Blackmailers use false copyright claims to shut down victims' YouTube accounts - <AUTHOR> https://boingboing.net/2019/01/30/moderation-at-scale.html <comment><USER2> > The small number of humans available to review contested claims means that > people who fall afoul of machine error, sloppiness and criminal mischief are > often unable to get a fair hearing or justice.

This is possibly one of the key points in this report. Google is synonymous with their blackbox/magic "AI".

These systems become remarkably interesting to game (their ad platform has been subject to fraud, but on a different layer). I wonder how many levels of "AI" they think they can automate before they realize that it's probably not possible.

For some good news though, there was a story a little while ago for some educational platform that noped out of YouTube and migrated to self-hosted.

<comment><USER3> We thought it would take some sort of super AI to take over the world just make arbitrary / unfair at face value / decisions that can't be appealed or undone.... naw we just needed companies like Google.

<comment><USER4> Both AI and bureaucracy are sufficiently opaque enough to be indistinguishable when it comes to ascertaining their decision making processes.

<comment><USER3> I think for Google at this point we can be sure, there simply isn't a decision making process. Nobody is deciding things, nobody is responding, it's just a black hole where a process leads to and ends.

<comment><USER5> /Dev/null/goog

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I hate to cheer on a crime, but I actually think this is a positive development. Fake copyright takedown claims are already used to chill speech, but it flies under the radar so the process stays broken. If this type of ransom takes off, YouTube will be forced to actually address false takedowns.

<comment><USER7> Or not, they will just protect the bigger channels that would get articles written about them and hurt their ad revenue. Everyone else though will just get the classic google cold shoulder.

<comment><USER8> Most probably yes. Google hasn't been friendly to his content makers for a while.

They were nice before they had the monopoly. Now they don't care.

That's why I really hate all those speeches about how it would be great if everybody used chrome.

A lot of thing the privacy savy tech community predicted about Google 10 years ago arrived exactly as expected. And the reason is not that they are seers seing the future, but because it's always the same story with entities growing and getting power.

<comment><USER9> YouTube has always had the monopoly - not on video distribution, as many mistakenly assume, but on monetization.

Twitch has recently encroached on that front, and therefore YouTube Livestream was made.

The real reason YouTube doesn't care about content creators is that they are trying to woo more mainstream media onto their platform. With the decline of ad revenue since the ad-pocalypse of 2015-ish, they are trying to change their platform to look like traditional media where big advertisers would pay for spots (the likes of Coke and Nike).

<comment><USER10> YouTube tried to show me a 25 minute video today as a mid-video advertisement.

The fuck.

<comment><USER11> I suspect that those 10+ minute advertisements are aimed at people who just leave Youtube open in a background tab playing music all day.

25 minutes seems to be a new record. Congratulations!

<comment><USER12> I've had a few, and that's not how I use Youtube.

I did wonder if it was an experiemnt to see just how far they could push ad- tolerant people like me.

<comment><USER11> The old adage about giving an inch definitely applies here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> One way to cut down on such is to require copyright claimants to post a bond, which is forfeited if the claim cannot be substantiated.

<comment><USER14> But it massively rate limits the ability of an individual who doesn't have large means to enforce a valid copyright.

Also if the outcome is determined by some capricious and unpredictable algorithm, it creates a massive risk for the copyright holder.

<comment><USER15> Require a bond for the counter claim and give both to the winner.

Or we could develop a functional copyright system...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> That's what happens when there are no consequences for bad actors. Is anyone surprised? A legit copyright claim can take down a copyright violator and "restore" the copyright holder's control of the copyright just as easily as a bad actor can take down a YouTube publisher with lies based on the DMCA. The law equally protects both actors. Greed makes lawmakers look stupid when in fact they are just vile when creating their laws. Then Google comes in, looks at the same problem, and concludes that the law is enough because their content producers are not customers (they are the product, you guessed it) and therefore should be exploited rather than protected. Abusers of this law will simply not be punished. Undoubtedly this sentiment is shared across a variety of major platforms whose only incentive is to pretend like the systems they set up are effective at enforcing a law that's simply unenforceable. And so the charade continues with people's livelihood and creative works as the cannon fodder in this stupid war of greed. Someone should get together and start filing such claims against content the big media corps provide. I guarantee you Google fixes this problem in hours.

</comment><comment><USER17> This also a repeated lesson to never trust 100% of your business to some platform you don't control.

YouTube, Adsense, PayPal, eBay... the list is long and stories are plenty.

Use platform for what it's good for and have plan B always ready and active

<comment><USER18> I think youtube is actually one of the best demonstrations of why that attitude is incorrect.

Obviously it's better if you haven't trusted 100% of your business to a platform you don't control. But for some businesses (such as many youtubers) the choice is either do that or don't have a business (since that's the only place with a large enough audience). In such a case it can make sense to do so.

<comment><USER17> Many YouTube publishers also maintain their own successful portal with paid subscriptions, memberships, product affiliations etc...

There is always plan B.

Google of course prefer 100% dependence on their platforms.

<comment><USER18> It depends on the youtuber of course, a few of them have an audience that legitimately allows for a plan b.

For most of them there isn't. They might have seperate portals which they earn money from, but the business still goes poof fast if they get banned from youtube. Without publishing on youtube they won't reach enough of an audience to have a sustainable business.

Twitch alleviates this somewhat for some youtubers. But we don't have to go far back in time to consider an era before that existed.

<comment><USER19> Not sure I agree with this. Beyond a certain level, subscriptions to a given creator are to that creator, not via the platform. It's true that a lot of consumers won't take the effort to follow the brand off platform, but that's not always the case. I think the recent development of the influencer marketing industry as a whole is proof of this.

Of course, how you ever get remotely famous or established in the first place if the content you create is remotely vulnerable to false copyright claims is another question entirely...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Why arent supposed copyright holders required to prove their copyright in order to affect the takedown?

Why then arent we seeing rampant copy claims against huge channels.

<comment><USER21> I haven't heard of any 'perjury' prosecution for false DMCA claims or even DMCA counter-suits? Wikipedia even lists many cases of criticisms and abuse: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_A...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_Act)

Youtube being sued by Hollywood company with big pockets vs angry uploaders of personally-generated content who don't have much money. At the moment, it makes business sense for Youtube to ignore angry uploaders.

<comment><USER22> YouTube's "safe harbour" takedown system is a bit stricter than what the law requires - it doesn't require an actual DMCA takedown (which, when falsifies, results in a fine of $800), but simply using YouTube's internal system (which has no such falsity fine).

<comment><USER23> If you're referring to Content ID, you're correct that it's not a DMCA takedown, but if disputed and appealed the claimant must file a DMCA to keep the claim active.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Thank you, music industry. Your contribution to making the world that bit shittier has been noted.

<comment><USER25> Is all because of the dmca which hurt the music industry and gave Google etc the freedom to pirate content as long as they let someone report it.

People sharing music at home got fined heavily and yet Google does the same and nothing. Even worse Google earns money on it.

This content id system is aruse. And they lover because they can see we are not only effective but TOO effective.

And yet I can watch pirated content with ads on it on YouTube 24x7 - forever.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Hank Green posted a video just yesterday that gives a lot of good context about the YouTube ContentID system, its challenges, and the broader impacts of copyright, creativity, and culture.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BL829Uf2lzI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BL829Uf2lzI)

<comment><USER27> Th8a recently posted an outstanding overview of the YT ContentID situation:

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I have a youtube channel where I post videos of dance competitions. Because it involves music, I frequently get copyright claims from whatever rights group that wants to take my ad revenue (which is 0 anyway because I disable monetisation on principle).

When you get a claim, there is an option to appeal it, all the way to a formal counter-notification which will remove your strike and require the claimant to institute court proceedings against you.

I have even used that a few times, years ago when I still got fired up by this. Now, I just appeal it once on fair use grounds and if it doesn't get dropped I move on with my life.

Has something changed that doesn't allow this particular channel owner to challenge the claim? (Genuinely interested as a channel owner myself.)

<comment><USER29> > which is 0 anyway because I disable monetisation on principle

I also disable monetization on principle, but I think if a video is claimed by a copyright holder, then YouTube will add adverts in it, even if you disabled it.

As to your other point, a claim is different from a strike from what I understand. A strike is a more serious offense that may lead to blocking the account entirely. A strike can come if you dispute a claim and the claimant is considered to be in his right.

<comment><USER28> I know the distinction between a claim and a strike - I have direct experience of both. ;)

You can appeal a strike and it will be removed unless the claimant provides documents that they have instituted proceedings within a fixed period of time.

You have to provide your contact details if you appeal a strike.

Description of the various stages of the process: [https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2797454](https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2797454)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> We _desperately_ need another major video streaming site. Google has been consistently acting in an atrocious manner for users and content creators, with negligible cost due to their functional monopoly - even massively popular creators are able to recover their videos only in the rare situation of widespread media attention [1].

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18758758](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18758758)

<comment><USER31> I use Vimeo.com for hosting video tutorials for my website.

Works well. You don't get YouTube's traffic, but the traffic I want should come from my website anyway.

<comment><USER29> I've decided to use it to host some artsy stuff as well. I don't know what will happen when I reach the 5GB total storage limit though. I'm not keen on paying a monthly fee for the rest of my life so my videos, including the older ones, stay available...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> In addition to hiring an infinite number of human reviewers, what's the solution?

<comment><USER33> They could fall back to the legally required process (DMCA takedowns). There is no law requiring Google to take down channels because of reports on a few videos, or requiring Google to keep content down after the uploader has re- affirmed it is not breaking copyright law (called a DMCA counter-notice).

<comment><USER25> Dmca ruined the Internet. We thought it was good but it wasn't.

<comment><USER34> That's not even remotely what we're talking about here. Anyway, this has nothing to do with DMCA but with Google's Content ID system which is much worse than DMCA.

<comment><USER25> No dmca. No Google content ID system.

<comment><USER35> No, that's not how it happened. ContentID is a proactive system that goes well beyond what the DMCA requires and skirts around the DMCA penalties for false claims.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I'm a little tired of all this creators complaining how broken is Youtube (and other platforms) and still investing lot of their time and effort in building channels, accounts and entire businesses relying on these platforms.

<comment><USER29> That's just what monopolies look like I think.

For them moving to another platform doesn't make sense because they wouldn't get the same reach/make enough to justify the time and effort put into their channel in the first place. So it's either they are on YouTube and complain of its faults, or they aren't anywhere and you don't hear about them.

<comment><USER37> There's a third option that makes the most sense: Be on multiple platforms at once.

There's minimal effort in uploading to multiple sites, making the video is what takes multiple hours/days.

<comment><USER38> Until the platforms push exclusivity contracts... I do remember a twitch streamer being happy about his contract being old enough to allow him streaming on youtube while temporarily being banned on twitch. Sure, you can fault the individual for signing something like that, but an effective monopoly will hardly leave you an other choice.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Power of Language - <AUTHOR> http://blog.alexmaccaw.com/the-power-of-language

<comment><USER2> The relationship between language and thought is unclear. To be polarising, psychologists believe that language influences thought/culture and linguists believe that thought/culture influences language. There are evidence to support both conclusions, but most of the debate in popular media focuses on examples that are severely misinterpreted. For example, if Language A does not distinguish green and blue, it does not necessarily mean that the speakers of Language A cannot distinguish them, but only that Language A does not distinguish them _linguistically_. A more concrete example: many languages, such as Chinese, lack linguistic tense (e.g. past, present, future)—using instead aspectual markers (e.g. perfective, imperfective)—, but this does not mean that Chinese speakers cannot understand temporal relations (nor that they could not still express such notions linguistically). Similarly, Russian has separate words for light blue and dark blue, but English speakers can still express these two distinct shades despite not having two separate, distinct words. In short, one has to be extremely cautious about making such broad generalisations without fully understanding the empirical data and, ideally, linguistic theory. See the debate in the Economist between Boroditsky and Liberman for more on this topic: <http://www.economist.com/debate/overview/190>

<comment><USER3> If you casually asked a native Chinese speaker "are leaves and the sky the same color?" would they answer differently than if you asked a native English speaker? If so (i.e. if Chinese speakers tend to say Yes while English speakers tend to say No), then I would argue that there's something more going on than simple hue labels, since the labels themselves aren't being asked for or provided.

<comment><USER4> The problem with that test is that the notion of "same" is too fuzzy. If you asked me "are leaves and traffic lights the same color?", I might answer yes. After all, they're both green. On the other hand, I might say no, since one is dark green and the other is bright green. To test if something is going on mentally, it'd be better to take my personal opinions out of the equation. For instance, show a traffic light colored square on a leaf colored background, followed by a sky colored circle on a leaf colored background.

<comment><USER3> Absolutely. That's why I mentioned that it was a casual question. Since everyone presumably has similar hue thresholds regardless of language, I was wondering if language would effect their answer, according to whatever definitions of "color" and "sameness" they themselves use.

In English, if you casually ask the color of the sky or the color you would use for water on a map, most people will simply say "blue" even though they could probably detect hue difference if presented printed samples of the two. Accordingly, I think most English speakers would say Yes if casually asked whether the sky is the same color as water on a map. But is that the same response and reasoning you would get if you asked a speaker of a language that doesn't distinguish between blue and green whether the sky and leaves are the same color?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Not everyone thinks in a language. Language is extremely helpful for conscious thought, but not because language itself has some inherent magical control over our thoughts, but because language embodies certain kinds of cognitive technology. The keystone paper for that point of view is "Number as a cognitive technology: Evidence from Pirahã language and cognition" (<http://langcog.stanford.edu/papers/FEFG-cognition.pdf>). Having words for colors makes it easier to remember the specific shades that you have words for, because it's easier to remember the abstract symbol, which you can use to access the concept later, than it is to remember the actual experience of that color. Same with numerical quantities, or anything else for which your language has labels and categories.

</comment><comment><USER6> Good article :), here's my dissent... I, like most europeans (or for that matter most of the non anglo-saxon world), speak multiple languages on a daily basis. I think its true that a language forces you to concentrate on certain things i.e. object gender, its relative distance, or shape when counting objects, but it doesn't make you "think" differently in any fundamental way. We all still perceive three chairs, or drei Stuhlen o tres sillas, and I think whatever system we were to develop so long as it allowed one language user to express (in any way) a symbol that could be interpreted by another language user it would suffice (see de Saussure). I agree that language is powerful, I just don't think it hinges on spoken language, just an ability to abstract. I don't believe anyone thinks in sentences or words and for most tasks - especially programming, I visualize in what's happening. That's my two cents :)

<comment><USER7> But doesn't your programming language change how you think about problems? Does a Lisp expert think the same way as a Java expert? Our spoken language is not something that was designed but is an artefact of thousands of years of social interaction. Of course most of the time it doesn't matter, but sometimes it does.

<comment><USER8> This is sometimes theme in science fiction as well. While for example Snow Crash was a bit cheesy in this regard (reprogramming human brains with special words and similar stuff), the language used plays interesting role in The Culture series as well.

EDIT: I would also suggest that Lisp and Java are more different than any two human languages in history. And even then, they are both Turing complete.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "For example, infants don't have spacial awareness, or understand how objects can be relative to each other, until they learn the words for describing relativity."

Where's the citation on this?

<comment><USER10> Indeed. Infants can home in on a breast or a bottle from the get-go; babies are crawling by about 6 months, and walking at about 1 year. They are able to grasp and manipulate objects around six months, I believe. All these seem to imply spatial awareness.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Language isn't an invention, it's co-evolved with Homo Sapiens.

I highly recommend The Symbolic Species for the current state of the art in language origin theories. [http://www.amazon.com/The-Symbolic-Species-Co- Evolution-Lang...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Symbolic-Species-Co-Evolution- Language/dp/0393038386)

<comment><USER12> Are you kidding? The book is 15 years old. I did enjoy it very much in 1997, though.

<comment><USER11> I'd love to hear about recent theories that are substantively different. I'm not aware of any.

<comment><USER12> You could check out the first few pages of google scholar for "evolution of language" restricted to "since 2011" for a start. E.g.

[http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev- anthro-...](http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev- anthro-081309-145722?journalCode=anthro)

<comment><USER11> I was addressing a lay audience like myself, so I was looking for a big picture, not primary sources. It takes more than a google scholar search to distinguish minor tweaks to our understanding from radical changes. Your example isn't freely available, so I have no basis to judge whether it's paying $20 for.

Is Symbolic Species now outdated in some respect? Is there a different theory that better explains observations? Please educate rather than flatly disagree or tell me to go get educated.

<comment><USER12> Then what was your basis for claiming it's "the current state of the art in language origin theories?"

<comment><USER11> That I haven't found anything better or more comprehensive. I think that's what state of the art means, not "less than 1 year old" or some arbitrary time horizon like that.

Perhaps I should have said "IMO". I tend to assume that opinion is implied in most statements, especially for something hard to define like "state of the art". _Edit_ : you're right, I was misusing the term (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_of_the_art>). It's a lot more concrete than I realized, and it has nothing to do with lay readers. Apologies. Unfortunately I can't update the original. If I could I'd rephrase it as "the most comprehensive story on language evolution for lay readers".

It sounds like you don't actually have a different theory or a substantive criticism. Is that correct?

<comment><USER12> Judge for yourself. I think you understand what I was saying.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This www.radiolab.org/2010/aug/09/transcript/ is a fascinating hour long podcast all about language and words. They show how thought and language _are_ linked. For example, imagine a rectangular room with entirely white walls and an item placed in one corner. Your chances are 50-50 of finding it.

Then colour one of the side walls blue. You can then use that as a reference to always choose the correct corner to go to. However, if your language goes to "the white wall" or "the blue wall" you can't do it. Not until you can say/think "left of the blue wall" can you do it.

Anyway, podcast explains it far better than I can, well worth a listen. (Radiolab in general is excellent)

</comment><comment><USER14> Yeah, that' true. I speak (better or worse) 5 languages and thinking in each of them is pretty different. :) The most interesting thing i found there are very few words that would have exaclty the same meaning in two different language. For instance, even the simpliest english words like "go" or "cat" doesn't have exact translations in polish. The exception i know are slavic languages, they are very similar to each other. Anyway set of available meanings in laguage has pretty big impact on what we think.

<comment><USER15> I agree. When thinking (or talking with people fluent in both languages) I constantly switch between polish and english, as quite often one language captures intended meaning much better than the other. There are words and phrases that just cannot be translated without loosing some parts of their meaning.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Some people have a really clear narrative in their mind. I don't. Rather everything is probabilistic and will only be final once I formulate it.

Language is a reduction of reality and I realized a long time ago that I would rather keep my options open than let myself be let into narratives with premises that might be deeply flawed.

It has it's advantages and dis-advantages of course.

</comment><comment><USER17> Obligatory Wikipedia article with everything you ever wanted to know about blue and green: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distinguishing_blue_from_green_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distinguishing_blue_from_green_in_language)

For the remark about word genders, all I could find today was [http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.html...](http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.html?pagewanted=all) which doesn't include sources.

I'm sure I've seen a different article about it, though, because I've heard of a variation on the experiment where the subjects were people who had learned a non-English language as children, but then moved to America and had spoken English for 10+ years. Even though the entire questionnaire was given in English, people associated a physical object with attributes of its gender in the first language they learned as children.

</comment><comment><USER18> Another observation is that the grammatical structure of language differs between humans and other primates. At some point in human evolution there must have been a transition to a recursively enumerable grammar, which facilitates complex culture and metasystems similar to Wolfram's class 4 automata.

</comment><comment><USER19> I hope all this recent talk of language and the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis spurs interest in lojban. Perhaps it can be further tuned to reduce color/gender bias.

<http://lojban.org/publications/level0/lojbanLevel0.pdf>

</comment><comment><USER20> Again -- if you are interested in this topic, I would recommend reading _Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages_ by Guy Deutscher. It deals with numerous facets of the relationship between language and culture in an accessible and comprehensive manner.

</comment><comment><USER21> Here's an episode of radiolab, where they talk about language as it relates to color, and how kids don't really ask why the sky is blue, because they don't think it's blue in the first place. <http://www.radiolab.org/2012/may/21/>

</comment><comment><USER22> The Guugu Yimithirr are possibly an extreme case, but humans have always relied heavily on directions. The loss of stress on directions seems to be somewhat a modern phenomenon. At least till my grandfather's time it was fairly common for places/land to be associated with directions. For eg. a house would be called "Thekkeparambu" literally Southern field. We have railway stations and bridges that are commonly referred to as South or North. Some cities have places called East End and West End (London comes to mind).

</comment><comment><USER23> I just realized that visible light spectrum, as it is taught in physics classes, is different depending on the language. Of course it is just a gradient and we distinguish 7 colors from it so we could remember the pattern, but those 7 colors differ. In my language, Lithuanian, we have names for light blue and dark blue (just like in Russian, as mentioned by Alex). These two colors sit between green and violet in our simplified 7color spectrum. They do not directly link to blue and indigo in the English spectrum.

</comment><comment><USER24> There's a mistake in that article -

Japanese does indeed have a word for green (midori, みどり(緑)) it's just relatively young, so especially traffic lights are still referred to as blue in some kind of weird linguistic hangover. All other green things (grass, clothes etc.) are referred to as actually green (midori).

</comment><comment><USER25> Matz, the creator of Ruby talks about why languages matter: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ix2DeCzuckc>

The basic idea is that the structure of the language determines how you think about the problem and influences what you create.

</comment><comment><USER26> It's funny that he concludes the post in celebration. I personally find it a scary suggestion that our core perception and being is decided by idiosyncrasies of language and culture.

</comment><comment><USER27> "For example, green traffic lights in Japan are referred to as blue" That's because in Japan the traffic lights USE BLUE INSTEAD OF GREEN!

</comment><comment><USER28> My oldest thinks in pictures. Sometimes, it is like speaking to a foreigner in that he makes translation mistakes. He and I have lots of interesting conversations about language and have talked about the blue green issue -- that it is one word in Japanese. One thing we wonder is if having one word says something about their eyesight.

</comment><comment><USER29> We think into language. We do not think in language.

The former is a more consistent notion than the latter. More consistent with the evidence, etc. cited. Thinking 'in' language implies passivity and representation, thinking into language implies evolutionarily novel linguistic production, autonomy of mind, etc.

Please review The Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience.

</comment><comment><USER30> Stephen Pinker from MIT has written some fascinating books on this very subject</comment>


Suggestions for cafe/bars to work, hangout and network in Vancouver? - <AUTHOR>

Hi guys,
I'm traveling to Canada and wanted suggestions on good spots to work (cafe) and places to have a drink and network with entreprenuers, hackers, makers, etc.. Can someone suggest an area to explore?
Thank you. <comment><USER2> Walk around the city. There is no absolute best place. Hang around where the steam clock is in Gastown. West Van is also great. Nice places on Robson street close to Burrard too. The library is also worth a check and was featured in a bunch of movies (on Georgia). Personally I find Yaletown a bit boring but if you want "relax" and "not cheap" go to Blenz on Helmcken.

</comment><comment><USER3> Gastown. Places around Hastings and Cordova.. check out the Woodwards building.. JJ Bean in there is great. If you want hipsters, check out Main Street.</comment>


Teach kids electronics with PlayDoh - <AUTHOR> http://courseweb.stthomas.edu/apthomas/SquishyCircuits/index.htm

<comment><USER2> Seems cool, but not better than Snap Circuits.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. Snap circuits is great. The mechanics are easy enough that my three year old can put together simple circuits.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Note: unsuitable for air travel.

<comment><USER5> Heh, yep, I'd love to see what the TSA would make of a lump of plasticine with embedded electronics.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'll watch the video later today, but I wonder if this might not make for some truly _excellent_ summer projects for my 7-year-old daughter, a self-described "geek girl".</comment>


Hover test of [SpaceX] Dragon 2 spacecraft that can carry cargo and crew - <AUTHOR> https://vine.co/v/iepOLZvMBYz <comment><AUTHOR> A bit more info here: [https://blogs.nasa.gov/commercialcrew/2016/01/21/spacex- test...](https://blogs.nasa.gov/commercialcrew/2016/01/21/spacex-tests- superdraco-descent-landing-capability/)</comment>


Ask HN: Is there any tool that detects plagiarism in songs? - <AUTHOR> Does anyone know of any kind of tool that detects plagiarism in songs? <comment><USER2> Pied Piper? (a little HBO's Silicon Valley reference) :D

Joking aside, IDK. Sorry.</comment>


The Stellar object model - <AUTHOR> http://gdb.svbtle.com/the-stellar-domain-model <comment><USER2> So many explanations of the trust model involve examples of interpersonal trust, which doesn't help me understand what I presume is the common case: trusting depositary institutions to hold balances for you.

Let's say I have $10,000 in a Wells Fargo checking account. Tomorrow, they add support for Stellar. How does that play out in the protocol? Should I trust them for the full $10k in my Stellar client? Some intermediate value? Why?

Let's say that I want to cash out some bitcoins using Stellar. I'd find a Stellar gateway that supports Bitcoin, deposit the bitcoins there and trust them for the deposit amount. I'd need a USD gateway to send the funds to. Do I trust the USD gateway for the expected USD value of the bitcoins plus a buffer for variance in the price?

If I trust two gateways for the same currency, the network reserves the right to move balances between those gateways. Do these moves only happen if they increase my balance? Otherwise, why would I trust multiple gateways for longer than it takes for me to complete my transactions?

Conceptually, it seems like decentralized exchanges should already be winning over the Bitstamps of the world, but Ripple and Stellar have been so hard to understand and use as an exchange that it's easy to see why they're not. I'm excited to see what people build to solve that problem.

<comment><AUTHOR> > Let's say I have $10,000 in a Wells Fargo checking account. Tomorrow, they > add support for Stellar. How does that play out in the protocol? Should I > trust them for the full $10k in my Stellar client? Some intermediate value? > Why?

Great question. You'd probably want to Wells up to the $250,000 FDIC insurance limit — the US government has guaranteed that funds up to that amount are safe, and so you likely feel comfortable with them holding that amount on your behalf.

> Let's say that I want to cash out some bitcoins using Stellar. I'd find a > Stellar gateway that supports Bitcoin, deposit the bitcoins there and trust > them for the deposit amount. I'd need a USD gateway to send the funds to. Do > I trust the USD gateway for the expected USD value of the bitcoins plus a > buffer for variance in the price?

This one is probably easier to handle just by using Stellar's baked-in exchange. As I mention at the end of the post, you can make exchanges without regard to your trust settings. So the workflow would be:

\- You deposit BTC with a gateway, trusting them to your deposit amount. \- You create an offer with TakerGets: BTC, TakerPays: USD from your desired gateway.

And you don't need to set an explicit trust line with the USD gateway.

> If I trust two gateways for the same currency, the network reserves the > right to move balances between those gateways. Do these moves only happen if > they increase my balance? Otherwise, why would I trust multiple gateways for > longer than it takes for me to complete my transactions?

In the steady-state, the way to think of a gateway is as an analogue of a bank. You probably want to maintain a long-lived relationship with one or more of them. Those moves will happen at par.

For example, imagine that I had $100 with Wells Fargo and $100 with Chase, and you have the same. By default, we could wake up tomorrow and find that I have $200 with Wells and you have $200 with Chase.

> I'm excited to see what people build to solve that problem.

Me too :).

<comment><USER2> > For example, imagine that I had $100 with Wells Fargo and $100 with Chase, > and you have the same. By default, we could wake up tomorrow and find that I > have $200 with Wells and you have $200 with Chase.

Does anyone want that behavior? The network benefits from it, but individual users don't. I'm assuming someone has weighed the costs and benefits of this behavior versus paying people for providing liquidity, and that'd be interesting reasoning to hear.

<comment><USER3> It is a complication left over from ripple. It will most likely be turned off by default.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Wouldn't all this stuff work better if it was simply backed by cash? Is stellar/bitcoin a store of value or a transaction mechanism? If it is just a txn mechanism then backing it with regular currency is fine. If you want a non-fiat store of value, choose gold or something.

<comment><USER5> In my view, Stellar is the "IP layer for credit" while Bitcoin is the "IP layer for money".

Stellar doesn't actually transfer value (like Bitcoin), it only transfers IOUs, the settlement (actual value transfer) occurs outside the Stellar network.

Stellar and Bitcoin achieve two different goals. Ripple can function as a decentralized exchange, while Bitcoin functions alongside USD, EUR, CNY for transferring value.

<comment><USER6> Of course, "credit" is how the modern banking system works.

So an "IP layer for credit" is infinitely more valuable (if it works…which is a big if).

<comment><USER5> > Of course, "credit" is how the modern banking system works.

Correct. Ripple adds another layer on top of the traditional banking system.

> So an "IP layer for credit" is infinitely more valuable (if it works…which > is a big if).

Well, Bitcoin can be credit as well, and can be interchanged with national currencies via Ripple. The two protocols complement each other, they don't compete. Just as the USD does not compete with Ripple (because it is a currency that can be traded _on_ Ripple, just as bitcoins).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> One thing I need to clarify (similar with Ripple). If in the future, there are enough trust hops between nodes, then the currency won't even be required, right? Because the currency is just a way to hop between untrusted nodes?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, that's right — certainly for the most popular currencies/issuers, in any case. I wouldn't be surprised if there's always a long tail of lower-traffic currencies which lean heavily on exchanging to stellar.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm disappointed that Stellar has the automatic balance transfers. I always thought that was one of the major flaws with Ripple. This breaks people expectations that the balances are like accounts and money won't move without authorization. It assumes that issuers credits are equivalent which is normally true but causes serious problems when it fails (see Mt Gox or bank runs).

If they need liquidity for the network to operate, they should allow people to provide funds for liquidity or operate as middlemen.

<comment><USER9> >If they need liquidity for the network to operate, they should allow people to provide funds for liquidity or operate as middlemen.

Being a market maker (providing liquidity and being able to transact between currencies) is a feature of Ripple; I'm assuming it's part of Stellar as well.</comment></comment>


Breakout List 2015 - <AUTHOR> https://breakoutlist.com/assets/breakout-list-15.pdf <comment><USER2> I think this is likely just some angel investor's portfolio, with some other companies sprinkled in. A few alarm bells are going off:

* Explicitly filters for people who do not want a work life balance. If a job applicant says they found your company via this list, you don't have to ask, "Will you regularly work more than 40 hours a week for free?" They just told you.

* No information on why these companies in particular are special ( _everyone_ has a strong market/team/growth)

* No disclaimers regarding conflicts of interest

* Trying to establish a brand for some reason

* Published anonymously

Hopefully I'm not being too cynical. Just seems very financially motivated.

<comment><USER3> [I'm a founder of a company on the list, and know the creator Chris as a result.]

He's a student, and has been interviewing a broad swath of VCs, students, and founders to create this list for the past few years. As far as I know, he has no financial upside in any of the companies on this list. In the past, the site has asked for (optional) referral bonuses if candidates find the company through the site. That seems fair given the work involved in creating and maintaining this, but arguably that could be worth a disclaimer?

To many engineers and students, the breakout list brand already means something.

I think you're being too cynical – it's closer to a passion project and I respect that he keeps the site about the companies and not about himself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This focuses pretty well (?) on traditional consumer (e.g., social media): worth augmenting with other strong areas like the data industry, enterprise, and physical (e.g., Flexport). For early stage, greenfield areas are important like VR / cloud streaming (e.g., OTOY is amazing!). Put differently, I've guided many folks towards recent startups.. and generally not to ones on this list.

For job seekers, may be worth resorting. Most of the startups there already dilute away most future employees, and I bet there'd be reordering if you think in that way. I've been wanting, for awhile, to be able to sort & slice offers on sites like AngelList by company phase ($ raised or valuation, revenue, growth, industry). Equity and salary offers change significantly along these. Coarsely, seed companies generally shouldn't be valued the same way as A and certainly not B ones.

</comment><comment><USER5> _I'll say it again — avoid random startups! In the words of Sam Altman, "unless you are getting multiple percent of equity, it's usually a bad deal to join an early-stage startup that hasn't yet found product-market fit and the resulting growth (there is a big exception here for hard tech startups that will take a long time to produce a product but be incredibly valuable if they're able to)."_

I've seen advice to not work for startups that aren't well on their way to becoming the next big thing at least a dozen times this month. Instead go with an established company (Google often mentioned at this point). It seems that this sentiment is spreading quickly right now and often backed up by citing lower wages and lottery type chances at the equity being worth anything in the future. This article gets into it a bit as well as noted in the above quote.

Maybe it is a vocal minority right now, but it seems that it will be difficult for "random" startups to get anywhere if they can't bring talent onboard.

</comment><comment><USER6> The problem with this list is it essentially reads as if it were compiled by someone who just reads TechCrunch/Hacker News/Twitter all the time. There's no insight and it could easily be someone's investor portfolio, as someone else mentions (even though it is started by a student). The most telling aspect is how strongly it's influenced by "what's hot" right now. There are now a bunch of AI teams at large and small companies, which is a new addition to the list that wasn't there before. Has the author actually worked there or personally known people that worked there? Or is the author just jumping on the ML bandwagon in tech?

</comment><comment><USER7> The juxtaposition between Google and Facebook alongside Palantir seems strange. Is Palantir really a big, bloated company now? I would've assumed they would be listed by Uber, Airbnb, and Pinterest.

<comment><USER8> Palantir is almost certainly not where you want to work as an engineer. The vast majority of developers there are basically just working as glorified consultants.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This document has excellent advice about choosing a company, such as the interview advice and offer checklists.

The list itself is decent but not great.</comment>


Random Forest vs. Neural Network - <AUTHOR> https://mljar.com/blog/random-forest-vs-neural-network-classification/ <comment><USER2> This is a very thinly disguised advert for the author's product, and doesn't really advance on the benefits of either approach, as it doesn't go into any depth on why Random Forests/NNs are applicable to each type of data provided.

They're both generalised solvers, but default Random Forests aren't the most common Forest these days - LightGBM/XGBoost are both using Gradient Boosted Forests by default, which would be a much more interesting comparison to a NN's Gradient Boosting.

<comment><USER3> I don't know why it isn't as popular, but CatBoost should be on the list too [https://catboost.ai/](https://catboost.ai/)

<comment><USER2> I tried Catboost when it came out. It _should_ be very popular, as working with categories is where a lot of people seem to fall down in Random Forests.

The 'typical' response is either to make them into numeric variable, so 1-3 for 3 categories, or to make an individual column for each one. The first approach makes sense for ordinals, but not so much for actual categories, and the latter makes it difficult to group categories when a group of two categories together has more predictive capability than any single group. I know that LightGBM did a lot of work in this to optimise testing groups of variables, as testing every possible group in a large set is very intensive.

When I tried Catboost in R, I remember it downloading a large binary to work with, which put me off considerably, and predicting with it was pretty fragile, even for R. I trust Yandex about as much as I'd trust Google, but it seemed 'odd'.

<comment><USER4> I think it is actually preferable to start by converting categorical variables to numeric most of the time, even if they are not ordinal. The RF algo can separate off individual classes with 2 splits (e.g. <=7 then >=7) if a single class is very important. The "pool" of features for RF sampling also doesn't get diluted with one hot encoded classes from the one feature.

I am pretty sure I've seen this done successfully in kaggle a bunch before, but don't have any sources on hand for evidence that this method is "better". It does however make it much easier to just throw the data into the RF and check the feature importances to see which features are helping the most.

<comment><USER2> The only case it struggles with is when the grouping is difficult to achieve in a small amount of splits, such as 1,3,5 against 2,4,6,7, especially when each split will need to show more predictive capability against any of the other column options.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The article recommends RF for tabular data because it is easier. In general I agree, but newer tools are making NN for tabular data as easy as can be... see, for example, fastai [https://docs.fast.ai/tabular.html](https://docs.fast.ai/tabular.html)

<comment><USER5> The biggest reason to use RFs is that with sufficient trees it's basically impossible to overfit your data. You also don't need to spend days optimizing your hyperparameters. Hence, if you need a quick model where time is tantamount, and you want to err in the side of caution, I feel like an RF is the best choice.

<comment><USER6> I would have assumed the opposite, with enough trees you are guaranteed to overfit your data? Boosting increases the VC dimension of the aggregate model, which makes it more prone to overfitting.

<comment><AUTHOR> Random Forest doesn't increase overfit error when adding more trees. I did the experiment on toy dataset to check it [https://mljar.com/blog/random-forest- overfitting/](https://mljar.com/blog/random-forest-overfitting/)

What is more, Leo Breimain wrote on his website: "Random forests does not overfit. You can run as many trees as you want" [https://www.stat.berkeley.edu/~breiman/RandomForests/cc_home...](https://www.stat.berkeley.edu/~breiman/RandomForests/cc_home.htm#remarks)

<comment><USER7> These are (false) claims, therefor not proofs.

Deep trees will fortunately overfit your dataset.

Any binary tree of depth log2(P) can completely separate your P points.

<comment><USER5> But we are merging hundreds of trees each of which has been handicapped by removal of multiple features and a fraction of the data. Sounds to me like overfitting is not easy (no single data point or feature contributes to every tree so it can't be represented all the time).

False claims as they maybe, these are claims I've seen in at least two of the most commonly studied statistical learning text books, so given that it makes sense and that it's in the text books, it seems reasonably not false to me. Someone else posted that if too many features or data points are very similar then it will overfit, and that totally makes sense. Whatever you say doesnt. Clarification would be useful.

<comment><USER6> Adding bunches of trees will overfit the accidental patterns in your data.

I have an explanation here why reducing variance is not the same as reducing overfitting: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20089890](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20089890)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Random forests can be applied to images. The RF algorithm only needs to be tweaked to split its trees by comparing the difference of two pixels to a threshold.

</comment><comment><USER9> Been using the annoy library lately ([https://github.com/spotify/annoy](https://github.com/spotify/annoy)) after becoming frustrated with TF not behaving as I'd expect. There's another lib in python, nmslib, but I can't get seem to get it to work right - and the docs are crap.

Anyway, would love to pick someone's brain about this stuff to help fill in my gaps.

</comment><comment><USER10> No mention of backpropagation</comment>


More nurturing reading environment may stimulate brain development in children - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/16/health/child-brain-reading-books-wellness/index.html <comment><USER2> I could talk about this for hours, but "screen time" is too vague - placing a kid in front of a youtube autoplay stream is vastly different than playing a word game on the iPad with their parents right next to them.

I've found low effort, high stimulus creates bad behaviour, which is obvious. But specifically, it creates a low effort flow state, setting false expectations about life in general, and parents should make sure to minimize this kind of media.

However we found a few good apps, and both my kids knew the alphabet before 1 year old, and my 2 year old is drawing Chinese characters (he's spent 1/4th of his life in China) thanks to good apps, and having parents present while using them. And passive media isn't all bad, How Things Work and David Attenborough, and anything space related has taught my kids a lot.

I wish more studies would not focus on "book time" vs "screen time", because what's really important is interactivity, such as being present with your child for them to bounce things off you, or apps that give small rewards for high effort tasks, rather than large rewards for low effort tasks - it just so happens that books are more conducive to this, but if you actually pay attention to what your child is doing, screens can be a powerful tool.

That being said, it's really tough being a parent, and sometimes you just want to put some high stimulus thing on the screen to get a break - in my experience, it's only bad when that becomes a habit or norm.

<comment><USER3> >both my kids knew the alphabet before 1 year old, and my 2 year old is drawing Chinese characters

I honestly find this hard to believe. Maybe you have one special kid that knows the alphabet before one. But two??

The US Department of Education says [0] by age 3-4 start working simple things, like I love you.

[0]: [https://www2.ed.gov/parents/academic/help/reader/part9.html](https://www2.ed.gov/parents/academic/help/reader/part9.html)

<comment><USER2> It is true, though I'll give two minor concessions/clarifications:

My 2 year old is basically 3 - his birthday is in Feb, close enough that calling him 2-year-old is bending the truth, but not technically breaking it :)

The alphabet thing is totally true - Largely due to Endless Alphabet, which is a rare really well designed learning app - but I will say that learning what sounds go with what alphabet letters is a specific type of education that really plays to the screen strengths and isn't as transferable to other types of education. The fact that I don't have another example like that one to demonstrate the power of educational apps shows that this might be exception rather than the rule.

On Endless Alphabet, when you drag the letters around (something kids get right away) it repeats the letter pronunciation again and again in different ways, and it still cracks them up. Then we finish dragging them, you get treated to a little funny animated video that are really well made. So they could play with that for hours, and knew all the pronunciations from there, and the order from the song (well the song is basically how I still know it). We'd test them when we pass signs on the street/sidewalk, and they did struggle, but both would get all the letters before they turned 1.

You wouldn't believe how badly most kids apps are made, even the big ones like hooked on phonics. Things like supporting multi-touch are essential since they don't have great motor skills, and not nailing that can be really confusing and frustrating for a child, who tends to think everything is because they can't do it, not because the app didn't implement it well. And the rest of the "Endless X" apps teaching other skills (maths, music) don't work as well as Endless Alphabet, I think it works exceedingly well for the specific memorization task of matching sounds to icons.

<comment><USER4> Do you have any other app (or even linux/Windows/Mac software) recommendations? There's just so much crap out there..

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Actually, the title claims something, what the study doesn't. It states: "More nurturing home reading environment prior to kindergarten may stimulate brain development supporting language and literacy skills, reinforcing the need for further study."

It is an observational study, which tries to correct for various obvious factors, but they cannot separate the environment, where more home reading is happening from actual more home reading (vs screen time).

<comment><USER6> Worse: brain scans can't prove this kind of claim at all, so the title is really yet another piece of lousy science journalism. The only support comes from old-fashioned cognitive tests, and the effect was only found for linguistic skills. So yeah.

<comment><USER2> If I had a dime for every pop science article that shows "good parts of the brain light up in MIR machine for X" images... well I'd have a helluva lot of dimes

<comment><USER7> Having a helluva lot of dimes would actually highlight a part of an MRI scan.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The article doesn't mention anything about what the researchers controlled for. Some other explanations that fit the data:

1\. Parents who take good care of their children in other ways also tend to read to their children (perhaps because they're conscientious and have read other research that says reading helps brain development, so they read to their kids). It's actually the "take good care of their children in other ways" that makes the difference, and reading just correlates.

2\. There is a shared genetic factor between parent and child. Parents with this factor are more likely to read to their children. Children with this factor score better on literacy tests. Any factor that affects intelligence or personality would fit the bill.

3\. Reading doesn't affect language skills, but they are instead caused by other environmental or genetic factors. Children who have factors that lead to good language ability enjoy hearing stories, and their caregivers adapt by reading to them more. Children without those factors react poorly to being read to, so their caregivers read to them less.

A randomized controlled trial would tell us much more about whether reading actually causes any later outcomes.

<comment><USER9> There have been many studies about this. Listening to books read aloud pretty convincingly causes accelerated language development, after controlling for other factors.

[For example randomized interventions aimed at convincing parents to read aloud to their kids more often have a positive impact on the kids.]

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Tangential: Reading to my children has been one of the unexpected joys of raising them, the oldest is now ten and I still typically read to her for 30-45 minutes a night. It gives me a chance to revisit books I enjoyed decades ago and compare her reactions to my own at that age and now and it gives us a broad and deep shared world beyond the day-to-day (one of the biggest arguments for reading "the classics" IMO is that it allows you to tap into a longer and deeper cultural conversation than we typically have access to via more contemporary cultural products).

<comment><USER11> My 10 year old reads about 30 minutes or so a day on her own, she loves it. Though she isn't interested in too many classics so far. She has trained herself to get tired from reading, it puts her to bed every night.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Hmm I read it as "if you read/are being read to more, you're doing better at reading". Am I wrong?

I do think the younger generation is shooting themselves in the foot with not being able to assimilate information by reading any more (video tutorials take 10x the time to convey the same amount of information if you can actually read efficiently), but this study seems to basically say that you're not proficient at a skill you don't practice?

<comment><USER13> > (video tutorials take 10x the time to convey the same amount of information > if you can actually read efficiently

Many subjects are better suited to video and can be conveyed more efficiently so. Especially complex UIs, in my experience. Learning to use and find my way around Maya was way easier and quicker using video than text with images. I definitely feel the same way about learning to do specific car repairs/maintenance.

<comment><USER12> Right, but some young uns need video tutorials to write code... not to work in a visual medium like Maya.

<comment><USER14> Agreed. I never understood the videos for programming language courses at, say, Coursera.

Written material is better and clearer. The slow speed of the videos drives me mad. Instead of digesting the information and examples at your own pace, you must watch as the teacher carefully enunciates his words and takes forever to belabor a point you already understood.

But strangely enough, some people prefer video to actually reading a detailed, step-by-step written tutorial. Go figure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm often concerned that studies that assess screen time (especially in contrast to reading or other cognitively rich activities) don't seem (ever, so far as I can tell) to assess two areas that seem important:

1) The distinction in content being delivered via a screen: ie, does watching Mighty Pups result in measurably different brain activity or development than Studio Ghibli films? Common sense suggests so, but why aren't these studies assessing that?

2) The function of a parent or adult companion to help with understanding and integration of the content - does watching media alone result in different outcomes than watching with an attentive parent?

However, this study doesn't even seem to actually measure any aspect of screen time at all - it just looked at differences between households that used "Get ready to READ!", a particular reading curriculum which requires parents and children to read together, vs those that didn't.

I think books and screen time are both important. Given the incredible ability for parents to curate decades of incredible digital media, from series to TV to classic video games, it seems crazy to me to refrain from substantial collaboration with our kids in enjoying and reflecting on these media.

Now, sometimes parents end up using screen time as a way of babysitting, with media that hasn't even been viewed by the parent, much less together with the child. I admit that I myself have occasionally fallen into this form, but I don't like it, and it's not what I'm talking about when I suggest that screen time is an overall good thing.

But why aren't these studies measuring that difference?!

My 4-year-old gets a lot of screen time (and a lot of book time, and board game time) and I think that's great. We play classic NES and SNES games, watch age-appropriate (but socially meaningful) movies, and explore the internet together to learn about his interests. Until a serious study (ideally much larger than this one, with 70 participants) actually addresses the realities of the media being delivered and the methodology and its delivery, I find it hard to take seriously for making my own parenting decisions.

<comment><USER16> I don't like watching toddlers shows. It is maybe odd think to point out, but most adult are indifferent at best and actively dislike them at worst.

I am also no sure what congnitive gain kid would have from me sitting there and attentively watching Peppa the pig too.

<comment><USER15> You don't have to watch Peppa Pig. And if you do, you can (the first time through) curate episodes that are better (like the composting one) and just not repeat the really stupid ones.

Old school Sesame Street is a lot of fun for adults. The early Zelda games are great. Kiki, Ponyo, and Totoru are staples. I mean, like I said, this an incredible wealth of content from the past few decades; don't dwell on Peppa.

<comment><USER16> It is still completely pointless. There is no reason to prevent kid to see an episode of peppa the pig I personally like the least. It is not like the kid would be harmed by seeing episode of peppa that I personally find stupid.

There are million things I would still like better then watching any of that.

And also, most importantly, the idea that parent needs to be glued to child constantly and should do anything else any time is what I disagree with too. Should you ignore kid all the time? No, it is neglect. Can the kid play alone some times or watch peppa without parent? Absolutely yes.

<comment><USER15> I mean, yeah sure. But consuming media for the first time without a parent? Ideally, no, I think it's good to be with them the first time they see something.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Vilifying screen time isn't great either, are the negative effects coming from actual screens or brightly-coloured games designed for dopamine hits? Is reading on a screen functionally different from a book in terms of attention span?

<comment><USER18> Apparently yes

"...Conclusion: Main findings show that students who read texts in print scored _significantly_ better on the reading comprehension test than students who read the texts digitally..."

[https://www.researchgate.net/publication/256563189_Reading_l...](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/256563189_Reading_linear_texts_on_paper_versus_computer_screen_Effects_on_reading_comprehension)

<comment><USER19> I'm curious as to why. Would e-ink make a difference? What's there to learn differently from screen to paper?

<comment><USER20> The obvious difference to me is, that the e-ink screen is not flickering. Every other screen flickers when it gets updated 60+ times a second. They say it is too fast to notice for the eye, but I doubt that. Also a normal screen is an active light source. E-ink is passive.

All in all, I can read for hours on a e-ink display, but my eyes hurt soon on a normal screen. But az least they improved a lot compared from the old bulky ones.

<comment><USER21> Contrast ratios likely play into this as well. I ran across some research a while ago that found that a contrast ratio of about 8:1 is ideal for readability. E-ink is pretty close to that optimum (usually around 10-15:1 these days). Whereas for conventional screens contrast ratios keep being pushed higher and higher (1000:1 is pretty typical). While this is great for video, it makes sense that at some point it becomes tiring for the eye when viewing black text on a white background (imagine trying to focus on an object superimposed against the sky on a blindingly bright summer day).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Direct link to the relevant study (PDF):

[https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/apa.15124](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/apa.15124)

</comment><comment><USER23> From the first chapter: "We all know that's true, but now science can convince us with startling images."

Like... the author doesn't even try to conceal confirmation bias.

</comment><comment><USER24> It seems there could be some correlation rather than cause as parent attentiveness or nurturing behavior is more beneficial in general in terms of lowering child stress and providing a feeling of being loved or taken care of. A positive environment from that would result in a better situation for the child's growth so it would be difficult to strip out the nurturing side of things toward "screen time" vs. not, IMO.

</comment><comment><USER25> As I was reading this I began to wonder if there were confounding factors here.

The original study did mention controlling for age, gender, and income... though I can't help but think that there can easily be other confounding factors. Maybe parents who read to their kids altogether spent more time with them and it's that kind of attachment that really had the benefits. Maybe it's the simple act of holding your child that's giving them the benefits.

Also, whenever a study like this comes out I can't help but think of the mechanism that could be causing this. Why would reading to a child have substantial more benefits than screen time? What if the screen time were a reading simulation app? What if you read a book to your child that happened to be on an iPad? What if you held the child and showed them a reading simulation app without actually reading to them yourself?

Some part of me doesn't think it's as simple as "screen bad, book good"

</comment><comment><USER11> I didn't like how the article bifurcates screen time and reading - as if kids only get one or the other. Where are the scans of kids that do both screen time and reading?

I have 3 kids, we read to all of them from birth. They all read every night. Two of my kids also love time on the iPad/devices - though we limit them to 2 hours per day total after lots of fights about when to put the devices down. All of my kids get lots of outside play too. We just don't fit neatly into the categories of the article here. As far as I can tell, my kids are doing fine, screen time and all. You just need moderation and to mix it up. Screens are not inherently bad, its about how you use them.

</comment><comment><USER26> At the end of the day, the more you can _engage_ with your kid, the better — but modest amounts of shows, games, etc are not going to ruin their life. Sometimes parents need a break, so they can be at their best the other 99% of the time. That's ok! It's ok to find a middle way between plopping a kid down in front of the TV for three to six hours a day (familiar to me and probably a lot of people who grew up in the 80s and 90s), and stressing that screens will roy their brains and ruin their chance at getting into Stanford two decades from now.

</comment><comment><USER27> Those pictures are fake.

Not sure how, but other than brain damage two brains wouldn't look different like that. We don't have the tech for registering the difference in smarts even if it existed between reading and screen time.

I know the pictures are a mix of the children, but don't understand how?

It feels like the researchers have picked a technique that will give two different pictures, no matter what given a mix of kids aka a pretty picture for the media.

I'm sure in the journal article they have not lied. But I can't understand after reading it what the pictures are. Clever.

</comment><comment><USER28> "Taking away screens and reading to our children during the formative years of birth to age 5 boosts brain development. We all know that's true, but now science can convince us with startling images."

We all know that is true? All my alarm bells go off. It all sounds very logical and may be exactly what we expect and want to hear. At the same time I wonder what happens to research that show benefits of digital gadgets to the development of kids.

</comment><comment><USER29> I find it amazing that people are trying to justify screens in any way. Just because a game says is "educational" it's not. Similar to the way "diet" soda keeps you skinny. Regardless of research, people want to believe they're not wrong and try to justify that certain kinds of screen time are ok.

<comment><USER30> Doesn't Diet soda normally have 0 calories ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Screen time can be great for kids. It's just not a substitute for playing with peers, interacting with parents, playing with physical toys, doings crafts, singing and playing music, reading physical books, experiencing nature, eating, or sleeping.

But assuming your child is getting more than enough of all those, it's great.

<comment><USER32> It's an accepted recommendation by pediatricians to not expose kids under 2 years old to tv. The jury is still out there with tables and the such. They are way more addictive, but also more interactive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Can someone provide the scientific journal/article reference that this report is based on?

</comment><comment><USER34> I credit much of my success in grade school and now as an adult to the fact that my mom consistently and constantly encouraged me to read.

She at first did this, when I was a toddler, by teaching me my ABCs and counting while she "did her bills"; I can't explain her accounting methods, but there were always dates and numbers and months and...well you get the idea. She would encourage me to tell her "what month comes next" or "what number is that"...

Then, as I got older, she started to read to me; first, from a set of "animal encyclopedia" books my parents got from the grocery store as a "give-away"...

(aside: they don't really do this much any more, but back then to get customers to come shop, grocery stores and supermarkets would run these giveaway things where, if you spent so much money, or collected so many "stamps", you could get "this month's book", or dishes, or utensils or whatever - so you'd build up a complete encyclopedia set over the course of a year or so)

...then later from similar encyclopedia books about science; she would read to me about "the brain" or "the lungs" or "the heart" \- then other subjects, and I would "read along" with her - she'd ask me "what does this say" and I would read it.

One other thing I remember my mom encouraging me to do was recognizing car models and makes; I'm not sure why or if that even fits in here - but it was something I recall.

As I got older, both of my parents would buy me books on any subject I desired. I also had several magazine subscriptions (I once had three different computer magazines coming in - Family Computing, K-Power, and the Rainbow, plus Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, and Omni). They purchased and I had access to two different sets of Encyclopedia Brittanica. I had my own library card by the time I was in the second grade for the city library system.

At one time I recall I had some problems with reading and spelling - and my parents got one of those "hooked on phonics" sets and worked with me on that. Ultimately I went from being an average student to doing much better work and having an easier time in school.

But all of that ultimately led to my life today; their encouragement of reading, and of "finding out the answers on my own" ("Dad, what's this and that?" I'd ask - my dad would reply "Let's look it up in the encyclopedia!") also encouraged me to become a self-learner, among other things. They were always encouraging my education, and helping me however they could (when they saw how much I liked computers, they bought me one, and upgrades - this was in the 1980s mind you, and none of it was cheap).

I wouldn't be the person or the software engineer I am today had it not been for their efforts and sacrifices. My parents weren't wealthy (my dad did road construction for the county, my mom was a "stay at home" mother who earned extra side-money by selling eggs from our chickens) - but they both knew the importance of an education, and were always involved in it for me.

But it all ultimately started with reading.

</comment><comment><USER35> What if a child uses a screen to read?</comment>


Introducing Threads - <AUTHOR> https://instagram-press.com/blog/2019/10/03/introducing-threads/ <comment><USER2> Remember "Poke" or "Slingshot"? I wonder how this will be different this time around. There's already an app on the Apple Store called "Threads", so I'm sure having the same name as an established app will not help any.

[https://www.engadget.com/2014/06/17/facebook- slingshot/](https://www.engadget.com/2014/06/17/facebook-slingshot/)

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

[https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2012/12/introducing-poke-for- mo...](https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2012/12/introducing-poke-for-mobile/)

<comment><USER3> Remember bolt?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I am not a fan of Facebook, in fact quite the contrary. But you do have to give them one credit, they understand Social very well. HN audience is not something FB targets. The world outside HN is quite different and loves FB, Instagram etc.

<comment><USER5> I actually don't think that's true at all. Facebook has been caught sleeping again and again with the latest social trends. This new trend of private, group communication seems to be something that's completely caught them off guard and now they're trying to catch up.

<comment><USER6> > This new trend of private, group communication seems to be something that's > completely caught them off guard and now they're trying to catch up.

I'd bet that there's more of that happening on WhatsApp than any other app in the world, possibly by an order of magnitude.

<comment><USER5> Absolutely. And acquiring WhatsApp is another example of them being on the back foot and having to catch up.

<comment><USER7> At a certain size, companies innovate through thoughtful acquisitions.

You can't separate the company WhatsApp from the company Facebook because they are the same company FB.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Looks like Facebook is after Marco Polo now - [https://www.marcopolo.me/](https://www.marcopolo.me/)

</comment><comment><USER9> I typically like having less apps on my phone rather than more. This feels like when Facebook spun off Messenger, I just stopped using it on my phone

<comment><USER10> I did the opposite: Kept Messenger and got rid of the Facebook app. That way, when someone wants to talk to me, I don't get sucked into the void of their newsfeed - so it becomes just one more communication app alongside iMessage, Telegram, Whatsapp and Discord for me.

<comment><USER11> I just wish those services exposed a chat protocol that I could connect to from a single messaging app. I'd straight up pay for access to such a thing.

<comment><USER12> It's not a protocol, but an app, but bitlbee and even pidgin tend to support a lot of these various chat services with plugins.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Some people may not see the use case, but the popularity of SNAP has shown that there is a user base for this product. What's interesting to me is Facebook's decision to completely copy the use case in an attempt to capture the market. They've tried to do so with Instagram Stories & DMs, as referenced to by the post, but I'm curious about the rationale to make it a standalone app, which would hurt adoption.

I suppose the idea is the entry point - Instagram's entry point is viewing content, not creating content (the feed is the first thing that shows up when opening the app). Threads is the same as SNAP in that the first entrypoint is to create content: it opens the camera.

It'll be interesting to see if this can succeed in finally pushing SNAP out, as one benefit for users is leveraging the existing social graph from Instagram, whereas you must add people for SNAP.

</comment><comment><USER14> I wonder if this is part of the plan to merge messaging on Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp. Pull out the final messaging platform that doesn't have its own app and then begin merging Threads, Messenger, and WhatsApp into one.

[https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/25/technology/facebook- insta...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/25/technology/facebook-instagram- whatsapp-messenger.html)

I'm actually happy to install this so I can delete Instagram. I keep Instagram around because some friends only message me through that.

<comment><USER15> That article says the apps will remain separate, only the backend will be the same. You don't need to separate Threads out of IG to use that unified backend.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> What are the demographics of the targeted or expected audience?

n=1 this doesn't appeal to me; why would I want to fragment my communications further? But I could believe that teenagers would use this more; I've read that many young people today aren't on a single monolithic platform like FB or Instagram but instead have different social apps for different friend groups or parts of their lives.

</comment><comment><USER17> This is consistent with 2 major trends in social networking projects:

1\. The closer the relationship the faster the communication

2\. Different levels of privacy should be in different UI spaces entirely (fiddling with privacy settings on posts is not how we think about privacy in real life)

I think both are great ideas that extend natural human relationships and communication rather than forcing people into unnatural modes.

</comment><comment><USER18> This seems very directly targeted at teens, competitive with the constant- social use of "find my friends". My impression is that many youngsters keep shockingly close tabs on each other, which this seems built to enable.

</comment><comment><USER19> So, what's the difference between WhatsApp, FB Messenger and Threads? They all allow to message a selected list of contact, send videos and have a status, all owned by FB. What's the strategy here?

<comment><USER20> Different audiences.

Whatsapp is for non-US general population. FB Messenger is for US general population. Threads is for US and non-US Gen-Z and below.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I don't understand the positioning. So it's instagram but only with friends and with status as an option? Why couldn't they change instagram to filter on friends or something?

<comment><USER22> It's another direct shot at Snapchat.

They've already tried the "close friends" feature with Instagram stories. Anecdotally, hardly anyone is using it.

<comment><USER23> A good chunk of my friends use stories daily. It's the new facebook for 30+ year olds :)

<comment><USER24> I think he means the "Close friends" feature of stories, not stories in general. These are the stories with the green circle around them.

<comment><USER22> Yes thank you that's what I'm talking about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Hope it won't become Deads

</comment><comment><USER26> 2 moderators: can we have a better title? I was expecting to see something about concurrency and multi-threading.

</comment><comment><USER27> SNAP stock fell 5% on the announcement, it recovered by about 2% but still a big drop.

</comment><comment><USER28> This is the app to compete with TickTock from the leaked FB all hands meeting

</comment><comment><USER29> Finally! I really missed yet another chat app which can even more divide all my communications with my friends! So good! The world needed this very much!

<comment><USER30> The issue is not so much the diversity of clients, but fragmentation caused by proprietary protocols they use.

<comment><USER31> I still miss the few years where Trillian talked all instant messaging protocols. Jabber had a brief shot at unifying them, but no dotcom wants to be a commodity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> >Threads is a standalone app designed with privacy, speed and your close connections in mind.

I dont believe you FB. Prove it! This all clear text or there encryption?

<comment><USER2> It was designed "in mind", meaning, they thought about it but didn't actually do anything about it.

/s

<comment> caleb-allen I party with safe alcohol consumption in mind

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Why in the world would programmers name a feature after a programming primitive?

I'm gonna make a new chat app called deadlock.

<comment><USER5> Why in the world would Microsoft name an operating system after a UI primitive? Doomed to failure, I tell you.

<comment><USER33> The UI primitive was named after the operating system.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I live without any social network. I use only Skype/phone for voice calls and rarely some messaging with Whatsap for messaging and that is all my online communication (except work email). I am pretty happy.

<comment><USER35> Area Man Constantly Mentioning He Doesn't Own A Television

[https://www.theonion.com/area-man-constantly-mentioning- he-d...](https://www.theonion.com/area-man-constantly-mentioning-he-doesnt- own-a-televisi-1819565469)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is it worth migrating from SendGrid if IP is bad - <AUTHOR> We were on a cheaper SendGrid plan with a Shared IP pool and 100% of our templates were reaching the inbox on Outlook/Gmail.
Later on, we upgraded to Pro Plan and received a fresh IP (no warmup). Our deliverability struggled because of low sending volume and IP was present on some public blacklists. Same templates went to spam on Outlook (tried changing the wording etc)
Decided to downgrade the plan, as we're getting more customers and onboarding email is a crucial part of the experience.
Now we got assigned to another IP pool, but ALL our emails bounce from Outlook (with the message that part of the providers network is blacklisted) and do not even reach spam...
I've submitted a support ticket, but it's gonna take a few days to get reply + most likely they're going to advertise selecting a more expensive plan with dedicated IP (spam better than bounce but it's still horrible before we have IP warmed up).
Is there a better provider with high volume shared IP or a quick way to solve this problem? <comment><USER2> Get your own IP. Submit to the block lists to remove your IP. Then over time the IP will be trusted. It's pretty much the only way forward. Other services will have the same issue.

You could try your own VPS and mail in a box. But you run the same risks.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's going to take a couple of weeks. We really need to serve the onboarding emails now - updating our backend to another service will only take 1-2 days.

However, I have started the warm-up process in SparkPost for the long term, Thanks.</comment></comment>


Cheap LLC publication service in NYC? - <AUTHOR>

Does anyone have a recommendation for a LLC publication services in NYC? For all the one's i've found, their websites look pretty janky and I have no idea how legit they are.<p>Much obliged! <comment><USER2> I'll have to double check with him, but I think a friend of mine used a company called Blumberg with no problems. Only reason I remember is I was always calling it Bloomberg :)</comment>


Dr. Brian May on Freddie Mercury's creativity - <AUTHOR> http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/09/happy-birthday-freddie-mercury.html

<comment><USER2> He's signing the article as:

 _Dr. Brian May, CBE. Guitarist._

As in: Doctor Brian May with a PhD in astrophysics from the Imperial College London, Commander of the Order of the British Empire. Guitarist of Queen.

It can't get cooler than that.

</comment><comment><USER3> _"... I was very poor & the thought of a Stratocaster was way out of my price range. So me and my Dad took it into our hands to make the guitar... It took about 2 years and we made it from all sorts of scraps and pieces ..."_

Brian May is no slouch either. The link is a quick 1992 interview describing how his Dad built their own TV and how they both built the Red guitar you see him play. cf: @neilmurraybass, _"Brian May guitar 1992"_ ~ <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPD7_hQk7hk>

<comment><USER4> My favorite Brian May fact is that, as soon as he had a few years off from being a legendary rock star, he went back to grad school and finished his doctorate in astrophysics.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, I love that one of my favorite guitarists has a PhD in Astrophysics. It's just cool.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I thought this kind of attitude would appeal to anyone building a startup:

"Freddie was fully focused, never allowing anything or anyone to get in the way of his vision for the future. He was truly a free spirit. There are not many of these in the world. To achieve this, you have to be, like Freddie, fearless—unafraid of upsetting anyone's apple cart.

To create with Freddie was always stimulating to the max. He was daring, always sensing a way to get outside the box. Sometimes he was too far out ... and he'd usually be the first to realise it. With a conspiratorial smile he would say "Oh ... did I lose it, dears?!" But usually there was sense in his nonsense—art in his madness. It was liberating. I think he encouraged us all in his way, to believe in our own madness, and the collective mad power of the group Queen."

<comment><USER6> I appreciate you sharing this; it was sweet. But there's something disturbing in the way you're framing it.

Have we lost perspective to the point where even the basic notions of how to live one's life have to be seen through the lens of a hacker working on a startup?

I say this as a hacker, working on a startup. When I'm done with my IE7 hacks, and I figure out why my production server isn't behaving like my dev server, I might take a moment to re-read that article and play some Queen, so I can fix my mind's eye on that beautiful human being who died too young.

<comment><AUTHOR> > Have we lost perspective to the point where even the basic notions of how to > live one's life have to be seen through the lens of a hacker working on a > startup?

Absolutely not, I just posted that because people tend to complain about posts that are not related enough to the hacker/startup world here so I anticipated that complain by posting that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't get why Google posponed showing their Freddie doodle (quite awesome btw) until Sep. 6th in the US. "Out of respect for Labor Day?" Why does Labor day require that kind of respect? I'd absolutetly understand a Memorial Day hiatus. Is it because it's Freddie Mercury? I recall a Charles Schulz birthday doodle with Snoopy on Thanksgiving. Just confused here...

<comment><USER8> Snoopy is synonymous with Thanksgiving because of the Charlie Brown movie, "A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving".

Labor Day is celebrating workers, hard-won worker rights etc. I personally like that Google is respecting this by delaying showing Freddie's celebration a day.

<comment><USER4> More cynically, Labor Day is a day off from work, so Americans are usually barbecuing with their families and enjoying the last bit of summer rather than sitting inside and using the internet. They would have a bit more exposure waiting until Americans were back to work.</comment></comment></comment>


Request HN: Can we please start using tl;dr? - <AUTHOR>

tl;dr: To summarize your wonderful thoughts, can you please use tl;dr?
I don't know about most of you, but I can't get through ALL the comments from ALL the submissions on the front page of HN in a day. Believe me when I say that if I could, I would love to read every single one of them.. every day!
But can we please start using tl;dr for some of our slow readers (or the ones with very busy days)?
That's all, and thanks! <comment><USER2> You have too much time on your hands if you ate reading even half of them! Learn to prune, it's a valuable skill.</comment>


CVE-2017-5589+ Multiple XMPP Clients User Impersonation Vulnerability - <AUTHOR> https://rt-solutions.de/en/2017/02/CVE-2017-5589_xmpp_carbons/ <comment><USER2> Xabber never fixed that even though their development branch has at least some activity? That's good prioritizing…</comment>


New Cappuccino version (0.5.5) released - <AUTHOR> http://cappuccino.org/discuss/2008/10/08/cappuccino-version-055-released/

<comment><USER2> I was going to ask what the big deal about this was then I realized I was confusing it with the much-hyped Espresso.. <http://macrabbit.com/espresso/>

<comment><USER3> No big deal because there are no new major features, but at least for me, Cappucino looks a lot more interesting than Espresso.</comment></comment>


Faster Backtraces for Native Applications - <AUTHOR> http://backtrace.io/blog/blog/2014/09/15/bt-lightweight-backtrace-tool/ <comment><USER2> There are a couple excellent reporting frameworks, PLCR and breakpad. What's sorely missing is a really good backend.

There's commercial options in crittercism, crashlytics, bugsense, and hockeyapp, but these are either mobile only or subpar in what they provide.

And there's really not any decent opensource backend. Mozilla Socorro is ugly and tied to their infrastructure in many ways. The closest I can think of is Sentry... but it's primarily designed for handling tracebacks from backend apps. (Oh, I guess there's also squash.io)

Anyway, I'm curious to see what you're building on the backend, and if you intend to opensource it in addition to what you plan to offer commercially.

<comment><AUTHOR> Will reveal the backend soon but we do not have plans to open-source it as of yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It would be useful to know the commands that were run for gdb, lldb, and so on to do our own comparisons.

I also have need of being able to run a program under a harness that, should it crash, lets me get the stack and other details. Bonus points if I get to set up my own code to help decode and pretty print my own data types. But for my purposes, that needs to be something under a more open license which is why I've been working with LLDB to date.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Appreciate any feedback to the early access core software and we're all ears on feature requests. Let us know if you encounter any sub-optimal output and we'll fix it, hope some of you guys find this useful and live a more manageable life :-P

<comment><USER4> As the author of a crash reporting framework, this is the first time I've seen execution speed of a frame unwinder so strongly touted :-)

Without code, I can't make much of a comment otherwise, although I'm certainly interested to see your patches to libunwind once it's upstreamed.

One of the reasons we didn't use libunwind in PLCrashReporter (and instead, wrote our own DWARF unwinding code) was the relative difficulty we saw in porting libunwind to Mach-O and the Mach thread/VM APIs, as compared to the cost in porting our relatively platform-neutral code to other platforms.

The analysis side is super interesting too, and it'll be great to see more of what emerges from your work. I can't think of much that's been published on that front other than Microsoft's overview of their Windows Error Reporting heuristics:

      http://www.sigops.org/sosp/sosp09/papers/glerum-sosp09.pdf

Congratulations on your release!

<comment><AUTHOR> Come on now, you're the author of _the_ crash reporting framework for mobile :-P Big fan of PLCrashReporter and your work with it, the mobile error reporting market has much to thank for it. I've looked at some of your code and definitely appreciated the cleanliness of it.

On performance: The execution speed being touted here is not that of a frame unwinder and we're building something that goes beyond this in scope. Our core client-side technology is a debugging library optimized for tracing. Unwinding was only a bottleneck for some specific ridiculous workloads and usually the bottleneck is elsewhere if program structure is being parsed (and this is where the general purpose debuggers end up taking up so much time).

There are applications out there that are so complex that traditional debuggers are simply infeasible (imagine 30 minute+ backtraces). However, what we're excited about are all those spare cycles we get to make use of...

On libunwind: Yes. We'll be targeting some exotic platforms, and this is where libunwind definitely helps. It definitely lacks in file format abstractions but we support multiple unwinding backends for this reason, it will be painful but not too painful.

Thanks for the SOSP link, looks interesting. I agree, this is an area that has definitely been neglected by academia.

We're very excited for the first release of our platform and I'll keep you posted on it, your feedback would be great and we think we've come up with very useful technology.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> So something I don't understand that doesn't seem to have an explanation in the linked article:

Why does the speed of backtrace generation matter for handling/reporting crashes? If the process is dead, I don't see how it taking an extra 50ms (if that) to tear down makes a big difference - especially since crashes should be an exceptional case, not a common one.

Is the optimization here actually intended to enable more accurate, less intrusive realtime profiling, or something like that? Otherwise I'm having a hard time understanding how optimizing for wall-clock time here is actually a useful exercise (even if it is very interesting)

<comment><AUTHOR> 1) What's most interesting to us is that with all these spare cycles mean we can start doing some computationally expensive analysis as part of crash reporting and can even do it at scale. However, this type of analysis requires a very efficient tracer. We will provide updates on the latter in an upcoming post.

2) The speed and efficiency of backtrace generation can affect recovery times. It's far more than 50ms for a lot of server-side or embedded applications.

3) Large programs today cannot be debugged feasibly (as in, good luck in generating a detailed crash report, your system will likely not have the resources), especially if they're time sensitive as well (tracing is the typical approach there). There are engineers out there who have to spend hours just to extract a small memory dump from a single thread.

4) Certain classes of bugs are best observed over time and minimizing jitter is important (more on that later as we unveil some features of the advanced tracer and user interface).

Less intrusive real-time profiling is interesting to us, but currently only in the context of state leading to a fatal bug (this also includes bugs that involve hanging such as an infinite loop). The technology does have applications for performance management but this isn't something we are focusing on at the moment.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for all the feedback people. We've released a new version with robust handling of attachment failures, additional DWARF features and performance improvements (up to 35% on targets with lots of shared objects).</comment>


Highlights and video from Supercomputing 2011 show - <AUTHOR> http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4230751/Highlights-from-Supercomputing-11 <comment><USER2> Supercomputing sounds esoteric but this tech will be mainstream in a few years

</comment><comment><USER3> Can't wait to have a 1TFLOP/s chip in my mobile devices!

</comment><comment> rickmerritt-eet Great use of video</comment>


Microsoft: Free resources to help IT pros start/build careers in the cloud - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/server-cloud/2016/04/20/microsoft-introduces-free-resources-to-help-it-pros-get-started-and-build-their-careers-in-the-cloud/ <comment><USER2> Full disclosure I work for MSFT.

Honestly I'm a bit surprised this wasn't posted earlier (maybe it was and I missed it). One of the biggest knocks against Azure, in my opinion, is that the documentation is spread all over so you end up going to 2-3 different sites to figure something out. This at least puts all of it under one location even if the links still take you to various sites :)</comment>