Ask HN: What would you like to see from an IRC network? - <AUTHOR>

We're trying to develop features for our fledgling IRC network that have the capability to draw people to it. We've got all the standard stuff - an Atheme services package with an InspIRCd backend and dedicated staff and developers, but we just don't know what we can do to get people to stop by and visit. If you had a pie-in-the-sky idea, what would it be? <comment><USER2> The fact that you're trying to perpetuate IRC in a time after the nineteen- hundreds is admirable, but the protocol itself is somewhat broken. I mean, it'd be great if a network offered Public Key Infrastructure for authentication (non-spoofability), Encrypted communication, and non- repudiation... but then you're talking about SILC (which, by the way, I think is vastly superior to traditional IRC)

</comment><comment><USER3> Lots of "high quality" people already using it:-) That's the most important thing.

</comment><comment><USER4> It would be interesting if one could attach a karma system to an IRC network. The #perl channels have long had infobots hanging out in channel recording karma informally. (You simply say [username]++ to increment karma).

Before you object, yes I know everything is gameable. I'm just throwing it out there. We have karma systems for async discussion, and they work at least somewhat well. Why not synchronous too?

There is no such thing as sorting messages by karma for synchronous chat but perhaps other analogues could be found. Maybe in the same way that Slashdot has "browsing at +2" you can choose to receive all messages or just messages from higher karma people.

<comment><USER2> I know it's ingrained into the culture of HN and other sites, but karma is dumb.

In response to the bury, let me clarify. On HN, upvotes and downvotes allow a comment to stand on its own merit. Using amassed karma to determine the quality of an individual is dumb. Since IRC's nature is instant and ephemeral communication (yes, often logged, etc), it makes little sense to use a karma system for IRC. Individual comments can't be filtered or buried (they're instant!) so the only other option would be to filter people individually by karma. We call that a popularity contest, and THAT is dumb.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I run a website that gets occasional buzz in programming channels. As a result, I'm in a dozen or so IRC channels, with hilight rules set up to ping me when someone's talking about the site--that way I can dive in and address misconceptions or problems, or just generally interact with an interested community.

I had an idea for a bot that would allow temporary, rule-based bridging of conversations in participating channels. I never got around to coding, but I did blog the concept in more detail: <http://mmol-6453.livejournal.com/213900.html>

</comment><comment><USER6> You want to make an IRC network, but don't have the killer features yet.

Is this idea the right way round?

</comment><comment><USER7> Web frontend. Persistant users, where you can leave messages for people. Notification of interesting channels also on the network. Let me get it on my phone.

<comment><USER8> you just described facebook.

<comment><USER7> and every other social network ever. who cares?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I honestly can't think of any good reason to start an IRC network in 2010. Can somebody please help me out?

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm not sure how feasible this is, but if you could somehow detect that a user has submitted several lines very quickly (ie: they've just pasted something into the channel), automatically dump it to some Pastebin variant, and then show the link to that instead.

</comment><comment><USER11> Perhaps an inspiring idea: [http://blog.xkcd.com/2008/01/14/robot9000-and- xkcd-signal-at...](http://blog.xkcd.com/2008/01/14/robot9000-and-xkcd-signal- attacking-noise-in-chat/)

<comment><USER12> I was a moderator in #xkcd-signal (the original channel ROBOT9000 was run on) for awhile. In the past 12 hours, #xkcd-signal had 55 messages. #xkcd had over 4,000. Its a fun attraction, but not much more. And not something people stay around for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Room chat history! I am an IRC novice so I'm not sure if that exists as part of a server already somewhere. I haven't been able to find it, but I haven't looked very hard.

<comment><USER10> Logging is usually up to the users. Also, it's generally assumed (unless otherwise stated) that the logs will not be explicitly made public.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> In addition to the standard IRC ports, also make it accessible from port 80 or 443 to avoid being blocked by corporate firewalls.

<comment><USER2> Most "corporate firewalls" are egress filters with a proxy server, and proxy servers won't just barf IRC packets to a box on port 80. Some will barf random non-SSL traffic to port 443, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> need to transfer small file via irc server from account to account

so if you can break the message length limits , that would be better

</comment><comment><USER15> Web frontend and high quality content.</comment>


$2T in Proceeds of Corruption Removed from China and Taken to US, AUS, CAN, NL - <AUTHOR> http://www.antimoneylaunderinglaw.com/2017/01/qa-on-the-2-trillion-in-proceeds-of-corruption-removed-from-china-and-taken-to-us-australia-canada-and-netherlands.html <comment><USER2> This is a relatively big problem in Australia - there has been talk of a housing bubble in Australia for the last few years which in part has been propped up by Chinese grey money buying whole apartment buildings for investment, which drives up prices (they can just dictate prices) and keeps young locals out [1]. I cannot afford a house and I have a well-paying job.

The government looks the other way since building is one of the last big job creators now that the mining boom is over. For example, there is a government body for foreign investment breaches (rules like you're not allowed to buy 'used' property if you don't have permanent residency, but I've personally talked to quite a few Chinese students whose parents did that for them) but it has never once initiated court action [2].

So everybody profits in the short term - Chinese corruption can move 'dead' money out of the country, Australian government gets to present itself as a job creator. Except young Australians, who have to rent and cannot rely on real estate property for their retirement.

In the long term, the bubble is going to pop and then you have dead cities with empty high rises falling apart (but then again, people have been saying for at least 10 years that the bubble is going to pop any day now and it's still inflating)

[1] Contains no numbers: [http://www.smh.com.au/comment/grey-money-from-china- helps-bl...](http://www.smh.com.au/comment/grey-money-from-china-helps-blow- our-property-bubble-20140928-10n7a8.html)

[2] [http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-11-27/foreign-buyer-rule- enf...](http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-11-27/foreign-buyer-rule-enforcement- needs-to-be-strengthened/5921518)

<comment><AUTHOR>
        Except young Australians, who have to rent and cannot rely
        on real estate property for their retirement.

This is orthogonal to the money laundering, but what's stopping the young people from investing for their retirement? Houses are not the only way to build savings.

<comment><USER3> Because you still have to pay rent - if you could buy, your housing costs would be earning equity.

<comment><USER4> It's not uncommon for it to be better financially to always rent and just invest the difference between rent and mortgage+maintenance+taxes. With interest first mortgages as they are it is generally a long time before you earn any equity at all.

<comment><USER5> This. I did the math when I rented an apartment in downtown Toronto and the rent was less than mortgage interest + condo fees + property tax + maintenance.

<comment><USER6> So let's say you save 10¢ on every dollar by renting in your scenario. You'd have to have a hell of a return on that 10¢ you saved to beat the 90¢ you would have invested in the property but instead flushed down the drain in the form of rent....

<comment><USER7> "flushed down the drain"

Oh not this crap again

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAMeI4uHAFE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAMeI4uHAFE)

<comment><USER6> "But practically speaking, ownership has worked out better for most people over the long run."

As I said before, as long as you don't buy high and sell low, your money has effectively been flushed down the drain in the form of rent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> In Australia we were supposed to have tranche 2 ("covering real estate agents, lawyers, accountants, car dealers and others") of the anti-money laundering regulations introduced over 10 years ago. As this article details, it is "comically" overdue: [http://www.smh.com.au/business/banking-and- finance/slated-an...](http://www.smh.com.au/business/banking-and- finance/slated-antimoney-laundering-legislation-is-comically- overdue-20150913-gjlb7j.html)

While political parties can wallow in the extra taxes garnered from sky- rocketing real-estate prices and sizable party donations they have no incentive to introduce this second tranche.

For example, any party in power in New South Sales will keep its budget in the black simply from "stamp-duty" taxes collected on real-estate transactions.

The Foreign Investment Review Board was and is a farce and that's how the government likes it.

</comment><comment><USER9> BC is by far and away the most impacted region. Let's list some quick housing prices examples:

NL - Amsterdam up 15% in 2016 [-1]

AU - Sydney up 17% over _5_ years [0]

NZ - up 13% oct 2015-2016 [1]

BC - Metro Vancouver up 31.4% August 2015-2016 _alone_. BC (not just vancouver) housing prices have almost _tripled_ since 2004. [2]

No, these new rules the BC government has put in place are not going to work. I've commented on the reasons before here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12873156](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12873156)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12215490](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12215490)

[-1] [http://www.globalpropertyguide.com/Europe/Netherlands/Price-...](http://www.globalpropertyguide.com/Europe/Netherlands/Price- History)

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

[1] [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-02/the- rich-...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-02/the-rich-have- found-a-place-to-escape-the-horrors-of-the-world)

[2] [http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/26-slump- in-v...](http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/26-slump-in-vancouver- real-estate-sales-called-a-return-to-historically-normal-levels-1.3745825?kkk)

</comment><comment><USER10> In India, "grey income" is called "black money". It is a hot topic in India right now.

Recent activities on this:

Note ban (Nov 2016) => [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_black_money#Ban_on_1000...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_black_money#Ban_on_1000_currency_notes)

Using analytics (today's news) => [http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/economy/policy/i-t-...](http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/economy/policy/i-t- department-scanning-data-pile-to-dig-out-unaccounted- income/articleshow/56282112.cms)

<comment><USER11> We Chinese call it "black money", too. But it sounds too harsh and directly pointing to crime when talking, esp. publicly. So the color is changed to gray meaning color between clear and black so that no one "overreacts" (when "black money" is normal, everywhere possible and most people deal with it do not end up in jail or are not being investigated"). Just a way people accept the reality.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Interesting point on the Vancouver angle:

        Q: In Canada, where does the money end up and why?

        A: Vancouver is the preferred destination, by far, because of perceived
        more relaxed anti-money laundering on-boarding compliance and more
        importantly, easier access to better schools and lifestyle for children
        of Chinese foreign nationals.

<comment><USER12> What's the source of their Vancouver assertion?

<comment><USER13> Don't know their source, but I can confirm that relevant Canadian laws are wide open for abuse due to both being toothless and because of near zero enforcement, at both federal and provincial (BC) levels.

You can google how CRA actively avoided auditing foreign buyers "for fear of racism allegations" (yeah right) or how people bring hundreds of thousands of dollars in paper bills on themselves and their children, paying only $2.5K if caught (cheaper than Western Union!).

Or the latest Vancouver 15% foreign investor tax designed to appease the population, but wholly ineffective because it relies on self reporting which no one ever checks and allows for other obvious loopholes. Much better proposals were ignored in favour of this purposely flawed one.

It's amazingly fucked up, I'm surprised Canadians are taking it so willingly.

<comment><USER5> > It's amazingly fucked up, I'm surprised Canadians are taking it so > willingly.

Nothing surprising about it, ~69% of Canadian households (and a much higher percentage of voters!) are homeowners and directly benefit from this influx of capital.

<comment><USER13> That home ownership rate includes everyone who lives in a dwelling owned by their family, so it includes the youth who lives with their parents because they can't afford to move out. Besides, all the home owners I know are not happy about constantly increasing prices either. Many of them think it's unfair, many don't like the foreign inflation aspect, and even pragmatically speaking it's harder to jump to owning a bigger dwelling now. So I don't know why this is going on, but it's not because most people want higher housing prices.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I wonder what ways US could prevent Chinese money buying real estate in the US?

1\. Do what Vancouver did, add tax for foreign property ownership. 2\. Tighten the checks on origin of money? How exactly, especially when it's coming as all cash? Maybe forcing it to go through a bank, where more thorough check is mandatory per IRS? But then again, banks are not the most trustworthy in this country. 3\. Other ideas?

<comment><USER15> Why ban Chinese money, not local money or money from other countries? What's your actual goal? To keep rich people concentrated in the places they came from?

Transferring money internationally is already a pain in the ass. You want to make it even harder? To outlaw bitcoin too? China itself is already restricting its people from taking money out of the country. It's nearly impossible for normal people to invest overseas because banks won't allow them to transfer their money.

<comment><USER14> Thry can probably invest in housing through indirect ways. When the houses chinese bought do not result in increased housing, thats when things are wrong.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I study at Vancouver UBC and rented a room in a house in the nearby area. I could tell that the Canadian government has started to investigate the corrupted $ because one day a government official came to "my house" and asked the information about the previous landowner. It seemed that he used the corrupted $ to buy the real estate and make more $

<comment><USER17> I'll just say if you're using house sales in Vancouver or the Bay Area to launder your money you are really moving a lot of money around.

I bought a house for cash in Las Vegas after the crash and the bank never once asked where I got the funds to do so. I'm pretty sure they were supposed to.

<comment><USER18> > I bought a house for cash in Las Vegas after the crash and the bank never > once asked where I got the funds to do so. I'm pretty sure they were > supposed to.

Umm, no. It only. I, but that's frightening. You have a right to privacy in a private transaction like that. Where you will run in to a ton of questions is when you use a big chunk of money for a down payment on a mortgage. In that case the bank wants to make sure you didn't borrow the down payment and get in over your head.

<comment><USER19> The US has no general right to privacy, and all large transactions are potentially notifiable to the anti-money-laundering authorities. This is what HSBC got in a lot of trouble for not doing.

<comment><USER18> Any notification would go as far as that - simple notification of a transaction. There's no requirement for the bank to investigate the source of your funds as part of a private transaction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Interesting about this on a per-capita basis. Is ~$2K per citizen a lot? I wonder what comparable #s for the US and Russia are.

(Note that with 16,000-18,000 people doing the moving, it's very large per intermediary)

<comment><USER21> Average annual household income in China is around $10k, so yeah, $2k is quite a lot.

<comment><USER20> The numbers are on a cumulative basis though. So $200 per person per year sounds less. It's hard to tell without seeing similar for other countries. I assume Russia is higher. And how do you measure corruption in government contracts in the US?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Simple question: when some invests his corruption money in US, doesn't it automatically become "public" and hence traceable? For example, if you buy a house for X dollars in US then shouldn't Chinese government be able to easily trace you down? My understanding was that so called "black" money stays black only as long as you use it in form of cash, not investments.

<comment><USER19> Traceable to whom or what, though? If you've got enough money it's easy for the registered owner of the house to be e.g. a Cayman Islands company with anonymous directors.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> And in a similar vein: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13314967](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13314967)

</comment><comment><USER23> Wonder how this correlates with the current growth of the US economy, and maybe more relevantly, how the top 1% seems to be increasing its wealth much faster than the rest.

</comment><comment><USER24> Might also explain a lot of Chinese moving into Australia.

</comment><comment><USER25> What's wrong with keeping the proceeds in China?

<comment><AUTHOR> From the article:

        China also has something called "grey" income, which means income
        earned (or acquired off the books) in China that is not reported
        on income taxes and that is held by its richest families.

If the money can be laundered by buying a house overseas, grey becomes green!

<comment><USER26> How is it "held"? I've seen reports of raids where they find houses stuffed full of cash, but how do you get $2T in cash to Canada? At some point this is getting converted to electronic funds and that is where the "laundering" is happening.

As to why they are buying hard assets in Anglo-sphere, possibly because they are worried that the said Anglos may pull the plug on the fiat currency in a Great Reset at some point in the near future. I guess the silver lining here is that the Chinese corrupt set are bullish on the continuity of rule of law over here.

<comment><USER27> _> how do you get $2T in cash to Canada? _

Shipping containers?

<comment><USER28> Try wire transfers.

Eg Their factory needed a container full of Danish ball bearings. They paid the overseas supplier. Maybe there was an actual container (in which case it was re-sold overseas) and maybe there wasn't. May e an actual container of bearings arrived in China.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> And it all poured into real estate.

</comment><comment><USER30> Wonder why the British Isles isn't in there; unlikely to be EU stuff as NL is on there.

</comment><comment><USER31> That's a big number, _way_ too large for anyone to take personally in an emotional sense. But it's definitely big enough for a purge. Jailing, disappearances and more.

This is a pretty large economic tide. Almost twice the size of California's economy, all at once. Ranking it The Fifth Largest Economy, worldwide, if it's worth thinking in those terms.

Given that an approximate number of participating Chinese nationals have been enumerated, if they suddenly disappeared (and ~20,000 is certainly within the realm of possibility), what would a sudden halt of two trillion (legal or not) do to the rest of the world?

<comment><USER32> >This is a pretty large economic tide. Almost twice the size of California's economy, all at once.

Well, not all at once, that number (USD 1.5T, the 2T number is CAD) is cumulative from 1995-2013, per the article.

<comment><USER31> You're right. I skimmed the numbers too fast.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I thought around 500 times to buy myself a car on christmas and then I see this</comment>


Resistance - <AUTHOR> http://fadeyev.net/2010/05/11/resistance/

<comment><USER2> Thanks for posting this! I'm working on my next blog post which I've been meaning to get out since Monday, and clearly coming up with reasons to postpone actually finishing it. The idea of giving in to resistance is good motivation to get me to focus enough to publish it tonight and not put it off any longer. A lot of what you mentioned in this post definitely resonated with some of the things I have done and also purposely avoided doing, specifically settling for safe and boring in my life.</comment>


Experience the C1 cloud server with a free 15 minutes trial - <AUTHOR> http://labs.online.net/try-it

<comment><USER2> "Forget virtualization and all its doubts, you now have true dedicated hardware!" This seems very interesting. But I would really like to know the price plans.</comment>


Ask HN: 9+ hours too long for interview process? - <AUTHOR> I'm interested in a Senior Software Engineer position with Cisco/Meraki, or at least I was until I was told the interview process would last 9+ hours and would include algorithmic heavy questions. The position is for a Senior Platform Engineer:
https://meraki.cisco.com/jobs#50444
I'm discouraged because I know the position doesn't require heavy knowledge or use of algorithms--mostly board bring-up and device driver work.  I know this because I have 11+ years of experience doing the same job, 5 of those years working for the very same Cisco.
My question is, what's the deal?  It seems like the interview process is more of a pissing contest more than anything else. How is someone who works full-time and has a family have time to go over algorithms from graduate school that I know I will never use for this position? <comment><USER2> Cynical alternative: The job is meant exclusively for H1B candidates, and the posting is just so they can say they had no qualified locals.

<comment><USER3> Why would they prefer H1B candidates?

<comment><USER4> Cheaper. Common H1B rate is 30-70% of the green card rate.

If you few IT as expense centers not innovators.. i.e. we make a lot of money, but we need IT people to build our business people some reports.. why not hire the cheaper guys?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It certainly ignores a lot of human productivity studies that indicate people rarely work at full manual labor productivity past 8 hours and full creative work productivity (including problem solving and often socialization skills) past 4 hours.

It certainly may be the case that they actually are interested in seeing interviewees past such points in a somewhat controlled environment.

Such "gauntlet" interviews seem common among large technology companies and while I think some of it is a semi-intentional attempt to push interviewers to limits to see how they react, I think it's also just as much "everybody else does it" and that continual momentum of existing interview processes. Which is precisely how such hazing processes in organizations get normalized and their problems ignored over the long term. (Yes, pushing someone to the limits of their productivity is strenuous activity and the very definition of hazing.)

<comment><USER6> > Such "gauntlet" interviews seem common among large technology companies...

True - the bigger the company, the dumber they are. And HR flunkies need to justify their existence somehow.

The only possible way to short-circuit the process is to connect directly with the hiring executive. Assuming you can reach a conceptual agreement that you'd be an ideal match for the role; he 'may' have the decision authority to dispense with all the formalities. Surprisingly, even these titular Big Shots don't have the same level of actual power you'd find in smaller, more nimble companies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wouldn't worry about the BS interview. I would imagine at some point they'll talk about thing things you've accomplished and it's important to show confidence and get through the parts of interview you know don't matter that much. If they hire some kid out of college versus someone with experience who tells them they can get up to speed quickly and do the job. Good luck too them. If someone does well on both more power to them, but unlikely. I kept pointing out I could look it up on the internet in 2 seconds.

</comment><comment><USER8> This seems like they're selecting for candidiates that will tolerate a job that is perpetual crunch-time.

</comment><comment><USER9> May be ask them to split interview into two days. I have done it before and I don't think it negatively impacted anything.

</comment><comment><USER10> It seems they are looking for candidates who can work for long hours and under pressure.</comment>


How do you delete users from your website? - <AUTHOR>

Heartbleed has got me rotating passwords and deleting stale accounts.
I've found a lot of websites, despite what they say, don't actually delete your account.
For example, Eventbrite appends "deleted-" to your e-mail address and leaves everything exactly the same. You can even log back in!
Deleting accounts and user data is always a frustration. SQL foreign keys being one pain I'm sure many have suffered. On my last project, we just had a "deleted" column.
How is everyone else handling deleting users from your website? <comment><USER2> In this day when valid email addy is at a premium I never delete an account.

I have a status field Active/Inactive, when a user goes inactive (over 90 days) I have a process in a cron job that creates a strong password (36 chars) for that account.

Then when an inactive tries to login, my system tells them they have been inactive and must reset their password.</comment>


Deep Learning From The Bottom Up - <AUTHOR> http://metacademy.org/roadmaps/rgrosse/deep_learning <comment><USER2> In addition to issues raised by other commenters, one of the problems with deep learning (deep nets in general) is that they can be very hard to train. If you're interested in some techniques people have been using, I highly suggested you read up on optimization methods such as conjugate gradient and hessian-free optimization. I did this recently [0] and have a brief write-up, but honestly the original Martens paper may be more understandable [1].

[0] [http://andrew.gibiansky.com/blog/machine-learning/hessian- fr...](http://andrew.gibiansky.com/blog/machine-learning/hessian-free- optimization/)

[1] [http://machinelearning.wustl.edu/mlpapers/paper_files/icml20...](http://machinelearning.wustl.edu/mlpapers/paper_files/icml2010_Martens10.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER3> Hi, I'm one of the creators of Metacademy. I hope you find it useful. Feel free to follow our new Twitter account if you'd like low volume updates:

[https://twitter.com/meta_learning](https://twitter.com/meta_learning)

Also, you can register an account for an occasional email.

PS) We're completely free and open source: [https://github.com/metacademy/metacademy- application](https://github.com/metacademy/metacademy-application)

</comment><comment><USER4> For anyone actually interested in implementing DNN's I wrote up a quick blog post (essentially a brain dump) of general guidelines to adhere to when training DNNs. The source for this information is primarily from videos given by Geoffrey Hinton as well as various papers.

[http://343hz.com/general-guidelines-for-deep-neural- networks...](http://343hz.com/general-guidelines-for-deep-neural-networks/)

</comment><comment><USER5> I just skimmed the post as I don't have time to fully read it right now, but I'll point out a couple of problems that you can run into with neural nets and associated approaches.

One issue that can be a back breaker depending on your application is that, to produce a generalizable model, nets tend to need much more training data than the alternatives. There are ways to work around this, though.

The bigger problem to me is interpretability. Deep learning often gives feature sets that are very good for whatever task you are working on, they are in some senses artificial and it is difficult to relate changes in features to changes in the input data. I work with a lot of biological and medical data, and this is an issue because for some applications it is important not to just get accurate classification results, but to be able to understand what your features mean in the context of the original problem. I saw some interesting work in a computer vision paper earlier this year on trying to learn how to visualize how changes in input and outputs of a neural net were related, I'll try to dig that up later if anyone is interested.

I'm not sure how coherent that was as I was trying to get this typed out in a hurry.

<comment><USER6> Sure, please post the link to the paper, it sounds interesting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> To address some of the comments being presented here, neural nets despite being harder to train can be debugged visually.

A few tips for those of you who use neural nets:

Debug the weights with histograms. Track the gradient and make sure the magnitude is not too large and its normally distributed.

Keep track of your gradient changes when using either gradient descent or conjugate gradient.

Plot your filters, visualize what each neuron is learning.

Watch the rate of change of your cost function. If it seems like its changing too fast and stops early lower your learning rate.

Plot your activations: if they start out grey you're fine. If you start all black, you need to retune some of your parameters.

Lastly, understand the algorithm you're using. Convolutional nets are different from recursive neural tensor are different denoising autoencoders are different from RBMS/DBNs.

Pay attention to your cost function, reconstruction entropy is used differently from negative log likelihood is used differently for different objectives.

If you are trying to do feature learning, you are using RBMs, Denoising AutoEncoders and you will use reconstruction entropy. This is what you use for feature detectors. You may end up using negative log likelihood if you are dealing with continuous data.

For RBMs, pay attention to the different kinds of units[1]. Hinton recommends Gaussian visible with recitifed linear for continuous data, binary binary otherwise.

For denoising autoencoders, watch your corruption level. A higher one helps generalize better, especially with less data.

For time series or sequential data, you can use a recurrent net,moving window with DBNs, or recursive neural tensor

Other knobs:

If your deep learning framework doesn't have adagrad find one that does.

Dropout: crucial. Dropout is used in combination with mini batch learning to handle learning different "poses" of images as well as generalizing feature learning. This can be used in combination with sampling with replacement to minimize sampling error.

Regularization: L2 is typically used. Hinton once said: you want a neural net that always overfits but is regularized (youtube video...don't remember link right now).

Would love to answer questions! Source: I work on/teach this stuff. Still working my way up there, but it seems to be going well so far.[2][3]

Lastly, tweak one knob at a time. Neural nets have a lot going on. You don't want a situation where you A/B tested 10 different parameters at once and you don't know which one worked or why.

[1]: [http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hinton/absps/guideTR.pdf](http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hinton/absps/guideTR.pdf)

[2]: [http://deeplearning4j.org/](http://deeplearning4j.org/)

[3]: [http://zipfianacademy.com/](http://zipfianacademy.com/)

[4]: [http://arxiv.org/abs/1206.5533](http://arxiv.org/abs/1206.5533) [http://deeplearning4j.org/](http://deeplearning4j.org/) [http://deeplearning4j.org/debug.html](http://deeplearning4j.org/debug.html) [http://yosinski.com/media/papers/Yosinski2012VisuallyDebuggi...](http://yosinski.com/media/papers/Yosinski2012VisuallyDebuggingRestrictedBoltzmannMachine.pdf)

<comment><USER3> Nice to see you HN, Adam =)

We just opened up the roadmap for contributions (click the "view source" with a logged in account). Feel free to add any of these notes where you think they'd fit in nicely -- don't worry about messing anything up, we have version control for a reason. Also, please email me if you run into any problems/confusion.

<comment><USER7> Will do! Like we discussed before, great initiative!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm pretty familiar with neural networks, and skimming that article it appears to describe something that is a neural network. Is 'Deep Learning' new terminology for 'Neural Network', or does it describe a subset of ways of using them?

<comment><USER9> Deep learning models are neural networks, but their recent popularization is due to a new method of building them incrementally, adding generative hidden layers trained as autoencoders to extract representative features, until the final discriminative layer. The resulting model is still a neural network, which can be finetuned by gradient methods, though conventionally training the same model from scratch with a random initialization would not have worked.

<comment><USER8> Ah, I see. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> THANK YOU for this link. Meta Academy is amazing! I always wanted a tool like this which tells me graph of concepts I need to learn first before I can learn X. I wish we had this kind of learning plan graph for other fields as well.

</comment><comment><USER11> Anyone know of good papers relating to deep learning that are not from image classification or speech/text recognition?

<comment><USER12> "Recursive Deep Models for Semantic Compositionality Over a Sentiment Treebank" by Socher et al. (2013) is a personal favourite of mine.

[http://nlp.stanford.edu/~socherr/EMNLP2013_RNTN.pdf](http://nlp.stanford.edu/~socherr/EMNLP2013_RNTN.pdf)

"Linguistic Regularities in Continuous Space Word Representations" by Mikolov et al. (2013) is also a nice read.

[http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/189726/rvecs.pdf](http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/189726/rvecs.pdf)</comment></comment>


Forcing vegan diet upon kids can lead to jail time in Belgium - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/1622642/making-your-kids-go-vegan-can-mean-jail-time-in-belgium/ <comment><USER2> This headline must be some sort of basic intelligence test, that sadly a number of poster are not passing.

Why do I say that?

 _The animal-product-free diet isn't technically prohibited, and the ruling doesn't necessarily equate veganism with child neglect. However, it will make it easier to prosecute parents who impose the strict diet and whose children have health problems._

and

 _However, opinions on this matter vary worldwide. The American Academy of Pediatrics, for example, is not opposed to vegan diets. "Although there have been case reports of children failing to thrive or developing cobalamin deficiency on vegan diets, these are rare exceptions," the academy notes on its website. "Multiple experts have concluded independently that vegan diets can be followed safely by infants and children without compromise of nutrition or growth and with some notable health benefits."_

So if a kid in Belgium is visibly malnourished - ie, abused - and the mechanism of abuse is a restrictive diet that is not being applied correct, then the parents can go to jail. In general, the diet is not illegal in Belgium and one of the largest associations of childrens' doctors in the world (AAP) is not opposed to that restrictive diet (and comes close to endorsing it).

This is a non-story.

<comment><USER3> Cobalamin deficiency is a result of our prewashed food in wester society. Vitamin B12 is only created by bacteria on the surface of plants and excessive washing removes it.

Eat more dirt ;)

(I sometimes inject B12 IM due quite low blood levels detected last year. Regular intake of supplements should also do the trick).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The headline is somewhat misleading, unsurprisingly. Child neglect can lead to jail time. The ruling in question will make it easier to prosecute for child neglect in cases where children develop health problems due to a forced vegan diet without appropriate dietary supplements or medical follow-ups. The ruling itself is essentially a health authority stating that a vegan diet is not suitable for children unless properly supplemented - as far as I'm aware, it's generally accepted that vegans are at a high risk of certain deficiencies and need to pay particular attention to those.

Here in Sweden, there have been some relevant cases lately. In one case, a couple was convicted after keeping their baby on a strict vegan diet, and ignoring several warnings from doctors that the baby was malnourished and needed milk. In another case, which was national news earlier this year, a 17-month old infant was brought to the hospital, underdeveloped and so malnourished that, according to the trial, she would have died within hours and was only saved by intensive care. The parents, as it turned out, had only given the baby vegan food, and had never taken the baby for any checkups.

<comment><USER5> > The parents, as it turned out, had only given the baby vegan food, and had > never taken the baby for any checkups.

Iirc they had used almond milk instead of breast feeding. Whoever thinks almond milk is a valid substitute for breast milk is unfit as a parent.

I have hung on quite a lot of vegan forums, and these kinds of parents are rare and are quickly told right by others.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> A step forward. Note this is the case in the USA also. If your child is malnurished for any reason, you are responsible. How people spin the protection of children as bad, because of their own bias, boggles the mind.

Nothing is wrong with feeding your kid veggies, but something IS wrong with denying your child nutrition based on your own philosophical hangups.

<comment><USER7> > philosophical hangups

This is a strong statement, when there is more than enough evidence to support that everything is available in a plant based diet.

Modern scientific thinking will tell you that eating a plant based diet is

1\. The best way to fight climate change and ecological destruction and species extinction.

2\. The health benefits to athletes of a meat free diet are now known and logged.

The only slightly philisophical hangup would be against animal cruelty and global agribusiness.

The rest is science and in the public domain.

<comment><USER8> There is no evidence (and actually evidence to the contrary) that a plant based diet can provide all essential nutrients.

Sounds like you watched Game Changers on Netflix and now that's your knowledge. None of that was scientific at all and full of inaccuracies.

All the athletes mentioned saw their performance go down after adopting a plant based diet.

There are virtual no athletes at the top of their sport who got there on a plant based diet (plenty who started on animal and then moved to plant, but you will see their performance drop).

Animals are needed to fight climate change. Without them the soils would have no nutrients. It's a symbiotic relationship. They eat plant matter we can't. Grown on areas that we couldn't grow stuff. So they are vital to supplement our food. Going plant based would be a huge ecological disaster.

<comment><USER7> > All the athletes mentioned saw their performance go down after adopting a > plant based diet.

I'm sorry I must have watched a different film. The complete opposite of what you claim is portrayed in the film. Also my personal experience of regularly running and recovering from Ultramarathons suggests that you are wrong. My times and recovery rates are much much better on plant based diets.

Also the Amazon is being cleared for Beef and agribusiness to food humans. We don't need to do this and we don't need to eat meat. Please read some decent news and science and try and think things through.

<comment><USER8> Perhaps you did. The documentary does sound quite compelling. There is no doubt that switching to a vegan diet from a standard processed food diet will see improvements. But those athletes built themselves up as omnivores.

Some examples from athletes in the film:

-Griff Whalen: went vegan 2014 out of the league 2016

-Bryant Jennings: went vegan end of 2013 (17-0 before vegan, 5-2 after vegan)

-Mischa Janiec: went vegan fall of 2015 - no wins 2 years after

-Kendrick Farris: went vegan 2014 -performed poorly in the 2016 Olympics

-Patrik Baboumian went vegan 2011 - 5'-7" and never ever part of the World Strong Men competition.

-Morgan Mitchell went vegan 2014... in 2017 finished 26th place world championships

-James Brett Wilks went vegan 2011, retired from MMA in 2012

\- Lewis Hamiliton suffered depressive breakdown on twitter

Typically within 2 years after going vegan, performance goes down. So veganism based on many of the athletes in the film is a sub-optimal diet for athletic performance.

As to your comment about the Amazon, we aren't eating Amazon beef. You're right it's being cleared, to make way for soy and other processed food. When you buy a steak from the butcher it's not coming from the Amazon, it comes from your local butcher, from a grass fed field, using less carbon then your bananas from Panama.

Tim Rees (amongst other) have written several writeups about the "evidence" in the movie. [https://medium.com/@timrees/watched-the-game-changers-now- yo...](https://medium.com/@timrees/watched-the-game-changers-now-you-must- watch-this-fcc877b0104)

Greenhouse gas emissions of meat is also very questionable. Here is a PhD GHG expert, who has looked a bit closer: [https://www.sciencealert.com/sorry-but- giving-up-on-meat-is-...](https://www.sciencealert.com/sorry-but-giving-up-on- meat-is-not-going-to-save-the-planet)

As always it's not as so simple. I believe the place to start is with science- based facts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > _Children can follow a vegan diet if it's accompanied by medical > supervision, regular blood tests, and vitamin supplements_

This really should be the case for any diet for children. It makes sense to invest a little into society's future.

<comment><USER10> A child does not need vitamin supplements in a omnivore diet though

<comment><USER11> In many countries, it's darn near impossible to achieve an omnivore diet that _isn 't_ supplemented. There's direct supplementation in things like vitamin D milk, folate fortified wheat, and iodized salt, but, also, supplements added to animal feed serve to increase the levels of some nutrients in their meat. Notably, B12.

What's interesting to me is the level of overlap between the list of things that vegetarians are advised to take pills for, and the list of nutrients for which fortification is typically applied to animal products. The big gap is calcium, which people are often advised to get from milk, but that also seems like a kind of crap piece of public health advice given that ~75% of the world population is lactose intolerant.

My sense is that vegetarians and vegans do have a higher need to voluntarily supplement their diets, but this is as much about public policy around fortification assuming that everyone eats an omnivorous diet as it is about the vegetarian or vegan diet itself.

<comment><USER12> You're stat is technically close to correct, but the implication is wrong for many HN readers.

Around 68% of the global pollution have lactose malabsorbtion, but only 36% of people in the US have lactose malabsorbtion. Not everyone with lactose malabsorbtion is lactose intolerant.

> You are more likely to have lactose intolerance if you are from, or your > family is from, a part of the world where lactose malabsorption is more > common. In the United States, the following ethnic and racial groups are > more likely to have lactose malabsorption:

> African Americans

> American Indians

> Asian Americans

> Hispanics/Latinos

[https://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/digestive- disea...](https://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/digestive- diseases/lactose-intolerance/definition-facts#common)

<comment><USER12> Weak evidence for my presumption many HN readers come from the US

[https://www.similarweb.com/website/news.ycombinator.com#over...](https://www.similarweb.com/website/news.ycombinator.com#overview)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > This implies higher requirements for protein and essential fatty acids. The > body does not produce them, it must be brought in via animal proteins.

This is not true. Proteins and fatty acids are found in many common vegetables and it's not difficult to get a healthy balance of the above. Harvard's school of public health, recommends, "Get your protein from plants when possible" [1], and it's not hard to find many other sources suggesting the same.

1\. [https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/what-should- you...](https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/what-should-you- eat/protein/)

<comment><USER8> It's well known that plants can't/don't provide all essential nutrients without supplementing. B12 is a major one amongst others.

Yet the reverse is true.

Sidenote: I wouldn't put much stock in Harvard school of "nutrition". They have massive conflicts of interest with companies like Monsanto and also numerous problems with their methodology like oversimplification of the issues. [https://www.forbes.com/sites/trevorbutterworth/2013/05/27/to...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/trevorbutterworth/2013/05/27/top- science-journal-rebukes-harvards-top-nutritionist/)

<comment><USER14> Wikipedia has plenty of other citations, if you have issues with Harvard:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_combining#Criticism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_combining#Criticism)

Summary: Yes, eating _solely_ one food _may_ eventually cause an issue. For instance, eating _only_ rice would eventually cause a lysine deficiency -- on the order of ~88% of required amounts. Eating pretty much _any_ other food that is not lysine-limited would likely be enough to make up the ~12% gap.

<comment><USER8> Where does it say you can get B12?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Do they also make sure the parents aren't giving them junk food? Because I'm pretty sure obesity is a bigger problem than this.

<comment><USER16> Vegan diets are much more destructive to children than candy and pop. If a child was _only_ eating candy and pop, then yes, it would be harmful. But usually, kids eat junk as a supplement to otherwise stable meals.

You need protein and iron to grow, you just can't get a kid to eat the vegan versions of foods that provide this.

<comment><USER17> Are you seriously saying there's just no way for a parent to get their child to eat vegetables and legumes?

<comment><USER16> Didn't say that, I said that it's hard to get kids to eat vegetables that provide protein and iron at the same levels that chicken fingers do. Good luck getting a kid to eat a plate of spinach.

<comment><USER18> All depends how you're raised. My sisters and I devoured vegetables. My mother would have a plate of cut-up turnips waiting for us when we got home from middle school. Yum. I still eat raw cabbage and turnips as snacks into my 30s because of that while everyone around me asks me how I could eat that.

You're thinking of a kid who has been raised on ketchup and chicken fingers suddenly encountering a plate of spinach leaves for dinner. Sure, I'd expect problems in the short term. But let's take a little bit of responsibility as parents.

I had a neighbor who was fed so much candy at her house that when she slept over at my house (slumber party) she would throw tantrums because my parents didn't pair candy with dinner. I'm sure her parents thought the same as you: heh, good luck getting children to eat chicken fingers without their side of candy, it's the only thing that works for us!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Veganism _can_ work, if you are knowledgable about your body's requirements. Realistically, most people are pretty crappy about what they put into their bodies. My opinion is that most people throwing stones against veganism aren't exactly paragons of health themselves. I know that I'm not, and I'm not vegan.

The bigger issue with veganism is that the rest of us non-vegans can eat whatever we want and still be somewhat healthy, purely by accident. In veganism, you do need to be aware of the balance of amino acids your body requires, and the various vitamins and minerals too. You can't haphazardly just eat whatever plant-based foods you want; you have to plan a bit more. I would hazard a guess that most new vegans are just jumping onto what's trendy, without doing adequate research. Just look at the swathes of vegan YouTubers that recently had to start eating meat again due to health problems.

With new products targeting vegans becoming available, this is getting to be a bit easier. I have an infant son that is currently intolerant to dairy and eggs, even when his mom ingests it and he gets it via nursing. We've had our share of frustrations with trying to find products that they both can eat that don't have milk, eggs, or milk-based ingredients. So I'm a fan of the new options available. My fear is that these products start to go down the path of gluten-free foods; that it becomes a marketing buzzword and makes it impossible for the actual target market (i.e. celiacs) to actually eat the foods.

Personally, if I ever decide to give up meat, I'd probably ease into it with pescatarianism (eating farmed instead of wild), or eventually, bivalve veganism [0].

[0] ([https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/qvxznq/are-scallops- vegan](https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/qvxznq/are-scallops-vegan))

<comment><USER20> >Veganism can work, if you are knowledgable about your body's requirements.

It can with minimal effort if you try to follow the daily dozen [1] which (for an adult) you can easily check off a significant portion of those in a single meal. In my breakfast smoothie alone I handle all of the fruit (and then some), 2-3x the berries, all of the cruciferous and greens the flax (and chia), the spice, most of the grain (I blend oats in because I'm not a fan of oatmeal), the spices (which I exceed just via turmeric and also add cloves and cinnamon most days).

A child will need lesser quantities, and should be comparably easy, but I'm wholly unfamiliar with RDAs for children given I haven't been one in a long time and have no offspring.

[1] [https://nutritionfacts.org/daily-dozen- challenge/](https://nutritionfacts.org/daily-dozen-challenge/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is apparently a real issue even in the USA, not sure where the ideas came from but I have a direct experience.

While at a funeral for an older man at a church I attended, my wife and I met a younger lady that was our age and she was very talkative and wanted to go out and have lunch with us. She stated that her husband (who worked at a large tech hosting company) had a "computer job" (in reference to me) as well. We went out eat, I met her husband, all seemed normal. We were both newly married, and my wife and her both ended up pregnant just months apart. So it was feeling like this was going to be one of those "life long" friendships since we seemed to have so much in common... and then...

My wife and her both gave birth to healthy children though things quickly started to change in our friendships. I consider myself a christian fundamentalist and my wife and I started to think it was strange that our new friend seemed to be way more opinionated and strict with how she was going to raise her daughter. This was realized when we offered to help babysit since she was going to try to go back to her teacher's aid job.

It was the scheduling... she had everything scheduled for this 5 month old baby. We were to every 2 hours feed her x number of ounces of freshly pumped breast milk. Problem is, the kid sucked down the entire day's worth in just two feedings. On top of that, we were to write down how long the naps were (which also were "required" to happen every 2 hours or so) and when bowel movements happened and what they looked like. Then there was the smell. The kid was just plain filthy, the mom had already bragged about how they don't really do baths any more since its "bad" for the skin. The extra clothes she brought were nasty too. So baby got a bath and we washed the extra clothes. The mom returns 8 or so hour later. We informed her of how the kid sucked down the milk and acted like she was staving, but mom was disappointed in that we didn't follow the schedule. After all, if we followed the schedule, we would not have ran out of milk...

Something didn't seem right, but we were naive.

Then a few months later, while over at their house for dinner, they informed us that they had all gone vegan. So there was no meat or cheese to eat and they had taken their (now 8 month old) daughter off of milk as well. To eat, we were given some thin vegetable soup with some mashed cauliflower on the side. The daughter got a small handful of raw diced squash and some beans which she gulped down practically whole in a matter of minutes.

The irony is both parents were quite over weight (nearing 300lbs). The daughter was strictly forced vegan but they were not. Mom still got her Dr.Pepper while baby got water and squash. They at one time asked us to baby sit at 9pm so they could have a "parent's night out" which was explained as they were going to go get doughnuts followed by margaritas at a mexican restaurant. Not sure how you can even mix those two... Being christian fundamentalists, we declined since we weren't going to help someone get drunk and drive themselves home.

One of the last times we met, they had informed us CPS had been visiting them. Apparently their daughter was running a fever at night so they took her to the ER. The nurse of course noticed the under-height and underweight child and told the parents they should try upping the amount of milk she gets every day. The mom of course squawked back that they're "vegan". And I guess the rest is history.

I've never quite figured out where she got her weird ideas from. She had other friends and they all seemed to support each other's ideas. She was not anti- vax either (though I am). She went on to have a son (which she circumcised), and as far as I know, raised the same. Even though she is "vegan" she still pushes 300lbs. After her CPS story, we stopped hanging out and blocked her on facebook.

</comment><comment><USER22> Good, this should be seen as a case of child abuse. It's not healthy for children. If adults want to take up that diet, then fine for them, they can make their own choices, but children have no choice but eat what is put on the table.

The other issue is that your kid is going to be "the vegan kid". In general, one should not try to paint a target on one's children if one can avoid it.

<comment><USER23> >The other issue is that your kid is going to be "the vegan kid". In general, one should not try to paint a target on one's children if one can avoid it.

There were plenty of vegetarian kids in my school with me (vegans were a rarity then), and they didn't get any particular stick for it. Besides, even if they aren't vegan they'll still get short/tall/pimply/ginger/nerd/.* of the same intensity, so I think this is a pretty weak argument.

<comment><USER22> Being ginger isn't such a pain in the neck for other people to make accomodations for if they want to include you. All of these competing quasi- religious food restrictions introduce unnecessary overhead. And people are often not reasonable about bowing to the demands of politeness or necessity, and insist on absolutism in their diets.

Frig trying to plan a birthday party when little Timmy's parents think he should be vegan, and little Billy's parents think he is gluten-intolerant, while Frankie's parents are enforcing paleo raw foods, and your kid just wants a regular Funfetti cake and real ice cream.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is Udacity's AI nanodegree worth it? - <AUTHOR> Do you think Udacity newest AI nanodegree priced at $2400 (3x800/trimester) is worth it, for someone who wants to change careers from software dev (full-stack web) towards AI/ML but with no formal compsci education? I'm currently going through some other AI/ML materials like their older and cheaper ML-nanodegree ($200/mon+50% off if finished <6 months, now at ~40% through it). Right now I really care about this money because of complicated life situations, so even if I can easily make this, I don't feel like burning this cash on something of dubious benefit.
Will most jobs in the field go towards PhDs and MScs anyway, and such a nano-degree would mean nothing, so I am better of learning on my own from cheaper resources? Or is a much cheaper nanodegree + other courses that I'll probably get certified from Coursera be the same thing. Or do you think there would be somthing of value in this nanodegree they offer that would help in getting a job after it, even lacking a formal education, being in Europe, and not really having an interesting? My goal is to land a job or paid-internship at some company doing cool real world ML and hopefully also with access to a tons of data.
(More on me: good at learning on my own, above average math & physics background despite being a uni drop-out from an unrelated field, I'd dare say I'm a decent software engineer (but with not that much to show on resume and github because I made bad decisions and wasted years working for either failed startups or "dubious" clients under strong NDAs). I even dare think that I have some truly original ideas about solving some tough AI/ML problems (though this is probably wishful thinking, there are too many way smarter than me folks grinding on this in academia), especially around explainable ai, and around using current technologies to build "common sense infused human-like agents". But I also tend to get lazy and lose motivation for stretches of time so maybe more strucutre would help me.) <comment><USER2> IMO proper educational courses are not a means to an end, and will need strong supplement and continued work. It will provide a good foundation, and in the long run probably increases your worth as an engineer (ML or full-stack) more than a couple grand per year. Thus, as an investment, it's quite high.

In addition, as a full-stack engineer with no CompSci background, these types of courses and projects (non-CRUD, more challenging) will help set you apart from the waves upon waves of Rails/Angular bootcamp grads.

<comment><AUTHOR> > these types of courses and projects (non-CRUD, more challenging) will help > set you apart from the waves upon waves of Rails/Angular bootcamp grads

yes, but the question is more like whether _this particular course /nanodegree_, which is priced like >4x as much as other courses in the fields, _is really worth it?_

I mean, they did kind of a poor job explaining its contents and why it's better than maybe getting a similar thing by combining much cheaper or free resources from them and their "competitor" MOOC platforms... even the backers, IBM + Amazon Alexa + Didi... are not exactly the most transparent and "leading" entities in their field, it's not like they have a "backed by Google/Facebook" that would inspires 10x more trust.

I will definitely continue learning more and trying to get a career in this field... but my question is _about this particular learning resource: do you think it would be really worth the price?_

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I have same doubt about this course. I got selected for the AI nanodegree and it's really a big investment for me. In my country a masters price starts from 1500 Euro, so I am not sure I will join

<comment><USER4> I have not studied any nano degrees but I think if your university is half decent the masters at 1500 Euro, if you can stuff it with AI courses, is a lot more valuable than a $2400 nanodegree, face to face interaction and discussion with teachers and students means a lot IMO. I think the nano degree is targeted at people whose alternative is studying a $20000 masters degree, not 1500 euro.

<comment><USER3> You are right. Maybe it's too focused for people from US.

They both have pros and cons but in the end, I think for me, a master degree is more interesting:

\- More content and subjects (Usually takes 1-2 years) and usually more theoretical contents \- Official title \- Options to continue with a doctoral degree

In favor of the nanodegree:

\- Taught by influential people in the field \- Industry-oriented \- Hiring partners (?)

I have been thinking and if I was going to take a nanodegree, the only one I would go for is the self driving car ND. Why? Because It's something different, something you can't easily find at the university. I see it like a bootcamp, so maybe if you have a AI background you can learn more about this particular field and hopefully land a job related to this technology

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> it is $1600(2 x 800)</comment>


Facebook/create-react-app: Create React apps with no build configuration - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/facebook/create-react-app <comment><USER2> Note: This was recently moved from the facebookincubator org on GitHub: [https://twitter.com/fbOpenSource/status/955513652261482496](https://twitter.com/fbOpenSource/status/955513652261482496)

</comment><comment><USER3> Great tool. Use it all the time and definitely a good way for beginners to get started with React without worrying about how to set up the surrounding project.</comment>


The death of American democracy: not dying, but already dead - <AUTHOR> http://blog.markwatson.com/2011/10/letter-to-m-friends-and-family-death-of.html

<comment><USER2> I suppose the author has an interesting point at the core, but the article is way too prejudiced to be taken seriously.

</comment><comment><USER3> I liked the part where he called Naomi Wolf Naomi Watts. Because, you know, it's just a blog, so why proofread?</comment>


Drone Hacked, Crashes, Injures Athlete - <AUTHOR> http://kotaku.com/report-drone-hacked-crashes-injures-athlete-1559631471

<comment><USER2> Stretching the word "hacked" to it's limit.

If I walked into a store and turned over the TV with my own remote control, suddenly I've "hacked" it.</comment>


I think bootstrapping might be impossible for non-programmers - <AUTHOR> http://blog.thestartuptoolkit.com/blog/2012/05/bootstrapping-should-i-learn-to-program/ <comment><USER2> I think also that if you are not a tech founder, you should learn this stuff. Not in a complex way to be the best engineer, instead to understand the concepts, so you can work with other developers and know what to ask for.</comment>


TechShop: A Xerox PARC for the rest of us - <AUTHOR> http://www.techshop.ws/

<comment><AUTHOR> I especially liked the looks of these classes:

<http://www.techshop.ws/take_classes.html#245>

btw, I am in no way affiliated with the TechShop, just thought it looked cool and designed specifically for hackers.

</comment><comment><USER2> What I really would love to see is a commercial version of this concept attached to the warehouse of one of the big parts companies.

Imagine a hacker space with 5 minute delivery from Newark?

</comment><comment><USER3> See also the hackerspace movment.

<comment><USER4> Not the same at all--the HN title is a little misleading. Membership (pricey!) buys you access to $500,000 worth of tools and facilities, not just outlets and comfy chairs/wacky furniture. I've been complaining for years about not being able to do physical projects because I don't have access to a machine shop, and, well, now I can, for $125/mo. Excellent idea.

<comment><USER3> It's true. It's much better outfitted than most hackerspaces. But I thought that these were having problems becoming profitable? I could be just remembering things wrong...</comment></comment></comment>


Checked exceptions I love you, but you have to go - <AUTHOR> http://googletesting.blogspot.com/2009/09/checked-exceptions-i-love-you-but-you.html <comment><USER3> To me one of the fundamental issues with checked exceptions is that they break encapsulation. There's no way around it: if foo calls bar, and bar calls readFile which throws an IOException, assuming bar is unable to handle the exception itself (which is generally the case) and you want it to be reported up the stack (say, all the way to the web request handler), you have two options: you declare every method in the chain as throwing an IOException, thus polluting a ton of higher-level code with information that should be restricted to a lower layer, or you catch it and wrap it in a runtime exception, defeating the purpose of having that be a checked exception.

I think it's really just a fundamental problem with the whole idea, and it's why any attempt to "fix" them will fail: the idea of checked exceptions is just deeply flawed.

<comment><USER4> The checked exception didn't break encapsulation here, you did. You have alot more than two options, and the two you listed aren't very good ones.

If foo calls bar, something might go wrong, and foo should take some kind of action. If bar can't complete because of an IOException, it should throw it (or wrap it and throw the wrapper). Foo now knows that bar may not complete successfully, and can do what makes sense there (throw it's own exception, retry, etc). If foo can't complete because bar didn't complete, it should tell it's caller. If it matters that the reason Foo couldn't complete was an IOException, throw it, otherwise throw a more meaningful exception.

<comment><USER3> Let me try to phrase the argument more clearly: if you want to pass on a checked exception via redeclaration in the "throws" clause, you've broken encapsulation because a change to the lower layer implies changes all the way up the stack. If bar() was originally calling readDatabase() that threw a SQLException, and I change it to call readFile() that throws an IOException, if I'm passing that exception up the stack I have to change bar's signature purely due to an implementation change, and so on up the stack. So a change at the lower layer has now forced me to make changes all the way through my application stack. Henceforth, encapsulation is broken by what should just be an implementation change.

The only way to avoid that break of encapsulation is to catch the exception immediately in bar(), and then do something with it: either handle it, or rethrow it as something else, either a runtime exception or as a different checked exception. But that also isn't really ideal; in my experience, about 98% of the time even checked exceptions are throw-up-your-hands sort of programmer errors that you want to bounce a fair way up the stack to some more central error-handling location, or to kill the high-level operation being attempted. In other words . . . you generally just want to treat them exactly like runtime exceptions.

So while the theory of type-safety around checked exceptions is nice and all, in practice if you actually use them as part of type signatures they massively couple all the layers of your application, and I find them much more annoying than useful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Fundamentally I want to be able to ask my programming language "what exceptions might propagate to here?" Having this ability allows me to make stronger claims that my program is correct, because then I can say that the only exceptions which can propagate to that point are of a type I have decided not to handle (like the filesystem being disconnected) and this can be a strong safety property.

I think Java has ruined checked exceptions for the rest of us, because this article makes good points and successfully knocks down Java's exception system. I don't think this invalidates the concept of checking one's exceptions, though!

What would I do instead? Since it's always the prerogative of the receiver of a possible exception to rethrow it uncheckedly, then why not allow the type system to promote (/demote) a checked exception to unchecked at the catchpoint, without requiring an actual catch block? Some system like that could reduce the syntax clutter which is the root of the author's beef.

<comment><USER6> You could use RuntimeException as a superclass for your exceptions, or wrap checked exceptions in a RuntimeException. I'll often rethrow exceptions this way when I have to deal with something horribly wrong (like I/O or UI meltdown, etc.) in a place where I have to deal with the checked exception.. This is handled gracefully in the Eclipse workbench as a popup though, YMMV.

I would only recommend this as a last ditch effort to appease the Java compiler though, not an acceptable way to handle a common failure mode.

As a side note, does anyone else find the pattern (well, I would say headache) of dealing with checked exceptions similar to working with the IO monad in Haskell?

<comment><USER7> I often explain monads to laypeople as "It's a way to abstract away extra information that's passed through the computation, and define arbitrary ways to handle that information." One of the possible types of "extra information" that may be attached are the types of exceptions thrown: see the Error monad.

And yeah, monads have most of the same problems that checked exceptions do. Each action in the monad must have the same type; you can't just ignore one of those bits of extra information and declare that it doesn't matter in this context. For example, if your complicated algorithm writes to a log file, you probably don't care in the rest of the program and could just as easily treat it as pure. But the type system won't let you, unless you fall back on cheats like unsafePerformIO.

I dunno really what the right answer for this is, but I really like the Erlang philosophy toward errors. "Let it crash, then do something simpler." Instead of trying to enumerate all the ways your program can fail, it just assumes that you _will_ fail sometimes, so you ought to try multiple ways to succeed instead. That requires quite a paradigm shift from the way programmers normally think about programming, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The difference between error codes and exceptions are that, for error codes, you must check the result of every function call and method and in some way handle that result. Contrast this to exceptions, where the advantage is that your error handling is centralized. You should throw as much as necessary and catch in a few key places.

Checked exceptions ruins that advantage of exceptions -- you're back to writing a whole bunch of buggy error handling code rather than just a few key catches. The result is errors are being hidden, masked, or ignored for absolutely no gain except to satisfy the compiler.

</comment><comment><USER9> Relying on the IDE to know which exceptions can be thrown is nicer I think.

The .NET pattern of inner exceptions is nice too (relevant to the article's example, you could throw an NHibernateException(inner exception:SQLForeignKeyViolatedException)).

It's nice I guess from a certainty and stability standpoint in Java to know that you won't have an exception crash your system, but even then you aren't going to be sure because some exceptions _do_ crash your system because they aren't checked (e.g. null pointer, array index etc.).

In my opinion Java is a dead language anyway. The language's bloat (exceesive boiler-plate required for everything), lack of high-level functionality and general approach to boxing in the programmer mean that new programmers don't want to use it (most will learn it though).

The slow initialisation time (JVM problem) and lack of native interfaces (despite the work done here) mean that companies don't want to use it for customer products.

For internal apps, I'd wager that the company just wants something that most people know and that is quick to develop in, and while Java has some ground here I think other languages will be making strong headway too, especially when you have some control on the deployment platforms.

Java just strikes me as dissapointing now. It is probably single-handedly responsible for us getting over the fear of automatic memory management and GC. Similarly it's had massive influences on virtual machines and easy cross- platform deployment. Just about every CS student in the world knows Java. But right now it has failed to innovate with the resurgent popularity for language functionality, address the issue of bloat or develop on the issues that discourage people actually using it for cross-platform deployment.

In the mobile sector it's pretty strong, but Objective-C/iPhone will probably hurt that, and it's only strong because of the JVM's portability. On the web it had the potential to take out flash, but the incredible load time and associated lag of the JVM initialising has killed that chance.

Overall, Java is only afloat because it is too big to sink.

<comment><USER10> _Relying on the IDE to know which exceptions can be thrown is nicer I think._

No. If you can't remember what it throws, you can't remember the documentation. If you can't remember the documentation, you don't fully know how to use it properly. Go read the documentation; IDEs are a crutch.

EDIT: I'm completely serious. <http://docs.python.org/library/> and help() are my best friends, in that order.

<comment><USER9> I think knowing every exception a method can throw and knowing the method are different things. I want to be able to write code, while I'm in the zone and thinking about the business problem, not have to jump and navigate a web site for every method call.

And I didn't say you can't check the domentation from the IDE (through a nice context link) but I still think mouseover on a method that lists exceptions (as Visual Studio does) is the ideal solution as it gives me the information I need as I code.

NB: VS exception info is comment documentation based, I have no idea why the compiler doesn't generate this information as much as possible becuase then you are getting some of the advantage of checked exceptions without the cost.

As a counterpoint to knowing the documentation, consider the System.Reflection.MethodBase.Invoke method in .NET which I have in front of me, are you going to remember all these exceptions:

        // Exceptions:
        //   System.Reflection.TargetException:
        //     The obj parameter is null and the method is not static.  -or- The method
        //     is not declared or inherited by the class of obj. -or- A static constructor
        //     is invoked, and obj is neither null nor an instance of the class that declared
        //     the constructor.
        //
        //   System.ArgumentException:
        //     The elements of the parameters array do not match the signature of the method
        //     or constructor reflected by this instance.
        //
        //   System.Reflection.TargetInvocationException:
        //     The invoked method or constructor throws an exception.
        //
        //   System.Reflection.TargetParameterCountException:
        //     The parameters array does not have the correct number of arguments.
        //
        //   System.MethodAccessException:
        //     The caller does not have permission to execute the constructor.
        //
        //   System.InvalidOperationException:
        //     The type that declares the method is an open generic type. That is, the System.Type.ContainsGenericParameters
        //     property returns true for the declaring type.

<comment><USER10> I didn't say you have to _know_ the documentation, and I'll admit I'm behind on how much of it IDEs show you. In my recollection, you generally get a list of language-level constructs and that's it. For example, the names of those exceptions are not as useful as the text you've shown there. If VS does that for exceptions, great! Contrast it with the 2003/2005 IntelliSense feature, where you just get method prototypes.

<comment><USER9> I misinterpreted "No. If you can't remember what it throws, you can't remember the documentation" as _know_ the documentation but I can see your point now.

Yeah and you just get a list of possible exceptions rather than a description of each which is a fair point to make too. Maybe it's configurable though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> FileNotFoundException is not really a corner case, it's all but unavoidable race. No matter how soon you open the file after verifying its existence, it could have gone away. And the only reasonable thing you can do in the face of it is route the message that the file is missing to the user one way or another, and possibly exit.

In that way, it makes sense for a top-level handler, such as at the main() routine or in the event loop in a GUI app, to be the one to handle it, and for all intermediates to pass it up. The fact that most meaningful applications do I/O at some level, means that almost the only routines that can be indicated not to throw this exception or a similar I/O exception, are functionally pure ones, or the ones that implement the aforementioned user notification.

<comment><USER12> Why would you verify it's existence? Just open it, you either get it or you don't. If you don't then catch the exception and do what you would have done if you'd have checked and it wasn't there. Honest question?

<comment><USER13> Opening a file (or attempting to) is resource intensive and throwing/catching exceptions is sloooow.

<comment><USER10> Both opening the file and checking whether it exists involve a syscall, which dwarfs the overhead of throwing and catching an exception. If you check whether it exists and then try to open it, that's _two_ syscalls.

<comment><USER10> On reflection, it occurs to me that a Sufficiently Smart Compiler (TM) could figure out that you were going to open the file right after checking whether it exists and just call open(2) as the existence check instead of stat(2) and then open(2). This seems to depend on the details of the library implementation as well, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Why does everyone seem to think this a black-and-white issue? Checked exceptions are appropriate for some things, unchecked exceptions are appropriate for others. Use the right tool for the job.

Some parts of Java's API have made poor decisions in their use of checked exceptions (the close methods on file input streams and database connections, for example), but that doesn't invalidate the concept.

Correct use of checked exceptions helps create more solid code with less testing required, because the compiler is able to do checks that would otherwise have to be written into unit tests. Incorrect use of checked exceptions is what leads to all of the objections I've seen listed here.

<comment><USER15> _Why does everyone seem to think this a black-and-white issue?_

You answered your own question. Inappropriate use of checked exceptions is _built into the heart of the Java standard libraries_ , which means that (a) every new Java programmer is taught, consciously or subconsciously, to use them everywhere, at least until the programmer is very explicitly educated about their badness; (b) even experienced Java programmers must deal with them every day, and 95% of the checked exceptions they deal with are an unredeemed pain in the ass, so before long the very sight of one makes you flinch. It's Pavlovian.

In a language community where checked exceptions were a completely optional add-on which was only used when appropriate, they might have a much better reputation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Checked exceptions are probably are of my biggest pet-peeves about Java (erasure and lack of closures/first order functions are the other ones). They create excess verbosity, but what good are they if most code I've seen does this:

try { foo.bar(); } catch (FooException fe) { logger.error(fe); }

A descriptive crash would be more useful, especially if the exception is thrown as a result of an invariant being violated. Scala _is_ a step forwards in this manner, but now there's the issue of remembering which Java methods (foreign to Scala) rely on exceptions to convey important information (e.g. anything which throws InterruptedException).

<comment><USER17> Most try-catches are considered boiler plate and are often generated. For example of the default options in NetBeans generates the following:

try { foo.bar(); } catch (Exception ex) { Logger.getLogger(InvalidConversionException.class.getName()).log(Level.SEVERE, null, ex); }

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> FWIW, Scala lets you call java code that would throw checked exceptions - <USER2> not check them. The checking is only enforced at compile time by javac.

</comment><comment><USER18> The most important problem with checked exceptions in Java is the way they interact with inheritance. If you could just declare "throws" everywhere, you could at least live up to the ideal of knowing the exceptions to expect. But you can't override and add a new "throws". Substitution principle, yeah, I know. But why did they design Runnable without "throws Exception"?

<comment><USER14> Runnables don't throw checked exceptions for the same reason that main() doesn't - because there's nothing sensible that could catch it.

<comment><USER18> You can declare main() as "throws Exception".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I typically use 3 categories of exceptions when building frameworks or libraries.

Two are unchecked RuntimeException extensions to indicate operating environment issues, and, implementation issues (aka bugs).

Finally, if the api semantics seem to indicate it, api level checked exceptions indicating misuse of the api (aka user errors). Typical example are cases where the api semantics require return values which preclude uniform application of an 'error code' as a viable means of alerting user error. I don't believe it is a good practice to throw an unchecked exception in these cases.

Both checked and unchecked exceptions have their uses.</comment>


1950s New York City's 'Mad Bomber' - <AUTHOR> https://www.damninteresting.com/ghoulish-acts-dastardly-deeds/ <comment><USER2> >Police dismissed the [bomb] as the work of "boys or pranksters."

My father tells me stories about how he witnessed people openly and actively "recruiting terrorists" in public in San Francisco in the 1970s.

He said they were just standing around with signs and pamphlets, calling out and trying to get you to sign up to their terrorist campaign.

Just as the religious zealots you see on the streets today that are mostly ignored.

The world has really changed, and fast.

<comment><USER3> Wouldn't police arresting those before they have committed violent acts be considered thought crime? Shouldn't we arrest those that do things not those who talk about things?

<comment><USER4> Yes, but in most cases we are arresting people for _planning_ a crime, not just nonchalantly discussing it. Handing out recruitment flyers for an organisation that bombs others? Planning to murder your wife? Planning on defrauding x out of their life savings? You know, actual plans that meet the burden of proof for a criminal investigation. Yes. Please prevent this stuff that folks are planning.

<comment><USER5> Only more often it is the police who pretend to plan a crime and recruit suspects to participate in that fiction. If the suspects show willingness to participate they get arrested.

[1][http://www.npr.org/2014/07/18/332636882/newburgh-sting- terro...](http://www.npr.org/2014/07/18/332636882/newburgh-sting-terrorist- cell-or-group-sold-on-a-trap-by-fbi)

[2][http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/was-fbi-grooming- po...](http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/was-fbi-grooming-portland- suspect-for-terror/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > _Another exception occurred in November 1954 when, 30 minutes into a > screening of Bing Crosby's White Christmas at Radio City Music Hall, in an > auditorium with around 6,000 patrons, a seat exploded and injured two women > and two boys. Apologetic theater ushers asked 50 or so patrons near the bomb > site to watch the remainder of the film from alternate seats, allowing > ushers to rope the area off so the police could investigate after the > movie._

Contrast this 50s crowd with the mass hysteria over the slightest disturbance today...

Can you imagine people today sitting to watch a movie in a theatre where a seat had just exploded and hurt people -- not to mention the total hysteria from the authorities jumping in like it's the end of the world.

<comment><USER7> I wonder if it has anything to do with the fact that WWII had ended only a few years earlier.

But, reading other articles about people back then, it does seem they were less inclined to panic than those today. IMHO today's mass hysteria over terrorism is playing directly into what the terrorists want, so perhaps there's a valid point to be made for "keep calm and carry on" as much as possible.

<comment><USER8> > playing directly into what the terrorists want

It more complicated than that. As much as it suits some terrorist, it suits a larger group composed of the likes of the militarised police forces, the administration hawks, defence forces protecting our freedom, arms firms, security companies, the tsa etc. It's a big industry that needs a scary bad guy.

<comment><USER9> It's a triangle. Terrorists, Media, Authorities. All three get something out of blowing this out of proportion (ok, bad pun).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This was a great read, I enjoyed it very much – thanks for sharing!

It's also the first time I see this site. I've read a couple more articles on it and it looks nice, I like it. The writing is good and the material is interesting, and it's ad free on purpose. I pitched in a few dollars while I consider whether to subscribe. Again, thanks for sharing this nugget of gold!

Edit: fixed fat finger typos.

<comment><USER11> _Damn Interesting_ is, as far as I know, the original "collection of historical anecdotes" Web site in the vein of Atlas Obscura or Mental Floss. They've always favoured long-form, well-sourced articles, and they started doing it before it was cool and/or profitable -- the site was at one point left unmaintained for well over a year if I remember correctly. So yes, hats off to them for playing the long game, sticking to their formula, and not devolving into yet another ads-plagued list-icles Web site.

<comment><USER12> Yep. At this point they also have a podcast which is the author reading the article and is a great lesson if you'd prefer to get it that way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It was a different era for media. Locally we had a week of hysteria when some nutjob crushed old mercury thermostat vials in a hospital cafeteria. A crank bomb threat at a community center brought a platoon of paramilitary police milling around smoking all day for two weeks.

</comment><comment><USER14> Google maps street view shows that the house in Waterbury is nearly unchanged. The siding is different, the narrower boards of yesteryear having been replaced by wider boards at some point, but other than that it's the same.

[https://www.google.com/maps/place/17+4th+St,+Waterbury,+CT+0...](https://www.google.com/maps/place/17+4th+St,+Waterbury,+email@example.com,-73.0458198,3a,75y,309.78h,89.76t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sLQnGVnxPkDhPOh_RfhU94w!2e0!7i13312!8i6656!4m5!3m4!1s0x89e7c1a183f73d83:0xff7ad6651f4d155e!8m2!3d41.540793!4d-73.046008)

</comment><comment><USER15> The police and the community seems to be more respectful of each other. The serving of warrant and how they arrested him would be the total opposite in our current society.

The only thing that has not changed is the ruthless corporations treatment of their employees.

<comment><USER11> On the other end, they detained their first suspect with next to no evidence, then locked him up in a mental ward for over 6 months despite new bombings happenings while he was in there.

Remember Serpico (not just the movie, but what the real guy uncovered): the New York police used to be hugely corrupt, until his testimony brought about changes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The writing of this was incredibly twee--"booming side business" in particular inspired a groan. I think that added to my enjoyment of this article.

<comment> rkuykendall-com My favorite line:

> Mullen clearly had every intention of throwing the book at Metesky, picking > it up, dusting it off, and throwing it again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Why put nuts and bolts in the bomb if he didn't really intent to hurt somebody?

<comment><USER18> I thought the same thing. A) The dude clearly had some loose screws. B) He was convinced his actions were just. After crossing that line, you can justify plenty of stuff to yourself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> There's also this which occurred in NYC in the 70s and remains unsolved:

[http://observer.com/2016/01/why-hasnt-washington- explained-t...](http://observer.com/2016/01/why-hasnt-washington-explained- the-1975-laguardia-airport-bombing/)

</comment><comment><USER9> Just imagine the pandemonium that would ensue if something like this would happen today. "Breaking News" 24/7 for as long as the campaign lasted.

</comment><comment><USER20> One nitpick: Con Ed's plant was _located near_ an actual thing called Hell Gate, not _nicknamed_ that. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell_Gate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell_Gate)

Also see its namesake bridge, under which seemingly every "dangerous meeting" scene of every movie ever, was shot.

</comment><comment><USER21> Damn interesting. Though I didn't quite get the whole dissolving-lozenge-as-a- timer thing. How would that work?

<comment><USER22> Probably a spring-loaded striker which is released once the lozenge has dissolved sufficiently. British WWII limpet mines used a similar system.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> The quality of the audio narration is really surprising!! Foley and music!

</comment><comment><USER24> I miss the good old days when cops could be cops. Locking people in mental institutions for 6 months, arresting people and killing them with heart attacks.

> Also, it was Friday.

</comment><comment><USER25> Back when newspapers actually did good, valuable work.

</comment><comment><USER26> >anti-communist red scare

McCarthism was as much anti-fascist as it was anti-communist, but of course commies would rewrite history to play the victims. Read the actual laws, it never mentions communism without mentioning fascism in the same sentence.

<comment><USER27> Would you please stop using HN for ideological battle? We ban accounts that do this because it violates HN's mandate. And we've asked you many times before.

<comment><USER26> I don't want to post about politics either, but people post ideological stuff, ideological replies should be expected, no? When I started using the website it was more focused on what it was meant to be, and I don't think I ever discussed politics then. Then the American elections happened and people started posting politics all the time. Well, political replies ensue. I flag posts that are purely political, I don't just reply to them.

<comment><USER27> HN has always had a certain amount of political discussion and while you're right that it fluctuates with external conditions, the core amount of it is pretty stable. But there's a difference between substantive discussion and ideological inflammation. Name-calling ("commies") and dismissive swipes ("stop being so defensive") belong to the latter, so please edit such bits out of your comments here.

The principle is simple: avoid flamebait to reduce flamewars.

<comment><USER26> That's fair, I will be more civil. But I don't think I am able to edit my comments.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Setting Up a Linux Workstation for Software Development - <AUTHOR> https://tkainrad.dev/posts/setting-up-linux-workstation/ <comment><USER2> Frankly speaking, I'd prefer to use macOS to do software development generally these days and since I don't really need to do alot of configuring my environment thanks to its consistent user interface and it fits my development mental model. Windows + WSL2 might suffice but only for Windows development but I rarely needed to boot-up and directly use a Linux desktop these days; just only for specific open-source needs or reproducibility scenarios via SSH.

As much as setting up a dev environment on a Linux desktop sounds "superior" in the authors opinion which to some extent I agree with in some use-cases, I'm afraid, I'd pretty much side with consistency over customization as I find it very difficult to reproduce bugs found in Linux distros / environments that are heavily customized, especially GUI applications. I'd simply just want to get on with the work I have to do rather than messing around with sane defaults and then having to end up reseting or googling issues over my setup.

> Whenever I read about new features for the Windows Subsystem for Linux, I > wonder why people settle for anything less than the real thing.

Perhaps Windows developers enjoy having a consistent Unix-like environment without having to install + configure everything. Plus they can enjoy running all those Windows apps anyway without doing a full blown migration to another OS.</comment>


The Headache Of Android Tablets - <AUTHOR> http://mikecanex.wordpress.com/2011/05/01/the-headache-of-android-tablets/

<comment><USER2> Tablets are not ready for prime-time yet; hardware manufacturers haven't had time to design good components and gear up production, and there is no software to speak of. There is the iPad and that's all the industry can handle right now.

In a few months, we'll see the good Android tablets start to roll out. Asus' transformer is the beginning of this cycle -- better hardware than the Xoom, same software, and much cheaper. By Christmas, I predict that there will be at least three excellent Android tablets in 7" and 10" form factors. You have to be patient -- if you want a tablet now, get an iPad. You won't be able to use it for anything other than what Apple says you can use it, but you can do those things today. If you want to do whatever you want, you will have to wait a bit for things to really get started.

(Yes, I owned an Archos Android tablet a few years ago. Fuck Archos. Never has a product made me hate a company so.)

<comment><USER3> I own a xoom. I like it. Not sure what you would change hardware wise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Half of his arguments seem to apply to Android before 3.0, and the other half are against the 10" screen.

If I wanted portable, I'd use my phone... It's much more portable than a 7" tablet... It certainly fits in my pocket better than a paperback book.

And the 'designed for phones' bit might be originally true, but 3.0 wasn't designed for phones. It was designed for tablets.

Oh, and his last argument, that Google won't let them put Google apps on the tablets, is wrong. All the good tablets have official permission now.

I thought this article would talk me out of buying a tablet, but it failed. I want one just as much as before.</comment>


The latest hot searches in Turkey - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends/visualize?nrow=5&ncol=5&pn=p24 (Tor browser is among the top) <comment><USER3> This is the worst site design I've ever seen. I find it pretty funny that the reason most people started using Google was because of how clean their designs were. Now everything they release is designed worse and worse. What happened to making things that are usable?

EDIT: Luckily there is still a usable view available: [http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends#pn=p24](http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends#pn=p24)

<comment><USER4> For whatever reason, the OP linked to the "visualize" view, which is pretty but pointless. The 'usable view' is the default (and would have been much better to link to).

That said, as of this writing, almost all the top searches appear to be about a standardized school test ("YGS"), and the only thing that even hints at Turkey's Twittercalypse is Tor at #7.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Really surprising that you can't click the search term to perform that search, seems so obvious.

</comment><comment><USER6> "Please sign-in." 'We want to know what you are interested in.'

</comment><comment><USER7> The whole time I looked, there was at least one person searching for "nekrofil" \- I feel like I'm missing some context...

<comment><USER8> Around a week ago, a Turkish "politician" who used to be the chief negotiator for EU affairs made what might have been the most tasteless comment in Turkish political history:

[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/03/13/egemen-bagis- necrop...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/03/13/egemen-bagis-necrophiliac- tweet-turkey-protest_n_4952315.html)

<comment><USER9> Looks like readers misinterpreted the context which made his comment quite reasonable. This is why democracies elect incompetent politicians - <USER2> won't vote for effective people who say the wrong things. Although calling someone a necrophiliac reinforces people's prejudice against necrophiliacs which is probably worse than calling someone gay but I doubt the outraged group-thinkers are concerned with that.</comment></comment></comment>