Apple knows 5G is about infrastructure, not mobile phones (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://www.cringely.com/2018/11/21/apple-knows-5g-is-about-infrastructure-not-mobile-phones/ <comment><USER2> Wow. There's some truth in there, but a lot of nonsense. Especially in the analogies. If you can't see the difference between 60Hz and 144Hz when a small object (mouse pointer) is moving quickly against a static background, you're not paying attention. And 144Hz is amazingly far short of the actual perceptual limit in that case. Consider the difference between what it looks like to move your fingertip around and move a mouse pointer around at high speed. I haven't done tests to measure, but I'd be surprised if I mistook a 500Hz sampling rate for continuous movement.

This is all because there are edge cases for which your brain can make use of significantly more information than it can directly identify. Just because a pixel has a smaller arc than your retina can distinguish doesn't mean that its contribution to the image isn't recognized. "Retina" screens are still far below the level at which there would stop being advantages to increasing resolution. (Yes, there would be huge disadvantages too, and I'm not saying we need higher resolutions.)

What are the odds that there are edge cases where the extra bandwidth of 5G would actually matter? Seems pretty close to 100% to me. Some of those edge cases might be as easy to find as moving your mouse pointer rapidly. Maybe going to a sporting event?

<comment><USER3> I do wonder what the limit is in visual "framerate". Normal light seems very smooth, but I can easily pick up on individual "frames" if I wave my finger under an older fluorescent light (which should be running at 50-60Hz to match mains power if I understand it correctly).

<comment><USER4> The eyes don't have a framerate. A video at 60fps looks smooth but a single black frame on a white video is visible even at much higher fps. If I move my mouse quickly in circles on a 60fpx screen it looks like I have 10 individual cursors in a ring but if I move my finger quickly in circles it looks like I have a slightly transparent ring shaped finger with no gaps in between, I can see the smooth curve of the path that my finger took which would have to be captured at an incredibly high framerate to display on a monitor.

<comment><USER5> A bit off topic but I've been thinking there has to be a better way of handling this at the LCD controller level here...

Currently, a 60hz screen isn't perfect and pixel overdrive will be used to reduce motion blur. In effect, there are more 'unique intermediate frames' being displayed as the system tries to approximate the discrete input frames physically. The actual blur on fast-moving content on a modern screen is huge...

Ignoring latency for a moment, if a controller has the previous and next frame plus motion vectors and knowledge of the precise pixel response and decay curves for the monitor... it should be possible to continuously adjust the current/voltages(?) to every pixel to better approximate what a much higher refresh rate low motion blur panel would look like on high fps content. Can't remove blur but can make motion continuous rather than a stair step. A kind of smart motion interpolation + overdrive implementation.

The assumption is the higher fps the more linear the motion is frame to frame. 30 to 60fps interpolation should have more noticeable abnormalities than 120 to 1000hz.

<comment><USER6> I'd like to see a demo of this...

I doubt one could make it work for computer graphics (since motion vectors aren't easily accessible), but when displaying video the results could be good, although users seem to dislike content with interpolated generated frames, and perhaps your proposed tech could get a similar response.

<comment><USER5> Arguably computer graphics are the best candidate since many engines already have a velocity buffer for effects like temporal anti-aliasing and motion blur... would need API integration though.

My hunch is motion interpolation is preferred at high fps. E.g. a high action scene at 30 fps will need a lot more information to be filled in and has likely already been mastered with the target frame rate in mind (camera shutter speed etc).

But 120hz or more content will have very little motion between frames, and this motion will be far more linear (e.g. a finger might move 1cm between frames, but doesn't bend so less motion artefacts).

So 120hz content upscaled to 960hz+ would be much closer to native 960hz content and preferable to displaying at the original 120hz. A logical implementation would be VR headsets with a built-in DSP.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Just to get this out of the way, I see Apple shares currently presenting a huge buying opportunity. A good Christmas quarter will regain that lost 20 percent, and I don't see any reason why Apple shouldn't have a good Christmas quarter.

Yikes...

<comment><USER8> Yes, that comment was a not well timed at all.

<comment><USER9> Prediction is at best a fools game. I wish people were more forgiving. Just, of course, be extra careful when predictions involve your money.

<comment><USER10> If predictors state their confidence and make falsifiable predictions then they can be fairly graded and compared. This is especially true when many other people are also making predictions about the same event.

Cringely is the stereotype of the pundit who makes a lot of really confident predictions that are just absurdly, comically wrong, over and over and over. But he's fun to read, so he gets read. Same as the analysts that you see on the news.

<comment><USER11> I love watching Jim Cramer, but I never take his stock picks. I like his analysis and use it as a representation of the majority of household investors looking at the short term. I find that entertaining, and I like watching the movement of stocks after his analysis.

However, when I make my own investments, I do more thorough that watching a guy make quick-fire guesses.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> What a strange article.

The real issue is that 5G in 24–86 GH region has a range of about 1500 m, unlike LTE (and 5G in the LTE bands up to 6 GH) with a much longer range. So think of 5G more as a small-cell mesh technology -- I doubt you'll see it outside urban centers except for marketing -- your "5G" phone will continue to work but only at LTE speeds & bandwidth.

<comment><USER13> It's my understanding that 5G will also be used in the 600mhz spectrum at least by T-Mobile so will have the longer range with improved bandwidth and latency of 5G.

<comment><USER12> I'm afraid at the lower frequencies you're not going to see much improvement due to the laws of physics.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> "Just to get this out of the way, I see Apple shares currently presenting a huge buying opportunity. A good Christmas quarter will regain that lost 20 percent, and I don't see any reason why Apple shouldn't have a good Christmas quarter."

Ouch

<comment><USER15> My exact thought.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> People are talking about 5G from a consumer perspective here, which is fine, but I'm pretty sure the real benefits will first be seen in industrial manufacturing and autonomous vehicles. Perhaps gaming as well. The latency is a big factor.

So yes, you can already watch netflix on your phone, but not every technological step forward is about your individual entertainment :)

For reference, just look at what Ericsson is doing: [https://www.ericsson.com/en/5g/what- is-5g](https://www.ericsson.com/en/5g/what-is-5g)

<comment><USER17> Thank you. That was the clearest video explanation I could have asked for.

<comment><USER16> Maybe you saw it, but there's a video below the first one on that page which I think illustrates the latency difference pretty good too!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > But sometimes writers looking for a story don't fully understand what they > are talking about

Or they're just talking about what their audience wants to hear.

Without actually making a story up. Usually.

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm still looking for whitepapers on 5G. Has a standard even come together yet, or are we mostly just talking about high-band spectrum use that will be stopped by leaves?

The carriers are just going to push a software update to change the indicator for LTE-A to 5G, I think AT&T already did that...

<comment><USER20> A big part of 5G are deployments at sub-6Ghz frequencies.

So for this part, you do not have to worry about 5G being short range or easily blocked. Compared to LTE you will still get benefits like flexible numerology (ie. lower latency) and full duplex (ie. increased bandwidth).

The name 5G is more of a marketing term rather than an accurate technical description, just like the term "retina display". Different vendors can market the same technology very differently. For example, HSPA was marketed as 3.5G, 3G+, Turbo 3G, 3.7G, 3.9G and even 4G. It did not help that HSPA evolved a bit during its lifetime. I would not be surprised if operators arbitrary decide to call whatever they are using 5G.

<comment><USER21> AT&T has already decided to rebrand existing LTE infrastructure as "5G E" and label the new mm-wave stuff as "5G+".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> > All networking will be wireless and truck rolls will end forever. No more > cable guy.

People have been saying this for years, but I'm not yet convinced; I don't hear too many people giving up wired for 4G. The overall download limits must surely be tighter?

What 5G _might_ solve is cell congestion. There are already places in central Edinburgh where I can have full "bars" and no bandwidth, because it's too heavily contended with the other thousand people in the same cell now that everyone has a phone that's polling all the time.

</comment><comment><USER23> The author isn't thinking ahead enough. We might be reaching human perceptual limits for rectilinear 2-D displays -- but what about stereoscopic, 360, lightfields, ...? There's plenty of future formats for content that will drive bandwidth and resolution improvements for a long time to come.

<comment><USER24> That all comes out in 2019?

<comment><USER25> I have a streaming volumetric video chat prototype. I plan on launching private beta this month. I also have a portable hardware display that I guess you could call a phone that I'm working on. I expect it to be testing with a small group by Q2. I'm petty excited about 2019. 5G makes things a lot easier and really increases how people can interact with the content.

Just for reference, streaming point cloud is about 100mb/sec. You can compress "frames" with the totally unproven Google Draco product, but there's nothing quite like mpeg for the format. I guess it's really hard to call it a format since there's no real standard at current.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> For me personally the jump from 4g(LTE) to 5G is much less apparent than from 3G to 4G. It's not unlike the upgrades in video technology.

2G -> 3G -> 4G -> 5G

VHS -> DVD -> Bluray -> UHD

While the jump is significant between each level, the apparent improvements are diminishing. On LTE I can watch Netflix, live tv, Facetime, use the internet as I would at home on Wifi.

Using the internet on the go (mobile) won't see that much of an apparent improvement (unless you are needing high bandwidth connectivity), but I could definitely see a case if this was used to push gigabit level wireless speeds in hard to install/dense residential locations.

<comment><USER27> I think the biggest change won't be the faster speeds that 5G will deliver; but that it will necessarily mean the carriers will have to significantly raise their bandwidth limits beyond the current 1-10GB/mo limits (even "Unlimited" plans have soft caps and speed limits).

Kinda like how 3G meant iMessage, Skype and Hangouts rendered SMS obsolete so carriers stopped charging per-message - I think 5G will mean more people will stream other video streaming services (this skirting the controversy over zero-rating Netflix and YouTube to the detriment of their competitors). Hopefully this will also mean that people in underserved rural areas stuck on atrociously slow DSL can get decent service without needing to compromise with a high-latency satellite connection or a low-transfer-limit LTE hotspot.

<comment><USER28> Herein lies the question, if we actually prefer to text instead of vid/facetime/etc how this would be relevant. Streaming applications from powerful server might be a thing though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I'm not familiar with the author but I agree with their first few points. But I feel there's more to it than that. Apple can afford to hold off on 5G because the networks aren't there, the "5G" term as an industry-sanctioned umbrella for related innovations is firmly in the hype-phase of the hype cycle and its various features are intentionally and unintentionally conflated (both at the origin by industry and along the way by writers and pundits in media), and because Apple is an integrated hardware-software platform distinct from the only other mobile alternative, and is therefore more resilient against a hypothetical consumer exodus over not supporting something no one can yet use anyway. Unlike consumers, some investors may see it differently, but Apple isn't in dire financial straits either.

As for use-cases that 5G will enable, industry groups are hopeful for nearly every scenario that involves sending and receiving data. But technical fitness and business models are different questions entirely. And if we're talking about the kinds of hardware Apple currently makes, 5G is to be understood solely in terms of wireless carriers a customer can subscribe to a plan for, not in some intricate use-case for machine-to-machine communication.

Unlike a more invested party and component-maker like Qualcomm, Huawei Nokia, or Samsung, their customer base isn't industry at large, but people who want a tablet-like device to carry with them. They can punt this to the next generation of phones or the one after that, they can wait out the network to be built, for the insane number of access points to be deployed, and perhaps even until their feud with Qualcomm winds down, and the state of play (solely in terms of mobile data and its utility for a smartphone) isn't going to be running circles around them for a while.

</comment><comment><USER30> ...because this story presumes that 5G support is somehow vital to mobile phones. It isn't.

...

But the important question to ask here is why that speed difference matters for mobile phone users? It doesn't. 5G is no killer app.

———-

Stopped reading at this point.

1) based on quotes from various providers, one big benefit of 5G is in bandwidth. I don't personally know how (beyond less time to download something opens up bandwidth for other devices quicker), but that'd seem to be a big deal. The whole network saturation issues I hear about (T-Mobile is great in my area and I've never experienced throttling issues or the like, but I've heard stories).

2) What other killer feature can a phone have at this point? I'll give credit to phones that flip out into tablet like displays, but I think just about any truly compelling innovation is pretty done in these devices.

3) Anecdote time. I live in a neighborhood where we spent 5 years fighting a provider that maintained an exclusive easement over TV/Internet. This provider's speed was 10Mbps on a great day and their peak hours were, per their support staff, "between 4pm and 1am" where you were lucky to get Facebook to load (and people sharing pictures/video which seems to be the big use case was a painful experience to be on the receiving end of). Finally, we got out of it and while waiting for Spectrum to lay their infrastructure, I was using T-Mobile's International Plus add-on as a hotspot for desktop, laptop and TVs and it was fantastic (relative to what we had). Mobile LTE/5G could very easily serve those in similar situations and if infrastructure is in place, rural areas.

I'm of the mind that I won't buy a 5G device until the infrastructure is there so I'm okay with what I read to a point, but it seemed like a case of making a myriad excuses after a point and tired of it quickly.

</comment><comment><USER31> 5G home routers will come before first. It's seems that the plan is to get early adopters to replace cable. [https://www.verizonwireless.com/5g/home/](https://www.verizonwireless.com/5g/home/)

<comment><USER4> I can see it happening in Australia where the internet is universally shit unless you are in the lucky 1% of areas. My office is in the center of the city and has 10Mbit/s down. We would easily be in range of any future 5g infrastructure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> > Much of this spectrum has been bought-back by wireless carriers from TV > license holders. We'll see this trend continue over the next decade or so > until there will be no over-the-air TV left at all. At that point you'll > still be able to watch all the same TV, but it will be over 5G, instead.

Now this is interesting. I wonder if this means the rural and the poor will have to give up on free[0] television.

[0] Ad supported.

Edit: Not trying to imply _only_ the rural and poor enjoy free tv. Cord cutters do too. My concern is that they won't be able to afford the new alternative or it just won't be available.

</comment><comment><USER33> Maybe I am biased, but live TV is not going to die completely. News, sport, concerts, lotto results, and other timely things will continue to have demand. IP is a terribly broken and inefficient medium to deliver this to the audience, and the internet as it stands today with what we deliver simply does not have the capacity to survive a "traditional TV switch off". Some broadcasters are testing with deploying onto 5G with various trials, but most appear to be doing an all IP operation, and handing over the controls of deployment from the incumbent transmission networks who charge on site/power and other performance metrics, to telcos who will probably charge both the broadcaster _and_ the end user per packet, as well as introducing more middlemen (CDNs) to further create inefficiencies.

There's a lot to work out before Cringely's "utopian" 5G network to rule them all can actually exist.

<comment><USER34> TV delivered over IP is not the same as TV delivered over the internet. When your ISP is the same entity as your TV carrier, the traffic doesn't have to travel over the internet. Comcast is already doing this with X1 and Verizon is already doing this with Fios.

<comment><USER35> Yeah exactly. Lots of cable TV networks are all-IP, using multicast to distribute the signal.

But the previous post is 100% correct in saying that "video over unicast on the internet" is massively inefficient compared to current broadcast techniques.

People want Netflix-style video on demand though. Outside live news & sports that will kill broadcast TV.

<comment><USER6> What seems 'horribly inefficient' today is usually the future.

Sending cartoons as raster rather than vector data is also horribly inefficient, yet every TV network does it.

Sending music as MP3 is horribly inefficient compared to the original notes in midi form, yet everyone does it.

Taking a photograph of your electric meter rather than writing down the number is millions of times more wasteful of space, yet people do it.

<comment><USER36> > Sending music as MP3 is horribly inefficient compared to the original notes > in midi form, yet everyone does it.

If you've ever played an instrument that isn't a bad synthesizer, you'll know why everyone does this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> fta

''' The whole idea behind 5G is that it will allow the wireless carriers to totally eat the lunches of wireline telephone, cable and Internet service providers while also supplanting broadcast TV. '''

well, most of the wireline operators have a _huge_ presence in the wireless world as well, think at&t, vzw, sprint, vodafone etc. of the world.

afaik, 5g has primarily been about better specturm utilization. core-network has not really changed significantly since 3g -> 4g transition (where it i.e. core, became an all ip network). sure, you keep hearing about things like control-plane user-plane separation (cups) etc. but that is just a marginal improvement over what has already been deployed/running...

</comment><comment><USER38> Can anyone tell me in which country I can use 5G network as a regular consumer? I don't really understand the author point if there is nowhere I can access this tech.

Also, having a 5G network with lots of restriction won't bring much usage. I prefer to have a good 3G unlimited connection than 5GB at 4G speeds. Same thing for 5G. If we cannot have unlimited (or close to unlimited) data then new usage cannot really be developed.

Edit : typos.

<comment><USER39> >I don't really understand the author point if there is nowhere I can access this tech.

It's that his point? Others complain that Apple doesn't have a 5G iPhone ready. Part of Cringelys point is that it doesn't make sense to penalize Apple for the lack of 5G support, when there's no infrastructure available.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> None of the supposed speed improvements matter in the US due to widespread usage caps and throttling.

Latency? That sounds nifty for something like video confrencing. Alas, the bandwidth caps are there anyways.

Faster speed just means a random website can burn through your Verizon cap that much faster. "Unlimited" has and is a willful lie and deception by wireless companies. The fine print always says the opposite.

</comment><comment> GuB-42 No excuses to Apple.

First, 5G is the future, it may not be important at first but it will eventually change. Is a bit of future proofing too much to ask of a high end smartphone?

Second, 5G is not just about maximum bandwidth, it also gives you access to less saturated frequencies.

The lack of 5G is a very big deal, especially when smartphones vendors struggle to find even minor differentiating factors.

<comment><USER41> I agree about future-proofing a phone from the consumer point of view, but it would decrease Apple's margins or increase the price of an already really expensive phone for no current benefit.

On the technical side, I think 5G has a serious problem of being blocked by just about anything at those frequencies. I'm sure the RF wizards will get it sorted out, but I imagine early adopters are going to suffer with garbage signal indoors.

<comment><USER29> More on this: upcoming 5G implementation proposals, such as 3GPP's '5G NR', have bands [1] in the UHF, SHF, and EHF range, out of which the EHF/mmWave bands are most susceptible to environmental attenuation, but they're also the ones capable of the highest throughput. The UHF bands are rather similar to LTE, and deliver only a modest improvement.

So really, 5G is a somewhat abstract standard by ITU-T that specifies requirements, and the industry then delivers a suite of technologies that are deployed together and marketed as 5G. In the case of 4G, the same was true at first, but then non-confirming LTE was cobbled together as a series of progressive enhancements of existing tech by the industry, and marketed as "4G", co-opting the term in consumers' minds and making the prior formal definition irrelevant.

With the hype and anticipation over 5G rapidly intensifying, there's a chance the same might happen again, as networks are eager to brand any progressive enhancement as a true differentiating factor. It's enabled by the term "5G" having cachet with consumers, yet its technical specs are relatively obscure so average customers lack meaningful information and recourse to challenge the marketing.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5G_NR_frequency_bands](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5G_NR_frequency_bands)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Just to get this out of the way, I see Apple shares currently presenting a huge buying opportunity. A good Christmas quarter will regain that lost 20 percent, and I don't see any reason why Apple shouldn't have a good Christmas quarter.

</comment><comment><USER43> i remember a call from someone trying to sell me 3G internet. she had a very hard time understanding why the bandwidth they offered wasn't enough, i already had a fiber connection. its nice to only have to wait a second when downloading packages using apt-get, downloading free OS distributions, container images, training sets, software modules and dependencies, raw images, backups, installing a game from Steam, etc.

</comment><comment><USER44> There need not be any limit. The eye can pick up a of a single photon in the right context. It doesn't get any briefer than that.

</comment><comment><USER45> (2018)

<comment><USER46> It's over. What about it?

<comment><USER47> Articles from previous years are postfixed with (year)

<comment><USER46> That's the joke...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> I read an article a couple of months ago where numerous scientists signed a letter proclaiming significant health risks to ubiquitous 5G in society, that the waves are apparently quite dangerous to health? Anyone know anything about that?

I think this was it: [https://www.saferemr.com/2017/09/5G-moratorium12.html](https://www.saferemr.com/2017/09/5G-moratorium12.html)

<comment><USER49> One of the primary premises of cellular technology is Frequency re-use (time division is as well, combined called OFDMA) but just in terms of Freq re-use, if you want to increase the capacity of a cellular system then you want to reduce the size of a cell site. The way this is done is by reducing the power level (also lowering the elevation of antennas). When you reduce the power level then adjacent cell sites can re-use the same frequencies without interfering with each other.

When people hear about 5G where plans call for 300 meter cell spacing, they panic thinking that the power levels will increase, but in reality it does not. Because the transmitter power levels are reduced commensurately.

A lot of people (even scientists) do not understand this basic concept. Current spacing and power levels are 2Km at 40Watts (typical but varies) in an urban area for low and mid band (1ghz - 3ghz). If you reduce the spacing to 300M and 5W, then you really have not changed the energy density. But what you accomplish is getting more capacity by enabling more re-use of frequency spectrum.

The numbers are different for different bands due to different propagation properties, but that is the basic concept.

<comment><USER48> I was referring to this:

[https://www.saferemr.com/2017/09/5G-moratorium12.html](https://www.saferemr.com/2017/09/5G-moratorium12.html)

The concerns seemed legit, I wonder why the industry is either not paying attention to them, or not at least responding to the concerns

<comment><USER50> People respond to these concerns constantly. This was the same group against, 2G, 3G, 4G, wireless power meters, etc. In fact, The response from the DIRECTORATE-GENERAL HEALTH AND FOOD SAFETY of the European Union was linked on the site.

Of course, the SaferEMR folks dismiss it and all of the safety testing and health risk studies that have been done. Their official stance is that we haven't demonstrated that there couldn't be some unknown mechanism by which EMR could negatively impact human health so we should curtail all wireless technology until we have proven that there is no possible down side. This is of course impossible.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How Giant Ships Are Built - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/06/17/business/economy/how-container-ships-are-built.html <comment><USER2> The pictures alone are worth the read.

I've seen huge ships in dry dock a few times before, but these pictures are an even better experience of the whole process.</comment>


Ask HN: determine language - <AUTHOR>

I'm planning to work on a project that will involve i) harvesting small pieces of text and ii) determining the language of those pieces, to be later able to display the pieces sorted by language. I'd be very interested to hear HN'suggestions on how to do that language identification part the simplest, quickest, cheapest way. Not looking for 100% accuracy here, rather something that can be implemented in a day or 2 of coding and gives satisfactory enough results ;) Thanks! <comment><USER2> Ooh, natural language processing, my first love.

You can take a corpora of text in any language, collect letter frequencies, and create a vector for each language. Then, when you have sample text, create a vector of letter counts. Take dot products of sample vector and pattern vectors, rank by magnitude in descending order as guesses.

You can also do this with bigrams or trigrams.

There is a lot of academic work on this question. I can't recall citations since it has been 7 years since I worked with it.

</comment><comment><USER3> The simplest, quickest, cheapest way to solve any problem is to let somebody else solve it for you.

Like Google, for example. Their AJAX Language API for Translation and Detection sounds like it might fit your need.

<http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxlanguage/documentation/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Looks to work efficiently with even very short texts, but I'm afraid we'll get banned pretty soon by Goog : we'll have lots and lots of very short text, so we'll need to invoke the API a lot... (with the aforementioned ban outcome, we fear :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you're using PHP, a while back I found a library that returned a scored array of languages the texxt might be. It needed quite a bit of text to work well, but I was working with only a few sentences. I can probably dig it out for you if you want.

<comment><AUTHOR> hmm, our early tries with a php lib proved no good since we have very limited text to analyse each time (not enough, I mean, for the library to help us identify the language efficiently) :(</comment></comment>


Aether - <AUTHOR> http://getaether.net/about.html

<comment><USER2> Nice. It would be nicer if you actually put any effort in describing what the heck is this instead of describing what it is written in.</comment>


Fable: F# to JavaScript Transpiler - <AUTHOR> http://fsprojects.github.io/Fable/ <comment> david-given Can anyone comment on Fable vs Elm?

I really like the idea of Elm; but I also really like the idea of using the same language for both the frontend and the backend, so I can share code, and I currently can't do that in Elm.

But I could do in with Fable, using F# on Mono on the server. The idea of using something as big as Mono doesn't really fill me with joy, but F# is supposed to be a thoroughly decent functional language (I've never used it myself). Except... Elm comes with all this value-added functionality that's ideal for web development. Unless Fable has something equivalent, I lose out on half the benefit.

Anyone?

<comment><USER2> I can speak to F# being a joy to program in, though I have not yet taken the plunge into transpiling it to javascript yet. Websharper is another option you can look at for that, which may be more nicely integrated.

.NET Core is coming to Linux soon and will give you another option for compiler/runtime which will be good. Performance will be better, but mono has been working fine for me so far.

<comment><USER3> F# on .NET Core works now with released rc2. just go to [http://dot.net](http://dot.net) and download .NET Core SDK. Tested on supported ubuntu/osx/docker/win

for example ubuntu 14.04 is [https://www.microsoft.com/net/core#ubuntu](https://www.microsoft.com/net/core#ubuntu)

if you dont want to use installers, just unzip the binaries packages from [https://www.microsoft.com/net/download#core](https://www.microsoft.com/net/download#core) and add that directory to PATH

after that

\- mkdir hello && cd hello

\- dotnet new --lang fsharp

\- dotnet restore

\- dotnet run

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Compare this to Reason [https://facebook.github.io/reason/](https://facebook.github.io/reason/)</comment>


NYPD launches new analytics tool for fighting terror, crime - <AUTHOR> http://www.it-networks.org/news/nypd-launches-new-analytics-tool-for-fighting-terror-crime

<comment><USER2> "Data from cameras will be purged every 30 days" ... "the NYPD can not only track a suspect's car in the city, but also determine where the vehicle might have been the preceding days, weeks and even months"

So, which is it?

Also, radiation detectors?! Surely they've just been thrown in as a bit of a joke/toy. Gun shot detectors would perhaps be a more sensible addition.

Putting the privacy considerations aside there's a lot of potential utility in systems like this. Robust person recognition and tracking from camera to camera could be really useful.

<comment><USER3> "Data from cameras will be purged every 30 days unless there is a reason to keep it longer."

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> So now when someone posts a video of the police breaking the law the police will be able to track them down.

</comment><comment><USER5> Also, Think Of The Children! I'd say "disseminating terror and thus securing funding" is the actual goal. (Terror, terrorism, same thing, right?)</comment>


Cloudflare WARP+ VPN and others aren't hiding your real IP, test your VPN here - <AUTHOR> https://svpn.com/ <comment><USER2> WARP has never claimed to hide your IP. In fact, they literally explained that it didn't in their announcement: [https://blog.cloudflare.com/announcing-warp- plus/](https://blog.cloudflare.com/announcing-warp-plus/)

"WARP is not designed to allow you to access geo-restricted content when you're traveling. It will not hide your IP address from the websites you visit. If you're looking for that kind of high-security protection then a traditional VPN or a service like Tor are likely better choices for you."

<comment><AUTHOR> The general understanding of a consumer VPN is that it hides your real IP address, and provides privacy.

The CloudFlare WARP+ app even says "Your Internet is private" on the splash page when WARP+ is enabled which is false, and misleading.

CloudFlare do not make this clear enough in their app, they should state clearly that your real IP is exposed on the splash screen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Amusing: This Web site uses Cloudflare:

Cloudflare Ray ID: nnnnnnnnnnn • Your IP: nn.nn.nn.169 • Performance & security by Cloudflare

<comment><AUTHOR> Why wouldn't it?

CloudFlare is good at protecting websites.

They just need to be more transparent in the WARP+ app itself, and make it clear your real IP is exposed on the splash screen maybe.</comment></comment>


Yahoo Acquires Xobni - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/03/yahoo-acquires-xobni/

<comment><USER2> There's also a very cool history behind Xobni featured on their homepage: [https://www.xobni.com/](https://www.xobni.com/).

<comment><USER3> The guy is holding the dog from the groin...

<comment><USER4> That dog is a girl and was pretty squirrelly 60 lbs lab for the photo and hard to hold. I checked with her if she wouldn't mind me holding her "by the groin" and got her consent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Blog post: [http://blog.xobni.com/post/54534193175/oohay](http://blog.xobni.com/post/54534193175/oohay)

FAQ: [https://support.xobni.com/entries/21914995](https://support.xobni.com/entries/21914995)

</comment><comment><USER6> Seems like a sensible acqui-hire.

The only surprising thing for me is the amount of attention those small acquisitions by Yahoo get around here.

<comment><USER7> $60 million is an acqui-hire?

<comment><USER8> When Yahoo is on the acquiring end? Yeah.

Investors and board members know Yahoo is cash rich and sitting in a talent void. I know of a deal where they paid closed to $4 million a head.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Don't Xobni own the bookmarking tool that they rescued a few years ago?</comment>


US ready to 'hand over' the internet's naming system - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-37114313 <comment><USER2> Previously discussed: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12311433](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12311433). We also reverted the editorialized submitted title to that of the article.

</comment><comment><USER3> Honestly, I much prefer the US having control of DNS over pretty much any governmental body. Pretty much every other government has a pretty strong history of wanting to wipe things from the internet without any judicial proceedings.

Though it seems like it's more the US giving more power to ICANN

</comment><comment><USER4> >US to hand over ICANN to UN

ICANN is an independent organization, and DNS will not be controlled by the UN. This is actually a fear-mongering narrative being repeated by American conservative news sites. Obama's administration promised control of DNS would not be handed over to the UN, which would make it susceptible to political pressure from e.g. authoritarian governments.

The plan is for ICANN, a non-profit company located in California, to work with the private sector to steward DNS.

<comment><USER5> Legal control of ICANN will be ceded to a board that is ultimately chosen by the UN. Given that the US is pretty much the only country with anything approaching absolutist free speech protections, this is very concerning. Majorities in the UN support banning the "defamation of religion" and other things considered to be hate speech. What you're saying is directly contrary to the facts.

Given that you're directly contradicting the facts presented in the BBC article, you should provide evidence.

<comment><USER5> I'm mistaken that it's being directly handed over to UN control, but the government advisory panel does have some power and there is no limits on what ICANN itself now decides to do. They are now free to reorganize themselves however they see fit. In order to get around antitrust law, they would have to put themselves under some kind of governmental control, such as by joining the UN.

I don't see any good reason to risk anything. US control was working perfectly fine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The hackernews headline _really_ needs to not say "the UN".

All the article says is the ICANN, based in Los Angeles, is no longer under the Department of Commerce, but instead will be an "organisation that answers to multiple stakeholders". It does not go into detail as to who those stakeholders are.

It literally has nothing to do with the United Nations except for a paragraph that said the UN tried to take control in 2012 and the US (and others) shot down that idea.

</comment><comment><USER7> Nowhere does this article say ICANN is being handed over to the UN.

<comment><USER8> In fact, in direct contradiction:

> Instead, the US has used its remaining power over DNS to shift control to > Icann, not the UN.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The orginal title is, "US ready to hand over the internet's naming system" . The edited title here on HN, "US to hand over ICANN to UN" is wrong.

ICANN is already independent and sending ICANN to UN, if it happens, might only slow down their decision making (cause there will be too many parties to satisfy).

</comment><comment><USER10> The title of this definitely needs to be changed back to the original, not only is it factually wrong, but it tries to paint the issue with a specific narrative/brush.

Currently reads:

> US to hand over ICANN to UN

Original:

> US ready to 'hand over' the internet's naming system

</comment><comment><USER11> I remember reading about this several days ago & that the article said how the US had decided not to let the UN run ICANN. When I saw this at the #1 position here titled "US to hand over ICANN to UN", my first thought was that this is real news, being a reversal of what had previously been decided. I immediately wondered what was behind such a decision. But then I see it's just an erroneous title, & it's the same as what I read previously. I agree the title should be changed- this is alarmist in its current state.

EDIT: Seems the title was changed as I was typing this comment. Good.

</comment><comment><USER12> Given the exploiting and abuse of the unprotected internet protocols by private and state actors, it's likely that in 10 years we won't rely on one or two central databases controlled by benevolent managers anymore. It will be spread and you'll get to pick what neighborhoods you'd like to visit.

</comment><comment><USER13> A moderator or the submitter should update the grossly editorialized and misleading title of this submission.

</comment><comment><USER14> Does this mean that ICE won't be able to do takedowns of domains as easily anymore?

<comment><USER15> No.

<comment><USER14> Thanks. That cleared it up :)</comment></comment></comment>


Design Decisions: New Basecamp blank slates - <AUTHOR> http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2322-design-decisions-new-basecamp-blank-slates <comment><USER2> As someone who sometimes think the advice 37s tries to be a one-size-fit-all (that is: it worked for us, it's the gold standard), I've got to say I've never been disappointed with their decisions in writing software and designing UI.

My favorite feature: Backpack remembers that I use openID to log in, so when I boot up my laptop, and head over to backpack that's the login screen I see. Well done.

<comment><USER3> Thanks.

For the record, we've never believed our ideas are the gold standard or the only way to do something. They've worked well for us, and we share them with that experience. We just don't think appending "it depends" to every opinion serves anyone well. Reasonable people know everything ultimately depends on your own situation.

<comment><USER2> _We just don't think appending "it depends" to every opinion serves anyone well._

This does make a lot of sense, actually. (Also, good job catching me completely by surprise, I wasn't expecting you to drop by ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wonder whether anyone will ever read the paragraphs between 'The are no X on this project' and the button to add them. Reminds me of landing pages, perhaps bullet points as to why you should use them would work.

I always thought the videos were a good idea, then again I've never actually used the concept, I guess they looked at the actual view rates and saw no-one was using them?

edit - just noticed the comments say the videos were useful and JF's replied that the videos are out of date.</comment>


Running Java in a Container - <AUTHOR> https://mesosphere.com/blog/java-container/ <comment><USER2> Not just the JVM, lot of libraries build thread pools based on number of processors and some of them even hard code the multipliers (X the number of processors etc).

Setting up each one becomes a lot of work fast, so we wrote a LD_PRELOAD[1] hook that overrides sysconf[1] _NC_PROCESSORS* call to get number of processors availabale/online to a certain specified value and is baked in the docker image by default during builds.

[1] [http://man7.org/linux/man- pages/man3/sysconf.3.html](http://man7.org/linux/man- pages/man3/sysconf.3.html)

<comment><USER3> Can we expect that kind of horror to fade away as Java evolves?

In the .Net world there's the ThreadPool class to manage the single process- wide thread-pool, and the Task class to enqueue and orchestrate concurrent jobs (it uses ThreadPool and almost completely abstracts away the thread management).

(You _could_ write your own thread-pool, of course, but for most code that wouldn't make sense.)

As I understand it, the JVM is rather behind in this department. (Not to mention async/await.)

<comment><USER4> java.util.concurrent is actually more advanced that TPL, with contributions from Doug Lea.

Java just lacks async/await primitives.

<comment><USER5> java.util.concurrent certainly has more buttons and levers you can fiddle with. I could probably burn at least a week trying to grok the whole thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The just-released Java 10 has improvements in the container case: [https://www.opsian.com/blog/java-on- docker/](https://www.opsian.com/blog/java-on-docker/)

edit: at the end of the article, it is acknowledged that there are improvements in Java 10 and the following link is provided: [https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8146115](https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8146115)

<comment><USER7> There was a discussion about this yesterday on Reddit:

[https://reddit.com/r/java/comments/85t7dt/java_on_docker_wil...](https://reddit.com/r/java/comments/85t7dt/java_on_docker_will_no_longer_suck_improvements/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This. I've seen container builds for Java applications broken in the described ways fail in production over and over again. Just because Docker makes building an image very easy doesn't mean that you will end up with a production ready image using three lines of code in a Dockerfile. Most of the time people don't even bother to use a non-root user to execute the jvm in their container...

That's why I feel platforms like Cloud Foundry are a much better fit for teams that don't have tons of container experience but want to get the benefits of a containerized runtime. The CF java buildpack[1] for example automatically handles OOM and heap settings calculation while building your application container.

disclaimer: co-founder at meshcloud, we offer a public cloud service for Cloud Foundry and K8s hosted in german datacenters.

        [1] https://github.com/cloudfoundry/java-buildpack

<comment><USER9> I wrote up my experience[0] on containerizing JVM based applications a bit ago using the cloud foundry java buildpack's memory calculator. Fortunately the JVM now has a way to respect cgroup memory[1] making it a bit simpler.

[0]: [https://medium.com/@matt_rasband/dockerizing-a-spring- boot-a...](https://medium.com/@matt_rasband/dockerizing-a-spring-boot- application-6ec9b9b41faf) [1]: [https://twitter.com/codepitbull/status/934384652806221825?s=...](https://twitter.com/codepitbull/status/934384652806221825?s=20)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Fabric8 has really good base java images[1] with a script that simply sets environment variables with right GC and CPU parameters before launching Java, with nice sane defaults.

Heavily encourage anyone running Java in containers to use their base image, or for larger organizations to create standard base image dockerfiles that set these JVM envvar parameters. A simple contract is: ENTRYPOINT belongs to the base image, CMD belongs to downstream application images (unless something else essential).

Just don't use vanilla "FROM openjdk:8-jre" and expect it to work. That's the worst way to kill application performance and reliability in a container.

1: [https://github.com/fabric8io- images/java/blob/master/images/...](https://github.com/fabric8io- images/java/blob/master/images/centos/openjdk8/jre/run-java.sh#L3)

<comment><USER11> Jdk8u131+ and 9 support detecting cpu and memory limits to set heap and core usage.

[https://blogs.oracle.com/java-platform-group/java-se- support...](https://blogs.oracle.com/java-platform-group/java-se-support-for- docker-cpu-and-memory-limits)

<comment><USER10> We tried those flags in the beginning since it was introduced in docker openjdk image[1].

When we dug in further, we find its just not trouble free (i.e. experimental). The default is to use 1/4th of RAM which is entirely inefficient [2]. The "MaxRAMFraction" parameter allows to specify 1/n fraction and not possible to efficiently use 65% or 75% of memory. The only place to start is to set MaxRAMFraction=2 and that already means only 50% of memory is used for heap. That produces a lot of wastage. A lot of resource efficiency is gained by starting with 65% or 80%.

OpenJDK 10 is introducing a new option "MaxRAMPercentage" [3] and that goes closer to making a script unnecessary.

TL;DR - The default flags are still experimental in JDK 8/9, and deemed to be better on Java 10. A script is just better for consistency.

1: [https://github.com/docker- library/docs/pull/900](https://github.com/docker-library/docs/pull/900)

2: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16636544](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16636544)

3: [https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8186248](https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8186248)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> These options were also backported to Java 8 in update 131 - [https://blogs.oracle.com/java-platform-group/java-se- support...](https://blogs.oracle.com/java-platform-group/java-se-support-for- docker-cpu-and-memory-limits)

</comment><comment><USER13> Anyone here actually use Java containers in production?

Sadly the article mentions very little in terms of practical advice. We've tried running some small Java 8 Spring Boot containers in Kubernetes which are configured to use max ~50M heap and ~150M total off-heap yet decide to use in excess of double that memory so we end up with either a lot of OOMKills or overly large memory limits.

<comment><USER14> Honestly I don't feel there is any need to run Java in containers. The war/jar file is its own container with its own dependencies. The JVM still makes the same syscalls as it would inside a Docker/Kubernetes container.

In fact I would rather look at serverless architecture before considering docker/Kubernetes.

<comment><USER15> when you run a polyglot stack with java/python/go/node on top of a cluster of machines, you will love to have them containerized and uniform. It makes scripting and CI so much easier.

or, when you have a legacy app that relies on java 6, but you want everything else to run on java 8, the ability to drop everything into a container with its runtime is a life saver.

source: I'm the devops person that's responsible for making this work

<comment><USER14> We already run a polyglot stack at our company, and we use Docker(nvidia- docker) for our Python environment. With Java there is no need, and it is a lot less work updating and upgrading the JVM and our Java applications. I would use Docker for Java 6 though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> We created a model and applied unsupervised ML to tuning the JVM for execution in containers and eventually open sourced the project:

[https://github.com/sladeware/groningen](https://github.com/sladeware/groningen)

Unfortunately the experiment state persistence management capability is broken.

</comment><comment><USER17> The real killer app would be the ability to fully containerize all jvm instances running on any given box.

It will be a setup where one jvm instance on the host basically serves the role of "master" in terms of class data and shared object loading while each container instance uses its memory allotment only for running computations specific to the application in that container while sharing memory objects with other containers as much as possible.

It is possible to do something similar at the moment but it requires going through a hodge-podge of painful hacks. A seamless solution to this would basically make the jvm an out of the box poor man's polyglot PaaS platform.

<comment><USER18> Aren't you describing every OS since Solaris 2.x that uses shared pages across processes as well as Solaris 2.x did?

<comment><USER17> My OS internals knowledge is rusty so I am not sure they are quite the same but likely similar.

If you think of a typical jvm application (true for non-jvm apps as well), a significant chunk of class data will be shared since apps are typically using the same libraries (with deltas in versions), allowing easy reuse of class data across all container instances on a host would be a major scalability advance.

<comment><USER19> There is a java feature called class data sharing that does that since Java 5 but I've never seen it in the wild.[0]

Java 10 will bring AppCDS via JEP 310[1]

[0][https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/class_data_sharing](https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/class_data_sharing)

[1][http://openjdk.java.net/jeps/310](http://openjdk.java.net/jeps/310)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Have to say I really liked this article, but most of it was spent on how containers actually work on the backend. Which I think is fantastic as it's one of the most concise and easy to understand articles I've seen on the subject. I forwarded it to my team because a few of them still think Docker is some black-magic voodoo.

</comment><comment><USER21> Wasn't the original promise of the JVM to provide container like services to applications? This field is way outside where I normally work, I would love to hear some expert commentary about this.

<comment><USER22> It kind of does: Jave EE was all about having single Java Application Servers running on each host, and deploying applications/services on top. In practice every service was built by the same company though, so focused moved toward shared libraries in containers and things like that: Search for OSGI.

The issue is both that the security concerns were way softer than they are today, and that all your dependencies better be deplorable in a JVM too. Modern ideas of having databases deployed along with the services that need them don't work quite as well as just using OS level virtualization. That said many a crufry old company still deploys hundreds of services to production by loading .war files into a cluster of servers running JBoss or WebLogic.

<comment><USER23> > and that all your dependencies better be deplorable in a JVM too.

Remember: Never use the standard library when a forgotten, half-assed CPAN module you can run via Perlito will kind of do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> One of the authors here: First of all thanks for the great disucssion here, it really motivated to write another follow-up article. There were some comments asking for more practical advice which is totally fair as this was supposed to be more informational and creating problem awareness. What else would you like to see covered in a follow-up?

<comment><USER25> A base Java image and a set of recommendations. Most of us here (I assume) are running containers in K8s or Swarm. Our issue is - there is no base docker image which the java community can embrace. I have pods which restarted 35 times in the last one month.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> We use shaded/fat jars where I work because it's easier to ensure we never run into issues with missing dependencies. It does however come at the cost of longer build times. I've been hoping that Docker might be able to help with this by allowing us to keep all of the dependencies in the container base image and then just add the new class files in the build process. Is that a reasonable assumption?

</comment><comment><USER27> I wonder if it might be a good general rule to never give just 1 CPU to _any_ multi-threaded application (JVM or otherwise).

Often, there's a mix of threads, some of which are doing CPU-intensive stuff and some which just need to do some quick thing to unblock something else, like start some new IO when some IO completes. With 1 CPU, any time any CPU- intensive stuff is happening, these quick things have to wait their turn until the next time slice. With 2 CPUs, you have twice the work and twice the likelihood of having to deal with CPU-intensive stuff, but CPU-intensive moments don't necessarily happen at the same time, so you have better odds of having one of those CPUs immediately available to do the small, quick stuff.

</comment><comment><USER28> >> But the in case of containers with a hard memory limit, the entire container will simply be killed without warning.

At least in my experience that is not true. I quite often run into this issue and the OOM-killer will only kill one of the processes inside the container, not the entire container.

>> The same is true for default memory limits. The JVM looks at the host overall memory and uses that to set its defaults.

Well, I guess if you launch a JVM anywhere without setting appropriate memory settings, you are doing something fundamentally wrong.

<comment><USER29> >> At least in my experience that is not true. I quite often run into this issue and the OOM-killer will only kill one of the processes inside the container, not the entire container.

Hence one does not run multiple processes in the container or / and handle crashes of potential child processes correctly.

<comment><USER28> Well, I guess, sometimes you need to break the rules. But you are right.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> What a great read! I'm mostly in application land all day, and even though I have daily interaction with docker containers I don't have a good understanding what is going on under the hood. Now I partially understand why my coworker who manages our K8s cluster added some of the VM arguments to our java application images.

</comment><comment><USER31> It would be nice to have some kind of cooperative API for runtimes like Java, Go etc to where the OS or container manager can provide watermark hints for the heap size and when to run collections.

<comment><USER32> How does the JVM determine the number of cores on a Linux system by default?

<comment><USER24> One of the authors here: This is the OpenJDK 8 implementation: [http://hg.openjdk.java.net/jdk8/jdk8/hotspot/file/tip/src/os...](http://hg.openjdk.java.net/jdk8/jdk8/hotspot/file/tip/src/os/linux/vm/os_linux.cpp#l4967)</comment></comment></comment>


Beware techies talking gobbledegook - <AUTHOR> http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/8f108044-6c31-11e3-a216-00144feabdc0.html?ftcamp=published_links%2Frss%2Fcomment%2Ffeed%2F%2Fproduct#axzz2pPokNbsA <comment><USER3> Sometimes it's not always possible to explain something in sufficient detail to someone who has no concept of what you are trying to explain.

Feynman explains this really well when trying to answer a question about magnets:

 _" Of course, it's an excellent question. But the problem, you see, when you ask why something happens, how does a person answer why something happens? For example, Aunt Minnie is in the hospital. Why? Because she went out, slipped on the ice, and broke her hip. That satisfies people. It satisfies, but it wouldn't satisfy someone who came from another planet and who knew nothing about why when you break your hip do you go to the hospital... when you explain a why, you have to be in some framework that you allow something to be true. Otherwise, you're perpetually asking why."_

 _" I can't explain that attraction in terms of anything else that's familiar to you. For example, if we said the magnets attract like if rubber bands, I would be cheating you. Because they're not connected by rubber bands. I'd soon be in trouble. And secondly, if you were curious enough, you'd ask me why rubber bands tend to pull back together again, and I would end up explaining that in terms of electrical forces, which are the very things that I'm trying to use the rubber bands to explain. So I have cheated very badly, you see."_

The key quote being:

 _" I really can't do a good job, any job, of explaining magnetic force in terms of something else you're more familiar with, because I don't understand it in terms of anything else you're more familiar with."_

Video: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMFPe- DwULM](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMFPe-DwULM)

Transcript: [http://lesswrong.com/lw/99c/transcript_richard_feynman_on_wh...](http://lesswrong.com/lw/99c/transcript_richard_feynman_on_why_questions/)

<comment><USER4> I feel that here Feynman is reluctant to admit that the answer is - we don't know. While we know a lot of the properties of magnetic fields and how they're amplified in magnets, afaik we have no idea what they're "made of" yet (if they're made of anything at all) or by what means they exert force at a distance.

The fields are presently among of our base concepts. Like the atom was, until the discovery of the electron and nucleus around ~1900.

What he does capture well is that you always have some kind of a base which you accept.

<comment><USER5> Well we might not know what electrostatic attraction is, but google "magnetism relativity" and you'll find that magnetism comes from relativistic effects of the motion of electrons. It's really nifty, and simple to understand if relativity is already a concept you're familiar with.

(That might be what you meant, but learning this a couple years ago blew my mind so I had to share.)

<comment><USER4> Yes, thats it! It turns out we (humanity) did know more, its just that I did not :) Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The author is conflating an awful lot of things which are not necessarily similar or even necessarily technical challenges to draw a deflecting conclusion about "gobbledegok".

It's a warning / apology for the logical, competent, altruistic and forthright executives of the world not to be further misled by the self-serving, evasive, babbling "geeks".

Something like a condensed _Make Mine Freedom_ [0] for the "dangers" of technology.

 _> "But the first step is the simplest and the most important: like Dennis, we need to ask challenging questions, admit that we do not understand "gobbledegook" and demand answers."_

What a concept.

Just _demand_ answers to something so far beyond your current comprehension as to be nonsensical.

What's in the best interest of the company / country here?

Is it really attempting to synthesize three decades, a handful of degrees and years of domain-specific knowledge into a 5-minute PowerPoint deck? Or might we all be better served by replacing complacent, technically illiterate board- sitters with people who care enough to come prepared and stay current?

0: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVh75ylAUXY](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVh75ylAUXY)

<comment><USER7> You think Steve Jobs (insert other tech CEO if you prefer) wouldn't demand answers from finance specialists or lawyers, and wouldn't be equally dismissive of them if they replied with obfuscatory jargon?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> In my experience, it's not techies that talk gobbledegook, it's that those signing off IT work don't want to hear about problems ("this will take years to implement"), so it's those who pull the wool over their eyes that get to talk to them.

I've seen a FTSE-100 company destroyed because of adherence to buzzwords and industry standards (nothing inherently wrong with that) without - crucially - any attention to the details of applications to their business. Which is what this Dennis did.

<comment><USER9> I've seen entire codebases riddled with method names that could've been taken straight from the latest sales pitch made up by Marketing. I think it depends on what kinda company you are. The more "sales-driven" (for lack of a better wording) your company is, the more likely you are to end up with words like "human assisted training" to describe a non-AI related configuration process.

I would say techies also get caught up in this behavior sometimes.

<comment><USER10> We had to change the names of our API function calls when marketing updated our product name :(

<comment><USER11> Well I have to say that some command/API names on unixes for example are horrible. What's up with killing processes. Can't we just say terminate. Since software is mostly developed by a geeky bunch we sometimes forget that we are actually making something to be presented in an appealing manner to a buyer/licenser.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> In academia I would often meet people who were unable to explain what they working on in language I could understand, even though their PhDs were in the same field as my own. Sometimes I would have to interrogate them for more than ten minutes, like getting blood from a stone, before I got a clue what it was. I think if you can't explain what are you doing in general terms in 30 seconds to a layman you probably don't really understand what you are doing.

<comment><USER13> Not every research topic can be explained to a layman in 30 seconds (personally, I think it's cruel to expect that). Some research work only makes sense within a certain context or background, and it can sometimes take a lot more than 30 seconds to explain that context, or the background behind it. The academic him/herself can understand the work very well, because he/she also has a very good graps of the related concepts.

For a concrete example, I work on compiler research. To explain my work to a layman, first I have to explain "compiler"; for that, I need to explain "native code" and "programming language". That can take a lot more than 30 seconds.

<comment><USER14> "I am trying to find ways to improve the translation from a language people like to a language computers like."

<comment><USER15> Well done, you've said "compiler research". You've just spent 10 seconds explaining 'what is mathematics' instead of what project he's actually working on. Plus your explanation would leave someone with very little idea about computers even more confused: is he going through some novel and translating it into another language like french? You made him sound like a translator.

The CEO you've now explained what he does now has a good idea - <USER2> between human languages usually loses some of the intricacies of the statement and makes it seem unnatural. It's better to just get someone to write directly in french rather than translating it from english, right? So the CEO will fire the compiler researcher and hire someone to code in ASM. Good job.

I'm being silly here, but the point still stands: explaining something complex is fraught with dangers when there is no mutual understanding of the subject matter. You might think you've explained something, and the listener might thing he has understood, but in reality you have now simply created completely invalid assumptions in a person's mind. The greatest example of this I've seen is regarding quantum mechanics and observation collapsing the wave. There is a whole quasi-spiritual movement that now believes that the world is shaped by conscious observation - talk about missing the point!

<comment><USER14> Well, there's a minimal set of things you must mention to fully explain something. The only way to explain his PhD fully would be to read his PhD dissertation, as that's what the definition of a dissertation is.

Summarizing is about maximizing the amount of information conveyed per word. Saying "you have failed to explain what he does in two sentences" is a bit silly, since, if one could fully explain his PhD in two sentences, it wouldn't be a PhD.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If IT is this important then maybe it would be a good idea for the firms affected to have people who understand it on the board, rather than relying on Dennis.

<comment><USER16> Can you predict all possible effects of someone smart joining the board? Better not stirring the pond!

<comment><USER11> LMAO!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> interesting article, when I visit doctor I have similar feelings, same thing applies to law, finance and other specialized fields. But my energies permit me know only so much. So its essential we watch out for jargon abuse. Most of the times when someone is heavily using the technical bits, they are trying to hide their incompetence. If a person knows about something well and is explaining to a layman, they will do their best to explain it as plainly as possible. Gobbledegook signifies something festering underneath

<comment><USER18> Not sure if the comparison with finance is apt. Financial sophistry layered complexity on complexity without a robust understanding of principles (i.e., housing prices don't always go up, hiding debt and ownership in millions of small pieces spread around will create a mess), whereas computing grows intelligently (most of the time) from real world problems that need addressing.

<comment><USER19> Oh they understand principles pretty well (I get comission x% and I don't fucking care about everything else). The layering of sophistry is there so they can obfuscate them from you. They also use it for maintaining plausible deniability.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Board level decisions are not concerned with the details of project implementation. Rather they concern risks, returns, costs and alternatives.

If some "techie" has presented a bag of buzzwords to the board, then someone has failed to recruit a competent technical manager. Someone who's job is to understand both the technical _and_ the strategic domains. Directors would be best to spend their time recruiting, rather than learning Vim.

OTOH, sometimes the board fails to realise that they are actually running a software company. For example, many directors still believe they are running a "bank", when the vast proportion of their business is software development. In such cases, complaints like this amount to little more than pining for the "good old days".

</comment><comment><USER21> Learning to understand the technobabble is hard even for engineers who aren't familiar with a system. If you're not an engineer the best you can do is hope to understand the cliff notes. And understanding something about the software isn't going to help much anyway. In the examples of failures the author lists, the people who understood the system, the experts you'd turn to for understanding, probably didn't expect the failures that came about. So if you are learning to understand the system from them, how would you spot them? It seems like a bad argument from start to finish. Hire someone you can trust that is known to be competent, have them audit the software. Don't do it yourself.

<comment><USER22> I am convinced at least some of it is there to confuse the engineers who would try to understand the system.

For example, I tell people who want to learn networking "do NOT start with the OSI model. Start by learning how TCP/IP actually works and how it was designed. Then learn how and why the OSI model was designed." But a lot of people insist on going the other way, I think _because_ it is more confusing and obfuscates more than it clarifies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> First we lived in a post-9/11 world, now we live in a post-2008 world. Insofar as as the opening lines of articles are concerned.

</comment><comment><USER24> Having to explain technical concepts to a self-styled hard-nosed character can be extremely tiresome and bad for the cardiovascular system. The subject is specialized and deep enough for the most supreme intellect.

</comment><comment><USER25> You have to applaud anyone seeking to know more about technology. And the more your customers know, the more likely they are to choose the optimal solution (yours?) rather than some slick marketing pitch that will inevitably fail to deliver the promises made.

Some people argue that you can't condense all of that knowledge into phrases non-technical people can understand, that's rubbish. Consider what they already know, then give an overview at that level with a list of benefits. Wherever they inquire then just explain that part at the next level down.

</comment><comment><USER22> One of the things I have often noted is how theories which don't match reality very well often trump reality in terms of explanations. For example, TCP/IP is a 4-layer network stack, while the OSI model is 7 layers. These models are _fundamentally different_ and understanding the _differences_ is often key to understanding design decisions for OSI protocols ported to TCP/IP (H.323 being a good example).

But people talk as if TCP/IP follows the OSI model. It doesn't. Often understanding that it doesn't and why it doesn't is a good first step to understanding why it works the way it does. So that is top of my list.

THere are other issues. For example, when another techie is speaking gobbldiegook, it is way too easy to project meaning onto what is said so that misunderstandings develop. For example, I have written frameworks for building object frameworks. These are not object factory factories (but rather services to offer object frameworks, for example generalized service locator API's for locating stored procedures, allowing a looser coupling than most people have). However, when someone says "its an object factory factory" very often the simplest response is "well, sort of, if you are the factory worker!"

<comment><USER11> Don't be baffled. When was the last time you went to the movies to see the ordinary life of that normal person called Tony Stark. Buzz is what we desire. As for the TCP/IP and OSI differences, you are being slightly iffy. While they are definitely designed differently, TCP/IP only coalesces OSI layers to make programming simple for the task at hand.

<comment><USER22> > While they are definitely designed differently, TCP/IP only coalesces OSI > layers to make programming simple for the task at hand.

But it _doesn 't_ except if you use the cliff notes version of the OSI model. That's my point. Otherwise, H.323 would look like SIP, which it doesn't. Protocols designed for an OSI model look _fundamentally_ different than protocols designed for a TCP/IP model.

Let's look at H.323 since that is the example I am using. The protocol is a beast to work with over TCP/IP because it was not designed for that. It was instead designed for a unified OSI network where virtual circuits could be requested to handle voice and video information. Those don't exist in TCP/IP which has _no_ concept of a virtual circuit and so over TCP/IP, you use a new TCP connection everywhere you'd use a virtual circuit because that is the closest equivalent. It isn't really an equivalent however which makes the protocol very, very difficult to deal with in terms of firewalls, etc. Compare with SIP which just passes everything across a single TCP connection hitting a well known port.

The difference here is that the basic assumptions of what the network _can do_ are different. TCP/IP assumes at its basis that you have a simple, dumb packet switched network that really isn't capable of doing anything else. OSI assumes you have an intelligent network capable of routing packet-switched and circuit-switched information together. They are _totally different design criteria_ and _at best you can say TCP /IP is a very narrow subset of what OSI is designed to do._

What this means, effectively, is that you either have to strip down the OSI network in theory to match TCP/IP (which is useless) or you end up with something that doesn't really match. Either way there is no way of understanding H.323 without understanding the OSI model to a level in which the fundamental differences with TCP/IP matter and that requires knowing the basics not only of packet-switched networks but also circuit-switched networks too.

<comment><USER26> How about we simply agree that OSI is a monstrous "designed by 99 committees" theory and accept that it is not used in practice ? Actual networking stacks do not follow it. Hell they don't even follow TCP/IP's layers, but at least there they make an effort to make it look like they do (e.g. in networking hardware, or for that matter the linux kernel, there is no actual "layer 3 routing" step that is distinct from the "layer 2 switching" step).

OSI is an ancient, dumb, wrong, 10000000000000 feet architect view of networking. Do not learn anything about it, you'll do yourself a favor. Ethernet is NOT OSI layer2, IP is NOT layer3, and especially do not think TCP is OSI layer 4.

<comment><USER22> > _How about we simply agree that OSI is a monstrous "designed by 99 > committees" theory and accept that it is not used in practice ?_

Partly agreed. It's worth noting however that the PKI associated with SSL (X.509) is an OSI thing and so understanding OSI concepts is still rather important. This is also why X.509 certificates IMO feel a bit foreign in terms of structure and they tie in closely to LDAP concepts (a stripped down version of OSI X.500) rather than more internet-y directory concepts like DNS where everything is a text string and human readable.

> _Hell they don 't even follow TCP/IP's layers, but at least there they make > an effort to make it look like they do_

My point was that TCP/IP and OSI are just fundamentally different. They are culturally different. They have different goals. You can understand TCP/IP better on its own than through OSI. You can't understand OSI by using TCP/IP as a sole reference.

> "OSI is an ancient, dumb, wrong, 10000000000000 feet architect view of > networking."

I think it is more correct to understand OSI in context, namely that it was a network model designed to support the OSI protocol stack. This stack was intended to fully merge circuit and packet-switched networks (effectively merging phone switches and the internet). This means you have, effectively, an intelligent network with possibly intelligent terminals, which are capable of doing both circuit- and packet-switched networking on top. OSI protocols ported to TCP/IP like H.323 make perfect sense if you understand that they are assuming they can open phone calls (but in the process of porting them to TCP/IP, they have to use one TCP/IP connection for each phone circuit they would otherwise open). This is furthermore why the network perimeter controls designed for H.323 involve what amount to phone switchy things instead of things like firewalls (and why a simple packet filter won't work).

In terms of the value of not learning it, I think the best approach honestly is to learn TCP/IP without the OSI model first, and then learn the OSI model and what the OSI stack was designed to do after. This gives you whole layers of insight, not into TCP/IP but into OSI protocols ported to TCP/IP.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Clearly the board has to be fired for not keeping up to date with modern knowledge.

</comment><comment><USER27> Techs don't talk gobbledegook, just that non tech's listern with the wrong mindset. This is why we have managers, to act as translators - it is what they do and are paid to do.

The day when an employment contracts is shorter than a CV is when techs do not need to talk gobbledegook. A CV explains your liftime of skills and experience and a employment contract explains how you are paid and what you do to gain that pay. With that in mind, techs deem life too short to expand upon what people do not understand. WIth that you always get the sturborn person who wants to know details they need not know and with that we ask that person for a charge code for our timesheet and play one problem of techs of against another.</comment>


Practical Tips for Not Looking Like a Resume Black Hole as a Startup - <AUTHOR> http://blog.hirelite.com/dont-be-a-resume-black-hole-practical-tips

<comment><USER2> It's just common courtesy to respond to folk who send you a cv. I've always done this and will always do it.

Even when I worked for a Big Name tech co., I worked with HR -- she was terrific and unique in my experience with HR -- to ensure that every candidate received a response. I'm also prepared to talk with rejected candidates if they wish. I understand this is a no-win, but it's just the civil thing to do.

And if any company failed to respond to me, then they'd go into the Little Black Book and I'd never buy their product or service again.

A company should hold its prospective employees at least equal to those of its customers -- they will, after all, have to manage and maintain those customers. So any company that treats its employees in this way, must regard its customers of worthy of lesser treatment, or just be cynical frauds. In both cases, who'd want to either work for them or do business with them?

<comment><USER3> That's awesome that everyone got a response.

Years ago I interviewed for a company once that was probably a stretch for me, but I was totally honest up front about my c++ skills and experience. I wasn't an expert, but could get around and mainly lacked the things that come along with more experience. I landed a phone interview that I did fine on and was given a multiple choice c++ test from one of the testing sites. After taking the test the site showed me my score, a solid B+. I was actually kind of surprised how high I scored given the numerous 'did you memorize the STL api' questions there were.

After taking the test I wait a few days for a response. Nothing. So the next week I emailed the HR lady and received no response. I called and left a message, nothing. I'm guessing they wanted an absolute expert at C++ which is fine by me, but the complete lack of response was the most unprofessional thing I've ever experienced.

<comment><USER4> Your experience is a little more typical of the job market for most people without relevant hard skills like programming; the hiring environment is an extremely frustrating black hole.

In fact, until I looked for a development job through a contractor, I only had 10 responses to around 250 job applications.

While the development side isn't a perfect fit, it is a novel feeling to be able to turn down a job.

<comment><USER3> _In fact, until I looked for a development job through a contractor, I only had 10 responses to around 250 job applications._

I fully expect this sort of response, but when an applicant starts and completes parts of the interview process the company should give some response instead of disappearing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This.

 _2) Lay out your hiring process and timeline. Example: "After receiving your resume, if you progress through each stage, we'll do a phone screen within 3 days, bring you in for an interview within 10 days, and give you an offer within 15 days. We want to have you working here in just over a month."_

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm not sure I follow the logic in using a URL shortener to generate a link for the LinkedIn profile, unless you're accepting job applications solely via Twitter. Can someone explain a bit further?

<comment><USER7> > I'm not sure I follow the logic in using a URL shortener to generate a link > for the LinkedIn profile

I believe the logic is that since you create the url you can track who visit's it. That way you know when the company views your linked in profile.</comment></comment>


Dhamick – Privacy-Focused Social Network - <AUTHOR> https://www.dhamick.com/ <comment><USER2> You gotta give me a lot more to get me to sign up. Give me screenshots of the logged in view. A list of features that would make me want to participate here. A black page with a signup page is not enough to get me on board.</comment>


New software could have ID'd Boston bomber - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/05/hallucinating-a-face-new-software-could-have-idd-boston-bomber/

<comment><USER3> The title is a little over-reaching.

The software could've given a clearer image of a suspect which would've aided police in finding said suspect. Figuring out who actually placed the bomb in the first place was bottleneck #1 and probably took the bulk of the time. Bottleneck #2 is finding out who that person is and this is made easier with the crowd-sourcing that is local news. Bottleneck #3 is physically finding the person which they even had trouble doing with Boston on lockdown.

It's a neat solution to a very real problem, so technically very cool just not what the article is billing it as.

<comment><USER4> If the super resolution software worked, then you don't release the information to the media and you skip step 2.

That's important because the suspect will most likely flee once they realize you have their image.

Instead you develop leads and set up surveillance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Meaningless unless you know the false positive rate. A technology with a 1% false positive rate over the US population gives you a Minneapolis of people to investigate.

<comment><USER4> You only seed it with persons of interest.

They don't want to identify every random person, just persons of interest, wherever they go.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'd rather live in a world where terrorist attacks happen occasionally than in the movie Minority Report.

<comment><USER7> Too bad. If it's any consolation, there will still be terrorist attacks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Anil Jain from Michigan State University (one of the highest ranked h-index in Computer Science) recently published a technical report on the this subject [0]. The technical reports says that they were able to identify Dzhokhar Tsarnaev with a Rank-1 hit against a 1M mugshot background database.

[0] [http://www.cse.msu.edu/rgroups/biometrics/Publications/Face/...](http://www.cse.msu.edu/rgroups/biometrics/Publications/Face/KlontzJain_CaseStudyUnconstrainedFacialRecognition_BostonMarathonBombimgSuspects.pdf)

<comment><USER9> Except the Rank-1 hit wasn't against an image from the mugshot database.

 _..The notable rank-one hit for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is an illustrative example of this potential. However, the hit was against a graduation photograph with similar pose that was tweeted after he had been publically identified, and not a conventional mugshot from a prior arrest._

<comment><USER4> Yes but Tsarnaev's brother was known to authorities. It's feasible for authorities to index his photo and known family members.

If they had put _both_ faces into the search, and matched both with high confidence, the result would have sent up a huge flag because the known relationship.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This stuff is really cool, and really frightening. The genie is already out of the bottle.

</comment><comment><USER11> Super-resolution is the future of a lot of image processing technologies.

<comment><USER12> This isn't like most super-resolution techniques, that take multiple images and align them to a higher-resolution grid. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super- resolution#Geometrical_o...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super- resolution#Geometrical_or_image-processing_superresolution) This is about having a model of what a face _should_ look like, and fitting the data to it. It's like taking a handful of data points and plotting a curve, then interpolating/extrapolating other data points. Except instead of something simple like a bell curve, the model is of a human face! (That means you could feed it random data and it would still come up with a face - <USER2> distorted perhaps, but the model can _only_ make faces.)

<comment><USER13> Machine pareidolia!

[http://www.flickr.com/photos/unavoidablegrain/sets/721576288...](http://www.flickr.com/photos/unavoidablegrain/sets/72157628855014523/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Obligatory :) <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUFkb0d1kbU>

</comment><comment><USER15> Looks nothing like the actual image.</comment>


Your Very Own Yipit, in a Minute - <AUTHOR> http://blog.sqoot.com/yipit-in-a-minute

<comment><USER2> Help me get those 1000 subscribers in the first place. That's my real pain point. Curating deals to each one is actually fun, and something I rather do myself.

<comment><AUTHOR> Part of what we think makes this feature great is that you can generate leads with it. Instead of bouncing a user to a deal page, you can send them to this landing page first. If they subscribe, they're a customer for life!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> So the site owner that has the email list pays you $99 per month AND splits commissions 50% with you?

You can't have it both ways. Pick one.

<comment><AUTHOR> We've actually tried a whole bunch of pricing options. A few weeks ago we changed our prices to the 50% commission split. It minimizes risk for larger publishers. But your feedback is definitely noted. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Super cool. I know a bunch of folks who could use this.

</comment><comment><USER5> This looks really useful. Great stuff guys!</comment>


How This Ends. (The Pandemic) - <AUTHOR> https://realscience.community/2020/08/26/how-this-ends/ <comment><USER2> I'm a little surprised by the author's tendency of wondering abstractly and suggesting cataclysmic shoot-from-the-hip solutions.

There still hasn't passed enough time for us to make confident statements about immunity in patients who recover from acute COVID, not to mention make grandiose plans, either as a state or as a society of individuals.

A popular blog post or article circulated earlier, plotting very simple mathematical models of infection numbers based on some assumptions about the durability of immunity. But even without visual aids, mathematical intuition suggests that widespread immunity of short duration would lead to a relatively high constant number of new cases, with relatively frequent small waves. In contrast, widespread immunity of longer duration, on the order of a year or two, would lead to lower background level of infection, punctuated by larger, more severe, less frequent outbreaks, made worse if they are seasonal and coincide with the flu.

And these are assumptions, things we don't know. Which of these scenarios should we be making grand, nationwide plans for?

We saw a definitive report about an asymptomatic case of reinfection. That patient managed to get tested twice, despite being reported as asymptomatic the second time. Both times, the viral genome was sequenced, which is why we now believe this is a case of reinfection.

In the US, this patient would likely not have been tested at all. Should we update our expectations about the incidence of reinfection?

Are there differences in humoral and mucosal immunity to COVID? I don't think we have consensus yet. Do asymptomatic carriers infect others? We have some evidence that they do. Other diseases can be spread by asymptomatic carriers. As an extreme example, Typhoid Mary was a real historical figure who infected hundreds over a lifetime.

In this context, suggesting that we ship our most elderly and medically fragile members to some kind of COVID-free zone is... staggeringly whimsical.

<comment><AUTHOR> The case of the person that got reinfected is grossly exaggerated. Don't you think if this was really occurring frequently there wouldn't be only one or two reported incidences of this world-wide? Asymptomatic carriers do definitively infect others. Just because you personally are not sure of things, doesn't mean that they are not known. And this "do nothing" approach you are advocating for- which is what happens if you wait until everything is fully and definitively proven- has resulted in the disastrous results the US has had so far. Also please explain "suggesting cataclysmic shoot-from-the-hip solutions"\- I don't think anything I suggested comes close to that. I said that we shouldn't reopen colleges in places with rising cases. That doesn't seem cataclysmic to me.

<comment><USER2>
      > Don't you think if this was really occurring frequently there wouldn't be only one or two reported incidences of this world-wide?

No, for reasons I have already mentioned in my first comment.

The patient we think was reinfected was reported to have a mild case in the spring. The US, at the time, had extremely limited access to tests for anyone except the grievously ill. It is likely the patient would not have received a test in the US, and certainly not had the infection genome-sequenced.

The second time the patient tested positive, he was asymptomatic. The CDC currently recommends against testing asymptomatic individuals. It is likely that, in the US, the patient would once again not have received a test.

Basically, the US tests sparsely and doesn't seem to test longitudinally on any scale at all. Does any country in the world with more than a few thousand cases test longitudinally?

If anything, I think it's more telling that this patient was identified in Hong Kong, which only has 4.5 thousand cases total. Finding seemingly ironclad evidence in such a small pool suggests that this isn't a rare phenomenon.

      > And this "do nothing" approach you are advocating for- which is what happens if you wait until everything is fully and definitively proven- has resulted in the disastrous results the US has had so far.

If I'm advocating anything at all (and I don't think I'm advocating anything in my original comment), it's that we hold off on making aggressive policy decisions based on our Swiss cheese "understanding" of COVID immunity. How about working toward goals we set months ago and have since kept failing to meet, such as ubiquitous access to testing and meaningful case tracing?

On the other hand, let's maybe hold off on jokes about sending Grandma to New Orleans? The photo of the elderly woman wearing sparkly bangles is the joke, but I think your suggestion right before that, that "we could send the highest risk people to the places that are the most immune so they could be shielded" is made seriously, right? Like, even moving an individual, medically fragile, institutionalized elderly person leads to complicated and often negative outcomes in the best of times, simply because of the complex and fragile support systems their well-being relies on. Shipping "the highest risk people" en masse and organizing care for them seems dramatically more complex than, again, following through on testing and mitigation strategies that we, as a state, have been paying lip service to for months now.

<comment><AUTHOR> It literally says "All joking aside" following that comment. I don't know how much clearer I could have made that. I also advocate wearing masks, distancing, protecting the vulnerable, and not opening schools. I don't know how you can possibly be construing me as advocating for any of the extreme things you are talking about.

<comment><USER2> The logical connection between our comments is pretty tenuous. I don't think there is a need to continue the conversation. Good luck promoting your point of view!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The user exists to promote this site. The author of this site admits they have no expertise. This and previous posts make hyperbolic claims with little to no evidence.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have an Md, a Phd, and I'm a computational biologist at MIT. I think this qualifies as expertise.

<comment><USER3> How does that relate to epidemiology? In a previous discussion here you made basic errors like referring to a study from a single clinic as if it was representative of all of New York.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's not an error. Epidemiologists are computational biologists. I don't want to argue with you because that seems to be what you are solely after.

<comment><USER3> I apologize, that didn't seem to be the case from the bio you give on the site. the bio you link to, or your published research. Obviously you know your background better than I do, but you're not putting your best foot forward to build credibility.

I'm after pointing out that a self-promoted site on the front page makes grandiose claims about public health with flimsy support.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The only thing I have to contribute to this is a mention that social connectivity should realistically be considered a function of covid caseload (or more generally - community confidence). That picture of the big ol' party in Wuhan is a great example (although china also follows up with massive mandatory lockdowns whenever new hotspots are developing - a "luxury" we don't have in the west)

This is the reason there _will_ be second, third, Nth, waves with a mere 20, 30% immunity

<comment><AUTHOR> Call me an optimist but I think the public can handle the nuance of cases have dropped but still don't throw a crazy party until they are 100% gone or everyone is vaccinated. Also levels are 20-30% now but will continue to rise throughout the fall because there still are new cases and transmission even if RT<1.

<comment><USER5> I really want to believe this. It neatly lines itself up with my worldview and afford individuals the agency of being smart enough to do what is right 99% of the time while also allowing for the freedom to make the rare "less than safe choice" in situations that warrant it. That is the world I want to live in.

-BUT- I think to get there, we are going to need some serious education on this matter that actually penetrates the politics that have grown to dominate the pandemic. I don't think most people see it as "containment vs keep clam and hope everything is okay." Opting instead to see it as r-v-l.

To be clear, I don't blame anyone for thinking in those terms, that is the narrative being presented. That said, I do ask that any theory hinging on "people are able to handle nuance" provide some evidence for the claim that can be directly applied to the now. In a world where individuals leer at each other for not wearing masks in wide open outdoor spaces, while others yell inside of Walmart about the constitution, it is hard to have belief in that claim.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree with your first two points whole heartedly. But I think we got into a r-v-l place where the public has lost all trust BY paternalism. Trust means giving people the truth. And my theory doesn't hinge on people behaving responsibly at all. If people are irresponsible- this ends sooner with more death. The theory is the same either way- the timeline and number of deaths just change a bit.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


EmberConf 2020 goes virtual and free to attend due to COVID-19 - <AUTHOR> https://emberconf.com/ <comment><USER2> I"M SO EXCITED.

This is the most online engagement I've seen from a tech conference... and it seems to be better than even _usually_ online things, such as esports tournaments.

<comment><USER3> best part is it's available for all! Didn't know that at first.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> For more details on chat and the community side, see [https://twitter.com/trek/status/1239904391152504837](https://twitter.com/trek/status/1239904391152504837)</comment>


When Big Companies Are Dead But Don't Know It - <AUTHOR> http://steveblank.com/2010/06/07/when-big-companies-are-dead-but-don't-know-it/ <comment><AUTHOR> I'm guessing that Steve is referring to Macrovision. Interesting inside look.

<comment><USER2> That was my guess as well. Analog Macrovision obviously died a hard death when DVDs replaced VHS tapes ... and that translation was remarkably fast for consumer electronics. If they hadn't been on the ball it would have been ugly, probably terminally so.</comment></comment>