When should I disclose my hacking convictions? - <AUTHOR>

Hey guys, I appreciate any insight this community can share with me.
First some context: I'm a full-stack dev, on the job-market, interviewing mostly at small-to-medium companies (3 - 50 employees). A few years ago (circa 2009-2010) I made some very foolish mistakes and ended up with 5 hacking felonies. I served a little time, paid some restitution, and got on with my life. I was finally released from probation 2 months ago.
My question is: At what point during a job-search / interview-process should I bring this up? I've tried putting it right on my resume (just to "get out in front of the issue") but then nobody seems to return my emails. I've tried staying mute and waiting for them to ask or mention a background check, but I'm worried that this tactic makes it seems like I'm hiding it or being deceptive.
Is there a best-practice for this? Or is it company-specific?
Lately, if I know that the work might require a security clearance, I'll disclose before the first conversation, just so I don't waste their time. A recent potential-employer gave me advice yesterday along the lines of: "Any small startup who is still raising money might need to know up-front, because of the potential for investors to run background-checks on early-stage team members during a round" - Is there any truth to this comment, in your experience? Would a VC care if I'm a non-founder?
On the other hand, I've been wondering: Is it possible that some small startups never ask about criminal history because they don't wan't to know? In that case, should I just default to being quiet until asked?
Again, any insight from this community would be very much appreciated. I've been going in circles with my logic, and I'd love some outside advice.
Thank you <comment><USER2> This closes off some avenues to you, but isn't a career killer, particularly if e.g. you work in security. (Of all things.)

I don't know why you'd disclose this without first being asked. If they don't ask, it isn't because they _don 't want_ to know, it's simply because it isn't in their decision calculus. I would not inject it into their decision calculus, in the same fashion as I wouldn't say "Don't have great reasons to not hire me? I can think of three!"

Your recent potential employer has a curious understanding f how much VCs notice non-founder employees, to my understanding. Feel free to check that with people who do this for a living, but I'd bet on most VCs being unable to name non-founder non-management employees, to say nothing of running background checks on them.

<comment><AUTHOR> Right on, thank you for the thoughtful reply. Much appreciated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I agree with patio11's 'decision calculus' point. And I'll add that if you don't plan to repeat your actions at the company, then you don't hurt them by staying silent until they ask--you'll just carry on as a normal employee.

I don't have a felony, but I _do_ have to decide whether (and when) to allow a potential employer to know I'm gay. I know it's not legally the same, but it works the same way in terms of the interviewer's 'decision calculus'. Bringing it up is literally pausing to ask for explicit judgement.

I've always intentionally stayed silent in an interview about being gay, since I always plan to carry on as a 'normal' employee. At work, my intimate life doesn't interfere, just as your history is in your past.

<comment><USER4> As a fellow gay man, I kinda know what you mean. I often out myself in interviews to see their reactions. If they have a problem with it, I don't wanna work there.

Though I'm in the EU, where discrimination based on sexual orientation is illegal, so I have that protection.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Personal disclosure is a valued leadership trait. Openness is responded to with openness. The best rule of thumb is to volunteer the info quickly, matter of factly as possible. Put a human spin on it, share what you've learned, and made restitution. No need to mention it on your CV. But you must get in front of this issue during the initial conversations. Being able to admit mistakes demonstrates trustworthiness. Lots of folks get second-chances.

</comment><comment><USER6> Don't include it in your resume but, volunteer the information during the first interview. Put a positive spin to it - "made mistakes, learned from it and here is how I am now better off".

<comment><AUTHOR> That's really helpful, thank you!

<comment><USER7> I disagree with him. Unless you morally feel you have to disclose it (understandable) unless it is brought up or relevant (security clearances etc), then id leave it: it simply isn't something a lot of places care about at all, and won't affect your work, so it won't be an issue. That's my two cents.

<comment><USER8> Watch the documents you sign, like always, but particularly look for something like "employee will maintain eligibility to get a security clearance."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> So, what did you do?

<comment><AUTHOR> Nothing particularly noteworthy.</comment></comment>


Regex was taking 5 days to run. So I built a tool that did it in 15 minutes - <AUTHOR> https://dev.to/vi3k6i5/regex-was-taking-5-days-to-run-so-i-built-a-tool-that-did-it-in-15-minutes-c98 <comment><USER2> This is a really poorly-researched article.

Had the author taken time to research regular expressions, he would have discovered the difference between DFA-based and backtracking-based implementations. [1] He would have also discovered that the former (as implemented by, say, OCaml) not only gives performance independent of the number of words searched, but in fact creates and follows the exact same table as his bespoke algorithm, while covering a wider range of patterns.

(Yes, you can apply the DFA technique even when you need to query submatches. See Laurikari's thesis [2], which forms the basis of the OCaml regex implementation.)

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression#Implementat...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression#Implementations_and_running_times)

[2] [https://laurikari.net/ville/regex- submatch.pdf](https://laurikari.net/ville/regex-submatch.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER3> We are somewhat in amateur hour here. It is well understood that literal matching is easier at scale than regex matching, and some of us have built regex matchers that take advantage of this whether they are given a pure literal case or where regexes have literal factors: [https://github.com/intel/hyperscan](https://github.com/intel/hyperscan) being a project I've worked on for a little while.</comment>


Automated DRM keeps spoiling the show, from the DNC to Mars - <AUTHOR> http://www.jwz.org/blog/2012/09/i-for-one-welcome-our-new-algorithmic-snitch-overlords/

<comment><USER2> Has this been resolved?</comment>


A Fusion Thruster For Space Travel - <AUTHOR> http://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/space-flight/a-fusion-thruster-for-space-travel/0 <comment><USER2> OK, I need an explanation. Carbon-12 is stable, so how come it decays into 3 helium-4 atoms. Is the carbon-12 not really an atom but some kind of metastable thingy with too much excess energy to be stable?

<comment><AUTHOR> The process produces "excited carbon nuclei", not stable normal carbon-12 atoms.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Hurray for talking about specific power but not specific impulse or specific energy.

<comment><USER4> It looks like they are actually talking about specific energy, and through a series of blunders mislabeled it as specific power:

" _The specific power of the proton-triggered boron fuel would be so great that a mere mole of it (11 grams) would yield roughly 300 megawatts of power. (According to Chapman, using this aneutronic fusion technique with helium-3 isotopes would yield 493 MW per mole. But boron is a more attractive fuel source because it is abundant on Earth and helium-3 is scarce.)_ "

This looks like nonsense. I think it was supposed to be megawatt-hour -- the quote is essentially correct, after you r/megawatt/megawatt-hour/, r/MW/MWh/, and r/specific power/specific energy/.

No idea why they are using this unit outside its native context (electricity generation).

\</comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-

I don't know about specific power, but the (theoretical) specific impulse is very good. The exhaust speed of the fusion alphas is sqrt(2 * 2.9 MeV / 3.7 GeV/c^2) = 1.2e7 m/s (or 0.04 c). Since these alphas constitute all the mass of the fuel/propellant (which are the same in this scheme), this is also the _effective_ exhaust velocity. Or a specific impulse of 1.2e8 seconds.

This is one of the best specific impulses conceived of, and (I think) is about the theoretical limit for a fusion-powered rocket carrying its own reaction mass.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacecraft_propulsion#Table_of_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacecraft_propulsion#Table_of_methods)

For some reason I don't see it represented on this (very big) wiki page. They do have the "fission fragment rocket", which is conceptually the same thing applied to fission reaction products.

<comment><USER5> It endlessly annoys me how journalists confuse energy and power. It's sometimes possible to figure out what they must really have meant, but not always. To see this error in IEEE Spectrum -- there's just no damn excuse.

I was wondering if maybe they meant J rather than W, but you must be right -- 300MJ/mol doesn't sound like much.

<comment><USER4> Well, the energy per reaction of p+11B is 8.68 MeV, or 837 GJ/mol. This is about 230 MWh/mol, so _that_ would make sense.

[http://www.nndc.bnl.gov/chart/reCenter.jsp?z=2&n=2](http://www.nndc.bnl.gov/chart/reCenter.jsp?z=2&n=2)

[http://www.google.com/#sclient=psy&hl=en&authuser=0&...](http://www.google.com/#sclient=psy&hl=en&authuser=0&source=hp&q=\(7.2890+MeV+%2B+8.6679+MeV+-+3+*+2.4249+MeV\)+*+Avogadros+number&pbx=1&oq=\(7.2890+MeV+%2B+8.6679+MeV+-+3+*+2.4249+MeV\)+*+Avogadros+number&aq=f&aqi=&aql=undefined&gs_sm=e&gs_upl=6679l9537l6l23l17l2l0l0l1l350l3306l0.2.11.1l14&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.&fp=bd71108a3b251f45&biw=1511&bih=971)

edit: Another source for "8.68 MeV", which doesn't require math:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fusion#Criteria_and_can...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fusion#Criteria_and_candidates_for_terrestrial_reactions)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What's the downside to using this process to generate energy here in the well?

<comment><USER7> Like all the other known forms of fusion that fit on a bench (and there are several, such as the Farnsworth Fusor [1]), it doesn't produce more energy than it consumes.

The article doesn't say that directly, I'm inferring it from the fact that if it was net-energy positive, this would not be "hey, this might make more efficient propulsion", but "HEY EVERYBODY, HOLY COW, FUSION IS HERE!". I am comfortably with this inference.

I also would imagine the efficiency in question is that it has a very high specific impulse [2], and thus requires very little mass, not anything else. Satellites in the inner solar system generally don't have a power problem, they metaphorically just stick a cup out the window and grab some of the power just streaming by them nearly continuously. They have a _mass_ problem. Converting solar power mass-efficiently to thrust is a big win.

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

[2]: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specific_impulse>

<comment><USER8> Which makes it pretty silly to talk about recovering energy from the particle stream, instead of getting that energy from your power source directly.

<comment><USER8> Turns out they do actually think they can generate net power: [http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/07/fusion-energy-without- radio...](http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/07/fusion-energy-without- radioactivity.html)

For a power plant they'd need a laser that doesn't exist yet, but it looks like commercially-available lasers could do the experiment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > A traveling wave tube—basically an inverse klystron—captures most of the > particles' flux kinetic energy and efficiently converts it into electrical > energy

Anyone else think this sounds like sci-fi technobabble?

<comment><USER10> It sounds like technobabble because technobabble is a crude imitation of dense technical jargon. Sometimes reality sounds unrealistic.</comment></comment>


Scrum for One: How to Apply the Scrum Framework to Personal Projects - <AUTHOR> https://zapier.com/blog/scrum-framework-personal-projects/ <comment><USER3> Having to suffer with Scrum at work is bad enough. This sounds like a great idea for people who hate themselves.

</comment><comment><USER4> While I'm sure some of the specific practices used by scrum teams are valuable on personal projects, the broader notion of Scrum for Personal projects seems strange to me.

Scrum gets it's name from rugby. During a rugby scrum, the entire cross- functional team works to move the ball down the field. If there's just one guy, he isn't in a scrum, he's just sprinting. Besides that stretched metaphor, half of the key statements in the agile manifesto are about collaboration and working with people. Having "Agile for one" doesn't really make sense.

While planning ahead and doing retrospectives is definitely a good idea for personal projects, doing those things doesn't mean you're doing scrum.

</comment><comment><USER5> Would love to see if anyone has a good & sustainable system by doing this in a notebook. My system is a small notebook, with 1 week "sprints". Inspired a bit by bullet journal. A sprint section is the start/end date of the week, underlined. Unearneath are two columns - left is for important & urgent. Right is less important / less urgent. Within these two columns I free-list my todo's, with a checkbox next to each. If I can think about it, sorting by importance/urgency, descending. As I go through the week, I add things, check stuff off, etc. At the end of week, I start a new week sprint. For not done items from previous week, I rewrite them into the new sprint. I try to order them but most important/urgent at top.

I've been doing this since 2015. Works great for me. Previously, I'd tried digital systems like Asana, Trello, text files, etc. In the end, I'd use them for awhile (or for part of my life) then stop after 6 months. This one - <USER2> better or worse - has stuck. I'd love to hear about other peoples paper based systems like this. If nothing else, to iterate and improve!

Issues/gaps with my system I'd love to fix: How to handle personal vs work (1 book containing each? Or separate?). How to indicate size of effort? How to handle projects (grouping of tasks) vs free tasks? How to handle long term initiatives (e.g. "learn spanish") in the same system? How to handle recurring tasks (e.g. call distant friend X every month)?

Screenshot of my notebook: [https://imgur.com/a/XmOMR](https://imgur.com/a/XmOMR)

<comment><USER6> I really like the sound of this! I've been using a bullet journal for my contracting work and it's been great, and yours sounds like a good system for managing personal projects. I've tried using digital tools and run into the same problem as well - too much ceremony which I don't have a lot of time for outside work anymore.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm using a quite similar approach, a kanban board implemented as an org-mode agenda to manage both my personal and professional life.

I'm really happy with this method, as it's avoids overplanning and too many open tasks. Those were two pitfalls that I experienced using GTD.

Also, org is really flexible, so it's possible to implement a variety of workflows. And it has excellent facilities to put stuff quickly into your inbox: org-capture and org-protocol.</comment>


Android 2.2 home screen inspired by the iPhone? - <AUTHOR> http://www.skimnote.com/android-2-2-home-screen-dedicated-shortcuts-80-20-rule-in-the-iphones/

<comment><USER2> I think "inspired" is a bit of a strong word for imitating one particular design element. The Android home screen remains an entirely different beast, with it's widget-oriented interface. Frankly, I think that the home screen is one of Android's biggest strengths over the iPhone. I love being able to glance (for example) at my upcoming calendar events or recent tweets without launching the respective apps.</comment>


Sending in our nude photos to fight revenge porn? No thanks, Facebook - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/nov/13/sending-in-our-nude-photos-to-fight-revenge-porn-no-thanks-facebook <comment><USER2> This sort of article makes me angry. Facebook are trying to come up with solutions to fight a real problem and this person is just saying "I don't trust Facebook".</comment>


Sbase – Suckless unix tools - Syrup-tan http://git.2f30.org/sbase/about/ <comment><AUTHOR> Frankly this about page sucks. I want to like this project, but there is only one sentence on what it's supposed to replace and why. Apparently this is supposed to be better than busybox somehow. No information on why busybox sucks, no information on how sbase sucks less. Is sbase better because it is smaller, faster, better architected, more POSIX compliant, more useful features, what? What are the tradeoffs for this? If you're going to make the claim that you suck less, at least say WHY you suck less.

Even Google doesn't seem to know what sucks less about suckless. The best I could come up with was "sbase vs busybox" which leads me to [1], where this exact question was asked, to which the response by the project creator was "The busybox code sucks." Not helpful at all, which was pointed out one post later, to which another project member said "Try to read it [the code?] and understand it." Great. Like I have time to read the code of every project before I decide to use it.

[1] [https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=176854](https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=176854)

<comment><USER2> [http://git.suckless.org/sbase/tree/find.c](http://git.suckless.org/sbase/tree/find.c)

[http://git.busybox.net/busybox/tree/findutils/find.c](http://git.busybox.net/busybox/tree/findutils/find.c)

I think one of the main advantages is it's written in the same straightforward, braindead dialect of C as the other suckless projects. They are really easy to dive into. (Hence why, eg, dwm has so many derivative.) I think the suckless folks would consider the fact it doesn't produce a single fat binary to be an advantage too.

It's part of this project: [http://morpheus.2f30.org/](http://morpheus.2f30.org/)

<comment><AUTHOR> I think that fat binary might be part of busybox's space saving. Most file- systems I'm aware of have 4k chunk sizes, and I would expect the last chunk of a file to be half filled on average, so if you have 20 utilities wasting 2k, that's a good 40k more on disk. Plus, I expect that many utilities duplicate functionality (error-checking the input IO and printing informative messages), so a monolithic binary could save space with only one copy of the boilerplate, error messages, etc.

Anyway, if they would talk about why they suck less, we could evaluate the claim. If they were wrong, people could point it out and they could fix it and verifiably suck less. As it is, we have unsubstantiated claims and fun speculation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Suckless gets a bad rep (probably because of their openness about their opinions of the projects of which they create alternatives); but, honestly, they have made some of my absolute favorite utilities. dwm, dmenu and st serve as the foundation for my whole workflow.

I'd love to see a whole suckless OS someday. I know it's been around for some time, but it seems like this might be the first step towards that.

<comment><USER4> _I 'd love to see a whole suckless OS someday._

That might be Plan 9--or Project Oberon. ;-)

I'm _really_ looking forward to kOS: [http://www.kparc.com/o.htm](http://www.kparc.com/o.htm)

<comment><USER3> There are so many things about Plan9 that I deeply love. I need to install 9front and play with it sometime :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I can't stand the attitude of the suckless project. Apparently all software is bloated unless in it is written in C, statically linked, and configured only by modifying a config.h file and rebuilding.

Thanks, but I'll just keep on using the GNU coreutils, Emacs, etc.

</comment><comment><USER6> Wait. Is that really related to suckless.org? I've just checked that suckless.org Unix tools are called "9base", not "Sbase", and is different code. Could someone explain that?

[http://git.suckless.org/9base/tree/cal/cal.c](http://git.suckless.org/9base/tree/cal/cal.c) [http://git.2f30.org/sbase/tree/cal.c](http://git.2f30.org/sbase/tree/cal.c)

[http://tools.suckless.org/](http://tools.suckless.org/)

<comment><USER7> The sbase page on suckless.org is here:

[http://core.suckless.org/sbase](http://core.suckless.org/sbase)

> 9base is a port of various original Plan 9 tools for Unix, based on > plan9port.

While sbase is supposed to be POSIX-compliant.

<comment><USER8> Since that page links to

[1]: [http://git.suckless.org/sbase/](http://git.suckless.org/sbase/)

instead of

[2]: [http://git.2f30.org/sbase/](http://git.2f30.org/sbase/)

I'm guessing [2] is a mirror, and [1] is the original Git repository. They appear to have the same content.

<comment><USER6> Thank you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Also, check ubase [http://git.2f30.org/ubase/about/](http://git.2f30.org/ubase/about/)

</comment><comment><USER6> It looks well written.

</comment><comment><USER10> no vi?

<comment><USER11> The suckless editor is called sandy[0].

[0] [http://tools.suckless.org/sandy](http://tools.suckless.org/sandy)

<comment><USER12> I wonder why they didn't just make an ncurses frontend to sam. You'd get regex search, selection-based commands and unlimited undo for free...</comment></comment></comment>


Journalists Need To Start Asking About Storage, Not Access - <AUTHOR> http://uncrunched.com/2013/06/17/journalists-need-to-start-asking-about-storage-not-access/ <comment><USER2> I remember during the Boston bombing investigation, Tim Clemente, a former FBI counter-terrorism agent, told Erin Burnett on CNN that they could go back and get access to the content of the calls between the deceased bomber and his wife, Katherine Russell.

After some Googling, I found a partial transcript of the CNN interview...

"Almost immediately Erin Burnett, the host of CNN's Outfront, wanted to know how the government knew. Aren't phone calls supposed to be private? She interviewed Tim Clemente, a former FBI counter-terrorism agent on May 1, asking:"

      Is there any way … they [the federal investigators] can
      try to get the phone companies to give that up … It's not
      a voice mail. It's just a conversation. There's no way
      they can actually find out what [was said on the call],
      right, unless she tells them?

      Clemente:  There is a way. We certainly have ways in
      national security investigations to find out exactly what
      was said in that conversation. It's not necessarily
      something that the FBI is going to want to present in
      court, but it may help lead the investigation … we
      certainly can find that out.

      Burnett: So they can actually get that? … that is
      incredible.

      Clemente: Welcome to America. All of that stuff is being
      captured as we speak, whether we know it or like it, or
      not.

Source: [http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/crime/item/15340-boston...](http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/crime/item/15340-boston- bombing-investigation-reveals-government-surveillance-of-phone-calls)

When I initially saw this on CNN, my first thought was, do they also have access to all photos and videos that are taken and transmitted online?

And if so, couldn't they stitch together a multi-angle montage from all the photos and videos taken at the scene of the Boston bombing (like [http://photosynth.net](http://photosynth.net)), rather than asking everyone to manually scour through their personal footage?

UPDATE:

CNN Interview Clip ([http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPHZrVPt4-U](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPHZrVPt4-U))

CNN Follow-Up Interview ([http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vt9kRLrmrjc](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vt9kRLrmrjc))

<comment><USER3> I am assuming that if something is technically possible, they're doing it. So, they're tracking telecom metadata and storing content because they can.

In fact I believe that the only reason our physical mail was mostly not read had nothing to do with the 4th Amendment, and everything to do with that it was logistically impossible and still have a working postal service, and difficult to keep secret.

With modern mail sorting machinery, I'm sure there is metadata being collected on physical mail.

<comment><USER4> >So, they're tracking telecom metadata and storing content because they can.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but to theoretically record every single phone conversation in America would require unbelievable amounts of data storage, would it not? Even if it's stored in a highly compressed format.

The metadata I can believe, but I find it kind of unlikely they have the means to store the contents of every call.

<comment><USER5> Petabytes/day, certainly.

<comment><USER6> According to this article ([https://sumanrs.wordpress.com/2012/04/14/youtube- yearly-cost...](https://sumanrs.wordpress.com/2012/04/14/youtube-yearly-costs- for-storagenetworking-estimate/)), about 76 petabytes is stored to Youtube per year. (calculated from the released info, that "one hour of video is uploaded to YouTube every second."). So Petabytes/day is probably doable for them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Exactly this.

As I've commented elsewhere, words matter. They matter _a lot_. Especially when discussing the critical issues at play in this situation. Almost zero media outlets are asking the _right_ questions. Instead, they all appear to be asking questions that specifically serve the talking points that were leaked a few days ago.

Perhaps media outlets and their journalists should start treating political actors the way prosecutors treat defendents--ask the right questions, vary them, alter the wording, etc., in an effort to suss out the truth and leave as little wiggle room for interpretation as one possibly can.

When shit like this hits the fan, the press _must_ stop treating politicians with kid gloves, only levying inquiries that serve the established talking points. Go on the offensive. Ask something that hasn't already been sound- bited and parroted by everyone involved. Ask the right goddamned questions.

A few things worth asking:

1\. Is the government storing, parsing, analyzing, transcribing, recording, translating, or any other type of data-gathering and/or analysis actions on the private communications of any persons who are not covered by a standing warrant. Be specific about the words chosen in the question. Even better: ask the question repeatedly, substituting each word in place of the prior one asked.

2\. If so, what is the legal reasoning and constitutional authority by which the Congress has legislated such actions?

3\. If so, what is the legal reasoning and constitutional authority by which the Executive is interpretating Congressional legislation to permit these programs to exist?

4\. If not, what is the legal reasoning and constitutional authority that proscribes such programs from existing?

5\. Carefully and completely delineate how Americans are to understand their Fourth Amendment rights in light of these programs. What does the government believe to be their papers in 2013? What level of security and privacy can Americans reasonably expect to have, against which intelligence programs will not and do not transgress?

Etc.

<comment><USER8> So you're suggesting journalists to do their job? Nonsense!

Recently in Spain a comedian surfaced as a journalist, "El Follonero" (free translation: The Trouble-Maker).

It all began as a TV comedy programme about the spanish elections, where El Follonero (actually Jordi Évole, he's no longer El Follonero) asked uncomfortable questions. It eventually became a full programme, not much about comedy but with lots investigative journalism and uncomfortable interviews.

A comedian saving journalism.

Meanwhile, traditional media is just parroting the official views of the established power.

<comment><USER9> The US has this as well

Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and the Onion.

Sadly, they're some of the best journalism happening in the country at present, though I'll give a hat tip to Glenn Greenwald (though he's not in the country), Democracy Now, and a very few others.

And, sadly, jester as truth teller is an ancient tradition.

Much of the political (national) and business press have long since sold out their morals and credibility for the golden ticket of "access". I include PBS and NPR on this bill of indictment.

<comment><USER8> He's actually not like Colbert or The Onion.

We also have lots of comedians doing that kind of political satire, but most of them just scratch the surface and comedy often blurs the real issues.

Jordi Évole is no longer a comedian, though he started his career as one. Now he does serious interviews and, even if comedy is still present (he's just funny and charismatic), his programme is actual journalism and not just satirical interviews and puns.

I think what gives him the edge over traditional journalism is how he approaches interviews. He looks like the average Joe and is not very knowledgeable, but he asks the questions that matter. Being very charismatic and polite, their interviewees feel confident with him, which he uses to his advantage (lots of slips from interviewees).

He also questions like a lawyer would, asking again and again until he gets an acceptable answer instead of the common PR crap that politicians are used to vomit.

<comment><USER9> The comedians I names are among the better known, and are just given as current examples. There are others, including those who spoof the news (the Yes Men for example), or who would critique it (George Carlin, Lenny Bruce).

The more general point is that humor can sweeten the bitter pill of truth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> >If you're not a "U.S. person," there are few restrictions on what the U.S. government can do to monitor you. If you are a U.S. person then…

So as someone who doesn't live in the states, this has been the biggest takeaway from all this. It doesn't matter that my country is allied and friends with the US, it doesn't matter that we're not at war, the US is not and has no intention of being my friend.

My current feelings then, is that I and everyone else who isn't a US citizen really need to get our data out of there, because regardless of where this debate is going, our "alien" data will never get any respect.

<comment><USER11> You might want to consider why your nation is considered a US ally. Because it sure isn't just because the US takes their word for it.

Intelligence agencies promote international stability, because they mean that at the high-level strata of world organization, its still possible to have a very informed opinion of the disposition, intentions and important issues of one's neighbours. A world where we don't know these things is less stable - you can't have trade negotiations publicly if you don't have a good idea of what can and can't be asked for, you can't "trust" anyone unless you can be reasonably sure they're not planning to stab you in the back or funding insurgencies, or if they're dealing with significant internal power struggles.

And frankly, the US doesn't know _you_. It also doesn't care about you. It's not a person, its a massive nation of millions, much like your own is. The fact you're allies at a high-level means precisely zilch for what your personal intentions are towards the US.

<comment><USER12> so why not give _us_ copies of all _your_ data. then we can trust you too.

makes sense to me.

<comment><USER11> Fundamental problem: if you _give_ me something, then I only know it's what you were willing to give. It tells me nothing of your intentions or agenda other then what I know you'll tell me.

This is why intelligence organizations exist. Because information you acquire yourself, through your own processes, is trustworthy. Information gifted is not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> To add more water to this article: for anyone reading books, papers or recordings dating before the very last years it is obvious that public morality is changing, rapidly and a lot.

A simple qualification of an human group (think women, Chinese, Jews, kids) was just a good joke yesterday and is now an offense. Contrary to what we may believe, our times are not more free than before on many topics, and many books (eg. Trois filles de leur mère) or movies (eg. Going Places/Les Valseuses, but even 007) could not be created today.

So keeping indefinite records is very dangerous for this reason too: you may believe your behavior is proper today but who knows what public morality will look like tomorrow?

(Just as a thought experiment: maybe watching horror movie will be considered a completely crazy thing to do and horror movie watcher will be asked to cure themselve in special detox centers. I, for one, have never understood what kind of pleasure one can get from watching an horror movie.)

(Thought experiment 2: In 20 years the animal defense movement become prominent and crazy, gets over the top, becomes the governement, and start legally killing human who showed disrespect for pets in their past life, checking the "logs". As a reaction a bunch of less crazy humans pull them out and instigate a defensive law against "over-loving animal", and then any blogger who's sent a caturday pic is suspitious forever.)

(Ok, that's imagination, but some recent event did show reality can be worse than imagination.)

edit: fixed a few words

</comment><comment><USER14> It's worse than that. Sometime last week I noticed that people giving testimony were using the word 'collect' in a very non-traditional way. They were using it to describe the process of accessing already collected (normal English usage) data.

Doubtless, lawyers were behind this gross mutation of language. Far worse than Bill Clinton's "it depends upon what the meaning of 'is' is."

<comment> brown9-2 They use the word "collect" in that way because surveillance laws use the word "collect" in a very specific way, and making distinctions between "collect" and "analyze" and "intercept" is important to delineate exactly what actions people are talking about:

 _A few definitions: to "collect" means to gather and store; to "analyze" means that a computer or human actually does something with the records; to "intercept" means that a computer or human actually listens to or records calls._

[http://theweek.com/article/index/245228/the-fbi-collects- all...](http://theweek.com/article/index/245228/the-fbi-collects-all- telephone-records)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Storage. How do you define it? Apparently, any way you like, even in international agreements.

Here's an example from the European Union agreement to pass traveller information to Australia (they have separate agreements for the United States and Canada):

 _the airline PNR data are temporarily retained, but not stored_

On the face of it, it would seem that when you mix this with probabalistically presumed intelligence agency interception, it means 'stored'. Can we please have a journalist cover something related to this at some stage, anywhere, ever? Thanks.

Full FOIA response @ [http://www.asktheeu.org/en/request/information_on_pnr_agreem...](http://www.asktheeu.org/en/request/information_on_pnr_agreements#incoming-1120) (PS. Great site, recommended some time ago by Wikileaks. Use it!)

Current summary (please help expand from above) @ [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_name_record#Internat...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_name_record#International_PNR_Sharing_Agreements) ... also please help expand [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_name_record#Internat...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_name_record#International_PNR_Sharing_Agreements)

</comment><comment><USER16> Cross reference with something from the Snowden Q+A yesterday:

 _US Persons do enjoy limited policy protections (and again, it 's important to understand that policy protection is no protection - policy is a one-way ratchet that only loosens) and one very weak technical protection - a near- the-front-end filter at our ingestion points. The filter is constantly out of date, is set at what is euphemistically referred to as the "widest allowable aperture," and can be stripped out at any time. Even with the filter, US comms get ingested, and even more so as soon as they leave the border. Your protected communications shouldn't stop being protected communications just because of the IP they're tagged with._

This implies they hoover all data direct from fibre, but with a 'front-end filter' that restricts what is hoovered based on IP address or some other (vague, often inaccurate) marker.

source: [http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/17/edward- snowden-n...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/17/edward-snowden-nsa- files-whistleblower)

<comment> brown9-2 The existence of underseas cable taps has long been an open secret, you can find articles dating back to at least 2001 about it ([http://cryptome.org/nsa- fibertap.htm](http://cryptome.org/nsa-fibertap.htm)).

I think Snowden's distinction between "policy protection" and "technical protection" is ultimately meaningless and naive - technical protections can be changed at any point just as a policy can be. All checks on government power are "policy protections", whether that policy is set by the Constitution or law or just regulation.

<comment><USER16> I think his point is, when policy is your only protection, and the policy is "ask secret court in secret for permission to look at data" then you really have no protection at all because there is no oversight - no way to see what is going on. At least with a technical protection (e.g declare 'they are not allowed to tap into undersea cables') you have some method of oversight, because there is some physical evidence outside of the NSA.

<comment> brown9-2 But isn't that declaration merely policy? I get the impression that Snowden is referring to "technical protection" as in the software/hardware systems, for instance ones that would prevent any analyst from issuing any query they like.

<comment><USER16> The technical protection he refers to is 'filter at [the] ingestion points' \- in other words, its a technical protection that prevents some data from reaching the NSAs data centre in the first place. Once its in the NSA's data centre, your only protection is a (weak, changeable, unaccountable) policy one. So by technical protection he's talking about _preventing the data from reaching the NSA in the first place_ \- if you can achieve that, you're much better off.

edit: here we're talking about indiscriminately hoovered data, rather than 'asked for nicely and specifically via court order' data.

<comment> brown9-2 What I find confusing or misleading about his differentiation between policy and technical protections is that he values the latter over the former, but it would seem that the technical protection he cites could just as easily be ratcheted in any direction if/when a new policy dictates it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm more concerned that any stored data about me and you can and likely will be lost or traded or simply stolen and used for any purpose a criminal organization or corporation can invent. Data that sits somewhere can be taken at any time. Imagine all of your personal/financial data and even connections winding up in the hands of someone with a nefarious intent. You don't know it, you can't sue anyone, you can't defend yourself, you are likely ruined.

<comment><USER18> Massive surveillance, whether for marketing or "national security", definitely eases identity theft.

I'm also troubled that people are accessing, consuming, using data about me without my knowledge or consent. I would like to know if someone cares that I'm meditating with the Buddhists monks or really love collecting Beannie Babies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> President Obama on the NSA when interviewed on the Charlie Rose Show

Source:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlThTTJgKYo&t=26m40s](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlThTTJgKYo&t=26m40s)

(Link takes you to about the 26th minute mark where the issue is mooted)

[http://www.charlierose.com/](http://www.charlierose.com/)

(Unwieldy video player)</comment>


The Scientific Basis of Cryonics - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/view/542601/the-science-surrounding-cryonics/ <comment><USER2> Yeah, I freeze and thaw cells constantly without much trouble--just plop those suckers in a solution of 10% DMSO and a serum-containing isotonic liquid then throw into the freeze-assist device, then put that into the -80C freezer and transfer it to the liquid nitrogen freezer the next morning. Everyone does it this way, and has for years. I've always wondered if the freezing and thawing process subtly changes cell functioning (beyond the time given to cells to rest after being thawed), but I'm guessing if it were the case someone would have noticed it by now.

The bugger that haunts human cryonics is that thawing is never perfect because the cryoprotectants used to prevent ice-crystals within the cells are usually toxic. If you freeze cells that are measured to be 100% viable/alive at the time (very common) then thaw them using best practices, you're going to have some cell death-- maybe 1-5% if you're fast (less time spent in toxic cryoprotectant) and lucky. If you're unlucky or slow, you can look at 25-45% of your originally healthy cells being dead upon completion of the thawing process. The remaining cells are usually extremely discombobulated, and can take days to return to their baseline. This is completely fine if you're tooling around in a research lab or industrial lab, but even a 1% loss is probably too much for a human brain to bear and remain the same as before.

I suppose that if you work under the assumption that the future technology cryonics relies on for thawing will exist, cell loss during thaw will not be a problem; I find this possibility to be fairly likely over a long time span. Alternatively, you could assume that there will be advanced ways of restoring brain function or generating fresh neurons after systemic damage-- quite a stretch if you ask me, but it's conceivable. I think that ultimately the goals of cryonics will be scientifically realizable for those who were most recently preserved.

<comment><USER3> > Yeah, I freeze and thaw cells constantly without much trouble--just plop > those suckers in a solution of 10% DMSO and a serum-containing isotonic > liquid then throw into the freeze-assist device, then put that into the -80C > freezer and transfer it to the liquid nitrogen freezer the next morning. > Everyone does it this way, and has for years. I've always wondered if the > freezing and thawing process subtly changes cell functioning (beyond the > time given to cells to rest after being thawed), but I'm guessing if it were > the case someone would have noticed it by now.

Has anyone tested this on a macroscopic creature? In particular, one complex enough to demonstrate memory, which could be tested afterward?

I've seen one or two reports of such tests, but nothing going into detail about the degree of function afterward.

<comment><USER4> There are a number of amphibians that freeze during winter as part of their natural life cycle. They seem to be fine.

<comment><USER5> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UuhEHNey37Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UuhEHNey37Q)

The above video is a short demonstration of one such amphibian

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> See also the scientists' open letter on cryonics, which is old enough to have had many homes online over the years, but is now here:

[http://www.evidencebasedcryonics.org/scientists-open- letter-...](http://www.evidencebasedcryonics.org/scientists-open-letter-on- cryonics/)

You might also look at the Alcor FAQ for scientists:

[http://www.alcor.org/sciencefaq.htm](http://www.alcor.org/sciencefaq.htm)

Some of the ongoing information generated by the Brain Preservation Foundation's technology prize competition is also interesting.

[http://www.brainpreservation.org/competitors/](http://www.brainpreservation.org/competitors/)

The perspective of the BPF folk is perhaps a useful calibration point for those coming into this as a new topic; they are critical of cryonics for some detailed technical reasons, with plenty of room for debate, think that plastination should be developed as an alternative technology, but are firm supporters of the concepts of brain preservation and the evidence to date for fine structure preservation. For example, see this response to an earlier and very shoddy article critiquing cryonics at the Technology Review:

[http://www.brainpreservation.org/ken-hayworths-personal- resp...](http://www.brainpreservation.org/ken-hayworths-personal-response-to- mit-technology-review-article/)

</comment><comment><USER7> Consider what will happen a hundred years from now, if the technology to restore cryopreserved people is developed and used. Our descendants will look back on our failure to do cryopreservation on any significant scale, and I think they will judge us harshly. We, humanity, should have a billion-dollar research project to learn how to do cryopreservation well, to improve the odds that the brains we preserve will be repairable and to get the cost down low enough to offer to everyone. Instead, we are condemning literally everyone to inevitable, permanent death, not even trying to save them.

It is, without exaggeration, the greatest tragedy in the world, and it's happening because superstition and our society's anti-superstition memetic immune system misfired simultaneously.

<comment><USER8> I've suggested to a few people the idea of cryopreservation and I've yet to find someone who wants it. The consensus is one life is enough. I quite like the idea of living on but seem to be in a minority. Rather than billion-dollar research maybe the government might be better funding a big freezer. People might be more inclined to do it if it was a no cost option compared with cremation / burial.

<comment><USER7> It's not just a matter of putting people in a freezer; if you do that, ice crystals will form and totally destroy the brain structures you're trying to preserve. The actual procedure involves pumping cryoprotectants into arteries very shortly after death (it has to be quick). Nearly all of the cost is in the procedure performed at time of death; once that's done, long-term refrigerated storage is trivial by comparison.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Interesting, but I think that the psychological basis of the _belief_ in cryonics (to the point of paying for/investing in it) is far more so.

<comment><USER10> I was asked a while ago by a non-geek, wouldn't you have to be crazy to believe in cryonics? My answer was, you would have to be crazy to believe there was a one hundred percent chance it was going to work, but you wouldn't have to be crazy to believe there was, say, a five percent chance. And that's a lot better than the zero percent you get in a hole in the ground.

<comment><USER9> Yeah but that hole in the ground doesn't cost you nearly as much, and you don't risk the chance of waking up a brain-in-a-jar.</comment></comment></comment>


30+ CSc Video Lectures - <AUTHOR> http://linkmingle.com/list/30-plus-List-of-Computer-Science-Video-Lectures-Over-200-Videos-video-lectures <comment><USER2> At some point I tried to watch some MIT lectures. After a few minutes I realized that they're just as boring as the classes at my University were. I guess most lectures are dull whether you're at an elite school or not. Or?

<comment><AUTHOR> I haven't done MIT OCW yet (so I can't comment), but I found Berkeley Webcasts to be very interesting.

<http://webcast.berkeley.edu/courses.php>

</comment></comment><comment> mark-t I've watched a lot of the ArsDigita lectures on archive.org, too: <http://www.archive.org/details/arsdigita></comment>


Show HN: Font Playground – Play with variable fonts - <AUTHOR> https://play.typedetail.com/ <comment><USER2> This uses font-variation-settings CSS property

[https://caniuse.com/#search=font-variation- settings](https://caniuse.com/#search=font-variation-settings)

<comment><USER3> I was digging through the sourcecode and package.json and was wondering how the new font changes were being made, thanks for noting this

<comment><AUTHOR> I love how you go directly to the source code to dig it out! Actually the answer if also hidden in the code tab of the app. It you switch to Code, you can get the code snippets to make the setting work in css!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Tangentially to what is demonstrated here it also makes an interesting point about how browsers approach text rendering. Dragging the sliders in Chrome makes everything jump around in pixel offsets all the time (so you couldn't even smoothly animate those values without the viewer getting a headache), while in Edge everything is smooth. But in Edge some interactions just don't work. Firefox doesn't appear to support a required feature for these to work.

<comment><USER5> That's an 'old windows text rendering' thing. You can turn variable fonts on in Firefox, and it behaves like Chrome; but neither one works like that on MacOS.

<comment><USER4> All browsers on Windows by now use DirectWrite and Direct2D as far as I know. It's not an inherent limitation of the text rendering API. Yes, GDI always uses pixel-grid fitting, but no browser has used GDI text rendering for a while on Windows (Chrome was the last to switch, IIRC, and before they did, webfonts looked horrible).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The Merit Badge sidebar preview gets extremely colourful with subpixel rendering: [https://temp.chrismorgan.info/merit-badge-subpixel- rendering...](https://temp.chrismorgan.info/merit-badge-subpixel- rendering.png). It looks quite fascinating!

<comment><USER7> Interestingly, on Mac Safari it actually renders in color [https://djr.com/merit-badge/](https://djr.com/merit-badge/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Cool, this one is also great: [https://fonty.dizoo.bg/](https://fonty.dizoo.bg/)

</comment><comment><USER9> I love how "Cheee" has the descriptive dimensions of puffy "Yeast" and droopy "Gravity"!

The last one in the list, "ZinZin", has "Swash" that makes discrete changes to different characters. And "Lab" also has four very different parameters: "Bevel", "Oval", "Quad" and "Size". "Devovar" has a LOT of weird parameters!

Aha, you can click on any of the checkboxes next to the parameter names to map them to the two-dimensional variable options puck. It helps to break the text sample into several lines and zoom the font size way up to appreciate it.

Using variable fonts instead of color for syntax highlighting would make code look less like puking up a roll of skittles. Especially with some variable fonts designed to express the syntax and semantics of the language. Parens could get huggier as the got deeper!

I'd love a handwriting font with a continuously variable parameter that drove something like perlin noise to make each character slightly different.

Reminds me of the weird property names like "BlueFuzz" that Adobe Type 1 fonts used.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12478422](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12478422)

>The story I heard was that Adobe's Type 1 font encoding [1] used obscure names like BlueValues, OtherBlues, FamilyBlues, FamilyOtherBlues, BlueScale, BlueShift, and BlueFuzz, so that Adobe employees could discuss their proprietary font hinting algorithms in public while they were in line for burritos at La Costeña [2]. That way nobody from Apple or Sun or SGI who was standing in line next to them could understand what they were talking about. Yes THAT World Famous La Costeña: Guiness Record Holder for the World's Largest Burrito! [3] On May 3rd, 1997 La Costeña of Mountain View, California created the world's largest burrito. The burrito weighed in at 4,456.3 pounds and was measured at 3,578 feet long. It was created at Rengstorff Park in Mountain View.

[1] [https://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/en/font/T1_SPEC....](https://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/en/font/T1_SPEC.PDF)

[2] [http://www.costena.com](http://www.costena.com)

[3] [http://www.costena.com/famous.html](http://www.costena.com/famous.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your review! I passed along the goods words to the designer of Cheee, I am sure he is delighted. Interesting story on Adobe Type history! The good old days!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The .panel on the right doesn't do overflow, so on not-enormous screens, some of the sliders are hidden from view. Decovar with fifteen sliders is the easiest to see this on—if the viewport is less than about 1550px high, you'll miss some of them.

I won't offer suggestions on fixing that, because the straightforward solutions do damage in other ways; a more carefully thought-out solution will be required.

(Firefox Nightly, Windows.)

<comment><AUTHOR> I add a temporary fix to this overflow issue. it is caused by a flexbox issue on firefox. On firefox the behavior is a little different from chrome/safari, but at least the axis are not hidden from overflowing anymore :) thanks for the report!

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Does not seem to work for me on Firefox/Linux

<comment><USER11> Support for variable fonts is due to ship in Firefox 62.

(You can experimentally enable it in Firefox 61 by setting layout.css.font- variations.enabled to true in about:config.)

<comment><USER12> Thanks! That worked for me. This is such a great feature. Once standard, it would reduce the need for have multiple variants of the same font-family.

I noticed only a few fonts allowed slant. Does this depend on the TTF/OTF we use?

<comment><USER4> The axes are defined by the font. Slant implemented that way usually leads to an oblique font, while many fonts (even sans-serif ones) have distinctly- designed italic variants. Simply applying a skew transform to a font only rarely leads to something good, which is why most fonts don't offer that.

At least FF Meta has an italic axis, but only two discrete values for it, which comes out at more or less the same as two different fonts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This one finally made some things about how fonts play in the web more tangible to me. the bounding box and three choices of rescaling/sizing made this much more clear to me, felt intuitive.

Felt like the font catalog was small. Some back info about what fonts this can play with, and why, and how to add more would help

(not a typography or font expert.)

<comment><AUTHOR> I will support adding your own fonts to font menu soon! Stay tuned and thanks for the suggestion!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I love the idea of an x-height axis as demonstrated in Dunbar. Different x-heights can be used for really interesting effects in different design contexts.

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm getting some rendering artifacts, i.e. white horizontal lines.

</comment><comment><USER16> Doesn't seem to do much on mobile Safari

<comment><USER5> The site itself is desktop-only, but the feature it demonstrates works.</comment></comment>


3Taps' Counterclaim to Craigslist - <AUTHOR> http://3taps.com/papers/3taps-answer-counterclaim.pdf

<comment><AUTHOR> As a developer who received a C&D from Craigslist for a pretty innocuous app (seriously, it was built in a weekend), I'm glad to see someone test Craigslist's legal position in court.

At the very least, I hope it will expose that Craigslist is not just a happy, hippy-infused neighborhood listserve like many seem to think; rather, like most other companies, it actually goes to great lengths to quash threats to its very profitable business.</comment>


AI will be able to beat us at everything by 2060 - <AUTHOR> https://www.newscientist.com/article/2133188-ai-will-be-able-to-beat-us-at-everything-by-2060-say-experts/ <comment><USER2> The following sounds like a "where's my flying car" objection, but is founded upon a desire to avoid seeing another AI Winter. I don't need to see AI beat me, I just want to see AI doing the following, in an economically feasible package that is amenable to mass production, so we can concentrate human jobs on value-added activities like 1:1 teacher:student ratio education:

* wash dishes, especially baby bottles and odd-shaped utensils

* mow and edge the lawn, trim bushes, and dig up weeds

* tidy up clutter in the house

* treat stains, wash clothing and linens, fold, iron, starch, and put away clothes, towels, and linens

* pick delicate fruits, vegetables and nuts at the peak of ripeness or readiness

* wash vegetables and fruit, prep them as needed for recipes

* plan, purchase and cook a meal with substitutions where necessary, set a table and clear it

* vacuum, sweep, mop and polish floors and stairs, scrubbing where needed to get that spot of ink off the floor

* dust all shelves, ceiling fans, and contents of shelves

* sweep and wash down all windows and siding

* open and file physical mail

* once a month replace A/C filters, turn water valve knobs, and check water heater anode

* general household repairs like replace a fuse, replace a bulb, fix a squeaky door

The list goes on, but hopefully the idea is clear: AI is far from offering a generalized robot, and automation's marketing hype is very close to claiming such a breakthrough in articles like this, when the reality is closer to single-purpose or limited-use, expensive devices with limited lifespans.</comment>


WebMynd - A better way to search: Complementos para Firefox - <AUTHOR> https://addons.mozilla.org/es-ES/firefox/addons/policy/0/6416/62175?src=addondetail <comment><USER2> A better link (English, and not the EULA): <https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/6416></comment>


A Better To-Do List: The 1-3-5 Rule - <AUTHOR> http://www.thedailymuse.com/career/the-1-3-5-rule/

<comment><USER2> My current system is kind of strange but works for me:

\- I have a "master view" of sorts in Trello where I keep track of projects/long term stuff in a birds eye view

\- I use a notebook (real one non electronic) to keep track of my daily stuff

\- In the notebook I write down the stuff todo every day and scribble down 25 minute checkboxes behind each one guestimating the time it takes (this is a leftover from promodoro which I dropped alas I kept some parts that I liked)

\- Whenever I start on an item I highlight it with a yellow marker and cross off a checkbox after about 25 minutes...if it takes longer i add extra checkboxes as circles, triangles if it takes even longer (this is to keep track of my self estimation)

\- Other than the date and todo items I have a box at the top for each day where I track long term improvement stuff i.e. silly stuff like "got out of bed within 15 minutes of the alarm ringing", "drank 1l+ of water"...I start each day by drawing that box and after a while when those items become automatic they get removed and replaced by other stuff (say "took a 10 minute walk")

I could see adding a layer of 1-3-5 when creating the daily list but it might actually be more like 1-2-3.

<comment><USER3> I used to write my tasks for the day on a single Post-It note. This limited space forced me to make deliberate choices about which tasks were most important. When I wrote longer lists in a big notebook, I rarely completed every item. Over time, I determined that the Post-It note was just the right size (depending on your handwriting). Plus I could stick my Post-It right on my monitor, never out of sight.

Carrying leftover tasks over to tomorrow's list (sometimes for multiple days) feels bad, whereas crumpling up (and recycling!) a completed Post-It note feels great. :D

I also found a good use for those old business cards from a previous job or title; they are just the right size for mini-task lists. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> On the surface it sounds like an reasonable way to prioritize things -- every day do 1 big thing, 3 medium things, and 5 small tasks -- but why should such a division of your time necessarily reflect your priorities? What if the best use of your time at the present moment was to just focus on the single most important thing (for example)?

(Note, this is just from thinking it through in the abstract, and I know that practical experience with things can show you sides of them that weren't obvious in the abstract. So if anyone does have practical experience with it and can comment, I'd be interested to hear it).

<comment><USER5> > What if the best use of your time at the present moment was to just focus on > the single most important thing?

Well, you wouldn't need a to-do list, for starters.

<comment><USER4> Just because it might be best to focus on just one thing _at the present_ doesn't mean you don't have other things to do that you need to keep track of.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think the rigidity of this system is its biggest drawback, as is the case with most productivity systems. For example, if I have two large projects that I need to get done and I only write down one, the other is going to keep nagging at me in the back of my head while I'm working and distract my focus. If I write both of them down, then I've deviated from the system, which in my experience means that by the end of the week, it'll just devolve into a vanilla to-do list grouped by the 'size' of tasks.

That's mainly why I switched to GTD for all of my to-do lists and projects. Because my inbox holds literally every task or to-do item that pops into my head during the day, I never have that distracting "am I forgetting something?" feeling during the day. I can process and sort my inbox whenever I have free time, and the flexibility in deciding which tasks should be made into projects, next actions, etc... means that the system always fits my schedule no matter how unpredictable or crazy it is, instead of me having to fit my schedule into the system.

<comment><USER7> If you only have two big things you need to get done, that is probably part of your problem. In that case, one of your todo's should probably be to subdivide one or both of them into smaller tasks.

One of my most effective ways of overcoming procrastination in particular is that when I don't want to do something, I force myself to at least spend two minutes splitting at least one task on my todo list into a few smaller tasks. Sooner or later I have enough really small, trivial tasks that it is easy to push through at least some of them.

Sometimes that ends up with stupid levels of details. But often it ends up revealing that part of the reason for procrastinating was that I didn't really know, but maybe had a nagging suspicion of, the level of complexity in a task...

<comment><USER6> Sometimes it's not so straightforward to split up large into many small tasks. A lot of the time these steps will depend on other unpredictable factors, which leads to a lot of backtracking and adjusting my to-do list down the road when I should be working.

I'm a fan of iteratively processing my projects, deciding just the next one or two steps every time I process my tasks. I find that if I let my to-do lists balloon in size, I have less motivation to actually clear it out. But that's just me. In the end it's all about making the right decision based on how you know your brain works.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Inspired me to make <http://1-3-5.com/>

<comment><USER9> Kudos to you!

I can see that this is really really simple stuff (single page client side only), but it's genuinely executed very well in terms of appearance, usability and functionality.

I think we could all learn a little something from this.

<comment><USER8> Thanks! I was also inspired from this: <http://a5.gg/> Sort of the same idea; simple, elegant.. 1-3-5.com is just a GitHub page ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I know there's a lot of this kind of advise out there and I find most of it works fairly well. I think that for people who have a problem getting things done, the main issue is just not having any way of tracking things at all.

I don't follow any methodology as such, but one thing which did help me was reading a tiny bit about the Pomodoro stuff. Basically the thing which absolutely kills my productivity is context switching. i.e. starting one thing, then breaking off to do another. What I take away from the Pomodoro stuff is that I should not work on anything for less than 20mins and that time should be carved up into 20min chunks.

In practice all this means to me is that I try not to get distracted by other things and if somebody attempts to get my attention I'll get them to wait until I've completed the thing which I'm at task on.

I don't do anything by strict structure, so everything's subject to changes, but I try to be careful to allocate a minimum amount of time to things and I _try_ to make a todo list. In my private life I use toodledo, which gives me decent views by due date/urgency/context/folder. At work, I'm using a mix of Gmail stars, Gmail tasks and proprietary apps, though in the past I have just used a single .txt file.

</comment><comment><USER10> Only thing I've found that worked for me was emails. Whatever app I want to use, I'll still get 100+ emails everyday. When I don't have that much thing to do, cool todo apps are great.. but anytime there's a real "get shit done urgently" I just fall back to email mode.. so I guessed why not always use email.

</comment><comment><USER11> Even doing just 1 big thing per day can do miracles: <http://blog.weekdone.com/top-10-ways-for-a-productive-week/>

</comment><comment><USER12> This reminds me of a blog post by Scott Hanselman where he mentioned the Rule of Three [2], which seems like a similar approach to todo lists in that it helps you narrow your focus onto the most important things you need to get done.

[1] [http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ProductivityVsGuiltAndSelfLoat...](http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ProductivityVsGuiltAndSelfLoathing.aspx)

[2] <http://sourcesofinsight.com/the-rule-of-3/>

</comment><comment><USER13> This approach also lets you move the big thing (or hard thing) to a time when you are at your best and have few interruptions. I personally like to do the hard or more unknown bits sooner, and sometimes I even save up the easy stuff for those after-lunch hours when my brain feels mushier.

</comment><comment><USER14> I use a diary to maintain the tasks for any day. If the tasks are not done on that day, very rarely they are done in a single day, I write them on the next day's calendar page. I also write a small note below the previous page where I get the next thread.

</comment><comment><USER15> Try this App EisenPower - <http://www.eisenpowerapp.com/>

Nope, I've nothing to do with the app. I'm just a happy regular user.

</comment><comment><USER16> This is similar to A-B-C analysis: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_management#ABC_analysis>

</comment><comment><USER17> this is similar to these suggestions from the following articles

1\. [http://mysuperchargedlife.com/blog/personal-productivity- acc...](http://mysuperchargedlife.com/blog/personal-productivity- accomplish-3-things-today/)

2\. [http://lifehacker.com/5853732/take-a-more-realistic- approach...](http://lifehacker.com/5853732/take-a-more-realistic-approach-to- your-to+do-list-with-the-3-%252B-2-rule)

</comment><comment><USER18> I like what this allows for daily tracking. It makes it really easy to see if you got through everything you wanted to on a daily basis.

</comment><comment><USER19> Not a bad idea, but I don't print the templates out. Just use a scrap piece of paper. It'll save money and trees.</comment>


The Ruins of Dead Social Networks (2011) - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/09/the-ruins-of-dead-social-networks/245397/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> This thread might be as good as any to point out:

* There is an enormous quantity of culture locked into Facebook posts

* Since Facebook's graph API have been shut down, there exists no API-based way to export _other people's data_. You can get whatever you personally have posted to FB, but none of what _other people_ have posted.

* Individual posts might be scraped, and present in archive.org ,but people's / pages' indices are not available for non-logged-in users

* Social networks have a typical lifecycle of 5-10 years; and their shutdown can happen in a very short timeframe, see eg. geocities ; but imagine that without any accessible index, making full archiving impossible

* This implies, that if/when FB goes down, so will a major slice of Internet Culture circa 2008-2016

* If you have any suggestions, or partial solutions to this, please kindly post it to [http://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/questions/37036/self-h...](http://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/questions/37036/self-hosted-front-end-for-social-networks) .

</comment><comment><USER3> I often wonder what's going to happen to all the great information that's on sites like HN, Reddit, Stack Overflow, or other popular forums when the companies that run them finally bite the dust or stop being interested in running these websites. It would be a real shame to lose all the advice, howtos, solutions, opinions, conversations, etc.

I'm hoping these sites have archives, and that those archives would be made publicly available in case of such a disaster. But maybe even then they'll be buried behind a shitty web interface such as Google's web interface to old Usenet archives. Or maybe they'll just disappear completely, which would be a huge waste.

<comment><USER4> Similarly, you might be interested in the "Save Page As..." feature of web browsers along with the bookmarking one. I too was worried the best stuff would go away. Plus, Archive.org is sort of a single point of failure, isn't it? So, I just started copying best comments into text files or bookmarking their info if they suited my purposes. Could straight up save the whole thread. If it ever goes down, we upload our collections to one or more repositories in a similar format.

Note: I'm ignoring the complexity that copyright law would introduce into this to just focus on keeping the key info.

<comment><USER5> The moment that copywrong stops us from keeping a full and accurate record of history, it's time to eject the broken and destructive system entirely.

<comment><USER4> Sounds nice but masses dont care that much.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Will we see a "myspace" museum? That would be neat.

I think the digital form of the artifacts left over from social networks and the vast amounts of data retained is something we've not seen before and don't know how to catalog just yet.

This new historian job that can handle large amounts of unstructured data sounds perfect for a machine.

<comment><USER7> I'd like to see a team of digital archaeologists find and reassemble the lost Digg pre-4.0 database. Lots of gold lost in that upgrade.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The Computer History Museum has an exhibit based on the salvaged 650GB backup of GeoCities. It's a big touch-sensitive monitor that lets you pinch-stretch zoom your way into the data, eventually (with patience, which few museum visitors have) you can drill down to individual pages.

[http://www.computerhistory.org/exhibits/deletedcity/](http://www.computerhistory.org/exhibits/deletedcity/)

</comment><comment><USER9> "Will Facebook fade out like MySpace?" ...in our lifetime? Not sure actually. Unlike those that came before them they somehow managed to get a monopolistic position. Seems to have done the trick for Microsoft.

</comment><comment><USER10> Fitting that the link to the Wired story about Asheron's Call 2 in this is pointing to a page on Wired that no longer exists.

</comment><comment><USER11> The most important part about the ruins of dead social networks is to properly dance on those ruins.

</comment><comment><USER12> [http://booktwo.org/notebook/wikipedia- historiography/](http://booktwo.org/notebook/wikipedia-historiography/)

An excellent talk on this subject from 2010.</comment>


What the History of Math Can Teach Us About the Future of AI - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/what-the-history-of-math-can-teach-us-about-the-future-of-ai/ <comment><USER2> As the founder of the patent troll Intellectual Ventures the author (Nathan Myhrvold) has hurt our community deeply and I'm surprised how willing we are to give him a platform.

<comment><USER3> Because we already do give a platform to patent trolls.

"The new" Microsoft trolls Android manufacturers and makes ~$1 billion from it. Then, they have the nerve to say "Microsoft <3 Linux".

And they are still playing the embrace, extend and extinguish game. For example, according to Microsoft, you should stop using R CRAN and move to MRAN instead. [https://mran.microsoft.com/](https://mran.microsoft.com/)

btw, I don't care if I lose karma because of this, I have karma to spend.

<comment><USER4> Android is so open to begin with. Let's face it anything that has a stock market symbol or plans to be a stock market symbol or be bought by a stock market symbol is a cannibalistic partner.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > Theorists have proved that some mathematical problems are actually so > complicated that they will always be challenging or even impossible for > computers to solve. So at least for now, people who can push forward the > boundary of computationally hard problems need never fear for lack of work.

That applies equally well to humans. Consider the complexity class of Go.

> Meanwhile, many of the tasks that seem most basic to us humans—like running > over rough terrain or interpreting body language—are all but impossible for > the machines of today and the foreseeable future.

Wow no.

<comment><USER6> > > Meanwhile, many of the tasks that seem most basic to us humans—like > running over rough terrain or interpreting body language—are all but > impossible for the machines of today and the foreseeable future.

> Wow no.

...wow indeed. No research at all. Often I just read the comments here and skip the article, but that made me go and look to be sure.

For anyone somehow still unaware (BigDog creepiness factor was nearly viral back when I was in college around 2008), BigDog has been handling rough terrain for over a decade: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1czBcnX1Ww](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1czBcnX1Ww)

Here's BigDog getting abused to see what it can recover from (including being kicked in the side): [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PaTWufUqqU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PaTWufUqqU)

Here's a running cheetah robot jumping over unexpected obstacles (2015): [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_luhn7TLfWU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_luhn7TLfWU)

And here's a two-legged robot walking around outside (2017): [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Is4JZqhAy-M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Is4JZqhAy-M)

<comment><USER7> My "running on rough terrain" video from 1995.[1] On non-flat surfaces, traction control dominates the problem.[2][3] This was before Boston Dynamics. (There's much more that could be done in this area, but there's no market. BD still doesn't do speed changes fast. Their machines start by walking, running or trotting in place and then extend the gait. Humans start by falling forward, for a faster start, and go far off vertical for fast direction changes.)

As for interpreting body language, here's the code on Github.[4]

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kc5n0iTw- NU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kc5n0iTw-NU) [2] [http://animats.com/papers/leggedrun/leggedrun.html](http://animats.com/papers/leggedrun/leggedrun.html) [3] [http://animats.com/papers/articulated/articulated.html](http://animats.com/papers/articulated/articulated.html) [4] [https://github.com/shahqaan/kinect-body-language- analysis](https://github.com/shahqaan/kinect-body-language-analysis)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> But the article says nothing about _the history of math_. Whatever technique NASA used to do calculations in the 1960s, it was an _engineering_ concern not a math concern. And I doubt if it has any relevance to the progress of AI today.

</comment><comment><USER9> The important point to be made is that the "simpler" tasks will be automated early, pushing human required labour to generally be smarter and better educated.

There are only so many people for any required value of "smart". The historical human computers in the article required less education and base intelligence than the mathematicians that are employed today.*

Sooner or later a significant segment of the population will simply not be able to train to most tasks that still require human labour. And slowly (or quickly) that bar will rise. When I hire and train people I simply need a certain baseline mental capacity, otherwise they will never get good enough to keep, no matter how long they train.

*) Note though that this does not mean they necessarily were less intelligent than the modern work force.

<comment><USER4> I kind of disagree. I think the pace of "smarter" is progressing faster and cheaper then "simple tasks"

<comment><USER9> Well made point, and I could be wrong. I assume you refer to the automation inroads into accounting, legal, organisation tracking (lower management) etc. I personally see those as specific low hanging fruit since they are highly rule based.

But soon we will reach strong automation on diverse simple manual labour, transportation, stocking/handling, etc. Even if automation just manages to handle 90% of everyday tasks it will crash enormous employment numbers, far beyond what we see today in accounting, legal, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> FTA: "Meanwhile, many of the tasks that seem most basic to us humans—like running over rough terrain or interpreting body language—are all but impossible for the machines of today and the foreseeable future."

[https://www.zdnet.com/article/boston-dynamics-set-to-sell- it...](https://www.zdnet.com/article/boston-dynamics-set-to-sell-its-viral- hit-robot-dog/)

</comment><comment><USER11> This article gives very little evidence to support the claim that AI will never be capable of doing everything a human can do. On the other side Of the argument I'm still very convinced by the fact that our brains are physical things doing some sort of computation, so computers will one day be able to achieve anything that our brain computation can achieve.

<comment><USER12> So if the brain is just doing some sort of computation then do you also agree with the statement that any flow of fluid (river etc) is just solving fluid dynamics differential equations?

<comment><USER13> Flow of fluid is governed by physical laws, for which Navier–Stokes is an approximation. Brain is governed by physical laws too, of course. But its structure facilitates processes which can be described as information processing.

If water fails to solve Navier-Stokes, we change the equations, if a human fails at reasoning, we correct the human.

<comment><USER12> My point was that we use mathematics to model physical phenomenon and by definition every model is an approximation of the phenomenon which means that you cannot say that the phenomenon is actually doing what the model says. Instead we say that the model is useful only to answer certain set of questions to certain degree of accuracy.

<comment><USER13> If a brain isn't doing what formal logic says, then it's doing it wrong. Sometimes models are more important.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > Meanwhile, many of the tasks that seem most basic to us humans—like running > over rough terrain or interpreting body language—are all but impossible for > the machines of today and the foreseeable future.

I don't think the author ever ran over rough terrain, that's all but a basic task. And for the interpreting body language, that fails as soon as you get to a different culture or just to a different animal. The author is vastly overestimating human capabilities.

</comment><comment><USER15> I think two things go on with automation that are good and bad

1) things get cheaper and markets tend to be elastic so demand goes up. Good for whole economy 2) particular jobs disappear completely, very bad for particular sections of the community for a while.

It is sort of inevitable though.

</comment><comment><USER16> Apart from no overdose danger, demand for computation is economically like drug addicts'. So vendors call their clientele _users_.

> It turns out that human intelligence is not just one trick or technique — it > is many.

Disagree. Though humans have many varied talents, some inherited from mammals like walking and seeing, some developed culturally and practiced like go and chess, I think strong intelligence is just _one trick_. It might need quite a lot of background processing and memory in order to do anything useful or even vaguely "intelligent", but the key trick itself might not need much processing power, and could be quite simple.

> people who can push forward the boundary of computationally hard problems > need never fear for lack of work

So, full employment!

</comment><comment><USER17> > interpreting body language

[https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.05521](https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.05521)

<comment><USER18> this paper is about lip reading, which is indeed a difficult task (i cant do it well, to be honest) and worthy of study. however, lip reading is not body language. lip reading maps movements to words in a natural language. recognizing body language requires knowing e.g. that crossing arms maps to the idea of closed-ness and thus that the interlocutor is closing themselves off from the conversation to some degree. or maybe the interlocutor has very long arms and has never been able to know what to do with them in a conversation or something.

<comment><USER19> Multimodality isn't really my field, but there's also a lot of research on emotion detection. E.g. [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1801.07481.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1801.07481.pdf) is a recent survey about commonly used methods that I found by quick googling.

We definitely _can_ combine things like detecting crossed arms (and knowing that it's correlated with closedness) with emotion and stress signs in your voice, sentiment mapping of the words you say, micro-movements and your pulse rate (that a machine can detect from video if it's sufficiently good) and various other things to infer your likely emotional state.

The trouble is that in-depth analysis requires excessive external context and a shared worldview - i.e. "being of the same tribe" and knowing how a particular real world event " _should_ " make one feel (and why), which is pretty much a general AI problem; but purely reading what the body language of this moment is telling about your emotions is a hard task but somewhat solvable even right now.</comment></comment></comment>


I'm a male tech exec in SF who was punished for reporting sexual assault - <AUTHOR> http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2017/10/23/victim-claims-equinox-sports-club-sexual-assault/ <comment><AUTHOR> If anyone is so inclined, please view my petition at Http://www.ChangeEquinox.org

#metoo

</comment><comment><USER2> The silence beneath this post is speaking volumes. I guess no socially exploitable damsel in distress PC reflexes here. Im very sorry for what happened to you. No being should be allowed to exploit another being without its consent.

<comment><USER3> Why do we need to describe who and what the victim is when discussing sexual harassment? The whole part of the narrative where we describe the gender, appearance, fashion choices, how many hours of yoga you have done? Why are we focussing on that aspect at all?

<comment><USER4> I don't think there were enough details. I usually like to see the pics of the accused and the victim to make up my mind.</comment></comment></comment>