wrong, but my final score placed me as above average.

Actually, after I started mousing over the images to see full-size, and spending several seconds studying each face, I was almost always correct.

Yay for me.

<comment><USER38> I think I did "better" with the small images, the large ones leading to overanalysis perhaps?

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I got 21. I have a feeling that if I took this test a bunch of times (with different faces) that I'd probably get better at it.

</comment><comment><USER40> 30 with several of the wrong answers being my 50/50 choices with the actual correct answer. Nearly all of the ones I got correct, I was instantly certain.

One, I think "ashamed", looked just like the expression on a character in a TV show, SGU colonel young, and I realized he nails the mood perfectly.

</comment><comment><USER41> I have aspergers, but I got 30. Strange. The ones I had difficultly with were the "flirty" female ones.

But then again, I've been working on "hacking" by aspergers for past few years, working from the ground up to figure out wtf facial expressions mean among other things.

</comment><comment><USER42> 21/36 - high functioning autism. Should I go see someone about this perhaps? Weird.

</comment><comment><USER43> 22...I think I got five or six wrong by second-guessing my first instinct.

</comment><comment><USER44> 31\. The only stress was that at a point I was alarmed because I felt I was misreading too many.

</comment><comment><USER45> 23 here, i'm off to watch jeopardy at 5 o'clock! and then it's judge Wapner...

</comment><comment><USER46> I scored 29. Not stressful, but kinda odd all the same.

</comment><comment><USER47> 31

</comment><comment><USER48> 26

</comment><comment><USER49> 31 here.</comment>