Building a r/place in a weekend - <AUTHOR> https://josephg.com/blog/rplace-in-a-weekend/ <comment><USER2> Thanks for the support everyone! It was a really fun little project. I'm happy to answer any questions people have.

I'd also like to say that I highly recommend everyone does projects like this from time to time. I don't know any way to gain programming skills faster than making small throwaway projects using new tools and techniques.

<comment><USER3> Any tips for coming up with good projects to do? Something like this is obviously beyond the scope of most novices.

<comment><USER4> I'd honestly disagree. Start small, don't expect to build something that works for 100k users and you'll be fine!

Take the bare bones of this project:

\- Canvas.

\- Websockets.

That's literally it. You'll need to know how to draw on a canvas, and how to send and receive WebSocket information. You can quite happily keep the current state of the canvas in an in-memory array, perhaps saving it to a file every few minutes in case the server crashes. Then, perhaps, when that's done you can swap our your in-memory array for a REDIS bitfield, improve the web sockets to no longer use JSON, but instead binary? Both of which should be only a few tens of lines of changes, but after that you'll be able to support tens of thousands of simultaneous users with hundreds, if not thousands of changes per second.

The thing with this project that's complex is the number of users required to use this at once, lessen the requirements a little and you'll come up with a simple project.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > "I'd never actually used kafka before, and I have a rule with projects like > this that any new technology has to be put in first just in case there are > unknown unknowns that affect the design."

I have been doing the same intuitively for as long as I can remember but never stopped to realize this or why. I wonder what else I've learned by doing like this that now I use unconciously.

<comment><USER6> I think Jeff Atwood (known from CodingHorror and StackOverflow) once talked about "de-risking" a project. I'm not sure if this is a general, well-known business technique, but from all the business things I've had in school, this was never any. It made a lot of sense to me too and having a term to throw around helps convincing others that it's a good idea.

Teachers typically want to first make up requirements and use-cases, then functional design, then technical design, then either code and tests or first tests then code (depending on the teacher)... Basically, you wait till 60-70% of the work is done to discover design flaws. Later on we had some Agile stuff as well, but more as a "this also exists" rather than "this is how it's done". Doing some prototyping and benchmarking to see whether something works at all was never part of anything.

One, exactly one subject ever had a performance requirement: 1000 simultaneous users in a multiplayer game. And it had to work over Java RMI (which makes no sense at all). I was the only person of two classes who pushed for (and was finally granted) the use of raw sockets. I was the only person who took this as a challenge and ran thousands of prototype clients on the school's computing cluster on a Saturday night so I'm not taking anyone's compute time. They never even looked at it. But next Wednesday is the last thing I will ever have to do for that school (unless I have to resit) and I'm so happy I'm done with their shit and can do my own thing next. Properly.

<comment><USER5> I can see though how arguably it's more applicable to personal or startup (flexible, able to pivot) projects, not so much to medium-big companies. I can see how it might be more important to implement it regardless of it being 1h or 1 week than asking whether or not it's a good idea to implement it.

And also arguably the university teaching focus on these companies. That is why you have all of these fancy ways of encapsulating dependencies and wrapping them into oblivion.

Funnily enough a really similar thing happens in other degrees. I studied Industrial Engineering and can calculate whatever you want about the cinematics of a robot arm but it wasn't until I set up with some friend to learn how to make one from scratch that we really knew what it was all about.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> You could make it so that blank pixels are free to draw on, but it takes longer to redraw subsequent times. This would encourage the board to get filled up even with a small number of users, but would eventially allow things to be "locked down". Also would work well if you expect users to scale with time!.

For example, first draw = free. 2nd redraw 10 seconds, 3rd redraw 20 seconds... capped a 5 minutes. Not that the actual implimentation is that important.

<comment><USER2> Oh thats a great idea! That would also encourage people to draw new things instead of defacing old ones.

One of the first things that happened when the site went up was that someone started drawing something, and then someone else immediately start spamming junk pixels over the top of it. Despite being able to draw literally anywhere else in the world they thought the best use of their time was to ruin someone else's creation. It was kind of disappointing to witness.

I might make that change now actually - the simplest form of that is very easy. I can just make white pixels cheaper to draw on, and for everything else there's stiffer rate limiting penalties. (Which isn't quite what you said, but I think its the MVP version of it)

(Edit: This is implemented now. You can draw over 25 white pixels in each 10 second window, but only 10 colored pixels)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Cached: [https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:-I98fR...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:-I98fR6PE7kJ:https://josephg.com/blog/rplace- in-a-weekend/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

<comment><USER2> Thanks. My blog is running on the same server as the app itself. Its a small linode machine with only 1 CPU core, and nginx isn't keeping up with the traffic of both sites while fighting for CPU with ghost and kafka.

So much for my big talk about performance numbers. I'm fixing it as fast as I can.

<comment><USER6> Serving a static page shouldn't take much though... Are you using Wordpress?

<comment><USER2> Ghost, and I agree. I think the server might be getting thrashed by bots hitting sephsplace.

I've spun up a new much bigger server to handle the load. I'm just waiting DNS to propagate and it should start running much smoother.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is super awesome work. Well done - you should be proud!

I have to admit, I remember stumbling across your comment when you accepted the challenge and in my mind I scoffed, thinking you were never going to do it. Boy was I wrong! Once again, this is super cool.

<comment><USER2> Heh thanks!

I feel like there's two kinds of people who make bold statements like that: There's young people who are suffering from the Dunning-Kruger effect - inexperienced but think they're hot shit. Then there's people who've actually done a lot of hackathon-type events and as a result know what it takes to pull them off successfully. (Time, caffine, and a deep familiarity your tools.)

<comment><USER10> As the one who challenged you in that original thread, what drew me to your initial comment was the great point that you made: that much of the time and difficulty in doing something novel is making many of the tough decisions, and that once those design and technical decisions are made (and revealed), it seems "obvious" to others, and is judged simple in comparison.

Congratulations on following through, and demonstrating your core premise!

What were the top things that you felt _weren 't_ captured by that premise-- for instance, undocumented decisions that you had to discover on your own, or cases where you made tradeoffs that led to unexpected complexity? Were they maianly around bot-mitigation?

<comment><USER2> Thanks for saying so!

> that much of the time and difficulty in doing something novel is making many > of the tough decisions, and that once those design and technical decisions > are made (and revealed), it seems "obvious" to others, and is judged simple > in comparison.

Yes - one of the things that drew me to the project was how building this in an event-sourcing style fits so well here. Doing it that way solves some of the architecture problems reddit talked about in their blog. It seems obvious to me that this is a good approach, but obviously not everyone shares that view!

> What were the top things that you felt weren't captured by that premise--for > instance, undocumented decisions that you had to discover on your own, or > cases where you made tradeoffs that led to unexpected complexity? Were they > maianly around bot-mitigation?

Thats a great question, but I didn't spend much time surprised.

The thing I was most concerned about was kafka, but integrating kafka turned out to be was delightfully easy. I had to write some code to buffer recent operations in my server for catchup - I wish kafka had an API for that, but that wasn't hard to work around.

I think getting notifications working would have been a time sink but I explicitly removed them from the spec so I wouldn't have to deal with them.

It took me way too long to get kafka actually running through systemd on my linode. But I've spent enough time with apt-get that I wasn't _surprised_ , just disappointed.

I was surprised how quickly people started drawing smut, and how much time I needed to spend early on cleaning things up or writing tools to remove large bot-drawn genitals.

There are still a lot of decisions around rate limiting that I feel uneasy about. I worry that reddit's 5 minute rule wouldn't work for a little website like mine. I allow ~1 edit per second. Is that a good idea? I don't know. Its an expensive experiment to try different values and see what happens because there's a community involved. And I don't have reddit's huge user base. But maybe I'm being unnecessarily risk averse by allowing so many edits. Forcing slow editing is bolder - it requires a longer commitment to draw, but is probably also much more satisfying to people who create content.

<comment><USER11> Did you consider using Docker for the provisioning of Kafka?

A couple of days ago I remember reading how difficult was to deploy Oracle on Linux and how Docker made this a breeze. I wonder if Kafka would also fall onto the same premise.

<comment><USER2> Probably. I was bullish on docker in the past, but I'm no longer convinced its worth the trouble for small projects. It adds an awful lot of operational complexity for what is essentially a more complex abstraction around processes.

I think its a nice tool for deployment and making reproducible builds, but a lot of other things become harder through docker - like managing a databases's data, and communication between local processes.

Maybe the tooling has improved in the last few years, but I've gone back to the raw unix coalface.

<comment><USER12> >... but a lot of other things become harder through docker - like managing a databases's data, and communication between local processes.

It doesn't have to be this way. If you use shared folders to persist data on host you are in no worse position than you would be in if you used natively installed app, persistence wise.

I think the Docker's focus on orchestration (which makes business sense for them) is the reason why running DBs in containers got bad reputation. But really, if you use shared dirs with host and view containers as processes you can use them for DBs too.

IPC with containers OTOH forces you to architect the system as a bunch of microservices, which is usually not a bad idea either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Event Sourcing is a great pattern that could be used for many applications. It gives you an audit trail for free and lets you rewind to any point in time.

You don't even need to use a dependency like Kafka. We built a tool for tracking the lifecycle of software we ship, it uses Event Sourcing with snapshots and is open source: [https://tech.fundingcircle.com/blog/2016/09/06/shipping- in-f...](https://tech.fundingcircle.com/blog/2016/09/06/shipping-in-fintech/)

<comment><USER14> In this context, what do you mean by pattern?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Would you consider streaming/broadcasting yourself doing a project like this? I think it would be interesting to pop in and watch you work, especially if once every couple hours you provided some commentary about your thought process and what the latest hurdle to overcome is.

</comment><comment><USER16> That was pretty fun. I missed out on the original until many days after it happened, but just now I started to recreate the Windows 95 start button in the bottom left corner... seemed almost daunting to even do that many pixels, but it took no time at all until other people started collaborating and finished the button in a time I couldn't imagine at the start of that miniature journey.

I have no clue who those people are. It's just anarchy and the only thing we have in common is a canvas :-)

<comment><USER17> I was repairing the Germany flag above, when I saw you wanted to draw a Windows 95 start button I moved it up to make space. I was amazed when I saw that people building the button helped me move it up a notch :-) ps: also did some grey pixels on the button. great fun indeed

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I could well have missed it but - have you got any scripts or config associated with setting up Kafka as you're using it?

I haven't used it before, and the comments on your writeup make it sound more approachable than I'd expected.

</comment><comment><USER19> First of all, great work. It's been a long time since I've done a weekend hack like this myself.

However, it seems to me that Kafka is unnecessary in this system. It's clear that, at least in the final version, the system isn't designed to scale beyond one application server. For one thing, you're storing the ban list on the local filesystem. So it's definitely not 12-Factor compliant. And you're storing a local snapshot of the image. So why send the edits out to Kafka, only to have them come back in to the same process?

<comment><USER2> Even if I'm only using a single machine, using kafka allows me to load balance across a local cluster of server processes. This is important for nodejs apps because node is single threaded. And if I skipped kafka I'd still need to store the edit log somewhere for catchup. I've written that code a few times now, and I think its arguably more complicated to implement than just using kafka directly.

But right now to help deal with load the process is running across 2 machines. I just had to manually copy the ban list and snapshot database files across. When the server came up it pulled the snapshot version out of the database file, caught up from the kafka log and went to work.

Having a nice solution to distribute those files would be lovely - but I made the whole project start to finish in 2 days. I'm not going for 12 factor compliance here.

<comment><USER19> Ah, makes sense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> honest question, how did you fill out the canvas? you put it live, and then? thousands of people (including those who care enough to setup bot) suddenly came from your tweets?

<comment><USER21> I imagine quite a few came from the HN thread [1] where he originally made the bet that he could do it. That's how I found the site. It was 95% blank and I just decided to draw a bit. Later I came back several times to see how my drawing had lasted and fixed some minor vandalism. Also had to completely redraw at one point due to the Merkel bot. [2] Finally, after the blog post discussing how he built it started to get traction the vandalism rate got so high that I decided to write a bot to maintain the art for me.

\--

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14109158](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14109158)

[2] [https://twitter.com/josephgentle/status/853312152223965184](https://twitter.com/josephgentle/status/853312152223965184)

<comment><USER2> Someone also posted it to the original r/place subreddit. I think a lot of the traffic came from there: [https://www.reddit.com/r/place/comments/65hs9j/inspired_by_r...](https://www.reddit.com/r/place/comments/65hs9j/inspired_by_rplace_a_twitter_user_is_making_his/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I might be going a bit tangential. I did read the article but I always wonder. How would I go about learning all the technology involved to build all this.. is there like a guide for people who know the basics of php and mysql. I'm a civil engineer by trade and only do this as a hobby sometimes.

<comment><USER23> I make my living programming, but I've never had any formal training -- programming used to just be a hobby as well. I learn the best by digging into what other people have done and seeing how they did it. So I'd suggest taking a look at the GitHub repo for this project and set up your own instance of it. Learn how to install and configure the dependencies. Then make a few small changes that forces you to learn how the code works.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Seph's law: Programming is 95% decisions and 5% typing.

You are an inspiration! If people grasp what you've done then you've lowered the fear people have of copying things. That should lead to more attempts, failures, improvements, competition, a true catalyst!

<comment><USER2> Aw thanks! And yeah I agree. The way to get good at programming is to make lots of stuff.

> Seph's law: Programming is 95% decisions and 5% typing.

:) In real projects there's usually the other 95% of the time spent reading the existing code and figuring out how it works. But thats much harder to fit in a glib saying.

<comment><USER24> "the other 95% of the time" haha

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Would the server-side bit of this be a good, or at least fun, benchmark? More towards the TechEmpower end of the pool than TPC. There's a pretty clearly defined API, and some fun concurrency and data-handling to do.

</comment><comment><USER26> Just the write-up of what he did would take me more than a weekend.

</comment><comment><USER27> Great work thanks fir sharing!

One decision that I don't agree on is the choice to send messages in order.

I usually prefer to flood the client of messages and attach at each message a timestamp (a monotonic increasing integer) and having the client to re-order everything.

It is cheaper from the server point of view and the worked is done by the clients.

Are there any reason why you picked your specific solution?

Just a technical question, that I am very curious about. I guess that there are concerns that I am overlooking at the moment...

<comment><USER2> That would work, but I don't think it would make anything simpler. You would essentially be reimplementing parts of TCP on top of whatever unordered protocol you'd use to make sure your client view is eventually consistent. All the APIs I used strictly order messages. Websockets simply don't have a UDP- equivalent, unless you want to send the events over plain long-polled HTTP requests or something, but that sounds like an inefficient recipe for disaster.

And if you did that the client would need to be able to track and fetch lost messages. That adds client complexity and server complexity for the extra endpoints.

My imagination is haunted by premonitions of bugs. In one ghostly image I see edits getting silently lost sometimes and not knowing why. Just, sometimes if I draw a line, on your screen you see the occasional block missing until you refresh your browser. In another premonition I imagine a packet reordering system thinking its missing a single operation and waiting on it forever. To the user it looks like everything has frozen completely.

We have well-implemented protocols that deliver messages in order. I see no reason not to use them.

<comment><USER27> Definitely, mine was just a simple question on the design, it is interesting to see how different people thinks ;-)

The work to keep everything in order, definitely, has to be done somewhere. You are doing it twice, once sending the messages actually in order, another in the TCP stack. Clearly the one on the TCP stack "comes from free" for anybody reasonable.

Like yours, also my mind is haunted by possible bugs, however in this cases I prefer to borrow from the Erlang philosophy and embrace possible failure. The way I model this problem is that the packets arrives usually in the same order, or one close enough, to the order in which they are send. It is rare that a single packet get lost, but if this happen I want to be able to reask for it and don't block the whole rendering.

I would have accept to receive messages slightly out of order and have a guarantee of something like the last 10/20 messages.

Would it require some reimplementation of the TCP stack? For sure! Would it be the common case? Definitely not! Would it make the architecture more resilient? I believe so but I may be wrong.

Now, to be clear, your work is amazing! I am really glad that you shared it and it I a pleasure to have this kind of technical conversation. Given your technical and time constraints I would have done just the same.

Just wondering if you have any thoughts on my counter points.

Happy Easter!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Great work.

I'm curious about the algorithm for bans, once you're done with the project I hope that you will disclose it.

<comment><USER2> The system isn't fancy. Its just the bare minimum code to stop the specific forms of abuse I was seeing.

I replied to another comment with details: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14125518](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14125518)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> This is absolutely great, and also much closer to how I would have done it as well. Reddit's implementation seemed like they chose so many wrong tools.

</comment><comment><USER30> Fantastic job, congrats and Happy Easter, it was very nice following along. A lot of people were rooting for you.

Someone get this man a chocolate egg, he deserves it!

</comment><comment><USER31> Its down

</comment><comment><USER32> What if we had reddit but with arbitrary group activities instead of just chat?

</comment><comment><USER33> It looks like it's down for me. Is anyone else still able to see it?

</comment><comment><USER34> will be possible to make this entirely serverless with WebRTC P2P ?

</comment><comment><USER35> Hahaha, awesome work. And sorry from Germany for the Nazi morons spamming you.

<comment><USER36> Germany did nothing wrong.

<comment><USER35> I highly suspect at least the spamming of distorted/vandalized pictures of Merkel is the work of German alt-rights (or, to be accurate, neo-Nazis).

Spamming swastikas, though, this one is a known modus operandi of trolls worldwide.

<comment><USER37> It says "rules: no swastikas", which is just an invitation for people to draw swastikas.

This reference is better than a swastika though. [http://i.imgur.com/sFwteao.png](http://i.imgur.com/sFwteao.png)

<comment><USER2> I added that after someone got snippy at me after I deleted their 'art'. This way expectations are clear about when I'll intercede with my admin powers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Good job!

</comment><comment><USER39> super awesome!!

</comment><comment><USER40> Jesus, how many more weeks are people going to write 10 articles a day about this silliness? You'd think it was the first online webpage that did something besides display hypertext?</comment>


Kerbal Space Program Extension Now Available - <AUTHOR> https://kerbalspaceprogram.com/en/?page_id=591 <comment><USER2> I had heard the original team that built this game quit due to poor working conditions. Is that true? If so, who built this expansion and have the working conditions improved?

<comment><USER3> [https://www.destructoid.com/former-kerbal-space-program- deve...](https://www.destructoid.com/former-kerbal-space-program-developers- slam-studio-for-poor-pay-and-crunch-time-359507.phtml)

They won't get a dime from me ever. For anything.

<comment><USER4> I was just thinking of buying it, and now I have changed my mind. Back to Factorio for me!!!

<comment><USER5> I should get back to Factorio, but Cities Skylines has taken over my brain- game timeslot lately.

It's really amazing to me how fun they both are, given that they're just exercises in logistics.

Cities Skylines is about managing traffic flow, basically every other mechanic stems from that in some way or another. Not a surprise given the developers' previous games were the Cities In Motion series.

Factorio is about efficient transport of materials into machines that assemble goods, and about building up abstractions so you are constantly solving new types of problems with the resources you've automated already.

Both of them have helped me to better understand concurrency, throughput, and optimization. And playing Factorio with friends has helped me stretch my project management muscles. By halfway through the game I had to make a Trello board just to keep track of what needed to be done and where the bottlenecks were.

If you're in the mood for a thinking game I highly recommend both of them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Been playing since first linux biulds. Love the game. Hate the developer. Too much politics. Too many mind games. Too many unaddressed bugs. Would jump at any similar game, something more based on physics, if run by anyone else.

<comment><USER7> Do you know of Orbiter: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbiter_(simulator)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbiter_\(simulator\))

Orbiter vs Kerbal, etc.: [http://www.thespacereview.com/article/3091/1](http://www.thespacereview.com/article/3091/1)

(Via XKCD, note title text: [https://xkcd.com/1244/](https://xkcd.com/1244/) \- nice slingshots too )

<comment><USER6> Orbiter imho is more about flying than operating a space program. Flying is nice, but I am much more a fan of coordinating a mission between multiple craft.

I can live with the cartoon nature, but I do not appreciate "features" as window dressing for poor coding. The way KSP handles memory (loads everything 24/7) is ridiculous and necessitates many silly compromises. And don't get me started on how they handle "heat" and aerodynamics.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've spent a lot of time playing KSP. This game has an incredibly steep learning curve. The best thing they could do is build a player autopilot that lets them get to orbit with basic rocket builds. There's a ton of hardcore players (like me) who do things like write kOS scripts to run rockets to the mun and beyond. But that kind of thing is lost on the person who first downloads this game.

If the devs are reading this, that's the package you need: a basic autopilot for noobs.

<comment><USER9> I disagree. Half of the value of this game comes from the fact it forces you to learn a few things about real physics along the way. Beginnings ain't hard. You can easily get to orbit manually, and you can even eyeball your way to the Mün.

That said, something like the per-stage ∆v display from KER (a mod) should IMO be stock, both during construction and in-flight - without that one piece of information, any trip past Kerbin orbit gets too difficult - you either end up seriously overbuilding your vehicle, or run out of fuel in the middle of a mission.

<comment><USER10> 100% of the value of the game is that it's a sandbox that lets you play with a bunch of different things - rocket design, orbital mechanics, exploring a technology tree, resource management, etc. etc.

To that end, _any_ feature that makes it easier for different players to approach the game in their own ways will make for a game that appeals to more people. Let people who want to control the rocket manually control it manually, and let those who want to just have nice, automatic, repeatable launches use the autopilot. Let people who want to fiddle with rocket designs do that, but also hand out a bunch of prefab rocket designs for when you just want to sit down and fly a rocket. Let the same people play the game in different ways in different sessions, depending on their mood.

Just don't try to tell them that there's only one proper way to have fun, because all you'll do with that is ensure that they tend to get bored more quickly.

<comment><USER11> That's a nice idea in theory, but in practice, players will take the most efficient method of completing a task, even if that method isn't fun. If you give players autopilot, they will use it, even if they would prefer the game without it.

I'm sure I've read research on this, but I'm not sure how to dredge it up from the internet. So I apologize for the lack of citation.

Anecdotally, in the Elder Scrolls series, I vastly preferred Morrowind's lack of unlimited fast travel. But I still used fast travel liberally in future installments, in no small part because the games were designed under the assumption that fast travel would be used. The takeaway is that you can't assume that players will ignore a feature just because they don't like it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Tried out KSP and just couldn't get into it. I may be the only one but there was absolutely way too high a curve to jump right in and have some fun. I did over half their tutorials and could not improvise at all based on what I had learned. Not much fun when I have to go watch a YouTube video to figure out my next step in career mode.

<comment><USER13> It only took a few videos to figure out how to do things, for me. But I sure wouldn't recommend it without those few.

<comment> King-Aaron Scott Manley's tutorials were absolutely invaluable in my learning with the game. However I've never before in my life played a game while having a pad next to me to make notes, haha.

<comment><USER13> Come on, you need a spreadsheet!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I like how they use the proper term expansion, instead of pretty nonsensical DLC.

</comment><comment><USER15> mods: "extension" -> "expansion" in title

</comment><comment><USER16> Page 4 of their comic has a pretty irritating typo. It's "Wry" not "Rye".

</comment><comment><USER17> Note: not available now.

`Kerbal Space Program: Making History Expansion is still in development and will be released as a paid expansion. Pricing and availability details will be announced at a later date.`

<comment><USER18> It is available now.

[http://steamcommunity.com/games/220200/announcements/detail/...](http://steamcommunity.com/games/220200/announcements/detail/1678026870137797509)

<comment><USER19> Steam store link: [http://store.steampowered.com/app/283740/Kerbal_Space_Progra...](http://store.steampowered.com/app/283740/Kerbal_Space_Program_Making_History_Expansion/)</comment></comment></comment>


Proxy Politics: Signal and Noise - <AUTHOR> http://www.e-flux.com/journal/proxy-politics/

<comment><USER2> how did this pass any sort of peer review though?</comment>


Future of Earth - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_Earth <comment><AUTHOR> "One billion years from now, about 27% of the modern ocean will have been subducted into the mantle. If this process were allowed to continue uninterrupted, it would reach an equilibrium state where 65% of the current surface reservoir would remain at the surface. Once the solar luminosity is 10% higher than its current value, the average global surface temperature will rise to 320 K (47 °C; 116 °F). The atmosphere will become a "moist greenhouse" leading to a runaway evaporation of the oceans. At this point, models of the Earth's future environment demonstrate that the stratosphere would contain increasing levels of water. These water molecules will be broken down through photodissociation by solar ultraviolet radiation, allowing hydrogen to escape the atmosphere. The net result would be a loss of the world's sea water by about 1.1 billion years from the present. This will be a simple dramatic step in annihilating all life on Earth."</comment>


Havana syndrome: Exposure to neurotoxin may have been cause, study suggests - <AUTHOR> https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/havana-syndrome-neurotoxin-enqu-te-1.5288609 <comment><USER2> Possibly related tidbit - I used to roll my own cigarettes when working in the field as a geologist, left a pack of papers under the seat of my truck which had no carpeting, spilled 100% DEET on the floor, DEET absorbed into pack of papers. Months later found those same papers (what luck!) and rolled a cigarette without thinking about it, minutes later I was asking my now wife if she "could hear the helicopter sounds!!?" and thought I was losing my mind. I put it all together weeks later when I remembered the DEET spill from several months earlier. Pesticides/insecticides, in my experience at least, can induce those symptoms, lol - maybe the mosquito spraying was a little heavy by the hotel? And now I hope I don't have brain damage, thanks internet.

<comment><USER3> When my father was a child, he would bike behind the trucks that sprayed DDT all over the neighborhood because the DDT mist kept him cool. I hope you'll be fine, because people have done much worse!

<comment><USER4> Ha I remember doing the same thing when I was ~6 years old in South Korea. There would be these trucks that went around spraying mosquito killing fog in the apartment complexes and all the little kids from the neighborhood would run behind them.

Well now I'm 30 and so far things seem to be ok! Fingers crossed

<comment><USER5> Yup, this has been my experience growing up outside of the US.

Watching this video made me facepalm really hard.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2NmuQW8cjE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2NmuQW8cjE)

<comment><USER6> The description on that video is hilarious.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> (Cuban here.) I find this result very interesting, really, as we're exposed to these chemicals in varying degrees and frequency. I personally live in a epidemiological controlled/safe (-ish) area of Havana, so my exposure is very limited. However, I do know that some other areas are way more affected by vectors since they are less urbanized and with more population density.

In those cases the authorities are more aggressive in the use of mass fumigation, particularly during the summer and autumn; but still I don't think that such elevated frequency produces the effects shown in the article, for the general population, that is.

It is true that we're particularly vulnerable to zika, chikungunya, yellow fever, and dengue fever (especially in 2016); and what I can easily imagine (and conjecture) is that diplomatic personnel were overly (and rightly) concerned, and liberally applied these products with more zeal than necessary. Thus, increased their exposition to these chemicals.

<comment><AUTHOR> They were apparently spraying INSIDE the offices. I'm not particularly concerned about pesticides in general, but I would NEVER use them indoors.

Also, the diplomatic buildings are likely well sealed and air conditioned while I suspect local buildings use more natural cooling (open windows and the breeze) and are thus better ventilated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> tl; dr:

\- Neurological studies show actual damage to the same region of the brain for these diplomats

\- Pesticides (organophosphates) are put out as a candidate theory.

\- Research shows people whose residences were sprayed MORE with pesticide had greater symptoms, adding strong evidence

\- Mass Hysteria is dismissed as a theory, as the group of people experiencing it is highly vetted and because the diagnosis is only applicable when no underlying cause is present. In this case, the actual measurement of the brain show there is damage, ruling out the theory.

<comment><USER9> > The embassies actively sprayed in offices, as well as inside and outside > diplomatic residences — sometimes five times more frequently than usual. > Many times, spraying operations were carried out every two weeks, according > to embassy records.

This suggests that in fact it was the US government (following the host government's lead) that introduced the toxin into their environment. If so, it seems like the Cubans may be owed an apology.

But did the embassy use stronger concentration than Cuba? Or a different agent? Are any local Havanans experiencing these symptoms?

<comment><USER8> The article answers this

<comment><USER9> Specifically this section I suppose:

> The symptoms experienced by the victims — headaches, hearing loss, cognitive > problems, loss of balance, etc. — are frequently found in the general > population, these scientists argued, and can be attributed to many causes.

<comment><USER10> also page 35 mentions that there's genetic factors (PON1 gene) that affect organophosphate susceptibilities

<comment><USER11> Possibly CYP2D6 polymorphism has a role too [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26723569](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26723569)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > The embassies actively sprayed in offices, as well as inside and outside > diplomatic residences — sometimes five times more frequently than usual. > Many times, spraying operations were carried out every two weeks, according > to embassy records.

Wow, that is really alarming. I would never feel comfortable with that inside my home or office.

<comment><USER13> You kind of wonder, if someone's fumigating your office that often, and then you suddenly get sick, why wouldn't that be the first thing you look at?

Like, "Hmm, what about this giant cloud of bug spray? Maybe I'm allergic or something?"

Why did they jump to, "The Cubans must have Marvin the Martian's P-U-38 Explosive Space Modulator that they're shooting at my ears."

<comment><USER14> But, did the spraying start short time before the symptoms appeared? Or has it been going on for a long while? In the latter case, it's not strange that they didn't make a connection initially, because "nothing changed".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Reminds me of all the people mysteriously dying in the Dominican Republic[1]. The best I could figure out from reading about it was that illegal pesticides were being used in hotels to eradicate bed bugs and they ended up getting on bottles of stuff in the minibar and in the food and randomly killing or making people extremely sick all over the country and the resort chains covered it up.

[1][https://nypost.com/2019/06/28/fbi-to-release-toxicology- resu...](https://nypost.com/2019/06/28/fbi-to-release-toxicology-results-in- rash-of-dominican-republic-deaths/)

<comment><USER10> also reminiscent of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chlorpyrifos#Tourist_deaths](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chlorpyrifos#Tourist_deaths)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Maybe we would use less pesticides if we just called them neurotoxins.

<comment><USER17> Fun story... VX nerve agent was discovered and originally introduced as a pesticide. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VX_(nerve_agent)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VX_\(nerve_agent\))

<comment><USER18> Not exactly VX, but Amiton (also known as Tetram or VG). It's about one tenth as toxic as VX, and similar in toxicity as sarin.

In 1975 the Iraqi ministry of agriculture negotiated with a U.S. company, Pfaudler, for a contract to build a pesticide production plant. The deal eventually fell through because Pfaudler did not understand why the Iraqis insisted on manufacturing Amiton instead of some safer alternative.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Interesting findings, but how do we blame the Russians for this?

[https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latin-america/u-s-officials- sus...](https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latin-america/u-s-officials-suspect- russia-mystery-attacks-diplomats-cuba-china-n908141)

" The suspicion that Russia is likely behind the alleged attacks is backed up by evidence from communications intercepts, known in the spy world as signals intelligence, amassed during a lengthy and ongoing investigation involving the FBI, the CIA and other U.S. agencies. The officials declined to elaborate on the nature of the intelligence. "

<comment><USER20> At this point I think we owe Cuba and Russia an apology for the hysteria involved.

However, if you're looking for a reason you can always find one. From the article, it sounds like the spraying of pesticides was "more than usual" which might mean it was done intentionally to appear as an accident, since the spraying is a good cover.

I expect this would be easy enough to check on if they _only_ sprayed with more frequency at diplomatic residences and the embassy.

Edit: a few replies here are really more thoughtful than my comment. I recommend reading them :)

<comment><USER21> > At this point I think we owe Cuba and Russia an apology for the hysteria > involved.

We are at the point where we need to confirm the hypothesis. _If the hypothesis is confirmed_ we owe Cuba and Russia an apology.

<comment><USER20> Yep. Fair conclusion thanks for pointing that out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I find this hypothesis slithly more plausible than a pulsed radiofrequency/microwaves attack where the way this could alter white matter seems unclear, but especially given a precedent [0] both are good candidates.

This is compatible in my view to a russian interference in the midst of warming relations between Cuba and the US/Canada. The diplomats seems ro be the only members of the embassy to be affected and the russians know how to not leave their footprint when they don't want to (e.g. not Novitchok or Polonium).

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

</comment><comment><USER23> I preferred the top-secret Russian microwave neuro-weapon headlines. :)

</comment><comment><USER24> It was just a gas leak! Nothing to see here, move along citizen!

</comment><comment><USER25> This seems completely plausible to me and I hope it puts the absurd "sonic weapon" theory to bed. Combination of stress, genuine brain damage from excessive pesticide fumigation, and a little bit of mass hysteria.

<comment><USER26> For reference, the "sonic weapon" may have been very loud crickets [1]

[1] [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/04/science/sonic-attack- cuba...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/04/science/sonic-attack-cuba- crickets.html)</comment></comment>


The US meat market is effectively a monopoly - <AUTHOR> https://www.kcrw.com/culture/shows/good-food/meat-supply-slaughterhouses-french-classics/economics-industrial-meat-industry <comment><USER2> This is pedantic but what happened to oligopolies?

<comment><AUTHOR> They got bought out. What's worse, as the writer explains in the interview, we haven't been able to enforce antitrust laws, as these companies can prove that the consumer hasn't been negatively effected (until COVID hit, of course).

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> If a plant in France closes, how much of their meat supply do they lose?</comment>


YC deadline in two days co-founder F's you - <AUTHOR> What do you do?
You stop what you are doing, build it day in and out. You sign a contract.
 then he flips you and goes with another partner whom is a networker bringing in WELL KNOWN fund X with $500,000-$1mn Serious dollars at the seed stage (most probably true). <comment><USER2> There was a startup in one of the YC W14 that had something similar to this case, but different scenario.

Camperoo, the technical founder quit, but she still moved on to apply to YC.

[https://medium.com/@emmie/my-technical-co-founder-quit- the-d...](https://medium.com/@emmie/my-technical-co-founder-quit-the-day- before-i-got-my-y-combinator-interview-759482562fcc)

Perhaps you should still go ahead and apply!

But yeah like the jsprogrammer mentioned, add more details to here, there are lots of folks whom can give one or two words of advice. I've personally got some good feedback.

</comment><comment><USER3> IANAL, but you should talk to a lawyer experienced in startups/equity/contracts ASAP. Don't tell your partner that you've talked to a lawyer (mentioning lawyers is a great way to make a conversation go south) - unless your lawyer advises otherwise.

You should probably go sort this out and you probably shouldn't apply to YC. I guess you learned a lesson the hard way? (that is, it's really important to have a cofounder you totally trust; I might be totally off here but I would guess you didn't have that close of a relationship with your cofounder).

</comment><comment><USER4> Had the inverse of that happen. Co-founder applied to YC behind our backs, lied in literally every field and still managed to somehow get an interview (even though basic googling would reveal massive red flags). We tried to make that person withdraw the application to no avail. They went to the interview, luckily didn't get in. So it ended at that.

</comment><comment><USER5> Post full details to HN and we hash it out.

</comment><comment><USER6> I think this all depends on how far along are you? And how replace-able is your co-founder?

</comment><comment><USER7> What does that quite mean? It was obviously not meant to be.. In this game of "startups" and world of "entrepreneurship" many hurdles, obstacles will try to come your way. The number one job is to jump over and accelerate faster harder and better each time. I have had this happen to me on projects before today and all I do is break down the wood and add it to the fireplace ;)</comment>


The Startup That Built Google's First Self-Driving Car - <AUTHOR> http://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/artificial-intelligence/the-unknown-startup-that-built-googles-first-selfdriving-car <comment><USER2> I worked at 510 for 2 years. We were a little over 10 people when I started and around 60 people when we sold to Google. The whole thing was bootstrapped, no VC's. Bryon Majusiak, the guy interviewed in the article, is a great guy, a hard charger and a very practical engineer. So much so that I hired him away from Google a little less than a year ago for another robotics endeavor.

510 did many great things and got credit for nearly none of it. We barely had a website b/c big companies like Google, Microsoft and Nokia liked letting people think it was all them. Quite frankly, we were happy to take the money, but in hindsight, we should have aimed higher.

The article gives the impression that we only did hardware. That is not true. We did all the sensor integration and real-time systems software. We also sold our GPS filter to Google early on for Street View.

It was a scrappy place. We solved hard problems very quickly and big companies often resented us for it and reluctantly bought our wares. In return we were silent.

The employees were fantastic and the management was horrendous. We laughed a lot, we fought a lot and we drank a lot. The founders, like most 20 somethings who've achieved too much success too early, were amazing in many ways but deeply flawed. They did not realize that the Berkeley Robotics Lab did not prepare them to manage a real company. They could never see that they were the ones in the way of their own success. Since there were no VC's there was no board. I never again worked for a place where the CEO could not be fired. And I never worked for a founder who had too many life lessons in front of him.

Anyways, lessons learned: The value is in final products not in parts of products, people don't change on a startup's timeline and getting acquired is generally a letdown.

Onwards and upwards...

<comment><USER3> If you could (or have already) written a blog post about your experience, I would love to read it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Well, Lewandowsky heads Google's self driving car project now. Thrun is long gone, off trying to make Udacity fly.

He's an impressive guy. I met him when he was going to Berkeley and doing the self-balancing motorcycle for the 2005 Grand Challenge. He'd already done a startup, with a specialized giant laptop for construction sites for people who needed to see blueprints.

The LIDAR Google uses is from Velodyne, which was "Team DAD" in the 2005 Grand Challenge. The first version of their LIDAR fell off their vehicle, but they improved the mechanics and produced that cone-shaped thing Google now uses. That's really a research tool; a different approach is needed for production vehicles. (I still like the Advanced Scientific Concepts flash LIDAR; it's expensive, but that's because it has custom silicon. If you had to get the price down, that's where to start. No moving parts, all electronics.)

I'm kind of disappointed with Google's self-driving effort on the hardware side. I'd expected flash LIDARs, terahertz phased array radars, and other advanced sensors by now. You need to be able to see in all directions, but the requirements to the sides and back are less than for looking ahead. The CMU/Cadillac effort is ahead on the hardware side; their self-driving car has all its sensors integrated into the vehicle so you don't notice them.

(I had an entry in the 2005 Grand Challenge: Team Overbot. Ours was too slow, and we worried about off-road capability too much.)

<comment><USER5> I suspect price is still the driver (pun intended) here. Flash LIDAR is, for the most part, shockingly expensive. Some companies like Toyota are looking into bringing the cost down with CMOS SPAD arrays, but it's still very much lab work. Similarly the Velodyne system ain't cheap and was close to $80k not too long ago. Stereo is pretty much free, but still needs more work to make it robust enough. Even smaller line scan LIDAR units (e.g. the SICK LMS models) are around $5k each.

</comment></comment><comment> sam-mueller I recently learned that Elon Musk wasn't actually the founder of Tesla, but rather an early investor. This article borders on the same theme; there's more than meets the eye to the faces of today's most innovative technologies. It is alarming to see how often proper accreditation is being misattributed/stolen in our industry.

<comment><USER6> Regarding Elon Musk, do you have a reference you can point to? Just curious.

<comment><USER7> [http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/In- Gear/2013/0919/5-things...](http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/In- Gear/2013/0919/5-things-you-probably-didn-t-know-about-Tesla-Motors)

I was quite surprised by the parent comment because I had never heard of Musk being described as a founder. But then again I've lived in palo alto since before tesla was founded so the power struggle was minor gossip at the time (and was in the mercury news).

What _has_ surprised me is that he is in fact listed as a founder on the wikipedia web site and in fact Tesla litigated over the matter.

Now the word "founder" is weird -- IME A round paperwork typically refers to any common shareholder at the time of venture investment as a "founder". And then there was that bizarre Facebook suit over who could refer to themselves as a company founder. Weird.

<comment><USER8> "Founder" title drama is mostly around successful companies in my experience. Basically some additional mojo can be had a funding discussions if you can legitimately claim to be a 'founder' of some previous success (the bigger the better). Especially in social settings it is strange (and to my twisted humor funny) when people will say they 'worked' at one company and 'founded' another company when they had the exact same role in each company at the same level of development and differ only in the perception of 'success' or 'not success'.

After reading the article on how primates use 'fame' in dominance games that made the rounds here I found that it identified that sort of behavior pretty precisely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Seems like the journalist is trying a little to hard to create a controversy. 510 was never 'unknown' and they always had a close relationship with Google. Consider the story in '08 - [http://www.cnet.com/news/robotic-prius-takes- itself-for-a-sp...](http://www.cnet.com/news/robotic-prius-takes-itself-for-a- spin-around-sf/)

<comment><USER10> I think the bigger point is that Google has created a revisionist story about the origin of its self-driving car that the vast majority of people, including myself, would never have known about. For example, there was no mention of it at this summer's self-driving car exhibit at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. Is it necessary that Google represent the true story in its marketing material? No, of course not, but it is strange that they would go to that extent to keep the acquisition a secret for so long.

<comment><USER9> Have not seen the museum. So long as they are crediting the engineers from the DARPA contests then the story is not revisionist. Everything since DARPA has been fairly incremental with contributions from a wide variety of people (including 510). There just isn't a Da Vinci code type conspiracy going on here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The article presents a one-sided story at best. I actually interviewed at Google for "project that shall not be named" in June 2009, with Sebastian Thrun and Chris Urmson (the current head of the project). I could tell the project was already well underway. Although none of them would say anything about, it was pretty clear what they were building. So, while '510' may have played some part, the writer is grossly exaggerating their significance.

</comment><comment><USER12> Maybe I'm missing something, but isn't the lidar on the google car made by Velodyne? I know the radio head video used Velodyne's Lidar. And the picture of the lidar that they show is a picture of the Velodyne HDL-64 Can anyone explain?

<comment><USER13> The article didn't really make it sound like 510 built the LIDAR, just that they do the integration and software to process the data into maps. The article is also very explicit about their role in processing the data into the cool cloud visualization for the Radiohead video, not capturing it.

<comment><USER14> I think the photo captioned "510's lidar system" and showing nothing besides than a Velodyne sensor bolted to a frame is specific enough to be misleading.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The nut appears to be this:

"From then on, we started doing a lot of work with Google," says Majusiak. "We did almost all of their hardware integration. They were just doing software. We'd get the cars and develop the controllers, and they'd take it from there."

Anybody who has done robotics knows there is a lot of integration involved (hardware and software), and that doing integration is hard and tends to be thankless. It's nice to see some in-depth reporting in a major publication on the full depth of the engineering team.

</comment><comment><USER16> Replying to ekm2, who is hell-banned:

      So,who is Suzanna Musick?

Good question! I'm not going to post details here, but she appears to have plenty of public info easily Google-able, including a Linkedin profile and the name of her current startup. That said, I couldn't find anything about this company at all, and don't want to delve too much deeper as it's starting to make me feel creepy.

<comment><USER17> Thank you!

I had no idea i was hellbanned(though I wont waste my time begging for an unbanning).

<comment><USER18> > I had no idea i was hellbanned

That's because you're not. You posted a couple of comments from an IP that was banned because of past abuses (apparently by others). We unbanned the UP and unkilled the two comments.

It's on our list to make the IP banning system better so that this happens less often. Having it happen at all is bad, obviously, but the measures available to counter abuse are often unsatisfactorily crude, and doing nothing is not an option.

<comment><USER16> My apologies, I should've just said "banned" or "dead" or some other word. I've seen other people use the "hellbanned" word before and figured it was the right phrase.

Out of interest, I did look up the user and saw that he/she seemed not to have done anything that I felt deserving of any form of ban - how should I have communicated this back to you? Am I even encouraged to do so?

<comment><USER18> Absolutely! Email us at firstname.lastname@example.com. We're more than happy to fix stuff like this.

We intend to build ways for the community to regulate these things without going through us, but it's going to take a while to get there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> like with Internet, the self-driving cars revolution is firmly rooted in DARPA's Grand/Urban Challenges of 2004/2005/2007 years. In fact i have hard time finding any principal progress in Google cars from the winners/top cars of 7 years ago. Though obviously there is a lot of evolutionary/product- development-style improvement, especially related to increased processing power available for sensor/image data processing.

<comment><USER20> That tends to be the case with all technologies though. Initial progress at adding features is much greater (to an outside observer) than later progress. What you probably don't see is the large number of small incremental improvements that are slowly ironing out edge cases, fixing bugs and turning prototypes into something reproducable. I bet if you ask any team involved in those challenges you'd find that the apparently functional cars were constantly requiring fixing and tweaking in a way that the Google cars of today probably don't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Someone really needs to explain to me what the thought process behind this acquisition was.

Self driving car technologies have has actively developed by almost every car company for years now. Many of the beginnings of this work has already made it to market e.g. Parallel Park Assist, Auto Emergency Breaking, Lane Merge Detection, Adaptive Cruise Control. And companies like Volvo are already testing their self driving cars in real world, difficult conditions in Sweden. And because there are only a few car conglomerates they will simply share technology within each group.

So what is their end game ?

<comment><USER22> My guesses:

1) To supply the data that the future robot cars will consume, and profit via license fees. The Google cars use data-heavy techniques with very good preexisting metric maps.

2) To speed up the development of technology that will save perhaps 20,000 lives a year in North America alone. Larry Page has enough power and Google enough money that they can do stuff with "because it's great" as a primary reason.

(I'm not affiliated with Google, but have pondered this question and asked around)

<comment><USER21> But wouldn't it be better for Google to focus on doing data supply deals with the existing car companies ? Far less money, risk etc.

And Google isn't helping speed up the technology. Companies like Volvo are far ahead already.

<comment><USER23> > Companies like Volvo are far ahead already.

Volvo is actually far behind -- their cars are designed for Level 3 Autonomous Driving, while Google cars are Level 4. Also, Google has far more miles in real-world city driving than Volvo.

Right now Google is furthest ahead in this space, arguably by years.

<comment><USER21> Where have you heard this ? Everything I've seen to date has Google/Volvo at the same level. And it's somewhat irrelevant how many years Google is ahead when they have zero experience in bringing automative to market.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Early Street View history: [http://thetrendythings.com/read/7424](http://thetrendythings.com/read/7424)

</comment><comment><USER17> So,who is Suzanna Musick?

</comment><comment><USER25> Wow, this is seriously good journalism. Thanks for ythis!</comment>


Mathematics is full of wonderful but relatively unknown theorems - <AUTHOR> http://1ucasvb.tumblr.com/post/90160448163/mathematics-is-full-of-wonderful-but-relatively

<comment><USER2> My first thought when I read this title was that there should be a site like Hoogle for mathematical proofs, where one could search by type signature for existing proofs. I'm not sure if people often think of proofs in terms of their type signature, but by Curry-Howard it would be doable.

<comment><USER3> This is a complicated problem. I know some Coq developers are trying to build a search tool, but the problem is there are many ways to state a theorem and you want to not only find statements that exactly correspond to your request, but also those that are convertible to it. And there it gets ugly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I completely agree about the interconnectedness of different branches of mathematics and think it is difficult to visualize and intuit because we don't yet have the language.

My guess: Eventually, as we begin to understand mathematics better, we will elucidate the underlying properties of theorems and there will be better "tagging"; the underlying language must also change. This will not happen for a minimum of 30+ years as new advances must be made and institutional faculty will object lest their life be rendered irrelevant.

<comment><USER5> I saw a talk that said the branch of Mathematics that dealt with the interconnectedness of Mathematics was called 'Category Theory'. You can see it here: [http://vimeo.com/17207564](http://vimeo.com/17207564) and Part 2 here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yilkBvVDB_w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yilkBvVDB_w)

<comment><USER6> Category theory by Tom LaGatta[1] is also a nice introduction. He suggests taking a look at the nLab website[2], a wiki of Maths and Physics from the categorical point of view.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6L6XeNdd_k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6L6XeNdd_k) [2] [http://ncatlab.org/](http://ncatlab.org/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Related: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_calculus](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_calculus)

</comment><comment><USER8> How can a theorem be "poorly" used?

<comment><USER9> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_limit_theorem](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_limit_theorem)

<comment><USER8> If you use the central limit theorem truly as a theorem, then you're using it correctly. Either a theorem applies or it does not. That's the point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The way this is presented in the blog post is as if this is a really insightful but now under-appreciated gem of mathematics.

But all that description is saying is, when a 2D shape is made by rotation, its area is the multiple of the 1D generator and the 1D path it takes? You don't say! And then volumes! when a 3D volume is made, its a 2D shape going through 1D path ...wow.

Forgive me if I am not impressed. This is not an unknown theorem but a trivial mathematical fact that one learns somewhere around Grade 7 in school. Of course, Pappus deserves credit for discovering in 300 AD, and the paper by the Goodmans is nice to have a general formal proof of. But even that paper concedes that they are simply proving a general proof for completeness.

<comment><USER11> But it isn't that simple. The insight is in the importance of using the centroid of the shape and the path it traces. It can't be any other point for the simpler form to work.

That's the cleverness, and the reason the centroid has that property is interesting enough, and not immediately obvious. But by understanding why it works, we can see we can apply it for much more general cases than surfaces of revolution, which is usually the only treatment the theorem gets out there. The purpose of the post was to illustrate the generality of the theorem.

<comment><USER10> The centroid is the average of all points of a shape. It is therefore the only point that contains information about the entire shape. Any other point doesn't. Naturally, since paths are distances and can also be averaged in the same way, it is actually quite obvious that the path travelled by the centroid of a shape is also the average path of all the points on that shape. In fact, it directly follows from the definition of a centroid consider that the path of a shape is the addition of one more dimensional coordinate to each of the points on that shape.

Sorry,I still do not see what makes this so special.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Create a single product checkout with SellOneThing.co - <AUTHOR> https://sellonething.co

<comment><USER2> love this lightweight app, great for marketing testing of a new idea etc</comment>


Ask HN: Drastic drop in problem-solving abilities - monoid-jotlle Hello, I have to ask, have anyone of you suffer from drastic drops in problem solving ability when doing uninspiring work over a long period of time? I always think before I act, but offlate my behaviour has completely flipped .. not sure if this is reason to worry <comment><AUTHOR> Are you depressed?

Look through the symptoms on the bulleted lists below

[http://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases- conditions/depression/sym...](http://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases- conditions/depression/symptoms-causes/dxc-20321472)

Do you recognize them? What are you doing instead of solving problems?

<comment> monoid-jotlle Thanks for the reply. Yeah there a small intersection, too early to call it depression I feel

<comment><USER2> It doesn't matter if you feel like you can diagnose yourself or not. If you're feeling weird and you don't like it, it's a good idea to see a therapist. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Even if it's just a dip in motivation or some low-level anxiety or something, it's worth it to work on it with a professional. Everyone has things they can work on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Make sure you're not taking any medication which effects your problem solving skills. Nothing is without suspicion, even things you take for granted. Sometimes medication of all kinds, particularly those that effect your hormone system, has unlisted side effects.

Another silent killer is poor air quality. Make sure you're getting lots of fresh air each day.

Obviously eating well & exercising helps as well.

Beyond that, simply taking a break may help.

<comment> monoid-jotlle I see. No I don't take any medication of any kind. Haven't taken any medication of any sort in the last 5 years, no pain killers, no coffee nothing. Strange now that I think about it. Must be bunch of other stuff like you mentioned. Thanks for the reply

<comment><USER3> Oh, yea, and vitamin D! Don't forget to get vitamin D! Beyond my suggestions I don't know.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Are you getting quality sleep at least 7 hours a day? If not, fix this. If you are, don't think you need to be worried either.

Uninspiring work can cause sustained and unhealthy stress in the best of us. And stress is known to deplete cognitive abilities. It's probably stress.

<comment><USER5> +1 on the quality sleep. if you wake up with dry mouth or drool regularly, you're mouth breathing during sleep which is commonly a warning sign of sleep apnea, which causes loads of problems, especially mental health probs.</comment></comment>


Who Is Paying Their 'Fair Share'? - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2019/01/who-is-paying-their-fair-share-more-on-the-history-of-tax-rates/581407/ <comment><USER2> Left out of the charts, is the entire 19th century up until 1913. Under a regime of NO income tax, the United States moved from a rural, agrarian society to the worlds leader in oil, steel, autos, airplanes, radios, telephones etc. Immigrants, like my grandmother, who arrived penniless in 1911, flocked to the country. But that was before we became 'progressive'.

<comment><USER3> Also left out is the 21-point drop initiated by JFK.

And the _effective_ marginal rates imposed via AMT for many years.

Neither fact fits _The Atlantic_ 's narrative.

<comment><USER4> Elaborate?

<comment><USER3> JFK's administration dropped the top marginal rate from 71% to 50%.

<comment><USER4> So just an irrelevant factoid. Sigh. For a moment I thought someone had found enough data to compute effective marginal rates. That would have been interesting.

The marginal rate on its own, without the rules that are used to compute the taxable income, is IMO about as meaningful as the wordcount of the rules.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How are you swifting through Hacker News content overload? - <AUTHOR>

Hacker News is so great with all great stuffs that most of the time I end up having a whole bunch of tabs open on my browser with content I find so interesting to read. Then I started leveraging Instapaper and but that list also has outgrown with so many unread items.<p>Just wanted to see how everyone else is efficiently swifting through this much of content overload? What tools do you use to make life easier? Any high time/low time that you see with the content flow? I don't want to miss out any of the great stuff that you all share here. <comment><USER2> I put together Hacker News Daily (<http://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/>) to solve the "don't want to miss out" problem.

</comment><comment><USER3> I discover many new and interesting projects on HN, but there isn't enough time to sift through all the github projects I want to see, download that cool framework to get a hello world working, or just read some long articles. It's a zero-sum game against having a day-job and maintaining meaningful meat-space relationships.

I'm not alone on this right?</comment>


Power Efficient Home Offices Can Save Money and Polar Bears - <AUTHOR> http://www.toptal.com/remote/power-efficient-home-offices-can-save-money-and-polar-bears

<comment><USER3> Cramming a hundred people in tiny cubicles under fluorescent lighting is cheaper than having individual offices for everyone, or home offices. Then again, working from home or working from a crappy cubicle… No contest :)

More and more people are either working from home offices on a daily basis, or bringing a lot of work home. The numbers are bound to go up, I mean it's good for employers and employees, probably good for public health, environment and so on. There's still a long way to go though.

</comment><comment><USER4> Come to think of it, telecommuting and self-employment isn't very power efficient. Although people don't drive to work, there's really no big incentive to use the most efficient devices. They cost a lot, and big companies are more likely to embrace these new technologies and products. They also get better pricing (they buy fleets of cars, hundreds of computers at a time, sophisticated heating and air conditioning and so on).

</comment><comment><USER5> What about installing a bunch of solar panels on the roof? It's expensive and they degrade over time, so is it worth it? I know many European governments offer subsidies for sustainable energy investments, or cheap credit if you want to make your home more efficient, but I'm still not sure it's an option for most people (it also depends on geography and a few other factors).

</comment><comment><USER6> For me, switching from "old school" light bulbs to LED and switching my old PC with new MPB resulted in a visible drop in my electricity bill. It's not gonna make me rich or anything but it's a good start and I after reading this I believe I've contributed to saving baby polar bears too ;)

</comment><comment><USER7> Integrated all in one desktops, or small desktops like the NUC should be a good choice for many people. Of course, they can't completely replace traditional desktops for everyone, but they are fast enough for most. If you don't want to run games, edit video and so on, you can easily replace your tower with small desktop like the NUC or Mac mini. I expect to see more of them, along with more all in ones. Personally, I lean toward small desktops rather than all in ones. They make more sense from a financial perspective. They are easier to upgrade, repair or simply replace while keeping your old monitor. Plus, there are loads of panel sizes to choose from, and more resolutions including 4K.

</comment><comment><USER8> A lot of home users have already moved to laptops, but not all. People who are into gaming will continue using desktops, along with all sorts of professionals (designers and so on). I am talking about proper desktops, towers with big motherboards, graphics cards and so on. These machines aren't going anywhere yet, there is simply no substitute. Most people I know still use desktops in their home offices.

<comment><USER9> I want to know if there's a huge difference between charging your laptop and running off of battery sometimes vs leaving it plugged in all the time - <USER2> sometimes move to my couch or something to do some work, and maybe leaving the charger behind is actually an additional cost

<comment><AUTHOR> As long as it's plugged in, a charger will waste some power, but when it's not actually charging anything, the losses are negligible

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The standard of living is different in different parts of the world. Even relatively small savings can mean a lot in some countries. However, investing in cutting edge efficiency can be prohibitively expensive if your household income is $1000 or so. New PCs, monitors, AC units - they all cost the same no matter where you live. Energy does not.

</comment><comment><USER11> The problem with hardware is that it's already very efficient and things are getting better. If you have a really old computer, yes, upgrade is probably worth it. If you use laptops, I don't think so. A lot of people stopped buying desktops already, because laptops became so cheap (if you need big monitor, you can always buy plug it in)

</comment><comment><USER12> I think it all depends on where you live and how much you pay already (as the author pointed out). This is basically a guide for developed countries, with very high power costs. Investing in home office efficiency in many parts of the world won't save you much money, and might not be worth it, although it is good for the environment.

</comment><comment><USER13> I doubt Nest and the Tesla battery will take off all over the world, maybe in a decade or so, but not soon. However, I think smart sockets could be useful if you want to save power without investing thousands of $$$

<comment><USER14> Any chance you can link any good posts on the cost/benefit of smart sockets and their potential future use?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Love the article. Advice in there do show a way how easy it is to make a little better organization of your living and work space for a lot of gain.

</comment><comment><USER16> That's what I call an useful post! My wife will be happy with all these ideas to decrease our electricity bill.

</comment><comment><USER17> Also, going to a coffee shop with a Chromebook is saving a lot of energy at home, I'd say ;)

</comment><comment><USER18> very insightful and informative</comment>


Maid, 26, tied to tree as punishment for leaving furniture outside in the sun - <AUTHOR> https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/maid-26-tied-tree-punishment-15977378 <comment><USER2> The "privileged" wealthy Arab Gulf states have a more laissez-faire approach to looking out for foreigners and exploitation. It's not even particularly about religion, as various "employers" in these countries don't treat other Muslims any better (i.e. Pakistani, Indian, Bangladeshi, Indonesian workers).

Those who are not Arab, and are not citizens, are of a less valuable lower class. There is huge cultural pride in being an Arab from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, UAE, Qatar, or Bahrain. They've had a complete desert-to-riches transformation in 1-2 generations. However, it turns out "living the high life" makes some employers feel like kings of the kingdom, and the foreigners are there as the serfs to do the unappealing dirty work. Not every Arab is rich and does this, there's just some that have a more medieval style of wealth.</comment>


Help a human - <AUTHOR> http://www.chillping.com/ <comment><USER2> With no descriptions of any criteria for choosing? With no open ledgers that show who the needy are and what amounts have been transferred? Never!</comment>


Flying Around the World in a Solar Powered Plane - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2016/07/flying-around-the-world-in-a-solar-powered-plane/493085/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> It's inventions like these that truly benefit humanity.

</comment><comment><USER3> We're living in the SF movies of 50 years ago.</comment>


EU data protection reform now irreversible following Parliament vote - <AUTHOR> http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_MEMO-14-186_en.htm

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the primary source. Can't wait for the rehashed news story from the conglomerate media.</comment>


Idea for HN: Wifi-centric apps - <AUTHOR>

Some people like me are cheap-skates and don't want to buy data plans for their smart-phones, using them in Wifi zones only. It would be great if more apps could download the data when connected, and allow browsing, editing etc. offline. I couldn't find an HN app or a StackExchange app that works this way. As soon as I open them while disconnected, they fail to show even the content I was browsing earlier. <comment><USER2> It would be difficult to do properly, unless it just cached only what you were looking at.

Most links in HN are to external sites, so you wouldn't want to be caching them on your phone. Then there's the amount of traffic to HN meaning that you would be caching massive amounts of data only to get mostly unusable links, and some comments about them.

I agree that it would be nice to keep reading things after you go offline, but I think the technical side of it would be prohibitive.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree, a "good" solution to this is hard. But I'd rather have a very bad solution right now, and if someone comes along and iteratively improves it, so much the better. Something like the text of the top 30 links + the ones you were reading in the last hour. A refresh button that updates the current content if it is changed, and an update cache to update this cache. I will certainly be very happy with something to start with.</comment></comment>


Ask YC: What do you do about spam? - <AUTHOR>

Hi all. We're a small team (5 people) but are inundated by spam.  We've all got iPhones or Blackberrys and so have been looking for online solutions which will filter the spam out before the email hits our server.  We tried one company, but they're wanting to charge us over $2000/year for this as a service and I was wondering what you do about spam?  Are there any low cost (but good) services that you would recommend similar to the above?<p>Thanks! <comment><USER2> This won't filter email before it hits your server, but if what you're really asking is filtering email before it hits your inbox, then we use spamassassin and it works great.

We have a few public email addresses on our site that aren't obfuscated in any way, and I'd say spamassassin misses maybe 1 or 2 spam messages every couple of days without any false positives. Granted, it will take some work to get it properly configured for your particular setup.

</comment><comment><USER3> Find a host that allows you to use Postini. I found a host last week that lets you buy Postini for $1/mailbox. Postini was bought by google and my understanding is that it is the logic behind why gmail has so much less spam than others.

<http://www.google.com/search?q=postini+email+hosting>

</comment><comment><USER4> Yep use gmail,the cool thing is gmail will allow you to send emails from your gmail account that look like its coming from your work account.

</comment><comment><USER5> google apps for domains will do the trick, you can set up wild card email address and forward everything to your own server.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow, this sounds awesome. I'll go check it out. Hopefully I can then re- distribute this cleaned email. Thanks for the tip though. I'll report my findings and a "How To" here if I get it to work</comment></comment>


Breakthrough Technologies 2014 - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/lists/technologies/2014/

<comment><USER2> First impression: Linkbait to paywall

Forces visitor to "activate" their account.

No thanks.</comment>


Bat: cat(1) clone with syntax highlighting and Git integration - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/sharkdp/bat#bat <comment><USER2> Note: If you try to `cargo install bat` it on MacOS (at least 10.12 with Homebrew Rust 1.25), you will need to `brew install cmake` first, or it will fail.</comment>


UK scientists ask for help in transcribing 200 years of rainfall data - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-52040822 <comment><USER2> Why science must always be done for free, and all the other non scientific stuff, including things dificult to explain logically, are gladly and generously overpaid?

Universities take an economic profit from this volunteer work. They can just share some and hire a few students to do it. And if there is a scarcity of more volunteers, maybe they should think about if repeatedly firing, whimsically dismantling expert teams, and cut the funds to scientists at the slighest opportunity really pays at long term.

<comment><USER3> Zooniverse was a direct response to a PhD project that Chris Lintott was supervising. His student was tasked with classifying galaxies and in the end decided that the volume of data was just too great.

There is a good supply of volunteers, and the tasks are enjoyed by those who undertake them. Where volunteers identify notable things, they are also credited by name in the resulting papers.

> maybe they should think about if repeatedly firing, whimsically dismantling > expert teams, and cut the funds to scientists at the slighest opportunity > really pays at long term.

I don't see much evidence for this happening in the UK, where the project is based.

<comment> nil-sec Ha, funny seeing this mentioned on HN, this student was my Professor for Astrophysics during my time in this field. He was a great mentor and taught me (and others) quite a lot, in particular about outreach and science communication. The Zooniverse project is amazing and citizen science in general is a great idea. However, you mention the crux of the issue already: the tasks need to be enjoyable. Looking at galaxies that potentially no other human ever laid eyes on is pretty much as exciting as it may get. A former colleague of mine (in the group of the mentioned student) worked on this interesting structure [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanny%27s_Voorwerp](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanny%27s_Voorwerp) that was discovered by one citizen scientist in the Zooniverse project (hence the name). It's one of the coolest success stories of crowd-sourced research I've heard about.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> 10+ years ago, Ancestry.com hired people in Asia to transcribe U.S. census returns and vital records. They also used volunteers: [http://blogs.ancestry.com/circle/?p=2321](http://blogs.ancestry.com/circle/?p=2321)

Not sure how it's done now, but I suspect it's very hard to automate owing to inconsistent handwriting styles, unusual names for people and places, footnotes and abbreviations, etc.

</comment><comment><USER5> [https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/edh/rainfall- rescue](https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/edh/rainfall-rescue) is the direct link where you can start transcribing the data yourself.

</comment><comment><USER6> Having collected so many data points, I wonder how it was used at the time? Clearly it was probably summed to give yearly totals and possibly monthly averages, and so on. But were the same sheets revisited year after year then?

</comment><comment><USER7> It would be great if the data entry panel and the main document scrolled separately. Right now I have to scroll up and down to enter data, which is frustrating.

<comment><USER8> I usually scroll down the main document and use the Tab key to tab between each field to enter data - that way, I don't need to keep scrolling back up and down.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Mechanical Turk?

</comment><comment><USER10> Some kind of input validation and user feedback would be welcome. Show a green check mark, if the input annual sum equals the computed sum of the input monthly sums. Typically, all values have two decimal places, thus, validate that there are no more and no less in the user input.

</comment><comment><USER11> Why hasn't this been automated? Digit recognition technology is pretty good and it seems like the forms are pretty standardized.

<comment><USER12> Probably because 99% accuracy isn't good enough.

<comment><USER13> What accuracy do you think humans have?

If I give you 1000 handwritten numbers, do you think you'll make less than 10 mistakes?

<comment><USER14> The forms are in open access, anyone can fill one form, so they surely did consider variations in accuracy (if not plain sabotage). They are probably submitting the same data to multiple people and the cross-checking the submissions. Also, the totals help to filter out submissions with mistakes. One can also add bound checking for individual values (misplaced decimal point, extra digits etc.). I would love to see how they do it, but they'll probably keep it confidential because trolls and other vandals.

<comment><USER15> This is exactly how zooniverse works. The first thing you do is go through a few known pieces of data to verify you know how to identify things correctly (more important for galaxy types, etc).

As you start labeling data everything has to reach a consensus. I'm not sure exactly how it works, but it does have multiple people verify each piece of data.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> that's a job. go pay someone for their work.

</comment><comment><USER17> What they should do is make a crypto platform like curecoin but for this where you earn coin for transcription of these documents (and others, could be a cool platform).

<comment><USER18> Or, you know, cut out the middle man and just pay per transcribed page.</comment></comment>


The origins of the Nazis' secret horse breeding project - <AUTHOR> https://blog.longreads.com/2016/08/23/the-secret-nazi-attempt-to-breed-the-perfect-horse/ <comment><USER2> >> Gustav Rau pulled a pistol from his hip and pointed it directly at the SS officer."You have no authority here," he said. "This horse farm is under the jurisdiction of the German Army. [...] Neither man moved until, with a curt nod, the officer stepped back. He agreed to remove his men."

I like this story. It emphasizes the error in the title. These seem to have been German horses, not Nazi horses. I see so many articles and books reference everyone and everything in the German armed forces of the time as "Nazi". The reality was complicated. There was much conflict as many in the armed forces felt they should remain politically neutral. This idea is not uncommon today. Many members of various armies go so far as to not vote while in active service. Others, notably in the US forces, see political detachment unpatriotic. This boils down to an officer within an older, politically detached force pulling a gun on an officer of a new and fanatically active force. There must have been many such stand-offs.

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

<comment><USER3> You're coming dangerously close to arguing for the clean Wehrmact myth. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_Wehrmacht](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_Wehrmacht)

<comment><USER2> Only a nut would think that they were clean. That's an answered question. I'm more interested in the internal debates, the clash of culture, within and between the various forces as exemplified by the story above.

I'm interested because we see similar divides within western forces in recent years. They aren't pulling guns on each other but there is an old guard with one set of values and a more political generation (post-9/11) with a very different cultural outlook.

The fact that a gun was pulled also points to a total breakdown of the standards of decorum armed forces reply upon to prevent internal arguments turning violent. This wasn't mutiny, but only because there was no clear mode to determine seniority between these two men.

<comment><USER4> > I'm interested because we see similar divides within western forces in > recent years. They aren't pulling guns on each other but there is an old > guard with one set of values and a more political generation (post-9/11) > with a very different cultural outlook.

Could you elaborate on this please? Which direction do you think the modern generation are taking?

<comment><USER2> Take the CIA drone program. During the early days they resisted armed drones. The old guard said they didn't do assassinations, didn't arm spy aircraft else their missions become acts of war (see Gary Powers). A decade later, armed drones are the backbone of the program. Targeted killings are a norm. Or, take the torture program. Despite him being a complete hawk, Senator McCain was against mistreating prisoners. He was a POW himself. But he lost his race for president. The new nominee is pro-torture. The old warriors of the cold war are retiring out and the new batch is moving into senior leadership. The new batch are much less restrained. They don't believe in principals based on reciprocity as they have been brought up fighting asymmetrical enemies. Every fight is now an existential battle to be fought without restraint or compromise, an attitude adopted from politics imho.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Slightly off topic, my wife just sent me this link after a friend mentioned today how Bayer had links to the Nazis. The last paragraph about IBM is particularly _funny_.

[http://www.11points.com/News- Politics/11_Companies_That_Surp...](http://www.11points.com/News- Politics/11_Companies_That_Surprisingly_Collaborated_With_the_Nazis)

<comment><USER6> In September of 1939, when Germany invaded Poland, the "New York Times" reported that three million Jews were going to be "immediately removed" from Poland and were likely going to be "exterminat[ed]."

IBM's reaction? An internal memo saying that, due to that "situation", they really needed to step up production on high-speed alphabetizing equipment. (Source: CNet)

<comment><USER7> When I click on the source link I get redirected to [http://www.cnet.com/topics/tech-industry/](http://www.cnet.com/topics/tech- industry/), which tells me nothing.

It doesn't strike me as very plausible that NYT would be reporting on the extermination of Jews in 1939. If they were, I am eager to learn about it. If anyone knows more about this, please link me to it.

To my knowledge, mass exterminations didn't begin until 1941, carried out by gas trucks and firing squads. The Final Solution was formulated in 1942, with the first death camps going into operation that year. In 1939 the Nazis had already started exterminating some "undesirables" (including at least the disabled and mentally ill) and they were already operating concentration camps, but the nominal goal of these camps was the eventual deportation of Jews rather than extermination. I would be surprised to learn that any Allied governments (or those who would become Allies) knew about the extermination of Jews in 1939, let alone the press.

<comment><USER8> The link should've been to [http://www.cnet.com/news/probing-ibms-nazi- connection/](http://www.cnet.com/news/probing-ibms-nazi-connection/). The claim about the IBM memo comes from Edwin Black, author of the book "IBM and the Holocaust". The reference to a New York Times article is specifically to one from its front page on September 13, 1939, titled "Nazis Hint 'Purge' of Jews in Poland". The article can be purchased from the New York Times at [http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9B06EED81330E...](http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9B06EED81330E53ABC4B52DFBF668382629EDE). You can also see bits of the article at [http://www.rarenewspapers.com/view/590025](http://www.rarenewspapers.com/view/590025), and it is also referenced at the New York Times itself more contemporarily in the article [http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/14/news/150th- anniversary-185...](http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/14/news/150th- anniversary-1851-2001-turning-away-from-the-holocaust.html).

(I haven't actually been able to read the referenced article in full, mind you, because I am cheap; thus, I am not personally vouching for the article saying what it is claimed to. I'm just providing to others the ability to do so if any of you have interest and/or disposability of income greater than mine at the moment.)

<comment><USER7> I am also too cheap to buy the article, but I think it is noteworthy that the full title is "NAZIS HINT 'PURGE' OF JEWS IN POLAND; 'Special Report' From Invaded Region Discusses Possible Solution of Problem GROUP EUROPE'S LARGEST 3,000,000 Population Involved --'Removal' From Europe Viewed as Benefit." We're primed to associate the word "solution" with extermination, but the Final Solution definitely did not exist as such in 1939. The word "removal" matches my recollection that official Nazi policy at this time was aimed at eventual deportation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wish there was a place I could go to read translated versions of notes kept by German scientists. They did horrible things but some of the other research was really cool like what I've learned about their attempts in creating nuclear power.

<comment><USER10> Not quite the same, but immediately after the war a number of prominent German scientists were interned at Farm Hall, in England, and secretly recorded for months. The full transcripts are available ([https://books.google.com/books?id=pzNjntMMq- oC](https://books.google.com/books?id=pzNjntMMq-oC)) and it's interesting to hear what Heisenberg and Otto Hahn thought of the Nazis and the successful American nuclear bomb. The transcripts were also adapted into a pretty good stage play a few years back.

<comment><USER11> Would that play be Copenhagen ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copenhagen_(play)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copenhagen_\(play\)))? If so, I highly recommend the BBC adaptation with Daniel Craig as Heisenberg, Stephen Rea as Niels Bohr, and Francesca Annis as Margrethe Bohr.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Since Lipizzans are mentioned. If you ever get the chance, go visit Lipica, Slovenia [1] it's the place the horses take the name after with a very old stud farm. The place is well underfunded and nothing special from a commercial tourism perspective imho (well, except if you like golf). But the nature and the horses are amazing. I can walk for hours there and get a huge energy boost and mood improvement.

[1] [http://www.lipica.org/en/](http://www.lipica.org/en/)

</comment><comment><USER13> Cuts out at the most interesting point.

<comment><USER14> Did you expect something else from a book excerpt? It's intended to draw you in so you buy a copy.

<comment><USER13> I actually do expect more from a longreads post. They're usually a top-notch site and above dark patterns like that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Secret Nazi attempt lol

You guys act like you wouldn't jump at the chance to have your pet project subsidized by ANYBODY, literally any government or organization with any ideology if it meant the chance for you to pursue your dream

Aren't most of you guys here interested in VCs, for example.

Interesting story though, any more details about the guys that successfully scammed Nazi taxpayers?

<comment><USER16> Investment money and government subsidization aren't the same thing but I get the gist. Money for doing what you'd rather be doing instead of what you're currently doing. Sounds lame though. Too many strings attached. Most people here aren't chasing that. They just want a better adblock.

<comment><USER17> Literally all of Silicon Valley and most of the computing research of the 20th century was built on funds the US government plowed into industry, in the hopes of developing tech that would help us nuke the Russkies while preventing them from doing the same to us.

<comment><USER18> I think you mean 'figuratively'. If it was literal there would have been no private industry at all, which is complete nonsense.

<comment><USER7> I believe the above commenter was being hyperbolic, but plenty of government money has supported private industry. That's not just defense contractors, either. Where would Silicon Valley be without ARPANET?

<comment><USER17> The Silicon Valley economy were established to develop radar and comms equipment for the military -- before digital computers even became the boom industry they are today.

So when I say "literally all", I'm exaggerating -- but only slightly. Not every dollar in the fucktons of VC money sloshing around out there can be traced back to defense funding, but an awful lot of them can.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>