Asteroid Mining Is Our Best Hope for Colonizing Mars - <AUTHOR> https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/j5gxa4/asteroid-mining-is-our-best-hope-for-colonizing-mars <comment><USER2> Eh.. right off the bat, you have to doubt "analysis" that comes from an article that doesn't know the difference between the Falcon Heavy and ITS.

But then it gets really stupid. The idea that you'd transport water from asteroids to the _surface_ of Mars is bananas. Mars has enough surface water already. The reason asteroid ice is valuable isn't because it's water, it's because it's _not on the surface of a planet_. To fly around the solar system you need rocket fuel _in space_ , and launching it off planets is really expensive. Landing asteroid water on a planet that already has water destroys 99% of its market value.

Also the idea that water ice is only useful if you're going to Mars misunderstands why water ice on asteroids is useful in the first place; as fuel for flying around the Solar System more cheaply (or with more mass) than you could if you had to launch all your fuel from Earth. That's useful no matter where you're going.

Anyway, I'm not going to debunk this whole article, but it was basically written by a very uniformed person. Basically the only thing they got right was recognizing that launch costs (not engineering ability per se) is the primary barrier to further space exploration.

<comment><USER3> its not hard to imagine mars needing more water due to increased human activity. i mean earth is mostly water, and it still has a market value.

<comment><USER4> It could be useful when going from the 10 million people on Mars to the 10 billion people on Mars stage. However, at that point 'colonization' is already a solved problem.

<comment><USER3> honestly I dont think there is enough (easily accessible) water for 10 million people.

<comment><USER4> [https://www.space.com/17048-water-on- mars.html](https://www.space.com/17048-water-on-mars.html)

"The caps are an average of 2 miles (3 kilometers) thick and, if completely melted, could cover the Martian surface with about 18 feet (5.6 meters) of water."

So, there is actually plenty of water for arbitrarily large colonies. However, I assume people would want large lakes for various reasons.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Highly recommended video on Colonizing Mars by Isaac Arthur [https://youtu.be/kmFOBoy2MZ8](https://youtu.be/kmFOBoy2MZ8)

Equally amazing Asteriod Mining by Mr. Arthur [https://youtu.be/3-3DjxhGaUg](https://youtu.be/3-3DjxhGaUg)

</comment><comment><USER6> Headline: asteroid mining is our best hope for colonizing Mars.

Body text: after people start colonizing Mars, asteroid miners can sell them water.

It looks like circular hope to me. Hope that asteroidal water will be useful to people on Mars. And hope that there will be people on Mars who will pay for asteroidal water.

</comment><comment><USER7> But how to keep water on Mars? The way I understand Mars can't keep an atmosphere because it lacks a magnetic field and probably lost a lot of water this way.

<comment><USER8> mars has an atmosphere even now. the processes stripping it off work on geological (or longer) timescales. if you can import (or free) enough water to make a difference in the first place, then keeping up with the losses should be pretty easy.

<comment><USER9> Also, giving Mars an artificial magnetic field to stop the stripping isn't easy but it's a lot easier than importing that much water.

<comment><USER10> throw a bunch of big wet heavy ice rocks on the surface (before we decide to set up base there) and you'll have a good kick start to an atmosphere.

Also, sounds fun...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I had to look pretty closely at that "asteroid miner" concept image to assure myself it wasn't just a ship from Kerbal Space Program. :)

</comment><comment><USER12> This is just stupid. The value of water in space mined from asteroids comes from it not being on a planet. Compressing water is just stupid and water weighs a lot and thus is very expensive to get to orbit. On a planet like Mars which has water ice available transporting water ice from space is just stupid.

</comment><comment><USER13> This is assuming we can even get a person to mars, which has not been demonstrated as feasible. Let alone a whole community. It would be better to colonize the moon, but equally pointless IMO. It's a massive waste of resources which could go towards making earth better, where we're all stuck anyway.

<comment><USER2> > This is assuming we can even get a person to mars, which has not been > demonstrated as feasible. Let alone a whole community.

Landing per se shouldn't be impossible. We landed people on the Moon a long time ago. Recent advances in magnetic shell aerocapture are really exciting and make landing on Mars more feasible. The real question is whether we can learn how to do it in an economic and sustainable way; unlike Apollo.

> It would be better to colonize the moon

I agree with this. Going straight for Mars seems unwise. We should expand slowly out into the Solar System, step by organic step. Even better than the Moon would be Low Earth Orbit. A colony in LEO would have same-day access to Earth in either direction, and would benefit from being inside Earth's magnetic field, which would allow the designers to cut the mass needed for shielding significantly. Big savings.

A LEO colony would be close enough to Earth that people on Earth could teleoperate robots in the colony in real time with minimal lag, allowing it to circumvent the bootstrap question of "Where do people live while it's being built?"

A LEO colony would also have to built using bulk physical resources from the Moon or the Near Earth Asteroids, building up our manufacturing base there, and serving as a "shore leave" destination for people working further up in Geosyncrhonous Orbit or elsewhere Cis-Lunar space.

Once we have a basic torus capable of holding, say, 10,000 people, it could serve as a staging area for venturing deeper into the Solar System, such as Mars. But personally even then, I wouldn't advocate for Mars. After all that work of moving humanity out of a deep gravity well, why climb into a new one? Space is where all the solar energy is, and all the resources of the asteroid belt and the moons are (gravitationally speaking) close at hand.

> It's a massive waste of resources which could go towards making earth > better, where we're all stuck anyway.

Now here's where I disagree with you.

1\. In no way did colonizing Australia or North America prevent England from improving the homeland. You can do both! Heck, Elon Musk is already doing both. The whole point of Tesla/Solar City is to move humanity off fossil fuels.

2\. Space colonization can be part of the solution. Imagine industrial processes that have very polluting intermediate steps; they could be done on the Moon where you don't have water or air to worry about polluting. Earth could be cleaned up by exporting those industries to space. The Moon could also serve as a much better repository of high-level nuclear waste than Yucca Mountain.

And of course in the very long term, the Solar System has the energy and material resources to support a human population 10,000x bigger than Earth does. As much solar energy as Earth receives, space receives a lot more. As much iron and PGM and carbon and water as Earth has, space has more. Europa alone is estimated to have 2x as much water as Earth. And so those resources can support more people who have more ideas who solve the very problems you want solved.

<comment><USER13> The difference is that, despite being a long trip, sailing to Australia and South Africa and the USA was fairly routine, and did not involve enormous costs, both in material and to the environment (how much CO2 does lifting a person to orbit release to the atmosphere?) How much did it cost to put a trifling amount of men on the moon?

In colonial times for example it was common for a woman to go home to Europe to give birth. Will that really be feasible in mars or the moon?

<comment><USER2> SpaceX is already 10x cheaper than the Space Shuttle. Reusable rockets will be another 10x or more cheaper. Access to space will be cheap and routine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> My alma mater, the Colorado School of Mines, has had a department focused on this for over a decade, the center for space resources: [http://spaceresources.mines.edu/index.htm](http://spaceresources.mines.edu/index.htm)

</comment><comment><USER15> Asteroid mining would be necessary for colonizing Mars.

Getting into Mars is technological problem. Colonizing Mars is more economical and sociological problem than technological problem.

Everyday living in high-tech place where everything is safety critical (like in a nuclear submarine or ISS) is extremely expensive. Productivity would have to be beyond everything that has ever existed for that becoming possibility.

If Elon Musk can crack Mars colonization economy, he has also invented something that can be used to drop F-35 fighter, nuclear submarine and aircraft carrier maintenance costs to level where they are negligible.

There is always counterarguments that are based on post-scarcity economy. I accept that argument. But we get faster into Mars if we first develop post- scarcity economy here on earth first. Then those who want to leave just move there. Those who want to go Mars now are thinking it wrong.

<comment><USER16> I think there's a bit of tail wagging the dog involved, in a good way.

You are correct, mining asteroids would be necessary for colonizing Mars. But mining asteroids would also bring Earth much closer to post-scarcity (maybe even as necessary!).

So if building a private beach on Mars for Musk and Richard Branson and Taylor Swift is what it takes to get an asteroid mining economy rolling, then cool, that's a plan…

<comment><USER15> As others have pointed out, asteroid mining does very little to Earth. In a large scale it's only for use in space.

Most rare-earth minerals are not really that rare. Mining them on earth will be more cost effective. If we need larger quantities than can be found on surface deep sea mining is still more cost effective than asteroid mining.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Flow of events: See article in Feedly -> ooh that looks interesting -> click it -> See the link is vice.com -> oh :-( -> notice lots of chatter from fellow HN readers -> things improve immensely!

Please HN dont change :-D

</comment><comment><USER17> Why colonise Mars at all once you're mining asteroids?

Build colonies in free space instead and avoid the time and hassle of terraforming.

<comment><USER10> Gravity, Atmosphere, Aesthetics (for population expansion), research... all sorts of reasons.

But yes, once you've gotten reliable mining operations the pressure will be less. But the novelty will always be in high demand.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> why not just drill down once we get there and put a roof on the hole?

<comment><USER19> They are talking about mining for water not precious metals, which there may not be enough of on Mars to sustain the colonies.

But I think you are right about what they colonies will look like. Subterranean for the most part with some farming glass domes on the surface.

<comment><USER20> What advantage does living in the Martian underground have compared to living in a free flying space colony somewhere in the asteroid belt?

With the latter arrangement you have lots of minable resources at hand, only a small delta-v away from you. Ik you are ok with long delivery times, transporting them around doesn't cost you much energy.

Whereas on Mars, everything is much more energy-intensive, both mining raw materials and moving them through your industrial processing chain.

Space-based manufacturing is still an alien concept to us and while it comes with its own challenges, the vacuum and zero-gravity of space offers a lot of advantages too:

[http://www.permanent.com/space-industry- environment.html](http://www.permanent.com/space-industry-environment.html)

<comment><USER21> I agree overall, but living in a hole on Mars does offer at least somewhat better shielding against radiation, and people are strangely fondly of gravity, too... (not that you couldn't tackle those both in your hollowed-out asteroid).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Yep, but how about colonizing Antarctica first? It's way easier.

<comment><USER23> There are dozens of research bases in Antarctica. Establishing a research base on Earth isn't comparable to an off-world research base anyway, if you're looking to study said remote world or establish a lifeline for humanity in case the Earth is devastated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Asteroid mining for use on Earth is pretty silly. Take the example in the article, Platinum. According to Wikipedia, platinum is 0.005 ppm of the earth's crust, which is 2.3 x 10^22 kg. So there's about 1.1 x 10^14 kg of Platinum on earth, and we mine 200,000 kg per year. We're not going to run out any time soon.

But as the article implies, mining asteroids for use in space makes a heck of a lot of sense. That's a very different market.

<comment><USER25> The risk isn't "running out", it's that the cost of extraction becomes prohibitive. As a rule of thumb, asteroids are generally much richer with heavy metals than the Earth's crust because heavy things sink on Earth but they have no where to go on asteroids. These metals persist in small quantities in the crust mostly when they are bound to light elements. So the density and types of ores on asteroids are completely different, vastly changing extraction costs.

Whether the benefits of asteroid composition outweigh the costs of space mining is complicated and time-/tech-dependent, and cannot be guessed by just noting that in principle there are sufficient atoms in the Earth's crust.

<comment><USER24> "the cost of extraction becomes prohibitive"

You're implying that the cost of extraction is going up. It's not, it's going down quite steadily because it's tech-limited, not resource limited.

<comment><USER25> I'm not implying that at all. Everything is on a supply and demand curve, and the claim is that the extraction price increases, not with time, but with _amount extracted at a fixed time_. So the question is if we hit a point where the 1st ton of asteroid platinum is cheaper than the millionth ton of terrestrial platinum.

<comment><USER26> There is no actual evidence that the extraction price of precious metals will increase with the amount extracted at a fixed time. This is entirely speculative, and it seems more likely that extraction prices will decline as extraction technology improves faster than demand increases.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


A better Scala? Rust higher-kinded types RFC approved - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/blob/master/text/1598-generic_associated_types.md <comment><USER2> The section in the RFC titled "Background: What is kindedness?" is the most concise and helpful description of higher-kinded types I've encountered anywhere, and I absolutely love the attitude expressed at several points:

        Kinds are often called 'the type of a type,' the exact sort of
        unhelpful description that only makes sense to someone who already
        understands what is being explained.

and

        the term "type constructor" is an obscure piece of jargon from type
        theory which most users cannot be expected to be familiar with.

Any fear I had that this RFC was an expression of Rust evolving into an academic toy is greatly assuaged by this. This is supposed to be a systems programming language and it needs to stay amenable to people that think in terms of bits and bytes, not categories and type theory.

</comment><comment><USER3> This isn't higher-kinded types, it's associated type constructors.</comment>


Ask HN: Ham sandwich theorem - <AUTHOR>

What are your favorite famous/ridiculous theorems out there? I just stumbled upon this gem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ham_sandwich_theorem <comment><USER2> Was this submission inspired by the earlier one here:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=982247>

??

And why is the Ham Sandwich Theorem "ridiculous"? It says that any N sets in N dimensional space can simultaneously be bisected by an N-1 dimensional (hyper-)plane. Giving it a visually evocative name doesn't make it ridiculous.

What about Hall's Marriage Theorem? Is that "ridiculous" enough?

<comment><AUTHOR> No... I was looking at the post on mathoverflow:fundamental examples: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=984512> and then I went off on wikipedia for a while and came across this.

It's only ridiculous in the sense of the name and the fact that they used it as an example in the proof. Otherwise it is a fine result.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Clickable link:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ham_sandwich_theorem></comment>


Ask HN: Help me choose a data science research project - <AUTHOR>

I'm mulling over the idea of working my way through a data science text and self-teaching. I'd probably create a blog to document my efforts and to serve as notes to myself. I think I'd learn more and have more fun if I had a research project that I could work through as I learn.<p>I'm very much interested in finance and economics. Additionally, professionally I work in commercial real estate. However, I don't know how well these subjects would lend themselves to research projects. Generally trying to predict the markets is a fool's game. So I'm wondering what unexplored, worthwhile areas of research might exist. I'm reaching out to the HN community to see if you guys have any interesting ideas. Thanks! <comment><USER2> The hardest part of my practical coursework in statistics was picking good, free data sets for final projects. Pick something awesome, your final presentation will be awesome; pick something lame, and your final project gets you an A in Dejected Foot-Shuffling 101. If anything, the best data sets _weren 't_ from the sexy, unexplored fields. Remember how everyone tells you to pick classes by the professor, not the subject? It's a similar counter- intuitive thing for data sets. Find a data set that's rich and complete, and even if it's not a topic you're interested in now, you'll secretly love it by the end of the term.

Enough sermonizing. Here's a list of data set ideas that served me well in my youth:

1\. R comes with a lot of built-in data sets. Open up R and run the command "data()" to see the list. Many R packages come with additional data sets (I like the diamonds one from ggplot2). All these built-in data sets are sort of small and not really project-worthy, but they're nice if you're just playing around with new techniques.

2\. Government agencies release large, interesting data sets. Weather, census reports, travel statistics, public health data... The only problem is that they're usually a pain to query. Think outside your own country. And get ready for spatial stuff.

3\. Academic institutes release pretty neat data, too. Natural science stuff, geology stuff... Again, here comes spatial data analysis.

4\. Data journalists sometimes publish their data along with the story, and usually, they haven't found _nearly_ all the cool stuff in there yet. This, for instance, looks insanely fun: [http://project.wnyc.org/dogs-of- nyc/](http://project.wnyc.org/dogs-of-nyc/)

5\. Sports data is free like tap water, terrifyingly detailed, and deeply cool indeed.

6\. Natural language processing. Check out Project Guterberg! I like these analysis projects... [http://lotrproject.com/statistics/books/](http://lotrproject.com/statistics/books/), [http://bost.ocks.org/mike/miserables/](http://bost.ocks.org/mike/miserables/)

7\. Make your own data! Do you have a pedometer? Records of what temperature your house is? Some bloggers in the "Quantified Self" movement seem awfully cavalier about their own privacy, but they have undeniably boffo data.

8\. And finally: commercial real estate?! There has got to be _so_ much interesting data to work with there. I know you don't think you can predict the markets, but at the very least you could make pretty maps and pictures. Maybe your company will let you play with some data, provided you show them your insights? Don't know if they'd let you blog it all over town, though...

Congrats, my friend, you are one of us now. The people who drool over CSV files.

</comment><comment><USER3> I know that there are a few municipalities in the U.S. that have made some of their governmental records available via API. Off the top of my head, I'm not sure which ones, but there is likely a boat load of under analyzed data there. Similarly, the Census Bureau has a lot of large data sets.

Which book are you going to be studying?

<comment><AUTHOR> I haven't decided on one yet although I did come across this HN thread [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4973450](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4973450).

Do you have any recommendations?

<comment><USER3> No, I don't. Sorry. Thanks for the link. I'm actually looking to start learning some advanced stats also, so I'm on the lookout for resources.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Have you looked at Kaggle ? - it's a good place to learn as you can benchmark yourself against others and after a contest has closed there's normally a fair amount of post-game analysis as people share approaches.

</comment><comment><USER5> Browse through here: [http://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/](http://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/)

You might be able to pick up a few things you want to predict based on the datasets here.

</comment><comment><USER6> Are you looking for a programming challenge or something? I've got an idea off the top of my head that I'd love to share but don't know what kind of experience you have/looking for.

<comment><AUTHOR> A few things: to learn about ML methods, to improve my coding chops a bit, and to add to my portfolio if I'm ultimately happy with how it turns out.

<comment><USER6> I've had a theory for a while. Can you use technical stock indicators (such as bollinger bands/SMAs) on natural data sets such as crime?

The theory would say yes since the formulas used aren't specific to the market - they're just data. Its riddled me for quite a time and I think it could be valuable if true.

This would test your coding, API, mathematics, and economics skills for sure! Let me know if you're more interested in the idea.</comment></comment></comment>


Bit Planets: High quality RTS in browser (mobile,desktop,no install,no register) - <AUTHOR> http://bitplanets.com/ <comment><USER2> Great game, had really fun

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!</comment></comment>


Belgian man has been receiving pizzas he never ordered for years - <AUTHOR> https://www.brusselstimes.com/all-news/belgium-all-news/114806/belgian-man-has-been-receiving-pizzas-he-never-ordered-for-years/ <comment><USER3> It's easy to assume maliciousness in something like this but it is just as easily explained by just stupidity.

My Fiance has a fairly common name, and is the owner of the associated gmail account (think email@example.com). Several older women in other states have the same name...and seem to repeatedly beleive they have her email. My fiance got so frustrated with Walmart orders, amazon orders, bills, personal emails being sent to her that she tracked one lady down and called her.

The lady got angry that my fiance was 'using her email address and hacking her' and had to have it repeatedly explained that the old lady's email address was in fact slightly different (number at the end). It keeps happening. the lady writes it down wrong, her husband enters it wrong, her HOA (at her new house) enters it wrong. When the HOA got it wrong we told them and they asked us to fix it for them...We finally seemed to get some purchase on behavior change when we cancelled one of her orders via email. But the amount of information/influence we had over her accounts with just email was amazing. At one point, her husband used my fiance's email to register a bank account. We called the bank and after explaining the situation were able to CORRECT the email address for her (we decided that a bank account was serious enough to fix it rather than just be annoyed).

I think its perfectly valid to be concerned this is malicious or evil...but so many people are just inept technology users.

<comment><USER4> This is a great reason to not have gmail/yahoo/outlook/hotmail addresses: It's really hard to accidentally send an email to my domain. And people misentering my address are very unlikely to hit another valid one.

<comment><USER3> totally agree. but it is also sooo convienient as a junk mail address for signups.

Just like biometrics aren't a password but are a good user ID, I have a couple different email address that I use for very different purposes that involve different exposure. My work email never has anything not work related, my personal email rarely gets ads and I prune it aggressively...my gmail looks like a syphilitic brain and I don't mind because I know what it is.

<comment><USER5> I have a dedicated, very generic sounding domain name just for signups.

I use a custom email for each service. Like email@example.com for Amazon, xyz.ycombinator@... and so on.

All email is forwarded to a single catch-all account from a good provider, so it is just as convenient to use.

But it is trivial to isolate what emails came from which service, who has leaked my email to spammers, to just block a individual recipient, ... . It also makes it easy to have multiple accounts without the annoyance of a fallback email.

I wish I had switched to this method much earlier.

Ideally that domain would be used by at least a few hundred people to prevent associating via domain name though, with different prefixes (see xyz above) for each user.

<comment><USER6> For over a decade I've used hushmail's aliasing feature which allows you to create such custom emails (e.g. email@example.com) on the fly almost instantaneously. I use one per service that requires an email to sign up. Works great.

You can do it with the free account, too.

Just delete one if you are obviously getting spam because of a service selling their email lists. Which is a reality for "free" services. Bonus points because you can identify exactly who it is that is doing this and have the option of publicly shaming them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi, I'm the one who posted this article. I'm sorry I bothered someone by doing so, I can share, thought, why I did it. I've been working on e-commerce for 20 years already and I have experienced or seen very curious things related to fraud, geo localisation mistakes, and false claims too. As someone already mentioned in the comments, I thought this could actually be one of those cases.

Again, sorry if it bothered you.

<comment><USER7> Follow the money. Why doesn't he contact the delivery restaurant and find out who paid? Also, if he never orders pizza, have the restaurants put him on a "no delivery" list.

<comment><USER8> Reading the article, it sounds that it is pay on delivery, not on order.

> "I have always refused the deliveries, so I have never paid for anything," > he said, adding that the harassment is not only annoying for him, but also > for restaurants.

> "It costs them money and they have to throw the food away. On the day that > ten deliveries showed up, I did the math: it cost €450," Van Landeghem said.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm a US expat living in the Netherlands. I often have to use built-in browser translation services to fill out forms. It's amazing how some forms completely break when using the translator. I've been born at NaN-NaN-NaN before, and submitted completely blank forms that passed client validation but apparently there's no server validation.

I wonder if it's this issue where the form gets the postal code but not the rest and they happen to live at "the default" for that location. This could explain their friend too.

<comment><USER10> hahaha the same happened to me, I also remember when I had to register for an internet connection, I didn't have a Dutch bank account yet and my French IBAN was too long. Simply removing the maximum character limit from the input field was enough, and I was able to submit the form, they never asked anything and accepted my long IBAN gladly. It was XS4all, so not the small ISP either.

<comment><USER11> Karin Spaink has an awesome XS4ALL t-shirt:

Final Victory

Scientology - <USER2>

0-4

[https://www.religionnewsblog.com/13053/scientology-0-xs4all-...](https://www.religionnewsblog.com/13053/scientology-0-xs4all-4)

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Probably some group checking to see if their stolen credit cards are working, by ordering pizza to this guys address.

<comment><USER13> Reply All did a show about this [https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply- all/z3hgd2](https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/z3hgd2)

<comment><USER14> One theory they never covered in the show was that it could be a hedge fund doing this to generate receipts so they can analyze sales velocity. That's part of how the Luckin Coffee fraud was uncovered.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Somewhere someone's CI/CD pipeline is kicking off a test that completes an order.

<comment><USER16> It makes me very interested as to what his address is, is it "123 Main St" or some other common name? I mean at a past company we had a ton of data pointing to our old office, places close by to our office, or home addresses of employees for testing.

That said unless all these places (it appears to not just be 1) have the same backend and the tests are run against each location I'm not sure if CI/CD is the right answer.

It gave me a laugh for sure and reminded me the terror around kicking off a job in our production clone (the only way to fully test some queries/processes due to size and real-world data needed). We had scripts that wiped things like phone numbers, emails, SSN, etc before it hit the clone but not all developers where diligent about adding to the cleaning script when adding new fields to the DB. My nightmare was sending out a batch of SMS/Emails to people alerting them to an issue (the staleness of the data would fire off false alarms) that didn't exist.

<comment><USER17> Makes me want to live at Foobar St. 42...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I wonder how long it took local pizza restaurants to figure out that this address is problematic and flag it, refusing service? I'd tolerate no more than 3 times. So, how many pizza restaurants are there in the area? 20? 50? 100? I don't know how this could last for years.

(That comes from an assumption that pizzas are not paid for in advance, which the article kinda implies)

<comment><USER19> Several possibilities I can imagine:

\- they don't handle ordering and delivery: those are outsourced, and so they don't get the address. Or they do manage ordering, but not delivery, and the ordering system has a bug.

\- they benefit from those fake sales because they are laundering money through their restaurant

\- they benefit from those fake sales because they have an insurance that pays for those

\- they are using those addresses, that they know don't cause problems, to test something.

\- they use the pizza delivery as an excuse to be here, and do something illegal (surveillance, delivering drugs, territorial presence, etc).

\- it's a fake/exagerated article/testimony

<comment><USER20> That would be a lot of testing for the fourth option. :)

<comment><USER19> Indeed.

But the testing may have nothing to do with the pizza business itself.

Maybe it's a way to do hiring.

Maybe they test delivery gears.

Maybe they test the time it takes to delivery using said vehicule on one terrain.

Maybe they test the time it takes for some kind of product to be cold, or not tasteful anymore.

A serious test must be down for a long time, accross terrains and seasons.

And if you test a lot of thing, you will need a lot of deliveries for a long time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Reminds me about this Reply-all[0] episode about a mysterious $2 coke that is orders at Domino's all over the USA:

[0] [https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply- all/z3hgd2](https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/z3hgd2)

<comment><USER22> Damn that is a hell of a story.

<comment><USER23> Reply All's "Super Tech Support" segment is amazing and full of these weird tech issues. You should check them out if you haven't already. I can't recommend them enough.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> If he was the only person receiving these deliveries I'd guess the most probable explanation was completely unrelated to his person - a GPS coordinate / default value in some frequently used application or service. Or maybe something similar like an erroneous lookup in a database that actually contains his data, like somebody using production data in a database for testing purposes. This would explain orders of 14 pizzas at once, which may be a rare order size in production environments.

However, the fact that he seems to know a second person affected by this makes it way more likely that this is in fact a personal attack.

</comment><comment><USER25> > _"A friend of mine who lives in Herenthout is going through exactly the same > thing as I am. She has been receiving pizza she has not ordered for nine > years, too," Van Landeghem said._

Either this problem is extremely common in Belgium, or this is a very suspicious coincidence.

<comment><USER26> It's possible there's code somewhere in the stack which sets a default, and the fall through case in the code resulting in this real-life weirdness.

eg. [https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/08/kansas-couple- su...](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/08/kansas-couple-sues-ip- mapping-firm-for-turning-their-life-into-a-digital-hell/)

<comment><USER25> Sure, but it would be quite a coincidence that these defaults happen to two people who happen to be friends.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I wonder if he's at the geographic center of his city or postcode. Sometimes a geocoding service will default to the center of an area if the address isn't precise enough or if it's using IP address based geocoding.

It doesn't say if the orders actually have his address on them or just show up.

Approximately a small scale version of this: [https://splinternews.com/how-an- internet-mapping-glitch-turn...](https://splinternews.com/how-an-internet- mapping-glitch-turned-a-random-kansas-f-1793856052)

<comment><USER17> Maybe the people ordering are using IE4 and too modern Javascript on the restaurants' site fail to return the correct address.

Luckily it's just pizza and not an artillery attack. I guess that'll happen soon enough, military bomber dropping a bomb in a wrong location because the soldier "ordering" the bombardment from the ground didn't update his app to the latest version...

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> A strange story. I cannot understand why the police isn't looking into it. At minimum, there would be a credit card number for each order which could be traced. There should be phone records. If this goes via a payment processor, they should flag the addresses. The fact that the orders happen to two persons in parallel basically rules out any randomness in the process.

<comment><USER29> I doubt there are credit cards involved; the article mentions that he refuses delivery each time so he's never had to pay for anything, so I assume they're cash-on-delivery.

Europe doesn't do the credit card thing to the same degree as in the US; cash purchases, especially for things like this, are much more the norm.

<comment><USER30> It depends, Europe is quite diverse. For example, practically everything is paid by card in the Netherlands, but cash is used in Spain. Although in these covid times, everything has to be paid by card everywhere I know.

<comment><USER31> But in the Netherlands food (and other online purchases) are nearly universally done with the local iDeal system. Germany and Belgium use Sofort, and for Poland there a few parallel systems. France and I guess Spain CCs are used.

Its varied.

<comment><USER32> In my experience, French bank cards are debit cards not credit ones.

<comment><USER31> Ah, then there to whole Maestro/VPay vs MasterCard/Visa thing. With CC I mean the latter, but its true they provide debit versions of those. My French bank provide a proper credit-CC though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> What if this is only an ad for frozen pizzas?

From the article:

"I only buy frozen pizzas from Colruyt or Aldi. I have never asked for them to be delivered to my house,"

<comment><USER34> I'm wondering if this whole situation is the universe trying to show this poor guy what good pizza is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> This is really poor journalism. Where's the interviews with the restaurants and police? Speculation from industry experts? Anything more would make this a better article.

</comment><comment><USER36> Wouldn't it take only a few minutes for the police to get the phone number(s) and find out?

<comment><USER37> You're not a bad enough person to understand this wont work:

I've unfortunately known someone who had a psychic problem . If she thought you'd crossed her for anything howvere minor, she'd harass you for years. She always has a list of 20 or so victims.

She had a never-ending list of new friends, and was the most charming person possible to them. She'd get invited home to them, or found some excuse to come by. Then, when the new friend went to make e.g. some coffee, she'd borrow their phone/computer/wifi/... , commit a few minor crimes like the ones in the article, and by the time the coffee came she was back in the sofa and the new friend was none the wiser. It would take a few months before the friend catches on, at which she'd drop them like a stone and find some new friend to suck dry.

Police knows her very well. Every 2 year or so she voluntarily commits herself to a psychiatric institute, at which point the legal system backs off. After 2 weeks she leaves against docters advice and it all starts from 0.

<comment><USER38> "Mental disorder" in English :), psychics are the people who read your fortune.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Could just be a geocoding issue? Some data bug in a database somewhere that unfortunately ends up "redirecting" a load of addresses/postal codes etc to this guys house?

<comment><USER40> There's story like this about a place in Kansas that acts like a "dead letter office" for problematic geolocation queries.

[https://consumerist.com/2016/04/11/this-farm-in-kansas-is- th...](https://consumerist.com/2016/04/11/this-farm-in-kansas-is-the-default- address-for-all-american-internet-users/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I sometimes receive my neighbor's mail (199 instead of 119), and he does too. One time I ordered pizza and it said it was delivered, but I never received it. I'm wondering if he ate my pizza.

</comment><comment><USER42> Seems easy enough to catch the source of this prankster, if there is one. All he'd have to do, is notify the restaurants in his delivery radius, give them his address, tell them to never accept the order to this address. This alone should stop the orders, but to catch the source, ask them to take the phone number of the person placing the order, maybe to pretend to confirm the order, the restaurant calls back the person placing the order, if the person answers, give the # to the police.

</comment><comment><USER19> It may be a bot? Either one with a bug, or a way for the authors to kill some competition?

The article doesn't say if the pizzas were ordered online or by phoning directly the shops.

At the begining, the bot would not have been able to call, but I assume now it's possible to make bots smart enough to handle pizza orders. It may even be a nice way to train one.

</comment><comment><USER43> Reminds me of the couple that lives on a farm that is the default geolocation for 600 million IP addresses. Their farm has been visited by authorities for a long time.

[https://consumerist.com/2016/04/11/this-farm-in-kansas-is- th...](https://consumerist.com/2016/04/11/this-farm-in-kansas-is-the-default- address-for-all-american-internet-users/)

And in my work, we always know the direction to null island, because stray robots will head right for it. I even thought about writing a short story about all the stray / bugged out robots piling up on the seafloor near it.

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

</comment><comment><USER44> I think it might be a case of someone testing the delivery/ordering software in production with real data instead of dummy data?

That would explain why it went on for years. The test data won't be updated quickly and no one would flag it because it is not supposed to be a real order.

<comment><USER45> And the tester just happened to pick two friends, who live 20 miles apart in different cities, who have never ordered from the restaurant? That is both a remarkable coincidence, and a bizarre choice of test data.

<comment><USER46> Maybe the tester is a friend of theirs and he's been quietly fucking with them for years?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> I have a theory, which I hope is mostly wrong, and may or may not apply directly to this particular situation. We always hear about the cases where people from foreign countries are trolling celebrities or other high profile people. Why should people with malicious intent stop there? Why shouldn't we all consider ourselves a target of trolls? It only helps us lose faith in society. I am under the impression one of the relatively NEW tactics of groups (also why does it have to be groups and not angry individuals?) trying to cause civil unrest is to simply target every human being so they will all turn on one another, become hostile, and cause their own collapse.

</comment><comment><USER48> I keep getting amazon packages to my apartment from a former tenant. I try to decline them but they sometimes get delivered while I'm not home. I can at least put return to sender letters in mailboxes. How do you deal with boxes?

</comment><comment><USER49> I have used several food delivery services in Belgium, and all of them require upfront payment. Perhaps that's why the restaurants didn't blacklist his address. But regardless, it's a weird story that seems unlikely

</comment><comment><USER50> Can't this guy call all these delivery places and explain to them his situation. Sure it's annoying but seems worth it given the circumstances

</comment><comment><USER51> I share the same name as a tv journalist and author.

After years of receiving emails and calls - I received an invitation to a "Back from the Hamptons Cocktail Party" hosted by a now US Ambassador.

With the RVSP, I let the host know I was the other guy (we both worked in TV at the time).

She insisted there was no mistake and the invite was for me.

Spent the evening partying up with Martha Stewart and many other celebs.

</comment><comment><USER52> It's two things, maybe he has an enemy.

Or a slightly more likely he's a crazy old man who's got a few wrong orders. As you can tell by the fact his friend has as well.

Explains why no blacklist or why no police helping after 9 years.

There's no default value going on here. No one here ever wrote a web form or used a map? Try and understand the Appp map Las Vegas issue, don't just rote learn it.

</comment><comment><USER53> I'm confused... if everything is paid for, why doesn't he accept them? Is it common for delivery services to deliver unpaid good?

And if he never orders pizza, can't he tell the pizza place to never deliver to his address? If that's already been done then a sign on the door would help a lot, no?

<comment><USER54> IANAL, but if someone else paid for it and you keep it, then it is almost stealing.

<comment><USER53> How would you then make the distinction between that and a gift?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> I was in the gmail beta so have a great email@example.com email address. The name is an extremely common asian name (there are like 5 people with my name in my town). I have gotten divorce papers to sign, okcupid account signup, jims worm farm order confirmation/delivery etc.

</comment><comment><USER56> It's weird but I feel like with a little more info this would be a case for Reddit to try and figure out.

<comment><USER57> This can go badly wrong though. It's had impressive result too but the doxing of innocent people has had catastrophic results. [https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/2r3d54/what_h...](https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/2r3d54/what_happened_with_reddit_and_the_boston_marathon/)

<comment><USER46> I think at the very least, this is the kind of harmless situation that won't turn into a Pizzagate kind of thing. ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizzagate_conspiracy_theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizzagate_conspiracy_theory))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> Once I received a payment via PayPal, of a few hundred dollars.

Luckily, before I needed to do anything or call PayPal, the payee realized her mistake and PayPal took the money out - they notified me. I can only imagine how freaked out the payee must have been.. ;)

</comment><comment><USER59> Wow - that is really weird that it has been going on for that many years. Also strange that he had a friend who experienced the same problem. I suppose the pizza shop should do more to avoid it.

</comment><comment><USER60> > A friend of mine who lives in Herenthout is going through exactly the same > thing as I am. She has been receiving pizza she has not ordered for nine > years, too.

That's rich, either she is in on it or they have common enemy.

<comment><USER54> Is she an old friend (like someone he meet in kindergarten) or a new friend that he meet while discussing this (for example, after posting this in some forum, he meet someone with the same problem and they become friends)?

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> I tend to always use the same fake email and fake phone number in some forms... it might cause issues similar to this, unfortunately.

</comment><comment><USER62> I've heard of worse things happening to people

</comment><comment><USER63> Not gonna lie this is pretty funny. Hope the person actually ordering gets their pizza.

</comment><comment><USER64> I mean, I could go for some pizza and kebab right about now...

</comment><comment><USER65> As long as it is paid for I would not mind. I can't eat gluten, maybe they could switch to gluten free pizza or sushi?

<comment><USER66> There are constant discussions on online security on HN, but do not forget that accepting and eating food that way is a big security risk for your actual health.

It's basically like knocking on a door at random and asking the person who opens it to eat something you're giving them... Accepting sounds like playing Russian roulette.

<comment><USER67> It depends on your threat model. Unless you think someone wants to kill you, the risk is so low that it makes sense to take it and get a free pizza

<comment><USER66> " _this risk is so low_ " is a leap of faith because you have no clue about that unless it happens to you all the time (where do you live??). It is playing Russian roulette by betting that the risk is low...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> That's crazy. It cannot possibly be one person harassing him, or this person is a true sociopath.

I guess it could be a bug, in some common system that restaurants use to register adresses ?

</comment><comment><USER69> Seinfeld wants to kill him I guess...?

</comment><comment><USER70> How is this at the top spot?

</comment><comment><USER71> "stupid Flanders" (TM)

</comment><comment><USER72> One of the victims is in love / obsessed with the other, and this is a misguided attempt to stay in touch and have something unique in common.

</comment><comment><USER73> Sorry but why is this on HN? I kept reading and I was expecting some programming, off by one, Unicode, or whatever error that caused the problem. Or Some online Credit Card Fraud operation that used Food Delivery as whatever tools it may be.

But no, Nothing.

So again, why is this on HN? I am generally curious.

<comment><USER74> Because the guidelines allows it:

Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're _evidence of some interesting new phenomenon._

I think this qualifies as interesting new phenomenon.</comment></comment>


The Global Consciousness Project (2014) - <AUTHOR> http://noosphere.princeton.edu/ <comment><USER2> This is the most interesting thing I've seen on HN this year.</comment>


Comcast Launches Eye Control for the TV, an Aid for Physically Disabled Viewers - <AUTHOR> https://deadline.com/2019/06/comcast-launches-eye-control-for-the-tv-an-aid-for-physically-disabled-viewers-1202633522/ <comment><USER2> I'm sure the motivation is accessibility for their users rather than their analytics...</comment>


IBM to Open Source 50 Projects - <AUTHOR> http://www.infoq.com/news/2015/07/ibm-developerworks-open?utm_source=hacker%20news&utm_medium=link&utm_content=ibm%20open%20source%20news&utm_campaign=external

<comment><USER2> This is the usual pattern of a big company open sourcing peripheral and dying projects to appear hip, or to hope for free work. Now, let's see if they open source an important greenfield project, then devote resources to the development of that project. Don't count on it.

<comment><USER3> Which project that IBM open sourced did you ever used? None.

</comment></comment><comment> leonfhl-co Hope it will come the day when all the software is open source

<comment><USER4> I agree with the sentiment even if the practical doesn't mean much. I'd like to see more companies open source abandonware.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> At least one of these, Node-RED, I'm pretty sure has always been open source? It's excellent, by the way.

<comment><USER6> You're correct, it's been open-source for quite some time. I can also second your assertion that its worth checking out - I would say its a more accessible flow-based programming tool than noflo.js, which I found to have a more complicated toolchain and less helpful documentation than node-RED.

<comment><USER7> Something with less helpful documentation than an IBM product? I can't decide if I should be shocked or merely incredulous.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> AIX would be nice.

<comment><USER9> So would OS/2, but we all know that isn't going to happen.

<comment><USER10> AFAIK, IBM sold OS/2 a long time ago (it's now eComStation, owned by Serenity Systems).

<comment><USER11> Didn't they only license OS/2 to Serenity Systems? AFAIK the problem is that OS/2 still contains large portions of other corporations, such as Microsoft.

<comment><USER9> That's my understanding... they licensed OS/2 to Serenity, but IBM still technically owns it. But they can't open source it, since MS (and possibly others) own large parts of the copyright.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The surprising accuracy of Minority Report 10 years later - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2011/05/12/entering-the-minority-report-era-a-video-series/

<comment><USER2> In 2011, we have precrime. See video of those arrested for planning on staging street theatre to protest royal wedding. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOli98fgBP0> [01:15]

"This is minority report! Pre-crime! We're being arrested for street theater."

It's amazing how well the British do fascism, complete with a bit of descent into absurdist comedy. Life imitates Terry Pratchett.

<comment><USER3> Pre2011, there's attempted crimes like murder, conspiracy to commit like fraud, and even thought crimes where discussing a bomb in a cafe can land you in indefinite imprisonment.

Minority report is distinctly different in that there's 100% assurance that a crime has been committed in the future, therefore the suspects are guilty.

[SPOILER BELOW]

As plot progresses, it is found that reading the computer that looks towards the future are human and there's no 100% certainty due to paradoxes among other past life twists. This lead to release of all prisoners (I think).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A small detail I found interesting while watching Minority Report recently: among all the futuristic innovations displayed and mentioned in this article, when it began to rain, people still opened up traditional black umbrellas.

<comment><USER5> Some inventions can't be improved?

<comment><USER6> <http://www.nubrella.com/>

<comment><USER7> An honest attempt to improve the umbrella, perhaps, but it looks both ridiculous and claustrophobic. (edit: Why _do_ we describe small spaces as claustrophobic rather than claustrophobia-inducing? We don't describe spiders as arachnophobic or wide open spaces as agoraphobic, do we?)

There must be a better solution to umbrellas getting inverted. Why do they even have to bend that way?

<comment><USER8> If you make the umbrella ribs more rigid you will tend to make them heavier. You could improve the leverage of the braces between the stem and the ribs by attaching the braces farther out on the ribs and lower down on the stem, but that will collide with the owner's head unless they hold the umbrella higher, which will cause more leakage and catch more wind and make it harder to brace the stem against your body in a wind.

I'd be very hesitant to claim that I could design a better umbrella. They've been evolving for a very long time. Maybe modern materials would help, but I for one wouldn't dare buy a carbon-fiber umbrella because I just know I'd leave it on a bus or something. Cheapness is a feature too.

Meanwhile, the hilarious invention at the link not only looks ridiculous, but I'd have to be convinced that it wouldn't drip all over my lower body. And how on earth do you carry it when it's folded up? A big feature of the standard umbrella design is that it's not that hard to carry or store while folded.

I have a nice waterproof hat from Outdoor Research and a Gore-Tex jacket. For serious swimming I've also got waterproof pants and even gaiters. That combination seems like it would be superior to the space helmet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Spielberg tried very hard to create a believable near future. He invited a collection of futurists to brainstorm ideas and implemented those ideas in the film.

[http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.06/spielberg.html?pg=1...](http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.06/spielberg.html?pg=1&topic=&topic_set=)

</comment><comment><USER10> Interesting aside: The UI shown in Minority Report was actually developed by a team at MIT: <http://goo.gl/tRLXO>

<comment><USER11> Casey Reas and Ben Fry, the two guys behind Processing.org

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Minority Report was one of my favorite movies, precisely because it's liberal use of attainable sci-fi, stuff which was being researched and thought to be attainable en masse in 5-10 years (like e-ink, gesture based interfaces, etc...)

In many ways, I think a really well written sci-fi book, and especially a movie, can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. In which case, the movie would be making a proposition rather than a prediction :)

</comment><comment><USER13> Hm, interesting. I only saw the movie about a month ago (and didn't even like it much) but it never occurred to me that the movie predicted anything correctly. I suppose because I took it out of context (in 2011, I took the things mentioned the article mostly for granted).

Actually, the future predicted by the movie is pretty scary, in particular:

\- Automated cars that can be remotely controlled by the government

\- Eye-based identification everywhere

I wouldn't wanna live in such a place :/

<comment><USER14> I'm renting a Ford Edge right now. After a few minutes, the radio will mute itself until you buckle your seatbelt. The car is configured to limit your speed to 80 MPH or under.

Even though I drive with my seatbelt on under 80 MPH anyways, it's really annoying for my car to tell me what to do.

<comment><USER15> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MyKey>

It should be configurable, the rental company probably programmed the key they gave you.

When I rented a Penske truck, it was speed limited to 75mph, which I don't object too, 26" diesel truck over 75mph is a scary thing, even when going in a straight line through fields of corn.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I hate to be "that guy", but the language in this article is really poor in both grammar and style, and it could use some editing to help with that. Are thenextweb articles normally copy-edited?

</comment><comment><USER17> Scott Adams wrote in The Dilbert Future that life would become more like Star Trek.

I heard once that the imagination of science fiction is the same imagination of innovation. That life becomes more and more like science fiction because actually building something is the next step after coming up with the idea,

<comment><USER18> I think it's mostly because science fiction molds are view of the future and many inventors are influenced by that. I'm pretty sure that Star Trek influenced some of the inventors of the cell phone even if it wasn't consciously. Now we have things that are looking closer and closer to holodecks (all we need is photonic matter), the kinect is pretty proto- holodeck in my view. The touchscreen interfaces and iPads were probably also influcence by Sci-Fi. Basically Star Trek invented the future ;p

<comment><USER19> There's actually some truth to this. Cool sci-fi can influence scientists and technologists to pursue ideas they see on screen or read about in books. Alternatively, it can inspire kids to want to _become_ scientists or technologists. While I have no data to back this up, I imagine the genre has done a lot more good for the world than we'll ever know.

<comment><USER20> Watch this presentation to get an overview of how we can learn from sci-fi interfaces : <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMIyO8F0jxg>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Wasn't the movie set in 2050 or so? IIRC Hal Finney reviewed it at the time as plausible for the next few decades but ridiculously conservative for 50 years. I thought that was about right. (I didn't expect to see self-driving cars quite so soon.)

</comment><comment><USER22> I remember reading about an (now ex) RCMP officer from BC, Canada created an application that took all sorts of data from crimes and combined it to create kind of a heat map/"elevation" of predictions where the criminal may be based.

That's about as close as you could get to Minority Report (this was earlier than the movie) but it used ongoing series of crimes to predict where the crimes may occur or to narrow down where the criminal may live.

It's not the IBM software mentioned in the article this was from Canada and I distinctly remember it was an RCMP officer who created it.

</comment><comment><USER23> Was anyone else seriously pissed that the Spielberg version missed the entire point of the Dick story?

<comment><USER7> What was the point of the Dick story?

Movie adaptations of science fiction short stories often have a way of missing the point. Sometimes it's an improvement, sometimes it isn't.

The bit about Minority Report that I didn't like (and I think this point was made by somebody else at the time but I can't remember who it was) is as follows: the movie starts off by saying _"Let's suppose that there's some psychic system that allows us to predict crimes before they occur!"_ "Gee okay movie" I say, "that sounds pretty implausible but I'll go along with it". _"And then"_ says the movie _"the big twist at the end is.... sometimes it doesn't work!"_

It feels like a cheap sort of ending because, well, I never would have thought it _could_ work until the logic of the story demanded it. It feels like the movie is trying to make some kind of point about free will, but it's not only keeping its thumb on the scale, it's also keeping its other thumb on the other side of the scale, making the discussion pointless. Free will is nonexistent, it says, because of this hypothetical device which could never exist in the real world. Except, oh wait, the device doesn't work because there's free will. The end.

<comment><USER24> My understanding was that the device did work there was just a human element to the interpretation.

<comment><USER25> The last scene of the movie demonstrates that knowing that a pre-crime report was generated does allow the future to be changed (Burgess chooses to shoot himself, rather than Tom Cruise). The earlier plotline had suggested there was no way to escape fate - the protagonist ends up committing the exact killing he had been desperately trying to avoid (a la _Oedipus Rex_ ).

<comment><USER26> At the time the film came out, I was in a long involved argument about the theme of the film on screenwriting board.

There, I said:

"The issue of her predicting the future as it actually ends up taking place is more or less irrelevant in terms of the story the filmmakers chose to tell. That's set up from the very first precognition and subsequent raid. Agatha sees a murder that does not happen, because there is interevention. The premise underlying the story the filmmakers chose to tell us is that what she sees will in fact occur if we do not stop it. We are free to stop it, of course, but only because we know it is coming. If we didn't know, the world would continue on the rails it has been traveling on, and it would arrive at the destination Agatha has foreseen. This is the essential point that you have to buy into for the premise to work at all."

I dig a little deeper here, including analysis of the eye transplant scene. With a bit of a snarky tone, but I was arguing with friends...

[http://www.wordplayer.com/forums/moviesarc05/index.cgi?read=...](http://www.wordplayer.com/forums/moviesarc05/index.cgi?read=34716)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> What's really sad about that article is the failure to mention the origin of the ideas: Philip K. Dick.

<comment><USER28> Dick isn't the source of most of the ideas discussed in the article. Minority Report is a pretty short read, and well worth the hour or two it takes.

Social Advertising: There isn't any advertising. The only media that's referenced is the radio which is a broadcast medium, and as such can't be individually tuned.

Virtual Shopping: Anderton buys some essentials at a drugstore, and a second hand set of clothes. It's important to the plot of the story that he takes the risk of exposing himself to get these items.

Crime: Alright, I'll give you that one. Pre crime is a cool concept.

Robots: The only automatic machines mentioned in the story are those that tend to the needs of the pre cogs (presumably life support type stuff) and things like automatic card printers. Hardly robotic spiders.

Gesture Based Computing: In the story, Anderton has to lookup where data will be stored on a tape and manually copy it to another reel of tape. That's as close as he gets to a cool interface.

Cars: Flying cars feature into the story, but they required a human driver. Anderton has to ask his wife to take the wheel at one point as he has to deal with something else.

Sometimes it's alright to acknowledge that an adaptation of a work has added to it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I think the article has it backwards. The movie used technology that was being developed and took it to a logical conclusion.

</comment><comment><USER30> Warning: Once you start reading, your productivity will go out the window. Awesome article.

</comment><comment><USER31> Looking at the difference between the Microsoft Kinnect and the Apple iPad demos, the marvel is how Microsoft manages to make something really amazing both boring and uncool, while Apple spends 15 seconds and inspires. Fortunately, the Kinnect is a great enough device people seem to have discovered it in spite of their marketing.

Don't miss the "What's around the corner" video.</comment>


Firefox Focus now has Google Safe browsing integrated with no way to disable it - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Safebrowsing is censorship by another name. the baked in aspect is a GET request to DL a black hashlist. either block the GET or alter the hash of the site, and google nanny wont have any say over what site you can visit.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/ahfc8k/firefox_foc...](https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/ahfc8k/firefox_focus_for_android_now_has_google_safe/)</comment>


Dip by Alcamy: 5-minute tappable lessons, once a day. [DEV] - <AUTHOR> Hey Everyone!
We're super excited to share DIP – hacking a Snapchat-story-esque format that people are already used to, and leveraging it productively to build a sustainable learning habit.
Dip sends you one tappable 5-minute lesson every day. It's a sustainable way to learn something new, one day at a time.
We're launching with 3 lesson categories: Emerging tech, Influencer advice, and Book Summaries.
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Cheers! <comment><AUTHOR> Download for Android: [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.dip.fyi](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.dip.fyi)

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The internet decides whether or not to water this plant - <AUTHOR> http://www.pleasetakecareofmyplant.com <comment><USER2> This page has at least 5 different analytics hits in it (Facebook Connect, Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, MyFonts Counter, and Twitter Button).</comment>


Scribd is now the largest Rails site on the Internet (using Alexa rankings) - <AUTHOR> http://rails100.pbwiki.com/?

<comment><AUTHOR> Scribd is growing quickly and actively hiring all kinds of developers (ruby on rails, flash/actionscript, C++, etc) so please contact us, email@example.com, if you're interested. Check out our jobs page here: <http://www.scribd.com/static/jobs>

Here's a link to our traffic graph on alexa:

<http://snipurl.com/24rqq>

</comment><comment><USER2> The first time I used Scribd's iPaper I thought, "This is magic." Its one of those products that, as a web developer, you'd have to be stupid not to use. Its simply that much better than its competitors. Congratulations, guys.

<comment><USER3> Can you explain the magic? I just don't get it. (Maybe I am stupid; I'll admit that much.)

From what I've seen, it looks like a Flash plugin to view PDFs. It breaks my scroll-wheel and keyboard shortcuts, uses funny-looking controls, and it takes as long to load the Flash plugin as it would have to just load the whole PDF. I always edit the URL so I can view the PDF normally. I don't know why I'd want to do this to my users.

<comment><USER4> doesn't in-browser pdf viewing suck apart from safari?

<comment><USER5> I don't understand scribd's popularity. What's wrong with pdfs?

<comment><USER4> i never liked acrobat reader on windows much. maybe that's it? or people just don't know where to host their pdfs. or don't know how to make pdfs.

<comment><USER5> So maybe the popularity comes out of ignorance?

<comment><USER4> yes. but that's not necessarily a bad thing to say about scribd. if scribd makes it easier for people to not know anything about how to use computers, then that's valuable to lots of people.

<comment><USER5> Scribd should win some award for being the most counterintuitive successful startup. It's hard to imagine that computer science majors came up with this idea!

<comment><USER4> youtube doesn't do much besides make a few things easy: make a file web accessible and convert to another format and provide comments and some text people can paste to embed it, and i guess favorites and a bit more -- all the kinds of things scribd has i think. plus give away free storage space and bandwidth, which scribd does too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> yeah, this is using alexa rankings, so it's far from perfect and misses a lot of other data, so take it for what it's worth.

<comment><USER6> Alexa did a major update to it's ranking algorithm and source data yesterday. It's supposedly a lot better.

<comment><USER7> yes ... though it depends who you ask. Many like hacker news rankings went down. Was 14K two days ago... now 77K, while looking down next to my alexa toolbar ranking of this site I have the compete toolbar that says hacker news is ranked 25K. Though compete only measures US traffic, best of my knowledge. Scribd was ranked 900 something now its 500 something. Congrat to Ed K and the Scribd team!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Wow, I didn't know that. This is a handy site.

<comment><USER9> Double Wow, I didn't know Sribd is bigger than Yellow Pages

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> That's great for Scribd, not so great for Rails. The largest (known) Rails site isn't even in the top 500!

I'm curious how this compares to other technologies. Someone should write a script that crawls the top sites attempting to detect the technologies they're built on.

I can think of a few heuristics, like URL patterns and file extensions (.php, etc) and cookies (PHPSESSID for PHP, _session_id for Rails, JSESSIONID for J2EE, etc)

</comment><comment><USER11> What was previously?

<comment><USER12> twitter?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> That doesn't count desktop twitter clients.

It also doesn't count Facebook apps.

</comment><comment><USER14> What about yellowpages.com?

<comment><USER15> They're #2 according to the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Scribd looks great, but Basecamp is down at 70262, probably since it uses subdomains. Full aggregated traffic for Basecamp and other 37signals properties would probably put it higher up on the list.

<comment><USER11> Highly doubt it. They have a lot of signups, but I bet a lot fewer active users. Scribd claims over 17m uniques a month.

Though I bet 37 Signals financial statement looks a lot better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The two largest Rails deployments on the internet are not on that list.

<comment><USER18> Could you please elaborate more on what those two deployments are?</comment></comment>


This Resume Does Not Exist - <AUTHOR> https://thisresumedoesnotexist.com/ <comment><USER3> Only checked two examples, and it read like pure nonsense output by a markov chain.

Example text:

>Linghalus is a company that operates in the idea to Marks and internationally in the field of experience to a company.

>Completed 3 company in the first 3 months of internal stations

<comment><USER4> Yeah I think they could have benefited from reading for example this: [https://www.gwern.net/TWDNE#text](https://www.gwern.net/TWDNE#text)

<comment><USER5> And if he wants to generate headshots which are businessy, [https://www.gwern.net/Faces](https://www.gwern.net/Faces) would be useful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Got something like "hired and executed a team of 14 people" . Lovely. Unfortunately I didn't realize it would disappear when I leave the page, proof gone.

</comment><comment><USER7> I too work on synthetic data, specifically at scale for a large company:

[https://medium.com/capital-one-tech/why-you-dont- necessarily...](https://medium.com/capital-one-tech/why-you-dont-necessarily- need-data-for-data-science-48d7bf503074)

I'm fairly wary of where it is going. "Post-Truth" took on a whole new meaning when I could build a general synthetic data system (general, for text based data).

This appears to be using an RNN or a Markov Chain trained on samples of job experience. As you can see it looks pretty good, but in the end is nonsense. I really don't look forward to the day where this is even better (with today's tech it could be made better btw).

Much better and you could essentially DDoS recruiters.

</comment><comment><USER8> Work in progress - <USER2>

>We certainly believe that your skills and accomplishments display that you would be great asset for our current project that supports SW -GIS- ENGINEER. Let me know if you're interested in chatting with one of this team's technologists to learn more. Software Engineer Individual must have senior knowledge and senior hands-on experience in developing, implementing and leading software programs. As a senior coder, this labor competency is responsible for maintaining and improving the performance of existing software code, with duties to design and update software databases under contract and direction from the assigned Government Product Manager.

<comment><USER9> > As a senior coder, this labor competency is responsible for maintaining and > improving the performance of existing software code, with duties to design > and update software databases under contract and direction from the assigned > Government Product Manager.

Sadly, this sentence makes the job summary 100% better than many I have received.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> So far I've seen Person, Waifu, SO Questions, Startup and now Resume.

Pretty interesting how "This X Does Not Exist" is starting to become almost a trend, to display AI generated stuff.

<comment><USER11> I'm not sure this one was done with AI. It reads a lot like typical random text spinning.

This {company|corporation} {specializes|is a leader} in ...

Actually, maybe I'm wrong. A well done implementation of the above might have more convincing output.

<comment><USER12> We have such a mudflation of AI now so that every algorithm that creates even slightly-interesting output is now "AI".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Loved the link to [https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/](https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/)

<comment><USER14> \- [https://thisstartupdoesnotexist.com/](https://thisstartupdoesnotexist.com/)

\- [https://thiscatdoesnotexist.com/](https://thiscatdoesnotexist.com/)

\- [https://thisrentaldoesnotexist.com/](https://thisrentaldoesnotexist.com/)

\- [https://www.thiswaifudoesnotexist.net/](https://www.thiswaifudoesnotexist.net/)

<comment><USER15> [https://thiswebsitedoesnotexist.com/](https://thiswebsitedoesnotexist.com/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I wasn't sure of the utility of this until I came across this sentence:

> I am passionate about problems that do the norm.

How can something so nonsensical contain so much meaning...

<comment><USER17> Pennycook et al. (2015) On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit. [https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~baron/journal/15/15923a/jdm15923a...](https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~baron/journal/15/15923a/jdm15923a.pdf)

<comment><USER16> I wonder if there are any good pseudo-profound bullshit generators.

<comment><USER18> This one "thematic on New Age", is not at all shabby, IMHO:

[http://sebpearce.com/bullshit/](http://sebpearce.com/bullshit/)

Example snippet:

>The complexity of the present time seems to demand an evolving of our souls if we are going to survive. Without karma, one cannot heal. You may be ruled by stagnation without realizing it. Do not let it shatter the truth of your mission.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> You might also like - [https://twitter.com/erowidrecruiter](https://twitter.com/erowidrecruiter)

</comment><comment><USER19> I found this hilarious for some reason. Probably because it really does seem like a resume at first glance, but makes less sense the more you look at it. Things like "Facilitated a team of 10 staff members to consistently reduce the sales turnaround to 200 people."

I wonder if it can fool an ATS.

</comment><comment><USER20> I like that all of these people are interested in minority languages. I don't think many people in the real world speak Hawaiian and Catalan and Turkmen and still have time to work as Community Business Manager.

</comment><comment><USER21> It seems like the image displayed has nothing to do with the name. I was consistently getting male names with female pictures.

</comment><comment><USER22> On the "My Time" graph:

25% of time spent 'Battling Cancer'

</comment><comment><USER23> I'd like to download these CVs as PDF :-)

</comment><comment><USER14> Funny marketing idea by enhancv.com</comment>


The Los Angeles Hacker News Meetup is this Saturday - <AUTHOR> http://groups.google.com/group/los-angeles-hners-hacker-news/browse_thread/thread/ad05d831813a1a24

<comment><USER2> As always, family prevents me from making a Saturday meetup.

However members of HN are always welcome to lunch on the Santa Monica Promenade on Thursdays. See <http://promenade.thursdaylunch.com/> for details.

<comment><USER3> Bummer for me too, wish I knew about the meetup sooner (or even the group! joined.), would have loved to meet up this weekend.

Thanks for the link to the Thursday lunches, never knew about them. Would be cool to drop by one day :)

A handful of Cocoa developers meet up every Tuesday evening for dinner in Santa Monica (see <http://nscodernight.com> for more info), fair warning: developers only, we're not a user group or a bunch of prime recruiting targets. We've had the occasional person stop by trying to recruit or whatever that get quickly ignored, so... :)

<comment><USER2> _Thanks for the link to the Thursday lunches, never knew about them. Would be cool to drop by one day :)_

Tomorrow would be good. ;-)

(Though I may skip tomorrow, I have the opportunity to go to a talk on public policy perspectives on potential marijuana legalization that sounds interesting.)

Your first time it is good to make sure you're on time. If you've been there a couple of times, you'll know who to call to figure out where it is. (I'm perpetually 5-10 minutes late to it.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> We still have room for one more presenter, if you're interested reply in the thread.

</comment><comment><USER4> Thanks for the heads up on HN -- I wasn't aware of the group but joined it now.</comment>


Understanding the mind by studying ant colonies - <AUTHOR> http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/ants_and_neurons/

<comment><USER2> I'm still wondering what happened to the whole 'social' movement for web apps in the early 2000's.

Facebook and Twitter came along and suddenly people were only interested in whoring themselves (and buying iPhone apps) instead of inventing apps (and using them) to change the world with 'social' or truly democratic means.

Moral: People tend to only care about themselves ("look at all my followers!") Big, hard global/social problems can wait for 'the next generation'.

</comment><comment><USER3> Swarm intelligence is a fascinating concept that has interesting possibilities in the computing world. Whether it be finding near optimal solutions to NP- Complete problems through the use of algorithms like Ant Colony Optimization or applications in robotics, such SI approaches to common problems will gain an increasingly amount of importance down the line.

As I'm entering my last year as an undergraduate in Computer Science, I'm thinking that my senior project may deal with utilizing swarm robots in some sort of pathfinding problem. Now, if only I could afford enough arduinos...

</comment><comment><USER4> Similarly interesting research modeling bee colony nest choice through individual agents: [http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2009/03/bees_nesting_an.ht...](http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2009/03/bees_nesting_an.html)

The paper is rather straight-forward for anyone here, so I'd recommend just reading it directly.

<comment><USER4> PDF: [http://www.ma.rhbnc.ac.uk/~elsholtz/WWW/papers/papers28liste...](http://www.ma.rhbnc.ac.uk/~elsholtz/WWW/papers/papers28listelsholtzseeley.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> How does it work again (I remember reading up on ant behaviour)? An ant comes straight back on the same path, when it finds food. Since ants leave pheromone markers, this path is now stronger, so other ants know and will in turn follow. A simple algorithm leading to a higher aggregated outcome.

</comment><comment><USER6> Emergence is my favorite science. It's infinitely applicable.

Also, this article is another reason why I love this magazine.

</comment><comment><USER7> Very interesting study. It could also lead to interesting insights when it comes to swarm (or the more proper term, crowd) psychology in general. Or maybe we'll finally find the mechanism(s) by which we form/join mobs. This seems like something worthwhile.</comment>


Ask HN: Any good book recommendations for aspiring product managers? - <AUTHOR> I am thinking about making the switch from Software Engineer to Product Manager. Does anyone have any books that they can recommend as must reads for product managers? <comment><USER2> Let's get this conversation started.

What do you see is the role of a product manager?</comment>