Can Happiness Make You Healthier? - <AUTHOR> http://harvardmagazine.com/2016/11/can-happiness-make-you-healthier <comment><USER2> Uh, isn't there a pretty well-established link between negative self-image / negative feelings and potentially self-destructive / self-harm type behaviors?

I guess my thinking about this conundrum is that anything regarding "happiness" or "health" \- in my opinion - comes down to an issue of sustainability. Sure, I can be happy on the day I get some good news, but will I be happy on the day where I have to sit through frustrating traffic and getting cut off by every asshole leasing a Land Rover and going to work about the same time as me? Hm, I mean, I can try, but it's not like I can reach into the glove box, grab a carrot stick, chomp away and suddenly feel like I've just gotten out of having a nice swim off the coast of Cabo San Lucas.

As a species I do think studies considering what makes us "happy" and "healthy" and how we can treat "depression" or other "disabilities" of various degrees are worthwhile. But, when I see goals like this:

> _Other studies will aim to establish best practices for corporate wellness > programs by testing their efficacy._

I just laugh, because we already know the combination of how to make people happier and healthier (don't over work them, provide time for exercise, provide guidance and resources to eat appropriate diet as fresh as feasable) but there's not a "study" yet that has convinced the working US corporate culture to change. Maybe Harvard can finally do it. Yay.

<comment><USER3> > Uh, isn't there a pretty well-established link between negative self-image / > negative feelings and potentially self-destructive / self-harm type > behaviors?

More than that. There's a pretty well-established link between long-term heavy stress and a huge number of health issues. Definitely heart problems, but IIRC also immune system health and strokes, and perhaps even cancer.

If you don't believe me, no, I don't have any documentation handy...

<comment><USER4> Interestingly it's probably not actually stress that is killing you, it's how you handle stress. There was a really popular TED talk about it-- people who were stressed but didn't view it as a bad thing were still fine health wise. It was people who were stressed and also believed that was a bad thing that suffered.

How to make stress your friend | Kelly McGonigal: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcGyVTAoXEU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcGyVTAoXEU)

<comment><USER5> Stress can cause growth (like when you exercise) and stress can be toxic(like when you're burned out). The problem with the study referenced in the video is that the people who don't see stress as bad likely aren't experiencing any negative physiological effects so obviously wouldn't die at the same rate as those who hold the opposing belief and experienced the negative physiological effects traditionally correlated with stress.

<comment><USER4> That's not a "problem" with the study, that's the entire point. The entire point is that stress isn't the issue, it's perceiving stress to be a bad thing that is bad for your health.

It's not talking about "good stress" or "bad stress".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There is a connection between being happy and living a healthy life. We can take a look at so many examples where happiness and being positive changes the prospective of how you feel. For example, when you are going to a week long vacation you feel so happy, all your work related stress is gone. Even after miles of hiking you will get tired but not stressed out. But the same thing hits you hard Sunday night thinking about going to work Monday morning.

Sometimes it is hard for science to prove things but there is a clear evidence.

<comment><USER7> A long time ago my wife and I just simply swapped monday and sunday. For us mondays were crappy simply because others seem to wind themselves up the entire weekend only to leave for work monday morning ready to stress everyone around them out. It seems quite a common thing. I'm hard to stress out these days, but people who were easily stressed before benefited massively from just 'not doing' mondays.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> When I am happy my body is much more resilient to getting sick and injuries. It just seems that everything is working better and I feel stronger. When I am depressed my joints hurt and exercise is much harder.

I strongly believe there is a feedback loop. Being healthy makes you happy and happiness makes you healthier.

<comment><USER9> I'm doubtful its really quite as simple as that. This is really only an anecdote, but a pattern I've noticed while leading mountain climbing trips is that feeling good [1] is strongly connected with people's ability to feel safe, ignore their own aches and pains, take risks, and look out for the welfare of the team; while feeling bad is strongly connected with fatigue, risk-aversion, and an inability to think about anything beyond your own immediate needs.

I'm not sure about any particular cause and effect here, but my experience suggests to me that there is a strong psychological effect here[2] where feeling good or bad has significant effect on the perception of your own well- being.

[1] I don't want to use the term happiness as it is too vague.

[2] Which may be physiological too, like low glucose levels leading to an altered psychological state.

<comment><USER10> I also made this theory that for an adult, pain is unnecessary and a sign of instability; while for a kid it's a sign of new information and learning stimulus. A lot of time kids will be a lot more oblivious to short and medium pain than an adult (of course, too high and they cry). The gist of it is that we process nociception differently depending on mood, age, perspective.

Similarly an unknown source of pain develop and increase over time, while if it's for a known and potentially positive future benefit it will just stay tagged as a temporary information.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm certainly no expert on happiness. I feel like i'm always ice skating on a highwire. But I think one important thing to do is, when things are good, don't be afraid to admit, out loud, that things are good.

I think being on edge and always waiting for the other shoe to fall hampers the enjoyment of the high. For most of us, life is crests and valleys, but while in the valleys, we are used to saying "Oh my god, this is so bad" instead of "Only way to go from here is up!", I notice that in the crests, people tend to not say "Man, things are really GREAT right now!"

I try to make it a habit to point this out fairly often.

</comment><comment><USER12> Not sure if happiness can make you healthier but good health can definitely make you happier.

</comment><comment><USER13> A better word than "happiness" should be satisfaction. Happiness can be for me instant joy or a good cup of hot chocolate. Satisfaction is more long-term and being satisfied with what you what, instead of joining the rat race.

And satisfaction is obviously linked to health outcomes.

<comment><USER11> Sometimes definitely wonder how many people read the article.

the article actually starts: IN THE QUEST to study human happiness, including its causes and effects, even agreeing on a definition is a formidable undertaking. Joy, euphoria, contentment, satisfaction—each of these, at times, has been used as a proxy or emphasized in research studies.

So i mean, they basically get that idea out of the way in the first paragraph.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> We have a lot of junk food snacks at the office, when I'm tired or stressed I eat them, when I'm rested and not stressed I can easily stay away.

This type of situation seems to exist in many different ways in my life, so its easy to see how I'd be healthier if I was happier.

</comment><comment><USER15> Happiness is fleeting. Content-ness is what feels most de-stressing to me. Perhaps we can call it fulfillment.

I find that I experience more flashes of happiness when I am most content; and I get there by removing stressors and handling the "small things" in life that have a tendency to pile up.

Overall, I think we as a society focus too much on money, love, and happiness. Each feel better as a byproduct of effort rather than the goal. For example, some of the healthier businesses I've seen started were created with the passion for helping people more than profiting from them.

</comment><comment><USER16> There is also a beautiful course on EdX "The science of happiness" where they show beneficial impact of happiness on health. [https://courses.edx.org/courses/course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x+3...](https://courses.edx.org/courses/course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x+3T2016/info)

</comment><comment><USER17> without reading this article I bet blood pressure is mentioned. I have always been told that basically being happy leads to lower blood pressure which is certainly a good thing.

</comment><comment><USER18> I conjecture that unhappy people are continually inhibiting certain ideas. This consumes attentional bandwidth which otherwise would go into managing/healing the body.

</comment><comment><USER19> My casual, general reasoning is that more happiness approximates less stress, which means less health problems in general.

</comment><comment> awinter-py They're correlated, so, definitely yes?

</comment><comment><USER20> I think it's the other way around: being unhappy makes you unhealthy.

<comment><USER21> The two ideas are hardly mutually exclusive.

Unhappy/stressed => worse health than baseline

Moderate level of contentment/stress => baseline

Happy/unstressed => better health than baseline

The questions are: is that the correct order of implications and does happiness produce better than baseline health.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Happiness is bad for business. Happy and self-reliant people are bad performing consumers. Especially for pharma and political products. You will soon see that happiness will be legally prohibited everywhere.

</comment><comment><USER23> If laugh-loud is one measure of happiness, then I found most loud-laugher tend to be a bit on the heavier side.

It's said when you're upset, you're basically generating toxic cells inside your body.

yes I believe happiness leads to health, except for frequent-loud-laughs.

</comment><comment><USER24> Probably. But karma is a bitch. Meaning your happiness of today is a bomb truck full of bad things set to explode in your face tomorrow. So I think its wise not to enjoy anything too much.

<comment><USER25> This is a misinterpretation of the concept of karma.</comment></comment>


Weird Substances: Hagfish Slime - <AUTHOR> https://hackaday.com/2019/12/10/weird-substances-hagfish-slime/ <comment><AUTHOR> To quote just one interesting thing (for me):

"Hagfish slime is made of two different kinds of protein. One is a type of mucin, which acts much like the mucus that the human body uses to drown bacteria and viral intruders in antibodies and enzymes.

The other protein is in the form of tiny threads that are 100 times thinner than human hairs. These strong and stretchy threads act a lot like spider silk.

....

At any given time, a hagfish has about 20,000 km of fibers inside its body, ready to go"</comment>


Ask HN: Strategies to Avoid Burnout? - <AUTHOR> I'm in a situation where I'm the senior engineer on a team that has to manage a lot of work. I'm a bit overwhelmed right now and having to work nights to keep up with it all.
The main responsibilities are: 1) Building out products, building features and working with the PM to ensure everyone is reaching deadlines. That means working with both backend and frontend engineers.
2) My team has a lot of reusable components that other people use and build on, this makes other teams want to change our APIs often and add things to them. I've been having to code review & design review a lot. There's at least 2-3 concurrent projects at any time every quarter.
3) Work on bugs that come up that sometimes are simple and sometimes require significant investigation.
The team has 3 Product Managers right now so we always have tons of feature requests, asks to investigate future work, etc.
I have only one other team member right now who has been taking on one of the larger projects that requires a lot of cross coordination. They're posting PRs late into the night so asking them to take on more work seems unreasonable.
What's some solutions here?
1 & 3 seem that they still have to happen regardless. But I'm wondering if there are better ways to do 2? Do I need to have to help them find solutions? Do I stop participating in these API changes and just let technical debt accumulate and fix it later?
My manager wants to hire more people but we've had more people, the work just increases to accommodate that new engineer. <comment><USER2> Some points to ponder:

\- You're doing this to yourself, buddy. There's always more work to be done; it's not your responsibility to do all of it.

\- You're not going to outrun a train by running faster on the same railroad tracks.

\- When (not if, but when) you finally crack up, you won't get a word of thanks for your efforts. They'll just ease you out of the company (gently or, more likely, not) and hire someone else to replace you.

My advice is:

\- Gradually start padding your estimates until your work fits into a 40 hour week.

\- Learn to say "no" or at least "not right now" to requests from other people and other teams.

\- If you get dinged by your management chain for reducing your pace, find a new employer ASAP. Good managers want their employees to work at a sustainable pace because replacing good employees is expensive and risky. You clearly don't have good managers.

<comment><USER3> I'd add to this good answer, that I'm afraid, padding estimates gradually won't work — you are already working nights and weekends, and the worst — seems like you are expected to.

I worked in a similar environment for some time where I was expected to start my morning at 7am by joining a call with an offshore team and end my day at 11pm jumping on another status call. I could not fix it, this state of operations was enforced by management.

So many things are wrong here that I just don't believe you can change anything there either, you gotta find another job in my opinion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > The team has 3 Product Managers right now so we always have tons of feature > requests, asks to investigate future work, etc.

This is a red flag to me - 3 PMs should be collaborating together to get to the root of the customer needs, and coming up with new functions that solve problems in simpler, better ways. You should have fewer requests that each have larger impacts. Likewise, why is a PM asking an engineer to do product research? If you need technical analysis, get that into your backlog. Outside of that, the PMs should be doing it.

</comment><comment><USER5> 3 Product Managers = Recipe for disaster

Sounds like you are suffering serious leadership/management issues. Unless you are at start up that is making money and is profitable, kind of sounds like a sinking ship?

I was previously at a start up where it sounds similar to what you are experiencing. Except the business model of the product was failing, I had off shore developers and the business side started point fingers at the the development department. Which was just me and I was the only paid employee. (The company never ever made 1 cent of revenue.)

Regardless after 70 days I resigned, without another job. It took me a year or so to really recover from the exhaustion of the start up.

My only advice is keep in mind that burn out can have far reaching effects after you leave the stressful situation.

<comment><USER5> Also it's just a job. I know it's difficult to see that in the heat of the moment. But life is so much more than a job. Jobs come and go...

<comment><USER6> Sane words. However sometimes life pressures like building a nest egg for a family while advancing in age and having to support them through a tough (non US) economy, with few jobs sharply reduces available options in similar situations, piling up the misery.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> One hard lesson to learn: usually when you're burning the candle at both ends thinking your hard work will be recognized by management and rewarded, it won't.

Sometimes they don't even notice, more often your output is their idea of baseline, and a budget is predetermined.

Depends largely on the organization, but I think this is the typical case.

Go home, have a life, or if you have extra energy roll it into a side project you can own.

</comment><comment><USER8> 1) state how many projects you can deal concurrently, refuse new ones unless relieved from another project

2) let them go into production with their forks to relieve pressure on dependency maintenance: created value at the end of the day will be the same, juggle with more debt

3) seems like a well defined perimeter they could have a new hire for: when not working on a particular bug then work on issues to pay tech debt created by the new strategy for 2)

Also, try to get more specific consulting from an on-call hacker firm: assign more tickets to others. Some hackers have passed such burnouts already, and figured how to keep doing what they love and how much they love without risking burnout ever again / have found preventive fixes for their brains.

</comment><comment><USER9> First things first: why do you "have" to work nights? Are you getting paid a fair hourly rate for this overtime?

Would anything materially bad happen if you just stop and dial back the hours to whatever you contractually agreed to?

This might depend upon what other alternatives you have for work.

I've worked in companies where management explicitly and structurally decide to always have more work in the pipeline than employees have capacity to deliver. That's a reasonable business decision. It doesn't mean that you're automatically required to work unpaid overtime. Whoever owns the company might be delighted if you do start providing them with a bunch of free labour, but not delighted enough to pay you fairly for it.

As another commenter has pointed out, the three PMs sounds like a bit of a red flag. You could instead be receiving a single stream of prioritised tasks, where all three PMs and other relevant stakeholders have hashed out the priorities.

You might find the earlier discussion of late projects, negotiation, estimation helpful:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19072941](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19072941)

Also:

[http://www.dadhacker.com/blog/?p=1693](http://www.dadhacker.com/blog/?p=1693)

> Work expands to exceed your capacity for stress.

> If you can, take an unplanned mental health day. I've emailed my boss and > cow-orkers at 5:30 in the morning, saying "Hey, it's gonna be a beautiful > day, and I'm going to spend it on two wheels in the mountains instead of > pushing buttons in my stall." Come back refreshed and grinning and try not > to make them feel too bad.

E.g.

What do you do that's unrelated to your work that you enjoy in your life? For me personal, physically exercise -- jogging, cycling --- is both enjoyable and helps me maintain mental and physical health, especially during periods of stress, with related or otherwise.

If you can, try increasing the amount of time you spend on non work activities that you enjoy, as you dial back your hours given to the company.

Edit: if things are particularly bad you may be able to recognise your situation as something like this:

[http://www.issendai.com/psychology/sick- systems.html](http://www.issendai.com/psychology/sick-systems.html)

</comment><comment><USER10> Working nights is massively counterproductive, and will make you less effective: [http://www.igda.org/?page=crunchsixlessons](http://www.igda.org/?page=crunchsixlessons)

As others said:

\- Learn to say "no" to people. You listen, make sure they're heard, and then you drop whichever task is least important. [https://codewithoutrules.com/2018/08/16/how-to-say- no/](https://codewithoutrules.com/2018/08/16/how-to-say-no/)

\- To meet deadlines... again, drop the less important work. [https://codewithoutrules.com/2018/10/24/deadlines/](https://codewithoutrules.com/2018/10/24/deadlines/)

\- Choose what is more or less important based on team goals, project goals, and your goals. Those last, _you_ goals, are the most important ones.

If that won't work at your job, time to find another job.

</comment><comment> 70122-_6 usually happens in febr. and 0ctober, but jb did a video on this. plus 10th of 10th month. [https://youtu.be/I88yluGb9oE](https://youtu.be/I88yluGb9oE)

</comment><comment><USER11> Learn to manage your time, your energy & your emotions.</comment>


London commuters drag Extinction Rebellion protesters off of Underground train - <AUTHOR> https://metro.co.uk/2019/10/17/angry-commuters-drag-xr-protesters-off-tube-try-glue-10933003/ <comment><USER2> This is what happens when people carry out counter-productive actions and alienate the very people that they should keep on side. This one is especially ill-advised: What can possibly be the point of disrupting _electric public transport_ at rush hour?

Unfortunately, "Extinction Rebellion" has roots in radical and left-wing movements, which are not known for trying to influence and be constructive, but rather for taking 'direct action' in the 'struggle against capitalism'...</comment>


Finland passes enhanced surveillance bills without a vote - <AUTHOR> https://yle.fi/uutiset/osasto/news/finland_passes_enhanced_surveillance_bills_without_a_vote/10683444 <comment><USER2> I'm currently launching [https://tiedustelulaki.com/](https://tiedustelulaki.com/)

On this website I intend to collect as much information as possible about the politicians who supported this legislation, I hope to expose every last part of their private lives. Nothing will be off limits.

I'm starting out with a total of 20000 euro budget in cryptocurrency that I intend to use to fund some sort of a bounty program in order to collect personal information on politicians who voted for this legislation.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's not that there was no vote so much as there was no opposition, so not vote was needed to pass it. It's as if it passed unanimously. Although this happened in a "nearly-empty plenary chamber", which makes one wonder about quorum -- did they have quorum?

<comment><USER4> There is no minimum requirement for plenary sessions.

Looks like the majority of MPs were present at the beginning (list of absentees: [https://www.eduskunta.fi/FI/vaski/PoytakirjaLiite/Sivut/EDK-...](https://www.eduskunta.fi/FI/vaski/PoytakirjaLiite/Sivut/EDK-2019-AK-251781.aspx) ), but the video shows that by the end (when voting happens) most people were not present anymore: [https://www.eduskunta.fi/_layouts/15/Arkena.Edk.SaliVideo/in...](https://www.eduskunta.fi/_layouts/15/Arkena.Edk.SaliVideo/index.html#clip_id=6021BB78&position=0&tab=ConferenceCurrent)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Note that "without a vote" in this context means that no one in the plenary session opposed passing it, so no vote was held.

<comment><USER5> Thank you for the clarification. Reading the title I understood that it was "slipped in" somehow without following due process (for example because it wouldn't have gotten the votes). Which would have made a world of difference.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I was not expecting this from a country like Finland.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm confused. Is it that there were no mp's who were opposed to the legislation? Or is it that there were, but it was somehow sneaked through without a chance for them to vote against it? Or what?

</comment><comment><USER8> The article is scant on details - what was the bill and why was it controversial?

</comment><comment><USER9> I wonder why this was marked dead.

      tiedustelulaki 14 minutes ago [dead] [-]

      I'm currently launching https://tiedustelulaki.com/

      On this website I intend to collect as much information
      as possible about the politicians who supported this
      legislation, I hope to expose every last part of their
      private lives. Nothing will be off limits.

      I'm starting out with a total of 20000 euro budget in
      cryptocurrency that I intend to use to fund some sort
      of a bounty program in order to collect personal
      information on politicians who voted for this legislation.

While the response might be considered over-the-top, it also reflects a level of concern and anger which HN readers may find helpful in understanding.

<comment><USER10> The comment was killed by a software filter that is based on past activity by trolls and applies to brand new accounts. It has since been unkilled by users vouching for it, which is the intended use of vouching.

In the future, can you please not post comments like this? They always attract attention because meta is the crack of internet forums, but they take discussion off topic, and the discussion they do lead to is usually just a sugar high rather than interesting. Here are two better things to do in such cases:

(1) vouch for the comment (click on its timestamp to go its page, then click 'vouch' at the top—this requires karma > 30);

(2) email us. Then we can unkill the comment and mark the account legit so it won't happen again.

<comment> java-man could you please explain what's a meta?

<comment><USER11> A discussion about the discussion.

<comment><USER10> Right, or the voting. Or more generally, HN talking about HN on HN.

<comment><USER11> Smart rule, that kind of thing is a bottomless pit second only to chained puns.

<comment><USER10> It really is crack though. Or sometimes I call it evil catnip.

<comment><USER11> I've become convinced that anything which makes us experience strong feelings has the potential to be compelling. Add to that the difficulty many of us have with letting things go, and you have a recipe for intellectual/emotional "crack" as you say, in the online world. Offline we tend to pursue extreme feelings in ways that don't erode our relationships with others, or give us a bad reputation, but online those controls tend to fall away.

It's a tough problem that seems like it requires commensurate energy (mods) to control.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> java-man oh no, not Finland!</comment>


Show HN: NodeOS 1.0-RC1 - <AUTHOR> http://node-os.com/GitBlog/article.html#!181 <comment><AUTHOR> Yesterday November 18th it has been released NodeOS 1.0-RC1, a Linux-based operating system build on top of Node.js as userspace and mostly intended for cloud servers and embeded systems.

The best advantages of such a system are performance and memory foot-print, since there are no intermediate layers between the Node.js binary and the Linux kernel making Node.js applications to run almost on the metal, but also making it easier to understand and learn since all the applications are written in Javascript and it's code is easily accesible. It has some particular characteristics that make it different of other OSes, like a build system fully managed by the npm package manager, full unpriviledged access to system devices in a secure way, or the combination of OverlayFS and chroot jails to provide per-user root filesystems, allowing to each of them to create its "own" OS inside NodeOS while being isolated from the other users.

The project was winner on the systems category of the spanish national Universitary Free Software Championship 2014-2015, and it's a participant of the 2015-2016 edition and of the University of Granada Free Projects Championship 2015-2016. Future roadmap includes ARM support and a graphical HTML5-based GUI.

You can download NodeOS source code, build instructions, prebuild ISO images and contribute to its development at [https://github.com/NodeOS/NodeOS](https://github.com/NodeOS/NodeOS) (pull- request are highly welcome).

P.D.: Thank you to @dang ([https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dang](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dang)) by advice me how to publish correctly the message :-)

<comment><USER2> I'd love to use it if it can give me sub-second boot times in VM like hyper.sh. My intended use is to execute un-trusted JS on the server.

Having said that, you're going to get challenged on the performance (runtime) statement. In my understanding (correct me if I'm wrong), the layers between the node binary and the kernel will be the same in NodeOS and in other OSes. You'd be able to offer much better start up performance though.

<comment><AUTHOR> hyper.sh seems to be a Docker images manager, isn't it? When running NodeOS on Docker or vagga (another LXC container mechanism) it boot instantly, and on QEmu or real hardware it doesn't spend more than 3 seconds, mostly only init the Linux kernel.</comment></comment></comment>


Hide Jimmy Wales from Wikipedia (Chrome Extension) - <AUTHOR> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bfjhgapggdjickppeacklbnlgkkckibl?hl=en-US

<comment><USER2> If you´re not going to donate, fine. But I think it´s not so invasive to justify creating a Chrome extension for this.

<comment><USER3> If i go to a Wikipedia page without having been there for a day or so, my initial reaction is that the image of the person is somehow tied to the office. Maybe I'm an idiot but it's the first thing that came into my head many times now. Distracting and annoying.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm assuming you meant article instead of office. I totally agree... I keep thinking the picture relates to the article and get confused!</comment></comment></comment>


The Yahoo!/Microsoft chess match continues: Yahoo! enters trial partnership with Google - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/09/yahoo-provokes-microsoft-with-google-adsense-for-search-trial/

<comment><USER2> I do not believe for a moment that Yahoo suffers from lack of talent or technology know how in all areas as compare to Google. Going for AdSense send the signal that they do believe there's a problem with their ads system. Its shows how desperate Yahoo is facing all their trouble, desperate to the point of losing self confidence.

Yahoo problem is not technology, at least not the main problem, the problem is lack of traffic, search traffic which generates revenue from ads, they seems to be failing to recognize it in this move. They can try what ever they want; actually I think it is a bad strategy, it supports in the mind of their remaining audience that Google is better. If Google is better even in their mind MS should reduce the offer.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm pretty sure Yahoo! has it's own ad system. Does this mean that (Yahoo! thinks) adsense is better?

<comment><USER4> Yes, it was once Overture, but Yahoo hasn't been able to successfully monetize it: <http://sem.smallbusiness.yahoo.com/searchenginemarketing/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> what's with calling everything a chess match? as a chess player I can tell you that chess matches are rather different.

<comment><USER4> Makes no sense to me. Snubing MS for the sake of pissing on their offer just so Yahoo can turn around and undermine their own service. Sounds more like Microsoft is playing Bullshit and Yahoo is playing Go Fish...</comment></comment>


Qattara Depression Project: Time to Revisit? - <AUTHOR> http://www.theenergycollective.com/roger-arnold/2385012/qattara-depression-project-time-to-revisit <comment><USER2> This is an interesting idea, but I'm not sure of the feasibility. Wouldn't the salt water lake simply keep increasing in salinity as the water evaporated? I know that desalination is mentioned in the article, but it's unlikely to be efficient solution to this since it is either very expensive to build (reverse osmosis) or requires lots of input energy.

Also, salt water is more corrosive so pipeline components probably won't last as long changing the economics of the project.

</comment><comment><USER3> If there's constant evaporation which drives the inflow, wouldn't the new sea and the surrounding soil become very salty, like several large-scale dam- projects?

</comment><comment><USER4> didn't we do this accidentally in california in the 1920s? the Salton sea isn't in good shape.

<comment><USER5> The problems of the Salton Sea are largely caused by the intensive agriculture of the surrounding watershed combined with the tendency in the past 40 years to horribly overuse fertilizers and pesticides (it turns out that agriculture is just as bad a polluter as industry, but it's more diffuse and thus harder to target with regulations. Also, the farming lobby is probably the most well- protected in politics). If Qattara avoided such fertilizer practices, it could probably avoid such a fate.

On the other hand, I'm more worried about the sustainability of aquifer withdrawals. The Nubian aquifer hasn't had significant recharge for thousands of years. As Ogallala shows, "a lot of water" is not the same as "limitless water" (some of the aquifer in Texas has completely run dry).</comment></comment>


Bevel – 3D Photography for Any Smartphone or Tablet (Kickstarter) - <AUTHOR> https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/matterandform/bevel-3d-photography-for-any-smartphone-or-tablet <comment><AUTHOR> Sounds great but few technical details are given. For example how it works. In the video is a glimpse of a red laser beam (moving slowly...). But in that case I doubt the result could be full color ?</comment>


China-made UOS gets support from another office suite - <AUTHOR> https://cntechpost.com/2019/12/31/china-made-uos-gets-support-from-another-office-suite/ <comment><USER2> China is a big market and we should not ignore it. If office suites are not ported to it, China would write their own office suites to compete with the other office suites out there.

<comment><USER3> It's Linux (based on Debian). The office suites mentioned in the article already had versions for Linux systems, which explains how they could finish the "adaptation" work so quickly.</comment></comment>


Reduce working week to 30 hours, say economists - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/jobs/10316850/Reduce-working-week-to-30-hours-say-economists.html

<comment><AUTHOR> And suddenly:

"There's so much space...! For cool side-projects!"</comment>


Large Scale Deep Learning – Jeff Dean [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en/us/people/jeff/CIKM-keynote-Nov2014.pdf <comment><USER2> For those of you who want to learn the nuts and bolts of deep neural networks, Andrew Ng's tutorial on Unsupervised Feature Learning and Deep Learning is getting older but still great: [http://ufldl.stanford.edu/wiki/index.php/UFLDL_Tutorial](http://ufldl.stanford.edu/wiki/index.php/UFLDL_Tutorial)

The best research results from 2014 and 2013 make less use of the unsupervised techniques than initially expected, so I would start by focusing on the below sections, which focus more on supervised learning with deep neural networks:

Sparse Autoencoder: Neural Networks, Backpropagation Algorithm

Building Deep Networks for Classification: Deep Networks: Overview, Fine- tuning Stacked AEs

Working with Large Images: Feature extraction using convolution

You'll need some background in matrix algebra, calculus, and probability to understand this. Having taken a previous machine learning course, although not strictly necessary, is probably extremely helpful--I'd recommend taking any standard course on ML on Coursera or Udacity, or going through any standard textbook.

EDIT: I almost forgot that Michael Nielsen (who wrote the standard textbook on quantum computation) is also writing a free online textbook on Neural Networks and Deep Learning. Chapters 1-4 are currently available and would get you pretty far: [http://neuralnetworksanddeeplearning.com/](http://neuralnetworksanddeeplearning.com/)

<comment><USER3> Bookwise, Yoshua Bengio, Aaron Courville, and Ian Goodfellow are nearly finished with their MIT Press book on deep learning: [http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~bengioy/dlbook/](http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~bengioy/dlbook/) . It is pretty strong on the true theory of what is going on in deep networks, and has fairly good intuition for how and why things work. Paired with the deep learning tutorials [http://www.deeplearning.net/tutorial/](http://www.deeplearning.net/tutorial/), as well as the content from UFLDL it is a pretty strong foundation for advanced study.

Michael's book seems to target a more introductory level - a beginner might be better off to start with that, follow with Andrew Ng's ML course, which has a section on neural nets including an assignment implementing backpropagation, then continue with the deep learning book and the {deep learning, UFLDL} tutorials. This should be solid enough to at least read most of the cutting edge work and papers, if that is the aim.

Hugo Larochelle's youtube course [https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6Xpj9I5qXYEcOhn7Tqgh...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6Xpj9I5qXYEcOhn7TqghAJ6NAPrNmUBH) and Hinton's coursera course [https://www.coursera.org/course/neuralnets](https://www.coursera.org/course/neuralnets) are also great references.

<comment><USER2> Didn't realize Yoshua & co had a book coming! That would definitely be the one to read.

BTW, for anybody who wants to learn machine learning in general, Kyle's blog also seems to be packed full of clear explanations with working demo code: [http://kastnerkyle.github.io/](http://kastnerkyle.github.io/)

Very nice!

<comment><USER3> Thanks for checking it out! I am planning to add a few deep learning related posts during the holidays. The recent results for NLP, captioning and speech using encoder/decoder models are just too cool not to demo.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This whole slide deck is worth reading. A couple of highlights:

Pg 26, quote: "Anything humans can do in 0.1 sec, the right big 10-layer network can do too". That is a very bold claim. It encompasses the entire fields of image and voice recognition as well as knowledge encoding. It's slowly becoming clear that this is likely to be true.

Pg 39, 40: Google's ImageNet-winning system in 2011 had 7 layers and an error rate of around 16%. The 2014 system had 24 layers and an error rate of 6.66%. Note that trained humans have an error rate of around 5%[1].

Page 50-57 talk about the miracle that is Word2Vec, and what is possible with that.

Page 60-70 talks about paragraph embedding. I haven't seen this published before.

Page 70-73 extends word/paragraph embedding for translation. I've seen a slide deck showing this works before, but I need to read the new paper cited there.

Page 74+ talks about cross-modal embeddings, especially the caption generation stuff. HN has had a few things on that over the past month or so.

[1] [http://karpathy.github.io/2014/09/02/what-i-learned-from- com...](http://karpathy.github.io/2014/09/02/what-i-learned-from-competing- against-a-convnet-on-imagenet/)

<comment><USER5> Whelp, Page 54 blew my mind right out the window.

> E(hotter) - E(hot) + E(big) ≈ E(bigger)

> E(Rome) - E(Italy) + E(Germany) ≈ E(Berlin)

These things are linearly separable?!

<comment><USER6> Deep neural networks essentially transform input data into a vector space where the data is "easier" to model. So while the input vectors may not be linearly separable in the input space, the network learns how to transform the input vectors into a space where they are.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I know distributed neural nets are 10000 miles out there for most, but I just want to add a few nuggets for those considering it.

I work with distributed deep nets quite a bit. It's a different animal than training on a GPU.

I am working on benchmarks with my framework deeplearning4j now.

That aside, a few neat references/projects that will be digestible for people.

For those of you already in neural net land, there's a few key takeaways when doing distributed neural nets:

parameter averaging across mini batches

(depending on the algorithm) adagrad

momentum

[1] Project Adam: [http://www.wired.com/2014/07/microsoft- adam/](http://www.wired.com/2014/07/microsoft-adam/) [2]: Associated Paper: [https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/osdi14/osdi14...](https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/osdi14/osdi14-paper- chilimbi.pdf)

[3]: Hogwild algorithm: [http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~brecht/papers/hogwildTR.pdf](http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~brecht/papers/hogwildTR.pdf)

[4]: A variation of this I use called Iterative Reduce done by my partner Josh Patterson: [https://github.com/jpatanooga/KnittingBoar/wiki/Iterative- re...](https://github.com/jpatanooga/KnittingBoar/wiki/Iterative-reduce)

[5]: Sandblaster LBFGS by Dean and Co. [http://research.google.com/archive/large_deep_networks_nips2...](http://research.google.com/archive/large_deep_networks_nips2012.html)

</comment><comment><USER8> Reading through documents like this really pains me because I it seems like such interesting work and I immediately want to understand it better, but then realize the time required to acquire the knowledge and experience necessary to understand and apply this technology is so great, that it almost seems like a waste of time. After all, think of all the things one could build in the 2 full-time years it would take to fully comprehend all of this to the point where it's useful in any practical application.

<comment><USER9> You should be complaining about the computing resources to train 24 hidden layers.

<comment><USER10> GPUs make a lot of this tractable. Nvidia is actually offering some free compute time for researchers:

[http://www.nvidia.com/object/gpu-test- drive.html](http://www.nvidia.com/object/gpu-test-drive.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This video uses the same slide deck: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvK- XOiKXOs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvK-XOiKXOs)

</comment><comment><USER12> The second half of this video has an earlier talk that goes along with the slides: [http://youtu.be/S9twUcX1Zp0?t=22m49s](http://youtu.be/S9twUcX1Zp0?t=22m49s)

</comment><comment><USER13> HN readers in the Montreal area will have a chance to listen to the talk in person at the McGill colloquium:

 __Scaling Deep Learning __, Wednesday, December 10th, 2:00PM-3:00 PM at the McGill University M1 amphitheater of the Strathcona building at 3640 University Street.

</comment><comment><USER14> Does Deep Learning on this scale offer any obvious benefits for genomic analysis? Does it make sense to use data from the 1000 Genomes Project (or similar large-scale sequencing effort) and perform association studies?

</comment><comment><USER15> I wonder how many machines are chomping on raw data generated by chrome, android and search. What is Google trying to learn and what does it already know?</comment>


Tesla Motors CEO Replaced by Elon Musk, Layoffs Expected - <AUTHOR> http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008/10/tesla-motors-layoffs-ceo-elon-musk.php

<comment><USER2> What, again?

</comment><comment><USER3> don't see why Tesla gets affected this. Do people really buy a $100K car on credit?

<comment><USER4> I agree. On the other hand, I drive by the Tesla showroom in Menlo Park almost every day, and there never seem to be any customers there. I'm not sure if that's normal for a sports-car dealer, but it certainly looks depressing to have such an empty parking lot.

<comment><USER5> Don't quote me on this but I thought there's already a substantial wait list for the roadster. Once more people take delivery I think their show rooms will fill up a little bit with maintenance and stuff but don't expect tent and fairground sales like the Ford and Toyota guys. :)

The lambo dealer near me is the same way, yet somehow I still think they're profitable. Probably only need to sell only 1 car a week, if even that.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Can Spamming Help? - <AUTHOR> I was recently approached by a data selling company with Data Guarantee Terms:

  85%+ Email Deliverability

  Hard bounces of more than 15% will be replaced with new contacts.

  Not a single duplicate contact.

  Each contact will come with permission based GDPR and CAN SPAM act,

  Contacts will be for your unlimited usage.
 A couple of months back, I launched extracttable.com with a post on Hacker News, a week later on Reddit and answered under 10 questions on Quora. My usual nonpaying user traffic comes from Quora and "direct" (as what shown on Google Analytics), the paid clients were from Quora and HN. Looking into the client base, as expected, 80% of them are combined from Data Engineers/Analysts/Scientists and Python developers. So, I was tempted and responded to them to check the last 3 years PyCon conference users filtered by targetted Job titles. While the price they quoted was ranging between 5-10 cents for the 60K user list, I'm just wondering to see if anyone were successful in this approach. <comment><USER2> Can spamming help? Sure, but most mass-email platforms explicitly prohibit sending unsolicited emails. On top of that, if you were to get even a handful of spam complaints, your account will be immediately shut down.

<comment><AUTHOR> I will be cautious in sending out emails and analyse the responses before heading.. Thanks much, Jermy( "Developing tools in the SEO")

<comment><USER2> I would actually recommend you NOT doing this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> > Each contact will come with permission based GDPR and CAN SPAM act

This line, especially the "CAN SPAM act" part, seems suspicious in the extreme.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree, but I consider those are the users who didn't opt or not aware of "DO NOT SPAM" sign-ups.</comment></comment>


Introductory Tutorials for Machine Learning - <AUTHOR> https://leanpub.com/introductorytutorialsformachinelearning <comment><USER2> I've gone through sample, seems a good book.</comment>


Unscii – a bitmapped Unicode font for blocky graphics - <AUTHOR> http://pelulamu.net/unscii/ <comment><USER3> I had an adjacent project about 6 years ago which included a Unicode drawing program, text engine and image converter ([https://github.com/kristopolous/unifig](https://github.com/kristopolous/unifig)) ... I think the mirror I have at [http://9ol.es/blocky/](http://9ol.es/blocky/) is still functional. Edit, no it's not... I can bring it up to functional if people request.

I spent a decent amount of time on it, nobody paid any attention though. Oh well, not everything's a winner.

<comment><USER4> Hey, I think it's cool. Would like to try.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Well, I'm ecstatic. What a beautiful font.

After seeing this, I was finally inspired to find out why BitchX wouldn't display ANSI art correctly.

Turns out I needed a code 437 emulator! [1]

I can now use it the way it was meant to. Here it is paired with unscii-16-full 12pt [2]

This isn't nostalgia, this is just _better_.

[1] [https://github.com/keaston/cp437](https://github.com/keaston/cp437)

[2] [https://i.imgur.com/3Oj9Vsy.png](https://i.imgur.com/3Oj9Vsy.png)

<comment><USER6> > Turns out I needed a code 437 emulator! [1]

So that… just converts from cp437 (output by the subprocess) to whatever the "system encoding" (assumed to be the terminal's) is?

I'm surprised iconv or the like doesn't handle that natively. Or is the issue that you still need to interact with the subprocess and iconv(1) only does piping/non-interactive conversions?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's a bit sad that many of the ETSI EN 300 706 V1.2.1 graphics characters (1, section 15.7.2) are not available in Unicode.

I am maintaining a small program that renders images directly in the terminal using unicode block graphics characters (2), and these would come really handy to enhance the conversion...

1) [https://www.etsi.org/deliver/etsi_en/300700_300799/300706/01...](https://www.etsi.org/deliver/etsi_en/300700_300799/300706/01.02.01_60/en_300706v010201p.pdf)

2) [https://github.com/stefanhaustein/TerminalImageViewer](https://github.com/stefanhaustein/TerminalImageViewer)

<comment><USER8> There is a proposal to add them to Unicode, but the process takes a while (and its the third proposal since 2017): [https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2018/18275r-terminals-prop-no- at...](https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2018/18275r-terminals-prop-no- attachments.pdf)

<comment><USER7> Looks great! Do you know why the other two have failed? I was initially wondering whether it makes sense to bundle legacy and teletext all together into one "big" proposal, but then I realized that there is a very high amount of overlap...

<comment><USER8> well, the three proposals are from the same group of people. they probably are reactions to feedback from the unicode technical commitee[0]. I've looked into the utc meeting notes, but those don't really contain much info[1].

[0]: see the progression at [https://www.unicode.org/cgi- bin/GetMatchingDocs.pl?L2/18-275...](https://www.unicode.org/cgi- bin/GetMatchingDocs.pl?L2/18-275R) and [https://www.unicode.org/cgi- bin/GetMatchingDocs.pl?L2/18-235](https://www.unicode.org/cgi- bin/GetMatchingDocs.pl?L2/18-235) and [https://www.unicode.org/cgi- bin/GetMatchingDocs.pl?L2/17-435](https://www.unicode.org/cgi- bin/GetMatchingDocs.pl?L2/17-435) [1]: [https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2018/18007.htm](https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2018/18007.htm) and [https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2018/18272.htm](https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2018/18272.htm) and [https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2018/18115.htm](https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2018/18115.htm)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I also recommend checking out glyphdrawing.club for a contemporary web-based editor using inventive unscii fonts. It features an original font and some contributor-submitted ones! Really fun to play with.

[https://glyphdrawing.club](https://glyphdrawing.club)

[https://github.com/hlotvonen/glyph-drawing- club](https://github.com/hlotvonen/glyph-drawing-club)

[https://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/glyph-drawing-club- edit...](https://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/glyph-drawing-club-editing-tool- heiki-lotvonen-ian-tuomi-digital-251018)

</comment><comment><USER10> This is beautiful and heart-warming. Thank you.

I use for terminal the classic IBM mainframe 3270 font [1], but I can replace that in a heartbeat with Unscii, which is more uniform and less OCR-y.

[1] [https://github.com/rbanffy/3270font](https://github.com/rbanffy/3270font)

</comment><comment><USER11> It's a little confusing, but my read is that this is a generalized set of old font characters that were used for graphics (like code 437) plus a bunch of unicode symbols that are also useful for graphics. With the idea being you could make much more intricate art from this font set. I think the more interesting idea would be to use it to encode movies similar to how ASCII animations work - I wonder how compressed and good looking a movie might be using this font?

<comment><USER12> Nice approach! Unless I missed something you'd still be having very few colours, a limited resolution, comparatively poor performance to an OpenGL rendered DRM output (as in, also a command line environment), and if you simply use deflate or zstd for your compression you'll have none of the streaming benefits of h264 or newer. I like your idea though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> As some kind of a parallel project, I once wrote a library for transforming Unicode text to 8-bit character patterns. (The goal was a bit different, as it was meant to render about any text which might be found to a canvas implementing a 8-bit terminal emulation. The glyphs were mostly based on PET character sets.)

[https://www.masswerk.at/char8/](https://www.masswerk.at/char8/)

Here's a rendering sample: [https://www.masswerk.at/char8/samples/char8js- sample-green.h...](https://www.masswerk.at/char8/samples/char8js-sample- green.html)

</comment><comment><USER14> The ansi art scene is still kicking it. [http://blocktronics.org](http://blocktronics.org)

<comment><USER15> Also [https://artpacks.org](https://artpacks.org)

<comment><USER16> The BBS ANSI scene was fun, but then we moved to Photoshop. Now it's fun to work with Retina level graphics! And the tools now... I love Lightwave.

So it's always been peculiar that some are attached to this particular style. Then I noticed a bit of it is quite explicit or just nasty, and the art style complements the restricted artistic method ANSI provides.

Also since I associate it with my youth, it just seems so immature. That's obviously my personal bias.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I did similar exploration of generating PETSCII from images recently on a Jupyter notebook: [https://github.com/amb/Image-to- PETSCII/blob/master/Picture%...](https://github.com/amb/Image-to- PETSCII/blob/master/Picture%20to%20PETSCII.ipynb)

No colors though. Might have to continue the project as the colors look really nice on the examples.

</comment><comment><USER18> Wow, pelulamu.net still exists! I remember a friend talking about it about 20 years ago, i.e. when we were in school.

The font looks nice and is probably strictly an improvement over most terminal fonts of the same size. I just wish they had a 24 or even 32px size for the hidpi displays we have these days. I wonder if it's easy to run a linux console font in double size.

<comment><USER19> > Wow, pelulamu.net still exists!

Yeah, it's a site maintained by viznut, a well-known Finnish demoscene figure and digital activist.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Wondering how it may be used along with [http://caca.zoy.org/wiki/libcaca](http://caca.zoy.org/wiki/libcaca)

</comment><comment><USER21> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13185932](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13185932)

</comment><comment><USER22> Oh cool! I'm a Mudlet dev ([https://github.com/Mudlet/Mudlet](https://github.com/Mudlet/Mudlet)) - <USER2> font looks pretty nice. Not that many MUDs out there that make use of unicode graphics though.

</comment><comment><USER23> Reminds me of: [http://www.inp.nsk.su/~bolkhov/files/fonts/univga/index.html](http://www.inp.nsk.su/~bolkhov/files/fonts/univga/index.html) though this one is based on Fixedsys instead of VGA.

I used VGA16 for years, until LCDs, subpixel rendering, and Unicode programming fonts became ubiquitous.

</comment><comment><USER24> > Mattel Aquarius:

Holy cow, thinking of George Plimpton and the computer I'll never have. This person did their homework.

</comment><comment><USER25> z!OMG it supports Amiga ASCII and C= PETSCII!1!11!!, instead of being yet another PC-tin-bucket-MS-DOS-only font.

Now we can enjoy all that wonderful Amiga Type ASCII art in front of Skid Row cracked games!

 _Well done! Well done! (Loading Star Control.)_

<comment><USER19> The author, viznut, is an olskool demoscener and specifically interested in extreme low-end and vintage computing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> What does "Unicode" mean in "Unicode font"? From what I can see it only has a handful (ascii?) characters.

Edit: after some testing it seems that "unscii-16-full" is the one (and only one?) that supports some Chinese characters, but it's unusable because glyphs stack on each other.. (screenshot: [https://files.catbox.moe/262742.png](https://files.catbox.moe/262742.png) )

<comment><USER27> It means that it supports characters outside the basic 127 ASCII or 256 ISO-8859-1 characters, like the Box Drawing[1] and Block Elements[2] characters defined in Unicode.

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Box_Drawing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Box_Drawing) [2]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Box_Drawing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Box_Drawing)

<comment><USER28> [2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_Elements](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_Elements)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> It's a bit unclear why this exists. It seems to combine glyphs from 8-bit computers and place them in Unicode space even though the standard doesn't define many of them.

I guess the reason is to be able to combine them in some "art".

Perhaps those missing code points could be added by the Consortium based on this feedback.

<comment><USER25> If the terms "PETSCII", "Amiga ASCII" and "ANSI art" do not mean anything to you, then this font and what can be rendered with it will be completely meaningless to you and you will be confused like you are. You had to have experienced it to appreciate it, which you do not apoear to have. A shame, really, since you missed out on a lot of cool art.

<comment><USER30> I think for many people this here doesn't mean anything. I'm having a really hard time understanding what is going on in the comments and on the post itself and I've just settled with "it's something about ascii art on terminals" and that's it. Probably has uses. But don't dismiss the confusion on lots of people since this appears to be target at older folks.

<comment><USER25> One can render ASCII art or even "poor man's graphics" in any text editor regardless of their age. Yes it's dated, but if one is working anywhere near physical equipmet like terminal concentrators hooked up to servers' serial ports, one quickly learns to appreciate graphic approximations of windows with just ASCII characters.

The rest like Amiga ASCII art from Skid Row and PaRaDoX and the like... you missed out. It was a glorious childhood. It's hard to relate just how great it was owning a Commodore Amiga computer. The ASCII art in front of cracked games from the group who cracked them belong with that experience, and back in the day, it was mind-blowing. This font is a modern implementation of characters enabling that kind of art again, on modern systems, in programs like OpenOffice for example.

And the target is the cracking / demo scene, irrespective of age.

<comment><USER29> I have an Amiga and C64, so I'm very familiar with the art form. Again, I don't understand the value of combining them in one font. I can understand implementing each of the respective fonts as modern fonts, but not this.

<comment><USER25> With this font, you can use say OpenOffice to create the same kind of art while not needing the original systems and tools.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: OpenArena Live – In-Browser Quake with Multiplayer Using WebRTC - <AUTHOR> https://openarena.live/?src=hnn <comment><USER2> Nice, I guess that's similar to QuakeJS ([http://www.quakejs.com](http://www.quakejs.com))

<comment><AUTHOR> yes, except this one allows to run the servers from the browser as well :)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> uses humblenet: [https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/06/introducing-humblenet-a- cr...](https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/06/introducing-humblenet-a-cross- platform-networking-library-that-works-in-the-browser/)</comment>


Ask HN: What are the features you build on AWS Lambda, Serverless? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I built an email newsletter system using Lambda, SQS, DynamoDB, S3, and SES.

I think it is a perfect application for that stack because it gets nearly 100% uptime and durability without having to worry about keeping a server up. Even if I was handling 1000 requests a day, it wouldn't be worth keeping a server running, but if it grows I can scale it up quickly by just turning a few knobs.

<comment><USER3> Huh. Swap SES for Drip (because SES is borderline crap) and you just described how I build and run "Last Week in AWS."

I tag links in Pinboard, then have a Lambda that consumes them into DynamoDB. Other Lambdas build out snarkive.lastweekinaws.com, the weekly newsletter template population, and setting static headers for CloudFront.</comment></comment>


The Demo - <AUTHOR> http://sloan.stanford.edu/mousesite/1968Demo.html <comment><USER2> Reflecting on the fact that this video was recorded before the unix epoch was humbling.

<comment><USER3> This led me to wonder why 1970-01-01 is the Unix epoch. Answer: [http://stackoverflow.com/q/1090869/578288](http://stackoverflow.com/q/1090869/578288). In short, Unix was developed in 1969 and first released in 1971.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Main Engelbart discussion going right now on HN (in case it drops off): [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5986307](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5986307)

</comment><comment><USER5> [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv- zdhzMY](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY)

^ Youtube link to the demo, as I can't get the video on the site to work.

EDIT: better quality version

</comment><comment><USER3> Archive.org has this video, too, and lets you download it: [http://archive.org/details/XD300-23_68HighlightsAResearchCnt...](http://archive.org/details/XD300-23_68HighlightsAResearchCntAugHumanIntellect)

Also, this demo has a Wikipedia article: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos)

</comment><comment><USER6> I absolutely love all the buzzing and whirring in the video. Combined with the fairly heavy reverberations of his voice, it's almost ethereal.

<comment><USER7> I was actually thinking about writing something to generate these computery sounds as I work. :)

<comment><USER6> Drop everything, and do it now. I _need_ this :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I read "1968" as "!986" and when looking at it again, still read "1986"...as in, the mouse was a pretty big deal back in 1986, from what I barely remember. But 1968? My mental picture is just circuit boards and punch cards. How amazing this technology must have seemed.

<comment><USER9> Well....Sutherland's SketchPad demo was done in 1963.

<comment><USER10> The SketchPad demo is just amazing. Whenever I work with a crappy interface I think about SketchPad and wonder how we collectively haven't set higher standards for the way we interact with computers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Did anyone else notice that the "word processor" demoed here is really more of a flexible outliner, like WorkFlowy ( [http://www.workflowy.com](http://www.workflowy.com) )? Actually, the more features he ran through, the more I was struck by the similarity.

</comment><comment><USER12> It is things like this that show why every college should have a history of CS course.

</comment><comment><USER13> Wow hearing him explain the concept of a mouse to a room full of people who may or may not be convinced that computers are the future is really interesting.

One of the most important demos in tech next to the invention of fire and the iPod

<comment><USER4> love the wit

posting this before someone inevitably rails against your _obviously genuine_ belief that the iPod was the greatest invention ever. X_X

<comment><USER14> That's sarcasm.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> And reflecting on this demo, today's XKCD is nice: [http://xkcd.com/1234/](http://xkcd.com/1234/)

</comment><comment><USER16> This reminded me of the original presentation of the iPhone, which I didn't watch until recently:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hUIxyE2Ns8](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hUIxyE2Ns8)

Points of similarity:

1\. Both presentations happened in San Francisco (at the same convention center?)

2\. Both demonstrate major advances in user interfaces

3\. Both include demonstrations of remote communication :)

<comment><USER17> Other than the fact that they are both demos and happened in SF (in different locations, Brooks hall has been closed for many years), they're almost entirely dissimilar.

One is a demonstration of new technologies, previously unseen by many in the audience. The other is the introduction of a new product integrating many existing technologies. You could buy an iPhone a few months after that introduction. Computers with mice didn't become generally available to consumers till 1984. You're either underestimating the impact of Engelbart's demo, overestimating the importance of the iPhone or both.

<comment><USER18> I'm going to disagree and say that Jobs' unveiling of the iPhone will be up there with The Demo in terms of watershed moments in computer, and indeed human history. It wasn't the iPhone per se, but what the iPhone represented and the clear inflection point it has proven to be for realizing much of the vision originally hatched by those at PARC.

<comment><USER19> That is ridiculous. Please, have some imagination. In preparation of The Demo, just think about the algorithms that were discovered and technologies that were invented.

Unveiling of iPhone was a marketing gimmick. And please look outside America before talking about human history, and indeed computer.

I really don't want to sound rude but this kind of vanity gets to me.

<comment><USER20> > And please look outside America before talking about human history, and > indeed computer.

You're too harsh on the OP. As Doug Engelbart discovered himself at some point: "One of the basic things you soon learn is that after a certain degree of quantitative change, you almost invariably go into qualitative change." ([http://www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/hasrg/histsci/ssvoral/enge...](http://www- sul.stanford.edu/depts/hasrg/histsci/ssvoral/engelbart/engfmst1-ntb.html)).

Before Apple put everything together for the initial version of the iPhone nobody else other than technology enthusiasts (or masochists) were using their mobile phones as windows into the world. Not 10 years have passed and now I can see 12-year kids chatting with their friends on their iPhone5s while I'm taking the tramway home, or 20-something lady-drivers checking their Facebook while they're waiting for the green light.

If it matters I live half a globe-away from the States, and while I do own an iPhone 4 I still fondly remember how I used to write Python scripts for a Nokia N73 that would somehow try to pair the images I was taking with said phone with the geo-coordinates recorded by an external GPS device, both of them (the GPS device and the phone) connected through bluetooth.

<comment><USER21> > "windows onto the world"

People were emailing each other and secure IM'ing in 1999 on BlackBerries, I think you forget there was "internet phones" before the iPhone in 2007. This wasn't some "geek machine" it was something every wallstreet, government employee and exec had.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Students build auto-tracking Nerf turret with Arduino and Kinect - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpQKaHzHaLQ

<comment><USER2> I was actually there for the hackathon and got to try this out. I couldn't dodge a single bullet.

</comment><comment><USER3> I always wanted to build one of these, never thought of using a Kinect for some reason. I've tried doing it with Arduino and the CMUcam before but it's fairly complex to implement that way.

</comment><comment><USER4> Do you have the contact information for Conor & Jacob? Someone from the press should reach out to them and cover this story-- such a great hack!

</comment><comment><USER5> Is there a link to the source code or blog post? Seems like this would be a great starting point to build a game on.

<comment><USER6> Couldn't find the code but here's some more info: [http://mhackswinter2014.challengepost.com/submissions/20138-...](http://mhackswinter2014.challengepost.com/submissions/20138-enough- said)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Anyway I can get one of these for the project managers in my office?

</comment><comment><USER8> that is freaking amazing.</comment>


Humbot's Strategy: How we plan on making tutoring more accessible - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@canolcer/humbots-strategy-how-we-plan-on-making-tutoring-more-accessible-604fe169afa0 <comment><AUTHOR> Hi, I'm a co-founder of Humbot and wrote this post. I wanted to share it here to get your thoughts on it. Also, I hope it can help other founders struggling to find product-market fit get another perspective or inspiration.

1) What do you think of our approach to entering the tutoring market?

2) Do you have any experience with the tutoring or education market in general?

Thanks and happy holidays :-)</comment>


Apple ordered to pay retail workers for security screening time [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2020/09/02/15-17382.pdf <comment><USER2> Dupe of [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24364652](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24364652)

<comment><USER3> This one is a link to the ruling. That one links to a news article citing a Reuters article of which neither link to this PDF.

<comment><USER2> That's still a dupe by HN's Rules of Dupery. Otherwise everything would be on the front page all the time forever and that's impractical.

<comment><USER4> Agreed. Perform the ritual and summon the @dang for his opinion perhaps?

<comment><USER5> It's a dupe because it's the same underlying story.

Generally it's probably best to have the best third-party article on a topic and link to the court ruling from the comments. A similar point came up earlier today: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24366620](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24366620)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What privacy conscious cloud storage provider do you use? - <AUTHOR> I've been looking for a cloud storage provider for a while but nothing is meeting my expectations in terms of privacy and reliability.<p>The only service that I consider safe and reliable, Tresorit, costs a fortune. I'm currently testing sync.com but I can't find that much info about them online. Amazon Drive is probably "safe" as in "they will never lose my data" and they will never stop existing, but on the other hand it's Amazon and I don't trust them that much regarding privacy. <comment><USER2> Have you considered client software which encrypts before upload? This way you don't have to trust the provider. Something like [https://cryptomator.org/](https://cryptomator.org/)</comment>


Network Performance Issues in Europe - <AUTHOR> https://www.cloudflarestatus.com <comment><USER2> Not be a CF apologist, but CloudFlare status shows their issues pretty honestly and openly. In contrast Akamai has frequent issues (usually isolated to a small area) and virtually never admits it unless you can PROVE it's them.

</comment><comment><USER3> As Cloudflare continues to grow their POP footprint, the frequency of issues has also gone up.

When I say issues, I mean "something, somewhere in the world is broken". More POPs and more peers means more outages. This is probably especially true for their POPs in less developed regions of the world.

Cloudflare also has a team monitoring for issues and it's usually pretty easy for them to work around the issues that come up. Their design makes it so that even the loss of an entire POP isn't a big deal.

As their service continues to get better and more reliable, their status page will actually look like it's getting worse and worse. But that's because they are being open and transparent about day-to-day operational details.

</comment><comment><USER4> Seems to be a backbone / fiber issue. Leaseweb also experienced quite a large drop in connectivity and transatlantic latency went through the roof[1]

[1] [http://leasewebnoc.com/en/networkstatus/latency-and- packet-l...](http://leasewebnoc.com/en/networkstatus/latency-and-packet-loss- eu-us)

</comment><comment><USER5> "down across Europe" seems a bit of an overstatement. Not having any problems with any CF-dependent sites from here in the Netherlands.

It also seems from the status page that only Moscow is currently being rerouted. It could be teething troubles, as that datacenter is the latest to be added to their network.

<comment><USER6> A number of high-profile, consumer-centric sites/services were completely offline for around an hour throughout what appears to be a large portion of Europe.

Seems like a fair statement to me

(Dublin, Ireland - a heap of sites and service were completely offline, including hackernews, whatsapp, and reddit)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I always wonder if there's easy way to know where current global internet interruptions are, anyone know? In this case it apparently was Telia [1] but how do you figure that out? Top Google results for 'global internet status' aren't really usable.

[1] [http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/cloud/cloud- management/cloud...](http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/cloud/cloud- management/cloudflare-suffers-european-outage-194020)

<comment><USER8> Realistically, this isn't solvable due to information asymmetry. Any one company only knows if their services are up, but doesn't really know what's going on upstream or downstream of them. That's why tracing an incident like this takes time, and most people blame the wrong party at first until the true cause is found.

But Twitter has become the de facto platform where you announce stuff to people, or shout into the ether saying 'is Cloudflare down?' Signal-to-noise ratio isn't even that low -- most baseline chatter is noise, but there should be a MASSIVE, near-simultaneous spike when a high-profile site goes down.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> What's interesting about this is that Cloudfare seem to duck a big chunk of the flak - everyone immediately suspects their own server, as cloudfare gives a pretty generic error page.

Lots of people chasing Heroku on twitter currently, for example when it's not their fault at all.

<comment><USER10> Really? The Hacker News error page said CloudFlare could not be reached.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's really good that they were honest about it. An hour or so of downtime basically throws any five nines SLA out of the window for the entire year.

</comment><comment><USER12> For those of you who missed it: [http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/06/20/telia_engineer_blame...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/06/20/telia_engineer_blamed_massive_net_outage/)</comment>


Ask HN: Best quantum programming framework to learn? - <AUTHOR> I have some background in quantum mechanics and programming and am looking to get into quantum programming. There seem to be a lot of frameworks out there (QisKit from IBM, Forest from Rigetti, Cirq from Google, and Q# from Microsoft).<p>What are the tradeoffs with each? Does it matter which I learn? <comment><USER2> D-Wave Leap is pretty neat: [https://docs.dwavesys.com/docs/latest/leap.html](https://docs.dwavesys.com/docs/latest/leap.html)

I recommend checking it out.</comment>


Evidence of regulatory capture of patent examiners - <AUTHOR> http://papers.nber.org/papers/W24638 <comment><USER2> I saw an argument not long ago that the revolving door ensures more rigorous review of the regulated company. Basically, domain experts are hired out of a regulatory agency if they demonstrate their domain expertise by being a competent regulator. Would you want to hire someone who didn't do their job well? Also, the 'toughest' regulators are the ones who the companies don't want in their jobs anymore - they'd rather those people were on the other side of the fence, so they hire them. The people who are soft (or incompetent) are useful in their role, so are left alone, not hired out.

Not sure this is actually true, but the incentive arguments seem like they run in the right direction.

This may not apply to patents as much as other regulatory agencies due to the way patents are argued (Not in court)? Maybe they cover these arguments in the paper... I just read the abstract and didn't pay to get the whole thing.

<comment><USER3> If I worked for a regulator and wanted to maximize my revolving-door compensation, then I'm not sure whether I'd want to be harsh or lenient. As you say, there are forces in both directions. I'd probably aim for the middle of the pack, since I (a) don't want to make my future employer hate me, and (b) also don't want them to think I'm an idiot lackey more valuable to them in government than on their payroll.

But, I think I have a pretty straightforward incentive to create maximum procedural complexity--that is, to draft and enforce regulations that require lots of administrative effort to comply with, but in the end have little economic effect beyond the legal fees. If I'm really clever, then I might even get whoever thought regulation was needed to perceive the paperwork burden as satisfying that--so the company might not even mind the legal fees, if they get an offsetting PR benefit from the procedurally strict (but substantively meaningless) rules. This is the legal equivalent of a computer programmer's job security through poorly-documented code, just with the creation and maintenance phases split across two different employers.

A lot of what patent attorneys do sure feels like it meets that description. If the regulatory capture mentioned in the paper exists, then I'd guess it works more through that procedural complexity than through substance.

<comment><USER4> Unless I misunderstand, the parent's hypothesis doesn't try to explain the data, which apparently shows a strong correlation between:

A) volume of patents granted by the examiner, and

B) applicant hiring that patent examiner & applicant hiring the same year as the grant of patent.

The parent seems to be an argument that they would expect the data to be otherwise, but it's not. Do I misunderstand?

<comment><USER3> I don't think natosaichek's comment above attempts to explain the paper's observed correlations. Possibilities include that:

1\. Examiners who want to get hired in private industry go easy on their future employers' applications. That would explain the linked paper's correlations.

2\. Examiners who want to get hired in private industry help create a quagmire of complex procedures that they will then be uniquely qualified to help their employer follow. That also would explain the linked paper's correlations.

3\. Examiners who want to get hired in private industry go hard on their future employers' applications. That would not explain the linked paper's result, though it could still be true if some confounding variable (e.g., different approval rates for different fields and types of client, as patentatt speculates) explains the correlation.

People worried about the revolving door are usually thinking (1). I suspect that it's actually (2), since that achieves the same effect in a way that superficially seems less corrupt, and that requires less trust between the revolving-door employer and employee.

<comment><USER4> > 2\. Examiners who want to get hired in private industry help create a > quagmire of complex procedures that they will then be uniquely qualified to > help their employer follow. That also would explain the linked paper's > correlations.

From my amateur point of view, that would seem to cause a decrease, not an increase in granted patents. At best the number would be unchanged and the process would take longer. So how would (2) explain the observation of an increase?

<comment><USER3> The paper studied the relative benefit to firms that hire former examiners. That relative benefit is the same regardless of whether examiners go easy on revolving-door employers, or hard on non-revolving-door employers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I would be interested to see a patent/intellectual property system that was incorporated into a market for licensing. Taxes would be levied on the market value. You would pay taxes based on the royalties collected in the open market, or you could release intellectual property into the public domain.

<comment><USER6> I'd like to see something like this too, but the tax is based on bonafide offers to license the patent rather than actual licensing revenue. You don't want me to make my cool gadget that infringes on your patent? Ok, fine, but if I register an offer to you for a million dollars for a license, and you turn me down, you have to pay say, 10% as a tax. You're a small independent inventor/patent troll? Either pony up for the government keeping everyone else off your turf, or take the money and move on.

<comment><USER5> As I mentioned, there needs to be both components, royalties and valuation. I'm not sure what the proper mix would be, but it seems like an area where a market based solution could work. You'd probably need some form of arbitration to hammer out explicitly what is novel/being licensed. Patent trolls and large IP war-chest holding companies would probably hate this.

<comment><USER7> The thing is that patent valuation is a black art, it's not a science. The best approach as you suggest is market based, but for a lot of IP there is no efficient market setting prices. How often do we read headlines of $X billion in damages 'awarded' as the result of some litigation, only to find out years later that that number was overturned on appeal and it was really much much lower in the end. It's just an imprecise thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The patent examiners don't have to wait till they leave to work for corporate. Many of them already have full time jobs and do patent examination as their side job. Their only requirement is to recuse themselves from patents filed by their company or their friends.

I'll bet it's pretty easy for two companies to make a deal to pay bonuses to each other's employees when patents are granted.

<comment><USER9> _> I'll bet it's pretty easy for two companies to make a deal to pay bonuses to each other's employees when patents are granted._

With regard to the moonlighting patent examiners, I'm fairly certain this is illegal. See MPEP 309 and MPEP 1702.

[https://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/s309.html#d0e1919...](https://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/s309.html#d0e19194) [https://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/s1702.html](https://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/s1702.html)

<comment><USER10> It's not a crime if nobody finds out.

<comment><USER9> True. But occasionally, it does happen.

[https://www.ipethicslaw.com/pto-suspends-ptab-atty-who- filed...](https://www.ipethicslaw.com/pto-suspends-ptab-atty-who-filed- multiple-tm-apps-for-cannabis-client/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm pretty skeptical:

1) Granting a patent doesn't necessarily mean that the examiner is more lenient or that the applicant got something good. There are good patents and bad ones, strong ones and weak ones. A high allowance rate may be an indication of very narrow patents which pad corporate quarterly numbers, but don't have very much significance as patents.

2) This high volume, low value patent prosecution strategy is often seen in large corporate files, the same ones who hire patent attorneys.

3)Examiners deal with an attorney who is usually employed by some independent law firm. The underlying client is often not in direct contact with the patent office at all.

4) those large corporate filers are often in a technology niche. Particular pharma drugs, certain high tech niches like display tech or semiconductor fab, etc. The point is, these are small worlds, and if someone has the background to examine that kind of patent, they are probably in a very small group of people qualified to work on that technology. If they then get a law degree and go into private practice, there's a good chance they cross paths with an entity that they examined patents of. In some of these tech areas there may be only a few dozen people in total (notionwide) who are qualified in the tech and are in the patent law field, it's a small world.

5) All the same goes for law firms, there just aren't that many people in this business, it's not unlikely to cross paths.

6) bad patents aren't good. Let me explain. If you're a patent prosecutor worth your salt, you want a thorough examination. The last thing you want is to have a portfolio of patents which fall apart in IPR. It makes you look really really bad to your clients. hypothetically bribing an examiner is a fools errand, not just in a moral sense, but it's literally a bad position to be in to get a bunch of bogus patents. Nobody wants that, it's actually bad.

7) measuring patent quality in terms of citation is a red herring. First, some patents may have a different 'lifespan' to when they're relevant. Some may be immediately cited a bunch, others may linger for a few years before being suddenly relevant due to some other development. But most of all, remember that patents cited on the front page of a patent are largely from the applicant themselves, cited in an IDS. So if a large portfolio starts citing a certain document, it might get cited in 10's or 100's of other cases that are somewhat related. And if you're going to use it as a measure of low quality, that just bolsters my original argument that these would mostly be very narrow patents, a type of low quality but not the type that the public should care about. Shareholders, yes, as it's a waste of corporate resources. Not anyone else.

<comment><USER4> The parent, while very informative, doesn't seem to address the actual issue:

What is an alternate hypothesis for a strong correlation between A) volume of patents granted by the examiner, and B) applicant hiring that patent examiner & applicant hiring the same year as the grant of patent?

<comment><USER7> I'd really like to read the paper to see what they're facts are. I suppose my underlying argument is that there may be inocuous reasons for the statistics the paper cites. I'd be super interested if it is a smoking gun on a wide scale type of thing. As someone who's been on both sides and intimately familiar with the whole patent industry, it just doesn't jive with my experience.

<comment><USER3> The paper is also at [https://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/thomas.wollmann/docs/Revolv...](https://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/thomas.wollmann/docs/Revolving_Doors_Tabakovic_Wollmann.pdf)

I proposed an alternative mechanism for the effect elsewhere on this page at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17175983](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17175983)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Whenever I've tussled with domain experts in patents here on HN, I receive these messages from them:

1) Patents are the way they are, because it's a finely honed machine.

2) You're an ignorant rube.

Perhaps that's true. On the other hand, what patents say often seems to contradict common sense. It makes me wonder if the whole field isn't ideologically subsumed.

<comment><USER7> The whole field is about being absolutely precise with language, in writing and reading. It's tough to do in English, the language just wasn't built for it. So patent practitioners have sort of developed a way of being precise with a malleable langauage. Much of the really odd stuff can be understood through that lens. Note, that precise doesn't mean "clear" or "easy to understand," something may be precisely broad in just the way intended, while being precisely clear and narrow in other ways. That's another inpedence mismatch between normal humans and patent people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Are there any decent plausible solutions to the problem of regulatory capture?

Are there any laws restricting companies from "lobbying" regulators or engaging in quid pro quo?

<comment><USER13> On the upside - competitive pay and benefits with industry. Probably a tough sell for many.

On the downside - restrict employment opportunities for X years after being in a specific position.

Clearly both have issues, but regulatory capture is a problem worth solving.

<comment><USER7> Patent examiners top out at like $140's pretty much. Nobody that's GS scale makes over $160. Starting salary at big law firms is $180 + bonus. So you have a fair pint there.

Also, as far as time bars, the PTO does something like this. Former examiners are not allowed to apply for a patent for a term after they leave. Doesn't really solve the problem, but it's something.

<comment><USER14> The USPTO also bars former examiner's from working as an attorney on cases in the area in which they previously examined for two years after they leave the USPTO. I do not know how carefully this rule is enforced.

<comment><USER7> Good point, I think it's really on the honor system with the threat of invalidating a patent in some later litigation.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


LangLadder: add language learning to your everyday web browsing - <AUTHOR> http://www.langladder.com/ <comment><USER2> Cool. There was just a post the other day on that Polyglot Chrome extension with a similar goal. That one is at:

[https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/plpjkjplknknmhfh...](https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/plpjkjplknknmhfhkjgcfgofclmlnine)

The polyglot just auto-translates some of the words on the page. Might be a feature worth adding here too.

</comment><comment><USER3> Too much rambling, not enough concrete info on the front page. And I _hate_ video product introductions. Show me a screenshot or two instead, please.

</comment><comment><USER4> That video is painful to watch.

<comment><USER5> Impatience was my reaction. It's actually not too bad, it was just twice as long as it needed to be; probably too much adlibbing.</comment></comment>


Vicarious AI passes first Turing Test: CAPTCHA - <AUTHOR> http://news.vicarious.com/post/65316134613/vicarious-ai-passes-first-turing-test-captcha

<comment><USER2> Achieving 90% success rate is quite a feat, I find myself reloading captchas a lot to find a readable one. It's a bit scary to imagine spam rates going up soon, though.</comment>


Rashomon of Disclosure - <AUTHOR> http://addxorrol.blogspot.com/2019/08/rashomon-of-disclosure.html <comment><USER2> What a beautifully structured, thoughtful, surprising, and helpful document!

These in particular jump out:

\- Risk profiles for diverse users can be very different:

 _Any discussion of the pros and cons of disclosure should take into account that risk profiles vary drastically. Taking this argument to the extreme, the question arises: "Is it OK to put 100m people at risk of inconvenience if I can reduce the risk of death for 5 people?"_

\- Ultimately a patch must be published. If a corresponding vulnerability disclosure does not also go out this leads to information asymmetry between attackers and defenders:

 _People in the offensive business can build infrastructure that helps them rapidly analyze patches and get the information they need out of them. Defenders, mostly due to organizational and not technical reasons, can not do this._

\- The incentives inherent to the software development lifecycle are out of alignment with the incentives of writing secure code:

 _By the time the security flaws in the newly-shipped features become evident, [the software manager responsible] is four steps in the career ladder and two companies away from the risk they created._

<comment><USER3> The last point is the one that really rings out to me as an Info/IT Security person.

While these incentives aren't aligned it is unlikely there will be a significant improvement in overall IT Security practice.

It's been proven time and again that the optimal approach for organizations is "move fast" and worry about security later.

Of course the problem from a societal standpoint is that there are externalities there, so the entities suffering from the consequences of this mismatch of incentives aren't the same as the entities making the money out of it.</comment></comment>


Show HN: The worst ANSI renderer, except for all the others - <AUTHOR> https://hpjansson.org/blag/2019/01/07/the-worst-ansi-renderer-except-for-all-the-others/ <comment><USER2> see also: squeezing 1024 colours out of a 1981 IBM 5150 with a CGA display:

[https://trixter.oldskool.org/2015/04/07/8088-mph-we-break- al...](https://trixter.oldskool.org/2015/04/07/8088-mph-we-break-all-your- emulators/)

Explanation & pictures of how some of the techniques work:

[https://int10h.org/blog/2015/04/cga-in-1024-colors-new- mode-...](https://int10h.org/blog/2015/04/cga-in-1024-colors-new-mode- illustrated/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Should try rendering some of this. [http://blocktronics.org](http://blocktronics.org)

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh, that's the stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> You can get even better rendering quality if you are willing to use Unicode 9.0 characters: [https://github.com/daleroberts/tv](https://github.com/daleroberts/tv)

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm already using the Unicode block range, and a little from the symbols, geometry, math and braille ranges. You can turn ranges on/off and combine them in different ways.

There's ASCII too in some of the examples because I think it works pretty well as a complement to blocks, when used for dithering only (--fill ascii).

I'm always looking for more Unicode symbols to put to use, though. I think PETSCII and Teletext symbols are supposed to make it into the standard soon, if they haven't already.

Edit: Forgot to mention TV looks very good, an actual useful tool for big geo images.

Edit 2: Here's the PETSCII etc. proposal: [https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2017/17435r-terminals- prop.pdf](https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2017/17435r-terminals-prop.pdf)

Will be a blast when/if it gets adopted and font support catches up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is great, I've been working on something that tries to do something similar among other things. ANSI's going to come back in a big way - I got a hunch!

<comment><USER6> Now I can finally stop using AcidDraw to build my web site graphics and start using Chafa instead. More colors to boot!

<comment><USER5> Here's what I made, but I'm keeping it stealth this month. I did make an editor/Converter, it's not great, but it makes ANSI's, and 256 colors as well. It's what I did with those ANSI's that's interesting - I stored them in the blockchain as non-fungible and created a neural network based off them. It's done, it's coming. Just don't want it all to come too fast.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> ANSI what? They have overseen many many standards.

<comment><AUTHOR> ANSI X3.64 plus almost 30* years of oddball extensions. For a long time, "ANSI codes" or even just "ANSI" was almost synonymous with that (increasingly loosely defined) standard, at least in the context of terminal graphics.

Now I'm not sure that still holds, but I decided the post title didn't need to be even longer and more arcane :)

* Edit: That should be 40, actually. Time flies.

<comment><USER8> You could always add tek4xxx overlay support.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> As someone who has played around with the ASCII/ANSI output (and knows nothing about the matter) that's really impressive.

</comment><comment><USER10> So how long will it be before someone puts a gui desktop in a terminal?

<comment><AUTHOR> You can get halfway there if you combine Xvfb's -fbdir option and Chafa's --watch option. Chafa supports the XWD format Xvfb puts out.

Have to do input with xdotool, though :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Background for anyone unfamiliar:

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

I would've killed for this in 1985.</comment>