Supersonic: New UI Hybrid Framework – Ionic, AngularJS, Cordova - <AUTHOR> http://www.appgyver.com/supersonic <comment><USER3> Is it just me or did anyone else stop immediatly at this sentence on the get started page? "Create a free AppGyver account"

Ionic didn't need me to create an account and everything you list in this news title i can use without an account. Ionic also begins their getting started with "Install Ionic" so the fork part was even more misleading. I immediately got disapointed.

I don't know but every time i run into an "accountwall" within the first 10 seconds i immediately turn away and loose all interest.

I also wouldn't call something where i need to give any information to evaluate it "free".

<comment><USER4> Just give us a fake email then until you trust us :) We're hackers ourselves: I never give out my real email until I know something is good. We just want to get to know our users + get you started right away with everything we have to offer that requires an account, like cloud distribution with QR codes (see that in action here (no account needed): [http://www.appgyver.com/supersonic/kitchensink](http://www.appgyver.com/supersonic/kitchensink))

\- Matti, CTO of AppGyver

<comment><USER5> Hey Matti, great job. Marry Supersonic to Strongloop's Loopback and you're the winner...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is a coincidence, just yesterday i checked out Cordova, Ionic (on todo list, but the demo's on the APK's seem to slow :s), Supersonic seems quite interesting also (and a lot easier then Polymer)!

But what really interested me are the demos from Google (Namely Paper Elements as UI) with Polymer (it's like AngularJS, but it isn't): [https://www.polymer- project.org/docs/elements/material.html](https://www.polymer- project.org/docs/elements/material.html)

Fyi, an index of webcomponents for polymer is available on : [http://customelements.io/](http://customelements.io/)

There's a designer tool for it: [https://www.polymer- project.org/tools/designer/](https://www.polymer-project.org/tools/designer/) , here's how to use it [http://goo.gl/r8ovXN](http://goo.gl/r8ovXN) (it's a responsive maps application, with search input and speech input)

<comment><USER7> Yup, Polymer is doing exciting stuff – the declarative native UI components in Supersonic are actually implemented using web components (meaning they're really framework independent), and we utilize their polyfill since the web component spec is not supported in browsers yet. You can see the source code at [https://github.com/AppGyver/supersonic/tree/master/component...](https://github.com/AppGyver/supersonic/tree/master/components)

We didn't embrace Polymer more fully for various reasons (like it being a very WIP project still), but the Polymer web components should all work fine with Supersonic apps.

Disclaimer: AG employee here. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The problem we found with using AppGyver is that you depend on them for your builds. Once you finish making your app, you deploy to AppGyver then go to their website and click a button to build a compiled application. Also, keep in mind that is not uncommon to wait up to 10-15 minutes for a build. When you are on the clock, this add up.

Like others have mentioned, it's a framework on top of a framework on top of a framework. You will find breaking points and get frustrated. Are you trying to use custom Cordova plugins? Well, the build failed. Here's an error report of what went wrong. Go make the changes necessary and build again while waiting for another 10-15 minutes.

So, you built an Angular application on top of AppGyver with the native navigation. Actually, you built many little applications where each one works in one of the native views. If you are trying to port this into a web app you are SOL.

These are my thoughts on AppGyver, from a developer that used their stack for a few clients. These days I'll either go RubyMotion or Emberjs/Cordova.

<comment><USER7> AppGyver dev here – I hear you, the build service wait times are a real pain, especially when you are debugging a custom plugin and need to iterate quickly.

However, local builds are on the pipeline – can't give a date yet, but you'll definitely be able to build your AppGyver apps with Xcode/Android Studio. (We'll provide the AppGyver Wrapper code as a library you can include in your project.)

<comment><USER8> That is certainly good news. Keep up the good work!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I don't understand. I thought Ionic was AngularJS + Cordova so how can it be "Ionic + AngularJS + Cordova"? What is this exactly?

<comment><USER7> AppGyver employee here – the part from Ionic we forked is the great CSS defaults, so it's more like "Ionic CSS + AngularJS + Cordova + AppGyver stuff". What we bring on top of the CSS framework is native navigation, native UI components, data etc.

<comment><USER10> I found the CSS to be one of the worst parts of Ionic.

"Oh did you want to make a change? You'll need to declare it six levels deep and !important"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've been building iOS app with AppGyver for almost four months. It's great. There is a lot of bugs and difficulties, but we've managed to get app that satisfy us and ready for AppStore. And now I'm opening marketing email, seeing that marketing buzz about the new brand name, super exciting, scanning QR of Kitchensink demo app to Android Scanner and getting terrible experience. If I understand correctly we still should use almost entirely different codebase to make it look native on Android 5 Material Design (navigation/tabbar/material components, etc.). And Ionic doesn't help to solve this problem. Maybe [https://material.angularjs.org/](https://material.angularjs.org/) does. My biggest hope is that AppGyver will continue to improve support for Android, but I'm not sure that it will happen in next 4 months, so yes, different codebases or custom grunt hacks.

</comment><comment><USER12> On Galaxy S4, installed AppGyver Scanner and scanned the Kitchensink QR code. Just some things I noticed:

\- Opened up and it was blank except for title and bottom tray. Content appeared into view after a few seconds of randomly tapping around.

\- The content inside the left drawer is being sized incorrectly, it's illegibly small, the words are barely 0.5mm tall.

\- There is sometimes a white blank space to the right of the title at the top, making it look like Supersonic Kitchens[ whiteness ]

\- Navigating to transitions took me to a blank pane. Tapping there crashed the app

\- Not a bug, but can't use swipe to toggle the Status bar/Tabs toggles, even though users may be used to being able to

\- The Back button is decidedly non-native looking, the arrow is basically touching the word Back.

\- Tapping Network crashed the app

Not sure what's going on.

</comment><comment><USER5> I've been reading all the info and docs (shameless Ionic docs clone xD) in the AppGyver website and I quite like it. I'm _almost_ sold for some apps we have in the pipeline (we were going to use Ionic/Cordova)...

The tooling is awesome... Thing is I don't like the fact that the prototypes can't be shown online in a whitelabel fashion. I don't want my clients to know which frameworks I'm using...

Any plans to offer a solution without AppGyver's logos all over the place? I guess I could just use iOS Testflight as an alternative for testing...

<comment><USER7> AppGyver employee here! The QR code sharing is just icing on the cake (tasty icing, but yeah) – the basic functionality of creating a stand-alone IPA/APK and sharing it via TestFlight or TestFairy is still there, just as strong as it is with Cordova/Ionic.

Good point about a whitelabel scanner, though – we'll consider options to make the flow of sharing a prototype/development version even better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> So it's JS right? Where does it sit between PhoneGap/Cordova (Web pages wrapped in WebView) and Titanium Appcelerator (JS transcompiled(?) to native code).

My experience with Cordova.. it's slow at runtime, and you build the UI yourself using CSS (which gives the feeling, "Why am I building this by hand, while in native I can just drag?").

My experience with Appcelerator.. it's slow at compilation (imagine GWT), debugging is printlns, and you're at the mercy of whatever feature they provide (e.g. if the latest version of Android has new widget X, you can't use it until Appcelerator comes up with their version of X).

I still hope there's holy grail for code reuse / cross platform, but until then I'm forced to go native.

<comment><USER14> Hi, AppGyver dev here. Our platform expands on the web view approach, allowing you to leverage existing web development experience when getting started.

Yeah, it's HTML and JS - but whereas Cordova provides you with one web view to build your app in, Steroids applications have multiple views joined together with native navigation. We ship with a lovely CSS framework by default to make building UIs a snap. The command line features livereload, so your changes can be reflected instantly on the device. And because it's Javascript, you can debug using the tools in Chrome and Safari - a vast improvement over printlns.

You might find this page illustrative: [http://www.appgyver.com/supersonic/ui](http://www.appgyver.com/supersonic/ui)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Congrats to the team! Supersonic looks like a solid contender in the hybrid app space. I know of several companies that use Angular + Cordova who would likely be interested in this.

</comment><comment><USER16> Yeah I was wondering about what's different between this and ionic. Looks like some of the elements are 'native' rather than html representations of native elements such as tabs and slide out menus are done with native elements for performance reasons.

I like ionic but this looks pretty good, its forked from ionic. Will give it a run on my next project

<comment><USER17> The Ionic fork is just the css (a small piece of what supersonic is).

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> So I had this stale app in the Play Store for over 6 months. I just didnt feel like updating since I hate Andrdoid UI design. And yesterday I got your announcement email. Too bad I was at work. 5PM comes around, I rush home, download supersonic and re-wrote the whole app in 30 minutes! I <3 you!

</comment><comment><USER19> "FUTURE-PROOFED FOR IOS & ANDROID When you use Supersonic, you can be sure you are using the most up-to-date visual and functional paradigms of both platforms. That means iOS8 and Android KitKat today, and future-proofed for the next generations."

Like Lollipop never happened.

<comment><USER7> Fixed now, thanks for catching it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wonder how the comparison would be with Polymer (or Paper Elements) on page: [http://www.appgyver.com/supersonic/comparison](http://www.appgyver.com/supersonic/comparison)

Supersonic does seem MUCH simpler then Google's solution though :)

</comment><comment> V-2 What IDE do you use for developing on that platform? Just any HTML editor, like Aptana or NetBeans? Or is there something dedicated like Xamarin Studio? Is this CLI they provide integrated with anything out of the box? I couldn't find that info in tutorials

<comment><USER7> AppGyver employee here – any text editor works. We like Atom ourselves. (There's no direct integration with any IDE tool at the moment.)

<comment><USER20> will you provide the shortcuts that you were using in the demo for atom?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Isn't the Angular framework totally changing in the future? How will that affect supersonic?

<comment><USER7> AppGyver dev here! The core of Supersonic is framework-independent, so we're not at a risk of becoming stuck with an old version. We're monitoring AngularJS 2.0 closely, and will bring all relevant components up-to-date when the time comes to switch over (or we'll keep providing legacy support if that seems like its required).

As an example: unlike e.g. Ionic, our navigation is not built on top of AngularJS, but leverages the native navigation stack instead. Angular can be used to enhance the core Supersonic bits (as we do in many places), but it's not a lock-in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Huh, came here to search for "Meteor" and didn't find any comment yet.

AppGyver-Guys, what about the integration into meteor? I know, supersonic has its own data API but... it would be quite interesting to me to know how to merge these both things together.

</comment><comment><USER23> I like some of the ideas in the CLI (live reloading on both platforms, live dom editing etc.), but indeed this is very much Ionic + Firebase-like 3 way binding bundled into a nice packaging.

Not sure I see the benefit vs. Ionic in itself to be honest.

<comment><USER7> The big unique thing is the native UI and navigation – instead of running a single WebView and doing everything in the DOM, we actually shuffle around multiple WebViews by leveraging the native navigation controllers (and native UI elements like navigation bar).

This means that you can e.g. have your details view running in the device memory even when it's not visible. Then, when you click on a link on your index page, the details view animates into view using a hardware-accelerated, native transition. Same for tabs – switching between them is instant, since no DOM needs to be redrawn. It's a whole separate WebView being brought onto the screen.

Disclaimer: I work for AppGyver.

<comment><USER24> If each tab is a different WebView, how is angular working between tabs (I.E. updating something in one tab being reflected in another tab, or similar)?

Is each WebView contain a different bootstrapped angular? are you using some kind of "parent" WebView and communicating between WebViews (I'm not sure how two-way binding will work in this case) ?

<comment><USER25> check this out: [http://docs.appgyver.com/supersonic/guides/architecture/comm...](http://docs.appgyver.com/supersonic/guides/architecture/communication/) \-- basically, there are many options, depending on what you want to do. you can bind angular scope between views, if you're using angular. you can also broadcast messages etc. you can also have a "parent" webview that's hidden, it's pretty straight forward to do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I use Appcelerator Titanium pretty frequently - I think it is still the best compromise to develop cross-platform applications.

But - if Supersonic fulfills its promise, Appcelerator will have trouble to catch up.

</comment><comment><USER27> "With multi page apps (MPAs), all your views and controllers are neatly divided into separate HTML and JS documents. "

Multi page app?! Not sure whether to laugh or cry.. this pr-fu stinks.

<comment><USER14> Hi, AppGyver dev here. I understand the confusion around that claim. Especially taken out of context ([http://www.appgyver.com/supersonic/ui](http://www.appgyver.com/supersonic/ui)) you can read it as ridiculous hyperbole over something readily achieved with eg MVC architectures. I'll try and explain the difference between SPAs and MPAs and why we think the latter has merit.

A Single Page Application will usually consist of any number of logical views handled in a single web browser view. Since the app is Javascript and HTML, everything is loaded in the same runtime environment and switching between views is actually about swapping things in and out of the DOM. We feel that this isn't a very good approach when you're doing mobile applications, not least because everything you do will be an approximation of the native UI capabilities. Companies like Facebook and LinkedIn have famously failed to deliver hybrid mobile apps with a good enough user experience when using the traditional SPA approach.

This is where an MPA architecture comes in useful. As opposed to a single runtime environment in a single web view, multiple web views can be run _concurrently_ and the native layer is used for transitions between them. This is different from both SPAs and traditional server-side architectures which you could call "multi-page" if you squinted a little. Besides the readily felt advantage in user experience, the approach also has architectural benefits which help out in growing your app. When your Javascript runtime is working towards rendering exactly one kind of view instead of dozens, there are radically fewer possible states and thus less issues with global state leaks and the like. In short, it helps make development simpler.

Hope this clarifies. As a dev, I think the ability to leverage multiple concurrent web views is one of the core advantages of the platform.

<comment><USER28> Ezku, very interesting indeed. Your answer actually got me really interested in Supersonic and will be starting to evaluate it for a future project vis-a- vis the Ionic Framework itself, plus Angular Material and Kendo UI.

One more thing, Kendo UI does give us the ability to include only those modules that our apps need (package customization), plus it's AMD-compatible. Does Supersonic provide customization and AMD-compatibility as well?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I like AppGyver - however when I try to run their Scanner app in the iOS simulator it seems to reload itself (even without file changes) relatively often. Is this intentional?

<comment><USER17> No. it might be an issue. You can report it here [https://forums.appgyver.com](https://forums.appgyver.com)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I'd like to use a combination of Cordova, React.js and some kind of UI framework (Bootstrap?). Anyone have experience with this?

<comment><USER31> Not React but I'm in the middle of one using Cordova and Ractive. A very simple, natural combination (so far).

IMHO, Angular adds too much complexity for small apps, though I could see it may make sense for larger ones.

As regards the article, I'm a bit confused. Ionic is already Angular + Cordova. What does Supersonic add?

<comment><USER6> My observation : Web components, but the complete short list is here : [http://www.appgyver.com/supersonic/comparison](http://www.appgyver.com/supersonic/comparison)

But i think a lot of "Cross platform UI's" are going to look like this, here's another custom elements HTML 5 UI framework with AngularJS: [http://onsen.io/](http://onsen.io/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Wow, quite amazed I must say. Looking forward to applying this to an idea of mine I just had.

</comment><comment><USER33> I've been using Appgyver + Steroids for a mobile project that would be a lot more complex if we were to build with Cordova + Ionic... Steroids workflow is awesome, it is even better than developing an HTML5 app... Can't wait to test supersonic...

</comment><comment><USER34> This is definitely the fastest way to create polished native like hybrid apps for sure. I would not do any native code for iOS/Android unless it is some really resource demanding app (games for example). But for data driven apps, this is just sweet.

</comment><comment><USER35> Frameworks upon frameworks upon frameworks, running in a platform-dependent embedded mobile browser, wrapped together with AppGyver-specific API thunks for accessing some native functionality in a non-standard way. There's tremendous impedance mismatch at every layer here.

I don't feel these deeply convoluted stacks are ever the right way to build a mobile app... Unless perhaps in the situation where you're already familiar with something like Angular and you know for sure that performance and look & feel won't be important criteria.

<comment><USER36> I agree with the second paragraph. It seems that we're constantly pushing to make developing mobile apps easier for people with a web front-end background, in doing so tying them into using a stack of frameworks that in my opinion is far enough removed from 'web' that it loses sight of the core advantage - <USER2> it is easier to learn and develop with than the 'native' alternatives.

I wonder if by the time you get to this stage you wouldn't be better off investing the time in actually learning the native languages and toolsets provided with them. I am also concerned about how much you would be tied into doing things the, in this case, Supersonic way. The scaffolding for example looks interesting, but is it actually useful in a real-world application?

I don't have experience with Supersonic, I do have experience with AngularJS + Cordova mobile apps (I built the front-end of the RuneScape Companion app) - and I think if I were faced with building a similar app again I would think very very carefully about investing time into learning a stack of frameworks such as this.

<comment><USER37> This type product fits a specific niche. If you are a small team with a lot of web experience, no mobile experience, and only enough funds for one guy to work on your mobile app, then this might be a good choice. While there are some technologies that would need to be learned to build on this stack, it's meeting you half way as a web dev, so it will still be a lot faster than learning native dev from scratch. You will also save a lot of time by only coding for one platform instead of two.

A stack like this though may not be the best approach to maintain as the user base and dev team size grows, but it will get you off the ground with limited resources and time.

<comment><USER5> Couldn't have said it better...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Supersonic is much more than a UI Framework, it is all of the best tools and components you need to develop hybrid mobile apps in a single place. Anyone that has real world experience developing hybrid mobile apps knows the hassle and hundreds of different bits and pieces requires for development. It is time consuming and painful. Supersonic is all about taking out the pain and complexity. It brings together all of the best pieces available instead of reinventing the well + it has some great innovations of its own. You should try it now.</comment>


The Sky Is Falling: Oracle (Might) Want Your Money for Java SE in 2017 - <AUTHOR> https://dzone.com/articles/the-sky-is-falling-oracle-might-want-your-money-fo <comment><USER2> This article does a nice job of setting up a straw man and summarily knocking it down. The original article on The Register states that the issue arises with people using Java SE Advanced features without realizing they are licensed separately from Java SE itself, particularly on Windows which (according to that article) has one installer which installs both (thus making it easy to inadvertently use JSE Advanced features).

<comment><AUTHOR> The situation is not that simple. For example, the borderline between "general computation" and "embedded" as it is defined by Oracle is not clear at all.

They say if your app controls some external "hardware", it makes your system embedded. Does sending a command over a serial line to an actuator from a Java app makes it embedded? Apparently yes. How about Bluetooth devices? A joystick? Controlling a router?

Now, how about a rack stuffed with ARM units, are those embedded? They might be quite easily, depending on how Oracle interprets it.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Supplemental reading:

* [http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/pricing/price-lists/java-...](http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/pricing/price-lists/java-embedded-price-list-1977272.pdf)

* [http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/embedded/embedded-se/...](http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/embedded/embedded-se/documentation/javase-embedded-faq-2043259.html#9)

</comment><comment><USER3> Oracle: The anti king midas of companies</comment>


Sentinel 0-Day Attack Protection Tool for 32-bit Windows (GPL) - <AUTHOR> http://corelabs.coresecurity.com/index.php?module=Wiki&action=view&type=tool&name=sentinel

<comment><USER2> What is the difference between this and the newest EMET?

[http://technet.microsoft.com/en- us/security/jj653751](http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/jj653751)

<comment><AUTHOR> Look at this thread: [http://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/comments/1x04kh/sentinel_0day...](http://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/comments/1x04kh/sentinel_0day_attack_protection_tool_for_32bit/)</comment></comment>


Woz's personal website - <AUTHOR> http://woz.org

<comment><USER2> Woz deserves more love and respect -- he was never a manager or a businessperson, but he's a good person and there's something to say for that in a world obsessed by money. If you're looking for a role model of a technical founder he'd be my pick.

<comment><USER3> > If you're looking for a role model of a technical founder he'd be my pick.

That's a good choice. Still, you might want to avoid some of the PR choices he has made.

I think it's kind of shame that Woz gets as much mainstream media attention as he does, especially surrounding his relationship with Kathy Griffin. In many people's eyes he's just grabbing fame by latching himself onto Steve Jobs. I think he would have gained less publicity but more respect if he stepped out of the limelight a little more often.

I don't mean to be overly critical, because there are advantages to the choices he's made, but it's worth understanding why Woz doesn't get all the respect he deserves.

<comment><USER4> I had never heard of this Kathy Griffin before you mentioned her, and never heard nor read of any connection between her and Woz until now. Wozniak is almost completely absent from almost all the the media[1] I consume - I don't think he has much mainstream fame and attention except as colour commentary when Apple is doing or has done something.

Are you sure that you aren't actively looking for Woz stories, that there isn't a bias at work?

[1] Mainstream media for me is a range of UK Guardian, Telegraph and BBC website, Economist, NYT and occasional WaPo, WSJ and FT.

<comment><USER3> I'm not actively searching for Woz stories, but wouldn't you perk up if heard Steve Wozniak's name on the promo for Entertainment Tonight? It was extremely out of place, but sadly that kind of thing is all some people know about him.

All I'm saying is that, even though Woz deserves a lot of respect, his reputation has been distorted by the American media behemoth. In the end that doesn't really matter, but it is something that happened.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Woz is literally my hero. He is one of the main reasons I got into coding.

</comment><comment><USER6> Interesting to know from his "About" page that he was a founder of the EFF.

<comment><USER7> There is no mention of him on the EFF's history page [1], but their initial press release [2] suggests that he contributed funds at the foundation's inception.

It is sort of strange that Woz claims that "he founded the EFF" and not that he was a founding sponsor, like some of the other organizations on his About page.

[1]: <https://www.eff.org/about/history>

[2]: <http://www.textfiles.com/law/eff.txt>

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> While not an Apple or Jobs fan, I've been reading Folklore.org[1] for the past few days.

It didn't really make me appreciate Jobs more, but he made me look at Apple in a new light. There were some awesome people working there.

[1]: <http://folklore.org/>

<comment><USER9> Just to be clear for those that don't know, folklore.org isn't a product of Woz - it's from Andy Hertzfeld.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is a random story, but I'm curious if anyone else remembers: A few years ago, I landed on Woz's personal website, and noticed a small blurb about a public AFP connection for his personal machine (I think, afp://steve.woz.org) I connected and was greeted by a bunch of software (a lot of commercial) that he made available for download. Even more amazing was just how fast downloading the files were.

A quick google brings up this thread (from 2001!!! which sounds about right, actually, for when I first connected...I'm fairly certain I was still on OS9 -- my my, how time flies!)

<http://macosx.com/forums/archive/t-10013.html>

</comment><comment><USER11> Glad to hear that they were still friends - some stories were weird, like the one where Jobs threatened to fire their design company (was it frog design) if they continued to work with Woz's new company.

<comment><USER12> Lots of weird stories, I posted this in another thread: _"I was a little disappointed — Steve Jobs had indicated he'd write a foreword. But he'd never written a foreword before and I said, "Just write what we were like back then."_

 _"We sent him the book and he said, "Oh, I saw some excerpts, and I'm going to decline writing the foreword." I don't know why because I'm nice to him, so there must have been something he didn't like."_

[http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/200...](http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2002929498_wozqa14.html)</comment></comment>


Algorithms book, by Jeff Erickson - <AUTHOR> http://jeffe.cs.illinois.edu/teaching/algorithms/ <comment><USER2> Same link got 238 comments 7 months ago [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18805624](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18805624)

<comment><USER3> This is posted quite often. I agree with the top comment there, great professor, great book.

Think it's being re-posted because it was just published (June 2019), also no more hand drawn photo on the webpage

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This appears to be being re-posted because the book is now available on Amazon:

[https://www.amazon.com/dp/1792644833](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1792644833)

The text used to only be available via a PDF. Highly recommend if you're learning about algorithms, might buy a copy myself just to support Jeff (and add my own notes into the book).

<comment><USER4> I'm guessing more so it got reposted because it was recently mentioned here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20729252](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20729252)

<comment><USER3> Ah quite possibly, didn't see! Anyway, book did come out in June

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Just a small note on the logo for people that might be interested. It is calligraphy version of al-Khwarizmi's name(خوارزمی) in Persian script. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_ibn_Musa_al- Khwarizmi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_ibn_Musa_al-Khwarizmi)

Term "algorithm" actually comes from his surname because of his works in the field of Mathematics.

</comment><comment><USER6> For any one hitting the comments without reading it, this book is amazing and is written super well, it's as if you have a friend explaining the algorithm to you.

</comment><comment><USER7> This published edition apparently got rid of some content that was in a previous pre-publication draft. I remember thoroughly enjoyed the discussion of treaps and generally using randomization to great effect. That seems to be gone from this edition :( It was always one of my favorite topics to discuss with interviewers when doing coding interviews (if the interviewer is into it of course).

<comment><USER8> There is a section in the book's page called Director's cut. These are the topics not discussed in the book and mentions treaps, randomized minimum cut etc.

<comment><USER7> Yes I saw that. I was just questioning the choice of what to cut. For example I don't think I've ever used max flow min cut but it's in the book, yet something quite common like disjoint sets or something deeply interesting like randomization didn't make the cut. As a reader, I would've made different choices.

<comment><USER8> Yea, that makes sense. Maybe, wrt the university course this was a better choice for the author.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> One cool thing about the cover that it drawn to say algorithm in Arabic.

</comment><comment><USER10> Still patiently waiting for an EPUB or Kindle version :)</comment>


Microsoft Unveils Its Container-Powered Cloud - <AUTHOR> http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/09/30/microsoft-unveils-its-container-powered-cloud/

<comment><USER2> There's been a rash of stories recently about Microsoft's data centres which all seem to present their technology as cutting edge.

Sun has been _selling_ such containers for years, I'm fairly certain Google and IBM had the lead on chillerless datacentres and using outside air for cooling.

Having a PR campaign that boasts about "cool" technology that others introduced and publicized before you did seems an awfully strange strategy.

</comment><comment><USER3> That is a datacenter, not a "cloud."</comment>


What Happens When You Try to Photoshop Money - <AUTHOR> http://hyperallergic.com/195922/what-happens-when-you-try-to-photoshop-money/ <comment><USER2> As far as I know many countries use Digimarc for their money.

EDIT: Here is a source:

        Recent versions of image editors such as Adobe
        Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro refuse to print banknotes.
        According to Wired.com, the banknote detection code in
        these applications, called the Counterfeit Deterrence
        System (CDS), was designed by the Central Bank
        Counterfeit Deterrence Group and supplied to companies
        such as Adobe as a binary module. However,
        experiments by Steven J. Murdoch and others showed that
        this banknote detection code does not rely on the
        EURion pattern. It instead detects a digital
        watermark embedded in the images, developed by
        Digimarc.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation)

An interesting hack is that this Digimarc pattern could be used for a Copy Attack [1]. To my knowledge the mark is not tied to the image of the bank note in any way. So in short: You could extract the Digimarc pattern and apply it to any other document, which then in turn could not be edited by mentioned software.

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

<comment><USER3> The fact that the watermark detection algorithm doesn't seem to require a tremendous amount of processing power unlike most image processing/detection algorithms - apparently it's present in scanners and photocopiers too - implies that it could also be embedded in camera firmware, making it very possible to produce cameras that refuse to take pictures of certain things... I find that more unsettling since scanners/photocopiers are somewhat more specialist equipment today, whereas practically everyone has at least one camera. Imagine not being able to take a picture of something crucial like a crime in progress because there happened to be something watermarked present in the scene. That's why I don't believe in leaving these types of moral decisions to the machine.

I think it's only the legal issues that keep people from RE'ing the algorithm and generating obviously-non-banknote images which get detected, in a similar spirit to this:

[http://news.cornell.edu/stories/2015/03/images-fool- computer...](http://news.cornell.edu/stories/2015/03/images-fool-computer- vision-raise-security-concerns)

As the watermark detection algorithm is not that resource-intensive, I would guess that a false positive is even easier to produce.

<comment><USER4> Wait, so you are against the new PROTECT system that scans all images for signs of child sexual abuse and blocks and reports any images containing those signs? Why do you love child abuse images so much? Why are you protecting child molesters? Are you are a pedophile?

All said with a /s, but with a serious question. What happens when we reach a point where the software and hardware exist to do this? Many hosting providers are already doing something similar as well. I believe they work by taking a image hash and comparing it to a known database, but the newer hashes work even as the images are slowly modified.

Would there be any way to stand against this trend without being demonized?

<comment><USER3> Similar is the argument that anyone who wants privacy/freedom is either a criminal, terrorist, or hacker (cracker)... but "think of the children" evokes such an emotive response among most of the population that it's difficult to counter.

I'm just glad we're not at the level of "open-source image processing software and hardware enables banknote counterfeiting" yet...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I like how the workaround is to open the file with The Gimp and export to psd. Then Photoshop will open it fine.

I'm assuming this is a case of "the suits told us it couldn't import banknotes", so they made it not import banknotes. Banknotes that were already imported... well you didn't say anything about that.

(The same thing happened for the DVD encryption. Someone asked an engineer for encryption. The engineer just happened to have made it easy to bruteforce the key, negating the entire point of the encryption.)

Remember: you're the software engineer -- write the software you want, not the software you think someone wants you to write.

<comment><USER6> > Remember: you're the software engineer -- write the software you want, not > the software you think someone wants you to write.

That's easier said than done, kudos to those that pull that off but there is this thing called code review and if your co-workers are halfway competent you'll get called on what you built. In some cases that can be a career limiting move.

Better to pick your employers so that you don't end up as an enabler of technology used against the public interest.

Of course if you're going to 'take one for the team' and purposefully gain employment somewhere for the sole reason of messing with the machine that's a laudable strategy but it will likely come at a price in the longer term.

<comment><USER7> Figuring out how to manipulate the Someone so that they want you to write what you want to write- or at least _tell_ you to write what you want to write, or to compromise on writing something _closer_ to what you wanted to write- seems a useful strategy for mitigating those risks.

I have recent relevant experience in this regard. I'm working on a system for university-level language professors, a large part of which is making it easy for them to use videos for homework assignments. We recently had a meeting with one of the university's copyright lawyers to ensure that the video delivery system was sufficiently "safe", and they'd be legally protected from being sued for copyright violations when professors want to use films in their classes.

We quickly discovered that, if we explained things well enough that the copyright lawyer was capable of understanding how decrypted video ended up on the students' screens, and thus how a sufficiently tech-savvy student might possibly pirate it, they would freak out and insist we Do Something More. The obvious solution: stop explaining how things work, 'cause this is just making more work for ourselves. Tell them "other people used this thing and didn't get sued", and deflect all technical questions, on the other hand, and they leave us alone and let us work on something reasonable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> They mention this was "discovered three years ago", but I was sure I remembered this from years back.

"Adobe adds algorithms to Photoshop that prevent users from opening or printing scanned money. While we've been aware of this feature for quite a while" Posted by Craig Swanson on May 14, 2006 07:03 PM [http://www.creativetechs.com/iq/how_to_use_scanned_money_in_...](http://www.creativetechs.com/iq/how_to_use_scanned_money_in_adobe_photoshop.html)

edit: seems to be more info here, from 2004. Latest Photoshop version contains anti-counterfeit measures [http://www.geek.com/news/latest-photoshop-version- contains-a...](http://www.geek.com/news/latest-photoshop-version-contains- anti-counterfeit-measures-555286/)

<comment><USER9> I encountered this error in 2005 on a Photoshop version that was 2 or 3 years old. Also, back then you could mirror the scanned bill in some other app and it would open fine in PS. It is funny how this is still front page news in 2015 :P

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Here's a hi res image of a ten dollar bill. It's pretty cool: [http://i.imgur.com/XInY8HI.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/XInY8HI.jpg)

<comment> semi-extrinsic I'm not an expert by any means, but to me that looks too low-res to be useful for printing money. Still cool though.

<comment><USER11> It depends on what you want to use it for. Australia currently has polymer currency that means we've basically forgotten about counterfeiting, but before that we had a $100 note that was greyscale with a bare whiff of colour. Not the best design. You'd occasionally hear stories of people who'd simply photocopy the bill on standard paper, scrunch it up to look used, then find a sleepy clerk at a late night convenience store. Buy a couple of bucks worth of stuff, leave with >$95 real change. You'd have to be pretty inattentive to be fooled by it, but, well, humans have foibles...

<comment><USER12> Counterfeiting is unfortunately still a thing in Australia. A friend who runs a cafe makes his staff subtly attempt to tear any $50 note they take due to counterfeiting in the past.

They were caught out by scammers (or unknowing people with scammed notes) several times last year and the bank rejected the notes (and of course wouldn't hand them back)

Apparently the counterfeit notes are sometimes on a plastic too, but not sturdy enough to withstand a quick tear. I'm not sure how long that will hold true though.

<comment><USER11> I stand corrected. I knew there was still a little out there, but it sounds like more than I thought. I remember doing retail in my mother's shop in the paper note days and having to be moderately vigilant, and I've not seen retail staff doing any routine sort of note-checking since the start of the polymer days.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Related [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_steganography](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_steganography)

"Printer steganography is produced by laser printers, including Brother, Canon, Dell, Epson, HP, IBM, Konica Minolta, Kyocera, Lanier, Lexmark, Ricoh, Toshiba and Xerox, where tiny yellow dots are added to each page. The dots are barely visible and contain encoded printer serial numbers and timestamps."

</comment><comment><USER14> Oh wow.

There is nothing preventing Adobe from implementing a script that auto forwards your account details (Via Adobe Cloud!) to law enforcement if the CDS detects money. That alone could easily be made into probable cause and based on how easily warrants are being given nowadays, could easily lead to a no knock warrant being issued.

<comment><USER15> I imagine the legal bill developing that scheme wouldn't be small as there are quite a few countries laws to be considered. Here in NZ the way to get a massively overreaching search warrant is just to say that the FBI are interested, see Kim Ditcom.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The awesome article exploring and testing the protection mechanisms, with pictures, from ~2009 (actually earlier probably, that's the "last modified" date of the article):

[http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~sjm217/projects/currency/](http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~sjm217/projects/currency/)

(author notes his own earlier presentations on this topic starting 2004)

</comment><comment><USER17> This is a good read. [http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation) always wondered about performance if these apps are scanning every image for this pattenrn

<comment><USER18> It's known to not be the EURion constellation that image software uses, it's some secret proprietary mechanism. See [http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~sjm217/projects/currency/](http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~sjm217/projects/currency/) which is cited by the page.

<comment><USER19> Interestingly even Adobe doesn't know what it is, the detection software was supplied to them as a binary. I messed around with it in a similar way to the author out of sheer curiosity and ended up completely baffled by the whole thing, even trying to eliminate parts that aren't triggers is impossible by my measure. I should make it clear I have no desire whatsoever to thwart the system (as others point out, simply using different software does that), but the methods it is using seem to completely defy all of the fingerprinting systems I'm aware of and is therefor incredibly interesting as a result.

<comment><USER20> This sounds like a job for an approach like [0]! Reminds me of [1].

0\. [http://lcamtuf.blogspot.fr/2014/11/pulling-jpegs-out-of- thin...](http://lcamtuf.blogspot.fr/2014/11/pulling-jpegs-out-of-thin- air.html), [http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/afl/](http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/afl/), american fuzzy lop

1\. [http://news.cornell.edu/stories/2015/03/images-fool- computer...](http://news.cornell.edu/stories/2015/03/images-fool-computer- vision-raise-security-concerns), Images that fool computer vision

<comment><USER19> Doesn't AFL rely on being able to compile the application with it's hooks? It's been a long time since I've messed with Photoshop, but it's a complete mess of random dead code inside (even includes poems about a dead dog believe it or not), chances are you're looking for a completely obfuscated bunch of assembly in the hundred plus megabyte binary. I love Hopper, but not that much.

<comment><USER20> Yes, you're right. I'm admittedly not at all an expert on this type of thing, but surely some randomised testing, starting from a real banknote and making small mutations, would be doable.

<comment><USER19> Oh sure, you could make a quick imagemagick script to make random variations and get a pass/fail with AppleScript, or even do some exploring with a debugger while opening one. Main barrier is motivation, I have no desire to counterfeit money (and who would use PhotoShop for that anyway), so I decided to let that rest.

<comment><USER20> It wouldn't be about counterfeiting, but about learning more about the detection algo :)

<comment><USER19> I'm mostly concerned about experimenting straying into "reverse engineering".

<comment><USER21> Indeed, the FBI are known to lack a sense of humor when it comes to funny money.

<comment><USER22> The secret service, even less so.

<comment><USER23> Just make sure you counterfeit so many bills they offer you a tiny punishment in exchange for helping them track them down

[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2624697/Master- count...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2624697/Master- counterfeiter-printed-250million-fake-bills-walks-jail-just-month-half.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is why GIMP is superior. It doesn't impose what you can and cannot edit, and never will.

<comment><USER25> Yes, this is a good example of why Free Software is very important.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> This jogged my memory - I remember these coming out in 2004: Adobe_Photoshop_CS_Banknote_Patch-TiGER Adobe_Photoshop_CS_v.8.01_Banknote_Patch-PARADOX

</comment><comment><USER27> Photocopiers will keep a count of the number of attempts to copy currency, and the copier leasing company tracks those numbers. I wonder if Photoshop does the same.

<comment><USER28> Source?

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I had no idea the spockyourfive thing was a thing, but I'm kind of glad it is.

Worth a look if any of this amused you: [http://www.thepoke.co.uk/2014/08/05/10-banknotes-improved- by...](http://www.thepoke.co.uk/2014/08/05/10-banknotes-improved-by-doodles/)

</comment><comment><USER30> Nothing new, and honestly I'm not so worried about Photoshop, as it's some closed-source program, which does whatever it wants and has a bunch of good alternatives anyway (well, for drawing purposes, at least, because I still can't convince myself Gimp is usable).

What is much more disturbing: I still don't know if it's possible to find hardware devices like scanner and printer, that do what they are intended to do, and are not masking banknotes or leaving special marks on printed image.

</comment><comment><USER31> I was just asking about this yesterday: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9309120](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9309120)

I would love to know how to manipulate images/documents to make it so that photoshop won't open them and photocopiers won't copy them...

<comment><USER32> Would be funny to include [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation) on websites, so you cannot make screenshots with Photoshop ;)

<comment><USER33> From the first paragraph of your link: "Research shows that the EURion constellation is used for _color photocopiers_ and is likely not used for computer software."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I've tired to open the bills in the post and a few bills in this thread and they all open with no problems in Affinity Designer [1].

[1] - [https://affinity.serif.com/](https://affinity.serif.com/)

</comment><comment><USER35> For a marketing campaign, "bonus cash" was the offer. An image that wouldn't open in Photoshop was able to open in Illustrator, which, dragging that image from Illustrator to Photoshop worked perfectly.

</comment><comment><USER36> I guess this is orthogonal to those little yellow circles?

<comment><USER37> They yellow dots watermark output with printer identification information. I think this serves CDS, but has potential to be used/misused for so much more.

<comment><USER36> Sorry, I forgot that the printer dots were lingering in the HN consciousness- I was thinking of these things [0] (shown here [1] on the us $10, with little ones next to them to give apparent visual purpose) which I've also seen on non-currency things such as event/movie tickets iirc. Wikipedia suggests a scanning-hardware focus of the circles, as opposed to the software focus of the "Counterfeit Deterrence System" discussed in OP.

[0] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation)

[1] [http://i.imgur.com/XInY8HI.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/XInY8HI.jpg) left side

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Added to Photoshop 8 (CS). It's a good thing it's completely impossible to run Photoshop 7 still, right? ... /s

<comment><USER39> Actually I believe it was added to PS 4.0. Probably improved upon since then. So you can dig up an ancient 90s high quality inkjet and PS 3.0 to copy money if you really want to.

Or you could do what the really clever criminals do and just go into banking and finance.

<comment><USER40> GIMP is much cheaper, and less of a hassle.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Another trick is to invert the colors and then import it to Photoshop & invert it back.

</comment><comment><USER41> I wonder if this is the reason why Paint .NET went closed source.

</comment><comment><USER42> Interesting...

</comment><comment><USER43> It is good that the same tools that can be used for creating and bypassing game DRM, trainers and hack does not work here ...</comment>


How Did I Get Here by Cyan Banister (Founders Fund) - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/video/how-did-i-get-here-by-cyan-banister-founders-fund-disrupt-sf-2018/ <comment><AUTHOR> This is one of the most inspiring talks ever.</comment>


Potent protection against  influenza via childhood hemagglutinin imprinting - <AUTHOR> http://science.sciencemag.org/content/354/6313/722 <comment><AUTHOR> (Removed "H5N1 and H7N9" from title beacuse 80 char limit)

The first influenza attack that a child suffers can affect the way that their lifelong immunity to the virus builds up. As a result the year person is born predicts how they survive influenca attacks in later in life.</comment>


Atlanta Startup Action--CapVenture Kicks Off - <AUTHOR> http://www.peachseedz.com/peachseedz/2007/10/capventure-kick.html

<comment><AUTHOR> The Atlanta startup scene is moving along pretty well. My startup (Bravadosoft) is the second one listed on here. Some pretty interesting companies there last night, and we had a good panel of VCs and investors.</comment>


Affinity Profiling and Discrimination by Association in Behavioural Advertising [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://poseidon01.ssrn.com/delivery.php?ID=194116069100028027005087019002109122123035068045044085007112029075102008006127078066019021099031023051029091100079092078067027054018089018064000085115108028022083072002007039029083079000104064122099090078001108005072066007085010007015001124121020085111&EXT=pdf <comment><AUTHOR> _Abstract

Since approval of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in 2016, it has been widely and repeatedly claimed that the GDPR will legally mandate a 'right to explanation' of all decisions made by automated or artificially intelligent algorithmic systems. This right to explanation is viewed as an ideal mechanism to enhance the accountability and transparency of automated decision-making. However, there are several reasons to doubt both the legal existence and the feasibility of such a right. In contrast to the right to explanation of specific automated decisions claimed elsewhere, the GDPR only mandates that data subjects receive meaningful, but properly limited, information (Articles 13-15) about the logic involved, as well as the significance and the envisaged consequences of automated decision-making systems, what we term a 'right to be informed'. Further, the ambiguity and limited scope of the 'right not to be subject to automated decision-making' contained in Article 22 (from which the alleged 'right to explanation' stems) raises questions over the protection actually afforded to data subjects. These problems show that the GDPR lacks precise language as well as explicit and well-defined rights and safeguards against automated decision-making, and therefore runs the risk of being toothless. We propose a number of legislative and policy steps that, if taken, may improve the transparency and accountability of automated decision-making when the GDPR comes into force in 2018._</comment>


Nootropics: their effects, their risks, and where to get them - <AUTHOR> http://sites.google.com/site/thinkinginanutshell/nootropics <comment><USER3> Eh, piracetam. Anirecatam or oxiracetam are more expensive, but they're also a better value, because while piracetam is cheap, you're also eating three-plus grams a day of something that tastes like ground-up mothballs. (When the author of the linked article says, "it'll probably have the taste and texture of sugar", you should know they're either blissfully ignorant or pissing themselves laughing. Piracetam tastes like sunshine and gumdrops, totally!) Piracetam and friends may work for you, or they may not, but (as these things go) they're among the most benign nootropics. Either way, they will probably take at least a week of consistent use to have a real effect. (For piracetam, at least, that's often too much trouble, though gelcaps help.) I still wouldn't necessarily recommend them, but odds are you'll just find them boring and move on, neurons intact, albeit with a distinct hatred for orange juice.

Taking choline can make them work better, though for some people, racetams (alone or combined with choline) can cause major headaches. Regularly eating foods with moderate amounts of choline (particularly eggs) is a middle path. YMMV.

While not mentioned in the article, I've had good results with l-theanine, which is mainly present in green tea. (The sort of salty / MSG-ish taste from Japanese matcha and gyokuro is from high concentrations of l-theanine. It's an amino acid, and tastes very _umami_.) At the very least, it counteracts caffeine jitters, and if you're still reading this, you may already be taking enough caffeine. A bit makes me feel calm-but-alert, though IMHO there's not much point in taking significantly more than occurs in green tea already. I like green tea, but if coffee's more your thing, then powdered l-theanine is quite cheap - it's extracted in bulk from low-grade tea. It's worth a try.

I've also had good results from getting enough sleep and exercising, as lame as that sounds. (I like martial arts, weight training, and bicycling. Find something fun.) There are going to be diminishing returns from nootropics, particularly if you're sleeping or eating poorly to begin with.

Also: Vasopressin / desmopressin is a major antidiuretic hormone, so if you're experimenting with it, keep that in mind.

<comment><USER4> >When the author of the linked article says, "it'll probably have the taste and texture of sugar", you should know they're either blissfully ignorant or pissing themselves laughing.

The author did go on to say that piracetam tastes like nasty sugar.

Also, your comment is reasonable, so I don't know why you're being downvoted.

<comment><USER3> In these sort of threads, people who indiscriminately encourage people to take amphetamines tend to get upvoted* , and everybody else is a buzzkill. If people don't want information, though, so be it. (I was a bit heavy-handed on the whole "no free lunch" aspect.)

* Update - happened again.

That said, I find it interesting that, in the course of posting this, I've been upvoted and downvoted five times.

Also, "nasty sugar"? More like "ground-up burnt plastic, with a slap".

<comment><USER5> I would describe piracetam as having a sharp chemical-ly gag-inducing flavor. I cannot imagine taking it long term without putting it in a capsule.

<comment><USER6> Citrus juices, like orange juice. They mask it well enough.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The Immortality Institute forums have some great discussion on nootropics. This one for instance:

<http://www.imminst.org/forum/index.php?showtopic=35751>

This comment in particular I thought was very thought-provoking:

 __The MOST important tactic to prevent brain disorders: avoid fructose, and carb over-consumption. The brain degrades MUCH faster under the assault of a glucose-driven metabolism. It runs much cleaner -- metabolically speaking -- on fatty acids, which it can do up to approx 50% of its energy needs. __

I'd be curious to hear of other places on the web where people are discussing nootropics as it a very interesting area to me.

<comment><USER8> While carb overconsumption is all-around bad for you, the brain needs glucose more than just about any other organ. Neurologic symptoms are often the first signs of hypoglycemia, and the brain's functional ability falls rapidly with glucose levels.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> there was a long reddit IAMA thread where some med student said he'd tried everything and the only one he'd consider using long-term is a daily extended- release dextroamphetamine, like dexedrine spansules. i've got no clue about this stuff but he sounded like he knew what he was talking about.

this thread: [http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/b4duo/iama_grad_studen...](http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/b4duo/iama_grad_student_who_has_tried_nearly_every/)

</comment><comment><USER10> Piracetam has the distinct disadvantage of having to take large doses of it before any noticeable effects. I think one of the more popular tips for it is to mix it in with orange juice to dilute the taste. Coupled with the headaches it can cause, and it's very much a matter of whether or not you can personally elicit any benefits from it.

If not, save yourself a few bucks. If so, have fun~

<comment><USER11> If you encounter headaches when using piracetam, or any of the racetam family stimulants, it's a sign that you have to start taking choline. Choline is used rapidly by the body when medicating on piracetam, causing headaches, so you have to replace it with a choline supplement.

I've heard that piracetam is so subtle that it's not worth messing around with, and that aniracetam is only a little bit better. If you're serious about using a nootropic, use a more potent analeptic like modafinil or amphetamines, if they're available to you.

<comment><USER10> Amphetamines have the distinct disadvantage of being more rigorously regulated - not to mention a whole host of various physiological drawbacks including overdose-induced psychosis.

Modafinil, sure. Its drawbacks are fairly minor. I seem to recall that it's fairly ubiquitous in medical circles - certainly, you'd probably want your surgeon working ten-hour shifts on a delicate operation to be on the stuff than not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The important thing you need to do if your planning to take these drugs is _do the initial work_.

You cant (at least not from my observations) just start taking these tomorrow and see improvements; you'll be mentally and organisationally unprepared and the effects will likely be negative. You should:

\- get _really_ organised; get into a routine and stick to it. This is key because if you drop out of the routine things can spiral out of control

\- learn how to recover fast. At uni I learned quickly how to get home at 4am and be up/bright at 7am ready for work - and last the whole day (I never took drugs but coffee + OJ were consumed in large quantities).

\- focus your mind with mental exercises and so forth. This will help you concentrate generally and will help the drugs do their job.

I advise you try all of that first and get a routine/pattern sorted - <USER2> that might give you the desired affect anyway (worked for me :)).

</comment><comment><USER13> I wonder what a carefully designed research study would look like

<http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html>

to show that so-called nootropics do anything at all. What would be a good objective test (as contrasted with patient self-report) of better mental function? What treatments are best suited for placebo-controlled trials?

After edit: thanks to another participant for a link to a 1981 study that didn't seem to look at human behavioral outcomes (better memory, etc.) but rather physiological outcomes in an animal model. As the link in this comment

<http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html>

notes, it's always a good idea to look for replication of a first published result. Has there been any replication at all of any peer-reviewed result regarding the more common kinds of nootropics?

<comment><USER14> Posting this link on _nearly every_ study which is not in your subject area is beyond tedious. I cringe every time I see it.

Ask the question - have their been any well designed studies with nootropics - by all means, but enough's enough. If you have no subject matter expertise, don't make claims about lack of good studies. It's like the morons spouting "correlation is not causation". Sure they are right, but the first step in good science is to _create_ a model, the second step is to test it for causality. In the meantime the best we have is correlational studies. The alternative is just to believe whatever your biases allow.

Diminishing the result of the study (which is often the implication of posting that link in my opinion) is just showing a lack of understanding of how good science iterates between induction and retroduction over time.

BTW: There are 24,000 studies with the search term nootropic. 2500 with piracetam. Even a cursory look may be useful in the future.

<comment><USER13> _There are 24,000 studies with the search term nootropic._

To ask the question you suggested asking, which of those are well designed studies? (And to follow up with what is my concern, which of the better designed studies show an objectively measured improvement in cognitive function over a reasonably long span of observation?) Which studies, if any, make a positive case for meaningful effect with a good safety profile of nootropics in human patients?

Citations would be greatly appreciated from any reader who has citations available. I will look them up. I checked the Cochrane Reviews yesterday while this thread was first active.

<comment><USER14> Your questions seem to err on the side of researchers _not_ doing good research. Why is that?

My assumption when reading a study is that it _is_ well designed. I trust in the scientific establishment vs random people on the internet, but are fine to be proven wrong when I read the methodolgy.

Even a cursory look at the wikipedia page or some of the meta analyses will tell you the information you are after. I found it within a few minutes of searching. But instead of looking you make assumptions and jump to conclusions based on your own biases. How is that helpful to anyone? What are you adding to the conversation by promoting your own biases?

Remember, the null hypothesis apriori false in nearly all research.

<comment><USER13> _Your questions seem to err on the side of researchers not doing good research. Why is that?_

Experience in reading the peer-reviewed medical research literature since the 1970s. It used to be that one had to go to an actual biomedical library, as I have done on many occasions, and look up the articles through journal indexes and then walk to the shelf where the journals are kept. That still works, but now many of us also do online searches. Peter Norvig's article

<http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html>

is a good reminder that just getting into a peer-reviewed journal doesn't always establish that the published conclusion is correct (or important).

I see the Wikipedia article on piracetam

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piracetam>

still has some "citation needed" notes up by some factual claims, and some very old journals cited for some of the claims that do have citations. Because I had recently read

<http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=3534>

about reviews of the actual effectiveness of one prescribed medicine that supposedly helps cognitive deficits, I was particularly interested in this thread to see what citations there are for recent, replicated research with proper protocol that back up the drugs most discussed in this thread. (I figured that anyone taking those drugs to good effect would readily remember the citations.) Over the decades, I've seen different kinds of smart drugs come and go out of vogue. Eventually, every use of smart drugs needs to ask, "What smart things are people who take this drug doing that aren't being done by people who don't take the drug?" People in the business of selling drugs have a lot of incentive to obscure the basic question of drug effectiveness in the interest of appealing to drug-buyers' hopes, which is why I request especially cogent evidence for claims such as those made about the drugs discussed in this thread.

<comment><USER14> "is a good reminder that just getting into a peer-reviewed journal doesn't always establish that the published conclusion is correct (or important)."

Which science school did you go to? Science is about the body of evidence, not an individual study. It's about understanding mechanisms, gradually iterating between induction and retroduction to uncover new hypotheses then prove a mechanism over time. It's about gradually building up an argument over many years of research across the field, not any one individual study.

I agree that we need to be careful in interpreting studies (I am a statistician, I should know), but your stance from ignorance adds nothing to the conversation, and in a worst case scenario belittles the efforts of an entire field that you no nothing about, but are _biased_ against all the research you haven't even read from the outset.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I feel like folks are tap dancing around the border of the parts of the topic that fall under the "behind the counter" category, so I'm going to jump over for y'all.

Adderall and related schedule II nootropic stimulants are amazingly effective for their intended roles and when used at medically indicated dosages (rather than doing the abusive equivalent of swallowing a bottle of no-doze caffeine pills) are among the safest drugs for which it is possible to get a prescription, in that any side effects induced by taking a prescribed dosage will cease soon after cessation of the medication.

That being said, the view that they are study drugs is not quite a complete or accurate picture of their cognitive effect. A more accurate but still imprecise view would be that at the correct dosage, adderall and family "reduce the activation energy needed for attentional engagement" and "increase the baseline activity level of higher order planning faculties" (that is, every time you have a "I should do this vs i want to do that" moment and chose the "should do this" path, you are actively using the higher order planning faculties).

These effects are why adderall et al are great for treating those who have ADHD, ie those who have a dysfunctionally high activation energy for attentional engagement in tasks, and perhaps due to insufficient activity of those higher order planning faculties that influence moment to moment behavior also have impulsive behavior and all the externalities that these difficulties imply. Study drugs they are not, they just happen to help you focus on what you really really want to focus on if you try hard enough.

If you do not have much in the way of excessively impulsive behavior or difficulty focusing on what you really really want to be doing when both well rested and in shape, then you do not stand to gain much / anything from using them.

If you're not well rested, either drink some strong tea (because caffeine and theanine are great!) or go to sleep, and if you're not in good physical health, go fix that with some exercise instead of whatever you'd be procrastinating with because that affects your quality of life and net productivity more than getting another hour of work done. Adderall et al will not make you better at focusing just then and there.

I feel that people often lose sight of the fact that while the human brain can do amazing things, there are limits. With nootropics such as adderall, even a slightly higher dosage in the normal dosage range can essentially result in a sort of unpleasant "overload" of your ability to direct your focus. I suspect this is a miniature version of whatever those who recreationally abuse these stimulants experience, in which case they must be idiots because i don't understand how that could be pleasant.

if you have allergies that can be made tolerablish without something like zyrtec or claritin and you have work you need to do, don't take the allergy medication, they have essentially the exact opposite (I believe antagonistic is the term used) cognitive effect of prescription dosages of adderall et al.

Obvious caveat, everything I say is merely reflects my personal experience managing adhd, reading up on various bits, and observing how many people work. Also, it seems that at least anecdotally that the manner in which a person with unmedicated adhd structures and approaches work is radically different from how everyone else does so, and that part of the adhd treatment process is sort of a (think HeMan) "By the power of ADDERALL, I shall use my newfound powers of ease of attentional engagement to devise more effective and efficient ways of structuring how I approach work"

theres probably things i'm overlooking, omitting, oversimplifying or exaggerating, but hopefully this has some useful information for someone.

<comment><USER16> Are you on adderall right now?

<comment><USER15> nope, I'm only that rambly when exhausted but not able to fall asleep.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've been interested in piracetam for a while.

Anybody with personal experience?

Wiki: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piracetam>

<comment><USER17> Yes, I took it for several days and developed an annoying headache/feeling. It did not, at all, improve cognitive function. In my case it impaired it.

YMMV of course.

I've had far better luck with fish oil (Omega-3 supplements), taken every morning with earl grey tea. The fish oil helps me concentrate, while the tea releases caffeine more slowly than coffee does, preventing jitteriness and extending its duration.

<comment><USER18> To make fish oil, you need fish that are low enough in the food chain to not have many PCBs. Fish oil is usually made from the menhaden fish (aka the alewife fish), which used to be plentiful all around the Atlantic coastline of the US, feeding on algae. With all those fish turned into fish oil pellets, there are massive algae blooms, and the food chain's getting disrupted.

See <http://www.ethicurean.com/2009/03/23/menhaden/> and <http://motherjones.com/environment/2006/03/ill-take-menhaden>

<comment><USER17> Thanks for that! Any recommendations on alternatives? I find other sources of Omega3 (flax seed) to be not as good unfortunately...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Mind Boosters by Ray Sahelian MD [http://www.amazon.com/Mind-Boosters-Natural- Supplements-Enha...](http://www.amazon.com/Mind-Boosters-Natural-Supplements- Enhance/dp/0312195842) provides some good background on various pathways and mechanisms of action for different supplements. He advocates a conservative approach to supplements focused on counter-acting effects of aging.

</comment><comment><USER20> Piracetam for me is about as effective as Adderall. Which is to say that it is very effective. I took it a lot in college. Be careful taking it with coffee though, it potentiates stimulants.

</comment><comment><USER21> I have used several puzzle web sites to benchmark my brain from day to day. Obviously puzzles are a narrow measure of cognitive capacity, but that's true of any benchmark. I've used <http://www.ricochetrobots.com> and the Puzzle Maniak game on the iPhone (usually the loopy puzzle).

</comment><comment><USER22> Does anyone here have any experience with sulbutiamine?

</comment><comment><USER23> (Disclaimer: I'm not a doctor, nurse, or med school dropout. You shouldn't listen to me.)

Nootropics don't work, but this is mostly by definition. Just like any algorithm that works isn't AI, and successful minorities aren't minorities, when a drug is shown beyond all doubt to improve the ability to deliver sustained mental effort, it's not a nootropic. It's a stimulant.

I'm baffled why people spend so much time hunting the perfect combination of vitamins and piracetam and fish oil when prescription stimulants are so readily available, obviously effective, and completely safe at clinical doses. They're the Apple products of nootropics: They just work.

<comment><USER24> "I'm baffled why people spend so much time hunting the perfect combination of vitamins and piracetam and fish oil when prescription stimulants are so readily available,"

Because nootropic != stimulant.

Your brain depletes assorted neurotransmitters during the course of the day and that depletion reduces cognitive ability. You can improve your state of mind by helping the body replenish them.

Choline, for example, is not a stimulant per se, but it may help boost levels of acetylcholine. That, in turn, can improve your cognitive activity if you are low on acetylcholine.

It's similar to taking general vitamins and minerals. For most people there's a easy limit after which taking more simply does nothing but cost money. They are not, in themselves, magic health enhancers you can pile on to make yourself more fit. However, if you are engaged in some physical activity that depletes vitamins and minerals, then ingesting higher levels than normal will help you maintain that activity and overall better health.</comment></comment>


Successful insomnia treatment may require nothing more than a placebo - <AUTHOR> http://sciencebulletin.org/archives/10750.html <comment><USER2> Darkness (the real thing, where you can't see your hand in front of your face) at constant times is the cure for insomnia. (Take it from someone who suffered insanely for decades, and only suffers from "painsomnia", now, from time to time.) So if a placebo convinces you you'll sleep if you turn the lights off, and you do turn the lights off, the placebo will be a real help. Or you could just do the (true) darkness thing. PS red light at night is okay, it doesn't trigger your pRGCs.</comment>


What angel investors aren't looking for - <AUTHOR> http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/348626_schreter25.html <comment><USER2> Roughly correct, but the point about lack of financial expertise seems wrong. I suspect plenty of the most successful founders can't read a balance sheet. It's far more important to know how to build things people will love.

<comment><USER3> It's a problem if they have no willingness to learn. If something is important to the business, the founders should make an effort to understand it.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Best way to group data using machine learning without clustering? - <AUTHOR> I want to create group of matches(1-1, 1-2, 1-3 or m-m) from the data. I already have test data. Which algorithm should I use? Clustering is not at all helpful! <comment><USER2> Something like [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disjoint- set_data_structure](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disjoint-set_data_structure) ?</comment>


Leaving Behind the Digital Keys to Financial Lives - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/25/your-money/forgotten-in-estate-planning-online-passwords.html?ref=technology

<comment><AUTHOR> Is anyone building a solution to this? Why should you be trusted?

<comment><USER2> I built <http://emergencybinder.com/>, a set of free downloadable documents that deal with this sort of situation. It doesn't address the "changing passwords" issue, but would, at least, get you a snapshot of all of your account numbers and what banks have them. Your estate's executor should be able to contact the banks, who would have some sort of protocol for liquidating those assets.

It's not a project I actively update, but if you have any suggestions for forms / papers / docs / info that it's missing, I'd be happy to add them to it.</comment></comment>


Automatic SIMD vectorization support in PyPy - <AUTHOR> http://morepypy.blogspot.com/2015/10/automatic-simd-vectorization-support-in.html <comment><USER2> PyPy is an absolutely amazing piece of technologies and the core developers are brilliant people - however, their main use case is not numeric python.

Their framework is (theoretically) able to trace any Python operation, no matter how dynamic, and speed it up. This means that if you want to speed up pure Python code, PyPy is really the only game in town.

The downside is that when scientists use Python, Python is used as a beautiful API on top of very optimized code written in Fortran or C. If you want to do numerically complex code in Python, you are much, much better off using numba. numba is much less ambitious than PyPy - it handles a small subset of Python (basically, NumPy) but it is very, very fast and very efficient at speeding up pure NumPy code. In my experience, 100x speed ups (over pure NumPy code) are not that uncommon.

The founder of continuum (Travis Oliphant) wrote a blog about his technical vision for a Python jit: [http://technicaldiscovery.blogspot.it/2012/08/numba- and-llvm...](http://technicaldiscovery.blogspot.it/2012/08/numba-and- llvmpy.html) and [http://technicaldiscovery.blogspot.it/2012/07/more-pypy- disc...](http://technicaldiscovery.blogspot.it/2012/07/more-pypy- discussions.html)). Basically, the continuum team made a big bet that a very efficient JIT that targets only numerical python would be more useful than a generic JIT that can theoretically handle all of Python. For my use case (scientific coding) - numba is far superior.

<comment><USER3> PyPy is really impressive, I love the idea of getting all these optimisations (SIMD, STM) for free... but as you say, numerical work means numpy, scipy, pandas, which don't work with PyPy. Even if the NumPyPy project was able to fully match the Numpy api, you still have a lot of large projects like Pandas that depend on the c api. it would be stupid to copy everything. Perhaps something can be worked out between pypy, cffi, and cython.

In the short term Numba is much more practical for numerics. In the longer term Pyston looks promising - it's actually similar to Numba in that it also uses LLVM, I imagine there could be synergy between the two...

<comment><USER4> NumPy is a protocol that dictates the layout of multidimensional arrays with really fast Fortran code that knows that layout. What needs to be copied is that memory layout protocol so that we get n:m sharing instead of n^2 duplication.

<comment><USER3> My point was that even if you copy the numpy protocol, you still have huge projects that depend on c-extensions that you wouldn't want to port.

Pandas is one, others include scikit-learn, scikit-image, Astropy, Bioinformatics libraries, stats libraries, etc... which all have heavy C/Cython use and depend to varying degrees on the Python C-api. Porting NumPy barely scratches the surface of scientific python.

<comment><USER5> Biopython runs on pypy. It also runs under Jython. While it has C use, it is not "heavy" C use.

Going on a tangent, and though I realize it's a lost battle, I wish people would stop saying that NumPy is the base of scientific programming in Python. As Biopython shows, it isn't required for at least some of bioinformatics.

My own research[1] deals with chemical graphs, and NumPy/SciPy/etc. are nearly irrelevant to that research.

[1] For example, given a set of 100 structures, what is the largest substructure (based on the number of bonds) which is in at least 90 of the structures?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> All of the operations in the plots are being calculated using tiny arrays. Even 128 elements is pretty small. Additionally, I'd be interested to know how they compiled NumPy, and which BLAS implementation they linked against.

<comment><USER7> The graphs are a travesty of detail, and I suspect that the more you poke it, the worse the results get. There's a definite downward trend in speedup as you increase vector size, and that is completely different from what you would naively expect (at larger vector sizes, you spend more time in the embarrassingly-parallelizable kernel)--so this suggests that the baseline itself is not scalar code but vector code.

So what the graphs end up highlighting is that the CPython (NumPy?) has decent overhead on tiny calls that don't really matter for gross performance. As you say, 128 elements is tiny: that's where I'd consider starting a graph, not ending it. At 4 elements, you're looking at about 40 clock cycles to do a simple vector-add in the scalar case (I think x86 L1 cache hits are ~3 clock cycles and there are two load/store units; if these numbers are wrong, my estimate is off). This also means that there's absolutely no measurement of the overhead of the JIT autovectorizing operation (!), which is quite significant because the usual resistance to adding autovectorizers in JITs [1] is that they're way too slow for the speedup they give.

[1] As far as I'm aware, the only other JIT of note that includes an autovectorizer is the Hotspot JVM. The approach taken by other people (e.g., .NET CLR) is to effectively expose a SIMD primitive in the bytecode and get compilers to target those via static autovectorization instead of autovectorizing at runtime.

<comment><USER8> The demo should really be 128 thousand elements or 128 million.

128 elements is still useful for when you have an inner loop that has a small vector operation. Most of the time this is not the case though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Can anyone explain the version numbers? PyPy 2.6.1 compared to 15.11, which will eventually become 4.0.0...?

<comment><USER10> AFAIK, they were considering to change the versioning scheme because the old scheme is becoming too confusing.

The old scheme (PyPy 2.x) resembles Python 2 versioning too much (PyPy 2.6 vs. Python 2.7) and may cause confusion that PyPy version correspond to Python version it implements (while in fact it is not). Say, if the next release is PyPy 2.7, some may assume it is a PyPy implementation of Python 2.7 (even though PyPy 2.6 is already Python 2.7). The situation is also confusing with Python 3 as well (PyPy3 2.6 for Python 3.2.)

I think PyPy's initial plan was to use YY.MM for versioning, so the tentative version was 15.11 but now looks like they decided to follow the old scheme but with major version > 3 instead (so the next release is PyPy 4.0.0 and PyPy3 4.0.0).

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Does CPython 3 do any better?</comment>


Ask HN: What do you think of Reddit's redesign? - <AUTHOR> This has been discussed ad nauseum on reddit itself, but I know there are a lot of people here who've used reddit since its inception. What do YOU think of the redesign?<p>Personally, I think it's visually and functionally a step in the wrong direction. On top of that, performance is considerably worse. If they ever disable old.reddit.com, I'll probably stop using the site. <comment><USER2> Very literally one of the worst redesigns I can think of in recent memory, easily on par with Digg/Myspace to me. (And I was a web-izen through both)

To avoid hyperbole, I'll list many of the same concrete elements others have.

\- Page load MUCH slower.

\- Information density is MUCH lower.

\- Inlined ads between actual posts.

\- Terribly ineffective use of linked images (they're massive rather than only on hover as one would get with RES)

It feels to me like Reddit embracing its "potential" as a clickbait factory ala buzfeed/instagram, over trying to encourage discussion and community per what I first found appealing about it.

</comment><comment><USER3> Only positives: I sometimes like the "all images already visible" view they added, and it's kind of nice you can now click the lines indicating nesting to fold the thread you are in.

Both of these things could have been perfectly fine implemented in the old design.

I find it especially annoying that the sidebar (with subreddit rules etc) appears to be gone?

</comment><comment><USER4> We should just go back to 4:3 monitors, because according to "modern" web design, utilizing horizontal screen space is tantamount to devil worship.

<comment><USER5> You don't need to go back to 4:3, just turn your widescreen monitor sideways and there's even less evil horizontal space.</comment></comment>


How science is giving voice to mummies such as Ötzi the Iceman - <AUTHOR> http://www.heritagedaily.com/2016/10/how-science-is-giving-voice-to-mummies-such-as-otzi-the-iceman/112822 <comment><USER2> I wonder if this software could reproduce my voice or the voices of dead actors so we can continue to use their likeness posthumously.

<comment><USER3> First, your way of writing will be imitated.

Then, the words will be matched to your voice.

Then, the voice will be matched to a video of your likeness.

Then, a talking hologram of your likeness.

Maybe more could be follow, but at present my optimism is slightly deficient to envision it.

<comment><USER4> This was exactly the subject of one of the episodes of _Black Mirror_ , a very interesting short TV serial from the UK specifically about the impact of technology on current and near-term society.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I read that as "giving votes to mummies." I thought "Jeez, I've heard of the 'graveyard vote' but this is a whole new level."</comment>


Charlie Kaufman's Defense of Film - <AUTHOR> https://newrepublic.com/article/158663/charlie-kaufmans-defense-film <comment><USER3> Charlie Kaufman writing a book about a film critic who hates Charlie Kaufman is pretty on-brand.

Also Richard Brody is hilarious to read. He's such a grumpy old man. I love reading him just for his disgust with modern acclaimed films and championing of smaller obscure films (some of which are genuinely great!). And his absolute adoration of Godard.

<comment><USER4> Yes, one of the few current film critics who bring occasional originality and insight to their writings. Film reviews seem to be almost universally idiotic and insipid (also ideological, although Brody is not excepted from partaking in this last quality) these days. Another occasional exception in the same vein is Armond White.

Writing an entire book to spite a critic for writing a bad review strikes me as being a bit of a "self-own" so to speak. From the summary, there also seem to be some borrowings from better imagined fiction, such as the novel A Confederacy of Dunces, and the short story The Aleph.

<comment><USER5> Armond White's writing is almost 100% ideological, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is a strange and IMO unsatisfying book review, as it's largely a summary without much in the way of analysis or evaluation (except for the explanation of which real-world critics Kaufman is targeting). But perhaps this is an attempt at a demonstration, by its absence, of the value of criticism - <USER2> would be an appropriately meta way of responding to Kaufman.

</comment><comment><USER7> Anybody remember "Lady in the Water"? That was M. Night Shayamalan's attempt to get back at mean critics with a mean critic who meets a bad end.

<comment><USER8> This sounds like what Michael Chrichton would do with the "small penis rule": [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_penis_rule](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_penis_rule)

<comment><USER9> In _Dune_ , Frank Herbert named the assassin for the bad guys Piter DeVries, something I noticed not all at twelve or so when I first read the book. When I picked it up again over forty, I had read a couple of books by Peter DeVries, and immediately wondered what book of Herbert's DeVries might have savaged.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I wondered when they were going to mention Richard Brody.</comment>


Liza Alert: searching missing people using machine vision - <AUTHOR> https://habr.com/en/company/mailru/blog/446974/ <comment><USER2> Liza Alert is named after her: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizaveta_Glinka](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizaveta_Glinka)

EDIT: Apparently I was wrong.

<comment><USER3> No, it's not.

> Liza Alert takes its name from 5-year-old Liza Fomkina. In 2010 Liza has > died of hypothermia in the Russian wilderness after a 9 day unsuccessful > search mission. The foundation was born less than 21 days after Liza's > death.

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

<comment><USER2> Thank you for the correction, I always assumed it was named after Glinka.

<comment><USER4> No. The previous commenter is correct.

I'm actually a member of LA and I know the people who are running this project. So far has never read the article and I just know they're trying to automate image processing with ML.

I'm mostly involved with communications (e.g. radio, etc) and generally helping out with their missions if I can.

They asked if I knew drone pilots awhile back too.

<comment><USER2> Fascinating to see a comment from one of you guys. Any interesting news/insights?

<comment><USER4> Maybe we could organize a Reddit AMA? I don't know. I'm sitting in front of my office PC now, incidentally, after returning from a night lookout for a missing person.

All I can say, get as much sleep as you can, sleep deprivation is a b __ch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've recently read that they often find missing children drowned in outhouses because a huge portion of people in Russia doesn't have access to normal WCs.

<comment><USER6> I wouldn't call a rural portion huge, but, sadly this still happens. About 5 known cases in last year

<comment><USER5> That's not just about the rural, many minor cities have this problem too as far as I know. But I haven't been to there to check myself (and actually hesitate to).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What about an owl or other big bird. Attached with a tiny gps and radio. Trained to push a button or make a sound when they find a human not dressed in search west.

</comment><comment><USER8> Wouldn't infrared cameras work better? Or does the forest blocks a persons heat?

<comment><USER9> If you can see them visually, you can definitely see them thermally. A small corner that might not be visually distinct will be thermally warm. You're spot-on, and drone-ready thermal cameras have been available (but expensive) for some time now.

However, even the best thermal cameras are fairly low-resolution -- getting beyond 640x480 generally costs more then a car. So you want to overlay the images, and view them side-by-side, and see if one can tell you something about the other. That workflow could use a lot of improvement.

Also, thermal images have some weird artifacts. In visible light, since we've all grown up perceiving it, shadows and reflections are just natural and we don't even notice them anymore. But medium-wave infrared tends to reflect off things we don't think of as reflective, and it confuses a lot of first-time observers. Different surfaces have different emissivity, and tend to take on the apparent temperature of the background or reflected scene, which is often the sky itself, and the temperature of the sky is a whole 'nother topic. These artifacts are so confusing to untrained observers that they've spawned an entire genre of TV shows ("ghost hunters"), and continually trip up new analysts.

All that being said, yes, adding thermal cameras can definitely produce more useful data. It just might not be suitable for crowdsourcing.

<comment><USER10> You uh... how do I say this... only living people have a thermal signature. There is value in finding a body as far as closure for the family and ending the search. So it would be a matter of whether thermal imaging improves survival rates, because of course finding more people alive is worth more than finding them at all.</comment></comment></comment>