A Type of Simulation Which Some Experimental Evidence Suggests We Don't Live In [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://philpapers.org/archive/ALEATO-6.pdf <comment><USER2> > Suppose we live in a computer simulation with the following x-xˆ property: > for each memory-bit x in any computer in our world, there is a memory-bit ˆx > in the simulating computer such that ˆx is used to store which value is > stored in x. Then any such x is subject to two different types of soft > errors:

One thing I've never understood about the simulation theory is that if we live in a simulation, we have almost know basis for making any assumptions at all about the nature of the reality in which we're being simulated. If you assume it's like ours in every way, then it's also equally likely to be a simulation, and on to infinity.

<comment><USER3> I wrote a paper arguing that 'ancestor' simulations are effectively impossible. Part of that argument was that, in order for the simulations to be meaningful, the world had to work largely the same way as our own. (Otherwise, it's not an 'ancestor simulation'. Other types of simulations could work.) You could, for instance, just project a 'video' of the sky every night to save some energy costs. Until the simulated people gain the ability to, say, practice photometry. Then your have to spend a bit more energy simulating the actual physics. So, as time progresses in your simulation, energy costs rise.

Eventually, your simulated beings develop the ability to compute. There are some things you'll be better at optimizing, but over time the simulated beings will get closer and closer to the optimal way of doing an operation; at which point any operation they do is an operation you are doing.

Until they generate a simulation of their own. That's when it all falls apart. At the point they make their own simulations, now you're paying in energy for your simulations, plus all their simulations and their simulations' simulations in an infinite chain. Voila. Infinite energy requirement. (There's some caveats here... some simulations may result in a dead world, but presumably every successful simulation would run more than one successful simulation of its own.)

So, your options are:

1\. End the simulation when the simulation becomes capable of running its own simulation.

Useful, perhaps, but not very for a very old civilization. It's not clear that humanity 1 million years will be that interested in simulating the first X00,000 years of humanity.

2\. Dumb down the simulation.

However, this would have to be done "just so" so that the energy use limit converges as the depth of simulations approaches infinity. This also provides a mechanism for a simulation to detect that it is a simulation (I forget why, it's been awhile), making the entire exercise not useful as an ancestor simulation.

3\. Prevent simulations from running their own simulations.

Like (2), this potentially allows the simulation to discover that it is a simulation. It also may make the results of that simulation less useful. If you, for instance, wanted to know what the world might be like if event X happened differently, you could change that event and let the simulation run, but as soon as you got to the point where they would have run their own simulations, you can't be sure of your results.

<comment><USER4> You don't add any energy from a simulation that is running a simulation. The higher-level simulation has to devote some portion of its own resources to running the lower-level simulation, and that cannot grow larger than all the resources available in the higher-sim universe. If the lower-level sim has more simulated resources, that just means a resource in the higher-level sim has to be multiplexed somehow.

In terms of simulations like our own universe, if we simulate a universe twice as large as our own, using half the resources in our universe for the sim, and reserving the other half for us to continue to live in, then barring any shortcuts or optimizations and assuming multiplexing by time, the sim will advance one simulated second for every four real seconds. All that simulated energy is already tied up in the simulation hardware we built in our universe.

If we are living in a simulation, then the parent universe won't ever have to spend more on our simulation than the maximums they set when starting it. Unless we break out of the simulation and hack our own simulator to allocate more resources, of course. We can't up the requirements from within, because the parent could just start multiplexing some resource without any simulated person ever noticing.

Also we have no way to know whether the resources of a simulator-parent are infinite or not, or the aleph numbers of any infinite resources they may have.

We think we might have an infinite universe, but the portion of it we can observe is finite (but very large, encompassing many galaxies), bounded by our light cone and the expansion of spacetime. If quantum effects are really just lazy evaluation in the simulator, the simulator should be able to prune everything we cannot observe.

<comment><USER3> That's really no different than (2). I'm specifically talking about ancestor simulations in which the world of the sim is largely identical to the real world. Changing from infinite resources to finite is a big change. And having the simulation run more slowly than real time probably defeats the point. Imagine waiting for 600+ years for the simulation to complete to find out what would have happened if Abraham Lincoln hadn't been assasssinated.

<comment><USER4> I argue that the distinction is effectively pointless, because human imagination can already simulate our reality. Have you ever had a particularly vivid dream? Ever daydreamed about punching that smug customer in the face, or launching a rocket at that ass in front of you in traffic?

What would happen if you had a dream about having a particularly vivid dream? If you dream in that dream that you're having another dream, does your real brain cook itself from using too much processing power? If you dream that someone else is having a dream, does that matter at all to your simulation? It's entirely possible that you never have to simulate that at all, because the dreamer forgets all about their dream when they wake up, and that branch just gets pruned.

By that standard, the (1) simulation would halt the instant some random animal ancestor fell asleep. The (3) simulation could not model anyone that made a decision based on a portentious dream--such as the dream about seven fat kine and seven lean kine found in a millennia-old book with some cultural significance. Only a (2) simulation has any chance of producing meaningful results.

And given the predictability of events, you would need to run that Lincoln simulation hundreds of times to learn anything from it, and many times more if you want any reasonable degree of precision. Nobody wants to wait 1000 years just to find out with 95% confidence what Lincoln might have eaten for breakfast a month after not being assassinated. You could prune more extensively if you had a specific question you wanted answered. Even if you just want to wander around in a simulated Lincoln-unassassinated Earth, the sim could still prune based on what you decide to look at. The sim would probably have to simulate Lincoln's impact on journalism regardless of whether you read a newspaper or not, but if you never stop to smell the flowers, it could probably prune Lincoln's impact on gardening.

An ancestor simulation has a great advantage over an alien simulation, because it can play back recordings of real observations rather than simulating or randomizing results from scratch.

<comment><USER3> I think we are talking about apples and oranges. The dream metaphor is inapt, because your brain is consciously experiencing only 'level' of that dream. There is only one "you". In the case of the simulations, each 'level' is independently conscious.

The idea behind ancestor simulations is that the simulated people are conscious. If we aren't talking about that, then of course there is no chance we are in such a simulation.

So, you can't really skip what Lincoln had for breakfast, because Lincoln has to experience it and because it can affect him. Maybe the chef poisons him. Maybe it gives him the runs and he cuts a speech short. Maybe he has an allergic reaction and misses an important meeting.

In any case, if you could prune it and we are in a simulation, then none of us would ever have the experience of having breakfast.

<comment><USER4> The solipsistic argument says that I can't ever really tell if you are really a conscious being or just a simulation of a conscious being. I can't tell if the real world actually exists, or if I am a brain in a jar being fed simulated sensory data.

And we don't need the experience of having breakfast if we have the _memory_ of having breakfast. If you copied one memory of me having breakfast, randomized a few variables, and replayed it to me later, it would be unlikely to impact any of the impactful decisions I make later.

Since you're running a simulation, you can choose whether or not my breakfast needs to be simulated in detail or elided over after identifying a decision node that might be significantly impacted by my breakfast. I honestly probably wouldn't do anything differently if you swapped gravlax and bagels for eggs and toast. So you can usually replay a partially memoized breakfast sequence as it happens, and revise the simulation, overwriting my memory and that of all witnesses, if it turns out later that my breakfast might have an impact on something else.

So every day, I have memoized breakfast routine. At 3 PM one day, there is a potential for a hangry conversation at work that might get me fired. Now you can backtrack, copy all my variables from this morning into the breakfast simulator engine, and this time everything is simulated in detail. Then you patch the detail results over the rough results, and I can't tell the difference, other than the fact that I can now remember significant details of my breakfast, rather than a blur of things I usually eat in the morning.

You might not be able to skip _Lincoln 's_ breakfast, but you could skip a few million other breakfasts.

So that leads to the existential horror. Do I actually still exist if I'm not doing something meaningful to an external observer _right now_? Maybe most of me is just a slipshod model of a generic person, that exists solely to produce some initialization variables for a detailed simulation of some-guy-on-the- Internet replying to you, and then after I'm done, I'll just go back to being an NPC with no personality of my own.

<comment><USER3> Any shortcut you take you are no longer running an ancestor simulation. The reason you don't memoize breakfast is because the entire point of the simulation is the simulation of the conscious beings you are simulating. If you memoize away their decisions and actions, you take that away. And I strongly suspect retrofitting reality to match countless decisions is going to be more expensive than simply running it in the first place.

> I honestly probably wouldn't do anything differently if you swapped gravlax > and bagels for eggs and toast.

That is unknowable. Maybe in making the eggs and toast, you leave the house a second later, and a driver that ran a stop sign that would have hit you passes in front of you instead.

You're not _wrong_ that you can skip breakfast and take all these short cuts. You can do whatever you want in the simulation. But if you do, you're not running the type of simulation that is called an 'ancestor simulation'.

<comment><USER4> > _Maybe in making the eggs and toast, you leave the house a second later, and > a driver that ran a stop sign that would have hit you passes in front of you > instead._

This is likely unimportant to answer the questions that the simulator is supposed to answer, which means that no one would ever bother running one ancestor simulation--as you define it--when they could instead run multiple trials of a different kind of simulation for the express purpose of eliminating such confounding "want of a nail" moments. "We ran this ancestor simulation for 10 million years to find out what logfromblammo would eat for lunch on 13 August, 2018, and the results were ruined when the simulated logfromblammo was killed in traffic that very morning, just before the entire simulator planet was demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass. We'll check the budget to see if we can reset for another run."

Maybe the other driver also had a breakfast that delayed their departure by one second, and now they hit me again. In one ancestor simulation, you won't know all the various circumstances that contribute to the causation of an event. If you do cut corners, you can say that there is an X% chance on any given day that I get involved in a traffic collision.

So an ancestor simulation--as you define it--is functionally identical to walling off a piece of your own universe, rearranging matter inside it to conform to initial conditions, and then watching it to see what happens.

If your universe is itself a simulation, how does the parent universe detect the difference between someone running a simulation and Magrathean-scale engineering projects? If I commission a planet that is a perfect copy of Earth on the day before Lincoln was assassinated, and black-bag Booth an hour before he shows up at the theater, is that an ancestor simulation? Do I need to wrap it in a perfectly black shell and project sunlight and starlight through it from time-appropriate locations? That only requires that the star you use for energy is a bit more energetic than the sun. If you simulate a planet that predates astronomy, perhaps to see what would happen if dinosaur-like creatures hadn't been wiped out, you wouldn't even need to do that. Your total energy requirements for the lifetime of the simulation are the delta-v required to build an Earth-like planet with a Moon-like moon and move it into an Earth-like orbit around a Sol-like star.

We wouldn't be able to detect if our planet is a simulation by dinosaurs, to see what would have happened if their planet had suffered an extinction-level event before they launched themselves into space. How do you tell the difference between a naturally-formed and artificially-constructed planet? Likewise, how do you distinguish between someone trying to compute an ancestor simulation and someone just running an immersive MMORPG? If you did create a single ancestor simulation larger than a few interacting atoms, it rapidly loses its scientific power, due to all the variables you intentionally did not constrain. How is that not just an amusement park?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Another thing no one considers. If the simulator or maintainers of the simulation identify that the individuals being simulated are aware of or close to determining they are in a simulation, they may alter the observations in the minds of the individuals being simulated to indicate there is no simulation.

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<comment><USER7> Could you please not do that here? HN is a text-only site.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This paper is assuming the simulating universe has things like "particles" and "cosmic rays". The properties of the simulating universe, including foundational things like rules of logic and mathematics, could be literally unimaginable (by design or accident) within the simulation.

<comment><USER9> As I wrote in another comment, you can still come up with theories for certain types of simulation, and test whether their properties hold or not. I suspect no one in the "simulation community" ever expects to disprove a simulation completely, but as the authors did you can try to come up with a likely simulation model (maybe close to how we would do it) and try to refute that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> (a) Maybe the simulator uses ECC RAM (b) Maybe the simulator's world is as similar to our world as the Game of Life is to Earth.

<comment><USER11> Author here. The type of simulation ruled out is "external-soft-error-prone simulation with (two other properties)". If the simulator uses ECC RAM, then the simulation is not external-soft-error-prone.

You might say: "But surely the simulator does use ECC RAM!" Yes, but that's speculation. It's nice (and surprising) that a concrete experiment can empirically support it.

<comment> shaded-enmity How exactly would the 1:1 bit correspondence work in practice? What is the binding between simulated and external bit? Wouldn't we need to operate at the edge of Landauer's principle to really rule out this possibility?

<comment><USER11> Imagine if you were to program a video game in which players could interact with in-game computers, which were implemented as genuine full-feature emulations of working computers. It seems plausible that a memory-bit in one of the in-game computers would have its value stored in a memory-bit in the real computer on which the game was running.

<comment> shaded-enmity What do you precisely mean by genuine full-feature emulations of working computers? If the in-game computer is represented as some "physical model using fundamental particles" than each bit of simulated memory is backed by, I don't know, gigabytes of data about properties of those particles? Isn't what constitutes a bit strictly dependent on the process making the actual reading? How would the simulator know what is considered a bit of information within the simulated system, and intentionally map it 1:1 onto a real memory bank?

If we discard these problems, wouldn't that imply that if such mapping were possible, that the simulation would also have to be strictly Anthropic i.e. the only running "software" are minds being fed data as "sensory" input?

<comment><USER11> Things that the players think are computers. Sorry for such a vague answer, but here's an example.

Suppose some people live in a Minecraft server, unaware there's anything else. Within the game, they build some computers (search for "working computer in Minecraft", it's been done many times).

They run their computers a long time and observe soft errors. The soft errors are caused by cosmic rays hitting the Minecraft server in the real world, but our heros don't know that. They attempt to protect their computers, moving them underground and setting guards to make sure no creepers get in, etc. But nothing they do stops the soft errors. Of course! What could they possibly do to stop soft errors caused by real cosmic rays hitting the Minecraft server?

<comment><USER12> It might be interesting to do exactly that - rerun the OP example in a Minecraft server, attempting to prove that it is a simulation.

Proving the simulation hypothesis true in Minecraft could give ideas on how to prove it in our universe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I don't really follow the argument. If the number of errors in the vault were nonzero, it would most likely indicate that the vault did not screen some ("real", "physical") effect that could cause errors. For instance, you could have errors due to radioisotope decay, low-probability interactions with neutrinos, etc.

<comment><USER12> They acknowledge that:

> Without additional technology, we are unable to tell which soft errors were > external and which were internal.

...

> Perhaps this paper's most interesting conclusion is just that a non- > contrived simulation hypothesis is falsifiable in a concrete way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think compute power is what matters, not amount of simulations. Compute power available in simulated realities vs base reality will always be significantly in favor or root reality.

And parsimonious simulation won't work, or would be even easier to detect than what this paper was talking about.

</comment><comment><USER15> > A paper by O'Gorman et al [1] describes (p. 46) the following experiment and > its results. A total of 864 modules were first run on the second floor of a > two-story building for 4,671 hours, during which time, 24 soft errors were > detected. Then, the same 864 modules were run for 5,863 hours in a nearby > vault shielded by about 20m of rock, during which time, zero soft errors > were detected.

Interesting, but there's no guarantee that time moves at the same rate both inside the simulation and outside of it -- indeed there's a good chance that the simulation runs much faster than the external environment. A 25% increase in observation time seems way too low to draw any kind of conclusion.

<comment><USER11> Assuming external-soft-error-proneness and x-x and uni-directionality, we can think of a "space" of possible simulations we might live in, thought of as quadrant 1 of an x-y plane where x represents "how many seconds pass in our simulation for each second in the real universe" and y represents "frequency with which soft errors occur in the simulating computer". Different experiments would rule out different parts of that plane with different probability.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The computer could have enough error correction where it doesn't matter.

</comment><comment><USER17> I love this title and abstract; we need more of this kind of plain speaking and rigor when dealing with mysticism-adjacent areas.

</comment><comment><USER18> I think we are not in a simulation. Though our world is pretty close in principle to a simulation -- there are certain (small number of) building blocks which contruct this complex world. That should be it.

</comment><comment><USER19> The simulation conjecture is a funny way to get around to Intelligent Design.

<comment><USER20> I don't see how that follows.

<comment><USER21> If we're in a simulation, it must be running on a simulator. That simulator is presumably not just a natural feature of the universe - that's just "laws of nature deeper than we have discovered so far", which I take as something different from "simulator". In fact, the simulator (by my definitions) has to be an artificial construction - that is, created by an intelligence for a purpose.

That doesn't necessarily get you intelligent design of _life_ , but it does get you intelligent design of the _universe_.

I, too, find it amusing that we've decided that God doesn't exist, that the natural universe is all that exists. And then some people decide that we're in a simulation, that the universe is an artificial construction created by someone outside of it (but who totally is not God). I'd find it even more amusing if I thought that the simulator people had a reasonable position. (To me, "you can't prove me wrong" does _not_ imply "therefore I'm probably right".)

<comment><USER22> Curiously, parallel to this thread, there's another one on HN, which discusses (the lack of) exceptions in golang. And the reasoning starts out with "we don't need exceptions", so we throw them out the door, but then, after a couple of intermediate steps, they come back through the window. Same door- window scenario is playing out here :)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


ExploreRails on Kickstarter - Screencasts exploring the Ruby on Rails internals - <AUTHOR> http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1295127299/explorerails-the-inaugural-6-episodes

<comment><USER2> I think a code deep dive is always a good thing. I like seeing what's under the hood and seeing what's behind the magic.

I hope this gets some traction.

</comment><comment><USER3> Great idea. FTIW I'm also writing a book on Rails Internals.

<comment><AUTHOR> Any details on the book? (I obviously think it's a great subject matter.)

<comment><USER3> Not yet, but will be soon.</comment></comment></comment>


Yitang "Tom" Zhang and fame in mathematics - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/43/heroes/the-twin-prime-hero-rp <comment><USER3> I found his old beef with his graduate advisor interesting.

From wikipedia:

"Zhang's Ph.D. work was on the Jacobian conjecture. After graduation, Zhang had a hard time finding an academic position. In a 2013 interview with Nautilus magazine, Zhang said he did not get a job after graduation. "During that period it was difficult to find a job in academics. That was a job market problem. Also, my advisor did not write me letters of recommendation." The reason behind this is that Zhang's research pointed out the mistakes made by his advisor Tzuong-Tsieng Moh's previous work. Moh was very unhappy with this and refused to write the job recommendation letter for Zhang. Zhang made this claim again in George Csicsery's documentary film Counting From Infinity while discussing his difficulties at Purdue and in the years that followed. Tzuong- Tsieng Moh, his Ph.D. advisor at Purdue, said that Zhang never came back to him requesting recommendation letters.[8] In a detailed profile published in The New Yorker magazine in February 2015, Alec Wilkinson wrote Zhang "parted unhappily" with Moh, and that Zhang 'left Purdue without Moh's support, and, having published no papers, was unable to find an academic job'"

His advisor wrote his own version of events here: [https://www.math.purdue.edu/~ttm/ZhangYt.pdf](https://www.math.purdue.edu/~ttm/ZhangYt.pdf)

Crazy how this one guy derailed a genius like Zhang. Glad to see he found his way back, but sad that he had to endure almost a decade in the wilderness - <USER2> one point even homeless (living out of his car) - working minimum wage jobs just to get by.

<comment><USER4> It actually sounds like the "having published no papers" bit was the primary reason he wasn't able to get a job. Not having an advisor recommendation is not a good sign, but it's hard to argue with published work.

<comment><USER5> I don't think a PhD can get any _interview_ for academic jobs at all without adviser's reference letter.

It's worse than no publications.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I find this very inspiring, because it seems like he's not necessarily a genius but just worked really hard and didn't give up. Also, he was in his late fifties when he published his proof, going against the commonly held belief that mathematicians do their best work before 40.

[edit:] Peter Sarnak from Princeton does call him a genius. When you read about him online, you actually find several other people who have known/worked with him to call him that as well. So I guess I was wrong.

> Why did you solve this problem and not somebody else?

> I think the important reason is that I persisted for several years. I didn't > give up.

> How long did you work on your conjecture?

> I worked on my conjecture for four years. I worked on it seven days a week. > I didn't take any breaks almost. If we count the time I spent thinking about > the problem, then it was more than 10 hours a day. If you count sitting in > front of a desk or using a computer, then it was five or six hours a day.

<comment><USER7> One thing I think you will notice both with him and others who are successful was that they never were interested in fame or success. He seems to do mathematics merely because he enjoys it.

What I'm trying to say is that perhaps you shouldn't worry too much about whether you are a genius or smart enough but just try to be happy by doing something you enjoy.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, also it's worth pointing out that he _finished a PhD in math_. That is already genius level mathematics as far as most people are concerned; certainly relative to your average undergraduate STEM student.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > Q: Is the most likely application of this result in cryptography?

> A: Yes, this should be true.

> Q: Are you interested in cryptography?

> A: Not so much.

Pure mathematicians are awesome.

<comment><USER10> And:

> Q: What do you think of Grigori Perelman, who turned down the Fields Medal?

> A: I think it was because of his personality also. Maybe he himself was very > proud of himself. Maybe he looked down on other people, even looked down on > very important prizes and medals.

> Q: Would you accept a medal?

> A: Yes.

> Q: What would you do with the money?

> A: Maybe the best way would be to give the money to my wife. Let her deal > with this issue.

Wow.

<comment><USER11> > Wow.

There's quite a few cultures where it's a traditional norm to put one's wife in charge of the household finances (cultures in which that wife tends to be stuck at home running it, whereas the husband is mostly home to sleep and otherwise working himself to death). The husband is given sort of an allowance to spend. It's not a strange idea for many people on the planet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There's an interesting 1-hour-long documentary about him: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIIyKWxGhEA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIIyKWxGhEA)

<comment><USER6> Follow-up video where Terence Tao explains in very simple terms the history of the problem(s) and how people improved on Zhang's 70,000,000 constant afterwards: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pp06oGD4m00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pp06oGD4m00)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The article mentioned Polymath 8, which lowered the bound from H=7*10^7 to 4680. This bound has since been lowered[0] to 246. \--- [0]: [https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2014/02/21/polymath8b-ix- larg...](https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2014/02/21/polymath8b-ix-large- quadratic-programs/#comment-297456)

<comment><USER12> I believe it's 246 iff the generalized Elliott-Halberstam is true, and 4680 iff it's false.

edit: Never mind. You're right. It's 6 assuming the generalized Elliott–Halberstam conjecture is true, and 246 without assuming the conjecture.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> " _What would you say to a young student who wants to solve a problem?_

 _Keep going. Do not easily give up._ "

Sounds like good advice.

</comment><comment><USER14> Such a huge inspiration. He has achieved the impossible with all odds against him.

</comment><comment><USER15> Yitang Zhang and the Twin Prime Conjecture [2015 Documentary][https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIIyKWxGhEA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIIyKWxGhEA)

</comment><comment><USER16> Is Zhang a genius? Maybe not, but consider the possibility that he is. We have a particular expectation of what a genius looks and sounds like that he doesn't conform to.

Jeremy Lin, again, didn't look like a star, except to a few geeks who reckoned his numbers told a different story to that his own coach believed.

How many people like Lin and Zhang are we missing? Those who, given a little more opportunity, could have become obviously exceptional.

<comment><USER17> I can't endorse the movie "Whiplash" because it is so crass, but it takes an interesting look at what it takes to be truly great. I don't think we "miss" people like Lin and Zhang because they make themselves. Intelligence and skill really make a small part of the overall requirement for success. Hard work, perseverance, preparation, and choosing the right problems to work on are really more important.

<comment><USER16> But the problem stands no matter which qualities you think are important. Lin, for instance, was just plain lucky. He was due to be dropped but a spate of injuries gave him an opportunity to shine he hadn't had before. Equally, you can talk about any number of desirable qualities Zuckerberg and Brin had but you can't ignore the fact that they went to accelerators for gifted children rather than a public school in the rough end of town.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This guy sounds like a plant. A plant which is great at mathematics.</comment>


This Aussie Teen Wanted People to Understand His Autism, So He Made a Video Game - <AUTHOR> https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2017/11/the-australian-teenager-using-video-games-to-explain-autism/ <comment><USER2> A good (U.S.-based) autism resource:

[https://www.autismspeaks.org/](https://www.autismspeaks.org/)</comment>


Facebook Can Tell You If A Person Is Worth Hiring - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/03/05/facebook-can-tell-you-if-a-person-is-worth-hiring/

<comment><USER2> The data are meaningless. They got data on the job performance of about 10% of the people whose Facebook pages were rated. There is no significance, either statistical or real. Worse, the "finding" seems designed to tell employers it's a good idea to snoop into candidates' private lives in the interview process. Here's an opposing thought: Facebook pages of smart people aren't public. They are strictly for private communication between a circle of friends. Therefore, employers could only hope to see the Facebook pages of stupid people - good luck with that! - or people who are so desperate for a job they will hand over the passwords to their private lives to strangers. Just Say No didn't work very well in the eternal "war" against drugs, doesn't work at all as a birth control measure, but seems appropriate for a boycott of snoopy employers. Let them hire morons. Justice will be served.</comment>


Google is retiring Latitude - <AUTHOR> http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2013/07/a-new-google-maps-app-for-smartphones.html <comment><USER2> Disappointing, but not unexpected, because I was the only person I knew using latitude. My wife and I used it to know when each other were coming home from work, so we weren't providing much value to google.</comment>


Google, don't politicalize yourself — China's official news agency - <AUTHOR> http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/indepth/2010-03/21/c_13219289.htm <comment><USER2> _In fact, no country allows unrestricted flow on the Internet of pornographic, violent, gambling or superstitious content, or content on government subversion, ethnic separatism, religious extremism, racialism, terrorism and anti-foreign feelings._

The US basically does. The government never censors the Internet; producing child pornography or running an illegal gambling site may be illegal, but there is no filter on Google to prevent you from finding those things. Terrorism, anti-foreign feelings, racism, government subversion, ethnic separatism, etc., are reprehensible, but are protected speech here. The government could find itself in trouble if it prevented someone from publishing something about one of those topics ("prior restraint"), and has lost many cases where it has tried to remove this information after the fact.

Basically, anything goes except libel, obscenity with no cultural value, and speech to incite imminent lawless action.

So basically Xinhua, get a clue. China is the outlier.

<comment><USER3> Internet censorship: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship>

Pervasive: Burma, Cuba, Egypt, Iran, North Korea, People's Republic of China, Syria, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Vietnam

Substantial :Australia, Bahrain, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Yemen

Nominal and others: Belarus, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Fiji, Finland, France, Germany, Ghana, Ireland, India, Israel, Italy, Jordan, Malaysia , Mexico, Morocco, Netherlands, Norway, Pakistan, Poland, Russia, Singapore, Slovenia, Sweden, Thailand, Turkey, United Kingdom, United States of America

Specifically the US, although not much:

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

<comment><USER4> Man that makes sad -- go Australia :S Although, note that at this stage it is still "nominal" in practice while the plans are yet to be implemented.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Pretty smooth of the PRC to redefine this as "Google trying to make a political statement" rather than "Google deciding it can't do business in a country that sponsors attacks on its systems."

<comment><USER6> I see no reason why these two are mutually exclusive. If I boycott a company due to disliking their business practices, can I not also be making a statement?

In fact, I support Google in this because it _is_ making a statement, even if that's not the primary intention.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's not about aligning with certain politics (!= policies).

It's about something higher, about human rights.China should not be giving any lessons to anyone about this kind of stuff.

I guess China fears that Google's movement will start a pattern of western tech/internet companies leaving China.

Would Chinese companies be able to fill the void leave behind be those companies? I'm not sure.

We are about to watch a game of _victimhood_ (sorry, not sure if that's the word) played by the Chinese Govt. Let's see how that works.

<comment><USER8> Not just tech companies I'm sure. For example HSBC moved it's world headquarters to London before Hong Kong was handed over to the PRC.

Source: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hsbc#History>

If your company is in China, it's implicitly controlled by the gov't since it has authoritarian rule.

<comment><USER9> That's not a correct statement. Your Chinese company has the rights set forth by their laws. It is true their judicial process is prone to more corruption than in the U.S. But thats spotty and changing as well. You just can't always count on winning a court battle in China because your rich and connected anymore.

I have witnessed very powerful Chinese officials and businessmen not take action against a rival because the action would have been unlawful and they didn't want to risk the penalties. I have seen mid-level government officials block attempted actions from senior officials because the actions didn't follow the rules.

<comment><USER8> I'm assuming the CCP can win a court battle because it's rich and well connected in government (well, if dominance can be described as "well connected").

<comment><USER9> The CCP _is_ the government. The distinction is that government is operated with officials that sit on the administration side and others that sit on the "party" side. They all have their functions.

Here's an anecdote for you: a young chinese lady contracted HIV from a hospital blood transfusion. When it was found out, she was fired from her job and her family threw her out.

She sued. Not just her employer and the government hospital but the government as well for not protecting her. She won.

There are quite a few stories of the little person going up against government and winning.

A few months ago, a waitress at a restaurant (hotel) was being accosted by two drunk men..assuming she was about to get raped, she stabbed them. I think one of them died. Turns out they were high level local officials. The girl was given leniency by the court as they understood it was self-defense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I would never have found this and appreciate you posting it.

Fascinating, though I hope history will disagree with the message of this piece.

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure history should disagree with it. The underlying message is that corporations shouldn't be playing politics, and that's an increasingly popular public sentiment in the USA as well (or the internet amplifies it).

How is Google trying to manipulate foreign government different from the health industry lobbying for their own interests?

<comment><USER11> No company should be forced to do something it's executives and employees find morally wrong. They are not actively trying to usurp the Chinese government and I don't see anyone claiming Google is bribing people and push for self serving laws in Beijing.

Lobbying can be ok if it's done in a fair and open matter. Which it is not. Lets not forget that corporations have employees and those employees are often better off when their corporation has an easier time doing business.

<comment><USER3> While I agree in general with what you're saying I don't think most of it applies to Google's situation.

\- Google was never forced to do anything. They chose to. The cost of doing business in any location is abiding by any number of laws that businesses must evaluate to see if they're willing or profitably able to operate within.

\- They didn't seem to have many moral problems for the first 4 years.

\- They very publicly announced they had a problem with the situation and tried to force the Chinese governments hand with an ultimatum - change the laws or lose Google's business.

<comment><USER12> _\- They didn't seem to have many moral problems for the first 4 years._

The reason Google didn't have a problem for the first 4 years, is because for the first 4 years it wasn't clear who was going to win the search engine war in China. Now it is clear, the winner is Baidu.

Google is leaving China because they have clearly lost in China and rather than take second place, they are inventing a principled stand and forcing China to kick them out.

Baidu has 3/4 of the search market in China and it's growing.[1] Rather than Google search traffic hitting zero, they're leaving in a political charade. What better excuse for losing to Baidu?

[1] [http://brainstormtech.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2009/12/28/googl...](http://brainstormtech.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2009/12/28/google- v-baidu-which-company-will-win-china/)

<comment><USER13> 30% of a market the size of China doesn't seem like loosing. Companies survive off of much less, 1% of the market is often plenty enough.

<comment><USER12> Except they have barely half that percentage and it's declining.

<comment><USER13> The problem is dealing with a socialist country you never really own what you have made. They can come in anytime and take away your manufacturing plant, confiscate your physical goods, or block your website. It always happens without fail.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The only thing that I wonder (and fear) about this piece -- is whether this is the only slant on the story that Chinese citizens will be allowed to access.

<comment><USER12> I fear for the safety of the Google employees who are still there. At best they are going to lose their jobs -- at worst, their _lives_.

<comment><USER15> I suspect that's unlikely. Google and it's country specific domains are the most trafficked sites on the internet. The level of visibility is too high to make examples of anyone. Worst case scenario they block access and carry on like nothing changed. Best case, China realizes it must make certain concessions if it wants to continue growing it's economy and fostering competition. There is no reason India should be the only billion person democracy.

<comment><USER12> How _exactly_ does Google help grow China's economy? I don't really think China cares much for Google -- not the people or the govt. They won't care to lose them. I don't see any evidence that they will. Baidu can take care of whatever crumbs Google leaves behind.

<comment><USER16> Check out alibaba.com, the website basically do SEO on Google and it visions itself as a bridge for small business owner in China (manufacturers) to the global market. By the way, it is a listed company in Hong Kong.

<comment><USER12> I use alibaba, but I didn't get there through google. Nonetheless, it's a good example, except that the google that is referring people to alibaba is the US google.

I should have been clear, how is google.cn benefitting google's economy in a way that isn't also being covered by baidu or any other search engine for that matter?

<comment><USER15> It benefits Chinese users to have competition between Baidu and Google. Otherwise, there's no reason for improvement. China want's to have a part in the information economy, not just the manufacturing economy.

<comment><USER12> _I_ believe improvement is valuable for the sake of improvement. I don't believe competition is the only reason for improvement. See my comment here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1213199>

<comment><USER15> Maybe a few centuries into the future, but at this stage we're still focused on market economies. In your other post you mention betamax vs VHS. You can build a superior product, but if it's cost is too high it won't fit the market need. Baidu has captured significant market share in China and has little reason to spend money innovating. Google has global market share and can continue to compete and innovate in other markets without the Chinese.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > It is unfair for Google to impose its own value and yardsticks on Internet > regulation to China, which has its own time-honored tradition, culture and > value.

But fair for the CCP to impose it's filtering on the people.

I think the fundamental issue is that they are trying to make improvements (opening up) to its policies but wants to do it on it's on terms, which is slightly understandable. "It" being the Chinese communist party. And the prevailing sentiment among all Chinese is that the west (aka pretty much just US) is meddling in the "opening up." I mean after what the US did in Iraq, I can see why they are hostile.

</comment><comment><USER17> They say:

 _In fact, no country allows unrestricted flow on the Internet of pornographic, violent, gambling or superstitious content, or content on government subversion, ethnic separatism, religious extremism, racialism, terrorism and anti-foreign feelings._

Not true, the US allows all this, with very minor exceptions.

<comment><USER18> Online gambling is, at least to some degree, illegal in the US

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

So are certain types of porn and anti-government websites.

<comment><USER17> Yes, online gabling is mostly illegal, thus my "minor exceptions".

But all types of porn except child porn are allowed as far as I know. Definitely all types of anti-government websites are allowed. The first amendment confers very strong protection on free speech.

This Chinese news release is trying to mislead. I think the average Chinese citizen would be shocked to learn the level of freedom of expression and access to information in the US.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Ironic for the Chinese government to talk about obeying laws, when they don't even obey their own laws.

Maybe Google should point this out to them.

And there's no rule saying companies need to stay out of politics. Even if there was, Google, from the outset, said it was going to be a different kind of company.

</comment><comment><USER20> How many people in China have internet access? How many people in China even know what Google is? How many people in China do even care about all of this? I may be naive, but I don't see chinese people being vocal on any matter regarding "their rights" - either they are satisfied (in majority) with their system and it's not anyone's business outside of China, or they are contempt but silent about it - which, again, shouldn't be anyone's business outside of China until they ask for outside help.

<comment><USER21> I think that this is an interesting and valid point. My perception from visiting China and talking to recent mainland immigrants to America is that most people in China think that their government is basically doing a good job, and basically looking out for the best interests of the Chinese people. No one there would argue that everything the government does is in their best interest, but if you think that the government is doing a good job on most issues, you'll probably be complacent.

To a certain degree, the same thing is true in America and other western nations. There are a _lot_ of issues to be upset with, and that most people would disagree with the government on. Everyone has problems with the government, and on certain issue most people think the government is wrong (e.g. most people think that Congress spends money wastefully, and that our representatives look at more for their own interests than those of their constituents). But as long as you basically feel that the government is doing the right things -- and I think most people do, looking at things from a holistic perspective -- then you're likely to forgive the transgressions of your government. Or at least you'll limit your disagreement to grumblings, instead of actively protesting or campaigning against the government.

I would argue that the position of the Chinese people is, if not right, at least defensible on these grounds. The quality of life has been improving rapidly in China, and certainly the prestige of the country has been on a huge upswing for the past twenty years (e.g. in economic terms, the space program, political power in international diplomacy, etc.). In such an environment you might not be too worried about Internet censorship (most of which is probably censoring things you don't really care about). As their expansion catches up with them, and the rate that China can increase its wealth and prestige slows down, that will probably change, and people will find more reason to be concerned with censorship and other human rights issues within China. But that could be a while off.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> It's a usual stance for China to claim some situation is an internal affair to block outside meddling.

When the bird flu broke out, China blocked Taiwan's access to the World Health Organization to get information on how to deal with it--mostly on the grounds that it is an internal affair.

</comment><comment><USER23> _In fact, no country allows unrestricted flow on the Internet of pornographic, violent, gambling or superstitious content, or content on government subversion, ethnic separatism, religious extremism, racialism, terrorism and anti-foreign feelings._

<sacasm> ...except Sealand </sarcasm>

Anyway, there is a great divide between letting a good majority of this kind of stuff through vs blocking as much of it as you can (eg, 99.9% vs ~30%)

In both instances you can say that no country is allows unrestricted flow, but that is not an adequate measuring stick for data flow.

</comment><comment><USER24> Has this been machine translated, I wonder why is the English of the article so poor? News agencies in China don't have anybody who write proper English?

<comment><USER25> "Anybody" is singular, so your last sentence should be: "News agencies in China don't have anybody who writes proper English?"

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> "no matter in which country you conduct business, you have to obey the laws and regulations there."

Quoted for truth.

<comment><USER2> That's why they're leaving, so they don't have to obey the oppressive third- world laws and regulations there.

<comment><USER26> "we intend to continue R&D work in China and also to maintain a sales presence there"

Doesn't sound like they're leaving to me. If they were to leave properly they would shut down all operations and 404 the .cn domain. Instead they've just redirected and uncensored their services. To me thats just more drama, another move on the chessboard.

<comment><USER27> They are no longer serving search from china. That means they are no longer responsible for censoring those results. China is responsible for censoring them. China has no laws that say just because you have a presence in our country you must censor all of your sites on the internet. The redirection is merely a courtesy to the china users not all of whom by the way are in china. The Hong Kong site is still censored just this time China has to do it all by itself without Googles help.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Walmart and Best Buy Opt Out of Apple Pay – Required Point-of-Sale Upgrades - <AUTHOR> http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1776896 <comment><USER2> The comments there are pretty much why people talk about a "distortion field" around Apple. It's basically person after person saying, "once all the iPhone 6 users start wanting to pay, they'll have to change their mind."

A few stats (from [http://www.statisticbrain.com/wal-mart-company- statistics/](http://www.statisticbrain.com/wal-mart-company-statistics/)): Wal-Mart, as a country, would be the 19th largest economy on earth. Of every $1 spent in the US, $0.06 goes to Wal-Mart. There are 100,000,000 shoppers in Wal-Mart _every week_.

NFC needs to become the way you expect to pay for things. Otherwise, it's Passbook -- that thing you vaguely remember that your phone can do, but that you don't really use, because in the time it takes to figure out if you can, you could just swipe your card.

If anyone's going to push it mainstream in one big push, it will be Apple pairing it with new iPhones. But it's not a given that that's the way it plays out, and every large retailer who pulls out is important.

<comment><USER3> > Of every $1 spent in the US, $0.06 goes to Wal-Mart.

I do not believe you. How can that possibly be true?

<comment><USER4> In the UK it's often stated that £1 in every £7 spent in the UK is spent in Tesco - a large supermarket chain. [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/8471807/Its-time- Te...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/8471807/Its-time-Tesco-haters- stocked-up-on-facts.html). This similarly sounds impossible. Maybe there's some extra constraints they don't mention - just supermarkets, or just consumer spending. I know I certainly don't spend anything like £1 out of every £7 in Tesco, or any other supermarket. For example I'm sure I've spent many times more on buying my house than I will in Tesco in my entire life.

This is the sort of thing that More or Less should look at [http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qshd](http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qshd).

<comment><USER5> That must be wrong.

Tesco turnover is £63bn, UK GDP is £1550bn, so it is 4% of GDP, which is equal to total expenditure.

Your house is misleading, as assuming you borrowed the money, that is other people's deferred expenditure (saved money) which you will pay back later, so that nets out when you pay the money back.

<comment><USER6> Apparently it's "Tesco is expected to confirm this week that one pound in every seven that is spent in British shops goes through its tills." So house sales not included.

[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1548742/1-in-every- se...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1548742/1-in-every-seven-now- spent-in-Tesco.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I have two thoughts on Apple Pay:

1) Android has had cardless payment for 2+ years now via Google Wallet. That being said, Japan has had similar technology for way longer. While the marketing machine that is Apple made sure to let everyone know how magical/revolutionary/awesome/brilliant this form of payment it, Apple is late to the game. Similarly, other products such as Softcard/ISIS exist too from non-smartphone companies. Thanks Apple for finally catching up.

2) Apply Pay will, however, finally give cardless payment the push it needs. Apple has the market power to get retailers to start (read: more than rarely) embrace this technology (for example: Passbook & tickets). That I can fully support Apple for as the iPhone is the single best selling phone and will get NFC into the hands of millions very, very quickly. And with the volume of devices + Apple's marketing of Apple Pay = great news for payment.

<comment><USER8> I don't think your first thought is relevant for all of this.

It has been quite clear for quite some time that mobile payments was not a technology problem but a policy problem. The technology was not just ready for it with the release of the Nexus S - it was ready for it for years before that! The problem was getting people to actually use it. Since most vendors were trying to use mobile payments for their own short-term gain, things were going nowhere.

Apple has not "caught up" in that sense at all since they weren't behind in any meaningful way. There was no important reason for smartphones to have NFC as there did not exist many use cases for it _without_ payments. Although I had high expectations of NFC when I bought my current Nexus phone two years ago, things simply never got off the ground in that area.

The contribution that Apple Pay makes to the market is quite unique if you look beyond technical merit. It provides an intuitive user interface for _anyone_ 's payment product for use in mobile phones. It isn't tied to your prepaid Google Wallet card, it isn't tied to your SIM card, and it isn't tied to propietary point of sale hardware. Furthermore, it is being pushed

I'd argue that Apple is the only one with the required leverage to push something like this into a market obsessed with conservatism and self interests. They have the power to convince shops and banks to cooperate with it, moreso than Google. Moreover, because they have their own hardware, it is easier for them to integrate a secure element and a user-friendly authorization method (the fingerprint scanner) to have an integrated solution.

It's not as if Apple has reinvented the wheel or anything, and I hope nobody is claiming that. But their execution of this idea seems very good. And it is the execution of the idea, your second point, that is the important part here. I hope that Google can fight off its own and carrier interests, and follow suit with a similar application. Many Android phones already possess all required hardware.

<comment><USER9> As mentioned in the article, Apple is taking advantage of required changes in POS systems to help make this push.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Apple Pay will have slow adoption simply due to it being tied to new phones and/or the US. That's tiny in global payments. Then I think its early traction comes via in app mobile payments. Things like Lyft and Uber. From there it'll branch out into physical retail. Short answer is the battle at retail is still 2-3 years away at least and that's OK

<comment><USER11> I'm a techie and there's no way I'd consider using NFC until it's as simple as swiping my credit card. If it got that simple though - what would be the point? My credit card works fine.

Do I need another middle-man between me and my money expenditures? Nope. I already have trouble with Amex being overly secure and blocking my purchases at certain sites and locations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> If the technology that Walmart is backing only requires a software update to existing phones then it is not nearly as secure as apple pay.

A lot of people are comparing Google wallet and apple pay like they are the same thing - they are not. A phone with compromised firmware could leak sensitive data with Google wallet but not with Apple pay.

<comment><USER13> Depends on implementation.

NFC has that "secure element" thingy, that is, a TPM, like a SIM card. Implementations may vary. I'm unaware on actual Google Wallet NFC implementation, but I heard rumors (which are not certain by any means) at least Samsung had some hardware-assisted keystore. And I doubt Visa or MasterCard would permit Android vendors to do things on a phone's base OS a manner that could be exploited with a software hack.

<comment><USER12> The card details were stored on the secure element but the pin was not and because the authentication is not done using the secure element it is trivial to bypass: [http://cybersecurity.mit.edu/2012/10/google-wallet- overview-...](http://cybersecurity.mit.edu/2012/10/google-wallet-overview- threats-and-security-measures/)

The current implementation of Google wallet stores your card details in a google server which protects against these attacks but is not a viable business model (google are making a loss on every transaction since they pay it and then bill the customer themselves).

<comment><USER14> I suspect they consider it a worthwhile cost to get their hands on a persons complete transaction history

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's pretty weird that both Walmart and Best Buy will probably be required to advertise Apple Pay and yet won't support it at their registers that is going to burn a lot of customers. If they don't want to support the NFC payment movement they shouldn't sell the products that have NFC. They are just going to regret this decision at some point when NFC is the norm and they have to do yet another round of POS upgrades.

<comment><USER11> The phones doe a lot more than NFC payments. Why _shouldn 't_ they take a customers money just because they're betting that NFC payments will never achieve widespread popularity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> is the fundamental act of a card swipe broken ? On on hand, I can clearly see the value of Square... and on the other hand, I can also see the value of business models like LevelUp (that commoditize mobile payments and leverage marketing budgets).

But is a disruption of mobile wallets vs credit cards even possible ? Why would a 19-year old college student prefer it ... or why would a 30 year old professional switch to it _over credit cards_ ?

<comment><USER17> I recently switched from magnetic stripe card to chip card and it is far slower to do a transaction... and by the end of 2015 most cards in the US will be chips probably... so I guess this could be one reason.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm not up-to-speed with Apple's new shiny things, is Apple Pay compatible with existing contactless payment systems over here in the UK?

<comment><USER19> Yes, it is. djhworld is laughably wrong.

All the contactless systems Visa/MC/Amex are deploying in the world are variants of PayPass/PayWave which are all based on an international standard and will work no matter what. The article djhworld linked to is talking about how users _in_ the UK won't be able to add cards to Apple Pay because Apple doesn't have any deals with UK banks. If you go visit the UK and have an already-enrolled Apple Pay account, it will work at contactless terminals.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> One general issue I would have with Apple Pay is that I use credit cards that give me specific rewards such as money back or airline status-related benefits. Of course, there's no reason that Apple Pay couldn't be tied into similar reward programs but until it is, anyone who currently uses a reward card is likely to keep pulling out the plastic rather than bump the phone.

<comment><USER21> According to [http://www.apple.com/iphone-6/apple- pay/](http://www.apple.com/iphone-6/apple-pay/):

> Apple Pay works with most of the major credit and debit cards from the top > U.S. banks. Just add your participating cards to Passbook and you'll > continue to get all the rewards, benefits, and security of your cards.

<comment><USER20> Ahh. Thanks. I realized it worked with the existing credit card processing networks but didn't know it worked with the actual already issued cards--but, thinking about it, it makes sense that it would have to. (Given that it's the actual card issuers that determine credit worthiness, etc.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm guessing that Walmart customers are more likely to use Android vs. iOS.

<comment><USER23> All customers are more likely to use Android vs iOS, even in the US as its marketshare is much greater. Unless you just mean to imply that people that shop at Walmart are poor, which whether true or not, is irrelevant.

<comment><USER24> Why would it be irrelevant to Wal-Mart that Apple's marketshare is even lower amongst their customers than in the general population? I think it's crucial to note that price-conscious bargain shoppers and luxury fashion phone buyers may not overlap as much as the general numbers would indicate.</comment></comment></comment>


Stop Freaking Out About the NSA - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/frame_game/2013/06/stop_the_nsa_surveillance_hysteria_the_government_s_scrutiny_of_verizon.html

<comment><USER2> Who wrote this bullshit article?

1\. This _is_ wiretapping, _par excellence_. Metadata in aggregate is shitloads of data, and tells a much more compelling story than the data.

2\. Judicially supervised means the public needs to _know_ about the process, and be able to challenge it. Some NSA agent visiting some "judge" who signs a piece of paper in the darkness is _certainly not_ "judicial oversight".

3\. US Congress is biased, and lubricated with money on a daily basis. It is beyond me how the US people continue to believe in a political system so cynical and so corrupt.

4\. Quick expiration is irrelevant when these orders keep getting re-approved every single fucking time, and again, with no oversight whatsoever.

5\. Um, yeah, so the NSA is apparently collecting _data_ from 9 big internet companies. What's that about "further court orders"?

Congratulations, William Saletan, on the worst rebuttal ever of what is now, de facto and de jure, one of the largest surveillance states in the world.

<comment><USER3> Still better than Google, though, who are actually reading the content of all my e-mails and documents, without so much as even notifying a judge, or even a "judge" as you refer to them. It is beyond me how Americans continue to believe in a political system so cynical and so corrupt that allows a corporation to gather so much data about private citizens without any oversight whatsoever.

What is Google doing with the data? Who has access to it? How do they make sure it doesn't fall into the wrong hands?

And if you say the difference is that you're surrendering your data to Google voluntarily, I'll say it's not that different from what you do with the phone companies. What you had here was lack of information. You simply didn't _know_ the government was collecting your data. Well, now you do. Most Google users aren't aware that Google is actively scanning and analyzing their information either. The only difference is that the US government owes the people an explanation, while Google reports to no one, as long as its egregious widespread surveillance - which, BTW, is on a much bigger scale than this NSA business - is considered legal. The only reason Google gets away with it is because people either don't know, or would rather not know how their personal information is used by Google (I would add "against them", but that is a metter of opinion).

<comment><USER4> I have authorized Google to do that. For my secret communication I maintain my own mail server.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I am reminded of the story linked on HN a few days ago detailing how many people were in solitary confinement in US prisons and how they ended up there.

Many of the people were in solitary because the bureaucracy had decided that they were associated with a gang. And even if the link was tenuous then into solitary they would go being allowed out of their cell for an hour a day.

I can imagine this dragnet of NSA data being used one day for similar automatic spurious bureaucratic purposes. If the wrong person rings your mobile phone asking about something you're selling on craigslist then say goodbye to your security clearance. And heaven help you if you get involved in the US criminal justice system.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is clearly link-bait.

 _It's limited and supervised._

Seven years of daily collections from every major telecommunication company in the United States is _limited_? I struggle to comprehend what William would consider excessive.

</comment><comment><USER7> So can we freak out now? :: [http://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/us- intelligence...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/us-intelligence- mining-data-from-nine-us-internet-companies-in-broad-secret- program/2013/06/06/3a0c0da8-cebf-11e2-8845-d970ccb04497_story.html)

</comment><comment><USER8> The funny thing is this is about _yesterdays_ story, dealing with just metadata. The article asserts that it's no big deal because it's just metadata.

With today's revelation that they're slurping everything from everywhere with no accountability, this article is now comedy.

</comment><comment><USER9> Contrarian to be contrarian drives eyeballs, which drives ad revenue. Keep writing stupid articles Will.

</comment><comment><USER10> We need this again: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Committee>

</comment><comment><USER11> "Any senator who's expressing shock about the program is a liar or a fool. "

Or a good politician. A Senator's purpose many times is just to play to the masses and appear to be outraged at what happens regardless of what the truth is. That's the way they operate so it can appear that they are concerned and getting to the bottom of protecting honest hard working Americans.

They do come off as jackasses frequently. But not everyone that votes for them sees it that way.

<comment><USER12> > play to the masses and appear to be outraged at what happens

Exactly and typically they won't take a stand unless they can turn it into a wedge issue to rally their base into playing the red vs blue game.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> No.</comment>


Responsive Web Considered Harmful - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/cool-code-pal/responsive-web-considered-harmful-f3a2f075e971#.u1ekahhqe <comment><USER2> Such a garbage article I couldn't finish it.</comment>


Ask HN: Resume parsing library/API recommendations? - <AUTHOR> Anyone here knows a good resume parsing library or API? I am planning a startup around skill building. Thanks! <comment><USER2> Yes, would love to see some stuff here as well. Not much open source, difficult domain problem, apacke tika seems to be mentioned sometimes as backend tool</comment>


Ask HN: I have been sued by a patent troll what do I do? - <AUTHOR> I run a website development company and have been sued by a patent troll in the Eastern District Court of Texas for supposedly violating a patent on building websites using online software. What do I do next? <comment><USER2> Get a good lawyer, even if you only pay for a couple of hours. There are things you can do immediately (depending on whether you received a letter or they actually filed a suit) that may make them go away.

I was party to one of these a couple of years ago and if we had received good legal advice early it would have been much less expensive in the long run.

</comment><comment><USER3> You either commit to fighting, or you capitulate.

If you fight, it will be expensive, but you will likely win, and establish a precedent that's good for the whole world.

If you capitulate, it will be expensive.</comment>


Amazon Redshift - What You Need To Know - <AUTHOR> http://dailytechnology.net/2013/08/03/redshift-what-you-need-to-know/

<comment><USER2> These are very different databases, PostgreSQL is a transactional database, while Redshift (aka: ParAccel) is an analytical database. Each of these databases have implemented much different design decisions, which improve queries on certain type of workloads.

PostgreSQL is optimized for blazing fast record mutations, inserts, while maintaining adequate query response times on medium to large size data. Redshift (ParAccel), or your other analytical databases like Greenplum, Teradata, or Netezza make optimizations that make sense for queries that pertain to the majority of a tables data (full table scans).

For example, Redshift stores stores a tables columns in separate locations, allowing you to not only skip reading columns which don't pertain to the query, but also allows for easier disk parallelization. Keeping your columns separate from each other slows down things like record reconstruction, since you're performing n disk seeks, where n = # of columns...this is bad for databases where you need a single record. Databases like Redshift are meant to compliment your MySQL and PostgreSQL databases, not replace them.

Shameless plug (I work at Cloudera): For reasons unknown, the article dismissed Hadoop without listing any reasons. If you're interested in having a secondary system designed for doing ad-hoc queries over your large datasets (billions of rows), I suggest trying out Impala. You can run it across a few servers you have sitting around... [http://rideimpala.com/](http://rideimpala.com/)

<comment><AUTHOR> > These are very different databases..

Sure, they are. The point is that the API is similar, so developers already familiar with SQL, or libraries that speak SQL (SQLAlchemy in our case) can speak to Redshift. I attempted to make that point in the post, hopefully I can make that more clear.

> For reasons unknown, the article dismissed Hadoop without listing any > reasons.

I didn't feel that it was the place for it, but the basics are that we didn't have the skills in place to restructure our system to use Hadoop. Second, our data structures are constantly changing, which Hadoop didn't accommodate very well. Third, we were not able to accommodate ad-hoc queries as every reduce operation needed to be figured out prior to running. Last, we were looking for something to handle "large" data sets, but not "big data." Hadoop works great for "big data" (petabytes) but it was overkill for us (working with terabytes).

I'm sure all of these problems could have been resolved, but the point of my write-up is not to kick dirt at Hadoop so much as to explain how Redshift fit our needs. Other companies, I'm sure, have different needs and should of course make their own evaluations.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the clarifications, I wasn't not meaning to discredit your article in anyway. I am just trying to help people understand that these databases are very different from eachother, and were created to solve different use cases.

> Hadoop works great for "big data" (petabytes) but it was overkill for us > (working with terabytes).

This is a very common misunderstanding about Hadoop, terabytes of data is still very large when you want to apply complex transformations, or allow someone to run queries over it with low latency expectations (a few seconds).

Impala does not use MapReduce, it was designed with low latency goals in mind...speeds are comparable to RedShift ([https://amplab.cs.berkeley.edu/benchmark/](https://amplab.cs.berkeley.edu/benchmark/)), although they are citing an older version.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting. I will definitely check out Impala. Thanks for bringing it up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> In the COUNT(*) example, looks like you annotated the wrong snippet.

"5 seconds! That's an improvement. Note that I didn't make any adjustements to the data: no indexes, no differences in table structure." should be 1.5s.

<comment><USER4> Looks like he typo'd and put a space in between the "1." and the "5", which got interpreted as an ordered list.

<comment><AUTHOR> Whoops, thanks for catching that. I didn't actually have a space there, but it did get interpreted that way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> select count( * ) from dummy_table;

takes 10 minutes on PostgreSQL to return the result 21454134?

With H2, an open source embedded SQL database I use daily, a "select count( * ) from table_name" query returns the result instantly. I assumed therefore that this was the norm...

<comment><USER6> As mentioned by sargun (who was irritatingly downvoted by someone) the difference is that PostgreSQL uses the MVCC concurrency model, which allows you to do quite complex queries concurrently with other people making writes to the database, but comes at the cost that there is no longer any objective count of the rows in a given table: the number of rows is related to which transactions are considered live at any given moment.

[http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Slow_Counting](http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Slow_Counting)

<comment><AUTHOR> In my case, this was inadvertently a good comparison. Most of the "ad-hoc" queries we're doing are AVG, SUM, or similar operations that require scanning the entire table.

I may try to edit this post to compare those operations, as it may be more meaningful.

Thanks for posting the link. TIL.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > Redshift smelled enough like PostgreSQL

I'm curious. How does something smell like Postgres? Does it use some of the same PG-specific datatypes?

<comment><AUTHOR> It uses similar data types and has a similar API. The differences between the two are summarized in the documentation.

[http://docs.aws.amazon.com/redshift/latest/dg/c_redshift- and...](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/redshift/latest/dg/c_redshift-and-postgres- sql.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think beside familiar PostgreSQL enviroment there is not much advantage over SAP HANA. I listed advantages of HANA on my posting [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6466222](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6466222)

<comment><USER9> Redshift is a SQL relational database for large structured data volumes, whereas Amazon EMR (Elastic MapReduce) is for non-structured data. The Redshift FAQ has more details on this topic: [http://aws.amazon.com/redshift/faqs/#0120](http://aws.amazon.com/redshift/faqs/#0120)

Other than the marketing buzz from SAP, I have not seen any reputable (neutral) comparison between Hana and Redshift that includes price. I also have never met anyone that uses/run Hana that was not already an SAP ERP client, albeit the fact that SAP keeps saying Hana is the fastest-growing product in the company's history.</comment></comment>


Example.com Is Down - <AUTHOR> http://example.com/ <comment><USER2> Works fine for me.

<comment><USER3> doesn't work for me: "IP could not be resolved"</comment></comment>


Brain Games To Make You Smarter - <AUTHOR> http://reyneiro.com/

<comment><USER2> I get the message but the clunky implementation of the website is so distracting that I closed it in frustration.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is one of those times where I think the HN title rules work against itself. The page does say 'Nothing is impossible', so this title is legit, but it's just a page of a bunch of mobile games. Apparently they are 'Brain games to make you smarter', but all I see are games.

I'd suggest a title change, but that goes against HN policy.

<comment><USER4> There is usually more than one candidate title on the page. When a title heading from the page (or, in rare cases, the first sentence of an article) contains an obviously more informative title, it's ok to use it. For example, when I scrolled down I saw "Brain games to make you smarter" in a heading, and used that instead.

One thing we try (really hard!) to do is not to impose words of our own on the content, but rather use what's already there. You can nearly always do that with one of the original titles. (I use the plural because many if not most articles have multiple titles to choose from.)</comment></comment>


We Didn't Evolve for Lifelong Monogamy - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/s/story/monogamy-as-a-mismatch-disease-2a45fd223afb <comment><USER2> This headline is nonsense. It should tip you off that the author isn't a scientist. He's "Writer of fiction & non fiction".

My partner of several years is an evolutionary biologist. She says there's selective pressure for some monogamy and also some non-monogamy. Each has pros/cons and increases adaptability in certain situations. Evolved behaviors are never black and white or universal.

There's also not much evidence on what selection occurs after reproductive years end, but having more grandparents to raise children is likely selected for.</comment>


Tell HN: 360 Voltage is out of Beta (10 PRO accounts to giveaway to HN) - <AUTHOR> http://360voltage.com/blog/2009/11/360-voltage-is-out-of-beta-our-complete-set-of-free-online-marketing-tools-is-live/ 360 Voltage is out of Beta, it's a set of online marketing tools that my agency envisioned for in-house use and decided to turn into a freemium web site along the way, which we now use in house (natch). To say that HN has been good to me is an understatement, it's an oasis of rational thought and discussion in a wasteland of online social media sites... (</digression>)
So I've got 10 yearly 360 Voltage PRO account subscriptions ($149/ea.) to give away here to some devs who would really dig into the site, use the tools, and then give us ongoing feedback as we iterate like mad and try to populate the blog with useful content. Obviously, that's all unenforceable, but you get the idea...
Once again, I'm giving away 10 yearly pro account subscriptions to HN users to help us prime the pump on our freemium web site, which is a search marketing tool set called 360 Voltage. If you're interested:
1) Create a free account on the site. (360voltage.com) 2) Leave an initial impression of the site in this thread 3) Shoot me an email via wade [at] voltagecreative [dot] com with a sentence or two about how you'd use the tools. Also include your 360 Voltage account name in the email so I can flip it to PRO status on the back end.
I'll post, "Thanks guys, they're all gone" in this thread once they've been spoken for. (If I get more than 10 requests, the PRO accounts will be awarded subjectively/pretty-much-randomly by me.) <comment><AUTHOR> 360 Voltage is out of Beta, it's a set of online marketing tools that my agency envisioned for in-house use and decided to turn into a freemium web site along the way, which we now use in house (natch). To say that HN has been good to me is an understatement, it's an oasis of rational thought and discussion in a wasteland of online social media sites... (</digression>)

So I've got 10 yearly 360 Voltage PRO account subscriptions ($149/ea.) to give away here to some devs who would really dig into the site, use the tools, and then give us ongoing feedback as we iterate like mad and try to populate the blog with useful content. Obviously, that's all unenforceable, but you get the idea...

Once again, I'm giving away 10 yearly pro account subscriptions to HN users to help us prime the pump on our freemium web site, which is a search marketing tool set called 360 Voltage. If you're interested:

1) Create a free account on the site. (360voltage.com)

2) Leave an initial impression of the site in this thread

3) Shoot me an email via wade [at] voltagecreative [dot] com with a sentence or two about how you'd use the tools. Also include your 360 Voltage account name in the email so I can flip it to PRO status on the back end.

I'll post, "Thanks guys, they're all gone" in this thread once they've been spoken for. (If I get more than 10 requests, the PRO accounts will be awarded subjectively/pretty-much-randomly by me.)

<comment><USER2> Hi Wade,

This looks like a good site. I checked out the Voltmeter test and it gave me some info I already knew, but also some information that might help with site ranking. So it seems like you're on the right track!

I'll definitely be checking out your site more in-depth moving forwards!

Btw, I enjoyed the little messages that appeared while I was waiting for the report to run (e.g., "Web crawlin' ain't eeasy!"). It may be a bit trivial, but I got a kick out of it anyways.

<comment><USER3> its the little things we put into this that make it nice :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> "A unique site analytics tool that can peek into your users browsing history and tell you where else your market is gathering online."

How would you peek a users browsing history, and if you did manage it how legal/unevil is that?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's an old and well documented exploit that never has been, and probably never will be, fixed due to it's intrinsic nature to the web...

We can't actually peek into anyone's history the way a layman might take this statement. What we can, and do, do is load up a list of links and see which one's have been visited. The freemium accounts just load up our default list of the top 100 sites online and looks for hits. Pro users can customize their check list to ad competitors and other URLs of interest.(See timdorr's response below.)

A tool like this good for finding out if your users are more of a MySpace or Facebook crowd, more of a Yahoo or Bing crowd, etc... for market research purposes. If you have a PRO account and can customize your list you can ad direct competitors and see which ones get cross-shopped with your product the most online, etc...

Example usage: Let's say you want to run an ad on one of the top tech blogs. You could plug 100 tech blogs into this tool for a week and see which ones your crowd reads the most. Now you know a good place to advertise to get a second brand impression.

Addressing "evilness" - I don't consider it any more intrusive than any other type of analytics. And it's also completely disabled with Javascript turned off. So, as always, users are welcome to empower themselves.

On another note, I've been waiting to have this conversation with an informed crowd, what do you guys think about using this for the purposes stated above?

<comment><USER5> Personally I place high value on knowing my customers and I would really like a comprehensive solution to get that knowledge. To be comprehensive it would have to include techniques to compel users to fill out surveys, participate in usability studies and other direct interactions in addition to the passive observance that you do. And yes, knowing the visited links is helpful in my quest, it's just not the whole story. The way I see it, I want either an ready-to-use building block to roll my own, or a wholes-story thing, but I have no use for a wholes-but-different-story thing.

I understand this would be a different product/service from the one you are making, but you may find this perspective valuable.

Also, lose the kittens. It's the wrong kind of childish.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Thanks for sharing this tool. Turns out I had a free account already, must have come up across it before. I'm particularly excited about Randal, which solves a (relatively) simple problem (keyword monitoring) that I haven't seen done well yet. The Voltmeter report took quite a while to complete, but other than that the UI seems intuitive. Look forward to getting a chance to play with it more, I'm working on the SEO efforts at Optask (<http://www.optask.com>).

</comment><comment><USER7> This is... pretty awesome. I've only tried the Voltmeter so far, but what I really like is the education that comes with the results. You guys have done a really good job of explaining each factor in plain English. It's very easy to understand.

</comment><comment><USER8> I love this site. Please think of adding catchpa for signup. Its very easy for a script to scrape and create quite a number of accounts. Very useful guide to improve search results.

* Voltmeter - How is the keyword targeting decided? I got unexpected keywords for my site.

* RANDAL - I used to check where my site appears for given set of keywords. It solves the problem automatically.

Haven't checked other tools yet. Will be doing it soon.

</comment><comment><USER9> Hey, I like what I think this site is supposed to be. I think I broke it though. I have two reports generating in my account somehow and so neither of them are coming through.

Edit: OK, one came through.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, we can run multiple reports, but doing so doesn't make the first one complete any faster. ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks guys, they're all gone. I appreciate all the feedback and would love more. I'll sort through the ton of emails I got and notify _everyone_ who sent me an email of their account status.</comment>


Mithril React Ember Knockout Angular - <AUTHOR> http://jsperf.com/mithril-react-ember-knockout-angular/4

<comment><USER2> to save a minute or two of your time, i ran this test; results: [http://gyazo.com/d39a8c3de39c0f3a0621b507daf59a0c](http://gyazo.com/d39a8c3de39c0f3a0621b507daf59a0c)

by this metric, mithril > ember > angular > knockout > react</comment>


Essay contest: Is reality digital or analog? - <AUTHOR> http://www.fqxi.org/community/essay

<comment><USER2> It's an interesting topic, but if you look at the challenge questions, most of them raise issues with the idea that reality is digital. But from the little I know, modern quantum theory is analog. The polarization state of a photon is expressed as a point on a unit circle. That's analog. It takes an infinite number of decimal places to precisely express the state of the photon. In that sense, it represents an infinite amount of information.

But the paradox is that if you try to store information in the photon state and then read it out, you can only store 1 bit. How much sense does that make, that you have a state that takes an infinite amount of information to represent, but in practice you can only store one bit? Why would there be such an infinitely information-hungry infrastructure, to support such limited, information-poor storage?

To put it in terms people around here might appreciate, imagine if Google required an infinitely large cloud computer to store just one bit. They wouldn't stay in business long. That's no way to run a universe.</comment>


Learning Emacs, any tips or tricks, best tutorial? - <AUTHOR>

For many many years I used my own, homebrew editor, aptly named 'e' (I don't like typing more than I need to). This worked quite well until about a decade ago when I started to work more and more on other peoples machines and it bothered me that I always had to spend time to move my environment with me. So I decided to standardize on the minimum that is always available, which turned out to be vi(m).
This worked really well for a long time, even though I never got to the level of being a poweruser I managed to get through the day.
I've used 'leo' for a while, an awesome little project, it is essentially a literate programming editor and I really liked the concepts behind it but it has some serious shortcomings as well (does not work in terminal mode), so I had to let that go.
I've decided now to invest serious time into learning a new editor and have chosen to leave vi(m) behind and to move to emacs.
Are there any tips & tricks that you think I should be aware of? I've googled a bit for guides on learning Emacs but nothing that strikes me as suitable turned up, however I can't imagine that I'm the first to try this, the key 'emacs tutorial' turns up a wild variety of material, too much to choose from really and lots of it of questionable heritage and/or dated (which may not be bad by itself).
What would you use as a starting point if you were to point a new emacs user to today? <comment><USER2> Hello,

as someone who shied away from regular IDEs to use Emacs for programming work, I would recommend that you start setting things up for some very specific need.

As it was already pointed out, Emacs is huge and you will never stop learning it. Therefore, if your main line of work implies writing Java code, I would recommend you look for some tutorials that are particularly aimed at that, and build on those as you need more out of your editor. For example right now I am looking at learning org-mode to be able to do time tracking with it.

If you seriously consider using Emacs all the time I would recommend remapping the Ctrl key to Caps Lock for easier typing.

Since you were asking for some tutorials, these are the two tutorials that I found most useful in defining my Emacs setup:

<https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/effective-emacs> \- specific things that are very useful in your configuration

<http://devblog.avdi.org/category/emacs-reboot/> \- someone in the ruby community, remaking his emacs config from scratch and explaining it as he goes

I am no where near a proficient Emacs user, but maybe I can provide some insight as a fellow learner if you get stuck. I believe my e-mail should be in my profile if you have any problem starting up with Emacs.

Have a nice day, Vlad

<comment><USER3> This absolutely, best way to learn is to have a specific goal in mind. I got started with emacs because I was using an IDE called RStudio (<http://www.rstudio.com/>) which I really liked, and I wanted something similar for python but couldn't find anything to suit my needs. I set out to recreate the functionality of RStudio in emacs and have (largely) succeeded. It took a lot of mucking around but I really learned my way around the editor.

<comment><USER4> Well done to have replicated RStudio for pyhton on Emacs. I am interested by that, do you have the ELisp code somewhere? Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The GNU Emacs Manual is pretty comprehensive ([http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/ind...](http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/index.html))

One of the things about Emacs I've discovered over the years is that you never finish learning it. It's so extensive. That's how I ended up reinventing this wheel: [http://blog.jgc.org/2013/03/automatic-bookmarking- locations-...](http://blog.jgc.org/2013/03/automatic-bookmarking-locations-in- emacs.html)

</comment><comment><USER6> Hey there,

I used to Vim too, and started using Emacs since I started doing a lot of Clojure development. Since then, I have not looked back. The power and flexibility of Emacs is second to almost none. Just the other day, I was working on a Latex file, and I had a buffer open with a pdf viewer right next to my tex file, that would update as soon as I saved changes to my tex file. And the community has done almost everything you can think of already. If not, just write it yourself!

To get started, I would highly recommend using Emacs Prelude: <https://github.com/bbatsov/prelude> It's incredibly useful and user friendly, and makes your Emacs all the more powerful. This is a good intro article to it: <http://batsov.com/prelude/>

The other blog that I find useful even as a fairly seasoned Emacs user is <http://www.masteringemacs.org/> It has some great guides and tutorials for beginners too.

</comment><comment><USER7> I agree with the people recommending the built-in tutorial (C-h t) and the official manual. Emacs' documentation is very good.

Also, the basics of Emacs haven't changed since forever so some of those dated resources you mention may be just fine.

Good luck! I hope you like it.

</comment><comment><USER4> I dont have a tutorial to offer you, but here's what made semi-comfortable with emacs:

\- install the emacs starter kit [0] as it's much user friendly than the raw emacs

\- learn the most used shortcuts (C-w to cut, M-w to copy, C-Y to yank (paste), C-x C-s to save, C-x C-f to open a file, C-k to kill a text, C-a to go at the start of a line and C-e to go at the end, etc.)

\- try to use emacs for everything and slowly get more and more comfortable at it.

[0] <https://github.com/technomancy/emacs-starter-kit>

</comment><comment><USER8> You didn't say what operating system you are using. When I 'got into' emacs it was with the OS X-ish version, Aquamacs.

Which _is_ emacs, but with Mac friendly bits. At first I used it simply as a replacement for Textmate, then later got into things like TRAMP, and org-mode.

I didn't need a guide or a how-to. Every so often I would wonder 'I wonder if Emacs can do this, or that', google it, and learn that it could.

</comment><comment><USER9> If it's only about the "editor" part of Emacs then I would recommend starting with an Emacs-like editor mg[1]. It's clean, small and has nice manpage that I feel wouldn't overwhelm newcomers. It also has some of the basic commands helpful for programming.

[1] <http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi?query=mg>

</comment><comment><USER10> The built in tutorial (M-x tutorial) is good.

M aka Meta is generally Alt on a PC keyboard or Alt+Esc on a Mac.

</comment><comment><USER11> some bite sized emacs tips <http://rawsyntax.com/blog/categories/learn-emacs/>

and a great introduction to setting up emacs <http://batsov.com/articles/2012/10/14/emacs-on-osx/>

posts on various emacs topics <http://www.masteringemacs.org/>

</comment><comment><USER12>
      (menu-bar-mode nil)
      (tool-bar-mode nil)

It'll force you to climb the very steep learning curve to Emacs mastery.

</comment><comment><USER13> RTFM?

<http://shop.fsf.org/product/Emacs_Manual_24/>

</comment><comment><USER14> Emacs tutorial itself is a nice start for you.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thank you all!

</comment><comment><USER15> M-x doctor ;)</comment>


Ask HN: How does the GDPR affect Internet archives or caches? - forgot-my-pw Esp on the right to be forgotten. <comment><AUTHOR> Amazed nobody commented on this. I know there is a lot of information but from technical point of view imho it is impossible to comply fully. Moreover I actually believe it creates more not less security risks. I reduced caching expiration time within the days to remove limit and for archives I listed up the most important ones in the executing rights procedure with feedback to customer for feedback about other urls they are concerned with. Even though lawfully this information is classified differently.</comment>