Show HN: Tool Time - how well do you know your dev tools? - <AUTHOR> http://tooltime.stackshare.io/ <comment><USER2> The title made me think this will be a quiz about rarely known commands or feature in some IDEs.

That would be nice.

Instead it's a quiz where there are 8 subjective barely descriptive words (such as good ui, has app, etc..) and 4 saas products that I barely heard of and never used.

So, nice idea of the aim was to get people to discover new SaaS products using a playful game.

<comment><AUTHOR> One of the creators here. Fair point regarding expectations. But I'm pretty sure if we had said "SaaS tools" people would have been thrown off since there's a fair amount of non-SaaS. And the subjective words are submitted by people who've used the products, so they're more feedback than anything- we probably should have made that clear in the UI.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It seems biased on SaaS tools. But I like it, found out about cool services :D

<comment><USER4> _> It seems biased on SaaS tools_

Yeah, that bothered me a little. I was expecting something like interesting lesser-known features of popular standalone tools, from command line tools to plugins for text editors and IDEs. Instead it felt more like sponsored ads loosely presented as a quiz.

I probably wouldn't mind so much if the examples were then discussed. I might have missed it, but I couldn't even find a "read more" link about any of the products so if I hadn't heard of the examples then I've gained nothing from the exercise.

<comment><USER3> There are two links on every answer.

One to a StackShare profile and one to the website of the product.

<comment><USER4> You're right, my apologies.

It still might have been nice to have a little information on the quiz answers though. It breaks the flow of the site if I constantly have to navigate away just to find a summary of the product. The questions are pretty vague a lot of the time and often full of marketing double talk, so you don't glean much new information from the quiz site itself. However I do understand and agree with having those links for contestants who wish to learn more than a summary about any specific product.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good idea! We originally had the descriptions there for the options but that gave away the answer. Showing the description once you answer would be helpful, we'll add that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "If you know http you know Sintatra". I wonder which option I should pick? Sinatra?

There's a lot of those, especially with AWS products, where all but the product name is mentioned in the descriptions.

It's fun to play though :). Also amazing how many things there are.

<comment><USER6> It's also entertaining to get the keywords:

        Great community support
        Flexible, powerful, simple
        Superb api
        Easy to learn and powerful to work with

mmk. Just shows how fluffy and not _actually_ useful SaaS descriptions can be - the only real clue here is "api", since one of the options was nginx, that helps a tiny bit.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah that's our bad- we need to make it clear that the descriptions are coming from users of the products, not the companies.

<comment><USER6> Oh okay - I cynically assumed that these were keywords/phrases pulled off landing pages.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A lot of the ones I saw were a mix of way too vague to be guessable ("easy to use", "simple", "pleasant") or way too obvious because of the clues ("backed by Microsoft" \-- the only Microsoft one in here is C#) ("If you know HTTP you know Sinatra" \-- guess it's Sinatra then), with a couple that were just misleading (why is "Scala" given as a clue for a Git hosting platform?)

That being said, it's a fun little quiz, and I definitely understand that getting good clues is hard. Writing good clues for a quiz by hand is hard enough; using scraped/machine-collected clues makes it harder.

</comment><comment><USER8> It's like a reCaptcha to catch non-programmers :)

</comment><comment><USER9> Free, Powerful, Customisable, Scalable, Easy to understand code, Great community

React? nope, PrestaShop

wut?

</comment><comment><USER10> Hi, interesting quiz. I might discover some new tools here. I would suggest a "I don't know" button.

</comment><comment><USER11> "took down many large sites when it failed"

^ Describing AWS Lambda. May want to fix that one.

</comment><comment><USER12> Cool. There are many tools which I don't know about. My Current Score is: 3 :)

</comment><comment><USER13> you should put the descriptions around an image of doge.</comment>


10,000 Mechanical Turkers work separately to draw a 100 dollar bill. - <AUTHOR> http://www.tenthousandcents.com/index.html <comment><USER2> You can certainly see who the lazies are. Especially prominent: the "H" in "THIS", the "LE" in "LEGAL", part of the crest, and part of the seal.

Guess the Mechanical Turk isn't good for, say, important data entry (without a system to set up cross-checks).

Pretty cool, though.

<comment><USER3> If you scroll down you can see that some people drew completely unrelated things. One guy doodled a stick figure. Another wrote "$0.01!! REALLY?!" The last guy did the drawing, then wrote "i hate u" over top.

<comment><AUTHOR> That kind of stuff is pretty rare. Turkers are pretty hard-working/honest people on the whole I guess out of 10,000 maybe 10-20 screwed around. That's less than .2%.

<comment><USER4> They're certainly harder working than I'd be, given the amount of effort for the return.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think its funny that folks feel this stuff is so baffling. It think what's causing this alarming "HEY" in people is the price. Understandable really, who the hell wants to do anything for .02 cents. Yet, again, we got blinders on. That's not .02 cents an hour, time really isn't defined, either is real effort, or care and quality of effort.

We just jump to the obvious answer in our heads without thinking about why, why WOULD someone do this. Why do people participate in social media? Why does the average teen check their myspace page 17 times a day? Who's getting paid to make 2.0 such an interesting place, well we sure aren't. Yet in turk land, the name of the game isn't to wake up and get excited about doing a .02 cent task. Its how fast can I do that so it doesn't feel like I did a .02 cent task. I'm bored, watching tv, why not make a few cents. Crazy, I know, yet, again, hello people are doing it.

Then we jump into the next assumption, well most of these folks have to be indian or chinese. Gold farmers sleeping in cots, that's it, thats gotta be it. Feel better? Wrong, 80% of these turks are not chinese gold farmers. They average joes here in the states buying milk and bacon just like you do. SHOCKING!

The sad thing is we hone in on all the .02 cent stories in turk, and yes there are plenty of them. But most turks I believe endure that cent crap to get to bigger fish. The "it took me less than 30 seconds for a buck" HITS, and I did 50 of those today. Now the money isn't so bad.

For people requesting the work, paying some 2 cents is a great way to get crap data, good luck with that. Course at a large volume of stuff, maybe you don't care, but in general turks don't do 2 cent tasks for 2 cents, they do it cause they are bored, multi-tasking, its interesting or fun- drawing 100 bill rather interesting, or cause its fast as hell to do.

</comment><comment><USER6> What kind of people think of stuff like this?

Or more precisely - what kind of people think of stuff like this, sober up, and then actually implement it?

<comment><USER7> People who eventually end up doing something meaningful, because they're not afraid to try.

<comment><USER4> "Afraid" is not even close to the right word for this context.

When I consider something like this, I don't think: _"Oh, that's scary and/or challenging!"_ Instead, I think: _"given all other possible uses of my time, is this one the best use possible?"_ Usually, the answer is no.

For me, if there's any "meaning" in this project, it's in divining why someone would choose to begin (or participate in) this in the first place.

<comment><USER7> If the question is _"given all other possible uses of my time, is this one the best use possible?"_ , then the answer will be "no" for almost any given value of "this". A likely result is doing nothing while one waits for the "perfect" thing to do - it might not apply as much to people on news.yc, but this does describe many people I know.

If the question is _"given all the ideas I have right now, and considering the effort to implement each, should I work on this?"_ , the answer might be different.

<comment><USER8> In fact, it is impossible to determine the best possible use of your time without determining, without doubt, the meaning of life.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What really baffles me is the number of people that start out with the foreground and then destroy most of their work by slowly filling in the background. No wonder that it took them 5 month. Great project though and a nice demonstration of what can be done with mechanical turk.

</comment><comment><USER10> With a single print ($100) they recovered the costs of the entire labor ($100, or 10,000 cents). This is a great metaphor of our modern production chain, isn't it? (i. e.: How production exploits cheap labor)

<comment><USER11> What metaphor would we use to explain the guy who did this on our production line?

<http://imagesocket.com/view/lol100b69.PNG>

<comment><USER12> [http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2088/2881/320/Herman,%20D...](http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2088/2881/320/Herman,%20David.jpg) <\---

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Isn't it illegal to sell life-sized colour prints of a $100 bill? Quality aside...

<comment><USER14> This is only the front. You check the backs of your US bills, don't you?

<comment><USER15> One-sidedness is one of the legal requirements, but it's not the only one.

<http://www.ustreas.gov/usss/money_illustrations.shtml>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I've always been a little confused... Who's time is worth so little that they'd actually see a single cent worth doing one of these drawings? Kids? Third world laborers?

I can see kids doing this, though I doubt that many would have access to the accounts and bank information necessary. As per third worlders: if a person's situation were such that a cent per minute was a reasonable wage, how could they afford a computer and an Internet connection? I'm imagining vast Chinese sweatshops with workers making .5 on the cent.

Is my analysis wrong here?

<comment><USER5> A classic and popular misconception that "no one in their right mind would do this", yet they do. The time for effort formula trips up a lot of people, your not the first one come up with this analysis.

The problem you have is the lens you're looking through. No one paid you to post here, no one paid you to participate in a social network, watch a youtube video, let alone make a blog, yet a whole heck of alot of the folks on the planet do it.

People need to stop looking at turk through the "job" lens because it will never ever make sense. But if you look at it through the multitasking, social media, bored outa my gord, what the hell, yearning to participate in something, be apart of something, advisory and authority lens it makes much more sense.

Meanwhile, read up on turks, get to know their behaviors and find out the why behind their actions.

[http://www.floozyspeak.com/blog/archives/2008/08/valley_of_t...](http://www.floozyspeak.com/blog/archives/2008/08/valley_of_the_t.html)

Don't take my word for it, go ask them yourself, make HIT, put it up there and see for yourself. But take the traditional "this is a job" lens off cause that is a classic misguided view of mechanical turk.

<comment><USER17> I think you overestimate the value of most of the worlds workers.

Let's say revenue is 1cent an minute for 40 hours a week and 48 weeks a year. That's 9,216$ / year. Split the cost of a low cost energy efficient PC 300$, electricity ~100$, and internet 400$/year, over 1 year. And your left with ~8416$ which works out to ~700$ a month. In 2004 a southern China factory job would pay about $120 a month for long hours and often dangerous conditions. There are more than 4 billion people who gladly take that job but most of them don't have the skills to do so.

PS: If you think my numbers are a little off 8000$/year places someone in the top ~15% of the worlds income earners. (<http://www.globalrichlist.com/>)

<comment><USER17> Ops, I knew that number looked to large. I multiplied by an extra 8. Anyway, lot's of people live off of less than 1cent an min of work, but you would need to significantly cut down the PC and internet cost's to make it work out. Anyway, it can still work for a surprising number of people as 1k/year still put's you into the top 1/2 of the worlds workers.

<comment><USER18> A person that makes 1k/year will hardly be able to buy a PC.

That person will probably not know how to use a computer, read or understand English.

<comment><USER17> True, but I think this is what the 1 laptop per child concept is all about. US minimum wage is 6.25/hour in other economies over a billion people would be happy with 1-2% of that. The trick is finding something useful for them to do and handing them the tools to do so. Anyway, I expect the cost of outsourcing low end jobs is only going to go down as digital work becomes more common.

PS: My point is mostly about what constitutes a "living wage" in most of the world and has little to do with Amazon Mechanical Turk as it exists right now. I expect most people using Turk are making a lot more than 1cent / min of work or are just doing it as a hobby where the cash value is almost zero incentive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> this is the same idea as the 10,000 sheep art project, done by the same guy, aaron koblin

whee

</comment><comment><USER20> This isn't exactly new. It was also one of the first projects like this done with Turk (ie, an art project and not just menial data entry).</comment>


Ask HN: What's going on with Hover? - <AUTHOR> My clients and I have been experiencing problems with DNS over the last 12 hours.  Hover seems to have an outage of some sort which includes domains registered with them and even the hover.come home page.<p>Any insights into what's going on?  I've used Hover for years, and this is the first time I've had even a hiccup of trouble -- but it's definitely causing some issues. <comment><USER2> [http://hoverstatus.com/](http://hoverstatus.com/) DNS and other parts of their service are down. First time I've ever experienced this with them. Been using their services for years now. Waiting for them to get it repaired and do post mortem

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I saw that at [http://hoverstatus.com/](http://hoverstatus.com/) (and somehow edited it out of my original post). But it seems weird and disturbing that a DNS registrar has DNS problems...

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This isn't the first time I've been impacted by an outage of theirs.

Can anyone recommend an alternative?

<comment><USER2> Stick with hover for domain registration. I do love their service around that. Just move your DNS out to any number of providers. In my case, I moved off to Route 53 today. I forgot that Digital Ocean also provides DNS facilities and could have moved to that as well.

You can move to Google as well if you'd like (nothing needs to be hosted with any of these providers btw. Just in case that's helpful)</comment></comment>


UK opposition party force vote on NASA hacker Gary McKinnon's extradition case  - <AUTHOR> http://www.computerworlduk.com/management/security/cybercrime/news/index.cfm?newsid=15711

<comment><AUTHOR> There are two main parties in the UK - Labour and Conservative. Labour would be similar to Democrats, and Conservative is broadly equivalent to the Republican party.

What is more surprising is that the fate of a hacker has become a political election issue (it's almost election time in UK), which goes to show the growing appreciation of the importance of IT to government for critical services.

</comment><comment><USER2> UK conservatives are far more conservative then the US conservatives. I hope they win, and Gary is not extradited.

<comment><USER3> If you look at many of the Tory policies, they're very very much to the left of the Republicans and even many Democrats.

<comment><USER2> That's what's called "libertarianism" in the US. That's what I meant by my above statement, as in this is what "true" conservatism looks like.

<comment><USER4> To all the downvoters: "conservative" and "liberal" mean very different things in the US and UK.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Where's the downvote button? - <AUTHOR> I've been wondering for awhile now how some comments on HN become greyed out. Is there a downvote or report button?<p>I'm also having a suspicion that the [-] button on the right, which I've been using to collapse threads, might be the one. Either way, I find HN's UX confusing. <comment><USER3> By the way I think that this downvote button is really a bad feature that brings negativity.

Don't like a post? Just ignore and don't upvote it!

<comment><USER4> I always liked Reddit's intended approach: downvote comments that don't add to the conversation.

Sadly, votes are too easily mapped to agree/disagree or truth/falsehood - <USER2> the "1,800 karma" comment below as a key example, where it furthers the conversation but is downvoted "because they are incorrect".

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Yes, both. Downvote and flag.

You need x karma to see it.

The [-] collapses the subthread, nothing more.

<comment><USER6> x is actually 501.

Even past that threshold, you can't downvote responses to your own comments. That's probably a wise limitation when you think about it.

Downvoting threads is done with the "flag" button which appears at the same time. Unfortunately, as HN has grown past a certain size, there's gotten to be a critical mass of "made" high-karma censors, who flag nascent postings on a whim. The diversity of articles suffers, limited now to either the things censors like, plus a small selection of postings where teams will "unflag" (also available at 501) this price-of-admission flagging.

Running any kind of good forum is hard, and HN's moderators work really hard at it, but "strangled-in-the-crib" flagging both takes away from the value of the site and gamifies the forum to where it now takes a team to make a posting that survives. I don't have an easy solution, though it might be worth trying to limit flags to one, two, or ten per day.

<comment><USER7> I have well under 501 karma, and I'm able to flag articles as well as vouch for dead ones.

I think your idea of limiting the number of flags a user has per day is a good one. I'm kind of surprised that isn't the default behavior already...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > There are no down arrows on stories. They appear on comments after users > reach a certain karma threshold, but never on direct replies.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)

</comment><comment><USER9> AFAIK you need 500 points to unlock "downvote" functionality.

<comment><USER10> That's a urban legend.

I have over 1,800 points, and there's no downvote to be seen.

<comment><USER11> I see no downvote on articles.

I do see downvote on some comments (not all).

The rules seem subtle.

<comment><USER12> Quite consistently: no downvote button on comments more than 24 hours old; no downvote button on comments that are followups to your own comment.

Submissions don't have downvoting, but you can flag them.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Physicists find misaligned carbon sheets yield unparalleled properties - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2020-07-physicists-misaligned-carbon-sheets-yield.html <comment><AUTHOR> >Strong mid-infrared photoresponse in small-twist-angle bilayer graphene

[https://www.nature.com/articles/s41566-020-0644-7](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41566-020-0644-7)</comment>


Android Malware Developed in Kotlin Programming Language Found in Google Play - <AUTHOR> http://www.securityweek.com/android-malware-developed-kotlin-programming-language-found-google-play <comment><USER2> What does the language have to do with anything?</comment>


BPF Theremin, Tetris, and Typewriters - <AUTHOR> http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2019-12-22/bpf-theremin.html <comment><USER2> Only tangentially related, but if you're interested in the theremin there's OpenTheremin [http://www.gaudi.ch/OpenTheremin/index.php](http://www.gaudi.ch/OpenTheremin/index.php), which is fairly fun to play around and make spooky noises with. Turns out actually playing music takes way more coordination than I have though.

</comment><comment><USER3> For other people like me who aren't super familiar with the Linux kernel, BPF is a packet filtering API which evolved into a kind of kernel scripting language: [http://www.brendangregg.com/bpf-performance-tools- book.html#...](http://www.brendangregg.com/bpf-performance-tools- book.html#BPF)

(Posting since it took me some digging to find out).

<comment><USER4> Now, a new way to run user programs in the kernel of a general purpose OS! What could possibly go wrong?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I want to like BPF, but so few of my problems are in the kernel. Performance problems are usually at the application layer, either in my code or my dependencies. Even in the rare case that it something outside of my control (like the compiler, or the nature of the data), it's almost never the kernel. Lastly, when it is the kernel's fault, there's usually a sysctl or other knob to turn to fix it. Real kernel problems, such as some missing functionality, are usually better resolved by committing changes to the kernel itself, not so much on demand filters. BPF is a solution in search of problems.

<comment><USER6> BPF programs can be attached to uprobes and thus much of the same tooling applies to userspace as well.

<comment><AUTHOR> That and user stack traces.

For many of the kernel tracing tools, I'll add user stack traces as needed for the user context. TCP connections and latency _with_ the Java code paths responsible; ditto for disk I/O, memory growth, lock contention, etc. If you've ever had a network problem, a disk I/O problem, a memory problem, etc, BPF can give you new insights that are unavailable from user-space tooling.

<comment><USER5> But that's also why BPF doesn't seem to have a place in this world. Anything surfaced by a BPF program should probably be surfaced by a proper kernel module or syscall. As far as I can tell, the utility of BPF tracing is solely between the time a bug comes up, and a few weeks later when a kernel upgrade exposes this info anyways.

<comment><USER7> Neither of your suggestions really get at the point of eBPF. That is, to safely (goodbye kernel modules) and dynamically (goodbye syscalls) instrument the kernel.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Entrepreneurial Proverbs - <AUTHOR> http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/03/entrepreneurial_proverbs.html <comment><USER2> The serial entrepreneur proverb:

If you go to bat enough times you may never hit a home run, but sooner or later you're bound to get hit by a pitch and walked.</comment>


PrivCo Tech Co. M&A Report: 100 Most Active Acquirers, Acq-Hires Spike - <AUTHOR> http://www.privco.com/products/2012-m-and-a-industry-overview-technology-sector-volume-I

<comment><AUTHOR> Anyone else on here been offered an "acq-hire" (ditch your startup, tech team heads off to the buyer in exchange for signing bonuses and equity?) Did you take it?</comment>


How I got a game on the Steam Store without anyone from Valve ever looking at it - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@rubiimeow/watch-paint-dry-how-i-got-a-game-on-the-steam-store-without-anyone-from-valve-ever-looking-at-it-2e476858c753#.kiy52xzcn <comment><USER2> link #11 to that article: [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=How%20I%20got%20a%20game%20on%...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=How%20I%20got%20a%20game%20on%20the%20Steam%20Store%20without%20anyone%20from%20Valve%20ever%20looking%20at%20it&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&prefix&page=0)</comment>


Skyscraper suspended from an Asteroid - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/bridaineparnell/2017/03/29/skyscraper_suspended_on_asteroid/ <comment><AUTHOR> More of a Friday afternoon story (or perhaps early April 1st story) but interesting that people spend time trying to figure out how you would build and use a skyscraper that was suspended from a geosynchronous asteroid.

I can't imagine that this would work given the other stuff in orbit but from a 'sit back and consider the argument' point of view, it definitely would be an interesting building to visit.

Here is the original: [http://www.cloudsao.com/ANALEMMA- TOWER](http://www.cloudsao.com/ANALEMMA-TOWER) and perhaps I should have submitted that as the URL, I can't change the URL but one of the mods can ...

</comment><comment><USER2> An April fool's joke if I ever saw one.</comment>


Ptacek, Tracy & McFeters: software security: ur doin it rong - <AUTHOR> http://www.viddler.com/explore/rentzsch/videos/31 <comment><USER2> Very interesting talk on generic security, definitely worth the 1 hour spent watching.</comment>


Public Computing and the Next Gang-of-Four - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/venkateshrao/2011/10/10/public-computing-and-the-next-gang-of-four/

<comment><USER2> "Every technology era has its four horsemen driving growth and innovation"

It appears to cherry pick solution. Mainframe computing in the 1960s and 1970s was dominated by IBM. IBM controlled over 50% of the market. The competition was first "the seven dwarves" and later five, also known as "BUNCH" (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BUNCH>).

What are the other three horsemen which could be compared to IBM?</comment>


NSA data will soon routinely be used for domestic policing - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2016/03/10/surprise-nsa-data-will-soon-routinely-be-used-for-domestic-policing-that-has-nothing-to-do-with-terrorism/?postshare=1861457633851446&tid=ss_tw <comment><USER2> [http://fee.org/articles/three-felonies-a-day-how-the-feds- ta...](http://fee.org/articles/three-felonies-a-day-how-the-feds-target-the- innocent/)

> Perhaps the most chilling quote of the Soviet era came from Lavrentiy Beria, > Stalin's head of the secret police, who bragged, "Show me the man, and I > will find you the crime." Surely, that never could be the case in America; > we're committed to the rule of law and have the fairest justice system in > the world.

> This should make everyone fearful. Silverglate declares that federal > prosecutors don't care about guilt or innocence. Instead, many subscribe to > a "win at all costs" mentality, and there is little to stop them.

> The very expansiveness of federal law turns nearly everyone into > lawbreakers. Like the poor Soviet citizen who, on average, broke about three > laws a day, a typical American will unwittingly break federal law several > times daily. Many go to prison for things that historically never have been > seen as criminal.

[http://mic.com/articles/86797/8-ways-we-regularly-commit- fel...](http://mic.com/articles/86797/8-ways-we-regularly-commit-felonies- without-realizing-it#.OsdEK5bhZ)

[http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/11/04/david-barton- expl...](http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/11/04/david-barton-explains-how- you-could-be-committing-three-felonies-a-day/)

> John Baker, a retired Louisiana State University law professor, made a > similar comment to the Wall Street Journal: "There is no one in the United > States over the age of 18 who cannot be indicted for some federal crime. … > That is not an exaggeration."

[https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/statistics](https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/statistics)

Do you even know the 134 laws passed by the current Congress are? I know I don't and you just have to fall afoul of 1.

<comment><USER3> I'm currently watching The Wire (Season 2). One thing I'm learning is that the common citizen really does not matter at all - the three different branches of the government keep each other in check by alternatively trying to fuck each other over/brownnose each other as much as they can.

That's the genius of checks and balances. As long as no one branch (legislative, judicial, executive) gets the upper hand, we can ensure that the power-hungry people who rise up through the ranks will hold each other accountable, if only for selfish and corrupt reasons.

I'm not sure what to consider corporations though. They seem to have piled up enough legal protection to be considered a fourth, private wing of government. Some of their incentives align (no taxes, bailouts, less regulation) but many more do not. Google and Apple control enough cash and information that they are de facto more powerful than 95% of world governments, and they play a major role in ours. Eric Schmidt taking on a role at the Pentagon is one recent example [1].

As Dostoevsky put it, viper will eat viper. We are all a little Karamazovian - of the black root. It's what keeps the world balanced.

[1] [http://www.wired.com/2016/03/ex-google-ceo-eric-schmidt- head...](http://www.wired.com/2016/03/ex-google-ceo-eric-schmidt-head- pentagon-innovation-board/)

<comment><USER4> Corporations are part of the checks and balances as well. Most of the opposition to SOPA/PIPA came from the tech industry, they've united to fight the FBI decryption challenge, and they started encrypting everything in response to the NSA revelations. On the flip side, the FTC is continually butting heads with Google over what are acceptable advertising statutes, human rights groups love to expose Apple's use of sweatshops, and European governments are big advocates of privacy.

The genius of democratic capitalism is that it's managed to harness the natural desire of sociopaths to fuck each other over to ensure that life doesn't get _too_ miserable for ordinary people. The unfortunate part is that you pretty much have to become a sociopath to enter the class that gets to decide who gets fucked. But I'd much rather have this than every other social system, where the sociopaths fuck over the common people unchecked.

<comment><USER5> > ... European governments are big advocates of privacy.

Maybe, but not where "national security" matters.

Edit: Added quotes for clarity.

<comment><USER6> Very few countries have reasons to fear for their 'national security', that's mostly just a fig leaf for activities that would otherwise not stand a chance of being implemented.

Countries that have legitimate national security issues (Syria, North Korea, Venezuela, Afghanistan, Iraq, Algeria and so on) are not the ones using that term the most frequent.

<comment><USER5> Agreed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> In related news, I heard on NPR today people are complaining that the TSA no- fly list didn't catch a man who was a wanted shooting suspect.

The insinuation is the no-fly list should be expanded to catch domestic criminals. You know, the no-fly list that you can't be removed from and don't have to have committed a crime to get yourself listed on. The no-fly list that is unconstitutional, yeah that one.

[http://abcnews.go.com/US/idaho-shooting-suspect-kyle-odom- fl...](http://abcnews.go.com/US/idaho-shooting-suspect-kyle-odom-fly- dc/story?id=37533421)

<comment><USER8> That response is deeply fucked.

It also gives further evidence to the fact that most people simply want to live a good life, and are happy to give power to any authority that can promise them that. The thinking here is: the government created the no fly list to catch bad guys, these are bad guys, why aren't they on the list?

<comment><USER7> My fear with all this is that we all think Snowden was great because it put a spotlight on this stuff. But the reality is Joe Average is perfectly ambivalent and powers in the government can use that to push this far beyond secret programs ostensibly created to protect us from terrorists.

<comment><USER9> I tell people I work for Booz | Allen | Hamilton, and the vast vast majority outside the beltway don't recognize the name at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Of course, since this is now available to local & federal cops & prosecutors, same as any other law enforcement database, any exculpatory information will naturally be discoverable by defense attorneys.

Right?

Right?

<comment><USER11> I'm suddenly reminded of two stories. One was my Civics teacher who grew up in a dry country. Every four years they got a new sheriff. Because hey after you've earned a quarter of million in bribes (circa 1965) why not retire. And another who mentioned when she was a teenager the feds busting two local sheriffs deputies for trafficking cocaine.

You really want a corrupt sheriff or drug dealing cops to have access to all the stuff the NSA does?

Seriously? Scares the crap out of me.

<comment><USER11> Also, just remembered these guys

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > It'll be Black, Brown, poor, immigrant, Muslim, and dissident Americans: the > same people who are always targeted by law enforcement for extra "special" > attention.

.. Another Quote.

> First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out— Because I was > not a Socialist.

> Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out — Because I > was not a Trade Unionist.

> Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—Because I was not a Jew

> Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

I guess i'm on that list now.

</comment><comment><USER13> You when you get paid to find terrorist, and your job depends on you finding terrorists, well then, everybody starts to look like a terrorist.

<comment><USER14> I've considered before that overzealous police forces are in certain respects analogues of auto-immune diseases. Host rejecting/attacking itself.

<comment><USER15> Yes! I've thought the exact same thing, thought I was the only one.

<comment><USER14> I'm trying to remember where I saw the idea developed. Possibly by Andreas Schou at Google+.

Basically: if you've got some discriminating test with Type 1 and Type 2 error (false positive, false negative, don't ask me which is which), then as the _actual_ rate of incidence _falls_ , no matter _how_ sensitive your test, at some point it's mostly making false positive rather than true positive selections.

Cue a system which rewards based on, say, arrests, rather than on correct convictions, and _doesn 't_ penalise on false arrests or wrongful convictions.

You're going to see a lot of false/wrongful arrests and convictions.

Makes me think if part of what happens within immune systems isn't similar.

Bruce Schneier probably covers similar ground, now that I think of it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I request the link to be changed to the original source; this article is an opinion piece. The original is here:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/26/us/politics/obama- administ...](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/26/us/politics/obama- administration-set-to-expand-sharing-of-data-that-nsa-intercepts.html)

<comment><USER17> I don't know, the WaPo article adds some useful context, like links to stories about previous, unofficial information sharing.

Of course, the usefulness hinges on whether you trust that WaPo is being impartial. (I have no opinion on that, since I don't follow US politics that closely.)

<comment><USER8> Yeah, it's not like the NYTimes is impartial either. Read their election coverage for example. I've been thinking about this recently because I was considering adding some more news sources to my feeds, but I'm fairly content because at this point I understand and notice the biases in the sources I do read, and I'm worried it would take a long time to build up a similar understanding of a new source.

<comment><USER18> What's wrong with the their election coverage (serious question)?

<comment><USER8> Severely biased in favor of Hillary. Makes sense – their main demographic is bankers, got to appease the customer.

When he was in the race, they were hugely in favor of Jeb Bush, too. For instance, this [1] was on the front page of the website for at least a day.

[1]: [http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/26/us/politics/hear-the- one-a...](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/26/us/politics/hear-the-one-about- jeb-bushs-humor-you-have-to-listen-closely.html?_r=0)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> As someone who doesn't live in the US, I am awestruck by how big of a deal this seems to be for people.

Are you really trying to tell me that surveillance of ~the rest of the world~ is somehow less bad?

<comment><USER20> Yes! To a first approximation, my government doesn't have the power to put _you_ in jail for, say, hacking into a local server in your hometown. (Yours doesn't have that power over me, either.)

So (again to a first approximation) the files that my government collects on you are only available to be used in cases with some sort of international significance. (And the same with the files that your government collects on me.) I see a vast difference between that situation and the situation where a local cop can casually dig through these vast databases to find out if I've ever been associated with anything at all potentially illegal.

<comment><USER21> There might be some deceased cell phone owners in Yemen that might disagree.

But in general, yes, spying on foreign nations have always been illegal, and always considered to be inevitable.

On the other hand, with the information sharing across borders (NSA spies on UK citizens, MI6 spies on US citizens) -- this line has already been blurred (Or for a less "redundant" example than the UK, Swedish and Norwegian intelligence services have had a rather incestuous, illegal secret relationship for a long time).

All that aside: a state where the electorate fear the elected, rather than the other way around (or; where the elected takes steps to _act_ on their fear of the electorate) is no longer a democracy.

<comment><USER21> I'm reminded of this 2015 story from The Intercept, about how all this started (which apparently haven't been submitted to hn before):

"GCHQ AND ME – My Life Unmasking British Eavesdroppers" [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11265969](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11265969)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Rumour has it that the NSA already has threat predictor algorithms and processes, how long until the NSA provides the FBI this and you get arrested for pre-crimes or thought-crimes? How do you answer the charge that you were _thinking_ about doing something bad?

<comment><USER23> Since when is thinking about something a crime??? It is the act that is important.

<comment><USER24> Felony to talk about harming the president, even in jest.

<comment><USER25> Just going to point out... Many dead presidents are still spinning in their graves from the day that became a crimp. That's not how the freedoms they strived to uphold are supposed to work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> With low level bureaucrats getting access to this data, isn't it inevitable that we'll start seeing massive security breaches on a routine basis?

I suppose we'll just have to start assuming that anything said or written or looked up online will eventually be accessible to anyone who's interested.

<comment><USER27> Yes - aside from the inevitable LOVINT abuses, it seems likely that this will end up compromising even more sources and methods.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Sorry in advance if this is somehow not a "substantive" comment, but it really needs to be said very clearly:

This country is so f#cked now.

What are the remaining options?

1\. Those who accept the new reality will be forced to behave like sheep.

2\. Those who speak up will be silenced even before they will have organized some kind of serious movement (see: OWS + parallel construction).

3\. Leave.

<comment><USER29> I think you should expand point 3. At the very least, consider "where" you'd leave to. I came to the conclusion that pretty much everywhere on the globe, you'll find the same problem you're trying to escape.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Is anyone surprised?

Don't use electronic messaging to tell people you're holding cash, bring a cheque at least. The cops are going to find out and your cash is going to be confiscated.

<comment><USER31> The better evil is still fucking evil. Don't ever forget that.

<comment><USER32> I'm printing that out tomorrow, and posting it on my wall. thank you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> It's not enough to go after drug dealers, you have to go after their families as well.

<comment><USER34> God save us if Trump is the new POTUS.

<comment><USER35> Hillary is just as bad regarding this topic.

<comment><USER36> I'm not much of a fan of Hillary's record either, but she never called for Snowden to be "assassinated".

I submit that an impulsive and narcissistic demagogue with no vested interest in "the establishment" is a far scarier leader in the context of a turnkey police state than even a right-wing career politician.

<comment><USER37> She said Snowden should return to the US and "face the music." [1]

Treason, punishable by death. [2]

IMO, "face the music" is code for "funeral march". [3]

1 [http://www.businessinsider.com/democratic-debate-edward- snow...](http://www.businessinsider.com/democratic-debate-edward- snowden-2015-10)

2 [https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2381](https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2381)

3 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyFyAqLtHq8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyFyAqLtHq8)

<comment><USER38> I think you are taking something said figuratively literally. Everyone has used "face the music" as an idiom to mean "take responsibility." I'll give her the benefit of doubt in this situation.

<comment><USER39> Since Snowden has taken responsibility, I don't see how you can construe was you said as anything other than a statement that Snowden should come back to the US and face prosecution for a capital offense.

That certainly isn't the same thing as calling for extra-legal assassination.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> The singularity is coming... It just turns out it's fascism.

</comment><comment><USER41> I would not be surprised if there are crowdfunding sites that help fund lawsuits or other legal matters.

Are there crowdfunding sites that help fund civil rights cases?

Edit: In other words, I'm beginning to think the only way to chip away at this sort of massive government overreach is to crowdfund the hell out of a ton of legitimate civil rights cases. Eventually maybe our government(s) (since I imagine US is not the only one to be concerned about) will get the hint.

<comment><USER12> They do not need to get the hint. All taxpayers are already "Crowdfunding" the govts lawyers. They lose nothing by fighting you in court.

<comment><USER41>
      They lose nothing by fighting you in court.

I am 100% certain you are wrong about that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I think they are a few organisational steps away from something truly terrifying. That will be when the NSA just hand over the 'graph' dataset of all the drug dealers to the FBI/local police. As it stands they have to have a clue, e.g. a name before they can get particulars. So policing is still 'hampered' conveniently for those that use drugs. So long as their network does not arouse the suspicions of the police then there need not be any suspicions.

However, if the complete 'graph' is just handed over then even the most discreet of networks could be uprooted, all chains and links identified, geolocated too. This could be done. All it would take is a Donald Trump to take it up another level. He could get a lot of votes by promising to use NSA data to eradicate drugs from America once and for all, with no drug-dealer left behind...

Aside from the 'where next' aspects, as it is, I found this article to be quite shocking. So much for the 'land of the free'.

<comment><USER31> Like Hillary wouldn't. She has Drug Warrior in her blood.

<comment><USER43> She would turn from that position the moment it became financially or politically expedient to do so.

 _Edited_ : for those downvoting, I invite you to consider how her (stated) positions on abortion and the black community have changed over the years. Everyone learns and changes their opinions over time, but her changes are too politically convenient to be simply personal development.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Meanwhile the leading Republican presidential nominee is a right-populist (a.k.a. fascist), and the Democratic presidential nominee was _almost_ a left- populist (socialist).

We are literally one economic crisis or major terrorist attack away from some form of significantly more authoritarian if not outright totalitarian government. Whether it would be "left" or "right" is sort of up in the air, and might depend on which side is able to produce a more compelling demagogue at the right time. In any case if history is any guide it doesn't matter much. Totalitarianism is totalitarianism.

If that comes to pass, we're going to find out what "turn-key totalitarian state" means. The infrastructure is in place. The only barriers are legal and social/cultural.

<comment><USER45> >Meanwhile the leading Republican presidential nominee is a right-populist (a.k.a. fascist), and the Democratic presidential nominee was almost a left- populist (socialist).

That's just incendiary nonsense. Trump is no more fascist than Bernie Sanders.

<comment><USER46> Encouraging his supporters to "rough up" protestors and offering to pay their legal bills is about as fascist as it gets.

<comment><USER45> No it isn't. If you really want to see fascism in the US you have to go to college campuses, where students are expected to shout down speakers and assault them.

<comment><USER46> Now you're just lying.

<comment><USER45> [http://www.therebel.media/watch_triggered_protester_pours_bo...](http://www.therebel.media/watch_triggered_protester_pours_bottle_of_urine_on_lauren_southern_because_she_was_winning_debate)

[http://nypost.com/2016/02/11/the-fight-for-tolerance-at- rutg...](http://nypost.com/2016/02/11/the-fight-for-tolerance-at-rutgers-hits- a-new-low/)

 _That_ is fascism. Not what Trump is doing. When you try to prevent people from speaking. Not when they react.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> This sounds awfully familiar.

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

</comment><comment><USER48> It's time to shut down the NSA for good.

<comment><USER49> I wonder why you're being downvoted? Perhaps they know something we don't about the terrorist attacks averted and Constitutional protections upheld due to the NSA's virtuous efforts?

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> In my humble opinion, something that folks may want to think about is existing NSA data retention plus the statutes of limitations.

Now various agencies can trawl back through decades of data collection and see what people can still be prosecuted for, extorted with, etc.

</comment><comment><USER51> If that is true then that I think is a violation of due process. If proven to have happened then many people can simply go free due to technicalities of the law. Awkward for the FBI.

</comment><comment><USER52> To quote the great Gomer Pyle, "surprise, surprise, surprise!"

</comment><comment><USER9> Public announcement of these programs is good. It opens the door to Constitutional scrutiny.

These actions were happening anyway. Aren't we better off now that they're acknowledged and can be challenged?

</comment><comment><USER53> We need to stop this bullshit from happening. We the people.

</comment><comment><USER54> "What is your hue?"

The question will become relevant soon enough.

</comment><comment><USER55> [http://www.isittimetomovetocanadayet.com/](http://www.isittimetomovetocanadayet.com/)

</comment><comment><USER9> More doors in, more doors out. Bad OPSEC.

</comment><comment><USER56> So how many candidates in the upcoming election are publicly against this kind of data mining?

<comment><USER57> Publicly against it doesn't really mean anything for politicians (look at Obama)... I think that looking at their voting history is probably more reliable (in Congress or Senate, if available).

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> This is honestly the road to 1984.

</comment><comment><USER59> This sounds exactly like what is happening right now.

"All lives matter" gets you harassed and possibly fired.

<comment><USER60> It's not that anyone disagrees that all lives matter, it's that your intention in saying "all lives matter" is to undermine a legitimate social cause. "Black Lives Matter" supporters aren't saying that other lives don't matter, they're saying that black lives matter _too_ \-- and that's a valid point in a country where blacks, for example, are much more likely to receive the death penalty for committing the same offences.

<comment><USER61> So... was "too" too difficult to say?

<comment><USER60> No it's implied, was the implication too tough for you to figure out?

<comment><USER61> I can figure out multiple implications. Apparently some of them contradict each other.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How the NSA Got So Smart So Fast  - <AUTHOR> http://on.wsj.com/11HXT5w

<comment><USER2> The question(s) I have about the NSA aren't "Do they use Hadoop, Spark, S4, MPI, OpenMP, etc." but rather things like:

1\. Do they already have a functional quantum computer, capable of rendering most modern encryption useless?

2\. Do they have a mathematical breakthrough that allows them to factor products of large prime numbers multiplied together, far faster than anyone suspects - which would render most / all modern encryption useless?

3\. Have they planted backdoors and vulnerabilities in popular, widely distributed hardware / software platforms?

etc.

<comment><USER3> Re: #3; can you seriously imagine that they can't take control of an MS- Windows PC, with or without MS's knowledge?

And you forgot a point: can they get an SSL root certificate signed for them, in order to perform MitM attacks on seemingly secured connections? Here again it's a foregone conclusion, several less technically-savvy countries have been caught doing that.

<comment><USER4> > Re: #3; can you seriously imagine that they can't take control of an MS- > Windows PC, with or without MS's knowledge?

Can they take control of an MS-Windows PC without the cooperation of my router maker and my firewall maker? And what does it cost them to do so for the different makers?

You know? I'm fairly sure they can, after all if some kiddy off the internet can what are the chances they can't. But what's the cost to cover the different profiles? Is there a single point of failure?

<comment><USER5> Shouldn't be hard for the NSA to monitor your web browsing for a few days and then inject a 0-day for whatever browser you're using into an HTTP response from, say, HN, right?

<comment><USER4> If they've got to rely on the infrastructure provider to know what I've been looking at, then I assume that they don't have infrastructure in place themselves to arbitrarily do HTTP injection in a push button manner. May be wrong though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Paywall for me... :(

<comment><USER7> [http://lmgtfy.com/?q=How+the+NSA+Could+Get+So+Smart+So+Fast#](http://lmgtfy.com/?q=How+the+NSA+Could+Get+So+Smart+So+Fast#)

<comment><USER8> Most of the top links are just teasers which link to the paywalled story.

Here is a complete (I assume) version. [http://finance.yahoo.com/news/nsa- could-smart-fast-235100722...](http://finance.yahoo.com/news/nsa-could-smart- fast-235100722.html?.tsrc=mobifone)

<comment><USER7> When I posted the link, the top result was the actual story. Simply add "site:wsj.com" to the search and the top link should be correct. If you click the link from google, you avoid the paywall.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Article behind paywall. Here is link that works: [http://stream.wsj.com/story/latest- headlines/SS-2-63399/SS-2...](http://stream.wsj.com/story/latest- headlines/SS-2-63399/SS-2-252859/)

</comment><comment><USER10> welp if the PLA has a backdoor on my Shenzhen-made electronic goodies, I need an NSA backdoor in order to keep em honest. Also any conversation with "backdoor" could get dirty fast...

</comment><comment><USER11> I wonder if the NSA will open source their server architecture?

<comment><USER2> Believe it or not, they do open source some of their stuff, sometimes. See, for example, Accumulo.[1][2]

[1]: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Accumulo](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Accumulo)

[2]: [http://accumulo.apache.org/](http://accumulo.apache.org/)

<comment><USER12> I believe NSA has a dual mandate. We are hearing a lot lately about their efforts to discover and use intelligence via electronic means, but I believe they are also responsible for providing guidance on how the U.S. can secure its own electronic communications--this is where efforts like SELinux and the guide to securing OS X come from.

<comment><USER8> >but I believe they are also responsible for providing guidance on how the U.S. can secure its own electronic communications

How can anyone find them credible in such a role with such huge glaring conflicts of interests, and their demonstrated lack of trustworthiness?

<comment><USER13> We see the same kind of behavior in corporations all the time. "Sony" is both "Columbia Pictures", which wants to put invasive DRM in your TV, and "Sony Electronics", which wants to sell TVs without DRM so more people buy them.

And you can just look at the NSA's guide to securing Red Hat Linux.

[http://www.nsa.gov/ia/_files/os/redhat/rhel5-guide-i731.pdf](http://www.nsa.gov/ia/_files/os/redhat/rhel5-guide-i731.pdf)

It's not substantially different than the information you'd find in any other book about security. Anyone is free to review or comment on it. I don't find it plausible that the NSA would hide any tricks in that document so they could track you. At best, they might omit information, such as knowledge of a 0-day exploit.

<comment><USER8> I don't consider Sony trustworthy either.

As far as the NSA's published guide you linked, of course it is in the national interest for them to do things like that, and given the nature of a public document it would be foolish for them to put false or misleading information in it. That would be both bad, and comically obvious. I was thinking more along the lines of them promoting or mandating the use of encryption/technology that has weaknesses known only to them.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Reporters in Las Vegas Try to Crack Case of Who Owns Their Newspaper - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/15/business/media/reporters-in-las-vegas-try-to-crack-case-of-who-owns-their-newspaper.html <comment><USER2> Speculation: "Because the newspaper is a prominent platform in a key electoral state, some wondered whether there could be a political motive behind its purchase. Some in political and media circles suggested that the casino magnate and billionaire political backer Sheldon Adelson could be behind the change in ownership, but representatives for Mr. Adelson did not respond to emails and calls seeking comment on Monday. (Through a spokesman, the Republican donors Charles and David Koch publicly denied to Fortune magazine that they had any role in the purchase.)"

<comment><USER3> That people wondered is a fact. It is subject to verification.

<comment><USER2> I'm in complete agreement with your statement--that was my intent; I regret the confusion. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Making it difficult to determine who owns huge assets is newest craze. Referenced in a recent HN link [http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/15/us/shell- company-bel-air-m...](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/15/us/shell-company-bel- air-mansion.html)

</comment><comment><USER5> Another rumor I heard is it's Tony Hsieh. I don't think there's any evidence for that, but it's at least plausible in the sense that he has a lot of big investments in Nevada that could perhaps benefit from a friendlier press. See e.g. [http://www.reviewjournal.com/business/angry-tenants-voice- co...](http://www.reviewjournal.com/business/angry-tenants-voice-complaints- about-downtown-container-park)

</comment><comment><USER6> Sheldon Adelson: [http://fortune.com/2015/12/16/sheldon-adelson-bought-the- las...](http://fortune.com/2015/12/16/sheldon-adelson-bought-the-las-vegas- review-tribune/)

<comment><USER7> and refuted: [http://money.cnn.com/2015/12/16/media/las-vegas-review- journ...](http://money.cnn.com/2015/12/16/media/las-vegas-review-journal- sheldon-adelson/index.html)

<comment><USER8> The article you posted is not a refutation, let alone a convincing one. This was a bored Sheldon Adelson toying with a reporter in an informal context while waiting for an event to resume.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > ...said it was difficult to demand transparency from the people and > institutions the paper reported on when their organization was not being > forthright itself.

Does anyone else see a contradiction here? By not knowing who the owner is, no reporter can bias any article for or against the owner. If they never find out then they'll have the only unbiased publication in history. That should more than compensate for 'lack of transparency'.

<comment><USER10> By not knowing who the owner is, nobody can verify the existence of a pipeline from friendly editors upwards, whether or not stories need approval from upwards, whether or not certain stories were commissioned by those upwards, etc.

Complete transparency or bust, especially in an organization like this.

The issue of individual reporters biasing individual articles is extremely small potatoes. Unfortunately, it is what most people think of when thinking 'media bias'.

The much more serious issue is larger systemic bias where reporting about {X1,...,Xn} potentially never even sees the light of day, or is systemically edited in particular ways, without anyone other than top people knowing why.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> Confirmed as Adelson family (son-in-law, and so forth), by the paper itself, on December 16, 2015 - 1:51pm: [http://www.reviewjournal.com/news/las- vegas/adelson-son-law-...](http://www.reviewjournal.com/news/las- vegas/adelson-son-law-orchestrated-familys-purchase-las-vegas-review-journal)

</comment><comment><USER11> China? Mark Zuckerberg? Ashton Kutcher?

<comment><USER12> Kim Jong Un.

<comment><USER13> Please stop submitting useless comments, thanks.

<comment><USER14> It's not useless - its humor.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Spokane millennials buying houses - <AUTHOR> https://www.kxly.com/news/spokane-millennials-buying-houses-1/742253323 <comment><USER2> Have a co-worker who moved from California to Spokane, sold his house for over a million and bought an equivalent house on large acreage lot for less than half. His parents moved 2 years ago, doing the same thing.

And hes not the only one, the large 20+ acre lots being craved up in the rural areas. Sold to California transplants. These houses on acrage are going for about 500-600k each, creating large tracks of new high taxable for the rural cities. And normally too expensive for locals, so transplants are the ones buying these large plots.

Also, I have inlaws on the Deer Park city council, California retirees moving in have been buying up the houses over 200k. They actually ran out of houses in the smaller city just north of Spokane. The new golf course has empty plots just waiting for new homes to be built.

When you can get average old houses in town for around 120k, and land outside the city for 40k, you can see why people are moving.

I have land north of Spokane, that I plan on retiring on, well and power already installed, just an hour north, and away from people. Throw a log cabin home or manufactured double wide with metal roof on it. Only issue is Internet is limited to Verizon LTE, but by the time I'm retired, wireless internet from sat and cell will be common. Thanks SpaceX!

Also, when I left Spokane for Seattle for work 20+ years ago, Spokane put in Fiber in all the downtown for cities. The ISP was working at couled get bandwidth cheap.

Also spokane has businesses that do cloud based services like banking backups and hosting companies. Wages go for about 20-30k cheaper than Seattle, just about the amount that makes the difference in a mortgage. A old high school friend works at a web hosting business for company, and they have almost 100 employees. Expect more with companies moving out of the big cities for places like Spokane.

But, the commute times are starting to go up, I hear my friends telling me how its getting bad. But I cant believe its as bad as Seattle.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> _" Tollefson has some big plans for her Central Spokane property. The 23-year- old gets the keys to her first home Thursday. ... If you think Megan is unusually young to buy a house - you're half right. Megan is young, but more and more people her age are committing to real estate.

According to the US Census Bureau, 36 percent of every American under the age of 35 owns their own home; a dramatic increase from just last year, when the percentage was 34.7 percent for the same age group."_</comment>


Convert Your Legacy SQL to Laravel Builder with Orator - <AUTHOR> http://www.midnightcowboycoder.com <comment><AUTHOR> Orator allows you to convert your legacy SQL statements to Laravel Builder syntax. This is great for migrating old PHP to a new Laravel project. Since this service is free and new, we need all the feedback as possible, please use the feedback button for further instructions. Orator is still learning, we would love you all's help.

Orator is at [http://www.midnightcowboycoder.com](http://www.midnightcowboycoder.com)</comment>


Watch a harpoon successfully spear a piece of space junk - <AUTHOR> https://www.technologyreview.com/the-download/612966/a-harpoon-has-just-successfully-speared-a-piece-of-space-junk-at-high-speed/ <comment><USER3> I wonder, is space debris not valuable? After all - it allready is up there? So why not glue it together- web it in and sell it later to a factory, who goes up there?

One kilogram of space debris should be worth some x < 14.240$ - this might be the one instance where recycling is of interest.. - just before somebody tows a asteroid in and glues a refinery to it.

<comment><USER4> Why harpoon these things? I think webbing them in is a better idea. Also - <USER2> assume its impossible to create "suction" in space - like - you cant slurp something into a tube, in space, can you?

Also - how do we know what is space junk, and whose it is? How are we sure that a small satellite by india or china isnt operating but maybe disguised as space junk?

<comment><USER5> It's pretty well tracked. [https://www.wired.com/2009/03/howtojunk/](https://www.wired.com/2009/03/howtojunk/)</comment></comment></comment>


Sugar Should Be Regulated As Toxin, Researchers Say - <AUTHOR> http://news.yahoo.com/sugar-regulated-toxin-researchers-180605186.html;_ylt=Amaj5zLSmK4pdOYz6J.1nJumWot4;_ylu=X3oDMTRzcnNkZHQ3BGNjb2RlA2N0LmMEbWl0A0FydGljbGUgTW9zdCBQb3B1bGFyBHBrZwM5MGM0YzI4NS0xZmNkLTMwYmQtOGMwZi05OWFlYTBhYzM0NGUEcG9zAzMEc2VjA01lZGlhQkxpc3RNaXhlZE1vc3RQb3B1bGFyQ0EEdmVyAzdhZjcyN2FlLTRkZjUtMTFlMS1hNTdiLTZiMzdkYTgyZTI4Yg--;_ylg=X3oDMTNoMDM3N2hhBGludGwDdXMEbGFuZwNlbi11cwRwc3RhaWQDOWI5ZWMzYzMtNTRhNi0zMmUzLTgwN2ItOTZmNmQxYTgyZWE4BHBzdGNhdANwb2xpdGljc3xkZXN0aW5hdGlvbjIwMTIEcHQDc3RvcnlwYWdlBHRlc3QD;_ylv=3 <comment><USER3> Robert Lustig, despite his considerable bona-fides, is an alarmist who uses hack science and a number of unsupported suppositions to make his (telegenic) points. When you call something like fructose 'toxic', you are doing the public a disservice.

<comment><USER4> His contention is that it's as toxic as alcohol, although alcohol has immediate effect on the brain and therefore is more self-limiting. You can also check out his video where he goes through the biochemical pathways:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM>

At one point, he asks what you call a substance that primarily gets metabolized in the liver and when presented in excess (not an extreme excess either), gets metabolized into products considered harmful to the body.

I should also note that every objection you make is unsupported and ad hominem ('alarmist', 'hack science'). If you want to counter his claim, point to a study where fructose is shown not to be correlated with the diseases in question. There are certainly a lot of studies as far back as the 50s that support his claims. I personally am on the hunt for well-controlled studies with reasonable duration (years to a decade) that involve sugar/fructose.

<comment><USER3> Fine, you're right. Let me de-hominenize. His claims are alarmist and the word toxic is unsupported by the available science and opens him up to claims of media-seeking hackery. He's probably on the right path in untangling the effects of the godawful modern diet but to single out a specific sugar and call for its regulation is still a big stretch.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > _"Sugar and other sweeteners are, in fact, so toxic to the human body that > they should be regulated as strictly as alcohol by governments worldwide"_

Alcohol shouldn't be regulated, endangering others while intoxicated and other irresponsible acts should be.

<comment><USER6> I disagree. Alcohol is claiming more and more lives from liver disease and throat and stomach cancer in the UK [1] and Ireland. It's not just drink driving that's a problem, but also the death toll from alcohol abuse over the long term which also places increasing pressure on health services.

[1]<http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-15997695>

<comment><USER5> > _"Balance's figures found 189 hospital admissions for 30 to 34-year-olds"_

Those people are adults, and the numbers of cases is so small that one might question its statistical significance.

Furthermore, what evidence is there that regulation would be a more effective way of dealing with the problem (if it exists) than alternatives such as education or public awareness campaigns?

<comment><USER6> >and the numbers of cases is so small that one might question its statistical significance.

You clearly miss the point. The fact is that liver disease is increasingly significantly in age groups it was not historically a problem in. This was widely reported in the UK last year, I may not have picked the best article.

<comment><USER5> The rate of occurrence may be increasing, but the rate at which persons are being diagnosed may also play a role, as may changes to the rates at which person's seek treatment.

In other words, a 32 year old with a beer belly might be more likely to be diagnosed based on a doctor's increased awareness, or may be more likely to be diagnosed because of more frequent visits to the doctor.

And even if those do not play a role, a case has not been made that special regulations with regard to alcohol are a better solution than other alternatives.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Maybe processed food producers should stop adding sugar/HFCS to everything under the sun. An example list: [http://www.accidentalhedonist.com/index.php/2005/06/09/foods...](http://www.accidentalhedonist.com/index.php/2005/06/09/foods_and_products_containing_high_fruct) Does HFCS _REALLY_ need to be in NyQuil? In steak sauce? In _vegetable soup_?

<comment><USER8> The problem is, they do that because people buy more of the product when it has sugar in it.

On the whole, I don't think pressuring the producers is going to get us anywhere. There may be specific cases where such pressure might work -- vegetable soup, perhaps -- but even then, that can only happen if enough consumers refuse to buy products containing gratuitous sugar.

No, I think educating the public is really the only strategy available to us. Even regulation and taxation, which could be beneficial, can't happen without a certain number of informed consumers pushing for it.

<comment><USER9> Educating the public will be hard as well. People lobby the government on behalf of sugar companies.

Stevia, a low calory, low GI sugar substitute was unavailable in the US until very recently because the sugar companies lobbied the FDA to classify it as a 'drug' or a supplement and needed to be tested ad nauseum before it became available. All this allowed sugar and sweetener companies to prolong the entrance of Stevia into the market and not hit their profits.

In addition to actually getting it classified as a drug, there is paid propaganda research out there saying that it is actually bad for you. Some handwaving arguement is presented without much evidence and a giant leap in order to frighten people.

On such article can be found here. (done by quick Google search and I am in no way partial to this particular one. I am sure that there are more on the same subject) [http://www.30thstreetclinic.com/general- reviews/100-stevia-d...](http://www.30thstreetclinic.com/general- reviews/100-stevia-dangers.html)

When asked about dangers of stevia, this author says that it is dangerous, because it is not approved by the FDA. Hence, there is this vicious circle that even people who will seek out to educate themselves will come across these claims and perhaps continue to use sugar.

Educating the public against products of the giant companies is an uphill battle. I am Canadian and Canadian doctors and nutritionists chuckle at this "not approved by the FDA - hence bad" arguement about stevia, but I am sure that if we were a major sugar country that it would be the same here as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Anyone with a bit of time and a mild interest in chemistry and/or nutrition should watch this video: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM>

It's a talk by Dr Robert Lustig called Sugar: The bitter truth.

<comment><USER11> It's good to watch his talk but keep in mind this is hyperbole and propaganda mixed in with science. He uses alarmist words to push his ideas which is pretty unscientific.

<comment><USER12> Please explain how Dr. Lustig's words are "unscientific".

<comment><USER13> It runs against the principle that my liberty as an individual is above all other considerations. Ergo, it's "unscientific".

/sarcasm

<comment><USER12> I appreciate your sarcasm, but there is a fine line between "regulations" (in terms of general public safety) and "free will". For example, you _could_ smoke as many cigarettes as you want to, but is that in the interest of the general public?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This NY Times article from last August ([http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/magazine/mag-17Sugar-t.htm...](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/magazine/mag-17Sugar-t.html?pagewanted=all)) goes into a lot more detail on the toxicology of sugar.

</comment><comment><USER15> The headline is misleading.

 _The researchers propose regulations such as taxing all foods and drinks that include added sugar, banning sales in or near schools and placing age limits on purchases._

It's for the children, of course.

And for your own good, because you, yes you, are clearly irresponsible and can't think for yourself.

Funny ol' world where supposedly smart guys can't think of a better solution for a problem than to ask the government to step in.

<comment><USER16> > And for your own good, because you, yes you, are clearly irresponsible and > can't think for yourself.

I really dislike a nanny state. But I also dislike a state where people don't take care of themselves and then clamor for better healthcare for their preventable diseases and expect the public to pay for it. Not sure what the answer is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Yeah, and caffeine is a drug, do you need a prescription for that. I have no doubt that some lobbying special interest group is behind this "research".

<comment><USER18> Which group would that be?

<comment><USER19> Why, the artificial sweetener industry, of course! In seriousness, there is surely a bunch of money to be made here, even if that isn't the objective of the researcher. Step one, declare that eating X will _kill_ you. Step two, develop a book all about how not to eat X. Step three, profit. Note that there is no "..." step, because there are always people dumb enough to jump on the latest food craze.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I am in favor of taxing sugar and this money could could go directly to healthcare.

</comment><comment><USER20> I didn't see that article cite the researchers, but it's probably this group: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM>.

Pretty interesting talk about the rise of high fructose corn syrup.

<comment><USER21> The guy in that talk is the principal investigator of the study. But it has nothing to do with HFCS in particular, and everything to do with added sugar in general. Sugar made from cane and beets is just as bad as HFCS.

<comment><USER14> >> Sugar made from cane and beets is just as bad as HFCS.

That is false.

Refined sugar (that is, sucrose) is made up of a molecule of the carbohydrate glucose, bonded to a molecule of the carbohydrate fructose — a 50-50 mixture of the two. The fructose, which is almost twice as sweet as glucose, is what distinguishes sugar from other carbohydrate-rich foods like bread or potatoes that break down upon digestion to glucose alone. The more fructose in a substance, the sweeter it will be. High-fructose corn syrup, as it is most commonly consumed, is 55 percent fructose, and the remaining 45 percent is nearly all glucose. It was first marketed in the late 1970s and was created to be indistinguishable from refined sugar when used in soft drinks. Because each of these sugars ends up as glucose and fructose in our guts, our bodies react the same way to both, and the physiological effects are identical. In a 2010 review of the relevant science, Luc Tappy, a researcher at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland who is considered by biochemists who study fructose to be the world's foremost authority on the subject, said there was "not the single hint" that H.F.C.S. was more deleterious than other sources of sugar.

The fructose component of sugar and H.F.C.S. is metabolized primarily by the liver, while the glucose from sugar and starches is metabolized by every cell in the body. Consuming sugar (fructose and glucose) means more work for the liver than if you consumed the same number of calories of starch (glucose). And if you take that sugar in liquid form — soda or fruit juices — the fructose and glucose will hit the liver more quickly than if you consume them, say, in an apple (or several apples, to get what researchers would call the equivalent dose of sugar). The speed with which the liver has to do its work will also affect how it metabolizes the fructose and glucose.

Full article: [http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/magazine/mag-17Sugar-t.htm...](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/magazine/mag-17Sugar-t.html?pagewanted=all)

<comment><USER22> I don't see anything in there which refutes the statement that refined sugar from cane and beets isn't significantly different to HFCS in terms of their effect.

<comment><USER14> Fructose is metabolized primarily in the liver. Glucose is metabolized through many other (supposedly less deleterious) processes. HFCS is primarily fructose. Refined sugar is a mix of about 50-50 fructose-glucose. Thus, refined sugar is significantly different that HFCS.

<comment><USER8> HFCS is 55% fructose; sucrose is 50% fructose. This doesn't strike me as "significantly different".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Huh, was just talking about this on hubksi: <http://hubski.com/pub?id=15982>

I provided this link there too: <http://naturalnews.com/Images/Cola- Earlier.jpg>

It wasn't so long ago that the cola industry was actively marketing it as something that was beneficial to "put in a bottle".

I imagine that years from now we will look back at our naiveté regarding health with shock and awe.

<comment><USER24> The second link is a parody created in 2002.

<http://rjwhite.tumblr.com/post/472668874/fact-checking>

<comment><USER23> Thank you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I highly recommend watching King Korn [1], a documentary about growing corn in the USA and the subsidies that come with it.

At one point, they make High Fructose Corn Syrup in their home kitchen - <USER2> chemicals involved and the process is mind blowing. It's amazing it's considered "food".

[1] <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1112115/>

<comment><USER19> _Chemicals_ , oh my god! Not that!

I bet you don't eat that scary irradiated meat, either.

<comment><USER25> For lunch just now I ate wild moose that I shot... so no, I don't eat farmed meat.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I still don't understand why people put sugar into tea? At least Trader's Joe has very good tea (yes, I have to put that one here "UNSWEETENED")...

</comment><comment><USER27> I don't get it - glucose is fuel for our cells (or at least that's what I've been taught), so why is sugar bad for you? Does anyone know?

</comment><comment><USER28> Read "regulated" as "taxed" in this headline.

In another similar "regulatory" move, taxes on cigarettes have been shown to be effective for reducing smoking in "new smokers" and young adults (18 - 24) but with almost no effect in other age groups:

<http://org.elon.edu/ipe/gallagher.pdf>

and

<http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/rr4916a1.htm>

Would a similar strategy really be effective w/sugar or just add a further tax burden to 95% of us?

Can't we come up with a better system that seeing more money out the door in taxes?

<comment><USER29> Not too long ago a link was posted here regarding some research that suggested bodies that had been overweight will process foods differently to try to return to that weight, even after a person had lost weight via diet and exercise. The gist was that a person who was, say, 200 pounds and lost weight down to 160 pounds had to eat ~20% fewer calories to maintain that weight than someone who was at 160 without ever being overweight.

If that research is upheld upon further examination, then any policy which prevents young people from becoming obese in the first place would be perhaps the most promising way to obtain objective progress against societal obesity.

I'm not suggesting that taxes are the right way to go, but if taxes merely discourage the young from developing obesity, that's not a mark against it.

<comment><USER30> I find it hard to believe such ideas. It would mean that, somehow, a body that has not been overweight wastes 20% of its energy intake every day.

Moreover, if you subtract the energy loss that must take place due to the temperature difference between body and air, the muscle efficiency of such persons must be extremely more efficient.

Surely, evolutionary pressure must have been able to optimize that away?

I find it more likely to believe that people who become overweight tend to be less inclined to be active, and that that does not change when they do lose weight.

<comment><USER29> It's entirely possible the study had flaws, but the idea is not without evolutionary precedent. It's my understanding that some orangutans are similarly specialized to prioritize rebuilding fat stores, given an environment of intermittent plenty.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Well, there go apples. And grapes. And peaches. And so on, and so forth.

<comment><USER32> Not at all. From the article "Added sugar, more so than the fructose in fiber- rich fruit, hits the liver more directly and can cause more damage."

<comment><USER31> So if they added fiber to a Snickers bar, that Snickers bar would be healthy?

<comment><USER33> In addition to adding fiber, you would need to add vitamins and minerals, bring the fat to almost nothing, and reduce the calories by a factor of 3.

<comment><USER12> What kind of _fat_ to bring to almost nothing?

You need _fats_ to aid in the absorption of vitamins and minerals[1], such as using a plain olive oil dressing for your salads.

1\. <http://www.naturalnews.com/001545.html>

<comment><USER33> >What kind of fat to bring to almost nothing?

The point was to show that one cannot simply "add fiber" to a candy bar and make it comparable to fruit. Their individual nutritional values are not correlated because they both have sugar. Nor would they be if fiber was added to the candy.

>You need fats to aid in the absorption of vitamins and minerals[1],

Would this hypothetical diet consist of only snicker's bars? Otherwise I don't understand the argument.

What point are you even trying to make?

<comment><USER12> No, you're missing my point: I'm saying you should not remove all fats from your diet. As the linked article I provided suggests, you need fats in your diet.

And I did not suggest a hypothetical diet of only snicker's bars. Any healthy diet needs a balance of fats, fibers, minerals and vitamins.

Suggesting that all fats should be removed is not accurate. (And I'm simply providing information that you need fats in your diet.)

<comment><USER33> I never said you need to remove all fats from your diet. Therefore my confusion to your reply.

While I missed your point, apparently you're having your own conversation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Sugar is as essential to the body's functioning as water and air.

Such a tax will not eliminate sweet foods. Basic uncontroversial economics is sufficient to know the result of such a tax will be that manufacturers will switch to saccharine, Aspartame and other synthesized sweeteners which are not so taxed. Whether their deleterious health effects are real or conspiracy theories and if real are more harmful over the long run than sugar I will leave to the curious reader's further research.

<comment><USER35> That's just flat out wrong. Sugar, as in sucrose, is not at all necessary for the body's functioning. Other sugars are used by the body, but they can easily be synthesized from fruits and vegetables.

<comment><USER36> Sugar is sugar is sugar is sugar.

And it is absolutely essential ... regardless of its origin.

But yes, too much ain't a good idea.</comment></comment></comment>


Language Can Give You Super Mind Powers - <AUTHOR> http://weblog.noahburney.com/language-scripts/mind-powers-via-language

<comment><USER4> This is a simplistic restatement (on a rather ugly webpage color scheme) of the strong version of the linguistic relativity hypothesis ("Sapir-Whorf hypothesis"), which is surely wrong. My native language is General American English, and I grew up in what was essentially a monolingual immediate family and neighborhood of English speakers, although both of my parents had had some instruction in other languages. All of my grandparents were born in the United States, but three of the four spoke languages other than English at home, and my two maternal grandparents had all of their schooling in German.

German as a second language was mandatory for all elementary pupils in fourth, fifth, and sixth grade in my childhood school district, very unusual for the United States. I had more German in junior high and senior high (in two different states) and then Russian in senior high. I entered university as a Russian major and immediately began taking Chinese, switching my major to Chinese as I grew in delight for that language. I have had formal instruction as an adult in Modern Standard Chinese (a.k.a. Mandarin), Cantonese, Biblical Hebrew, Literary Chinese, Attic Greek, Biblical Greek, Japanese (first in the medium of Chinese, then in English), Taiwanese, and Hakka, and various courses in linguistics (also in the mediums of both English and Chinese). I have engaged in self-study of Biblical Aramaic, Mongolian, Spanish, French, Latin, Hungarian, Malay-Indonesian, Esperanto, Interlingua, etc., etc., etc.

I have to respectfully disagree with the strong version of the linguistic relativity hypothesis. Within each language grouping, people differ far more in their personal thinking along the dimension of visual thinker or not, or auditory thinker or not, than people differ from one another in thought patterns based on language background. But it is useful to learn another language and to live in another culture for exposure to new basic assumptions, and the same applies to learning computer language paradigms. People who program for a living, or who program just for fun, may like the books

[http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Language-Pragmatics- Third-...](http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Language-Pragmatics-Third- Edition/dp/0123745144/)

or

[http://www.amazon.com/Essentials-Programming-Languages- Danie...](http://www.amazon.com/Essentials-Programming-Languages-Daniel- Friedman/dp/0262062798/)

among other books on programming languages mentioned here on HN as examples of overviews of different approaches to high-level computer programming languages facilitating different kinds of programming problem-solving.

The case of human languages is quite a bit different. All human languages are constrained by the biology of the human brain, and human ear and human vocal tract (or hands and arms, in the case of sign languages for the deaf), and all human languages, without exception and even if they are constructed languages, have ambiguities and illogical features inconsistent with other features of the language. Many of the faults of Esperanto are very well documented,

<http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ranto/>

and the Lojban promoters I have met online since 1994 have repeatedly demonstrated lack of logical capacity (at least in our common language of English) in a manner that puts me off from learning Lojban.

Learning a new cultural perspective by living in a new culture and learning the predominant language there is a very good idea, and highly educational. But the incidental features of one language as contrasted with another have no necessary relationship to how speakers of each language think, or how they can think.

<comment><USER5> I'm impressed by your vast experience with different languages! I'm also curious to learn why one language contrasted with another language have no necessary relationship to how speakers of each language think. The authors post seem to prove the opposite:

>An Australian Aboriginal tribe, The Guugu Yimithirr, famously have no words for left, right, in front of or behind. They use north, east, west, and south instead. And as a result: they develop an internal compass—always knowing which way is north, even if you blindfold them and spin them around.

I for sure don't know the direction after being spun blindfolded :)

(edit: grammar)

<comment><USER6> Heard this story on RadioLab recently. Very interesting but it's hard to see how language itself was the mechanism behind their unusually sensitive internal compass.

More like they're acutely sensitive to external cues like their shadow (position of the sun) and other subtle details of the landscape. Their language just seems to reinforce that more subliminal attentiveness to these cues.

I found this to be one of the more interesting points made in the RadioLab story: while the majority of the limited number of modern languages in use today do not have this spatial-directional feature, it seems to have been a feature of a large number of the languages that have ever existed. (Edit: per Dr. Lera Boroditsky [great website: <http://www-psych.stanford.edu/~lera/>], it's a third of the world's (current?) languages, though not speakers.)

Which makes sense. Imagine our unsettled, migratory ancestors trying to keep their bearings without the aid of compasses or standardized maps. One of the first features you'd probably ask for in your language is a feature that helps you keep track of your approximate location.

Radiolab link: <http://www.radiolab.org/2011/jan/25/birds-eye-view/>

<comment><USER7> _More like they're acutely sensitive to external cues like their shadow (position of the sun) and other subtle details of the landscape._

That's confusing how they achieve it (the cues) with why they developed the ability (need to know for proper communication, maybe for the reason you mention).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> From the post: "Speakin' in a different language changes the way you think—it's a well attested phenomenon."

A great answer for the perennial questions "why should I learn math or science." It changes the way you think -- only instead of learning about culture you learn about patterns and nature.

I got a physics degree before leaving the field. People who didn't take science ask if I still use it. How do I answer so they'll understand that I use it in every thought?

<comment><USER9> "A different language is a different version of life" - <USER2>

I agree completely. And I would certainly agree that learning to think in Math/Biology/Evolution is just as important as learning to think in French.

Slightly related, one of the reasons I love English so much is that there are so many words and the creation of new words is not discouraged. There are an enormous amount of ways to describe how a thing is or how we feel and I think a certain level of expressiveness is very important for doing good work.

By the same token, knowing the _language_ of say evolution or math - <USER3> all the terms and how to describe what's going on - can be just as important for say visual or program design as knowing the more 'industrial' words.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> From the post I'd conclude that language is the by-product of innovation (and necessity), not the other way around.

There is already an artificial language out there: Esperanto <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto> . From what I remember from language students, it's pretty much a failure.

Also, do you have any concrete ideas/point of action to do that? Do they work?

<comment><USER11> Esperanto isn't too much of a failure; at least, it's the most successful a conlang has been -- a couple dozen have learned Elvish or Klingon; a couple hundred thousand have learned Esperanto.

And yes, there has been a long and somewhat-pointless philosophical struggle by people who take language as more important, and those who take technology as more important. I remember discussing this with a Swedish man who insisted that we thought of everything in language, and I was insisting instead that I think in _thought_ , which does not necessarily map to language. What finally seemed to make him uncertain about his own hard-line position was to just say, "look, I sometimes have the experience that _I don't know how to put my thoughts in words_. And I at least appear to be monolingual. It sounds like you're saying that this should be literally impossible. My thoughts are always _in_ English, how could I ever have problems encoding them _into_ English?"

Stephen Pinker's works have indirectly shown me one useful thing about these philosophical discussions: it helps to have an idea of Gödel/Turing- completeness[1] in your philosophy of language. The problem with the radical biological innatists[2] and the radical linguistic relativists[3] is that it seems hard to describe how languages evolve under either account. If our languages and proto-languages are in some sense Gödel-complete and can describe anything which is describable, then linguistic evolution just consists of building new language constructs which can more efficiently describe the new technologies -- and these in turn help us in thinking about our new technologies and making even newer technologies. You can also get a good distance in understanding how children acquire language; it's fundamentally similar to the bootstrapping process which gets a computer from being offline to running a modern operating system; a small set of built-in intuitions can construct a model for the entire rest of any logical system.

[1] Gödel's completeness theorem, as distinct from his more famous _incompleteness_ theorem, says that a couple basic laws of logic are all you ever need, and any other logical system can be emulated by just constructing new objects whenever the axioms of the basic system call for them.

[2] something like, "all the concepts which you find meaningful are somehow indirectly encoded in the genome, your words name just those concepts meaningful to you."

[3] something like, "if your language doesn't have a word for X, then you just cannot think about X, full stop."

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Learning anything changes the way you think: chemistry, physics, biology, astronomy, mathematics, computer science, linguistics, philosophy, literature, etc. I'd place a language somewhere between a science and something like astrology as far as usefulness goes.

</comment><comment><USER13> "Speakin' in a different language changes the way you think—it's a well attested phenomenon."

This is wrong. I speak two languages, so I can tell. Learning the second one didn't change the way I think.

<comment><USER14> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity>

what were the languages? they may be very similar.

<comment><USER13> Russian and English. They are quite different, although definitely more similar than say Spanish/Vietnamese.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Lojban is a constructed, syntactically unambiguous language based on predicate logic that was originally conceived to examine the influence of language on the speaker's thought:

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

<comment><USER14> I spent a little bit of time learning lojban. Although I am in no way proficient, their small community is an interesting place. the more fluent ones sometimes mention this phenomenon (from their personal experience).

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I've often wondered what it would be like to think in a rational language (i.e. one free of contradictions). I suspect that logic and reasoning would improve as a side effect.

<comment><USER13> How one can _think_ in a language? Isn't language a product of thinking?

<comment><USER17> This question is a bit funny, given that it's posted on a site with frequent arguing over which programming language is better for certain purposes. You can think in French just like you think in C++ or Python, but I think that what is different about thinking in two natural languages is that they are more alike each other than programming languages are.

<comment><USER13> Well, I don't think in C++ or Python when I'm programming. I think in... well, that's probably weird -- in algorithms, flows, bubbles, pocket-like thingies holding values and that stuff. Then I express my thoughts in a programming language. And yes, some languages are definitely better for certain things than others.</comment></comment></comment></comment>