Smoke and Fumes: How the oil industry influenced the debate on climate change - <AUTHOR> https://www.smokeandfumes.org/#/ <comment><USER2> Outrage is not the answer, if you live in OECD countries you have a massive footprint that rivals villages of developing countries. So do something about it. No, your pre-order of Model 3 that is going to come 3 years down the pike, does not put a dent in your carbon footprint. It is one small step, the roads your Tesla drives on needs petro-chemicals, so do those perfectly manicured french fries. Oil industry is greedy and entrenched, and do not expect some sort of Egalitarian enlightenment not from them, Nor from SV companies that colluded to screw their employees by forming a Cartel. Understand human nature, and it will help you trying to see the problems through caricatures and hopefully to work towards solution.

Here is the hard truth, We are a fossil fuel civilization. The problems are complex, we can green wash and eat some organic pop corn, but that does not help.

edit: there are some serious people trying to bring real solutions, I find Vaclav Smil, taking it to the next level of thinking instead of the constant greenwashing marketing campaigns.

<comment><USER3> I live in a flat that is suitable for living alone, I don't drive, I cycle everywhere except when I need to go really long distances in which case I use public transport.

I buy nearly all my food from the local market most of which comes from farms within a hundred miles, I minimise energy consumption, most of the furniture I buy is good second hand stuff, I rarely buy clothes and everything I do own would fit on a single 3ft rack in a closet (and does).

I recycle as much waste as I can, I don't have a garden so that restricts some options in terms of growing food/composting.

I take showers not baths.

My desktop is 5 years old with upgrades, my laptop is 3 years old, I've no current plans to replace either.

I don't do any of this for purely ecological reasons (though that's a nice benefit) but because I have everything I need to live comfortably and I don't put much premium on expensive possessions, I want to own stuff not be owned by stuff.

Not really sure how much more I can do given that I rent so major energy upgrades aren't really a possibility.

<comment><USER4> Help organize collective action to make it easier for many more people to make the choices you're able to make.

<comment><USER5> Yup; not to knock personal lifestyle changes, but your own personal impact is a drop in the ocean- you only start to make a true difference when you can spread them to many other people.

Of course, practicing what you preach can be a key step in spreading those changes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The key document given in this article is the Robinson report of 1968. Looking at the excerpts given, this report made a prediction for CO2 level rise that can be tested: it predicted about 400 ppm by the year 2000 (from a value of about 320 in 1968). This was an overestimate: the actual level in 2000 (using the Mauna Loa measurements, which seem to be the key reference relied on in the report) was about 375.

This enables us to test a second prediction made by the report: the temperature increase caused by C02 level rise. The report gives a very wide range for this: 1.1 to 7 degrees Fahrenheit, depending on the humidity change. The usual baseline assumption about humidity is that relative humidity will remain constant, and the report notes that that assumption leads to the larger prediction--7 degrees F--for temperature rise by the year 2000. That is about 4 degrees Celsius.

Even if we correct for the actual CO2 level rise vs. predicted--about a 20% increase vs. 25% predicted--that still gives about a 3 degree Celsius predicted temperature rise by the year 2000, as compared to 1968. The actual rise was about 0.5 degrees Celsius.

The report does say that the estimating method it uses likely overestimates temperature rise; but it does not, as far as I can see, consider the possibility that it might overestimate temperature rise by so much. So as far as I can see, the oil industry's decision to treat this information as much more uncertain than its authors claimed was reasonable.

<comment><USER7> It seems that you're cherry-picking items in a deliberately deceptive way.

The CO2 level rise clearly must have been an estimate based on, "If we project current usage trends forward, here is how much fossil fuel gets burned. Here is what that does to CO2." That usage model would have been thrown off by the first OPEC price shock of the 1970s, which induced a lot of conservation efforts and resulted in significantly less emissions.

I'd be shocked if they had the basic "fossil fuel to CO2" relationship wrong. There is no way that they could have predicted the economic shocks that slowed consumption.

Now let's talk about their environmental model. They gave a range from about 1 F to 7 F. The actual rise is about 1 F. I'd call that a success! (And why did you switch between F and C? Was it just to make the actual rise seem smaller.)

Moving on, you argue for which model should apply, then argue that they got it wrong. Your behavior already doesn't make me trust you, but let's assume you are right. What mistake likely explains it?

My best guess is that they simply did a long-term steady state model for what temperature things would stabilize at. That is a relatively simple calculation, and would have been fairly accurate if the atmosphere were mostly separate from the ocean. However we've learned since that heat exchanges with the oceans are much larger than we knew. (I remember circa 1990 learning in fluid mechanics that there was a big question THEN about how much global warming would slow down.) So the long-term temperature picture in the model is relatively accurate, but we get there more slowly than predicted.

This is the kind of detail of our system that we COULD NOT have predicted with 1960s science. They knew that they were overestimated and knew that they would be right in the end, but had no way to know how long it would take to get there.

<comment><USER8> From this reply it is clear that the GP read, at least, the portions of the Robinson paper excerpted in the article. Unfortunately, the particular critiques that you have made indicate that you have not read them.

For example, the switch from F to C is because the underlying paper is written using F, as that was the style of the time; but the GP presented in C as that is the current preferred unit.

Robinson admits that the model is crude, as he was using an older model of Moller (from 1964), and that he expected that more sophisticated models would improve forecast accuracy. Nonetheless, the numbers presented in the paper are reflected accurately in the GP's post, including uncertainty ranges, and the comparisons seen valid at a glance.

In this case, the GP is not cherry-picking, at least not in the usual sense, as they are using the "cherry-picked" portions of the paper to produce verifiable predictions.

Admitting that early models of climate change make some inaccurate predictions does not necessarily undermine the correctness of the directionality, especially as newer research has come to light, but it does present a less sinister explanation as to why the results were not taken as seriously modern observers feel they should have been.

<comment><USER7> The article had failed to load for me, so I was basing what I said on what was excerpted and what I read elsewhere.

That said, now that I find it, it is easy to dig in for details. Moller's model from 1964 can be read in [http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/JZ068i013p03877/a...](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/JZ068i013p03877/abstract) and says up front that a 1% increase in cloudiness is sufficient to counteract the warming effects of 30 ppm in CO2. I'm sure it leaves out ocean heat sink effects. According to [https://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/far/wg_I/ipcc_far_wg_I_chapt...](https://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/far/wg_I/ipcc_far_wg_I_chapter_07.pdf) it seems that cloudiness HAS increased several percent. Which means that the top end of the projection (which the GP thinks it the right model) would have been the wrong projection to use.

From whence did the GP draw the incorrect claim that humidity has remained the same? Shouldn't he have done the same Google searches that I just did and come to the same conclusion??

<comment><USER6> _> I'd be shocked if they had the basic "fossil fuel to CO2" relationship wrong._

I would too, and I wasn't claiming that they did. The CO2 rise prediction in the Robinson 1968 paper was actually reasonable; but the fact remains that to compare their temperature prediction with what actually happened, we have to first adjust it based on what actually happened with CO2 compared to what they predicted.

 _> They gave a range from about 1 F to 7 F. The actual rise is about 1 F. I'd call that a success!_

They gave a range _based on different assumptions about how humidity would change_. Their prediction of 1 F was based on no change in _absolute_ humidity --i.e., the same absolute water vapor content in the air despite a rise in temperature. That corresponds to a significant _reduction_ in relative humidity, which clearly did not occur. In fact, the actual data on relative humidity change suggests, if anything, a slight _increase_ in RH from 1968 to 2000. The Robinson 1968 paper prediction corresponding to that assumption is 7 F, as I said. So their prediction was not a success.

 _> why did you switch between F and C?_

Current temperature projections, such as the IPCC reports, routinely use C, so that's what most recent figures are quoted in, including the data on temperature rise over the late 20th century. Feel free to convert back to F if you're more comfortable with that.

 _> the top end of the projection (which the GP thinks it the right model)_

I didn't say I personally thought it was the "right" model; I said it's the model that appears to be most consistent with the position taken by the Robinson 1968 paper. Remember that the topic of discussion here is not how the climate actually changed from 1968 to 2000; the topic is whether the oil companies, in 1968, were remiss in not accepting the predictions made in the Robinson 1968 paper and acting accordingly--since that's the argument the article is making.

 _> From whence did the GP draw the incorrect claim that humidity has remained the same?_

I said the usual _assumption_ in making climate predictions is that relative humidity remains constant. (The data seems to bear out this assumption, as I noted above; but I don't see any data on RH in the excerpts of the Robinson 1968 paper.) Relative humidity is not the same as "cloudiness", so I don't see how your findings say anything about how, if at all, RH actually changed from 1968 to 2000.

Also, the Robinson 1968 paper, as far as I can tell from the excerpts, does not mention "cloudiness". This might simply be because that paper misunderstood Moller's model. But in any case, that would mean the Robinson 1968 paper did not take into account an additional factor that would clearly _reduce_ the predicted temperature rise based on a given CO2 rise. So if you are correct that the actual increase in cloudiness was significant in reducing the temperature rise over the last half century, you are _agreeing_ with me that the Robinson 1968 paper was overpredicting temperature rise, and therefore the oil companies, in 1968, were not remiss in treating that paper as they did.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Not divulging their internal research cannot be a crime because industries conduct private research for all kinds of competitive reasons. But the funding of false propaganda campaigns that they know are the opposite of their research should definitely be illegal, probably under fraud legislation I think. The problem is you can't find out that their propaganda campaigns are knowingly false because the research is secret. Though, as with the tobacco industry, the research does seem to leak out eventually, but it can take decades after all the original criminals are dead.

</comment><comment><USER10> > When do we hold someone responsible for a harm? What if the harm is climate > change?

We all burned oil in our cars. We didn't make an effort to carpool because it wasn't convenient. Skipped days riding our bike to work because it's too cold, etc.

To me holding the blame entirely on the oil industry is akin to persecuting prostitutes for sex crime.

<comment><USER11> Did you deliberately obfuscate, falsify documents, spend millions on misleading advertising, attempt to buy off critics or fund massive lobbying of law makers to make legislation become more favourable to yourself and increase your profitability?

<comment><USER12> Combining the two, would still have done this:

 _" We didn't make an effort to carpool because it wasn't convenient."_

if the oil companies had not done this:

 _" deliberately obfuscate, falsify documents, spend millions on misleading advertising, attempt to buy off critics or fund massive lobbying of law makers"_

If you think the answer is obviously yes, then also please think about the dramatic turn in smoking statistics since it was revealed that the cigarette companies were acting in the same manner.

<comment><USER11> Um. I'm having difficulty parsing your question. Are you saying we wouldn't have behaved in the way we did if petrol companies didn't do all those dreadful things?

<comment><USER12> There are certainly a lot of 'not's in the statements, so I apologize for the confusion. I was trying to keep the previous comments pure.

At a basic level:

Would we have taken the same actions, if the oil industry had not taken the same actions?

If someone thinks the answer the question is, 'obviously yes', then I'm suggesting they look at the results of the revelations of the same actions by the tobacco industry.

If someone thinks anything else, I'm not making any specific statement.

<comment><USER13> I think something else, because I don't think that individual human choice is the only driver of _society_ , and modern human civilization.

This is precisely the role of policy and governance - we don't use CFCs for example, and we move towards more progressive emissions norms around the world every year.

lots of people would be tremendously happy to wait for tomorrow to make a difficult moral choice, even if it was obviously immoral.

And then there's additional fallout. The improvement and evolution FUD. A series of catchy rhetorical arguments, has given birth to "deniers", and the amazingly made expertise itself toxic.

And with the web, this malaise spreads over the English speaking web and infect other countries, forums and communities.

So, yes - as a society we would have taken different decisions and at a different time scale.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> saiya-jin how about we start considering every single corporation above certain size/revenue not as an altruistic setup but rather ruthless gain-at-almost- all-costs oriented businesses and deal with them accordingly. and it would be their responsibility to prove state and public otherwise. something along presumed guilty until proven innocent.

I know, naive and with many holes, but imagine it for a moment...

</comment><comment><USER14> Even if you took all the oil industry executives and board members and brutally murdered them on live television, leaving their corpses to hang from trees by their disemboweled entrails, it would not change anything. Others would take their place, doing the same thing. We all enable this by creating the demand.

<comment><USER11> Yeah, that's a pretty inappropriate reaction!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Is the industry or us evil? most of us have big suv's that we drive alone and the only thing we care about oil is the price.

Some will look worried, chat on forums about these stuff but continue to do nothing because "there is nothing we can do".

<comment><USER16> I don't think your assertions are correct. This article[0] is a bit old (2015), but it puts the number of SUVs on the road at 35%. There absolutely are things you can do, though obviously you, personally, aren't going to solve the problem. For example, skipping meat one day a week can have pretty substantial affects on emissions[1]. Or you can get involved with a group that is organizing around climate change.

[0] - [http://www.goodcarbadcar.net/2016/01/usa-suv-crossover- marke...](http://www.goodcarbadcar.net/2016/01/usa-suv-crossover-market- share-2015-sales-chart.html) [1] - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Livestock's_Long_Shadow](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Livestock's_Long_Shadow)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Easily solved -- let's all stop using petrochemicals of all kinds.

<comment><USER18> That would _devastate_ the global economy.

<comment><USER19> Using petrochemicals has _already devastated_ the global economy. We will spend trillions to attempt to fix the damage that has already been caused, when exactly $0 is what we should have to spend. We are causing a mass extinction event on the planet and will never be able to undo all the physical damage done. We will spend a huge amount of the world's money, resources and time to do our best to fix it, and all that is wasted because it could have been used to move forward sustainably rather than make a few people obscenely rich at the expense of most life on Earth.

<comment><USER20> Your basic premise is not terribly convincing. The earth, and humanity, are in no serious danger of collapse. The measurable advantages our species has because of our industrialization seem far more tangible and have far more weight than your emotions, no matter how stridently expressed.

I understand how difficult it is to hate people who have things (your unrelated parting shot at the "obscenely rich" is rather telling) and also want to express that hatred in a morally defensible way, but I don't think hyperbolic lies are as useful as you want them to be.

<comment><USER19> > The earth, and humanity, are in no serious danger of collapse.

Many species on Earth are indeed in very serious danger of extinction due to human-caused climate change. Here is a paper in Nature discussing this: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14712274](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14712274)

> The measurable advantages our species has because of our industrialization > seem far more tangible and have far more weight than your emotions, no > matter how stridently expressed.

I disagree with this. We could have industrialized and gained those measurable advantages without causing all of this destruction. That's what this HN link is about: why did we do this? Partly because the rich and wealthy people controlled the public's understanding of the risks in a way that would keep their money flowing at the detriment of our health.

> your unrelated parting shot at the "obscenely rich" is rather telling

How is this unrelated? The pursuit of wealth and the greed of the oil executives is directly related to this disaster. I do not "hate people that have things". I have lots of things. I do, however, hate people who are so greedy as to pollute our planet and cause runaway global greenhouse effects purely for their own gain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The harder problem to solve is social, I think. The planet is literally unable to support 7 billion people living a USA/Western Europe lifestyle. Who's going to be the one to tell all the people in developing economies, "Sorry, but you can't have those things that we have."

<comment><USER22> > Who's going to be the one to tell all the people in developing economies, > "Sorry, but you can't have those things that we have."

Who is going to be so brave to tell poor third world countries they cannot have nice things? We do all the time, by complicity in geopolitics which consist in things such as propping up dictators elsewhere so "our" corporations can get bigger slices of pies and resources rather than the local population. Not to mention war. So who is going to tell the actual centers of power that this can not be tolerated any longer? That is the real question IMO.

The problem is taking out resources and exploiting people at a level that cannot be sustained; not that others want to do it _too_ , but that anyone does.

I mean, what is "a Western lifestyle"? For me it's stuff like basic sanitation, freedom of speech, high literacy rates, having medicine and clothes and shelter. Living and letting live, and last but not least work, preferably meaningful. Yes, some prosperity is a requirement to even have the possibility of those things. But buying new things all the time, ordering screws individually at Amazon, and throwing away a lot of plastic, those things and others seem not strictly needed to me.

We need the scientific method, human rights and rule of law, not so much a constant stream of trinkets. People should be free to strive for trinkets, sure, but without too much pollution (which is essentially a way of restricting the freedom of others; indirectly, but very powerfully). As many things in life, it's not really a complex issue, it's not wanting to step on the toes of powerful people or peers that makes it complicated and contorted I think.</comment></comment>


Big Data Coming in Faster Than Biomedical Researchers Can Process It - happy-go-lucky http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/11/28/503035862/big-data-coming-in-faster-than-biomedical-researchers-can-process-it <comment><AUTHOR> One point: Most Bio type people have not had multi-variable calculus, and many have not had calculus at all. So, it's not really that they _can 't_ process it fast enough, it's that their techniques for processing it are stereotypical. They figured out how to do that T-Test (or something else) once, and they stick with it, because they really don't know he math behind it.

Also, though there is a TON of 'data' coming in, most of it is not useful. For example, I have a 500Gb file of a stack of .tiff images per fish that I have imaged in a confocal microscope. I have a GFP filter on the scope and therefore only get the green part of the .tiff files exposed, the red and blue are just background noise. Also, most of the image is the dish I have the fishes in. I tickle the fish, they flick their tails, and I see this all in 120fps. Now, I measure how much of an angle the fish made their tails flick, all in 3-D, because that's what the scope records in. I have a half TB per fish to comb through, and I have ~20 fishes, say ~10TB. At the end, I get a single graph comparing the fish with some gene to those without it, and I have 10TB of 'data' left over. Yeah, someone _could_ comb through it all and find something else to look at. But i forgot to record the precise temperatures, the orientation of the fish, the fish that I knew later died, etc. I had that all in my head. And, hey, what do you know?, the p-value is ~.45 and therefore there is no 'real' difference in the fish and we can't include this in a paper. Now all that 'data' is being kept on a drive on some computer somewhere and is counted towards the budget that the lab has on the shared spaces. It's not really 'data' anymore, in that it is useful to advancing knowledge for anyone (it counts as practice I guess), but it still clogs up space.

<comment><USER2> Totally on point, regarding multivariate relationships! The problem is not that they do T-test (and other Stat-101-jargon blackbox stuff), but that they stop at it. To many of them, even the existence of multivariate effects is beyond their imagination.

So, inference to many biomedical folks is just 1-dimensional. Big data has a long way to go to penetrate fields where people cannot think in more than 1 dimension!

<comment><USER3> The best way to get published is to use a variation on a method that was used many times before. Since the novelty you're focused on is something biological, you stick with the same statistical methods that have gotten published for the last decade.

Unfortunately, there just doesn't seem to be much tenure-juice from innovating in statistical methods for most life-science fields. Not all, of course. Science moves slowly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm a biologist by training. Eventually my research hit a data wall (my simulations produced too much data for my storage and processing system). I had read a paper on GFS and Mapreduce and Bigtable from Google, and decided to go work there. I got hired onto an SRE (production ops) team and spent my 20% time learning how production data processing works at scale.

After a few years I understood stuff better and moved my pipelines to MapReduce. And I built a bigger simulator (Exacycle). It was easy to process 100+T datasets in an hour or so. It wasn't a lot of work, really. We converted external data forms to protobufs and stored them in various container files. Then we ported the code that computed various parameters from the simulation to MapReduce.

I took this knowledge, looked at the market, and heard "storing genomic data is hard". After some research, I found that storing genomic data isn't hard at all. People spend all their time complaining about storage and performance, but when you look, they're using tin can telephones and wind up toy cars. This is because most scientists specialize in their science, not in data processing. So, based on this I built a product called 'Google Cloud Genomics' which stores petabytes of data (some public, some private for customers). Our customers love it- they do all their processing in Google Cloud, with fast access to petabytes of data. We've turned something that required them to hire expensive sysadmins and data scientists into something their regular scientists can just use (for example, from BigQuery or Python).

One of the things that really irked me about genomic data is that for several years people were predicting exponential growth of sequencing and similar rates of storage needs. They made ludicrous projections and complained that not enough hard drives were made to store their forthcoming volumes. oh, and the storage cost too much, too. Well, the reality is that genomic data doesn't ahve enough value to archive it for long times (sorry, folks, for those that believe it: your BAM files don't have value enough for you to pay the incredibly low rates storage providers charge! Also, we can just order more harddrives, Seagate just produces drive to meet demand, so if there is a real demand signal and money behind it, the drives will be made. Actual genomic data is tiny compared to cat videos.

The real issue is that most researchers don't have the tools or incentives to properly collect, store, and use big data. Until that is fixed, the field will continue in a crisis.

<comment><USER5> Question from ignorance: how do you get "petabytes of data" into the Google Cloud in a reasonable time? I find copying a mere few TB can take days and that's on a local network not over the internet.

<comment><USER6> I'd also be interested to hear this.

I'm running a project that's 10gb in size and uploading the data to AWS S3 was absurdly slow.

Is there any way to speed up the upload that you found? 10 GB was painful though, I can't imagine uploading terabytes.

<comment><USER7> I don't work in this specific field, but did previously, during the first decade of this century, in broadcast video distribution.

At the time, UDP based tools such as Aspera[1], Signiant[2] and FileCatalyst[3] were all the rage for punting large amount of data over the public Internet.

[1] [http://asperasoft.com/](http://asperasoft.com/)

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

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

<comment><USER8> Aspera, is the current winner in Bioinformatics. The European Bioinformatics Institute and US NCBI are both big users of it. Mainly for INSDC (Genbank/ENA/DDBJ) and SRA (Short Read Achive) uploads.

For UniProt a smaller dataset we just use it to clone servers and data from Switzerland to the UK and US at 1GB/s over wide area internet.

Very fast, and quite affordable.

<comment><USER4> I used aspera for a while, but plain old HTTP over commodity networks works fine if you balance your transfers over many TCP connections.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It seems like there's good opportunity for skilled data scientists and engineers to make a real difference here. I do think that laypersons (to both medicine and engineering) think that practitioners in medicine and biology have mastered such mundane things like data pipelines, because you have to be so smart to be in medicine/biology, but my limited experience has been more along the lines of what Neil Saunders describes as the inspiration for his coding+bioinformatics blog:

[https://nsaunders.wordpress.com/about-2/about/](https://nsaunders.wordpress.com/about-2/about/)

> You may be wondering about the title of this blog.

> _Early in my bioinformatics career, I gave a talk to my department. It was > fairly basic stuff – how to identify genes in a genome sequence, standalone > BLAST, annotation, data munging with Perl and so on. Come question time, a > member of the audience raised her hand and said:_

> _"It strikes me that what you're doing is rather desperate. Wouldn't you be > better off doing some experiments?"_

> _It was one of the few times in my life when my jaw literally dropped and > swung uselessly on its hinges. Ultimately though, her question did make a > great blog title._

edit: To add an anecdote that I believe I read on HN; regarding the topic of the huge datamine of DNA and other health data provided by the U.S. government, a commenter said that the reason it was all on FTP was because professors couldn't download large datasets via their web browser, or some such technical hiccup.

I won't say that putting data on the Web makes it automatically more accessible, but data discovery through FTP requires a bit of scripting skill that I imagine the average biomedical scientist does not have.

<comment><USER10> I agree--the impact of a great engineer working in healthcare is very high, particularly if you partner with medical experts.

We're a small startup that has partnered with UCSF Cardiology to detect abnormal heart rhythms, and other conditions, using deep learning on Apple Watch heart rate data:

      https://wsj.com/articles/new-study-seeks-to-use-deep-learning-to-detect-heart-disease-1458240739

      https://blog.cardiogr.am/three-challenges-for-artificial-intelligence-in-medicine-dfb9993ae750

      https://a16z.com/2016/10/20/cardiogram/

We have about 10B sensor data points so far. If you're a machine learning engineer and interested in working on this type of problem, feel free to email me: firstname.lastname@example.com.

<comment><USER11> I'm curious. What is your definition of "machine learning engineer"? Are you talking mostly feature engineering or something deeper. If so, what?

<comment><USER10> In our case, we're applying deep learning to sensor data, so much of the day- to-day work of a machine learning engineer is experimenting with new neural architectures rather than feature engineering by hand. For example, we're using or interested in techniques like:

      * semi-supervised sequence learning (we have a paper in a NIPS workshop next week on applying sequence autoencoders to health data, for example)

      * deep generative models

      * variational RNNs

From a day-to-day perspective, we use tools like Tensorflow and Keras, similar to most AI research labs. In general, we try to act as a software startup that happens to work in healthcare, rather than as what you might think of as a traditional biotech or medical device startup.

Does that help answer your question?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Yeah, that happens when you prioritize buying sequencers and building genome centers while pretending that analysts grow on trees.

The post-docs and graduate students who do the heavy lifting on all of these projects don't make a living wage.

They can't raise a family, buy a house, or save for the future. The people in charge made them indentured servants and now those leaders are going to reap the whirlwind.

<comment><USER13> Yep. Money is strangely spent. Incentives and historical attitudes of the field regarding money are hard to change.

$500k for a new microscope, no problem! It's a fancy, four channel live microscope. So it takes four 1Mb images each frame, and you're running a 10min long experiment taking an image 5 times per second. So that's like 12Gb per imageset. And you take like 10/15 replicates per experiment under 3-5 different conditions. That data for that experiment which under-girds a 6-7 figure grant is now stored on a $100 3TB USB disk from Best Buy. Oh, and trying to process that 12Gb image over USB2.0 using MatLab on a student's personal macbook air is horribly inefficient - but there is no other option for the student really.

The students collecting the data and storing it on their local HD or laptop hard drive have no place to archive their data even if they wanted to. There are no repositories capable of generically storing that kind of huge data that needs to be frequently accessed at the price the students/labs are willing to pay (nothing).

And this speaks nothing about the code every student reinvents in MatLab to do basic scientific analysis. Or worse, does not reinvent and instead reuses 20-year old code written by some long-forgotten student who wanted to try their hand at a 'new' programming language like IDL.

The 'students' and postdocs are paid nearly minimum wage to do the high-tech biomedical research. There are no computer-scientists to be seen because they would be fools to give up making 5-8x money across the street at Twitter.

On the other hand, the scientists know their work really well, and it will take a truly integrated team to solve these issues. A computer scientist can't just come over for a day and write up an app to help out. The code will have to make scientific assumptions and must be custom for many/most projects. But it's very hard to build a capable team when the market salary for certain kinds of team members is multiples of another on the same team.

<comment><USER14> I am surprised they don't use something like S3 to scale up the storage withouf buying hardware.

<comment><USER8> From the perspective of the student S3 over university wifi is not "better" than local USB2 hard drives. It actually is a risk budget wise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I've heard about this a lot from people I know who work in healthcare. It seems that one could make a successful business simply by hiring a bunch of data scientists to offer analytics and data processing services for healthcare, but what's preventing that? Is there a lack of expertise, funding, too much regulation, or something else?

<comment><USER16> There's a bunch of issues:

\- Real, bespoke biomedical analysis is not trivial in effort, cost, or time. There are biomedical analysis systems-in-a-box (look at [https://galaxyproject.org](https://galaxyproject.org)), but that's just canned analysis. To make real breakthroughs, you need rigorous analysis that requires years of experience to be able to perform.

\- It's easier to get the money to collect the data than it is to effectively steward the data you collect. In a past life, I ran a biomedical research computing facility, and everyone got plenty of money for new sequencers, mass specs, and other fancy instruments. They got plenty of money for collecting all kinds of data. No one would ever add money to their grants to actually STORE the data. They would literally put the data on USB hard drives bought from Best Buy, and left them in file cabinets and on desks. There was absolutely nothing I could do about this, and so I quit.

\- Research is balkanized to hell. Even though I ran the scientific computing for 20 research labs, each research lab was its own fiefdom. They could decide to obey or disobey my policies at will, since they controlled their own funding. You can imagine what happened when I proposed turning on quotas (~100TB per lab, to start!). Rather than work with my team to determine how to share resources, people would just jump off my high speed facility, buy a shitty cheap JBOD from Dell for their analysis, and store their archives on shitty cheap USB hard drives from Best Buy. The funniest part was that if the hard drive failed, and the data couldn't be restored, in theory the primary investigators could get into real legal trouble. No one seemed to worry.

There are a few biomedical research institutes that "get" scientific data stewardship - Broad, Scripps, but for the most part, biomedical research computing is a total clusterfuck and I couldn't have gotten out of there fast enough for the way saner land of tech companies.

<comment><USER17> I agree. A lot lab do not want to hire good developer or data scientist. Or they do not have the money to hire, even they spend thousands in data collecting.

check the job here, most of them are postdoc level. [https://www.biostars.org/t/Jobs/](https://www.biostars.org/t/Jobs/)

the postdoc level means you get about 50k~80k, even in bay area.

The situation is really bad.

<comment><USER18> I believe money is definitely a big part of it. If you have the skills needed to help manage and analyze "big" data (big as in too big to realistically handle in Excel, which is the limit of most biologists), you can easily earn much more somewhere else.

<comment><USER19> Partially. I worked with bioinformatics labs until recently. Career progression is limited as they treat a software engineer as a technician, and nothing more. They don't appreciate the value you bring unless you are publishing papers (certainly in the last two institutes I worked in).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> To most here:

Try to make sure you aren't just helping people publish papers for the sake of it. As soon as you sense that, stop working with them. It is a very, very bad thing.

</comment><comment><USER21> This isn't just in Biomedical fields.

In Earth Sciences, Astronomy and presumably quite a few other fields there is a staggering amount of data coming in and the number of people who have the required domain knowledge, math knowledge and programming knowledge is not growing as fast as the data is. Teams can and do help, but well, there is lots of work out there.

<comment><USER14> The LSST is a telescope project that is a sky survey and is to generate 15tb of data a day. Staggering amount of data coming in.

The data processing pipelines need to be very efficient and questions clear to tackle these. Not to mention the processing algorithms for this data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> This isn't very surprising to me. Data is relatively cheap and the (effective) analytics of it is where the value lies. This typically the case, isn't it?

That said, this is a good reminder that data scientists are in high demand and can make a difference.

</comment><comment><USER23> If you're interested in working on an open source project involving big data, machine learning and cancer, check out cognoma.org. It is sponsored by UPenn's greenelab.com

</comment><comment><USER24> Anyone know of open datasets one could play around with?

<comment><USER25> The Harvard Personal Genome Project Over 200 whole genomes and I think over 500 genotyping data (23andMe and the like) released under a CC0 license with sporadic phenotype data [1]. Open Humans [2] has a bunch of data with a convenient API [3]. OpenSNP has a lot of genotyping data (23andMe etc.) available for download [4].

For a more comprehensive list check out one of the many "Awesome Public Datasets" [5] (biology section).

[1] [https://my.pgp-hms.org/public_genetic_data](https://my.pgp- hms.org/public_genetic_data)

[2] [https://www.openhumans.org/members/](https://www.openhumans.org/members/)

[3] [https://www.openhumans.org/public-data- api/](https://www.openhumans.org/public-data-api/)

[4] [https://opensnp.org/](https://opensnp.org/)

[5] [https://github.com/caesar0301/awesome-public- datasets#biolog...](https://github.com/caesar0301/awesome-public- datasets#biology)

<comment><USER26> Incidentally, Arvados ([http://arvados.org](http://arvados.org)) is the software used to host the Harvard PGP data, and is a free software platform for managing large scale storage and analysis aimed at scientific workloads.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Isn't Watson Health in exactly this space?

<comment><USER12> Waston can only categorize what is already known about genomes given existing research.

What we need is to have people who can ask questions and think critically. Good, hypothesis driven science is how we discover entirely new concepts and mechanisms.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> If that much data is being collected it's time to start asking what we're looking for within it, and if the rate of collection, retention, and range if inputs is worth it.

Maybe it only makes sense to store sections which deviate in a significant way from a range of error (lossy compression).

Maybe some of those inputs just don't make sense for the questions being asked.

A concrete reasoning for why the data should be kept needs to be presented, and THAT is what should call for the funding to back that need.

<comment><USER29> Genomic data is basically stored as "diffs" from the reference genome. For humans, that's "some guy from Buffalo", as a UCSC professor put it.

<comment><USER28> My take was that this was mostly 'telemetry' data from all of the vital signs monitors hooked up to a patient.</comment></comment></comment>


S-expressions for fun and profit - <AUTHOR> http://www.mohiji.org/2011/01/s-expressions/

<comment><USER2> Unnecessarily indirect. A JSON file would have provided the same advantages here, except it would not have required a fully separate language runtime, just a JSON library. Text files as data is definitely a great idea, though.

<comment><USER3> But using JSON would have required parsing text in order to load the file. That's fine in a lot of domains, but games often have to load megs and megs of data in a very short time.

To speed things up, lots of games have this sort of external program that reads in a human-readable text format and outputs cooked binary files (with appropriate endianness and so forth) for the game runtime to consume. The fact that this utility is an external program means that there's not a reason not to use a nice language instead of a C library.

For a toy example like this, the advantage isn't obvious, but when you're consuming dozens or hundreds of megs of compiled text, it's indispensable.

<comment><USER4> How was the text not parsed in the author's example? He did not write the parsing code, but the text always has to be parsed _somewhere_ if you're going to do anything with the data in the text.

The parent post was suggesting to replace external calls to Common Lisp with external calls to a library for JSON parsing. In both instances, the text is parsed, and in both instances, it's possible to transform the human-readable data to a convenient-for-C binary format. The parent suggested that calling a JSON library would be faster than Common Lisp - I cannot evaluate that claim, but it may be true.

<comment><USER3> The distinction I'm trying to make is between parsing the text once (using a compiler-like utility which is separate from the game runtime) then shipping the "compiled" binary format, versus shipping the text file and parsing it every time it's loaded by the game.

I took the parent post to be suggesting linking JSON into the game and parsing on each load -- IMO, the separate-data-compiler approach is superior for large projects, as it speeds up loading by a couple orders of magnitude. That's what I was trying to say.

(On the other hand, linking the entire Common Lisp runtime into your game just to load text files is a terrible idea. Obviously JSON is better for runtime parsing, but I don't think that's what the author is doing.)

So, if you then ask what language the separate data compiler should be written in, it seems like Lisp is a nice approach since it has a nice native object format with a built-in parser. Presumably you could also write it in JavaScript or some other language with excellent JSON support (Ruby? I'm getting outside my expertise here) and get a similar benefit vis-a-vis not having to write a parser.

Edit: I'm betraying my C heritage by saying "linking the Common Lisp runtime." Does that make any sense at all? Assume I mean some viable method of shipping Lisp with the game and making external calls to it somehow. ;)

<comment><USER4> I understand what you're saying, but I think you're unnecessarily conflating two orthogonal concepts: how the human-readable data is parsed, and whether the shipped game uses that process or loads a binary format. Jerf's post made no mention of changing the second concept, only the first.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Because no one else is saying it: Most misleading title I've seen on Hacker News yet!</comment>


Show HN: Wregex – How Regular Expression Engines Work - <AUTHOR> http://wstoop.co.za/wregex.php <comment><USER2> I'm with glangdale on this one. Some parts of this are strange, but it was overall a fun read. Thanks. :-)

> DFAs have some big advantages over NFAs: Because DFA regex engines don't > need to backtrack they are in general much faster than NFAs. Also, because > NFAs need to backtrack, it is possible to structure your pattern in such a > way that the backtracking will cause nearly infinite loops on certain input > sequences. DFAs also don't need the non-greedy operators STAR? and +?

Two points to make here. NFAs certainly do not need to backtrack. You can write an NFA implementation that inspects each byte at most M times, where M ~ len(regex). You can implement this with a virtual machine: [https://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp2.html](https://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp2.html)

The other point is that "DFAs don't need non-greedy operators" doesn't really make any sense. Were you thinking of possessive quantifiers instead? Non- greedy operators don't impact whether a match occurs or not, but they can certainly impact the length of a match. Both NFAs and DFAs can implement those semantics.

<comment><USER3> You can write an NFA implementation that can inspect each byte _once_. Of course, you won't get capturing or greedy/non-greedy semantics as a result. Even Start of Match is a challenge.

We did have a project for a while which did capturing (in a Glushkov NFA) in two passes - you had to inspect each byte twice (if you were content with a O(N) size requirement for side storage, where N is the size of the input), three times (with a O(sqrt(N) side storage requirement), ... k times (with a O(power(N, 1/(k-1)) side storage requirement).

It was quite cool, but we never found a customer, and it polluted the Hyperscan source base in many weird ways.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I am not convinced that what is shown as an NFA corresponds to what is normally understood as an NFA. I don't think that makes it bad (in fact, it can do more things than a strict NFA, like capturing and back-references), but it is remarkably different to a Thompson NFA or a Glushkov NFA.

Something that can backtrack has a stack. I suspect this removes you from 'finite' territory; the 'F' in '*FA'.

I think Friedl has a lot to answer for in his muddying of the waters here. It's created a lot of headaches for us over the years, as we implement both DFA and NFA (strict) matching in Hyperscan, and people do ask us why our NFAs can't do backreferences. :-)

<comment><USER4> Something that has a _finite_ stack is still in 'finite' territory. Is there an upper bound on the number of backtracking steps?

<comment><USER3> Anything that can grow proportionally with the input (regardless of which O() it is) takes us out of finite territory.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Even better, a visualized state machine, with email regex demo: [https://tinyurl.com/ycel7z3k](https://tinyurl.com/ycel7z3k)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I created a regular expression many years ago. I did it mostly for my own enrichment, but I've made some time recently to write an essay on how it works.

<comment><USER6> nice and concise explanation.</comment></comment>


Why Knuth stopped using email - <AUTHOR> http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html

<comment><USER2> Heh, and email was just the beginning... If he can't stand email I wonder how would he react to even more distracting things such as IM, Facebook, Twitter.

</comment><comment><USER3> What is greatness, you ask? It is the ability of a man to stand on his own, against the whole world, against the very flow of time itself:

 _Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration._

</comment><comment><USER4> Same reason I quit using email.</comment>


Hindu Nationalists Undertake Effort to Rewrite History in India - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/india-modi-culture/ <comment><USER3> This is a clickbait article.

The current government, under the façade of "Hindu Nationalism" is doing zilch (at least until now, nothing noticeable) to fix the education system that has been messed by the previous administration.

No matter how much you tweak with history, its not going to be effective if education system is left in shambles.Adding to that is the ministry of education, that knows how to troll bait international and Indian media, which tends to follow a certain ideology (thats not 'Hindu Nationalist').

With that said, having read more and more content from independent authors (not funded by an institution, publicly) I believe Indian history needs a thorough redo.

Problem is not with misinformation, but with lack of adequate information. The 1% of history gets 99% focus, whereas an equally amazing 99% is not mentioned, either due to laziness or due to scheming history writers, wanting to support a particular ideology.

Whats worse, is an Indian kid learns more about 200 to 400 yr old architecture around the world, but zilch about a 1000yr old fort or a temple in his/her own state.

Whatever the effort of rewriting history, as claimed in this article is, it is not going to have any serious effect, other than a few progressive-liberal news outlets hyperventilating on a non-issue that will be forgotten when Trump/Putin/KimJongUn et al throw a new troll-bait.

<comment><USER4> > having read more and more content from independent authors (not funded by an > institution, publicly)

Could you please list these books, papers etc? I too am in hunt of more neutral, unbiased work.

<comment><USER5> I really suggest that you dig into original references.

1\. Read translations of original Buddhist/Jain literature and the Puranas to get an idea of the founding of the Nandas, Pataliputra, Chanakya, Chandragupta Maurya, and Ashoka.

2\. Read translations of Megasthenes, Hiuen Tsang, and Fa-hein.

3\. Read translations of Harshacharita by Banabhatta to get a feel of Harshavardhana's empire. Read how Banabhatta tears into the practice of Sati - in 600AD. No modern history book will tell you about this.

4\. Read "History of India by it's Own Historians" \- Elliot to get an idea of the Muslim invasions and the Mughals. These are translations of biographies and works of Muslim historians spanning Ghazni to the Mughals.

<comment><USER6> It's probably "History of India by its Own Historians".

<comment><USER7> And it's worth noting that it was written specifically to advance the view that British colonialism was okay because, apparently, the Mughals and the Central Asian Sultans were worse.

<comment><USER5> It's a translation of various Muslim historians. So you can go read the original text. You can completely ignore the "British commentary" if you so wish.

<comment><USER7> Even if you don't read his commentaries, you have to contend with his selection of source material - texts and translations. They don't exist in a vacuum, they have purpose and context.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Not more of this pearl-clutching sensationalist reporting. India has shown no signs (any more than before) of the Hindu nationalism that was supposed to sweep the nation once Modi came to power. He is no more Hindu nationalist than Shashi "Why I am a Hindu" Tharoor (one can't give it away, the other can't pay for it).

Modi will fall, oh sure, Modi will fall. But mostly because he did not deliver on all his promises of economic miracles, which really, being a pragmatic people, is mostly what Indians care about. Indians are either too smart or too busy (or both) to care about the nuances of history as written in text books for children (which they only read before the exams to regurgiate).

<comment><USER9> Because they are preparing to roll out their agenda in their second term. They cannot jeopardise it by being too open about it now before the next elections.

There are working committees in the RSS already drafting amendments to the constitution.

<comment><USER10> How do you know about this? Do you know people working on it?

<comment><USER11> I think he is talking about this article: [https://thewire.in/43846/rss- ideologue-govindacharya-we-will...](https://thewire.in/43846/rss-ideologue- govindacharya-we-will-rewrite-the-constitution-to-reflect-bharatiyata/)

Doesn't mean anything at all. But its not like the news is alien. This sort of thing just keeps coming up in the news all the time.

<comment><USER12> TheWire is a known propaganda machine. Just look how much in cahoots with the old Govt their founders Siddharth Varadarajan and the other guy were in. They were paid by funds from the previous Vice President for absolutely nothing

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> India's history has _always_ been written to suit a political purpose. The Nehru family (and their cabal of left historians - ideologically influenced by the former USSR) has deliberately tinkered with our history since independence, and the holier-than-thou stance of the article is extremely hypocritical. You only realize how much is manipulated when you start ploughing through the original reference material. The evidence of a whitewashed history we've been fed all these years is damning.

<comment><USER13> "History has always been written to suit a political purpose. " It's not just India.

That being said, the RSS is a malign organization, and their official view of history is loony.

<comment><USER14> Yup. They do a lot of damage by helping people after natural calamities.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, surely there's no history of right-wing organizations gathering support by engaging in public welfare operations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> 'Who controls the past,' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.'

\-- 1984 (George Orwell)

<comment><USER12> I can assure you the previous Govt. which rules for 60+ years did the same and i feel a lot of this changed the character of the country. We need to reverse some of these changes so that we are proud of our heritage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> One of the qualities of India that I've appreciated growing up in modern India is how welcoming it is to all religions despite being super racist / castetist. As a Sikh who has cut his hair, I'm not sure what religion I belong to from an official standpoint (in the sense that what box I should tick on a Govt. form).

However, I can see how this could make a lot of people happy with BJP given their biases (and fear) against the Muslim population that is popularly perceived as the most rapidly growing religion in all neighborhoods across India.

<comment><USER17> It's not just perception, the data states that Islam is experiencing the most growth:

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

Not surprising, they have tons of children which you can easily see if you've been to various countries.

<comment><USER9> Disappointed to see this on HN . They are among the poorest and most marginalized communities in the country . Their population growth when correcting for their economic status is not that much higher than the rest.

<comment><USER17> What could be disappointing about data? Poor or rich, population changes can cause changes in lifestyle and the social order in general, hence the relevance of knowing that it is real and not just perceived or bias.

<comment><USER18> I think the point is that this muslim population growth isn't real, in the sense that the implied causation is wrong. Those people don't get more children because they are muslim but because they are poor, as poor people generally get more children all over the world (e.g. African Americans in the U.S. are both over-represented among the poor and grow as a share of the overall population in the U.S.)

<comment><USER17> There are tenets of Islam that encourage increasing their population and/or having multiple wives (see Saudi Arabia and some of the countries around it). So I would not postulate that they have more children only because they are poor. Also the data shows a higher childbirth rate for wealthy Muslims also.

There is a similar belief for evangelical Christians and hasidic Jews, and those populations also have more children than average.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Economic reforms and getting the government away from as much as possible should be their priority which I was hoping to see with Modi. This other stuff is not important. Also, I thought this (that Hinduism had been around in India long before Islam, the same way Zorastrianism was in Iran) was already accepted knowledge, I am surprised to hear it's not.

<comment><USER20> That Hinduism is older than Islam is an absolute no-brainer. Islam dates to the 8th century, whereas the oldest layers of the Vedas are likely 3000 to 4000 years old. The question is the origins of the Vedic religion and its adherents. For Hindutva, it's of vital importance that Hinduism originate in India, but as I understand the scientific consensus it's quite clear that the Aryans came into India from the outside and subjugated an extant population (likely Dravidian-speaking).

<comment><USER21> The "Aryan Invasion Theory" that you refer to has been thoroughly refuted by all serious historians. I can't believe there are still people who propound such nonsense. There were no Aryans and no Dravidians. The Vedas originated in what is present day India and it is the original indigenous culture of that land.

<comment><USER11> Cite your 'all serious historians' and feel free to edit: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo- Aryan_migration](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Aryan_migration)

Also every one comes from some where. No one ever fell from the sky, or sprouted from earth.

<comment><USER21> Read Breaking India by Rajiv Malhotra. Not everything you find on Wikipedia is true.

<comment><USER7> Conversely, almost everything written by unqualified hacks is probably false.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This maybe too far fetched, but I wonder if rewriting Indian history textbooks to make India appear more Hindu could somehow potentially increase our pace towards adopting Uniform Civil Code in our constitution?

<comment><USER22> For Uniform Civil Code to be adopted, it is the Hindu marriage act which has to be supplanted as all the other communities have already opted for Special Marriage Act to register their marriages.

<comment><USER11> That's just the tip of the iceberg. You also have to navigate through all sorts of laws related to crime, food regulations, civil rights and bazillion other categories and basically get a society so diverse to agree on deeply conflicting issues.

Easier said than done. In many cases it might involve undoing a lot privilege in many sections of society.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Rewrite history in India? Isn't that what Christian and Muslim invaders did for the last 500 years? They are not Hindu nationalists, they are just normal Indians taking back the narrative in their country.

</comment><comment><USER24> Nobel laureate Amartya Sen outlines in his book 'The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity', what the incumbent party did in its previous stint i.e. when ruling India during 1998-2004:

... What is its specific relevance in contemporary Indian politics, and why is Hindutva politics so keen on redescribing the past? I would argue that the answer lies in two specific features of contemporary Hindu politics

... The first is the need for the Hindutva movement to keep together its diverse components and to generate fresh loyalty from potential recruits... The second reason for focusing on India's past is the large support for the Hindutva movement that comes from the Indian diaspora abroad, particularly in North America and Europe, for whom it is quite important to be able to retain their general Indian nationalist attachment while embracing any other loyalty they may be persuaded to have (such as Hindutva)

... The rapidly reorganized National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) became busy, from shortly after the BJP's assumption of office, not only in producing fresh textbooks for Indian school children, but also in deleting sections from books produced earlier by NCERT itself ( under pre-BJP management), written by reputed Indian historians. The 'reorganization' of NCERT was accompanied by an 'overhaul' of the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR), with new officers being appointed and a new agenda chosen for both, mainly in line with the priorities of the Hindutva movement

... School children were to be taught, in one of the textbooks, that Madagascar was 'an island in the Arabian sea' and that Lancashire had been 'a fast-growing industrial town' . The newly devised history of India in the new textbooks prepared by the Government of India received sharp criticism in the media and in public discussions that followed. The reviews in the major newspapers were almost uniformly disparaging. 'Bloomers Galore in the NCERT Texts', was the news headline in the Hindusthan Times

... one of the textbooks that was meant to teach Indian school children about the events surrounding India's independence failed to mention the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi by Nathuram Godse, the Hindu political fanatic who had links with the activist RSS (the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh) - <USER2> omission of very considerable moment

[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10310.The_Argumentative_...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10310.The_Argumentative_Indian)

</comment><comment><USER25> I don't understand why was this upvoted at all? This topic is as divisive as NRA or Trump in USA.

IMO, these politically charged discussions should be kept off HN.

<comment><USER26> I agree with this. The topic is vast and number of opinions will be equal to number of people. And exactly what is getting discussed here? Hindu propaganda, patriarchal hierarchy, education system, Muslim and British attacks? No point in discussing such issues on HN. At least create different threads for different topic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> In the book 'Beyond the Hoax: Science, Philosophy and Culture', author Alan Sokal, Math Professor at University College London, writes under the heading 'Hindu nationalism and Vedic-Science' in 'Pseudoscience and Postmodernism' chapter:

On February 23, 2001, the University Grants Commission (UGC) — the central government body overseeing the funding of higher education in India — announced that

 _" there is an urgent need to rejuvenate the science of Vedic Astrology in India, to allow this scientific knowledge to reach to the society at large and to provide opportunities to get this important science even exported to the world ... [Accordingly,] the Commission decided to approve in principle [the] setting up of a few departments of Vedic Astrology in Indian universities ... leading to certificate diploma, under-graduate, post-graduate and Ph.D. degrees."_

The plan provoked a storm of protest from Indian scientists and rationalist intellectuals. But what on earth prompted such a bizarre decision in the first place? The answer, not surprisingly, is politics: more precisely, the Hindu nationalist politics of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which governed India between March 1998 and May 2004. The BJP is the political expression of a multifaceted mass movement for Hindutva, or "Hindu-ness", "an ultranationalist and chauvinistic movement that seeks to modernize India by recovering the supposedly pristine Vedic-Hindu roots of Indian culture".As part of its program for the Hinduization of Indian education, the BJP rewrote school history textbooks to excise the contributions of Muslims and other non-Hindus, and promoted university-level courses not only in Vedic Astrology (Jyotir Vigyari) but also in karmakanda (Hindu priestly rituals), vastu shastra (sacred architectural rules), "human consciousness and Yogic science", and "Vedic mathematics"

... Contemporary Hindu-nationalist intellectuals, many of whom are trained scientists and engineers, have brought this art to an even higher level of refinement. For instance, Subhash Kak, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Louisiana State University and one of the leading intellectual luminaries of the Hindu-nationalist diaspora, claims to find "astronomical codes" in the Rig Veda's descriptions of ritual fire altars, using a method that, as Nanda wryly observes, "is breathtakingly ad hoc and reads like numerology 101".Even more ludicrously, #Raja Ram Mohan Roy asserts that "the Vedas are a coded book ... of particle physics and cosmology": thus, verses referring to wild and domestic animals are really alluding to fermions and bosons, respectively; passages recounting the destruction of black-skinned people are in fact "about annihilation of anti-matter"; and the phrase "ten- finger form" in the Purusa hymn gives us "compelling evidence of [the] universe being considered ten-dimensional in Vedic cosmology", just as in modem superstring theory.

#A contemporary author, not to be confused with the early-nineteenth-century Indian reformer of the same name.

[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2036727.Beyond_the_Hoax](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2036727.Beyond_the_Hoax)

</comment><comment><USER12> Wow, the west remains as clueless of Indian politics as ever and the media continues its hit jobs and agenda

</comment><comment><USER27> The Arabic countries led by Muslims were the most advanced scientists/engineers in the world until they let religious bigots/radicals take over. Just saying Modi/RSS/BJP...

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

<comment><USER15> The Wikipedia page doesn't seem to support the thesis. One can plausibly argue for quite the contrary, IMHO. In fact, many outstanding scholars in STEM of that era, including a few names in the cited Wikipedia page, were also religious scholars (jurisprudence, theology, hadith etc.). Arabs were so much lost before the advent of Islam that the neighboring Persians and Romans apparently had little to no interest in them. History is more complicated/nuanced of course, but these are important points.

<comment><USER28> Early Islamic philosophy was positive towards scientific principles, later Islamic philosophy actively hostile:

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

<comment><USER15> Agreed mostly. But again the picture is more complicated than what a single sentence or two can convey.

Curiously, many of the lethargy, idleness and sense of pointlessness came through sufism. Sufism itself has also many roots (including Greek, and later Andalusian twists), and has a wide spectrum. Ghazzali (the author of The Incoherence) himself was heavily affected by Sufi themes before he wrote 'the Incoherence'; but that book, a rationalist attack on some form of rationalism itself, has many valid points though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Modi/RSS/BJP will not appreciate democracy/diversity

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triarchy_%28theory%29](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triarchy_%28theory%29)

They promote hierarchies [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varna_in_Hinduism](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varna_in_Hinduism)

<comment><USER12> What nonsense</comment></comment>


Story about spies penetrating grid may be part of a PR campaign - <AUTHOR> http://erratasec.blogspot.com/2009/04/has-power-grid-been-penetrated-by.html

<comment><USER2> There's a whole lot of propaganda all around us, and the willingness of newspapers and columnists to constantly grant anonymity to sources has turned it from a valuable tool for sunlight on public affairs into a valuable tool for any stakeholder with a telephone.

<comment><USER3> But there is a flip side. Let's assume for a moment that this is a true story and that the military did not authorize its release. In that situation, an anonymous source is pretty much the only way to get the story -- unless someone is willing to ruin their career (or worse) over it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> As I mentioned in a comment earlier today, I have some experience in this field.

Yes, the ISOs (Independent System Operators) have Internet presences. Yes, they can send out dispatch signals to the generators over the Internet. Yes, the generators can access an extranet to find out what their current dispatch should be.

Security (in the environment I'm most familiar with) is provided using well- known standards (SSL certificates on both the server and the client). I'm sure there are ways to spoof, but I'm not an expert at those things.

I have ideas on how to create a bad day for the grid, but I don't think it would be wise for me to share them ;)

<comment><USER5> As mentioned below, why on earth are these systems (still) connected to the Internet at all?

Sure someone might have though it was a good idea, but surely someone has got to have pointed out just what a dumbfuck idea that is?

<comment><USER6> More or less...

<http://xkcd.com/463/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The big question: why on earth are the shutdown systems (or any others) connected to the Interwebs? How on earth could the risks of that justify whatever benefits there might be? Governments are stupid about all things except increasing their power and control, so it could be true. But I'm still skeptical.

Does anyone know why these systems would be online and what benefits would be large enough to justify this?

</comment><comment><USER8> Reminds me of pg's article on PR campaigns: <http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html>

</comment><comment><USER9> If it's all lies, what's the motive? Politicians/government officials don't usually lie without some sort of expectation of benefit.

<comment><USER10> There is a significant momentum building for stronger executive control over Internet connectivity to private-sector networks that are designated as "critical infrastructure."

The proposed CyberSecurity Act of 2009 would allow the president to designate a private network (such as a SCADA system) as critical, and in the case of a declared emergency, shut it off from the Internet.

As you can imagine, there is resistance to this from multiple parties, including those industries who fear additional government regulation and also privacy and anti-censorship advocates who fear "scope creep" in the legislation.

<comment><USER11> How would they send the shut-off signal? Over the internet?

<comment><USER10> Executive orders to impacted entities would involve a much more formal chain of command and control than a direct kill switch from White House.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> When I was reading the article yesterday I wondered why are they telling us that the grid has been hacked. I thought this is not news at all, I mean what can we do about it. And how do they know that it was Chinese and Russians? I am sure any nation would like to know how the advanced grid works.

</comment><comment><USER13> Do they already have a switch to shut-off the power grid?, telephones? regular mail? newspapers?

So why the internet? What's the threat?

Or is it about money? how so?</comment>


Community is just as important as the Code - <AUTHOR> http://journal.paul.querna.org/articles/2010/02/02/facebook-open-source/

<comment><USER2> > _programmers didn't like web forums for submitting patches, and later proper > mailing lists were setup._

I've been curious about this for a while. Any particular reason? Forums to me seem 10x easier to read.

<comment><USER3> It's much easier to mange your inbox to your own liking than it is a forum. Flagging, sorting, filtering and deleting are all much more difficult in a forum.

It's also much easier to have all the things you do point at at one location than have to check a bunch of forums.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Raindrop.io – Your library of knowledge and inspiration - <AUTHOR> http://raindrop.io

<comment><USER2> This looks really cool. Do you plan to release an API? I would love to be able to send the articles to my Kindle, and maybe come up with some crazy IFTTT recipe.

</comment><comment><USER3> This looks amazing - however unless Im crazy I found no way to upload images, which stopped me using it in my tracks :(</comment>


NYC Subway - Half an inch makes all the difference - <AUTHOR> http://vimeo.com/44807536

<comment><USER2> Firstly, you can't have something that's "very unique" - either it's unique, or it isn't.[1]

Secondly, it's not made "unique from any other subway station" - it's made _different_ from any other subway station.

Thirdly, I wonder if he really has checked them all.

Finally, it's not the case that "EVERYONE trips on it." I counted at least 14 who didn't, and that's in a film specifically intended to show that "everyone" does.

</comment><comment>==

[1] Yes, I know that some claim you can't be "more wrong" because "wrong" can't be compared, and that others claim you can compare "wrong" - "Of course it is; it's a little wrong to say a tomato is a vegetable, it's very wrong to say it's a suspension bridge."[2] Still, I claim that something can't be "very unique".

[2] Big Bang theory, Series 2, episode 20.[3]

[3] Also from BBT (Pilot, 2007 (and relevant)):

        Sheldon: You want to hear an interesting thing about stairs?
        Leonard: Not really.
        Sheldon: If the height of a single step is off by as little
                 as two millimetres, most people will trip.
        Leonard: I don't care. Two millimetres? That doesn't seem right.
        Sheldon: No, it's true, I did a series of experiments when I was
                 twelve, my father broke his clavicle.
        Leonard: Is that why they sent you to boarding school?
        Sheldon: No, that was the result of my work with lasers.

<comment><USER3> My counter to the "unique" thing is that by the binary definition surely everything is unique. Two twins, still unique, two atoms, two electrons, two imaginary sheep, two infinities, two number 9s. Very similar is some cases, often commonplace, but still unique. What is there in the Universe that isn't unique? Which means that if you're pointing out that something is unique, you really mean that it is unique in some particular categorisation. And if you're unique in more categories than something else? Surely then you're more unique? Is someone who gets three questions wrong "more wrong" than someone who gets two wrong?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Viral Video Forces MTA To Repair Tripped-Up Subway Stairs

[http://gothamist.com/2012/06/28/viral_video_forces_mta_to_re...](http://gothamist.com/2012/06/28/viral_video_forces_mta_to_repair_tr.php)</comment>


The Biology of Sloppy Code - <AUTHOR> http://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2010/11/26/the-biology-of-sloppy-code/

<comment><USER2> Wil Shipley has explored this approach: [http://blog.wilshipley.com/2009/08/pimp-my-code- part-16-heur...](http://blog.wilshipley.com/2009/08/pimp-my-code- part-16-heuristics-and.html)

I also swear I remember reading another example of this on his blog, but I'm unable to find it, so I'll paraphrase from memory (which is somewhat murky, so caveat lector):

One of the features of Delicious Library is that you can use your computer's built-in webcam to scan barcodes as a way of adding items to your library.

The traditional, mathematically-inspired computer science approach to implement this is to frame the problem as: "Given an image with a barcode somewhere in it, find the barcode, and then read it." The problem is that a general algorithm that accepts entire set of images with barcodes in them is prohibitively slow, because you have to deal with skew, perspective, lighting, focus, etc.

The approach they ended up using was inspired by biology: it's OK to fail some of the time as long as there's feedback. They went with a much simpler algorithm that takes a fraction of a second to succeed or fail. They run it continuously against new frames, and indicate to the user whether it has succeeded. Since the user is standing there with the barcode in front of the camera, they'll reposition, try different angles, etc, until there's success.

</comment><comment><USER3> _If you pass around numbers as strings (or JSON, or XML) even though they can be more compactly encoded in binary, you're doing sloppy programming. If you then parse those back into a native int at some later point and assume it won't overflow, you're really doing sloppy programming._

I find this to be a terrible example of what's sloppy. Formatting as text is more portable, it's one of the tenets of the UNIX Philosophy.

If you encode numbers in binary, you also need to somehow communicate the endianness of the encoding (maybe this is standardized, and you always use htonl, but something still needs to know that you're using "network order"), and you need to store how many bytes the number represents (because the int size on the target may be different a different size) , and you need to provide some way to easily convert back to a readable format for debugging.

By the OP's logic, SMTP and HTTP are "sloppy" because they are readable and easily debugable; admittedly, they are sloppy for other reasons, but not because they don't encode things in binary.

</comment><comment><USER4> Previously: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1944551></comment>


Patch runs ed, and ed can run anything - <AUTHOR> http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2018/04/05/bangpatch/ <comment><USER2> I will admit that people consider it a little surprising and non-hackers will be very loudly booed if they rely on this behavior but ed finds it way into lots of utilities like this. It's a remnant of a bygone era where people _wanted_ their tools to have this kind of power.

But the author is absolutely right, nowadays we should prefer red. Still a small amount of shame if you're applying untrusted patches.

<comment><USER3> The early computing era (I'd say until early '90s) was definitely had something special in the way so much relied on trust, both trusting the user and trusting the wider community. Today everything is so locked down, paranoid and anxiety inducing that computing has become increasingly stressful and unfun.

I'm also reminded by a RMS writing (I think it was letter of some sort) campaigning that denying computer lab users root access was oppressive. Bit sad that I can't actually find it now.

And of course the classic (if misused like I'm doing here) Franklin quote "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

<comment><USER4> It's easy to trust the user and the wider community when your typical user is "another student in UCLA" and the worst they can steal from you is yesterday's experiment log.

Put another way, it's easy to trust a user if you and they both know that they can be tracked down and face disciplinary action if their behavior was deemed unacceptable.

<comment><USER5> Moreover: it's easy to trust each other if all you're doing is scientific research, games and pranks. But one day we woke up and found half of the world relying on computing in everything, from business to healthcare to national security. With regular people and regular day-to-day stuff comes regular crime.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> OpenBSD's patch handles ed style diffs internally now and also it is not permitted to execute other programs thanks to pledge.

[https://marc.info/?l=openbsd- cvs&m=144498099601083&w=2](https://marc.info/?l=openbsd- cvs&m=144498099601083&w=2)

</comment><comment><USER7> Patch knows that ed is a fine choice. Ed is generous enough to flag errors, yet prudent enough not to overwhelm the novice with verbosity.

In case anyone has not been exposed to the reference, it's perhaps invoking the famous `ed, man !man ed` page. [https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed- msg.html](https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.html)

<comment><USER8> Crap! I knew I forgot something. I forgot to reference "eat flaming death". Oh well, good catch!

<comment><USER9> We used that phrase in some Tradewar games during the BBS Era.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is bad and should be fixed, but there are fairly few circumstances where it actually creates a new vulnerability. The majority of uses of patch are applied to source code by someone who's going to end up running that code anyways, so applying patches you haven't read closely from sources you don't trust is already unsafe.

<comment><USER11> You could build the binary on your machine and run it inside a VM.

<comment><USER12> The patch could also modify the Makefile (or similar) to run arbitrary commands when the build is started.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I don't have ed installed (not a conscious decision), which prevents this from working:

% patch<evil.patch sh: 1: ed: not found patch: ____ed FAILED

patch works just fine for me, though, so ed is not required.

<comment><USER14> What distribution?

(I don't think I've ever used a system that didn't have ed installed by default.)

<comment><USER15> Arch Linux doesn't contain ed in their base package group.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> So patch can read email?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zawinski%27s_Law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zawinski%27s_Law)

<comment><USER17> Off topic, and forgive my naivety & ignorance, but I really do not understand the highly specific nature of this Principle / Law, as it is on wiki:

"Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can."

... was Mail just the example at the time? and this is basically just the a generic reference to feature/scope creep?... I just don't get the highly specific inclusion of "Reading mail" as something that all programs expand towards.

<comment><USER18> It's a bit of both. I think the joke was mostly driven by Emacs which - due to how incredibly flexible the Elisp interpret is - started gaining plugins to do the most absurd things. There is, for example, a full "web browser" mode, a full-blown email client, even an implementation of the Snake game.

<comment><USER19> You can have my nyan cat modeline when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers.

<comment><USER5> You're welcome! :).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Eep. Seems like patch should be running red, not ed!

Amazing how an ancient vuln can still be found hidden in plain sight.

<comment><USER21> Does anyone know if the GNU tools, the coreutils, have been through security audits and fuzzing? They're the most used tools on the planet, I'd say, and relying on the 90's "many eyes make all bugs shallow" doesn't seem to cut it anymore...

<comment><USER22> I'm the GNU coreutils maintainer and have fuzzed them extensively. For example a recent bad bug in TZ handling was found using AFL and fixed by: [http://git.sv.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=gnulib.git;a=commitdiff;h=94...](http://git.sv.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=gnulib.git;a=commitdiff;h=94e01571)

We put a lot of effort into the test suite which makes it easy for others to test various experimental security checkers. This has been detailed in the "third party testing" section at: [http://www.pixelbeat.org/docs/coreutils- testing.html](http://www.pixelbeat.org/docs/coreutils-testing.html)

<comment><USER23> wow pretty awesome to see such a QA pipeline in Open Source projects. I'm used to this in expensive R&D pipelines in the Telco space[0]. Is there a reason you're not using oss-fuzz[1]?

I recently did a lot of work using AFL-fast[2] (poking mostly Perl & Lua and crappy IoT products). My experience is that AFL-fast yielded far better results (in a fraction of the time) when compared to AFL.

[0] [http://www.syssec-project.eu/m/page- media/3/johansson_tfuzz_...](http://www.syssec-project.eu/m/page- media/3/johansson_tfuzz_icst14.pdf)

[1] [https://github.com/google/oss-fuzz](https://github.com/google/oss-fuzz)

[2] [https://github.com/mboehme/aflfast](https://github.com/mboehme/aflfast)

<comment><USER22> aflfast is mentioned in my second link and was the most used fuzzing implementation to find bugs in coreutils.

We've had a quick look at using oss-fuzz, which will need a bit of work since it's more suited to libraries rather than standalone utils.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> similarly, i recall once being denied root on a host while trying to help out with something and then asking if i could at least have sudo less to look at things... which was granted. >:D (then i fixed the problem)

<comment><USER25> Always nice to know more about the system than those nominally in charge of the system.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> "patch will attempt to determine the type of the diff listing, unless over- ruled by a -c, -e, -n, or -u option.Context diffs (old-style, new- style, and unified) and normal diffs are applied directly by the patch program itself, whereas _ed diffs_ are simply fed to the ed(1) editor via a pipe."

According to this, context diffs are not sent to ed.

Is the author suggesting that patch can be fooled to interpret a context diff as an ed diff?

Theres a file called pch.c with an excessive amount of parsing and "intuit" functions like intuit_diff_type().

patch has anthromorphised progress and error messages and tries to "guess".

However I am only a dumb end user. I should not question what I do not understand. Its all safe I'm sure.

</comment><comment><USER27> Does this mean a "git pull" is vulnerable to this, or does git not rely on patch?

<comment><USER28> git's delta pack format which used on the wire is not based on patch. This would only affect "git patch" and derivatives like "git am".

<comment><USER29> Does `git apply` actually farm out to /usr/bin/patch? I kind of assumed it reimplemented the patching itself.

<comment><USER30> You're correct, git has its own patch implementation (plus, it's a bit stricter than the patch program, because it doesn't have to deal with various patch formats--only "unified" patches).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> The beep bug on HN: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16753013](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16753013)

</comment><comment><USER32> So how long will it be before we have a Monero miner implementation in ed?

</comment><comment><USER29> Why does patch call ed? What did anyone ever actually use this for?

<comment><USER30> The `patch` program is expected to be able to apply any patchfile syntaxes created by `diff`. Once upon a time, the default behavior of diff was to spit out an `ed` script (nowadays, it's behind the `-e` flag). So, to apply that syntax of patchfile, it invokes `ed`.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Text editors are shells, remember that if your program executes a text editor.

</comment><comment><USER34> Here's the upstream bug report: [https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/index.php?53566](https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/index.php?53566)

</comment><comment><USER35> This hole needs a fancy name. Patchowned? Pwneded ?

<comment><USER36> No, just no. Naming vulns is a theme that needs to go away

<comment><USER37> Agreed. Every mundane bug or misfeature doesn't need its own website or 20-page analysis. Fix things and move on to the next thing that needs fixing. There is an endless supply of broken things.

<comment><USER36> To be fair I can appreciate the technical analysis of a security issue. The marketing is useless and just plain stupid

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> This is, of course, a vulnerability. But let's not get too crazy. Once you are applying a patch, either you trust the patch or not.

If you blindly apply patches, you will be in risk as soon as you run or try to compile the patched command. This attack is just a bit faster because it happens as soon as you apply the patch.

<comment><USER39> Patch isn't only used for source code. I wouldn't have expected any risk of malicious code execution if I was patching documentation.

<comment><USER31> Even for source, you may want to review the patch after applying it.

For example, dpkg-source applies patches when you unpack source package. I don't think anybody expects code execution when unpacking stuff, even when this stuff is untrusted.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> My reaction whenever I read things like the OP: [https://blog.codinghorror.com/assets/images/codinghorror- app...](https://blog.codinghorror.com/assets/images/codinghorror-app- icon.png?v=1162b121ab)

</comment><comment><USER41> The whole (satirical) website [https://holeybeep.ninja/](https://holeybeep.ninja/) is really great.

</comment><comment><USER42> Real programmers use ed.

<comment><USER37> Disagree :)

      $ cat >a.out

EDIT: maybe not

[https://xkcd.com/378/](https://xkcd.com/378/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Torvalds argument against microkernel: 'But, performance!'.

Result: QubesOS

...

</comment><comment><USER44> Does this mean that it would be dangerous to try to patch patch?

</comment><comment><USER45> This is where unix philosophy fails. Patch should be editing files itself, not via an external program.

<comment><USER46> This isn't the Unix philosophy at work. This is embedding a DSL. Microsot Office has the same exact problems, does it not? No Unix philosophy there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> So, who is this Rachel, and why has her blog suddenly exploded on HN? Both old and new post have been filling the front page for about 2 weeks.

<comment><USER48> The blog has been appearing on HN for many years. I assume she just started publishing more lately.

<comment><USER8> Yep. Getting out of a 'real job' released a whole bunch of cycles and there are a bunch of stories waiting to be told. I don't submit 'em ... I just write 'em.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > _This came up as part of the discussion on the "beep exploit" yesterday. I > found it buried in the HN /new queue as a simple link to the Debian bug > tracker._

I was expecting this post to go through the roof and was rather surprised it gained zero traction, lol. Nobody using the GNU toolchain anymore on HN or it just got drowned out idk ... [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16766577](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16766577)</comment>