The Atlas of Early Printing in Europe - <AUTHOR> https://atlas.lib.uiowa.edu <comment><USER2> Pretty cool stuff.

My high school had one of those big flatbed lever presses. It took four strong teenagers to run it.

One, with clean hands, to put the blank paper in the truck. One, with clean hands, to take the printed paper from the truck. One, usually an ink-stained wretch, to use a hand roller to ink the form. One to push the truck into the press, pull the lever, and pull the truck back out of the press.

We could usually get three or four pages a minute out of the thing.

It took us a semester to compose and print a 48-page literary magazine. But the result was fine.

</comment><comment><USER3> Very interesting. I read the biography of Gutenberg sometime back. He put a lot of his life and effort into the printing press and his traveling and contacts when he was younger helped enable the spread of printing.

</comment><comment><USER4> I was shocked by how eurocentric this is. Expected to see China SOMEWHERE . . . since printing was invented there . . . it is cool though, if incomplete.

<comment><USER5> Not to disparage one of the four great inventions of the Chinese but Europeans invented the printing _press_ which is kind of the crux here: massive partially automated distribution of knowledge.

<comment><USER6> The Chinese did have movable type and all of the building-blocks centuries earlier, though.

Unfortunately, much of the head start the Chinese had in printing seems to have been chewed up by their devilishly difficult writing system. Learning the thousands of characters necessary to become literate in Chinese is a steeper task than the couple dozen of Latin letters and the few tens of ways that they combine phonetically. Not to mention the purely prosaic result that a Latin script requires far, far fewer different varieties of type for printing.

On the other hand, I am not sure that European literacy and printing would have exploded so quickly without the Protestant Reformation inducing demand for the printed word, or rather Word.</comment></comment></comment>


Resume that looks like a Google results page - <AUTHOR> http://liugle.com/

<comment><USER2> The "Sign in" button is a mailto link? "News" on the top navbar goes to his Twitter, but the other "News" link doesn't do anything.

If something is a link, it should be obvious. It should also be obvious what that link leads to.

Okay, it's interesting, but I don't see how it's creative. How is this a good resume?</comment>


Writing for Snobs - <AUTHOR> https://russelldavies.typepad.com/planning/2020/09/writing-for-snobs.html <comment><USER2> Any of these thoughts are valid only under the assumption that one is concerned if something is written by GPT-3 or a human. But nobody cares. I would gladly read Wikipedia written by GPT-3, if it can rewrite math articles in a less fucked-up unnecessary jargon-filled way than they already are. And if not, I will hate it more, but only to a degree it will do it's job worse than a human did (presumably it's humans who write all this atrocity, I don't know for sure).

And nobody reads marketing brochures anyway. I hope they don't, and I pity them otherwise.

Who I don't pity though are lawyers, and if GPT-3 can make lawyers as miserable, as normal people are when forced to deal with lawyers: good. I mean, I don't _really believe_ anything can eliminate this pesky profession (which depends on laws & litigation process being incomprehensible to ordinary citizens), but I can at least entertain myself with this thought for a while.

<comment><USER3> I can imagine GTP-3 being used to make legal documents that are even more difficult for a human being to parse. That's probably a net-negative for society as a whole if it is used that way.

Of course, it's fun to chuckle at the thought of a lawyer having to read through the most insane document of all time and muttering profanities to himself the entire time.

<comment><USER2> "The most insane document of all time" is not the point. It is good to make documents unreadable, sure, but they still must be valid, and you have to be sure they are valid, before you use them in the battle. However close to the realms of sci-fi we may be, I believe we are still very far from any machine being able to compete with a professional lawyer in that kind of stuff. Jokes aside, they kinda specialise on it.

What GPT-3 can be good at though is making a huge amounts of text cheaply and quickly. Making up a tons of bullshit to present in court (or putting the other side in a position when they have to) is a way to make litigation last forever, i.e. until the side with less money is forced to give up on a case they could have otherwise won. You can win by virtue of having more lawyers to read and type stuff.

And that way to use GPT-3 based stuff I imagine to be much closer shot. A company with 2 competent lawyers will be able to generate virtually same amount of semi-coherent bullshit as a company with a 100 of lawyers. You can produce an amount of stuff in a single night that is humanly impossible to read, but still if kinda meaningful stuff with some content kinda "relevant" to the matter at hand. At some point it will stop making any sense, the judge won't read this shit, nobody will. You will have to somehow forbid to make stuff more complicated than it must be. What is currently normal will fall apart.

As I said, I don't actually believe it will do any good: people will still find a way to make it way too complicated for normal humans, but acceptable for lawyers. But until they agree on a new norm, it will be painful for everybody involved.

<comment><USER3> If you have 'known valid' legalese broken into segments and clauses (this already exists in platforms in use by legal professionals to speed up this process, but for legit purpose) and you can convert certain elements into variables (names, dates, addresses, and so forth), you can trivially make a 'valid' legal document that is nearly impossible to parse due to length, by referencing everything under the sun and stars, by introducing lots of situational logic that rests on references, or by simply relying on hyper- specific language and structure.

For example, I've had to read quite a few 1,000+ page legal documents (Companies Act 2006 being one example) and that document gets referenced _all the time_. I can imagine tools like GPT-3 being used to crank things up to 11 to ensure that no user ever really reads or understands the TOS/EULA/whatever they're reading. Not that most people do anyway.

> too complicated for normal humans, but acceptable for lawyers.

I can totally imagine someone building a tool to parse generated garbage legalese into plain language bullet points and adding the proper visual references/links and document structure so that a human can read it. Perhaps it already exists and I'm just not aware of it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > _" the tell-tale signature artifact of simulation is not the spiky glitch, > it's the smooth, shallow, facile surface"_

Notably, this has been true for visual content from the beginning, compare the original "TRON" movie. It had been especially true in times, when smooth gradients and perfect lines had been a luxury, which were hard to achieve in analog media technology, and became the tell-tale signature of computer generated visual content. After an intermezzo in the uncanny valley and with embraceable pixels, we seem to be right back where we started. – It's somewhat logical that what is true for visual content should also be true for textual content.

[Edit] We may add a definition: "Interesting" is the artful deviation from the smooth and perfect.

<comment><USER5> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Headroom#Production](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Headroom#Production)

hard to achieve as a practical effect, but still cheaper than digital.

<comment><USER4> Max Headroom is somewhat special, since it's a crossover of digital and video. The later has always been signaled by glitches and artifacts (as in color, unstable vertical and/or horizontal hold, overly expressed scanlines, lately also by exaggerated cushion distortion, etc).

<comment><USER5> Supporting the signalling, [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23833111](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23833111) was definitely a product of the VCR era.

See also the expressed scanlines in the "faked" 80's of the first video in [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24398456](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24398456) .

As for exaggerated curvature, surely we've all run across [https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro- term](https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term) by now?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Japanese and British cultures are so hierarchical and stratified, in such > long-lasting and subtle ways, that they've become incredibly good at > discerning status from tiny signals.

The topic of the article wasn't all that interesting to me, but I thought this quip was interesting.

Does anyone have any references that expand on the merit of it?

Or thoughts on the idea in general?

<comment><USER7> I've worked in Britain and what I noticed was that working class Brits consider themselves apart from the "posh" middle class and of course, the upper class.

They seem to think they will be working class for the rest of their lives and there's noticeable hate/resent for the rich.

Being an immigrant, I didn't notice any of this stuff. I didn't notice the dismissive polite attitude, I thought it was just politeness. You know, when someone wealthier talks to you, they're polite but there's subtle signals that they consider you "inferior".

I only saw the opportunities, of which there are plenty. I didn't see classes, I just saw that it is possible to go from working class to upper class, much easier than in most other EU countries.

I did start noticing these "subtle signals" after a year and a half or so, but honestly I just decided to ignore them. Since I would always be a foreigner, people would just cut me some slack for not understanding stuff (this also happens in Japan afaik).

Clothes play an important role, surprisingly (OK, maybe not that surprising). If you're in dirty workwear and a hi-vis vest, you're pretty much considered bottom of the barrel. With the right clothes, you can turn into anything from a "chav" or a middle class manager to a millionaire (though you also need the attitude - no slouching, make eye contact, etc).

Just some of my thoughts.

<comment><USER8> Foreigners are in a special class in the UK, so you were already pigeon-holed.

The subtle signals are about who your parents are, which of the different educational streams you went through, and - more than anything - who you know. Clothes will display all of that indirectly, but the core is always about families and networks.

The idea that opportunities exist is very much a middle class mindset, and anyone who pursues it will inevitably run into the class ceiling. You can make a huge pile of money but it won't buy you entry into the upper classes. At best you'll be a nouveau "someone we can do business with" \- or the technical help.

Under the considerable surface polish and politeness the defining characteristics of the upper classes are effortless social - not just professional - confidence, personal entitlement, and exceptionalism. Members are strongly encouraged to believe in all of the above from birth, and it's very hard for outsiders to understand this. There's also a curious affinity with more successful - let's say almost managerial - working class criminals.

I used to live in an upper class enclave, and it was quite astonishing how much time these people spent trying to screw each other over with disputes over family inheritances, property and land rights, various investment scams, and so on.

<comment><USER9> Okay so you've made a pile of money, but the people that think they've got a god given right to wealth from birth still thumb their noses at you and don't want to be friends. My question is, why should anyone care if clearly shitty people don't want to know them?

<comment><USER10> For the same reason people in the US care about what a bunch of high-follower Twitter accounts think of them. We're hard-wired to seek status even when that status is counterproductive and contrary to our instrumental goals.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It just occurred to me that GPT-3 could become an existential threat to Google.

If the SERPs are filled with garbage, their search algorithm loses competitive edge. We may need to go back to a reputation graph-based system. That sort of thing doesn't scale, and Google isn't doing this at all.

In fact, all of the platforms may suffer. How will Facebook keep out GPT-3 spam?

<comment><USER12> Why would they want to keep out GPT-3 spam? They're probably already looking at how they can drive engagement by having human users argue with bots they run.

<comment><USER13> _Because their users don 't want to read GPT-3 spam._ If that's the dominant form of content on those platforms, people are going to use those platforms less.

I mean, for a while Facebook may get paid for presenting ads to GPT-3 spam bots, but eventually advertisers will catch on that the _people_ are gone.

<comment><USER11> I can't wait for us to train models on user browser behavior.

Maybe we can unleash bots that appear exactly as humans, ruining the advertiser gravy train forever.

<comment><USER14> Mark my words: if that even looks like that _might_ happen, the advertising behemoths (chiefly Google and Facebook) will spend every last dollar trying to get some kind of human Internet ID program passed into law.

If our weapons (programs, scripts, "AI") become half as effective as theirs (the advertising giants'), they'll drop nine-plus figures paying to have ours outlawed, guaranteed. The only thing that might save us from that in the US is that national ID of any sort is pretty unpopular across party lines, and that's effectively what it'd be.

I wouldn't be surprised if they're already quietly laying the groundwork for such an effort.

<comment><USER15> "national ID of any sort"

In the US it's not possible to catch a flight across the country or obtain a loan without providing your SSN. And the SSN was originally, extra-explicitly, not allowed to be used for anything but administering social security benefits.

<comment><USER14> Exactly. It's a terrible tool for that job and wasn't designed for it, but there's such a great need for something like that, that businesses and governments have grabbed onto it anyway, for lack of something better.

Despite what might be described as an absolutely huge _market signal_ that there's desire and need for this, resistance to actual national ID is so high among elected officials that propositions for it have, so far, always been DOA. Maybe national IDs really are terrible and it's worth the shared-over- the-population pain and expense not having one causes in a modern society and economy, IDK.

<comment><USER13> Then maybe a privately-issued national ID is the answer, for those that want it. That's the proper response to a _market_ signal, no?

<comment><USER14> Indeed, there must be some reason no such thing has materialized from the market, despite ongoing problems caused by its absence.

I'd guess it's one of those things where network effects make it hard to get off the ground, and given the nature of it, especially hard to get off the ground without government buy-in from the beginning, as so many of the ways it'd be useful for saving time and money and reducing risk are tied to interaction with the government. If a market-based solution for it were desirable, for whatever reason, defining some clear and interoperable standard at the government level would probably be necessary to make the market viable, no matter how much latent demand there may be.

Further, imagining the user experience of a non-heavily-regulated/standardized ID market, it seems like it'd necessarily be so hellishly bad it'd never gain adoption. Having 5 different IDs and sometimes having to get new ones or drop an old one seems no better than using credit cards and our social security numbers as IDs, like we do now. It seems to me the epitome of something that can't possibly be any good as a market solution, unless it's so monopolized or regulated that it's indistinguishable from a government solution, except somewhat less straightforward.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> _" One lesson that GPT-3 might be teaching us: the tell-tale signature artifact of simulation is not the spiky glitch, it's the smooth, shallow, facile surface. It's not the errors, it's a certain kind of boring flawlessness, that's what we should be on the lookout for."_

These models could be trained on any arbitrary corpus of writing, from any one author or combinations of authors.

Let's see the the critics complain about "boring flawlessness" when the model is trained on the works of Shakespeare, Voltaire, Buckowski, Lewis Carroll, Mark Twain, or Hunter S Thompson... or some combination of the above.

<comment><USER17> GPT-3 was trained on all of those authors.

<comment><USER16> But many millions of others besides these.

So these authors were drowned out in the noise.

I'm talking about training on just a relatively small number of authors, so the model can acquire some of their distinctive traits.

<comment><USER18> I don't know much about GPT-3, but if you drastically reduce the size of the corpus won't you also drastically reduce the output domain to the point that it's no longer useful? Or is there some way to get it to take whatever "semantic understanding" makes it somewhat convincing, that it's gathered from the full corpus, and ape a particular author's style over it?

It's very possible for human authors to imitate style. In fact, if you write a lot of the same kind of thing that you read, you'll find your own style gravitating toward that of whoever you're reading at the time. I just (re)read _Franny and Zooey_ , for instance, and for days I've been fighting Salinger outbreaks in my own prose. Presumably a machine could do the same thing, but I'd guess it's a very hard problem _on top of_ creating something like GPT-3.

edit: and this is not even getting into the thematic and semantic richness of the content, which is something good authors pack a lot more of into each word than the blogspam wordsmiths GPT-3 is about to put out of work.

<comment><USER16> _" if you drastically reduce the size of the corpus won't you also drastically reduce the output domain to the point that it's no longer useful?"_

Usefulness is in the eye of the beholder.

A model trained on, say, all the works of Shakespeare might not create something that can pass for Shakespeare's lost work, but might be inspiring, interesting, or have a Shakespearean quality about it in small doses... which could still be very useful for a writer seeking inspiration.

Incidentally, all of Shakespeare's works make up a not insignificant amount of data, though obviously it's a lot less than what GPT-3 was trained on.

Other prolific authors might also provide enough data to train a model.

It's not clear to me at what point the amount of data one uses becomes too little for useful results, and it would surprise me if there was any consensus on this matter, considering the enormous variety in AI techniques, combination of techniques, and parameters that can be used for training and testing, along with all the different uses one might put the models to after they're trained.

<comment><USER18> > Usefulness is in the eye of the beholder.

I think the context here is the question of what "kinds" of writing GPT-3 and similar technologies can and can't do as well as humans, so when I talk about "usefulness" I'm really talking about whether GPT-3 can do its thing of generating passable text in response to widely varied prompts. If it can't do that in some domain, then it's not going to replace writers working in that domain.

That doesn't mean the output won't be interesting, but it will be far less relevant in the ways that make GPT-3 notable in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> > There's a kind of writing that is actively aspiring to a smooth, shallow, > facile surface, a certain kind of boring flawlessness. The writing that most > corporations do. That's who GPT-3 will get to first. Not the novelists and > the poets but the corporate copy-writers. They came for the writers of car > brochures, but I wasn't a writer of car brochures, so I said nothing.

I'm not at all convinced. A car brochure at least has to tell you what's good about the car. Poetry seems to actively aspire to saying nothing substantive, and so does a lot of "literary" fiction and a certain kind of magazine article.

<comment><USER20> Computers are good at giving you facts, that's why computers will be able to write a car brochure. Poetry is more about making you feel something. That's harder for a computer to do.

<comment><USER21> Marketing of cars has very little to do with facts, it's all about emotion. There are no pictures of the typical congestion, its all open roads with no other pesky road users. The models are all slim whereas most of their customers struggle to drag their fat backsides into the car. The kids are happy to sit in the back whilst the reality is they will be screaming "are we there yet" after five minutes of a long drive.

Modern marketing is all about emotion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Hmm. Have these guys seen Ryan North's "Star Trek GPT-NG"?

`S1, E20: The Big Goodbye: The crew of the Enterprise-D sets aside all of its other duties to try and solve a murder mystery. Filmed on location in Miami. A woman dressed in a Starfleet uniform from the ship is murdered, and Riker's going to need a tan to solve this case.`

</comment><comment><USER23> The premise is that GPT-3 has a certain style, but it doesn't. It is almost defined by its ability to readily adopt linguistic idiosyncracies. That includes the OP's example of using colloquialisms like "dang."

GPT-3 will reduce the premium on style compared to substance.

<comment><USER14> The value of much writing, especially on the Web, is being what the reader happens to have found rather than whatever better thing they might instead be reading on the same topic. That is, if your cheap knock-off article is what people end up reading, for whatever reason, instead of the better one(s) you cribbed from, you win. Because the barriers to entry on reading are so low (click link, start reading) and most of the writing's low-value to begin with, people don't exactly shop around for their idle Web reading.

These articles may have substance, but simply be far from the best presentation of that substance. I think GPT-3 and similar projects will do a fine job at subpar regurgitation of existing info that's better covered elsewhere but still manages to capture eyeballs, which describes, I expect, something like 99% of all writing on the Web, including, and perhaps especially, message board posts like this, as people often remark when yet another 300-post thread hits the front page on [some tired topic the discussion of which plays out the same every time]. Long-form print isn't perfect but is somewhat better, since there are some barriers both to publishing and to reading and you're not giving the writing away for free so simply holding a passing reader's interest for two minutes means nothing. The web, though, and maybe even magazines? I wouldn't bet against machines doing much or even most of that writing within a decade. Consider: how much of an issue of, say, Cosmo consists of light re-workings of earlier, recurring articles? People already joke about that kind of thing. Machines can probably do that work, very soon.

<comment><USER23> We're playing a sequential game. No one is going to happily lap up GPT-3/4/5 generated articles in the long run as their _primary reading_ unless they only read articles that take the form of "X happened, then Y, and A said B" (which actually is a lot of people, but they're not really readers anyway).

GPT will serve as intellectual humiliation. Some people will be embarrassed to find out that most of their reading materials can be generated by robots. On the margins, that can lead to people deliberately seeking out more intellectual content. That includes long format materials such as books. On the labor side, writing talent will be allocated away from shallow topics. That's a plus to me.

<comment><USER24> If GPT could produce something intellectually interesting, wouldn't that pass the Turing test?

Seems like all GPT can produce is an infinite supply of shaggy dog stories. I don't know if I'd call that intellectual humiliation, just a lack of a point or punchline.

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

<comment><USER23> To rephrase: it will humiliate people who consume non-intellectually interesting material but don't really think about what they're doing. E.g. Someone whose daily reading consists of the top articles on Yahoo News. I don't think they'll continue to do so if Yahoo and its partners switch to GPT-X. So either Yahoo will source better material, or its readership will decline.

<comment><USER24> In GPT's current iteration, I agree.

If GPT produces better output and is carefully mixed in with existing stories, I don't think anyone will notice.

What percentage of stock price stories are generated by a bot? Off the cuff and totally guessing, I'd say 50%. Do you know the exact number? Could you tell? Would the headline service tell you? (probably not)

<comment><USER23> Ethos matters, especially when there's money involved and you're taking advice from someone. You'd be disturbed if that someone is a bot. Maybe you shouldn't be, because sometimes financial advisors are worse than bots, but people don't know that.

As for the stories that merely describe stock movements without any real analysis, I myself would read those. I'm completely fine with that as long as there's reliable QA on the output.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The forgotten underground world of Swiss bunkers - <AUTHOR> http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/in-case-of-emergency_the-forgotten-underground-world-of-swiss-bunkers/42395820 <comment><USER2> This one in Stockholm, Sweden is also sized for 20k people. It also predated the Swiss one by about 20 years. (!)

[https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katarinabergets_skyddsrum](https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katarinabergets_skyddsrum)

Google translate link: [https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=sv&tl=en&js=y&prev...](https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=sv&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=https%3A%2F%2Fsv.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FKatarinabergets_skyddsrum&edit- text=)

In a typical Swedish utilitarian way it was designed with two uses in mind:

a) peace-time: parking cars

b) war-time: securing people

Here's a sketch: [http://hjak.se/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/kbgt- ritn.jpg](http://hjak.se/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/kbgt-ritn.jpg)

<comment><USER3> It's totally normal to have peace-time usage for bunkers. Here's one underground bunker being used as swimming hall in Finland. [http://mirstran.com/wp- content/uploads/2014/11/bassein.jpg](http://mirstran.com/wp- content/uploads/2014/11/bassein.jpg) Actually bunkers are plentiful in Finland because building those is mandatory. Not many countries build bunkers as much as Finland. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air- raid_shelter#Finland](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air-raid_shelter#Finland) Also subway tunnels and underground parking halls, many (underground) sport halls are pre-equipped with massive blast doors. [http://www.vastavalo.fi/albums/userpics/10913/normal__MG_419...](http://www.vastavalo.fi/albums/userpics/10913/normal__MG_4194.jpg)

<comment><USER2> You guys are even closer to the russians, and have actually fought with them within the last 100 years...

<comment><USER4> At the same time they stay out of NATO etc to avoid poking the bear...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The cellar of my home in Switzerland also acts as a bunker and has massive concrete doors (0.5m thick). When I was a kid, inspectors came by to check that enough water and food was stocked and not too much stuff inside the cellar. There was also a list of which bunkerless neighbour you have to host in case of emergency.

</comment><comment><USER6> The swiss are an inspiration.

I hope that the swiss spirit is not submerged in the ever-rising tide of internationalism.

<comment><USER7> Swiss bank secrecy is in part what allows criminals and dictators around the world to ruin and enslave entire nations for money.

<comment><USER8> As someone who has worked at a Swiss bank: This might have applied a couple of decades ago. Especially in the last decade, Swiss banks introduced rules to overcome this problem with international customers. Smaller banks started to turn down US customers right away (like the one I worked at). It has become dangerous for bank employees and banks themselves to support criminals like you mention. There is zero tolerance for money laundering. While it is far from perfect, the financial sector has matured in that regard.

<comment><USER9> To my knowledge, these rules came from intense diplomatic pressure from the US, not from some internal realization that it wasn't ethical. I wouldn't be at all shocked if subtler approaches to dealing with tainted money have been adopted.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, and now US banks and Delaware-based entities are in the same business … cui bono?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> John McPhee's book "La Place de la Concorde Suisse" covers the history and culture of the Swiss army, and spends a bit of time talking about the bunkers in Switzerland, including the secrecy around them. Worth a read if this stuff interests.

</comment><comment><USER12> There's a data centre deep in the heart of a former Swiss bunker near Zurich. You can get VMs there from Exoscale.ch

<comment><USER13> Also pionen in Stockholm: [http://royal.pingdom.com/2008/11/14/the-worlds- most-super-de...](http://royal.pingdom.com/2008/11/14/the-worlds-most-super- designed-data-center-fit-for-a-james-bond-villain/)

<comment><USER14> There's also one in The Netherlands, "CyberBunker". They have an interesting history: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CyberBunker](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CyberBunker)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I used to be a youth camp counselor when I was college-aged. I went to Switzerland many times; of which 4 or 5 times to a large 'hotel' that had several stories of bunker underneath. It was rumored to be a full hospital, fully equipped and ready to do surgery within 12 hours. Another rumor was that some kids (somewhere between 12 and 15) of a group of my organization once went on an 'exploration expedition' in the middle of the night, and then couldn't find their way out. One of them then did find a way out, and thought the best thing to do was to find a phone in one of the manager's offices and call his/her parents (1000 km away) with the story that 'he escaped from an underground abandoned hospital and his friends were still stuck' (in the middle of the night). Which (allegedly) then caused the parents to call the national emergency center, who called the Swiss emergency, who called the villages major (still in the middle of the night), who send in an emergency team (obviously the major would have known about this hospital but, as this rumor goes, the story of what was happening got worse and worse every time it was retold; Chinese whisper style).

We also went on multi-day hikes, and we'd stay in some of these bunkers in the mountains (the whole of Switserland is mountains, but I mean far away from villages or houses - smack dead in the middle of the mountains). We got a tour once from the 'grounds keeper' as it were of the bunker we were at. In the kitchen was a hatch in the floor; it was an air tight hole to put bodies in, because it was quite likely that people would die while inside (either because of pre-existing wounds or due to the stay in there). It never made much sense to me that you'd put such a hole right where you'd normally be cooking (how would that work - 'hey guy peeling the onions, move other because we have another one here'?), but it was too deep to be a storage hole, didn't have anything that indicated being water storage like pump holes or so, so I just nodded and thought 'not sure if surviving a nuclear holocaust is worth it, if you have to spend 6 months in this place for it - and then go out and have to rebuild the world'.

</comment><comment><USER16> Below the ski resort of Verbier (Swiss) there is bunker which has been converted into a hostel. I've stayed there for a week and it is very bad, and this is just sleeping there at night. Think tiny 3 story bunks, 10+ person dorms, 2 showers and almost no communal area.

[https://www.tripadvisor.com.au/Hotel_Review-g198848-d306983-...](https://www.tripadvisor.com.au/Hotel_Review-g198848-d306983-Reviews- The_Bunker-Verbier_Canton_of_Valais_Swiss_Alps.html)

</comment><comment><USER17> Here is one in Amsterdam, hidden under a subway station (Weesperplein).

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_My_uLAMAY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_My_uLAMAY)

</comment><comment><USER18> From the comments, it seems there are bunkers designed for the masses in many European countries, but none in the USA.

There has to be at least one, right?

<comment><USER19> Not sure about "many" European countries. Switzerland is certainly the only one who went to extremes on it.

"None" is the wrong answer for the US as well (but the number might be approaching it). In the 50's and 60's the Civil Defense group published books on how to convert a basement into a shelter, or dig one in the back yard. Faced with the immense cost of building community shelters, they instead went about identifying which buildings would be designated as shelters (with minimal-if-any engineering work to see if they'd hold up under the air pressure of a nearby blast). You would see the shelter signs pretty frequently, along with their designed occupancy. A few shelters were stocked with food, water, radios, Geiger counters, and so on. But even that expense was deemed too great. These days the signs are very rare.

Oh, and lots of propaganda films were produced to assure people that nuclear war was survivable.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6J3HOaU9E5U](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6J3HOaU9E5U)

<comment><USER20> _You would see the shelter signs pretty frequently, along with their designed occupancy._

The approach to this in Manhattan in NYC was beyond farcical. Yes there were shelter signs at various buildings. Presumably their basements would be able to hold a few hundred people each. But consider:

1) what would an H-bomb or two do to Manhattan?

2) if alive, how do several million people survive in Manhattan if there is no water supply?

3) even if there is water, for how long will a few cases of moldy food feed them?

4) what about waste and hygiene? That many people will produce a lot of poop. Does it all stay in the basements if the sewage system isn't functional?

5) etc. As I said, the situation couldn't have been more absurd if it was deliberately written to be a farce. Manhattan wasn't the place to be hunkered down during a nuclear war. The movie Escape From New York depicted a Utopia when compared to what reality would have been.

Thankfully we never had to use any of those shelters during a real war.

<comment><USER21> Bunkers are also useful against conventional bombing.

<comment><USER19> Depends on whether your bunker location is known, and/or if it's considered to be high-value. Conventional weapons like the GBU-28 that can penetrate 30 meters of earth or 6 meters of reinforced concrete make any bunkers that aren't very deeply buried obsolete.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GBU-28](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GBU-28)

It's also possible that with today's precision guided bombs that successive impacts of "ordinary" 2000-lb bombs on the same exact spot could destroy a bunker.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Date and Time in Java 8: Timezones - <AUTHOR> http://www.insightfullogic.com/blog/2012/dec/19/date-and-time-java-8-2/

<comment><USER2> This is so long overdue, but I feel like I've been using Joda Time for so long that the benefit of having it in the platform is kind of outweighed by the hassle of learning a new API.

<comment><USER3> I doubt there's too much of a learning curve as the new API is pretty similar to Joda Time: [http://blog.joda.org/2009/11/why-jsr-310-isn-joda- time_4941....](http://blog.joda.org/2009/11/why-jsr-310-isn-joda- time_4941.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wonder how this library deals with ambiguous times around daylight savings. For example on the day of switching from summertime to wintertime the clock goes from 2:59 am to 2:00 am again resulting in the hour being repeated. If you know the correct time zone for that timestamp, it is still ambiguous which of the two UTC times it maps to.

<comment><USER5> I've always wondered how the world in general can tolerate something like that. Here we are adding leap _seconds_ every year or so, and yet we're all totally fine with the same, indistinguishable hour repeating once a year.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> What's the use case for storing a time with timezone instead of just storing the UTC value?

<comment><USER7> Maybe if you want to schedule a meeting for 4pm local time, no matter the time zone. Some countries have very unpredictable daylight saving schedules.

(For example, <http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=551195> \- "To keep on with the great work our government has done the past two years of deciding stuff with 2 or 3 days of anticipation, the government has just decided that we won't switch to DST this Sunday.")

<comment><USER8> For the curious, the government in question was argentina.

<comment><USER9> Australia also has some interesting history with daylight savings. I remember it being used for a discussion of DateTimeOffset in .net because it could showcase all the different scenarios.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The real solution is to get timezones thrown out. All they do is waste the time of everyone involved and create complicated issues around travel, finance, computing, etc.

They have no real benefit - if you want to come into work later in winter because it's dark where you live then just come in later! Changing time to suite this madness is insane, broken, and requires immediate fixes.

If we could get all the OS markets/net service providers to agree to a boycott, then nobody would even notice DST is gone as they just get their time from their phone/computer/radio/etc anyway.

I'll get the pitchforks and we can get this started. Anybody with me?! :)

<comment><USER11> No.

What we really need is timezones that are always straight hour offsets of UTC, and no DST. With that simplified, we'd keep the benefits of timezones but have less problems dealing with them.

<comment><USER10> Sorry, I completely messed up my post. Replace every 'timezone' in the post with 'day light savings' - it will also make a lot more sense then.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I cringe every time I hear "Date" and "Java" in the same sentence.

<comment><USER10> Then you're cringing for the wrong reasons - nearly every deployed language gets this wrong also (numeric timezones instead of descriptive ones) - java is actually one of the first to fix this stuff up.

<comment><USER13> Perl has had the DateTime suite of modules since early 2003. (Shameless plug since I'm the author). <https://metacpan.org/release/DateTime>

<comment><USER14> So does Java. But, same as in Perl, it was not included in standard library.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: SlackScreen – a live full-screen visualization of your Slack channels - <AUTHOR> https://www.slackscreen.com <comment><USER2> This is pretty cool! Will be trying it out.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks - looking forward to your feedback!</comment></comment>


GitHub Releases Dataset of 6M Open Source Methods for Code Search Research - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/syncedreview/github-releases-dataset-of-six-million-open-source-methods-for-code-search-research-383cc2ae7069 <comment><USER2> discussed when it was released in [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21082757](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21082757)</comment>


R.I.P. Les Paul  - <AUTHOR> http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090813/ap_en_mu/us_obit_les_paul

<comment><USER3> I heard a great story about Les Paul's invention of multi-tracking in an old (long ago defunct) basement coffee shop in Harvard Square called Passim, featuring Guy van Duser (guitar) and Billy Novick (whistle, vocals).

Guy is a local Boston guitar phenomenon, playing stride guitar with 3+ parts at times. (Rounder Records carries his stuff--highly recommended.)

Anyway, Guy told the story of growing up adulating Les Paul, struggling for years to learn to play some of his recordings, until he got it right. He finally got to meet Paul, told him of his admiration, and showed Paul his licks. Paul's jaw dropped as he told Guy, "I double-tracked that recording!" Of course, that left Guy floating on air...

<comment><USER4> there ought to be a place to save little gems like this. Thank you for that!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This man was phenomenal. Not just a great musician, but a real hacker, inventing the solid-body electric guitar and multitrack recording.

And he loved what he did, and kept doing to the end.

<comment><USER5> A real hacker indeed, at least he lived a long fulfilling life.

<comment><USER6> At least? What more could anyone ask for?

<comment><USER7> To live forever?

<comment><USER8> Remembered something by Tolkien. "Death was a gift to men. Though elves did not die, as they aged they became more sorrowful". [paraphrased]. I don't think that living forever is a good thing.

<comment><USER9> Living forever is only hell if you remain human. By the time I turn one million I will be an entity of nearly infinite wisdom, more powerful than the God of the Christians.

<comment><USER10> A nice (though hella-long) follow-up to this thought: <http://lesswrong.com/lw/xy/the_fun_theory_sequence/>

<comment><USER9> I've read it. I wish more people were asking the questions asked by Eliezer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> God will be switching the angels over from harps within a week.

</comment><comment><USER12> This is the kind of seemingly non-hacker RIP post I love seeing. I didn't know much about him before seeing this post, but the comments made me read more about him and I'm glad I did. Great stuff.

<comment><USER13> If he isn't a hacker, I don't know who is. Multitracking was innovative and early multitracking was a straight up hack. The first solid-body guitar was made out of a 2x4 mounted into an acoustic guitar. He may not have hacked computers, but he was a great hacker.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Les Paul has been a personal hero of mine since I was a kid. It's really sad to see him go, but at least we can continue to enjoy all of the wonderful creations and creative spirit that he brought into the worlds of music and engineering.

</comment><comment><USER15> Though less well known than Les Paul, Tom Dowd (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Dowd>) was another amazing recording industry hacker. If you're interested in the Les Paul story, you might also like the documentary about Tom Dowd: _Tom Dowd and the Language of Music_.

<comment><AUTHOR> I watched that a few months ago. Quite good.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I can't even count the ways his innovations shaped my life and how I express myself.

</comment><comment><USER17> I live in New York, I heard that he used to play here every week, as recently as a year ago. I regret that I never saw him play. I regret even more that I never took my fater to see him play.

<comment><USER18> They were talking about this on the Bob & Tom show this morning and apparently he played as recently as June 1, '09 and did so every Monday. They told a story about how Jimmy Buffet sat in and Les was cracking jokes...great stuff. I hope to have so much spunk should I make it that far.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> From the CNN report:

 _Paul is enshrined in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the Grammy Hall of Fame, the Inventors Hall of Fame and the Songwriters Hall of Fame._

 _"I had to build it, make it and perfect it," Paul said in 2002._

 _"I learned a long time ago that one note can go a long way if it's the right one," he said in 2002, "and it will probably whip the guy with 20 notes."_

A hacker if there ever was one. Most of us still enjoy the output of his output. RIP.

<comment><USER20> _"I learned a long time ago that one note can go a long way if it's the right one," he said in 2002, "and it will probably whip the guy with 20 notes."_

A sentiment proven time and again by Status Quo (the 3-chord band) :)

A serious hacker. RIP.

<comment><USER21> I think recently, another interesting proof for this is the Joker's note. Watching the Dark Knight behind the scenes commentary, Hans Zimmer talks about how he thought the most chill-inspiring theme for Joker wouldn't be an intricate composition, but one slightly sour note played at length. Other sounds and effects were layered upon it to fit with the soundtrack, but the effect is amazing, simultaneously warning the audience of the joker's presence and inspiring suspense at the same time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> ...and just when I was thinking about buying that black-to-blue sunburst Les Paul I saw recently...I bet the price tag has already been changed. ;) RIP Les, you were a Legend long ago and always will be.

</comment><comment><USER22> I watched an old documentary about Les Paul the other week. He's really fantastic. (<http://www.mininova.org/tor/2607255>)

</comment><comment><USER23> I think it's interesting that so many people on HN recognize Les Paul - <USER2> shows how many hackers are music lovers as well, which is definitely a curious data point.

RIP Les.

</comment><comment><USER24> I got to hear Les Paul at the Iridium when I was in New York in April. So glad I got hear him live at least once. Thanks for the music and the inventions. Play on!

</comment><comment><USER25> What does Les Paul have to do with Erlang?

<comment><USER26> He invented concurrency in music recording.</comment></comment>


The sad state of PDF-Accessibility of LaTex Documents (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://umij.wordpress.com/2016/08/11/the-sad-state-of-pdf-accessibility-of-latex-documents/ <comment><USER2> The thing is: LaTeX might try hard to look like a declarative language for structured documents, but it is not. It is a set of TeX macros. And TeX is a type setting system.

There is no good reason to put the accessibility into the type setting. Instead, use a declarative (e.g., any markup) language, translate that a) to (LaTeX) and b) to accessibility annotations and then combine the two results. Problem solved.

Unfortunately you will either lose a lot of expressiveness along the way or you have to find a _very_ sophisticated markup language.

<comment><USER3> Why not simply augment LaTex with PDF tags which would be inserted manually, in the process of typesetting?

Something like:

        \pdftag{blah}

Common packages could then generate these tags, and very few modifications of TeX source would be needed.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, one could do that. But then again, one could do that with any other scripting language. A true declarative document would mean a single source of truth and freedom from those technical matters.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> An answer, particularly in the sciences, is to also distribute the source *.tex files, which being plain text with markup, can be handled just fine by things like emacspeak, or accessibility tooling for other sensible editors.

This comes up a bit around the blind accessibility issue for mathematics, which is why I suspect it's bubbling up this week on HN.

<comment><USER5> Standard maths notation is sight first and sight only.

If you want maths for the blind you need to convert to something like s-expressions, which emacspeak and read perfectly.

<comment><USER4> There's a bunch of counter-argument here from working practising blind mathematicians who read and write raw TeX every day, so there's at least a non-zero audience.

[https://www.nfb.org/latex-what-it-and-why-do-we-need- it-0](https://www.nfb.org/latex-what-it-and-why-do-we-need-it-0)

<comment><USER5> There were a bunch of mathematicians who used roman numerals for arithmetic between 0 AD and 1200AD. That they existed is not a counter-argument to the fact roman numerals are terrible to do arithmetic in. That is an argument that people can get used to anything, and become proficient enough at it that changing to a new - and better - system will set them back enough for it to be not worth while doing - for them. The same is true for modern maths notation.

<comment><USER4> I am not blind. Neither am I a mathematician. I'm a sighted biomedical engineer.

I have heard blind mathematician colleagues very loudly espouse using LaTeX for everything they do. I'm inclined to believe them!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Even though LaTeX is still not very close to producing perfectly accessible PDF documents, there is some recent work towards this goal.

\- [https://ctan.org/pkg/tagpdf](https://ctan.org/pkg/tagpdf)

\- [https://ctan.org/pkg/accessibility](https://ctan.org/pkg/accessibility)

I am using the former for some personal documents and found that it improves text selection and copying on Apple devices. (This could be related to how PDFKit handles text.)

Edit: formatting.

<comment><USER7> accessibility, which its own author says not to use any more (or at least not until foundational problems are fixed), is mentioned in the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Converting LaTeX to HTML may be a route to making it accessible. I'm working on this project: [https://github.com/arxiv- vanity/engrafo](https://github.com/arxiv-vanity/engrafo)

It's 80% of the way there, but with 80% more work it could be a pretty complete implementation.

It powers this: [https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/](https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/)

</comment><comment><USER9> If you want accessibility, it would be better to convert your content to XML and run the LaTeX through MathJax first, using accessibility extensions ([https://mathjax.github.io/MathJax-a11y/docs/](https://mathjax.github.io/MathJax-a11y/docs/)). Then use a third-party converter such as PrinceXML to generate the PDF from the XML.

</comment><comment><USER10> One pattern I like to use is to write my documents using markdown which can be compiled into pdf via latex with a template of my choosing. It is also capable of compiling to other formats which may be more accessible such as plain text, html and docx.

[https://pandoc.org/](https://pandoc.org/)

[edit to add link to pandoc]

</comment><comment><USER11> The "accessibility" LaTeX package maintainer is looking for help in this area: [https://github.com/AndyClifton/accessibility/issues/42](https://github.com/AndyClifton/accessibility/issues/42)

</comment><comment><USER12> Ross Moore did a presentation about accessibility and PDF at the 2020 TUG online conference.

[https://youtu.be/VF9Ubax_HIY](https://youtu.be/VF9Ubax_HIY)

</comment><comment><USER13> The author writes:

"Did I mention that both Word and LibreOffice generate tagged PDFs?"

But then the simple solution is this: Convert your LaTeX to Word or LibreOffice. Then generate the PDF.

Absurdly the easiest way to convert LaTeX to Word/LibreOffice is by creating a PDF first ([https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/111886/how-to- conver...](https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/111886/how-to-convert-a- scientific-manuscript-from-latex-to-word-using-pandoc)), import that into Word/LibreOffice and then create your PDF/A from that.

</comment><comment> hugh-avherald Why must the PDF encapsulate all requirements? My understanding of accessibility requirements it that you must have _a_ version that is amenable to automatic speech, not that all versions must be.

<comment><USER14> It doesn't have to. But ideally you only want to have to produce and distribute a single file.

Also, a lot of people don't consider accessibility when generating PDFs. If LaTeX produced accessible PDFs, the PDFs would be tagged automatically without the author even thinking about it. Of course, it might still not be perfect, but it would be a lot better than the status quo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> 1\. Needs (2016) in the title.

2\. Even by 2016, pdfTeX had been largely superseded by LuaTeX.

3\. The author bizzarely links to "the mess" of the literate source of TeX the program as a WEB file rather than as a typeset document.

4\. AIUI, the source code of the TeX engine has nothing/very little to do with adding tags to PDFs, which it is the job for LaTeX packages. Admittedly, understanding and writing their source code is a rarer skill than reading the literate source of TeX.

<comment><USER16> > 2\. Even by 2016, pdfTeX had been largely superseded by LuaTeX.

Is that true? My experience was that pdftex is by far the most used one, but while thinking about it, I noticed I have zero data to back that up.

<comment><USER17> The overwhelming majority of people writing today use pdflatex. But at this point lualatex is pretty fast, and is starting to accumlate packages that leverage it to do good things. It is starting to build momentum.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> [https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/498987/generate- pdf-...](https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/498987/generate- pdf-a-1b-with-lualatex)

</comment><comment><USER18> I can't believe MathML just died and it's like not even part of the conversation about the history of math markup.

<comment><USER19> MathML isn't dead! Igalia have been doing some pretty great work on getting it upstreamed into Chromium, where there has been no MathML implementation (in contrast to Firefox) for some time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> >Take your average computer science graduate from the last ten years. Do you think anyone would be remotely able to understand what is going on there?

Yes, you literally read the literate program of TeX and understand what's going on: [http://brokestream.com/tex.pdf](http://brokestream.com/tex.pdf)

I had never learned Pascal but I've managed to edit and compile TeX successfully, and it was easier than trying to understand any of my own non- literate programs.

>My point being that if we wouldn't rely on TeX itself and use ANT (or whatever alternative) which is written in the quite elegant OCaml, than hacking it would be at least possible for mere mortals. Although I have to admit, despite being in love with OCaml since my PhD days, it's also a quite niche language. But imagine if the whole thing was written in Python, or at least C.

Imagine if software engineers were actual engineers instead of glorified script kiddies.

>I wish someone would design a new space shuttle because while it's a neat project I only understand MKS units and it's too much effort to use a calculator for converting between them and Imperial units.

<comment><USER20> > Imagine if software engineers were actual engineers instead of glorified > script kiddies.

Maybe you shouldn't need to be an engineer to write a document with some formulas inside?

<comment><USER21> Back in the day we had engineers writing documents from markup. We called them typesetters. It was a qualified job, you don't _expect_ the task to be something Joe Random could to with 6 weeks of training.

<comment><USER22> > _Back in the day we had engineers writing documents from markup._

Back in the day secretaries were creating electronic documents with troff and nroff:

> _The first version of Unix was developed on a PDP-7 which was sitting around > Bell Labs. In 1971 the developers wanted to get a PDP-11 for further work on > the operating system. In order to justify the cost for this system, they > proposed that they would implement a document-formatting system for the Bell > Labs patents department[1]. This first formatting program was a > reimplementation of McIllroy 's roff, written by Joe F. Ossanna._

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

<comment><AUTHOR> OP, here. It's not that long ago, I've used troff myself. Or maybe it was that long ago, but it just seems like yesterday.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Imagine how much further ahead HTML/CSS would have been if the academic crowd abandoned latex 20 years ago.

Revisit this comment in 5 years.

<comment><USER24> It wasn't because mathematicians were reluctant to change that math in HTML didn't take off. Rather, it was because browser developers were loathe to implement and maintain the enormous and complex pile of code that is MathML, and they said "Why should we, if you mathematicians already have LaTeX?" [0]

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MathML#Browser_support](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MathML#Browser_support)

<comment><USER25> Firefox has had MathML support for a long time. Complain to Apple and Google (and vote with your browsing activity, by using the browser that is less driven by commercial considerations).

<comment><USER26> Safari has supported MathML since 2011. Though apparently the implementation is somewhat buggy.

The real issue is the lack of MathML support by Chrome (and until recently, Edge)

<comment><USER27> Yes, Chrome had some MathML support but removed it (I think as part of their forking of Blink from WebKit).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I had a realization a while back, that in my opinion LaTeX isnt really needed anymore. Pretty much anything you can do with LaTeX, you can do with HTML. Want a PDF? Most browsers will print to PDF now, or you can use a library like this:

[https://github.com/dompdf/dompdf](https://github.com/dompdf/dompdf)

Need a page break? Here you go:

[https://developer.mozilla.org/Web/CSS/break- after](https://developer.mozilla.org/Web/CSS/break-after)

Im not sure what you would do about TikZ and stuff like this, but I have seen some pretty wild stuff in CSS, so surely its possible:

[https://pattle.github.io/simpsons-in-css](https://pattle.github.io/simpsons- in-css)

<comment><USER29> Not even considering the math formatting, Html is still lacking good footnotes, bibliographies, glossary generation, index generation, and table of context generation. Browsers also render things atrociously compared to a latex pdf.

<comment><USER9> There are third-party tools that do all of this.

A LaTeX-generated PDF does not render correctly at all for a blind user.

<comment><USER29> I'm not saying latex is exemplary in all forms. (I would also like to know if the big browsers render all web pages as accessible PDFs, though).

I simply meant that a plain html document + the browser leaves much to be desired for even non-technical documents.

Tbh, I would like to see a more advanced and open html-based ecosystem for documents. Latex has many watts, but also a lot of features.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


What Is Next Generation Ad Tech AI? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/adext-amaas/what-is-next-generation-ad-tech-ai-60526b8d27e6 <comment><AUTHOR> Adext AMaaS is launching soon and we're calling it next generation ad tech AI, so I wrote an article explaining what we mean by that. Feedback appreciated.</comment>


Show HN: Gorse – A recommender system back end based on collaborative filtering - <AUTHOR> https://gorse.io/ <comment><USER2> Maybe it's just coincidence, but the name Gorse resembles Go+Morse ([http://www.fmjlang.co.uk/morse/MORSE.html](http://www.fmjlang.co.uk/morse/MORSE.html)), and the name Steamlens resembles like Steam+Movielens ([https://movielens.org](https://movielens.org)), both early recommendation systems.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep. SteamLens is the combination of Steam and MovieLens. However, gorse means Go recommender system engine :D

<comment><USER2> You might want to have a look at the Morse paper. It describes an algorithm which worked well, significantly better than KNN, at least on movies, using, by today's standards, a small data set. Unfortunately, when I inquired about open sourcing the code, I was told that BT had lost it. But the algorithm is described in detail in the paper.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll have a look at it. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Looks good, I'll keep an eye on this as development goes on. One thing I'm particularly curious about: the project page emphasizes optimization through SIMD instructions and multi-threading. Are there any benchmarks versus other recommendation engines to demonstrate what type of performance improvement one should expect?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your feedback. More benchmarks should be added later.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've been looking for a recommender system, how does this compare to something like Apache's PredictionIO?

<comment><AUTHOR> PredictionIO is built for the large scale recommender system based on Spark. But gorse is designed for datasets that fit a single PC. :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I get an error 500 on steamlense :/

<comment><AUTHOR> It might happen when Steam API requests exceed limits :O

<comment><USER5> sadly persistent...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> We changed the URL from [https://github.com/zhenghaoz/gorse](https://github.com/zhenghaoz/gorse) to the project page.

<comment><USER7> An followed by a word starting with a constant is grammatically incorrect, can you fix this as well?

<comment><USER8> Well if we're going to get nitpicky I think you meant "consonant" instead of "constant" ;)

<comment><USER7> Ooops</comment></comment></comment></comment>


TRESOR Runs Encryption Securely Outside RAM - <AUTHOR> http://www1.informatik.uni-erlangen.de/tresor <comment><USER2> This keeps the AES keys in some x86 debug registers so they never appear in RAM and can't be accessed after a reboot.

<comment><USER3> Why not keep the keys in a TPM and pull them into "real" registers whenever the kernel context switches into a specially flagged AES decode thread, and zero them when context switching away?

<comment><USER4> Here is an NSA slide where the NSA talks about exploiting Trusted Computing Platforms for intelligence[1].

The German government believes that the TPM is backdoored and a danger to security[2].

1: [http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/09/05/us/documents-r...](http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/09/05/us/documents- reveal-nsa-campaign-against-encryption.html?_r=0)

2: [http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/news/microsoft-seeks-calm- on...](http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/news/microsoft-seeks-calm-on-german- security-panic-over-windows-8-125702)

<comment><USER3> If you can't trust the TPM, can you trust Intel's debug registers to be secure?

Long term I suspect that this kind of thing will use Intel's Software Guard Extensions (SGX), which creates a trusted enclave of code and data that not even the kernel nor the hypervisor can access.

<comment><USER5> A couple of interesting articles on SGX:

[http://theinvisiblethings.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/thoughts- on...](http://theinvisiblethings.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/thoughts-on-intels- upcoming-software.html)

[http://theinvisiblethings.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/thoughts- on...](http://theinvisiblethings.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/thoughts-on-intels- upcoming-software.html)

<comment><USER3> The second article is quite alarming. Don't run any code in an enclave which you didn't compile yourself! One may not even be able to use a virtual machine to peer inside an enclave by emulating SGX: the software could demand a valid public key stored uniquely in every Intel chip and signed by Intel's private key, which a hypervisor would not have.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> TRESOR still leaves all the code and data exposed in memory. You can modify the code that's being executed in order to divulge the contents of the debug registers.

We're working on solving the malicious device and cold boot problem at PrivateCore. To do so, we're encrypting all of main memory and keeping plaintext state in the L3 cache.

Here's a resource page with links to the TRESOR paper and other resources: [http://privatecore.com/resources-overview/physical-memory- at...](http://privatecore.com/resources-overview/physical-memory-attacks/)

<comment><USER7> Where's the source?

Or are you expecting us to trust your proprietary nonfree software without ever seeing it?

Good luck with that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Didn't DDR3 ram basically make cold boot attacks obsolete? They don't hold any voltage when you power down long enough to even freeze the chips

<comment><USER9> Interesting, that sounds correct:

[http://www1.cs.fau.de/filepool/projects/coldboot/fares_coldb...](http://www1.cs.fau.de/filepool/projects/coldboot/fares_coldboot.pdf)

Even with cooling they weren't able to recover. However, a warm reboot, would still work. Speculating, but some laptops might have a way to force a reboot like some machines have a reset button. That'd at least restart the system, although proper BIOS config should prevent that from being useful.

<comment><USER10> hm, it looks to me like they just cover the sorts of temperatures you see in refrigerators.

any idea if work has been done on cryogenic temperatures?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Shouldn't this also be a really fast implementation since there isn't even the delay required to move items into/out of ram?

Also what happens if the scheduler moves the application out of running state?

<comment><USER12> Even if all of the AES state is kept in cache, the data to be encrypted would still have to be copied from ram or disk, right?

<comment><USER13> yeah but you can have an encrypted disk, encrypted ram, not so much.

<comment><USER14> OpenBSD will get you halfway there, it at least encrypts (if you switch it on) the virtual memory.

<comment><USER8> OpenBSD does this by default. It also now directly boots cryptodisks eliminating the need to create a /boot partition and carry it around if you're concerned about evil maid attacks, though I would imagine a camera or keyboard hardware keyloggers would defeat that pretty easily

<comment><USER15> The boot loader is still on the disk, unencrypted.

<comment><USER16> That's what removable media is for

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> In the AUR: [https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/linux-lts- tresor/](https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/linux-lts-tresor/)

</comment><comment><USER18> I'm not very knowledgeable about x86, but why do they have to use the debug registers if they're slower? I know in GCC you can mark registers as "do not touch" when you write assembly in C. Why not use more general purpose registers?

<comment><USER19> Because the idea is to run it in kernel mode with arbitrary other software running on the computer. Asking other software to pretty please don't touch these specific registers isn't going to work, because there's no way to enforce that. The debug registers are perfect because they can only be accessed from kernel mode, not userland.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> And to avoid keyloggers being installed when the machine is powered of, see STARK[1] from the same uni.

[1] [http://www1.informatik.uni-erlangen.de/stark](http://www1.informatik.uni- erlangen.de/stark)

</comment><comment><USER21> Now thats paranoid ;)

<comment><USER22> Not really... I've seen a demonstration where a Truecrypt (or something similar) encrypted laptop is stolen. The machine is locked, but still powered on (very reasonable. You locked your machine and left your desk). This basically means that the AES key is in RAM.

The attacker/thief cools down the RAM with liquid nitrogen (to slow the discharge), inserts a bootable CD with a special tool to dump physical RAM on bootup, and quickly cycles the laptop battery (causing a cold boot).

Since the RAM is not zeroed on bootup, the "old" bits stay pretty much as they were (thanks to the cooling).

IIRC this allowed an attacker recovery of the key with a very high probability of success.

<comment><USER23> While everything you say is true, it would seem paranoid in many cases. I don't know how many neighborhood electronics fencers have liquid nitrogen laying around or the computer savvy to pull this kind of stuff.

If someone is after me who is using this methodology then I have seriously pissed off the wrong people. While you could argue that it's only paranoia if the object of preparation is not possible, I would say that you're at least one leg over the fence into paranoia-land if you're prepping against a cold- boot and don't have any nation state or corporate espionage level enemies.

<comment><USER24> LN2 is cheap. If undergrads can make LN2 ice cream, they can use it for cracking too.

<comment><USER25> One of the nice things about OSX and Filevault2 is that you can force the key to be destroyed on suspend:

         destroyfvkeyonstandby - Destroy File Vault Key when going
         to standby mode. By default File vault keys are retained
         even when system goes to standby. If the keys are
         destroyed, user will be prompted to enter the password
        while coming out of standby mode.(value: 1 - Destroy, 0 -
         Retain)

<comment><USER26> One of the other nice things about OSX is the feds may already have your key[0], so if you manage to get your computer back from them after that confiscate it, it won't have cracks in it from the extreme cold.

[0][http://www.nosuchcon.org/talks/D1_02_Alex_Ninjas_and_Harry_P...](http://www.nosuchcon.org/talks/D1_02_Alex_Ninjas_and_Harry_Potter.pdf)

<comment><USER25> SMCs are present in nearly all Intel systems...They could very well store your truecrypt keys too

<comment><USER26> SMCs are not the problem. The problem is code in OSX could put your key there in a way that someone could dump it.

Of course, since FileVault is not open source, we have no way of knowing if it does this. Is this paranoid? Perhaps, but if you are worried about cold boot attacks you should be worried about this as well.

You might also be worried about some strange design decisions in FileVault such as the fact that it uses public key cryptography[0] for what ought to just be symmetric disk encryption. While not a red flag,it is a bit strange.

[0][http://deimos3.apple.com/WebObjects/Core.woa/FeedEnclosure/u...](http://deimos3.apple.com/WebObjects/Core.woa/FeedEnclosure/utah.edu.1380568002.01381129957.14368733217/enclosure.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> /me sings, "Another one bites the Dust"

Error

The website encountered an unexpected error. Please try again later.

Error message

PDOException: SQLSTATE[HY000] [2002] Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock' (111) in lock_may_be_available() (line 167 of /var/www/i1/includes/lock.inc).

It looks as Drupal is not suited to stand a HN-DDoS, of 70 points (7000 visitors estimate) in 3 hours.</comment>


The Spark of Life and the Unification of Intelligence, Health, and Aging - <AUTHOR> https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0963721419829719 <comment><USER2> This has a mix of biological facts:

* Mitochondria are the main producers of energy in the cell

* Energy is important for many traits, like Intelligence, Health, and Aging

But the conclusion that Mitocondria are somehow an unification item in these factors is an exaggeration without a solid proof. With a similar reasoning we can prove that ribosomes are the unifying factor (they build proteins, and proteins are important for Intelligence, Health, and Aging) or use the same idea with most of the other celular organelles.</comment>


Not just the Higgs boson     - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17352453

<comment><USER2> I'm glad to see a news organization emphasizing this point. I bring up physics in conversation with my friends, who aren't as familiar with the subject, perhaps more often than I should. On more than one occasion, they have remarked on how it seems such a waste to simply find evidence of a single "god particle." They're often fascinated by the amount of openness this project has achieved, in addition to the many, _many_ experiments and projects that are utilizing this incredible machine.</comment>


Announcing 10x donation matching on Watsi - <AUTHOR> https://watsi.org/universal-fund <comment><USER2> See also: "Why you shouldn't let 'donation matching' affect your giving" at GiveWell. ([http://blog.givewell.org/2011/12/15/why-you-shouldnt-let- don...](http://blog.givewell.org/2011/12/15/why-you-shouldnt-let-donation- matching-affect-your-giving/))

<comment><USER3> Undeniably the case that it works really well, however, especially given how easy it is to arrange for the people holding the fundraiser. Broadcasting a matching fund is news, adds an extra touch to potential donors, inspires people to donate when they wouldn't otherwise have done so, and costs very little in additional administrative time.

Administrative time is always at a premium in non-profits, and optimizing for lower overhead in time and work is a reason for many things that might otherwise seem a little puzzling in their persistence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is there a cap to this? For example, the first $100K will be matched 10x?

Also, is the match monthly or all at once?

<comment><AUTHOR> The match is for the first month's charge. If you sign up for a $20 monthly donation, it will be matched to $200 for the first month, then return to $20 after that.

The current cap for the campaign is $100k and we still have a ways to go. However, the campaign is off to a great start and there might be an opportunity to increase the cap if needed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's awesome when platforms can increase the effectiveness of our donations like this.

By the way, if anyone is looking to support teachers through small donations, DonorsChoose ([https://www.donorschoose.org](https://www.donorschoose.org)) does matching opportunities like this regularly. They fund classroom projects, not health issues, but I think the satisfaction and rationale for supporting are similar. The most recent match was backed by The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

<comment><USER6> It's the effectiveness of Tencent's donation that is being increased.

Which I guess I don't feel bad that more money is being raised for Watsi, but it's interesting that people don't see this sort of thing for what it is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I love the idea of Watsi. I do wish they would, tastefully of course, take a page from CharityWater's playbook and highlight better the impact your money creates. Also is it like charity water in which my donation goes to the cause 100%? or are the funds going to support watsi ops? (I'm ok with either, but would prefer transparency this day in age). The donate a birthday Idea could be pushed further. I've given up my birthday a bunch on charity water, raised thousands that way. I'd like to see "I'm giving up my birthday so we can get Maria in honduras a new kidney" or something along those lines.

anyway sorry for the rant.

<comment><USER8> 100% goes to the patient. They fund raise for operations via other means.

<comment><USER9> Since we are already linking GiveWell, claiming administration costs are paid separately is just an accounting trick. [http://blog.givewell.org/2009/12/07/robin-hood-smile- train-a...](http://blog.givewell.org/2009/12/07/robin-hood-smile-train-and- the-0-overhead-donor-illusion/)

Donors shouldn't obsess about the overhead ratio anyway, as the link explains.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I LOVE Watsi - 100% of my donation goes directly to help people.

Is this only for new donors? I am already a universal fund donor, but may consider making a new account for my 'friend' to get the match donation.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! If you are already a donor and you increase your donation, Tencent will match the new amount the next time your donations runs. E.g. increase your existing $10 donation to $20 and it'll be matched to $200. No need to create a second account.

<comment><USER11> Nice! Have you sent an email out to existing UF participants explaining this?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> No emotion on the home page. Would be nice to immediately see a real person that could be helped. Not sally struthers style melodrama but some connection. Some example of the good that will happen.

<comment><USER13> When I go to watsi.org, I see 3 friendly faces with bios in the "Meet the patients" section. Are you not seeing that?

<comment><USER14> Guessing was mistaking the Universal Fund page for a home page.

<comment><USER12> Yes you are right, assumed the link was to the home page.

Thanks -

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Can the monthly donation amount be lowered in the future?

<comment><AUTHOR> Of course. But we hope people will keep them and continue to support patients.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> What if they have a 90% administration fee... all that matching could go right back into the charity. This would effectively make it 0% matching.

Also, the matching could be prorated over the next 100 years. This company has only been around for 3 years and doesn't have a profile on Charity Navigator yet. I will give it some more time.

<comment><AUTHOR> 100% of donations directly fund patient care. We even pay the credit card processing fees out of our own pocket in order to keep the administrative costs at 0% for donors. If you donate $10, it'll be matched to $100, and every cent will go to the healthcare provider to cover the cost of the patient's care.

We can afford to do this by 1) raising money separately from a group of donors to cover our administrative costs and 2) enabling people who donate to patients to add a tip to help cover administrative costs (despite it being optional, ~2/3 of donors tip).

We're too new to have been rated by Charity Navigator. Regardless, even when we are rated I won't point donors there. I think Charity Navigator is a valuable tool (more transparency around nonprofits is a good thing imo) but I don't think it's an effective way of evaluating an organization's impact. It's focused on what % of donations nonprofits spend on programs (vs administration) but not on whether the programs work.

<comment><USER6> You need to find a better way to discuss the separate pools of money. Each of the three sources of funds you mention is donated.</comment></comment></comment>


Virtual Apollo Guidance Computer - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/virtualagc/virtualagc <comment><USER2> [http://svtsim.com/moonjs/agc.html](http://svtsim.com/moonjs/agc.html) // AGC ASM.JS Port

[https://www.orbiter-forum.com/showthread.php?t=8091](https://www.orbiter- forum.com/showthread.php?t=8091) // TODO: Port NASSP to Celestia ([http://www.celestiamotherlode.net/](http://www.celestiamotherlode.net/))

<comment><USER3> [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/callisto-space- sim...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/callisto-space- simulator/nahngjoliloconljdnpdeknknooehbjo)

</comment></comment><comment> emily-c This is awesome. If you haven't seen this talk about the AGC you should definitely check it out: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xx7Lfh5SKUQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xx7Lfh5SKUQ)

</comment><comment><USER4> And here is some excellent footage of the restauration of a real AGC: [https://youtu.be/2KSahAoOLdU](https://youtu.be/2KSahAoOLdU)

</comment><comment><USER5> Great project.</comment>


Ask HN: What is the best way to find people looking for a role? - <AUTHOR> Hey. I've recently been using AngelList and LinkedIn for hiring for our company but its hit and miss. I know the monthly hiring threads are great but wanted to you lot if there are other great resources?<p>Thanks for the pointers! <comment><USER2> I've used AngelList (successfully) and LinkedIn (landed interviews but no roles) in the past. I currently have a role but I will answer anybody that reaches out to me. I tend to look for the following:

1) role/title alignment with career goals - this also covers tech stack being interesting

2) benefits - specifically 401k, in the US all employers offer healthcare so unless yours is exceptional I don't think it's worth promoting

3) salary; it doesn't need to be FANG level but if it doesn't beat my current role there's no point in starging a conversation

</comment><comment><USER3> Why do you specifically want to find 'people looking for a role'?

Those looking for a role comprise a small proportion of the total population you could target. And this subset is likely to have lower average quality than the relevant population, because those who are 'good' will spend less time before finding a good match.

</comment><comment><USER4> There's no silverbullet here, work as many channels as you're willing to open (local recruiter, meetups / user groups, ask your team to search their network, job boards, social media) and make sure you have a good interview process.

</comment><comment><USER5> I find twitter to be a great way to find people interested in a specific area or technology. Use hashtag searches or lists to find potential hires. I haven't used this but I can see myself doing it if I needed to hire today

</comment><comment><USER6> Meet-ups and local user groups are great sources of talent. They are frequent if you're located in a tech hub

</comment><comment><USER7> Stackoverflow ads maybe? What about through networks?

</comment><comment><USER8> What sort of role? Local or remote?

<comment><AUTHOR> Local over remote... lots of resources for remote roles

<comment><USER2> I would start by not referring to people as resources

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What company?</comment>


Governor signs bill requiring California corporate boards to include women - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-governor-women-corporate-boards-20180930-story.html# <comment><AUTHOR> > "By the end of July 2021, a minimum of two women must sit on boards with > five members, and there must be at least three women on boards with six or > more members. Companies that fail to comply face fines of $100,000 for a > first violation and $300,000 for a second or subsequent violation."

</comment><comment><USER2> In my opinion, this law enforces sexism and encourages adding token board members. I am not a lawyer, but I believe it would be trivial to game this system.</comment>


Salary Cut from Coronavirus - <AUTHOR> Just wondering. Did anyone or know of anyone in engineering/development get a salary cut because of the coronavirus? <comment><USER2> Yes. Many layoffs.

[https://candor.co/hiring-freezes/](https://candor.co/hiring-freezes/)

</comment><comment><USER3> I've heard of other fields getting furloughed but none in tech. It's hard enough to retain people.</comment>


Frickin' Laser Beams: Fact vs Fiction - <AUTHOR> http://martianchronicles.wordpress.com/2010/02/08/frickin-laser-beams-fact-vs-fiction/ <comment><USER3> >But really, the most likely place for lasers as a viable weapon is space. Without air, the difficulties with plasma creation and turbulence are removed. The issue of power and optics remain, but I could plausibly see a satellite or space station with the stability and power to use a laser as a weapon.

The hard part of almost any space-based power consumption is the difficulty of later dissipating the wasted heat energy. Conduction and convection don't work when there's no surrounding medium. Without lots of clever technology, then, your space-based laser is a double-edged sword.

<comment><USER4> > The hard part of almost any space-based power consumption is the difficulty > of later dissipating the wasted heat energy. ... Without lots of clever > technology, then, your space-based laser is a double-edged sword.

Not if you design it like a mine or a one-shot munition. Cheap high-powered lasers and targeting systems will pave the way for laser-mines in space. Without air, there is little need to pulse your lasers. Your weapon might as well expend itself ASAP to do maximum damage without prolonged tracking and risk of retaliatory fire. If you can only sustain pulsed fire at say 6 shots per minute, that gives your enemy a lot of time to triangulate and return fire, potentially with more lasers than you have. However, you could simply expend your munition by firing it continuously for a minute until your mine overheats and its systems fail.

If you're lucky your mine might survive the battle through a bad retaliatory shot, or by destroying the target. If your mine survives, it could well live to fight another day. It will eventually cool down, and assuming you'd provide it with solar panels it could well charge itself up to repeat the process next time you're attacked. It's also nice to point out that smaller objects dissipate their heat faster, so attaching your weapons inside your ship may only serve to hamper your efforts to fight effectively.

If you're actually defending _something_ , like say a asteroid mine then you're likely to have enough spare material to afford heat sinks, or you could use several meter wide asteroids to mount your lasers. Drill tubes and heat- sink into the asteroid (it doesn't matter what it's made of, but a metallic asteroid would be ideal) with copper-rods and you could fire for even longer periods. On top of this, you could use the asteroid as a heat-sink for the enemy fire. If you know a ship-mounted laser only fires once every 10 seconds, you could simply realign so that there's a high probability that your enemy will be hitting rock and not a vital system.

I doubt we'll be using them any time soon, but I think what people fail to understand is the incredible vastness of space, but also the potentially endless resources we will find there (at least from our present perspective where we can't strip-mine our planet because of all that inconvenient molten- gooiness that is containing precious materials).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> One myth left: can I just use a mirror to reflect the high power laser at the gun that fired it to destroy it?

<comment><USER6> Mirrors are not 100% efficient. That fraction of one percent will kill you if the incident power density is high enough. Once one little portion of the mirror is absorbing more energy than it can dissipate, that portion will heat up and up. When it gets hot enough it tends to become less reflective - <USER2> oxidizes or maybe just evaporates - and then you've got even higher absorption at that spot, which makes it fail even faster and helps heat up adjacent spots...

When this happens with a pulsed laser you can sometimes hear it. That tiny snap-snap-snap is the sound of your three-hundred-dollar optic heading for the trash. You'll look at it and see the telltale little spots. If you're cheap you'll try just sliding it sideways to a non-spotted bit of surface, but sometimes there isn't enough mirror for that...

That's with a high-tech custom-designed laser mirror, not a random surface of some random object. And we're generally not _trying_ to destroy it. And yet they often get destroyed, when you screw around with high-intensity lasers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> > The air poses another problem: it absorbs light. In fact, a high enough > powered laser can cause the air itself to break down into a ragged line of > plasma. I've seen this in the lab and it is awesome.

Badass.

edit: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZeqIZyUMDP4>

<comment><USER8> _I mentioned lightning earlier and that's relevant here. There is a way to make use of the "plasma issue", because plasmas conduct electricity. So in theory it would be possible to use a laser as a long-distance taser! The laser would first create a conduit of plasma out of the air, and then with a high enough voltage, an electric shock could be send down the plasma to the target. This would not be a subtle weapon: at this point the lightning analogy is not really an analogy anymore. It would basically be a lightning gun, and would make a noise to match. I thought I was being really clever when I thought of this, but it turns out I'm not the first: the US military has experimented with them._

So we don't get lasers but we do get plasma cannon/particle beams/PPCs? I'm okay with that.

<comment><USER9> Hmmm... so controlled dielectric breakdown with lasers... Use E-fields from lightning to produce gamma rays via

[http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/01/lightning- antimatt...](http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/01/lightning-antimatter- physics/)

collect positrons with a magnetic bottle. Finish with big jars of antimatter. I wonder...</comment></comment></comment>


More itertools (Python) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/erikrose/more-itertools

<comment><USER2> Nice.

Isn't the functionality of "collate" already available in the standard library as heapq.merge? The heapq version should be faster, too.</comment>


Is This the Beginning of the Great Tech Depression of 2016? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@karan/is-this-the-beginning-of-the-great-tech-depression-of-2016-54af7d6fdbef#.pb9bmeqnu <comment><USER2> The only company I see on a rebound strangely is MS. Except for soem of the issues of Windows 10. They're actaully growing overall and getting off to a strong start. I feel bad for what happened to Yahoo this past week. Such a good company but apparently they were late in aqutie a few things</comment>


How "three strikes" file-sharing enforcement system is working in France - <AUTHOR> http://paidcontent.org/article/419-french-anti-piracy-agency-finds-18-million-file-sharers-investigates-10/

<comment><USER2> An article that mostly toes the Anti-Piracy At Any Cost/Infringment is theft dogma.

You can tell because it misses the other side of the coin: Did movie or recorded music sales rise in France? Because notationally, that's what Anti- Piracy is all about, right? If grotesque, massive dragnets like this eliminate "piracy", yet sales don't rise, empirically, we can all get off the Anti- Piracy bandwagon, and stop paying for the dragnets.</comment>


Google Plus: Is This the Social Tool Schools Have Been Waiting For? - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_plus_education.php#.ThHldk_rnwQ.hackernews <comment><USER2> Anything that helps break the Blackboard monopoly is good news in my book.</comment>


Ask HN: What product started as an email list? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Craigslist</comment>


Twisted graphene exhibits previously-unseen form of magnetism - sahin-boydas https://newatlas.com/graphene-new-form-magnetism/60770/ <comment><AUTHOR> It's gonna be really cool to see graphene used... in 60 years, when it's possible to manufacture in sufficient quantities

<comment><USER2> Yeah graphene is like lasers 40 years ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> One day we'll discover that graphene can even be used to make graphene, and then everything will finally just work</comment>


The Programming Book Graveyard - <AUTHOR> http://blog.slickedit.com/?p=236

<comment><USER2> I'm a bit of a pack rat… I have a hard time getting rid of anything I think I might possibly need in the future, and that's especially true of computer books and magazines. Once upon a time, there was no internet… a sad fact that makes me feel older than my parents who can remember a time without TV. There was no Googling MSDN, no easy access to message boards, no coding sample web sites. Back then all you had was paper and ink, and you learned what you needed to learn by going to the bookstore and picking up the latest programming book on that subject. And we liked it!</comment>


Ask HN: Is there a repository of "green" tech firms? - <AUTHOR> Warning, there will be opinions in the text that follows
Climate-change skeptics please disregard this post.
As far as I see it, there is one problem in the world that shadows all other problems: climate change.
I'd like to put my programming skills to good use, meaning trying to chip away at that exact problem. But the problem is huge and there is a million angles you could (should) address it.
THE QUESTION:
Is there a list or repository over companies that work towards reducing the harm we are causing by emitting CO_2? Or maybe a place where people with great ideas can get in contact with people who have skills they need to make their a into reality? <comment><USER2> > As far as I see it, there is one problem in the world that shadows all other > problems: climate change.

This problem certainly tops in the media, but I think this always conveniently omits what are the root causes of climate change: the fact that we have broken economic systems that preach unlimited growth and are effectively wealth inequality creating pyramid schemes.

I guess in a couple of years the dominating news will be collapsing ecosystems and wars, if we don't address root causes.

PS. Sorry, I do not have a list of companies for you.

<comment><USER3> This is exactly on point. The whole thing is that to "win" the game, countries need to grow and keep growing. If we found a way to change the paradigm and incentivize sustainability instead, then it would better. Imagine like a blockchain contract between countries where the "spoils" of economic activity were split between them with regard to how efficient and sustainable their economies were. GDP -> GDS - Gross Domestic Sustainability

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Ground up approaches can also have a large impact. There are quite a few citizen science projects that indirectly influence ecology. Bug hunts, bird migration data. It's a terrific way to gain a foot hold, and see direct impacts of the anthropocene era ;)

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

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the reply

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> You could browse through TechCrunch's "cleantech" tag for interesting companies breaking news in the space. [https://techcrunch.com/tag/cleantech/](https://techcrunch.com/tag/cleantech/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for that. I'll try that.</comment></comment>