In the Future Movie Stars May Be Performing Even After They're Dead - happy-go-lucky https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2018/03/05/590238807/in-the-future-movie-stars-may-be-performing-even-after-their-dead <comment><AUTHOR> More like they'll create faces and bodies that are more attractive and sell more tickets than people they'd need to pay.

And they'll create algorithms to animate emotions more accurately and creatively so they won't need living actors on which to paste the simulations.

Or maybe each viewer can choose which face and body they see, at least on home viewing, and software can put on the likeness you want each time.

Why would they depend on people if they can simulate more attractive and expressive?

<comment><USER2> Perhaps that is as it should be. Perhaps it will help even out celebrities' contribution to the asymmetric distribution of power and influence we're experiencing in the world today.

<comment><USER3> This is an interesting comment. I don't disagree with the statement that there is 'asymmetric distribution of power and influence... in the world today' but am interested to hear more about why you think celebrities contribute to this.

My own world-view doesn't account for much celebrity contribution, apparently.

<comment><USER2> Obviously my personal opinion, but since you asked:

1\. Celebrities receive preferential treatment within the legal and bureaucratic system

2\. Celebrities often have both public appeal and wealth -- two important ingredients for wielding political influence

3\. Less importantly, celebrities absorb a high proportion of media attention compared to issues of importance

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I can recommend the movie "The Congress" \- [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Congress_(2013_film)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Congress_\(2013_film\)) \- it deals with an actress who sells off the right to her digital likeness.

<comment><USER5> Well, some of it does. Then the rest is a trippy psychodelic dream about....something.

But, at least in theory, it's based on a book by Stanislaw Lem under the same title - and I can certainly recommend that one(I can recommend all of his books, to be honest).

<comment><USER6> That "something" is the pharmaceutical companies and Hollywood studios colluding with the government to create a synthetic reality where everyone can "be a star" as long as they stay on the free government drugs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> In the future we may see likenesses of actors perform again after they're dead.

That's such an important distinction. It's true that an actor's appearance is one of their most memorable traits, but its not the sum of their accomplishments. Acting is a skill.

I'm not and never have been an actor, but I was impressed with Wil Wheaton, when he detailed on his blog how he prepared for auditions, the choices he would make about how to approach a particular scene. That level of thought, and experience will be lost forever when an actor dies.

With technology, we may see the likeness of a particular actor again, but we'll never again see their particular like.

<comment><USER8> Well it's also about characters which are portrayed by the actors, sometimes just replacing an actor is kind of invasive and almost an injustice to the fans despite circumstances. I do agree with you, some actors you truly cannot replace.

<comment><USER9> Spartacus is a TV show that did it respectfully and sucessfully IMO. Do you have an example of a show or movie where it was a complete disaster?

<comment><USER8> Not off the top of my head, I'm just thinking of some of the crazy fan bases I see where they freak out when a character is killed off, I can't imagine if an actor / actress is replaced. Maybe indirectly Doctor Who is a sort of example? Some people don't like some Doctors while they like other Doctors, or they only liked x Doctor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> More to the point, contracts need to be written so that the likeness of an actor remains in their control -- or else movie stars will be "performing" while still alive, and not being compensated.

This is akin to a book contract not defining "out of print". First we'll need contracts, then maybe we'll get laws.

<comment><USER11> Surely there must already exist some legal protections? I seem to recall certain professional (football? basketball?) players successfully suing EA Games over unauthorized use of their likeness.

<comment><USER12> It was NCAA athletes that sued EA games. ([https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/09/ea...](https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/09/ea- sports-settle-lawsuit-over-using-college-athletes-its-video-games/310522/))

<comment><USER6> The distinction is it was NCAA as a whole, acting as a single legal entity. The individual athletes were/are powerless against the wealth EA can throw at their legal team.

<comment><USER12> >Essentially each player who has appeared in the football and basketball games marketed by EA in the last decade -- approximately 125,000 men -- are eligible for settlement money. ([https://www.cbssports.com/college-football/news/ea- sports-se...](https://www.cbssports.com/college-football/news/ea-sports- settles-suits-thousands-of-players-eligible-for-money/))

In this case, it was clearly not the NCAA as a whole. The NCAA was against the case because it would mean athletes being paid.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Cool. One of the sci-fi things I really want to see is NEal Sephenson's Ractives, from The Diamond Age:

 _A term (short for "interactive") used by Neal Stephenson to describe a form of elite interactive entertainment, in which a live human performer (a "'ractor") working from a computer-provided script, improvises in real-time with paying customers, over a virtual reality network. This imaginary genre, a cross between improvisational theatre, interactive fiction, and mass- entertainment such as TV, features prominently in Stephenson's novel The Diamond Age, or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer._ [0]

[0]: [http://www.ifwiki.org/index.php/Ractive](http://www.ifwiki.org/index.php/Ractive)

<comment><USER14> I personally am trying to build the primer. :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Interestingly, although the title talks about "performing after they're dead," it opens with the example of Sean Young, who is still alive. That's the other aspect of this technology, continuing roles as actor's age. Arnold Shwarzenegger could continue to crank out Terminator films, looking no different than the first film. Harrison Ford could continue to play Indiana Jones. Why not let the studios use your likeness as you get too old to play the part or play all of the scenes>

I'd be worried about greedy estates, too; licensing the actor's likeness.

<comment><USER15> It's already started, Arnie's recent Terminator appearance(s?) was pure CGI.

<comment><USER9> In both cases "Arnie" was quickly blown off the endoskeleton revealing the robot underneath.

"Peter Cushing" had a substantial role in a recent Star Wars film. I'm still not sure how I feel about it.

<comment><USER15> The technique behind deepfakes will rapidly improve the quality of CGI actor re-skins. One of the early (safe-for-work) demonstrations was a recreation of young Princess Leia's scenes in Rogue One, which was arguably higher quality than the film studio's best efforts despite being the work of a lone hobbyist.

Completely fabricating an actor in CGI will still look weird, but using a stunt double / character actor and transferring a big-name actor's appearance onto them is rapidly becoming faster and cheaper.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> There is no doubt about this becoming a reality, it's already a reality as others have pointed out.

What is interesting is that people don't really grok how close to a reality crash we as humans are. What I mean by this is our ability to sense the real world accurately is becoming more and more degraded as our ability to augment reality grows.

I heard this as an analogy somewhere: imagine a rudimentary self driving car approaching the brow of a hill when it crashes with a semi truck. Investigators try to figure out why. From the data the car logged they find that the car's sensors did not see the truck trailer because it was the same colour as the sky, so it just kept going.

Humans are persistently working on fooling our senses to the point where we can't distinguish what is traditional physical consensus reality and what is generated relative/personal reality. We are striving toward the goal where our imagined worlds are indistinguishable from the outside world, and _when_ we achieve this we will be dealing with a profound reality collision.

Not knowing, and not being able to know, if you are interacting with a real human, or what it really means to be a 'real' human is going to be something I don't think anyone is ready to deal with. Forget the post-truth nature of today's society conjured up by data-overload and attention deficit, tomorrow's world will be post-reality. Crazy times ahead of us.

</comment><comment><USER17> I'd love to see a captain Kirk, Spock or McCoy again digitally tacked on actors who really know how to act at the character. While not the same I really liked the cross-overs like Generations, Relics or Unification. Perhaps they can or will make an appearance in Star Trek Discovery. As William Shatner is still living, he could act the same way as the actress who acted Rachel in the new Bladerunner. Who is the better Kirk, the Kirk alternate Chris Pine or the digitally recreated Kirk played by Shatner?

</comment><comment><USER18> Like Philip Seymour Hoffman in the last part of Hunger Games?

[https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/nov/17/philip- seymour-...](https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/nov/17/philip-seymour- hoffman-hunger-games-mockingjay-2-paul-walker)

</comment><comment><USER19> Yeah, I think I knew this 30 years ago...

Something more interesting to think about is how anyone could become a movie star.

[http://h4labs.org/in-the-future-anyone-can-become-a-movie- st...](http://h4labs.org/in-the-future-anyone-can-become-a-movie-star/)

</comment><comment><USER20> Things were a lot simpler back in the day.

When Bela Lugosi died during filming of 'Plan 9 from outer space', Ed Wood simply had some other actor step in for him, even though there's no likeness whatsoever. (Then again, who looked like Bela Lugosi except Bela Lugosi...)

<comment><USER21> Did other directors at the time also do this? I wouldn't consider what Wood did to be a good indicator of the industry in general.

<comment><USER22> Not "at the time", but Terry Gilliam did this in _The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus_ after Heath Ledger's death.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The movie Simone [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simone_(2002_film)is](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simone_\(2002_film\)is) about a producer that invented a digital actress.

</comment><comment><USER24> Or the future is more like in Japan, where Hatsune Miku, "Future Sound", a Vocaloid-based anime hologram is selling out concerts, and has more followers than "regular humans". The fans like lack of drama as well.

</comment><comment><USER25> I suspect these models will actually be used for extremely mundane "acting" gigs like commercials hocking falafel in Memphis TN or being a smartphone personal assistant, rather than the aspired A-list movies.

</comment><comment> d--b Well, as the article says it's not the future at all, it's already there... It's neither surprising nor is it a problem. Movies are about making images, it's all fake anyways...

</comment><comment><USER26> I find it strange how the headline says "in the future" and "may," when this is already happening and the article thoroughly discusses that.

</comment><comment><USER27> Why movie stars?

The stars themselves are the product of scarcity.

You could just remix anything with anything. Just like Wikipedia.

</comment><comment><USER28> There was the whole Tupac ghost concert thing. Kinda creepy.</comment>


How to Contribute to Open Source without Being a Programming Rock Star - <AUTHOR> http://blog.smartbear.com/software-quality/bid/167051/14-Ways-to-Contribute-to-Open-Source-without-Being-a-Programming-Genius-or-a-Rock-Star

<comment><USER2> One thing I've learned about contributing to open source is that it's primarily a social achievement.

If I see a developer who has contributed to many oss projects, I don't think "wow this guy must be a great programmer", I think "this guy must have great communication/people skills".

Often (especially with popular oss projects such as apache, python, firefox), you can fix a bug, add it to the ticket tracker, and it'll just sit there and rot. Every day people fix bugs and upload patches. You have to contact someone and sweet talk them into merging your fix.

<comment><USER3> You make a good point. For those just getting their feet wet with Open Source projects it makes sense to start first with a smaller yet active project.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Just a reminder:

> If the original title begins with a number or number + gratuitous adjective, > we'd appreciate it if you'd crop it. E.g. translate "10 Ways To Do X" to > "How To Do X," and "14 Amazing Ys" to "Ys." Exception: when the number is > meaningful, e.g. "The 5 Platonic Solids."

<http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry about that, folks. I'll keep that in mind for all future posts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is a good guide for a starter, but doesn't address dealing with rock stars themselves, which is what's required if your contribution is going to be merged.

And _that_ usually requires the skin of a pachyderm, and the patience of a fox. The reality of today is that the world idolizes idols. Idols in turn become arrogant. Their worst trait is belittling others' contributions - especially when they're better than the rock star could've done.

I have no solution. I'm pointing out what I see as an omission from an otherwise useful post.

</comment><comment><USER6> Something I think that's interesting and too often overlooked is that even non-programmers can provide lots of help to Open Source projects, sometimes the help they can provide can be critical to the project's success.

What kind of things? Everything from sane documentation to artwork is open and in need of _lots_ of help in many projects.

</comment><comment><USER7> This post didn't mention internationalization, localization, and translation. Maybe because it was targeted to English speaking people?

Here in Korea, a lot (probably majority) of people who contribute to open source started from i18n, l10n, and translation.

</comment><comment><USER8> Thanks for this. When I was first getting into programming, people would tell me and others like myself to "go contribute to open source projects". I don't think they realized just how daunting and impossible that seemed to us at the time. To be honest, none of us even knew where to begin.

<comment><USER9> 1\. Find a project you like 2. Spend a weeks looking at the code

The daunting part is the time commitment.

<comment><USER10> This. You invest in a project and find out with your first merge the maintainers are assholes and toss out fine commits. I've seen that happen a bunch. It is why there are so many freaking forks, and a lot of them end up atrophying because one person can't recreate an ecosystem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> In the same area, OpenHatch[1] seems very nice. From their own landing page:

 _OpenHatch is a non-profit dedicated to matching prospective free software contributors with communities, tools, and education._

[1] <http://www.openhatch.org>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I love seeing the great discussion that this started (both positive and negative feedback). Thanks everyone for turning the post itself into an open source project.

</comment><comment><USER12> How about contributing to Open Source by helping write the documentation for projects? Properly documented projects go a long way in helping developers get recognition and notice.

I, myself, have begun more thoroughly documenting projects, not only for my sake but for everyone else that comes along. I find that this book helped me get up to speed quickly: [http://www.amazon.com/The-Elements-Style-4th- Edition/dp/0205...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Elements-Style-4th- Edition/dp/0205313426/?_encoding=UTF8&keywords=Elements%20of%20style&tag=produc05-20&linkCode=ur2&qid=1356985769&camp=1789&sr=8-1&creative=9325)

</comment><comment><USER13> Awesome post but instead of writing a program to move all the tickets over, a better suggestion would be to follow Joel's advice (<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2012/07/09.html>) and get rid of that clutter. I can almost guarantee you most of those tickets were useless, completed, or irrelevant.

<comment><USER14> I'm the author of the article, and throwing away the tickets was suggested many times by different people.

We had a pretty big discussion in #parrot about the value of this ticket set. People on the project plowed through the Trac database and closed tickets, and even with that we still hundreds that tracked all sorts of development. Many were bug reports, and many were effectively to-do items, and many were bug reports that had been resolved but still couldn't be closed for various reasons, such as needing an automated test to verify it.

It's nice to start over clean, but sometimes there's too much baby with the bathwater.

<comment><USER13> Sounds like you guys did your due diligence. In that case, of course, writing the app to move them over is the right choice.

Thank you for the article, BTW. It may be obvious to some but not to most. Especially contributing to documentation. I'd say that most open source projects can benefit more from that than from new features ... and maybe even most bug-fixes, depending on severity.

<comment><USER14> I'm glad you liked the article, and it seems to have struck a chord. One of the things I've found very handy is that I now have a place to point people on, say, StackOverflow when someone asks "How do I get started in open source?" I started 89starts.com as an offshoot of the article, but I haven't yet gotten it ready for prime time.

Agreed about documentation, and at the top of my to-do list for today is making final edits to another article for them on open source documentation. Should be out in a week or two I think.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Visualize Randomness in OCaml - <AUTHOR> http://typeocaml.com/2015/11/22/visualise_random/ <comment><USER2> 3d scatterplots dramatically visualize the flaws in the infamous RANDU: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RANDU](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RANDU)

</comment><comment> Ono-Sendai Don't use jpeg format for this stuff, you'll end up just looking at blocking artifacts. Use PNG.

<comment><AUTHOR> Can I know why?

<comment> Ono-Sendai The way JPEG works is by dividing up the image into 8x8 pixel blocks, then transforming each block using the discrete cosine transform (DCT). If you look closely at a JPEG file, especially at low quality settings, you can see the edges of the blocks. This means that artifacts have been introduced during the compression of the image. PNG however, is a lossless image compression format, meaning that no artifacts will be introduced by saving and loading an image in PNG.

<comment><AUTHOR> Just tried, but seems not that different

\</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>----

PNG:

[https://raw.githubusercontent.com/MassD/typeocaml_code/maste...](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/MassD/typeocaml_code/master/visualise_randomness/random_plot_time.png)

\</comment><comment></comment><comment>-

JPG:

[https://raw.githubusercontent.com/MassD/typeocaml_code/maste...](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/MassD/typeocaml_code/master/visualise_randomness/random_plot_time.jpg)

<comment> Ono-Sendai You have a very high quality JPEG in this case, even bigger than the PNG. So there aren't visible artifacts in this case. It's more of a general principle.

<comment><AUTHOR> But anyway, I updated teh post, so people could be aware of this diff.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Generate command-lines in Python using YAML or JSON files - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/fmenabe/python-clg

<comment><USER2> This is really neat. I do prefer cmdline configurations in a separate file, much easy to visualize and modify. Great that someone got the time to make this.</comment>


Proprioception: The Silent "Sixth" Sense - <AUTHOR> https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/11/22/20920762/proprioception-sixth-sense <comment><USER2> The way we learn about the five senses in elementary school bugs me. It is presented as this absolute fact and has become completely culturally embedded.

Some may argue proprioception is provided by touch, but by the same light smell and taste are inextricably linked.

We can also sense heat and humidity to some extent, we have some of the mechanisms needed to sense magnetic fields, but no compelling evidence (to my understanding) exists that demonstrates that we can.

It's just one of those things thats much fuzzier than we think

Many things that we are taught in elementary school have this property

<comment><USER3> Even "touch" as a sense makes no sense. Feeling pressure and feeling heat exchange are completely different senses. In addition to that there's obviously a kind of pain felt by the skin that is neither extreme pressure nor a temperature extreme but an indicator of skin damage.

Then there's proprioception as mentioned in the article, the sense of balance/acceleration as measured in our ears, and together with smell, sound, taste and sight we are already at 9 senses.

And as you mention many of the things we actually perceive are derived from many senses. The "taste" of a steak is a mix of smell and taste, your balance is a mix of sight and your acceleration, temperature is something we can't actually fell but can derive from how much heat enters or leaves our body, "pain" is a giant category spanning nearly all senses, etc.

<comment><USER4> We also have speed cells, boundary cells, place cells, grid cells... some of our senses might not be auxiliary or primary but rely on another sense which mediates them.

But your body keeps track of its speed and location in any environment regardless of if your senses are impaired (grid cells and place cells rely not only on sight but information gathered from speed and head direction cells), which is as much of a sense as proprioception. We don't even have a word for this, I think. Locoception, perhaps? Posiception? Only two Latin roots I know which fit.

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

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

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

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

<comment><USER5> "We don't even have a word for this". Isn't it just spatial frequency?

<comment><USER4> The innate sense of where you are in relation to yourself is proprioception.

The innate sense of where you are in relation to your environment is... spatial frequency?

That doesn't sound right.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Humans have more than the commonly cited five senses. The number of senses > in various categorizations ranges from five to more than 20. In addition to > sight, smell, taste, touch, and hearing, which were the senses identified by > Aristotle, humans can sense balance and acceleration (equilibrioception), > pain (nociception), body and limb position (proprioception or kinesthetic > sense), and relative temperature (thermoception). Other senses sometimes > identified are the sense of time, echolocation, itching, pressure, hunger, > thirst, fullness of the stomach, need to urinate, need to defecate, and > blood carbon dioxide (CO₂) levels.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_misconceptions#...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_misconceptions#Senses)

</comment><comment><USER7> I think proprioception is also part of the secret to 'athleticism', which is kind of a vague hand-wavey concept but also a very real one (speaking as someone with no natural athleticism myself). Being able to intuitively understand where your body is in space & how to react/move it in the moment is a hidden part of being an athlete, whereas conventional analysis usually just focuses on strength/speed/explosiveness.

I also think there's a very strong cognitive/information processing in the moment aspect to athleticism as well- a general CPU motor that coordinates the speed, strength, proprioception etc. together in the moment. (Another aspect that I noticed I lacked growing up compared to others in sports)

<comment><USER8> I don't think it's a hidden skill in the context of sports, because it's a baseline that almost every athlete has.

I think it's a huge myth to think of athleticism as a talent and not a skill that can be trained. It's absolutely a skill - my wife was pretty uncoordinated when we met - she never really played much sport or did many outdoorsy activities. She just assumed she was uncoordinated, but after about a year of lifting weights, she's found that her balance and coordination have improved tremendously. She doesn't stumble when walking as much, she's better at doing things like catching stuff out of the air, and she's more aware of where her body is in space - she doesn't bump into things as much.

<comment><USER7> Athleticism is absolutely an inborn talent. It certainly can be developed, but just look at any sport where all of the participants started at the same age in life and all received roughly the same number of repetitions/practices- there are logarithmic differences in ability. If we all started playing basketball at age 7 and all went to the same number of practices, by 18 there are just massive, massive differences between different players.

Frankly, this is true of literally every field. Like, imagine we all started in programming at age 10 and all received the same level of instruction- by age 20 there are again just huge, huge differences between where people are at ability-wise. It's unfair and doesn't fit into a lot of meritocratic 'just work hard and you'll end up at the top!' narratives (which are especially popular in the US), but it's sadly true

<comment><USER9> > If we all started playing basketball at age 7 and all went > to the same > number of practices, by 18 there are just > massive, massive differences > between different players.

Those differences come from a lot of places, not least that the people who ended up on the better end of the stick almost certainly found every opportunity they could to play basketball outside of practice.

My sister and I both played sports and learned about computers in school. She spent lots of her spare time after school and on weekends shooting baskets in the driveway. I spent that time messing around on computers and taking things apart. Any guesses which of us ended up the better athlete and which the better engineer?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> reminds me of a story in "the man who mistook his wife for a hat" by Oliver Sacks, an amazing collection of harrowing psychological tales, where one of his patients–a computer programmer!–has a dream where she can no longer control her limbs, and when she wakes it has somehow come true.

[https://www.litcharts.com/lit/the-man-who-mistook-his- wife-f...](https://www.litcharts.com/lit/the-man-who-mistook-his-wife-for-a- hat/part-1-chapter-3-the-disembodied-lady)

<comment><USER11> Did anyone figure out why this happened? I wonder if this would feel similar to when you sit awkwardly and your leg goes numb - it kind of feels like you're just walking on your bone. Trying to walk with a leg that's 'asleep' is quite a challenge.

<comment><USER12> I used to have that. It seems that it was the cat, laying on top of the covers. I would try to move in my sleep and be unable to, because I was moving with very little force, and it wasn't enough to overcome the cat. But I'd feel this as my limbs not responding to me. What a horrible feeling!

It quit happening to me once the cat died.

<comment><USER13> Sounds like sleep paralysis: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_paralysis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_paralysis)

Happened to me a couple times, but it's been like 15 years since.

<comment><USER11> Happened to me a ton as a kid. Now maybe I only get it once every few years. A long time ago I learned I could 'exit' sleep paralysis, and after that I actually began to enjoy it and not try to immediately exit it - it's like lucid dreaming but you're totally aware of the world around you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I recently stumbled on painscience.com blog. It is a great resource to understand pain and be able to live with it.

[https://www.painscience.com/articles/central- sensitization.p...](https://www.painscience.com/articles/central- sensitization.php)

Physical therapy involves a lot of proprioception retraining that is lost due to injury, surgery or inactivity.

[https://www.painscience.com/articles/sixth- sense.php](https://www.painscience.com/articles/sixth-sense.php)

</comment><comment><USER15> I made a minor personal discovery recently along these lines and would love to hear from others here if they can reproduce it: I can "see" my hands with my eyes closed. That is, if I hold my hands out in front of my face with my eyes closed, I can see a faint image of them in the eigengrau. Further, if I then move my hands outside of my normal field of vision, (say, to my side) the image persists; I can "see" them outside my normal field of vision. While this effect is strongest for my hands, it does extend somewhat to my legs and feet if I pay extra attention.

I'm curious if others can reproduce this for themselves?

My hypothesis is that the visual areas of the brain can get involved when the eyes are closed, and can pick up and interpret the proprioceptive information spatially. It may be that it's always happening, but that the "image" of one's hands is swamped by visual data when the eyes are open. Another hypothesis, I suppose, is that the visual expectation of the hands may be registering or, rather, its absence. You're "seeing" the expectation of the hands that should be there, but are blocked by your eyelids.

I should say that the sensation of seeing the hands is pretty fine, extending to the motions of the fingers. That said, it's easy enough to lose the image or forget it is there.

<comment><USER16> Funny, a few comments above, before reading yours I experienced exactly that.

I closed my eyes in the dark and tried to touch my two index fingers together in random places instead of just pointing at my nose. Can confirm that I also "see" the position of hands and fingers.

I think what we "see" is mostly out brains doing spatial reasoning and using part of the same systems as used for visual perception.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> is proprioception really a sense or just the persistence of spatial info in our short term memory gathered from our senses of touch and sight? If I touch something several times with my eyes open then try it with my eyes closed, I can touch it again because I still remember where it was.

Is there some way a human can be said to propriocept things that they neither saw nor touched?

<comment><USER18> _All_ your senses are constructed out of more basic sensory inputs and presented to the rest of your brain as higher-level abstractions. Hearing, for example, doesn't just present the raw noises being heard, but also yields a best-guess about the direction and distance of noise sources, and you can argue that the audio-location function should technically be a separate "sense".

Proprioception being an abstraction over touch and sight data that generates awareness of how your body is arranged in space is a sense in the same manner. And you can definitely get proprioception over more than your own body - partner dancers will _quickly_ develop a felt sense of how their dance partner's body is moving, as well.

<comment><USER19> As a tango dancer I can relate to feeling the position of my partner while dancing. Even weirder is that I can feel my car while driving and if I rent another car it takes me a while until I can also feel this other car as a part of myself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> _" The feeling is as hard to imagine as it is to describe. "It's as if you had a blindfold and somebody turned you several times, and then you're asked to go in a direction. The first few seconds, you don't know what direction you're going in." Pure disorientation."_

I think might other ways to approximate this. Try lying completely still in bed at night in the dark for 10 minutes or so... after a while you might have trouble knowing exactly how your limbs are positioned (unless, of course, you make a mental note of just how they were positioned when you first laid down, or kept your attention focused on that all along, but if you think of something else, then ten minutes later think about the position of your limbs, you might have trouble). The key in the above exercise is not feeling anything in your limbs that could give you a cluse as to where they're positioned. This makes me wonder if we need some kind of periodic kinesthetic or viseo- kinesthetic calibration to keep our sense of proprioception functioning well.

Psychedelic drugs could also impact our sense of proprioception, as they can just about everything else about our experience. Being in a floation/isolation tank could likewise affect it.

Something else I wonder about lack of proprioception is at all related to the problem some people have of telling right from left.

</comment><comment><USER21> The article title and headline sentence confuse the reader.

Proprioception is an interesting and exciting mental process that is important to artistic expression, human growth, mental development, and cultural communication.

Whew. The opera "Nixon in China" has an embedded ballet. The embedded ballet has the uncanny property that in a few minutes it retells the entire story of the opera.

Why is ballet so expressive? Why does the nation of Russia need ballet? Notice on youtube, the Russian dancers are extraordinary. A prima ballerina who came to New York, drew comments that "She dances in Russian." And the untutored viewer could see it too. The nation devotes considerable resources to the art.

What is happening when 1st through 5th graders in an American Elementary school run around and scream at the beginning of the school year? Were they running around to generate huge amounts of propriaceptive signals to the brain? Is the screaming part of the brain sending motor control signals every which way?

Finally, why do opera singers stand up to sing? Except when they are dying or portraying a special propriaceptive statement like kneeling (to pray or be beheaded).

</comment><comment><USER22> Try this fun experiment yourself:

On some long sidewalk (with no hazards on either side) or on a field, find any visible point 20-30 feet straight ahead of you, like a crack in the sidewalk or a leaf, whatever. Now look at it for just a moment (only takes a second or two to imprint its location) and close your eyes. Start walking towards that spot (no peeking), and stop when you think your foot is over the target. You will be shocked at how accurately you estimated the walking distance, and how your body very strongly senses when you've reached the spot. Almost 10 out of 10 times, my foot is perfectly centered over the target (modulo some lateral movement from not walking perfectly straight).

For me, I can somehow "physically" feel when it's close, I can feel when I'm over it, and I can feel when I've gone too far.

</comment><comment><USER23> Alcohol throws off proprioception, which is why it's tested for as part of field sobriety tests, e.g. touch your finger to your nose. Similar decreased capabilities are also one of the reasons why someone getting hypothermic will often start to have an unsteady gait.

<comment><USER24> I had to re-learn my alcohol limit a few years into martial arts. Turns out I was using the decline of proprioception as a marker for 'last beverage' and the training pushed that to the right. Got a few hangovers before I sorted it out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Much like optical illusions, there are proprioceptive illusions. The simplest yet most amazing to me is the rubber hand illusion, where you can trick your brain into feeling proprioception of an inanimate object. I highly encourage you to find a friend and try it out:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_transfer_illusion#Rubber_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_transfer_illusion#Rubber_hand_illusion)

</comment><comment><USER26> I find this interesting as I had a somewhat opposite experience when I tried a dark restaurant when visiting Berlin (eating in complete darkness). It was surprisingly rest to relocate utensils and my glass of beer, as I went back and forth between them, stopping and raining to eat.

Of course, the room wasn't empty and void other sounds, which may have helped me build a general sense of direction and thereby helped me.

</comment><comment><USER27> This is a fascinating article. I never realized all the complications involved in propriception and touch.

</comment><comment><USER28> TL;DR; people with reduced sense of touch have major troubles controlling their bodies unless they see them (own interpretation: due to the lack of feedback on movement). There is a rare genetic condition.

There is no other sense involved, it is the same touch sense, but internal.</comment>


FSF gives freedom-respecting videoconferencing to all associate members - <AUTHOR> https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/fsf-gives-freedom-respecting-videoconferencing-to-all-associate-members <comment><USER2> Jitsi Meet works really well. I set up an instance on my server for my church to use instead of Zoom. I needed to change the ports it uses, since I have another web server running (I'm pretty sure that's where I went wrong when I tried to set it up the first time). I also needed to disable it from directing mobile browsers to the app, instead of just going to the meeting in-browser.

</comment><comment><USER3> > The platform we use to offer ethical videoconferencing access is Jitsi Meet. > We used it previously to stream and record our annual LibrePlanet conference > for an online audience after the COVID-19 pandemic forced us to cancel the > in-person event. Choosing Jitsi Meet is only the first step to addressing > the problems posed to user freedom by services like Zoom and Facebook. Even > users that start a call via a server running Jitsi could still be vulnerable > if that server depends on or shares information with third parties. The FSF > made changes to the code we are running, in order to enhance privacy and > software freedom, and published the source code, to motivate others to host > their own instances. The FSF instance does not use any third party servers > for network initialization, and does not recommend or link to any > potentially problematic services.

Curious what code changes the FSF made to their copy of Jitsi Meet. Is anyone able to report on this?

</comment><comment><USER4> Good move, FSF. Do they have other similar offerings? A chat service, say?

<comment><USER5> [https://www.fsf.org/associate/benefits](https://www.fsf.org/associate/benefits)

<comment><USER4> Thanks. Relevant username, I see. Looks like the Jitsi service is the only one that allows you to communicate privately with friends who aren't FSF associate members.</comment></comment></comment>


Building scalable serverless solutions with IBM Bluemix OpenWhisk - <AUTHOR> IBM just announced its new event-action platform IBM Bluemix OpenWhisk, an event-driven programming model for cloud-native application development that allows it to execute code in response to events.
OpenWhisk propagates a serverless deployment and operations model hiding infrastructural complexity to allow users to focus on providing the code to be executed. It provides a fair pricing model at any scale where the platform provides exactly the resources being needed and where users are only charged for code running.
OpenWhisk helps to focus on developing value-adding code instead of worrying about low-level details. It hides complexity and allows users to develop highly scalable solutions.
It provides a flexible programming environment that allows to develop in different languages like NodeJS and Swift to reuse skills and to develop in a fit-for-purpose fashion. It even allows for the execution of custom logic via docker container. OpenWhisk also eases access to the diverse Bluemix ecosystem comprised of services from different domains. Due to the importance of providing access to an open service ecosystem it has been made available as open-source encouraging others to participate to accelerate development and to help building such an ecosystem of building blocks that can then be stitched together easily. OpenWhisk provides powerful tools to interconnect and even chain these building blocks without the need to touch the actual building blocks' code. With OpenWhisk building blocks that have been created in the past can even be shared to foster reuse and to avoid teams doing duplicate work. OpenWhisk can also be used by mobile developers that want to outsource compute intensive tasks to a scalable cloud platform. It eases this easy by providing mobile SDKs and by supporting languages like Swift even on server-side.
Learn more at https://developer.ibm.com/openwhisk/ or sign-up for the experimental program at https://new-console.ng.bluemix.net/openwhisk/ <comment><USER2> Source on GitHub: [https://github.com/openwhisk/openwhisk](https://github.com/openwhisk/openwhisk)</comment>


Ask HN: How to come out of this situation? - <AUTHOR>

Hello entrepreneurs and hackers. I have screwed my career big time. I am in mid 30s and I am penniless literally. After completing bachelors degree in CS from university, I started masters. Had to drop out due to illness. Joined a company after a year. Company paid low salary. And lot of politics in the company. After 2 years just when things were improving, mainly the salary, I left as I hated that political environment. Started consulting and did that for many years. I earned enough to pay bills but nothing at all for medical and retirement so far. I believe I didn't have necessary (business) skills for running successful business so I couldn't make good money though I made clients happy. Now my gf left me as her company offered her a good role and huge salary. She thinks I am a loser. And may be she is right. All my fault. So, here I am - no money, no house, no car, no wife, no savings. Totally f4d. As you guys are among the most intelligent ones on the planet, I thought you guys could help me with a bit of your wisdom. If you were in my shoes, what would you have done to fix things? I don't have ego problem. So, even if you are half my age, please don't hesitate to post your advice. Thank you all in advance. <comment><USER3> Most folks in your position have a hard time solving their problems because they collectively seem overwhelming.

You are employable, and have no difficult responsibilities (kids, debt, etc), so honestly you are not in a bad position. Also, if you have not considered moving, I would. Psychologically it can make a huge difference to feel like you are starting over, somewhere new. If that seems hard, remember you can always move back. And don't let yourself come up with excuses for why it wouldn't work: it can work.

Write down the problem you want to solve first. Say, getting stable employment.

For this problem, write down a few optimal outcomes. For each outcome, write down what you would advise someone to do to accomplish it. For example, "I want to move to Seattle and get a job at Amazon" (or whatever). Now write down what you would recommend: "Research Seattle; Find acquaintances there; Figure out Amazon's job positions; Social engineer your way into talking to an Amazon employee (probably not hard on this site); Convince them that you would be a good engineer for them".

Now the hard part: Follow your own advice from above. Wake up every day, and step-by-step work towards your goal. If you are worried you cannot, find someone to make you accountable (parents, etc) that you can talk to about it.

Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER4> I know it's tough to look on the bright-side, but consider this.

You're in your mid-30s, no house, no car, no wife and experience in one of the most saught after and well paying professions in the world! Nothing holding you back from living the dream.

You've got money coming in from your consulting gig, but maybe that isn't what you want to do. You've got a good grasp of the english language, but you mention 'nothing put away for medical', so I assume you're in the USA. I'm also assuming, since you're on HackerNews, that you're interested in start-ups and working on cool tech.

I've got many friends from different parts of the world who would die to be in your shoes. If I wanted to move to the US, I'd be dying to be in your shoes too.

If you're not in one of the tech-hubs now, why not move? It costs too much to move? Companies will pay your moving expensive. Moving to a new city is hard? You bet it is, I've done it twice in the last two years, but what have you got to loose. You can be miserable where you are, or miserable somewhere else.

</comment><comment><USER5> You are only a loser if you think so yourself, but don't worry. You are a winner! Like stated out, it comes out clear that you have a great set of professional experiences so getting yourself a decent job should not be a problem in my opinion.

I recently started reading How to win friends and influence people[1], by Dale Carnegie and already after 4 chapters it has changed how I think about how I interact with people. Get yourself a copy of this book and read it.

[1]: [http://www.amazon.com/How-Win-Friends-Influence- People/dp/06...](http://www.amazon.com/How-Win-Friends-Influence- People/dp/0671027034/)

</comment><comment><USER6> I don't think you're screwed.

I'm 32 and in debt (fortunately my country provides for healthcare and has mandatory retirement money set aside), and I'm in a company with a toxic environment (like you said your old one was).

Yet I don't think I'm in a bad position, and I don't think you are either - <USER2> others said: we're in a well paying profession, with almost no unemployment. You're not tied to a city either (no emotional attachments).

If you're making customers happy, I'm pretty sure you can make more money. A good and reliable consultant is worth it.

I'd take it as an opportunity to reshape my life and realize my goals (if you don't know what those are, to find them out :) ). If I were you, I'd use the opportunity to be adventurous. Do you like traveling and startups? There's for example Startup Chile - [http://startupchile.org/](http://startupchile.org/) .

You can travel with very little money by US standards too.

I'd try to meet people - is there a HN meetup or similar where you live? Meeting people face to face will probably help. Or if you have some kind of interest outside programming, meet other people that share those.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'll start with this. Fuck the past. You can have whatever life you want, now. I've known people who quickly turned their life around. When only a few weeks prior they were broke.

I think you have to change your mindset. If you think your life is terrible it's going to be terrible. Take things one small step at a time. As humans we're impatient and what to see immediate results. But that never works. It's more important to make consistent progress over time.

</comment><comment><USER8> I tend to think that Life is fair enough (to an extend) and the more effort and hard work you deposit, the better outcome you'd get. so, find a job in any organization you'd be ok working for, and work your a*s out and try to learn how others do it as well in the process.

</comment><comment><USER9> Where are you located? If you live in the Silicon Valley or you wouldn't mind moving there, contact me (my email is in my profile). I would love to chat.

</comment><comment><USER10> You gotta solve these problems one by one. Can you still code? Get a job at the highest salary you can find.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I code as part of my consulting work. In fact that is what I do a lot.</comment></comment>


That design is money - Designing ATM interface - <AUTHOR> http://physicalinterface.com/view/that-design-is-money <comment><USER2> The revised visual design is wonderful and clear (the check scanning process screen especially) and I'm sure the touchscreens will be a lot more pleasant to use.

However, I don't understand why they force the user to distinguish between depositing checks and cash. The scanner can tell the difference just fine I'm sure.

Actually, it'd be cool to not have to push a _deposit_ button at all – just start sliding checks in and it'd know I was depositing and switch to that mode.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think there is one thing still missing. Most people go to ATM to get cash. After entering my PIN, I don't want to press OK and see another menu to withdraw money. I want "Get $20" button right next to "OK" button for an option to withdraw money even quicker right after I entered my PIN.</comment>


Douglas Hofstadter: The Shallowness of Google Translate (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/01/the-shallowness-of-google-translate/551570/ <comment><USER2> > _that human translators may be an endangered species. In this scenario, > human translators would become, within a few years, mere quality controllers > and glitch fixers, rather than producers of fresh new text._

Huh? As someone who's worked in translation briefly before, that's _already the case_ and has been for at least a decade -- at least for written material that's not "art" (literature, poetry).

It's far faster for professional translators to run something through Google Translate or similar and then clean it up, than type it out from scratch. And identical quality in the end.

There's little "soul-shattering" about this at all. Someone who needs to churn out translations of UN meeting notes day after day isn't doing it for their soul -- they're doing it because it's their job and people of different nationalities can find out what happened in the meeting to do _their_ job.

<comment><USER3> That's true...people are lazy and costs want to fall, but it's a little disconcerting in areas that require nuance and detail.

I'm by no means a translator, but it isn't difficult for me to find sentences where Google Translate simply _butchers_ the nuance of Japanese/English conversions. Things like politeness and tone? Gone.

Maybe it's better for closer language pairs, but if a professional translator starts with automated translations for an important document, they're taking a huge risk. Even as an intermediate speaker, the things I am good at (concept understanding, idomatic speech, politeness, tone) are exactly the things that translation tools are bad at, and correcting the errors often just requires re-writing whole paragraphs from scratch.

<comment><USER4> Google Translate is spectacularly bad at Japanese/English. I received an email yesterday where someone who is visiting me said (in translation) that she was looking forward to eating "my rice" (proper translation: my food), which is such a basic thing I can't believe that Google still gets it wrong.

<comment><USER5> As a counter example, GT is surprisingly good at English to Russian translation: my sister's husband knows no Russian, but is able to participate in family iMessage chats with no issues. Most of the time I can't tell his messages have not been written by a native Russian speaker. He is able to fully participate in a written conversation. Mind boggling!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > _In this scenario, human translators would become, within a few years, mere > quality controllers and glitch fixers, rather than producers of fresh new > text. Such a development would cause a soul-shattering upheaval in my mental > life. Although I fully understand the fascination of trying to get machines > to translate well, I am not in the least eager to see human translators > replaced by inanimate machines. Indeed, the idea frightens and revolts me. > To my mind, translation is an incredibly subtle art that draws constantly on > one's many years of experience in life, and on one's creative imagination._

Well, there's another way to achieve the same effect, by turning anything written or spoken into such trivial BS, that any old translation will do.

When nuance is not appreciated or delivered, then you don't need to translate nuance. When literature is replaced by skimming online articles, there's no much nuance to begin with.

<comment><USER7> I don't think you're wrong and there is still many valid use cases for machine translation.

There are many situations where text should not be nuanced or contain subtlety, like business signage or instructions. It should be clear and direct, however people often want to convey frustration either actively or passively. Often people want to be playful around awkward or uncomfortable messaging. And there are times when they want to appear humble.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Shallowness is one obvious problem (obvious to any bilingual person). The more troubling problem I've noticed is that occasionally it's inexplicably outright wrong about basic things.

Anecdote time. One day in late 2017 (I remember that because of an event), a friend of mine read a Google-translated page in Chinese, and sent it to me (fluent in Chinese) because a statistics was "amazing". I looked at it, turned out Google translated 万, meaning "ten thousand", to "million". Of course the number was unbelievably good. I honestly couldn't think of how that happened.

<comment><USER9> I don't know about Chinese, but in Japanese, 万 is frequently used idiomatically in the same way we might in English use "a million"—just to mean "a whole hell of a lot."

<comment><USER8> You're right, except it was a statistic like 2.8万, translated to 2.8 million. Your take could point to a possible cause, though, maybe also putting it under the "shallow" category.

(Additionally, when 万 is used in Chinese to mean a whole lot, I would translate it to "thousands of" or "tens of thousands of".)

<comment><USER10> Myriad might be the perfect translation then. It comes from Greek for 10,000 and is now routinely used for "a lot" in English.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The trick is not to rely on Google translate for a finished translation, but to use it just as a tool toward reaching that goal.

As someone who is learning French these days, it is an absolute boon.

One of my favorite things is letting Google auto finish a sentence.... because those auto finished sentences usually tend to be phrases or constructs French speakers use a lot.

The other neat thing is that Google shows a check mark near a translation which it feels with high confidence is good — in my experiences those translations really are good and without fault.

<comment><AUTHOR> He addresses that:

>Let me return to that sad image of human translators, soon outdone and outmoded, gradually turning into nothing but quality controllers and text tweakers. That's a recipe for mediocrity at best. A serious artist doesn't start with a kitschy piece of error-ridden bilgewater and then patch it up here and there to produce a work of high art.

For somebody learning a language, they would be even more easily mislead.

<comment><USER12> It's faster than using a dictionary to look up words one-by-one, and Google's actually integrated a dictionary into the interface. And beginner sentences are well-represented in the corpus so they're relatively unlikely to mislead.

Using Google Translate for learning a language could be likened to using training wheels on a bike.

<comment><USER13> The training wheels dont randomly fall off of bikes. Either a great analogy counter to your point, or a terrible one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Did somebody say "shallow"?: [https://photos.app.goo.gl/wDy8TQR69iwuGUZb6](https://photos.app.goo.gl/wDy8TQR69iwuGUZb6)

<comment><USER15> _The intersection of a donkey and a horse is called a mule or a mule . The mule father is a donkey and the mother is a horse cat, while the mule father is a horse and the mother is a donkey cat. Both junctions are almost always sterile._

 _At the age of two, stallions are driven away from the herd and form their own herds by collecting oaks._

[https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https...](https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Ffi.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FAasi)

 _There are four species of wild deer in the wild: deer , wild deer , deer and white-tailed deer . Elk are by far the largest of these species. All species of Finnish deer are game animals . Despite its name, spruce deer do not belong to deer but to deer [2] [5] ._

 _It has also been referred to as the deer [4] [5], to distinguish it from the deer ( Cervinae ). The Mammalian Nomenclature Committee has proposed that the sub-tribe be renamed in Finnish to the goats ._

[https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=fi&tl=en&u=htt...](https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=fi&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Ffi.m.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FPeurat)

 _The subspecies of Canis aureus lupaster, previously defined as a subspecies of live cabbage in North Africa, originates from South Asian gray matter based on DNA analyzes published in 2011. [18] [19] The North American red wolf ( Rufus ) has also been the subject of scientific debate, for example as a cross between coyote and gray matter._

 _The same genus of wolves as the wolf canis is the goldfish, the warbler , the warbler , the Ethiopian wolf and the coyote , and the dingo , which is nowadays generally classified as a wolf subspecies._

 _The survival of young kittens depends a lot on how many adult wolves and babysitters remain in the herd._

 _Less than half of the wolf catching attempts are successful. A deer or a creepy male stuck in a threatening position is likely to survive, but the fugitive gets the wolves to his feet._

 _The wolf can carry loose pieces of pregnant mother and puppies in the nest or vomit the contents of their stomachs into the puppies._

 _In Central Finland, for example, the formation of new worms has been observed to have led to a reduction in foxes and raccoon dogs and, as a result, to an increase in woodland chicks. [40] This behavior, on the other hand, exposes wolves to infectious diseases in small beasts , especially the wardrobe ._

[https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=fi&tl=en&u=htt...](https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=fi&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Ffi.m.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FSusi)

 _Whales are also reared as fur animals, known as the blue fox._

 _The bean is most active in the twilight, when it comes up in search of food. Its main food is the fells and, to some extent, the moles . In years when small rodents are scarce, the bean has to deal with birds, their eggs and chicks, and berries and carrion, for example._

 _The situation of the species is particularly poor in Scandinavia and Finland. However, globally, the whale is not endangered. According to a report published in 2008, the stock of nuts is gradually gaining ground in the Nordic countries ._

 _In Finland, the whale is classified as extremely endangered . [5] As a popular fur animal , in the twentieth century, wild white fox was hunted almost extinct in Finland. Even in the early 20th century, the species was abundant in Lapland, and during the winter of 1908-1909, whales migrated all the way to the southern coast of the country._

 _Attempts have been made to improve the livelihood of Naal by hunting foxes and providing the nipples with nourishment and other food. [12] [13] In Norway and Sweden, dogfish are fed on dogfish, which has contributed to the growth of the stock. [7] The survival of nails is also hampered by the fact that they are no longer provided with enough reindeer kills for wolves and wolves._

[https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=fi&tl=en&u=htt...](https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=fi&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Ffi.m.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FNaali)

fi->en translations are so funny that I read them when I'm feeling down. Few other things make me laugh out loud so much.

Part of me hopes they never invent a better way to translate.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's like an algorithmic "English as she is spoke" :p

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'll equate this to being critical of any early technology as if no further development will happen.

Translation, good translation, is not easy. If it were, it would have been a solved problem years ago. And, yes, some languages pose more challenges than others.

I often have to write the same text in multiple languages. I usually write in English and use Google Translate to quickly generate a rough draft translation in other languages, say, Spanish. I then copy-paste the translation, proofread and edit. It is a huge time saver. Aside from not having to re-write the material, the cognitive load of the proofreading and editing process is significantly lower.

<comment><USER17> I guess the right things to take from the article are (1) the validity of the criticism, as a legitimate face value observation, but also as a way of sketching the kinds of problems and areas where we hope for progress and (2) the fact that Google Translate is nevertheless useful in its current form.

I think his overall thesis isn't a declaration that no further progress will be possible, but that it may have to draw from resources that are more than just statistical associations of words - things like interior human experiences. So it would not just measure words against surrounding passages, but against some understanding of concept generation that emerges from human subjectivity.

And, this is where I think a fuse blows for many people, things get complicated, circuits fry, and people find themselves filled with an urge to declare"well, computers just CAN'T do X." But I think what Hofstadter is saying is that it _is_ a hard problem but also the kind of thing that in principle could be done to make progress on translation.

<comment><USER16> Achieving human-level understanding is the canonical problem in AI. I think I can say we don't yet know how to encode and represent this thing called understanding.

We are excellent at classification and sub-par at understanding, with translation being just one of the many application domains that will benefit when we go through the understanding inflection point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> [https://deepl.com](https://deepl.com) seems to be better at this. I've long been looking for differences, dreading that Google (with its superior amount of money, larger dataset, and perhaps also a larger talent pool) would outperform it on something. It has always been on par so far, often giving word-for-word the same translation. When trying the author's example, however, Deepl actually does it correctly (also outperforming Microsoft Translate, which I threw in for good measure): the manually-translated french turns into correct English. (Not speaking French, I can't judge the french translation it makes.)

Now I'm reading this article: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21559633](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21559633) and this made me curious again:

> However, in German, there is no expectation at all that the subject must > come first (although it often does). These two German sentences share the > same meaning: "Der Hund hat den Ball." and "Den Ball hat der Hund."

It totally trips up Google (Den ball hat der Hund -> "the ball has the dog") but Deepl has this sort of silliness for breakfast (Den ball hat der Hund -> "the dog has the ball").

Of course, this is not negating the point of the article: translating is interpreting (or "art", as the author puts it), so deepl still can't be as good as a human. But for edge cases, deepl does seem to be better, at least in these two examples. In real-world cases that I tried so far, as mentioned, I've found it to be 100% equivalent so far (n=20 or so).

</comment><comment><USER19> From my own experience, I've found that Google can be a useful tool. But you have to understand the difficult bits of each language you're translating between and specifically write around them, making the translations tool job a lot easier. E.g. specifically avoid idioms, words with double meanings, etc.

</comment><comment><USER17> Hofstadter is trying to draw a conceptual distinction between "understanding" (generating language by drawing from a full interiority of human subjective experience), and mere "translation" (based on looking at words).

But analyzing how words are used is a great way of working backward into something that gets closer and closer to human subjectivity. Some neural net trained on how words are used would start to model concepts that reflect "under the hood" human experiences that generate language.

Maybe it's not 'enough', and a robust translation engine would have a sense of irony, jealousy, favorite foods, etc that it would need to rely on to translate things, and maybe that set of concepts to be obtained via something other than training on words. But I don't think there's a clear conceptual line to be drawn. Studying the way we use words can get us a loose approximation, maybe even a good one.

<comment><USER12> The Chinese example at the end where he had to look up the phrase himself (on Google) is particularly revealing. Humans don't have any more insight into words than the machine. They're just better at interpreting explanations written by humans and intended for humans.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I lately think the auto translation on youtube is better than on google.

</comment><comment><USER21> If I'm not wrong, this is a continuation of Hofstadter's critique of the "new AI" (i.e., AI boom since 2006 based on machine learning) and how it is at odds with his conception of what needs to be done in order to move towards AGI based on ideas surrounding his book Godel, Escher, Bach [1].

For context, please read this in light of the 2013 piece in The Atlantic [2].

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach)

[2] [https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/11/the- man...](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/11/the-man-who- would-teach-machines-to-think/309529/)

</comment><comment><USER22> After reading this I can't help but think (due to my fascination with the subject) of the parallels one can observe in modern day polarized political discourse on social and other forms of media.

> Whenever I _translate_ , I first read the original text _carefully_ and > internalize the _ideas_ as clearly as I can, _letting them slosh back and > forth in my mind_. It's _not that the words of the original_ are sloshing > back and forth; it's the _ideas_ that are _triggering all sorts of related > ideas_ , creating a _rich halo of related scenarios in my mind_. Needless to > say, _most of this halo is unconscious_. _Only when the halo has been evoked > sufficiently in my mind do I start_ to try to express it—to "press it > out"—in the second language. _I try to say_ in Language B what strikes me as > a natural B-ish way to talk about the kinds of situations that constitute > the halo of meaning in question.

In any communication between two or more people, verbal or written, there is an ever present translation process going on. Political (and other similar) conversations, despite the communication taking place in the same language (or so we conceptualize it), are subject to the very same AI translation problem Hofstadter notes: the translation of _words_ into _ideas_.

In his case, Hofstadter takes his time, reading the text carefully, "internalizing the ideas _as clearly as I can_ " (~steelmanning). He is _explicitly aware_ of the mind's behavior (ideas, triggering (an incredibly complex and poorly understood process) all sorts of related ideas, creating a rich halo of related scenarios), and that "most of this halo is unconscious". He takes his time, letting the subconscious mind do it's thing. And only then, "when the halo has been evoked sufficiently in my mind", does he put pen to paper to finalize the task of performing an as accurate as possible translation.

You can see this same sort of thing happening all over the place in the real world, except unlike Hofstadter, most people are unaware of what is happening under the covers, and lack the explicit and conscious intent to perform an accurate (as possible) translation before setting their fingers on the keyboard to have their say, which will then in turn be inaccurately interpreted (translated from words to ideas, and then processed) by readers, each in their own unique way due to the nature of their personal heuristics and mental model. "Round and round she goes, where she stops, nobody knows."

I'd love to find someone of Hofstadter's background and capability who is focusing precisely on this phenomenon. The closest I've come across so far is Jonathan Haidt, and a few people like Eric Weinstein (who often _touches on_ these ideas, but is focused on them to a much lesser degree than Haidt). Any recommendations of others to look into would be appreciated, as would any words of encouragement from people who believe there is actually something important going on here. I believe this, a lack of _true mutual understanding_ of the ideas and beliefs of others, and the lack of intent or desire to do so (if not revulsion toward the very idea (in my perception, speaking of sloshing ideas)), is one of the fundamentally important and mostly overlooked problems in the world today.

</comment><comment><USER23> Douglas Hofstadter is a pompous buffoon. His style is infuriating, pushing his undoubtedly fine intellect in the reader's face. He writes for people who want to believe themselves smarter than most, and the only cost of admission is that they validate Hofstadter's high self-opinion.

We all know by the end of the article that Hofstadter is a better translator than Google Translate, but nobody believes that Google Translate is going to match the work of someone who understands the text they are translating. Hofstadter claims he's not cherry-picking difficult examples, but he has chosen two passages where gender is critical, and moved them between languages where gender is expressed in very different ways. It's a tricky part of translation, as Hofstadter knows, and nobody expects a computer to speculate on the intentions of the author of a passage, as you must to successfully translate his examples.

Google Translate, plus some critical thinking and a bit of work with a dictionary, will get you a rudimentary understanding of a text in a foreign language --- _and that 's a great advance_. Hofstadter expresses an expectation that no-one holds for an automatic translation tool, shows that Google Translate does not live up to it, and then is satisfied with himself, as usual.

<comment><USER24> Instead of an ad hominem, would you care to address the specific examples sighted in the article?

<comment><USER25> I skimmed the article, but it seems the purpose of it would be better served as series of issue reports in the Google Translate bug tracking system than a full article.

I think it's not really that interesting to diss the state of the machine translation art in 2019, instead of looking where it could be in 2020, 2025, 2030.

<comment><AUTHOR> >issue reports

You miss the point. The point is that the "deep" learning approach is fundamentally flawed and will not lead to proper translation no matter how many racks of GPUs you throw at it, since it lacks the "understanding of ideas" required to do it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I really hate pieces like this. Hofstadter should know better than anyone how state-of-the-art machine translation works. Only absolute laymen would use words like "understanding" to describe what's going on. It's really good, and we're a lot further than we were 10 years ago but honest to god people should just drop using anthropomorphic laden terms like "understanding" and "intelligence" into these discussions. The I in AI is unfortunately taken too literally. Maybe just do yourself a favor and watch the videos to CS224 [1] and then you'd be less surprised that these systems do not "understand" (whatever the hell that even means, unless rigorously defined).

[1] [http://web.stanford.edu/class/cs224n/](http://web.stanford.edu/class/cs224n/)</comment>


Show HN: Trump content blocker for iOS - <AUTHOR> http://trumptrump.co <comment><USER2> Is this sponsored by Hillary Clinton? :)</comment>


Google criticized for skipping hearing on foreign meddling - <AUTHOR> https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/national/national-security/article217857925.html <comment><USER2> What I don't understand is why the "top executive" has to be the one to attend from Google. Another source said Google offered to send "someone", just not the top level execs (e.g. Pindar; a la Zuck, Jack)

Can someone explain this to me? They're big companies, the "top executive" may not (or even likely is not) the best person to attend anyway. As much as I equally appreciate they are also the figure heads. But I guess that's kind of my point... seems more like a governmental marketing exercise in some ways to want those people only specifically.

<comment><USER3> Politicians like to feel important. This reminds me of the UK parliament demanding Zuck go to hearing there and not some other executive.

Also reminds me of Kanye tweeting "I need to meet with Larry from Google".

It's all nonsense, the question is, how much does not playing ball with the nonsense hurt you? This article wants to say that not playing ball could lead to more regulation/worse treatment by legislators. I'm not sure I really believe that Congress will actually _do_ anything, but who knows.</comment></comment>


A Haskell Journey - <AUTHOR> http://pindancing.blogspot.com/2010/02/haskell-journey.html <comment><USER2> _What we really need is an "Advanced Haskell" book which assumes a knowledge of Level 1 Haskell and then lays out the CT bits in an orderly fashion. Monads for example, are best understood from a Category Theory perspective than through some tortured analogy to Space Stations or Elephants or whatever._

I think people are looking for something profound where there really isn't anything as profound as they are imagining. Monads are applicative functors with "join". Applicative functors are functors with "ap". Functors are containers that can apply a function ("fmap") to their contents. Add in some laws, and that's what you have; a few very generic concepts that let similar things have the same API. There is nothing more profound here than any other generic API, except that the "genericness" goes beyond what most programmers are used to. (Most programmers seem to be used to abstractions that take some "noun" and make variants -- map => hashmap, alist, plist, binary tree; list => linked list, vector. Haskell's abstraction is more like an adjective -- a functor isn't really a thing that you can hold in your hand, it's just a property of something. "Monad" is a property of "list" like "red" is a property of "apple".)

(Monoids are even more generic -- they are something that has an "identity" and an "append" operation. Lists are monoids, but so are booleans like "Any" and "All", and integers form monoids over addition and multiplication. Monoid is just a word that relates the common properties. The advantage of this abstraction in Haskell is that you can "mconcat" a list of sentences into a paragraph just like you can "mconcat" a list of numbers into their sum.)

Monads get a lot of mindshare in Haskell because they are a good way to sequence computations -- you write a single sequencing combinator, and you get convenient syntax sugar and a big collection of utility functions ("liftM", etc.). Write another function, and you can create monads from other monads, which happens to be convenient for writing applications. (Reading the definition of the type "X" in xmonad is enlightening, if only because you realize that the entire program is a bunch of functions that return "X", and that the mechanics of X's "monad" instance make the program work the way it does. xmonad is really the X monad!)

Arrows are like monads, except instead of "bind" you have a variety of other combinators; "fanin", "fanout", etc. If your data flow looks like that, Arrows make your code look like your dataflow. (And from a category theoretic perspective, every monad is an arrow. Kind of how every "light red" is "red".)

I think RWH provides good coverage of monads, although reading RWH once you "get" monads can be tedious. The good news is, by the time you learn what the word "monad" means, you already know what it does for you.

So anyway, just start programming, and you'll see why these abstractions are useful. You'll also see why "easy to understand" abstractions like "foldable" and "traversable" are useful too, even though there is not much category theory there.

I guess to summarize: don't let unfamiliar words scare you away from simple concepts! You already know how to program, and programming Haskell is just programming!

<comment><USER3> _Functors are containers that can apply a function ("fmap") to their contents. (...) Monoids are even more generic -- they are something that has an "identity" and an "append" operation._

Argh! Pet peeve time. Functors are not containers and calling them that makes it harder to understand how something like IO, ((->) a), or a Parsec parser qualify; also, some container types aren't (and can't be) Functors because they aren't polymorphic in the contained type (IntSet or ByteString, for instance).

Likewise, calling the Monoid operation "append" is needlessly confusing (and yes, the names the standard library uses are terrible). It's an associative binary operation with an identity value and no semantics whatsoever beyond that. Appending data structures is likely to form a monoid, but so can merging them (union and intersection both work). Any instance of Ord forms monoids under min and max. Functions are a monoid under composition. Even () forms a (trivial) monoid.

I'm pretty sure none of that is news to you, but I think using descriptions like "container" and "append" invoke too many preconceived ideas for people new to Haskell and creates barriers to understanding more than it helps. Most of this stuff is actually quite simple, but it's almost painfully abstract, and using concrete metaphors of familiar things obscures the full generality.

It's particularly a problem with Monoid, because the concept is both utterly trivial and broadly useful, but calling it "append" leads to people complaining about Haskell using a needlessly cryptic term for "appendable things" while simultaneously missing the entire point of the type class.

 _So anyway, just start programming, and you'll see why these abstractions are useful. You'll also see why "easy to understand" abstractions like "foldable" and "traversable" are useful too, even though there is not much category theory there._

For what it's worth, from a mathy perspective, I think Traversable represents some sort of distributive law between Functors (e.g., lets you do something that looks like "f (g a) -> g (f a)").

In categorical terms Foldable is related to "catamorphisms", though to my understanding the relevant bits of category theory were first explored by, and remain of interest mostly to, programming language theorists. Look at <http://knol.google.com/k/edward-kmett/catamorphisms> if you're brave enough...

<comment><USER2> You're right that calling a functor a container is an oversimplification. But when you start explaining something at full generality, it only makes sense to people that already understand the full generality. Once you understand how List and Tree are similar, you can understand how List, Tree, Reader, and IO are similar. But if you don't see any connections between List and Tree, you are never going to see any connection between List and IO. So, you need to simplify, understand the simplification, and then try to attack full generality.

The same goes for monoids. Many people won't see any use for "identity + associative binary operator". But they will understand the similarities between "append to a list" and "add numbers". Once you see something concrete, then you can worry about abstraction. If you don't understand the concrete, though, you aren't going to get there from the abstraction.

(Nobody ever said, "I'll define a functor to be ... Now I'll write a program with this functor!" Instead, they noticed how lists and trees were similar, and invented the functor abstraction afterwards. If you learn and discover things the same way they did, you'll eventually have the same deep understanding they do. That understanding is what allows you to use the abstractions, not the definition you find in a textbook.)

So anyway, if you are teaching people Haskell, it's better to teach them the concrete. Once they understand that, you can amend the definition to be fully abstract. Then they will be comfortable with the abstraction and its applications.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think what we need is "Real World Category Theory" to go along with "Real World Haskell." It's not surprising that it's difficult to get your head around concepts lovingly referred to as "abstract nonsense." The reality is, of course, that CT is really useful because it is so general, but that same generality is what makes it really hard to grok.

More experienced Haskell-ers are often very quick to offer encouragement and to tell you that Monads and Monoids and Functors and Arrows/Morphisms aren't that tough, and they're right, but in some ways they are missing the point. The level of abstraction that those concepts exist is so foreign to most people that they have trouble conceiving of it in any meaningful way until they actually go through and learn enough to kinda get it. At least Monads and Monoids have kinda scary names. Basic category theory concepts like arrows and objects have familiar, inviting name, but they refer to something totally different. Worse than being scared by words, these words leave us thinking we know things they don't.

</comment><comment><USER5> I don't think this is HN material (I wrote the blog post,I didn't submit it). This post is just me "thinking by writing", trying to clear my head.

I thought it was a largely content free post, just some rambling, and yet here it is on HN. Slow news day I imagine! :-P.

Here is a summary, to save you time - Haskell needs a book (to complement RWH) focusing on the the Category Theory aspects.

<comment><USER2> The advantage of HN is that you get better comments than you would directly on your blog. Feedback++.

<comment><USER5> "The advantage of HN is that you get better comments than you would directly on your blog. Feedback++."

Oh I agree. HN has the quality of having awesome comments and discussion on very bland subject material.

I am just faintly embarassed that something that was just me rambling in prose landed up here.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How long did it take you to double your salary? - <AUTHOR> Taking your first full-time industry salary as base. How many times did you change jobs/companies? Did you move to management? What else did you do? <comment><USER2> Doubled (total comp) every time I switched jobs, and then once without switching. It's hard to measure exactly because college & a couple startups were mixed in there, but averaged about 2-3 years of work experience per doubling. Each switch was moving from edge to center of an industry - I went from a startup writing software for schools, to financial software, to Google, and then the doubling within Google was moving from a UI-focused role to one that included UI + backend data mining. No official management positions, though I've led teams.

</comment><comment><USER3> Took about 8 years to double with 3 different jobs. 2 jobs at consulting companies. Last was at an insurance company full-time.</comment>


Ask HN: How to scale a startup after initial traction (books/resources/etc)? - <AUTHOR> I want to learn as much as I can about how to scale a start-up after initial traction has been achieved.  I'm interested in all aspects of this - operations, finance, engineering/product development, customer support, etc. - especially how to continue executing effectively in the midst of fast growth.  Any good resources/references you would recommend? <comment><USER2> I can recommend "Scaling up". [https://scalingup.com/](https://scalingup.com/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Here are a few sources which helped us grow our company:

\- [https://www.saastr.com](https://www.saastr.com)

\- [http://tomtunguz.com](http://tomtunguz.com)

\- The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz

\- Built to Last by Jim Collins & Jerry Porras

\- Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore

<comment><AUTHOR> Great list, thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The pragmatic programmer

<comment><AUTHOR> Read it, thanks :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> YC startup school videos.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!</comment></comment>