The next twenty years are going to be completely unlike the last twenty years. - <AUTHOR> http://captaink.blogspot.com/2009/05/next-twenty-years-are-going-to-be.html <comment><USER2> This feels a little too gold-buggish for me in parts. Fiat money and fractional-reserve banking are quite separate things: fractional-reserve banking was common even with gold currency. Unless an intrusive government regulation outlaws people from accepting deposits and lending them back out, and even further, from issuing promissory notes, it will continue to happen even in a gold-standard economy, because full-reserve banks are less attractive, both to owners and depositors, _except_ in crises, of which our memories are short.

Gold supply also has over the past 100 years or so inflated at a low exponential curve that looks much like a compounding curve, because the annual production has been increasing roughly in line with the total amount in existence (from 400 tons/yr in 1900 to 2500 tons/yr today). It's compounding with a low rate, around 1%-2% over most of that period, but nonethless the money supply inflates, and continues to inflate faster in absolute terms year to year (with some dips now and then).

<comment><USER3> actually they are connected. with a gold standard banks that run FRB risk actual bank runs. with a fiat system the government (fed) can provide unlimited backing so instead of a bank run the fed would print money, causing inflation (see the Savings and Loan crisis of the 80's). your buying power decreases in exchange for socializing the risk of bank runs.

one of the reasons austrians bug me is their insistence on 100% reserve banking even though a cursory examination of history reveals that there is market demand for FRB. sure, demand would certainly be lower than it is now if there was no "lender of last resort" fed subsidizing risk, but it would still exist. most people care about 100% safe investments.

however the austrian criticism that banks who mismanage their funds should be allowed to fail is spot on.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, there's more scope to maneuver in a fiat-money system; I was mainly objecting to what seemed to be the suggestion that under a gold standard FRB and the money multiplier somehow wouldn't exist. It seems that some people in this group want to somehow mandate that everyone conduct their transactions by literally exchanging gold coins in bags. But the people with that viewpoint tend to also be libertarians... how, consistent with libertarianism, can the government prohibit private individuals from exchanging pieces of paper saying "I owe you 5 ounces of gold", and force them to physically exchange the 5 ounces of gold instead? But if the government _doesn't_ force them to physically exchange the gold, you have a money multiplier, and, in effect, privately minted fiat currency. And the related bubbles and crashes would also exist, as they have for centuries.

<comment><USER3> well....

[http://unqualified- reservations.blogspot.com/2008/09/maturit...](http://unqualified- reservations.blogspot.com/2008/09/maturity-transformation-considered.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is mostly bunk. I'm not going to go through the whole thing, but I'll take the third video as an example:

First, the graph the author has drawn obviously isn't exponential. The graph is too flat and rises too quickly, but it certainly is scary. Second, global population growth is declining, and going towards zero. In some East European countries it's already negative. Third, this has already been discussed by Thomas Malthus back in the 70's and dismissed.

This looks like someone who doesn't quite grasp the complicated machinery of economy, people and energy and tries to explain it using pocket philosophy.

<comment><USER5>
      ...has already been discussed by Thomas Malthus back in the 70's and dismissed.

Not sure which Malthus you mean. In 1770, he was only 4 years old, and by 1870, he was dead...

<comment><USER4> Ah yes, sorry for that. I was mixing Malthus up with the Club of Rome that revived his ideas and published _the limits to growth_. (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Club_of_Rome>)

Thanks for catching this :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> So I'm just curious for someone who was around, but how similar were the last twenty years to the twenty years previous to that?

<comment><USER7> Single biggest thing: no Cold War.

Go watch Threads:

<http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090163/>

and if you aren't old enough, consider that people lived with this kind of threat for decades.

<comment><USER8> Indeed: for around 6 decades we had a determined adversity who was dedicated to destroying us by any means possible in every realm ... and we weren't used to dealing with that sort of threat.

And by some time in the '50s "the bomb" made that threat immediately existential (bomber or missile flight time) ... it's hard to describe what living under that was like.

<comment><USER7> "we had a determined adversity who was dedicated to destroying us by any means possible in every realm"

Of course, that was the view the Soviets also had. Although they were an "evil empire" I don't think they actually had anyone in power actively campaigning to start a war, which did happen in the US. The Soviets were largely dangerous because they were so very afraid and (by the 80s) had senile leaders - look at the near disaster of Able Archer 83.

<comment><USER8> In the 30s??? I think not.

They started effective war on the West in general and the US in particular no later than that. (A war doesn't have to be "hot" to be a war.)

Maybe they "were largely dangerous because they were so very afraid and (by the 80s) had senile leaders" ... but perhaps they should have thought of that before starting and sustaining a generations long war?

Moving out of the Lenin-Stalin eras, was Khrushchev, who actually ordered Soviet subs to use nuclear tipped torpedoes on the US Navy "so very afraid"?

<comment><USER8> (I should point out that the last comment was WRT the Cuban Missile Crisis, and Khrushchev's "adventurism" (or whatever) in it and the lead up was the grounds for purging him from office.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It frustrates me when energy consumption is used as a proxy for growth. That was probably true during industrial periods when manufacturing was the key economic producer, but isn't education and time more important now? Of course energy is still important to that, but to take a simple example - I can build a web store much more quickly now than I could 15 years ago thanks to the advent of frameworks, and indeed I don't need to build one myself as I can use an already developed one. My time can now be spent developing novel things.

<comment><USER10> Whew, I don't really know. If you visit the Peak Oil website and get beat over the head with the list of things that are made from or depend on oil, like paint and plastics, most transportation, even feeding the world depends heavily on natural gas fertilizers, not to mention diesel in the tractors, you'll see that are so many things we consider necessities which can't be replaced by photons racing down a fiber-optic cable.

<comment><USER9> I'm not trying to argue that energy/oil isn't important for growth. I think its that I see the argument so often that growth is the same as consumption, when it's not - it's the creation of value, not objects.

<comment><USER10> Oh sure. A good analogy for me would be swimming up stream. Even if the outbound tide of Peak Oil is draining our wealth, technological advances can stem that tide.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I didn't watch all the videos, but I didn't see anything about War.

It seems to me that if you read between the lines that the next 20 years wont be like the last 20 years because there will be no War.

Sadly I think we need to overcome the small human need to destroy each other before we need to worry about almost everything in this blog post.

<comment><USER12> The video on inflation covers how war has significant inflationary effects, but obviously focuses on the economics and not the morality of it.

<comment><USER11> I was thinking on how Wars fund many technological break thoughts and more often improves the economy. Where would the internet be without War? DARPA anyone?

If there were no war in the world tomorrow, millions would go out of work.

<comment><USER13> I'm sorry, this is a dangerous and wrong line of thinking. War's primary purpose is to _destroy_ economic output. You win by eliminating your opponent's ability to produce the goods and services that enable them to engage you.

You are correct that world peace would result in massive layoffs. However, those millions of newly unemployed people would now be free to do other, more productive work.

World peace would be the most beautiful and perfect example of creative destruction in the history of economics.

<comment><USER11> I am not claiming it's the right way to think. I am pointing out realistic facts.

Your assumption that these people would be free to do other more productive works is counter-intuitive, as you are assuming that people who fight Wars want to do something else.

My original observation still stands, that the blog context appears to disregard the positive influence that war has on economy as well as the negative.

<comment><USER13> I think you misunderstand me. If war was eliminated, people who fight wars would have to do something else, regardless of their feelings on the issue. That thing would necessarily be more economically productive, because war is a net drag on the global economy.

If you wish to debate this, then you'll need to prove that _in aggregate_ , war is economically productive. That's a difficult argument to make, and likely to be empirically false.

For a more robust explanation, check out the "parable of the broken window": <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window>

<comment><USER14> If I recall well the argument, the whole point about war is that it serves as a counterbalance against the problems that perpetual growth brings.

It is never truth that the war is economically productive. But the destruction of capital that comes as a side effect of war keeps inflation on check (monetary inflation defined as money growing faster than the tangible economic output; not price inflation, which is one result of the former).

Besides that, while it might be a net negative economic event, War puts lots of public money in some chosen private pockets. So there are always people lobbying to get into conflict in a perfectly rational way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The world, for the next twenty years, is going to be dominated by black swans, and a whole lot of them.

Hopefully it's mostly good black swans, not bad one.

<comment><USER16> If we don't get the good ones, we'll get the bad ones.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Yes, and also why the Singularity is such a silly idea.

We are not racing to utopia, we are racing to disaster.

<comment><USER16> Think of it. We are blessed with technology that would be indescribable to our forefathers. We have the wherewithal, the know-it-all to feed everybody, clothe everybody, and give every human on Earth a chance. We know now what we could never have known before -- that we now have the option for all humanity to make it successfully on this planet in this lifetime. Whether it is to be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race right up to the final moment.

Buckminster Fuller

<comment><USER18> Unfortunately we have no technology to manage (or enlighten) 6 billion irrational human beings.

EDIT: And so... variations on the Tragedy of the Commons march on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> F-ing hate doom-ers. I have ONE word for you:

Y 2 K

Remember? The world was gonna end. Fsssssssssssssssssss...

In 2005 we were told that PeakOil was supposed to happen before 2010. Guess what?!

Global Warming! Global Warming!

Yes, the system goes through crises, but then things change, wrong get righted and life goes on. No, the world is probably not gonna end. And if does, the fact that I won't hear you whining anymore will almost make up for it.

<comment><USER20> What do you think Y2k would have looked like if there hadn't been a serious date-format conversion effort?

<comment><USER19> But THERE WAS an effort and it WAS successful. That is my point: everything that comes our way, humanity WILL deal with it.

We did in the past and we will do again in the future. The probability for doom, while not zero, is extremely low, due to our flexibility.</comment></comment></comment>


Clone of the endangered Przewalski's horse is born of DNA saved for 40 years - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/12/us/cloned-przewalskis-horse-trnd/index.html <comment><USER2> _> The colt is a clone of a male Przewalski's horse and the first successful cloning of the species, San Diego Zoo officials said in a news release on September 4. It was born August 6 to a domestic surrogate mother._

I just wanted to note how nonchalant this paragraph sounded in the context of the rest of the article. I remember the cloned sheep over a decade ago, but is animal cloning now so common a procedure that we've moved on from " _Oh-em- gee, we cloned an animal!_ " to species bingo?

The DNA may have been perfectly preserved in lab conditions and we've got a sister species to carry the embryo so it's not comparable, but this is the first step to Jurassic park!

<comment><USER3> > I remember the cloned sheep over a decade ago

Slightly out in your "remember a long time ago" - Dolly was born in 1996! Pet cloning apparently started in 2004! So it's been around long enough to somewhat mature.

<comment><USER2> I don't know what's more horrifying - how old that made me feel or that pet cloning is a thing. Marketwatch says it costs something like $50,000.

Of course there's been discussions on HN about it! [1][2]

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17723325](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17723325)

[2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16506712](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16506712)

<comment><USER4> Thanks for sharing those links! This is so f*ed up that that's an industry. If all that money would have gone to preserving the wildlife we do still have left (but are losing rapidly)...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_that_have_been...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_that_have_been_cloned)

I think Joe Rogan talks to someone who mentions since horse clones are done by rich people and it's maturing rapidly, it stands to reason someone has cloned themselves by now, which is exciting.

</comment><comment><USER6> Disappointingly, it turns out that Przewalski's horse is not as exotic as people used to think.

There were several species of horse in the Americas until quite recently. It would be more interesting to clone some of them.

Also camels, a really big bison and bear, saber-toothed tigers, dire wolf, giant beaver, giant sloth, and glyptodont, never mind woolly mammoth and mastodon.

</comment><comment><USER7> I wonder if the clone of an endangered species is subject to the same laws protecting others.</comment>


SEOmoz: My Startup Experience  - <AUTHOR> http://www.seomoz.org/blog/my-startup-experience-vc-entrepreneurship-selfanalysis-the-road-ahead <comment><USER2> I'm a Pro member as well.

I think the subscription fee is well worth it if you are looking to draw more traffic to your website via SEO. It's the combination of the tools and the community.

Disclaimer: Rand Fishkin's a friend (but I would have been a customer regardless).

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm surprised that they were unprofitable. How does a consulting business with great brand recognition, in an industry that's _still_ growing fast, not make boatloads of money? They should be like all those Whateverilents of the late 90's, paying people $50/hour and billing them to companies at $200/hour. (At least, I know of plenty of companies that would pay that much, and plenty of SEOs who would make that much -- and having a middleman with the best brand name in the business could definitely make it happen).

So what gives?

<comment><USER4> byrne - I think you might have misread the piece; we were profitable when we took investment the first time and are profitable again now. The "dip" was during a period when we burned the investment capital to grow faster.

And yeah - our rates are $1,000 per hour, which helps moderate demand, but we rarely outsource anything (and even when we do, it's to other very high priced vendors). Strategic SEO (vs. the tactical keyword research, link building, site editing, etc.) requires lots of deep knowledge.

<comment><USER3> Interesting. I figured the most likely explanation was that you were investing in growth. I just assumed you were more like McKinsey, less like Amazon.

$1,000 an hour! Definitely gives me something to shoot for! I've noticed that in my SEO work, too: the first 10% of the work (planning and strategy) seems to have many times the value of the next 90% (the research and implementation). It's just tough to charge wildly different amounts for the same person's time. I guess doing just that first 10% is a solid solution.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Out of curiosity.. is anyone here a SEOmoz Pro member and is it worth the money?

<comment><USER6> I am.

I think your perception of value is going to be heavily influenced by your level of SEO expertise and what your SEO workflow looks like. Aaron Wall has a great pyramid for expertise in an arbitrary market -- the beginners always outnumber the intermediates who outnumber... SEOMoz Pro is targeted at, if I don't miss my guess, high beginning/low intermediate. If you can't look at the SERP for [bingo cards] and say "This is competitive but not nearly as competitive as [student credit cards]" then they have a tool which will tell you exactly that and that provides value. For businesses who are in that sweet spot it is totally a no-brainer.

With regards to the workflow bit: SEO is primarily a game of link acquisition at the competitive levels. One common strategy for acquiring them is to identify pages on the Internet that would be good links and then email the people in charge of them to ask for the link. A lot of the SEOMoz tools are designed to make this process more efficient. I have deep misgivings about it (from both a it-is-a-nuisance and the-ROI-is-inferior-to-less-annoying- alternatives perspectives) and don't practice it myself, so those aren't so useful for me.

I would like to flatter myself and say I'm a wee bit above low-intermediate in SEO. I mostly use the Rank Tracker, and the other tools have not frequently given me actionable information. That said, I am not displeased with my $80 a month or whatever it was. If there is ONE thing I wish everyone at HN understood in their bones about SEO, it is that the ROI on it is just freaking amazing. Pick a number beyond your wildest dreams, no, it is better than that. In that context, I often spend speculatively on it, and ~100 a month is easy to justify even if it only results in positive decisions once a year.

(Edited to add: Don't let the Internet Marketing crowd fleece you, though.)

<comment><USER7> "Don't let the Internet Marketing crowd fleece you, though." -- mind explaining that? I'd love to hear more. Thanks

<comment><USER8> Ya, Patrick, I don't really understand that statement. Please can you explain?

Secondly, I remember you writing previously that you got a free membership to the site? Or do you now pay for it?

<comment><USER6> I'm a moderator at SEOBook, which is not SEOMoz.

The aside about Internet Marketing -- if you ever look up the terms Internet Marketing or Make Money Online you'll find a wealth of squeeze pages with long copy attempting to convince you that $79.95 or $500 is all you need to make millions on Google. These places are little better than scams targeting the desperate and ignorant. So when I give advice like "Hey, don't sweat the small stuff, speculative spending on SEO is smart even if it doesn't immediately result in sales this time" I wanted to add a disclaimer "But don't get suckered, because exactly those words get repeated by people looking for suckers".</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is the longest client project you've been on? - <AUTHOR> Currently in the last week of a 4-month Rails project, responsible for the front- and back-end of the app. I believe this is the longest single project I've been on, not including side projects (wink, wink).
I'm the only developer on the project (we usually do designer + developer pairs), so to say I'm starting to get fatigued is an understatement. I'll be relieved to get it finished.
What's your longest client project, and how did you stay focused through it? <comment><USER2> 7 years - projects still running but i moved on

Only planned on a year on the project as was to train a workforce too. But as often happens in this industry - you train people and they move on.

Motivation wasnt a problem as interesting project - plus I liked the stability of being able to give good estimates, meet the estimates and deliver

</comment><comment><USER3> Heh - started out as a small project in Dec 1995 - I resigned from the board of directors in 2007 and quit outright in 2008... It was _quite_ a ride...

Right now me and my team are on month 9 of a "six month project"...

Staying focused? The meaning of that kinda changes as the projects get bigger/longer. It become way more important to document design decisions and meetings/discussions - you can't keep a 6 month project with 4 people in your head - it needs to be done differently. Then "focus" becomes reading your task list and going back to doco if needed every Monday morning.

</comment><comment><USER4> My own project, written in PHP, which basically is a reminder system that I've been working on it for almost a year now.

How I stay focused:

1) I write out my pricing system and how much potential money I can make on it from customers which helps to keep me motivated as to why I keep working on it.

2) I usually come up with and work on another small [fun] project which kind of helps my mind relax a little bit. It's like when I'm feeling stressed or exhausted or burned out from one project, I work on another that is much less harder and not as stressful, which not only helps me learn new things, but allows me to work on multiple side projects that have the potential to make money.

3) Go for a walk / ride a bike / swim / sit in sauna or jacuzzi (if you have access).

4) Talk to someone about your project or potential ideas about other projects.

5) Exercise.

6) If you have a wonderful woman in your life, get her in the mood, and get your mind focused on her for a while. Take her out to dinner or go see a movie. Do what you got to do to just unwind for a few hours.

7) I read Hacker News and try to share with or gain insight from others -- it helps me learn what others are doing and gets my mind off the project for a while so I can relax. In doing this, I often come up with solutions to problems I am facing and certainly is a stress reducer.</comment>


Why, oh WHY, do those #? nutheads use vi? - <AUTHOR> http://www.viemu.com/a-why-vi-vim.html <comment><USER2> Because its the only reliable way to edit a file when there's a "house on fire" production incident.

Want to use xemacs? sorry you need a weird dependency. Ok lets use emacs. Still not installed. Ok lets use nano... wait how do i save this again?

<comment><USER3> Ctrl+o, it's literally on the screen at all times. People that use vi, and not vim, use it, as my very limited experience with knowing one person doing it, is because vi is available everywhere AND is more powerful than nano. And since they have to rely on vi, they might as well learn it fully.

<comment><USER4> Can you imagine people use vi because they like the way it works? I do. The fact that it is available everywhere is a nice bonus.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have always had a problem with all these emacs or vim plugins for various editors and IDEs. The problem is that as soon as you leave the context they work in - switch to a different window or a dialog box (or, in the case of Visual Studio, anywhere outside the code editor window), you are back to having to use the native key bindings.

<comment><USER6> I had the same issues. I really liked vim for editing scripts but wanted more functionality as I was studying datascience and needed to work on Jupyter notebooks and RMarkdown files. Luckily someone showed me spacemacs which is an emacs distribution built on emulating the vim experience but with all of the power of emacs.

[http://spacemacs.org/](http://spacemacs.org/)

Definitely worth checking out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Favourite vi joke ever: "I've been using it for about two years now, mostly because I can't figure out how to exit it."

On the other hand, it's everywhere, it's quick and once you learn it there's a lot of muscle memory that takes over.

<comment><USER8> I always enjoyed, "Need to generate a pseudo-random key sequence quickly? Open up vim and ask a friend to close it for you."

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> What really makes coding environment productive for me are: file navigation, code browsing, call hierarchy, class hierarchy, find usages, find declaration, find implementations, refactoring, build integration, debugger integration, documentation integration.

I did try vim more than once over the years. I'd use it to edit config files on servers but would much prefer an IDE for coding.

<comment><USER10> You can use VIM style keybindings in an IDE. I have been using VsVim in Visual Studio for years, it's great!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'd like to stress the point in the article about how important the . is to efficient vim use. [https://pragprog.com/book/dnvim2/practical-vim-second- editio...](https://pragprog.com/book/dnvim2/practical-vim-second-edition) completely changed how I use vi in this respect.

</comment><comment><USER12> vim is a grammar, a true grammar, once you learn that, it all makes sense.

[http://rc3.org/2012/05/12/the-grammar-of-vim/](http://rc3.org/2012/05/12/the- grammar-of-vim/)

</comment><comment><USER13> 'Learn emacs instead'

I would say emacs can be a lot more complex than vim, I mean people use it as basically an OS.

</comment><comment><USER14> First of all the article is from (2007).

This is just another love letter to vi/vim that lists "misconceptions" people tend to have and tries to debunk them.

Me personally, I didn't have any of the misconceptions listed in there. My beef with vi/vim lies somewhere else. So let's tackle the question "Why, oh WHY, do those #?@! nutheads use vi?" and here is my top list of problems I have with vi(m)

 _1)_ most people I know don't know how to use vi(m)

I know quite a lot of people who use it, but those people don't use any advanced functionality. They basically use it like this

      i
      <do stuff>
      <esc>
      :wq

some of those people recommend vim to other people and when asked why they use it all argue with how powerful it is and that it is installed "everywhere", but nobody uses the powerful functionality (anecdotally it's less then 10%)

 _2)_ vi is installed by default everywhere - but what vi?

There is

* nvi (used in void linux in version 1.81) [https://sites.google.com/a/bostic.com/keithbostic/vi/](https://sites.google.com/a/bostic.com/keithbostic/vi/)

* ex-vi (used in archlinux) [http://ex-vi.sourceforge.net/](http://ex-vi.sourceforge.net/)

* vim-minimal (used in red hat) [http://www.vim.org/](http://www.vim.org/)

* vim (yeah ubuntu uses afaik "vim.basic") [http://www.vim.org/](http://www.vim.org/)

Then there are busybox vi, neatvi and neovim (that's what I use)

Anyway they all "should" behave the same, but they have non overlapping functionality and behave different (even depending on the terminal you use. I more then once had problems depending on the TERM variable set)

 _3)_ you probably have to carry over you config wherever you go

Let's be real here. If you use vi(m), _really_ use vim, you probably have your default config. Maybe on github, maybe on your homepage, maybe on an usb drive or memorized. I know people with multiple vim configs for different use cases. The defaults I find are not usable for most. And some functionality doesn't carry over from vim to vi.

And even thought I say that the defaults suck, the default behavior changes from version to version. For example the smart indent functionality on older versions is different than it is now and they changed the crypto for the encryption (imho vim shouldn't support encrypting of documents anyway [see point 5] these were just the 2 examples that came to mind first). Meeh

 _4)_ you have to use plugins

Yeah plugins are great. You don't have to use plugins, but you for sure _want_ to use plugins. With the right plugins vim can even be a really good IDE. But you have to manage them, update them and again: on every machine you use you have to carry it over.

What plugin manager do you use? vim-plug? vundle? pathogen? Or maybe something entirely different? You don't want to manage them by hand and you are gonna need one. So get comfortable choosing one and setting it up everywhere.

 _5)_ vims original goal (afaik) was to adhere to the kiss principal

but it failed. vim now has the kitchen sink. If you install vim you pull in more than 30mb (yeah today it doesn't seem like much, but I like having a small footprint no matter what I do)

If you can read mails in your editor you are doing it wrong (sorry emacs users)

_____________________________

So the reasons why I don't like vim or why people shouldn't use vim aren't the ones listed on the site.

PS maybe you want to take a look at vis if you want to see what vim should have been.

edit. formatting

<comment><USER15> I don't understand that your first problem with vim is that other people don't know how to use it. That's like me saying I don't like money because other people don't know how to spend it.

<comment><USER14> Oh it was in relation to the article :) the question was "Why, oh WHY, do those #?@! nutheads use vi?" and my first point was in direct reference to this. "Why do people that don't know how to use vim vim" that's all.

At first I wanted to write a direct answer to the article, but since I started ranting about my gripes with vim I tried to change the tone of my comment while keeping my starting argument.

PS. I used to only use nano and people kept asking me why/making fun of me. And most people that told me to use vim didn't know shit about it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Vim is my main editor, my main gripe is that it performs terribly (without any plugins) with either relative numbers, cursor line or syntax highlighting in files larger than 200 lines.

<comment><USER17> Did you try different terminal emulators? All these features sound like they cause a lot of redraws, so it could be that the terminal emulator's renderer is the bottleneck here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I've found that a majority of people who use vi(m) and profess to hate Emacs because of the complexity of its shortcuts also spend their whole time in insert mode, using only the arrow keys for movement, leading me to think that these people just hate efficient editing in general.

</comment><comment><USER19> This does not match my experience at all.

Most people I know use vim and the holdouts use emacs (except for Java developers using Eclipse).

No one in my circles thinks using vim is any cooler or harder than any other editor per se, but it generally meets people's needs well.</comment>


What the new Chromium-based Edge looks like - <AUTHOR> https://www.neowin.net/news/exclusive-this-is-what-the-new-chromium-based-edge-looks-like <comment><USER2> the pictures in the article look very similar to the current Chromium, and they completely seem to lose any kind of Edge look and feel that the browser had before.

Maybe these are just early development pictures? I'd be surprised if Microsoft went with such a generic look for Edge</comment>


Large Scale Data Analytics with XtremeData Parallel SQL Database Engine - <AUTHOR> http://bighadoop.wordpress.com/2013/07/07/large-scale-data-analytics-with-xtremedata-parallel-sql-database-engine/

<comment><USER2> Is it columnar? You can't really compare to Redshift if it isn't.</comment>


Flat Design and Color Trends - <AUTHOR> http://designmodo.com/flat-design-colors/ When it comes to color, flat design works with a variety of colors, but most commonly designers are choosing to go bold and bright. <comment><USER2> > What we are seeing more of with flat design and color though is the matching > of tone and saturation.

As someone with practically no design skills, how would I accomplish this? For example, let's say I had two or three colors in mind or already picked out. What are the steps I could take to line up their tones and saturation? Is there a formula or algorithm that applies?

I realize design skills are developed through practice, but I very often find myself with something I've put together that looks just _OK_ and just sort of aimlessly tinkering around with it until I've inevitably made it look washed out. So obviously my _feel_ isn't working yet--where else can I turn?

<comment><USER3> Open up any color palette tool and switch to HSB mode. Move H around and leave S & B alone.

<comment><USER4> No! Hue does not vary independently from perceived saturation and brightness in the HSB color space.

You would need to use something like the Munsell system to achieve this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Usability failures include low contrast, no delineation of borders, and no visual cues for the interactions that are permissible for different parts of the interface (e.g. "clickable" button vs. bare text).

Sigh. I like the aesthetic but fad-monkeys overwhelmingly fail at the engineering part of design. You can be simple and elegant without going backwards on other usability principles.

<comment><USER6> Buttons didn't have gradients or 3D effects or often even colors for nearly 10-15+ years on Macs and PCs and people were able to use them just fine. The did often have highlights and borders, however. A button in Classic Mac OS was unmistakably a button without most of those cues.

It's possible to have a nice, useable flat design. However, great care must be taken to use visual cues and be consistent in the UI. It's also possible to have high contrast. Low contrast is not flat design, it's a poor implementations of colors with a flat aesthetic.

<comment><USER7> > Buttons didn't have ... 3D effects

Buttons on windows have always had 3D effects.

[http://www.guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/desktop/full/win31....](http://www.guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/desktop/full/win31.png)

Note the 24 instances of shadows cast from a north-west light source, as if the buttons were objects with depth.

<comment><USER6> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Windows_2.1.png>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "Flat Design". "Responsive Design". These don't need proper names. Everything does not have to be a movement, you don't have to pick a side.

If you start a project and wonder, "Hmm... should I use Flat Design for this?", you're doing it wrong.

<comment><USER9> I understand where you're coming from but dismissing it as a 'thing' is a bit cynical. I disliked the whole 'web 2.0' look, it was garish and rarely had any relation to things in real life. With more designers embracing the flat aesthetic, I think it shows a deeper development that design is becoming more humanist, and this can only mean users are more aquatinted to digital interfaces and no longer need high gloss buttons to understand an elements can be clicked etc. The move towards flat to me a great thing, a turning point in digital design.

<comment><USER10> I don't think it is cynical. This is a new trendy style. In 3 years, everyone will be complaining about flat design, hipster mustaches, and wishing we had more gradients and glossy reflections.

Now i'm being cynical. ;)

<comment><USER9> I would mostly agree with you that flat design is a new style if we limit the context to only web/application GUI's. No one can really disagree that flat design is an already historically established visual aesthetic in the real world.

So this is _digital_ flat design. With digital there are different metaphors to consider, like user interaction, boundaries, display capabilities etc. This is the web adopting some of the best things about established design aesthetics in the real world (minimalism) and integrating them in an entirely new way to incorporate those considerations.

I agree that it is inevitable there will be some new design trend in a few years time (please hopefully not one that involves monstrous glossy buttons and gradients), however this current flat design feels like it is laying the groundwork, especially in how a design should be technically achieved. The flat design is naturally more vector, which makes it inherently more native to web technology (CSS, HTML). This is very different from previous web design trends I can remember which were essentially hacks, initially involving tables, and later divs compiled from static bitmapped assets exported from Photoshop. This I believe is a new chapter in the evolution of design on the web.

\-- Edited for clarity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Designmodo and the Flat-UI is pretty mediocre to poor at contrast. I forked the project and ended up ripping out a lot of the components which were low contrast and modifying the palette to have high contrast, then modifying the borders to my own inset/outset values to have a more muted level change on the buttons but still have them look somewhere between flat and and normal buttons. I did experiment with an inside white border on buttons for an Classic Mac OS feel (the original monochrome "Flat UI" )

Much of the flat aesthetic is rooted in swiss graphic poster design, however that doesn't translate so well to pages where dense text actually matters, especially with poor color choices. Much of designmodo's color scheme actually fails the contrast algorithm for small text, except at larger text it's generally okay. Bootstrap itself is pretty abysmal as far as this goes as well.

The flat aesthetic is nice, but those who continue on with it with disregard to contrast will not succeed. Accessibility and the flat aesthetic is possible, it takes more work and compromise, however.

<comment><USER11> Is your fork public or are there any screens, etc. available? Sounds good.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Am I the only one that thinks "flat design" looks bland, unengaging and unoriginal? Are we, on the cutting edge of web trends, going to take our design cues from Microsoft's Windows Phone marketing department?

<comment><USER13> Judging by the increased popularity, I'd say that you are at least in the minority. I find that it looks clean, elegant, and attractive.

<comment><USER14> _clean, elegant, and attractive_

I notice that these are not in contradiction with adjectives that come to my mind first.. such as sterile, pretentious, mediocre, repetetive, heartless. Though now I think I'm kinda projecting properties into "flat design" it might not have, based on the properties I see becoming real hip in people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> To be honest, I'm really sick of "flat design." All it seems like is a fad that should (hopefully) boil away soon.

When you make something flat, you make it more aesthetically pleasing, but at the same time, you take away many visual cues that alert the user as to what exactly a specific widget does.

I think the Windows XP interface (Bear with me on this) demonstrates how you can be "matte," so to speak, but still usable. You could tone it down a bit more, but to eliminate gradients completely out of a UI is ugly and a gigantic hit to usability.

I think OS X has a great balance between flat and dynamic. They've toned down the ridiculous levels of gimmicky glossiness, but they've kept in the stuff that is important to the design. For example, the lightening of a shadow behind a window is a visual cue that the window is inactive. The pulsating and glowing water-filled Aqua push-button is an invitation to click on it, while the matte de-focused button is less significant. The Traffic Lights are smaller but the click-point remains the same.

Progress-bars slowly pulsate to indicate activity, and if they've stopped pulsating you know that something is wrong. Borders are clearly defined through shadows and solid lines.

Overall, it's a great UI. Ditto for iOS. Android also puts the flat design to use properly.

Can't say the same about Windows 8, and I also can't say the same about designmodo's flat toolkit either.

</comment><comment><USER16> "One thing that really makes the flat design trend work is that it is new and fun."

Not 'a good idea' or 'usable' or 'accessible', just different.

EDIT: Just to take the snarky edge off, I want to mention that whilst this might have been quite a good blog post if you've already decided to use Flat Design™, I'd have appreciated a discussion of the merits. But of course not all blog posts about anything are required to go into such a discussion.

<comment><USER2> I don't necessarily disagree, but ( _unfortunately?_ ) there is a well-known result that aesthetics affect perceived usability [1]. Clearly, making your site look better does nothing for the underlying usability, but the perception of usability is arguably just as important. I believe Apple has demonstrated this with each iteration of OS X: aesthetic concerns always seem to trump usability concerns (example include the Dock and the behavior of green window button) but the OS is more popular than ever.

Of course, you're still left with the question of whether choosing a flat design improves or detracts from the aesthetics of site. Here we're venturing into the realm of the subjective, but I'd venture to say that, given the current trends, it hardly seems like the worst thing you could do.

[1] <http://www.sigchi.org/chi97/proceedings/paper/nt.htm>

<comment><USER17> _there is a well-known result that aesthetics affect perceived usability_

Other things being equal, that is true, but in the case of flat design other things are usually far from equal. The loss of affordance with flat design can be crippling.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Absolutely love the colours that are associated with flat design. I think, we as designers are defining a new set of rules for what we want flat design to be. The applications in the context of mobile sites is obvious where space is limited. As always, once you've learned the rules you then have the ability to break them.

<comment><USER19> flat design is a fad and will go away , like all trends. It's not bad , but since it is used everywhere even where it should not be used , it is an abused trend.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Heh, the colors remind me of the 80s, TRS-80 Color Computer and the CGA hi-res color palettes... Actually just about every 8-bit color palate from the time:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_8-bit_computer_hardware...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_8-bit_computer_hardware_palettes)</comment>


Does it make business sense to create a HN type site for a vertical market? - <AUTHOR> Is there a business opportunity for doing similar HN type news site? <comment><USER2> 1\. check adwords for <niche> news and see how much traffic searches for that news

2\. use Amazon turk to seed your site.

3\. start advertising on adwords or maybe bing in the part of the world with the cheapest per click.

4\. see if you get returning users come to back using google analytics.

5\. add ads and see if your returning user number stays up.

6\. roll it out to the rest of the world.

<comment><AUTHOR> Curious what you mean about Amazon turk to see the site? Hire people to post relevant news?

<comment><USER2> post relevant content at first until real users start to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The question is how do you make money off it?

<comment><AUTHOR> Our thoughts were that if it reaches a tip over point of traffic,to eventually include limited ads, or affiliate type links to help monetize. Similar to the way google started.</comment></comment>


PostgreSQL 9.4 Beta 1 Released - <AUTHOR> http://www.postgresql.org/about/news/1522/ <comment><USER2> I have an 8TB database with 10 bn rows, each with multiple json columns where most of the real data is stored... so jsonb day is like christmas for me.

<comment><USER3> Mind explaining your setup a bit more and why you're not using NoSQL? That sounds painful for Postgres.

<comment><USER4> Or alternately: Why wasn't the JSON parsed into normal form if the intent was to search & filter across that data.

<comment><USER2> To get the same flexibility you'd want from a nosql data store. Without giving up the simpler, more open access methods. The schema is partly predictable (and indexed or fielded on those parts) and partly unpredictable.

<comment><USER5> why not add the partly predicted keys as columns ?

also jsonb will require a little more storage

is 8tb in 1 tablespace/db ?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> After playing around in nosql land for the last 3 years I've landed at postgresql as my go-to sql alternative although the market will keep being fragmented.

edit: json support in combination with a less fanatic approach to normalization can approximate some of the benefits a nosql model can while maintaining the bulk of the tried-and-tested flows in a relational database.

<comment><USER7> SQL alternative?

<comment><USER8> I think he probably means that certain Postgres features like hstore and JSON support allow it to be used in situations where he once would have chosen a no-SQL solution. This has been my own experience.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Postgresql is getting better and better! I am happy lately every release has some more feature / improvement about replication.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> looking especially forward to JSONB, the extended array manipulation functions and the improved GIN index!

<comment><USER10> I can't wait until they support manipulating JSON directly (e.g. insert object to end of a JSON array)

<comment><USER5> i think there were functions for the new hstore(that became jsonb) but coudn't make it in core so will probably/hopefully be released as an extension

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> non blocking refresh on materialized views is going to be massive! I wonder when it's going GA and Heroku rollout.

<comment><USER12> Should be GA in August/September if the present mimics the past.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> When is PostgreSQL going to get its own modern language which is functional/object-oriented/homoiconic/has-all-new-fangled-goodies built in, with a GUI language thrown in for good measure, so I can do everything in PostgreSQL without having to turn to another language?

<comment><USER14> By "homoiconic" do you mean that the language would be expressed as a table (unordered multiset of tuples)?

Interesting thought experiment, but it sounds pretty radical.

<comment><USER13> To be honest I have no idea what homoiconic means.

I think it means that everything is the same, ie whether a function in the case of functional languages like Haskell, or an object in languages like Smalltalk.

<comment><USER14> [http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homoiconic](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homoiconic)

"In a homoiconic language the primary representation of programs is also a data structure in a primitive type of the language itself. This makes metaprogramming easier..."

For lisp, that means programs are are also lists, so can be manipulated with macros easily (because lisp macros are also lisp, which is good at working with lists).

For a relational language, that would mean the programs are also relations, which would be a little weird because relations are unordered.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Going to be such a great release. Congrats PostgreSQL team! I love your product!

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm particularly excited about improvements in materialised views that will make Postgresql better suited to OLAP usage scenarios.

</comment><comment><USER17> pg_prewarm looks interesting but the docs are currently a little opaque as to how best to use it (for me at least!): [http://www.postgresql.org/docs/devel/static/pgprewarm.html](http://www.postgresql.org/docs/devel/static/pgprewarm.html)

<comment><USER18> Oh, is it now a built-in module in 9.4beta?

I've used it in 9.1 (downloading the patch, applying it, recompiling postgres..) - have found this article re: postgres caching mechanisms (and pg_prewarm use in particular (though re: pg_prewarm, most of it is about applying the patch itself, etc.)) useful:

[http://raghavt.blogspot.com/2012/04/caching-in- postgresql.ht...](http://raghavt.blogspot.com/2012/04/caching-in- postgresql.html)

P.S. here are some more comments from the author: [http://www.postgresql.org/message- id/CA+TgmoZihvzFW6n6pPwzDO...](http://www.postgresql.org/message- email@example.com) (btw, I've found the pgsql-hackers to be a great mailing list indeed!)

<comment><USER17> Thanks wfn, those links are really helpful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> "ALTER SYSTEM SET, which enables modifications to postgresql.conf from the SQL command line and from remote clients, easing administration tasks"

This is fantastic. We're always adding and removing ip addresses and restarting the server with each update was a pain.

<comment><USER20> Why did you restart the server? You can just send SIGHUP to have it reload the file without restarting.

<comment><USER19> Hah! Because I'm self-taught, and I didn't know I could.

Appreciate it!

<comment><USER21> There's a number of options that you can change in postgresql without having to restart the whole server.

[http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.3/static/auth-pg-hba- conf.h...](http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.3/static/auth-pg-hba-conf.html) explains that you can just do a reload after changing pg_hba.conf.

[http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.3/static/config- setting.htm...](http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.3/static/config-setting.html) explains more.

<comment><USER19> thanks much, digging through both.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The refresh concurrently materialized views is huge. I am glad that it was introduced since I currently have to use tables with functions to create/drop to get the same functionality.

</comment><comment> nevi-me Am I right in saying that JSONB is another way to say BSON?

<comment><USER20> No, they're different formats: [http://pgeoghegan.blogspot.pt/2014/03/what-i- think-of-jsonb....](http://pgeoghegan.blogspot.pt/2014/03/what-i-think-of- jsonb.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> waiting for upset improvement.

<comment><USER24> In that regard, have a look at [http://www.depesz.com/2012/06/10/why-is- upsert-so-complicate...](http://www.depesz.com/2012/06/10/why-is-upsert-so- complicated/) which is a very good article explaining why you have to continue to wait.

Getting MERGE right is one of these "pick two" things. You get to chose between "fast", "doesn't corrupt data" and "doesn't throw errors at times" but you only get to pick two.

<comment><USER25> I pick correct semantics _NOW_ and fix performance issues at your leisure.

upsert has been an embarrassment for Postgres for far too long now. Particularly obnoxious was the "upsert is hard! Roll your own" stance taken.

<comment><USER14> A completely reasonable stance.

However, it's not so much a performance question as one of concurrency. The easiest way to get the right semantics is by locking the entire destination table against concurrent writes. Maybe that's fine for a lot of users. But it has caused some hesitation, because other users might be disappointed.

It would be fair to say "just do it" though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> With 9.4, what will be the best option for multi-master replication? Will 3rd party tools like bucardo remain the preferred method, or will there be another strategy that is more integrated with PG?

<comment><USER27> In general on the CAP spectrum where does multi-master replication with Postgres fall in?

<comment><USER28> Replication in PostgreSQL is actually highly configurable so it depends on how you set it up: [http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.3/static/high- availability....](http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.3/static/high- availability.html)</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Writing a book about proprietary software/language - <AUTHOR> What are some of the issues associated with writing, distributing, and/or selling a book about a proprietary piece of software? If I wanted to write a book about MATLAB or Dyalog APL, would MathWorks or Dyalog have a problem with that?
Would it be simpler to write about an open source version, i.e.,  GNU Octave and GNU APL?
Just wondering if anyone has experience with this. <comment><USER2> I just picked up a MATLAB book that was lying within arms reach, and here's what I observed:

The first few uses of the term MATLAB, on the cover, just inside the front cover, etc., all had the (R) symbol tacked on. On the copyright/notices page, there was a blurb saying "MATLAB is a registered trademark of Mathworks, Inc."

There wasn't anything like "...used with permission" like you see sometimes, and the rest of the references to MATLAB sprinkled throughout the text did not have the (R) symbol.

I also picked up a Swift book, and saw a similar pattern. The "Swift" on the cover and just inside the cover had the (tm) symbol tagged on. A page or two inside the cover was a page that just said:

        TRADEMARKS

        ... iOS, Swift, Objective-C, Cocoa, blah, blah, blah are
        registered trademarks of Apple Computer, Inc.

Again, nothing about permission.

Not sure how much you can infer from that, but I _think_ the rule may be something like "you can use a trademark in this fashion, as long as you acknowledge it and don't mis-represent your relationship with the trademark".

IANAL of course, and if you're serious about writing a book, you might want to consult an IP attorney... or just call up Mathworks or Dyalog or whoever and say "Hey, I'm planning to write a book about your product, are you cool with that?" Best case, they say "Sure, go ahead" and you can rest easy.

</comment><comment><USER3> You don't need permission to do a book about Matlab the same way yo don't need permission to do a review video of a Ford Mustang... Just give attribution where it is used.

<comment><USER3> But it is always better to help a free software project such as GNU Octave</comment></comment>


What if consciousness is not what drives the human mind? - <AUTHOR> https://theconversation.com/what-if-consciousness-is-not-what-drives-the-human-mind-86785 <comment><USER2> Through meditative and other techniques, I have learned that-- at least for myself-- that "I" am the result of a conversation of a number of what you might call entities, personalities, archetypal emotions, drives, and other things I am not yet able to classify.

My consciousness-- the surface most of us have access to, tries to make sense of these conversations and form them into a cohesive illusion/narrative in which I am a single "thing" of which I am in control.

A few times I've reached states where I can connect or disconnect these entities for a few minutes, or have a conversation with them directly.

<comment><USER3> Have you experimented with dimethyltryptamine before? I would be interested to know if a commitment to meditation could induce similar effects. What you have described sounds similar to common effects from chemicals such as N,N-DMT and 5-MeO-DMT. Alternatively, could those effects be reached more easily through sensory deprivation?

<comment><USER4> > "I" am the result of a conversation of a number of what you might call > entities

Prior to attending a week-long ayahuasca retreat in Peru, a psychiatrist friend decided to use ketamine to induce a controlled state of dissociative identity in which one detached aspect of her psyche could observe the machinations of another. Curiously, after returning from Peru following a mentored DMT regimen she reported experiences similar to those reported by oceanghost. Buddhist mystic types contend that one's psychology is a function of 'atmanah' (some sort of co-minds) interacting with a individual's 'prajnatma' (one's self) [Dhammapada text]. Interesting. IF valid (BIG IF) then nobody would be what they seem.

<comment><USER5> I kitesurf, there are some tricks that I find very scary, I both want to try them and find them too scary to do.

Sometimes its easier to hand off control to my monkey brain, I'm not sure who it is inside me, but they find it easier to ignore the fear that holds human me back.

I feel like there is Mr Low-level (maybe lizard brain?) who takes over when I'm super sleepy or driving or walking and listening to podcasts. There is monkey brain who is reckless and doesn't mind what happens to the physical self. Then there is me, I'm usually in charge.

The interactions are more complex and nuanced than I can write here.

<comment><USER4> Fun. With kite-surfing you have to be two people at once, legs and upper body having co-operating minds of their own. If you get down to Oz you may want to try cloud-surfing. When you have an occluded weather front the leading edge clouds have a strong updraft, with a strong downdraft at the trailing end; effect is like a suspended horizontal wind tube. That was demonstrated to me during a private-IFR lesson where (under hood) I heard a loud whooshing sound and the vertical speed indicator shot up. Concerned, the CFI explained what was happening. Interesting! Wonder if you could cloud surf? Turned out that was an activity in Queensland, Australia where they have a spring phenomena called the 'Morning Glory' with long tubular cloud formations and lots of glider pilots. If you try it make sure you know where you want to land since the back country there is full of nasty bugs and snakes and the Gulf of Carpentaria has more than it's fair share of box jellyfish. Nice place to visit ...

Instead of lizard / monkey / the 'me' try physicalistic / vitalistic / mentalistic

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Interesting! I am not a nueroscientist, but I think about this sort of thing a lot (a very self referencial activity!)

One thing I've come to believe is in line with (what this article presents as) the paper's thesis, and that is the following:

Consciousness is best described as a highest order observation process that is non-continuous. Somewhat like a serverless or virtual instance, it can pop in and out of use as needed, any maybe many times a second.

These brief 'flashes' of highest order observation, when observed by the person, blend to form a continuous experience, but it's really just a smoothing function, and an illusion.

Consider how you can be tricked into believing something was there in a memory that helps explain a story, even when it wasn't. The mind is not as precise as we want to believe!

Consciousness is therefore not the root, and persistent experience! It's weird, but it actually ends up explaining a lot of personal life experiences a little better.

<comment><USER7> Listen to what you said... the highest order observation, "when ovserved by the person" is an illusion.

This implies that there is someone ("the person") observing the highest order observation -- making it not the highest order.

And to be an illusion there needs to be someone to fool in the first place.

Try to get that language out of your stataments and then see if you can say ANYTHING AT ALL about consciousness! :-)

<comment><USER8> Think about it this way: It's an illusion, but the illusion is real.

Or think about it this way: We simulate a reality (the illusion).

Or how about this. We are pattern recognizing feedback loops (illusion)

Do we really need to know what consciousness is as a thing or have we perhaps by now realized that question doesn't really make sense because consciousness is not a thing. It doesn't exist somewhere. It's a concept we use to describe phenomena but which through language can always only be a reduction of reality.

<comment><USER7> Yep, I think our ideas are shaped by our language.

Same thing with the idea of "existence". It actually requires consciousness to make any sense. The two concepts are actually dual of each other!

Thought experiment: if I told you about a parallel universe which you would never be able to detect, or deduce from any phenomena in this one ... how is then saying "it exists" different from saying "it doesn't exist?"

Now imagine this world with no conscious observers. How is its existence any different from that of the hypothetical parallel universe?

In short - our very concepts of existence and consciousness are really influenced by the language we use.

Now an interesting question: can you pose ANY question about consciousness or existence that doesn't have a trivial answer, if you are CAREFUL to avoid all ambiguity in your language?

I believe that, from an atheist point of view, there IS no root you can get at. Everything is relative. When you are careful to state the subject and object of a sentence everything becomes trivially obvious.

The trouble is when you take a ternary relation (eg A should do B if A wants C to happen) and omit one of the terms. Then you get mystical wondering "How do we ground the moral imperative that A should do B?" Once you are careful to include all the input variables, morality and everything else becomes relative and the statements are merely relations. Then you get something like logical positivism.

The main question still remains - WHY are things the way they are, so consistent? And atheists may never know! :)

<comment><USER8> Can see you edited so let me add that i am also living without a religion. I agree that everything is subjective, but that doesent mean we can't build moral or ethical foundations for how we live together. There are plenty of shared foundation even if its an illusion to build upon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> _" I do not believe in freedom of the will. Schopenhauer's words: "Man can do what he wants, but he cannot will what he wills" accompany me in all situations throughout my life."_

Albert Einstein

<comment><USER10> This is the first time I've seen a quote of a quote. You just squared my hatred for quotes.

<comment><USER11> Don't blame him. The laws of physics forced him to post that. He had no say in the matter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I had an interesting experience once when I regained consciousness after fainting.

My first memory of that experience was a cacophony of noises, specific images, and what I can only describe as colored static. Then, over what subjectively felt like 10 seconds, I realized at some stage that I was 'awake' and the various sounds and images sort of faded until I had one coherent thought and then started to get awareness of my surroundings and then finally opened my eyes.

It was a very unsettling, but also very interesting experience and sort of made me curious to investigate if this is what people experience with hallucinagens.

Another time when I had to make a trip to the ER they gave me nitrous oxide when they tried to reset a broken bone and I had very interesting aural hallucination where sounds became chopped up/echoey. When the gas stopped I asked the nurse how long it had been and she said about 5 minutes but it had felt like 30 mins.

Both of experiences left me fascinated how malleable our perceptions are :)

<comment> atom-morgan I've fainted a couple times and I've done hallucinogens. The experiences aren't anything alike to me.

<comment><USER13> Agreed. Hallucinogens tend to increase synesthesia and sort of "remove the filter" on our brains imagination potential.

Being sedated tends to just "turn your brain off" in my experience. To make an analogy to computer vision: fainting lowers the resolution and increases the noise in the original image, psychedelics change the decision threshold for detection of objects.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > We suggest that our personal awareness does not create, cause or choose our > beliefs, feelings or perceptions. Instead, the contents of consciousness are > generated "behind the scenes" by fast, efficient, non-conscious systems in > our brains.

My consciousness prefers to think that it is the one in control, and any suggestion to the contrary makes my consciousness uncomfortable.

<comment><USER15> Another section of the article for a TLDR: "we don't consciously choose our thoughts or our feelings – we become aware of them."

> My consciousness prefers to think that it is the one in control, and any > suggestion to the contrary makes my consciousness uncomfortable.

Maybe you should rather say "My awarenes is aware of thoughts about myself being the one in control, and it is also aware of feelings of discomfort that accompany ideas about myself not being the one in control".

<comment><USER16> What do we achieve by adding all those words? I observe that my body is usually acts as if controlled by a single goal-directed agent. I call this agent I. It doesn't matter if we can single-out some useless subsystem and call it "ride-along consciousness" or "real I" or something.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> If you enjoy this article you might also enjoy the novel "Blindsight" by Peter Watts, which is available for free under Creative Commons and has some interesting ideas about consciousness vs. intelligence.

<comment><USER18> Came here to say the same thing! Link: [http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm](http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> In philosophy of mind this view is broadly construed as 'Epiphenomenalism'. The idea being that consciousness (any mental activity that shows up for us) is like the steam coming off of a locomotive, just a by product of underlying physical events. Our thoughts have no real impact on the underlying operation of the train (brain).

Though this view is certainly odd, I've always struggled to see how it isn't true. How could our behavior not be entirely determined by the physical state of our brain? In some ways this strikes me as obviously true, if unintuitive at first.

<comment><USER20> Well, one reason to believe otherwise is the simple fact that we are _talking_ about consciousness.

If consciousness were just a by-product (like steam in your example) then there would be no physical drive to talk about it.

<comment><USER21> I don't see how talking about consciousness is necessarily a limitation to it being a by-product of physical processes.

It could be that consciousness is simply an emergent property (a by-product) of the communication of billions of neurons that are connected in trillions of ways. Where neurons are emergent of chemical phenomena which are emergent of atomic phenomena and so on.

I'm probably greatly simplifying the dependencies of phenomena, but I think that consciousness is most definitely based upon physical processes. The current evidence makes me believe that consciousness is a by-product of evolution, which is a by-product of the conditions on our planet.

So it goes.

<comment><USER19> I do agree, but to be fair, Epiphenomenalism makes a slightly stronger point. Not only is consciousness entirely a physical process, but the 'events' of consciousness (any thought, feeling, emotion, sensation you've ever experienced) has absolutely no impact on behavior. There is no feedback loop here. So, instead of

Touch hot flame -> Feel sensation of pain -> Move hand

It's...

Touch hot flame -> brain processes event and sends signals to move hand -> You experience all of this but it had no relevancy to the chain of events.

EDIT: This does beg the question 'why do we have consciousness, then?' or slightly related 'how could we talk about it?'. Which are interesting questions, and probably explained by darwinian processes, but don't really get at the heart of it. My thoughts anyhow.

<comment><USER22> > but the 'events' of consciousness (any thought, feeling, emotion, sensation > you've ever experienced) has absolutely no impact on behavior. > or slightly > related 'how could we talk about it?'

All of this is at least intuitively easy to explain with added language and complexity in the brain. So like the chain would become:

Touch hot flame -> brain processes event (and then does complicated language processing, and complicated memory and emotion processing) and THEN sends signals to move hand or not move hand -> You experience all of this but it had no relevancy to the chain of events.

Where I would ponder the relevancy of consciousness is when it comes to attention and remembering things. Just from personal experience, I can read a book, watch a movie or listen to music and I will not remember a thing if I wasn't aware of it. Is awareness and consciousness the same thing? I don't know, but at least we are conscious of everything we are aware of, by definition, and not necessarily vice versa.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> A lot of this devolves to discovering that you can't remember more than you can remember, that you do indeed "feel" your mood just as we've talked about since the dawn of time, and other ways in which _what we think_ is limited by the machinery we use to do processing.

Shockingly, I neither chose to forget to send my sibling a birthday card, nor chose to have a song from Moana lurking at the back of my head. Both of these have had strong causative influence on my subsequent conscious actions.

In other news, when I consciously try to catch a ball, I am limited by the length of my arms. This does not imply that consciousness is an emergent property of my arm bones.

</comment><comment><USER24> As Ramesh Balsekar once said "as long as you believe you have free will, then live your life as if it's true" (otherwise "no freewill" is just a belief and it's doing more harm then good)

<comment><USER25> Does it really ? I don't believe in free will, to a large extent, and this doesn't stop me from trying to do good. And doesn't the idea of "free will" also do harm ? Such as when people just discard mental health issues as "just matter of will" ?

<comment><USER24> > I don't believe in free will, to a large extent, and this doesn't stop me > from trying to do good.

So, you believe in free will.

<comment><USER26> I feel like this issue needs more clarification.

Say you have complete disbelief in free will. Without free will, you just carry out a path which is already predetermined. In other words, you just carry out your destiny. It can be the case that you are destined to 'try to do good'. You do not choose to do good, you do good because it is in your nature.

More generally:

Regardless of belief, people are confronted with choice points where they have to choose A or B. Those who believe in free will believe that the choice is determined by an internal force which they associate with 'themselves'. Those who do not believe in free will believe that the choice is determined by some external force.

 _People make decisions in each scenario, the debate is over the ultimate force which drives the decisions._

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Reminds me somewhat of the Sankhya school of Indian philosophy, which was strongly dualist but (unlike Cartesian dualism) considered thought processes as part of material reality, and spirit as some sort of "consciousness capability" which worked mostly as an spectator.

[https://historyofphilosophy.net/samkhya](https://historyofphilosophy.net/samkhya)

<comment><USER4> Right, with 'consciousness' reported behaving as 'sakshin' or 'witness' and the sense of 'I' (and subsequent not 'I') as a synthetic product of the nervous system called 'ahamkara' ('I' maker) supervening within the 'sakshin'. The Vedantin's goal was 'neti neti', or I'm not-that (empirical) and not-this (human-animal cognitive operating system engineered to interact with the empirical), recognition of which purportedly catalyzed a subsequent 'recollection' of a 'transcendent' cognitive operating system. If interested, see 'Advaita Vedanta - A Philosophical Reconstruction' (Deutsch) for a comprehensive overview of the subject.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> There's long been good evidence from various experiments that consciousness is merely the publicity office of the mind; as Robert Trivers said using other words decades ago; but it's always good to see more.

</comment><comment><USER29> What would be role of the consciousness if it does not have a manager role? Just justifying our behaviours to the others?

By the way - people have already argued that is not _conscious_ , but _meta- conscious_ that makes us different: [https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/consciousn...](https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/consciousness- goes-deeper-than-you-think/)

It is argued that meta-conscious may reflect upon state of the conscious and attempt to readjust works in the other parts of the brain.

</comment><comment><USER30> The experiments about people with their brain hemispheres separated indicate that conciousness is an effort of many mental areas to create an integrated and coherent mental state. For example, consider subjects whose verbal area is separated from their visual area, when the subject tries to explain what he saw he tell us an imaginary story. This strongly suggests that our brain is working hard to integrate all the information that it receives. At this moment, I can't recall any concrete experiments, but they are something like this: one of your eyes see a message telling that you kid is crying, then you begin to try to phone home, when asked what are you doing, you gives some explanation like my kid was acting a little strange this morning, I need to call to see what is happening at home. More on split-brains and dual conciousness theory at [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_consciousness](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_consciousness)

</comment><comment><USER31> But where is the science? It looks like shooting in the dark and out of frustration coming up with more stories and pretending that what? progress? At least it makes for good sci-fi like Peter Watts'.

</comment><comment><USER32> Mind is just one of the many sheaths of consciousness. Mind is a very negligible entity with respect to the vast concept of consciousness.

</comment><comment><USER33> Anyone interested in this thread should read Godel, Escher, Bach, or at least it's preface

<comment><USER34> Any tips on how to approach G.E.B.? I have tried a few times now, but it seemed simultaneously too dense and abstract.

<comment><USER35> Read it out loud (to someone else if you like), and don't try too hard to understand it — if you don't get a section on first read, just keep going, it'll make more sense as you process it subconsciously.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Also hormones.

</comment><comment><USER37> Sounds like mimicry of the great Sam Harris.</comment>


Nvidia GPUs can break Chrome's incognito mode - <AUTHOR> https://charliehorse55.wordpress.com/2016/01/09/how-nvidia-breaks-chrome-incognito/ <comment><USER2> Previous discussion on the same subject, about a post written by me: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9245980](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9245980)

Basically, this issue is not restricted to NVidia GPUs or specific operating systems - This can be reproduced on Windows, Linux and OSX. Basically the concept of memory safety does not exist in the gpu space - which is the reason why the webgl standard is so strict about always zeroing buffers. The issue of breaking privacy and privilege boundaries on a multiuser system is very real, and there is no workable solution. This seems to be one of those problems where a lot of people are aware, but no one is sure how to fix it and so it just stays how it is.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I remember reading that when it was first posted. Glad to see other people are aware, but it's disappointing nothing has been done.

The fix is pretty simple, the GPU manufacturer just needs to update their driver to zero the VRAM like an OS would with RAM.

<comment><USER3> Are device drivers _ever_ updated, much less for security issues?

Seems like an obvious way to increase the take, in any event: "Chip X has a security flaw. Chip Y does not. Buy chip Y now or Evil People will own-zor all your cash-zors."

<comment><USER4> Since we're talking about GPUs... search the NVIDIA archive [1], and look for the WHQL drivers:

        Version: 359.00 - Release Date: Thu Nov 19, 2015
        Version: 358.91 - Release Date: Mon Nov 09, 2015
        Version: 358.87 - Release Date: Wed Nov 04, 2015
        Version: 358.50 - Release Date: Wed Oct 07, 2015

[1] [http://www.nvidia.com/drivers/beta](http://www.nvidia.com/drivers/beta)

<comment><USER3> So what about the BSODs that device drivers cause? Are those not device driver issues, but OS issues, or are they unfixable?

<comment><USER5> They could be any of those.

In a sense, BSODs aren't anything special -- all a BSOD means is that some code running in kernel mode has crashed or raised some exception that went unhandled. The same thing, when it happens in a user-mode program, gets you the error dialog box 'Program has stopped working'.

So the causes of BSODs and user application crashes are the same. The reason Windows has BSODs is that it's dangerous to keep the system going when something in kernel mode crashes. Things running in kernel mode have access to everything (think - all memory) and are deemed important enough to the operation of the whole system that a crash in one of those is a significant event that's worthy of special logging and rebooting. You can't guarantee, for example, that a display driver crash hasn't corrupted other parts of memory, cuasing potential for data loss if the system were to continue operating.

So, back to the original point. Device-driver BSODs from the big vendors are probably rare enough in general that you should suspect a hardware problem or glitch if you suddenly see one out of the blue. Graphics drivers, given their complexity, are a bit more prone to crashing though. Also, things running on the system can interact and cause the driver to crash.

Windows has lots of infrastructure in place for making sure device drivers behave safely. There's also good facilities for figuring out exactly what caused a BSOD beyond the usually cryptic-looking error code you see on the screen.

Resplendence WhoCrashed is handy: [http://www.resplendence.com/whocrashed](http://www.resplendence.com/whocrashed)

Though if you really want to dig deep, the tools with the Windows SDK (particularly WinDbg) can let you achieve the same thing; they are developer tools though, so targeted more to that audience.

EDIT: Just to add in answer to your original comment, big-vendor graphics drivers are VERY often updated. I'd bet they're the most often updated drivers on a system. There are myriad reasons for this, both technical and competitive. That doesn't mean that long-standing problems are necessarily fixed, but both AMD and Nvidia have very regular releases with fixes and performance improvements.

<comment><USER6> Along a similar line, in my own experience, since around Windows 2000 (not ME) it's extremely rare to see a BSOD that isn't related to either bad hardware or drivers, more often than not hardware related to a driver than the driver itself.

<comment><USER5> Another subtlety is that the term 'driver' on Windows tends to be used for any loadable module that runs in kernel mode. So a driver often isn't actually related to running a particular piece of hardware. Rather, it's a piece of software that needs kernel-mode access to the system.

Two examples that demonstrate this point well:

\- There are various tools out there that you can use to perform a live memory capture on a Windows system; not just doing a memory dump of a single process, but doing a live memory dump of the whole system without having to halt or reboot. I've used one of these and it works by loading a 'driver' component when it is run that does the memory capture from kernel-mode (it requires Admin elevation to run, obviously).

(For examples, see: [http://www.forensicswiki.org/wiki/Tools:Memory_Imaging](http://www.forensicswiki.org/wiki/Tools:Memory_Imaging)

I don't remember if it was one off this list that I tried though).

Another example: A friend of mine had a system that would inexplicably BSOD if he left it running for a long while, unattended (especially overnight). We initially suspected perhaps a heating issue (it was a small Intel NUC). After setting up for full memory dumps and then analyzing them after a BSOD occurred using WinDbg, we actually found out that the BSOD was being caused by a kernel-mode component of the anti-virus suite that he had installed -- I think at the time it was BitDefender, but not sure. When he consulted the AV vendor support website, I believe it turned out to be a known issue with a fix.

On my own systems, by far the largest cause of BSODs (of the few that I've seen over the last couple of years) has been RAM going bad. These typically manifest as BSODs out of the blue that seem to come from different modules each time they happen, or they come from a module deep in the system that 'shouldn't' have crashes. My personal rule is, if I see one, be vigilant. If I see another one, reboot and run MemTest86.

<comment><USER6> In practice, other than the Windows Kernel, the only things running in kernel space tend to be drivers, a/v software and malicious code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Back in 2000, a very similar problem was my first lesson in frame buffers.

I was watching some adult material using Quicktime on Windows 98. A few hours later, I wanted to show my mom something on my computer. As it loaded the new video in Quicktime, the last frame of the porno sat there in inverted colours until the new video began to play.

I had closed Quicktime hours ago... what was that still doing there in memory?

Needless to say it was very awkward.

<comment><USER8> Similar happened to me, except it was the entire family staring at a 50" TV waiting for me to start a movie Christmas eve.

<comment><USER9> I remember the first time I played porn on my TV. I felt like I had tainted in an irreversible way. Moreover, I had a nagging fear that somehow it would show up later when I didn't expect it (you know, like a file you forgot in your Downloads directory). Thanks for letting me know my fears weren't entirely unfounded...

<comment><USER10> From bash.org (which appears to be down, so linking to Google cache):

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:_JGpv1r...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:_JGpv1rzgSYJ:bash.org/%3F333409+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=au&client=safari)

<comment><USER7> Ouch. The only thing I could think of to fix this is to burn a different image overtop and hope the resultant burn is unrecognizable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Serious kudos to the author for posting this even though he mentions viewing pornography.

I had a similar problem on iOS. When I load Safari, there's usually a flash of the previous screen (probably cached as a PNG), then the page loads. I think it looks junky; I'd prefer a "loading" screen. It would flash the previous screen whether I was in private mode or not. So porn would flash on my screen. I didn't file a bug report or mention it on my twitter because I'm a little afraid of the reception. So, again, thank you charliehorse55.

edit: i said "cached as a PNG" but that's just what I thought prior to reading this article. it could be many things, including this bug.

<comment><USER12> Believe it or not everybody watches porn.

<comment><USER3> It isn't that everyone watches porn, it's that watching porn is just as moral as watching any other form of entertainment.

Anti-porn crusaders aren't necessarily hypocrites. They also don't need to be hypocrites to be wrong.

<comment><USER13> Careful, you're showing your hand.

<comment><USER3> I also wear gray shirts and occasionally listen to ska.

Nothing makes people quite so alien as differing moral codes. I'm "showing my hand" as regards something that simply _does not matter_ to the majority of people on this website. Trying to make a big deal out of it simply makes you look strange.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This sounds like fun, especially if webpages can use WebGL to read old buffers back into javascript variables - and then AJAX them out silently in the background. (preserveDrawingBuffer + canvas.toDataURL() + ajax ?)

Edit: Also, "google chrome incognito mode is apparently not designed to protect you against other users on the same computer".. what? Isn't that the _only_ thing it can and should protect against? It's not like it can protect against non-local users (i.e. HTTP network interceptions)

<comment><USER15> RE your edit, there is a reason incognito mode is also known as "porn mode". It's primary use case - that obviously can't be stated officially - is to let you browse porn without fear that your mom / girlfriend / boss will find out by checking your browser history or having the site's URL show up as a suggestion when typing something in the address bar. It has never been a serious security tool.

<comment><USER14> Obviously. It does have another use case too, for developers, it's an easy way to run parallel login sessions on webapps without stomping over cookies. :)

<comment><USER16> Yeah. I wish all apps had an incognito mode for this reason.

Imagine being able to open an incognito terminal to type commands that won't get saved to history or pollute what you already have.

<comment><USER17> In bash (and probably others) commands prefixed with space are removed from history. (it's a setting - google HISTIGNORE )

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > Google marked the bug as won't fix because google chrome incognito mode is > apparently not designed to protect you against other users on the same > computer.

That's nonsense. For most users, that's _exactly_ what it's used for.

I really think Google is dropping the ball here. I know it's not their bug, and they shouldn't _have_ to work around it in an ideal world, but this is a pretty clear leak of data outside of private mode. It wouldn't impact performance in any noticeable way (you're closing the window anyway at this point), and would just be an extra safeguard.

Very short-sighted of them to ignore this bug. Perhaps we could ask distro maintainers to add patches for this to their builds of Chromium.

</comment><comment><USER15> Interesting. I've never thought of it as a security issue. But it's something that's around since forever. I've seen old framebuffers containing stills from games or videos showing up when resizing OpenGL applications 15 years ago. Video cards don't clear memory for the same reason nothing is ever deleted by default - it's a waste of time.

<comment><USER19> > Video cards don't clear memory for the same reason nothing is ever deleted > by default

Modern operating system zeroes memory pages all the time. It is a security measure, and ensuring security is by no means a waste of time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> WDDM 2.0 gpummu is supposed to ensure that the memory has been zeroed between different applications that use virtual GPU memory.

If this is the case there might be a compliance issue on nVidia side which makes me wonder if webgl is vulnerable also.

WebGL was amended to request a zero when provisioning or disposing of a buffer but it relies on the API which is handled by the driver if nVidia is taking some shortcuts to save time it might be possible to leech stale memory this way.

<comment><USER21> > WDDM 2.0 gpummu is supposed to ensure that the memory has been zeroed > between different applications that use virtual GPU memory.

Which Windows version introduced this WDDM version? Could it be that OP is running an older version?

> WebGL was amended to request a zero when provisioning or disposing of a > buffer but it relies on the API

This is indeed a tricky situation. All modern GPUs do "zero bandwidth clears" which means that upon clearing, nothing gets written to the actual framebuffer, the memory is just marked "cleared" (by writing some special bits to the L2 cache, for example). This makes it difficult to reason whether there's any sensitive content left in the framebuffer.

edit: nevermind, the OP seems to be using OSX, so it's not WDDM. Additionally, the OSX GPU drivers are written by Apple.

<comment><USER20> Yeah this was confusing he said that it was an Nvidia issue which is why I thought it was on Windows.

As far as WDDM goes 2.0 requires that for sure I'm pretty sure this was part of the original WDDM GPUMMU spec also but I can't really find those details anymore on MSDN since most of the pages refer to 2.0 atm.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Sometime around 1995 I had a brand new 80486 Dx-100 I was putting together, and just for kicks I decided to pull the CPU out while it was running. I expected some kind of epic C-64 style rainbow gibberish crash, but it actually just froze, with the Windows 95 desktop still on the screen.

</comment><comment><USER23> Reminds me of when network card drivers would use random bits of memory to pad out minimum Ethernet frames. Oh hey, there's your sensitive data going out in an ICMP ping request.

<comment><USER24> Do you have more info about this? Sounds crazy!

<comment><USER14> For example, [http://www.securitytracker.com/id/1008910](http://www.securitytracker.com/id/1008910)

It's basically heartbleed in your ethernet driver in 2003.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> > Google marked the bug as won't fix because google chrome incognito mode is > apparently not designed to protect you against other users on the same > computer (despite nearly everyone using it for that exact purpose).

What's the purpose of incognito mode then? It doesn't protect you from your ISP, websites, or users on the same computer. I'm not sure what other use case there is.

<comment><USER20> Saves you from clearing your history after browsing porn.

<comment><USER26> It could trivially also clear the framebuffer history. However they marked it as wontfix.

<comment><USER20> I'm not so sure this shouldn't happen according to the wddm spec.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> OP, it looks like this is on OS X (from the screenshots), in which case you should probably report it to Apple as well. The driver stack on OS X is a mix of Apple and NVIDIA code.

</comment><comment><USER28> This should be easy to fix at the driver level. Window close and and GPU resource release are not operations that occur often enough that memory clearing would affect performance.

</comment><comment><USER29> > Of course, it doesn't always work perfectly, sometimes the images are > rearranged.

I've seen the same behaviour on OS X with an Intel GPU: [https://i.imgur.com/3fagsYx.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/3fagsYx.jpg) (screenshot of the contents of a browser tab - pretty sure it was Chrome. The Rooster Teeth page you can see parts of had been closed hours prior)

<comment><USER30> Googling shows that this bug previously received a $1000 bounty in 2012 and should already been fixed: [https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=152746](https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=152746)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> This is a hack that is caused by hardware, due to some way in which its currently designed. As such, I doubt if software patches would be able to fix it. A while back I read an article on arstechnica that described stealing encryption just by touching exposed metal parts of laptop.

[http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/08/stealing- encryption-...](http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/08/stealing-encryption- keys-through-the-power-of-touch/)

</comment><comment><USER32> Check out this paper if you're interested in a solution to this and other problems (somewhat amusingly, using the GPU): [https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~sangmank/pubs/lacuna.pdf](https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~sangmank/pubs/lacuna.pdf)

In particular, they refute via counterexample the arguments that VMs or secure deallocation alone are sufficient.

</comment><comment><USER10> And this is why Linux folks hate proprietary drivers. At least the developers of open source drivers would fix this. Probably very promptly!

There's a reason Linus Torvalds flipped the bird to NVidia. Here is a perfect example of the reason why closed source drivers suck.

</comment><comment><USER19> It would be nice if a software exists that allocates many many GPU memory pages and clears them, so we can be safe after viewing p-something.

</comment><comment><USER33> awesome -- also I'm glad you censored the porn but not the porn title ;)

</comment><comment><USER34> Same issue with Samsung GS5... on Snapchat... with disastrous results...

</comment><comment><USER19> Is this issue specific to Google Chrome? Does Safari has the same problem? In principle, I'd expect so, but if Safari surprises me, maybe I will jump ship.

</comment><comment><USER35> they could just fill the buffer with images of the nvidia logo free commercials for themselves?

</comment><comment><USER36> There's performance overhead to clearing memory.

If you were them would you take the performance hit?

<comment><USER37> GPUs have loads of memory bandwidth. I can't imagine a framebuffer taking more than a few microseconds to clear.

For example, Nvidia claims that the GTX 980 has a memory bandwidth of 223 GB/s. (1920 * 1080 * 3)/223e9 = 27us. Clearing all 4GB of VRAM would take 4/223 = 18ms. This would have a negligible impact on user experience in most cases.

I guess the driver could also erase memory in the background as soon as it is deallocated, with zero user impact.

<comment><USER21> It's high bandwidth but also high latency. If a page was cleared every time it was allocated, it would cause very unpredictable performance because the CPU would have to tell the GPU to clear memory and then wait for the GPU to finish before any other operations on the buffer could be done. This definitely isn't something that should happen for every allocated page. It might be acceptable if this happened only to pages previously used by other processes. But it would still be unpredictable and could cause unwanted stalls in the middle of a game session, for example.

Also note that memory bandwidth is typically the bottleneck in modern games.

The best place to do this would be in the browser, clearing out any textures and buffers before deallocating them if the contents are deemed private.

<comment><USER38> >because the CPU would have to tell the GPU to clear memory and then wait for the GPU to finish before any other operations on the buffer could be done

If you're doing write-only operations, the CPU can queue them behind the clear. If you do a read, then the CPU has to wait whether you clear or not.

Latency doesn't matter. Clearing can be slotted in with other operations, such as first use.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Uh, anyone else think this title is a bit sensationalist? I was expecting something a bit more along the lines of actually leaking usable private data, not just displaying a rastered frame.

Even further this has very little to do with chrome. The only way chrome could actually fix this issue would be if it nuked the frame buffer when it released it. This is a fine idea, but if I was a dev in that context I would assume the OS would make stronger guarantees than that??

If anything, this is an edge case Chrome devs (and other developers) could protect themselves against if they were so inclined, but I'm not surprised they didn't assume they needed to protect against this.

<comment><USER40> The primary use case for Incognito Mode, as far as I know, is so a user can casually use a browser without leaving inadvertent artifacts of their usage on the machine. Having a page you visited in Incognito Mode be visible in Chrome after Incognito Mode is closed seems to be precisely the kind of thing users expect the feature to prevent.

<comment><USER41> If you associate the Chrome browser with your Google account (not just logging in to a Google site, but going to settings and putting the information in there), the history will be synced across several devices. Incognito can be used to prevent pages viewed on your phone or laptop from going to your desktop's history or vice-versa.</comment></comment></comment>


Fidelity's new funds look to exploit index investing's weak spots - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/12/18/funds-fidelity-corporate-idUSL2N0JW15V20131218

<comment><USER2> If you accept the premise of an efficient market (as most index investors probably do), then Fidelity's argument is bullshit.

They say index funds have to follow the index, and -- in this concrete example -- buy Facebook, because it's going to be included in the S&P500.

That's true.

Unfortunately S&P management did not whisper this little piece of insider's information into Fidelity's ear. It's public knowledge. And so other actors besides index funds have already tried to exploit that nugget of information. Just as Fidelity is doing.

So it's already been priced in.

The hypothesis of an efficient market does not assume that all actors in the market are actively exploiting every bit of information, just enough of them to move prices to their "fair" points.

If you don't accept the premise of an efficient market, then index funds don't interest you much and you have other strategies to follow.</comment>


Silicon Valley's Hyper-Partisan Future - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/07/the-tech-industry-declares-a-political-emergency/491417/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> The link through to yesterday's Open Letter from tech leaders opposing Trump is actually the most interesting part.</comment>