Darpa Literally Reinvented the Wheel for Army Combat Vehicles - <AUTHOR> https://taskandpurpose.com/darpa-wheel-combat-vehicles/ <comment><USER2> As a military officer, I pray these never make it past Test and Evaluation. They took essentially one part and turned it into 1000 parts. Anyone who has seen what 20 year old Marines do with these machines, let alone what happens in war, will appreciate that this is a fantastically horrible idea in a war zone. I need high reliability, not high zoot. Let NASA have high zoot.

<comment><USER3> These were my thoughts also. During WW II German tanks were technologically superior to Russian tanks. However Russian tanks were easy to repair in the field and that was one of the reasons why Russian armour prevailed over German armour.

<comment><USER4> No, no, no, the comedy tank of the era was the Sherman Tank.

[https://medium.com/war-is-boring/the-m-4-sherman-tank-was- he...](https://medium.com/war-is-boring/the-m-4-sherman-tank-was-hell-on- wheels-and-a-death-trap-502b0d99e744)

Favourite quote: Hence, the Sherman's grim nickname—Ronson, like the cigarette lighter, because "it lights up the first time, every time."

Everything was wrong about it and the Russians that got given these on Lend Lease knew that they had been given a death sentence. Aforementioned article just touches the surface, the barrel was too short, the 'tech' for being able to shoot on the move did not work and you needed five of the things to take out one German tank, four as cannon fodder (complete with the guys inside) and one to sneak around the back to get that German tank whilst it was busy taking out the other four.

The 5 Shermans vs 1 Panzer myth is much disputed however where there is smoke there is fire and I would not want to be in one. Plus, by the time that the Americans rocked up to fight WW2 - which was late to the party - the Germans had run out of oil so their tanks were running on recycled coal dust extract rather than the diesel fuel required.

The shoddy design of the Sherman Tank was no matter though, the 'allies' were expected to pay for these useless behemoths after the war so this was the military-industrial-complex and built-in-obsolescence at its finest.

Meanwhile the Soviets had a much more serious war on their hands so their hardware wasn't about making a quick buck. It had to be fit for purpose. The same thinking happens today hence we have toy planes like the F-35 where everyone and his pet congressman is getting a backhander vs. the fit for purpose planes of Russia, as advertised over the skies of Syria and doing much better in the global arms trade.

<comment><USER5> This is the sort BS stories that capture the imagination of people who don't know what they are talking about but are trivially disproven by actual facts and statistics. At US entry to the war the Sherman has equivalent tank and crew losses due to fire as similar tanks from other countries and by the end of the war The Sherman was the _least_ likely tank to suffer an ammunition fire of all the major tanks fielded in the war by a very large margin. The biggest tell for this if you look at the stats is to compare vehicle losses and crew losses (e.g. a penetrated Sherman frequently lost one crew member while a T-34 with a similar hit that causes a loss of the tank frequently only had one survivor.) Oh, and the erroneous derogatory term popularized by Belton Cooper's widely discredited book was "Tommy Cooker" and not Ronson.

The T-34 was fit for purpose for certain, as long as the purpose was to leave a trail of broken-down tanks from factory to battlefield. Prior to 1944 more T-34s were lost to mechanical problems than to enemy action.

<comment> what-the-grump Did the US engage the Germans in heavy armor combat similar to that of the Russia's e.g when Hitler was trying to take Moscow?

<comment><USER5> Infrequently. The US were early proponents of combined arms tactics. Find heavy armour? Call in artillery or air support -- one of the advantages of owning the airspace over the battlefield.

Oh, and the only Tiger tanks that got close to Moscow are the captured ones on display at Kubinka.

<comment><USER6> The US Shermans were equipped with cannons that had weaker armor penetration by design so that they could fire more potent high energy rounds that would take out infantry since they were expect to meet very little tank resistance. I think part of the 5:1 myth is from the fact that out of a platoon of 5 Shermans only 1 would be equipped with a gun that could penetrate a Tiger from the front.

<comment><USER5> Correct. US pre-war tank doctrine was that enemy armor should be taken out with AT guns and dedicated tank destroyers (e.g. M10 & M36) while the Shermans were infantry support and to create and take advantage of breakthroughs to flank the enemy or take out supply and ammo depots. For US units all tanks in the platoon of four tended to be the same, but UK tank corps that had Sherman Fireflys available (a Sherman with a British 17 lb gun stuffed into the turret) would often run one Firefly per platoon since the 17 lb gun could engage and destroy at range any German tank it encountered. This was why the longer barrel on the Firefly tank was often camouflaged to look like a short 75/76mm gun to reduce the chance that it would be identified and targeted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I am not easily wowed but I got to say it.WOW. The transition from track to round again had a couple of bumps. Its amazing what we can do these days. I wonder if it's a pneumatic, hydraulic or an electrically actuated assembly. Looks like a hydraulic braking system.

</comment><comment><USER8> This design was actually developed by Carnegie Mellon's National Robotics Engineering Center in partnership with DARPA.

</comment><comment><USER9> Other than military applications. Looks like this could have potential for snow-bound vehicles. Ski areas and backcountry in the winter.

<comment><USER10> Definitely. The concept was commercialized years ago. E.g. [http://www.zonepowertrack.com/en](http://www.zonepowertrack.com/en)

<comment><USER11> Yes, but static.

And actually, it's an old thing, in that Model T conversion kits came out in 1922.[0] Also, later, for mud and sand.

0) [http://www.modeltfordsnowmobile.com/lcmainbriefhistory.htm](http://www.modeltfordsnowmobile.com/lcmainbriefhistory.htm)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Put this on a wheelchair, please.

<comment><USER13> Yeah if the weight isn't excessive it be great for mobility, looks like it could also manage a stair mode with all those actuators.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Isn't the advantage of using tracks supposed to be the increased surface area for traction and weight bearing? This seems to only slightly increase the surface area. It doesn't seem that this would have enough traction advantage to make the complexity worth it.

<comment><USER15> The contact patch goes from ~ 1 sqft/tire to ~3-4 sqft/tire. That's pretty significant.

<comment><USER16> Still if that 3-4ft^2 is in the air it's useless. This doesn't stop high centering or driving into a ditch.

<comment><USER17> It does help with traction, though. That's an improvement over tires.

However I wonder why they accept the complexity/reliability problems I assume come with this solution instead of going with _added_ (engageable on demand) tracks.

<comment><USER18> Since it's DARPA it's pretty far from being fielded, so I should think they're only worried about proof of concept at this point. But if you could modularize and ruggedize the wheels and make them easily replaceable and compatible with existing vehicles, then I could certainly imagine this being quite practical in certain situations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> That thing looks like a maintenance nightmare.

<comment><USER20> And how often do humvees get stuck anyway? I like the product, but it's obviously wasteful. During the Iraq insurgency what was wanted was armor plating. Literally just 1/4" slabs of steel.

This is of a piece with the F-35.

<comment><USER21> Humvees get stuck a lot!

The US donated (I'm sure with wink wink strings attached) to us, Slovenia, some years ago and it was quickly found that they are too large and cumbersome for our foresty mountanous terrain. They'd get stuck all the time on tiny roads or between trees.

I think these days they're used for paraded to show we have them but day to day the military keeps using their trusti Puchs from who knows when. Tiny and manouverable.

<comment><USER22> US is not fighting in areas where getting stuck between trees is a big issue.

<comment><USER23> Given how much money the US spends on its military I'd expect them to be prepared to fight just about anywhere.

Certainly in "foresty mountanous terrain" since that isn't particularly rare. Exists inside of the US. Exists on both borders of the US. Etc.

Producing a military optimized for "blowing up unsophisticated enemies in desserts" seems like a very shorted sighted way to spend the military budget.

(None of the above should be taken as me defending spending so much on the military as a whole, just on the allocation of the budget within the military to all sorts of terrain when taking the size of the current budget as a given).

<comment><USER24> The US military has divisions that specialize in "foresty mountainous terrain". There are parts of the world (and US) that are effectively inaccessible to any mechanized units and the US military has large combat units that are setup to operate effectively in those environments. Terrain that is prohibitive to mechanized units is traditionally the domain of "light infantry" divisions (e.g. 10th Mountain Division), distinct from mechanized infantry divisions.

The US military has dedicated units and training facilities for virtually every environment on Earth.

<comment><USER25> Yes unfortunately that makes for some miserable training.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I don't understand the benefit of turning the whole wheel into a triangular track; would it not be sufficient to make only the bottom third flat?

<comment><USER27> If it wasn't symmetrical it would be far more difficult to balance properly for when it's rotating in "wheel mode"

<comment><USER25> Yah the real trick is seeing that thing spin perfectly at highway speed.

<comment><USER13> The vehicle in the video was already wobbling around madly at low speed, as it is it'd be completely uncontrollable at highway speed and at whatever frequency the wheel and suspension resonate.

We add grams to balance wheels to prevent damage to suspensions etc, this thing seems just a dream for vehicle applications.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> That would actually be pretty useful on some farm vehicles. No need to pick a wheeled or tracked tractor, you can have both.

<comment> orbital-decay ...for twice the price.

<comment><USER29> First rule of military spending...

<comment><USER30> That would be _thrice_ the price.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> That video at the end about the army throwing Humvees without properly setting up the chutes was pretty incredible

<comment><USER32> From what I read, not so much "without properly setting up", more sabotage: [https://www.armytimes.com/news/your- army/2017/07/05/soldier-...](https://www.armytimes.com/news/your- army/2017/07/05/soldier-charged-in-failed-humvee-air-drop/)

<comment><USER33> Makes me wonder why nobody checked their work, parachute failures get investigated pretty thoroughly so it's not like you're going to get away with burning in a few hummers.

Though "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." Back in '90 or so I was on the ground crew for a jump they were doing to impress some Soviet generals and they jumped with too high winds which resulted in two arty canons and a sheridan tank burning in (they got to oscillating so bad the chutes collapsed) and three planes worth of troops ending up in the trees. Bad day to jump but made for an interesting day on the ground.

<comment><USER25> DZSO was either begging them to stop or should've been relieved for cause.

<comment><USER33> I _think_ the wind died down temporarily just in time for the go/no go call...was on a jump where that happened and it was nowhere near a fun landing.

Thinking further on the heavy drop thing, from what I remember the crew who's vehicle it was were the ones doing most of the rigging with the riggers mostly just checking their work. Too many eyes for it to be an accident methinks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Wouldnt it be a better/simpler design to just have big tires that can change pressure instead

</comment><comment><USER25> _Glorious news for all privates who've ever had to haul a Humvee out of a mud- filled ditch_

I've seen plenty of tanks get stuck but honest to god I don't ever recall a HMMWV getting stuck. I used to try to get my HMMWV stuck. That thing is geared so low it just walked out of soup up to the hood. Tracks are advantageous when more surface area is needed to spread the weight out, like soft wet ground (mud) or very fine loose (think sand dunes). It will be nice to have the added mobility for certain missions but I don't see this becoming organic to most units. The vast majority of missions just don't need these wheels and they look like they'll break.

</comment><comment><USER35> They could support tracks on existing vehicles by making new hubs/shafts. You remove the hub, add a shaft extension, replace the hub, then get spare rims and tracks out of the boot and do an Indy 500-style fast wheel change. If you hustled my bet is you could do this in 2 minutes with four people. Would add significant unsprung weight but would support existing vehicles.

If you modify the vehicle you can support this without changing the hub and shaft/extension, just change the wheels and add tracks. But I'm assuming they wanted to work with a mostly stock vehicle.

</comment><comment><USER36> I can't wait to see the next batmobile with these reconfigurable wheels.

</comment><comment><USER37> Interesting concept, but it looks like it wobbles around quite a lot in "wheel-mode"; and this is at the very low speeds shown in the video. I think it's reasonable to assume that it would be almost uncontrollable at higher speeds (leading to damage to itself and other components over time). As others have already mentioned, maintenance would be much more complex too with so many moving parts, all of which could potentially be damaged; and it certainly would be more expensive than a simple wheel.

</comment><comment><USER38> "Global War on Terror"

Capitalized as if it's a movie title, is strangely unsettling to me.

<comment><USER39> Always reminds me of the Wikipedia article that always used to give me a chuckle, since merged: List of wars on concepts[0]

      [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_wars_on_concepts&redirect=no

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Russia did reinvent the wheel a long time ago: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afJ18eJeNgU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afJ18eJeNgU)

</comment><comment><USER41> I'm curious how it affects performance in wheel mode.

</comment><comment><USER42> With that amount of funding, they'd better.

</comment><comment><USER43> I'd like to see it go ride through sandy road. or a gravel road.

I'd also like the inventor to use it for a year.

</comment><comment><USER44> As a previous soldier (commander of a hummer unit), there are serious challenges that the terrain offers. Bits of sand and rock get into EVERYTHING when you're driving over them. All those small complex moving parts could easily become a nightmare if they got stuck full of grit. Hopefully their engineering takes this into account.

</comment><comment><USER45> This is some good work, shows that taking a new approach to things can sometimes be delightfully tantalizing. But remember, the guys at DARPA want to go home and have a beer as well :-)

</comment><comment><USER46> So they took a simple wheel and added a couple hundred parts, increasing cost, maintnence complexity, failure potential, and weight. Is it worth it?

<comment><USER47> That's the point of RnD, though, right? Try a hundred things, extensively test ten of them, end up with one or two that actually work.

<comment><USER48> And, if you're lucky, also end up with ten neat brand new ideas that are spawned by the RnD that lead to entirely new things.

All the tech that went into this wheel, might coincidentally open other doors, that lead to still other doors...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> What's the benefit though?

<comment><USER50> read the article. it's the first sentence.

<comment><USER49> I mean what's the benefit of this design for rough Terrian. Obviously I read the article.

<comment><USER51> As with any tracked vehicle: Larger, flat surface area touching the ground results in better grip on soft ground and is less prone to sinking in. Small track-sections like here obviously aren't as good at that as full, tank-style treads, but easier to add to a wheeled vehicle and allow normal steering.

There's all kinds of companies making conversion kits to such (non-shape- shifting) small tracks for trucks and SUVs, not sure if there's a military example of that exact style.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> There's something deeply poetic to this that DARPA didn't understand the wisdom in what the "reinvent the wheel" phrase means. This seems to embody every bit of its meaning. Replace rubber tires which are brain dead simple and work very well with zero maintenance with this complicated monstrosity that I have many doubts about even being an improvement.

<comment><USER53> It's literally DARPA's job to fund pie in the sky projects, in the hope that maybe some of them might be practical.

The internet was born of a DARPA project, Siri was made with technology spun off from another. Project MAC was filled with groundbreaking research and development of AI and operating systems. All modern operating systems can trace their lineage back to Project MAC. The origins of GPS are also from an earlier DARPA project.

Most DARPA projects will never be used in an operational environment, but the technology discovered and lessons learned inevitably find their way into other projects and technologies.</comment></comment>


Still Smiling, Eduardo? USA Want To Collect Your $67M In Facebook Taxes Anyway - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/17/still-smiling-eduardo-senators-schumer-casey-want-to-collect-your-67m-in-facebook-taxes-anyway

<comment><USER3> _On top of that, they want to make it official that people who do avoid paying their taxes by renouncing citizenship are unable from ever re-entering the country again._

That is so braindead, it's not even wrong. You'd be hard-put to come up with a worse policy if you were actively trying.

 _Well, Schumer (D-NY) and Casey (D-PA) are mad as hell and they're not going to take it anymore. They will call Saverin's $67 million tax "duck" an "outrage" today in their press conference when they detail the rest of the Ex- Patriot act._

The "outrage" is these dipshit politicians and their big-spending government and their obsessive desire to steal every cent they can from the rest of us.

</comment><comment><USER4> What this law will effectively do is provide a huge incentive for foreigners who earn money in the states never to become US citizens.

</comment><comment><USER5> That's interesting. Someone who was born in country A and is a citizen of country B and decided to live in country C, no longer wants to be a citizen of B (which would be understandable for a lot of reasons, taxes being only one of many) still has to pay taxes as if he/she were actually using country B's tax- funded services.

<comment><USER6> Even worse: someone who was born in country B and lived his whole life _outside_ of country B, still needs to file taxes and pay social security every year as if _he was_ living in country B.

That's my particular case.

<comment><USER5> Well... You may still use their diplomatic services, vote, and freely return to B without first asking for permission. But I agree that you should be billed accordingly to the expenses you actually generate and that the process should be as painless (and cheap for B's government) as possible - <USER2> like a fixed amount per citizen that could be waived if you declare you are too poor to pay it.

How much does a citizen cost to B's government?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's nationalism. Very scary.

So, the government decides to give tax breaks to the rich. Not much you and I can do about that. It's hard fighting the system, you can camp out in Wall st all you want.

So lets single out this one guy and crucify him, make him an example of what we do with expats who don't pay their due.

</comment><comment><USER8> Banning wealthy entrepreneurial investors from your country would surely be counter-productive to stimulating growth?

</comment><comment><USER5> An interesting question is what happens when you renounce citizenship for political reasons (for this exercise, consider someone who fundamentally disagrees with the current employment of military force). Shouldn't this rule, one that effectively punishes such forms of protest, go against the 1st amendment?

<comment><USER9> Good luck getting this government to consider the Constitutionality of any bill (or executive order, for that matter) they pass.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> For reference, according tot his article, he may end up paying WAY more than the 67 million. [http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2012/05/re...](http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2012/05/renouncing- citizenship?fsrc=scn/tw/te/bl/dideduardosaverindoanythingwrong)

<comment><USER9> Yeah, seeing how Schumer and Casey are hell-bent on making an example of him, he probably will end up paying WAY more than 67 million. He'll end up paying with his citizenship if they get their way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The wall is going up one brick at a time...

</comment><comment> jack-r-abbit So... we have rules about who pays what taxes! Oh... you mean you _are_ obeying those rules? Well then... we will change those rules! _lame_

</comment><comment><USER9> Singapore is smarter about its tax policy than the US, more so if Schumer and Casey succeed in making their absurd proposal law.

How are these people even in the Senate anyway, much less re-elected each term?</comment>


Reinventing the wheel: the fluent interface design pattern - <AUTHOR> http://lexandera.com/2009/04/reinventing-the-wheel-the-fluent-interface-design-pattern/

<comment><USER2> That's totally wrong. The point of this style of programming is allow a series of function calls to be written as a linear chain of expressions. It comes from Smalltalk via Eric Evans, who popularized it in the Java world (<http://www.martinfowler.com/bliki/FluentInterface.html>). This style is favored by people who agree that side effects should be avoided but who don't like to build functional expressions with many levels of nesting (à la Lisp). Evans compared these composite linear expressions to noun phrases in English and argued that they can be a more natural way to express domain concepts in code.

The "with" control structure only resembles this in the degenerate case where every expression in the chain evaluates to _the exact same object_. Not only that, the "with" keyword expects a series of statements (as opposed to expressions), and that is the exact opposite of what the chaining style is about. This is easily seen in the author's own example: each member of the sequence has to end in a semicolon (i.e. is a statement rather than an expression), so you don't have a single composite expression at all, only a slightly more compact procedural script.

<comment><USER3> You're right, it definitely comes from Smalltalk. For those who aren't familar with Smalltalk, you can use the ';' operator to send a sequence of messages to the same object. The example in the article would look something like this:

      mainFrame := JFrame new: 'Hello World';
          add: label withAlignment: BorderLayout.CENTER;
          addWindowListener: MainFrameListener new;
          setDefaultCloseOperation: JFrame.DO_NOTHING_ON_CLOSE;
          pack;
          setLocationRelativeTo: nil;
          setVisible: True;
          yourself.

(The result of a chained method expression is the result of the last method call, thus the 'yourself' message at the end so that the object itself is stored into mainFrame.)

Sigh...I miss Smalltalk.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Yes, you're right! It looks remarkably like the "with" control structure available in Delphi/Pascal and VisualBasic!"

Those who do not understand Lisp are doomed to reinvent it, poorly. :-)

Fairly good intro article though.

<comment><USER2> As one dedicated Lisper to another, I think you're missing the point here. S-expressions are inherently nested, and the chaining style is about avoiding that (while still being side-effect free). I wrote about this a long time ago on HN... let me see if I can dig up the link.

Edit: here's one, though I remember writing something else with examples. Oh well. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=304871>

<comment><USER4> Good point. One way to do it might be to reify the object instance pointer to a first-class argument (usually the first.) Another way is with a dynamic variable _self_ (might be preferable, since you don't have to break function signatures.)

Yet another option might be with a custom method combination, which is overkill :-P

Any other ideas? or am I too off the ball park?

<comment><USER2> Well, the conclusion I came to was that trying to make Lisp less nested would be like trying to make the North Pole less arctic. If you don't like programming that way, you probably aren't using Lisp in the first place. There are a few exceptions, of course (I like loop quite a bit).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What's your catch-all note taker? - <AUTHOR> I use Microsoft OneNote and it has been working great for dumping all kinds of stuff (screenshots, logs, ideas, thoughts, love letters, resignation letters, resumes, code snippets and etc). That said I use an iPhone, use Linux for work, and Windows at home. So accessing the OneNote when I am not home has been difficult. What is your favorite dumpster(?) app? Do you recommend it? I am open for both free and paid solutions. <comment><USER2> As of 37 minutes in, not one Orgmode... ;)

I like Google Keep because it's one of the few apps I have found which gives me a readable preview of the notes. I generally try to keep the notes short. There is also an option to save the notes as Google Docs and then download as plain text if you like.

Of you wanted to arrange the short notes into a longer form, then Scrivener is a good next step. Again, Scrivener allows me to view these short notes in a readable preview. I can also drag and drop notes onto a larger document. Plus tons more features.

I have tried tons of other apps and none of them seem to allow a readable text preview. I like plain text, but I also like some sort of visual reference where I can scan loads of texts. Of course, this doesn't work well for longer text.

There have been some threads here lately about Perkeep, which I think has a lot of potential. A Google Keep interface on Perkeep would be perfect. What I like about Perkeep is that all content is content addressable and you can create meta-data external to the file which can hold things like tags, links between files, hierarchy, titles and a bunch more.

<comment><USER3> "As of 37 minutes in, not one Orgmode" \- ehh, how did you miss my org mode comment?

<comment><USER4> Well, your org mode comment was made 42 minutes in. At least, as I'm posting this, the post was 52 minutes old, your org mode comment was 10 minutes old, and this comment of yours was 1 minute in...

So... latency.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Shameless plug: I'm building Catch Notes ([https://catchnotes.app/](https://catchnotes.app/)) for this

The idea is to capture notes/thoughts/todos quickly and send them to any service (Trello/Basecamp/Asana/etc...). For people doing deep work (programmers, designers, writers) you want to stay in flow but also be able to capture any random thought that pops in your head.

This project is a bit harder than ones I've done in the past because I'm trying to take it cross-platform (macOS first) and keep it native UI everywhere.

For the past few years I've been storing almost everything in Markdown and organizing files into yearly folders—I call it my "memex".

It ends up being pretty simple, but I end up missing some information that gets silo'd off in services like Trello.

<comment><USER6> Very cool, congrats on building it. Do you have any affiliation with the old catch.com team?

I used Catch Notes for a bit several years ago before they were bought out. In case you weren't aware: [https://www.cnet.com/how-to/export-your-data-from- catch-note...](https://www.cnet.com/how-to/export-your-data-from-catch-notes- before-it-shuts-down/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm also a OneNote fan. I use it in a similar fashion - tons of work-related stuff, a bunch of personal stuff, and a notebook shared with my SO so we can both update grocery lists, etc.

I've got the OneNote app on my iPhone and it works well enough for what I need to access on the go. What trouble do you have accessing it when you're not at home? My biggest use-case for OneNote on the iPhone is to tick items on the grocery list - it works great and changes propagate to my SO's phone in under a second.

<comment><AUTHOR> Right, I forgot about the iOS version of the OneNote app. I guess I am searching for a more cross-platform solution (much like Google Notebook. Also, it looks like Microsoft is migrating OneNote out of Office suite and make it available as a default app in Windows, but will require a subscription to Office 365 to unlock features [1]. So cost becomes an issue when this occurs..

[1] [https://www.pcworld.com/article/3269056/software- productivit...](https://www.pcworld.com/article/3269056/software- productivity/microsoft-will-stop-developing-onenote-2016-in-favor-of-the- windows-10-onenote-app.html)

<comment><USER7> This is something I will need to keep an eye on. I've come to depend on OneNote pretty heavily.

On the plus side, Office 365 is quite cheap considering you get 1TB of OneDrive storage for the price. Since you're a Linux user that might not be useful to you though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I went paperless, this year, and after trying 3 or 4 different note apps, I settled on Notability on an iPad Pro with Apple Pencil. That I can run the app on my laptop (and phone), synchronized through iCloud makes this incredibly more useful than pen and paper. Importing pdfs and images from other places, keyboard based text entry from the laptop, proper handwriting recognition and search thereon based is amazing. I can tell when technology will work for me when I can quickly adopt it and feel no desire to go back to what I did before. That happened with ereaders for me when they came to the phone (I can read anywhere, anytime and for however long I have, I love it) and it has happened with this, as well.

</comment><comment><USER3> Emacs org mode ([https://orgmode.org](https://orgmode.org)).

<comment><USER9> What I badly miss about it is some kind of "org mode server" to synchronize things between several nodes, e.g. laptop and mobile, in a _structure-aware_ way.

So far I sync via git, which sort of works but is definitely not great on mobile.

<comment><USER10> Curious why you want a _structure aware way_?

My current setup (syncing between home and work laptops) is to auto-save files every few second in emacs, and "git pull; git commit -am `date`; git push" every few minutes in a cron. Works like a charm.

edit: I also do "git add * .org; git add * .org_archive" inside the org folder before the commit, in the same cron job.

<comment><USER9> Structure-aware: if one change sets a TODO item to WIP, and another to DONE, a structure-aware merge algorithm could resolve this conflict, e.g. based on time; plain git needs human attention.

Well, yes, immediate sync should work, all merges would be fast-forward except for a vanishingly rare case of two conflicting simultaneous pushes.

It's not very practical if one of the devices is mobile, so it's not always online, and parallel changes may build up sometimes.

<comment><USER10> That makes sense. I realize in my use case, even if I have one device offline, e.g., working on a laptop on a flight, in most times I will be able to sync before I switch to another device, so it rarely creates a problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> A disorganized collection of text files, often (but not always) in Dropbox, and random pieces of scrap paper.

I've tried fancier solutions over the years, including Tomboy and Evernote (and maybe even Google Keep, for a few minutes), but none of them have had sticking power.

Ultimately, my note-taking needs fall into two categories:

1) Something I can paste text into, where said text is best kept plain. (Word processor formatting would just get annoying, and cause endless problems, especially if that text is a code/command-line snippet.)

2) Something I can scribble on, where the content is likely to be some sort of sketch/diagram/chart with annotations. Most software note-taking solutions would fall flat on their head here, because its not what they're designed for.

When I was in school, I actually found that taking notes on a computer only worked in liberal arts classes. In STEM classes, handwritten notes were almost always easier.

FWIW, I recently picked up a reMarkable tablet as another way of attacking the "scraps of paper" problem (and as a nice offline PDF reader). Its generally nice, but still doesn't quite have the resolution to match a fine-tipped pen/pencil annotating a diagram without being close enough to the limit to drive one OCD crazy. (But it is getting fairly close.)

</comment><comment><USER12> I recently started using Zim Desktop Wiki ([http://zim-wiki.org](http://zim- wiki.org)) for the sole reason being that it saves them in text files and the obvious advantages that come with it (sync, no lock-in) etc. I use them across mac, windows, and linux machines. I couldn't find an iPhone app.

<comment><USER13> Zim is awesome for note taking. Highly recommended.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> There's a lot of input on this from previous ask HN's too: [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=ask%20note%20taking&sort=byPop...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=ask%20note%20taking&sort=byPopularity&prefix=false&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)

</comment><comment><USER15> I use Trello. It's not great at taking notes, but it's very easy to get data into it. Each list and item within a list has an email address, and you can shoot PDFs, web pages, etc., to those from anywhere without special software. It also "spatial,"[1] which is hugely helpful in being able to find things. I've tried a few other things but I don't like them. One Note is glacially slow for notebooks hosted online. And I can never find anything in Evernote.

[1] [https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2003/04/finder/2/](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2003/04/finder/2/)

</comment><comment><USER16> Is it just me or is Trello the most overrated software ever. Stack some cards. Color em. Write some more. Woo. Get bought for a few hundred mil.

</comment><comment><USER17> _That said I use an iPhone, use Linux for work, and Windows at home. So accessing the OneNote when I am not home has been difficult._

It shouldn't be, as there's an iPhone client, a Windows client, and you can use the web version for Linux. I have my complaints about OneNote, oh I've got complaints. But cross-platform isn't one of them. I don't have a personal notebook that use much anymore, but I've got one for a local non-profit that I work with, and a couple for work, all of which are accessible anywhere I have a connection.

That said, I just use vimwiki and Apple's Notes/Reminders apps. I've used OneNote since it was an internal Microsoft build running on my Toshiba Portege Tablet PC, but instead of adding features that have (IMO) been needed for over a decade, it looks like they'll be _removing_ functionality in the next release. So it's vimwiki for anything remotely complicated, and Apple's apps for the day-to-day "remind me to buy cat food" stuff.

vimwiki, which means you better be using vim, isn't a text version of OneNote, but it's close enough. And in a lot of respects I find it less annoying than OneNote's quirks. Project management, daily log, work notes, things that could use bullets and mulit-level outlining and the like. Export to HTML if it needs to be printed. As there doesn't seem to be any kind of iOS client, I might write one of these weekends when I'm bored. But I dump the wiki files to iCloud, so I can get to it from work or home, and if I were desperate I suppose I could view the raw files on iOS.

Apple's stuff I use mainly in conjunction with Siri. "Hey, Siri, remind me at 8:00 tonight to pay the light bill". Quick, one-off stuff I don't want to forget and would like a reminder for later. No heavy, project-oriented stuff goes in there.

<comment><AUTHOR> Whoa, I wasn't aware of the web version of OneNote. This is a nice surprise! I'm a Vim user so I will give vimwiki a shot as well. Thank you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Sublime Text for sure.

I used to use Apple Notes and still have years of stuff on there. Before that it was Evernote. And before that it was text files somewhere.

I came back to text files just because of the lack of formatting. It forces a primitiveness on the idea that ensures that it doesn't become distracting.

A lot of people in the WIP community are starting to use Notion. Haven't looked at it yet.

</comment><comment><USER19> My catch-all note taker is a Rhodia notebook with four different Lamy fountain pins, each with a different color ink. For digital stuff, I use Simplenote on mac, iOS, and Android and Resoph Notes (synced to Simplenote) on my Windows work laptop. I only just learned of Dynalist and may give that a spin but doubt that it will unseat Simplenote in my system.

<comment><USER20> As someone who also likes physical paper + fountain pen: how do you carry your fountain pens in a way that they don't leak ink when moving around in a pocket or something similar? (as in, the physical jolt of the pen moving in a pocket causes a little ink to come out of the nib, similar to if you were shaking it)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> For note taking, I used to use the LiveScribe pen and paper, which records what's being said, synced to your notes. This is not simply attaching audio to notes. It's far better. You can click on a written note to hear what was being said when you wrote the note, and replay the audio and writing together.

It allows you to be present in meetings and just jotting down headlines of things to review, instead of madly scribbling notes.

Livescribe: [https://www.livescribe.com](https://www.livescribe.com)

However, I hated the notebooks, simply because I didn't like carrying around multiple notebooks.

Now I use an iPad app called Notability, which does the same thing, without the annoyance of dealing with paper. I just wish they had a Windows version for when I get a Surface Book!

Notability: [http://gingerlabs.com/](http://gingerlabs.com/)

</comment><comment><USER22> Typora. Just a simple WYSIWYG markdown editor. I use it for anything from writing articles to notes to invoices. Has pretty PDF exports which look good and professional for documentation as well a nice selection of themes.

<comment><USER23> Amazing editor. I'm working in a little side project and I had in my mind an editor like this one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Zotero. Cross-platform and open-source. You can sync it using your favorite syncing tool, and even encrypt before syncing using something like Cryptomator. I regularly use this set-up on Linux and Windows.

</comment><comment><USER25> Currently moving from ResphNotes on PC ([https://resoph.com](https://resoph.com)) and nvALT ([http://brettterpstra.com/projects/nvalt/](http://brettterpstra.com/projects/nvalt/)) on Mac (with text files shared on cloud folder) to StandardNotes ([https://standardnotes.org/](https://standardnotes.org/)) which is E2E and supports all platforms.

</comment><comment><USER26> Plain text for notes/bookmarks/todo items/wishlists with my own markdown-like syntax for formatting. I use a small app (Editorial) on my iphone and Dropbox to sync.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. This is probably 1 of my top 3 choices at the moment. It is timeless, no need to worry about service shutdown, and robust and free. Of course, it probably has the most learning curve as I have to type out everything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I built my own solution for this after using many different apps and not quite being satisfied with any of them. My ideal editor is markdown based with preview as you type, available everywhere (so sublime wouldn't work), plain text storage that's easy to export, and simple linking between notes. It's at [https://www.nominal.net](https://www.nominal.net) if you're interested.

</comment><comment><USER27> I recently discovered VNote: [https://github.com/tamlok/vnote](https://github.com/tamlok/vnote)

Works great for me so far. Its QT based and uses plain Markdown files. Notes are organized in notebooks with (sub-)folders. Some of the features on top of this are tagging, full text search, reader-mode, vim key-bindings, attachments, MathJax, PlantUML, and Mermaid.js support.

</comment><comment><USER28> I used OneNote on a Surface Pro 1 for several years, but recently switched over to Goodnotes on an iPad Pro with Apple Pencil. Goodnotes has fewer features than OneNote, but the auto-shape tool is pretty sweet and I actually like the fact that it does not have infinite-sized pages.

I do miss OneNote's OCR, text indexing/search, and seamless cross-platform sync (web, mobile, laptop).

</comment><comment><USER29> Notes ([http://github.com/pimterry/notes](http://github.com/pimterry/notes)) on Keybase's kbfs. I really like having my notes be plain text files in an e2e encrypted network folder. The main downside is that there's no great way to create notes from keybase's Android app.

</comment><comment><USER30> Evernote. Nothing is perfect but still nothi g comes close to make sure I have everything I need across my desktop, iPad, and iPhone at all times. I like the scrolling list of notes interface and search is pretty good. I've had my work and life in Evernote for almost a decade now and it scales great.

</comment><comment><USER31> Dynalist [https://dynalist.io/](https://dynalist.io/)

</comment><comment><USER32> Vimwiki for text notes

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Never seen this but I already like it. I use Vim and the fact that I don't have to leave my terminal is definitely a bonus. Have you found a way to access it via your phone/mobile?

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I've tried many of them, but my favorite is Gmail. Yep. Whenever there's somethin I need to keep for the long run I'm sending my self an email with it. Attachments supported, formatting supported, search is pretty awesome, so it has all I need.

</comment><comment><USER34> We're an MS shop for office apps and I like OneNote and how it integrates with everything else and when I open it up I enjoy using it.

Still I never seem to actually use it... Maybe I'm just not a note taker other than the odd post-it note.

</comment><comment><USER35> I made the switch to [https://bear.app](https://bear.app) a while ago (over a year). Its simple yet full featured enough that its the one I've stuck with the longest.

</comment><comment><USER36> I tend to capture stuff in Quiver[0] now. It has decent search, shared notebooks, etc.

[0] [http://happenapps.com/#quiver](http://happenapps.com/#quiver)

<comment><USER37> +1 for Quiver.

I bought it years ago. I've never looked back. Such a great notebook.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Vimwiki. It's pretty much an 80% solution of org mode for vim, and works a treat for my usecase. I then just store those files in a cloud file sharing system and access them everywhere.

</comment><comment><USER39> Standard Notes: [https://standardnotes.org/](https://standardnotes.org/)

Mostly text, Web/iPhone/Android, private, freemium+self hosted

</comment><comment><USER40> SimpleNote [https://simplenote.com](https://simplenote.com) Lightweight/not bloated, quick, and syncs quickly across all my devices

<comment><USER41> +1 for simplenote, for plain text it's the best I have found.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I switched from OneNote to Notion (notion.so) for my personal notes and love it. The mobile apps are pretty slick. There is no Linux client afaik but the web client is full-featured.

</comment><comment><USER43> For many years it was plain text with Vim. Then started using Trello, then Zenkit for immediate actionable things. But in parallel also used Apple notes and now days Agenda.

</comment><comment><USER44> I'm using emacs org-mode. For everything, except notes on paper.

</comment><comment><USER45> Google keep. Works on all devices. Only barrier right now is the annoying load up time. Especially if you install it as a desktop app, it takes too long to load up.

<comment><USER46> I use Keep as well, but one thing I find very annoying is how frequently it loses it's place when my phone goes to sleep. Nitpicky - but this is especially annoying for the grocery shopping list.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Bear Notes. It's incredibly flexible. The key feature is the ability to create complex hierarchy/tree categories with simple hash tagging of notes.

</comment><comment><USER48> Pen and paper has yet to be defeated for me, personally

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm giving Vimwiki a shot at the moment. I can mark a task as finished with C-space, but is there a way to archive this finished task?

</comment><comment><USER49> nvAlt is the OS X client I use and I use the Simplenote iOS app (and backend to sync my notes). I have it on a hotkey so I can pull it up quickly. I only use if for text/links and would like one that could handle more and maybe even code snippets a little better but only if I get the same speed. NvAlt is blazing fast and always works (same for the iOS app).

</comment><comment><USER50> When I'm on my computer, it's Emacs org-mode.

On my iPad, I use GoodNotes with an Apple Pencil, which is an amazing experience.

</comment><comment><USER51> Papier [https://getpapier.com/](https://getpapier.com/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. Looks promising, except the notes don't seem to get synced between devices according to the reviews.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Standard Notes. Encrypted, has a lot of nifty extensions such as a Markdown and Vim editors.

You can even selfhost it.

</comment><comment><USER53> [https://scrapbox.io](https://scrapbox.io)

</comment><comment><USER54> Google keep

<comment><AUTHOR> I love Google Keep, but I am afraid they'd kill it all of sudden much like Google Notebook and Inbox.

<comment><USER54> So what? Use it till you can. The worst case scenario is that I have to spend half an hour again to pick a todo app sometime in the future :)

<comment><USER55> sure, but beware if you want to export your data from google keep, it will be HTML and not easy to import to most other tools

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Slack and use integrations to back up important stuff to say evernote.

</comment><comment><USER57> org-mode, with org-capture and Emacs bookmarks. In the past I have used deft, before zim and even before a custom spaghetti-code tiny monster that was a series of script and text files...

</comment><comment><USER58> Google drive! Just taking notes in google docs work pretty well.

</comment><comment><USER59> apple notes for throwaway stuff and shopping lists and other nonsense.

org-mode in a git repo for everything else.

notability for lectures, just for the audio synch

</comment><comment><USER60> Trello and a WhatsApp thread with myself

</comment><comment><USER61> Notion.so, its awesome.

</comment><comment><USER62> notability</comment>


iPhone HDR - Before & After Photos - <AUTHOR> http://l.thelikestream.com/72-iphones-new-hdr-before-and-after

<comment><USER2> I am actually surprised how well this works with in-phone, with fully- automated processing. I do a fair amount of HDR work with a Canon 7D, and the process is anything but simple. The results can be outstanding, but there is a lot of work in getting to the end product. The iPhone is using fairly conservative settings that avoid the surreal effects that HDR can produce if you are not careful.

Of course, it probably helps that the phone is able to make intelligent exposure decisions by evaluative metering. It can automatically pick the 3 best exposures. Most cameras do not have such automated capabilities. At best, you can take bracketed shots, but each shot is hard-coded to your chosen EV offset. I would imagine in-camera HDR will be the next must-have feature in point-and-shoots, which, given time, will no doubt find its way into professional models.

As far as the pro models go, I would love to have a more automated method of taking a series of raw shots at HDR-optimal EV offsets.

</comment><comment><USER3> If your photos are dull or washed out, you're doing it wrong. Or, to be more accurate, you're doing it right, but need to do a little more.

This high dynamic range mode compresses more highlights and shadows into the limited brightness values of a JPEG.

Your job is to widen the contrast back out selectively, using the saved details to re-process the image with the exposure and contrasts you want:

[http://michael.terretta.com/if-your-iphone-4-hdr-photos- are-...](http://michael.terretta.com/if-your-iphone-4-hdr-photos-are-dull-or- washe)

</comment><comment><USER4> I think the algorithm could try harder (or the photographer could possibly point to the shadows to expose them better).

The photos show a good job of underexposing to prevent blown-out highlights, but it could do better overexposing to bring out shadow detail.</comment>


Ask HN: Crossovers/intersections between mechanical engineering and CS? - <AUTHOR> I was wondering if anyone knew of any areas of cs where people with backgrounds in mechanical engineering who can also code are needed/work? I've found a few such roles related to software designed to perform analysis for engineering but am hoping to find additional areas to research or possibly of other relevant resources. <comment><USER2> Simulation software companies for the aerospace industries would fit the bill. I know CAE in Montreal hired both mechanical and software engineers.

</comment><comment><USER3> Mechatronics ??? I work as Mechatronist in a way. Process engineering with software automation.

</comment><comment><USER4> Robotics?

<comment><USER5> I was a field engineer installing robots in factories, more industrial engineering, manual labor (calibrating tools and checking for broken parts), and using software rather than designing software.

The teams that design the software i used sound like the kind of teams you want to be on, so yea, robotics...</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How many hours of productive work do you accomplish per day? - <AUTHOR> I feel like I'm topping out at 12 (6 at work, 6 at home). <comment><USER2> 12 is quite a lot. I'm closer to 10 when I'm really pushing it. Work 7-7 or 8-8 with 1hr lunch/errands and 1hr exercise/day. Maybe a bit on the weekends but it's hard if you want to see friends or have any kind of social life.

Probably 55/week tops. (This is real productive work, not the 1hr of email I do when I wake up, etc.)</comment>


Shutting down social media does not reduce violence, but rather fuels it - <AUTHOR> https://theconversation.com/shutting-down-social-media-does-not-reduce-violence-but-rather-fuels-it-115960 <comment><USER2> I largely feel the same... unfortunately today too many have lost the appreciation for civil rights, including discourse and challenge. People don't want to hear opposing views and are even starting to conflate speech to violence/assault. This viewpoint can make censorship an appealing idea.

The reality is that censoring speech only serves not to alienate people, but to bring more aggression as those targeted not only feel oppressed, but are oppressed. And now instead of having counter views to challenge their own are driven into echo chambers of those with same-think.

I'm not just talking governments, but of Twitter, Facebook and others. In the end, it's best to challenge ideas with countering ideas. It's best to not conflate a person's views on a given subject with their whole. There's too much tribalism and identitarianism. Censorship and encroachment on traditional liberties seems to be ever expanding, and only serving to escalate what appears to be an inevitable crisis ahead in society.</comment>


How Video Cards Work - <AUTHOR> http://www.x.org/wiki/Development/Documentation/HowVideoCardsWork

<comment><USER2> An interesting aside:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-letter_second- level_doma...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-letter_second-level_domain)

</comment><comment><USER3> Whenever I read about the guts of video hardware or 3-d game programming it always amazes me that this kind of stuff even exists. It's _so_ complex!

<comment><USER4> 3D graphics is also my favorite success story for programming abstractions. This code:

      glColor3f(1.0, 0.0, 0.0);
      glBegin(GL_TRIANGLES);
        glVertex3f (-1.0, -1.0, 0.0);
        glVertex3f (1.0, -1.0, 0.0);
        glVertex3f (0.0, 1.0, 0.0);
      glEnd();

Has been able to draw a red triangle for almost 20 years, on nearly every GPU released from a few dozen vendors. It transparently gets faster without you having to do much.

As a result of everyone having to writing code like the above, as opposed to assembly code specific to each GPU, the GPU vendors have been able to change their architecture tremendously over the years to adapt to changing process technology tradeoffs and add new features.

They've been able to do this in part because 3D graphics is a well-enough- defined domain and can be reasonably API-ified, but I could easily see things having gone a different way; people would be arguing about whether the ARM of GPUs would conquer the x86 of GPUs, given the massive install base of the incumbent. Instead, to some extent, anyone who can write an OpenGL compiler can play.

<comment><USER5> On the other hand, that same path has shown to be quite problematic, right? Lets say you have 10000 verticies, that's 10000 function calls to make. Sure, you could precompile a display list, or use some other work around, but we've finally come to the point where it is not fast enough anymore. Welcome to opengl 4, i'll miss the easy to understand glBegin blocks.

<comment><USER4> You're right that giving the OpenGL runtime information piecemeal (one vertex at a time, repeated every frame) is no longer acceptable for many apps in terms of performance, but I'd argue that that's not a strike against the abstraction layer per se. We've gone to a world where the code I posted was the only way to go, to a world where that works but is slow, and people who care about performance use display lists and vertex buffers and shading languages. However, most graphics code still feels like it's about graphics -- vertices, triangles, groups of triangles that share properties, lighting, shading -- and not about the registers you need to poke to set up the rasterizer on such-and-such chip, or how to optimally pipeline shaders to get the best hardware utilization.

The abstractions we have now are more complex than ever, but they are still, for the most part, in the problem domain -- it is possible to do weird things to your code for performance tuning, but it's just not possible to go as far with it as you can for a machine whose behavior is specified and guaranteed at a very low level.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Feds take down $1B Medicare fraud scheme - <AUTHOR> https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/feds-take-down-1-billion-fraud-scheme-operation-brace-yourself-n992481 <comment><USER2> "An even larger number of patients received unwanted braces sent to their homes. The unwanted products could disqualify them from receiving a brace under Medicare if they need one in the future, prosecutors said."

So Medicare knows this happened and is still willing to disqualify random people from getting braces? Really? I mean, I believe it but still, this is where we are folks.

It's like someone sued for "damaging" someone's credit, rather than just demanding that damaging information not being used. It's like an idiot going to jail for "SWATing" someone but where the SWAT team can still bust down doors and kill based on random tips.

<comment><USER3> |It's like an idiot going to jail for "SWATing" someone but where the SWAT team can still bust down doors and kill based on random tips.

Or getting the wrong house. Remember kids: Limited Immunity means complete immunity!

<comment><USER4> If they get the wrong house, there's always the possibility of them being shot and killed with no recourse. Any lawyer worth their weight in potato chips could get charges lifted from someone who guns down unidentifiable armed intruders entering their home unexpectedly.

<comment><USER3> Right, but if they gun _you_ down, there's not much that's likely to happen. They might have to get a job in a different city.

*Edit: Also, not every city has stand your ground laws. And there's nothing stopping them from shooting back and killing you. They're expecting a fight anyway. The lawyer might get a settlement for your family, but you'll still be dead. And your dog too; they love shooting dogs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Ah, so that's why I've been getting so many robocalls that start with "You've been qualified to receive a medical-grade brace".

<comment><USER6> Everytime they called me I would try to keep the conversation going telling them I had pain, and then explained that I had a pain in the arse from them calling me all the time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm starting to understand why medicare is going bankrupt... Glad these guys got caught and taken down.

<comment><USER8> Medicare is notorious for being rife with fraud and waste. This ring is far from the only one.

This includes mom-and-pop doctors who "upcode" certain procedure codes so that they get paid more. There's obviously very little the govt can do to check or know. That kind of stuff happens all the time. Like I wonder if the govt is even doing basic anomaly detection on claims data to catch these things...if a ring is getting away with $1bil it makes me think no.

Also...there got to be so much opportunity to build a company around selling a DS tool to the government or insurance companies to help detect and stop medical fraud.

<comment><AUTHOR> > a DS tool to the government or insurance companies

Insurance companies have actual fraud departments with investigators clinging onto every hint of over-prescribing, over-billing, over-testing or repeat visit inflation.

Medicare, on the other hand, has low administrative expense that's constantly touted as some kind of incredible achievement when compared to those "bloated" private insurers.

<comment><USER9> Isnt the 80/20 rule is a disincentive for insurance companies to go after fraud?

<comment><USER10> Theoretically, a competing insurance company that reduces fraud can offer lower premiums. In reality, this is thwarted by having significant portions of the population locked up in employer provided health insurance so they can't shop around, although the employer is sort of shopping around for them. It would be much better if everyone was dropped onto healthcare.gov.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Why are the criminals not named?

<comment><USER12> The accused. A fine distinction to make in conversation perhaps, but an important one.

<comment><USER2> It's completely standard for those merely accused of crimes to have their names spread boldly across the news in America. Nothing protects the accused in the court of the press and public opinion. I assume if the accused aren't mentioned here, it's a matter of their having good public relations and good lawyers.

<comment><USER13> I assume it's because they can afford lawyers that actually requested the information be sealed until they're found guilty.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Don't overlook the real problems out there - <AUTHOR> http://clint-hill.com/2009/01/02/so-you-made-your-website-in-5-hours-nobody-cares/

<comment><USER3> So you wrote a blog post titled "You made your site in 5 hours - <USER2> cares".

Nobody _should_ care.

I was doing my usual reading this morning and I started to recognize a pattern. Not just this morning, but a pattern that has been occurring over the last year or more.

It goes like this:

      * Blogger sees a link to some app on [Reddit,Digg,Hacker News]
      * Blogger thinks the app is stupid and insignificant
      * Blogger takes the time to write a rant about it

I understand why this happens. I have done it myself. Bloggers do this because there are posts out there that have been made in just minutes or hours that turned out to generate a huge number of page views. The allure is tremendous.

Here is the part that gets me: _There are so many bigger problems out there to blog about._

<comment><AUTHOR> So what you're saying is that while I'm blogging about education and healthcare software problems, I haven't chosen big enough problems?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Beginners like to have fun, and it is a good and healthy thing that they do so.

It's not their fault that social news systems are broken [1] and tend to vote their fun beginner projects up to the front page where they waste your precious time.

If you're going to rant about this problem, try to rant at the systems that are at fault: Digg, Reddit, and perhaps even Hacker News. Don't pick on the people who are doing silly practice projects. Everyone needs to do silly practice projects some of the time. We are all beginners at least once. In software, we are beginners _much_ of the time.

\---

[1] In this writer's opinion, not in mine. I don't think these particular headlines on HN are a big problem. I even appreciate the utility of the "built in _x_ hours" headline format: It's truth in advertising. I know what I'm going to see on the other end of such a link, and I can avoid it if I like.

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually I wasn't blaming the social news systems at all. In fact I only mentioned them as examples of where I see these links most often.

I still contend a beginner practice project can be built around some of these bigger problems. Why not?

<comment><USER4> _I still contend a beginner practice project can be built around some of these bigger problems. Why not?_

The _essential_ quality of a beginner practice project is that it is _guaranteed_ to be finished quickly. There are many reasons for this.

It's important to get the positive feedback -- the warm glow that comes from a _finished_ thing. Otherwise you just become frustrated and sad and you'll quit instead of sticking around long enough to stop being a beginner.

It's important to test the full stack -- you want to practice the stuff that happens near the end of a project as well as the stuff at the beginning. Often it's only when you try to launch the "finished" product that you discover the terrible flaws in your original design. Often, the features of the new tool or technique that you're trying to learn will only make sense after you've experienced _every_ part of the design cycle.

As a beginner, you are _really underqualified to choose an appropriate project_. You have no idea how good you are. You have no idea how hard the hard problems are, or why. Best to make sure that your badly-chosen project is a short and sweet one.

Having said all of that: Of course it might be possible to put beginners to work on tiny, solveable, easily-shipped pieces of these larger problems. That's what a teacher's job is. Why don't you write out a set of suggested projects and suggest them to some beginners?

<comment><USER5> Two other things to consider: 1) if it's not something you or someone close to you needs or wants, then it won't be a very good beginner project because you will be lacking that immediate positive feedback you spoke of. 2) the bigger problems may be more "useful" but these apps are being submitted to other developers for approval. Most devs won't know that you just solved a major problem in healthcare and will just shrug. If you submit it to a healthcare blog "i did this in one day!" You'll immediately start getting _negative_ feedback from a bunch of non-techies who (as they should) are looking at its usability, not the core technology you implemented.

To throw out an idea: two of my "pet projects" that I have yet to work on are a basic inventory system for small manufacturers and a basic job quoting/scheduling system for manufacturers/job shops. Technologically they're both easy and it shouldn't be hard to find people to present them to (despite what so many online think, the US is full of small manufacturing businesses). Unfortunately, neither of them is "fun" so don't make good beginner projects.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think it's interesting to see what people can do in a fixed amount of time.

Submitting such a project doesn't mean that's all someone is doing with their life. In fact, it _necessarily_ doesn't mean that.

</comment><comment><USER7> Trivial problems are easy to solve - real problems are _hard_. Speaking as a veteran of health care and education, the challenges in these fields are primarily bureaucratic and political, not technical. You would be crazy to jump into either field without an understanding of the domain or preexisting relationships with potential customers. In my experience, startup-minded folks rarely have the experience beyond software itself necessary to build a business in another field.</comment>


A Soviet scientist created tame foxes - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20160912-a-soviet-scientist-created-the-only-tame-foxes-in-the-world <comment><USER2> About 4 years ago I gave a talk at a genomics conference in Novosibirsk. I asked to go to this facility and it was super interesting. They were also doing similar experiments on minks and a few other mammals. I was pretty surprised on how few generations it took, and the physical features changed pretty drastically as well. I'll see if I can dig up some old videos.

<comment><USER2> Tamed mink (1)

Untamed mink (2)

Note the coat color change happened during selection.

Tame cute foxes (3)

Bred foxes (not for tameness) (4)

Excuse my shoddy camerawork.

(1) [https://www.dropbox.com/s/9h5imx8kr3zrxe4/2012-06-28%2000.54...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/9h5imx8kr3zrxe4/2012-06-28%2000.54.43.mov?dl=0)

(2) [https://www.dropbox.com/s/6sjenj5us94y2c8/2012-06-28%2000.50...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/6sjenj5us94y2c8/2012-06-28%2000.50.03.mov?dl=0)

(3) [https://www.dropbox.com/s/6z0x1f60z2evvmy/2012-06-28%2000.26...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/6z0x1f60z2evvmy/2012-06-28%2000.26.23.mov?dl=0)

(4) [https://www.dropbox.com/s/9o22yx9nk2pvfj8/2012-06-28%2000.36...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/9o22yx9nk2pvfj8/2012-06-28%2000.36.56.mov?dl=0)

<comment><USER3> That tamed mink is absolutely relaxed. Such an animal would likely serve as an excellent pet, but the regulatory and cultural obstacles are almost certainly insurmountable.

Even genetic evolution moves faster than our regulatory system!

<comment><USER4> Might be other problems though with a tame but undomesticated animal. Do they smell bad? Can they control their bladders etc? Carry pests or other undesirable bacteria etc?

<comment><USER5> I think the only problem would be finding a vet who knows the species and getting vaccinations.

<comment><USER6> Outside of dogs and cats, vaccinations are likely off label anyways. A vet would say "This mink is 4kg, I'll give it the dosing for a 4kg cat."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Great thinking point at the end:

"We always assume that intelligence is responsible for our success," says Hare. "That humans became smarter, which… allowed us to invent wheels and agriculture and iPhones. But what if that wasn't what happened?"

Hare suspects that, "like the foxes, and like dogs, we became friendlier first, and then got smarter by accident. This would mean that our prosocial skills, the skills that allow for cooperation and friendliness, were what made us successful."

<comment><USER8> A dog with the intelligence of a human still has the problem of having no fine manipulators (hands) with which to assist applying their intelligence on to the world around them.

<comment><USER9> i have often wondered if something like the orca has reached basically the pinnacle of intelligence for an ocean-dwelling animal due to the restrictions of being in water.

<comment><USER10> I would note squid and octopus have fine manipulators (tentacles) and they are relatively intelligent.

<comment><USER11> I've often wondered if we had suitable computer-brain interfaces, could we harness octopus brains to process various computational workloads. Like a squishy co-processor

<comment><USER12> _sarcasm on_

Don't forget, human brains are squishy, too, and there are many more of them!

 _Sarcasm off_

Not sure if your comment meant to be provocative, or if you just did not think through the ethical considerations of your statement. In fact, I am not sure how well protected octupus as a species are, since they lack a spine.

<comment><USER11> I was half joking, but I think there is something to be said for biological computation far beyond the capabilities of silicon, that we may be able to ultimately harness with better BCIs (brain-computer interface). Imagine Goldman Sachs running market predictions on huge banks of invertebrates hooked up to neural network HFT algorithms, literally earning the name "vampire squid" :)

I think the ethics of something like this is a very challenging area. Legally, cephalopods already enjoy some protection in the EU against scientific experiments that can cause pain - [http://eur- lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:L:2...](http://eur- lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:L:2010:276:0033:0079:EN:PDF)

However we readily eat squid and octopus, to the point of endangering them. We breed chicken and other animals in factories, in the case of battery hen from hatching to killing them in 72 weeks max (about 10% of their normal life span), in often horrific conditions.

Would using octopuses be more ethical than chimps, since they lack a spine and are genetically further from us? What if the octopuses were bred on a farm instead of captured in the wild? What if instead of whole animals, just the nervous system structures were grown in culture?

<comment><USER12> Thank you for your reply, and making your position understandable. In my humble opinion science has already a problem with communicating to the general public.

We are still far away from the comprehension of state, or even computuation in living tissue. The technology underlying silicium based computers is quite primitive compared to biologics. Certainly - these are interesting thoughts in theory - but for the sake of science communications with the general public I am very careful in what context and what way I would articulate these concepts.

Animal welfare, and the health of ecosystems, is definitely another minefield of a discussion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> An almost unrelated anecdote, but I was touring Russia in a bus, and the old lady in front of us had lived in Leningrad in the 1930's. Her father was a dog-keeper for professor Ivan Pavlov.

The said father was an "enemy of the people" (Article 58) due to his ethnicity, so he was allowed only second-rate jobs, but Pavlov and his dog research had enough standing even during the Purges to protect the dog-keeper. The daughter then survived Siege of Leningrad and later escaped to Finland, ending up in the bus with us to tour the old places and tell her remarkable story.

<comment><USER14> Can you elaborate on what you mean by being an "'enemy of the people' due to his ethnicity"? I've studied a fair bit of Soviet law and never heard of someone being targeted for their ethnicity specifically.

<comment><USER15> as a russian, I'll try to clarify.

i believe there were two different concepts. the first one — an enemy of the state, or enemy of the people (враг народа) — is not about ethnicity. it's about "criminals" who deed horrible things to Soviet state and Soviet people.

some of these people were indeed criminals (although someone could argue that their crimes are usually not so horrible, i.e. banal theft), some of them — a lot, I think — were innocent.

enemy of the state/people was a working concept in 1930-1950s.

the second concept is about ethnicity. i don't know is there a name for it though. all of the ethnicities in Soviet Russia were declared equal, USSR was extremely anti-racist and anti-nationalist.

at the same time there were some nuances. for example, it was very hard to go to the top university if you are a jew (or jewish? I don't want to cause offence here). no one will tell you that you are not qualified because you are jewish, but you won't be there anyway.

there were two reasons behind that. the first one: it was too dangerous to give a good education to someone who could leave USSR for Israel later. the second one is quite obvious, i think.

I don't know when it began but it was relatively difficult for jewish kids to get to the top faculties of top universities even in 1980s. the same could be said about top-secret research and some other areas.

<comment><USER16> > all of the ethnicities in Soviet Russia were declared equal

So were all the people, but I'll wager the General Secretary of the Party had a nicer apartment.

<comment><USER13> All were declared equal, but the General Secretary was declared more equal.

However, that's not the real problem. A society cannot work without some economic and social inequality.

Taking large numbers of people in the early morning hours from their homes, imprisoning and starving and shooting them in the back of the head and burying them in a ditch, that is a problem, and the system that did this survived until 1980's, and now Russia is increasingly nostalgic about it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> When I was at JCVI we tried to negotiate a plan to do a full genome sequencing of these foxes.

One of the more interesting discoveries - random piebaldness in animals (holsteins, pintos, salt and pepper dogs & cats) is almost exclusively found in domesticated animals and is probably related to genetic shifts in the expression of enzymes used to make dopamine, which is also the chemical precursor for melanin.

</comment><comment><USER18> There was also a converse experiment: a population of dogs was un-domesticated by breeding for a strong wild response. I don't have the exact reference, but recollect that the process also took a remarkably low number of generations.

I wonder what sort of physical attributes/neurochemistry would develop in increasingly wild populations of dogs.

<comment><USER19> This could have relevance to dog breeds originally selected for fighting or baiting, then subsequently selected for companionship. Maybe if a fighting or baiting dog is n generations into social breeding it can be considered safe?

<comment><USER20> Dogs are kind of a weird case, from an animal population standpoint. On one hand, there are a ton of 'purebred' populations that undergo very specific selection and which are fairly genetically isolated from the rest of the species. These are your fighting dogs, your hunting dogs, your ratters, your herders, your companions, etc etc. On the other, there's this huge pool of castoffs and mutts, which aren't really undergoing any concerted deliberate selection at all. However, the castoffs from the specific breed dogs are constantly being shunted into the general population.

So to answer your question in that context: Yes, it would be more than possible to take a population of dangerous fighting dogs and use them as the base stock for a pet breed, provided that the breeding program was well designed. However, the general mutt population will always have fighting dog traits mixed into it so long as there are fighting breeds around.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I remember reading an article about this in The Economist a few years ago.

The article stated that the tame fox specimen exhibited facial features that were slightly different from those of wild foxes, and that the tamer they were, the greater the differences were. Their jaws had become thinner, their chins less pronouned, and their eyes larger. The article noted that it was possible that these facial features were correlated with hormonal levels that made the foxes less aggressive and more tame, and that the same could be true in human beings.

Since human beings considers these facial features "attractive" in other human beings, it was possible to conclude that we're hardwired to be physically attracted to people whose facial features indicate a lower propensity to anger and aggression.

I've looked for the article on google but I can't find it unfortunately.

<comment><USER22> > Their jaws had become thinner, their chins less pronouned, and their eyes > larger. The article noted that it was possible that these facial features > were correlated with hormonal levels that made the foxes less aggressive and > more tame,

This is probably neoteny, which is considered a key part of the domestication of dogs.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoteny#In_domestic_animals](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoteny#In_domestic_animals)

> Some common neotenous physical traits in domesticated animals (mainly dogs, > pigs, ferrets, cats, and even foxes) include: floppy ears, changes in > reproductive cycle, curly tails, piebald coloration, fewer or shortened > vertebra, large eyes, rounded forehead, large ears, and shortened muzzle.

For humans, neoteny is generally considered attractive in women.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Been following this for a few years... more than tame foxes, they killed every fox that didn't carry the specific traits they wanted.

<comment><USER24> Right, the process never really claimed to "tame" foxes. It is an experiment in selective breeding. Which as a goal aims to end up with domesticated foxes.

Selective breeding does mean that you take undesirables out of the gene pool, in this case, turning them into fur to be sold which further funds the experiment.

Maybe in 10 or 20 years when this is further along I would be interested in seeing how a Fox would do as a pet.

<comment><USER25> They make terrible pets because foxes mark their territory with a scent that is extremely pungent. You basically have to have enough land to keep them penned away from the home.

<comment><USER26> I'd assume that this would be considered in the selective breeding process.

<comment><USER27> Perhaps, but it wasn't mentioned in the article. I'd consider those kinds of secondary things that breeders would work for once the primary goal has been accomplished.

<comment><USER26> This project has been going on for decades. If smell is a serious issue with foxes, someone certainly brought that up and increasing the scope in this way is rather obvious. In fact it's not really increasing the scope much at all because if you're going for pets, clearly the smell issue needs to be solved.

The primary goal of showing that this can be done at all, apparently has also been accomplished apparently decades ago. I can't imagine that they're not already in the refinement stage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> They didn't just breed tame ones, they also did the other half and bred aggressive / psychotic ones too.

<comment><USER29> That doesn't seem to be case from the article. It seems like they were not selected from the first generation of foxes to be domesticated, and for each subsequent generations, the non-friendly ones were simply sold as fox pelts.

<comment><USER30> [http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/mans-new- best...](http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/mans-new-best-friend- a-forgotten-russian-experiment-in-fox-domestication/)

"Belyaev then began breeding a line of foxes with the opposite behavioral traits, to be fearful and aggressive, using a similar method."

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RypuiEOouZ0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RypuiEOouZ0)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> One of the first Americans to successfully import domestic foxes was video game artist, Kay Fedewa. There's a fascinating interview of her experience here: [https://www.flayrah.com/3998/interview-kay-fedewa- domesticfo...](https://www.flayrah.com/3998/interview-kay-fedewa- domesticfoxcom)

</comment><comment><USER32> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10517631](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10517631) was about Wikipedia article [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Domesticated_Red_Fox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Domesticated_Red_Fox)

</comment><comment><USER33> There is an urban legend in Russia about these tamed foxes that quality of fur from them became a lot worse than from the wild ones, and thus all that attempt is considered a failure: foxes can be domesticated, but become useless as a result (originally it was done to reduce traumatism from bites on the fur farms)

<comment><USER34> I've heard that was just the cover story, and the article seems to agree:

> The study of genetics had been essentially banned in the USSR, as the > country's dictator Joseph Stalin sought to discredit the genetic principles > set out by Gregor Mendel. Stalin's death in 1953 gave scientists more > freedom, but in the early years Belyaev nevertheless worked under the cover > that he was breeding foxes to make better fur coats.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> "The domesticated foxes had floppier, drooping ears, which are found in other domestic animals such as dogs, cats, pigs, horses and goats."

I happened to recall the Origin of Species mentioning this: "Not a single domestic animal can be named which has not in some country drooping ears."

</comment><comment><USER36> The hypothesis that (human) intelligence could very well be rooted in prosocial behavior seems interesting. Too bad they turned the control group into fur coats or they could have seen if the tame foxes are more intelligent than the non-tame ones c.p.

[ethically extremely questionable research imo]

</comment><comment><USER37> A more accurate title would be "A Soviet Scientist Created Domesticated Foxes". Taming refers to making an animal accept humans by training, which is a fairly common practise. What this scientist did was to create a domestic breed by artificial selection.

</comment><comment><USER38> There was also a great radiolab podcast a few years back on the same subject.

[http://www.radiolab.org/story/91696-new- nice/](http://www.radiolab.org/story/91696-new-nice/)

</comment><comment><USER39> I saw this covered first in the BBC documentary: The Secret Life of the Dog [1]. If you can find a copy online then it's definitely worth watching; super interesting.

[1] [http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00pssgh](http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00pssgh)

</comment><comment><USER40> Here's a video about this:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jFGNQScRNY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jFGNQScRNY)

</comment><comment><USER41> The colour change is pretty interesting - it an nice example of genes for colours hitchhiking with the behavioral genes, that the foxes were selected for.</comment>


In praise of gentrification - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/united-states/2018/06/23/in-praise-of-gentrification <comment><USER2> It's common to hear people complaining about gentrification. So you would think the opposite would be a GOOD thing -- but it's not. Case in point: Westwood, the district of Los Angeles that is home to UCLA. It was THE happening place in the 1970's. On our first date my wife and I went to see Star Wars at the Avco on Wilshire. Between the rise of the multiplex theatres (Westwood once had the highest concentration of movie theaters in the world) and an unfortunate gang-related incident in which a thug mowed down pedestrians on the sidewalk, Westwood has fallen on hard times. Lots of business and restaurant addresses stand vacant. It's sad -- and to me, quite baffling, because Westwood is one of the most walkable parts of LA.</comment>


Show HN: Deta Base – Add a database to your side projects in 3 lines of code - <AUTHOR> https://deta.sh/ <comment><AUTHOR> Apologies. Our hosting company seems to have some trouble in some US regions, this staging site is available for now: [https://detab.webflow.io/](https://detab.webflow.io/)

</comment><comment><USER2> This looks nice and simple to use. Great for mvps.

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome, we hope you give it a try.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> can we use this with PHP? And how big can the data get before moving to MySql?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, you can use our HTTP API: [https://docs.deta.sh/docs/HTTP](https://docs.deta.sh/docs/HTTP) There is no limit to the amount of data you can store. With our free tier you get 3GB storage but you could upgrade any time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Where's the pricing info?

<comment><AUTHOR> We will release it this week. Let me know if I should ping you when we have it.</comment></comment>


200GB SanDisk Ultra MicroSDXC Card - <AUTHOR> http://www.sandisk.com/about-sandisk/press-room/press-releases/2015/200gb-sandisk-ultra-microsdxc-uhs-i-card-premium-edition/

<comment><USER2> This is exciting progress. We're all that much closer to terabytes of data in such a small size. Imagine the possibilities for wearable technology.

Wearable devices gonna derive a benefit out of this. I think SanDisk has unveiled this at the right time. They also want to get a foothold in wearable market.</comment>


One self is not enough - <AUTHOR> http://jessepollak.me/2012/06/20/one-self-is-not-enough/

<comment><USER2> I think the main problem with using Facebook comments is not so much that they assume you have one identity, it's that they don't allow you to isolate things between websites.

I comment on a lot of websites, the internet is my home, I don't mind people reading my comments on another website, if my parents saw my hackernews comments it wouldn't be of concern to me, however if all my hackernews comments were pushed to my Facebook feed and every friend on Facebook saw every comment I leave that would be a problem because it means I would have to consider them as an audience too when commenting.

Context is important, most people on Hackernews have the same background (technology) and will approach the comments others write in a similar frame of mind, however my parents would understand what I say in a different way and it would mean I'd have to consider the meaning of my comments to _everyone_ , it would change the dynamic. I think it's more about context than it is "personality" or having multiple personalities. In some ways they're the same thing though.

</comment><comment><USER3> 4Chan's Chris Poole/Moot nailed this last year with his talk about the prismatic nature of identity.

[http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/4chans_chris_poole_face...](http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/4chans_chris_poole_facebook_google_are_doing_it_wr.php)

<comment><USER4> Here's the talk that's from: <http://youtu.be/e3Zs74IH0mc>

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I brought this up with a couple Facebook PMs last week; they seemed nonplussed. One of them brought up the fact that the average user has fewer than 150 friends; he gently suggested that I was an edge case.

I disagree, even someone with 10 friends will show one face to five and another face to the other five (if those five are a separate group.)

Zuckerberg's comments about "integrity" suppose that we have an atomic identity that we sometimes modify out of weakness of character. Nonsense. Our identities emerge out of interactions (the linked essay makes the same point without sounding like an undergrad who just read some critical theory.)

The unfortunate thing for Facebook (and Google+) is that no one has made a successful feature set around different friend groups in the same service. Facebook might have to resign itself to being people's public face.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't know if Facebook will be people's public faces. At least for me, it's a much more private thing than Twitter and I'm much more comfortable posting personal content on it. Is that not the same for you?

Also, I think Google tried to tackle this issue with Google Plus, but they were just too late to the game. Maybe if they'd come earlier, it really could have been a successful solution to this problem.

<comment><USER6> Yes, most everyone I know delineates between the services this way. Twitter - public. Facebook - friends. Linkedin - managing recruiters.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Isn't this was Google+ "Circles" was supposed to solve? It seems even if you did have just one permanent online identity, you could choose who would see what. Which it seems would work for the author. On the other hand, for public forums and anything else that would come up in a Google search would be tied to your name as well (which I think is what Moot was getting at). It seems in the end, most people would avoid being their "true" selves, even if they're passionate about the topic of a site or forum.

I'm one who likes to remain fairly private, and wouldn't want many of my Facebook friends to even know about a blog I may have, the type of Youtube videos I watch, or know of my Reddit account. Maybe I'm just old fashioned or self conscious, but I try to limit what people know about me.

<comment><USER8> The problem with Google's circles is they only restrict: if I write about tech stuff, I have no problem with anyone reading it, but I know that my family probably won't _want_ to.

<comment><USER9> This sounds like a use case that does work for Circles. If you post about tech stuff, make it visible to your tech circle and not to your family circle.

<comment><USER10> But he wants his posts to be _available_ to anyone who (unbeknownst perhaps to him) might be interested in tech. The setting should be something like "Public, but only spam my tech circles."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> See also "The Social Graph is Neither" by Maciej Cegłowski.

<http://blog.pinboard.in/2011/11/the_social_graph_is_neither/>

And yeah, I have two Twitter accounts: one for friends and one for business.

<comment><USER12> Good reference.

Here's another few I'd found previously on the topic of faceted identities; There's been a bit of research on this topic in the social sciences for a while now, for whatever it's worth, but here are some papers that I found insightful:

Danah Boyd's undergraduate thesis (Danah is now a Sr. Researcher at Microsoft):

<http://smg.media.mit.edu/people/danah/thesis/danahThesis.pdf>

A more recent paper from Yahoo: <http://research.yahoo.net/files/pr308-farnham-1.pdf>

And this much older paper makes it clear that the idea of personal identity being multifaceted is all but a given in many lines of research, pointing back to influential papers as old as 1968: <http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/~jpiliavi/965/hoggterrywhite.pdf>

So, honestly, I've always been a little surprised that supposedly smart companies/developers at some of the hottest tech companies (FB & Google, for example) would build business models/big plans around such a simple model of social identity when it's so at odds with the way people really work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> As the article states, this isn't necessarily just an online problem (although Facebook brings it into sharp focus I guess). Each group of people I know meet essentially a slightly (sometimes very) different person because the interests and hobbies I share with those people is a small fraction of who I am (I always assumed it was the same for everyone). At my stag do I had relatives, work colleagues, online gaming friends, my jui jitsu friends and university study friends all meeting up for the first time trying to figure out why on earth I'd spend time with these other people that were so different from them. Of course once they started actually having a decent conversation a certain amount of commonality was found (there seemed to be a large number of arrogant sarcastic know it alls for some reason) but while they kept interactions at a superficial level (like a lot of online communication I suppose) there seemed to be very little common ground.

</comment><comment><USER14> All of the (moderately) famous people I know on Facebook have (at least) two Facebook accounts: their public / fan identity, and their private / friend identity. I think it's officially against the rules, but even when they obviously use the same name, and presumably log in from the same IP address, Facebook doesn't seem to care.

<comment> k-mcgrady It's not against the rules. You can have a profile (private) and page (public). They recently tried to solve this inconvenience with the subscriber model. People can subscribe to public updates on your (mostly) private profile doing away with the need for a separate 'fan' page.

<comment><USER15> problem here is that when I post publicly for the benefit of subscribers, my friends and family also get that stuff - and they are totally not interested in it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Reminded me of Mark Pilgrim's One: «My attempts at compartmentalization have failed. There is only one inbox.»

[http://web.archive.org/web/20110514112041/http://diveintomar...](http://web.archive.org/web/20110514112041/http://diveintomark.org/archives/2010/03/29/aka)

</comment><comment><USER17> I like the prism metaphor. It resonates with both concepts of multiple facets and filtering light differently through each. My first thought/equivalent for light is the stuff we share/publish on the social networks. Surprisingly, nobody mentioned github as one more self/personality.

</comment><comment><USER18> Here I was hoping that someone had a crazy idea for a new OOP paradigm....

<comment><USER16> Same here: I thought somebody proposed the use of different _self_ objects in Ruby procs to differentiate between the original containing object and the calling containing object.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> One online self per service is enough. I can't recall a recent situation where I felt I was acting differently in public depending on who was around. Certainly not differently enough that when I'm sitting at my computer I'm going to try to recall which persona I want to wear at which time. Perhaps I don't get out enough.

<comment><USER20> Ours is a nosy, judgmental species. Unless you can rely on being self-employed on your own farm for the rest of your life, you are someday (while you're seeking a job or an apartment or a partner) going to have cause to regret having put your True Name on a controversial idea. This is why HN gets substance while Facebook gets cheerful pablum from me, and I'm undecided about Google+.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> 1 self is too much!

The personality and egO that likes to joke on fb, the personality that likes to talk stArtups.. They are not really you... Eckhart Tolle would say..</comment>


On March 31, SETI[at]home will stop sending out new work to users - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/BerkeleySETI/status/1234648658726928387 <comment><USER2> Galaxy Zoo continues for astronomical citizen science: [https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/zookeeper/galaxy- zoo/](https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/zookeeper/galaxy-zoo/)</comment>


Mongolian shipwreck from 13th century invasion of Japan discovered - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/japan/11715158/13th-century-Mongolian-ship-Kublai-Khan-sent-to-invade-Japan-found.html

<comment><USER2> I do not like history stories on HN. They invariably lead to me going on an hour long Wikipedia safari.

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_invasions_of_Japan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_invasions_of_Japan)

pretty cool stuff!

</comment><comment><USER4> One of Japan's most unfortunate characters in the war, Prince Fumimaro Konoe (Konoye), tried in vain to get the military to avoid attacking America in the first place; he then tried to convince him to negotiate peace in early 1945, but the emperor refused, believing that Japan would get divine assistance again.

After the war, he refused to play along with the occupation's kangaroo court and killed himself.

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

</comment><comment><USER6> Awful page to link to since it features (a) an auto-play video ad, (b) click- text hidden ads, and (c) a full-page auto-popup after x seconds. Sheesh.

Try this instead:

[http://ajw.asahi.com/article/behind_news/social_affairs/AJ20...](http://ajw.asahi.com/article/behind_news/social_affairs/AJ201507030010)

Page about the 1st shipwreck found:

[http://ajw.asahi.com/article/behind_news/social_affairs/AJ20...](http://ajw.asahi.com/article/behind_news/social_affairs/AJ201410030034)

<comment><USER7> I kind of wish (kind of really wish) IBTimes was on the autokill list. They're a glorified repost site the overwhelming majority of times they show up here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Url changed from [http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/mongolian-shipwreck-kublai- khans-13...](http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/mongolian-shipwreck-kublai-khans-13th- century-invasion-japan-discovered-by-archaeologists-1509319), which points to this.</comment>