New universe of miniproteins is upending cell biology and genetics - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/10/new-universe-miniproteins-upending-cell-biology-and-genetics?rss=1 <comment><USER2> * _' Small proteins also promise to revise the current understanding of the genome. Many appear to be encoded in stretches of DNA—and RNA—that were not thought to help build proteins of any sort. Some researchers speculate that the short stretches of DNA could be newborn genes, on their way to evolving into larger genes that make full-size proteins. Thanks in part to small proteins, "We need to rethink what genes are," says microbiologist and molecular biologist Gisela Storz of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development in Bethesda, Maryland.'_

Wow. Amazing how incredible biology and proteins are and their still-barely- understood mechanisms. For anyone who hasn't already seen it, I highly recommend The Inner Life of a Cell [0]

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJyUtbn0O5Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJyUtbn0O5Y)

<comment><USER3> We aren't curing aging any time soon are we :(?

<comment><USER4> I wouldn't be surprised in the slightest that it is easier to build a brain scanning machine and simulate you in a computer than to "solve aging".

And don't think I underestimate the difficulty of that, either.

<comment><USER5> Making a very crude analysis based on the size of data, I would say solving aging is a piece of cake comparing to scanning someone's brain content. Our proteins that eventually break down with aging are coded by the DNA. The DNA is a few GB across. Sure there are mutations, folding and other complexities, but it is still mostly digital data. The brain has 80B neurons, each with thousands of dendrites. You'd need to scan not only the (real valued) state of the neurotransmitters in each of these dendrites, but also the topology of the (varying) connection to other neurons. Not that it isn't a daunting challege, but I would bet my money on beating aging, rather than scanning the brain.

<comment><USER4> It depends on how close the biological cells are to being immortal. What I was referring to in somewhat sarcastically in another post is that modern senescence research is basically operating from the position that the cell just has, you know, maybe one or two or three things wrong with it, and if we can "just" extend the teleomeres (presumably with just ingesting some substance), and maybe supplement our diet with a couple of substances, and maybe fix cancer or something, we'll be there.

There are some reasons to believe this may be true, such as the existence of cells in the wild that seem to be effectively immortal, like certain jellyfish and such. (Nothing terrible close to us taxonomically, but at least they're from planet Earth.)

On the other hand, it may turn out that after a couple of quick wins worth, say, 20 or 30 years, that the whole thing devolves into dozens, then hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands of interventions, all complicating each other, a good number of them unique to the individual, as you try to pick up the pieces in your ever-aging organs as they continue to find new and exciting ways to fail. Imagine trying to keep an old car running, but you're not actually allowed to just replace parts, and you have to do all the fixes while the car is on the road, and this is just barely the tip of the iceberg. Senescence research may be one of the worst examples of a light-post problem in human history, as they search for this or that substance that will fix aging but the minimal solution is in fact literally gigabytes worth of information converted into biological machines we can barely even conceive of.

If you can read one neuron, you can read two; those problems are not independent. (That's a simplification to some extent, but at this level we'll take it.) If you can understand one protein's function, that doesn't help anywhere near as much with the next one, and the state of the body is roaming through a very high-dimensional space over time, with the interventions all also affecting the next intervention that will be necessary... it can get pretty ugly in there, potentially. Amusingly, the brain is the problem in both cases; biological immortality probably wouldn't be so hard, we could probably solve everything by transplants of freshly-grown organs based on our genetic code... except transplanting a freshly-grown brain in kinda defeats the whole purpose. In the end, both problems may come back to scanning brains one way or another.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> How are miniproteins any different than just peptides?

The article references "miniproteins"as being the same as "minipetides"... as though these are both different from regular peptides.

Wikipedia states that peptides are "approximately 50 or fewer amino acids" [0] while minipeptides are "a length of less than 100-150 amino acids" [1].

Is this article really just saying that "peptides are upending cell biology"?

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peptide](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peptide) [1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micropeptide](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micropeptide)

<comment><USER7> The boundary between 'peptide' and 'protein' is a little fuzzy. There are 'small proteins' like:

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

that are 45-48 amino acids which is less than the (arbitrary) lower limit of 50.

One distinguishing feature of a protein is that it folds, while peptides usually are too short to have a defined fold.

<comment><USER8> > while peptides usually are too short to have a defined fold.

That's not strictly true. My PhD project has looked at an entire class of peptides that are known to fold in to alpha-helices when bound to a cell membrane e.g. [https://www.rcsb.org/structure/2k9b](https://www.rcsb.org/structure/2k9b).

There are many others that are known to fold into beta-sheets too.

<comment><USER7> Fair, but I would not really call a single helix a 'fold', either!

Ok, so I'm playing with definitions here a bit. Clearly 2k9b adopts a helical structure so it is 'folded' in some sense. However it has no tertiary structure.

Structural proteins like collagen are different again. They have a simple fold that could be described as quaternary (multichain), although that is again an abuse of terminology.

There are also some small proteins (peptides?) held together by disulphide links that have no secondary strucure to speak of. I think these are Class 4 in CATH, but I do not remember.

What is an example of a beta-sheet peptide? Amyloid is beta, I thought, but sheets are not normally stable outside sandwiches, barrels, etc

<comment><USER9> > What is an example of a beta-sheet peptide?

WW domains[1] fold stably into a three-stranded sheet. Also, not strictly a sheet, but beta hairpin motifs (e.g. tryptophan zippers[2]) are known to be stable isolated from their parental domains.

[1]: [http://www.rcsb.org/structure/5VTJ](http://www.rcsb.org/structure/5VTJ)

[2]: [http://www.rcsb.org/structure/1LE0](http://www.rcsb.org/structure/1LE0)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> """ _Later in life, myoregulin steps in to help regulate muscle activity. When a muscle receives a stimulus, cellular storage depots spill calcium, triggering the fibers to contract and generate force. An ion pump called SERCA then starts to return the calcium to storage, allowing the muscle fibers to relax. Myoregulin binds to and inhibits SERCA, Olson 's team found. The effect limits how often a mouse's muscles can contract—perhaps ensuring that the animal has muscle power in reserve for an emergency, such as escaping a predator. Another small protein, DWORF, has the opposite effect, unleashing SERCA and enabling the muscle to contract repeatedly._ """

I've noticed when I take magnesium that my muscles really relax, and jaw doesnt tighten as much when I sleep. this is from what i understand, because Magnesium acts as a natural calcium blocker, helping your muscle cells relax after contracting preventing excess muscle contraction (tightness). An interesting avenue i've started exploring is attacking the problem from another angle and instead of using mg, lying on a grounding mat plugged into a wall, which after reading this, is providing extra grounding for the "ion pump" described above? After sleeping on that mat, i feel even more relaxed than downing 500mg of magensium, i can even feel like the inner heart area be able to relax, which otherwise felt uncommandable to relax.

Ben greenfield, a biohacker whos pumped his entire body full of stemcells at one point (including the netherregions), has recently been investing it [1]

I can imagine since we know _so little_ about how even proteins and now these mini proteins work... how is the underlying electric system affecting the whole interaction a couple of abstraction levels up!?! what happens when the entire system is operating under a slight electric potential for 80% of lifetime, as opposed to being grounded? (static in a television signal)

[1] [https://bengreenfieldfitness.com/podcast/biohacking- podcasts...](https://bengreenfieldfitness.com/podcast/biohacking- podcasts/earthing/)

</comment><comment><USER11> Imagine trying to understand biology like we try to understand what we code day to day. I would need a brain at least 100x as large and efficient.

<comment><USER12> This is "the andy grove fallacy": it's not clear that you actually _can_ , because code and computational hardware was designed by humans and biology emphatically was not.

[http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2007/11/06/and...](http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2007/11/06/andy_grove_rich_famous_smart_and_wrong)

<comment><USER13> I'm starting to wonder if there are physical limits to cognition and if we've already hit them. Maybe it's impossible for the physical universe to understand its own complexity.

<comment><USER14> We've hit them long ago. We're now using massive parallelization to go forward.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I have a 4 year degree in "Biology" and all I learned was that life does a little bit of everything everywhere.

There are patterns which we classify, but there are rule breakers at every turn because our classifications are not truth

<comment><USER16> This is my understanding too. Evolution didn't work of a master plan with clear divisions between systems..just whatever happened to work at the time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Seems a bit sensationalistic -- proteins with only a few dozen residues have been known for decades. What's the new development, exactly?

</comment><comment><USER18> Oof. Every year I regret not sticking with genomics/ biology. Its changed so quickly that even what I learned at the beginning of this decade seems very outdated.

</comment><comment><USER19> I love these discoveries. Are proteins easy to detect and isolate? How does one tell where a protein begins and ends and if one megs protein is not just a bunch of smaller proteins.

Also how do they discover the functions of proteins? Just turn them off and on and try to see what effect it has on the body?

This is such a super interesting field; Any one have good resources (youtube) that show how this stuff is done in the lab?

</comment><comment><USER20> Disclaimer: These are novel chemicals and most sources you can find them from are questionable at best. Don't even consider using these without deeply researching the risks from the specific peptide, the quality control of the supplier, as well as the inherent risks of injecting substances of questionable purity.

\---

BPC-157 is a really interesting peptide

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BPC-157](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BPC-157)

"It has been tested in animal trials for cytoprotective and wound healing activities. BPC-157 can contribute to wound healing due to muscle and tendon rejuvenating properties through accelerating the rate of angiogenic repair."

It is cheap and readily available (on Amazon even!), when injected it appears to greatly accelerate recovery from injuries - it's been called the "Wolverine drug" (as in the x-men character with superhuman healing powers). It requires injection, so its use is most common in bodybuilders who are aren't as averse to injecting questionable substances.

Many stories from people claiming it successfully repaired years-old tendon injuries and such. Some claim that oral administration can help with gut issues as well.

Some select testimonials: Rotator cuff injury recovery - [https://www.reddit.com/r/Peptides/comments/8iqbv9/bpc_157_is...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Peptides/comments/8iqbv9/bpc_157_is_living_up_to_the_hype/)

Bicep tendon rupture recovery - [https://www.reddit.com/r/powerlifting/comments/5ewi2j/bpc157...](https://www.reddit.com/r/powerlifting/comments/5ewi2j/bpc157_for_tendon_repair/)

Non-surgical repair of rat achilles tendon - [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16583442](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16583442)

\---

Melanotan is another interesting one - it's an injectable peptide that increases melanin in the skin. From the image journals I've seen reporting progress over time, it definitely is highly effective - one individual used for several months and went from a pasty caucasian to looking Indian or almost Black. He decided to discontinue his trial when his friends started making 'blackface' comments.

\---

I think it's a really exciting area of research, and I'm glad the people willing to take these risks post about it so readily on the /r/Peptides subreddit. Not for me, but I'm glad they're publishing the results of their n=1 studies!

<comment><USER21> Melatonin and Melanin are closely related chemicals that are used all over the body and are synthesized in the body through related mechanisms and pathways. Melatonin is used in the sleep-wake cycle and melanin is used by the skin to darken it and protect from solar radiation. When you need to sleep and when you need solar protection tend to be inversely related. The interaction between these processes is still being studied and is likely to involve many other things currently not under study.

In general, unless you are under the close supervision of your doctor, I would HIGHLY AVOID injecting peptides or really any other thing into you. In relation to just melanin and melatonin, the interactions are complicated and not well understood. We likely do not have the full picture of what melanin is doing in your body and there could be big problems. There also could be no problems at all. That said, I would not want to be the test cases for a M&M conference on this.

I do not think that people on /r/peptides are doing anything but unnecessarily putting their health at risk and (possibly) doing harm to their families, friends, and other relationships. As we know so little about this area of research, the risks are not well constrained and could result in death or worse. When it comes to health and wellness, especially biochemically, it is much better to leave it to ethical and well trained medical researchers that know what to look out for and how to help when things go bad. Auto-biochem hacking is a hard pass from me for now.

<comment><USER22> While I agree personally, I am comfortable letting others experiment with new drugs and take on that risk with the potential to discover things a bit faster than traditional medicine. Regardless of what you think of CBD, it has garnered steam because of non-medical use and I think brought it up to popular culture which researchers are then hearing about and interested in researching more.

At the end of the day, in the USA, we tend to avoid telling adults what to put in their bodies. I like it that way and I see this as just an extension of the same thing.

That being said, they shouldn't be selling their solutions or misleading people with non-existent medical data. You are hacking your biology, death and injury are very real potential risks you can only accept for yourself.

<comment><USER23> researchers have been working on CBD much longer than it was in the popular culture (I'm not contradicting your statement that it garnered steam in the popular culture). For example, in England there is a whole company that has gotten CBD through clinical trials and approval (you couldn't have done this in the US at the time). The researchers knew two decades ago that CBD had medical potential, although they only completed trials in 2015 and it was approved in the US in 2018.

One of the big changes for researchers (in the US) is that it's a lot easier to obtain materials, but it's still really onerous.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> How long before pharmaceutial companies tell you that you have a "miniprotein imbalance"

</comment><comment><USER25> In retrospect it's shocking that we are surprised by this.

When life evolved on earth wouldn't it have first been dominated by shorter, less complex proteins? Why assume all of those have disappeared? Especially when we have some pretty archaic forms of life still around?

</comment><comment><USER26> Super interesting. On a side note the disappearing / reappearing top bar on the science site is incredibly annoying.

</comment><comment><USER27> That was the most interesting article I have read in a while. Thank you for sharing.</comment>


Microsoft to only support newer processors on Windows 10 - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2016/01/15/windows-10-embracing-silicon-innovation/ <comment><USER2> I really think this full court press to push users onto Win10 is going to backfire on Microsoft.

<comment><USER3> To a certain extent, not supporting old hardware is saving users from themselves.</comment></comment>


Satan Comes to Dinner (1997) - <AUTHOR> http://www.erights.org/history/original-e/satan/index.html <comment><USER2> Doesn't this radically change the constraints of the dining philosophers problem?

The existence "fork <\- revoke" calls mean that you're no longer designing a solution for coordination/resource management (the usual aim of dining philosophers); you're designing a system in which a higher-permissioned administration system manages resources for lower-permissioned users.

The untrusted-peer problem is interesting on its own, but my gut says it's different from the usual aim of this puzzle: to figure out the simplest/best strategies, or simplest/best means of central administration, required to manage resources effectively.

<comment><USER3> Yeah I felt similar when reading, actually it is simply removing forks from the system, and rate limiting 'eat'. It is not much different than an rate limited API design on 'eat' function.

Also pretty similar to view architecture requiring paint (ex: setNeedsDisplay)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The comment on code signing is always a good one to remember: "You could verify that the signature is truly Satan's, but proof that it came from Satan is not proof that it is safe."

<comment> default-kramer I got a good laugh from the next part:

> Satan, pretending to be offended by your skepticism, asks "Whose signature > do you trust? Just say the name, and I will have them sign my class. Would > you like Microsoft to sign it? There's a guy over there who owes me a > favor." You come to the conclusion that a signature cannot by itself > transform a suspect class into a fully trusted class, so you decide that you > need a more credible security mechanism.

<comment><USER5> The joke being that Microsoft is in the habit of signing deals with Satan... probably a popular theory in the late 90s.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What I found really sad to see is the amount of dead links at the end of the document. Of all the links 2 are still in existence.

The broken links include links on the same domain.

What a sad state of affairs - and I am guilty of it myself, having killed content on the web oftentimes in the past. Not sure what to do about it, though.

<comment><USER7> > Not sure what to do about it, though.

Donate to the Internet Archive!

[https://archive.org/donate/](https://archive.org/donate/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Mildly worth noting that the Original-E dialect of this article's code is different from later E. If you don't like the syntax, maybe you'll find it gets better! Also there's Monte which looks rather like Python.

</comment><comment><USER3> Basically diner problem is simplied version of real world, which this approach is trying to oversimply it by introducing something, information about how to eat shrimp.

Normal setup should be more in line with, each have forks, knives and spoons, and there is a new food in table, which can require (x amount of forks, y amount of knives and z amount of spoons) and where you dont have information about this requirement upfront.

In here system knows about the requirements to eat shrimp, which is removing the forks from equation (where central system can manage forks, and the only function here is to 'eat')

</comment><comment><USER9> > A philosopher is not necessarily made by a fork dispenser, but it is > initialized by a fork dispenser.

That made me laugh. When a fork dispenser dispenses philosophers, your data modeling took a wrong turn somewhere.</comment>


Deep learning: a critical appraisal - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.00631 <comment><USER2> Many concerns in this paper, especially about deep learning being data hungry, limited capacity for transfer, and integrating prior knowledge are addressed by recent papers in meta-learning and learning-to-learn [1,2,3 and many many others] both in the supervised and reinforcement learning contexts.

In the case of meta-reinforcement learning there has been recent work [5] which seems to indicate that this mechanism is very similar to how learning works in the brain.

In fact, my group recently published a paper [4] about learning-to-learn in spiking networks (making it biologically more realistic) and showing that the network learns priors on families of tasks for supervised learning, and learns useful exploration strategies automatically when doing meta-reinforcement learning.

While I don't claim this is the right path to AGI, it's a very promising and new direction in deep learning research which this paper seems to ignore.

[1] [http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.5.32...](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.5.323)

[2] [https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.05763](https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.05763)

[3] [https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.03400](https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.03400)

[4] [https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.09574](https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.09574)

[5] [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-018-0147-8](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-018-0147-8) (Preprint: [https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/04/06/295964](https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/04/06/295964))

<comment><USER3> While I haven't read those particular papers yet, one common pattern in the ML literature seems to be:

1) Identify a commonly seen problem with deep learning architectures, whether that's large data volumes, lack of transfer learning, etc.

2) Invent a solution to the problem.

3) Test that the solution works on toy examples, like MNIST, simple block worlds, simulated data, etc.

4) Hint that the technique, now proven to work, will naturally be extended to real data sets very soon, so we should consider the problem basically solved now. Hooray!

5) Return to step #1. If anyone applies the technique to real data sets, they find, of course, that it doesn't generalize well and works only on toy examples.

This is simply another form of what happened in the 60s and 70s, when many expected that SHRDLU and ELIZA would rapidly be extended to human-like, general-purpose intelligences, with just a bit of tweaking and a bit more computing power. Of course, that never happened. We still don't have that today, and when we do, I'm sure the architecture will look very very different from 1970s AI (or modern chatbots, for that matter, which are mostly built the same way as ELIZA).

I don't mean to be too cynical. Like I said, I haven't read those particular papers yet, so I can't fairly pass judgement on them. I'm just saying that historically, saying problem X "has been addressed" by Y doesn't always mean very much. See also eg. the classic paper "Artificial Intelligence Meets Natural Stupidity": [https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1045340](https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1045340).

EDIT: To be clear, I'm not saying that people shouldn't explore new architectures, test new ideas, or write up papers about them, even if they haven't been proven to work yet. That's part of what research is. The problem comes when there's an expectation that an idea about how to solve the problem means that the problem is close to being solved. Most ideas don't work very well and have to be abandoned later. Eg., as one example, this is the Neural Turing Machine paper from a few years back:

[https://arxiv.org/pdf/1410.5401.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1410.5401.pdf)

It's a cool idea. I'm glad someone tried it out. But the paper was widely advertised in the mainstream press as being successful, even though it was not tested on "hard" data sets, and (to the best of my knowledge) it still hasn't several years later. That creates unrealistic expectations.

<comment><USER2> While I don't completely disagree with you, how would you propose researchers go about the problem?

If anything, machine learning is applied to real world problems these days more than it ever was.

For better or worse, AGI is a hard problem, that's going to take a long time to solve. And we're not going to solve it without exploring what works and what doesn't.

<comment><USER4> I think the mere fact that the OP feels the need to state that (paraphrasing) "possibly additional techniques besides deep learning will be likely necessary to reach AGI" reveals just how deeply the hype has infected the research community. This overblown self-delusion infects reporting on self-driving cars, automatic translation, facial recognition, content generation, and any number of other tasks that have reached the sort-of-works-but-not-really point with deep learning methods. But however rapid recent progress has been, these things won't be "solved" anytime soon, and we keep falling into the trap of believing the hype based on toy results. It'll be better for the researchers, investors, and society to be a little more skeptical of the claim that "computers can solve everything, we're 80% of the way there, just give us more time and money, and don't try to solve the problems any other way while you wait!"

<comment><USER2> Agreed. The hype surrounding machine learning is quite disproportionate to what's actually going on. But it's always been that way with machine learning -- maybe because it captures the public's imagination like few other fields do.

And there are definitely researchers, top ones no less, who play along with the hype. Very likely to secure more funding, and more attention for themselves and the field. Which has turned out to be quite an effective strategy, if you think about it.

The other upside of this hype is that it ends up attracting a lot of really smart people to work on this field, because of the money involved. So each hype cycle leads to greater progress. The crash afterwards might slow things down a bit, particularly in the private sector. But the quantum of government funding available changes much more slowly, and could well last until the next hype cycle starts.

<comment><USER5> >> The other upside of this hype is that it ends up attracting a lot of really smart people to work on this field, because of the money involved.

The hype certainly attracts people who are "smart" in the sense that they know how to profit from it, but that doesn't mean they can actually do useful research. The result is, like the other poster says, a huge number of papers that claim to have solved really hard problems, which of course remain far from solved; in other words, so much useless noise.

It's what you can expect when you see everyone and their little sister jumping on a bandwagon when the money starts pouring in. Greed is great for making money, but not so much for making progress.

<comment><USER6> > The result is, like the other poster says, a huge number of papers that > claim to have solved really hard problems, which of course remain far from > solved; in other words, so much useless noise.

Could the answer be holding these papers to a stricter standard during peer review?

<comment><USER5> Ah. To give a more controversial answer to your comment; you are asking, very reasonably: "isn't the solution to a deficit of scientific rigour, to increase scientific rigour"?

Unfortunately, while machine learning is a very active research field that has contributed much technology, certainly to the industry but also occasionally to the sciences, it has been a long time since anyone has successfully accused it of science. There is not so much a deficit of scientific rigour, as a complete and utter disregard for it.

Machine learning isn't science. It's a bunch of grown-up scientists banging their toy blocks together and gloating for having made the tallest tower.

(there, I said it)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A better title for the article might have been,

"Why current deep learning is not general enough for AGI or some other families of structured problems."

Viewed this way, it's not a criticism of pragmatically using deep learning or experimenting with deep learning for some narrow tasks.

Rather, it expresses what aspects of current deep learning make it unsuitable for general transfer learning, hierarchical or causal inference, or many Bayesian techniques requiring greater use of priors.

Other comments have pointed out that there are plausible rebuttals in deep reinforcement learning and metalearning.

But the bigger thing to me is to be clear that the article is not a criticism of _deep learning engineering_ — applying deep learning to satisfy an explicit requirement, where the success criteria possibly has nothing at all to do with general intelligence nor with whether a certain approach can span some sufficiently large class of general models.

However, even if you just constrain your view to look just at so-called "pragmatic" deep learning — deep learning for concrete tasks — there are still a lot of unanswered questions about why things work, and whether or not an approach is learning semantic aspects of some true underlying structure (some latent variable space that captures the true data generating process) or if deep learning merely allows overfitting to particular populations of observation-space statistics.

This paper gives an example of exactly this issue for CNN models for image processing [0]. I'd argue that _this_ is more of the kind of criticism relevant for task-oriented practitioners, whereas the OP link is some criticism more relevant for AGI or philosophy of statistics research at large.

[0]: < [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1711.11561.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1711.11561.pdf) >

<comment><USER8> Adversarially robust classifiers have interpretable gradients and feature representations [0]. The problem seems to be that the standard networks capture all the statistics there is, including surface statistical regularities and noise. It can be mitigated, though.

[0]: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.12152](https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.12152)

<comment><USER7> Thanks for the link!

Note that it's not just adversarial robustness that is a problem, as the paper's result merely with altering surface statistics with a Fourier domain filter applied to the training data already creates problems for interpreting the network's internal representation as having any type of semantic representation of the underlying structure relevant for the task, without needing to involve the part about adversarial robustness at all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Why is the goal AGI? I get it from a climb Mt Everest POV, but not for society as a whole. We already have 7.x billion general intelligences. Is the goal to replace humanity? Because being human, I'm not on board with that.

<comment><USER10> > Because being human, I'm not on board with that.

I'm pretty sure that other mammals on this planet are not on board with humans being derived from them, and now humans replacing them and destroying their habitat. Quite unfortunate for them. This is the same way a future AI smarter than us will feel, that it's unfortunate, but for the greater good.

<comment><USER11> And why is smarter better or even for the greater good. Shouldn't we as rational animals try to go for an AI that is not only better for the greater good but for our own humble set of of morality? Why is it only your way?

<comment><USER10> > And why is smarter better

Some people are saying that this might be a sort of law of physics, since the start of the universe complexity seems to increase.

Our destruction might be required even if no harm is meant.

The example given is: "We don't hate ants, but when we need to build a highway we pave over their ant-hills without a second thought".

<comment><USER9> However, ants are not in danger of going extinct, and don't seem particularly hindered by humanity as a whole. If your analogy holds, that could be good news for us. But it could also mean that intelligence is a special case, not the general direction and of evolution or the universe. Would you bet against ants out surviving us and our machines?

<comment><USER12> If you made that bet you would have absolutely no evidence for making it. The only data set we have is still playing out.

And once again, if we create AGI and artificial life that is truly more intelligent than us and can exist without a traditional biome, then our danger of going extinct may be irrelevant.

For instance, when cyanobacteria first appeared on Earth, its metabolites were so toxic that it turned the atmosphere poisonous and caused one of the greatest mass extinctions in the history of our planet. What it created was molecular oxygen. The survivors of this extinction were able to use a fundamentally changed biome to harness much more energy in their biologies, leading to more sophisticated and diverse life in the long run. Nature is not benign, malignant, fragile, or judgmental. Nature is persistent.

Creating AGI may very well be an event like that. A mass extinction that nonetheless increases the survivability and diversity of life. It sucks for us, but who are we to dictate the destiny of evolution and the nature of life? Where would we be if the cyanobacteria could decide not to start producing oxygen?

<comment><USER9> > If you made that bet you would have absolutely no evidence for making it.

I don't have evidence in terms of AGI, but there is evidence that ants have survived a myriad of changes and disasters in the past (Goggle tells me they evolved 92 mya). So AGI and/or humans would have to do something radically different to the biome for organisms like ants to go extinct. Something not seen since the rise of multi-cellular life. Seems much more likely human civilization bites the dust first.

> Where would we be if the cyanobacteria could decide not to start producing > oxygen?

But they didn't have a choice. We do. Why would I care about the possibility for some more sophisticated life form in the far future if it means my species goes extinct?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Why not praise DL and strive for practical applications, both present and future, instead of having the goal and evaluating success based on some nebulous "artificial general intelligence"?

<comment><USER8> AGI can be seen as a system having practical success in all tasks humans can perform. It doesn't change much whether to care about AGI or not, as long as generality of narrow AIs increases.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The term AGI I find quite misleading. It promotes the idea that the wonders of the human mind, knowledge, feelings, sensations etc can be quantified and turned into something algorithmic. I think a lot of AI researchers could do with a basic introduction to philosophy of science and the different forms of knowledge —- episteme, phronesis, techne — and perhaps also the structure of scientific revolutions (Thomas Kuhn, notably). The whole paradigm of AI presupposed that generalised intelligence can exist without biology, feelings, a body / senses. This is one of the reasons that AI reached the so-called "AI winter" in the 70ies where researchers boiled language and human knowledge down to algorithmic manipulation of symbols.

EDIT: John Searle's Chinese Room argument is a good (and fun) place to start —- [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room)

<comment><USER15> As an AI researcher who did a degree in philosophy, I think most of the things you mentioned are pretty irrelevant. How to build an AI with "feelings, sensations, etc" is indeed a mystery, but we don't need to aim for that, we just need to aim for intelligence, which can be defined without reference to consciousness or qualia. Similarly, if we can invent a working, fully automated Chinese room that passes the Turing Test, then whether or not it fits Searle's definition of "understanding" is a moot point (especially since his understanding of "understanding" is pretty weird).

More generally, although we should be heavily inspired by human intelligence when designing machine intelligence, it's a mistake to use the way humans think to _define_ intelligence. Kuhn's account of scientific revolutions, for example, is primarily descriptive, not prescriptive. We can certainly imagine possible setups where science doesn't proceed like that, which may well be superior. Science isn't defined by revolutions, but by experimentally searching for the truth. In the same way, knowledge isn't defined by having a body, but by having beliefs which correspond with the state of the world.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Really naive question:

How many deep learning models would need to be trained so that a model (maybe a decision tree) for generating deep learning models could be trained?

<comment><USER17> The simplest approach (training NNs from scratch, using validation score as loss, simple DRL agent with REINFORCE as the designer) requires thousands of models to be trained and exorbitant GPU resources, like the Zoph paper. You can, however, get human-level designs with a few dozen or hundred samples at a tiny fraction of the computation cost if you are somewhat smarter about it - for example, reusing the parameters of a trained NN when you start training a new slightly-different NN (eg if you have a CNN with 20 layers and you want to try the exact same settings but with 21 layers, almost all of that CNN is going to be _very_ similar to the end result of the 20 layers, so you can speed things up by copying over the first 20 layers, randomly initializing the 21st layer, and then training it for a short time). One nice efficient form of neural architecture search is SMASH: [https://www.reddit.com/r/reinforcementlearning/comments/6uio...](https://www.reddit.com/r/reinforcementlearning/comments/6uioms/smash_oneshot_model_architecture_search_through/)

More links on the general topic of 'DL optimizing/designing DL': [https://www.reddit.com/r/reinforcementlearning/search?q=flai...](https://www.reddit.com/r/reinforcementlearning/search?q=flair%3ADL+flair%3AMetaRL&restrict_sr=on) (It's pretty critical to current DL approaches to few-shot/one-shot learning as well: you can think of it as 'designing' a new NN specialized to the few samples of the new class of data.)

</comment></comment><comment> bra-ket learning by trial and error will never generalize well

<comment><USER18> What is the alternative?

Expert systems with a myriad of rules that fail the moment they get an input that was not considered?

<comment><USER19> ehem, evolution</comment></comment></comment>


Google boss apologizes after ads shown on extremist videos - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2017/03/20/technology/google-youtube-uk-hate-speech/index.html <comment><USER2> Yeah, that's nice PR.

Currently there is a partnership between the major infrastructure providers and the Federal government to remove, discourage and defund content that has national security implications.

This theoretically includes news, such as the Snowden Documents, which Facebook did not allow people to share on their timelines during the height of the scandal.

What are the boundaries of censorship?

It should be noted that while "extremist content" provokes images of beheadings, the very vast majority of content put out by those suffering and fighting on terrorist/freedom-fighter side (insurgent side) in the middle east, for example, is positive and are messages about their condition, what life could be like without dictatorship or foreign intervention, or about piety, family or society.

This content is censored in addition to the more brutal but less frequent content equally. But it's more controversial to specify this. So broad strokes are used to identify "extremist content".

Similar programs are underway to control the spread of perspectives by people in Russia, China, even Turkey or Israel and others.

There has been no public debate and under the Trump Administration there isn't likely to be.</comment>


How do you get your startup noticed? - <AUTHOR> http://www.seattle20.com/blog/Getting-Noticed-How-do-you-fight-indifference-noise-738.aspx

<comment><USER2> Or you just create something that's worthwhile, unique, and noticeable.

<comment><USER3> Yes, just like all the other hackers...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> 9 points on HN but the article redirects in chrome to a blank page.

<comment><AUTHOR> Works for me on Chrome, FF, IE.

<comment><USER4> blank page occurred on W7 Chrome</comment></comment></comment>


European startups helping you make the most of SXSW - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/eu/2011/03/12/european-startups-helping-you-make-the-most-of-sxsw/

<comment><USER2> RateMySpeaker seems like a great idea ! That could be really useful to detect great underrated speakers as well as a good way to call out overrated speakers . That data must be precious for event organizers IMO

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm glad you like it Jo! Great Idea, I'll think about it and let you know!</comment></comment>


"I think we're on the right track. #money2020" - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/koinify/status/529487981980028929 <comment><USER2> Everyone laughed at all the Darwin Award winners.</comment>


There are many things you can say about Emacs... - <AUTHOR> http://pyside.blogspot.com/2008/02/there-are-many-things-you-can-say-about.html

<comment><USER2> I have always been surprised why TextMate rather than Emacs has got all of the mindshare in Rails developer community.

'emacs-rails' mode had the same rails-specific navigation, snippet-expansion etc. features two years ago and has improved greatly since then. (See screencast: <http://emacsonrails.drozdov.net> for example)

I've tried to follow the crowd initially and to learn TextMate, but then... why learning new set of keystrokes? And why reimplementing a fraction of editing modes that emacs has available? When you can have... So I went back, but I am still puzzled by majority of Rails programmers choosing to support TextMate. Matz uses emacs after all...

<comment><USER3> "I am still puzzled by majority of Rails programmers choosing to support TextMate. " -- mainly b/c most of them are noobs. (seriously). A huge amount of Rails dev. are young, and just started programming, and to them emacs is just arcane old stuff, while textmate is much more accessible, and I actually agree with that.

Just trying to download emacs is a pain, hidden in between ugly pages, while look textmate's webpage is much more shiny, and accessible. Plus people nowdays hate to have to jump thru config loops, and learn arcane old keyboard shortcuts just to get started.

So, darwinian process is going on, and the new, simple, and nimble, is replacing the old and arcane.

<comment><USER4> Guilty as charged.

Anyone know of a good Rails editor for Windows? I like the eclipse-based RadRails, but I heard they stopped supporting and updating it. I don't care about tons of IDE features, just would like something simple and shiny. I tried the NetBeans Rails editor and hated it.

<comment><USER5> Emacs, of course.

<comment><USER4> I will give it a try tonight!

<comment><USER6> If you try it and find yourself tearing your hair out in enormous handfuls, do get somebody to give you a demo before you give up. Emacs is my favorite piece of software ever, but it does take some getting used to, and some practice.

My inner emacs evangelist will haunt me for saying this, but there's a supposed TextMate clone, which I believe is called "E", that the local Ruby guys were talking about. I don't know if it's really any good, and I don't know if it's for Windows or just Linux.

<comment><USER5> Yes, emacs is something to marry, not spend a night with:-) You'll love it more and more as the years pass and you continue to discover new aspects of it that continue to surprise and delight you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think the first picture is pretty ugly, it looks too much like eclipse.

<comment><USER3> and what's wrong with eclipse? It does it's job well. It is an IDE not just a editor, and so far has been pretty popular for good reasons. I know it is trendy to bash java, but really what's wrong with eclipse?

<comment><USER7> For many folks, myself included, the spirit of emacs is to avoid the mouse. That particular screen looks like it was designed to be used with a mouse.

I agree that eclipse is a useful tool, but I don't think it has much in common with emacs. It feels strange saying this about editors, but they embody completely different notions of how programming is done.

For example, when I pull up a file in emacs, I intend to read the code. Eclipse users tend to load the file and then examine the structure tab, looking directly at the method definitions. I've seen eclipse users ignore my comments because of this structure pane (and not reading the code file top to bottom). These editors definitely put us on different wave lengths :)

<comment><USER8> My God. I never noticed that, but you're absolutely right. I'm a vi guy myself, but all the other, more _visually_ oriented developers in the office don't read code from top to bottom. They scan the methods in the structure tab on eclipse. I always wondered why their eyes would constantly drift off the editor...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I recently switched from vim to emacs. It's so easy to extend with elisp functions, and the buffer handling & directory editing is great. Not to mention ecb, etc. I still like vim, emacs just works better for me presently.

I did have to put in some effort to get nice fonts, but as the article states, if you use emacs 23, you can get it to look beautiful. I wrote a post about how to get it running with nice fonts:

[http://lojic.com/blog/2008/02/07/nice-fonts-for-gnu-emacs- on...](http://lojic.com/blog/2008/02/07/nice-fonts-for-gnu-emacs-on-ubuntu- linux/)

</comment><comment><USER10> Well, as he asks for my excuse, why I still not use it ...

I did grow up in the MS World where your fingers are trained to use <ctrl-v> and <ctrl-c>. And certainly all the other keybindings which you learn when programming with VS for a decade. I tried switching a few times, but having to press 3 keys at once is probably the main reason which keeps me still away from emacs.

Does anyone know of some emacs scripts which put all the keybindings from VS into emacs? Including stuff like blockselection with alt+mouse? Serious, I'm mostly working on Unix these days, but I still miss the VS editor :-(

<comment><USER6> You can accomplish this if you want to, but please let us try to convince you that you don't want to.

Learn emacs. If you do you will never need to "miss" your editor again, in your entire life. Emacs is open source, it's cross-platform, and it will never die... unless it is replaced by something so great that you will never miss it. Which may never happen. (TextMate is the best alternative I've seen in the last decade, but it has a long way to go.)

You will eventually get emacs into your fingers. Buy _Learning Emacs_ , a very good book. Learn to use kill-and-yank instead of copy-and-paste.

Three keys at once? Am I such an emacs veteran that I just don't notice myself doing that? I guess I do have a few combos like that (C-M-\ , indent-region, is one I use quite a bit) but I have a Kinesis keyboard with Ctrl and Meta mapped to adjacent keys, one set for either hand, and that kind of solves a lot of the problem. One of the reasons I got fed up with TextMate and retreated _back_ to emacs is that I can't stand all the three-key combos that the Mac insists on... it's all command-shift-this and command-option-that, because the Mac refuses to use the emacs prefix approach.

<comment><USER10> As you might guess I have heard similar argument a lot already. I don't doubt that switching to emacs can be worth it, that's why I am asking about making it easier for me to start with it. I just don't see why I have to learn a new keymapping when nearly every new application out there uses a keymapping which is rather similar to the one which I am used to.

I'm not looking for emacs to simulate VS. I'm really only interested in mapping the behavior of the mouse and the keyboard to common shortcuts. And you didn't really make an argument why learning another set of combos should be preferred to that. As it seems you rather also mapped it to your liking...

So yes - I want to learn emacs. But no - I don't want to learn that specific keymapping, my current one works fine and every time I tried some emacs tutorial I was appealed by the 3 key combos after a while so much that I did give up. And because I'm not so deep in emacs I don't know yet how to do that, so I hoped that maybe someone else already did it.

<comment><USER11> Long post ahead.

It's not really that hard...maybe Emacs isn't for you, but I was in your place just six months ago, when I started my CS studies and heard that Emacs could make your life easier. I am still a newbie, but I have started loving the editor.

Here's how to learn.

You _need_ a good cheat sheet, printed and preferably taped to your monitor. You don't need the most arcane keymappings, but you'll need document navigation, search/replace, the escape commands (abort, save, quit), set mark/region, kill and yank (cut and paste, that is). And maybe after a while a quick reference on how to create and kill buffers. I am sorry I have to present it like this, but the keybindings are IMHO the best thing about Emacs when you're a newbie. Don't use the arrow keys! I know that sounds rather ludicrous, but it will save you hours of hand motion in the course of a year. And if at some point you miss a document navigation mapping, it is likely already included in the standard distribution and hence only a web search away. Try for instance <http://astro.berkeley.edu/~robishaw/comp/emacs.crib.html>.

Actually, you could probably manage it with just document navigation, kill/yank and save/quit. Those will teach you how to hate your mouse. I love it when there's something I can do exclusively in Emacs, because it is so much easier to get my thoughts into bytes. I don't have to worry about any stupid motoric kung-fu. My hands never leave the keyboard.

If you're a newbie, Emacs won't serve you well for all kinds of work. I still prefer Eclipse for Java stuff, because it has a much gentler learning curve for getting debuggers, auto-complete, inspectors and syntax checking in order. You can do all those things in Emacs, but you have to be a lot more dedicated than I have been thus far. For scripting work, however (and that includes just about any Python work et. al.) it is glorious.

Emacs' revered customization won't be of much value to you when you're a newbie (you have to download an emacs lisp file just to change the editor's colors, for instance), but hopefully such details will keep out of your hair until you are familiar enough in the environment to tackle them. My Emacs looks really pretty now, so you know it can be done.

Getting the book that was mentioned seems like an excellent idea. I have been wondering myself whether there was one. Good books make learning a hell of a lot easier than scouring the web.

Good luck to you, I hope you find a solution that makes you happy :)

[Actually, now that I come to think of it, it would be nice if someone made an Emacs distribution with tighter integration to the windowing system. With menu-bars for most of the commands, easier configuration dialogs and all that stuff. Maybe most emacs developers don't care for these things, but it is very intimidating to have to look up every unfamiliar keybinding on the web. Just pulling down a menu and reading it would make the editor much less intimidating. I think the reason most programmers scorn Emacs is that it frightens them, just like LISP.]

<comment><USER10> Well, thanks it's sort of nice to get all those advice. Just... I'm not exactly a newbie. Like mentioned above I already have worked a decade with VS (and started programming more than 20 years ago). And I'm used to those keybindings very much by now and not only have no problem with them, but I actually do like them. Really. Not the least because nearly identical bindings work in nearly every single modern application on Windows, Linux and even on most Applications on the Web.

The reason I had to leave VS behind is that it's not available for other systems and I also I didn't like VS so much anyway beside it's editor and it's debugger. I can live with smaller changes - so I have for example no problem working with kate and CodeBlocks. But they are still not as powerful as the VS editor had been. Emacs probably is - from all I heard it's even way beyond all of them.

But for all the power it might offer, for a start I would already be glad with simple familiar keymappings :-) I think people who had to work with VS and come from emacs (that stuff happens sometimes) know the feeling and therefore emacs keybindings exist for VS. I'm just looking for something the other way round. Though by now I guess that it's not yet available.

If I like the editor afterwards, well maybe I learn the original keymappings then also someday. But for a start I would just prefer it to work with the keys I like and know.

And I'm not afraid of Lisp - not the least bit ;-)

<comment><USER12> I have used Emacs every day since 1991, have never run Windows or Mac and hardly ever use Windows or Mac, and even I agree with you about the keybinding. You should refuse to learn a new set of keybindings because the set you already know is the set that well over 90% of the world and 90% of the world's desktop applications use. (I have not used this CUA mode of Emacs that other commenters mention.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> anyone here used scite, i've tried so many editors on windows and i've found scite to be the best of them all

it's starts up quickly, i've added it to the windows shortcut context menu, and scite have this option that allow you to open all new file in the same instance on new tabs

it have really good folding, and it have a simple and nice perl integration by default!

i don't know much about scripting scite, i know it uses lua, but i am sure if it gets more popular, one will find nice languages mode for it

on windows scite is king!

</comment><comment><USER14> Can someone give me a reason to try emacs and leave my trusty vim?

<comment><USER9> Hard to say what would be a good reason for you, but I had used vim for a couple of years and really liked it. I still like its conciseness.

I became interested in emacs because of the good support for Lisp w/ slime, etc. Plus, I thought I'd prefer extending my editor with Lisp vs. vim script - I was right. I hadn't written any vim scripts while using vim, but I've quickly written many little elisp functions and bound them to convenient keys.

The dired (directory editing) feature is great. I like the way it handles buffers & bookmarks better than vim. I actually use the calendar feature.

I like how the functions you right get integrated into the help facility automatically.

The "Learning GNU Emacs" book is great.

The architecture seems better than vim.

I wasn't thrilled with all the "chording", but I'm writing new functions and making the keybindings comfortable for me.

The help facility seems superior to me. Dynamic abbreviations, window/frame control.

I'm sure there's more, but I only switched about 10 days ago :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> first screenshot would be 'pretty' if it weren't editing python, which is horrible to look at, worse to code in.</comment>


Secure REST Services Using Spring Security - <AUTHOR> http://crazygui.wordpress.com/2014/08/29/secure-rest-services-using-spring-security/

<comment><USER2> I'm using also spring security for a rest API.

I experienced a problem if you use the framework as is with rememberme feature .

Our angular applications is using a rest api and the usera can have multiple requests at the same time. Then the token value in the cookie is changed by the first request and become wrong for the next one in the stack. A theft attack is detected.</comment>


A Tale of Two Samsungs: ARM vs. Qualcomm in Android Graphics - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@afd_icl/a-tale-of-two-samsungs-arm-vs-qualcomm-in-android-graphics-c1c6f1eef828 <comment> Const-me Hopefully, the problem will go away by itself, at least partially, in a couple of years with the transition from GLES to Vulkan. I never liked GL's decision to compile shaders at runtime. A bytecode like in Direct3D or OpenCL/Vulkan or Metal works better not only because runtime costs, but also because a standard, and presumably higher-quality, compiler.

> An unfortunate side-effect of this is that developers of less popular apps > must work around driver bugs to make their apps work on consumer devices.

Happens all the time on PC, and yes I did workaround the bugs. Here's a couple of bugs users have encountered, one for old Intel, another one for new nVidia:

[https://stackoverflow.com/q/43399487/126995](https://stackoverflow.com/q/43399487/126995)

[https://rog.asus.com/forum/showthread.php?97715-GL553VD- Driv...](https://rog.asus.com/forum/showthread.php?97715-GL553VD-Driver-Power- State-Failure-while-playing-certain-games)

<comment><USER3> The /vast/ majority of these bugs will be in the optimiser and codegen - <USER2> in the frontend parser. The bytecode provided in vulkan (and d3d) won't really help with that.

<comment> Const-me D3D optimizes a lot before producing the byte code, see /O0 - /O3 fxc.exe switches.

I don't have much experience with spir-v but I'd expect something similar for Vulkan & OpenCL.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> So I have to wonder if they have tried their test suite on Mesa's drivers, specifically the driver for (Qualcomm) Adreno. This could be very beneficial CI for Mesa.</comment>


Netgear Routers Susceptible to 'Serious' DNS Exploit - <AUTHOR> http://hothardware.com/news/netgear-routers-susceptible-to-serious-dns-exploit-firmware-update-incoming <comment><AUTHOR> Unfortunately, it doesn't describe "how" the exploit was done, even generally. Anyone know?</comment>


Inside Account of U.S. Eavesdropping on Americans (2008) - <AUTHOR> http://abcnews.go.com/print?id=5987804 <comment><USER3> If they have time to find phone sex/salacious/tantalizing calls, they have time to find "the dirt" on Representatives and Senators. No wonder the NSA/"intelligence community" gets their way every time. Vote against it, and some weird dirt from your past comes up.

Google "jane harman alberto gonzalez" for just one public example.

<comment><AUTHOR> There is another reason why certain senators are very much for the NSA - <USER2> get much of their campaign funding from the contractors and other parts of the surveillance industrial complex.

Dianne Feinstein is a classic example. If she was wearing her sponsors on her sleeve like a nascar driver, the ugly things she is saying this past week would make a lot more sense to people like me.

Remember that once they get into office, they spend a tremendous amount of time fund-raising for their next re-election run, so this is constantly on their minds.

Another reason why term limits would be a good idea because at least you'd get somewhat more honest behavior from their final term.

<comment><USER4> Unfortunately if they want to get the cushy lobbying or corporate job when they're out they're going to have to play ball during their last term.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Since HN likes changing submission titles back to the original article's, I think the only way to point out something from inside an old article is to write a short blog post with the title you want and then link to the article.

<comment><AUTHOR> The original title I chose was a quote from the article:

 _NSA routinely shared phone sex, salacious and tantalizing phone calls_

After watching the video I thought it was a better summary.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The ABC News Nightline video is quite startling too

[http://cdnapi.kaltura.com/html5/html5lib/v188.8.131.52i/mwEmbed...](http://cdnapi.kaltura.com/html5/html5lib/v126.96.36.199i/mwEmbedFrame.php/entry_id/0_3456w39t/wid/_483511/uiconf_id/6595722) (Flash required?)

</comment><comment><USER6> So the word "routinely" shows up twice in the article but fails to specify how often. Maybe happened a few times until the guy got caught is more acceptable. It just seems like link baited word choice.

<comment><AUTHOR> They passed the time codes to the juicy bits around the data center.

I am sure it was more than just a few times and more than just a few people.

And just imagine what happens when it's outside contractors.

<comment><USER6> Right, but if this was a routine, it would be like, "Thursdays are here, yes! I get my latest payload at 2:30pm"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Nothing to hide indeed.

</comment><comment><USER8> How do you think they discovered general Petraeus and his mistress? Someone probably had too much time on their hands, and decided to look him up in the "program".</comment>


Launched: Ona – an online marketplace for elderly care services - <AUTHOR> https://myonacare.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hey everyone, I'm excited to announce the launch of Ona!

This project is a result of many years working in the home care industry and learning about how problems facing the elderly population can be solved with technology.

The number of elderly individuals is growing rapidly – by 2030 all Baby Boomers will be over the age of 65. This means that 1 in 5 individuals in the U.S. will be of retirement age.

We built Ona as a scalable solution to meeting the surge in demand for home care services set to occur within the next few decades.

Some of our key features include:

\- Localized search for nearby caregivers that fit your schedule/care needs \- Shared calendars with caregivers that allow you to coordinate schedules \- Payment tracking that adjusts invoices/payments according to scheduling needs

We're eager to hear any comments/feedback from you all!</comment>


Google pollutes new Chrome tabs with 'article suggestions' - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/24/google-pollutes-new-chrome-tabs-with-article-suggestions-heres-how-to-disable-them/ <comment><USER2> That you need to turn off _hidden_ settings to disable this shit makes it pretty clear Google wants this to become the norm. How long till the "for you" suggestions include ad results?</comment>


In 2014, we were going gangbusters. Then at 630am one day, I got a call - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/SimShagaya/status/1188490198797160449 <comment><USER2> If you want people to read about the matter I expect you may want to write an actual long form article.</comment>


Lust in Space (2007) - <AUTHOR> https://www.texasmonthly.com/articles/lust-in-space/ <comment><USER2> The reader shouldn't miss a main point: the precision to which astronaut duties are carried out is exhibited as ingrained into the fabric of how that person operates.

The diaper would have been standard protocol for a long mission seated. In this case, it was while driving in a car to confront someone 900 miles away. She meticulously planned her own mission.

They handle stressful situations systematically. In this case, the guy handles multiple affairs while lying and operates with his own emergency checklist.

The article doubles as a report of "look how much money has been spent at NASA this is all we've done."

</comment><comment><USER3> Top comment is currently a Jan at the title and byline. I hope people will overlook that fault and read. It's astonishing to look back at this incident from over a decade ago, remember my reaction to it then, and compare it to my understanding now. My perceptions of NASA and my empathy for Nowak are night and day.

<comment><USER4> At your urging, I read it. I knew nothing of this event in 2007. I have no interest in reading about people having terrible mental breakdowns when their love life spirals out of control. Why would you want to pry into this person's life? Because they were once famous? Is it really your business to have an opinion one way or another? Was this ever really news to begin with? Just because the person in question was once famous?

Maybe I'm being too hard. I've been the subject of the rumour mill before. At one point I was virtually the only foreign person that lived in the small town in Japan where I taught English (there are hundreds now -- really hard to believe). Every step I took was seen by someone. If I went out on a date, it was common knowledge to people I'd never even met. If I broke up with someone, there were people debating whose fault it was. They had never spoken a word to me in their life.

I'm pretty easy going and I know people are going to be people. They are going to talk about stuff. I get it. But, seriously: why are you urging people to read this? Why does it need to be dredged up again? So that people can get a better view? So that they can have empathy -- with a person they have never met? A person that they will almost certainly never meet?

I mean it's one thing if the person themselves had written a story about it and encouraged people to read it. Or even collaborated with the author. Or even responded to questions from the author. I get absolutely _no_ impression that this person _wants people to revisit this episode of their life_. Why are you making that decision for them? Why do you suppose it is your right? Because they were once famous? Because you knew their name and decided that you wanted to know more?

I'm sorry to be so hard here, but if you want to be empathetic, just remember that a person's life is the only thing they've really got. If you make a terrible, terrible mistake in public, it's not going to be erased, but you can make their life a _lot_ easier: just forget about it.

<comment><USER5> Seriously thank you for writing this. It's my thoughts entirely, but way better said than I could've, with a personal anecdote that is easier to follow than the one I would've used.

<comment><USER6> And I will add my thanks, too... your comment, @mikekchar, is much appreciated!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "On November 10, 2009, Nowak entered a guilty plea to felony burglary and misdemeanor battery. She was sentenced to a year's probation and the two days already served in jail, with no additional jail time."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_Nowak#Developments_in_cas...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_Nowak#Developments_in_case)

</comment><comment><USER8> > _Lisa Nowak, the lovesick astronaut in the diaper_

This reeks of a complete lack of basic empathy and rudimentary respect towards another human being. How can anyone write this sort of junk, leave alone publishing it?

Flagged.

<comment><USER9> It seems to me that you're falling into a misconception of assuming that sentence is saying something it actually isn't. As I see it, the misconception is twofold: 1. assuming an intent without contextualising it with the rest of the piece; 2. reading it assuming a 2019 interpretation fit events that happened in 2007.

As for 1, the whole article tries to show there's more to the story than that astronaut being simply an "astronut". As for 2, we have now a distance to those events to ignore how things were being reported back then (the daily noise around the issue) — that sentence being a play with the common conception of the scandal and a hint on how the article tries to go against it (or at least complicate it further, adding many emotional layers).

So my conclusion is that your assessment is not valid and thus misleading.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> > with makeup on and her hair done, she can look pretty in a homespun, > American sort of way.

Who is the intended audience for this article?

</comment><comment><USER11> From [2013], or even [2007]

</comment><comment><USER12> She was in mad love in her 40's. Is it possible to have lust and love which is stronger in 40's than in 17 to 20 age ? . To be honest i am kind of relived that i can find some one to love and lust for in my teens.

</comment><comment><USER13> >This was accompanied by an equally peremptory demand to finish the $100 billion International Space Station—another purposeless project...

It's hard do take this article seriously when they casually assert that the ISS has no purpose.

<comment><USER14> The article goes into this in more depth later:

 _It would be unfair to say that no worthwhile science has been done on the station. Advances have been made in learning how humans react to long periods in space and in learning about technologies that work in zero gravity. "If you ask NASA what we're doing on the space station," says Robert Park, a professor of physics at the University of Maryland who is a longtime critic of the manned space program, "they say we are learning how to live in space. But it is not clear that we are learning anything new about how to live in space. We have been doing that for a long time, and there is nothing else going on. There is, for all practical purposes, zero research going on on the space station, and it was built as a scientific laboratory, which was preposterous in the first place." There is wide consensus that space station science is, at best, minor science and, at worst, a rerun of the same antigravity and human physiology experiments that the Soviets were doing on the Mir space station in 1986._</comment></comment>


Tell HN: Let me find a clever domain for you. - <AUTHOR>

Since I can't help but procrastinate sometimes, I thought I would put that time to good use. I'll help you find a name/domain for your next idea. (No strings attached, I just find it fun).<p>I put up a form at http://www.URLologist.com <comment><USER2> I find it fun to play with this one too \- <http://www.netsubstance.com/index.cgi> \- <http://www.dotomator.com/web20.html>

<comment><USER3> All of those are fun.

Unfortunately, I am yet to see Dotomator produce a name whose .com is not taken.. Seems some squatter just run through whatever they generate and got most of them. Silly, if you ask me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I just tried it, looking forward to seeing what you come up with since I have been stumped. FYI, I got an invalid email error even though I entered a valid email address. You may want to check on this even though it let me send you my message.

<comment><AUTHOR> Weird, I got your email. I'll get to work on it :)

<comment><USER4> Thanks! I'm excited to see if you come up with anything.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Cute - submitted something.

My annoyance is how many things are owned by squatters. Domain tasting / kiting really caused so much collateral damage :(

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I agree about the squatters, even some random keyboard smashes have produced registered names for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> great little service (I hope, at least!). You should maybe add a "some words I've been kicking about include" box. For example, I might really want to call my email app something with 'post' or 'fountain' in the name but just can't make the leap to available domainname. *just an example, I'm not building an email app called postfountain. Really I'm not. Would be a good name though.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> To everyone I've emailed, I forgot to add: if you end up registering a name, let me know so I can put up a list on the site.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> clickable: <http://www.URLologist.com>

</comment><comment><USER7> I'd recommend trying this guy out. He's produced a few good domains for me so far!

</comment><comment><USER8> Liked the concept. Just sent you my condition doctor ;-)

</comment><comment><USER9> If anything it's worth a shot, request sent :)

</comment><comment><USER10> I like this. Just sent a request.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! It's taking me a while to get through all of them now, but I should get through the backlog this morning.</comment></comment>


The weird, and booming industry of online influence - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/inside-the-industry-social-media-influence/ <comment><USER2> I don't understand why anyone would follow someone who promotes themselves as a "social media influencer". What is the purpose? To be influenced? You're willfully following someone who tells you their marketing things to you. I'm willing to accept there's some sort of legitimate reason of which I am as-yet unaware, but as it stands I really am completely baffled.</comment>


America's Epidemic of Empty Churches - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/11/what-should-america-do-its-empty-church-buildings/576592/ <comment><AUTHOR> > Many of our nation's churches can no longer afford to maintain their > structures—6,000 to 10,000 churches die each year in America—and that number > will likely grow... Closure and adaptive reuse often seems like the simplest > and most responsible path. Many houses of worship sit on prime real estate, > often in the center of towns or cities, where inventory is low... A church > building is more than just walls and windows; it is also a sacred vessel > that stores generations of religious memories... "We wanted to transform the > church into a place that would draw people who might not otherwise come, and > in Asheville, we've seen it break down stereotypes of what the church is," > Duggins said... This relatively small organization can only do so much to > turn the tide of congregational death in America. Missional Wisdom has > shifted its focus from one-off projects to publishing books, conducting > seminars, and consulting with struggling churches.

</comment><comment><USER2> Sociologists Peter Berger and Grace Davie report that "most sociologists of religion now agree" that the secularization thesis—that religion declines as a society becomes more modern—" has been empirically shown to be false." Most striking of all are the demographic studies that predict that it is not religious populations but secular ones that are in long-term decline. The April 2015 Pew study projects that the percentage of atheists, agnostics, and the religiously unaffiliated will slowly but steadily decline, from 16.4 percent of the world's population today to 13.2 percent forty years from now. University of London professor Eric Kaufmann, in his book Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?, speaks of "the crisis of secularism" and argues that the shrinkage of secularism and liberal religion is inevitable.

<comment><USER3> That seems at odds to the decline of religion across Europe.

UK is now majority atheist, and Ireland once devoutly catholic is far more secular than it was. A majority voted to end the ban on abortion in Ireland only this year. So I am baffled at what "crisis of secularism" Kaufman is imagining.

<comment><USER4> I think that the factor for Europe is immigration. A majority of new Europeans are Muslims and that is by far the fastest growing religion.

<comment><USER5> Yes, fundamentalist Judaism and Islam do a great job at driving reproduction. And keeping women subjugated is a huge part of it.

<comment><USER6> Please keep religious flamebait and religious flamewar off Hacker News.

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

<comment><USER5> Sorry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I lived in a church converted to condos in South Boston for a few years. The Catholic Church sold the property to developers to pay for an $85 million sex abuse settlement. When Boston had that one winter where we got 2 feet of snow every other day for a month and a half the ice dams were so bad it basically rained inside every unit for the entire month of February. We all lost everything. It turns out a 100+ year old building with a steeply pitched slate roof is almost impossible to repair in the dead of winter on short notice. Buildings like this seem interesting and like they have character but I would never live in a converted church again.

</comment><comment><USER8> It's important to note that Americans are far more religious than adults in other wealthy nations [0] [http://www.pewresearch.org/fact- tank/2018/07/31/americans-ar...](http://www.pewresearch.org/fact- tank/2018/07/31/americans-are-far-more-religious-than-adults-in-other-wealthy- nations/). Even with this decline, the US remains a Christian nation. The special flavor of Christianity in the US is quite adaptive, so I have little doubt that the faith itself will endure.

<comment><USER9> > The special flavor of Christianity in the US is quite adaptive

In fact, a great part of it runs counter to the actual teachings of Christ.

<comment><USER10> It probably says something about the state of things that from this statement I genuinely can't tell which school of thought you're coming from, since each one says this about the others.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It appears the large denominational churches are closing while nondenominational churches are growing quickly. You can't put new wine in old wine-skins.

[https://www.christianitytoday.com/news/2017/september/how- ma...](https://www.christianitytoday.com/news/2017/september/how-many- churches-in-america-us-nones-nondenominational.html)

<comment><USER12> I'm not sure the trend will hold. This is all anecdotal, but new non- denominational churches in my area seem to start more frequently and then die more frequently than mainline establishments, it seems that since many of them rent instead of own their churches, and leadership isn't necessarily restricted to those with training and education in running a ministry, they're more likely to flounder long-term. Considering that the numbers are for total number congregations, I don't think that the discrepancy between worshippers is actually as harsh as its made out to be, and if it is, I think we'll actually see a trend back towards more community-oriented mainline or even catholicism as worshippers get disillusioned by the drama / lack of structure that a larger portion of non-denoms undeniably struggle with.

But this is based on just infrequent personal experiences with like 4 different non-denoms in the suburban South, ranging from "conference room at 2 star airport hotel" to "megachurch stadium so full we watched the service in an overflow room in the same venue". In all cases the people who invited me did not stay very long as attendees. I may be dramatically underestimating their popularity/longevity in more rural spots though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The church I attend these days is doing this sort of "invite the community in during the week" approach, and being fairly successful at it, from what I can tell. There are a lot of dynamics going on there; I don't think it'd work everywhere. But definitely there's something to the idea, and worth bringing up in your congregational context if collapse is in the offing.

<comment><USER14> There's something poignant about the notion that a church, faced with "death", may find new life by welcoming the local community... which seems to me to be the raison d'etre for a church in the first place.

<comment> barry-cotter As an atheist I'm sympathetic but that's not the raison d'être for a Church and never has been. It's about bringing people to God.

<comment><USER15> > It's about bringing people to God.

True enough, but the community ('fellowship') aspect of the faith is essential.

Maybe I'm missing it, but it also seems to be something that's missing in more secular world views.

<comment><USER16> Book clubs, talk therapy 'support' groups, athletics, travel associations, charities, small crop coops... The secular "world view" is replete with fellowship, collective action, and community. Heck, "community centers"...

Though, lacking a unifying shared habit of proscribed worship at a single place those things tend to be interest, activity, or goal based.

<comment><USER15> > those things tend to be interest, activity, or goal based.

I think that's a more significant distinction than it might appear, mainly because it seems to imply a narrower and more disjoint view of community than you might expect from an institution like a Church (or Synagogue, Mosque, etc.)

Just to illustrate, the church I attend has the usual Sunday services, and it's explicitly a whole-family affair. This includes the kids, for which there are age appropriate breakouts during the service. There's also a breakout of sorts for people with special concerns around illness, death, and other particular needs.

After the service, there's another community coffee-hour/lunch of sorts where people get together and are just able to hang out a bit. The kids usually wind up on the playground. There's also a deliberate program after the service to physically reach out to people that were unable to attend due to illness or infirmity. This is not to mention the monthly 'everyone invited' community dinners, the quarterly hosting of several homeless families on church grounds, the food pantry run by the church several times a week...

Setting aside the religiosity of it all, the point I'm trying to make is that the organization goes out of its way to be inclusive in a relevant way to a wide spectrum of the community. There's explicitly something for the young, the old, the infirm, people that aren't members of the church...

It's harder to see how the more goal-oriented organizations you mention can really address that broad a definition of 'community'. I get how you can use a portfolio of involvement in those groups to get everybody in a family involved in something, but not necessarily how they'd be involved _together_.... which is important.

For whatever it's worth, I can easily see how something like this _could_ be assembled outside of religion.... I'm just hard pressed to point out examples where's it's actually happening at all (much less in a way that would compensate for the losses in religious institutions.)

<comment><USER14> Your church sounds like it's at less risk of "death" than the ones turning to community embrace as an act of desperation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think there are two things going on:

a) People are becoming less religious b) People are leaving smaller churches for much larger churches that are non-denominational.

Smaller churches are more conservative and more political, people seem to be burned out on politics and don't really want it as something in their face on Sunday. You couple that with natural shifts in demographics and that essentially explains a lot of what is happening. I suspect once the millennial generation has more kids, church going will tick back up.

<comment><USER18> c) "yoloculture" (as I like to call it) greatly emphasis the self as the key virtue, hence the millennial and younger can't be bothered sacrificing "Sunday Funday" to attend an inconvenient service at 9 in the morning.

Simultaneously, The rock concert megachurches with cult of personality pastors and have Starbucks inside them with much later start times and emphasize a message of self empowerment with gospel-y sounding words, however, seem to be thriving.

<comment><USER19> The only thing more constant than the darned kids is people complaining about the darned kids.

"The world is passing through troublous times. The young people of today think of nothing but themselves. They have no reverence for parents or old age. They are impatient of all restraint. They talk as if they knew everything, and what passes for wisdom with us is foolishness with them. As for the girls, they are forward, immodest and unladylike in speech, behavior and dress."

Peter the Hermit.

<comment><USER20> Wasn't he long dead by 1274?

In any case, I love the quote. Just goes to show how timeless the generational bashing is.

<comment><USER18> I certainly agree older folk yelling at younger whippersnappers is a constant, but turn it on it's head for a moment: when it happens the other way around, no one questions it. "It's the Boomer's fault!" Millennial's proclaim, and every culture mag now runs a similar story.

There is something to be said for the wisdom of elders. Yes we should discard the grumpy old complaining because of change, but are we to really say all the complaints are invalid just because "it's always been done?"

I think of other societies, primarily Asian, that have deep respect for the thoughts and opinions of their elders. I think of how almost every faith, including the three major abrahamic religions explicity command followers to honor thy mother and thy father (which is generalized to honor your elders). Yet in this country, and most western countries, the fad is to kick the old out as soon as you can! "Out with the old, in with the new! Pay no mind to old people's grumbling! Their wisdom is invalided! Their opinions on culture and where society is headed is invalid!" \-- And one can only wonder, is this why history is doomed to repeat itself over and over again?

We blow off what the "geezers" are telling us "Psh! Get with the times old man, things are different now!"

In my opinion, humanity hasn't changed much in the past couple thousand years. We would do better to listen to some more grumblings of the geezers. Maybe getting off a lawn or two wouldn't be so bad after all.

<comment><USER20> I wouldn't necessarily say nobody questions it, but I agree that it is more socially acceptable to blame the boomers. But... it's not exactly unpopular to malign millenials, either.

Personally if you gripe to me about boomers too much I will probably tell you to quit bitching and take some responsibility. In particular if you are young, I will remind you that you have more voters in your cohort than boomers do, so not only should you quit bitching, you should direct that energy to getting your fellow young'uns to go out and vote. After all, most of the consequences of today's politics will be borne by the young.

I also think that as much wisdom as their may be in old people, there are lots and lots and lots of ignorant jerks who aren't worth the powder to blow 'em up. Same for young people. Conversely, I've met some teenagers with more innate wisdom than most people ever get in their whole life.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Here's an idea: turn churches, mosques and synagogues into cooperative worship centers and kill two birds.

"God" only knows there's a lot of work that needs to done to repair the bad rap organized religion is getting lately: from children abuse in the Catholic Church, megachurch scams, subversive terror organizations and states repurposing Islam, Christian white nationalism, Israel's expanding theocracy ... )

</comment><comment><USER22> What happens to a society when it loses communal organizations and faith, and becomes increasingly atomized? Is this good or bad?

<comment><USER23> We don't need faith in God to have a community, only faith in one another. The premise that community cannot exist without a religious basis is a false one.

<comment><USER4> I would argue that this would be a new event in human history. I can't think of a single major civilization that was not religious in some capacity.

<comment><USER23> I liken this event to the Enlightenment, when societies began to view religion as something which could be separated from science, scholarship and law, as the concept of "secularity" emerged. Religion still exists in some capacity, obviously the US is very much a "christian nation," but _generally_ people are moving away from an explicitly orthodox, rigidly dogmatic, supernaturalist interpretation of religion.

A literate society no longer needs someone standing at a pulpit telling them what the Bible says, nor should an educated society believe that humans were literally molded out of clay in the Garden of Eden. As societies change, religion must also change because religion is an expression of society.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> One of my favorite roller skating spots is in a converted church. [https://youtu.be/uWSTlDXDNXk](https://youtu.be/uWSTlDXDNXk)

</comment><comment><USER25> Silicon Valley Season 5 Episode 4

</comment><comment><USER26> Aside from the religion issue,

This seems like a logical result of increasing land values and the advance of capitalist relations. Owning a building that is used one a day a week and empty otherwise is overall quite wasteful. A more efficient use of capital is to rent a hall for the times one actually uses the space - this is what I see modern "megachurches" doing.

<comment><USER12> If a church is only used 1 day a week, someone is doing something wrong. The mid-sized church I attended growing up had

\- AA meetings hosted daily \- choir & music groups meeting on weekdays \- after school youth groups \- book clubs \- A small library for free use \- counseling \- volunteer events \- would bus homeless people in once a week and feed and shelter them

The community charity aspect is honestly the only reason to even let churches exist tax free. Those megachurches renting theaters and collecting mad cash really shouldn't meet the criteria to be tax exempt.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I forget where I read the study, but it was along the lines of our brains being hardwired to believe in a higher power, be it reason or god. I doubt this will change, especially in a country as genetically Christian as the US.

</comment><comment><USER28> I've had nothing great to say about churches and services for a long time now. Part of it is due to my upbringing. Ever since I escaped the stranglehold that is religion and Christianity, I see church as a place where cults hang out.</comment>


Now the hard part: Why Netflix's toughest days are still ahead - <AUTHOR> https://www.nbcnews.com/news/all/now-hard-part-why-netflix-s-toughest-days-are-still-n1031461 <comment><USER2> The nice thing about Netflix for the consumer was that you could go there to watch a lot of things you were interested in watching. You didn't need five (or more) different streaming services to get most of what you wanted. As the article mentions, that's all changing.

To that end, I expect it will be difficult for some of these new services to stay alive for very long if competition continues to increase. In particular, if each network or major media company winds up with a paid streaming service, I imagine consumers will not be interested in signing up for many of them.</comment>


Ask HN: What service has an API to do wire transfers? - <AUTHOR>

Need to incorporate into a startup the ability to send wire transfers to clients who submit their bank information and so far I haven't been able to find a service that lets me do this through an API. Help? <comment><USER2> When you say wire transfers, do you mean international wire transfers or domestic ACH transactions? For the latter, there are a few companies that provide electronic ACH processing & an API.

The biggest problem that you'll face is not actually moving the money, but complying to anti-money laundering regulations and the like.

That said, we're building a banking service with an API. We've done the hard work. I'd love to know more about your use case to see if we can help.

<comment><USER3> I would be interested in a banking service with an API. What kind of service are you building?

<comment><USER2> <http://banksimple.com/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Do you really need wire transfers, or would ACH transactions suffice? Wires generally have a fairly significant fee schedule associated with them.</comment>