Life Without Principle (1854) - <AUTHOR> http://thoreau.eserver.org/life1.html

<comment><USER2> Excellent essay, thanks for posting. It parallels the following important idea from pg's essay on losing time and money ([http://paulgraham.com/selfindulgence.html](http://paulgraham.com/selfindulgence.html)):

 __The most dangerous way to lose time is not to spend it having fun, but to spend it doing fake work. __

As a person who has suffered for the latter all my life, I cannot emphasize this more. Even now, when I have a few precious hours to myself on a Sunday afternoon (this happens _very_ rarely), I have no immediate plans, so I surf this or that website, taking notes about ideas, etc., which to someone watching me would seem like I was engaged in valuable activity.

<comment><USER3> >this happens very rarely

Why?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Awesome to see my favourite author here on Hacker News.

May I also humbly recommend:

* Civil Disobedience (1849) - the classic referred to by Gandhi and MLK [http://thoreau.eserver.org/civil.html](http://thoreau.eserver.org/civil.html)

* A Plea for Captain John Brown (1859) - Thoreau was one of the very, very few to defend Brown attempt to launch a slave rebellion [http://thoreau.eserver.org/plea.html](http://thoreau.eserver.org/plea.html)

* Walden (1854) - of course - read the first chapter at least ("Economy") for a timeless analysis of what is _necessary_ in life [http://thoreau.eserver.org/walden00.html](http://thoreau.eserver.org/walden00.html)

<comment><USER5> I would also include Walking in that list. But I may as well expand that and recommend all of his essays.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Relevant?

"When our life ceases to be inward and private, conversation degenerates into mere gossip. We rarely meet a man who can tell us any news which he has not read in a newspaper, or been told by his neighbor; and, for the most part, the only difference between us and our fellow is that he has seen the newspaper, or been out to tea, and we have not."

</comment><comment><USER7> Even though the language is a bit dated ( also, English is not my native language) this essay is well worth reading and insightful. Didn't know about this Thoreau fellow before reading this though so really thank you for posting.

One thing i keep thinking about is the stark contradiction between the high standard of living of western society and ever increasing depression rates ( I don't have a list of sources at hand, but I believe this to be somewhat common knowledge ), so I think that this essay strikes right at the heart of the problem, in the sense that we are almost living for making a living( Or some such phrasing ), or at least hints at a deeper, more underlying and worrying phenomenon .

</comment><comment><USER8> _" If I should sell both my forenoons and afternoons to society, as most appear to do, I am sure that for me there would be nothing left worth living for."_

If I say things like this, people are quick to suggest medication.

<comment><USER9> They suggest that you have a problem because this way of thinking questions their way of life. You can always keep your controversial opinions to your self or share them with a group of close friends. No need to make other people feel uncomfortable.

BTW, I agree with the author's assertion, you should try as much as possible to be your own master and not be the slave of other people opinion.

<comment><USER10> "They suggest that you have a problem because this way of thinking questions their way of life."

Well, perhaps. Or perhaps they have noticed that, or have accepted the conventional wisdom that, people who say things like this are more often depressed than both not depressed and thoughtful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> We have principles! Marriage is bad and drugs are good. Read it right here on Hacker News.

<comment><USER12> Thoreau is clearly comparing the Massachusetts startup scene to the one in California.

<comment><USER13> there is a Massachusetts startup scene ?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is a long, dense essay with dated language posted with no context. It is cumbersome to read. Does anyone have a more accessible article which parallels the ideas here?

<comment><USER4> "Men sometimes speak as if the study of the classics would at length make way for more modern and practical studies; but the adventurous student will always study classics, in whatever language they may be written and however ancient they may be. For what are the classics but the noblest recorded thoughts of man?" \-- Thoreau

Sorry, couldn't resist.</comment></comment>


Things you may not know you can do with attachments in Gmail - <AUTHOR> http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/tip-5-things-you-may-not-know-you-can.html <comment><USER2> Still waiting for the ability to search or sort by email size. I'm certain 25% of the space taken in my mailbox is attachments I've forgotten about.

<comment><USER3> Is that really a problem with a 7 gig inbox?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is there a reason that drag-and-drop isn't supported in Safari 5? As far as I know, it supports the proper new HTML5/JavaScript APIs.

</comment><comment><USER5> Didn't know about the the "has:attachment ext" search text. That's cool.

<comment><USER6> It falls inline with the: to:, from: cc: bcc: ... operators.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> GMail still doesn't index attachments though... It's a pity.

</comment><comment><USER8> I think there's no way to delete just an attachment - sometimes I wish to get rid of a large redundant/outdated attachment, but keep the email body.

(sort-of-lame workaround: reply to self, quoting text, delete original email)</comment>


Liquorix – The Better Distro Kernel - <AUTHOR> https://liquorix.net/ <comment><USER2> You, like me, might be looking for benchmarks; [https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=radeon-g...](https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=radeon- gaming-liquorix54&num=1)</comment>


Why NASA Helped Ridley Scott Create 'The Martian' Film - <AUTHOR> http://www.popsci.com/why-nasa-helped-ridley-scott-create-martian-film-and-what-means-future-sci-fi-space-movies

<comment><USER2> Consulting with Scott about a movie to Mars is all their budget can handle.</comment>


Ask HN: Has Facebook fundamentally changed from 2004? - <AUTHOR> tldr: Has it's primary definition evolved into something more than it was intended 16 years ago?
Reading all about Facebook, one can't help but wonder if it's no longer the communication platform it started as? Some argue the website is something akin to hybrid news model now.
Facebook is a private entity at the end of the day. Yes, an extraordinary large one at that. What stays and what doesn't isn't anymore dictated by the actions of a singular user anymore. Politics has so deeply rooted itself at the center of the platform that I fear it stands to fundamentally change the way Facebook handles content.
Should social media behemoths like facebook and twitter be content cops, is that business friendly strategy in 2020? In an ideal world, would even that be necessary?
Or does this community think they should follow models which prohibit any accountability for content posted by people of importance? But then again, where do you draw the line about who's content are you to moderate?
If they are to moderate people of importance and treat their publishing as 'news', does Facebook consider themself a broadcasting platform for celebrities? Does it not hold all users on the same set of guidelines anymore?
Is facebook going the right way? Is there really a right way? <comment><USER2> Are you from the past?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm sorry I don't get it.</comment></comment>


Natural Language Processing for the Working Programmer - <AUTHOR> http://nlpwp.org/book/ <comment><USER2> We just started out one and a half week ago, joining the Pragmatic Programmer's writing month. We though a 'release early, release often' approach would be best, that's why there are just a few in-progress chapters.

We will keep you posted, and thanks for the encouragement!

<comment><USER3> You seem to know a lot about NLP and I've asked this question in various places and never even found anyone who knew just a little, so I hope you don't mind that I ask you a small question on whether my problem can even be solved with NLP at all.

I'm looking for a way to extract addresses from web pages, where these addresses are immediately recognizable as such by people but are not in a standard format (zip codes before city or after, no zip codes at all, p/o box instead of street name, ...). All in text format (no graphics, no OCR problem) but inside html tags, in various forms (as row in a table, inside one or multple <div>'s, as an <ul>, etc).

\- Is this an NLP problem? \- If so, where do I start reading/learning? Most NLP seems to be about understanding free-flowing texts of all sorts of subjects. I'm looking for 98% solutions in what I think is a restricted problem space. Is this a reasonable expectation?

<comment><USER4> this could be an NLP problem although if you can find an adequate solution with a regular expression/context free grammar that's the easier route.

a lot of modern NLP is based on statistical methods and training data driven, meaning having a training corpus of example addresses identified within the context of these webpages would be the starting place if you went one of those routes. you might start by looking up some academic papers in this area and see if it's been done and methods published.

<comment><USER5> Just for information, CFGs used for processing natural language are almost invariably statistical too these days. Because natural language is inherently ambiguous and probabilistic.

"Fruit flies like bananas" can be grammatically parsed in [at least] two ways, but one if a much more likely interpretation.

<comment><USER4> yea for sure, I meant in my advice that a non-statistical solution might be good to start out with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's an interesting paper that I intend to dig into more carefully, but I kind of wish that a paper "for the Working Programmer" used a language like Python rather than Haskell. I'm aware that Haskell has a very nice type system for doing things like this -- and I'm a language nerd myself, so It's not that -- but it just seems like it would be more _practical_ in something more "mainstream."

That said, it is interesting from what I've read so far.

<comment><USER7> The title is likely a hat tip to a famous functional textbook: _ML for the Working Programmer_.

<http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~lp15/MLbook/>

<comment><USER8> ...which is in turn a nod to _Categories for the Working Mathematician_ by Saunders Mac Lane (as is Clocksin's _Clause and Effect: Prolog Programming for the Working Programmer_, and probably several other books.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've posted this link before, but these NLP posts keep popping up on HN, so I'll keep posting.

Over at <http://www.repustate.com>, we're taking the more common functions that NLTK performs (and the ones it should) and porting them over as web services. NLTK is kind of buggy here & there, and it's not too great if you're dealing with big data sets. Our API, with the obvious handicap of network latency, is lightning fast because we ported many NLTK functions down to raw C.

Our API is free so have at it, let me know if you want to see us add anything.

<comment><USER10> whiled I'm sure something nice will come out of it you may wish to temporarily disable the NER feature because, it seems to amount to "select capitalized words" at least on the few pages I tried (wikipedia, bitcoin, nytimes).

It is blazing fast though :)

<comment><USER9> Yeah, the NER call is not functioning as well as it can. We're aiming at improving that. Thanks for checking things out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'll have to put this on my 'to read' list, it looks really interesting. I think natural language processing/understanding may become one of those next 'big things' like mobile and social media simply because understanding what a user is trying to do will become very important.

If anyone is interested in playing around with a robust natural language processing tool, I built an API for the Stanford Parser. <http://nlp.naturalparsing.com/browserparser/parse>

</comment><comment><USER12> Thanks Daniël, this is cool!

I am not a very good Haskel programmer, but I spend an occasional evening with it, and I am interested in NLP also (have been working off and on on NLP since the early 1980s).

From skimming through the book, it looks like a nice read and just went on my reading list.

</comment><comment><USER13> This is pretty neat. At the risk of sounding childish, here I go -- I wish books like these could be given life like tryruby.org where you could try out examples and learn along the way. That would be wicked cool.

For now, OpenStudy will do the trick. I created a "StudyPad" if anyone wants to go through this book together. [http://openstudy.com/studypads/Natural- Language-Processing-f...](http://openstudy.com/studypads/Natural-Language- Processing-for-The-Working-Programmer-4ce2253e59fe3a7ffe5f6778)

</comment><comment><USER14> It's interesting to note that a lot of natural language processing is English- centered. It's clear that English natural language processing is way ahead of the curve, but based on the quality of Chinese results on Google Translate, I take it Asian languages don't do so hot when it comes to natural language processing?

<comment><USER15> Translation is a lot harder for language pairs that are less related. Most of the European languages are fairly close cousins, so translation between, say, English and French isn't that hard.

That said, it's generally true that for most NLP tasks, we're doing much better on languages similar to English.</comment></comment>


Pure JavaScript OCR for 62 Languages - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/naptha/tesseract.js <comment><USER2> Very cool! It'd be fun to link this up to a translator api. I think they already have an app that does that. But it would still be fun to build.</comment>


Show HN: Desktop Notifications (webkit) for Hacker News - <AUTHOR> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hndn/hkfhkpdkpjnbijpgfndjdghboghcplnc

<comment><AUTHOR> The extension runs with background permissions so you don't need to start chrome for using it. It starts automatically at user-login to OS. The projects is open sourced under MIT license.

Repo: [https://github.com/yankee101/HNDN](https://github.com/yankee101/HNDN)

</comment><comment><USER2> Works Great! I was looking for this. Few points you should consider: 1. Mention that the extension is for Chrome. 2. Add a screenshot to the extension page too. 3. Add an option to 'not' choose any notification sound.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the suggestions. Actually someone else has published the extension on my behalf. I will ask him to add the image at the time of a major release.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is the exact thing to ruin my productivity. I already have a FOMO problem as it is.

</comment><comment><USER4> One annoyance is that notifications never go away.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the suggestion. I will add an option to auto-hide notifications after a certain time.</comment></comment>


How an F Student Became America's Most Prolific Inventor - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2015-americas-top-inventor-lowell-wood/ <comment><USER2> Here we have Ashlee Vance, who three weeks ago we saw making fun of programming-contest finalists for their haircuts and physiques ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10283567](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10283567)), doing a PR exercise for Intellectual Ventures, the world's premier patent troll, whose business is to figure out what inventions would be the most important for the world's neediest people, obtain patents on them so that those people are legally forbidden to make those inventions happen, and then never bring those inventions to market themselves — putting themselves in a cozy spot to extract rent from any actual innovators who do create the inventions they've imagined.

The fact that this dude who goes around dreaming up ideas that never get implemented (fortunately, in the case of Star Wars) now outshines Edison in patent count is a key indicator of how badly screwed up the US patent system has gotten.

Is it a coincidence that a journalist who hates hackers and publicly ridicules them is doing submarine PR for a patent troll built to take control of hacking away from hackers?

(On rereading my comment, I'm forced to add: but at least he knows how to write sentences that are shorter than a paragraph...)

</comment><comment><USER3> "At 74, he's been an inventor-in-residence at Intellectual Ventures, a technology research and patent firm, for about a decade."

He works for IV which is a notorious patent troll and the article reads like native advertising / submarine PR for IV i.e. IV paid for the article. Does this guy actually invent things (that he strives to make real) or does he just waste his time submitting new patents for IV to use for its exhortion schemes?

</comment><comment><USER4> I really wanted to read this but I just can't. It's impossible for me to read anything while constantly being bombarded with all sorts of animated artwork and pointless flicker on the sides.

I recently cancelled my Economist subscription because they insist on playing unstoppable video adverts right in the middle of the article text so maybe it's just me being hypersensitive to this sort of thing (And yes I refuse to use ad-blockers).

They say it's a sign of intelligence if you are able to focus and ignore distractions. I noticed that some devs even work with the radio on. I don't. I also need to close a door behind me when I work.

So even though I am able to create some pretty interesting pieces of artificial intelligence (albeit with moderate productivity), my natural cognitive abilities seem rather limited.

My special needs seem to be incompatible even with business models that do include a paid component. I find that a bit disconcerting.

<comment><USER5> Just hit Reader Mode on your iOS/Mac device in Safari.

[http://www.engadget.com/2014/03/26/iphone-101-how-to-use- rea...](http://www.engadget.com/2014/03/26/iphone-101-how-to-use-reader-mode- in-safari-to-simplify-web-pag/)

I think Microsoft's browser has it so it should work on Windows too.

[http://m.winsupersite.com/windows-8/windows-81-tip-better- re...](http://m.winsupersite.com/windows-8/windows-81-tip-better-reading- internet-explorer-11)

<comment><USER4> That's an improvement, but it doesn't remove the animations within the text.

Also, I have this perhaps stupid inclination to use published stuff in a way that doesn't undermine the publisher's business model. This sentiment is of course a bit nonsensical if the only other option is to walk away entirely, because that wouldn't make them any money either.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Usually I appreciate the creative touches Bloomberg give pieces like this, but I'm not a fan of this background that rapidly flashes on scroll. I get that it's supposed to represent the sheer number of patents filed, but it renders the entire article unreadable for me outside of Firefox's Reader View.

</comment><comment><USER7> An F student? The man "enrolled at UCLA at 16, where he tested into an honors- level calculus class", and got "a doctorate in astrophysics". If he was an F student, it certainly wasn't for much of his academic career.

</comment><comment><USER8> An F UX. Can't read.

</comment><comment><USER9> sorry for the promotion here, but thought it might be interesting for some of you. we're doing a live q&a with Ashlee now if anyone wants join and ask him some questions: [http://digg.com/dialog/ashlee-vance- dialog](http://digg.com/dialog/ashlee-vance-dialog)</comment>


U.S. Labor Markets Aren't Truly Free - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-10-21/free-markets-could-make-workers-better-off <comment><USER2> Of course they aren't. What do you think minimum wage and licensing laws do?

<comment><USER3> Labor has virtually no pricing power in the U.S. except in a few industries. Minimum wage laws and licensing laws are the cause of U.S. labor markets not being a truly free market.

Did you read the article? The author clearly paints a picture of too much pricing power in the hands of corporations and consolidations in business. Your counterpoint is the minimum wage is what prevents labor from being a truly free market? I can't see how getting rid of one of the few protections for workers would make the labor market more free.

<comment><USER2> Freedom is the right to choose. Minimum wage laws restrict someone from choosing to enter into a contract to sell their labor below a rate set by the government. Licensing laws restrict someone from choosing to purchase the labor of someone not accredited by the government. In both circumstances the individual's right to choose is curtailed. The headline of the article was "Labor Markets Aren't Truly Free". That the author chose to focus on employers is beside the point. The fact that labor markets aren't "truly free" is transparently obvious.

<comment><USER3> Instead of looking at the headline read the article. It's clearly about the lack of pricing power for labor. The author is decrying the absence of pricing power on the part of labor so responding with a suggestion to further erode that pricing power without providing any evidence that this action would help labor is not constructive. Unless your point is that emoloyers have too little pricing power and we need to correct the mechanisms that take away their power.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


You don't need six months to prepare. You need an hour - <AUTHOR> http://joshuaspodek.com/dont-need-six-months-prepare-need-hour <comment><USER2> My conference presentations became much better once I learned to practice them a few times. That takes well more than an hour. The presentation takes about a week to put together. The research behind it can take months. So ... yes, I need more than an hour.

That said, that's not the post's point, which is that many one hour deadlines (and I assume these are real deadlines?) leads to better and quicker progress than a single 6 month deadlines.

I think the use of "an hour" when it's actually "a series of short deadlines" to be a bit dishonest.</comment>


Single Instruction x86 C Compiler - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/xoreaxeaxeax/movfuscator <comment><USER2> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12372242](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12372242)

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://github.com/kirschju/demovfuscator](https://github.com/kirschju/demovfuscator) :)

</comment><comment><USER4> This is an excellent hack.</comment>


Doing hard things - <AUTHOR> http://blog.hulu.com/2009/2/18/doing-hard-things

<comment><USER2> In summary: Content providers are Luddite control freaks, but without their material Hulu is nothing, so we have to be the ones to convince them otherwise.

I wish that they had posted some contact info for the content providers who made this decision.</comment>


Dispositional mindfulness is associated with reduced implicit learning - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053810014001019 <comment><AUTHOR> Original paper:

[http://pubman.mpdl.mpg.de/pubman/item/escidoc:1749328:5/comp...](http://pubman.mpdl.mpg.de/pubman/item/escidoc:1749328:5/component/escidoc:1760288/1-s2.0-S1053810013000780-main.pdf)

<comment><USER2> In fact, it's not. The paper you've linked is titled "Mindfulness reduces habitual responding based on implicit knowledge: Evidence from artificial grammar learning", from September 2012. It may be related, but not the same.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> A summary for us laypeople [1].

 _' The authors suggest that people who deliberate less are better at implicit learning because they have a wider span of attention and focus on a wider variety of stimuli. In turn, this makes them more likely to capture relevant associations in complex tasks.'_

 _' But they also found several positive correlations between mindfulness and previously investigated cognitive and psychological health outcomes, "supporting the idea of a tradeoff in benefit," Stillman says.'_

1: [http://www.georgetown.edu/research/news/mindfulness- cognitiv...](http://www.georgetown.edu/research/news/mindfulness-cognitive- aging-study.html)

<comment><USER4> Better: quote the actual authors.

> We therefore tested whether the mindfulness trait predicted a reduction of > grammatically congruent preferences ... Mindfulness was shown to correlate > negatively with grammatically congruent responses

> Mindfulness was measured using the Dutch version (de Bruin, Topper, Muskens, > Bogels, & Kamphuis, 2012) of the 39 item Five Factor Mindfulness > Questionnaire (FFMQ, Baer et al. (2006)).

> Working memory (WM) performance over sessions was analyzed with repeated- > measures ANOVA. WM performance (LEVENSHTEIN) was indexed by mean Levenshtein > distance between target sequence and remembered sequence ... Low Levenshtein > distances therefore represent good WM performance, and high Levenshtein > distance poor WM performance.

The WM variable represents mean distance between target sequences subjects were exposed to before they were told there was a pattern, and the sequences they generated attempting to recall them after being told there was a pattern.

The phrase, "grammatically congruent responses" appears only in the abstract, but it probably refers to the same thing as WM.

Sometimes, it's best to let your pattern matcher do its thing. Label your axes, kids.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> i spend almost of my time in thought. i've been this way ever since i was a kid, and i think this is why i was so bad at social skills.

most people learn social skills through implicit-pattern matching. 'when i do this, that happens' \- with no real structural understanding of _why_. they implicitly learn patterns like posture, eye contact, facial microexpressions.

that implicit learning is not possible if you are always engaged in conceptual thought.

<comment><USER6> _that implicit learning is not possible if you are always engaged in conceptual thought._

While I agree with you, the paper is saying that mindfulness (being "in the moment" or aware of your surroundings) results in _reduced_ implicit learning. That seems to be the opposite of your observation.

Although I have no idea whether "dispositional mindfulness" is different from "mindfulness," so maybe my comment isn't quite accurate. But if it's any way related to the colloquial definition of "mindfulness," then the paper is saying it's negatively correlated with implicit learning.

Is the paper's "implicit learning" the same as the type of learning you're talking about? I don't know.

<comment><USER5> thanks for the clarification. you're right on that.

i've found that my social skills have dramatically improved from trying to learn them _conceptually_, rather than implicitly. I watched a lot of tv shows - walking dead, house of cards, game of thrones, breaking bad - and kept pausing the tv to discuss with my wife _why_ people were acting the ways they did.

doing this really helped me come to understand a lot of things, like the importance of staying calm if you want to be respected. apparently 'dispositional mindfulness' is mindfulness as a default state, as opposed to something practiced intentionally.

going about my day thinking about abstract things constantly seems like the opposite of dispositional mindfulness. i'll haveh to look further.

<comment><USER7> Based on your description, it sounds like you may be on the autistic spectrum. Perhaps reading up on that can give you more insights.

You may also find this book interesting, by a man who was diagnosed with Asperger's (which is now just said to be on the autistic spectrum) as an adult, after his wife started picking up on it: [http://www.amazon.com/The- Journal-Best-Practices-Marriage/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Journal-Best- Practices- Marriage/dp/1439189749/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1407884946&sr=8-1&keywords=autistic+husband+handbook)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Reduced implicit learning is not in fact a "bad" thing, although we may quickly assume so at first glance. I suppose if you read the title of this post and thought "wait what? They're saying mindfulness is bad?" then that would be an example of where your implicitly acquired knowledge failed to some extent.

In fact, a common cause of disturbance within people is that they are too affected by implicit "I did this and that happened" learnings and not of the true intent/meaning behind actions and reactions.

<comment><USER6> It seems like only a trained expert can understand what they're saying.

Or, put another way: This paper desperately needs a translator for us laymen. We could puzzle over what the paper is saying, but hopefully someone in the field will write a translative comment.

Until then, everyone seems to be making comments based off of what they hope the paper is saying rather than its true findings. For example, it seems like the paper claims they administered a grammatical task, and performance on verbal tasks is a distinct type of learning. Someone can fail their English exams but still be an amazing artist, for example.

<comment><USER9> Well, stuff that you implicitly learn are things that you cannot 'explain'. In the paper, they say they use sequence learning as their implicit learning task. In sequence learning, you show some visual stimuli, and the subject reacts. Depending on the test, the sequence may have underlying structure. I don't have access to the paper, so I'm speculating here, but its probable that they used a test with underlying structure, and measured the reaction times of the subjects. This test essentially tests the subjects 'subconscious' pattern recognition. And one of the hallmarks of implicit learning is that your skill is only weakly transferable to other skills. So it might be that only sequence learning is impaired by mindfullness. Who knows.

As for if implicit learning is 'bad'? Well, it certainly depends on context. There are definitely large areas where it is preferable to have explicit knowledge. That said, there are also lots of situation where it simply isn't feasible to get that explicit knowledge - we must fall back to implicit learning. For example, language learning is a pretty weird case. As children, language learning is pretty much mostly implicit - it is entirely possible to develop into a passable English speaker without being to articulate any of the grammer rules. Even as adults, we are often told to stop worrying about the rules, and just get exposure to the language - this too relates to implicit learning.

<comment><USER10> The way you describe it, implicit learning is the formation of associations, pattern matching, and what some call intuition. I've seen great things done with fact-based x-causes-y deduction as well as intuitive understanding that is hard to explain. I've also seen cases of each where a person who thinks the other way would never have found a solution to a problem. I would not discount implicit learning, nor promote it as "better".

Are we getting at the old right-brain left-brain thing here?

<comment><USER11> Implicit or procedural learning refers to learning how to do things like tying your shoes: It requires considerable cognitive effort and attentive control of muscles to get right, but eventually, after you've done it many times, you don't think about it anymore.

Driving is another example: After sufficient experience, you drive without conscious effort, becoming consciously aware of things only when they exceed your implicit bounds ("That car is too close, what's that unexpected shape at the side of the road").

The basic gist of the article is that mindfulness (which essentially makes you both more aware of and detached from your conscious cognitive efforts) mixes poorly with learning tasks or activities that are intended to eventually be performed automagically.

I suppose, I speculate, that the reason for this is that implicit learning requires you be "all in" attending to the task, but mindfulness would have you at least partially attending to your attention, so your mind is in fact distracting itself.

I further speculate that this likely "weakens" the "signal" your brain is trying to send from the explicitly conscious regions of your brain that are attending to the new task to the implicit, subconscious regions that will eventually perform the task, once it has been well learned.

(Just for fun, try to describe to someone in step-by-step detail how you tie your shoes. Then try tying them while describing what you are doing. Report back on how many attempts it takes before you succeed.)

<comment><USER10> I tried very hard for a long time to explain to my daughter how to make herself go on a swing with no luck. "Lean back, legs out, when going forward..." Then I sat on the swing next to her and did it myself. She watched and was doing it herself in about 5 seconds. No idea if anything I had said helped prepare for that. I think she had seen me swing myself before and didn't get it, so IDK what clicked.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I still don't grasp how a distinction between implicit and explicit learning can be made. At a first glance, the two words seem to imply that these are two very different processes. But when I asked myself "Does learning a Karate move require rather implicit or explicit learning?" the answer is not clear to me.

On the one hand, you have to be fully _focused_ [explicit learning] on the actual move (What's the angle of my feet?, How high should my fist rise? etc.) On the other hand, karate instructors always advice "do not __think __about what you do ", they hence perhaps advice an implicit learning approach. [so, according to the paper, they don't want you to be mindful - and that sounds like an oxymoron since karate is about being mindful]

My uneducated guess would be that it requires both kinds of learning at the same time to the same amount (That's what I would actually consider/define as mindful learning...)

I would like to understand these concepts better as I guess a lot of ineffective learning can be ascribed to the "wrong kind of learning".

</comment><comment><USER13> Yes! I've always suspected that this is true.

<comment><USER14> I believe my first conscious experience of this was when I tried to write a towers-of-hanoi program. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Hanoi](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Hanoi)

My 'hands' figured out the algorithm in a minute or two, and could fly through the stacks without a problem. But when I tried to be mindful enough of what I was doing to write an algorithm for it, I basically forgot what i was doing, and had to painstakingly reteach myself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Given that "implicit learning" means, roughly, learning without being aware of what's being learned, this is expected. The question would be: is this lack of awareness a good or bad thing?

</comment><comment><USER16> so the harder you think about it, the less you are able to learn?

<comment><USER17> That's what came to mind first for me as well, but I think it's important to note that 'mindfulness' as defined in the paper is a specific type of "thinking harder".

I wonder if there would be similar results if the experiments were performed with new motor skill acquisition. I know that in my own experience it seems that a combination of "mindful" practice (especially at the beginning of the learning process) with "drill" type practice seems to seal the deal most efficiently. Basically the "engram" theory.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> So they're saying that if you don't pay attention you don't learn?

<comment><USER11> Kind of the opposite, really (see my other comment above for more): Learning a to-be-implicit-eventually task requires near-total attention while you learn it (tying a shoe, riding a bike), but eventually requires none.

Mindfulness, or paying attention to the fact you are paying attention, would appear to sufficiently reduce that required near-total attention so as to slow down the learning process.

When learning to swing the bat at the ball, focus solely on the bat and ball. Once you can hit the ball without thinking about it, then attempt mindful inspection of your actions - but not before.

EDIT: s/too/to/above.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> "We tested _two_ adult samples using two different sequence learning tasks."

Two? Nothing to see here.

<comment><USER20> This attitude is not helpful and actively damaging. Small sample sizes in science _do_ serve a purpose: to get larger studies funded.

It's as if the top comment to every ShowHN post was: "Not at $200mm in funding. Nothing to see here."

<comment><USER19> Actively damaging? A little dramatic perhaps? I didn't say it doesn't serve a purpose, I said there is nothing to see here. Quite literally. Until they do a larger study why is it news?

<comment><USER20> It is actively damaging to the community for you to take snipes at studies when the reason you are criticizing the study is not only unnecessary criticism that any layman could provide, it is actually a misinterpretation of the study. You didn't add anything to the discussion.

As for why it is news, a lot of hackers are interested in mental health and mindfulness+meditation specifically and would be interested in more cutting edge news about it, rather than what ends up in the NYTimes 8 months later.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Ask HN: can anyone come up with some old English language adage (or in any other language) which says the same thing as this paper?

For instance:

 _" Abstract: the timeliness of mindful preemptive action is positively correlated with mitigated needs for subsequent compensating or reparative measures."

\--> "A stitch in time saves nine."

\--> "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure."_

Not being able to _" see the forest for the trees"_ is in the right ball park. Cliche Zen ideas come into play here also: opening your mind to the broader experience, rather than straining at focusing.

"Turn on, tune in, drop out, man! ... and, like, learn more!" :)

<comment><USER22> not an adage, but here's an analogy (correct me if i'm wrong):

if you worry too much about the mechanics of shooting free throws, you're not likely to learn to shoot them as well/quickly as someone who just shoots over and over (and thereby letting their subconscious make the adjustments for them).

basketball analogies are my favorite =)</comment></comment>


California teen invents device that could charge a cell phone in 20 seconds - <AUTHOR> http://blog.sfgate.com/sfmoms/2013/05/20/california-teen-invents-device-that-could-charge-cell-phone-in-20-seconds/ <comment><USER2> Or maybe not. Here are some previous submissions of the same story:

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5730887> <\- moderate discussion

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5737910>

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5738327>

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5738595>

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5741949>

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5742227>

</comment><comment><USER3> I thought it was an Indian (or maybe Chinese) 3 year old - oh no that was probably the Daily Mail.

All nonsense of course. I suppose it does no good to wonder why such gets posted here on HN.</comment>


Curated list of Scala frameworks, libraries and software - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/lauris/awesome-scala

<comment><USER2> This list would be a ton more useful if there were some metrics or indications for which libraries were included and why. Just as good, which were purposefully _not_ included. And again, why.

This is pretty much _the_ reason folks go with full stack frameworks fairly often. Trying to determine which of the testing modules to pair with which authentication module and which ... is annoying.

<comment><USER3> The list is open source and community driven. It means that everyone can improve it and suggest edits. There has already been 19 pull requests with additions and deletions.

Currently the list is just a work in progress, but I am certain that after several iterations of pull requests it will be up to date and useful.

<comment><USER2> That just brings the entire "curated" aspect into question. I mean, sure it was curated. By the internet.

At the least, common metrics that can be applied to various offerings would be neat. Possibly a qualifier such that you can't add an item unless it meets a threshold on a few criteria.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Also [https://github.com/softprops/ls](https://github.com/softprops/ls) and [https://github.com/velvia/links](https://github.com/velvia/links)

</comment><comment><USER5> I've asked before but I'm going to try again: are there any resources out there for learning Scala that do not assume a Java background?

I have no Java experience (I'm primarily a Python developer) and therefore find most of the documentation difficult because I'm not at all familiar with the Java ecosystem (maven, jars, weird reverse-DNS naming convention for packages, JDBC, etc). Am I expected to first become a Java developer before I can even start with Scala?

<comment><USER6> I've been working with scala for about 1.5 years. My background previously was mostly Python & R for the previous 10 years although I had been working w/ Java a little here and there for about a year prior to switching to Scala.

I didn't encounter any difficulty picking up Scala - my main resources at the time were "Programming in Scala", poking around StackOverflow and my group's existing code base. If anything I think my background with Python & R helped as I was already familiar with a lot of the functional-ish approaches from those languages (e.g. lambdas, maps, etc)

As Kev009 pointed out, using something like IntelliJ helped immensely as well as it handles a lot of the boilerplate-y stuff.

<comment><USER5> Nice. That's very similar to my background (R & Python). There's no existing codebase though, we are doing everything greenfield in Scala.

I'll give IntelliJ another try, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's interesting to see that most of these libraries are either web services or language support. Are client side apps for the (Oracle) JVM definitively over?

</comment><comment><USER8> I wish people would stop creating scala libraries and frameworks, it just fragments the java community. Scala was a short term hack to fill in the gaps until Java has lambdas. Java does now and there's no need to keep scala separate, the syntactical sugar to remove some of the boilerplate to java is just not worth the fragmenting effect. We've seen much the same thing with python 2 and python 3, which differ in ways similar to java. We need to delete scala and delete python 3 and all get back to solving real problems.

<comment><USER9> Here's an interesting video from a Scala expert:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiJycy6dFSQ](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiJycy6dFSQ)

<comment><USER10> _Yawn_</comment></comment></comment>


Hunch: what we're trying to do - <AUTHOR> http://www.caterina.net/archive/001172.html

<comment><USER2> They already seem to have embraced interpreting correlation as causation. Now they seem to want to add confirmation bias to their issues:

"We went through a couple of different questions just to see look at the UI and get a feel for things. Then, I did the "pick a college" thread. I answered all of the questions and the top result was the actual school that I attended - Miami University, Oxford, Ohio. Unreal. Then my friend did it and the two schools that she chose between showed up as #2 and #4 respectively, UC Davis, and Texas. Amazing."

</comment><comment><USER3> I wonder if this site is made specifically as a machine learning tool, but it sure beats cyc as a source.</comment>


Fake Science:1 journal to 1,500 in 10 years: Hyderabad is hub of pay and publish - <AUTHOR> https://indianexpress.com/article/india/1-journal-to-1500-in-10-years-hyderabad-is-hub-of-pay-publish-fake-research-paper-5266839/Fake%20Science:%201%20journal%20to%201,500%20in%2010%20years:%20Hyderabad%20is%20hub%20of%20pay%20&%20publish <comment><AUTHOR> More info:

[https://indianexpress.com/article/india/v-cs-aiims-iit- profe...](https://indianexpress.com/article/india/v-cs-aiims-iit-professors- on-list-students-sent-it-we-dont-know-5265394/)

[https://indianexpress.com/article/india/inside-indias- fake-r...](https://indianexpress.com/article/india/inside-indias-fake- research-paper-shops-pay-publish-profit-5265402/)</comment>


Ars called out by its readers on product placement - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/cars/2017/07/why-did-chevy-bring-its-tahoe-and-us-to-a-firing-range/?comments=1&start=0 <comment><USER2> 'The United States Special Forces are perhaps the best tactical fighting force the world has ever seen. Whether it's hostage rescue, covert operations, or a Bin Laden-esque kill-or-capture mission, the Tier 1 Operators of the US military are the ones to beat.'

Debatable. There are several fearsome special forces units around the world. I don't think any one of these is generally acknowledged to be pre-eminent. They are all tough as nails.

Also, US SF have particularly close links with UK and Dutch SF. No doubt the US is getting some benefit from this, and the learning goes both ways.</comment>


Reddit's huge missed opportunity:  unifying social news with blogging - <AUTHOR>

You could try to make this work in the current design:
* create a subreddit for your "blog"
* others can subscribe to your subreddit and/or make you their friend
* others can submit links to your subreddit posts in other subreddits
While it can be done, it certainly isn't encouraged and might be considered spam.
Moreover, to make this work better, all link submissions to your posts should share the same comments.  These link submissions would be more like symbolic links in a file system.
UPDATE:  Instead of creating a subreddit for your blog, reddit could make it so you can make submissions that go nowhere initially but they would still be associated with you.  Others can then link to your submissions in subreddits. <comment><USER2> That was the original purpose of the merger between Reddit and Infogami, back in 2006. Still possibly a reasonable idea, though that time it spectacularly failed to work out.

<comment><AUTHOR> The startup landscape seems to mimic evolution in the natural world. You get a somewhat reasonable result but not one that is optimal by any means.</comment></comment>


The audacity of free - <AUTHOR> http://www.chrisbrogan.com/the-audacity-of-free/

<comment><USER2> More appropriate title would be 'The Paucity of Anything To Say'. The post references other stuff that has recently appeared on HN, but otherwise adds nothing new to the discussion.

Perhaps there is a paid version of this essay with actual content?

</comment><comment><USER3> I think this article contains some very valuable points about why "free" does not always mean good. It encourages startups and others to not offer their services free from the start, but rather to charge to ensure that their clients are serious.

</comment><comment><USER4> Ooh, this is a fun linguistic game...

capacity of help

opacity of hoop

perspicacity of hip

mendacity of, er, tenacity of...

...ok, I give up.</comment>


Why Credit Card Fraud Is Still a Thing - <AUTHOR> https://krebsonsecurity.com/2020/07/heres-why-credit-card-fraud-is-still-a-thing/ <comment><USER3> Or, you could go for a debit card with a pin, like in good old Germany. Credit cards require artificial fraud protection just because it's literally unprotected once someone gets the details. Why is there no secret involved? Just for the few seconds it takes to enter a pin?

[Edit] I'd like to add, that most German debit cards work differently from what some of you might consider a debit card. Here, the money is withdrawn from your bank account on the same day (most of the time), and you cannot go into debt. Of course, there are exceptions from this.

<comment><USER4> CC companies in the US made the moronic determination that the American consumer could not handle the complexity of the PIN. Or that it would take too much education and infrastructure change to get that to work. So we had a dumb hybrid approach, and usually the retailer pays for the fallout of this decision.

Secondly, I (and others) will not use my debit card for transactions (to the full extent that I can take this position practically), as debit cards do not have the same protections against fraud as CCs do.

Lastly, an observation, I'm surprised that given the potential penalties (in fraudulent charges), restaurants and other retailers don't just bite the bullet and buy the $100 terminals to get off the swipe system. Maybe it's a little more expensive if they have to replace those big clunky POS / order taking machines. But this technology always ends up costing cheaper than what the complaining businesses say they will have to pay in the beginning.

<comment><USER5> Most of Europe is moving to contactless card payments and PIN is needed only for large amounts (over 20 euro, recently raised to 60 euro) and for cash withdrawals. The result is I already happened to forget the PIN, fortunately I had another card.

So, stolen card can be used for small payments, but there's easy process to immediately block it (via app or internet banking).

<comment><USER6> Good banks allow you to pick your own PIN. For some reason in Europe few do that.

<comment><USER7> Looks strange. All my 10+ cards in Japan allow to pick a PIN.

<comment><USER8> Japan is funny anyway. 15 years ago I could go to every ATM to get cash. Now I think it is just possible to get cash from a 7-Eleven ATM with a non japanese card.

<comment><USER7> Now we can withdraw cash from ticket vending machine on train station but maybe no one actually use it.

[https://www.gmo-pg.com/en/corp/newsroom/press/gmo- paymentgat...](https://www.gmo-pg.com/en/corp/newsroom/press/gmo- paymentgateway/2019/0424.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> When I started my business I faced the problem of charge backs after sending goods to the scammer. I've looked for what Visa and MasterCard recommends to prevent it. Their advice: "contact the buyer to make sure it's not fraud". My question was: how I am supposed to contact the buyer if it's the scammer who actually filled in the contact info form. No answer to that.

One very easy step preventing most of the fraud in my case and I imagine many others would be an option to request a registered email or phone contact to the actual card owner. "Hello it's bluecalm from org X, we have noticed your order and it's marked as suspicious by our system, can you please confirm you made that order? Yes - great, we are sending you the product right now. No? Well, contact your bank as your card info was stolen".

It's such an easy and obvious step. Let me contact the actual card owner using the info they provided. I think the problem is lack of incentives. It's the seller who covers the cost. At least some of it should be on card companies to encourage them to actually do something about it. Right now they seem to just not care.

<comment><USER10> What CC/Merchant system do you use? Have you looked at Stripe's anti-fraud system?

<comment><USER9> Shopify with PayPal and Braintree. Shopify is usually quite good at flagging transactions. The problem if there are some false positives and just cancelling every flagged order would cost too much business.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> So last Saturday I got a brand new credit card from a brand new bank that I opened because my main credit card got compromised and I wanted a backup.

Saturday evening I verify receipt of the card, and then put the card on the counter and left it there. Sunday night / Monday morning, at 1am, I get a text that the new card was compromised as someone was attempting to use it to pay some scammer. I never left the house with the card, I never typed it into a computer beyond the verification process from my own home.

Wat.

<comment><USER12> I got a notification that my new card was used for fraud while it was _in the mail on the way to me_

<comment><USER13> don't cards require activation prior to use?

<comment><USER12> Yes! Fraud dept told me it was someone entering random numbers. What does that explain?! shrug

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> India moved to chip and pin a long time ago and stopped magnetic stripe swiping soon after. And for all CNP, there's additional factor of authentication (majorly, SMS OTP from the issuing bank). These are mandated by the regulator (RBI) and everyone had to comply quite quickly. Yes, receiving SMS OTP for every CNP transaction is a hassle but for majority of the people this is the only way they have ever used cards, so they are okay with it.

So, this killed the type of fraud that the author discusses. But there are other types of frauds (social engineering, ATM skimming etc) for which major defense in India is fixed rules based daily limits and mandatory SMS notifications of any deposit/withdrawal on your account. Of course it doesn't help very small account holders.

<comment><USER15> That's an interesting system. Do prepaid cards work without SMS OTP? And how long do lines get if you have to wait for OTP every time you make a transaction? Lastly, are cash transactions still commonplace (almost all my transactions were cash when I was a kid)?

<comment><USER14> For majority of the people, cash is still the main mode of payment. A new mobile payment called UPI that supports P2P payments based on simple virtual payment handle (<yourhandle>@<pspbank>) and QR based P2M (merchant) payments is growing rapidly to replace cash.

Government is giving free/basic bank account to everyone through a program called Jan Dhan Yojna. So anyone with a smartphone and a free/basic bank account or even more basic payment bank account (requires lesser kyc) can pay using UPI. (Of course KYC is still a challenge but way better than other countries due to a national biometric id system called Aadhaar and central kyc registries for financial institutions).

And regulator is taking a very interesting approach to open banking through unbundling. For example, see [https://sahamati.org.in](https://sahamati.org.in) for financial data unbundling.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I think its because fraud justifies CC companies charging their fees - i.e. consumers want peace of mind, so they don't complain when CC takes 3-4% cut from merchants on transactions. If fraud was non existent then CC companies couldn't justify those fees (i.e. insurance).

</comment><comment><USER17> > _Card-not-present accounts fetched a much steeper supplier commission of 80 > percent, but mainly because these cards were in such high demand and low > supply._

Some part of that statement doesn't make sense. Normally if something is in high demand, then it is easier to sell it, therefore the seller can demand that the middleman i.e., BriansClub, accept a _lower_ commission. In real estate for example, when there is a lot of demand for houses (in a "sellers' market), you as a seller can easily negotiate a lower commission from your brokerage agent.

One clarification: When there's high demand and low supply, the end-buyer will pay a much higher price of course. But the middleman (like BriansClub) should be charging a lower commission as a percentage, though he or she might end up making more money because it's a higher priced item being sold. So Krebs's explanation of why they charge a higher commission for card-not-present doesn't make sense.

<comment><USER18> You're getting it totally backwards here. The supplier commission is how much of the card's value BriansClub is paying to the supplier:

"On average, BriansClub paid suppliers commissions ranging from 50-60 percent of the total value of the cards sold."

High demand + low supply of these cards means that the suppliers are getting a better "price" when selling them to BriansClub, the middleman.

<comment><USER17> You are right, thank you. It's a non-standard way they used the word commission.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I really wish the Krebs site rendered better on mobile browsers. It's a bit of a pain to read.

<comment><USER20> If you are on Android, I suggest getting Firefox. [https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/view-articles-reader- vi...](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/view-articles-reader-view-firefox- android) The article can be flipped over into Reader Mode and is easy to read in that way.

<comment><USER19> I am using firefox as it happens but there's no reader view on offer for that site unfortunately

<comment><USER21> That's strange, on Firefox for Android v68.11.0 every article for krebsonsecurity.com can render in the reader mode. The main home page does not work for this, but individual articles work fine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Because there isn't a secret required to use them?

Chipped cards 'solve' physical card use fraud (assuming they actually do the crypto they can do - there was another article about it not always being enabled).

If processing networks just allowed it to be easy to generate one-time codes to replace putting in CN, exp, and CVV, then online fraud would be solved too.

We have the tools to solve the problem, card networks just haven't deployed them.

<comment><USER23> Yeah. Also, all of my chipped cards can be swiped if the merchant or network or PoS doesn't support it. Not sure of the mechanics, but that alone seems to defeat the purpose entirely

</comment></comment><comment> rob-olmos It'd be cool if payment cards had a built-in LCD screen for the PIN as a TOTP. That shouldn't be much harder for consumers than the existing card verification/security code.

<comment><USER24> It's not built-in, but an external device can generate an OTP (maybe a TOTP?). Some European banks have used this system for over 10 years, but others just use SMS or nothing.

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

<comment><USER25> Why not use card itself as u2f? Most phones now has nfc reader now.

Could be used for both - online purchases and bank logins.

<comment><USER24> Perhaps the banks did't want to trust the security of the phone?

Bear in mind these card readers were introduced in the UK and Sweden in 2007, around the same time as the first iPhone.

<comment><USER25> Yet literally every bank trusts the security of the phone + telco when sending you 2FA token via unencrypted SMS...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I am probably biased [1], but it seems that one-time credit card numbers for at least online transactions are the answer here. Chips and pins are helpful, but not for ecommerce... One way to do this is with Abine Blur ([https://www.abine.com](https://www.abine.com)), which has a browser plugin that automatically creates a new CC number for you. [1] : co-founder of Abine

<comment><USER27> How does Abine differ from Privacy.com? I can't tell but from the pricing page I get the impression that you have to pay to use abine.

<comment><USER28> Same here. Very confusing website. Also: I'm a German user and some parts of the page are randomly German, while most are English. Same on the checkout page which is a no go for me. Assets are pixelated, the page looks scammy in general.

<comment><USER26> Sorry for delay, missed the question. I'll pass on the feedback about the webpage, that's no good. In terms of comparisons, Abine Blur also does masked phone numbers, masked emails, password management and blocking tracking - <USER2> addition to masked credit cards. Here's a recent review, [https://uk.pcmag.com/password-managers/38259/abine-blur- prem...](https://uk.pcmag.com/password-managers/38259/abine-blur-premium)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Now if only we had a payment method where the account credentials (ideally these credentials would be cryptographically verified, that is, it would be possible to transfer funds only if you have access to the private key) are not disclosed to anyone and also payments would be as easy as scanning a QR code.

<comment><USER30> Don't you get a lot of that by using a payment system that uses the EMVCo tokenization scheme?

Apple Pay, for example, uses it.

[https://www.emvco.com/emv-technologies/payment- tokenisation/](https://www.emvco.com/emv-technologies/payment-tokenisation/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Every finance system that wants to remove your burdens has to arrive at a point where they ask if you permit them to do things with your money without your consent every time, or in every respect.

It can be one-time or it can be repeat, but the third party actor quality here, is really strong.

A ->wants money to go to -> B but money is vested through entity C and the transfer invokes entity D in front of B..

There are events here which are 'do I have your permission to do things with your money, through agents you don't know' which is really hard to remove.

Even TTP intermediaries doing A <-> B introductions have this burden. It feels like its baked into the system than something 'optimising' here has '..except.. you can exploit it' baked-in.

</comment><comment><USER32> >>> BriansClub earned close to $104 million in gross revenue from 2015 to early 2019, and listed over 19 million unique card numbers for sale.

100M for _selling_ card numbers - it actually defrauding just selling card numbers ... holy cow.

<comment><USER33> And you have "Jokers stash" / jStash which is even bigger than Briansclub.

Other mentions: YaleLodge

UniCC

Creditcard fraud is a big profiting business and has a huge ecosystem built around

<comment><USER34> I wonder if the banks could save money on fraud prevention by just buying all their stolen credentials on the open market and cancelling them all.

I know that would mess up with incentives to steal those credentials, but it still might be worth it.

<comment><USER35> I believe many of them regularly do exactly that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Ppl steal Credit Cards not for the cash on the card, but for the credentials, which are used to register for services with a credit limit, and then the limit is spent. So a single credit card can be used on hundreds of services such as Amazon Cloud hosting ,Facebook ads, Google ads, etc. all without spending any money. The billing occurs only hfter the trial limit is spent. Google Ads will give a $400 credit limit on a new user.

</comment><comment><USER37> I'm sorry to see how many people here on HN are commenting debit/credit card systems without really knowing the topic, spreading false notions, clichés, absolute conclusions from personal anecdotes or simply by stating easy stereotypes towards banks and financial institutions.

I'm usually learning a lot from HN but I'm sad to say this discussion is full with low quality contents.

</comment><comment><USER38> I was expecting a one liner: "because banks do not lose money if fraud happens, as they simply trickle down costs to their customers".

<comment><USER37> That's an oversimplification that's simply not true everywhere in the world.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I still don't get why not all cards have two-factor purchases.

Just have my bank or a Visa (or whatever) app send a push notification that I can approve or reject the charge.

</comment><comment><USER40> I know I'm in the minority here, but I really _really_ like cryptocurrency flows for this sort of thing. You open the wallet on your phone, scan a QR code, and you've paid, no need to fish for credit cards, enter additional info because your transaction looks weird, etc etc.

I wish more sites supported it, and I try to support it on all of mine. I use/recommend OpenNode, though I wish they had Monero integration, but I guess everyone has their own pet cryptocurrency they'd like supported everywhere.

<comment><USER41> See also: WeChat, Eurozone's [SCT Inst]([https://www.europeanpaymentscouncil.eu/what-we-do/sepa- insta...](https://www.europeanpaymentscouncil.eu/what-we-do/sepa-instant- credit-transfer)), Blik

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I can only speak from the ecommerce industry, where you make online payments:

Honestly, credit card fraud still exists because Visa/Mastercard/Amex/Discover et al have a near-zero liability for fraud. They foist it upon the merchant.

It would be trivial for Visa to notice an account suddenly starts making purchases from out of the country, or exceeded some threshold of declines, etc. But, they don't care.

If you, the merchant, accept a fraudulent order, even if it appears fine, you are on the hook for the chargeback + chargeback fee. Good luck winning one of these disputes - they're heavily weighed towards the customer. You practically will lose every claim, and be out all the money for the product, plus the chargeback fee. Everything can be perfect on the order, AVS, CVV2 code, etc... doesn't matter.

This is why companies like Bolt Payments have sprung up - attempting to offload that risk from the merchant. They're making a business doing what Visa could do if they wanted to - pool card data together and look for illegitimate patterns, and block them.

<comment><USER43> >It would be trivial for Visa to notice an account suddenly starts making purchases from out of the country, or exceeded some threshold of declines, etc. But, they don't care.

I've had CC companies send me fraud alerts plenty of times and have had them block payments automatically as well. So please don't make straw man argument.

Moreover, what I love when I go on a vacation to a foreign country is having my credit card stop working and trying to figure out how to make an international phone call to get it fixed. Credit card companies value improved customer experience over catching some larger percentage of fraud.

<comment><USER42> > So please don't make straw man argument.

Your anecdata doesn't coincide with reality. Maybe your card company does - probably issued through a bank - but most people's don't, and Visa/Amex proper, etc certainly do not.

You would be surprised by the number of fraudulent orders that are placed on major ecommerce sites daily. It's up to the ecommerce site to detect the fraud, and hopefully refund the order in full before a chargeback hits.

Visa literally has all the transaction data for all issued Visa accounts. They can stop fraud dead, if they had a financial interest in doing so. As-is, they (and their issuers/gateways/processors) actually profit off fraud, via the chargeback fee.

The millions of accounts Krebs mentions in the article? Did they all get fraud alerts when the "carding" transaction was processed on their card... to verify it was a live account and had available balance? Nope.</comment></comment></comment>


Open Name System: Extending DNS with the Blockchain - <AUTHOR> http://opennamesystem.org <comment><USER2> ONS is using Namecoin. Namecoin isn't free to use, is it? I'm curious to know what is the business model behind this and onename.io, since they must pay to add entries to the Namecoin blockchain.

</comment><comment><USER3> How is this different from DNSChain?

<comment><USER4> Having looked at it a bit more, here are some differences that I noticed:

        - This is written in python. DNSChain is written in CoffeeScript and runs
          on NodeJS.
        - This focuses on a command line utility, whereas with DNSChain you don't
          need one (just do an HTTP request).
        - opendig is like dig, so it doesn't provide your devices with DNS service
          (DNSChain does).
        - DNSChain focuses on security, signing of responses (though that's not
          implemented yet), replacing X509 PKI, unique anti-censorship features
          thanks to partnership with Unblock.us.org project, public key
          distribution for JavaScript apps... See the full list on the GitHub
          page.
        - ONS seems to be working on competing blockchain specifications to
          Namecoin's existing ones. DNSChain doesn't touch that.
        - DNSChain intends to add write access to the blockchain. It's not clear
          whether ONS project does or not.
        - Namecoin and DNSChain predate ONS and are active projects with different
          functionality that ONS seems to be replicating parts of, so I'm not
          sure why the authors chose to not collaborate with either of those
          projects and tread off on their own.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is a pretty direct challenge to keybase.io. I really, really like the keybase implementation, but the one thing I wished for keybase was that it was decentralized.

This has that.

However, in terms of the implementation itself, they still have a way to go before they match keybase.

<comment><USER6> > However, in terms of the implementation itself, they still have a way to go > before they match keybase.

Care to explain how? They're the team behind onename.io and clearly seem to have just as strong an implementation.

<comment><USER5> I totally agree that onename.io has done a good job integrating that site with Namecoin. However, with this new project ONS, I don't yet see a way to certify all the social identities that Keybase supports, not to mention the attractive user interface and convenient command line client of Keybase.

That said, it's a new project. I'm not saying onename.io won't accomplish this (I hope they do!). I'm just saying they have a lot to do to match what Keybase has.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> In addition to creating a website for this, you really should submit it to the IETF as an RFC. Get more engineers looking at it and improving it. If it ends up getting enough backing, we might even have a new standard.

<comment><USER4> There are specifications that I'm sure will be submitted to IETF as RFCs (when they're ready). You can seem them on Namecoin's wiki (scroll to the bottom):

[https://wiki.namecoin.info/index.php?title=Welcome](https://wiki.namecoin.info/index.php?title=Welcome)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is the first attempt I've seen at using a blockchain for DNS. Looks like an amazing solution to an increasingly desperate problem (as DNS takedowns are the preferred method for internet censorship).

<comment><USER5> One of the first uses of blockchain technology for a non-financial application was an alternative domain name registration system called Namecoin, started back in 2010 and still active.

Granted, that was an alternative domain name system, not an ICANN extension like this one. And it used a separate blockchain and coin (Namecoin), not the Bitcoin blockchain, which may be what you were referring to.

Nonetheless, I feel compelled to mention Namecoin in any discussion about the history of blockchain technology and DNS. (incidentally, Namecoin was also the first altcoin)

<comment> ryan-c This thing runs on Namecoin, though that is buried in the documentation.

<comment><USER9> Buried on the front page

<comment> ryan-c Wasn't mentioned at all when my previous comment was posted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Is Naval behind this?

</comment><comment><USER11> Why should we base critical infrastructure on completely anonymous building blocks? There is no mention about who is working on this, their motivations, the domain is behind WhoisGuard, etc. Why is it so critical to become anonymous as a developer in this case? Perhaps I'm missing something but is the FBI/CIA going after anyone working on blockchain/crypto stuff nowadays?

It feels like asking for transparency, but only from others. Same reason I can't truly trust Bitcoin, it's as shady as my bank's processes.

<comment><USER12> > _It feels like asking for transparency, but only from others. Same reason I > can 't truly trust Bitcoin, it's as shady as my bank's processes._

What additional information would get get from the name of the people behind this? How is Bitcoin in any way shady? It's an open protocol and most people use open-source clients to access it. You (and anyone else - including people with a lot of money riding on it) can verify that you trust the code, even if you don't have any idea who wrote it. Compare to a bank's process, where if you even try and reverse engineer the protocol you're risking jailtime.</comment></comment>


Kazakhstan spells out plans for alphabet swap - <AUTHOR> http://www.dw.com/en/kazakhstan-spells-out-plans-for-alphabet-swap/a-38407769 <comment><USER2> The current script was political, of course, but so is the decision to change it.

Basically, their choices are keeping Cyrillic, and therefore implicitly culturally aligning themselves with Russia (or, to phrase it in a different way, exposing themselves to Russian cultural dominance); or switching to Latin, and implicitly culturally aligning themselves with Turkey.

It's not a question with a single definitive good answer. Different ex-Soviet republics tackled it in different ways. The article points out that Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan switched, for example, but e.g. Kyrgyzstan did not.

The other problem with every switch (including the previous ones) is that it affects all existing written materials, especially books and textbooks. When Soviets originally switched most Central Asian republics from Arabic to Latin back in 1920s, they used it to great effect to control what kind of materials the new generations would have access to, very similar to what Ataturk did in Turkey. Same thing applies today: switching the alphabet allows the new governments of these countries to define the majority of the written corpus that their citizens will have ready access to.

<comment><USER3> Political and maybe ultimately economical. Latin script isn't much attractive due to southern Europe but mostly due to the enormous economic success of USA following the British Empire. Kazakh or any other nation want their children to learn English as it matters the most in addition to their mother tongue. Russian children too want to learn English for most. So any other secondary power in the world is shadowed by English. Slowly people don't want to learn French or German or Russian because they are those Nationals themselves striving to learn English as the business academic and travel language.

So the success of American economy drives the success of English and Latin script. Imho.

<comment><USER4> English is also the language of pop culture. Most popular movies are made in the US. So is a lot of pop music. The most popular science fiction authors write in English. Large parts of the Internet are English.

<comment><USER5> Not saying you are wrong but there may be a bias if you are English speaking. As a person with a another language as english as my first, lots of the internet I see is in my native language. Lots of new music and movies is as well.

<comment><USER6> What is your first language if i may ask? Curious what other languages have a lot of movies? Hindi?

<comment><USER7> Many countries dub Hollywood movies.

<comment><USER6> Ah, was curious as I didn't think Czechoslovakia or now the Czech republic had a film industry.

<comment><USER8> Actually it has a movie industry. Many movies from Czechoslovakia period are being considered "classic" and are still popular, with quotes from them being used all the time.

For foreign movies, there were also cases, when the dubbed versions were better (sounded better) than originals - for example Louis de Funès movies or MASH.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's not something new, Kazakhstan plans this for several years already.

BTW, in USSR in 1920s-1930s 66 languages were latinised (including Kazakh): [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latinisation_in_the_Soviet_Uni...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latinisation_in_the_Soviet_Union)

Latinization of Russian language was also planned, (wikipedia in Russian): [https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A0%D1%83%D1%81%D1%81%D0%BA...](https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A0%D1%83%D1%81%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B0%D1%8F_%D0%BB%D0%B0%D1%82%D0%B8%D0%BD%D0%B8%D1%86%D0%B0)

Later all that was canceled and Cyrillic was used instead.

<comment><USER10> > Later all that was canceled and Cyrillic was used instead.

Was something else used for Russian prior to Cyrillic?

Also here is an English language version of your Wikipedia link:

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

<comment><USER2> It was always Cyrillic. What OP meant is that there were plans to switch all Soviet languages, including Russian, to Latin at one point - this was considered beneficial by "first wave" Bolsheviks, who believed in worldwide communist revolution in near future, and unification in a single world state, and assumed that Latin would be the common script of that state.

Later, when Stalin ditched all that, and came up with "socialism in one country" and revival of imperial patriotism, these attempts were scrapped, and Cyrillic became the common script for all Soviet languages instead (even those that were already Latinized). This was in line with the new national policy, which presented the Russian nation as the "bigger brother" of other ethnicities, e.g.: [https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1945...](https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1945/05/24.htm)

<comment><USER11> Not exactly all of them. Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia retained Latin script for their languages, and I think Armenia (which is now using its own alphabet) used it during Soviet times too, though I am not 100% sure.

<comment><USER12> Armenian and Georgian had their scripts. So at least 5 SSRs out of 15 had their official language in non-Cyrillic script, who knows how many other languages did too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> red-indian Cyrillic is nice since it has extra letters that were added for central asian sounds. Spelling is more clear than when you use latin letters. With latin letters some single letters get replaced with double letters, or multiple sounds are overloaded onto a single letter.

It's a pity they don't switch to Orkhon script instead of Latin given their roots. There's a movement already to learn Orkhon as it's the traditional writing of the area and already developed with the sounds of the Turkic languages. (As an example, here's a Kazakh music video with subtitles in both Orkhon script and Türk alfabesi [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNUE05sRwrA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNUE05sRwrA)). As long as they are going to the trouble of switching orthographies they should make it more meaningful than simply replacing Russian influenced letters with western european ones.

<comment><USER13> _With latin letters some single letters get replaced with double letters, or multiple sounds are overloaded onto a single letter._

Or you can add diacritical marks to letters: Č/č for "ch", Š/š for "sh", etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Is this a form of rebranding? Has a nation ever undergone a significant attempt at rebranding?

I was joking with my colleague about how Russia probably just wants Ukraine to add a buffer between the West and Moscow. He educated me on the meaning of "Ukraine" being essentially "borderland." Got me thinking about the seemingly absurd concept of disregarding all national history and focusing exclusively on "brand". Find a great sounding country name, a cool memorable flag, a catchy national anthem, a relatable alphabet.

If you look at nations as brands, many (most?) are pretty forgettable. Countless flags that look randomly generated and lots of anthems that don't linger in your ear.

<comment><USER15> >He educated me on the meaning of "Ukraine" being essentially "borderland."

Incidentally, this is why they've been getting people to stop calling it The Ukraine - because Ukraine is more like a normal country name, while "The Ukraine" is like saying "The Borderland (of Russia)"

<comment><USER16> In Google Translate (English to Russian), "Ukraine" and "the Ukraine" both give the same result, namely "Украины". Not surprising, given Russian lacks the definite article "the".

However, "the Outskirts" translates to "окраины", which when pronounced, sounds very close to "Украины". "Uh cra eena" vs "Oo cra eena".

Translating Russian to English involves interpolating articles, definite and indefinite. I now have an inkling of how this controversy arose.

<comment><USER2> There's actually an equivalent of the distinction between "Ukraine" and "The Ukraine" in Russian. As you rightly note, it doesn't have the definite article, but the distinction does show up in prepositions instead.

In Russian, when you speak of a named geographic region, the preposition for "in" (as in "10 million people live in ...") is used - in Russian, it's "v". On the other hand, if it's not a name, but rather a descriptive designation like "borderlands", then the preposition for "on" is used - in Russian, it's "na".

So, English "in Ukraine" becomes "v Ukraine". But English "in the Ukraine" becomes "na Ukraine". In modern Russian, both are considered acceptable, but the latter is generally considered normative, and is what most people use. Needless to say, Ukrainians strongly prefer "v", even when speaking Russian (it's unconditionally "v" in Ukrainian, where the same distinction exists). This is a regular cause of flames and edit wars on the Net between Russian and Ukrainian users.

<comment><USER17> > In Russian, when you speak of a named geographic region, the preposition for > "in" (as in "10 million people live in ...") is used - in Russian, it's "v". > On the other hand, if it's not a name, but rather a descriptive designation > like "borderlands", then the preposition for "on" is used - in Russian, it's > "na".

Except that there is no "rule" for that, other than established use, and even that is not consistent. People who insist on "na Ukraine" would somehow never say "na Serbskoi Kraine" or "na Khabarovskom Krae".

<comment><USER18> There actually is a russian phrase "на чужбине", "на чужой земле" (in a foreign land) where "на" is used when talking about another country. I guess using different prepositions is something historical, so "на" is not used anymore, but it is left in some set phrases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Their current alphabet has 42 letters. Transitioning to Latin will either use variable length encoding for some sounds, or will eventually be reduced to the mere 26 letters. Thus I don't see using accent a good direction.

In Hungarian I see this a lot, and it is a shame. We have for example o ó ö ő for variations of the sound O in "lonely". We have a mixed model of variable length and accented characters.

ASCII and QWERTY are (the unintended) cultural equivalent of the Little Boy and the Fat Boy. Poor globalization throughout the IT industry made people adapt to it, instead of challenging it. This makes only variable length survive the "loss in translation".

Now when globalization is better, it became "cool" somehow in some subcultures (eg. UNIX related, programming related), as many ancient tools (Unix, C) lack proper support.

<comment><USER20> Current Turkish alphabet is mostly enough to convey sounds of Turkic languages (with few exceptions like Ng sound), Azeri alphabet 3 more letters for non Turkic sounds, I am Sure Kazakh people will find a way, there are already working examples.

<comment><USER21> Current turkish alphabet is bad at representing educated Istanbul turkish, and worse at anatolian dialects. For one, palatalisations, which are distinctive in many cases are either not represented or represented by a circumflex on a nearest vowel, but the diacritic also signals long vowels, even though they do not necessitate palatalisation, which is a quality of the consonants anyways.

<comment><USER20> Which alphabet represents local accents and dialects fully?? Lets be realistic here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Some of these old Eastern Bloc countries have had fascinating changes in language and written script in the last hundreds years or so. Uzbekistan is another interesting one, which currently uses Cyrillic, Latin, and Arabic (actually Nastaleeq) scripts despite Latin being the official script since the 90's. I had a really fun time building the BBC Uzbek website which had to support all of these:

\- [http://www.bbc.com/uzbek](http://www.bbc.com/uzbek) (Cyrillic)

\- [http://www.bbc.com/uzbek/lotin](http://www.bbc.com/uzbek/lotin) (Latin)

\- [http://www.bbc.com/uzbek/afghanistan](http://www.bbc.com/uzbek/afghanistan) (Arabic)

</comment><comment><USER23> Language change that shifts populations away from their historical niche and towards global systems conflicts me.

One the one hand I find it sad that whole bodies of literature will pass out of understanding.

On the other hand this seems like it will make it slightly easier for the Kazakh people to interoperate with the rest of the world.

In the end I believe the greater good comes from enabling more people to talk to each other.

(I know, it's "just" a script change, not a new language, but I feel the two are sufficiently related that the point stands).

<comment><USER24> Everyone already knows latin alphabet. It doesn't make it any easier to learn language. Nor it would make it easier for foreigner to understand anything in latinized Kazakh language, this language is completely different from English. I guess, it has some common words with Turkey language, so may be for them it would be a tiny bit easier.

Honestly I'm seeing it as a pure political decision and huge waste of money, not something, that would have any real benefit. Making Russian and English as an additional official government languages — now that would be useful. Currently almost noone except highly educated people knows English and a lot of people don't know Russian or know it very poorly and it's sad. For Kazakhstan, Russia is a most important neighbor and it's very important to keep common cultural values.

<comment><USER25> It probably is 99% political, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's a waste of money.

Cyrillic is/was a big part of Russia/USSR's identity from the west -- see things like "BORДT", faux Cyrillic [1], cheap exported Russian vodka, "СССР" on t-shirts, etc.

If Kazakhstan wants to appear less Russian, swapping the alphabet from Cyrillic to Latin will be very effective.

(I know the Latin alphabet but only a few letters of the Cyrillic one. It's far easier for me to read signs in Viet Nam than it is in Russia, even though I can probably pronounce Russian much better than Vietnamese. When I don't understand a word written in Cyrillic, it takes me 20 times longer to type it into my phone's dictionary.)

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I think the implications of switching a script are fewer than people imagine, especially between Cyrillic and Latin. These two are closely related alphabetical writing systems. People will not lose the ability to read old books, they will not change their political positions. Usually, the "new" and "old" characters correspond one to another perfectly.

I think what is more important is the "drive for expanded international recognition for the Central Asian nation that formed part of the Soviet Union until gaining independence in 1991." that is mentioned in the article. As you can see every foreign article still believes its to be necessary to mention the Soviet union, 26 years after it ended. So it might not change people's lives much, but it will change the perception of what Kazakhstan is.

</comment><comment><USER27> Does this only affect the Kazakh language or also the Russian language they speak there? I know a small handful of people from Kazakhstan, who identify as "Kazakh" nationally but as "Russian" ethnically, and they only speak Russian (+ English). The general response about Kazakh the language I remember is that they learned it at school, but as they lived in a heavily Russian speaking area they just never cared much about Kazakh and instead focused more on English when they got the chance.

</comment><comment><USER28> I hope this question is relevant enough to the thread to ask here: what language did the people of Turkey, and by extension most of the Turkic- speaking countries, speak before the Mongolian invasion? Are there traces of that former language in their current one? I know that there's definitely plenty of Arabic and Persian words still in use, and since Ataturk there's been a lot of French/other latin languages added as well.

<comment><USER29> > I hope this question is relevant enough to the thread to ask here: what > language did the people of Turkey, and by extension most of the Turkic- > speaking countries, speak before the Mongolian invasion?

The people of Anatolia spoke Greek before the Turks invaded.

<comment><USER30> You mean, Greek among others and many other languages before Greek, right?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> So, the alphabet of Kazakh language has 42 letters, 33 of them are borrowed from Russian language and 9 are unique. The modern Latin alphabet has 26 letters. It's quite unclear how they are going to convert between these 2 very different sets.

<comment><USER32> Wikipedia gives the form of romanization currently used on Kazakh government websites [1]. This extends the standard 26-letter Latin alphabet by adding diacritical marks to some of the letters (the way many other languages do, that have more sounds than 26 letters can express).

I seem to recall reading that as part of the romanization effort, Kazakhstan will also consider spelling reform, so that there will probably not be an exact one-to-one correspondence between the current Cyrillic spelling and the new Latin spelling.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazakh_alphabets#Latin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazakh_alphabets#Latin)

<comment> Al-Khwarizmi Actually most languages have more sounds than letters. Some use diacritical marks, others use multiconsonant groups ("ch" in Spanish, "th" in English), and another option is just not to care (in English most letters can represent various sounds and the mapping is often arbitrary, requiring one to know the word in order to know how it's pronounced).

<comment><USER33> At this point it may be appropriate to remind of the ortographical reform proposal for English, attributed to Mark Twain (though probably not really written by him).

[http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/twain.htm](http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/twain.htm)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> That's too bad. Cyrillic, especially in the context of Russian, has always seemed compact and almost _cute_ to me.

The alphabet is very regular; it's easy even for non-fluent speakers to perfectly guess the spellings of words.

<comment><USER35> > Russian, has always seemed compact

Russian here, I can assure you it decidedly is anything but compact. It frequently annoys me how verbose some things in it are compared to English.

Brevity is the soul of wit.

<comment><USER12> He or she probably means the script, not the terseness of Russian. If you look at English and Russian text you will notice that Russian has longer streaks of letters of the same height/depth compared to English.

<comment><USER34> That is indeed what I meant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> What does the population of Kazakhstan think about that?

<comment><USER37> Russian is still the most important language in Kazakhstan, although that could shift in the future.

My wife is from Kazakhstan, but her ancestors are from Ukraine, and they moved to Kazakhstan during the USSR. Her family only know a few words of Kazakh, and this is relatively common for people who were born and grew up in the USSR. Right now, you cannot get a good job in the city unless you are fluent in Russian, although there is a lot of pressure to move everything to the Kazakh language.

In the past, the pressure was so strong that some official government forms were only made available in Kazakh. But they have reverted that decision, so now everything is still available in both Russian and Kazakh.

<comment><USER38> and what exactly has Ukraine to do with Russian language? it may come to you as surprise but Ukrainians speak Ukrainian, not Russian

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> and now only if China wish to join a party and went full pinyin with accents like in Vietnam, that would make life in China and tourism much easier for everyone, after all they already simplified characters anyway, so let's not pretend current writing system has some historical value being younger than my grandma

</comment><comment><USER39> Would qwerty become history sometime? I tried Dvorak several times, but it's not that easy as it sounds like.

</comment><comment><USER40> I keep reading 'alphabet soup'

</comment><comment><USER41> Erdoğan must be delighted at this move towards Pan-Turkism

<comment><USER42> Erdoğan is not pan-Turkist. He is pan-Ottoman. Today might be the last day of the republic.

<comment><USER19> Yet while others approach hime as if he was a pan-türkist, with the idea of joining, this is also acceptable for him, I guess.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> One step closer: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan- Turkism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan-Turkism)

</comment><comment><USER44> Promoting the use of English will be a better option as far as international recognition is concerned.

<comment><USER45> Why is this downvoted? It's true, isn't it? And as far as I know they had plans to make English the 3rd official language (along with Kazakh and Russian).</comment></comment>