What We Want Doesn't Always Make Us Happy - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-05-01/what-we-want-doesn-t-always-make-us-happy <comment> cadence- We are unhappy with our wants, because we are being overpromised on how much happiness those wants will deliver. Advertising and politicians are probably the worst offenders here. We desire and pursue certain wants (big house, luxurious car, tropical vacation) only to later get disappointed with their quality and utility once we have them. Then we report in the form that we are unhappy because we don't use the two extra bedrooms that cost extra to heat, that luxurious car costs fortune in insurance and fuel, and the tropical vacation turned out to be a nightmare with roaches, bedbugs and salmonella outbreak.

<comment><USER3> Humans are not made to be happy. That's the one and only 'disappointment' to tattoo onto your brain, so that you don't spend your life thinking a utopia aka engineering happiness is possible or a good idea.

People are 'unhappy' because they're not at the top of the social hierarchy. The people at the top are not happy because everyone wants a piece of them and they get no peace.

It's all bullshit. Just live your life.

Only my opinion of course :)

<comment><USER4> _"Humans are not made to be happy"_

This is really important.

We didn't become the dominant species on this planet because contentment was easy to find.

Humans are designed to always want more, even if they have more than anyone alive ever has.

Understanding this can lead to contentment because whenever you find yourself unhappy, it's much easier to be ok with it if you realize that's the natural state of being.

<comment><USER5> *Non-happy or neutral is the default state of being. Unhappy is the opposite of happy while non-happy is just 'not happy'.

<comment><USER6> Yes. It is great to feel happy. But also great to be unhappy (in measure) The true purpose is simply to live and experience life to its fullest extent. Chasing or expecting happiness as normal is a direct path to misery.

Anyone interested in learning more about this idea should look up Saghguru.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "Success is getting what you want. Happiness is wanting what you get".

<comment><USER8> "I'm gonna soak up the sun ..."

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wonder what the default emotion is of most other creatures, specifically other mammals? To me, happiness is just a signal, just like sadness, anger, etc. It's your body telling you something is "good" or "bad" but isn't necessarily a natural feeling to be had 24/7.

<comment><USER10> Well treated pets seem to be happy nearly their whole life. By that I don't mean constant ecstacy, but on the positive side of feelings.

I'm glad you asked the question it made me look at things from a new angle.

<comment><USER11> If I look at my cat he seems happy having: Endless time to sleep/think, affection from his feline and human family, reasonably comfortable shelter, steady supply of food/water, sunshine, the freedom to go outside and explore. Seemingly little desire to turn on my computer/TV (outside of a brief fleeting curiosity), moving into my neighbors house, colonizing mars, listening to the news about starving cats in other parts of the world/city, or doing any "work" beyond directly helping him achieve the items on the first list. If I'm being honest that probably sums up the necessities for my own personal happiness.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> another-dave "Economists and other happiness researchers consistently find that longer commutes are associated with unhappiness. Yet people still pay quite a lot to live in far-flung exurbs."

This feels like an over simplification — the article makes it sound like the individuals don't weigh the benefits correctly.

Anecdotally know a few people in this position who do this because they have to get up earlier but their kids grow up beside woods & heaths rather than in suburbs/city. So you've people doing something which makes themselves unhappier because it makes their family happier (in theory) which they get happiness / satisfaction from.

</comment><comment><USER12> If it's possible to desire things without happiness, what is the evolutionary rationale for happiness at all? Maybe what we call "happiness" is only one type of positive feedback among many of which we might be less aware.

<comment><USER13> If a person embraces an intellectually wimpy evolutionistic metaphysics versus merely evolution as such as a means of explaining e.g. the diversity of life, then none of this really has an answer as there is truly no up, down, right, wrong, etc. Evolutionistic metaphysics begins with the presupposition that everything is purposeless and meaningless and so precludes the possibility of happiness as even a real thing.

However, if a person manages to finally free himself from that bogus, high school caliber metaphysics and recover telos, you will stand a chance of coming to understand happiness in at least eudaimonic terms, that is to say, as the same as completion.

<comment><USER14> Can you explain how to recover "telos"?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> From PG about this article: [https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1134755140802633730](https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1134755140802633730)

<comment><USER16> Is the motto of Y combinator still "Make something people want"? [http://www.paulgraham.com/good.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/good.html)

<comment><USER17> Though with adtech, it's more "make people want something".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I don't think economists really have such a narrow idea of utility. Usually it is applied in abstract models, where utility is predefined (like a lottery where you can win money, and the amount you win is used as the utility - <USER2> need to consider how happy it might make the theoretical player).

For the real world, I think evolutionary aspects have to be taken into account. A single actor may not act rational, but in the long term, the actors making the rational choice will prevail by the power of evolution. So rational choices will be made in the long run, even if it may not even be deliberation of the actors.

Also, don't forget that happiness research itself may also be wrong. I think the classic about people without children supposedly being less happy than people with children points in that direction. By the standard research methodology, watching Netflix on the couch all the time would probably make people the most happy.

</comment><comment><USER19> > More egalitarian economists will tend to value the utility of the poor and > disadvantaged more than the utility of the wealthy, but fundamentally it's > still about giving people what they desire.

That's not true, I think. What egalitarian economists would argue is that an extra dollar for the poor and disadvantaged buys a lot _more utility_ than an extra dollar for the wealthy, and therefore (because said economist values their utility _equally)_ extra _dollars_ should go to the poor and disadvantaged.

(Though most economists shy away from interpersonal utility comparisons, which is what gives rise to the concept of pareto optimality.)

</comment><comment><USER14> There's a passage from Existential Comics[0] that is relevant:

>Utilitarianism, as described by philosophers such as Bentham, Mill, and Singer, is roughly the idea that morality should be based purely on what causes the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. In his novel, Notes From the Underground, Dostoyevsky made a strong objection to this style of ethics, imploring us to imagine a world where Utilitarianism as a project was finished. The perfect world was created and it was known what would make us the most happy. He said at this point, the human would rebel, and reject the system. He claimed that if there was a single value that was held most high - human freedom, then no moral system could be perfect, because it would rob us of that freedom. He claimed that if happiness was indeed the ultimate goal of life, then all of human history has been a mistake. That is to say, if you observe individual humans in history, they have seldom sought out happiness for themselves. They have instead sought out only what they sought out. What they desired was merely what they desired, and often it had nothing to do with happiness, be it art, ambition, conquest, to have children, or merely spite - what they wanted to do was what they wanted to do, and the further explanation of their desire making them "happy" was superfluous, and unrelated to what their desire to be free.

[0] [http://existentialcomics.com/comic/236](http://existentialcomics.com/comic/236)

</comment><comment><USER20> Articles about this usually focus on frivolous wants, like Facebook likes. But it's also true of more worthwhile wants. If you want to cure cancer, and eventually succeed, you won't be any happier after an initial rush. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't be driven by such wants.

<comment><USER21> Research actually suggests that memorable experiences do yield sustained happiness, whereas transient ones or simply material goods do not. A handful of Facebook likes would probably not make you very happy in the longer run, but having your cure for cancer reach top spot on HN just might.

<comment><USER19> If I cured cancer (and I won't), I'd want an obituary in The Economist (at the apposite time), not make front page on HN.

<comment><USER5> IRL if you cured cancer almost no one would believe you and it would take decades before the treatment gained enough anecdotal steam to get officially recognized and FDA approved.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> See also previous discussion about the paper from 3 months ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19076863](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19076863) (31 comments)

</comment><comment><USER22> This is probably somehow coded in human's mechanism. People's happiness and sadness are relative, and it's all dynamic. Most of those who won a really big lottery don't last happy as long as they thought. Most of those who lost their legs will accept the truth after a while and find it's bad but it's not all that bad.

This makes some people keep pursuing higher goals, while some other people find to get out of the loop is to enjoy their life right now.

</comment><comment><USER23> Despite the fact that Bentham is the first name that comes into mind when speaking on utilitarianism, John Stuart Mill pushed the boundaries of it and actually addressed what utility is and how can it be measured. As article implies, the utility of a thing should be measured for each individual so that the person extract more happiness from it. I strongly suggest to read Mill's utilitarianism if someone is looking more information about this topic.

</comment><comment><USER24> "Why are people willing to pay so much money for something that reduces their happiness? One possibility is that social media acts like an addictive drug — in fact, the people Allcott et al. paid to deactivate Facebook ended up using it less after the experiment was over. But another possibility is that people use services like Facebook because they're compelled by motivations other than the pursuit of happiness."

This is a good point.

</comment><comment><USER25> About happiness:

I'm out of years of mental, physical, joblessness issues. I just took a newb car mechanic position. It was exhausting, sometimes problematic (difficult to mesh programmer precision fetishism with mechanics regular brute force approach)... but there's a deep bliss in forgetting what I/you want and just do things. The balance is subtle.

</comment><comment><USER26> "One of these things is Facebook, by far the world's largest social-networking site. In a recent paper, economists Hunt Allcott, Luca Braghieri, Sarah Eichmeyer and Matthew Gentzkow investigated how much money they had to pay Facebook users in order to get them to deactivate the Facebook app for one or two months. They found that the median amount was $100, and the average was $180 (the latter being larger because a few users really loved Facebook).

This suggests that Facebook, which is free to use, generates a huge amount of utility — more than $370 billion a year in consumer surplus in the U.S. alone. This bolsters the argument of those who believe that free digital services have added a lot of unmeasured output to the global economy.

But Allcott et al. also found that the people who deactivated Facebook as part of the experiment were happier afterward, reporting higher levels of life satisfaction and lower levels of depression and anxiety. The change was modest but significant — equal to about 25 to 40 percent of the beneficial effect typically reported for psychotherapy.

Why are people willing to pay so much money for something that reduces their happiness? One possibility is that social media acts like an addictive drug — in fact, the people Allcott et al. paid to deactivate Facebook ended up using it less after the experiment was over. But another possibility is that people use services like Facebook because they're compelled by motivations other than the pursuit of happiness."

Another possibility is that your analysis is completely illogical and therefore wrong. People who quit facebook are self-selected. Their experiences doesn't necessarily reflect those who remain on the platform.

</comment><comment><USER27> As I've gotten older I find that my wants are fewer, and the list of things I truly care about has gotten much shorter. I'm happy with what I have now and grateful for the basic things (family, health, work I enjoy).

Consider making as many good experiences as you can, rather than accumulating more things.

</comment><comment><USER13> If you want the wrong things, for the wrong reasons, to the wrong degree, etc, then duh, of course you'll be unhappy. We are the heirs of thousands of years of thought on the subject and yet we walk around oblivious to millennia of wisdom. WE know better, of course, because we came later.

An obnoxious dogma of liberalism (as in Lockean philosophy, not as in liberal institutions -- a VERY important distinction as the latter does not require the former) seems to be that any desire is an axiomatically and unquestionable good always, with no reference to human nature and what human nature tells us is good. (I won't name the recent manifestations of the late stage liberal freak show.) Human nature is what allows us to determine whether a desire is disordered or not such a pica, pedophilia, or zoophilia, though as the full consequences of liberalism manifest, I would not be surprised if these will eventually be "discredited" as bigoted, narrow-minded, and hateful cultural and social constructions. Ideology, as always, is impervious and blind to reason, so I will no doubt be downvoted given how deeply the poison of Lockean thought has penetrated into our culture. When hedonism has possessed a man, there is not even the slightest willingness to consider the truth, and if he were to witness it, he would likely fail to recognize it because of how blinded he's become by the mindless pursuit of pleasure.

If you want to learn something about happiness, we have to look to insights of the classical tradition and not the lunacy that seized the world not 20 minutes ago. Pieper, for example, has written an excellent book on the four cardinal virtues. He's very lucid and speaks directly to the understanding. That's just the beginning.

<comment><USER28> You're probably going to be very unpopular with your opinion, but I think you're on to something. The Old Testament has the verse "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?"(Jeremiah 17:9).

Basically the polar opposite of our modern society & every message we're sold. Christianity/ Atheism/ consumerism - whatever belief system you subscribe to has an arm that basically boils down to "do what makes you happy."

I'm not trying to get down on our current generation. If this truth was summed up in the Bible (regardless of your thoughts on the book), it's clearly a deeper reflection of human behavior. Happiness is hard.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Some things, very few things are genuinely wanted and we value them all along.

The rest that follows, not so much. Wanting to want is the fun, not getting what you want. Once you have it, you want something else, then the pursuit of wanting it.

</comment><comment><USER30> The best you can do is inform people about known risks and benefits, as best as you can. For instance, I smoke, and I know that it's bad, but I do it anyway because I know that I'll enjoy life more than the years that I will lose.

<comment><USER31> I quit smoking several years ago and started putting in the work to repair my cardiovascular system. The overall improvement to my wellbeing and state of mind cannot be overstated. I gained far more than I lost. My only regret is not doing it a lot sooner.

<comment><USER32> Same here

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Getting what you want is boring. The fun is in working to achieve it.

For example, writing a check to get your dream car is boring. Designing and building your dream car out of parts is loads of fun.

</comment><comment><USER34> I don't use social media, but I do sometimes wonder whether my iPhone has a net negative impact on my life. Has anyone tried downsizing to a flip phone for a few months to compare?

<comment><USER35> I often thought of switching from a Galaxy to a BlackBerry just to have a physical keyboard back with a smaller screen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Company A makes a product that truly solves a need, as in, buying or consuming its cure, you have no further need to consume it ever again. There is true utility, but there is no further marginal utility to be gained from subsequent consumption. For example: a company selling cookwear that is so good that its pots and pans are handed down the generations. Once you hae a set you nor the one that inherits from you will ever have to buy cookwear again. Long term these companies fail because the eat their own market.

Company B makes a product that does not solve your need, but provides a mere temporary relief. If you want to keep your problem 'solved', you have to perpetually buy the relief. In the above cookwear example, sell pans that are 10 times cheaper than those of company A, but they only last for 2 years until they bend or crack, so you need to buy a new set of crappy pans every 2 years. Unlike A, company B does not usurp it's own market. They can in theory keep selling junk cookware forever. This is partly why we live in a world filled with crap that breaks all the time, but unfortunately there is even worse.

Company C is a more nefarious type of 'B' company. It's products increase the problem at the same time they provide the temporary relief, thus increasing their own demand or making escaping the downward spiral harder and harder. We recognize and regulate against a few of these types of products, often fast acting ones (crack cocaine), but the vast majority can keep dodging regulation for a very long time (tobacco, alcohol, sugar, ...)

Company D is the true champion of the neo-liberal market economy though. It provides a product with genuine utility, that doesn't necessarily have the slippery slope built into it, but creates it nevertheless through externalities. A typical example of this is a car. It provides undeniably great benefits to person buying the car (personal mobility), while at the same time impacting the lives of all in a slightly negative way (pollution, use of public space, noise, ...). Let's say in a small model world where everyone starts with a 'happiness score' of 0, that the car 'buyer' gets a solid +500 happiness points, while everyone gets a shared -1. Yes, we might feel a little worse at the start, but that -1 is easy to offset with a solid net +499 I get the moment I also buy that desirable car. It is not until much further down the line, when the cumulative unhappiness has reached levels that not even a +499 buy can rectify, that some enlightened soul can observe we might have been better of without cars altogether in terms of happiness, but even at the point where people would realize this, they individually only have the choice between buying and at least get a +499 added even though the overall happiness score will still be far under water and sinking, or personally forego the consumption and still be 499 happiness points worse off. Personal abstention doesn't solve anything, apart from maybe a slight moral feelgood, as it is the consumption of all others that creates the systemic misery. This is why 'vote with your wallet' is a pretty hollow, even cynical phrase, in these types of situations.

Economists like to portray 'the market' as a fight among type A companies one- upping better 'solutions'. In reality it is the type B,C, and D companies that are systemically selected for long term, and that explains why we are consuming ourselves into perpetual unhappiness.

</comment><comment><USER37> Mostly never.</comment>


Coloring books are suddenly catching on with adults - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/437793/coloring-is-now-a-normal-adult-activity/ <comment><USER2> I don't see how coloring is any different from doing puzzles, playing board games, building Lego, having waterfights (or other simulated "war" e.g. laser tag), all of which have been popular adult pastimes for a while now...

Seems like people go through phases: Childhood (where fun is seen as normal), teenagehood (where teenagers try to separate themselves from childhood things), young-adults (where they discover it is "ok" to be whoever they want), and adults who just don't give a damn anymore (although some people still care WAY too much what other people think, see 'Keeping Up with the Joneses' etc).

Maybe if adults would stop caring what others thought about them so much, they could just have childhood fun without feeling ashamed or guilty. The world would likely be a better place, with less stress, and more fun.

<comment><USER3> I would say there's a degree of distinction between paint-by-numbers, versus coloring with magic markers or crayons. As with any craft or skill, including visual arts, there's opportunities for advancement.

But yeah, nothing wrong with relaxing pastimes, and aimless meandering. Not everything has to be a mad rush toward some greater goal or executed in the edification of some grand and auspicious endeavor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Girlfriend has pretty deep mental health issues, she got one of these for Christmas and it works really well as a coping technique. Takes her mind off of whatever she's obsessing about and instead she gets lost in colouring. Highly recommended as a distraction to an overthinking brain.

<comment><USER5> I make colouring(with paint) books for kids on iPad and have been giving serious thought to make adult ones. Do you think your girlfriend would interested in working on a digital surface?

<comment><USER6> I hope you'll post a follow-up to that in a few months, I am curious about it.

My (unsubstantiated) opinion is that the contact with a physical piece of paper (emphasis on physical) has much more impact than we think.

Personnaly I like zen doodling :).

<comment><USER5> I reckon I will put something up on my blog. Its a game dev blog but my painty endeavours have a great deal of influence on that side of my work. I would love todo something in VR that took the best from tactile and digital.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A friend of mine said that the Anatomy Coloring Book has been quite helpful to memorize the myriad structures that compose the human body.

<comment><USER8> Just googled this book. Turns out Amazon also offers a Kindle version :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> One thing I'm surprised the article hasn't mentioned is that coloring is also a profession, and there are people whose careers center around coloring line art (typically using Photoshop and a Wacom tablet). They're called colorists (and some people are now saying "color artist"), and they're core parts of a typical comic book creative team. They get their names listed on the cover and everything.

Some of these new coloring books for adults may actually serve a very practical purpose: to provide practice material for potential colorists.

Speaking of comic books, some of these new coloring books for adults are put out by Marvel Comics. What makes these books "for adults" is that they are filled with un-colored line art from actual comics Marvel has published, and they cherry-pick pages with high levels of detail. You color in one of those books, you're replicating work that's been done by actual professionals. This isn't kids' stuff at all. It honestly makes me wonder if Marvel is publishing these books specifically as a recruiting tool for colorists.

</comment><comment><USER10> The company I work for (BoredPanda) featured a post about the "Enchanted Forest"[1] over 3 months ago, which gained the author loads of attention. Later she sent us one of the coloring books, we still have it in the office.

A couple of months later, I saw an ad in my Facebook feed, a Lithuanian publisher was selling it here (normally, the books and etc are published here quite a bit later, because it's a tiny market, it was surprising). Although I have pretty much nothing to do with the content we publish, it still felt great knowing it helped to change someones career :)

[1] [http://www.boredpanda.com/coloring-books-for-adults- johanna-...](http://www.boredpanda.com/coloring-books-for-adults-johanna- basford/)

<comment><USER11> Loads of attention is an understatement. The book was literally #1 on ALL of Amazon books in the US for quite a while [1]. The press worked on me. I picked one up after reading an article because a few months prior I'd found myself on vacation continuing to color a page from my toddlers' coloring book long after she'd went to bed and found it incredibly relaxing.

[1] [http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/apr/05/colouring- books...](http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/apr/05/colouring-books-for- adults-top-amazon-bestseller-list)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> How in the world could that article miss out on any of Theo Nicole's amazing coloring books, Mer World Problems, Unicorns are Jerks, Fat Ladies in SPAAAAACE, and Dinosaurs with Jobs.

These are fun adult/everyone coloring books with great art and humor and make amazing gifts. I've seen these sell out at conventions consistently.

[http://www.amazon.com/Theo-Nicole- Lorenz/e/B005HHMSMY/](http://www.amazon.com/Theo-Nicole-Lorenz/e/B005HHMSMY/)

</comment><comment><USER13> Suddenly? I thought this had already been going on for a year or two.

<comment><USER14> I see them in discount stores as well, so the hype has probably passed... (guessing that you're from the Netherlands as well)

<comment><USER13> You guessed correctly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The "Anti Coloring Book" series ([http://www.susanstriker.com/anticoloring.html](http://www.susanstriker.com/anticoloring.html)) is also a clever idea.

<comment><USER16> Man, that website is like stepping back in time. I'm sure it does the job though :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Not sure if I was pleased or disappointed to discover this was not an implementation of the "all progress comes from pr0n" meme.

Not discussed was the obvious manga / anime / comic book theme. Why the game of thrones and abstract art themes mentioned in the article, and not coloring manga or a book themed on anime? Maybe the copyright/licensing situation is super weird in those fields, I can't imagine no one has ever thought of it.

<comment><USER18> There have been "Adult" coloring books (often with a BDSM theme) being released for a few years now. Quite expensive, but I've had fun coloring the pages with other people at events.

You likely won't see sexually-explicit coloring books becoming popular on bestseller lists, due to the overall puritanical nature of the UK and the US. I wouldn't be surprised if some more liberal countries such as Denmark or Belgium's bestseller list reflected this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> "A FORTRAN Coloring Book" \- [http://www.amazon.com/FORTRAN-Coloring-Book- Roger-Kaufman/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/FORTRAN-Coloring-Book-Roger- Kaufman/dp/0262610264)

</comment><comment><USER20> ...and here I was ashamed to tell anyone about my very recent addiction to jigsaw puzzles.

</comment><comment> saw-lau As a child growing up in the 70s and 80s, our family used to love colouring these:

[http://doodleartworld.com/](http://doodleartworld.com/)

</comment><comment><USER21> The next stage of infantalisation. I never thought it would get this bad!

<comment><USER22> Another part of that trend that I've noticed of late is people calling piss "pee" and shit "poo" or "poop". Just like you did when you were a 2-year-old and Mommy said you had "poo poo diapers" that needed changing.

<comment><USER23> "pee" and "poop" are like the base terms for those two things. With "piss" and "shit" being the crude terms, and "poo" or "wee" being the more childish terms. This is the most stupid conversation I've ever had on this website.

<comment><USER24> Frankly it's more infantile that Americans insist on talking about "restrooms" when it's clear you're not going there to have a lie-down.

<comment><USER23> I don't think anyone really associate the the "rest" in "restroom" with resting. May as well call it infantile to call it a "bathroom" when only children take baths.

<comment><USER25> > only children take baths.

Huh?

I regularly take baths. They are very relaxing and help me de-stress. They are also good for relieving some types of pain.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How Boomboxes Got Badass (2013) - bra-ket https://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/how-boomboxes-got-so-badass/ <comment><AUTHOR> There is a very interesting trick that you can pull with small speakers to make the listener believe that you have this amazing ability to make loud low tones (which is physically impossible below a certain size). You synthesize the overtones of that low tone (which you _can_ reproduce), which will fool the brain into thinking that the low tone itself is present.

Pianos have the same effect for the lowest notes, they will not reproduce the bases directly because the soundboard simply isn't large enough to accommodate the waveform. But the harmonics do fit and again your brain will interpret the harmonics pattern in such a way that they conclude the low tone is actually present.

This is called the 'missing fundamental' and is one of the more interesting psycho acoustic phenomenon.

It works like this: instead of playing A0 directly (27.5Hz) you'd play 110, 137.5, 165, 182.5, 220 etc all the way up to say 2 KHz in diminishing fashion as you go higher. For a piano you'd have to keep track of odd/even harmonics and ensure they are in the right relation to each other to get the right timbre. The brain then is apparently capable of determining the _distance_ between those harmonics and make you believe that you are hearing A0 even though that frequency is not at all present in the output.

<comment><USER2> Has this been the trick employed by those tiny Bose speakers that got popular in the 90s?

I remember being in some kind of demo truck as a kid, where they were showing a scene of Jurassic Park (from a Laserdisc!) and they had these big speakers left and right in front and small ones behind, and were blasting the audio at pretty high volume so you would think "surely the thick base is coming from those big speakers up front". Then, half way into the demo, they would open up the "speakers" in front of the audience, revealing the surrounding wood to be fake and the actual speakers inside the fake housing being just the same tiny ones as those located in the back.

I remember being very impressed by that demo. By the speakers, but actually even more by that Laserdisc ;-)

<comment><USER3> The Cheat is showing something on a Laserdisc!

Everything is better on a Laserdisc!

Whatever happened to the Laserdisc?

Laserdisc!

I saw that demo too, though it was in a store and I don't remember a JP scene being used. Bose were always shite at accurate sound reproduction, but great at making things sound _good_. And nothing noise-cancels like a pair of QuietComforts.

<comment><USER2> I definitely saw Jurassic Park in that demo. It was specifically that scene in the kitchen with the velociraptors sneaking around, hunting the kids.

But probably they had multiple variants of the demo.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> In my formative years, we always had something like this playing music as we played basketball. From the age of say 13-16 we would camp out in someones driveway or a park and play pickup basketball pretty much all day during the summers. Many D batteries were used in those days. Whoever had the loudest box with the most bass would get to play their box. I was friends with some kids whose dad repaired electronics, so they always had the best box. My folks weren't interested in competing with that so I had the weakest box. That all changed as we got our drivers licenses, and we proceeded to put amps and subs in our cars. That caused a whole other wave of competition. This was from 1988-1993 timeframe so by then I think the boom box era was mostly over. The boom car era was just getting cranked up though. I have that to thank for my poor hearing in crowded restaurants now. Im relatively young, and started noticing it in the past few years. I cant hear well enough to hold a conversation with lots of ambient noise. Hearing loss is completely preventable, and its much too late by the time you notice it. sucks...

<comment><USER5> We are similar. I spent alot of time on cardboard spinning around next to a boombox. As a result I have to repeatedly ask my daughter to "speak up" or "look at me" when talking so I can read her lips.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I had the Crown pictured in that article. Used it to rock Crazy Train on the bus. Then I got tired of carrying it around and it just sat in my room for the rest of high school.

I like how they all had some kind of "turbo bass" switch - like a kid carrying around a boombox would ever _not_ want turbo bass. The worst is when you accidentally turned it off and didn't realize for hours or sometimes days.

<comment><USER7> Like the Turbo switch on a PC!

Of course those did have a purpose. You would run in Turbo mode all the time, except when you were running bad old software like I wrote, that used timing loops assuming a 4.77 MHz clock rate.

<comment><USER8> My father used to hit Block Scor ("Blocca Scorrimento" in Italian, meaning "Scroll Lock"), disable TURBO, and then pipe DIR * . * | MORE on our shambolic 386SX-16MHz to see all the files he had in the pigsty directory he kept _all_ his documents in, all of which horrified me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If I can go off on a bit of a tangent. The image at the top of the article is from Spike Lee's _Do The Right Thing_ (1989). The character is Radio Raheem and his boombox plays only _Fight The Power_ by Public Enemy, which was made for the film. The movie is strictly about what happens when racial tensions boil over on a very hot day in Brooklyn. But really, it's about people, and how we treat one another when we're stuck in a system more powerful than ourselves. It's as relevant today as it was thirty years ago, and not just in America. It may as well be about the ongoing protests in Hong Kong. Great movie, strong recommend.

Back to the article: I owned a JVC-100 in red, just like the one pictured. I never took it out much because it seemed so fragile and my memory is that it sounded like crap compared to a hunk of plastic durable Sony that I also owned. I have no idea where either of those boomboxes got off to. Probably sold in a garage sale at some point.

<comment><USER10> > The image at the top of the article is from Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing > (1989). ...

Funny you mentioned that. I've watched that movie when I was a kid and, very impressed. I wanted to watch it again but I never knew its name to start with. Yet an internet stranger just blurts it out and makes my day. Thanks stranger.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The best boom boxen on the market right now is sold by tool manufacturers. Image search Hitachi Radio or DeWalt Radio. My plumber had the DeWalt and it boomed. Ran off the same chargeable batteries as his drill, and other tools.

<comment><USER12> I seriously forgot how much fun boomboxes were. Then we had to rehab our old apartment. Our contractor had one of those DeWalt toolboxes with the boombox built-in. I've been looking for ages for one like it and still haven't found it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I don't think I'm nostalgic for these at all.

Near my office, kids gather all the time and play music really loudly on small Bluetooth speakers. I don't even dare to imagine the experience if they had one of these bad boys.

<comment><USER14> I found that quite interesting: After the boomboxes went away, "outdoors" music got more personal, less communal. You had your CD/MD/MP3 players and listened with headphones.

Now common/cheap BT speakers made public music listening _en vogue_ again. Just right for me to enter my grumpy old man phase, but interesting nonetheless. (And to be honest, it beats the sheer cringe level of someone carrying around a vintage portable record player)

This also seems to make it more acceptable to listen to music/videos on your smartphones external speakers, so I'm willing to bet that having better ones will be a factor for current/future development.

<comment><USER15> Not sure everyone blaring his own music is a good thing. Doubly true in the era where lots of music has cusses and otherwise age-inappropriate content; I can't imagine people with little kids appreciate it. Besides, it's just rude for one to force his personal tastes on another. Headphones are cheap; no one likes the guy blaring tacky rap music and forcing everyone else to hear it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The trailer's over here, it's a bit rough. [https://youtu.be/ik6KUwB3sus](https://youtu.be/ik6KUwB3sus) I haven't seen anything since then indicating the project's status, and the website is now offline. Copyright on the site was 2017, and the last blog post was late 2015. So the project went off the rails somewhere, probably lack of funding, and everybody involved still having day jobs to do...

</comment><comment><USER17> Hah. I still have a Panasonic RX-DS20, purchased around 1990. This is a late- era device, with a CD player in addition to the tape cassette, and digital tuning for radio. It uses 10 D-cell batteries, plus another four AA to store the radio station presets.

I didn't carry it around though, it was my home stereo until I was able to afford something bigger. Since it has an aux input, I've continued to use it over the years as computer speakers and such.

Rock on!

</comment><comment><USER18> In Germany we frequently called them "Ghettoblaster". Only after my brother spent a year in the USA in 1990, I heard the name "Boombox" for the first time. How were they called in the street during the 80s?

P.S.: Of course we all know this movie scene, right? [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHyPS1boeuI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHyPS1boeuI)

<comment><USER3> "Ghetto blaster" has unpleasant racial connotations. It's the kind of term you'd expect your white boomer parents to throw around, as they shake their heads in looming fear that their neighborhood might degentrify. "Boom box" is considered more racially neutral so you will hear it more in the USA.

<comment><USER18> I totally disagree. I just cannot see a racial aspect in the word "Ghetto blaster". What makes you think so? Was it only used by white old men? Or by middle aged cyan women?

<comment><USER3> Using the term "ghetto" for predominantly-black neighborhoods is... one of those things black people can do that white people can't. This is less of a problem in other anglospheric countries, which don't have the history of oppression of and discrimination against black people, including segregation into specific neighborhoods and "white flight", that the United States has -- so words like "ghetto blaster" have less bite abroad than they do here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> A friend had a Sharp ghettoblaster ('boombox'? no one called them that) with built-in vertical record player. Now that was pretty cool. I'd also nominate the Phillips Roller as an iconic stereo design - popping up here and there now in the background of photoshoots, and becoming collectable.

</comment><comment><USER20> Unless you are on a beach with a bunch of your friends, walking around a busy city with one of these just illustrates how self-centered that person is that they think their music is the best music and everybody should listen to it. In reality most don't even care, and at worse you are just making a bunch of needless noise. It's just a failure of thinking about other people and thinking that maybe your taste is not everyone else's taste.

</comment><comment><USER21> What are the "three beat buttons" [0] on the Super Jumbo? Is this the same as a "beat cut switch" [1]?

[0] [https://classicboombox.com/tecsonic-j-1-super- jumbo](https://classicboombox.com/tecsonic-j-1-super-jumbo)

[1] [http://www.redwaveradio.com/11_e8026e0fe1fc5c07_1.htm](http://www.redwaveradio.com/11_e8026e0fe1fc5c07_1.htm)

</comment><comment><USER22> Electronics from the past had such an amazing form factor - nowadays every TV, smartphone, laptop etc. looks pretty much the same, dull and boring.

<comment><USER15> Well, people want slimmer and smaller products. There is more room for creativity in a large, bulky form factor than in a small enclosure sized to barely fit the components. Boom boxes were very heavy and bulky; today's consumers want svelte designs that fit easily in one's pocket.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Cool. I didn't realize people collected them.

I remember in the early 80's the transition from all-analog to LCD display boxes, which allowed more precise FM tuning, and programming for copying tapes or an alarm clock.

And that the #1 item in terms of interest and sales volume at a lot of consumer electronics retailers was the boombox.

Their size really did get ridiculous - carrying one around was a workout.

<comment><USER8> > _I didn 't realize people collected them._

Nowadays you can be fairly certain that just about every set of _somethings_ will be 'collected' by a set of aficionados whose number of members is or exceeds two.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I had a red JVC PC-30 single deck that took something like 8 D-cell batteries... it had touchy volume controls that needed cleaning all the time because any dust or oxidation would sound like white noise mixed with nails on a chalkboard when changing the volume. It was kinda cool because the speakers detached. I often plugged in a $300 Sony Discman with crazy skip buffering and anti-skip tech (D-828K).

I was lucky.. there was a Tower Records 1/2 mile (1 km) from my house, the one where Metallica played that concert in the parking lot. And somehow I acquired a 1990 _West_ German The Doors - The Doors CD.</comment>


Reading Notes on Braudel's "Civilization and Capitalism" - <AUTHOR> https://fantasticanachronism.com/2020/01/31/reading-notes-civilization-capitalism/ <comment><USER2> Appears to be a summarisation of its content without critique.

Funnily that's what I found with Braudel himself: describing what happened not why.

Regardless, a bloody good read.

<comment><USER3> To quote Feynman: explaining how something happens makes the why irrelevant.

<comment><USER4> Feynman did not deal with humans. Knowing that Lincoln was killed with a bullet does not lessen the value of why he was killed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Although I'm not a huge fan of Cowan this was a good call. Braudel will change your perspective.

You can clearly see the influence of Bloch who really could be credited with the creation of modern history and historiography. He took a view of complete engagement with history, joining the resistance being, in his mind, itself being part of the historical process (he wrote his last book on the run). His death at the GP hands of the gestapo was tragic.

</comment><comment><USER6> I hadn't heard of these books before, though skimming the summary, I'd very much like to read them -or the first volume at the very least.

But the content and size of the volumes strikes me as the sort that requires continuous engagement to be of most use.

If anyone's interested in forming a book club around this, feel free to email me at hn(αt)crocodiletears.cc

</comment><comment><USER7> Braudel's three tomes are a monument of historical writing. It's too bad they're also far too expensive, at least in French. There hasn't been a reprint in 20 years.

<comment><USER5> He is so widely studied that there are often copies in used bookshops.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Reminds me of Vaclav Smil

</comment><comment><USER9> What a fantastic article.</comment>


New "Requester pays" Option for Amazon S3 - <AUTHOR> http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/thread.jspa?threadID=27622&tstart=0 "This will enable you to provide other developers access to your buckets without incurring their access costs, and even use Amazon Web Services to sell data for a profit." <comment><USER2> they should add the option to add a surcharge. This way people can make some money off their data.

<comment><USER3> You can add a surcharge using Amazon DevPay. I'll write a blog post about this in the next couple of days!

<comment><USER4> is this whole thing a B2B proposition (someone hosts data, someone else pays for the delivery of the part of this data they need - which is great, don't get me wrong) or could this also become a "consumer" B2C thing? (i.e. I sell digital crap, and charge users via Amazon).</comment></comment></comment>


Newsweek in 1995: Why the Internet Will Fail - <AUTHOR> https://thenextweb.com/shareables/2010/02/27/newsweek-1995-buy-books-newspapers-straight-intenet-uh/ <comment><USER2> Well, would you look at that. The article _did_ mention what the Internet lacked, at the time: sale systems, search, and popularity; and indeed, market forces did provide.

Looking at the article's conclusion however, it is rather similar to the 2018 HN frontpage news of social-networking-breeding-isolation: perhaps the chap wasn't that far off the mark:

"While the Internet beckons brightly, seductively flashing an icon of knowledge-as-power, this nonplace lures us to surrender our time on earth. A poor substitute it is, this virtual reality where frustration is legion and where–in the holy names of Education and Progress–important aspects of human interactions are relentlessly devalued."</comment>


Xkcd: Travelling Salesman Problem - <AUTHOR> http://xkcd.com/399/ <comment><USER2> So I looked through the last 10-15 or so of the xkcd comics, and maybe 3-4 of them were what I considered HN material (Feynman, this one, etc) and a bunch that were not (tripping band kids, punch buggy, tapping, etc). The appropriate ones (like this) have a lot of upvotes, the others don't. I'm happy to announce that the system is working, the good ones are rising and the bad ones are getting ignored.

Remember, commenting to complain about the bad ones makes them rise to the top of the front page!

<comment><USER3> "A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language."

Notice how only one of those is math. I think it is by design that only ~1/3 of them are HN material.

<comment><USER2> Don't get me wrong, lots of those other ones were funny, just not HN material. I'm a faithful subscriber to their RSS feed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Before reading "O(1)" I thought it would be written "Priceless".

However I think that's the idea, but using programmers currency.

</comment><comment><USER5> Shouldn't it be O(N)? I mean, the time taken to pack and send your products will still scale linearly with the number of customers, right?

<comment><USER6> You raise a good point, but O(1) is a much better punch line.

<comment><USER7> It's definitely more stark, but O(N) would have gotten a chuckle from the intended audience and a nod to Randall for getting his complexity _right_.

But I'm just advocating for the devil...

<comment><USER5> Well, just to argue against my original point, the scaling of the travelling salesman problem usually applies to the time taken to figure out the optimal route, not the time taken to actually traverse it, which is O(N). If you're just looking at the route-planning stage, then the "sod it, I'll just sell on eBay" algorithm is indeed O(1).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This proves without a doubt that selling online solves np-hard complexity. And you don't even need a Turing Machine.

<comment><USER9> The reviews on ebay are turing complete. You might think people are giving over the top reviews with their "A+++++++++", but that's just unary notation.

<comment><AUTHOR> Syntax error...you have an odd number of pluses :P

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> One of best xkcd comics in recent memory. Come Monday, I'll be printing it out and taping it up on my monitor.

mS

</comment><comment><USER11> I didn't gain any insights from that cartoon.</comment>


Nordic countries point the way to cashless societies - <AUTHOR> http://news.yahoo.com/nordic-countries-point-way-cashless-societies-143338597--sector.html <comment><USER2> Maybe it is a mild paranoia attack kicking in, but I find the trend to a cashless society very troublesome. I'm doing all I can to avoid being tracked on the web, using AdBlock and Ghostery, among other things, yet the privacy implications of going cashless I'm rarely considering. Cash is anonymous; cards are perfect trackers.

Both your tracks and your most intimate preferences on the web and in real life are perfectly transparent to anyone with access to the transaction database. And I have no idea what kind of protections there are against governmental access to these databases. It is weird that the privacy implications of cashless are so rarely discussed - everyone just seems to be touting the great benefits of cashless all the time.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. I use cash for everything I can, checks when I can't (local payments), and credit cards only for purchases over the web, where it can't be easily avoided, and one does need, in the US at least, to maintain a credit record. This is primarily to avoid fraud with stolen info, and secondly that mild paranoia we share. If I had a Pocky addiction, no one would know outside my family ^_^.

<comment><USER4> Why checks for non-cash local payments? They aren't really much better than credit cards for privacy, are they? They also come with some significant risks [1].

[1] [http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/news08.html](http://www-cs- faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/news08.html)

<comment><USER5> They are also virtually nonexistent in Europe.

From Wikipedia: "In most European countries, cheques are now rarely used, even for third party payments. In these countries, it is standard practice for businesses to publish their bank details on invoices, to facilitate the receipt of payments by giro."

"In Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Scandinavia, cheques have almost completely vanished in favour of direct bank transfers and electronic payments. "

"In Finland, banks stopped issuing personal cheques in about 1993 in favour of giro systems, which are now almost exclusively electronically initiated either via internet banking or payment machines located at banks and shopping malls."

"In Poland cheques were withdrawn from use in 2006"

"Since 2001, businesses in the United Kingdom have made more electronic payments than cheque payments."

The story seems to be similar in Asia and Oceania. According to the Wikipedia article on cheques, North America is pretty much the only place where they are still taken seriously.

[1][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheque#Modern_era](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheque#Modern_era)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "while some unemployed people selling street magazines now also accept electronic payments."

This was hard to grasp when I saw it IRL for the first time. My local candy store and deli[0] both accept Mobile Pay and it's a strange thing to witness. Imagine the NYC delis, usually owned by immigrants and minorities who couldn't care less, suddenly be on the frontier of adoption of a cashless system. It's that user friendly. And the nature of the businesses (selling cigarette singles and imported sodas) mean you do have a suspicion of it being off the books..

Another anecdote, I just started a record label[1] and for our first show, we accepted cash and Mobile Pay. We're small, it was in a private apartment, but so many people do not bring cash anymore we basically _had_ to accept MP.

[0] Hvis nogen fra Danmark læser dette, så er det Palmen ved skt. hans torv, og kiosken ved Blågårds plads... Sikkert mange flere. [1] [https://scalatapes.bandcamp.com/](https://scalatapes.bandcamp.com/)

<comment><USER7> In the US, Square [1] seems very popular among small stores, like coffee shops and, yes, candy stores. Seems like it's great for low-volume stuff. A few days ago I was buying a piece of vintage furniture from a private seller via Krrb.com, and when I showed up, she said I could pay with either PayPal, Square or Venmo.

[1] [https://squareup.com](https://squareup.com)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This was a bit of a surprise for me when I moved to Ireland and later the UK two years ago.

In Sweden I wouldn't use bills and coins sometimes for months. Suddenly I have had to get used to carrying these around again, and having to pay fees when you pay with cards etc.

I'm looking forward for the world to go cashless, and think this will happen very fast.

<comment><USER9> What fees do you have to pay in the UK when using a card?

<comment><USER10> As a customer, there aren't many circumstances. The only one that springs to mind is when buying airline tickets with a credit card (but not a debit card).

Where it makes more of a difference, though, is that the fee charged to the merchant is a sufficient disincentive that it's pretty common for small shops and bars to refuse card payments under £10. This is even true of the new(ish) contactless payments that only work up to £20 and which were touted as replacing cash.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Its probablly ok if you live in Norway and your not poor and have a good credit rating, other wise your going to have to go with a prepaid solution that is full of transaction costs. The same with traveling to these countries.

At DEFCON last year I took two bank cards, that I had loaded with funds...big mistake transactions for ATMS and using POS systems were very high.

I don't think this is a good idea if you are forced to go with a card to go with everyday transactions.

<comment><USER11> Debit cards are the norm here in Norway. I pay 275 NOK/year for mine, with zero transaction fees on everyday usage.

<comment><USER9> You have to pay for a Debit Card? What's the reason for this?

<comment><USER12> You pay for debit and credit cards in most European countries. One reason is probably that the fees paid by the merchants for card processing are much lower than in the US. So while a bank in the US is happy to give you a free credit card in the US, because it knows that it gets the money back via the fees paid from the merchants, a bank in Europe won't be able to break even with that approach.

<comment><USER9> I'm from the UK and have never had to pay anything for opening up an account and using a debit card.

<comment><USER13> So why are you talking about prepaid solutions? That's not how it worked when I lived in the UK. I had a normal debit card tied to my bank account, just as in the nordic countries. Nothing to do with credit rating either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Here in New Zealand over 60% of retail payments are done using cards, especially as the local EFTPOS system is very low fee compared to credit card. I can't recall the last time I had to use cash. There's still a few small cash-only vendors, but mostly those without a fixed location as mobile EFTPOS terminals cost more to run.

It's very convenient, there's no need to keep receipts to record my spending. No cheques means no chequebook to balance. Of course it does make spending more traceable but given the police need a court order to get banking records I'm not too worried currently. Vendors can track you using the number if their POS records it, but it's hard to get a POS approved so most people use a sealed terminal with a serial interface to connect to the POS.

Cash isn't going away any time soon, but it's just a pain to carry around.

</comment><comment><USER15> Going cashless smacks of dystopianism. We seem to presume that anyone "off the books" is up to no good. Some are up to no good, but many are simply trying to survive.

Perhaps I'd think differently if we had no unemployment.

<comment><USER16> I wonder if now the governments there consider people using cash "suspicious", just like the US gov considers not having a Facebook account suspicious, or how the Spanish Court in a recent case considered encrypting your e-mail end to end as "suspicious".

<comment><USER17> This is true in Norway.

Merchants are required by law to report cash purchases over a certain amount to the tax authorities.

<comment><USER18> The same has been true for cash withdraws from the bank over a certain amount, for decades. "Suspicious" isn't quite the right word, as there are plenty of legitimate reasons. But the cost (reviewing a small number of large withdraws) vs. probability of detection is good.

<comment><USER19> The scary part is how low that amount is. It's something like 1000 euro/day and 3000 euro/week. There's also a yearly value. It's been going down over time (by a lot, used to be 5000 euro/day only when the euro was introduced).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Completely aside from the privacy issues, I rather bemoan the decline of cash, for the very simple reason that handling physical currency makes it much harder to spend carelessly.

It's too easy to swipe your card and receive an item. It's a lot harder to fork over $483.71 in tangible, handle-able dollars. After my wife and I analyzed our spending habits, we found that we were bleeding money specifically because of the tremendous number of small - $5 here, $10 there - transactions. These completely fly under your mental radar when you're paying with a card.

We've since switched to a cash budget, where we withdraw the money we need for the next two weeks for various things (groceries, hobbies, entertainment) and spend exclusively out of that. If we're out and about and want something and don't have the cash on us, we don't buy it. When I open up my wallet and see that I only have $X left of the grocery budget, I consider whether I really need that thing I just put into my cart. Internet purchases still get made on a card, but we "pay" for them with cash from the budget into a pool that we withdraw from the next period to refull the budget. We've become much more sensitive to sales, discounts, and smart shopping - and all because we have the continual feedback loop of physical cash. Our monthly margin has substantially improved as a direct result, and we've been able to make substantial progress on all our unsecured debt - we should be free of it this year. There's more to it than just cash, but it's really about being aware what you're spending and finding ways to make sure you only spend what you have; cashless transactions practically encourage you to be unaware of what you have and what you can afford.

For a society that is utterly crippled by debt, and in a culture that is practically begging us to spend money every time we turn around, it seems like the last thing we need is to go cashless. It's convenient, it's easy, it's fast...and that's a problem.

I'm not saying that cashless payment methods are bad. I love them. Paying for things on my phone Google Wallet is magical. Amazon has completely transformed how I buy stuff. There are lots of really great things about cashless economies, but for anyone that is less than perfectly disciplined, it's a very sharp two-edged sword.

</comment><comment><USER21> In Canada we have Interac debit cards and everyone is happy, I don't even remember the last time I used cash to pay for something...

</comment><comment><USER22> Here in Brazil I almost don't use cash. The credit card is accepted everywhere, even by the beach's vendor.

</comment><comment><USER23> I believe the trend in the nordics is largely driven by the Dankort and similar ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dankort](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dankort)) which is a debit card that is free to get and use for consumers. Merchants pay an annual fee depending on their transaction volume and they are not allowed to pass the cost on to the consumer. It doubles as a VISA which is neat when we go abroad.

An interesting data point is that every single taxis here is happy to take your credit card. I was surprised to learn that I was unable to pay with my VISA in many taxis in the UK and USA.

<comment><USER24> "they are not allowed to pass the cost on to the consumer"

Haha, that's funny. The merchant's whole income is from the customer, there's no way not to pass it on to the customer, just to conceal better the fact that they're passing it on.

<comment><USER25> obviously they pass the cost on to the customer, but not directly. they can't charge one price for cash and a different price for card.

<comment><USER26> Which means they have to pass the cost on to both kinds of customer.

<comment><USER19> If you're a business customer in a bank, and you bring in cash on a regular basis, the bank will actually charge you a percentage for doing that.

From a discussion I had with a merchant, that rate is quite high, especially for small change. The value he gave for small change was 7%. That's a lot more expensive than the worst credit card charges, except for really small amounts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Cashless societies like credit cards and mobile payments

Not cashless societies like Star Trek

</comment><comment><USER28> This makes quantitative easing so much easier!</comment>


Find The Missing Primes - <AUTHOR> http://www.primechallenge.org/

<comment><USER2> Ok, silly question time: why should we find them?</comment>


A Personal API for Email and Web Apps - <AUTHOR> https://bip.io/

<comment><AUTHOR> It's like IFTTT or Zapier, but open source. FINALLY.</comment>


Show HN: Coinerra – JavaScript Crypto Miner - <AUTHOR> http://coinerra.com <comment><USER2> "We add an intermediary 15s step" "Add a timer to lock items which your users can unlock by mining" "you can delay showing the results for 5-10s to mine crypto"

"giving your users the awesome experience they deserve."

Awesome experience indeed.

<comment><USER3> Well, maybe the emphasis is on deserve here? ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I love their first FAQ. You don't often see a service that comes out and says "This probably isn't for you."

> Q: Will This Work On My Site? > A: Technically yes, economically probably > not.

That same answer goes on to discuss how much revenue you could actually expect from using this crypto miner: "With just 10–20 active miners on your site, you can expect a monthly revenue of about 0.3 XMR (~$29)."

It seems like in some situations, where users are incentivized to stick around and mine for a bit, this could be an effective model. It seems like there is room for improvement in tuning power consumption and fees charged. Plus, if ad blockers block miners, it's likely a non-starter... but the merits of that are a different debate.

<comment><USER5> The FAQ is copypasted word-by-word from Coinhive though which I find kind of sloppy and non-serious.

<comment><USER6> Show HN: Coinhive – Embeddable JavaScript Crypto Miner | [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15246145](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15246145) (Sep 2017)

Mentions [https://medium.com/@MaxenceCornet/coinhive-review- embeddable...](https://medium.com/@MaxenceCornet/coinhive-review-embeddable- javascript-crypto-miner-806f7024cde8)

 _$0.36 a day For this exact website, it's 4 to 5 times less than what it makes with non-intrusive ads (banner + text only)_

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm sure it's been covered to death already, but wow, this really ought to kill user's batteries. I'm not sure how I feel about this concept.

<comment><USER5> I don't see the problem as long as you warn your users before making them explicitly start the miner to receive stuff.

<comment><USER8> That feels like the problem to me--there's no incentive for a website to do so instead of simply mining without the user's consent.

<comment><USER9> And the big problem isn't consent. If I'm paying to watch a video by mining, my battery might not last the duration of the video I'm mining to watch!

<comment><USER10> Okay I'll bite. How is your choice of device the dev's responsibility?

I mean it's not like it'd make sense to flame blizzard or bethesda because you can't play as long as you'd like on a laptop/mobile.

You use the proper device for the proper use, and this way you just get an additional option to trade value with the site owner. You're free not to mine in the same way you're free to get a paid account if you don't like ads.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Hard to take this seriously with a mistake right on the front page:

> It's the cheapest miner on the market: 85% to you - 15% to Coinerra

A rapid search turns up crypto-loot.com with 88% payout. That said, it's good to see more actors in this space. Just please get your facts straight!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi everyone. Founder here. Thanks for the feedback, and I admit, there are a lot of things that we can improve. We have focused more on the technology, and soon are going to update most of the documentation and FAQ.

</comment><comment><USER11> So this takes 15% fee vs 30% for Coinhive. With almost non-existant barrier to entry, it seems like commission would be driven down to what traditional mining pool cuts (1% or less)

<comment><USER12> This doesn't have an API though so I don't really understand how you would use it for rewards. With Coinhive you can verify the number of solved hashes per user server-side.

<comment><USER13> Yeah, they don't have a private api, but you could use the client side API (miner) to get total hashes / listen for accepted hashes and save the data on your side and give rewards based on that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The animation on the 'Sign Up' button is a sin. Instant tab close.

Almost as bad as the 'subscribe' popup nonsense way too many websites have.

<comment><USER4> It doesn't bother me too much, all in all. Distracting, sure, but then again, they found a way to draw your attention to the most important button on their website (in their opinion). It doesn't obscure the content like a popup or prevent you from closing the tab with an alert. By my book, that's playing by the rules.

<comment><USER14> Nah it's not that bad but it's similar to seeing a '.biz' domain or comic-sans font - an innate heuristic that informs my brain to _nope_ the hell out of there.

It triggers the _this is scammy_ response (no matter how unjustly).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think all ad blockers and the like should block these miners. Full stop. Not because I'm anti-miner but because serious websites must explicitly ask for users' consent and while doing that it's easy just to whitelist the miner for that specific website when you want to mine. I don't see any dichotomy. The problem is obviously rogue sites mining in the background.

<comment><USER4> It seems pretty natural for ad blockers to block miners, which extends them more into the space of allowing users to maintain control over their client, rather than purely blocking ads as the name implies.

That being said, the primary concern so far seems to be the CPU melting effect of the mining. (I don't want to use my battery, CPU, etc to make you money without you asking me.) Rather than blacklisting certain domains or requests to crypto-mining services, I'd like to see something that protects against intensive scripts in general.

Here's how I could see it working:

* Services like Coinerra want to do intensive work without blocking site responsiveness, so they should use something like Web Workers.

* Browsers should provide user controls to throttle the execution of Web Workers. This will protect their resources from most intensive scripts.

* Intensive execution on the main thread already has (inelegant) protections (no responsiveness, script timeout warnings). Maybe these will need to be improved as more sites request intense, continuous computations on behalf of clients.

Unfortunately, crypto miners themselves will have little incentive to add the controls on their end, because it is best for their customers if the hashes are computed at the maximum rate. (Well, they will have a little incentive, because throttling may allow them to fly under the radar, providing smaller revenue without being blocked entirely.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> > You are running Vue in development mode.

haha

Anyways, it's time for a miner blocker browser plugin I guess, this sucks!

<comment><USER16> Made a blocker some time ago for Coin Hive and a few others, will add Coinerra to the blocker too. You can check it out on Github: [https://github.com/keraf/NoCoin](https://github.com/keraf/NoCoin)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I did a 1 day trial... My stats TOTAL HASHES 2.33 Milion/Hashes TOTAL PAID 0.00000 xmr PENDING PAYMENTS 0.00000 xmr ????? ALL IS 0, I stopped using it

<comment><USER13> I think they had a bug, because for me it started showing today. 10.47 MH -> 0.00177 xmr pending and now it's increasing at each refresh

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> the js isn't just minified, its been obfuscated (actually adding to the size significantly). it also has the exact same api as coinhive. i wonder what they are trying to hide...</comment>


Amazon S3 – 2 Trillion Objects, 1.1 Million Requests/Second - <AUTHOR> http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2013/04/amazon-s3-two-trillion-objects-11-million-requests-second.html

<comment><USER2> "If you added one S3 object every 60 hours starting at the Big Bang, you'd have accumulated almost two trillion of them by now."

That actually sounds underwhelming! IMHO our brains have an easier time thinking "hey, 1 every 60 hours that's not much" compared to figuring out the universe is really incredibly old ;-)

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm open to more creative analogies. I'll happily send some AWS stickers to the first 5 truly great ones that show up under this reply...

<comment><USER3> My math is probably wrong... but I believe if you ate a twinkie for every request at the end of a year it would take 1,350 Blue Marlin heavy lift ships to move you across the ocean.

<comment><USER4> also you would die.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> So how many objects should have been corrupted/lost according to their SLA and how many actually did get corrupted?

<comment><USER6> >how many objects should have been corrupted/lost according to their SLA

Anywhere from 20 to 200M per year depending on how many people use RRS...

<comment><USER7> It's staggering that out of 2 trillion only 20 might be corrupted, assuming they lived up to their SLA.

2000000000000 - (.99999999999 * 2000000000000) = 20

Makes me feel pretty OK about having backups there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Considering we don't hear about problems that often, this is quite an impressive feat of engineering. You really don't think about it until we get a hiccup and half the Internet goes down.

</comment><comment><USER9> It would be really interesting to know the average size of an object and visualize the amount of harddisks it takes to store all this data.

<comment><USER10> To put this into perspective it's 2.7B new objects per day (assuming 1 Trillion objects averaged over 365 days).

Assuming each object is 100KB (generous estimate, after compression) that would be 270GB per day -- or assuming ten levels of redundancy and striped across three RAID storage devices (per level of redundancy) then 8.1TB per day.

I'm not familiar with their hard disk procurement policies but it wouldn't be difficult to assume they've been purchasing 1TB drives, so 10 new disk drives per day just for keeping ahead of growth. Furthermore let's assume their disk drive failure churn rate is 10% per day so another 1 new disk drive for parts replacement (so 11 disk drives per day).

These are really loose numbers not based on any actual data (or any personal experience at all) but just napkin math, so take it all with a grain of salt.

<comment><USER11> I'm not convinced that 100KB is a great estimate on file size, but either way you're off by a few zeroes. It's not 270GB per day, it's 270TB. Even if each object were just one byte, _that_ would be 2.7GB. 100KB is one hundred thousand bytes. So it's quite a bit more than eleven drives per day!

<comment><USER10> You are correct, that would be 270TB.

After applying the same shoddy math with each object being 100KB -- 270TB with 10 levels of redundancy across 3 RAID drives resulting in 8,100TB per day. This would be 8,100 drives (at 1TB per drive), or 8,910 drives after 10% being dead-on-arrival.

The math is sketchy, so let's cut it down by 10x (10KB per object): 891 drives per day. Keep in mind this is just for S3 and it doesn't account for existing drives failing, growth, or what other services require (eg: EC2, RDS, Cloudwatch, Cloudfront, etc).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Wow, Windows Azure seems to be beating it by a long way. Genuine surprise... I assumed it would be much closer.

9 months ago, they announced they stored twice this amount - 4 trillion objects. A year before that, 1 Trillion. Given that previous rate of growth, we can expect they have a lot more than this now.

They also announced peaks of 880,000 requests a second. Whilst Amazon wins here, I'd say its fair to assume this number has increased in those 9 months.

[http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazurestorage/archive/2012/07/...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazurestorage/archive/2012/07/20/windows- azure-storage-4-trillion-objects-and-counting.aspx)

<comment><USER13> Bear in mind that Azure storage includes "Blobs, Disks/Drives, Tables, and Queues" however S3 is only blobs (other services like Amazon's DynamoDB would be analogous to table storage). Hence, it's not an apples-to-apples comparison.

<comment><USER12> Fair point. Do we have any other numbers that might make it a more apples-to- apples comparison?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> What is an 'object' in this sense?

<comment><USER15> A file

<comment><USER16> i.e. a sequence of bytes

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I love S3, and have been experimenting with using it as a true key value store.

<https://github.com/kennethreitz/elephant>

It's going quite well so far :)

</comment><comment><USER18> Anyone know what technology S3 uses to meet this kind of demand?

<comment><USER19> Hard drives..

Jk... but seriously, good question! it's gotta just be a massive feet of engineering

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> waiting for the comparison to the total outstanding us derivative exposure :P

<comment><AUTHOR> Dollars and objects don't compare very well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> what do u mean by objects?

<comment><AUTHOR> An object is a single blob of data. S3 objects vary in size from 1 byte up to 5 Terabytes. They can be uploaded with a single PUT, or with multiple PUTs in series or in parallel (which we call multipart upload). They can be downloaded as a unit, in full (GET) or in part (range GET).

<comment><USER21> Thanks jeffbarr for valuable information...

<comment><USER22> Which you could have googled in 3 seconds.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I am surprised that the number of requests per second is this low — especially if this includes PUTs. There must be a pretty huge multiple between CloudFront and S3 that keeps this in check.

</comment><comment><USER24> Anyone else find this surprisingly low? I'd imagine your typical web service holds a few thousand objects in S3 for images etc, then backups and anything else. Then you have your big players like netflix, dropbox etc that use the service. Who store data for tens of millions of customers...

<comment><USER25> 1.1 Million Requests/Second seems especially low for Amazon.

The average server can serve more than 1,000 static objects / second easily.

<comment><USER26> There is more to S3 than just serving static objects off of the local drive. Maintaining the integrity of the data and ensuring that the data sent out is consistent is not a trivial task. A constantly changing map with 2 trillion keys is a hard problem on its own. Also, serving 1000 1MiB objects per second is not the same as serving 1000 1KiB objects per second so it's hard to say how many resources just the serving portion consumes.

<comment><USER25> I'm not saying it's simple nor easy.

I was assuming that the number of requests referred to read requests, and I guess that the system is designed in a way that makes read requests very cheap, maybe even cheaper than reading a file on a usual filesystem, at least for hot data.

Just because it's huge and complex doesn't mean it's slow and that requests are expensive.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


"Coming Out" as Face Blind - <AUTHOR> http://narrative.ly/coming-face-blind/ <comment><USER2> The bit about structuring conversations in a way to tease out if the other person recognizes _you_ resonates with me. It can be fun, in the sense of being a challenge or game, once you get used to it. Now I'm older and more "over" myself, I'll often just admit if I don't recognize you now.

I don't think I have what this woman has to the same degree, but I have a condition which causes me to fail to remember social and physical situations in any easily recallable way which results in similar problems.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, this resonated with me too. I can recognize faces, but I'm terrible with remembering names, or even remembering whether I ever knew a name. I can know someone casually for months and have their name just disappear from my memory, or I can see someone I know I recognize, but have no memory of whether or not I've actually been introduced to them and learned their name. Those are the worst—not knowing whether I've just seen someone before, or if I actually should know their name, so not knowing whether to introduce myself.

I find that if I learn a little bit about someone when I meet them it can help a bit, as it anchors the name to something in my memory. Otherwise, just being honest feels best: "Hey, I recognize you, but I'm terrible with names... what's your name again?" Works alright whether I've been introduced to them in the past or not.

<comment><USER4> More recently I've found if I meet someone new, either at work or socially, I write down their name, or email it to myself on my phone.

After the initial interaction I can then make any additional notes I think might help in remember relevant information about the person.

I don't keep any of this info, afterwards I'll either know their name from repeat interactions and delete it as unneeded, or not need it anyway, and delete it or throw it out.

<comment><USER5> On a similar note, repetition is a great way to remember names.

Try to repeat the persons name in conversation a few times, just slip in in there.

For instance, if they say their name is Charles, respond with "So Charles, how's your day been so far?".

Not only does it help you remember their name, you're also more personable.

Since I've started consciously doing this, it's helped a lot.

I'm terrible with names. It's entirely possible for me to meet someone and know practically their entire life story, but not remember their name.

<comment><USER6> I do this all the time when meeting new people. my memory for facial recognition is much better than an unaided association to a name alone, so shortly after meeting a new person, I try to mention some aspect of their appearance in a sentence. e.g. "Hey Steve - you've got a cool hairstyle."

It can come off weird to some people, but their name would be forgotten in seconds otherwise, so I've decided it's a worthwhile method.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wish it was easier for people to "come out" with their deficiencies. I'm miserable on the phone for example. I just can't really communicate unless I'm looking at the person on the other end. Yet there are a lot of circumstances where there's no other option, chief among which is discussing business opportunities. It's stupid. Videoconferencing has been out there for 15 years, yet people are still not willing to accommodate such a minor request.

<comment><USER8> You sound like you might have CAPD. A common coping mechanism is lip reading to help fill in missing auditory information, often without consciously realizing it.

I don't know what your situation is, but my sons just don't use the phone. I handle all phone calls.

I'm so used to us just side stepping such issues that I have trouble imagining feeling obligated to connect a certain way. Some people prefer email. Some people prefer texting. Etc.

<comment><USER7> Probably not. I'm perfectly fine with audiobooks, for example.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I remember attending a party once and introducing myself to someone who, it turned out, I had met and had an extensive conversation with about an hour earlier. I totally didn't recognize this person.

I don't have full-on face blindness. I do recognize the faces of people I see a lot. But I still struggle to remember people's names, especially if I don't see them every day.

</comment><comment><USER10> I hesitate to write this, but it seems that face-blindness could be related to autism spectrum. I know someone who is diagnosed on the spectrum and has face blindness and feels the social anxiety of it in much the same way as the author. Also, the author describes several behaviors that are on the spectrum.

I also noticed that many of the anxieties described by the author were projected and not materialized. She was afraid of how people would react and how she would feel in awkward situations, but when it finally happened and she admitted her condition, it went fine. Shyness and social anxiety have an element of self-fulfilling prophecy.

</comment><comment><USER11> You really have to wonder, from an evolutionary perspective, how and when this skill became so modular and specialized, that mostly everyone is born with this innate capability.

If you take this idea, that facial recognition is a modular specialization that most humans have inherited at birth (such that it can be added or subtracted from a person's instinctive skills, leaving everything else more or less untouched), and cross it over to other species, I'd take a wild guess that this is the missing piece in animals that fail to recognize themselves in mirrors.

Comparing elephants and dolphins with dogs and cats, it's tempting to contemplate that while dogs and cats can become familiar with us, they're likely face blind. Elephants and dolphins, while capable of passing mirror self recognition tests to a certain degree, are probably not as adept, because they lack the same socialization demands that have intensely pressured humans for a couple thousand years.

I have to figure in earlier periods of human history, an inability to recognize individuals, especially in similarly peopled enclaves might have been supremely deadly. Not just boss-in-the-elevator deadly (as mentioned in the article), but literally stab-you-in-the-back deadly.

So much so, that we aren't born with other skills like capable of walking directly after being birthed, like other animals, but for the most part, by age three, if we can recognize faces, we can pick our parents out of a line up.

We know literacy and written language is a hard driver of civilization. I wonder how much, the innate capacity for human facial recognition plays into the ability to read text? It seems like dyslexia is related to the degree of rendomization of the pattern of receptors in the eyes, but facial recognition seems strongly bound to processing and memory.

Is it a prevailing trait that predates history, or is the capacity to record history, and history's emergence and fidelity concurrent with the prevalence of human facial recognition as almost pure instinct?

Furthermore, imagine a world where the selective pressure is removed, and the trait is replaced by an augmented reality product, a device that recognizes people for you. How easily ruled would those people of the future be?

<comment><USER12> Please note: facial recognition is learned, not innate.

[https://www.leafscience.org/visual- recognition/](https://www.leafscience.org/visual-recognition/)

Thanks.

<comment><USER3> Some aspect of it must be innate, or it wouldn't be possible for people to have face blindness.

<comment><USER13> That's specious reasoning: something being learnt doesn't mean that people can't have an adaptation that aids, or inhibits, that particular learning.

Running isn't innate, we learn to do it. Most children do it. But some people lack the apparatus, some are just habituated against it, some are impaired in other ways. And, running is a defining characteristic of humans. (It's not a perfect analogy but I think it fits)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I have a mild version of this - usually I lean on a person's trappings, context, or they might hit a sort of LRU cache. In a crowded situation though all bets are off. Makes dating difficult - I've walked past girlfriends multiple times. Even if you try to disclaim this Prosopagnosia thing, there is a sort of innate offense you give when you don't recognize someone. The eyes give it away. Also if I look you up and down I'm not (necessarily) checking you out, I'm looking for distinctive characteristics.

</comment><comment><USER15> The Wikipedia list of (famous) people with face blindness is super interesting. Chuck Close (who cites it as inspiration for his portrait work), Jane Goodall, Markos Moulitsas, Oliver Sacks, Woz...

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:People_with_prosopagn...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:People_with_prosopagnosia)

<comment><USER16> Wow Steve Wozniak, never expected to see him on there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I have a child with this issue. He doesn't live with constant stress over it. I had not really thought about how well we accommodate it. The article was eye opening in that regard.

We've learned lots of tidbits over the years that help him feel okay about it. For example, normal people are more reliant on context than they realize and can fail to recognize someone out of uniform or met someplace different than the norm.

For example, see _Person Swap_ :

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

</comment><comment><USER17> On the opposite spectrum of face blindness, there has been recent progress in the field of identifying "Super recognisers".

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

Super recognisers are able to remember faces very well and score high on the Glasgow Face Matching Test.

<comment><USER18> interesting. for once I'm one of those people in the comments claiming an exceptional condition. for most of my life I've been able to "place a face" almost every single time. as a kid it would manifest itself when I would recognize kids from the various schools I'd attended while moving around. lately it's been recognizing people around town that I've seen on dating apps (I live in a smaller town now but it happened when I was living in NYC too). too bad it's basically a worthless talent (other than the occasional person that's charmed that I remembered them from some conversion we'd had years ago). ironically I'm shit at remembering names.

<comment><USER19> Yep, in this day in age it's almost horrible when you can go, oh right I saw that person's picture on the internet randomly, we've never actually met, or even talked.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I had a girlfriend who was faceblind. She had to explain this to me once, as she walked right by me in a library we were meeting at, as I had cut and dyed my hair.

She had some autoimmune diseases and believed/had read up that her face blindness was likely an effect of the chronic pain she dealt with.

</comment><comment><USER21> I might have a mild face blindness. I was never diagnosed, and might never be. This has never affected me in any way (other then a few awkward interactions). I am able to recognize people as soon as the start talking, sometimes I can even recognize people when they start moving. I also recognize people by their clothes, hair, etc.

My wife was the first one to notice I might have this condition (and yes it has happened more then once that I don't recognize her). This is despite the fact that I have a BS in psychology and had read a lot about face blindness in university. It just never occurred to me that I might have this. Those awkward moments I mentioned earlier, I usually blamed on me not paying attention, being stupid, shy or something else.

</comment><comment><USER22> Very interesting article. Too bad google glass didn't catch up, or we could set up reasonably inconspicuous face recognition to help these people. Otherwise, I guess they could have a hidden camera somewhere on them and a (wireless) earbud that tells them who's in front of them.

<comment><USER23> That sounds like a much better solution than google glass, and one that we could even build in a weekend.

<comment><USER22> the real issue is where to mine the names and pictures from. Facebook? LinkedIn? The tighter the pool of people the best the face recognition will be. Asking people to enter everyone in by hand is probably unreasonable, though I'm not sure

<comment><USER24> I think just the system recognizing faces that it's seen before would be good enough. Entering by hand isn't too bad.

When it detects a new face, add it to the "seen faces" list, and let the user go back though that (sorted most recent at the top) whenever they like, to add names and maybe a short note like "met at party in LA". So you have to remember their name yourself but only momentarily until you can enter it into the local DB.

Whenever that face is detected again, it shows the info.

That way you can skip Internet connectivity on the device entirely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I have a similar problem and have never been able to figure it out: random people look like people I know. Nearly every day I see someone who I'm sure is someone else. What I have to do is stare at them very pointedly, and if they look away I know it's not someone I'm acquainted with. It feels to me very similar to the way the author describes her condition, only it's sort of opposite in a way.

</comment><comment><USER26> Sorry I don't know how to word this but why would it be upsetting if people asked her questions about living with this?

I'd like to know just so I can be more sensitive in the future. I'd have never thought it would be a problem and would have asked way too many questions. Is this unique to this case or something I should avoid in general?

<comment><USER27> It isn't unique to this case - anyone who is different will get genuine questions over it. But there are a few problems I have with it:

1) The medical details of my life aren't any of your business. And people tend to let their curiosity cross those lines. They don't do it deliberately, and it doesn't bother everyone. But it is absolutely personal.

2) When we do get questions, we get the same questions all the time. To be blunt, I get tired of answering them.

3) For my particular problems, I have a pile of symptoms and things that trigger them, but no formal diagnosis of anything (even after years of doctors). I just don't like to get into it because once people dig in, they start trying to help. Try this herb, try this pill, see my doctor, etc. They mean well. And they really think they are suggesting things I haven't already done. But all it really does is rekindle old frustrations.

So everyone is different. Many people won't have my obvious bitterness from #3. Some people are fine with questions. But you never know. We are all different people. So I'd recommend not asking questions. But at the same time, that doesn't mean to avoid the subject. There is a nice balance where you just talk about the direct impact it has on the current situation without turning it into a huge conversation. And if you get to know someone well enough, just ask them directly if they mind questions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Is there a corresponding condition where you know faces, but cannot match them to names?

<comment><USER20> That's called being in the majority of the entire human race.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I knew a guy with this. I also have a friend who looks rather like me.

One day we both sat down in class next to the face blind kid. Face blind kid went out to the bathroom. lookalike and I swapped seats and exterior clothes (jacket, watch etc). Hilarity ensues.

</comment><comment><USER30> The author calls her face-blindness "mild" and "not as severe"; I wonder what severe face-blindness entails?? How do you recognize less than the author?

I have a small bit of difficulty with faces that my ex-wife made me aware of. Since then, if I don't recognize someone I may say, "Sorry, I'm bit bad at faces," and this seems to go over well. I also sometimes say this to cut short conversations about "who my kids look like."

</comment><comment><USER31> Is there a good test for this I could take (preferably online)? I suspect I have a mild case and would like an objective test.

<comment><USER32> "Famouse Faces" at [https://www.testmybrain.org](https://www.testmybrain.org) and [http://facememory.psy.uwa.edu.au/](http://facememory.psy.uwa.edu.au/) are both good.

<comment><USER33> Cool. I scored 97% on the second one, and 14 on the first one.

I did cheat a little bit on the first one by looking up their names on IMDB, because I can usually better remember which movie they were in and what role they played, than the name of the actor.

<comment><USER32> Wow. I scored 34% on the second one, i.e. no better than random guessing. The last part that added the random noise to the faces didn't make a difference, since I already couldn't do worse at the task.

<comment><USER33> I have to admit though that a few of the model faces were a bit featureless and hard to remember, so I mostly got those right by eliminating the other two faces in each group of three, because the wrong faces usually had prominent, memorable features.

The random noise made it harder, but if you squint and move your head around while looking at it, you can remove a lot of noise, it's a nice little "analog" trick for situations like that.

But 34%.. Do you think you suffer from prosopagnosia? Or was there something with the test that made it extra hard for you?

<comment><USER32> > Do you think you suffer from prosopagnosia?

I do.

I once watched Up in the Air and had to ask at the end which one was George Clooney. (In my defense, I had previously seen him in Syriana, where he had a beard. Hair and facial hair are the crutches I tend to use to recognize people.) Needless to say, on the Famous Faces test I had trouble with anyone less memorable than, say, Barack Obama.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Gitboard – React-Based Kanban Board for GitHub - <AUTHOR> https://adewes.github.io/gitboard/index.html <comment><USER2> Any reason why you didn't build an integration with Trello or other kanban- like apps out there with a public API? This is an honest question.</comment>


Dear Facebook, why are Facebook Comments so unremittingly terrible? - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2016/04/09/dear-facebook-why-are-facebook-comments-so-unremittingly-terrible/ <comment><AUTHOR> If I don't like a friends comments, I unfriend them. What is this "comment spam" of which they speak?</comment>


Archaeology meets particle physics - <AUTHOR> http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/archaeology-meets-particle-physics <comment><USER2> Folks interested in this unusual combination may also be interested in the use of particle tracks to date geological samples

> "Techniques for geological dating of minerals by chemical etching of fission > fragment tracks"

> > [http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/00167037649...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0016703764900171)

and the even more surprising case of using ancient rocks as particle detectors with extremely large exposure times (> 1B yr)

> "Unique Signature of Dark Matter in Ancient Mica"

> [https://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9701215](https://arxiv.org/abs/astro- > ph/9701215)

</comment><comment><USER3> Only works for hills?

<comment><USER4> For surface objects, there is at least [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface_exposure_dating](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface_exposure_dating)</comment></comment>