Alcohol and Its Effects on Learning - <AUTHOR> http://www.deltaself.com/2011/04/alcohol-and-its-effects-on-learning/ <comment><USER2> A pet theory of mine is that those with low self-awareness and lowered inhibitions are the fastest learners.

The positive way of saying this is that those who are not afraid of making mistakes will learn the most. By their willingness or indifference to being wrong in a conversation they overcome the problems of accumulating unknown unknowns. Meanwhile others who fear embarrassment accept a higher level of ignorance.

The negative way of saying this is that the loudmouth in class is actually doing everyone a favor.

It ties well into this article, as in the study alcohol is being used as a medium to decrease self-awareness. There could be more to this theory. For instance it possible that alcohol is accelerating the formation of new neural connections. But it wouldn't be needed to show a benefit towards learning.

<comment><USER3> A similar concept probably applies to the amazing ability of kids to pick up different languages and learn so many new concepts in the early years. Their low self-awareness and disregard for most social norms (including looking stupid ) allows them to be more persistent towards their goal (eg learning a new language or a new skill).

<comment><USER4> The reason kids pick up languages and concepts early in life is a result of evolution. It has nothing to do with self-awareness and disregard with social norms. It's the complete opposite. Survival of early humans depended on learning and communication. When we were hunter/gatherers cooperation and socialization meant survival. The faster you learned language and social skills (i.e. hunting or gathering) meant an increased chance of survival. The faster you learned, the more likely you were to survive. Language and socialization were key to early human survival and the more you excelled at it, the more you thrived. If you didn't, your more likely to be a victim of natural selection. Humans have an intrinsic nature to conform to what they perceive as "social norms". It's a genetic response.

<comment><USER5> I don't see how the two (excelling at language acquisition due to lowered social inhibition vs evolving to excel at language acquisition early in life) are mutually exclusive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I hate google noise (blogs, content farms) as I can't find a study from years ago which showed:

Study drunk, test better when drunk (lets say buzzed, most people "drunk" cannot function, its subjective in terminology).

Study sober, test better when sober.

You cannot mix it (in the study), IE: study drunk, test sober, study sober, test drunk.

Its a "duh" or common sense thing to me, brain functions being formulative to your current state of function.

I BELIEVE it was the University of Utah (which has a myriad of awesome drunk studies (cell phones vs >.08 alcohol levels, etc).

<comment><AUTHOR> I have 2 references for you: 1\. [http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~ucbpl/docs/3-Alcohol- Induced74...](http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~ucbpl/docs/3-Alcohol- Induced74.pdf)

2\. Topic of discussion at every college party ever

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm reminded of an interesting way babylonian merchants used to do business. They would bargain for a deal while intoxicated on alcohol, thus proving to each other that they are being honest.

Perhaps we should force all politicians to do the same thing? :)

<comment><USER8> Given how often I hear it said that politicians would be better replaced by drunk monkeys, you might be onto something.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> My german definitely becomes much, much better after a few beers. Too many though and it starts getting worse.

No one's mentioned the Ballmer Peak yet?

</comment><comment><USER10> Just what every college student needs to read...Pretty interesting though.

<comment><USER11> Every college student _should_ read this. Maybe if they had read it when I went to school, I would have gotten less harsh looks for showing up to class completely trashed every day...

<comment><USER12> A fitting username you have.

<comment><USER11> The hilarious part is that I was able to spend 4 years straight intoxicated, but I ended up getting the exact same degree as the rest of them. But yeah, being wasted and doing as well as my peers sure does suggest I'm pretty dumb, doesn't it.

People who look down on others for drinking are really no different than anybody who looks down on _anybody_ else who has a lifestyle different from their own.

<comment><USER5> In my well-tested experience, there is a fine line between having fun and making an ass of yourself. The correlation between showing up to class wasted and making an ass of yourself is (again, in my own intimate experience) too large to ignore.

Don't get me wrong, I like to drink a lot. And I don't look down on others who drink a lot. I certainly don't think they're dumb. But I do think promoting/encouraging/bragging about it is generally kind of silly, especially when alcoholism is a serious problem that destroys lives.

<comment><USER11> In my well-tested experiance, there is a fine line between me being able to sit through a lecture that has been dumbed down to the LCD, and me saying "fuck all" and not seeing to professor again until the final. That fine line is approximately 3-4 drinks ("trashed" is an exageration). On a wet campus it is entirely the professors call, and only once did I receive a complaint (over the bottle, not my behavoir)

Don't get me wrong, I think alcoholism is a problem, but I _know_ that _drinking_ is not. In fact, with all the recent neoprohibitionist MADD crap, I think drinking needs some public advocacy of its own.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Sorry, this subject can't be mentioned on the internet without this link being posted. Don't care if I'm downvoted to oblivion...

<http://xkcd.com/323/>

</comment><comment><USER14> My Deleuze reading group imbibes heavily, and it seems (in a totally non- scientific way) to have no ill effects. Then again, it's Deleuze, so it's almost impenetrable anyway. The 1960s in California were full of AI and comp. sci. people doing brain enhancement/augmentation experiments with LSD and other drugs. I see no reason why alcohol can't perform a similar function.

</comment><comment><USER15> Is there any reason this is specific to alcohol? From the article that doesn't appear to be the case. There are heaps of drugs that activate the same parts of the brain mentioned here, without (as many of) the deleterious side effects.

Curious that alcohol was singled out.

<comment><USER16> Alcohol is an unusual drug because it's _ubiquitous_ (socially and economically acceptable), and it has a very different effect in low doses than in high ones.</comment></comment>


Uber board member cracks joke about women at Uber event on harassment - <AUTHOR> http://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Uber-board-member-cracks-inappropriate-joke-11217457.php <comment><USER2> Not sure what is going on with that site, but it's crashing my Chrome tabs every time.</comment>


Ask HN: Should I start as sole proprietorship or LLC? - <AUTHOR> I am setting up one person business. Should I register my business as sole proprietor or LLC. <comment><USER3> LLC is usually the right answer but it can vary depending on what state you are in and what you are doing. One key thing is in a lot of states a single member LLC as a disregarded entity (IRS) will not have all the same protections as a multi-member LLC. Of course those protections are only critical in terms of like a personal bankruptcy or lawsuit etc, but nonetheless you should understand them.

A lot of the information can be found on legal zoom and other corporation creation sites. If you are just trying to run a small business in your state, the like best scenario is an LLC within your state. I dislike sole proprietor for the fact you are more exposed personally in most cases.

A corporation also isn't a bad thing you can elect a Subchapter S in which case your taxes are pass through and so it is very similar to an LLC and can be better in some circumstances, especially in some states where single member LLC's don't have the same level of protection a multi-member LLC does or a corporation does.

Also, typically, you can chat with an attorney during a consultation and figure out which one to use and then use something like legalzoom or the company corporation etc to setup the company. Just remember if you setup an LLC you need to have an operating agreement etc or the company really isn't safe, and the OA isn't something most corporation formation companies do for you, but you can find templates .

Last point, if you plan on any VC type level of fundraising then all the above is not what you want to do. But just as a point, you can raise money for an LLC from some angels/high net worth people, it isn't rare to see happen -- but VC's won't do it in general.

disclaimer, IANAL but do have current LLCs and have had both LLC's, corporation (S & C) in the past for various businesses.

</comment><comment><USER4> You should get a good tax person - let them advise you on your situation - <USER2> not take advice from random ppl on the internet.

</comment><comment><USER5> LLC is there right answer for most businesses, but without any more detail it's hard to say with complete certainty.

It's also hard to say with certainty because I'm not a lawyer, just a person who has done this many times. That said, all the usual legal stuff applies that you should take my suggestion with a grain of salt. Good luck.</comment>


Apple releases Swift for iOS Dev - <AUTHOR>

https://www.dropbox.com/s/s1r1fql1qx8vspm/Screenshot%202014-06-02%2011.47.03.png <comment><USER2> Going to get confused with [http://swift-lang.org/](http://swift-lang.org/)

<comment><USER3> I love how the world just DDos-ed the swift-lang.org site :P

<comment><USER4> They're going to wonder what the hell happened.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The beginning of the end for Objective-C? Thank god.

<comment><USER6> Sigh. The energy I spent learning Obj-C ...

<comment><USER7> … has broadened your horizons and made you a better programmer, making future languages you want to learn that much easier.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is there a reason you didn't just use the _link_ feature?

<comment><AUTHOR> Apologies, I added the URL subsequently.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Main discussion going on here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7835217](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7835217)

</comment><comment><USER9> More info: [https://developer.apple.com/swift/](https://developer.apple.com/swift/)

Download "The Swift Programming Language" from the iBooks Store [https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/the-swift-programming- langu...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/the-swift-programming- language/id881256329?mt=11)

</comment><comment><USER10> From looking at the slide, looks quite like Scala.

</comment><comment><USER11> I wonder if it'll be able to cross compile to other platforms?

</comment><comment><USER12> Do we really need another language?

<comment><USER13> Said no iOS developer ever.</comment></comment>


(Historical) Harry Porter's Relay Computer - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3wPBcmSb2U <comment><AUTHOR> This has been submitted a few times before, but I came across it again today and thought I'd re-submit it. There's not been much discussion, but it's a fascinating machine. Here's a link to the technical details and description:

<http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~harry/Relay/>

Here are earlier HN submissions:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=150788>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3116921>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3452778>

Here's a search:

[http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=harry+relay...](http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=harry+relay+computer&sortby=create_ts+desc)

I'm also reminded of "From NAND to Tetris", which is around here somewhere.

It's clearly possible to learn to program and to produce amazing things without knowing how a computer works, but sometimes I wonder if there are kids who would become interested in computers if there was more information about how they work at a more steam-punk level. Building a machine from relays, then getting it to do simple sums, then building a machine from NAND gates, understanding they are effectively the same thing, and thence to Tetris. Finally, seeing a more modern machine and what that can do, and understanding that it's a simple, but lengthy progression.

Are there kids who would be inspired by this?

Would they become good programmers?

</comment><comment><USER2> I imagine that the Zuse Z1 must have sounded like that while running.</comment>


Ask HN: Paradigm changes you've experienced? - <AUTHOR>

I was wondering if people on HN could share some 'paradigm changes' in the way they look at the world they've experienced.
For example as a student of math, the fundamental way in which I view things could be more or less summarized into three phases:
- Emphasis on 'objects' (high school): E.g. what are the properties of this specific real valued function? Solve this specific geometry problem. Where does this specific function attain a maximum?
- Abstraction to spaces (undergrad): The focus changes to abstract spaces and structures (e.g. topological spaces, groups, function spaces). E.g. Instead of focusing on the properties of one function, we study properties of a function space. A theorem proven about groups in general applies to any example of a group.
- Categorical abstraction (grad school): We can abstract further from specific structures to categories. Many structure-specific constructions (e.g. direct sums of groups, disjoint unions of sets, wedge products of pointed space) can be unified into categorical constructions (e.g. the co-product for those just listed). The language of functors provides a uniform way of talking about mapping one type of structure into another.
Another unrelated major viewpoint change I've experienced is that I've resigned myself to the fact that the world is much more random and uncontrollable than we believe it is. Pretty much all major events in my life have been unpredictable and essentially due to chance. This realization has provided me with more peace of mind, than before when I was much more worried about "making the right decisions".
I am interested in what meta-viewpoints people have experienced, and any changes they've experienced. They can be related to anything: computer programming, science, life, relationships ... <comment><USER2> > What programmers in a hundred years will be looking for, most of all, is a > language where you can throw together an unbelievably inefficient version 1 > of a program with the least possible effort. - > <http://www.paulgraham.com/hundred.html>

After years of working in C++, it took me a long time to come to believe that a lot of that work had really just been wasted effort, optimization decisions far removed from the problem domain that other languages let you completely ignore. Right now I'm enjoying Haskell, but I think JavaScript is going to win (even over Python and Ruby), because it's very easy to get something sloppy but often working and not quite slow enough to be unusable, and that's all customers will pay for.

> When I was a kid I always imagined I'd be normal by now. - > <http://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=1586>

I spent most of my 20s and 30s just minding the store, not limiting my options, unconsciously waiting for the sane and perfect version of me to show up and do something with my life. But he's not coming. It's just me, and whatever I don't get around to isn't ever going to happen.

And choosing a career that keeps you poor isn't noble but self-indulgent—it pays badly because we already have more people than we need doing the same thing, because that's all they want to do. Money is the measure of how much society actually values your contribution and wants to convince you to keep at it.

</comment><comment><USER3> I understood the world a whole lot better after reading _The Selfish Gene_ (e.g. [http://www.amazon.com/Selfish-Gene-Anniversary---- Introducti...](http://www.amazon.com/Selfish-Gene-Anniversary---- Introduction/dp/0199291152/) but see if you can find a used copy of an earlier edition). This is the book that introduced the meme meme.

Biology in general is _tremendously_ useful in providing you with a whole set of patterns and models of "things that work" (in the proper context, of course). Studying some college level general biology is recommended if you haven't already.

</comment><comment><USER4> 1998 - stopped being a Microsoft guy and learned to love Linux.</comment>


Embedded Rust Experiments: Is My STM32 MCU Running Fast? - <AUTHOR> https://nercury.github.io/rust/embedded/experiments/2019/01/27/rust-embedded-02-measuring-the-clock.html <comment><USER2> That diagram of the clocking system is a good example of how the bigger MCUs are like having a whole computer on a single chip, with all the implications of complexity that brings. It's not enough to set up a single clock; you also need to make sure the clocks to the peripherals that are in use are also what you need them to be.

(I wish such diagrams in datasheets would let you click on the appropriate blocks to jump directly to their registers and description sections.)

<comment><USER3> Vendor tools for STM provide almost exactly what you wish for for the clock diagram.

Example: [http://www.emcu.it/STM32clk/STM32clk.html](http://www.emcu.it/STM32clk/STM32clk.html)

<comment><USER4> I haven't used the STM Cube configurator for a while, but last time I did it was almost at FPGA software levels of user-unfriendlieness. If you changed the indentation on a magic comment in your code and then adjusted one of the clocks, CUBE would clobber your existing code and silently delete it.

<comment><USER3> Yes, Cube autogenerates a lot of code and will overwrite things that don't follow the inserted markers.

The original article even includes an example of using Cube to configure the clocks and then use those configurations together with Rust.

I agree that it isn't ideal at all and kinda wonky. But more links in the datasheets would be nice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It is always good to get to know your MCUs. When I first started using STM32s I would also scope the crystal and then toggle some pins as fast as possible to make sure.

Many gadgets later I trust the programmatic detection of external crystal use and appropriate PLL function. If you HAVE to know if the crystal fails you can use the CSS (Clock Security System) to generate interrupts in case you fall back to the internal oscillator.

<comment><USER6> TIP: You should never scope a crystal directly as that could damage it. In production, for testing crystals, we output a PWM on a pin using the crystal as a source and measure that if the MCU doesn't have a built in functionality.

<comment><USER7> I've never heard of putting a scope probe on a crystal damaging it, though the load resistance (typically 1Megohm to ground) and capacitance (~5pF to ground) will affect the frequency.

This is why the PWM-out is useful -- it gives you a buffered, divided-down version of the crystal clock.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think the hybrid approach, high-level Rust + low-level C is actually preferable. Rust really shines at the high-level things and you do what C is good at on the drivers.

<comment><USER9> I don't see what C gives you at a low level that rust doesn't.

You can translate C line by line into identical rust at no cost except that you have to write "unsafe" once per fn. With the exception of macros, but rust's replacements there are just better.

Keeping everything in one language seems like a worthwhile reason not to use C to me.

<comment><USER10> C gives you better options for static analysis of worst case stack usage, e.g. [https://github.com/PeterMcKinnis/WorstCaseStack](https://github.com/PeterMcKinnis/WorstCaseStack)

Proprietary software for this is also available with superior UI and features, and I expect people serious about high-reliability embedded systems already use it.

Rust Nightly does have limited support for printing stack usage by function with -Z emit-stack-sizes, but I could not find anything for analysis of worst case stack usage in whole programs.

<comment><USER9> Presumably you lose static analysis benefits as soon as you are mixing languages though?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Very nice writeup, those clock registers get so hairy and your notes are phenomenal!</comment>


Google Books Ngram of George Carlin's Seven Dirty Words - <AUTHOR> http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=shit,piss,fuck,cunt,cocksucker,motherfucker,tits&year_start=1650&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3

<comment><USER2> Many false positives in early years due to 's' being written like 'f' and mistaken by the OCR software. Both the short and tall forms were used, but there seemed to have been some style preferences that led to the tall 's' being used at the beginning of a word, and small 's' at the end.

In handwriting or italic, the tall 's' was rather like the integral symbol, but when setting serifed font it looks pretty much like an 'f', but missing half or all the crossbar.

<comment><USER3> Multiple meanings for 'tits' are also a consideration. (Maybe my monitor or eyes suck, but I had to do a tits vs fuck only ngram search to see that the big spike is in fact tits.)

<comment><USER4> I think either your monitor or your eyes must in fact fu- I mean suck, because the big bulge (it's not exactly a spike) is for "fuck", not for "tits".

(And most of it does in fact seem to be for wrongly-OCRed "suck", unsurprisingly.)

<comment><USER5> Note the long-s discussion earlier in this submission.

Maybe life just really fucked back then.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Does anyone else have a really hard time telling the difference between the green that's used for 'fuck', and the green that's used for 'tits'?

I don't think I'm suddenly going colour-blind but it strikes me as odd that google would pick two colours that are so close to each other for a graph that needs so few separate colours...

</comment><comment><USER7> In first page of search results for 1650 - 1724 I saw 4 different words OCR'd as "shit": This, that, first, and shit.

"first" looks like "firft", but "This" and "that" look pretty standard.

</comment><comment><USER8> Interesting to see how shit and piss diverged after WWII. I wonder what propelled shit's cultural ascent.

([http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=shit,piss&yea...](http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=shit,piss&year_start=1850&year_end=1965&corpus=0&smoothing=3))

</comment><comment><USER9> 1800 was the year ... :) [http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=tits%2Cboobs%2Cbr...](http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=tits%2Cboobs%2Cbreasts&year_start=1650&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=9)

</comment><comment><USER10> It looks like somewhere near the 60s, people stopped caring about not using expletives! :)</comment>


Can you make yourself smarter? - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/22/magazine/can-you-make-yourself-smarter.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all <comment><USER2> The scientific evidence for Dual N Back improving fluid intelligence is actually fairly weak as far as I can tell, see this critique and the other studies discussed:

<http://www.gwern.net/DNB%20FAQ#criticism>

My personal theory is that solving difficult math and programming problems is a better use of time than doing working memory training exercises. I'd guess that solving math and programming problems improve working memory just as fast as playing 'brain games', and they have the additional benefit of improving one's math and programming skill.

Of course, this is just a guess of mine that is unsupported by any experimental evidence.

<comment><USER3> In this book <http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0141035501/> the author says that solving simple math equations (addition,subtraction ,division) fast is much more stimulating than doing complex math.

<comment><USER4> And the argument and evidence he provides is what?

<comment><USER5> Seems very true in my opinion. I've always excelled at math, essentially have a bachelors in mathematics, etc etc. My weakness has always been getting the details of the "basic" math correct.

Higher math is about logic, abstractions and applying them to solve problems. Basic math is about holding bits of information in your head and manipulating them accurately. I absolutely believe that basic math taxes your working memory system more than advanced math does.

<comment><USER6> I just skimmed Outliers book by Malcom Gladwell. One of the things author discusses are differences in number systems in different cultures. He argues (in fact quoting Stanislas Dehaene [1]), that in eastern languages number words are shorter and faster to pronounce. Thus, you can hold more of them at a time in memory (short term memory is very time sensitive). You could say that you dont really need to 'pronounce' stuff to make mental operations, still they have sensory form (be it visual, auditory,...), so argument holds.

He also brings up the issue of regularity of eastern number systems making it much easier to do calculations in these languages - to an extent that it gives eastern children real advantage in math. Developmentally speaking.

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislas_Dehaene#Numerical_co...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislas_Dehaene#Numerical_cognition)

<comment><USER5> Sounds very true in my experience. This is one of the reasons why naming (in programming and everything else) is so crucial: good naming directly influences how easily one can mentally manipulate the objects in question. This is another reason why mathematicians work so hard to create concise abstractions.

I'll have to take a look at that book, sounds fascinating. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Not yet HN ready and I wanted to post this later . I have been working on a HTML 5 implementation , If you want to try the tasks mentioned.

<http://alpha.brainturk.com>

the chein task can be found here <http://alpha.brainturk.com/chein>

Please let me know your suggestions on how to improve this . I need to make a few more changes for this to be played on ipad but for now works with the keyboard

<comment><USER7> Keep going with this! I was just playing multiplication asteroids and there is a little lag between when I "die" and when the game over comes up so I can get an extra 2 or 3 answers in. Also, would it be possible to show lives remaining in asteroids?

I'd make the instructions pop up at first or at least make the link a little more prominent. I struggled with how to play the color game at first and it took me a minute to find the instructions.

The games are fun and I could see them being used for brain training or even just as teaching aids for middle school aged children.

<comment><USER3> Yes that will be a small fix to show the lives and as far as the instructions popping up first that is something I thought about but now that you mention it too I think that will be added next

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Superficially, the answer to this question is, obviously, yes. We reason spatially and with mental simulation, but we also reason by applying the linguistic conventions learned from our culture (e.g., "if this statement were false, then ...").

What most people seem to fail to realize is just how different people are from each other cognitively, and how many different ways there are of getting to a particular conclusion. "Intelligence" is like a country's GDP -- a complicated, non-stationary mess that, taken together and measured in a way our culture deems important, ends up representing our "Gross Cognitive Product".

So, dual n-back probably improves working memory in most people, which will probably improve their problem solving ability, most of the time. But there are, without a doubt, many other subtle, complicated, and idiosyncratic aspects of cognition that are likely to have far more dramatic effects if appropriately tweaked.

</comment><comment><USER9> Their sidebar explaining IQ scores seems a little silly. I'd like to see a citations for average scores of Nobel prize winners. Also, who went back in time to administer an intelligence test to Mozart?

<comment><USER10> IQ is just defined in terms of standard deviations. Having an IQ of 130 means you are 3 standard deviations smarter than average, i.e. in the 99.7th percentile. Presumably, they just put Motzart in the top 99.xxxxxx% percentile by guess and calculated the resulting IQ.

<comment><USER11> Well calculating using a guess is no better than just starting or ending with a guess

<comment><USER10> Oh sure. I was just clarifying how they went about giving Motzart a number without administering a test.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Wow, the timing here seems auspicious.

Lately I've been thinking about the limitations that being human puts on a programmer. We work very hard (and should) to reduce cognitive load on ourselves through good development tools that act as crutches for memory--- REPL's and good debuggers allow us to try something and see what happens, as opposed to simulating a multivariate operation in our heads. Intellisense and easily-available docs allow us to cheat a bit on learning(and what I really mean is memorizing) API's.

But what if we could do these things without relying on JIT computer aids? What if I could simulate more levels of abstraction in my head? The private dream of many a Lisper(this one, anyway)---writing programs that write programs that write programs---would be a bit more attainable.

I've been using Anki with great success to learn API's and keyboard shortcuts (Anki+emacs is a match made in heaven), but I despaired at my inability to hold the _whole_ stack, from top to bottom, in my head at once. So I posted a badly phrased question on Stack Exchange, ("How can I increase the number of levels of abstraction I can reason about at once?), and kept Googling. Eventually I came across Jaeggi's research. It looks promising, but hasn't passed the wide-replication test yet. I'm glad this came up on HN, because I'm eager to see more research in the area and get come confirmation or refutation of the findings.

In the meantime, the premise of Jaeggi's conclusion raises two questions---if working memory can be trained, can it decay with disuse? In that case, are with our fancy debugging tools mere shadows of Real Programmers that used to walk the earth? The other question is this---if the brain is likened to a computer, working memory corresponds to RAM. If we are successful at training working memory and making people "smarter," will we in the future face a bottleneck of processing speed rather than space?

<comment><USER13> How are you using Anki with emacs? Or are you using Anki to learn Emacs?

<comment><USER12> Anki to learn emacs. Should have been more clear.

One thing I've noticed about Anki is that the pain of memorizing and retaining stuff has been _significantly_ reduced. As such, I tend to be much more willing to "just memorize the whole thing" in a lot of cases. I guess a good analogy is the impact faster CPU's/more memory has had on programming---when they stop being the limiting factor, we start using languages adapted to us, rather than them. Similarly, as memorization has become "cheaper" to me, I find myself making choices that involve more memorization. A few days ago I made a deck specifically for all the gmail keyboard shortcuts. It would not normally be worth my time to commit those to memory, but because the cost has fallen so much, it didn't seem like a bad idea.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I did some moderately serious dual n-backing a year or so back in an effort to improve my chess game. Of course it wasn't a remotely scientific experiment so I can't tell if it really helped, but I did feel that my ability to concentrate increased, if not my ability to reason. I felt more able to take a breath after working out a variation and take a few seconds to really concentrate on the final (imagined) position and scrutinize it for tricks.

(My USCF rating did go up fairly significantly around then but it's no proof of any causation, plus I was doing plenty of other things at the same time to increase my chess results anyway.)

<comment><USER15> I feel the same way while learning a new technique on an instrument. It's having that focus and attention to detail that you can draw upon in your work when you need it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> It's interesting to think about what _intelligence_ really means. In some ways, this has been frequently discussed (ie multiple types of intelligence) and in other ways it seems that this has never been discussed (ie what are we actually talking about when we call someone intelligent?) Is intelligence the ability to learn something quickly? Is it the ability to understand something quickly? Is it the ability to solve a particular type of problem quickly?

Depending on what we mean, "Can you make yourself smarter?" has fairly obvious answers.

Start by looking at children. In one regard, we rarely learn faster than when we are kids. Everything is foreign to us, and we are constantly learning, our brains little sponges in a wet world. But clearly, our 25-year old selves could solve far more complex problems than our 6-year old selves. Did we get smarter between 6 and 25?

In the same vein, think about how severely retarded people are described: "He has the mind of a 4 year old." Whether that description is medically accurate or not isn't the point. We certainly think of children as intellectually inferior, even though all of our brains started out that way.

So what changed? Why is a 25 year old "more intelligent" than a 6 year old? Is it the creation of new neural pathways? Is it simply the way they've learned to look at the world or quickly apply answers and processes they already know to fit new problems?

Maybe you can provide more answers? Because it seems to me that the fact that we got to where we are today indicates that you can absolutely make yourself more intelligent, depending on how you define that. But I'm open to objections.

<comment><USER17> Yes, you certainly did get smarter between 6 and 25. Children's brains are still developing until late puberty. All sorts of cognitive tasks show development, including short term memory, working memory, etc... It's absolutely not just factual learning taht is happening.

<comment><USER16> Agreed (and studies show that brains are developing until at least 18, possibly into early 20's).

But why? Most people seem to think that this rapid development is, for the most part, genetically driven. Doesn't it seem strange to reach this conclusion when we don't even have a solid idea about what "intelligence" really means (other than "performs above X level on some cognitive test")?

<comment><USER18> >But why?

For the same reason that people grow taller until they're in their late teens and get stronger until they're in their early 20's.

>Most people seem to think that this rapid development is, for the most part, genetically driven.

It is. Depending on which studies you cherry-pick, the heritability of intelligence is somewhere between 0.5 and 0.8. The best way to be smart is to choose your parents.

>Doesn't it seem strange to reach this conclusion when we don't even have a solid idea about what "intelligence" really means (other than "performs above X level on some cognitive test")?

People can argue about the definition of strength just as easily. Who is the strongest person in the world? Is it whoever can bench-press the most weight? What about leg press? Clean-and-jerk? Maybe some average of these measures? Maybe we want to factor the person's weight in as well. While "strength" doesn't always have a precise definition, it's usually pretty easy for us to tell weak people from strong ones. It's the same when people talk about intelligence. The precise definition varies, but there are lots of correlating ways to measure it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This reminds me of an old New York Times article that categorized people into two categories:

1\. Those who believe that intelligence is fixed from birth, and

2\. Those who believe that intelligence can be improved

The finding was that folks in category (1) tended to be fearful of being wrong, and had trouble succeeding in life whereas the folks in category (2) felt it was OK or good to make mistakes, and tended to be more successful.

EDIT: article is <http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/06/business/06unbox.html>

<comment><USER20> [dweck mindset] will find the work of the researcher most associated with that result.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> When learning to program, my first major project was a feature-loaded N-back in C#/XNA. I crammed in every option I could think of. The game and code is available at <http://workingmemoryworkout.codeplex.com>, and it's worth noting that the inspiration came from Brain Workshop. (<http://brainworkshop.sourceforge.net/>)

</comment><comment><USER22> Another generic "intelligence" booster, for certain definitions of intelligence, is learning about cognitive biases and certain reasoning skills - "rationality". When I read the Sequences (<http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Sequences>) on Less Wrong (<http://lesswrong.com/>), I think my reasoning and analysis skills improved, and I was able to avoid some thinking mistakes, such as by training myself to be "fair" to all sides of an argument. I also found reading the Sequences fun; their subjects include interesting mental puzzles. Go check them out.

</comment><comment><USER23> I'm probably just being overly critical here but his example of "deciding if a number is odd or even in a matter of seconds" seems odd, I think 2nd graders and up can tell you in half a second or less whether or not a number's even or odd.

He says:

"In addition to working memory, researchers are seeking to improve fluid intelligence by training other basic mental skills — perceptual speed (deciding, in a matter of seconds, whether a number is odd or even), visual tracking (on a shoot-'em-up computer game, for instance) or quickly switching between a variety of tasks."

<http://i.imgur.com/k9PXE.png>

<comment><USER24> > can tell you in half a second or less whether or not a number's even or odd.

Sure, but just because it takes half a second or less doesn't mean it's not reflecting mental performance. For example, testing reflexes takes even less time, down to tenths of a second, but yet, reflex time still correlates with IQ.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> from the article, one of the games is <http://www.soakyourhead.com/dual-n- back.aspx>

update:

You need a speaker to play

should say "Press A when the box appears in the same location _since the start of the game_"

<comment><USER26> FYI: requires Silverlight.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Working memory is convenient for mental dexterity. But it doesn't help you see deeper associations between the apparently unrelated, which is the true crux of genius and of all revolutionary insight and progress, IMHO. _That_ comes from long-term associative memory, seeded by persevering immersion and experiment.

IQ!=genius. Genius is what you _do_.

</comment><comment><USER28> Don't know about the specifics in the article, but modern research is showing (has already shown, I think...) that the brain shows far more plasticity than they thought not long ago. Things (not specificially intelligence) that were thought to be invariable turn out to not exist.... the brain can learn.

</comment><comment><USER29> While I can't read the article. My answer to this question was always along the lines of "Oh I'm sure you can, but the problem is that thanks to the Dunning-Kruger effect, _dumb people won't feel that they need to put in the effort to get smarter._ "

So the smart get smarter and the dumb get dumber; so to speak.

<comment><USER24> Actually, there was a weird recent re-analysis of Jaeggi 2011 using the Big Five psychology data they recorded for the subjects at the time, where the Conscientiousness (rough synonym for hardworking and self-disciplined) benefitted least in terms of far transfer/IQ while their scores improved the most: [http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886912...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886912000815)

<comment><USER30> Thanks for that article. In the abstract, they seem to state that they believe the conscientious didn't improve as much because they developed specific strategies for the particular game. So, they basically gamed the system instead of improving organically. It looks like you could vary the game rules and objectives to keep the conscientious from developing those strategies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> The title needs a question mark at the end (as in the original).

</comment><comment><USER32> Unscientific data point:Two weeks after playing this game,my chess rating improved by 70 points.I had tanked for close to six months

</comment><comment><USER33> Can anyone recommend games on the android that do "N-back testing"?

<comment><USER24> <http://www.gwern.net/DNB%20FAQ#android></comment></comment>


Ask HN: I'm thinking about doing some professional listening - <AUTHOR> Dear HackerNews;
My name is Aaron, and I am a professional software developer.
But I'm thinking about trying something new.
My career as a full-stack developer has spanned twenty years. I've worked in telecom. I've consulted for the federal government. I've slung code for startups. For a few years I was even the lead developer for Squidoo.com. These days I'm self-employed—it's a means to an end, and I'm pretty sure I'm almost at the end.
But before I move onto the next waypoint in my current career, I'm considering testing a fork.
When I reflect on my career, I realize I've done as much if not more listening than I have done coding. I'm not talking about the sort of listening that's necessary to write good software. I'm talking about helping my colleagues to resolve personal and professional conflicts. Sometimes I've helped by saying nothing at all—I'm good at listening.
I'm wondering if there's a marketplace among my peers for a "professional listener." We could discuss personal and professional challenges together. You'd pay up front for an hour of my time. We'd sign a mutual NDA. I would add you to my Slack Team, and we'd setup a time to chat.
I want to be clear: I'm not proposing counseling; I'm pretty sure that would be against the law. I couldn't make recommendations for treatment of any sort. I suspect from time to time I would recommend licensed practicing counselors.
No, this would be more like life coaching, but I don't want to call it that. There's too much voodoo in that market, too many "weird tricks." This would be honest, patient, professional listening—no shortcuts, just kindness.
Would you use such a service? What would you pay for it? Please reply in the comments, or e-mail me at email@example.com.
Thanks for your time.
Sincerely,
Aaron Collegeman <comment><USER2> >No, this would be more like life coaching, but I don't want to call it that. There's too much voodoo in that market, too many "weird tricks." This would be honest, patient, professional listening—no shortcuts, just kindness.

I don't know... sounds like life coaching.

<comment><USER3> Maybe call it 'professional coaching', or 'executive coaching'. People that do those will definitely delve into the personal life of the client and how it all plays together with work-life.

<comment><AUTHOR> I guess what to call it should also depend on what people search for when they're trying to find what it is I'm offering...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> You are talking about mentoring services. This is a thing, and that business model already exists. You can even do online mentoring for programmers [https://www.liveedu.tv/about/](https://www.liveedu.tv/about/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Great feedback. Thank you. I like the idea of calling it mentoring.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> For me I'd consider paying for such a service if it could also help me achieve career goals as well as get stuff off my chest.

The getting stuff of chest angle is interesting because it's rarely possible at work, due to needing to keep a professional facade.</comment>


Convert binary to decimal - <AUTHOR> http://www.wikihow.com/Convert-from-Binary-to-Decimal

<comment><USER2> Not exactly a news topic :P Clear tutorial though

<comment><AUTHOR> Loved the tutorial ... True, there was nothing new here ... :)</comment></comment>


MDS: Microarchitectural Data Sampling side-channel vulnerabilities in Intel CPUs - <AUTHOR> https://mdsattacks.com <comment><USER2> Commentary by Intel: [https://software.intel.com/security-software- guidance/softwa...](https://software.intel.com/security-software- guidance/software-guidance/microarchitectural-data-sampling)

Commentary by RedHat: [https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/understanding-mds- vulnerabili...](https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/understanding-mds- vulnerability-what-it-why-it-works-and-how-mitigate-it) ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19912108](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19912108))

Commentary by Ubuntu: [https://blog.ubuntu.com/2019/05/14/ubuntu-updates-to- mitigat...](https://blog.ubuntu.com/2019/05/14/ubuntu-updates-to-mitigate-new- microarchitectural-data-sampling-mds-vulnerabilities)

<comment><USER3> Some additional pages by Intel describing mitigation techniques for non-HT domains (including the new overload of the VERW instruction): [https://software.intel.com/security-software- guidance/insigh...](https://software.intel.com/security-software- guidance/insights/deep-dive-intel-analysis-microarchitectural-data-sampling)

Details of which steppings of which processors are affected by which CVEs: [https://software.intel.com/security-software- guidance/insigh...](https://software.intel.com/security-software- guidance/insights/deep-dive-cpuid-enumeration-and-architectural-msrs#MDS- CPUID)

<comment><USER4> They advise only to use lfence, similar to compiler vendors. I advise to use a full mfence instead when clearing secrets. Load/store ordering is violated in caches. And cleaning secrets is done not so often, it needs to be reliable. MDS is thanksfully only for small data, and modern keys are much larger. But adding a simple verw for the tiny non-cache buffers does not hurt either.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There are 4 separate vulnerabilities in MDS, not just the one reported in the ZombieLoad paper. They each have CVEs.

Chrome Browser response here: [https://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium- security/mds](https://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-security/mds)

<comment><USER6> > Linux users should apply kernel and CPU microcode updates as soon as they > are available from their distribution vendor, and follow any guidance to > adjust system settings.

Canonical says that they have those for 14/16/18.04 [1]. But possibly more interesting is the fact that this disclosure has been so well synchronized. How do the relevant players decide what the threshold is for informing other tech companies? How does everyone know what policies that the constituent companies use to prevent early disclosure or unintended disclosure to 'somewhat-less-trusted-employees'? Is this all coordinated by US CERT?

[1] [https://blog.ubuntu.com/2019/05/14/ubuntu-updates-to- mitigat...](https://blog.ubuntu.com/2019/05/14/ubuntu-updates-to-mitigate-new- microarchitectural-data-sampling-mds-vulnerabilities)

<comment><USER7> As with Spectre/Meltdown, L1TF et al, Intel chooses who to loop in to their disclosure.

All of it is tightly controlled under an embargo. Who they choose to involve is entirely their decision, and is likely based on previous experience with those parties and their likelihood of leaking. Intel doesn't want these kinds of things to leak before official communication is done, or it's pretty much guaranteed to impact their stock price.

This time around has gone much smoother than the previous ones, though L1TF was pretty good too. L1TF was a little rough with the patching side of things because the patches were finalised a little late.

The various distributions and companies knew that the embargo was due to end at 10am pacific, and were probably (like us) refreshing the security advisories page on Intel's site waiting to pull the trigger on all the relevant processes, like publishing blog pages etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Hyper-Threading has been a source of security concerns for a decade now, and vulnerabilities in existing HT implementations have been trickling out over the last few years. Unlike Management Engine or TrustZone, at least we can disable Hyper-Threading (for a 30% performance hit).

<comment><USER9> Also, HT is not such a great performance win - on a few different 4-core/8-thread machines, I had access to, loading all 8 threads to "100% CPU" (whatever that means) usually only delivers 20-30% faster computation than with HT off (4-core/4-thread) - which is inline with your 30% number.

And that's an improvement - some 15 years ago, with similar computational loads, most of my tests ran 10-20% _faster_ with the HT off (using 2 core / 2 threads) than with HT on (using 2 core / 4 threads) - there just wasn't enough cache to support those many threads.

<comment><USER10> What do you think is a good performance improvement then?

<comment><USER9> (and to the two other responses)

If your workload is already well parallelized, then, yes 20% is quite significant. However, working to parallelize properly over 8 rather than 4 has its own costs.

The thing that bothers me most is that 800% CPU and 500% CPU on this processor are roughly equivalent at 5x100%CPU, it makes everything very hard to reason about when planning capacity.

<comment><USER10> I think you're misunderstanding what HT is. It's not true parallelism, it's just hiding latency by providing some extra superscalar parallelism. You can't expect it to give you actual linear improvements in performance because it's just an illusion.

<comment><USER9> I understand that very well. But non of the standard tools that manage CPU understand that, and most people don't either.

If I had a nickel for every time I had to explain why "You are at 50% CPU now, but you can't actually run twice as many processes on this machine and get the same runtime", I'd be able to buy a large frapuccino or two at starbucks.

Perhaps I'm uninformed though - is there a tool like htop, which would give me an idea of how close am I to maxing out a CPU?

<comment><USER10> No there isn't. But if you understand it I don't get why you think 20% isn't a good performance boost, especially considering the rate of return for power and area in silicon.

<comment><USER9> Because many people believe it is a 100% improvement, plan/budget accordingly, and then look for help.

As far as silicon/power it is nice, but IIRC (I am not involved in purchasing anymore) it used to cost over 50% in USD for those 20% in performance when you non-HT parts were common.

<comment><USER10> What a strange way to measure the benefits of a performance optimization: "how people will perceive it and then ask me for help".

<comment><USER9> You ignored the price issue, which was measurable and real, but also:

It (used to be) my job. Does "because people fall for deceptive marketing, waste money, and then waste my time trying to salvage their reputation" sound better?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Am I reading correctly that this has been under embargo for over a year?

<comment><USER12> It was discovered June last year according to this timeline, so a lot of people must've successfully kept mum for a long time: [https://mdsattacks.com](https://mdsattacks.com).

<comment><USER13> Maybe we should start to seriously question the value of so long embargos. This is _coordinated_ disclosure; if the vendor refuses _reasonable_ coordination (and it seems Intel does, with such delays, and also because it stills silos the security researchers way too much), then fuck them and publish (probably not immediately but certainly not after a year...)

It seems that broadly the same principles have been found independently by tons of teams. Expecting that well-financed actors have _not_ explored that field and/or _not_ yield any similar result at this point is completely insane.

Meaning, given the high level of technicality required, it's even doubtful that the embargo protected anybody; it might be that no attacker exist (and I postulate will ever exist) that will be simply waiting for 3rd party disclosure before writing its own exploits in that class. On the other hand, typical security providers monitoring threats in the field might not be aware for a long time of the existence of such vulnerabilities.

Now here arguably the first counter measures are similar to those for L1TF, so hopefully sensitive operators would already have disabled HT. However, it is not very cool to not make them aware of this additional (and slightly different) risk during such a ridiculously long period.

Also: does Intel has competent people working on their shit anymore??? They know the fundamental principles; which is speculative execution on architecturally out-of-reach data, followed by a fault and a subsequent extraction via covert channels of un-rolled-back modified micro-architectural state. The broad micro arch is widely known, so do they _really_ expect that 3rd party security researchers won't found all the places where they were sloppy enough to speculatively execute some code on completely "garbage" data? Or were they themselves unable to do a proper comprehensive review, despite having access to the full detailed design (and despite a dedicated team having been created for that)? In either case, this is not reassuring.

<comment><USER14> considering the june/july initial reporting, the stacking of evidence to related exploits and the release in may next year it look more like 9 months plus some slacking due to multiple being reported. Does not sound like a "they kept waiting indefinitely" but more like proper due diligence.

<comment><USER7> Right, and it takes time to build and comprehensively test a fix.

Anything on the CPU level that needs to be done in microcode is incredibly complex, and hard to test.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Better Intel page on the MDS vulnerability is here: [https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/architecture-and- tec...](https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/architecture-and- technology/engineering-new-protections-into-hardware.html).

Interesting point: "MDS is addressed in hardware starting with select 8th and 9th Generation Intel® Core™ processors, as well as the 2nd Generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable processor family." Looks like my 8700K isn't on the list though.

<comment><USER16> According to the researchers in the paper[0] this is not true.

>We have verified that we can leak information across arbitrary address spaces and privilege boundaries, even on recent Intel systems with the latest microcode updates and latest Linux kernel with all the Spectre, Meltdown, L1TF default mitigations up (KPTI, PTE inversion, etc.). In particular, the exploits we discuss below exemplify leaks in all the relevant cases of interest: process-to-process, kernel-to-userspace, guest-to-guest, and SGX- enclave-touserspace leaks. Not to mention that such attacks can be built even from a sandboxed environment such as JavaScript in the browser, where the attacker has limited capabilities compared to a native environment.

[0] [https://mdsattacks.com/files/ridl.pdf](https://mdsattacks.com/files/ridl.pdf)

<comment><USER15> I searched the the paper and it doesn't seem to falsify what I linked to, but I'll have to dig deeper into the research. "Recent Intel systems" isn't specific enough.

<comment><USER17> Page 16 in the slides[1] lists vulnerable processors, 8700K is one of them

[1] [https://mdsattacks.com/slides/slides.html](https://mdsattacks.com/slides/slides.html)

edit: This is mentioned in the paper as well, on page 8

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> In a Dutch article ([https://nos.nl/artikel/2284630-nederlanders-vinden- beveiligi...](https://nos.nl/artikel/2284630-nederlanders-vinden- beveiligingslekken-in-intel-chips.html)), one of the researchers says "het aantal mensen bij bedrijven als Intel die zich op dit niveau met beveiliging bezighoudt, is echt op de vingers van twee handen te tellen." = There are 10 or fewer people working on security at this level at companies like Intel. This sounds very hard to believe to me. With the previous attacks there surely are bigger teams working on this kind of stuff?

<comment><USER19> There are probably fewer than 1000 people in the world capable of finding these kinds of vulnerabilities. Sounds about right to have 10 at Intel.

<comment><USER20> Out of curiosity, where would the others be?

<comment><USER21> Universities, three letter agencies and private or government actors. At least I would guess that, maybe also a bunch at anti virus developers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> The overview page, [https://cpu.fail/](https://cpu.fail/) , is on Hacker News as [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19911715](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19911715) .

<comment><USER22> What does "UC" in "Meltdown UC" mean?

<comment><USER23> Microcode most likely.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Also for MDS: [https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/security- center/advi...](https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/security- center/advisory/intel-sa-00233.html)

I like how Intel prominently thanks their own employees for finding the bugs and later simply acknowledges the existence of any anyone independent reporters with zero thanks.

<comment><USER25> Interesting. This could mean that Intel actually discovered and thus knew about all those security-holes before the non-Intel researchers did.

Or they're just being awkwardly disingenuous here, that's also a possibility.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> funny that you don't see their email address for contact if you don't have javascript running, which is exactly one of the doors for this kind of vulnerability as they mention on their site

</comment><comment><USER27> End-user security, in web browser context: do I understand it correctly that if my browser was to only ever execute JavaScipt in bytecode format (without compilation to native code) it would be safe from those kinds of exploits?

Presuming the bytecode interpreter would be "slow enough" and "jittery enough" and "indirect enough" to hamper any attempts at exploiting subtle timing+memory layout bugs like that?

IIRC, Konqueror (of KDE) had reasonably fast bytecode JS engine. I wish the browser was still undergoing fast development, used to be my daily driver for many years.

<comment><USER28> AFAIK, there are techniques to detect and denoisify minuscule timing differences over millions of samples, and the fundamentals of most techniques apply to interpreters as well, so it is not a solid protection.

That said, it would make things harder in practice since you're introducing an extra indirection level and just making everything slower.

As for interpreters in modern browsers, I'd be surprised if there's no way to entirely disable the JIT somehow... since most JIT implementations I have seen have an interpreter fallback for debugging and easier portability to new CPU architectures.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> The interactive guide on that page is an effective way to visualise the components in relation to the attacks.

Does anyone know what this would have been built with?

</comment><comment><USER30> Am I reading this right? It looks like this bug lets you read any part of an intel chip's processing payload in-flight?

That's gnarly if true.

</comment><comment><USER31> It seems that we need to move away from clever, complicated low-level micro- optimizations that rely on mangling instructions and just use more cores. That should allow for simpler security model.

<comment><USER32> There are plenty of scenarios where synchronization overheads between cores dwarf the performance gain, but OoO execution can help.

But maybe instead of having more cores, we should expose the different execution units within a CPU core to the architectural level? That however brings back memories of Itanium, and the general fact that compilers just can't do static scheduling well enough.

<comment><USER19> I've started to think Itanium might have been sort of on the right track but ahead of its time and in some ways poorly executed.

<comment><USER32> I still don't think so. Exposing these microarchitectural concerns to the architectural level limits flexibility. In order for compilers to efficiently schedule multiple execution units, the compiler needs to know the exact latency of all instructions. That may be doable for arithmetic, but varies greatly from one generation of processor to the next. And compilers definitely cannot know the latency of a load: from a few cycles in L1 cache, to a few thousand cycles in DRAM, to millions of cycles if there's a page fault. And these things vary a lot, not just between processor generations but within the same processor generation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Again, Intel CPUs only.

<comment><USER34> Can I ask for money back? Intel should return 30% cost of all vulnerable CPUs then... because disabling HT is effectively reducing the claimed performance specs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> For me as a home user, taking a performance hit of any kind in response to threats which haven't yet been seen in the wild simply isn't good math.

<comment><USER36> I'd really like to be given a choice, at least. My gaming PC is used exclusively for gaming, so it needs to be performant, but does not need to be secure.

<comment><USER37> If running Linux you can disable the meltdown/spectre mitigations with the nopti option [1].

1\. [https://yux.im/posts/technology/security/disable-meltdown- an...](https://yux.im/posts/technology/security/disable-meltdown-and-spectre- patches-on-linux/)

<comment><USER38> Here is a similar windows tool: [https://www.grc.com/inspectre.htm](https://www.grc.com/inspectre.htm)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> It is funny how ChromeOS is the most ridiculously secure of the commonly available operating systems. It is not as if you can do much other than surf the internet with it.

It makes me chuckle to think that my not-so-computer-literate friend whom I gave a Chromebook to is protected from anyone snooping in on Youtube, Hotmail and Youtube running on this toy machine (designed for 9 year olds). There really is nothing to hide there. Meanwhile, people doing important work on proper computers are properly vulnerable to this new Hyperthreading theoretical attack.

I will be interested to find out if there is a drop-off in performance on ChromeOS, e.g. Youtube stuttering whilst the whatsapp web tab updates itself with a new message. If there is nobody complaining then why did we need Hyper- Threading in the first place?

<comment><USER40> Hyper threading was an intel stop-gap reaction to the athalon64 x2, which was a REAL dual core, to buy them time while the pentium D was created and later laughed off the market. We finally got an "OK" dual core from intel when they decided to hack pentium 3 cores together and call it the Core duo, and with the core 2 duo they finally caught back up to AMD (by hacking amd64 instructions onto the P3 cores) and were able to start taking market share back. Nothing interesting happens between then and threadripper, but now we would be back to eating popcorn and watching the rest of the fight..... but the fight is over and everyone is over in the other arena watching arm and webkit winner-take-all style demolishing the incumbent platforms.

<comment><USER41> > Hyper threading was an intel stop-gap reaction to the athalon64 x2

No. Hyper threading was introduced in Feb 2002. The original single core athlon 64 was Sept 2003. The x2 was 2007.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyper- threading](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyper-threading)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athlon_64](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athlon_64)</comment></comment></comment>


Firebug 1.1 Supports Firefox 3 Beta - <AUTHOR> http://ajaxian.com/archives/firebug-11-and-getfirebugcom

<comment><USER2> Firebug is the best thing since sliced bread. (and cake, if you know what I'm talking about)

<comment><USER3> Firebug is better than cake.

because the cake is a lie.

<comment><USER2> I agree with the first statement and don't understand the second. Cake is not a lie, it is a framework. =]

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> yes! finally i can upgrade to firefox 3.</comment>


The Incredible Shrinking Man (2004) - <AUTHOR> http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/drexler.html <comment><USER2> That said, Smalley opposing view was and is correct. Molecular manufacturing, where the manufacturing systems are also on the molecular scale, just don't work in the way that Drexler envisioned, and pushing grey goo scenarios when even the basics don't seem possible, is a sure way to get people turned off on nanotech - which uses huge fabbers.

In the 1990s I worked on molecular dynamics of biological systems. The nanotech hype was large, and I looked into the idea of switching fields, figuring that someone with my background could make some good money at it. Only to find that all the plans and simulations I saw seemed to be in vacuum, and assumed the diamond parts were effectively like steel machine parts, with no van der Waal forces or charges or cruft in the way. I still think those who propose nanotech fabbers have little understanding of small-scale physics/chemistry.

A summary of the debate between Drexler and Smalley is at [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drexler%E2%80%93Smalley_debate_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drexler%E2%80%93Smalley_debate_on_molecular_nanotechnology) .

<comment><USER3> That's my impression. The world is full of nanotech factories - we call them bacteria. They assemble molecules as necessary, but they don't do it the way it's done on the macro scale, because the macro-scale model doesn't transfer to interaction at the nano scale.

If the grey goo scenario was possible, I suspect it would have evolved as a life form.</comment></comment>


Microsoft acquires Simplygon - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2017/01/17/microsoft-acquires-simplygon-accelerate-innovation-enabling-3d-everyone/ <comment><USER2> How long will their services be provided? Will this be the most ironic startup name ever?!

</comment><comment><USER3> Given the Simplygon team's commitment to customers - I am sure they will make sure everyone is supported as the service evolves for a wider audience with Microsoft over time.

As you probably already know, the name Simplygon - is a play on Simplify Polygon - since the product started as a polygon optimization tool (but has evolved to be far more than just this today). Donya Labs - the company that develops Simplygon platform has been around for 10 years. The Simplygon tech is widely used by major game studios and major manufacturers for creating automated 3D asset optimization pipelines for game production, visualization and VR/AR applications.

Given Microsoft's Creative Update and Windows Hololographic platform and Simplygon's proven capabilities- this is a strategically important acquisition for both MS and the professional 3D industry. Its going to be interesting to see how this evolves.

Disclaimer - I have worked with the Donya Labs team in the past and more than a little biased - they are a great team and this is a great result for them and MS.</comment>


STUDY: Internet Explorer Users Are Dumber - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/study-internet-explorer-users-are-dumber-2011-7?utm_source=Triggermail&utm_medium=email&utm_term=SAI%20Select&utm_campaign=SAI_Select_072911

<comment><USER2> Yet another version of the same story.</comment>


Easiest Way to Upgrade PHP 5.3 to PHP 5.6 on CentOS 6.7 - <AUTHOR> https://www.zerostopbits.com/how-to-upgrade-php-5-3-to-php-5-6-on-centos-6-7/ <comment><AUTHOR> For upgrade to php7.3: [https://blog.remirepo.net/post/2016/02/14/Install- PHP-7-on-C...](https://blog.remirepo.net/post/2016/02/14/Install-PHP-7-on- CentOS-RHEL-Fedora),

Before do:

yum-config-manager --enable remi-php70

or

yum-config-manager --enable remi-php73

Naybe first install yum-config-manager:

yum install yum-utils</comment>


Send whatever you want, wherever you want - <AUTHOR> https://send-anywhere.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Anyone using this ?</comment>


HAProxy auto-configuration and service discovery for Mesos-DNS or SkyDNS - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/elasticio/haproxy-srv <comment><USER2> Thanks for sharing this!

With the mantl project [https://github.com/CiscoCloud/microservices- infrastructure](https://github.com/CiscoCloud/microservices-infrastructure) we feed mesos task information into consul.

We've looked a lot a load balancing and feel that rewriting haproxy files dynamically can lead to brittle behavior.

Our current setup is we use traefik [https://github.com/emilevauge/traefik](https://github.com/emilevauge/traefik) to proxy marathon tasks.

Haproxy 1.6 includes some dynamic dns lookups [http://blog.haproxy.com/2015/10/14/whats-new-in- haproxy-1-6/](http://blog.haproxy.com/2015/10/14/whats-new-in-haproxy-1-6/)

<comment><AUTHOR> That's nice feature, we would need to look into it, however DNS A or AA does not contain port information limiting us to the 'default' ports.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> What about giving the ability to HAProxy to perform the SRV requests directly???

<comment><AUTHOR> That's not possible right now</comment></comment>


Muting annoying users on Twitter without unfollowing them - <AUTHOR> http://blog.rmontanaro.com/2011/05/14/muting-twitter-users-without-unfollowing-them/

<comment><USER2> Despite what you might think, unlike Facebook, people do not really give a damn if you unfollow them on Twitter. Stop being such a wuss and just unfollow people whose tweets you don't want to see. If they're the rare case who gets back to you and asks you why, you can then provide them with valuable feedback.

<comment><USER3> I have an old friend I follow on twitter who tweets way to much garbage and I want to unfollow her, but I know for a fact she uses an unfollow tracker, and I KNOW it'll spite her. I wish there was a way to mute people right in Twitter.

<comment><USER4> If she's an old friend, just tell her (as an old friend) that you're not interested in her tweets and that's why you're unfollowing her. To rely on third-party services to avoid dealing with interpersonal relations is what is known as "being passive-aggressive".

Anyway, it's not like you're calling her baby ugly, it's just Twitter.

<comment><USER5> She might not take it well. You might then say he's better off without that kind of friendship, but that's not the outcome he wanted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Slipstream is an interesting Chrome extension that also supports this feature. It is more powerful in that you can also hide tweets that contain keywords. I believe that it checks tweets as they are rendered to the page so you never have to see them getting removed from the page.

<http://slipstre.am/>

</comment><comment><USER7> This is great and thanks for open sourcing the code.

There is also another chrome plugin called Proxlet <http://proxlet.com> which does something similar. Seems like there are many tools out there but discovery and marketing is all ways an issue.

</comment><comment><USER8> Refynr is a much better tool <http://refynr.com/>. It works on Twitter as well as Facebook and you have much more granular control of what to include or not include.

Apologize in advance for the autorun video he has added to his home page ;<(.

</comment><comment><USER9> Is there an equivalent for Facebook? Not necessarily to deal with 'annoying' people but I want to prioritize messages from a subset of friends/family.

<comment><USER10> You can set up lists of friends, and on every post there's a hide button, where you can either hide the person, or the kind of post.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> If you'd rather use a native client with loads of features, including blocking people and keywords, give YoruFukurou a try <https://sites.google.com/site/yorufukurou/home-en>

<comment><USER12> Hibari (<http://hibariapp.com/>) is another native OS X client with muting (and, in my opinion, a nicer interface than YoruFukurou.)

</comment></comment><comment> mike-cardwell Twitter really need to add this functionality to the core service. I use several different Twitter clients. I'm following a couple of users who I'd like to hide the tweets of, but it would potentially be awkward to unfollow them if they notice.

<comment><USER13> One native-Twitter solution available to you today is to create a private list containing only the people you'd like to read on a regular basis.

[https://support.twitter.com/entries/76460-how-to-use- twitter...](https://support.twitter.com/entries/76460-how-to-use-twitter- lists)

<comment><USER14> This is how I use twitter!

Lists are very useful if you follow are large number of people. Create a few smaller lists of the things you really want to see or that are important.

I created a list for the services I use, I check it once a day to see who's tweeted about something new and improved.

I have another list for co-workers and friends and check that one as my default.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Nice. One thing I'd really like would be the option only to see those tweets from someone that have been retweeted at least once - as a kind of filter for general interest. I've given no thought to whether that would be possible, though.

</comment><comment><USER16> There's an easier way to do this on Twitter - I just have a private "friends" list on that has everyone I actually care about following on a day-to-day basis. I can follow tons of people, but I only regularly read tweets on that list.

</comment><comment><USER17> What I would really want is a "Mark all as read" and to never see the same tweet again.</comment>


Show HN: Flow Playground – learn resource-oriented programming - <AUTHOR> https://www.onflow.org/play <comment><AUTHOR> Hey Hackernews! We are excited to show you Flow Playground, the first time anyone can write smart contracts in Cadence, our new programming language

Cadence pairs linear types with object capabilities to create a secure and declarative model for digital ownership

All of this was built with love over the past couple of years by a small yet mighty team based in Vancouver, Canada

For more on resources, check out our blog post ([https://hackernoon.com/resources-programming-ownership-on- th...](https://hackernoon.com/resources-programming-ownership-on-the- blockchain-lzb832d1))

Smart contracts are uniquely suited to managing ownership of valuable assets, but most programming languages – even those designed specifically for smart contracts – don't have any native abstractions for managing ownership, until Resources.

Resources have 3 rules:

1\. Each Resource exists in exactly one place: no duplication, double-spend, or accidental deletion

2\. Ownership of a Resource is defined by where it's stored: no central ledger or smart contract

3\. Access to methods on a Resource is limited to the owner

Check it out and let us know what you think</comment>


Apple's Decision to Delay Features and Focus on Software Quality Extends to Mac - <AUTHOR> https://www.macrumors.com/2018/01/30/apple-focus-on-software-quality-extends-to-mac/ <comment><AUTHOR> even though I loved my rMBP from 2012, I had to buy something new once I dropped it and the GPU died. I wanted TB3 so I went with a 2017 rMBP. It took me 1 week to migrate over from my old computer to the new because of

\- Adapters not being compatible

\- Multiple Disk Utility bugs

\- APFS bugs

\- Migration Assistant bugs

Since I finally got everything working, I've had the following hardware issues

\- Caps lock travelling is super iffy

\- Screen edge bleeding on all corners

\- Right speaker exploded when I unplugged the charger 3 week after I bought it

\- Accidental input because of Touch Bar

if this continues, this will be the last Apple computer I buy.

<comment><USER2> Ever since the release of the 2016 MBP redesign I've been hanging onto my late 2013 MacBook Pro for dear life.

I really want to upgrade, but I just can't justify spending thousands of dollars on a machine with a keyboard that can (could) be wiped out by dust particles, no function key row, and one that requires a pile of dongles be transported with it wherever it goes to support external hardware.

Just make the computer slightly longer and give me back my keyboard. The touch bar is neat, why does it have to be either/or?

<comment><USER3> That's everyone on my team right now. We're also all on Sierra still because High Sierra breaks things for us.</comment></comment></comment>


What My Five-Year-Old Son Taught Me About Marketing - <AUTHOR> http://www.copyblogger.com/inner-child-marketing/ <comment><USER2> I still remember as a kid walking down the cereal aisle and looking for which cereals had the best toys. That was the entire basis for how I chose cereal at that age.

<comment><USER3> Kids cereal marketing is fascinating, from the toys to the way the mascot's eyes tend to look down [1]. I didn't get to make a lot of decisions as a kid, but cereal was one of them.

I was also exposed to another strange aspect of cereal marketing: the sugar content. My father instituted a rule that we could have any cereal with <= 10 grams of sugar per serving, and so my sister and I became acutely aware of said levels. Captain Crunch was out of the question, but Cinnamon Toast Crunch would dip above and below the line, with a period of several months. Nearly all cereals I watched displayed this behavior.

[1] <http://i30.tinypic.com/2598znp.jpg>

<comment><USER4> The "Tooth Lady" who came to my school and taught us how to brush and showed us those gross movies of squirming plaque bacteria told us that any sugar at all in cereal is pretty bad. I was worried because I added sugar to my cereals that didn't have it. Mom never bought cereals with sugar added.

I said, "I like to add sugar to my rice crispies" and she said, "You couldn't add enough sugar to your rice crispies to equal the amount in the frosted kind."

And now, it's hard to buy even adult cereals without sugar in them. They are all so sweet. It can't be good.

<comment><USER5> > _I said, "I like to add sugar to my rice crispies" and she said, "You > couldn't add enough sugar to your rice crispies to equal the amount in the > frosted kind."_

Ah, I love a good challenge!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Maybe they should go and buy a cookbook and cook their kid a proper meal every now and then ?

McDonalds and Spongebob Branded food ?

<comment><USER7> I've often wondered about this...I know several parents of small children, and all of them have trouble getting their kids to eat. After a while, the parents get tired of the fight and they let the kid eat what they want--often pasta or such--instead of what the parent wants to serve them.

When I was a kid, this just wasn't an issue. Food went on my plate, and I ate it. Sure, I would whine a bit about eating broccoli or whatever, but I never _won_ any of those debates. So, I wonder:

1) Am I having selective memory?

2) Did I have an unusually tough set of parents / was I an unusually compliant child?

3) Has the level of marketing that kids are exposed to gone up so much in the last few decades?

4) Something else?

What do the rest of you think? Do you remember setting the rules with your parents about what you would eat?

<comment><USER8> My money is on #3, plus #4 - There are _tremendously_ more varieties of prepackaged imitation food crap available today than there were a few decades ago, because growth and profits in the food industry are in processed food. So kids today have a huge smorgasbord of junk food being created for them and marketed directly to them. Parents almost don't stand a chance.

<comment><USER9> Yeah but there was a still sizable smorgasbord of junk food being created and marketed to us as kids too. We were well aware of different chocolates/biscuits/soft drink/fast food and while some kids still got this kind of stuff (much to the envy of most of the class) most kids were forced to eat basic prepared foods. In contrast, these days I meet kids who can't recall ever drinking water (always a soft drink or milk). Is it perhaps that the parents of the current generation were the first to grow up as children with fast food they couldn't have and so enable their kids (perhaps without conscious thought) to have what they couldnt?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This made me cringe. The article may be revealing a simple truth, but it makes me profoundly uncomfortable to think that this is what modern marketing is based on. I would hope effective marketing communicates the value that a product has - if not, you're making a sale, but do you have a real customer?

<comment><USER11> Marketing itself is not immune to marketing; they go through waves of "methods" and "best practices" fads, usually initiated by a handful few industry gurus.

In the mid to late 90s, marketing became all about identifying with the customer's "core values" and "identity", they started making ads that neither told you what the product was, nor what it did, instead, they tried to make a brand "tribe", based on some weird interpretation of post-industrial anthropology, they tried to create a market segment where the brand was the central shared value of the "village", something more ideological than material. Marketing then became brand evangelism and market research was boiled down to studies of primitive emotions, love, fear, anxiety, comfort, family bonds, etc.

They swung back once again, and the new fad became humor, every ad had to make you laugh to create a private shared moment between customer and brand, so the next time you were at the store, you knew Frosted Flakes, Bud Light and Gillette Mach II were your buddies.

Then it's been about personalization and customization. Ads stopped telling you what the product was for, and instead, told you you could use it any way you wish.

Sometimes the ad would emphasize an sweepstakes prize over the quality of the actual product itself; you will be shown an image of you and your buddies rolling down Vegas Blvd on a topless '65 Camaro, smoking cigars and casino lights reflecting off of your Aviators as you stopped to grab a few ladies outside the Venetian and headed to a roof-top pool party where some sick tunes were being sliced by an underground dance DJ duo from Dusseldorf. Cut back to an image of four buddies on their couch in a frat pad, game controllers in hand, when one of them pops a bottle of Miller Light open and finds he won a free trip to Vegas for four.

You probably wont buy Miller to win the trip, but next time you're heading to downtown Cleveland in your buddy's 2004 Elantra, you will be stopping by 7/11 to grab a six pack and you will cruise down to the party, with the lights of chainstores and fast-food joints reflecting off of your Aviators. You will be associating Miller with "fun", "High Life". At least the people who the marketers study do. What matters is not that you find the imagery supperficial, yes, it's out of your reach and nigh near impossible to get there, but that you identify with the four dorm-room slackers in the end; "Oh, I too sit on my couch and play video games, Miller gets me".

Back in 2001 Smirnoff probably sponsored a local Baltimore rapper to sing about their product. Before then, Smirnoff has been a girly drink; a pre-mixed bottled drink of vodka, water and colored sweets. As soon as the song became a local hit in the D.C/Baltimore area, you saw all the hiphop guys started drinking Smirnoff. It caught like wildfire and people said they were "getting their noff on" .. street cred in 3 months! At the time, Budweiser was sponsoring basketball games, block parties and entire evening programming of radio shows. Smirnoff got more out of $10-50k out of that sponsorship than Bud.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Spongebob squarepants kraft dinner is better than the regular as long as you don't cook it too long.</comment>


VersionEye supports CocoaPods  - <AUTHOR> http://versioneye.wordpress.com/2013/11/18/versioneye-now-supports-cocoapods-2/ <comment><USER2> I've never tried VersionEye. They do seem to have the most comprehensive language support of the tools I've tried, which is awesome. But am I correct in understanding they don't support web hooks for running dependency checks when you push to a GitHub repo?

<comment><AUTHOR> We are currently working on exactly that. The idea is that we check your dependencies every time you push to GitHub. Here is the current status of that hook: [https://github.com/github/github- services/pull/727](https://github.com/github/github-services/pull/727). I hope to get it done next week.

<comment><USER2> Excellent! Looking forward to it :) I think the time-based checks are still relevant as well. The way I see it, Webhooks track added or changed dependencies during active development and the time-based checks make sure the project doesn't get stale.</comment></comment></comment>


Older Adults Learning Programming: Motivations and Frustrations - <AUTHOR> https://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm/217281-older-adults-learning-computer-programming-motivations-frustrations-and-design-opportunities/fulltext <comment><USER3> I've always had a terrible memory, both short-term and long-term. But this has been an advantage, in a way: I could never memorize material and bluff my way through. Instead, to remember it, I had to understand it. I think this helps partly because you can always work it out from first principles (and just remembering there's some tricky bit somewhere around here), partly the familiarity required for understanding helps embed it, but mostly that I've distilled it to a very simple model in my mind, that I've related to other systems I already know. The meta-model becomes the more interesting thing.

It's hard work to uncover this model, often requiring chasing up foundations, to see what's _really_ going up. And of course, sometimes you end up with the wrong model (or a limited one). Unfortunately, most subjects don't seem to be taught in terms of understanding - but I've had some rare lecturers and textbooks that are so clear, you can work out what they'll say next, and solve example problems the first time you see them.

I've always thought this understanding-oriented approach is a strong long-term strategy, as I age. Although it means some subjects are too hard for me - <USER2> human languages, history, geography, biology, medicine... and enterprise application development (but I'm good at libraries).

<comment><USER4> I think most people are in the same boat as you in terms of learning. I think "bluffing your way" through classes or interviews only sets one up for failure later. Learning the basics might be boring but one will find trouble getting to the fun stuff without a strong foundation in the concept.

You would really like the course, "Learning How to Learn" on Coursera [0]. The instructor wrote the book, "Mind for Numbers" [1] which is also great.

The course and book teach a great framework for actually learning and comprehension.

[0] [https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to- learn](https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn)

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/039916524X/](https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/039916524X/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm somewhat older and after retiring a little early I decided to return to university. I confess that the experience is both humbling and frustrating because I'm finding it much, much more difficult than the first time around.

I had the fantasy of getting a degree in a completely unrelated field and finding a fun part time gig. Now, if I'm honest with myself, I'm not really sure that I'm up for the task... and that's really disheartening.

<comment><USER6> My aunt was cleaning the houses of rich people for a living and then when she was in her late 40's she decided to return to school. She ultimately earned her degree in Accounting in her 50's and now she does all of the rich people's taxes that she used to clean for.

<comment><USER7> Awesome story!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've had a few students who were retired and were learning just for their own interest but most of my "older" students are going to school to get themselves to a paycheck. As someone who has learned programming on my own for some hobby projects, learning programming is probably not the fastest way to a stable income. Math, Sciences, and Computer Science are very demanding programs and can be challenging for "older" students, not because they can't do the work but because college is hard for someone with kids, mortgage, car payment etc.

</comment><comment><USER9> I am really fascinated by this article, and hope more research is done. I'm not near as old as those candidates, but still feel the effect. The older I have gotten, the harder it is to remember things or learn on the fly.

I remember being 21 at a company, and claimed, and could, write anything they wanted. The older members slowed me down with their inability to understand, well, to me.

But I was writing awful code. To me it was beautiful and worked fine, but as I learned more in years coming I learned design practices and testability, which were nonexistent.

I think this is normal, but to me, sad. I have learned some bit of wisdom in these years, but can admit my brain isn't as fast as it once was. Where's the divide, where do I go? I'm a software engineer, that one day will be replaced with a much younger, headstrong kid, who is much more productive, just as I was back then.

<comment><USER10> Fluid intelligence decreases with age, but crystallized intelligence continues to grow. You (metaphorical you) really are slower than the younger, headstrong kid. All hope is not lost though, you're still valuable on the market, you just present a different value proposition than you did in your youth.

[https://www.verywell.com/fluid-intelligence-vs- crystallized-...](https://www.verywell.com/fluid-intelligence-vs-crystallized- intelligence-2795004)

<comment><USER11> > You (metaphorical you) really are slower than the younger, headstrong kid

It pains me to think that others are put off by this. My old self was indeed much faster, and had plenty more stamina, but all that means I could make the wrong decision at half the speed for twice the time. I wouldn't go back if I could.

<comment><USER12> I don't think I ever knew where this quote came from, but it stuck.

"Computers let you make more mistakes faster than any invention in the history of mankind, with the possible exception of tequila and hanguns."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I don't want to sound discouraging but the problem with the profession is multifold. First the problem is that the domain is very large and is constantly changing. So the time investment is rather large to learn a significant enough chunk to be useful. Second problem is that it requires a lot of cognitive load in terms of remembering many different things and having a good intuitive sense of why things are not working, which again requires a lot of knowledge and experience. Third is the problem with the industry itself, it's not properly valued by employers. A sub-par programmer for many of the employers is completely useless. The low end employers all have no money to spend, but yet want one person to do a job that requires deep knowledge of many different things. All of these things taken together make a very difficult profession to get into in your 50s, 60s, or 70s as it will take you about a decade to get any good at it and then you will be fighting an uphill battle to actually get a proper job as businesses don't find you in their ideal demographic when hiring.

</comment><comment><USER14> The only way I remember is by doing exercises. I'll read examples and understand immediately then not bother with the exercises only to forget later unless I've done X instead of just learning X. If I have 20mins to spare I'll often grab a text I've done and try and redo a few of the exercises to see if I can remember and that also helps, I learned that method from an older post here from somebody who suggested redoing material 6 months after to help remember.

<comment><USER15>
      > I'll read examples and understand immediately then not
      > bother with the exercises

It's a trap a.k.a. the illusion of understanding. When you actually try to do something you think you understood from just reading/watching, it turns out a lot of small but essential parts were missed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm 63 but learned to code a long time ago. My ability to see connections, abstractions and the like is better than ever. I do find that distractions like background noise or other competing tasks reduces my ability to solve the complex problems. I have to really isolate and focus. I also find benefit from listening to [http://brain.fm](http://brain.fm)

<comment><USER17> 56 yo here. Since a year on a learning spree: Docker Swarm, CI/CD, React, RN after a life of C/PHP/Python and -later on -C-level management. Not aware that I'm slower these days, but slightly harder to focus, so using a headset.

<comment><USER16> I've got a two year plan. 2017 CSP (Certified Scrum Participant) then in 2018 take the [http://fast.ai](http://fast.ai) course. Maybe the Stanford ai course as well. 63 and still learning.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The author of the study is on a recent Talk Python to Me podcast that I just finished listening to. [https://talkpython.fm/episodes/show/112/geeking-out- in-the-g...](https://talkpython.fm/episodes/show/112/geeking-out-in-the- golden-years)

</comment><comment><USER18> I feel the problem is that people are not using the correct metaphors. Everyone is a programmer; every time you ask someone to do something for you you are programming.

I direct one to the opening of Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs to really learn what programming is:

[https://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book- Z-H-5.html...](https://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book- Z-H-5.html#%_chap_Temp_2)

<comment><USER19> The primary task of a programmer is to abstract, not instruct. But everyone does that also.

<comment><USER20> We all instruct and abstract, but imprecisely, because the people we're dealing with can either fill in the blanks, or they're inclined to agree with and follow us even if we're wrong. I remember one of the first things my programming teacher said was: Computers are stupid. They can only do what you tell them. That's a hurdle.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Super interesting reading -- thanks for this!</comment>


Ask HN: Review my startup, This & That - <AUTHOR>

http://getthisthat.com/explore
We're trying to organize social media around a web of topics (think semantic web). As a user you would sign in, connect your social networks, and we'd pull the links/media you're sharing/liking into a single feed organized around our web. Shares also get put into a general "explore" feed for public perusal.
Later possibilities include creating your own custom feed with topics and topic combinations. For example, you could add "iPhone 5", "Obama & Funny", or "Astronomy & Politics" to your feed.
We have not launched yet and organize half of the app is not yet ready, but thoughts on the general concept are welcome! <comment><USER2> I'd change the homepage to be the explore page ala Pinterest. Reason being the current homepage tells me absolutely nothing of what your app does. The majority of your audience has a microscopic attention span.

<comment><USER3> Exactly, what does the app do, exactly?

I read: "We organize social media around a web of topics. Want to organize your social presence?"

And I don't see the benefit for me as an user. Do I need an organized social presence? I don't feel the pain of not having one.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Bira,

Basically step 1 is we consolidate all the things you're sharing and liking on other networks into one place. Step 2 is we make your feed easy to navigate by organizing everything in it around topics.

Say that over the last year you've liked a few programming how-to videos on Youtube and shared a bunch of links to programming resources on Twitter / Facebook. We take all of that and consolidate it into the programming section of your feed. It makes it easy keep track of and re-share everything you've found about programming (just one specific topic example).

If you're able to keep track of all of this yourself across your networks then I guess we're not for you :) Or if you don't care to...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Where does the content come from right now?

Also, can I add new "topics" for the stuff I see here?

<comment><AUTHOR> The content on there right now is actually being pulled from public twitter accounts we've manually added.

When we open up the organize half of the app, content will be generated from a user's shares/likes on other social networks.

When you sign in, you can add topics to the posts we pull from your other social networks. This serves two purposes: you're organizing your own feed of shares, and helping to organize the general explore feed.

<comment><USER4> How do you rank the articles?</comment></comment></comment>