In College and Hiding from Scary Ideas - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/22/opinion/sunday/judith-shulevitz-hiding-from-scary-ideas.html <comment><USER2> This article is from March 2015, and shows that the writing has been on the wall for quite a while. The "safe spaces" movement is a plague, and I am sick of it. I hold extremely diverse viewpoints which span the political spectrum. Socially liberal and fiscally conservative. How can liberals claim to be accepting of all viewpoints but, in reality, only accept those that align with their pseudo-personal-Utopia outlook? It's bonkers.

There is no right to not be offended.

There is no right to not be uncomfortable.

Welcome to real life, where you must be resilient to criticism and offense and countless other negative occurrences and feelings.

<comment><USER3> I don't have a problem with safe spaces. To me, they're like office break rooms. Sometimes you just need a minute to disengage. But, if you're spending your whole day in there, I'm going to question why you show up to work in the first place.

<comment><USER4> Safe spaces as I've seen them implemented are exclusionary and discriminatory.

A women-only safe space is sexist, as the implied "safety" of not allowing men implies that men are inherently unsafe. A POC-only safe space is racist, as the implied "safety" of not allowing whites implies that whites are inherently unsafe.

If anyone were to even suggest the opposite implementation, a men-only or whites-only "safe space", then the discriminatory nature is immediately apparent and everyone rallies to shut down the idea before it ever reaches implementation.

Edit: Oops, I've invaded HN's safe space. Disagree with me all you like, but as we learned earlier this week it's not the votes that matter. Tell me why I'm wrong, I'm genuinely interested in hearing your opinion.

<comment><USER5> The US Presidency is such a "men-only (almost) whites-only" safe space, as are most circles of power in this country.

<comment><USER4> Article 2 Section 1 Clause 5 of the Constitution

> No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, > at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the > Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who > shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen > Years a Resident within the United States.

I don't see anything there about genitalia or skin color.

But since it's a "safe space" I think I'll pop in there and relax for a bit. It's time I escape this mediocrity and claim the power of my white male birthright.

<comment><USER4> I apologize for the snark at the end. I am easily goaded.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > I don't see how you can have a therapeutic space that's also an intellectual > space.

College should be a place where your beliefs should be challenged. If we've learned anything, echo chambers are strong and becoming stronger. The only way to combat that is with adversity.

<comment><USER7> What if that belief is that you're fine being an LGBTQ person, and the "challenge" is from people who believe that you shouldn't exist or have the same rights as others?

<comment><USER8> Then oddly enough, it becomes less about you being challenged and more about those who believe you shouldn't exist being challenged. Colleges are great for exposure to peers with varying backgrounds and beliefs and are great for fostering understanding of each other's viewpoints. Isolating your group to spaces of the same people will probably strengthen that demarcation and lessen the incentive (and the ability) for those with hardened beliefs to understand the other side's viewpoints. Sometimes all it takes is befriending one LGBTQ to melt that belief.

<comment><USER9> What if, sometimes, LGBTQ people want to achieve things _other_ than challenging people who believe they don't exist - things like, say, arranging financial support for people who've been disowned by their family for being gay and are in danger of becoming homeless, or even just having a friendly chat with other LGBTQ people about their experiences? That's what the LGBT space at university was used for when I was there.

<comment><USER10> Feel free to do so on their private property as has always been their right.

<comment><USER3> Many universities _are_ private property, and students have a say in how they are used, hence school-sanction safe spaces existing in the first place.

<comment><USER10> As long as they receive no public funding I don't see a problem with it, but you don't get to take federal dollars and put up a no whites allowed sign on the door.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I am 50+ and this whole safe space movement is really perplexing. No, people should not be subjected to hurtful circumstances, but at the same time, they are a fact of life.

Being a world citizen is a dicey proposition, and my gut reaction is that further insulating ourselves is the wrong way to go. I can't imagine how a military comprised of soldiers who have grown up in this movement can be expected to deal with the events of war.

If a person is truly emotionally wounded and sensitive to common messages from typical life events, they should be afforded therapy so they can cope.

<comment><USER12> I am 20+ and this trend seems to indicate that people are growing decreasingly familiar with traumatic experiences in their lives, which also seems to indicate a general increase in average quality of life.

<comment><USER13> I wonder if one could liken it to allergies. Your body is so insulated from bad things that your immune systems kicks in when it's not needed. This trend seems similar, as it seems to me that those who have had real and damaging traumatic experiences need these safe-spaces less than those that have had pseudo-traumatic experiences.

I have no statistics to back this up, though, and would welcome evidence in either direction.

<comment><USER14> All indications are that this is the safest time in history to be alive. The headlines give us all a sense of terror because it useful to some narratives, but any articles citing studies and statistics show otherwise. We're just much more aware of horrible things due to the proliferation of information. [https://goo.gl/yQkFXx](https://goo.gl/yQkFXx) [https://goo.gl/J9ib0x](https://goo.gl/J9ib0x)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's sad that this is old news now. But I'm sure the people who started these universities are still rolling in their graves. These free-thinkers celebrated civil discourse, and built universities to foster the marketplace of ideas. As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another.

</comment><comment><USER15> Has there been any empirical research done on this? Whenever this topic comes up on the Internet it is very charged and full of assumptions. I suspect that the creation/utilization of safe spaces and trigger warnings is actually rather low in a country with almost 14 million students in higher education.

</comment><comment><USER16> "What will they do when they hear opinions they've learned to shrink from? If they want to change the world, how will they learn to persuade people to join them?"

This seems like an important quote for those who are sad/disappointed/angry about the US election results.

<comment><USER17> This is pretty key. To persuade someone, you have to understand what they believe, and why they believe it. When you approach a conversation with "the other side is stupid/backwards", their response will be that YOU are just stupid/backwards.

One of the things very few partisans seem to want to admit right now, is that the other party is NOT just a bunch of hateful people. That both parties are made up of humans who, for the most part, want to make better lives for themselves and others around them. Mostly people who want to make this country a better place, but obviously disagree on what that "better place" looks like. And those beliefs are built on their life experiences, both what they've been told and what they've been through. And that one person shouting at them and telling them they're wrong isn't going to magically change that. And trying to invalidate their lives by going after their social class or their "privilege" isn't going to help anyone, and is tone deaf to the fact that people at all levels of class experience the same emotions, the same level of panic, fear, and trauma.

<comment><USER18> In other words, everyone reaches their conclusions because of reasons that are understandable. This is exactly what gets shut out when people resort to "othering" people they don't understand, out of laziness.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> From last time around:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9245862](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9245862)

</comment><comment><USER20> Why safe spaces? Diazepam doesn't work anymore? It seems there is an urgent need of psychiatric facilities around or in the campuses.

</comment><comment><USER21> It is the same inclination to shut out the big bad world that is driving the religious right.

</comment><comment><USER7> Nobody is hiding from "scary ideas". They're hiding from the fact that other people flat out believe that they shouldn't exist.</comment>


Why Data Structures Matter - <AUTHOR> http://joelneely.wordpress.com/2011/03/05/why-data-structures-matter

<comment><USER2> Previously, <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2294202>

More specifically, someone hunted down what I think is the Guy Steele talk mentioned in the OP: [http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Thinking-Parallel- Program...](http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Thinking-Parallel-Programming)

<comment><USER3> Great talk. I feel like he spent the first 18 minutes talking about his crappy ASM code just because he did all that work and wanted to present it.

<comment><USER4> Is Fortress dead?

<comment><USER3> Sorry for jumping on this late, it is not dead. <http://projectfortress.java.net/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What is the word splitting task mentioned here?

<comment><USER6> Not sure, but for the article's sake, "word splitting" is only relevant as it involves (singly-linked) list concatenation as a performance bottleneck. List concatentation is efficient when the first list is short (ideally length=1), which is to say, a right fold that builds a list by a series of prepend operations.

Of course, that analysis is a little weird, because if our goal is to accumulate a large _sequence_ (O(1) to get head, O(n) full traversal) as fast as possible, you shouldn't use a linked list at all. You should use something like a Finger Tree, whose construction is parallelizable (that is merging two size-n sublists is O(log n), not linked list's O(n) ).

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Who said they didn't?</comment>


Modernize your C++ code - <AUTHOR> http://www.jarchitect.com/Blog/?p=1566 <comment><USER2> > Pass-By-Value: Detect const-ref parameters that would benefit from using the > pass-by-value idiom.

I don't get why to make this change and the justification (after following 2 links deep: Want Speed? Pass by Value) is a 404.

Move constructors are great and it's awesome that a bunch of what used to be copy-constructor overuse in C++03 can now be done without deep copies in C++11. But I don't understand why explicitly move from something that is explicit and guaranteed to be cheap (pass by reference) to something that might be cheap if everything has reasonable move-ctors or (if not all ducks are in a row) might simply degrade to incurring the C++03-style over-copies. Does not seem like a strict improvement to me. Seems instead like blindly applying this to existing code will slow it down in some cases, possibly dramatically.

<comment><USER3> It's an antipattern. Consider the following scenario: a function says "something = move(passed_by_value);". When called with an lvalue, this assumes that copy construction followed by move assignment is as efficient as copy assignment would be (which is what you get when you overload for const X& and X&&, or perfectly forward). This is untrue for vector/string-like things. When you copy construct a vector/string, it must allocate space for N elements, then copy then. Move assignment just transfers ownership, that part is fast. But consider copy assignment. If the destination has sufficient capacity, NO allocation will be performed - instead, the existing elements will be destroyed and the sufficiently-large buffer reused to hold the new elements.

Therefore, "want speed? pass by value" can result in worse performance. Overloading for copy/move is near-optimal and perfect forwarding is optimal - this is what the STL does (push_back is copy/move overloaded, emplace_back perfectly forwards).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Very nice to see improvements to the tool landscape for C++. I'm sure the toolset that will emerge will be very nice. I just don't see any situation where I would like to subject any production codebase to this particular transform just for the fun of it. Cool CS toy, though.

</comment><comment><USER5> I see no tangible reason to do this. I mean, all of this is _nice_ , but it's just messing with the working codebase for the sake of messing with it.

<comment><USER6> More maintainable and idiomatic code.

<comment><USER7> Generated code is unlikely to be more maintainable.

<comment><USER8> Code is code. I doubt a computer program could do worse than my undergrads, indeed it will probably be functionally correct. Today I fixed a bug where a condition std::thread member used a condition variable in the constructor, problem was that the std::thread came before the condition variable in the structure declaration. No computer would make that mistake.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm really impressed with this tooling. Effectively Resharper for C++. There's a huge market opportunity for C++ tooling.

<comment><USER10> How's your astroturfing day going so far?

<comment><USER11> I don't understand this reaction. If the thread had several posts from green users like these, maybe it would be appropriate to jump to this conclusion.

A more charitable explanation that I also consider to be likely is that jbHawk was a long-time HN reader who simply never felt the need to have an account until this post about a pretty neat tool which inspired them to comment.

<comment><USER12> Im such a user. Sometimes I feel the urge to comment, but it happens so rarely that I won't recall my username or password. So I probably have 20 accounts on HN and 40 on Reddit, each with just a few posts.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


PEG.js - parser generator for JavaScript - <AUTHOR> http://pegjs.majda.cz/ <comment><USER2> There are a couple other parser generators for JS:

* <http://zaa.ch/2k> \- Jison

* <http://inimino.org/~inimino/blog/peg_first_release> \- another Packrat (has an es5 parser as an example)

Plus a few more that work but produce generated code that's too slow to be useful.

<comment><USER3> Worth noting that, last I heard, CoffeeScript is using Zaach's Jison: <http://zaa.ch/2o>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I had to do some digging for myself to verify that, yes, PEGs are a recent concept distinct from the kind of grammars I'm already familiar with. See Bryan Ford's paper, _Parsing Expression Grammars: A Recognition-Based Syntactic Foundation_ from PoPL 2004: <http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=964001.964011>

<comment><USER5> Memoization to get linear performance out of backtracking, which is exponential without it, is certainly a nice sleight of hand, but I wouldn't be under any illusions that the constant factor is competitive with say an LALR recognizer. Also, with a scheme that maps so closely to recursive descent, it's easy to miss what amount to grammar ambiguities, where nested productions preferentially eat tokens that may be in the follow set (i.e. the if/else problem).

<comment><USER6> PEGs don't have grammar ambiguities. Every PEG is deterministic.

Grammar ambiguities are resolved by ordered choice. If there are two ways to parse something, the first way will be tried first. If it succeeds, the ordered choice short-circuits and the second way is ignored. So you can resolve, say, the classic dangling else problem by ordering your choices correctly.

<comment><USER5> I know all of that. My point is that the if/else problem really is an ambiguity (i.e. it is a language bug, not just a problem you have to get around in parsing), and problems similar to it crop up when your tool doesn't alert you to first/follow conflicts, in LL(1) parlance. That PEGs encode the implementation strategy inside the declarative grammar is a flaw, in my opinion, not a benefit.

<comment><USER6> In programming, ambiguity is _bad_! Explicitly encoding disambiguation rules in the grammar is a good thing, just like it's a good thing in functional pattern matching, in Prolog... I'd be interested to hear any reason why you would want to not disambiguate a grammar in any language designed to be computer-recognizable.

<comment><USER5> Here, read this:

<http://compilers.iecc.com/comparch/article/05-09-114>

In particular:

"Yes, this is "the" problem with PEG's. / implies ordering of the search (parsing) space. You need to order your / operators so that special cases (e.g. longer matches), so that they appear first. Unfortunately, if you don't do this, nothing will tell you you have a problem with your grammar, it will simply not parse some inputs. To me this implies that if one wants to use a PEG to parse some input, then one must exhaustively test the parser."

Hopefully the thread therein will describe my issue better than I have thus far.

<comment><USER4> Indeed it does, and Chris Clark very nicely summarizes the advantages and disadvantages of PEG vs other parsers. Nice find.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I love LPEG for Lua. It usually takes me some time to write a decent grammar, but once it works it is rather straightforward to read it. (<http://www.inf.puc-rio.br/~roberto/lpeg/lpeg.html>)

Now seeing this for javascript makes me think if I should actually do more work with js.

<comment><USER8> Amen on the easy to read part. I'm the author of clj-peg ( <http://www.lithinos.com/clj-peg/> ), and the main reason I wanted to write it was to have grammars that were human readable.

<comment><USER9> I'm really interested in human-readable grammars. Thanks for your work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> A parser generator? Why oh why? It sounds so 80s. JavaScript is strong enough to express parser combinators, e.g. see Chris Double's implementation (also based on the PEG formalism):

[http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/2007/10/javascript-parser- combi...](http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/2007/10/javascript-parser- combinators.html)

I did the same thing in ActionScript. It's easy and fun.

<comment><AUTHOR> I believe that the classical generated parser has generally better performance potential - there is less function calling, less string passing (but this may be avoided easily in combinators too) and more opportunity for optimalization if you have the whole grammar AST in hand.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Are there PEGs available for languages like Javascript? Given recent discussion of Perl being undecidable, I assume there isn't one for Perl. Has anyone tackled such a thing for Ruby?

Update: Thanks for the links! That being said, I didn't mean parsers written _in_ Javascript or Ruby, I mean PEGs or CFGs that parse Javascript and/or Ruby programs :-)

<comment><USER12> <http://treetop.rubyforge.org/>

Im writing a programming language in Ruby at the moment - and after playing with that for a few days I've gone back to "hand coded lexer plus Racc for grammar". It's probably personal preference but I find that a little more tunable.

<comment><AUTHOR> What exactly you didn't like?

<comment><USER12> Just personal preference: I prefer the grammar structure for parsers like Racc

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm confused about the grammar example.

How does: multiplicative : primary "* " multiplicative { return $1 * $3; }

return the product of two integers?

<comment><USER14> HN formatting messed up your asterisks. The whole rule is:

        multiplicative    : primary "*" multiplicative { return $1 * $3; }
                          / primary

"primary" refers to another rule in the grammar, which is defined as integer or a parenthesized expression. This snippet defines "multiplicative", which is either a primary, or a primary followed by an asterisk followed by another multiplicative. (This recursively expands to allow any number of primaries, separated by asterisks.)

The value of the multiplicative expression is the value of the first term times the value of the third term. (The second term is just the literal string "*".)

<comment><USER5> On the face of it, however, the grammar is problematic. There's a reason it uses "additive", "multiplicative" and "primary" rather than a more traditional expression, term and factor: by using commutative operators like + and multiply, and leaving out - and / it disguises the fact that the grammar is actually evaluating the expression from right to left, rather than the expected order of left to right.

<comment><AUTHOR> I knew somebody would raise this point :-) You are right that the evaluation order would be wrong for "-" and "/".

I will probably implement support for left recursion in PEG.js - it is possible (see e.g. <http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2007002_packrat.pdf>). After that, the grammar could be rewritten to evaluate in the correct order.

(Another alternative - which works right now - is to change the parsing expressions to something like "additive ([+-] additive)*" and deal with the whole chain of operations with the same priority at once. I didn't use this in the example as I wanted it to be as simple as possible.)

<comment><USER6> Don't use that paper! I tried to use the parsing technique in that paper while working on a parser for use at the CME, and it caused me weeks of headaches.

First, you'll note the algorithm is extremely complicated--nothing like the simple top-down algorithm that makes PEGs so attractive. Not only is it complicated, it misses basic refactoring issues--some logic is duplicated across functions, and the functions interact in ugly ways.

Second, it doesn't even handle left recursion correctly. Throw a ruleset like this at their parser

A -> B "a"

B -> C "b"

C -> B / A / "c"

and it will explode into a million little pieces, because the authors did not account for any recursive rule having multiple recursion points. Don't even try something like

S -> A / B

A -> A "a" / B / a

B -> B "b" / A / "b"

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting, thanks for the warning. I only skimmed through the paper today and noted that the algoritm seems complex, but I didn't attempt to understand it in detail.

What was your final result? Did you implement the left recursion in the way the paper describes, invented/found some other way or abandoned the whole idea?

<comment><USER6> The approach I'm working on uses the same "growing the seed" idea, but in a different way.

It involves the memo entries being able to remember which left-recursive results they are dependent on. This way, when a left-recursive rule produces a result that is dependent on itself, it knows that this match can possibly be "grown" through repeated iterations. That's a basic sketch of the idea. Performance properties remain the same in the case of left-recursive rules that are not interdependent. I don't really know what they are like for large numbers of interdependent left-recursive rules--but if you have a language like that, better to use an Earley or GLR parser.

I'm still working on it. It passes a battery of test cases, two of which I posted above, but I'm not 100% confident in it just yet. Also, as posted above, I'm trying to get permission from the higher-ups to release the code into the wild.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Which is your most favorite old piece of tech? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> A toss up between the Atari Portfolio and the Tandy 102.

</comment><comment><USER3> A Canon AE-1 is high in my list. Also a HP-16C.

</comment><comment><USER4> AlphaServer 2100A, for pure nostalgia

</comment><comment><USER5> Nokia N9 & HP-15C.

</comment><comment><USER6> Toshiba Libretto</comment>


CRUDCAST: Two Nigerian Programmers Chat about Technology - <AUTHOR> A few months ago, my friend and I were stuck in traffic commuting back from work.
As usual we'd been chatting about challenges at work, the Nigerian developer ecosystem, local start-ups and everything else under the sun. Incidentally we hardly ever see eye to eye on a matter.
He thought it would be a brilliant idea to record these conversations and turn them into podcasts, as a way to open up our conversations to an audience wider than ourselves.
Though I had fun recording these, I didn't think other people would actually be interested in hearing them til we saw the positive reception Episode 2 (our third episode) got from our local programming community.
http://radar.techcabal.com/t/crudcast-xolubis-weekly-podcast/2919?u=akamaozu
Shortly after that, we submitted it to iTunes.
To date my favorite episode recorded is Episode 5.
http://radar.techcabal.com/t/crudcast-xolubis-weekly-podcast/2919/56?u=akamaozu
We had 4 guests: a web dev, two travel bloggers and a business development lead. All women.
We went out for ice-cream and the bloggers talked extensively about their tech stack, how they decided on which technology to bet on, how they use image curation to reel in their audience, using Instagram to discover new business opportunities.
I was pleasantly surprised by how much I learned, considering three of our guests aren't really tech people; it's just a means to an end for them.
I'm not sure if these conversations are interesting enough for Hacker News but I thought I'd drop it here and see what you all think.
---
SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/crudcast
iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=1052693458 <comment><USER2> I listen to a lot of podcasts and found them interesting. Tech communities around the world are vitally important.

I think the next level is better audio quality and tighter story telling...well that and persistence. Hanselman has advice born of experience regarding equipment and technique:

[http://www.hanselman.com/blog/HowToStartYourFirstPodcastEqui...](http://www.hanselman.com/blog/HowToStartYourFirstPodcastEquipmentEditingPublishingAndMore.aspx)

Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks :)

We've been pretty unstructured so far.

We let the conversation guide the direction of the show, try different approaches, lengths, settings and type of guests, looking for the ways that stick so we can double down and refine them.

We definitely need to invest in better equipment and tighten the gaps in the show. Very accurate advice.

Thanks for listening and many more thanks for the feedback :)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How may of you are applying for the government (no payback) "loans"? - <AUTHOR> I work with Chase bank and they are having an event tonight for business owners on how to apply starting tomorrow.<p>I was told loans are limited to about 3 million in the US so there is going to be a massive backlog. THe best way to jump the line is to apply through a larger institution (your bank). How many of you guys are doing this? <comment><USER2> I am, but how are we suppose to apply if the bank is close and only doing drive-thru?

<comment><AUTHOR> You need to call ahead and make an appointment.

My banker told me there are 3 million spots open so its all about who get in first.

<comment><USER2> Thanks, called my bank pnc and it's going to be an online application</comment></comment></comment>


Hacker News Gone Wrong - <AUTHOR> http://blog.madradavid.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/hacker-news.png or Why we should probably name this American Hacker News <comment><USER2> How can you blame us? It's like a news site for doctors freaking out during a bird flu outbreak. It's what we do. We care about this stuff.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have good news for you. You have the power to fix it.

Submit the kinds of articles you want to see, flag the ones you don't.

</comment><comment><USER4> It's become a huge news site and nothing more. There is basically no mention at all of any technology/programming on that page besides cruddy newspaper article type sites.

Maybe people should make a new hacker news much more focused on talking about programming/tech news only?

<comment><USER5>
      1. Flag it and move on.
      2. Vote up the tech/programming submissions.
      3. Submit articles of the type you prefer.
      4. Hope that others share your taste.
      5. If not, realize that you are "people".

(General, and not particularly directed at the parent)</comment></comment>


BMW prototype uses textile instead of sheetmetal - <AUTHOR> http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1075-bmws-fascinating-gina-light-visionary-model-design-study <comment><USER2> Gorgeous. Even if you don't like the concept, it makes you stop for a second and say 'what if?'

Also, ever hacker working on a project shouldn't miss those few seconds in the video where he talks about emotion. That's the missing key into most projects I see. When you are busy trying to sell your technology and not the emotional impact it'll have on me -- you are missing out on one of the most powerful human motivators.

<comment><USER3> "When you are busy trying to sell your technology and not the emotional impact it'll have on me -- you are missing out on one of the most powerful human motivators."

I think marketers rely on emotion a lot to sell...

<comment><USER4> _I think marketers rely on emotion a lot to sell..._

They do. Especially with cars, but it can be seen in almost every imaginable product (both physical and technological).

Look at an Apple commercial. Let's take the Mac vs PC version. Of course points of pain (viruses) are brought up, but emotionally we connect to the feeling of "victory" over the PC when we have a Mac. And if we don't, we feel a sort of defeat. If we have a PC and we see our friend Mr. PC embarrassing himself because the Mac is so obviously better (as implied in the commercials. Your current opinions need not apply), we get hurt, even insulted. We can be defensive. We want to be on the "winning" side. It's our emotions that tell us "we want to be cool, like the Mac." So we buy a Mac. For most consumers, it's not the direct, logical comparison that causes us to buy. Those comparisons are justifications for our purchases. We've already decided what we will buy, now we need to justify it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Very interesting, but is it 1 errant knife away from cosmetic destruction?

I actually like the concept a lot, especially the lights, but I don't find the wrinkles when the doors open very appealing.

<comment><USER3> Current cars are already 1 errant knife (or key) away from cosmetic destruction...

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> As I watched the video, I was thinking, "How does this apply to hacking?"

I got my answer at the end when he said, "The Gina philosophy, in its short form, it's about being flexible. Thinking flexible. Acting flexible. Context over dogma, that's it".

That reminded me about an recurring discussion that happens here, "What resolution do you design websites for?" most recently here:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=214393>

IMHO, the correct answer: Whatever resolution the browser arrives in.

</comment><comment><USER7> This is a really cool idea.

I'm guessing that the reduction in weight would make this car a lot more energy efficient also. It might even make it accelerate faster.

</comment><comment><USER8> I feel terrible that my first thought when reading the title was "I'm not familiar with a markup language called sheetmetal."

</comment><comment><USER9> Here are some animations of the shell changing.

<http://blog.wegif.com/?p=15>

</comment><comment><USER10> Cute, but in this form it will never be allowed on European streets. If you hit a pedestrian they will smash their head right into the engine block, so it is never going to pass safety standards. Still, the idea is nice, does anyone have any stats on how much weight this safes?

<comment><USER11> It would be easy to put on a lightweight, plastic maybe, engine cover. So do not discard the concept, these details can be fixed.

<comment><USER10> I definitely do not discard it. Another solution that sprang to mind is that the softness of the hood makes it possible to put some kind of airbag(s) over the engine. Though this probably has a rather complicated set of problems (when to fire it, how to time the firing, can the required volume be inflated in time, etc.).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is quite beautiful. It's sad, however, to see that the really cool concept cars never see the light of day (erm, mass production).

Also, I don't want to be the one to declare the end of the 1-car-per-person era... but in 20 years, will anyone be using cars anymore?

<comment><USER13> Yes, they just won't be powered by fossil fuels anymore.

Boy, there's a big wave of doom-and-gloom sweeping the globe these past few months, isn't there? I can't wait 'til it's over.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> "Context over dogma" is a delightfully nuanced way of challenging rules. Far more powerful (because it's far more true) than a "break all the rules" mentality.

I shouldn't have heard that line just before bedtime - I'll be up for a while now.

</comment><comment><USER15> Waiting to see a crash test of this vs a SUV street tank.

<comment><USER16> The person on the video touched on this. Most of the safety features of a car have nothing to do with the skin. If the innards are the same as regular cars, I'd be willing to bet passengers in this car would be just as safe.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Isn't this just a reprise of the covered wagon?

<comment><USER18> The whole having a motor... "thing" is rather nice, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'll get my car news from AutoBlog thank you very much.</comment>


Ask HN: Mac App for window management. (Open group of windows) - <AUTHOR>

Awhile ago I remember seeing an application linked on here that you would like define projects. So for example you may say coding: textmate, terminal, etc. And then when you want to do that it would close everything else and open those apps. But now I can't seem to find that project and can't seem to track anything down like it on google.<p>Anyone have any idea? Thanks <comment><USER2> It probably came up during the discussion of Slate. Is this what you were looking for? <http://most-advantageous.com/optimal-layout/></comment>


Ask HN: Why do so many YC startups use Ruby on Rails and not Python - <AUTHOR>

Hi everyone, I always see YC startups looking for Ruby on Rails developers on HN, rarely Python developers.  What is the main reason behind this? <comment><USER2> Probably because ruby is more popular among web developers?

There are plenty of YC companies that are python based. Dropbox, Disqus, and YesGraph to name a few.

<comment><AUTHOR> That makes sense... and your are definitely right, quite a few YC companies use Python as well

Thanks for the response</comment></comment>


BOMB Blast at Moscow's Airport  - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/25/world/europe/25moscow.html?hp

<comment><USER2> As much as people hate the strong security we have in the US..we haven't had anything like this for many years.</comment>


Taking a Long Look at QUIC [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://conferences.sigcomm.org/imc/2017/papers/imc17-final39.pdf <comment><USER2> _Google's QUIC protocol, which implements TCP-like properties at the application layer atop a UDP transport, is now used by the vast majority of Chrome clients accessing Google properties but has no formal state machine specification, limited analysis, and ad-hoc evaluations based on snapshots of the protocol implementation in a small number of environments. Further frustrating attempts to evaluate QUIC is the fact that the protocol is under rapid development, with extensive rewriting of the protocol occurring over the scale of months, making individual studies of the protocol obsolete before publication._

I had no idea QUIC was so poorly specified (at least outside of the walls of Google).

<comment><USER3> Not uncommon for a new protocol. Question is whether they will get around to it.

<comment><USER4> I think this is unlikely. Part of the advantage of having built your own datapath is being able to change it on a whim; I don't see Google giving this up by agreeing to stick to some fixed specification.

<comment><USER5> It's to be expected from any protocol for which this is true:

> the protocol is under rapid development, with extensive rewriting of the > protocol occurring over the scale of months

Once it stabilizes, I don't see a reason why it couldn't go the same route SPDY -> HTTP/2 did. A faster internet is a win for Google.

(I work at Google, but I'm not aware of the QUIC team's plans).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> From the conclusion: _cases where it performs well and poorly— both in traditional desktop environments but also in mobile and proxy scenarios not previously tested_

Example: _its benefits diminish or entirely disappear compared to unproxied TCP in low loss /latency cases, and when there is 1% loss. In the case of high delay links, QUIC still outperforms TCP [...]. Thus, proxies can help TCP to recover many of the benefits of QUIC, but primarily in lossy scenarios, and when the proxy is equidistant from the client and server_

</comment><comment><USER7> This paper should probably be read in conjunction with Google's QUIC paper from Sigcomm 2017, which provides quite a bit more detail about the protocol and its design decisions: [https://research.google.com/pubs/archive/46403.pdf](https://research.google.com/pubs/archive/46403.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER8> "Figure 12: QUICv34 vs. TCP for varying object sizes on MotoG and Nexus6 smartphones (using WiFi). We find that QUIC's improvements diminish or disappear entirely when running on mobile devices."

Contrary to negative tonne, Figure 12 looks like it favors Quic on almost all cases?

</comment><comment><USER9> Perhaps that bottom right corner of figure 8 (e) is why Google Drive downloads perform so abysmally over busy wifi...</comment>


Top Martin Gardner Physics Stumpers - <AUTHOR> http://martin-gardner.org/Top10MGPhysics.html <comment><USER3> One interesting common theme through many of these (helium balloon in a car; ice melting; bolts in a boat) is how counterintuitive buoyancy is. You can see why, when he had it figured out, Archimedes went all 'eureka' down the street naked [citation needed].

Similarly, the heated metal donut and gravity of a spherical shell questions challenge easy assumptions you may make. If your mental model of a torus is that it's a bent cylinder, you might conceive that when it expands the dominant behavior is that the cylinder gets fatter; if you mentally model gravitation of solid bodies as if it is equivalent to gravitation from point masses at their center of gravity, you'll assume a net attraction toward the center of a hollow shell.

The lesson to take from these puzzles is to modify your mental model so that the answers to all these questions become intuitive too. And that's why I love 'puzzles' like this - they help you deepen your understanding by focusing you on the places your assumptions might catch you out.

<comment> at-fates-hands >> Archimedes went all 'eureka' down the street naked [citation needed]

Here you go:

[http://www.thenakedscientists.com/HTML/articles/article/the-...](http://www.thenakedscientists.com/HTML/articles/article/the- original-naked-scientist/)

Two points here:

 _1 - "Whenever Archimedes is pictured in his watery moment of inspiration, he is typically alone in a tub in what appears to be his home. But the Greeks of antiquity, like the Romans after them, bathed in a public facility with attendants to receive and store patrons' garments. If the legend is true, Archimedes would have been at the public baths when he had his Eureka! moment and might have rushed home to pursue the idea, perhaps neglecting to retrieve his clothes. Even then, history's premier naked scientist might not have been completely bare. According to classicist Lydia Lake, "naked" in antiquity – Greek gumnos, Roman nudus – had a dual meaning: either stripped of all clothing or else lacking an outer garment, such as a toga or scarf-like wrap (chlamys). Archimedes might have sprinted through the streets of Syracuse in his underwear – what we would today recognize as a tunic"_

 _2 - "The Eureka! story – fact or fable – is the touchstone of creative epiphany. It represents the culmination of Archimedean effort: that still mysterious cognitive path that scientists tread toward solutions, fundamental truths, and new ideas."_

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Let's go I'm doing each of these in 30 seconds or less:

1\. You're rotating the image about a plane I think I remember

2\. Larger

3\. 600 miles

4\. They're ferromagnetic so magnetize them both by keeping them near each other. Boom we're done here

5\. Stay the same

6\. Fall since it doesn't have to displace a mass of water (less dense) equivalent to the nuts and bolts (more dense)

7\. Assume the pigeons begin at the top of the cab with zero initial momentum and we allow them to fall while the truck begins to accelerate. The truck would feel lighter and accelerate more easily up until the point where the free-falling pigeons contact the back of the truck and begin to be accelerated by the truck.

8\. It moves in the direction of the car since the air in the vehicle is a fluid mass that piles up in the car opposite the direction of acceleration.

9\. 30 seconds isn't enough to fully explain, but there's a separate solution to the field equation inside versus outside. Inside it should float where it is as attractive forces balance themselves out.

10\. Mass of the liquid = mass of the can let's go with that

No guarantee I read the questions correctly in the 30 seconds I gave myself for each

<comment><USER5> I got 500 for 3. and for 4. I'd just touch the end of one rod to the middle of the other.

<comment><USER4> Woops, typo yeah it is 500 miles. The relative speed of one to the other is 30,000mph so it's 500 miles. For 4 I gave a cop-out answer since I didn't think of one within the time I gave myself

<comment><USER6> They travel 500 miles. They start 1317 miles apart. The distance afterward is 1317-500.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> 1\. Feynman explains it best [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msN87y-iEx0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msN87y-iEx0)

3\. They approach one another at 30000 mph = 500 miles per minute, so two minutes before they collide they are 1000 miles apart, and who cares that they start out 1317 miles apart?

8\. The balloon rushes forward, and gets pulled toward the inside of the curve. The best reasoning is via the equivalence principle: acceleration and gravity feel the same, and the fact that the balloon is buoyant in air means that it should rush away from whatever direction gravity is pointing.

9\. It floats at the same location, by Gauss' theorem.

<comment><USER8> > 3\. They approach one another at 30000 mph = 500 miles per minute, so two > minutes before they collide they are 1000 miles apart, and who cares that > they start out 1317 miles apart?

It was clearly just a distraction, and apparently an effective one, as the question was "calculate how far apart they are _one_ minute before they collide".

<comment><USER9> The version I heard that truly leads a calculus student down the wrong path is along the lines of:

Train a is going 40 mph, train b 60 mph. They are 200 miles apart on the same track, headed directly for each other. There is a bird flying between the two at 100 mph, starting from train a. Each time he reaches a train he turns around and heads back to the other train. How far does the bird travel before he is crushed between the trains?

<comment><USER5> I don't see what's so hard about that one, it's a simple infinite sum.

<comment><USER3> There's an easier way than an infinite sum.

<comment><USER10> 40mph + 60mph = 100mph, so they will travel for 2 hours before they hit each other. The bird flying at 100 mph for 2 hours will travel 200 miles.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> A couple of these have been Mythbusters edutainment TV show topics. I am almost certain both the pigeons and the balloon have been on the show. I'm not sure how they'd use explosives to test the pigeon one, but I'm sure it would be interesting to watch. (edited to add, I just figured it out, they'll put frozen chicken parts from the supermarket in a really big box on top of some explosive, and put the works on a scale...)

The iron bars is more fun when analogized to the famous barometer building height challenge where the goal isn't someones abstract idea of simplest but to come up with the most unusual way to determine the answer (for the barometer I like the idea of tossing it off the roof and timing the impact, or bribing the building superintendent with a really nice barometer). For the iron bars I think a funny way to solve the problem is to heat one bar above the curie point and after it anneals back to room temp, if the bars don't stick to each other I guess the heat treated bar WAS a magnet. Another fun trick if you don't trust your string suspension to not bias the hanging position WRT north pole, simply spin each bar in each axis and one bar will have a funkier deceleration curves for various axes.

<comment><USER12> Depending on how solid the iron bars are, you could try breaking one in half. The two halves will behave like separate magnets if it was a magnet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think there is a better answer than yet given to the iron bar question. Lets assume the bar is magnetized so the ends are north and south (as opposed to the weird thing, where it is magnetized through its thickness). Position the bars near to each other and perpendicular, like the letter 'T'. Now switch the bars' positions, so the other bar is the cross and the other the stem. When the magnet is the stem of the 'T' there will be a strong attraction between the pieces, while when the magnet is the bar of the 'T' there will be almost no attraction of the pieces. It is just like sticking horseshoe magnet to a piece of metal with its tips is much stronger than sticking it with its back, just now the horseshoe is straightened. The attraction is to the poles, not the equator.

</comment><comment><USER14> Number 10 is tricky. I solved it by using the fact that when you remove mass the center of mass moves away from the mass you removed, so the minimum will occur when the height of soda matches the height of the center of mass. This gives the equation:

        (1/2 c + (1/2 h) (h f)) / (c + h f) = h

Where c is the mass of the can, the can has height 1, h is the height of soda remaining in the can, and f is the mass of the fluid when the can is full. (Incidentally, I wrote this equation wrong like eight times because I kept missing a factor of h in the fluid's center of mass height.)

Working the equation:

        c + h^2 f = 2 h (c + h f)
        f h^2 + 2 c h - c = 0

Oh hey this will get simpler if we just look at the ratio:

        let r = c/f
        h^2 + 2 r h - r = 0
        h = -r +- sqrt(r^2 + r)
        h = sqrt(r^2 + r) - <USER2>

Well that's kind of gross. I'm actually surprised it's in the right range based on how it looks (but plotting it shows it is in fact in [0, 0.5]). Maybe the values from the problem are nice:

        r = 1.5/12 = 3/24
        h = sqrt((3/24)^2 + 3/24) - 3/24
        h = 1/4

I guess that's okay..

</comment><comment><USER15> #10 seems to have confused a number of people, so I'll share my thoughts.

The reason that decreasing the amount of liquid lowers the center of gravity is that you're removing liquid from above the center of gravity. Likewise, the center of gravity rises again when you remove liquid from below the center of gravity. Thus, the center of gravity is lowest when the center of gravity is exactly at the level of the liquid.

Without the distribution of the weight of the can, I don't think we can get an actual number. The ratio of the weights of the top/bottom to the weight of the sides is important.

A final unrelated point: cans of soda are measured in fluid ounces, so the proposed numbers are somewhat less accurate than the questioner seems to think.

<comment><USER3> The point of a fluid ounce is that it's the amount of water which weighs an ounce - roughly (allowing for various failures of standardization and definitions of water purity and measurement circumstances). And most beverages have a specific gravity close enough to 1.0 that you can consider them more or less water. So yes, the weight of the liquid in a 12oz beverage is, for puzzle purposes, pretty much 12oz.

<comment><USER15> That was the point hundreds of years ago, but its now fairly inaccurate. For the purposes of food labeling, a fluid ounce is defined as 30mL, which makes a fluid ounce of water weigh almost 5% more than an ounce. Sodas are typically more dense - Coke is 10% more dense than water, for example, for a total weight of over 13.5 ounces for a 12 fl oz can. Seems like a pretty big difference to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> My favorite answer for #1:

There are two ways without a mirror that you could end up vertical and looking in the opposite direction: turn in place, or do a handstand. If you assume the former is what happened, then the mirror looks like if flipped left and right; if you assume the latter, then the mirror really flipped top-to-bottom. If you were to flip the image you get in the mirror upside down, you will see yourself upside-down with your hands _not_ reversed.

</comment><comment><USER17> 10\. when the soda's weight approaches the weight of the part of the can remaining above it (equality being the limit.) My initial thought was "...as half the can" but that's inaccurate.

... I think

<comment><USER18> I believe the answer is exactly half the can. Why do you think that is inaccurate?

<comment><AUTHOR> That is inaccurate. Consider the case when the fluid is very, very much more dense than the can, and then consider the case when the fluid is very, very much _less_ dense than the can.

<comment><USER18> You're right. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> An ice cube occupies a greater volume than the water that went into forming it, so I think the answer for question 5 would be the level of water in the beaker decreases.

<comment><USER20> You also need to remember that the ice cube is sticking out of the water. In fact the two effects cancel each other perfectly, so the water level stays the same.

To think about it in a more clear light, consider that the ice cube has the same weight frozen or melted. Thus by [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedes%27_principle](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedes%27_principle) it will displace the same volume of water frozen or melted.

<comment><USER19> Ah touché, that's absolutely mind blowing. A run through of the maths here for anyone interested: [http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/110645/why- does-i...](http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/110645/why-does-ice- melting-not-change-the-water-level-in-a-container)

<comment><USER21> This is almost the answer to the next question too.

<comment><USER13> Nope! :^) In the boat question, when the bolts are in the boat they are displacing water equal to their weight. After they drop to the bottom, they are displacing water less than their weight. So less water is displaced, i.e. total water level drops.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Another one: what keeps the train on the tracks?

<comment><USER23> Feynman explains it well [1].

[1]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7h4OtFDnYE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7h4OtFDnYE)</comment></comment>


The gender gap in startups - <AUTHOR> http://founderresearch.blogspot.com/2009/02/gender-gap-in-startups-part-2.html

<comment><USER2> I found it quite interesting to click through to the previous post referenced in that article, as well: [http://founderresearch.blogspot.com/2008/12/gender- gap-in-st...](http://founderresearch.blogspot.com/2008/12/gender-gap-in- startups-part-1-women-in.html)

He talks about the proportions of women in tech startups there. Funnily, the 12.7% women-in-IT percentage is more or less equivalent to the proportion of women on my undergrad and graduate computer science courses, and also nowhere near the percentage of female tech entrepreneurs I meet. (I've met two others, I think.)

However, I'm just doing what I want to do because it's cool and fun. Not because I want to fly a flag or be a statistic. I almost get annoyed when people draw attention to the gender gap, as it makes me even more of a three- headed monkey, and heaven knows I get enough strange looks as it is.

<comment><USER3> Me too, but at a certain point when you are established in a way, you want to fly a small flag just to say "hey look, it's possible!" to other women.

When I was wee (oh god, I'm getting old?! but I'm only 20!) I was put off by how many men there were and how weird it was to be the only girl in my entire CS classes, and now I think I'm over most of it (except for the really hurtful/disgusting discrimination, not limited to tech or gender). However, I occasionally meet another woman or some girl barely a few years younger who was put off by gender discrimination in tech (in general, not just startups) permanently or was on the verge of doing so, and I try to get them interested again in one way or another by mentoring in a way. I think in that aspect it's worthwhile to attempt that at least. All the women I talk to about this have found it helpful to know that there are other women in the industry that have been successful and that not everyone is so rude.

<comment><USER2> I wonder if there'll ever really be a way to mentor/help out women in tech without drawing attention to the gender statistics. I totally agree that helping others get interested when they are on the verge of being put off is a positive thing. But I still have this whole aversion to making us "special" and thus exacerbating the attitudes. Ho hum.</comment></comment></comment>


42 days of HN karma - <AUTHOR> http://blog.jgc.org/2009/09/forty-two-days-of-hacker-news-karma.html

<comment><USER2> Karma observations: if you reply in the early morning, before everyone gets up and reads HN, you'll get more karma than if you reply in the middle of the night when no-one will see it. Same goes for replying to threads that don't have many comments yet. More comments = old news, less new viewers, less karma.

Also, the other day, I replied to someone, got downvoted to negative something, and then, as an experiment, I copied the comment, deleted it, and pasted it into a reply to the parent of the comment I originally replied to, and got upvoted +8.

It's science.

<comment><USER3> "Karma observations: if you reply in the early morning, before everyone gets up and reads HN, you'll get more karma than if you reply in the middle of the night when no-one will see it."

This goes double for being an early riser on the East Coast!

Until recently I commented early in the morning for a few months. I fared well - I usually got the top comment in the thread, unless a power user struck first. I don't think my comments were particularly insightful, but the timing worked - they would stay above the fold long enough to pick up an upvote.

The "shape" of a comment also seems to affect the rating. A quick summary followed by several reasonable-sized paragraphs is a local maximum for gathering karma.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> One thing I hate about reddit is user's obsession over karma to the point that on most of the major sub-reddits highest rated comments are boiled down to puns and memes. I hope that type of obsession doesn't spill over here.

I rather have no public karma score or leader board. It adds zero value other than comparing e-penis.

Karma doesn't necessarily reflect the quality of comments. More often than not it reflects how much time you spend and how popular you are here (people will often blindly upvote users who adds nothing interesting to the discussion but is a popular user at HN) and how fast you can submit TC article.

<comment><USER5> On the one hand, I try really hard to ignore karma and remind myself that I post here to participate in conversation, not to rack up karma points. On the other hand, obsessively checking if my karma has changed is one of the most harmless things I have done while feeling like crap and being unable to sleep.

All communities have some means to keep track of pecking order. I really have no idea if karma is better or worse than other methodologies. <shrug>

<comment><USER6> I agree but I'm happy with the ambivalence. People who outright dismiss points/karma remind me of people who think money is "evil."

I have just shy of 13k karma and I'll admit that my rise from around 3k->10k was driven entirely by, first, trying to get on the /leaders page, and then into the 10K club ;-) A pointless, egotistic goal but good things came out of it. Firstly, most of my comments and posts weren't frivolous so people appreciated them at _some_ level. Second, spending so effort here made me feel more a part of "the community" and has led to some interesting extracurricular discussions and opportunities.

Not everyone _needs_ numbers, scores, or money as motivators, but some of us find it a handy metric. Being a points scorer doesn't mean the outcome for third parties is necessarily negative and I certainly wouldn't do "anything" just to score a few points, that's for sure - just like not all rich people are evil money grabbers.

<comment><USER5> I am unlikely to get on the leader board. I am very much an "outsider" here -- not a programmer and not male. Former homemaker in fact. This is the first place I have ever posted where a) I can't keep up with all the traffic (historically, I have been known to read every single thing posted to forums I belonged to -- not so here) and b) no one has ever remarked on my posts being too long or there being too many of them (a common complaint about me in most forums I have participated in). Many of my posts do not get upvoted and I may never figure out how to pursue such an achievement here. I have mixed feelings about that: Slightly bruised ego because I so very often attract the spotlight without meaning to (whereas I am being "overlooked" here) but also relief at not attracting so much negative attention just for being me.

I will note that many of the benefits you cite could have occurred even if karma were not the means by which pecking order is tracked here. So I don't think it really says much about karma per se.

But thanks for sharing.

<comment><USER6> _I am very much an "outsider" here -- not a programmer and not male._

My take is that if you identify with HN and many of the "hacker" standpoints and pursuits, you're not an outsider here. At least, I would hope one wouldn't feel that way. More than most other communities I've experienced online, HN isn't very cliquey nor very focused on one's vital stats - there are people from all corners, all genders, and all races here but it's already anonymous enough that it's hard to tell. Being a geek and taking an interest in new things are probably the only prerequisites to be "in" here. I think that's a great thing.

 _I will note that many of the benefits you cite could have occurred even if karma were not the means by which pecking order is tracked here._

Sure, but from different people. Without my side goals, I probably wouldn't have spent as much time on my comments or "contributing" here generally. Of course, I wouldn't dare to suggest HN would be any better off with more people like me ;-)

<comment><USER5> My only point (in mentioning that I am an "outsider") is that I don't expect to make it on to the leader board. I think the fact that I am not a programmer is definitely relevant to that expectation (or lack thereof). (If you really think I'm wrong in that regard, perhaps you can list several people on the leader board who are not programmers? Or even people on the leader board who are openly female?)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It would be nice if people just posted because they had something worth saying instead of worrying about all this nonsense. Karma: some people should lose it when it matters, but most of the time, too many people care about it when it doesn't mean anything except a number.

</comment><comment><USER8> I would like to take this time to send a huge "thank you" to all of these "power" posters for spending their time to contribute thoughtful incites on the topics we love here at HN. Happy Holidays!

<comment><USER9> +1

I'm a little disappointed to see that some of the top replies in this discussion right now are people who've obviously put some thought (and presumably effort) into working out how to post in ways that maximise HM karma.

It feels a bit to me like the old problem of not having the right metrics to measure and encourage the goals. If people are deciding when to post based on how it'll affect their karma, presumably that means sometimes they're choosing _not_ to contribute to the discussion "cause the karma payoff is too small". That's a bit sad.

(Which I guess is an easier to hold view from a lowly ~300 karma account...)

<comment><USER10> I don't know that it's anything to worry about. When you throw a bunch of analytical people into a rating system, it's only natural that they'll be searching out its weak points. A lot of us have probably noticed various weaknesses in the karma system, but I don't think it's because we're all scrambling to game that system. HN is just full of the types of people who can't help but notice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> (2009)

</comment><comment><USER12> This makes me wonder if it would be more useful to display the (weighted) first or second derivative of your karma score instead of the raw point total. The people who were most obviously "rising" in the graph are the ones everyone knows and recognizes around here.

</comment><comment><USER13> Hypithesis: membership of an online community becomes a major distraction/problem once you pass the threshold of recognising many posters. There's only a few names I recognise at the moment, mostly due to these leader board features. I'm pretty sure my name is not recognised at all. But I've been involved with a few forums in the past and often I wish I could have all the hours back that I spent on them.

HN is a bit different though as it's more of a meritocracy and the 'top posters' aren't just people who never log off.

</comment><comment><USER14> Interesting.

@edw519 get more karma in a day than me in some 388 days.

<comment><USER15> Yet the rate of growth seems to be more or less linear. At least within this time frame.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> There is no nickb on the current leader board any longer.

<comment><USER17> Only because he hasn't posted recently. He'd be in 7th place if he started posting again.</comment></comment>


MD6 Message-Digest Algorithm - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MD6 <comment><USER2> The important thing to take away from this article is that MD6 really shouldn't be used in any production software, unfortunately. MD6 didn't even make it past the first round of the SHA-3 competition, so it hasn't received much attention from cryptanalysts.

Cryptohipsters (can I coin this term?) should take a look at Skein (a third- round SHA-3 candidate), BLAKE2 (the successor of a third-round SHA-3 candidate), and Keccak (the SHA-3 winner). These hash functions have undergone much more analysis. Notably, BLAKE2 is faster than MD5 in many cases, but without the security problems of MD5.

<comment><USER3> I'd rather use ROT-13 said the brogrammer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> From the wiki:

Speeds in excess of 1 GB/s have been reported to be possible for long messages on 16-core CPU architecture

It uses a Merkle tree-like structure to allow for immense parallel computation of hashes for very long inputs</comment>


Facebook flo – modify running apps without reloading - <AUTHOR> https://facebook.github.io/fb-flo/

<comment><USER2> Between React, Flux, and now Flo - I'm becoming a pretty big fanboy of the fb frontend tech.</comment>


Isla, a programming language for young children - <AUTHOR> http://isla.herokuapp.com/

<comment><USER2> Hi everyone. I'm Mary and I am making Isla. It's exciting to see the language posted to HN, and great to see so much discussion.

I agree with the people who say that a programming language that apes natural language can be frustrating. Inevitably, it cannot support even a fraction of the constructions that a human brain can parse. What made me try a natural language approach is the following (contentious) ideas:

* Children find it hard to type punctuation. Natural language can be parsed without punctuation.

* Someone new to programming probably knows nothing of conditionals, loops, logical operators and functions. So, a language that codifies these concepts as jargon in the form of keywords is going to be alien.

* If you ruthlessly constrain the features of a natural language-like programming language, it's possible that you can keep the advantage of human readability and dodge the disadvantage of the "uncanny valley", as `antihero` succinctly put it. In Isla, the only expressions are instantiations, assignments (with support for objects), `if this then that` style rules (maybe), and invocation of built in functions.

* The joy of programming is in building something. To get children interested in programming, the language they use needs an application. Children love telling stories, so why not make the application a story-telling environment? This gels nicely with the sparse feature set of the language: writing a story is mostly a matter of data definition.

This is the first programming language I have ever made. All these ideas are theories. Isla is just my first shot in the dark.

<comment><USER3> I thought the example was intriguing, but it would be nice to have some minimal installation instructions for someone with no Clojure experience. Often the initial investment in getting something to function the first time is the biggest obstacle to using it. I'd like to play around with this language with my son (age 11), but I've got a ton of other things on my plate and he's got a ton of distractions (Roblox, WoW, etc.), so having to go off and look up a Clojure reference moves this pretty far down the queue for me, unfortunately. But, it's bookmarked for revisiting later.

<comment><USER4> I stuck an executable jar on my server just for you: <http://classifyr.com/~zak/isla.jar> \- run this with

        java -jar isla.jar

then follow the instructions starting from the part about connecting with a web browser. On some operating systems and configurations, you can just double-click it and open your browser.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is IMHO the correct way to do these things. Seymore Papert wrote a brilliant book on the subject.

Here is the forword to his book:

<http://www.papert.org/articles/GearsOfMyChildhood.html>

From the link:

* One day I was surprised to discover that some adults--even most adults--did not understand or even care about the magic of the gears. I no longer think much about gears, but I have never turned away from the questions that started with that discovery: How could what was so simple for me be incomprehensible to other people? My proud father suggested "being clever" as an explanation. But I was painfully aware that some people who could not understand the differential could easily do things I found much more difficult. Slowly I began to formulate what I still consider the fundamental fact about learning: Anything is easy if you can assimilate it to your collection of models. If you can't, anything can be painfully difficult. Here too I was developing a way of thinking that would be resonant with Piaget's. The understanding of learning must be genetic. It must refer to the genesis of knowledge. What an individual can learn, and how he learns it, depends on what models he has available. This raises, recursively, the question of how he learned these models. Thus the "laws of learning" must be about how intellectual structures grow out of one another and about how, in the process, they acquire both logical and emotional form.*

This kind of programming environment despite the stars in here scolding it is exactly how to teach IMHO.

What this allow children to do is to tinker with words and through an input/output model allow them to learn about variables.

There is no right or wrong output here (perhaps besides gramatically) there is only input/output.

The basic of computer-science is it not?

<comment><USER6> Excellent reference. Papert created his own theory called _constructionism_ based on the tenants of learning by doing and accumulated knowledge acquisition (genetic epistemology). He emphasized making learning tools meaningful and relevant to children, so that they could use their prior experiences to help model new concepts. With LOGO, children used imperatives to command a turtle around on screen. When things went wrong, children could "act like a turtle" to debug, often by physically acting out the commands themselves. He called it body _syntonic_ learning, as opposed to the more traditional _disassociated_ learning we typically see. Shameless plug: I recently wrote more about this in a review of the book "Mindstorms" that this was an excerpt from: <http://bsumm.net/2012/07/01/mindstorms.html>

<comment><USER7> Dammit! Can you people please stop adding to my reading list! ...sorry, two very good reads in the lat two posts.

I am currently teaching a Saturday morning LOGO class at my daughters school. Who'd a thunk kids (and parents) would forsake Saturday morning in the mall to futz with a little turtle on a screen... But they love it and for once the kids are learning a non-consumptive use of computer technology.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't like these natural language programming languages

you see that it makes grammatical sense and then the brain infers that it can understand anything that makes gramatical sense. In the end, it's just as hard to remember what subset of the english language it can understand as it is to learn a new grammar.

<comment><USER5> I think you are thinking about this exactly the wrong way.

You don't start with the abstract. You start with the concrete.

<comment><USER4> I disagree. That approach might work for teaching CS to college students, but most young children would find it _boring_. A much larger percentage would find the idea of making an interactive story _fun_ than would enjoy learning about the low-level mechanics of a computer.

<comment><USER5> Why do you think they would find it boring?

<comment><USER4> In part, because I did.

I started with BASIC, but didn't really get in to it before being introduced to Hypercard. With _that_ , I could make cool stuff almost immediately. A year or so later, I was told that real programming meant programming in C, so I tried that. It made me lose interest in programming for quite some time, as I couldn't imagine making any of the things I wanted to make with it.

It's more or less the same issue that affects technically cool products that don't actually address the needs of consumers.

<comment><USER5> You are asuming that everyone is like you? Bad premise to begin with.

There are a lot of children to whom programming isn't even in their vocabulary, but storytelling is.

<comment><USER4> I also remember other kids learning to program as pre-teens or early teens. Most of them wanted to learn to program so they could _make things_ , not for its own sake. Most things that were interesting to them would be burdensome to write in C.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Logo has been successfully taught to 4 year olds.

It has very simple syntax (lisp without parentheses), and the imperative style is easy to reason about. Direct control of the turtle has a lot of appeal-- probably more than making a text adventure.

[How to train your robot](<http://drtechniko.com/2012/04/09/how-to-train-your- robot/>) is a programming game that follows similar ideas.

<comment><USER10> I can't believe we're 30 comments in and nobody has mentioned Scratch yet! (<http://scratch.mit.edu/> or <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scratch_(programming_language)>)

If you're not familiar with it, Scratch was developed by the Media Lab and heavily influenced by Logo. It's used in thousands (tens of thousands?) of elementary schools to teach programming concepts. It's a really great language, and is _incredibly_ visual.

One of the great things about Scratch is that whilst it's certainly heavily slanted towards children it's not exclusively for them. Actually, Scratch is used at Harvard for the first week of their Intro CS course. If you're interested in programming languages for children and those new to CS then Scratch is well worth a look.

<comment><USER11> Yep. I introduced my little brother to Scratch and he quite enjoyed playing with it for a week or two, making a little game or three in the process with a bit of help from me. It's a great experience.

I think it might be slightly confusing for younger people, because it's almost 'real' programming, especially once you try implementing things like side- scrolling animation. But it's certainly powerful, and the way the code is created by dragging and snapping parts together is neat.

Give it a try with your young cousins, and give them an early taste of programming! When they're modding their games in the future they'll thank you for it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm not necessarily drawing a direct parallel here, but this example of teaching programming through the concrete example of telling a story reminded me of this paper[1], in which the authors show that teaching math through abstract concepts leads to better understanding of material than teaching through several concrete examples in undergraduate students.

[1]: Kaminski et al., "The Advantage of Abstract Examples in Learning Math", 2008 — <http://www.physics.emory.edu/~weeks/journal/454.pdf>

<comment><USER13> Anecdote warning:

I'm not going to _get_ the abstract unless you start with a concrete example and then head for abstract territory. "Learning abstraction" is memorization. Until you can tie it in to something real, the concepts aren't. Coincidentally, I suspect this is the difference between "computer scientists" and "programmers."

<comment><USER14> hackers learn by tinkering :). I'd personally learn as little as possible in a way suggested by the paper. I'll do it even if it takes 3x longer, because for me it is more fun to learn by tinkering. I'll learn the deep stuff after I get my feet wet. The real question is what fraction of the class has the patience to soak in the abstraction for years together so that they can apply it once they have have become experts.

I've also encountered people who prefer abstraction over concreteness and it works for them. So the best is for each student to learn according to his preferred style. I hope courses like udacity and coursera slowly evolve into something where each student learns by his/her preferred method.

<comment><USER5> This allows you to tinker.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> People keep bringing up Inform 7, I think this is closer to the mark:

[http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.smalltalk.fonc/317...](http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.smalltalk.fonc/3171)

<http://www.michaelslevinson.com/satevepost.html>

</comment><comment><USER16> Honestly I think the more you make stuff "for" kids, the more complexity they have to deal with in addition to learning the programming concepts. With natural language languages, there's an uncanny valley where some of the dialect they are already working, and some doesn't, and it becomes a guessing game.

<comment><USER10> Another problem with natural language languages is they can be very tricky to localize, because grammar can be highly variable across different languages.

<comment><USER16> Exactly, Haskell for instance, would be fantastic as it just relies on symbols that can be commonly read by everyone, we don't have to grok the meaning of "function" and "and". The only time you'd need to learn English to program Haskell is using the functions from the STL or Prelude.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Reminds me of Inform 7: <http://inform7.com/>

</comment><comment><USER18> Just get them indestructible python-controlled helicopter (ages 7+) or slower moving car (ages 5+). Once they've get the connection between car movements and writing statements in iPython it'd be a lot of fun for them. And time to find some cover.

Don't worry about trying to simplify modern general purpose language. Modern languages are already as simple as they could get. [And whatever you do, don't make them write machine code in binary. Although it is a lot of fun for a kid, that could seriously screw them up. Don't ask me how I know...]

</comment><comment><USER19> I always thought REBOL was quite a word like language that kids might 'get'. Check out... <http://www.rebol.com/docs/reference.html>

You can even use 'add' instead of '+' if it helps. <http://www.rebol.com/r3/docs/functions/z-plu.html>

It also has a neat gui dialect, although a little retro looking.

</comment><comment><USER20> I don't understand the purpose of this. Stories are best read, written and told. Using a computer to do it would be rather restricting. I wonder if kids would get the point either.

The best way to interest kids seems to be to show them ways to do things better. Like draw perfect circles and rectangles with very little effort using a program like logo. Or show them how to write python programs to solve their math homework at top speed.

</comment><comment><USER21> Reminds me of <http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~asb/thesis/> although it's not really clear to me where they're trying to go with this.</comment>


Drowning in Data: sometimes it's cheaper to recompute - <AUTHOR> http://blog.computationalcomplexity.org/2010/07/drowning-in-data.html

<comment><USER2> Nothing replaces the ability to use historical data to research something. Acquired data is historical information and the cost to re-acquire it (which is a falsity anyways) increases each time you throw it away.

It would be better to focus on forward looking data storage systems rather than re-acquisition.

</comment><comment><USER3> ...meaning that sometimes, we're better off keeping the data properly normalized.

Take _that_ , NoSQL guys! :)

</comment><comment><USER4> His quote, "Storage is pretty cheap but data acquisition and computation are even cheaper" seems a little out there. Data storage has gotten extremely cheep over the past decade. Computation on the other hand only will get much cheaper if it is considerably parallel.

</comment><comment><USER5> This also means that compression for on-line files is enjoying a bit of a renaissance.</comment>


The idea is only to motivate - <AUTHOR> http://middleman90.posterous.com/the-idea-is-only-to-motivate

<comment><USER2> I think idea today is 0% it's development process that matters.</comment>


Now you lost me - <AUTHOR> http://www.krista.cc/posts/56

<comment><USER2> I like the reasoning behind this and I really welcome the simplicity of giving feedback, but the way it is implemented here does not really make things clearer. The link makes me think I'll get a simplified summary of the paragraph, instantly. It's not clear that it sends an email to the writer.

Also, the writer will never know if a feedback-email comes from a genuinely confused reader or from someone like me who simply though 'what does this button do?'.

A solution would be to show a message after clicking the link, saying something like 'thank you for your feedback, we've send an email to the writer' together with a Cancel button.

</comment><comment><USER3> I find feedback mechanisms that allow readers to react to individual parts of text to be useful, especially when the text is of a technical nature.

What I dislike about this particular implementation is the UI: You don't know what happens when you click the button until you have actually clicked it (the same problem has for example the 'kudos' widget on Svbtle[0]). Also the button is slightly obtrusive. Something more subtle with an explanation on hover or a confirmation dialog would IMO do a better job.

A good example of something similar is (the now obsolete) Django Book[1] where people can comment on any paragraph.

[0] e.g. <http://500hats.com/late-bloomer/>

[1] <http://www.djangobook.com/en/2.0/chapter05/>

<comment><USER4> The same thing is done in the online version of Real World Haskell and is used fairly effectively by the readers to share solutions and clarify concepts.

<http://book.realworldhaskell.org/read/getting-started.html>

I believe this input was used in revising the book for the print version.

<comment><USER5> It is used effectively. Of course, programmers being programmers, it's also used to point out errors and typos. I've also read a bunch of good comments about choosing clearer wording for some parts.

If I was writing a blog (and I'll start one one of these days :P), I would definitely want free, crowd-sourced editing that way!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I love the idea and not just for blogs. Think about this button's application in learning environments like Coursera lecture notes or a Now You Lost Me! button that allow users to append their thoughts to specific parts of a lecture or video. Or what about a button you can press in a physical classroom? It's really quite wonderful.

I agree with some of the comments though, my first reaction was, "Don't leave it at where they got lost, let them tell you why." Maybe when users click the button a text box can fly out (gethopper.com does this really well) that allows users to append notes. In some cases admins will read all the feedback, but if you want to get really fancy you could parse the responses for common themes, keywords, etc to identify the most common points of confusion.

Looking forward to seeing this develop, this is great.

</comment><comment><USER7> > Think how cool it would be, if we had this button in lecture notes and so > on!

Years ago (2002?), I heard about a Uni that was handing out little clickers that TV audiences get for live voting.

With these, students could rate how much they were understanding as the lecture went along, or the lecturer could put up multi-choice questions for an instant gauge of how well the students got it. (Crucially, all voting was anonymous so students didn't feel like they were being tested.)

Apparently it really helped lecturers, but there was more than once when the lecturer came to a complete stop because they didn't know where to go. (Better than carrying on blindly not knowing no-ones with you tho.)

These days, with cheap smart-phones and wifi on campus it would be easy to do something similar with just a website.

<comment><USER8> I'd be very interested if you could provide a link to the Uni experiment you're talking about. Tried google without luck. Thanks

<comment><USER9> We used a device called an "iclicker" at my school that could do all of this, though it was pretty much only used for paperless pop quizzes.

One benefit was immediately after, the teacher could display a bar chart showing the correct multiple choice answer and how many students voted for each of A,B,C,D thereby giving students and idea of where they ranked in the class.

<http://www.iclicker.com/>

<comment><USER7> How is that a benefit? Won't that just promote feelings of smugness or worry? Surely a students independent learning is what's important, not where they rank in an arbitrary group of others? Did they really emphasise this aspect of it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is a really awesome idea, but it's missing an option to give a comment with my confusion. It would be much clearer for the author if I could specify what exactly confuses me.

<comment><USER8> Your comment confuses me.

Were you trying to say Krista lost you before the first PS ?

<comment><USER11> No, I think Swizec was saying that he wanted the ability to write text after clicking "Now you lost me!", to explain just why he is lost. For instance, he might click the button and then write "I don't know who you meant by 'they' in the second sentence." into a text field that popped up before clicking "Send Feedback". Giving more specific feedback might help Krista fix the exact part of the post that is broken more easily.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I love it! We have a similar thing in my company. We run a hosted CI service (<https://circleci.com>), and occasionally tests on Circle, but don't locally for the customer. That would just cause the customer to stop using us (and therefore not sign up at the end of the trial).

So we added a "report this build" button, and some text: "Uh-oh, this failed. If you didn't expect it to, report this build and we'll look into it". Since we added it about 3 months ago, this has led to dozens of bug fixes on our end, tons of improvements to the docs and language in the app, and lots of conversations with customers which helped us refine the product.

We should definitely add the same thing to our docs, like Stripe does. See the footer at <https://stripe.com/docs/api>

</comment><comment><USER13> It might be better to implement with a small (fits inline with text) '?' icon next to each paragraph; clicking on it will show (or hide) a text field where you can type your question.

Bonus points if you use cookies or server-side state to make the user's question persistent (he's able to see what he typed if he reloads the page) and have a way to see a list of all the latest comments across your website on one page.

</comment><comment><USER14> This should be integrated with A/B testing (or some variant).</comment>


Microsoft is now tying Satya Nadella's pay to LinkedIn's performance - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/19/microsoft-is-now-tying-satya-nadellas-pay-to-linkedins-performance.html <comment><USER2> This is so boneheaded. They are not tieng revenues but user logins! Expect more nagging emails from LinkedIn to do logins!!

 _According to the filing, the "number of times logged-in members visit LinkedIn, separated by 30 minutes of inactivity," on desktop and mobile devices will be evaluated over a three-year period to help determine the number of performance stock awards (PSAs) that get doled out to Nadella_</comment>


Idiomag Pushes the Envelope With Big New Music API - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/idiomag_music_api.php#more

<comment><USER2> What a wonderful idea. I logged in using pandora credentials and was served 6 pages. 4 of them weren't interesting to me, but the other two were. I dunno if that's enough for me to head back regularly but it was definitely impressive.

...where else could this magazine-on-the-fly model work?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> and congrats to danw who built it

</comment><comment><USER3> Thanks a lot, this looks fantastic!</comment>


Why Use Landing Pages? - <AUTHOR> http://www.stayonsearch.com/why-use-landing-pages <comment><USER2> Yeah, but why use landing pages at all? I never understood why some sites have a page whose sole purpose is to make you click something again. The only worse thing is a landing page with some sort of flash intro that, only if I'm very, _very_ lucky, I can skip.

<comment><USER3> The author is talking about landing pages, you're referring to splash pages. Landing pages should not require any additional clicks: [http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/7177/What-Is- a-L...](http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/7177/What-Is-a-Landing- Page-and-Why-Should-You-Care.aspx)

<comment><USER4> The article is about setting up landing pages for different web campaigns. I would assume that you would be selling something on these landing pages which would require additional clicks to get.

I agree with the first original comment, are these the best idea?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _2\. iFrame version (gets around ASP.net nested issues)_

Just curious. What's this mean?

<comment><USER6> i am not sure the author is very technical. for example, they also say "it's typically an better long term idea to setup a dedicated domain or subdomain for your landing pages" where i think they mean server, or apache virtual host, or something. if your company is called foo and has a site foo.com it would be odd to place the landing page on another domain (eg bar.com).

[or i may be misunderstanding, of course]</comment></comment>


Storm worm botnet more powerful than top supercomputers (good problem for a startup to solve) - <AUTHOR> http://www.itnews.com.au/News/60752,storm-worm-botnet-more-powerful-than-top-supercomputers.aspx <comment><USER2> Scary. I find it hard to believe that they can't catch these people. How quick can the botnet do RSA?

<comment><USER3> Most of these people live in Russia (or former satellite states of USSR); apparently, their government has better things to do. Add to that the fact that such botnets are not operated by random geeks who seek fun or fame but by profit-minded organized criminals (who usually don't brag about their acts on IRC channels, for example).</comment></comment>


People are calling SWAT teams to tech executives' homes - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/23/technology/fake-swat-calls-swatting.html <comment><USER2> > [Facebook, Google and Twitter] have asked those employees to take added > precautions, such as not publicly giving their whereabouts or listing > information about their family.

Ironic.

Another reason for online anonymity.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> > _In Seattle, people who believe they are at risk of being swatted can > include their information and that of their families on a police registry. > When an emergency call about a potential threat comes in, the police check > to make sure the home isn't in the registry. If it is, they call the home > first to see if they can reach someone inside, and check with neighbors to > see if there are any corroborating reports of shots fired or other > disturbances._

<comment><USER3> Why isn't this SOP?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah it's weird, the article also says that various famous folks (Zuck) are on a flagged list maintained by local police. I guess the innovation here is that anyone can opt into the list.

I wonder if such a system might ever be corrupted by someone for the purpose of slowing down police response. That is, if one gang is planning to attack another gang, could they enter the address of their target on the list, so that police don't respond as quickly (because they're taking time to verify authenticity of the 911 call) when the attack happens.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Police potentially attacking rich people may stop or at least slow police attacking anyone.

Police departments do not need an army.

<comment><USER5> Even if citizens are armed with assault rifles? Sounds like specialized police to me.

It doesn't mean their primary purpose is responding to the doxes of the mob.</comment></comment>


Nothing Will Ever Be AAA Again - <AUTHOR> http://dealbreaker.com/2011/08/nothing-will-ever-be-aaa-again/

<comment><USER2> Fairly sure we're still AAA here in the UK. Sounds like sour grapes to me ...</comment>


Google Chrome OS: unlike Android, it's open source - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/11/08/google_chrome_os_is_not_andorid/

<comment><USER2> Are they trolling, or what? Android _is_ open source, it's just not developed in the open, in the spirit of most open source projects.</comment>


Happy (?) 7 Billion Day - <AUTHOR> http://blog.infochimps.com/2011/10/31/happy-7-billion-day/

<comment><USER2> "Our teeming population is the strongest evidence our numbers are burdensome to the world, which can hardly support us from its natural elements. Our wants grow more and more keen and our complaints more bitter in all mouths, while nature fails in affording us our usual sustenance. In every deed, pestilence and famine and wars have to be regarded as a remedy for nations as the means of pruning the luxuriance of the human race."

-Tertullian (a Carthaginian priest in 210 AD when the world population was 250 million)

Can we improve the ways in which we utilize the resources on our plant? Definitely, but human beings can't be measured solely by consumption, but by their ingenuity and creativity, which help us to develop new resources, find new ways to deal with challenges, and discover new ways to protect the environment.

<comment><USER3> Of course, Carthage was teeming with about half a million citizens when he wrote that, and was completely destroyed by Muslim invaders four hundred years later.

Minor point: Tertullian was an ethnic Roman born in Roman-rebuilt Carthage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> In a world with 7 billion people, even if you are one in a million, there are still 7 thousand people just like you.

</comment><comment><USER5> If _Alice in Wonderland_ could proclaim Happy Unbirthdays, could we then perhaps proclaim a Unhappy 7 Billion Day?

</comment><comment><USER6> 31-10-11 is no different than what yesterday was or tomorrow will be. A successful childbirth is ALWAYS a Happy Occasion ! It might be a reminder but nothing more than that. it's not the child's fault he/she was born this day .

</comment><comment><USER7> notice that ~ 2/3 of the world population is south asia. Dear god. Nigeria and Pakistan combined have the same population as the US. Europe is a statistical error number wise compared to everything else.

<comment><USER8> Europe has about 400m people, more than the US. It's Russia that's thinly populated for its size (because a lot of it is frozen).

<comment><USER9> You must be referring to the European Union rather than the European continent. As of 2011, EU is now more than 500 million people.

<comment><USER8> My point is that even the narrowest measure of Europe's population amounts to rather more than 'a statistical error' as suggested above.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Death by warfare is on the decline, poverty globally is decreasing, affluence is increasing, technology is rapidly improving, communications are knitting together all cultures and regions of the world in ways we can't fully appreciate even while it's happening. Compared to even two decades ago there are millions upon millions of people who are no longer in poverty. There are countries who have become part of the developed, 1st world. And there are more countries on the way. "Developing" isn't just a euphemism for 3rd world shit- hole, a lot of countries are on their way towards the same level of affluence and development as the G8/G20.

Certainly there are a lot of problems in the world, some of them unprecedented problems. But there's little cause to bemoan the increasing population of the Earth. Human civilization is becoming more and more capable of dealing with problems like poverty, famine, environmental degradation, and even global climate change, even as it adds more and more members to its family.

<comment><USER10> In response to the deleted post below: I don't think it's fair, let alone possible, to try to prevent the developing world from becoming developed merely out of a fear for the possibility of "bad things" happening due to excess CO2 in the atmosphere. Moreover, we are already more or less past the stage where we will have to deal with the consequences of high CO2 levels, whatever they are. I think a wealthier, more developed world is far, far more likely to be able to do that.

Additionally, if it's possible for the developed world to switch to "green" energy sources economically then it ought to be possible for the developing world to do so as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> UN World Population predictions for 2300 (page 84):

[http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/longrange2/Wor...](http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/longrange2/WorldPop2300final.pdf)

Two out of three models predict decline of population after 2050.

</comment><comment><USER12> Previous discussion from last week here:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3154913>

</comment><comment><USER13> the guy from the video is excited to see that third world countries have a young population, but we better watch these stats along with life expectancy and poverty/famine rate.

</comment><comment><USER14> Happy?!

<comment><AUTHOR> perhaps a ?! would be more appropriate. :)

<comment><USER15> ‽</comment></comment></comment>


Stem cell transplant has cured HIV infection in 'Berlin patient' - <AUTHOR> http://aidsmap.com/Stem-cell-transplant-has-cured-HIV-infection-in-Berlin-patient-say-doctors/page/1577949/ <comment><USER2> Dup: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2002843>

Many comments there already.</comment>