Ask HN: How Ethereum (smart contract) works? - <AUTHOR> Hello,
I have been looking at smart contract and ethereum today. I have very good understanding of bitcoin and some knowledge about smart contract.
but there are some details I don't understand and I wan't able to find good explanation.
I know that as part of block verification, everyone on the ethereum network needs to run all the triggered contract codes and verify the execution with others'.
how does this work? how can you verify other people's execution of a program? does it only look at the output of a program? or the storage change of that program?
for example, a contract transfers $10 to a person A. how do I check if this contract has been executed or not by another person B? if it only looks at the output of the program or storage change, he can easily fake the result, right?
also, since the contract code runs on everyone's computer, how to prevent race condition and control execution times?
for example, I wrote a contract to transfer $10 to a person as a penalty, if I lost his book. How can I make sure this contract will only be executed once, as I don't want multiple $10 being transferred to that person?
Thanks. <comment><USER2> Many of your questions would equally apply to Bitcoin. For example, your question about transferring $10 to person A applies to Bitcoin as well. Ethereum uses a blockchain, as pioneered by Bitcoin to ensure that transactions are not spent twice.

For your last example, you might put the $10 in escrow, with a key held by you, one by the book owner, and one by a trusted third party. If you lose the book, if the third party and book owner agree, your money is released from escrow.</comment>


Ask HN: How secure is Signal messaging? - <AUTHOR> I'm trying to convince a party to use Signal to communicate privately with me, and would like to verify certain things with HN community to make sure my understanding of the application is correct.<p>- Are receivers and senders the only entities able to access privately sent messages/pictures/videos? Do the Signal servers not store any of this data?<p>- If it is not stored on the server, are all the media and content sent and received then stored on the user's device? In other words, will my usage be capped by my device's available storage?<p>- If Signal servers are hacked, are the security guarantees thrown out? Or, do the hackers only see encrypted data at all times, with no way to decrypt it themselves?<p>- Is Signal the most reliable mobile app in the secure communication domain? Are there better alternatives?<p>Thanks in advance :) <comment><USER2> How public and private keys are generated, updated and stored between two contacts for a particular Signal chat session is captured in the document below. You should be able to find most of your answers here

[https://signal.org/docs/specifications/sesame/](https://signal.org/docs/specifications/sesame/)

>> _Are receivers and senders the only entities able to access privately sent messages /pictures/videos? Do the Signal servers not store any of this data?_

The text messages are stored in the database (postgres) of signal server. They are encrypted, so even if you had read access to database, you wouldn't be able to decrypt it. Read the document mentioned above as to how keys are managed.

Pictures/Videos/any multimedia is stored in a separate storage server ( e.g. S3 ). This is also in encrypted form.

>> _If it is not stored on the server, are all the media and content sent and received then stored on the user 's device? In other words, will my usage be capped by my device's available storage?_

Most definitely your device should have enough space for the all the content being sent on your way.

>> _If Signal servers are hacked, are the security guarantees thrown out? Or, do the hackers only see encrypted data at all times, with no way to decrypt it themselves?_

Yes, even if servers are hacked, they may be able to get the contact details of users registered( this may not be true for the latest signal server ), but they shouldn't be able to decrypt any stored messages.

>> _Is Signal the most reliable mobile app in the secure communication domain? Are there better alternatives?_

I think Signal is the most reliable app right now.

Edit: Formatting

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the thorough answer, it was very helpful!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> not to sound snotty or anything, but you might want to do some poking around over at the official support page for your specific requests if you can't find help here.

[https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us](https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us)

And a more specific channel over at:

[https://github.com/signalapp](https://github.com/signalapp)

IMHO the weakest security link is always the human. Make of that what you will.

<comment><AUTHOR> >IMHO the weakest security link is always the human

Agreed, and thanks for links!</comment></comment>


DuckDuckGo's traffic keeps growing - <AUTHOR> https://duckduckgo.com/traffic?2019 <comment><USER2> DDG has gotten better to the point that I have switched all of my browsers to them and the number of times I have had to fall back to Google Search has dwindled to almost nothing.

If you were turned off by poor results in the past give them another try.

<comment><USER3> How often do you use !g or other bangs?

<comment><USER4> I use alternate bangs _all the time_ , which is a major win for DDG, as it skips the "go to the site first, or specify "site:<host> <search>", which actually is NOT equivalent as bang searches _use the site or service 's native search_.

Fave bangs:

!w wikipedia

!wikisource WikiSource

!etym Online etymological dictionary

!ngram Google Ngram viewer

!trends Google Trends

!gbooks Google Books

!scholar Google Scholar

!tineye Image match search

!so stack overflow

!hn Hacker News

!twitter Obv.

!thread Threadreader App, Twitter thread presentation, preferred to above ;-)

!img Image search (now DDG, Google Image is !gimg)

!worldcat Worldcat union catalog

!osm Open Streetmap

!wayback Internet Archive Wayback Machine

!archive Internet Archive global (non-Web + web) search

!dict & !define Word look-ups

!s startpage (proxied Google search)

!bangs will give you a list of bangs / search form for patterns.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> DDG is more neutral in political themes. You usually see some results that you wouldn't see on the first page on google. Google still has a slight advantage when searching for technical info, but most of times DDG is good enough for them too.

<comment><USER6> Obviously lacks the privacy aspect, but I've noticed Bing is also politically neutral.

This seems to be a Google-specific problem.

\---

Example that I just double-checked: (I don't claim any political views here; _JUST an example_ )

Reddit's largest subreddit for a political candidate is r/The_Donald. Objectively, a rather popular site.

Google (with or without SafeSearch) returns _zero_ results for "Reddit The_Donald" linking to the subreddit. [1] It's only results are indirect discussions about the subreddit.

Whereas DuckDuckGo, Bing, and Yahoo show the subreddit itself as the very first result. [2] [3] [4] ([https://np.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/](https://np.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/) which is Reddit's public non-logged in site.)

So Google won't display a high-traffic site. I can only assume they find the content objectionable and so will not link directly to it. I understand how some may want that, but that's not a simply not a service I want my search engine to perform, especially when SafeSearch is disabled.

[1] [https://www.google.com/search?q=Reddit+The_Donald](https://www.google.com/search?q=Reddit+The_Donald)

[2] [https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Reddit+The_Donald](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Reddit+The_Donald)

[3] [https://www.bing.com/search?q=Reddit+The_Donald](https://www.bing.com/search?q=Reddit+The_Donald)

[4] [https://search.yahoo.com/search?p=Reddit+The_Donald](https://search.yahoo.com/search?p=Reddit+The_Donald)

<comment><USER7> r/The_Donald is "quarantined" by Reddit, which means you get a gateway page if you visit for the first time, asking if you really want to visit it (try an incognito window). In the HTML, you'll see that there's a "noindex" metatag that Reddit is instructing Google not to index it.

Also, np.reddit.com seems to be excluded from all search engines: [https://np.reddit.com/robots.txt](https://np.reddit.com/robots.txt).

I'm not sure why Bing is ignoring both the robots.txt and the "noindex" metatag.

<comment><USER6> In another comment [1] I compare this with a pro-Marxist subreddit which is similarly "quarantined" and has noindex.

Google indexes it perfectly. [2]

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21316065](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21316065)

[2] [https://www.google.com/search?q=Reddit+ChapoTrapHouse](https://www.google.com/search?q=Reddit+ChapoTrapHouse)

<comment><USER7> I understand why one might expect r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse to have similar results, since they're both politically extreme subreddits. But after having worked in SEO for a pretty long time, I can't conclude that Googlebot is evaluating political affiliation with n=2 examples on n=1 sites. Instead, incoming links quality/quantity, popularity, competition, newsworthiness, age, and dozens of other ordinary differences between these pages and queries are usually the reason. Even the underscore in The_Donald likely matters.

It can get pretty frustrating to rank #1 or #2 for a query, and not rank at all for a _slightly_ different, higher-traffic query, like using the plural, a hyphen, different capitalization, or an article.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Switched to DDG + Brave browser on my laptop and I am surprised how subtly different browsing feels with this combo. Simply you realize how "watched" you feel on Google products and the tracked internet.

Without realizing it there is a "how would this search/page visit etc. look on a tracked profile" process running in my head that is greatly reduced by DDG+Brave. A chilling effect not just on speech, but on browsing behavior that we have to counteract.

<comment><USER9> I've found that it's becoming increasingly hard to browse the internet in Brave and Firefox because a. the increasing monopoly of Blink (doesn't apply to Brave) and b. how interconnected a lot of this tracking seems to be with the routine operation of sites i visit

<comment><USER10> So why do you mention Brave if your comment doesn't apply?

<comment><USER9> It does apply to part B and Firefox also has tracking protection.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've replaced my usage of DDG sadly, with startpage, I get superior results. Found myself way too often prefixing queries with !g especially for technical or localised (UK) stuff.

<comment><USER12> From Startpage: "You can't beat Google when it comes to online search. So we're paying them to use their brilliant search results in order to remove all trackers and logs."

It sounds like you're just using Google without the branding/tracking.

<comment><USER13> And now the question is, how is Startpage paying Google without monetizing its users?

<comment><USER14> If the product is free, you're the product. I don't know anything about Startpage, but I bet we'll find they're tracking something...

<comment><USER15> Startpage shows ads, just like DuckDuckGo: [https://support.startpage.com/index.php?/Knowledgebase/Artic...](https://support.startpage.com/index.php?/Knowledgebase/Article/View/180/20/how- can-startpage-be-free-how-do-you-make-money)

<comment><USER14> Makes sense. So I was right; you are the product. They want to get ads in front of users. Note that there's nothing inherently wrong with that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I made the switch to DDG from Google back around 2013/2014\. Rarely do I ever need the !g to find anything, and frankly with all the inline ads on Google, I'm having a harder time navigating those results these days.

<comment><USER17> Every time I see a comment like this on HN, I'm quite frankly shocked that so many tech oriented people don't use ad blockers. I use UBlock Origin, and I haven't seen an ad on Google in years at this point...

<comment><USER16> Turns out I don't see the inline ads on Google anymore. Not sure when that changed.

I was using NoScript from 2010 until FireFox Quantum came out and broke things. Since then I've been on UBlock + UMatrix.

Agreed, seeing the internet without an ad blocker is a terrifying experience indeed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I've been using it almost exclusively for a few months and I think I'm going to switch back. DDG is really bad at showing results from my own country near the top, which is really annoying when I wish to purchase something. I imagine the experience is much better in the United States as that's where all the top results come from.

<comment><USER19> 1\. I really appreciate that DDG shows me results deemed relevant globally or pertinent to the search query (and its language), rather than trying to guess where I am and what I want to see based on that. Now I find using Google, particularly when using a VPN, rather annoying (no, I don't speak Swedish and I don't want to know about Swedish Python groups, thanks).

2\. You can easily _ask_ DDG to show you country specific results by the switch on top, though (and you choose which country).

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I use DDG for almost everything now because it's mostly just as good as google. I think there's still some cases where Google is a little better: for example with Developer/technical searches.

</comment><comment><USER21> This statistics page is amazing, giving annual, monthly, and daily query counts dating back to April 2010, and no other data.

When I first read it I was expecting to see a list of the most frequently searched terms, which would be front and center in a Google report, but goes against everything DDG stands for. :)

</comment><comment><USER22> Context is google's strong suit: Local search, using my email/location/phone data to enhance or outright create a new category of results. For everyday search terms DDG wins hands down.

I end up using both accordingly to the use case at hand.

</comment><comment><USER23> Competition is always a good thing for consumers, of course. I'm loving it.

</comment><comment><USER24> How long would it take to overtake Google at this growth rate, if maintained?

I'm not saying it's realistic to maintain the growth rate, just want to get an intuition for what the current speed means.

<comment><USER25> I don't have an answer for you, but just want to mention that Google is a moving target, and if DDG ever became a significant threat to them it's very likely that they'd do something to counter it, such as just buying DDG and possibly killing it off, releasing a separate DDG competitor product, or changing their own modus operandi.

In fact, for all we know, DDG might be owned by Google already.

<comment><USER26> uh what that last line is real conspiracy theory territory

<comment><USER10> What does "conspiracy theory territory" mean, and why would something as commonplace as a large company investing in small competitors in the same space fit this?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> It's my understanding that StartPage is a proxy for Google Search, and DDG is both a proxy for Bing, Yahoo, and other places, with some "instant answers" thrown in, like JS minifiers, color pickers, and other tools.

I'd like to see DDG do some of its own indexing or perhaps indicate where results come from. Is this Bing? Is this Yahoo? Is there a percentage weight from both engines? This analysis would be cool.

</comment><comment><USER28> I wonder how much of this increase is people using bang commands to search other sites using DDG (where DDG just redirects the search to the destination site, like how the Firefox search bar has the option of searching on other sites, but with additional network trips). Whenever I have to use a non- Firefox browser that doesn't have a separate search bar (with configurable search engines), I use bang commands to get to Wikipedia or IMDB, for example. I also use !s (for Startpage) and !g (for Google) when the DDG results aren't satisfactory.

DDG is still not a perfect replacement for Google for me, but it is a replacement most of the time, and it is my default search engine on browsers I use.

One feature I don't have on DDG after all these years is limiting the search results to the past year. I go to Startpage whenever I need that.

<comment><USER29> >One feature I don't have on DDG after all these years is limiting the search results to the past year. I go to Startpage whenever I need that.

They added it just recently. You can now limit the search results to the past year.

<comment><USER28> Thank you for pointing that out! This makes my search life and sticking with DDG a lot more easier than before.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I switched to DDG recently when google stopped showing URLs in search results - that was the last straw for me.

</comment><comment><USER31> I'm glad to see DDG growing in popularity, largely because Google won't place my website in search results. Bing does, DDG does, Yahoo does, but Google does not (unless I explicitly search for the exact URL). Depending on your view this is why Google's results are so good or bad.

<comment><USER32> I'll bite. What's the site ?

<comment><USER31> I'm not interested in posting it on HN (though that is a good way to improve ranking on Google). It's a small static website with a political theme. The title is fairly unique, but not made of uncommon words. Every now and then I search for it on Google and get a good laugh from all the garbage that shows up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Still about 1% of Google's traffic. DDG sees <50 million queries/day, Google sees 63,000 per second, or 226 million/hr.

[https://www.impactbnd.com/blog/seo- statistics](https://www.impactbnd.com/blog/seo-statistics)

Google actually lost some share beginning August 2018, to Baidu.

I've been using DDG as my principle search since about 2013, and very happily. It's fast, relevant, bangs are awesome (see earlier comment), and there's now a "most recent year" date-range search, which is useful.

I still use Google when I'm interested in (rough) results counts, specific date ranges, or soem specialty searches such as Google Books or Scholar (though I'm finding alternatives).

<comment><USER33> Being 1% of Google's anything is a commendable achievement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Are there any details regarding the hardware setup they run/use/own to run this all?

<comment><USER29> Duckduckgo uses AWS for hosting. Although they have some crawlers hosted inhouse. IIRC their CEO told this once in an interview.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> On my phone I installed Firefox mobile using DDG default search about a year ago. But, whoops, it's a Pixel and so I occasionally use the OS's Google search.

I've not noticed a difference in result quality since the switch.

<comment><USER36> I was in the same boat and then started using the "LawnChair" launcher. The only major feature its missing from the pixel launcher that I can tell is that it doesn't have the most recent Android 10 gesture navigation yet. Aside from that it seems to be a fully open source implementation of the Pixel Launcher but with the added ability to remove the search bar from your android home screen.

<comment><USER14> I tried LawnChair (get it, it's a pun on the word "launcher"!) a while ago, but switched back to Nova. I may have to give it a try again.

<comment><USER36> I love how much you can customize Nova launcher, but the lack of ability to completely turn off animations was a deal breaker for me. Even with android developer mode turned on and all animations at the system level were turned off, nova still seemed to do a lot of animating.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I still don't care for their search results UI. There's a lot of wasted space on widescreens, content isn't centered, and the font blows. It really triggers me.

<comment><USER38> Try adjusting the settings, you can fix all of them: [https://duckduckgo.com/settings#](https://duckduckgo.com/settings#)

<comment><USER37> Mother of God, you are right! You just changed my life for the better.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I repeatedly tried to switch to DDG from Google for the past several years. DDG kept improving, but always fell short. About a year ago, I felt that DDG's results surpassed Google's in quality. Ironically, I think Google's "personalization" has something to do with it. I don't think Google is serving results for my benefit because serendipity is part of why I am searching in the first place.

I also swapped Chrome for Brave. Thank you, DDG.

<comment><USER40> Isn't Brave the browser that steals peoples branding and sets up fake accounts on their behalf without consent?

Edit: Yeah, I found this: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18734999](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18734999)

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I'm using DDG for less than a year now as my primary search engine.

One day I just decided to switch to DuckDuckGo and give it a try for at least two months before giving up. And it turns out two months was enough to kill the bad habit. Also it turns out Google being the only good search engine is just a myth. I hope more users give it a try.

I sometimes use Google search for online shopping or as spell checker.

</comment><comment><USER42> how does ddg get its google results? Last I checked the api is gone. If I wanted to do the same thing as ddg, is it still possible?

<comment><USER43> DDG is an entirely different search engine, they don't use Google.

If you want to build your own engine, go ahead :)

<comment><USER42> I mean the !g bang - DDG has the option of getting results from Google and Bing. Bing offers an API for $6/10000 queries, but Google does not - I'm curious how they have access to Google search results.

<comment><USER44> !g doesn't load googles results on duckduckgo's page, it just forwards you to the appropriate google page. A quick test suggests the format is

        https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=<query>

(Google might have redirected me after whatever ddg directed me to, but just using this format should work)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> The www.startpage.com is not so bad either.

<comment><USER46> Whenever I feel I'm not getting what I want from DDG (which is rare), I'll re- type my query as "my query !sp" to get startpage results. Between the two, I _never_ need to visit google for search.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Why do people who use DDG -- presumably for privacy -- then use !g if they feel the need, and not !sp?

<comment><USER48> That's a good tip. Presumably fewer folks know about startpage. But even reducing the number of searches that you send to Google is a privacy improvement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Does anyone know how these statistics were generated? I am curious if the data takes in to count traffic generated by bots. It is cool to see growth from a search engine other then Google. It would be nice to see more diverse options like in the past.

<comment><USER50> These traffic numbers are the number of anonymous searches we serve per day. We don't know how many individual users we have, but we do try to take into account bots.

Disclaimer: DuckDuckGo staff

<comment><USER49> Thank you for your feedback.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Nice to see the competition. Qwant (without JS) is interesting too.

<comment><USER52> DDG without JS - [https://duckduckgo.com/html/](https://duckduckgo.com/html/) Even lighter DDG - [https://duckduckgo.com/lite/](https://duckduckgo.com/lite/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> I started using DDG after Google settled the lawsuit with Getty Images. The "view image" button is incredible handy.

</comment><comment><USER54> Yeah because Catalina switch the default Safari search bar search to it.

</comment><comment><USER55> Hopefully they will add an email service and or integrate iCloud email into DDG as they did with Apple Maps.

I loathe Google!

<comment><USER56> Why do you want email service to be provided by the same company? Also, what's wrong with Outlook.com for example. AFAIK they don't sell your data.

<comment><USER55> I want to stop using Google .. Gmail.. Maps, etc.. and want to move over and use one company's integrated services I trust.

<comment><USER57> > _I want to stop using Google .. Gmail.. Maps, etc.._

Agreed.

> _and want to move over and use one company 's services I trust._

What do you think got you in this mess in the first place?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> I really don't get how people can trust US companies who have privacy as one of their main selling points. You are aware US/UK companies by definition cannot be private regardless what they say themselves.

If you want privacy use EU companies. If you don't want to use EU companies use Google since contrary to DDG they are heavily controlled by law. If you like the bangs of DDG use a native app like Albert or Alfred which is way more accessible anyway.

<comment><USER6> > You are aware US/UK companies by definition cannot be private regardless > what they say themselves.

There is a HUGE difference between "we give your information to advertisers (or ourselves, if an advertiser)" and "we give your information to law enforcement when legally required."

\---

"You are aware US/UK banks by definition cannot be secure regardless of what they say about themselves."

Yes, but it's a far cry from just leaving my cash on my doorstep.

Replace your checking account with Bitcoin if you want, but a bank offers enough security/privacy for most people.

\---

> If you want privacy use EU companies.

The EU has gone back and forth on wanting to allow/forbid backdoors.

<comment><USER58> That wasn't my point. My point is that US/UK companies are known for selling data that they are supposed to protect. Compare that to EU companies.

<comment><USER6> I understood your point to be "US/UK companies _by definition_ cannot be private" (i.e. for legal reasons). Which I think is true but a relatively minor problem compared to the status quo.

If your point was "US/UK companies _in practice_ are not usually private", that is probably true.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Implementing a random number generator for games - <AUTHOR> http://blog.yargies.com/post/130146906769/implementing-a-random-number-generator <comment><USER2> > Care must be taken when choosing these values.

For reference, this is what happens if you _don 't_: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RANDU](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RANDU)</comment>


L.A. may charge drivers by the mile, adding freeway tolls to cut congestion - <AUTHOR> https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-pay-to-drive-20190122-story.html <comment><USER2> In a city evolved with dependencies of automobiles and without adequate public transport, this idea seems incredibly regressive.</comment>


Amazon and Orlando Cops' Controversial Face Recognition Pilot Isn't Over - <AUTHOR> https://gizmodo.com/amazon-and-orlando-cops-controversial-face-recognition-1827483145 <comment><USER2> As someone in the industry, I'm amazed that Amazon is bothering with this market. Support for this is pretty demanding and usually the big guys want nothing to do with that.</comment>


Why spiky shapes seem angry and round sounds are calming - <AUTHOR> https://digest.bps.org.uk/2019/08/28/heres-why-spiky-shapes-seem-angry-and-round-sounds-are-calming/ <comment><USER2> 'we automatically associate variations in one particular property of images or sounds with variations in levels of emotional arousal.'

The future is going to be great, the implications of these findings seem obvious: auto-tune for my voice is coming so that people think I am thrilled that they called.

To monetize it, they can sell it to contact centres so that sales reps sound super engaged and interesting, and customer support reps seem genuinely concerned.

<comment><USER3> > they can sell it to contact centres so that sales reps sound super engaged > and interesting, and customer support reps seem genuinely concerned.

This sounds so dystopian!

It might even be baked into some phones by default, kind of like image softening to remove skin blemishes is the default post-processing for most pictures in most phones today.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Seems similar to the Bouba/Kiki effect [1] where we automatically associate spiky and smooth shapes with certain names.

I did this test with my toddler and he chose "correctly."

[1] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect)

<comment><USER5> They mention this in the article:

 _This process could also account for the classic "cross-modal" finding, first reported in 1929 and replicated around the world many times since, that people tend to pair a blobby shape with a word-sound like "bouba" and a spiky shape with a word like "kiki"._

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think a possible alternate answer to why these associations exist would be how the brain recognizes and utilizes patterns. The human mind appears inclined to find patterns in stimuli and form conclusions from those patterns. The inordinate amount of brain real estate that is lit up during facial recognition is an example, as well as our tendency to hallucinate fake stimuli in sensory deprivation scenarios after a time. Shrill, staccato noises and their counterpart pointed, sharp images represent sudden changes in stimulus. Unless those changes are regular, it tends to disrupt the brain's ability to recognize the changes as a pattern e.g. a pop song, with often tread chord progressions and rhythms tends to get stuck in your head much more easily than say a Rush song, with odd time signatures and discordant melodies.

If you draw out these patterns, or lack thereof, as a graph chronologically, be it changes in pitch, rhythm, timbre of a sound/music, or the characteristics of drawn figures, such as change of the direction of a line over distance, dramatic and frequent changes would make it harder to interpolate what would happen if we kept the graph going. I postulate that the brain associates regular, "round" patterns with happy or content emotions because it too tries to interpolate the future state of these stimuli, and uncertainty about that future gets associated with "negative" emotions that are rooted in the amygdala and are tied to more survival-centric emotions such as anger and fear i.e. fight or flight.

This might be total bunk, but that's the 2 cents from a non-psychologist :)

<comment><USER7> Thanks for the comment. Thoughts not dissimilar from yours are what drove us to undertake these studies. :)

I definitely suspect that predictive processing in the brain is part of the story, and we discuss that a bit in the paper. Interestingly, local entropy is highly correlated with our "spikiness" measure, the spectral centroid. However, where your comment focuses on macro-level regularity, like Bach versus Rush, our study focused on micro-level texture, like the hum of a box fan versus squealing brake pads. Although macro-level regularity definitely has an impact on emotion perception as well! This is something my other research has touched on, e.g.: [https://www.pnas.org/content/110/1/70](https://www.pnas.org/content/110/1/70)

We also found that "spikiness" predicted emotional arousal for both positive and negative emotions. E.g., "angry" and "excited" are both spiky across the senses, while "sad" and "peaceful" are both smooth. So the results can't be driven solely by uncertainty becoming associated with negative emotion.

Thanks for your thoughts! And here's a link to a preprint of the paper: [https://psyarxiv.com/wucs4](https://psyarxiv.com/wucs4)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Spiky shapes are like a dog showing its teeth or the fur standing up along its back. It's how animals and even plants get you to keep your distance.

<comment><USER9> I figure this has to be it. In nature spikes are almost always dangerous, whereas blobs are almost always relatively safe objects (typically soft, et cet).

<comment><USER10> Markings on snakes are one of the more prominent examples. I don't have a source, but I've read that human eyes are very well tuned to spot them- an evolutionary advantage from when we were living in forests?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> They say "Here's why", but they never explain why. They just found a correlation in what people think. No reason as to why we think that way...

This could even potentially be just from societal conditioning.

<comment><USER7> In the paper we do take a shot at explaining why. Specifically, we draw from the literature on cognitive ethology to argue that the ability to quickly and reliably read out emotion content from low-level stimulus features provides better prediction of others' behavior, and therefore an evolutionary selection advantage.

We don't rule out learning processes (e.g., social conditioning), but we do examine evidence for some level of innateness. For example, cross-modal Bouba–Kiki-like effects are present in pre-linguistic infants, and arousal signals can be easily understood across species. It may end up that what is innate is a predisposition to track and learn cross-modal correspondences that are widespread in the environment.

Link to paper pre-print: [https://psyarxiv.com/wucs4](https://psyarxiv.com/wucs4)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> So cool to see this hitting the front page of Hacker News! I've known Beau since we were in high school.

He occasionally posts about his research on twitter - [https://twitter.com/beausievers](https://twitter.com/beausievers)

</comment><comment><USER7> I am first author on this paper; glad to see it getting discussed on Hacker News.

Here's a free, non-paywalled link to a pre-print version of the paper: [https://psyarxiv.com/wucs4](https://psyarxiv.com/wucs4)

And here's a paywalled link to the published version: [https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/abs/10.1098/rspb.2019...](https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/abs/10.1098/rspb.2019.0513)

</comment><comment><USER13> Imagine something spiky hitting your face. It makes you angry. Then you see another spiky. You have empathy with your past self, and project it onto the thing. The new spiky is angry.

</comment><comment><USER14> surprised nobody else here mentioend this , but perhaps this is just a very common form of synesthesia?

</comment><comment><USER15> It would be interesting to see how different materials factor into these perceptions. They mention the straight lines and sharp edges of brutalist architecture, but if constructed out of wood instead of concrete, for example, I would expect the forms to be perceived as softer and more organic.

</comment><comment><USER16> Spiky things hurt and round things don't — would be interesting to simulate pleasure / pain of shapes against a virtual hand using a simulation then train a deep net to learn the pain response. Bet you would have similar findings.</comment>


From Nothing To Something. How To Get There.  - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/20/from-nothing-to-something-how-to-get-there/ <comment><USER2> A good read, but the article makes it sound like Seth was some kid who hadn't the slightest idea of anything business, kept trying, and finally hit jackpot with Meebo, when in fact, his CrunchBase profile says he "worked in IBM's mergers and acquisitions department, while also working on corporate strategy and venture capital initiatives prior to starting Meebo." That's not to invalidate his advice, but that seems like a hell of a lot of advantage to have, on top of a great founding team, when heading into a startup.

<comment><USER3> Being the assistant manager at Olive Garden does not mean you can open your own restaurant. I think that experience at IBM might help in some instances, but it probably didn't translate well to the startup mentality.

<comment><USER4> No, it doesn't mean you can open your own restaurant, but it means you have at least an idea of how a successful restaurant is run, rather than just starting a business because you're a good cook.

Its not my path (Go out, get job, learn how to do things there, start own business), but it definitely brings some advantages with it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "I think I just really feared working for the Man."

vs.

"worked in IBM's mergers and acquisitions department..."

How much more of _the man_ can you work for?

<comment><USER6> The federal government.

<comment><USER7> And more specifically, the defense industry. Ugh....

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "When I point out that they're all business people, and wonder who's going to build the product, they almost always fall back on "we'll get a couple of undergrads to do it," or, "we'll outsource it." If I hear either one of those, I know the startup's already dead."

God, ain't that the truth. It's an unrecoverable error. Learned that one the hard way.

</comment><comment> old-gregg From _nothing_ to something? Are you kidding me?

His entire product is just an HTML front-end to libpurple, which is 99% of his codebase. And that is FAR from "nothing"

And libpurple isn't even mentioned in the article, yet a ton of space is wasted on how he kept thinking about a "next great thing". What an asshole.

At least Pidgin folks openly say "we are GTK+ front-end to libpurple". Will it kill these SV types to admit building HTML front-ends to open source products?

There was something very right about Zed Shaw's rant regarding open source licenses.

</comment><comment><USER9> its easier to preach than actually do, you ALWAYS start thinking, "man I need more content" or "this one extra feature will REALLY make us take off."

same thing goes for the servers, everyone starts out thinking that they need some server farm, just in case they hit some success. Here is a dirty little secret, don't expect overnight success, you'll have plenty of time to grow into needing that big server, but there is no point in wasting money on something you don't need.

<comment><USER10> _> Here is a dirty little secret, don't expect overnight success, you'll have plenty of time to grow into needing that big server, but there is no point in wasting money on something you don't need._

Definitely true. One remark though: "plenty of time" won't be entirely true. When you first need to scale up you probably don't have any kind of server monitoring set up. There's more important stuff to be done. This means that you will notice far too late that you're out of capacity. It will be hard work and it will be painful for you and your start-up.

<comment><USER11> There are many things you don't need to be focused on at the start, but monitoring is something you should set up from the very, very beginning. Knowing when you're open for business and when you're not is absolutely crucial. Plus, it's cheap -- $5/month or less.

<comment><USER10> I wasn't talking about up-or-down monitoring. That's just last resort. But once you're down, you're too late.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> One of the better posts at TC

<comment><USER13> At the risk of being downvoted, I disagree. Maybe this is just a good introduction to the series of posts, but for now he simply regurgitated what we already know, ie "Build something, put it out there, then iterate". What it fails to tell you is how to get that initial traction.

For every 50 consumer startups that email Techcrunch/Venturebeat/Gigaom etc... one will be covered. If this does not happen, then getting that first set of beta users will be extremely time consuming (unless you resolve to less-than- ethical methods aka SPAM).

Products like Meebo took off from the start. I am sure most issues they had were around hiring, scaling, and monetizing. Most startups' problem is not what to do with the traffic or how to afford more servers, larger teams. The biggest problem we have is not even building a prototype or convincing someone to partner with us. The issue is how to get users.

Maybe in his next posts he will touch this subject.

<comment><USER8> I don't get this. Let me say this as succinctly as possible: it's not 2005 any more. TechCrunch, VentureBeat, Mashable, and GigaOm will not help you get users.

We've been in those publications multiple times, and since I run Google Analytics with goals, I know how many new users and transactions they send. It's de minimus. The links might be good for PageRank, but you'd rather be in Lifehacker anyway.

If you think users will come because you get into these pubs, please try harder.

<comment><USER13> Everyone knows major blogs will send a bunch of visitors to your site and most will bounce back immediately. Webmasters usually follow up with "Techcrunch traffic does not convert...". Well, in all fairness that is not the bloggers' duty to figure your conversion method. At any rate for most consumer startups a bunch of visitors from leading tech blogs is better than no visitors.

I run Google analytics with goals too for my website and at my day job. And let me tell you that in both cases I am pushing products that no one is jumping to write about. The same is true for (arbitrarily) 9 out 10 companies. Hence organic traffic is not easy to create, and paid traffic is as good as throwing money off the windows.

So when giving advises, give advises to this group. Not the one who can built a product and gain traction easily. I have not done this successfully so I cannot tell anyone how to but here are a few examples:

\- Don't go to major blogs first, go to smaller ones (TC used to be small when Meebo launched in their living room) and create a relationship there. Find a few competitors or a business that is complementary to yours and do a Yahoo Link Search/Google BlogSearch to figure who is writing about them (call it regression analysis if you want), and drop them 4, 5 lines and ask them "Can you please present us to your audience". Email users with an "Invite your friends" link. SEO is a marathon, not a Sprint. Be steady and set a goal to email at least 5 new blogs/newpapers everyday. Call a couple local radio stations, or TV stations, everyone is looking for a story. If people don't answer after 21 days email again with a polite 2 liner, because sometimes your emails get overlooked. Email the guys at Startupschwag, and ask if they can include your startup in their next mailer. Etc....Be HOTDAMN PERSISTENT, because the "only thing you can control is INPUT".

<comment><USER14> Could your problem be that you're pushing the wrong product? If people don't find your product useful/exciting/etc, there's no reason to expect any amount of coverage to make an impact on your traffic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Good read. When should founders start to incorporate a company? Can founders just release a Web application without worrying about things like incorporation?

<comment><USER16> I believe, the incorporation is a USA thing more than other parts of the world. Again with no credentials im under the impression outside of America it is easier to setup a company and just kick off a web app without an "incorporation".

Maybe a budding lawyer can shed some light on the benefits of incorporating before you have anything truely worth incorporating.

<comment><USER17> Actually, the opposite is probably true. I have yet to hear of any country where it's easier to start a business than in the USA.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Motivated, and really pratical. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER19> _The best composition is probably one engineer whose passion lies in the pixels on the screen and another engineer whose passion is making bits fly really fast through servers._

Best 2 people to do a start-up?

A programmer and a business guy? No.

A programmer and a designer? No.

2 programmers. Yes.

Classic.

<comment><USER20> Why the hate for designers;)

Seriously though, having someone who comes from the aesthetic/UI side is a lot more useful than the generic "MBA" type who has a big vision and just needs someone to build the site. For instance, Flickr and Typepad both had a hacker/designer founding team. One of the recent YC teams had 2 designers and only one hacker and have been doing really well. The best example is probably Apple, SJ had some technical skill, but his real art was designing the UX, but had SW to handle the technical challenges. I'm all for the coder/coder team, but a great designer is not a bad addition!

<comment><USER21> I think what you want is someone who can do both the interaction design and the front-end coding - they have skills in making things look pretty, but can also write enough JavaScript/Python/C++/whatever needed to interface with the backend. Someone like Eric Costello of Flickr or Glen Murphy of Google Chrome.

My ideal founding team would have three members: a frontend engineer/designer, a backend engineer, and a business/marketing person. I think this is basically what Seth was saying, and I've also heard the RescueTime founders say that this is a great combination (it's what they have).

I wouldn't really want to go without the business person entirely, simply because _somebody_ has to hold the entire product vision in their head, and the engineers usually have plenty to think about anyway. The tension between "C'mon guys, we can make this better" and "Okay, let's dive in and make this better" seems to be necessary for great creative works. That was really Steve Jobs' role in Apple - as I understand it, he did basically none of the coding. It also helps to have someone take care of all the interruption-driven tasks of running a company - following up on leads, talking to the press, drumming up excitement, getting feedback from potential customers, etc.

<comment><USER22> I would say that in the end, it's all about the user experience, and that unfortunately or not, comes from the design.

The cleverest app, or piece of coding is useless if the user doesn't get what they want from the experience of using it.

Brilliant design doesn't have to be flashy or clever, and of course, the simplest interfaces are always the best. There is a huge amount of skill and intelligence involved in taking what is a potentially complex idea or concept, and expressing to the user, not only how to use it, but also what the app is capable of, in a simple, graphical way.

There's been a of of discussion on HN about the new Sequoia site. I think I'm one of the few who think it's brilliant, because it already assumes a lot about its users, and that if they're on the site, they probably have a pretty good idea already of why they're there. The site is tailored to those people, they don't need to be hand-held with descriptions and explanations. This would be completely out of place in many other instances, but the designers knew their users, and what their needs were, so built accordingly. The web is a graphical interface for information, great design is crucial.

The OP made the point about a team...my point is that this has to a be a balance of skills, each member understanding their value and importance to the project, and understanding and valuing the importance of their colleagues. Teams made up of entirely one skill set will never be as productive as one with a wide range of skills.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Chrome extension to organize your Gmail labels as tabs - <AUTHOR> https://tuladhar.github.io/gmail-labels-as-tabs <comment><AUTHOR> Gmail Labels as Tabs is an email productivity extension for Google Chrome that customizes your Gmail interface by adding Gmail labels as tabs.

Organize your labels as Gmail tabs

Drag and drop to re-arrange tabs

Shows unread messages badge

Supports dark mode theme

Synchronizes extension settings with your Gmail account

100% open-source and ads-free - we don't mine your data, we don't sell your data</comment>


Professors told to report students who make campus 'less inclusive' - <AUTHOR> https://www.thecollegefix.com/post/36604/ <comment><USER2> I clicked on this, hoping it was about some college far away. Nope. :( 10 minutes down the road...

I attend a highly conservative university nearby. There is a degree of thought policing that already occurs, and I'm not sure how I feel about it. For example, "behavior that challenges University expectations" \-- what does that even mean?

I was afraid for my safety and emotional health all throughout public schooling. Bullying, etc, was real, but I don't blame the school for making me "feel unsafe" in that environment -- I blame the bullies directly. There will always be people who feel unsafe, uncomfortable, etc, in social settings. But that's not _necessarily_ the fault of the other people. They might not, in fact, be doing anything immoral. It could just be one's own insecurities or internal struggles -- that are very real -- that cause one's feelings of anxiety. But to make this the fault of people around them is frightening to me.

(Edit: After reading the whole document, most of it seems perfectly reasonable to report violence, threats, etc, and to expect professional behavior all around. But I think it's the part that talks about or strongly suggests catering to people's feelings, and enforcing that with authority, that bothers me.)

</comment><comment><USER3> The highlighted "behaviors of concern" are[0]:

* Using inappropriate language (vulgar or sexual) * Concerning email, social media, paper, or communication through CANVAS

That second one is vague, but if you're upset that the university is saying using vulgar or sexual language _in class_ is a disruptive behavior that should be addressed, maaaaybe you're taking the anti-PC bit a little too far.

[0] [https://www.thecollegefix.com/wp- content/uploads/2017/09/Fac...](https://www.thecollegefix.com/wp- content/uploads/2017/09/Faculty-resources-letter.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER4> Colleges and universities should not be Safe Spaces. They should challenge you, give you a chance to learn, and foster growth.

Of course if students feel excluded, they are less likely to fork over 100k in tuition fees. Maybe higher educations should focus on providing an education and not catering to hurt feelings and profits.

<comment><USER5> I fail to see how the behaviors listed in the source document should be tolerated in a classroom setting. It's literally just expected normal professional decorum.

<comment><USER4> Because the reporting isn't limited to just a classroom setting.

Here are some behaviors that are cause for concern and should be reported:

\- Argumentative (don't question anything) \- Behavior that challenges universities expectations (what expectations?) \- Unreasonable demands \- Speaking loudly, shouting \- Concerning email, social media, paper, or communication through CANVAS (which may or may not have any relevance to a classroom setting).

I'm not saying students should be allowed to act like animals, but any one of the "warnings" listed above can be stretched to fit almost any behavior.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The totalitarian nature of contemporary leftism is both its greatest strength and its greatest irony.

</comment><comment><USER7> > "team members can come and stand by coworker for support"

Is it just me, or does this sound like an odd suggestion? Especially when it's suggested as a response to someone complaining or swearing.

</comment><comment><USER8> Oh please, a website registered to some house in michigan.

<comment><USER9> Would you mind enlightening me what exactly this implies?</comment></comment>


Lab-Made Whiskey, Lab-Made Wine - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2018/10/31/lab-made-whiskey-lab-made-wine <comment><USER3> That's how most whiskey, by quantity, is made already.[1] Frank-Lin Distillers' Products makes most of the low-end booze on the West Coast, and some of the high-end. Ethanol, made in plants in the Midwest, comes in by the tank car load by rail. Water comes from the water main and goes through a de- ionizing plant. Water, ethanol, and flavoring are mixed and bottled.

They produce over a thousand brands, but there are only about a hundred different recipes. Much of the value added is from the bottle and label. The bottle factory is across the street. They make most kinds of booze, including wine. The alcohol is "food grade industrial alcohol."[2]

They used to make Skyy vodka, until Skyy was acquired by Campari. Skyy was just a marketing operation. Frank-Lin made the stuff under contract. You can have your own brand of booze made by them as a service. Selling it is your problem.

Brand differences in this industry are more about marketing than product.

[1] [https://www.frank-lin.com/production.html](https://www.frank- lin.com/production.html) [2] [https://www.mgpingredients.com/other- products/food-grade-ind...](https://www.mgpingredients.com/other- products/food-grade-industrial-alcohol)

<comment><USER4> Whiskey is not made by mixing flavorings with pure ethanol from a rail car. It's (essentially) distilled beer. Most American whiskey is in fact distilled in Kentucky.

Brand differences in the whiskey market are complicated and incestuous, but they are not generally "more marketing than product".

<comment><USER5> Is it true that most American whiskey is distilled in Kentucky?

Jim Beam is massive in scope in ways that are fairly incomprehensible. Add mpg and micros & I wouldn't be surprised if it's not true.

<comment><USER4> Beam's biggest distillery (Booker Noe) is in Boston, KY.

<comment><USER5> Ok? Not what I asked. Suntory has lots of distilleries. Honestly don't know what their production mix is.

Also doesn't account for the trick question which is jack daniels. With that one is their any chance your statement is true?

PS: this is the worst form of internet board pedantry. Thomas was talking about a mis representation of the whiskey industry & instead of reputing his point, which I agree with, I nerd sniped.

<comment><USER4> Jack Daniels operates the largest still (by capacity) in the states, but then the next like 15 big stills are all in Kentucky. Suntory has stills all over the place, but if it's not Beam, it's probably not not American Beam-Suntory whiskey.

(Weird fact: MGPI distillate is all over the market, but they're not even close to the "biggest" still).

<comment><USER5> So this is a legitimate nerd snipe I'm willing to concede. I think it is closer than Thomas is saying here. Between Jack, Beam (and their international owners) & adding MGP & the tiny crafts I'd bet more American whiskey is _distilled_ outside of Kentucky than in.

Here is the bet. Given a methodology chosen by 'harryh I'm in on $500 to Blackstone Bicycle works against $500 to tptacek's charity of choice.

<comment><USER6> I don't know what y'all are asking me to do here exactly?

It seems like someone needs to do some research to find a list of whiskey distilleries and their annual output?

<comment><USER5> It turns out that this was fairly hard data to compile. The easiest set of data came from the Brown-Forman annual report. They list their distilleries and their sales volume in clear terms. The rest of the distilleries were not nearly as clear. Further Heaven Hill, a giant, is not public so don't need disclose an annual report.

In any case it became really clear really early that this bet devolved into 'does Jack Daniels outsell the rest of the American Whiskey industry by itself?'

Surprisingly, the answer is 'its actually close'. Here is an article that summarizes similar results to what I found: [https://www.thespiritsbusiness.com/2018/06/world-whiskey- bra...](https://www.thespiritsbusiness.com/2018/06/world-whiskey-brand- champions-2018-jameson/).

Dickel is the next biggest non-KY distillery that doesn't show up on this list. They are effectively .1 additional 9l cases combined. The crafts are .007.

In any case, I'll concede the bet. Let me know the charity.

<comment><USER5> Also if its not obvious that seagrams entry is from Indiana. So this top 7 list actually shows _outside_ of KY on top, but the next N major distilleries are all in KY.

<comment><USER5> If anyone is watching this thread I paid the bet off to the Chicago Legal Clinic

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If you're in LA, I'd recommend visiting the Lost Spirits Distillery for their tour. It's 1/3 tasting, 1/3 science lesson, 1/3 Mr. Toads Wild Ride. A great experience and their products are absolutely fantastic.

<comment><USER8> I'll shill the St. George distillery tour in the Bay Area. They make my favorite liquor by far.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> One thing that I always wonder about with these sorts of things is the extent to which chirality comes into play.

Biological chemistry generally expresses strong chirality biases that do not result from inorganic reactions - but the chirality plays a huge role in terms of how organisms react to the chemicals.

If you can control the ratios of a chiral compound's enantiomers then it really is as simple as they say - just a number of compounds thrown together in appropriate ratios; but if not, it will be impossible to truly replicate the results of the standard process.

<comment><USER10> an interesting chirality story: The navy contracted John Frost [0] to make rocket fuel biologically. The normal route to butanetriol (the precursor to butanetrioltrinitrate, BTTN, the rocket fuel in sidewinder missiles) is via reduction of malic acid. In order to do this one must consume large quantities of boron, not terribly hard to obtain in the southwestern US, but the problem is that the partially oxidized borate salts are a bitch to clean up and quite toxic - I guess the Navy wanted a greener way to kill people. A biological route would make the entire process cleaner, and less costly.

The big problem, is of course, that 1,2,4 butanetriol is very much chiral. You might think that because it's gonna basically be burned who cares anyways, but actually since BTTN is a solid rocket propellant, having a different crystal symmetry can cause potentially undesired propellant effects in the bulk. We can't have a rocket that doesn't work, or perhaps worse, occasionally blows up, on the tarmac because of a teeny tiny difference in solid packing geometries.

So Frost had to build two biochemical pathways to the compound. Which he did (btw that is no small feat). The plan was to then combine them 1:1 before subjecting the product to nitration.

Then, just for S&G, they took one enantiomer and nitrated it. Turns out the nitration reaction is harsh enough to quantitatively racemize the compound.

[0] [https://patents.google.com/patent/US7923226B2/en](https://patents.google.com/patent/US7923226B2/en)

In general, if I were doing biosynthesis for profit, I would probably not want to make anything that didn't have a value-add due to the chiral selectivity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> So they've figured out how to turn water (and ethanol and some reagents) into wine. Neat!

But I'll believe that it's _good_ only after hearing about how it fares in blind taste tests.

<comment><USER12> We already know that self proclaimed aficionados can't tell the difference between cheap and expensive wine.

It'll be interesting to see if they can tell the difference between authentic wine and lab-made.

I saw some vegan mince the other day that _looked_ indistinguishable from the real thing.

<comment><USER13> Unless I misunderstand you, that's an absurd overstatement at best.

My wife is a somm as are many of our friends. I joined in on many of their study sessions as each of them went through various phases of their certifications.

Granted I'm lucky to tell a Pinot from a Chardonnay, but watching trained Simms do blinds is impressive. It's a mix of a very specific process - <USER2> work from "the grid", picking apart specific properties of a taste one bit st a time - as well as incredible amount of practical knowledge that comes from tasting an absurd amount.

It's another thing to say that tastes don't necessarily correlate with price - any honest somm will tell you that. But anyone with a reasonable amount of experience can tell a $5 bottle of Cupcake or a two buck Chuck and something less industrial.

I know there's a lot of excitement for lab made - it'll rightly be seen as just another technique eventually.

<comment><USER14> I believe you're misunderstanding OP.

You're speaking of somms being able to distinguish flavor profiles - which of course is a skill and I don't think anyone would deny that.

What OP said is that cheap vs. expensive wine is indistinguishable (At times). There have been blind tastes tests with 2 Buck Chuck and expensive bottles, and 2 Buck Chuck won.

[https://www.popsugar.com/food/Wine-World-Reels-2-Buck- Chuck-...](https://www.popsugar.com/food/Wine-World-Reels-2-Buck-Chuck-Wins- Award-404101)

<comment><USER15> The flavor profiles of cheap and expensive wines don't really correlate so this argument is flawed. 2 Buck Chuck and other cheap bottles have flavor profiles that tend to be sweeter and less acidic when compared to more expensive bottles of wine, especially from the old world.

I think the correct statement is that most people actually prefer cheap "industrial" wine as it's more approachable (sweet with low acid), especially in youth, than many expensive bottles.

Even that article you linked to stated "There are those who feel that the results should not be taken into account as the judges are not true, trained wine professionals. The California State Fair competition is dismissed by some critics as representing broad-based consumer tastes rather than the palates of true wine connoisseurs."

Blinding the average Joe with cheap vs expensive wine is not a good barometer for the quality of said wines from an well seasoned wine drinker's perspective.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Cleveland Whiskey[0] is a few steps less science-y than what they're doing in TFA, but they're also pushing the limits of what some would consider traditional whiskey. After having sampled a couple bottles, I'd say I'm on board.

With products whose appeal is partly rooted in traditional craft, I realize that gaining mass-market acceptance for highly non-traditional production methods can be tough, but I'm one to let the results speak for themselves. It turns out you can get pretty good results if you're willing to push the envelope a bit.

[0] [https://clevelandwhiskey.com/](https://clevelandwhiskey.com/)

</comment><comment><USER17> the Endless West website says "All our flavors are naturally derived, meaning they come from plants and yeast."

when i read that i felt disappointed. for some reason i was hoping they gave themselves the freedom to use the full range of natural and artificial food- grade chemicals present in soft drinks, junk food and other consumer edibles.

<comment><USER18> Which flavors are fully synthesized as opposed being produced by normal creatures or genetically engineered E.coli or yeast?

<comment><USER17> I'm bad at chemistry. Really bad. I freely admit I don't have a good answer.

I was going to use Ethylvanillin as an example because it falls under the heading of "artificial flavor", but as I reflect on your question further, I gather that you're telling me that even things known as "artificial flavors" could be acceptable ingredients to Endless West because artificial flavors (like Ethylvanillin) ultimately are derived from chemicals that are derived from plants.

<comment><USER18> Reading up on the topic it seems like a lot more compounds than I thought are chemically manufactured. I thought the popular way was implanting yeasts with the genes for making the flavor. TIL.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> It would be cooler if they made drinks with the taste and psychological consequences of alcoholic drinks but either without reduced brain function the next day, or with an antidote to take the same night. Or maybe made it simple and affordable to store and replace most of the blood in your body.

</comment><comment><USER20> Similar story as Four Roses rye whiskey, they make most of the rye whiskey in the United States and it all gets relabeled and marked up by branding marketing etc...

<comment><USER21> This is false. I've been to Four Roses Distillery. Their operation doesn't have anywhere near the capacity you are talking about.

<comment><USER4> It's false, but Four Roses has what was a few years ago the 7th largest whiskey still in the country (by capacity), larger than MGPI's, which is in fact the still that supplies most rye to bogus NDP "distilleries".

(MGPI rye is quite good, but you shouldn't pay a premium for it. They're finally doing their own bottlings now, which is good news for consumers.)

<comment><USER21> Yes, they are large. They just completed a $55 million expansion that will double their capacity (obviously bourbon has a significant lag-time).

Four Roses is owned by Kirin Holdings, one of the top alcoholic beverage conglomerates.

It was the case that the Four Roses brand was heavily tarnished for decades as a blended whiskey, when owned by Seagrams.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


What Happens While Your Brain Sleeps is Like How Computers Stay Sane - <AUTHOR> http://highscalability.com/blog/2013/12/23/what-happens-while-your-brain-sleeps-is-surprisingly-like-ho.html <comment><USER2> Sleep also plays a part in synaptic conditioning -- it's when the brain prunes itself by separating signal from noise...

"Sleep researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health believe it is more evidence for their theory of 'synaptic homeostasis.' This is the idea that synapses grow stronger when we're awake as we learn and adapt to an ever-changing the environment, that sleep refreshes the brain by bringing synapses back to a lower level of strength. This is important because larger synapses consume a lot of energy, occupy more space and require more supplies, including the proteins examined in this study."

"Sleep — by allowing synaptic downscaling — saves energy, space and material, and clears away unnecessary 'noise' from the previous day, the researchers believe. The fresh brain is then ready to learn again in the morning" ([http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/04/090402143455.ht...](http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/04/090402143455.htm)).

</comment><comment><USER3> these two things are not comparable- computers tend to reboot due to 'cosmic rays', cruft left behind by poorly written applications, or, more commonly, nvidia drivers.

my brain goes down to sleep at night to commit and file my memories of the day, for area's to be selectively cleaned, for the brain and body in general to consume less energy and last longer/heal.

I can't hit a reboot button, it's not defrag- it's a complicated required process for living in a human skin.

<comment><USER4> A simple and compelling reason to meditate is that it can function like a reboot button for your brain. Moreso, in my experience, than sleep.

<comment><USER5> Sorry, but 10-15 minutes of napping is nothing like what meditation can deliver, even at 3 to 5 times the time invested.

Sleep does so many positive things its hard to fully understand how great it is for us.

<comment><USER4> What are you sorry about? Nothing you've said directly or indirectly contradicts what I said as far as I can tell.

<comment><USER5> My point is that its incredibly inefficient and bringing it up in an article about sleep seems like typical New Age evangelism to me. While there are certainly some benefits to it, its nothing like taking a nap.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> >And you may have noticed now that your iPhone supports background processing it reboots a lot more often?

Are phones spontaneously rebooting?

<comment><USER7> Well, when you stretch a metaphore this far, you have to lie some.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> > Without access to spinal fluid or nicely chunked pieces of garbage like > molecules

I would be really worried if I started clearing nicely chunked pieces of garbage like things in my sleep.

</comment><comment><USER9> The whole article is flawed.</comment>


Researchers can slip an undetectable trojan into Intel's Ivy Bridge CPUS - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/09/researchers-can-slip-an-undetectable-trojan-into-intels-ivy-bridge-cpus/ <comment><USER2> No, researchers _could theoretically_ slip a difficult-to-detect trojan into Ivy Bridge _if they controlled the manufacturing process for the chip_. The paper is extremely interesting and important, but this headline does it a grave disservice. There is actually nothing specific to Ivy Bridge about the technique; Ivy Bridge is simply a case study in the paper for how the technique might be valuable to an attacker.

<comment><USER3> The choice of BIST over scan/ATPG makes this attack theoretically possible on Ivy Bridge. If Intel had used scan/ATPG then this attack could not have worked even in theory. Unfortunately, I don't have the insight to understand why scan/ATPG could introduce a backdoor.

Disclaimer: I don't think that this attack is even theoretically feasible given just a few real world constraints. I am just nitpicking

<comment><USER4> Scan chains by design, give you the ability to load each flop with whatever value you want. Then you can toggle the clock and see the result. If you were very resilient about this you may be able to gather information about the structure. Without a GDS or netlist this is all very far fetched and unlikely. I've said before, but it is far more likely to bribe a rogue designer than to introduce back doors at this level.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Alarmist title - you can't execute code undetected, as you would think from the title, you can alter the manufacturing process to poison the random number generator. The alteration is not detectable using current testing procedures.

It's not any big deal, people already are treating the RDRAND instruction as poisoned.

<comment><USER6> Before: it's no big deal, how likely is is that someone could compromise RDRAND without anyone noticing After: what's the big fuss, everyone who counts already treats RDRAND as compromised

Why does this always happen with stories like this one?

<comment><USER7> Possibly because almost every single post like this brings out the same apologists. The same apologists get voted sky high.

The proper question is how do the same apologists get voted to the moon and posts such as this get deleted?

We already know of corporate astroturfing. Could that be happening on HN? Nah, unpossible.

<comment><USER8> Are you suggesting NSAstroturfing?

The government has engaged in that sort of thing before. [http://rezn8d.net/2012/10/19/us-defense-contractors-sock- pup...](http://rezn8d.net/2012/10/19/us-defense-contractors-sock-puppet- scheme-busted-your-social-media-is-infected/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Worst headline ever. Ars is very bad at reporting on security issues.

</comment><comment><USER10> > In an e-mail, Paar stressed that no hardware trojans have ever been found > circulating in the real world and that the techniques devised in the paper > are mere proofs of concept.

No need to get all worried about this type of hack. First of all, it is just an idea, not something actually found. Secondly, the hack would be all too easy to detect: run rdrand 2^31 + x times and see if x is a repeated sequence.

<comment><USER11> It is not "too easy to detect" a bad PRNG from a good one.

<comment><USER12> I agree. Sounds like a number theory halting problem.

Generate sequences of numbers continually, ad infinitum, and determine if distribution rates are (?).

How would one begin to fill in that question mark? A PRNG that spits out three million 'zeros' and a single 'four' is as reliable as a PRNG that spits out an even distribution of random numbers.

<comment><USER13> Isn't the problem with detecting bad randomness that you can't be _sure_ about your decision?

That is, if you accept a certain probability of falsely identifying a RNG as biased, I don't see why this should be a fundamentally difficult problem, at the very least for the generator with four million 0s and a single 1: The probability that a good RNG spits out less than a thousand 1s in four million queries is negligible compared to the probability that it returns between 1.5 and 2.5 million 1s.

Of course, it will be harder to detect more sophisticatedly broken generators, but still, without requiring certainty, it should be possible to make some sensible claims?

<comment><USER14> For background info, read the art of computer programming, chapter 3.

For practical help, see [http://www.stat.fsu.edu/pub/diehard/](http://www.stat.fsu.edu/pub/diehard/) (linked from [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diehard_tests](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diehard_tests))

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> <3 the Trojan Horse from Burning Man 2011 :D

</comment><comment><USER16> This is interesting, but I wonder what the real world application of this change would be. According to Linus, the Intel RdRand is only used as one of many sources of entropy in /dev/random. So even if it were compromised it wouldn't have a large impact on security.

Source: [http://www.change.org/en-GB/petitions/linus-torvalds- remove-...](http://www.change.org/en-GB/petitions/linus-torvalds-remove- rdrand-from-dev-random-4/responses/9066)

<comment><USER17> Somebody posted this link on another discussion: [http://cm.bell- labs.com/who/ken/trust.html](http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html)

There's no way to know for sure, but I don't think this is a problem for the average consumer. I'd like to think serious black hats are not amateur fishermen who use a bait to catch anything that passes by. I picture them more like a sniper waiting for the perfect shot on a valuable target. In other words, yes every system could be compromised, but the ones that are will be the ones holding more valuable information. And those are few relative to the mass of average joes. But then one might get an advantage from controlling a botnet, and use it to attack more valuable targets.

I don't really know :)

<comment><USER18> It's the same as security always is. "What are my enemies capable of" is an absolutely critical component of the security equation that cannot be overlooked.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> NSA can do much better than that. US tech can no longer be trusted.

</comment><comment><USER20> Doesn't sound undetectable to me. Isn't this what the die hard tests are for?

<comment><USER21> No it's not. The die hard tests don't help against malice.

Consider this PRNG:

`"random"_bitstream` := AES('00000000...', NSA_KEY)</comment></comment>


A repository of 300 Engineering Management stories - <AUTHOR> http://stories.platohq.com/ <comment><USER2> I enjoyed hearing the firsthand stories from various managers. I like that they are organized into a template of problem statement, lessons learned etc. with summaries and are very concise and to the point. I like that they are filterable too. Reminds me of the old antipatterns catalog [http://wiki.c2.com/?AntiPatternsCatalog](http://wiki.c2.com/?AntiPatternsCatalog)

</comment><comment><USER3> I guess I'll be the unpopular opinion and say I enjoyed reading the few stories that caught my attention. They weren't as in depth as I had hoped, but it's still interesting to see how managers deal with situations. The airplane and kite bit had me cringing a little but I see what he was going for there.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm not going to read any of them, because I looked at their titles. Not saying it's fair, but I'm just done with "How to make your team inspired in love you!" stories by people who are trying to boost their personal brand.

If your team loves you, show me the blog post THEY wrote about how good a manager you are.

<comment><USER5> I had a brief look at some of them. I don't want to be too negative, but it does look like CV-booster articles like 'Learn to known if your employee is a kite or and airplane'.

Maybe I'm not the intended customer here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Would love to have your feedback on these stories!</comment>


UK's disused mine shafts plan to store renewable energy - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/21/how-uks-disused-mine-shafts-plan-to-store-renewable-energy <comment><USER2> "Gravitricity develops winch and hoist system to store energy at half the cost of lithium-ion batteries" \- Gravitricity, an Edinburgh-based startup.

I think Edinburgh has a really good startup scene with a huge bio-quarter and even some space engineering like Skyrora. Skyscanner, a flight search engine, has been the most successful so far, sold to Ctrip for 1.4b UKP.

</comment><comment><USER3> _" a typical 10MW lithium-ion battery project, capable of releasing 24MW of electricity per hour"_

What?</comment>


TensorFlow 1.11 released - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/releases/tag/v1.11.0 <comment><AUTHOR> The main highlight is a new version of AllReduce native to TensorFlow. This, like Horovod, builds a ring and has both native and NCCL implementations. Early results (albeit on a single host) show that it outperforms Horovod: [https://groups.google.com/a/tensorflow.org/forum/#!topic/dis...](https://groups.google.com/a/tensorflow.org/forum/#!topic/discuss/7T05tNV08Us)

<comment><USER2> And it looks like it's natively supported via Keras too? [https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/tree/master/tensorf...](https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/tree/master/tensorflow/contrib/distribute)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, and with the estimator API, too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> > Add multi-GPU DistributionStrategy support in tf.keras. Users can now use > fit, evaluate and predict to distribute their model on multiple GPUs.

Is this different than the existing multi_gpu_model? ([https://keras.io/utils/#multi_gpu_model](https://keras.io/utils/#multi_gpu_model))

</comment><comment><USER4> Looks like Python 3.7 is not supported yet:

[https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/issues/20517](https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/issues/20517)

Somewhat off topic: I'm rediscovering the dance required to set up a new Windows 10 laptop with Python, CUDA, and TensorFlow. If I understand correctly, pyenv does not work on Windows. Is there something similar?

Also, if I installed TensorFlow in WSL, it wouldn't be able to use the GPU, would it?

<comment><USER3> Python 3.7 is supported if you build master from source. But that can be a lot of work and though it may solve your TF problem, it may create other problems with other Python packages.

In my experience conda is the way to go for setting up your environment. I did not have great luck with pyenv, YMMV.

I don't know about WSL. Maybe setup a dual boot with Ubuntu on your system?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Does it still have that horrible java build dependency?</comment>