Decentralisation: the next big step for the world wide web - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/sep/08/decentralisation-next-big-step-for-the-world-wide-web-dweb-data-internet-censorship-brewster-kahle <comment><USER2> It will be a big change, but it's going to take time and is not going to be easy. _We need more early adopters than ever to participate and try things_ if we are to break out of this quote at the end of the article:

> "There are going to be a lot of forces for the status quo," says Kahle.

The status quo is beneficial to corporations that use/monetize users' data and to many governments that are increasingly looking at enhancing and widening the net of mass surveillance.

> "The DWeb is new and burgeoning, but it also isn't inevitable."

I'm not sure if it's burgeoning right now. It still seems like a bunch of several tiny experimental niches.

Communication and connection with other people, and content — these are the things that can help broader adoption.</comment>


Ask HN: What are you planning to learn in 2014? - <AUTHOR> Inspired by this topic from last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4966522
A new year is about to begin. What are you going to learn in this new year to improve yourself?
Last year I wanted to learn:
1) CFA Level 1 and start CFA Level 2
2) Skiing
3) Improve my knowledge of stochastic Calculus as used in finance
I finished CFA Level 1, learned some skiing and failed 3.
This year I want to finish Level 2 do 3 from last year and study some cryptography. <comment><USER2> 1) CSS, JS and PHP 2) CakePHP 3) Google Analytics beyond basics 4) Bike transmission maintenance</comment>


Linear Recurrences: How to Enter the Matrix - <AUTHOR> http://codeoverflow.wordpress.com/

<comment><USER2> FYI: You should link directly to the post so that in the future the link will still work. In this case the url should be:

[http://codeoverflow.wordpress.com/2011/05/23/linear- recurren...](http://codeoverflow.wordpress.com/2011/05/23/linear-recurrences/)</comment>


Give Me Jeans Not Shoes: How Bert Helps Us Deliver What Clients Want - <AUTHOR> https://multithreaded.stitchfix.com/blog/2019/07/15/give-me-jeans/ <comment><AUTHOR> Previous discussion around BERT [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18751469](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18751469)</comment>


John Carmack – Programming Neural Net Library on OpenBSD - <AUTHOR> https://m.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=2110408722526967&id=100006735798590 <comment><USER2> > I appreciated the good man pages, as I tried to do everything within the > self contained system, without resorting to internet searches.

I've been trying pretty hard to commit to this style of learning. It seems to me that using the internet to discover deep, comprehensive, self-contained resources for offline learning is an incredibly powerful way to learn. A pseudo-inverse to this idea is that over-use of search engines can really hamstring the learning process.

The idea as I now articulate it seems sort of platitudinal, but I'm nevertheless glad to have started paying attention to it in recent months.

<comment><USER3> Back in the early nineties I learned QBasic with its built-in documentation only. The local library had a ton of Basic books, but they were meant for learning simple game programming on 1980s home computers and often only covered a very limited subset of different dialects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Recent discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16518726](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16518726)</comment>


Academics Shouldn't Sell Out Truth for Justice - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/11/academics-truth-justice/574165/?single_page=true <comment><USER4> It takes a certain level of maturity and nuance to understand that people are complex, multidimensional beings of often contradictory impulses and principles, and as such, one's academic contributions can be separated from whose ass they grabbed. Sadly, maturity and nuance were killed and buried years ago.

<comment><USER5> > Sadly, maturity and nuance were killed and buried years ago.

irony

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Considering that the humanities sometimes have hard time to be taken seriously at sciences this does not help at all.

One can easily say that it's just politics and not real science if they're even having that discussion.

(Everyone whose viewpoint was taken into account in the article was from humanities. No-one was from hard sciences.)

<comment><USER7> This kind of controversy is intruding on the hard sciences. For one example, a highly abstract math paper on the greater male variability hypothesis was blocked from publication and the authors subjected to uncollegial harassment for purely ideological reasons.

[https://quillette.com/2018/09/07/academic-activists-send- a-p...](https://quillette.com/2018/09/07/academic-activists-send-a-published- paper-down-the-memory-hole/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's sometimes peculiar how quick we are to aim to repeat history, blisteringly awful history, seemingly with no concern or regard for what we are doing. The Arab world was once near the top of the world in scholarship and academic pursuit. Algebra, for instance, being a reference to Ilm _al- jabr_ wa'l-muḳābala, by Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī. Or there was the House of Wisdom in Baghdad where scholars were consigned with the responsibility of translating cultural and scientific works from across the world into Arabic.

But then in a shockingly short period of time that same Arab world started to place their selected social values above that of the truth, in and of itself. Perhaps one of the major catalysts for this was Al-Ghazali, and his very well received ideology laid out in " _The Incoherence of the Philosophers._ " [1] Formerly a philosopher himself, that work is where Al-Ghazali began to deny all science and reality and replace it with religion. He declared that there was no such thing as causality. When a leaf catches fire it is not because it was exposed to fire - rather god chose to transit the fire from the torch to the leaf at that very moment. And again when it deteriorates into ash - <USER2> is once again not a natural process, but rather the explicit and active will of god acting at that very moment.

The implication of this is that there is no truth to be sought, there is no connection in nature, there is nothing except for god. The reason for this is because it answered any sort of inconvenient questions for religion, by attacking the questions (and those that pose them) directly. And in a short period of time the Arabic world was set on the path that sent it away from academic pursuit and knowledge and onto the path that's brought it to where it is today. Imagine what a different place the world would be today had they instead remained focused on the truth, and the golden age of Islam persisted indefinitely.

Social values must never take precedent over truth, no matter how undesirable the truth may be to hear, or how undesirable the speakers of said truth may be.

[1] - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Incoherence_of_the_Philoso...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Incoherence_of_the_Philosophers)

</comment><comment><USER9> There are unlimited mechanisms to try to "punish" somebody who violates your moral code. Each mechanism has a certain effectiveness, a certain fallibility, and a certain inconvenience.

For example you can boycott, you can badmouth, you can arrest, you can refuse to acknowledge, you can socially ostracize, you can wield professional power (e.g. give a bad grade to), you can disrupt their speaking engagements, you can physically attack, you can sue.

I think we can all agree some mechanisms are reasonable, some are unreasonable, and some are worth debating.

I'm glad this discussion is becoming conscious and deliberate.

</comment><comment><USER10> > But no substantive imperative to cite people based on their social cachet > exists.

Well the article is pretty disingenuous on this point. Prestige in academia is heavily based on citations. It's insane that serial abusers are protected by their institutions and allowed to continue their abuse without suffering a dent in their social standing. If there were other ways to hurt a person's reputation, as there certainly should be, removing citations probably wouldn't be favored by as many people.

<comment><USER11> I mean, the shame of the abuse or the justice of law should be the one that handles punishment of crimes. To try and shame people not to cite or use scholarly work from people with controversy sourrounding them is sinister in its very nature. It is falling to mob rule instead of logic and reason. Science should be subject to logic and reason and not be infected with social, political, and culutural. Obviously science does not exist in a vacuum, but still.

<comment><USER10> Then think of how much scientific inquiry has been discouraged because people don't want to work under those conditions. It just weirds me out that the article quotes people about terrible behavior from professors, but doesn't put any blame there or with the authorities who could do something about it. It just blames everyone who responds for doing it wrong.

When authorities aren't doing their jobs, we're left with vigilantism or nothing.

<comment><USER12> >> To try and shame people not to cite or use scholarly work from people with controversy sourrounding them is sinister in its very nature. It is falling to mob rule instead of logic and reason.

> Then think of how much scientific inquiry has been discouraged because > people don't want to work under those conditions.

That's an entirely different issue. What we're talking about here is work that exists, but is not cited due to it's authorship. If Adolf Hitler himself had correctly proven Goldbach's Conjecture, is the proof itself so inseparable from his other actions that it should be rejected with them?

<comment><USER10> Yes, that was a response to "Science should be subject to logic and reason" etc. To your hypothetical example, I think Hitler's reputation is pretty low right now and it's not necessary to deny him citations just so he won't get more cachet. Her article was about professors who are "jerks", "whose academic sexism hasn't risen to the level of actionable correction".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> An article long ago in The New Republic by Richard Rorty remarked that most of Bertrand Russell's better philosophical ideas came from Frege, whose non- philosophical opinions were not of a nature to please Russell's admirers.

<comment><USER7> To be specific, Frege, was quite anti-Semitic in his private writings.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> You have to read the full article, if you believe in scientific advancement you will be absolutely terrified.

</comment><comment><USER15> After reading this I looked into James Watson (discoverer of DNA) more. He was blacklisted for some statements in an interview, many display his implicit biases, but one part was:

"there is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically."

That statement kinda embodies the darkest part of this issue. It makes sense, evolutionary differences between peoples extend beyond skin color, eye-shape, etc., but at the same time it is a can of worms that can never be opened (again). It is definitely an issue of science where justice is more important than truth.

My personal take is that we will all inevitably be a light brown shade in ~200 years and we should make that transition as enjoyable and smooth as possible. Hopefully this doesn't get down-voted to heck :o

<comment><USER16> The problem is that this statement presupposes that no research has been done. Yes, if we were starting fresh we wouldn't want to assume that all populations evolved identically. But we aren't starting fresh. There has been decades of quality research on race both from a biological and social setting. What we observe through evidence rather than conjecture is that the hypothesis that people of certain races are genetically less intelligent than other people is not supported by evidence.

Justice and truth are aligned here.

<comment><USER17> Unfortunately you have it exactly backwards. Watson's conjecture is indeed supported by studies and evidence. Why don't you start with the Minnesota adoption study: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Transracial_Adoption...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Transracial_Adoption_Study)

The fact that so many believe such evidence does not exist just further demonstrates the danger of suppressing science due to ideology.

<comment><USER18> The cited study has an obvious and large flaw - a black child raised by an advantage white family is still black, and society will still treat them as a black child.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The appropriate solution is to make sure that sexism and racism factor into an academic's evaluations (not sure, but I would guess this is already the case given how many departments demand faculty pledges to 'diversity' and 'inclusivity'), rather than polluting scholarship. It seems like what these academics really want is a sort of impunity for their vigilantism. This is bad for the regular reasons vigilantism is bad--someone can visit their view of "justice" on another person without due process--but also because it hurts scholarship.

<comment><USER10> This is considered by Usher in her article.

 _How would a journal editor draw the line between scholars not wanting to cite their rival in the field and not wanting to cite a sexist jerk? Would you have to provide a detailed accounting of the sexism and gender bias to persuade the editor?

In short, trying to avoid citing someone because you don't like them is impossible if their work is important in your field. Perhaps it's just adding insult to injury when the guy is a sexist jerk._

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Why don't academics just create their own version of a nofollow link?

<comment><USER21> Yeah, that seems like it would be ideal. Both for this sort of issue and also the issue where for example a paper is debunking a shoddy previous paper but has to cite that previous paper in the process.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I might be being dense here, but how is this different to plagiarism?

<comment><USER10> "If you can avoid teaching/discussing [Searle's work], that may be the best strategy."

"In the case of a sexist jerk, you are often left without recourse: Cite him, or look like you don't know what you're talking about to reviewers and readers."

This is about removing the content, not just the credit.

<comment><USER23> tell me this "usher" person is not an actual academic, please. they sound 12...

<comment><USER10> Dr. Usher received her Ph.D. and MA from the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication and her AB from Harvard (magna cum laude) [https://media.illinois.edu/nikki- usher](https://media.illinois.edu/nikki-usher)

It probably helps to read the paper [https://www.chronicle.com/article/Should- We-Still-Cite-the/2...](https://www.chronicle.com/article/Should-We-Still- Cite-the/244450) and maybe her response to TFA [https://twitter.com/nikkiusher/status/1058032795803639808](https://twitter.com/nikkiusher/status/1058032795803639808)

<comment><USER23> ouch. didn't help (but thank you for the references)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> For this comment I'll pretend I'm writing this on a Linux installed on ReiserFS. You get the idea.

</comment><comment><USER21> I'm usually anti-SJW, but if someone is a sexist ass who doesn't acknowledge women's contributions to the field, why should those women acknowledge his contributions either?

<comment><USER25> Because academia shouldn't be a tit-for-tat game played by people who wish to score points against each other in a game of judge-jury-executioner.

If you don't condone a particular colleagues attitudes or actions or reported actions - by all means please do say so in your footnotes and citations. Make sure your colleagues know of your discomfort and that they should also be discomforted by people like that being in a place where they are enabled to contribute to the field - when they should be driven from it.

However, under no account should one defraud one's editors and/or reviewers - or your colleagues who trust your work has been reviewed and approved by them. To do so is plainly dishonest and deprives those people of their right to autonomy. You aren't forced to cite, but then they don't have to approve - <USER3> read - either.

If you have to lie and cheat to people in order to get your way - perhaps what your doing is wrong, because you're certainly doing wrong to those people.

At what point do you opt out of a system with which you disagree? Is it morally acceptable to commit an unjust act to achieve what you believe to be justice? Is it acceptable to venerate vigilantism - to be a vigilante?

I would say that it certainly isn't - in precisely the same way using unjustly or immorally obtained data is unacceptable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Shouldn't have edited "social" out of the title. "Social justice" and "justice" are unrelated concepts.

<comment><USER27> The article never uses the standalone word "justice", and it is always preceded by "social". Therefore, your suggestion that the title is incorrect is spot on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> There's a fine line between truth and justice. Nothing illustrated this more than the movie, The Dark Knight.

<comment><USER29> Did you mean to be hilarious here or was that unintentional?

<comment><USER28> I'm 100% srs.</comment></comment></comment>


90 Days on a Carnivore Diet: Results and Insights - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@andylindquist/90-days-on-a-carnivore-diet-results-and-insights-8d07692869fe <comment><USER2> People must be really out of touch with what healthy food is to switch to a meat only diet. Eat plenty of plants and a little bit of meat, just like our ancestors did, and most importantly don't eat too much, it is easy as that. Don't fuck up the planet because you think you can only maintain a healthy weight by eating grass fed burgers all the time. In 20 years we will look back at fad diets like meat-only and keto and make jokes about it.

<comment><USER3> > keto

What? You mean keto practitioners aren't following a strict vegan diet of avocados and processed soy protein? /s

More seriously, though, in _fewer_ than 20 years, meat substitutes will be ubiquitous and people will tend towards sun-fed burgers (if for no reason other than cost).

<comment><USER2> I mean the keto diet in general. In 20 years I expect to watch a future version of a nostaligia show ("Remember the 2010's?") by having it beamed straight into my visual cortex, and in this show they will make jokes about keto & meat-only diets, and other stupid fads.

<comment><USER4> I think they would rather be making jokes about plant-based diets.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > As expected from a high cholesterol diet my LDL was elevated

Dietary cholesterol has no influence on their blood levels

<comment><USER6> It has, but not how it is explained traditionally.

[https://youtu.be/jZu52duIqno](https://youtu.be/jZu52duIqno)</comment></comment>


Researchers comb search logs to learn where users get stuck - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2009/06/researchers-comb-search-logs-to-learn-where-users-get-stuck.ars

<comment><AUTHOR> I find this very interesting. I think personally I tend to do two kind of searches - ones that I know in advance will only take one search, either because I am using the search as a lazy resolver (say because I type "BBC" knowing that google will return me a link to news.bbc.co.uk near the top, thus saving me a bunch of typing) or because the results will steer me to a definitive site (eg, if I type "tethering" I expect the Wikipedia page will crop up high, and I can figure out what it is [aside: why did we need a new term for modem?]).

The second kind of searches I seemed to do are the ones that really go quite deep, either because the information is hard to get, or because it is complex enough that I need to combine data from different sources, or because, as they say, I have phrased my query poorly and need to iterate to figure out what the magic words are.

I would be interested to know whether this is typical (ie the ditribution is bi-modal as I described) or just of descending frequency (ie most searches end in 1 query, the next most frequent searches end in 2, then 3 and so on)</comment>


Homeopathy for politicians - <AUTHOR> http://darryl-cunningham.blogspot.com/2010/06/homeopathy.html

<comment><USER2> The worst part about this is that they're out there selling this crap. I went to the pharmacy in Wal-Mart a while back for some eye drops because my allergies were acting up.

I was in a bit of a hurry, so I just grabbed one. Fortunately, I read the label. Sure enough, the damned things were _homeopathic_ eye drops (AKA water) with some undefined "apis" extracted from bees. I looked up their website, later. It claimed that their cures would "activate my immune system." Obviously, I put them back, but they were on the same damn shelf as the real medicine and in the pharmacy. Can you say "confusingly similar"? Yeah, they had a tiny label on them that said "homeopathic" without bothering to tell anyone what that means, or that the substance is nothing but bee crap heavily diluted with water.

Now, let's review: allergies are caused by an overactive immune system. Their eye drops, which are often used to treat allergic problems, contain bee bits (which people can be highly, even lethally allergic to, making me hope they really do dilute it enough) and they claim that this will cure me "like a vaccine" by _activating_ my already over-active immune system.

Talk about a recipe for disaster. I was pissed off enough to send out a complaint, but I never got a reply.

<comment><USER3> Yes, it is diluted enough (if it _is_ a homeopathy medicine) that it won't harm you even if it is incorrectly selected remedy.

Selecting the correct medicine for your allergy (or any other problem) is much more difficult in homeopathy. You need to take into account many factors. So selling off-the-shelf homeopathy medicines is probably going to make some money for the manufacturer but not cure you (from the point of view of a homeopath of course)

<comment><USER4> Why should I trust someone selling me magic water, to actually make magic water correctly? I'd have to doubt either their morals or their grasp of scientific principles, if not both. Does some external 3rd party like the FDA actually test these things to ensure that they only contain (at most) ineffectual doses of whatever they claim to contain?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I basically agree with this, but I can't help thinking it would be stronger if it were softer in places.

For example, I couldn't say that "for homeopathy to be effective, it would have to work in violation of the principles of biology, chemistry, and physics" actually means. Surely it would be just as damning and _clearer_ to say that it can't beat a placebo in well-designed tests.

Likewise, "Its devotees don't concern themselves with evidence" is awfully broad. I think some of them do, they just aren't very good at it. There's no need to call people stupid when you can show they believe something false.

Quibbles, really. I look forward to seeing more things like this.

<comment><USER6> The first example wouldn't be the same. There's a big difference between it being a theoretical impossibility, and something that sounds like we just haven't tested it enough.

Proponents of homeopathy like to confuse the issue by citing some of their own badly done studies. Explaining to the layman that proving the efficacy of homeopathy would earn you a Nobel Price in physics helps to bring some context to that.

<comment><USER5> Heh. What is that difference? Philosophers of science would love to know.

If homeopathy failed to conform to accepted theory but consistently beat placebos in a wide variety of good clinical trials, it would be good medicine; if it worked in theory but not in tissue, it would not be. Theory is generally constrained by observation.

Homeopathy is wrong because it doesn't work. Conceivably it could have turned out to work in some way that violated previous medical understanding. Lots of things have done this – it's one of the main ways understanding is refined.

Besides which, as far as I know (which is not far) there is no fundamental principle of biology, chemistry, or physics that it breaks. It just so happens that water molecules and immune systems don't work the way homeopathy would need them to. While you could see this in terms of a violation of principles (in the same way that you can rewrite any false math theorem to 1 = 0 if you work hard enough), that doesn't seem like a very productive perspective to me.

But I'm not a doctor, biologist, chemist, or physicist, so I guess it could be.

<comment><USER7> It sounds like you're trying to re-frame the discussion from a context where homeopathy simply doesn't fit within currently understood models of the universe, into a context where it does and there simply is no evidence of efficacy. i.e., whether it "would be" good medicine or not is completely irrelevant, because we're talking about a treatment that doesn't fit at all within scientists' observation of the universe.

Or, to put it another way, tptacek once said (and I'm paraphrasing here) that if you were to choose a cryptographic algorithm, you would tend to want to bet on the one that can only be broken by a fundamental new discovery in mathematics. In the case of medicine, the opposite is true: we're currently discussing a medicine that would require fundamental new discoveries in several sciences in order to work.

> _Conceivably it could have turned out to work in some way that violated > previous medical understanding._

That's the thing: no, it couldn't have, not even conceivably. I'm really not generally pessimistic about the possibilities of new discoveries in sciences, but we're talking here about violating not just "previous medical understanding" but the violation of our current understanding of the foundations of chemistry, physics, and biology. This is not just "medical understanding", this is "our understanding of almost everything".

> _Lots of things have done this – it's one of the main ways understanding is > refined._

This is mentioned often by laypeople when debates over our scientific understanding of the universe comes up, and it's wrong because it ignores the _way_ in which our understanding has changed throughout history.

Science tends to refine its understanding of the universe towards a narrower and narrower minima. Since people like to point to relativity as an example of a radical change in understanding, let's take that as an example: let's start with Copernicus, who started with the hypothesis that the Earth revolved around the Sun, and then move on to Galileo, who further observed and refined the movement of the planets and other objects in the sky, and then find ourselves at Newton, who began to formulate the theories of gravity that described the laws of the universe behind Galileo's observations. When Einstein described relativity, his discovery didn't violate Newtonian mechanics or the entire body of 700 years of scientific observation and understanding. Rather, it refined it: the observed differences between relativity and classical Newtonian mechanics only show up at very large velocities or very large scales. Otherwise, everything actually works pretty much the way Newton described it.

Likewise with quantum mechanics: it's likely going to further refine relativity, but only on very, very small scales.

 _The proposed mechanisms for homeopathy don't require a refinement in our understanding of science, they require a complete contradiction of its very foundations._

> _Besides which, as far as I know (which is not far) there is no fundamental > principle of biology, chemistry, or physics that it breaks. It just so > happens that water molecules and immune systems don't work the way > homeopathy would need them to._

I don't even know how you could put those two sentences next to eachother. :-) If "water molecules and immune systems don't work the way homeopathy would need them to", then "there _are_ fundamental principles of biology, chemistry, or physics that it breaks". You can't say, "it doesn't break anything, except that everything would have to be broken for it to work."

> _While you could see this in terms of a violation of principles (in the same > way that you can rewrite any false math theorem to 1 = 0 if you work hard > enough)..._

Actually, you can't. Every example I've seen of the "1 = 0" proof contains a very subtle mistake which violates mathematic principles. Sometimes, finding those mistakes is really really hard, but they're always there.

But, just to further drive the point home: if we were to argue that water _could_ contain "memory", we would have to try to figure out _how_. First, are we talking about ordinary tap water, which contains trace amounts of various other chemicals? Or are we talking about "hypothetical" water, which contains only molecules of H2-0? If we assume the latter, for simplicity's sake, then we next have to determine _where_ the energy for this "memory" is stored, how it's encoded, and what form it might take. Let's propose the simplest possible explanation -- which violates everything we know about cellular biology -- and say that this "memory" is basically some theoretical "frequency" that the "medicine" resonates with. All we have to do then is propose that atoms of hydrogen and/or oxygen can somehow store a frequency ...

If that happened in nuclei, I'm pretty sure it would break spectrometry, which would make it really hard for astronomers to observe the atmospheres of planets. If it happened in the electron shells, I'm pretty sure it would break the entire concept of ionization, since changes in frequency cause changes in energy levels of electrons, which cause them to interact with other atoms in various ways.

This is just one example; in fact, there is a _huge_ body of scientific knowledge, built by hundreds of years of experimentation, postulation, and observation, that would all be directly contradicted by any proposed mechanism for homeopathy.

> _But I'm not a doctor, biologist, chemist, or physicist, so I guess it could > be._

This is bugging me more and more, lately. If someone isn't a doctor, biologist, chemist, or physicist, then I don't see how that person could say, "...but I think they might be wrong!"

<comment><USER8> >"If we assume the latter, for simplicity's sake, then we next have to determine where the energy for this "memory" is stored, how it's encoded, and what form it might take. Let's propose the simplest possible explanation -- which violates everything we know about cellular biology -- and say that this "memory" is basically some theoretical "frequency" that the "medicine" resonates with. All we have to do then is propose that atoms of hydrogen and/or oxygen can somehow store a frequency ..."

Good post overall, but this kind of stance always gives me pause. The reason we know that Homeopathy doesn't work is because it can't be made to work beyond a normal placebo in testing.

As far as "does water have any kind of memory", it doesn't seem to in any way that affects us but in general? To me, excluding the possibility because we can't come up with a way to detect such a thing is going to far [1]. It wasn't so long ago that we couldn't see what was in cells. Any theories we built on that _ignored_ cells based on the fact that they were opaque to us could only coincidentally end up correct.

[1] Note this doesn't mean I think we should be spending time or money trying to find such a thing. Just that saying anything more than "at present, we've seen no evidence to suggest such a thing" is going to far.

<comment><USER7> That's a fair criticism.

> _The reason we know that Homeopathy doesn't work is because it can't be made > to work beyond a normal placebo in testing._

That's true, but it's a separate point from what was being discussed. As someone else pointed out in this thread, there's the "we tested it and it doesn't work" argument, and there's also the "it violates the current body of science" argument. These are two different, but related, things, and they reinforce each-other. I was focusing on the "it violates the current body of science" approach.

You do have a fair point about unknowns in general; a good example is the germ model of disease, which is a relatively recent development.

However, one of my big beefs with homeopathy is that it doesn't say, "we don't know what the mechanism is" -- which would be OK with me, because "I don't know" is a perfectly acceptable answer in science! -- and it doesn't provide a plausible mechanism that fits within the current scientific body. Rather, instead it presents a "scientific-sounding" mechanism that actually flies in the face of what we _do_ know.

Even if I were to concede that water _could_ have a "memory" of some kind -- and that would be a terrible and involved battle -- I would be unwilling to concede that that particular explanation could possibly work within our current understanding of biochemistry, because this particular aspect of biochemistry is fairly well understood. And, as DaveChild keeps pointing out, a homeopathic proponent would also have to explain how the "memory" from the water ends up in a sugar pill which contains no water. :-) (I would require some kind of explanation there simply because otherwise it would make no sense as a delivery method.)

<comment><USER8> > "it violates the current body of science" argument.

Oh I agree, I just put a lot more weight in the "testing" side than the "it violates our current understanding" side because our current understanding is constantly changing. It is more additions and amendments than rewrites, as you mentioned earlier but if there are components out there that we currently can't detect then some of our foundations could be wrong.

I was just addressing one part of your post. I had no intention of defending Homeopathy nor anything they say. I was specifically thinking of some extra "dimension" or realm that is effected by what we can currently observe. I can't point to any evidence that such a thing might exist but I wouldn't dismiss the possibility since I have no way of saying it doesn't (nor would I spend much time thinking about or trying prove/disprove it).

>However, one of my big beefs with homeopathy is that it doesn't say, "we don't know what the mechanism is" -- which would be OK with me, because "I don't know" is a perfectly acceptable answer in science! -- and it doesn't provide a plausible mechanism that fits within the current scientific body. Rather, instead it presents a "scientific-sounding" mechanism that actually flies in the face of what we do know.

Agreed. I would only add the amendment:

"and it doesn't provide a plausible mechanism that fits within the current scientific body, _nor demonstrate where the current body of science is in error_ ".

That is, I don't think they must stay within the current scientific body but they _must_ either show conclusively that the current scientific body is flawed in some way, or simply show something conclusive that seems to contradict that body and leave it to others to work out why.

I expect it to happen in my lifetime that some discovery will be made that demonstrates a large body of science is built on foundations that were misunderstood. But I expect this to happen scientifically based on observation/tests, not by a group fantasizing about what they would need to prop up their beliefs and then claiming it to be true.

I don't address any more of your post because I think we're in agreement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> A LOT of products in the drugstore are based on pseudoscience.

Products like Mederma (claims to reduce scars) sound scientific and are expensive ($30/tube), but Mederma is just a gel with some "botanical extract" that has been shown scientifically not to work. (They show before & after photos, but scars naturally look better on the same timescale.)

Other products like Airborne (to prevent colds on airplanes) are just dietary supplements which likely do not do as they say. This product even says it is "invented by a mom" -- why should that be a selling point for a medical product?

The list goes on and on.

</comment><comment><USER10> "Do you know what they call alternative medicine that works? Medicine." If only I knew where I heard this.

Edit: I'm fairly certain it came from House or Penn and Teller's Bullshit. Can anyone say one way or another?

<comment><USER11> Tim Minchin's 10 minute beat poem "Storm" has this line in it.

<comment><USER10> Hmm, very interesting. I've never read this, but it's entirely possible that the source I heard it from got it from there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If you're interested in this blog post I suggest reading Ben Goldacre's book Bad Science - <http://www.badscience.net/>

It covers the problems with homoeopathy in great depth and includes other similar alternative medicines, along with flaws in scientific studies promoting them and quackery in general. I highly recommend reading it. Not just to learn about the problems with these kind of treatments, but also the difficulties in creating unbiased scientific tests.

</comment><comment><USER13> How is it that he equates herbal medicine with homeopathic medicine? The two don't have anything in common.

<comment><USER14> Actually, they do. Most homeopathic remedies are just dilute herbal remedies-- note that it's fairly rare for homeopathic remedies to be "strong" (i.e., weakly diluted) enough to be completely inert.

In other words, much of the time, what you are getting when you buy a homeopathic remedy at the local pharmacy is actually just an incredibly weak herbal preparation.

<comment><USER4> The homeopathic stuff is small/non-existant doses of herbs that _cause_ some ailment. A herbal remedy would be a measurable dose of something intended to cure the ailment.

The latter may be woolly and untested feelgood hippy claptrap, but it's a lot less theoretically incoherent.

<comment><USER13> "The latter may be woolly and untested feelgood hippy claptrap"

You seriously think that no one has ever tested the efficacy of herbs?

<comment><USER4> Do you know what you call herbal medicine that's been proved to work?

<comment><USER13> Herbal medicine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I disagree with this popular beleifs. No one managed to explain with a scientific proof what happens in Benvenist experiences. It is mainly beliefs and assumptions that bias the data analysis.

Experimental data points undoubtly to EM effects in water. This is the only way, using rational and actual science, to explain what has been observed. And ther is at least one possible explanation proposed by my father, physicist, that explains how it could. How the activity could be reccorded and reinjected in inactive water, the oscillations in activity during the dillution process, why shaking is needed, etc. He presented his explanation at a conference on Homeopathy in France last year. He is a theorist and his theory should be tested experimentally. None of the people present conducted these experiences.

There are still a lot of strange and unexplained effects in water. One scientist who reported such effects he saw in his experiments on EM effects was forced by the scientific community to pull back and say it was mistakes. I don't remember his name. I think he was german. It happened well before Benvenist discovery. This happens just because the data didn't fit to common beleif and assumptions.

The editor of Nature was a strong disbeleiver, maybe not as agressive as Randi. The real problem here is that these people behavior has nothing to do with pur science research process as it should be. They forged themselves a model of how things works and any data that doesn't fit the model must be an error. Calling back into question the model is out of question for them.

I've seen this behavior on many occasion. This is not scientific and rational.

<comment><USER16> All lovely. Of course, in homeopatic "treatments", the water is allowed to evaporate away on a sugar pill. So does sugar have magic memory too?

<comment><USER15> There are two problems in your comment. First you assume, apparently without room for doubt, that the sugar pill contains absolutely no water. Second you assume that the activity is due to some element of fixed quantity.

Beside I don't see any reference to homeopathy in my comment. I only referred to Benveniste experiences which involved only water.

The sugar pill may contain water and contribute to stabilize the active and stable water molecule patterns. Even if there is only few of them, they may replicate themselves and amplify the activity with the same process occurring during the dilution and shaking process.

The theory suggest that the structures are aggregates of water molecule with ionic bound ruptures and rebinding at different locations. The oscillations yields a stable structure. This explains why very low EM frequencies are detected in active water. They are generated by the big structure oscillations. Recording the EM oscillations and replaying them in an inactive water, may induce the same ionic oscillations and the formation of the same patterns.

It is also commonly assumed that the activity is due to the chemical molecule itself. But if the molecule is polarized, the polarized water molecules will surround it and extend the polarization zone. The biological interaction could then be due to the water envelope around the molecule. The induced polarization would then have a particular shape. The structure can be stabilized by electron movements in the structure across water molecules.

By growing the structure would sort of take a print of the chemical molecule behaving like a sort of crystal seed. Shaking water would break the cluster and generate new crystal seeds, but made only of water molecules.

This would of course work only for particular type of chemical molecules and activity. Water behaves then like an amplifier and replicating system which could in some case have alternating negative and positive prints of the molecule or active structures.

This would be easy to test, but my father doesn't have the required apparatus and the time because he works on many other subjects. He is close to 80 years now.

Believe what you want. All I want to say is that the way Benveniste discovery was handled has nothing to do with science. The referenced comic is just an amplifying replication of the mishandling.

<comment><USER7> I would love to refute your explanation, but to be honest, I can't make heads or tails of it. "Active" water? "Inactive" water? EM "oscillations"? "Crystal seeds"? ...I give up. It's like pseudo-science buzzword bingo.

One thing though: people often complain that something "isn't scientific" whenever the science comes to a conclusion that they don't like. The editor of Nature -- a prominent science magazine -- was willing to publish the guy's article. That alone should be reasonable counter-evidence for all those claims that there's a some scientific "conspiracy" afoot to keep the miracle of homeopathy down. The thing is, they published his results, and then they tried to reproduce them. _This is science_. That's how it works. His claims didn't hold up, and that was that. He's free to go back and re-reproduce his results, this time consistently, and then they might be re-examined again. Until then, his results are bunk.

<comment><USER15> Water is said to be active when the effect on basophile cells was positive. Basophile cells are actors in the immune system and Benveniste was studying mechanism of allergy when he discovered this effect. Water remained active even with repeated dilution and shaking. When water was heated above 80°C and cooled back again it became inactive, which means it had no more effect on basophile cells.

Benveniste also detected the presence of a low frequency (~500Hz) EM emission of active water, which is not present with inactive water. The source of this low frequency EM emission is a problem in itself because it is not compatible with the water molecule oscillation frequency.

Recording the EM emission and replaying it back on inactive water rendered the water active on the basophile cells. These are the experimental evidences reported by Benveniste that remains to be explained.

Things fall in place when we assume the presence of stable water molecule aggregation with charge movement through them, a growth mechanism by polarization affinity and fragmentation by shaking.

BTW it is not true that the editor was willing to publish the "guy's" article. Benveniste was before it a well known and respected scientists and he had to insist and debate for his article to be published. It was published because the editor had nothing to oppose to it and justify a rejection.

When he came to check the experience with Randi, probably under pressure of the scientific community, they found nothing that could explain the observations which where reproduced at will in front of them in increasingly twisted ways. Randi and the editor went nearly nuts for not finding any trick or error.

The result is that they justify the mismatch between their beliefs and the data by undetermined experimental errors. How convenient, but that is not science.

Note that I am not talking about homeapathy here and claiming anything about it. I currently have no clue and no beliefs about it. What I say about it is I don't know. And this is the best that we can objectively say a priori without error about it.

Back to the Benveniste discovery, the normal scientific process should be to try to elaborate a theory that explains the observations; not to debunk it at any cost. Once a theory is proposed and proved to be coherent and valid with current scientific knowledge and understanding, it should then be tested. My father proposed such a theory, but it has not been tested yet. From what he told me, it should be easy. If the water molecule aggregates are present they should change the electric property of water. Simple direct measurement with conventional EM measurement devices should do it. No need of hard to control basophile cells reaction test. According to Benveniste observation, EM signal could induce formation of these aggregates and thus, according to the theory, alter the EM property of water. If the aggregates are stable, the change if EM emission of water would be persistent and measurable. it would be removed after heating the water which dissolves the aggregate structures. How hard would this be to test and explore ?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Somewhere in my book collection is H2O - A biography of Water, by Phillip Ball, one of the Nature editors.

The first half of the book is general background on the weirdness and uniqueness of water compared to other liquids of its class, but the latter part of the book is directly purely at explaining and dismissing a lot of the claims presented in Homeopathy.

I'm not certain if he was directly involved with the disclaimers surrounding the original article, but it wouldn't surprise me, given the vehemence in his later writing.

Amazon Link (hopefully non-referral, unless google has tricked me): [http://www.amazon.co.uk/H2O-Biography-Water-Philip- Ball/dp/0...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/H2O-Biography-Water-Philip- Ball/dp/0753810921)

</comment><comment><USER18> As much as I like comics as a form, I'm not sure the images add much here. I may have preferred to read this as just straight text. (Though maybe I wouldn't have read to the end in that case?)

<comment><USER19> The images provide visual stimulation. I probably wouldn't have finished it had it not been for the format. This is an incredibly smart way of spreading information (and I think quite a number of people understand this - Google, after all, used comics to explain Chrome when it was first released).

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Do homeopathy believers love vaccines? Or is a vaccine not diluted enough for them?

</comment><comment><USER3> There is a compilation of clinical cases titled "Microdoses Megaresults" by a renowned Indian homeopathy doctor Diwan Harish Chand. It lists around 400 cases with complete histories of patients each spanning many years.

It is a wonderful compilation in the sense that it first lists all complaints and test results of a patient and then follow up results after treatment by remedies. He has discussed why he selected a particular remedy and why it worked or not worked.

This book serves as a good empirical evidence for me.

</comment><comment><USER3> I know there is a really strong bias against homeopathy here.

I would suggest a thought experiment. Just for a moment think that homeopathy might have a grain of truth. And with this, ask how and why about its cures. This might help me to understand your point clearly.

<comment><USER7> ...except that you clearly _don't want_ to understand the point, because the point -- no matter how it's presented -- is that homeopathy _doesn't_ work, and it _doesn't_ have even a grain of truth.

And, I wouldn't say there's a strong bias against homeopathy here, so much as there's a strong bias in favor of 700 years of science of Things That Actually Work. (Thankfully; this isn't always the case on HN.)

<comment><USER3> "except that you clearly don't want to understand the point". Don't be so cruel to me.

Think about yourself. You don't believe anything which contradicts those 700 years of work. You don't believe that water can have a memory. You don't believe there is some sort of energy/frequency stored in water or sugar which cures us. Why? Because we cannot see it or prove it with any known scientific methods. Right?

Well I was exactly like you. I got helped by homeopathy by chance and probably a "hacker" (as defined by Paul Buchheit) within me got curious if homeopathy is really works and is as miraculous as it claims?

I spent time, took medicines myself and my volunteer friends and family. It is still hard to believe for me but it works and it looks more than placebo effect.

I did not read it in a book. I actually experienced it. And my experience of 10 years tells it works.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> (I could not reply directly to the comment, probably due to bleeding karma)

"How do you explain that the supposed effects of homeopathy evaporate like the morning dew once they're placed in the setting of a double-blind scientific experiment with proper (well, in this case more) placebo controls?"

To me, one thing is sure for me. It works. Proved many many times for the last 10 years.

Now I am not really interested into running such tests mostly because I am not motivated enough (I am a programmer) and also because for myself I don't need any further proof for my own use.

<comment><USER21> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Placebo>

As a simple experiment, could you put your most used homoeopathic remedy into a jar, and put pure water into another jar? They must be indistinguishable. Then, give them to someone you trust (and has no opinion either way on homoeopathy) to label A and B. They should record which of A and B is the real treatment, but not tell you.

Then, when you get sick, roll a dice. If it's 1 or 2, use A. 3 or 4, use B. 5 or 6, use the homoeopathic remedy. Record how effective they are after each use. Ideally, generate a new pair of A and B after each treatment. Also, assume that if you get A or B, it won't work since it's been messed around with.

After ten trials of each remedy, do the following. It'd be better if you didn't read this before doing it, but I want to commit to it, so I've ROT13'd it.

Zngpu hc gur rssrpgvirarff bs rnpu gerngzrag jvgu jurgure vg jnf ubzrbcnguvp be abg. Sebz urer jr'er tbvat gb nffhzr N jnf nyjnlf cynva jngre naq O jnf ubzrbcnguvp (nf jnf P boivbhfyl). Abj sbe n gehgu gnoyr bs rssrpgvirarff (0 sbe abg rssrpgvir, 1 sbe rssrpgvir):

      N O P
      0 1 1 Ubzrbcngul jbexf ba lbh
      1 1 1 Lbh whfg trg orggre naq nffhzr gur zrqvpvar jbexf, be vg'f n cynprob
      0 0 1 Vg'f n cynprob, naq lbh unir gb xabj lbh ner gnxvat vg

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I am not a homeopath, studied science in school and college and I was against homeopathy as much as any of you are. But here are my experiences which have made a believer and a lay, part time practitioner for myself, my family and friends. I am also not knowledgeable enough to support basis of homeopathy and related things like water memory.

I am posting my experiences about acute issues where a cure is expected in a matter of hours or days so it is quite clear if the disease has run its course or the medicine has worked.

I have seen many infants and young kids get better immediately with the homeopathy use. I am not sure if the placebo effect can work on them.

For the last 10 years my whole family (and many friends) are exclusively using homeopathy. So I think even if it placebo effect it is worth having.

I know my limited experiences can't be a basis of any scientific proof. But the point I want to make is homeopathy works for me as "advertised" so I don't care what science or other people say about it.

Have a look at these and let me know what it can be? Can placebo effect be so strong?

1\. I was travelling and had severe back pain which resulted from sweeting in sun and then immediately going into a chilled place. Pain killers for 3 days could not subside it. My host, a lay practitioner, gave me a single homeopathy medicine, Rhustox 200, which cured me like a miracle. Please note I was a non- believer and I took this medicine in the most desperate conditions (traveling, deadlines etc.)

This experience forced me to give a second thought and I started self-study and help from two homeopaths.

'Rhuxtox 200' is also a medicine for complaints from sprains and strains on body. Since then I have cured countless people for similar conditions.

2\. Any pain from injury to soft tissues immediately subsides with 'Arnica 30' 1 or 2 doses in a matter of hour. Have given this medicine to people of all ages.

3\. Cantheris 30 for burning in urine.

4\. Belladona 30 for fever/head ache due to host sun or any pain/inflammation with redness of the affected part.

5\. Cough. Phosphorus 30 cures most cases.

6\. Most pains which aggravate with motion. Bryonia 30 helps.

7\. General spasms/pains. Colocynthis 30 1 dose works miracle on kids as well as elders. Hardly need to give second dose.

<comment><USER16> You are not qualified, in any way, to determine what, if anything, had an effect on you or on other people. You are not capable of telling if your back pain, for example, was cured by homeopathy or had run its course. And this is why anecdotes are not considered evidence.

Anecdotes like yours are enough to warrant investigating to see if there is actually something going on. So people have - they have conducted trial and trial, and found homeopathy ineffective beyond any placebo effect.

It has no plausible mechanism by which it could work. It has no statistically significant effect when tested. It is dangerous and kills people. Hopefully you will wake up and realise this before you choose a homeopathic "remedy" for something serious and end up dead.

<comment><USER3> "You are not capable of telling if your back pain, for example, was cured by homeopathy or had run its course."

In my case, I may not be because it was for 3 days. But then I cured a large number of people for similar complaints within 1 day. Couple of weeks ago, I recommended Rhustox200 to a friend of a friend who had back pain for the last 1 year. This had started when he lifted a heavy object at that time. Rhuxtox faithfully cured him. Before that pain killers were temporary relief.

I am just narrating my positive experience for the last 10 years. And my point is that it works for me as it claims.

As I said in my comment, I have helped countless cases (fevers, pains etc) where relief was required within hours or days and I always got good results with homeopathy.

Homoepathy has cured, in my experience, really really serious cases in such a simple way that sometimes I just wonder what all this is; a placebo effect?

<comment><USER7> The problem with people that eschew science is that they no longer know how to even tell if what they're doing is actually working the way they think it is, or not.

> _Couple of weeks ago, I recommended Rhustox200 to a friend of a friend who > had back pain for the last 1 year. This had started when he lifted a heavy > object at that time. Rhuxtox faithfully cured him. Before that pain killers > were temporary relief._

What was the biological cause of the pain? Was it neuromuscular? Was it nervous system? Had there been any medical diagnosis of injury before the "treatment"? Any follow-up diagnosis? What was your follow-up? What is his subsequent range of motion? How much weight can he dead lift now? Has he taken any other treatments since? What was the timing between your "treatment" and any other treatments? Was his "cure" independently verified by anyone so that he didn't feel compelled to tell a friend-of-a-friend that it worked even if it didn't?

How many people have you "treated" that did not get better at all?

The maddening thing about saying that it might just all be "a placebo effect" is that that explanation implies that the treatment has actually worked, even in an indirect way, when in fact there's no evidence that it works at all.

This is pretty much the very example of cargo-cultism: taking magic pills and then trying to correlate positive effects with them.

<comment><USER3> "What was the biological cause of the pain? Was it neuromuscular? Was it nervous system? ....."

To use Rhuxtox, we only need to know (short version) if the ailment was caused by strain, overlifting, getting wet while perspiring. And it will work. I just mentioned one case but it has worked in many similar cases. In this particular case, the patient had stopped using pain killers because of side effects and he felt much better within first 3 days and after 1 week much better. Rhuxtox will keep working for him and if his complete recovery stops, he will get Rhuxtox 200 again or the next higher potency (Rhuxtox 1M).

"How many people have you "treated" that did not get better at all?"

This is an interesting point. Sometimes when I prescribe incorrect medicine (mostly because I was not careful enough taking symptoms, causes) the medicines does not work at all. Even though the patient is believer. For example if the abdomen pain is due to injury (Arnica 30 is correct medicine) and I give Colocynthis (for spasmodic pain), it won't work. Correcting the medicine will bring cure.

And there are times when I can't help people get better, mostly because I am not that good, though the patient has faithfully used medicine for quite some time. See place effect is not working here.

In such cases I recommend him to get consultation from professional homeopaths I know and he/she in fact gets better from someone with more knowledge. Placebos working again. Isn't it strange?

<comment><USER6> No, it isn't strange at all that placebos work if your definition of "works" just covers subjective experience. Comments like "I have seen many infants and young kids get better immediately with the homeopathy use. I am not sure if the placebo effect can work on them." show that you aren't aware of observer bias, for one.

How do you explain that the supposed effects of homeopathy evaporate like the morning dew once they're placed in the setting of a double-blind scientific experiment with proper (well, in this case more) placebo controls?

<comment><USER3> To me, one thing is sure for me. It works. Proved many many times for the last 10 years.

Now I am not really interested into running such tests mostly because I am not motivated enough (I am a programmer) and also because for myself I don't need any further proof for my own use.

<comment><USER6> For someone that's scientifically minded anecdotes like the ones you've described would actually count against the idea, not for it.

Why? Because human beings are very bad at intuitively interpreting information methodologically, this is why we have things like double-blind trials in the first place. It's very easy to subconsciously stack the odds in your own favor.

I'd encourage you to read up on James Randi and some of the people that compete for his million dollar challenge. Everyone that takes it is equally convinced (as you are) of their woo-woo ideas, and all of them are proven equally wrong.

You aren't immune from deluding yourself, and neither am I. Nobody is, that's why we have a process to factor human error out of the equation. It's called science.

In this case we aren't talking about some harmless and quaint idea. If you continue foistering homeopathy on your loved ones, there's a real possibility that the magical thinking will rub off on on them. And they'll subsequently neglect to seek real medical attention when they have a problem that can't be solved by a glass of water and a friendly smile.

<comment><USER7> There's a fantastic video online somewhere of a martial arts instructor that had built a practice out of some form of "energetic combat", where he would run around and wave his arms, and his students -- somehow convinced that it worked -- would helpfully fall over.

Then one day there was a challenge from a more traditional martial practitioner. The sensei was quite surprised when his unconvinced opponent did not fall down like he was supposed to.

And even more surprised when he got smacked in the face.

Unfortunately, rather than grapple with the realization that he had been practicing nonsense for years, IIRC he came up with some woo-woo excuse for why it didn't work that day, or on that opponent.

EDIT: Found it! <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEDaCIDvj6I></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Goodbye, XP. Hello, Midori - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=1466 <comment><USER2> I really would love to see Microsoft attempt a new OS project. Even if it were designed and released in parallel with Windows 7 and primary for the dev crowd, it might be interesting to see what they can do if they allow themselves to be really creative.

It is always fun to root for the underdog. Heck, Microsoft might even go nuts and try open sourcing the project.</comment>


Hijacking Bitcoin: Routing Attacks on Cryptocurrencies - <AUTHOR> https://btc-hijack.ethz.ch/ <comment><USER2> BIP150[0] adds peer authentication, BIP151 adds encrypted peer communication. Having them implemented and enforced is probably overdue - afaik so far i've only seen bcoin[2] implement it

[0] [https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0150.mediawi...](https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0150.mediawiki)

[1] [https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0151.mediawi...](https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0151.mediawiki)

[2] [https://github.com/bcoin-org/bcoin](https://github.com/bcoin-org/bcoin)

<comment><USER3> None of the bitcoin core developers have much experience in network engineering nor do they recognise the importance of having robust netcode. It is no susprise that they see no urgency to address the vulns.

Morever, their obsession with phasing in every change via a soft fork (i.e. updated nodes must be eternally backwards compatible with older versions) puts an unreasonable constraint on protocol development and snuffs any progress that is ever so slightly controversial.

<comment><USER4> > Morever, their obsession with phasing in every change via a soft fork (i.e. > updated nodes must be eternally backwards compatible with older versions)

This "obsession" is about the consensus layer, for very good reasons.

The peer-to-peer protocol is much more flexible, and a lot of work is being done there.

<comment><USER3> Adding authentication needs to break compatibility with older versions to be safe, or else an attacker could simply masquerade as an older client and perform an effective downgrade attack. As in what's happening with DNSSEC implementations.

<comment><USER5> When talking about breaking compatibility in Bitcoin you should recognize two district classes of compatibility.

1\. Consensus compatibility i.e. that a node running the new software and a node running the old software will, when given the same blockchain, will always agree on which blocks are valid and which blocks are invalid.

2\. Everything else.

Breaking consensus compatibility is viewed as very risky and should only happen under extreme circumstances or under extreme agreement. Breaking backwards compatibility at the network level should be carefully thought through but it is much more likely to happen.

>an attacker could simply masquerade as an older client and perform an effective downgrade attack

BIP-151 is only designed to defeat a passive attacker since it does not include a way of attaching a long term identity to a node. Thus, even without a downgrade attack you can just MITM a connection and substitute your own keys. As BIP-151 says:

"The encryption does not include an identity authentication scheme. This BIP does not cover a proposal to avoid MITM attacks during the encryption initialization."

BIP-150 is the identity mechanism for BIP-151 however establishing the pubkey to node mapping requires out of band communication.

"The identity-public-key(s) can be shared over a different channel with other node-operators (or non-validating clients) to grant authorized access."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> >> "Moreover, most of the traffic exchanged between Bitcoin nodes traverse few ISPs. Indeed, our results indicate that 60% of all possible Bitcoin connections cross 3 ISPs. In other words, 3 ISPs can see 60% of all Bitcoin traffic."

Direct link to the paper:

[https://btc-hijack.ethz.ch/files/btc_hijack.pdf](https://btc- hijack.ethz.ch/files/btc_hijack.pdf)

<comment><USER7> Level 3, Google, Facebook

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> If you're concerned about this type of attack it's pretty easy to defend against. All it takes to avoid partition is a single connection across a VPN, Tor, or even satellite ([https://blockstream.com/satellite/](https://blockstream.com/satellite/)).

</comment><comment><USER9> Crypto is misunderstood but can't be ignored. Welcome to the disruption and destruction of the VC model for founders that move things forward.

</comment><comment><USER10> > "An attacker can use routing attacks to partition the network into two (or > more) disjoint components. By preventing nodes within a component to > communicate with nodes outside of it, the attacker forces the creation of > parallel blockchains. After the attack stops, all blocks mined within the > smaller component will be discarded together with all included transactions > and the miners revenue. "

How does bitcoin protect against this from happening by accident? Could someone surround my node with malicious nodes and put me on a forked chain?

<comment><USER11> > Could someone surround my node with malicious nodes and put me on a forked > chain?

Yes. You can't know about blocks you don't hear about. However:

1\. Unless they can match the hashing power of the rest of the network, they can only publish new blocks to you at a very low rate (e.g. every 100 minutes if they have 10% of the hashing power)

2\. If you connect to just a single node which tells the truth, you will discard the forked chain (again, unless the attackers can match the hash rate of the rest of the network)

All in all, proof-of-work makes it pretty easy for you to notice that something weird is happening.

> How does bitcoin protect against this from happening by accident?

You can prevent nodes from connecting to you (no inbound connections), such that _you_ choose (randomly) which nodes to connect to. Choose a sufficiently high node count, and you're almost certain that you don't select a group of coordinating malicious nodes.

 _Side note:_ It would also be interesting to analyze the impact of this attack in the context of a proof-of-stake blockchain. I assume, although I'm not certain, that the attacked node would just consider the current stakers as defunct if the attackers don't deliver blocks from them, and that the attackers would be able to become the new stakers, since the attackers would be able to censor competing staking transactions.

<comment><USER12> > You can prevent nodes from connecting to you (no inbound connections), such > that you choose (randomly) which nodes to connect to. Choose a sufficiently > high node count, and you're almost certain that you don't select a group of > coordinating malicious nodes.

This sounds suspiciously like either a) choosing who to trust in advance, which negates one of the few benefits of blockchain-based cryptocurrencies that I accept exist (even if I don't value it highly); or b) relying on random numbers being both fair and not being tampered with, even though over-reliance on that is one of the common failure modes with cryptography in general.

<comment><USER5> >b) relying on random numbers being both fair and not being tampered with, even though over-reliance on that is one of the common failure modes with cryptography in general.

If you are interested I was an author on a paper which looked at the probability of choosing bad nodes, how an attacker could manipulate this and what bad things an attacker can do once they partition you from the network. Many of the countermeasures and security enhancements we proposed are now in Bitcoin making the network harder to attack.

> Could someone surround my node with malicious nodes and put me on a forked > chain?

Eclipse Attacks on Bitcoin's Peer-to-Peer Network [https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/263.pdf](https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/263.pdf)

<comment><USER10> Thanks for this paper, it's a really excellent read and explains the eclipse attack really well. I would love to track down some similarly structured papers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> One of the authors gave a talk earlier this month at Stanford on lightning network and fees, [http://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/scalingbitcoin/stanford-20...](http://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/scalingbitcoin/stanford-2017/how- to-charge-lightning/)

<comment><USER14> This talk is borderline unreadable. Are there slides or something I'm missing?

<comment><USER13> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pd6xHjLbhs&t=1h3m](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pd6xHjLbhs&t=1h3m)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Also like I said removal of net neutrality regulations means ISPs esp big ones can kill Bitcoin by blocking the default port used by the Bitcoin client and ISPs can more than just blocking a certain port. ISPs can identify and block all P2P traffic (anything that is not being sent or received to/from an approved central service) and do it in the name of protecting MPAA member revenue or whatever blanket execuse like killing off encrypted p2p communication like Signal et al)

<comment><USER16> Is there any evidence that ISPs want to do this?

(Hint: ISP didn't block BitTorrent because of the MPAA.)

<comment><USER17> No, but I'm sure that given the right financial incentives (hint: third-party) they'd be open to implementing this in practice.

<comment><USER18> bitcoin over TOR? bitcoin over IRC? bitcoin over websocket (w/ TLS)? bitcoin over facebook messenger?

<comment><USER17> Sure, but closing the _default_ port limits the tech to people with the interest and technical knowledge to proxy it in such a way. ISPs could also do DPI or timing analysis to id the stream and slow or block it. It was tried successfully (by Comcast) on bittorrent in the the early 00's and is one of the things that triggered the whole Title II fight in the first place.

<comment><USER18> >It was tried successfully (by Comcast) on bittorrent in the the early 00's and is one of the things that triggered the whole Title II fight in the first place.

torrents are hard to hide because no matter how much encryption/obfuscation you do, you can't hide gigabytes of data being transferred between residential IPs, using random ports. bitcoin uses megabytes of data _per hour_ , which means it's much easier to use stenography to hide it.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What do you use to manage your support? - <AUTHOR>

We're looking at the plethora of different support tools out there and wondering what most people do. Seems there should be some solution using plain old email but it hasn't worked for us yet. What do you use? <comment><USER2> What exactly are you looking for? We use Hipmob (we also ARE Hipmob.com) for live chat for our apps and our website, and Desk.com to handle email traffic and knowledgebase. We've also used Zendesk to handle email traffic in the past, as well as Olark to handle live chat for websites, and both work pretty well. Have heard of folks using Intercom.io for semi-automated in-app messaging, to good results.

</comment><comment><USER3> I work at SugarCRM and we use our own product to handle cases. I do know that there is Zendesk integration which has been quite popular too (assuming you might also be thinking about CRM; just throwing that out there) <http://www.zendesk.com/product/features/sugarcrm>

</comment><comment><USER4> We use Request Tracker for our internal support tool. That started out when there were five people in the company, and now we're around fifteen now.

It isn't the most attractive application, but with dedicated addresses ("queues") it can be pretty flexible with a small number of different teams (e.g. "support", "accounts", "hardware", etc.)

<comment><USER5> I've used RT before in an IT group, though we were on an unfortunately older version. We had a lot of fun after enabling the "unsafe" queues, such that you can comment and resolve tickets via email. On your phone you can close out a ticket while you're in the office fixing someone's computer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I founded SupportFu ( <http://www.supportfu.com> ), which is a lightweight alternative to Zendesk. We focus on being invisible to the end customer and do email support pretty well.

</comment><comment><USER7> We use HelpScout - <https://www.helpscout.net/>

Easy to use, good email integration, helpful support.

</comment><comment><USER8> We use Zendesk, mostly.

<comment><USER9> Andrenid, we're also using Zendesk. If you don't mind me asking how many agents do you have?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> FogBugz</comment>


Passive Fingerprinting  of HTTP/2 Clients [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.blackhat.com/docs/eu-17/materials/eu-17-Shuster-Passive-Fingerprinting-Of-HTTP2-Clients-wp.pdf <comment><USER2> If I were an online advertiser or a company selling to online advertisers, I would be happy with these findings.

If I were a user concerned with privacy and tracking I might wonder why the authors of the HTTP/2 standard did not make any efforts to address this type of fingerprinting.

<comment><USER3> Because doing so is not something that the authors of the HTTP/2 standard need to do.

This fingerprinting is just sniffing settings negotiated between the client/server, and comparing them to a known list of preset settings for a given browser. I think allowing these settings to vary is a generally good idea, as the best values for these settings aren't really able to be determined ahead of time, without trying a bunch of different configurations out and collecting real world data.

Whenever there is a variation of configuration options between implementations, fingerprinting will be possible. These configuration options are fundamental to how http/2 works. Differing vendors may arrive at differing configurations based on what they believe to be the "best" set of options to use.

If I was an online advertiser, or a company selling to online advertisers, these findings would be mostly irrelevant to me (outside of anti-spam/abuse), as for the 99.99999% use case, the user agent string is probably correct.

It's worth mentioning that there is not enough entropy in these fingerprints to be used as a "super cookie" but rather to just determine whether or not a user-agent string is probably spoofed, by comparing the settings negotiated by the client to settings that the given user agent is known to negotiate. This is a smart approach to determining whether or not a user agent is spoofed, which has its uses in anti-spam/abuse, but a fairly sophisticated adversary could also just have their client send the same settings, and packet sequences as the user agent it is trying to spoof.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Maybe I missed something but it seems to only fingerprint the browser/OS type, not the individual user. It's not like a super cookie.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, this seemed more like a bunch of guys at Akamai padding out their resumes. Their use cases seemed pretty weak, and with all the other information browsers leak, being able to get platform type "with increased confidence" seems like a tiny achievement.

<comment><USER6> This approach is common and obvious, and importantly it isn't about privacy vs advertising.

What it is about are things like click-fraud, content-scraping, and general classification of bots and other actors to allow customers to more confidently express their wishes.

Header ordering, H/2 options, and even capabilities via headers and the values they hold... these are just signals. When combined with other signals they allow for better classification and better control.

Is this really a Googlebot? Well ASNs aside, only if it has these traits. But Googlebot is the easiest, what about the SEO and SEM bots? What about the numerous bots that claim to be Baidu but really are not? What of the spam bots that claim to be Firefox and are little more than C# clients?

Classification of traffic based on all available signals is what this is about. The more signals, and the more that cannot be controlled by a user of a client, the more confidence in the classification.

About the only advertising use here is that it would be easier to spot click fraud when one knows the client is spoofed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Interesting. Perhaps adding some random variance between common settings from different browsers would help to prevent this?

Assuming the vast majority of the time the settings are pretty arbitrary and don't need to be set to anything particularly specific, when specific values actually are needed, they should blend in fairly well.

</comment><comment><USER8> I can see why people would love to read a paper about passively fingerprinting individual users. However passive HTTP/1.1 fingerprinting of servers and clients is a valuable, and well researched topic (at BlackHat no less). Finding ways to extend that to H2 is helpful to the industry as a whole.

Don't discard the work because its not a "super cookie"

</comment><comment><USER9> PDF is unreadable for me on iPhone/safari. Zooming in is just blurry.

<comment><USER10> Works fine here. I'd kill Safari and try again.</comment></comment>


Dc.js – Dimensional Charting JavaScript Library - <AUTHOR> http://dc-js.github.io/dc.js/ <comment><AUTHOR> I posted this as I've spent the last month with this library and it has made the creation of a multi tab dashboard a breeze.

Once you get your head around [http://square.github.io/crossfilter/](http://square.github.io/crossfilter/) and the manipulations you can do with groups, dc.js really makes rendering the data very simple.

1.7 has just been released and 2.0 is 'around the corner'.

It's a fantastic library and massive kudos to the people working on it. You make me look awesome :)

<comment><USER3> Can you explain what you found were the advantages of it over just using crossfilter and d3? It's not immediately apparent from the page. Is it that it wraps some of the complexities of d3 so you don't have to deal with them?

<comment><AUTHOR> dc.js is the 'glue' that holds d3 and crossfilter together. So I can create a crossfilter, generate multiple dimensions, group those dimensions, then render multiple charts.

Applying a filter to one chart (e.g. clicking on Saturday) then get's reflected in the display of all the other charts.

Note you can also override the group().reduce() function if your data is a lot more complex.

In fact I went a bit crazy and had one set of reduce() functions create me the struct array I needed from which to create another crossfilter and apply that to a subset of charts.

I'm hopeful that, based on conversations in the dc group, crossfilter will just become the default data engine and this will be replaceable, but crossfilter is very powerful.

I'll be honest here and state that I don't have a deep knowledge of D3. dc.js had me producing a 'limited' set of charts within days.

What I have noticed is that the linechart really does not like you pushing too many data points to it. (I have 24 temperature min/max/avg points over a day for 8 sensors going back a year) however I think this may be a browser SVG limitation (6 other charts on the page). In this case, on a dashboard, this type of chart is nonsensical for what I am doing anyway (decision taken 30minutes ago).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I am a massive fan of dc.js. Crossfilter is an amazing library, but my JS-fu isn't good enough to use its power without the help from DC.

An example of what I was able to do: [http://www.eanalytica.com/google- analytics-cube/](http://www.eanalytica.com/google-analytics-cube/) uses the dc, crossfilter and the Google Analytics API to make a simple visualisation

</comment><comment><USER5> I _love_ dc.js. In fact, I just released a data viz tool (www.machete.io) yesterday that lets lay people create charts/dashboards with dc.js. If you're a dev, you'll obviously have a lot more flexibility by crafting dcjs exactly to your liking, but machete would can help you rapidly prototype.

Example: All 3,025 Penalties in the NFL 2013 Season - [http://www.machete.io/board/view/NFL_2013_Penalties/3731630c...](http://www.machete.io/board/view/NFL_2013_Penalties/3731630c-e064-4d4c-a152-82d92997713f)

The plan is to use the github model - free public boards, private boards will be a small monthly fee.

<comment><USER6> Very cool tool. Signed up to the list, and keen to see how the service can simplify the data viz process.

<comment><USER5> Thanks! As I've been creating other examples (yet to be released), I've discovered there are always going to be little quirks with the way you want certain data pre-filtered or grouped, aggregated and then grouped again. But in general my time creating my first board went from two weeks ([http://stonefinch.com/Projects/Medicare](http://stonefinch.com/Projects/Medicare) \- 19mb download, it'll take a while), down to 1-2 days, then down to 4 hours. Now with machete I can knock out a new board in less than an hour. I typically spend a lot more time just munging together data.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Wow, I am surprised this has never hit HN before. I've been using the combo of dc.js/crossfilter.js/d3.js for a while now to great success. If you need to make interactive charts for things like dashboards -- this is an amazing triplet.

The dev team behind dc.js is also super nice and very responsive to questions / prs.

<comment><AUTHOR> TBH I was kinda surprised when it accepted my submission.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I Google-searched "dimensional charting" to get more information about this term. Guess what? All the results on page 1 are related to Dc.js. Looks like they'll have to write the definition themselves :-P

<comment><USER7> The use of the word dimension here more than likely stems from dimensional modeling / data warehouse / OLAP design [1], where designing your database in a star/cube schema will allow you to query it easily across many "dimensions".

With crossfilter.js your data gets structured similarly and then bound to d3.js svg charts. dc.js provides the glue between the two to make it easier to work with. This allows you to interactively select part of a chart and immediately see other charts bound to that data get filtered at the same time.

It allows for an interesting way to explore / visualize data.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> DC.js is great, but ironically it's deep integration with crossfilter makes it much more difficult to use with other d3.js-based charting libraries. A team I am on ended up switching to another charting library and handling the data manipulation and filtering with crossfilter ourselves.

<comment><USER6> Interesting to hear your experience. I'm wondering which library you switched to and how's the experience been with the two separate libraries?

<comment><USER9> We switched to C3, and as a charting library it is very nice to use (the declarative approach worked better for us than DC's (and D3's) imperative one) and were able to combine it with crossfilter as well as other libraries for a few missing chart types.

However, we ultimately had to switch again to a solution that was mandated by another part of the organization for IE8 compatibility and internal UI standards.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is one of the libraries I that I said "wow". I've been watching any improvements on github since I found it. It has a very active repo. This weekend I got 70+ notifications. I've used dc for a twitter data visualization and I got many positive responses.

</comment><comment><USER11> I used this for creating a full featured data pipeline a little over a year ago and it was great. We processed real-time data but our visualizations only pulled from a cache. It made it extremely easy for a non-tech team member to see what was going on with our system. That being said, I did find a few bugs which I had to patch in the system, but I don't even remember what they are anymore and I wasn't a heavy GitHub user at the time so I never submitted any PR's.

</comment><comment><USER12> Are there any commercial offerings that do some of the grunt work for you, like colors and resizing of page, zoom on maps, click to see just one chart, etc? I'd pay for that.

<comment><USER13> Yes. Tableau, QlikView, and SpotFire all provide this functionality.

<comment><USER12> No. I meant a commercial version that uses D3.js and is editable by users. I don't want a black box, but i also don't want to spend much time fixing quirks.

For example long text is a problem with charts and svg (in my experience). I'd like to pay for a version that fixes these things.

<comment><USER14> Highcharts might be up your alley. Highcharts.com

It's not D3-based, but it's one of the most popular JS charting libraries out there because it's has a well documented API and it's very customizable. We've had a lot of success with it producing visualizations at DataHero.com

D3 is like a paintbrush -- you can make anything with it if you're DaVinci, but it's a very low-level tool so you need to be a master if you want to make anything that's not my drippy kindergarten giraffe drawing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Could anyone explain the benefit of using Dc.js vs google charts API or d3.js? Crossfilter seems really cool - but since it's another library, what is it that Dc is offering?

<comment><USER16> Google Charts API is an external resource, and you're limited to the capabilities of that API, whereas d3.js lets you do just about anything you'd want to do with SVG/Canvas & javascript including animations and interactions. The benefits of crossfilter or dc.js over plain d3.js is the layer of abstraction making it easier to use.

<comment><USER15> I never understood why the external resource is such a concern for devs - <USER2> of your application will be online with online access. Google is not making a call out to send data, but to retrieve what it needs to render the different chart formats, it saves time.

<comment><USER17> Well, it's all fun and games with various APIs and remotely-hosted solutions, until those solutions start breaking and changing. For example, for awhile the news world loved making apps (simple infographics, interactives, etc) that used tabletop.js, which in turn pulled data from a google doc (spreadsheet, etc, which made it easier for text changes: programmers could program and editors could edit.)

Then, bugs surfaced after google altered login procedures. What should have been a simple JSONP call was replaced with a broken login page being returned instead of JSONP, that is: only if you hadn't logged into your google account for awhile. People who've never logged in or were logged into a google service were fine. Then they started throttling connections - per computer, per account, random without announcing it, etc. Debugging these things was frustrating.

So, in other words, a convenient feature becomes a liability very quickly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Is this compatible with d3? Why would I use one vs the other? etc. Just curious.

<comment><AUTHOR> dc.js sits on top of D3 and provides glue that between multiple D3 charts and crossfilter.</comment></comment>