Lytro announces light field VR video camera - <AUTHOR> http://uploadvr.com/lytro-immerge-vr-light-field-video-camera/ <comment><USER2> Site won't load for me but I read about this elsewhere. While this first gen product will surely be expensive and somewhat limited (capturing a cubic meter of light field) it's incredibly interesting to me.

I've been messing with VR stuff for the past year or so and I still think that the "killer app" in 5-10 years won't be fancier video games but more like immersive "movies" or VR telepresence. We're at that stage of the hype curve where expectations are high as gen-one products come out but while these will surely be underwhelming to many early users, I think that once depth cameras and light field cameras are developed and improved (along with the ergonomics of head-mounted displays and the speed of processors) we'll start to see more in the way of non-game applications.

Just from personal experience, playing video games in VR is cool and all but when people can watch a movie from the perspective of someone inside the scene or meet up with people in a live-scanned remote environment, I think they'll be hooked.

<comment><USER3> > Just from personal experience, playing video games in VR is cool and all but > when people can watch a movie from the perspective of someone inside the > scene or meet up with people in a live-scanned remote environment, I think > they'll be hooked.

Exactly, I definitely want to feel this in the first fps movie.

Hot pursuit, Steven Seagal's fights, gunfights... It should be freaking immersive.

<comment><USER2> Well, no. That would be pretty awful in my experience. First person in VR is already dodgy if you're watching/playing from a chair and your avatar is standing or walking. Still, the only thing worse than a mismatch between your position and the avatar's position is a first-person viewpoint where you don't control the camera or movement.

Watching a movie from the first-person perspective of an actor would be one of the barfiest things you could do in VR. Ideally you're observing things from a vantage point but everything is in 3d with full 360-degree spherical range of motion. You can lean around or closer to look at something.

Now, even a mostly fixed viewpoint can be disorienting when you don't have a "body" to look down at (you feel like you're floating and disembodied) but it's probably second to the motion issues. Not sure if people will develop conventions that become generally accepted (like some sort of placeholder/amorphous body for reference) but overall, think more "fly on the wall" than "I'm Duke Nukem!"

<comment><USER4> Exactly.

What is going to be cool is stuff like standing right on or slightly above the field in the middle of a sports event, or right on stage at a concert next to Mick Jagger and being able to move around a bit.

Unfortunately there will need to be a globe roughly the size of the range of motion somewhere to capture the light rays... at least for now until future physics are invented.

<comment><USER5> If you dropped once of these in place of the wire cam over {insert field sport here}, millions of dollars.

You wouldn't have more than limited head tracking (or live motion without turning off tracking and turning it into a virtual window), but being able to have _presence_ from 10' above the QB in American football for each snap?

$$$s where you start counting the zeros instead of the digit in front.

<comment><USER6> Imagine every roller-coaster video clip you've seen be filmed with this thing, every 360° video on youtube, putting these on drones, etc...

Oh, and every high security facility in the world would love these as they're capable of mapping out 3D positioning, enabling very precise face detection, etc...

And imagine live concerts sent to be displayed on VR headsets!

Also, in many cases you can likely use 4-6 in a grid to capture the entire scene.

<comment><USER5> Remember: desync'd head motion w/ virtual camera perspective motion = violent nausea.

So limit the applicable use cases to where that isn't going to happen.

The excitement about this is that it makes that no longer a concern for sufficiently small values of head motion. Read: the motion that occurs when the best of your body is not moving.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I hope for Lytro's sake that they release real open-source playback tools. AFAICT, if you have a first-generation Lytro camera right now, you're pretty much stuck viewing the pictures you take in a Flash app, and I'd be very hesitant to buy a camera of any sort that gives no real assurance that the picture format will still be usable in ten (or twenty or fifty) years.

Everyone has access to a JPEG decoder. Lytro, not so much.

<comment><USER8> Lytro switched away from Flash to a JPEG/JavaScript player in 2013, then to a WebGL player in late 2014. There were some open source player controls floating around last year but I can't recall the name. There were also some open source tools to extract the JPEG stack from the .LFP file as well, which you could use to build a player of your own. I worked at Lytro from 2012-2015 and we'd see occasional updates from those tools.

<comment><USER7> Huh, guess I'm out of date here.

Is it really a JPEG stack? I had assumed there was more magic (i.e. math and clever compression) than that. Or is a JPEG stack with extra fanciness?

I'd love to read up on how this stuff actually works. I know how to calculate the theoretical information capacity in a light field (hint: very very dense) but basically nothing about how people manage to munge it into something compact and useful.

<comment><USER9> At its core, the viewer works by just averaging the JPEG stack at varying offsets as described in this student project: [https://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs194-26/fa14/upload/files/p...](https://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs194-26/fa14/upload/files/proj6/cs194-dj/faizullabhoy_riyaz_proj6/)

I haven't looked into how they make everything efficient, but the source code for their flash viewer is here [http://lightfield.stanford.edu/aperture.html](http://lightfield.stanford.edu/aperture.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is pretty exciting - it looks like Lytro finally found a good use for light-field photography. Trying to shorehorn the concept into a camera product was never going to take off - as admirably as the company tried, refocusing an image in post was ultimately proven a novelty that the market was never going to consider worth all the trade-offs in resolution and convenience.

This has the look of a perfect pivot: Capturing light fields could turn out to be _the_ key to VR video, and Lytro is poised to make the ARRI Alexa of the industry.

<comment><USER11> this is the first time I have ever heard of "light-field photography" and I am at a loss as to why this is exciting or a critical technology for VR. I don't get it. Why is having a grid of slight perspective shifts better than just have two perspectives for each eye?

<comment><USER12> The viewer's head isn't stationary, so you have to have a perspective for each possible eye location.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> There seem to be a lot of questions on what a light field is. Lytro just put up a great blog post that gives a good introduction to them [http://blog.lytro.com/post/132599659620/what-is-light- field](http://blog.lytro.com/post/132599659620/what-is-light-field)

</comment><comment><USER14> Product page: [https://www.lytro.com/immerge](https://www.lytro.com/immerge)

</comment><comment><USER15> Site is giving me a 503.

Video here [https://vimeo.com/144034085](https://vimeo.com/144034085)

<comment><USER16> Bullshit ends and content starts at 1:10.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This looks and sounds incredibly cool, but I have no real idea what it does.

Could someone with domain knowledge give me a bit of a high level explanation?

I have inferred that it's something you use while shooting footage to capture how light is present in the room at all of the different possible angles. Is this then used to be able to generate new scenes that VR headsets can walk around and interact with? Or is this more for being able to add computer generated images into the room and light it properly?

<comment><AUTHOR> If you want a dense, technical explanation, I wrote about this hypothetically back in April, for the same site:

[http://uploadvr.com/what-the-bleep-is-lytro-doing-in- vr/](http://uploadvr.com/what-the-bleep-is-lytro-doing-in-vr/)

The editor informs me that HN has crushed his site, though. Should be back up soon, I hope. (Good argument for mirroring my own articles on my otherwise- defunct blog, I suppose.)

<comment><USER18> uploadvr_will, you've been marked as [dead], probably due to spam filtering on new accounts. Most users won't be able to see your posts, but you should be able to contact the admins to get it fixed.

<comment><USER19> If you click the timestamp you should be taken to a page that has a "vouch" link. So non-mods can now vouch for dead posts.

Here's the announcement: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10223645](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10223645)

And here's a follow up: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10478886](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10478886)

<comment><USER18> Neat, I missed that! Thanks for the heads up.

<comment><USER20> I think DanBC inadvertently gave the wrong (first) link for the original announcement of this feature. It was [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10298512](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10298512). The link Dan gave was when we announced some other stuff, that you also should know about. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is very cool technology. The challenge it highlights is that there is no opportunity to have lighting or grips or special effects "out of frame" because the entire visible space is "in-frame". All those shots that of untouched wilderness or of actors pretending to drive or getting yanked around on wire harnesses become much much harder since you'll need to create a believable 3d representation of whatever traditionally would not be visible.

</comment><comment><USER22> Where does the camera man sit and how does he/she move the camera?

This basically forces you into stable shots only which are far less compelling. Ring type VR cameras allow the cameraman to sit in the middle of the ring while moving the scene for far more interesting results.

EX: [http://www.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/2015/nytvr/](http://www.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/2015/nytvr/)

<comment><USER23> You do _not_ want a moving camera for VR cinema, especially not if you are using a lightfield camera. If camera moves, the user is struck with the nauseating illusion that space is moving around them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> If this opens up a possibility to (easily) isolate objects per depth, as in deep compositing, then it would be worth the price of admission alone.

</comment><comment><USER25> Really cool. I guess none of the current display tech (aside from Magic Leap) are not able to display light fields properly though? I mean natural DOF depending on where your eyes are focused on

<comment><USER26> Nvidia had a prototype a while back [http://lightfield-forum.com/light-field- camera-prototypes/nv...](http://lightfield-forum.com/light-field-camera- prototypes/nvidia-near-eye-light-field-display/)

That hardware adds variable focal length to each pixel. But, even without that, simply being able to move your head around inside the captured scene with the current tech is 90% of the effect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> can you only move your head "within" the bounds of the sphere?

<comment><USER28> You can extend beyond, but it will either fade to black or show up with much, much lower resolution

<comment><USER27> thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> So that's why their older cameras are selling at a heavy discount on Amazon. I thought something was coming around the corner.

</comment><comment><USER4> Here is a "handmade" implementation of this concept made with normal cameras.

[https://home.otoy.com/otoy-demonstrates-first-ever-light- fie...](https://home.otoy.com/otoy-demonstrates-first-ever-light-field- capture-for-vr/)

edit: it's actually mentioned in the article which I couldn't see at the time...

<comment><USER30> That's cool. Do you know if they have a version I could try out in the oculus? It just looks like a utube video on that site.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> "demo video" is defined in small print as artistic impression and conceptual rendering. Dont get too hyped.

</comment><comment><USER32> Hmm I'll believe this when I see it (and not the ridiculously faked demos in this video).

</comment><comment><USER33> I want one.

</comment><comment><USER34> lytro is and always will be novelty shenanigans.

until they open up their file standards for real and get some open source project going, it will continue to be ignored by every pro and enthusiast.

<comment><USER35> Yes, no pro works with RED or ARRI cameras due to their closed file formats and lack of open source projects.

<comment><USER36> Aren't proprietary RAW formats pretty much standard for cameras?

The difference at this point is that I can use the RED format with industry standard software.</comment></comment></comment>


Sean Spicer: 'Hitler didn't even sink to using chemical weapons' - <AUTHOR> http://www.rawstory.com/2017/04/sean-spicer-hitler-didnt-even-sink-to-using-chemical-weapons/#.WO0iPn5f_Lw.facebook <comment><USER2> He didn't use them because he was hit by mustard gas in the WW1 trenches and was blinded and lost his voice for some time, but the CyclonB he used in the concentration camps should also count.</comment>


Egypt: Behind scenes w/ key group of activists f/ April 6th opposition movement - <AUTHOR> http://english.aljazeera.net/programmes/peopleandpower/2011/02/201128145549829916.html

<comment><AUTHOR> FTA:

"It is widely accepted that the spark for the recent dramatic events in Egypt came from last month's uprising in Tunisia. If people power could bring down one regime perhaps it could do the same elsewhere.

Many of the necessary conditions were already in place: public fury at years of political repression, an economy that rewarded a corrupt elite and kept a majority in poverty, and widespread loathing for a leader clinging to office.

Could Egyptians be persuaded to overcome 30 years of fear and apathy and take to the streets?

It is no accident that this question has been answered, emphatically. Over the course of a remarkable fortnight, People & Power has been filming exclusively behind the scenes with a core group of young activists from the April 6th opposition movement.

As Elizabeth Jones reveals, they have spent a long time planning and organising for these momentous days, taking lessons from other revolutions about how to mobilise popular support."</comment>


A map of spacetime dimensions (maybe answering: why 3 space, and 1 time dimensions?) [pic] - <AUTHOR> http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/serpentine07/images/Tegmark1000.jpg

<comment><USER2> which theory is this ?

<comment><USER3> _resent_ theories, at least according to the diagram's caption.</comment></comment>


Gentoo 2008.1 Cancelled - <AUTHOR> http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/releng/

<comment><AUTHOR> Seems like they are getting things back on track piece by piece. Hopefully this is one of the final major steps.</comment>


Technically Interesting - <AUTHOR> http://engelaugen.wordpress.com

<comment><USER2> Asking this question is ignoring equally significant advances in human history. The invention of the computer is basically dependent on the invention of agriculture, if you go far enough back. Most people don't seriously contemplate if we are perhaps too dependent on agriculture and what it would be like to go back to being hunter-gatherers, though I've met at least that did. Also, the idea of all our technology ceasing to work is about as unlikely as all our agriculture ceasing to work.

I'm not saying it's bad to ask these questions. It's not. It's good to ask them. But we need to keep in mind the broader context.

(Some other inventions to consider: the steam and later internal combustion engine, the electrical generator on which all modern technology depends and the related battery, the printing press, pasteurization... the list goes on.)</comment>


Easily generate custom sample data - <AUTHOR> http://www.generatedata.com/#about

<comment><USER2> Doesn't work for me, I got this error in chrome: Uncaught TypeError: Cannot call method '_trackPageview' of undefined library.js:138</comment>


FedEx will give you $5 to reinstall Flash - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2017/3/24/15052286/fedex-adobe-flash-five-dollar-discount-print-orders <comment><USER2> previously:[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13949044](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13949044)

<comment><USER3> Just from 4 hours ago.

<comment><USER4> Judging by the upvotes and timestamp on that story (90 points, 4 hours ago), and not being able to find it on at least the first 3 pages of HN (for comparison, there's a story on page 3 with 33 points, 22 hours ago)...

That was one of those threads which just gets opaquely disappeared off the front page.

Which is something I've been noticing happening a lot lately. Really big turnoff from participating in this site.

<comment><USER5> > for comparison, there's a story on page 3 with 33 points, 22 hours ago)...

The ranking algo might be a bit more sophisticated.

<comment><USER4> Sure, but that's not all. Or maybe it is -- who knows. Certainly not you or I, because the only information that is public is the score and the date.

The problem is the _opaqueness_ of it

Which leaves a lot of room for the appearance of capriciousness, and sometimes even (though not so much in this case, this is not nearly that consequential a story) malice.

[http://sangaline.com/post/the-stories-that-hacker-news- remov...](http://sangaline.com/post/the-stories-that-hacker-news-removes-from- the-front-page/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> They obviously did the math...

Cost to migrate internal apps to HTML5 = $$$$$$

Cost to bribe users to use an outdated, security nightmare = $$$

Come on fedex... this is next level stupidity!

<comment><USER7> I'm imaging a few people around a table looking over a cost estimate, when one makes the joke "We could give every user $5, and it would still be cheaper"... when one person pipes up "well.... what if we did..."

<comment><USER8> OK people we need to brainstorm; remember no idea is too stupid.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is a spun headline. FedEx knows its site's reliance on Flash is awful and they're working on a fix, but it isn't ready. They feel bad so they're offering a $5 coupon to those who have to reactivate it to use their site. They aren't paying people to prop up Flash.

<comment><USER10> If that was truly the case, they ought to have moved away from flash "a long time ago".

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> $5 is not anywhere near enough to bribe me into turning on Flash. UPS will be getting my shipping business for the foreseeable future. I refuse to use USPS for anything critical after someone sending me a package made a typo of using "St" instead of "Dr" for the street I live on and it ended up in an overnight package destined for Illinois being sent to Florida.

<comment><USER12> I thought mail was firstly directed to a center dependent only on zip, and it's then further sorted. If the zip is correct, but a parcel ends up on the wrong side of the country, the mistake isn't due to a typo but probably physical mishandling of mail.

<comment><USER11> That was my understanding, too (and the ZIP + 4 were correct). I'm just recalling the excuse they used when my package went to the wrong state and arrived 3 days late.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Why would FedEx require users to enable Flash as "run always?" Is there really not a better solution available to simply whitelist their site or be given a pop-up in Chrome asking to enable it temporarily?

<comment><USER14> If FedEx relies on opening a .swf file directly in a new window, you need to select Run Always, because Google apparently doesn't give a shit about doing things right and made it so no amount of whitelisting will allow it to run .swf files directly (instead it just downloads the .swf).

<comment><USER15> Where flash is concerned, for me, doing things right is exactly what Google are doing here.

<comment><USER14> No, they really aren't. If a site opens a .swf file in a new window, Chrome _should_ behave exactly as though it opened an HTML page that embedded the SWF, i.e. letting me approve it, and playing it if I've whitelisted the domain. Instead it will _always_ download the SWF if you have your Flash content settings set to anything else besides Run Always. It's really stupid and it means I have to keep Flash enabled globally (which I really don't want to do) simply because Google doesn't care enough to handle edge cases properly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is such a band-aid fix when what they have is a gaping wound caused by a chainsaw.

I reckon, can they be held liable if for example, someone installed Flash and the machine got hacked or infected? It was their recommendation in the first place?

</comment><comment><USER17> I'm fairly sure I don't need Flash to print FedEx labels, however I don't use "FedEx Office", I have an actual FedEx shipping account.

</comment><comment><USER18> This headline should really say $5 off coupon or $5 discount as it is a very different thing from giving people $5 in cash.</comment>


Neurons That Tell Time - <AUTHOR> https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/the-neurons-that-tell-time <comment><USER2> Related

Abstract

 _Over the past 15 years, there has been an explosion of new research on the role of the hippocampus in the representation of information about time in memory. Much of this work was inspired by the ideas and research of Howard Eichenbaum, who made major contributions to our understanding of the neurobiology of episodic memory and the neural representation of time. In this article, I will review evidence regarding the role of time in understanding hippocampal function. This review will cover a broad range of evidence from studies of humans and nonhuman animals with a narrative arc that follows Howard 's major discoveries. These studies demonstrate that the hippocampus encodes information in relation to an episodic context, and that time, as well as space, serves to define these contexts. Moreover, the research has shown that the hippocampus can encode temporal, spatial, and situational information in parallel. Building on this work, I present a new framework for understanding temporal structure in human episodic memory. I conclude by outlining current controversies and new questions that must be addressed by the field in the years to come._

Preprint: [http://dml.ucdavis.edu/uploads/6/1/9/7/61974117/ranganath-20...](http://dml.ucdavis.edu/uploads/6/1/9/7/61974117/ranganath-2018-hippocampus.pdf)

Eichenbaum RIP.

<comment><USER3> Thanks! There's an interview with Howard on the great Neuroscientists Talk Shop podcast: [http://snrp.utsa.edu/Podcast/Entries/2016/9/20_Howard_Eichen...](http://snrp.utsa.edu/Podcast/Entries/2016/9/20_Howard_Eichenbaum_PhD.html)

Also a more recent discussion about how neural networks might memorize sequences: [http://snrp.utsa.edu/Podcast/Entries/2017/9/21_Dean_Buonoman...](http://snrp.utsa.edu/Podcast/Entries/2017/9/21_Dean_Buonomano_PhD.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wonder whether dysfunctions of these time-encoding networks could be implicated in psychiatric disorders. For example, a form of depression from rewards always seeming too far away to read as worthwhile, or anxiety from threats always seeming too close to respond to in a deliberate way.

</comment><comment><USER5> The original cron daemon

<comment><USER6> Brings a whole new take to Descarte's "Evil Daemon"</comment></comment>


India top court reinstates gay sex ban - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-25329065

<comment><USER2> Important tl;dr for those not from India:

1\. Section 377 is a 148-year-old colonial law (read: British rule) under which a same-sex relationship is an "unnatural offence" and punishable by a 10-year jail term.

2\. The Delhi High Court (akin to one of the US state supreme courts) had in 2009 struck down this law.

3\. The Supreme Court hasn't defended the law, but asked Parliament to repeal it. I quote:

> _" It is up to parliament to legislate on this issue," Justice GS Singhvi, > the head of the two-judge Supreme Court bench, said in Wednesday's ruling.

> "The legislature must consider deleting this provision (Section 377) from > law as per the recommendations of the attorney general," he added."_

</comment><comment><USER3> It's important to note that the Supreme Court has thrown the ball in the Government's court. They have said that they need to uphold the Constitutional section until it's there. If the section is repealed it can be done away with.

On the other hand, the Supreme court has the authority to stay such sections which affect fundamental human rights.

This is all objective stuff.

My opinion is that the Supreme Court effectively avoided the issue and put the onus on the government. In simpler terms, I feel the Supreme Court didn't have the balls to strike down the Section 377.

<comment><USER4> They could have refused to take the case, non? That's how the US Supremes effectively avoid taking the decision.

Here they effectively nullified an existing decision saying that the legislature has to act to support the decision.

Assuming a hostile or deadlocked legislature, this is nothing short of striking down the lower court's decision.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's not a surprise. Other BRICS are on the same road.

Russia and Brazil more explicitly.

I'm homossexual and live in Brazil. We have the highest rate of homophobia related crimes of the "civilized" world.

Moral aggressions are very common.

Just like in the USA, fundamentalist christians are pushing the government against all the progress we have made in the past decade.

I fear for my rights and my safety.

</comment><comment><USER6> Could hardly believe this when I read it. What an embarrassment. The damage done by the Brits lives on around the world.

<comment><USER7> In fairness to them, there aren't any Western cultures that openly or "legally" tolerated homosexuality in the mid 19th century...

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> As posted on another thread:

And people wonder why we need LGBT+ activism still....

It is worth baring in mind that this incidentally will affect a lot of people in Europe and North America. India is a primary area for companies to outsource not just their technology to, but also entire business processes. This includes HR document processing, which will result in personal information clearly relating to LGBT issues being processed by staff working in a culture hostile to LGBT people

</comment><comment><USER9> Implementing [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communal_Award](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communal_Award) would have prevented these type of issues in India

</comment><comment><USER10> India is a lost cause. Human rights, Climate change and on many other issues have only been driving the quality of life for a billion Indians into the gutter.

</comment><comment><USER11> Let's keep the outrage factory away from HN if we can.

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm so glad I live in Palo Alto</comment>


Organizing Functional Code for Parallel Execution (2009) [video] - <AUTHOR> https://vimeo.com/6624203 <comment><USER2> I enjoyed this talk along the same lines by Guy Steele, regarding not necessarily forcing a sequential solution to a non-sequential problem:

Four Solutions to a Trivial Problem - Guy Steele Jr.: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftcIcn8AmSY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftcIcn8AmSY)

Look for steps that are commutative and/or associative in the problem to exploit parallelism.

<comment><USER3> Monoids will save the world

<comment><USER4> They've been around for 30 years.

<comment><USER5> They've been hard to communicate by amateurs

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I didn't look to see when this video was made. As soon as the talk started about how, you have to use functional languages because of multi-core, to take advantage of parallelism, I immediately thought to myself, what is this 2008?

I was wrong. It's 2009.

We've moved on.

We've learned about Functional languages. It has helped.

It didn't solve the multi-core problem anyway even close to what was implied.</comment>


Aaron Swartz: How To Get A Job Like Mine - <AUTHOR> https://aaronsw.jottit.com/howtoget <comment><USER2> _Every morning I wake up and check my email to see which one of my projects has imploded today, which deadlines I'm behind on, which talks I need to write, and which articles I need to edit.

Maybe, one day, you too can be in the same position. If so, I hope I've done something to help._

A great talk, a great writeup, with a sad end when you read it today after the sad news. With all my respect, this is not a sustainable way of living your life. Expectation of high stress every day makes anyone collapse.

<comment><USER3> Indeed, I was also surprised by the 'Say yes to everything.' statement.

I'm currently doing nearly the exact opposite, to reduce my stress levels and avoid a burn out. Saying yes to everything might work when you are young, full of energy, and without kids, but in my case, with two young kids, saying no to a lot of distractions makes much more sense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This was an incredible piece. His earnestness and clarity is very evident, and you can tell he was once just a very curious kid with a sharp ability to focus. I'm grateful to have read it.

At the same time, I can't help but feel like he's talking directly to me. This is the kind of person who impacts you just through the sheer fact that he -lived-. As for the people harping about the notion of stress that he mentions at the end, I think it's meant differently. I think he means he's happy to have achieved what he has.

I also just watched his talk "How we stopped SOPA", and his speaking style echoed this article.

There is a quote that I've always tried to live by, which I think sums up Aaron's spirit.

 _"The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars."_

</comment><comment><USER5> He mentions past thoughts of suicide in this piece.

I'm having a hard time reconciling this with the strong, happy young man I would see at conferences a decade ago. First Ilya, now Aaron.

</comment><comment><USER6> Its numbing how you don't realise how much somebody on the other side of the world has affected your life until you find out until something tragic enough happens to them that it makes the news...

<comment><USER7> I've accepted it as life. You are unlikely to realize how much or how little you've affected people on the other side of the world too. I mourn Schwartz's passing, but I am not at all surprised that someone great has passed away. On a planet of 7 billion people, people pass away all the time, great, horrible, and mediocre. I try to recognize everyone's contributions, but I will not fret over making sure everyone gets their due recognition. In the off-chance I become great, I do not expect anything more in the sure-chance I pass away, and I hope that the attention I get is only to reflect on what still needs to be done, much like the attention we are currently giving Schwartz's passing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> You thought we could be decent men in an indecent time. You thought we could lead by example. You thought the rules could be bent but not break… you were wrong. The world is cruel. And the only morality in a cruel world is chance. Unbiased. Unprejudiced. Fair. funny .. the FBI terminates its cases with fire ; the US Attorney with suicide .. there is a long history of this ... Waco, Ruby Ridge, Abbie Hoffman SDS. the Prozac sanction : So they take a deposition after 3 hours offer you a drink of water after 6 more hours they reschedule more .. the drug in the drink goes to work. It's only a matter of time from there ...

</comment><comment><USER9> > we did agree on another good idea: a wiki to tell students what different > jobs are like. That site should be launching soon.

Did this ever happen?

<comment><USER10> I don't know, but I just read that on his "howtoget" and I'm eager to see if anyone else does know.

<comment><USER11> I have personally attempted this. It's a pretty large undertaking.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I couldnt load this. Found it cached via google:

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ViHqr5j...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ViHqr5j0_qwJ:aaronsw.jottit.com/howtoget+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

<comment><USER13> Different formatted, cached version: [http://thequeue.org/cr?id=https%3A%2F%2Faaronsw.jottit.com%2...](http://thequeue.org/cr?id=https%3A%2F%2Faaronsw.jottit.com%2Fhowtoget&title=Aaron%20Swartz:%20howtoget)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> _Assume nobody else has any idea what they're doing either. A lot of people refuse to try something because they feel they don't know enough about it or they assume other people must have already tried everything they could have thought of. Well, few people really have any idea how to do things right and even fewer are to try new things, so usually if you give your best shot at something you'll do pretty well._

What a fantastic insight, not to mention a real motivational boost.

</comment><comment><USER15> Also mirrored here: <https://gist.github.com/4517310>

</comment><comment><USER16> Jottit is such an incredible service. I hope it carries on.

</comment><comment><USER17> loved reading this. thanks for sharing it.</comment>


UpNote – Join the conspiracy of Kindness - <AUTHOR> https://upnote.io/ <comment><AUTHOR> Our mission is to provide a global platform to support one another with positive thoughts Life can be tough at times, but even a few good messages can help makes things a whole lot easier! We believe that everyone is happy to give to someone in need. On UpNote we are crowdsourcing this positivity for all those who need it.</comment>


CM2- Night Rider, our first ££ commercial bus route - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@Citymapper/cm2-night-rider-our-first-commercial-bus-route-d9d7918be899 <comment><USER2> This is very cool, though the East London Line is going 24hour soon, which closely follows this route.</comment>


The Misandry Bubble - <AUTHOR> http://www.singularity2050.com/2010/01/the-misandry-bubble.html

<comment><USER2> I'm upvoting this because it's thought-provoking, not because I agree with all the points made. I'd recommend reading it to engage your critical thinking skills - but of course, don't feed the troll.

<comment><USER3> I'm with you on this one ^</comment></comment>


Get Programming with Go is now available in print - <AUTHOR> https://programminggo.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Get Programming with Go is a beginner's guide to the Go programming language containing 32 quick lessons with plenty of fun exercises and silly gopher illustrations.

It's now available in print, and my publisher has made it the deal of the day today (September 19th, 2018). Get half off the ebook and print versions, with international shipping available.

Deal of the Day: [https://yng.mn/dotd](https://yng.mn/dotd)</comment>


Children of parents in technical jobs at higher risk for autism - <AUTHOR> http://www.uth.edu/media/story.htm?id=ef956e31-9815-42e7-a555-9a07959ce415

<comment><USER2> AFAIK there is a well-known correlation between father's age and autism risk. People who spend a longer time in education tend to marry and have children later. It's not surprising that the effect is stronger for doctors, who take several years to go through med school, specialization, residency etc., than for engineers, who can often find a good job with just a BSc.

<comment><USER3>
      AFAIK there is a well-known correlation between father's age and autism risk.

This is correct, here's a source: [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3645857/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3645857/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _" Fathers who worked in engineering were two times as likely to have a child with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD).

Those who worked in finance were four times more likely and those who worked in health care occupations were six times more likely to have a child on the autism spectrum."_

<comment><USER5> it looks like is the other way around, i don't get it.

<comment><USER6> I haven't seen the paper, but presumably the authors used a binary definition of "technical", which I suspect actually means "job that requires higher education", which might also correlate with "job in which fathers tend to have children later".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Couldn't a partial explanation for this be that those in higher paying jobs (i.e engineering) are more likely to take their children to specialists to be diagnosed?

<comment><USER8> Exactly...engineers & finance I could maybe see doing the semi autism thing, but when the article claim docs have a even higher rate...no way. Docs are patient facing..there is no way that flies under the radar. There has to be some other factor interfering (like your theory).

<comment><USER9> > Docs are patient facing..

And expected to maintain a certain degree of clinical detachment. If they were basing their parenting relationship on doctor-patient relationships, I'd not be surprised if they had a high rate of autism in their kids.

Not that I'm saying they do, just that if that were the line of logic one _were_ to go down.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's a very short article. I wasn't able to figure out whether the "higher risk" might just be higher rates of diagnosis. Tech worker parents are probably more affluent than the average and can afford better healthcare. This might also be why parents in finance and health occupations have even higher "risk."

<comment><USER11> It would only be a partial explanation, though, since the mother's career by itself doesn't appear to have the same relationship.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Dr. Dietrich Klinghardt established an extremely pronounced correlation between a pregnant mom's night-time wireless exposure (2.4 GHz = cordless, Wi- Fi, cell phones as well as microwave ovens) and incidence of autism.

Heavy Wi-Fi/smartphone data use has some serious negative effects that have been documented, but aren't popular!

<comment><USER13> Dietrich Klinghardt is not necessarily the most credible source of information.

See, e.g., [http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2010/03/26/your-friday- dos...](http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2010/03/26/your-friday-dose-of- woo-2/) for some critical commentary (from a source consistently critical of all That Sort Of Thing; read with appropriate caution if your general opinion of "energy medicine", "integrative medicine", kinesiology, homeopathy, etc., is more positive).

So, when Klinghardt established this extremely pronounced correlation, where did he publish the results and by whom have they been checked?</comment></comment>


Tiers of answers to half-baked questions - <AUTHOR> https://blog.plover.com/misc/half-baked.html <comment><USER2> I often encounter (especially among academics) people who are quick to refute questions or ideas on trivial grounds based on trivial formal description errors of the type described in this post. To any non-expert the intent of the ideas or questions is clear, but the formal thinkers are often quick to dismiss based on these trivial inconsistencies. I have a strong aversion to being dismissive or mean to people, especially in public, so by default I reinterpret in those cases - "If by X you really mean Y (where the difference between X and Y is only clear to an expert well-versed in formal descriptions of the subject matter) then yes, that is an interesting idea - the pros and cons are as such...". 99% of the time they actually mean Y, but they're just not quite well-versed enough to phrase it that way - or, upon knowing that swapping from X->Y converts their statement from trivial to meaningful, they would often be happy with Y capturing the sentiment they wish to convey.

I have started proselytizing this approach to my colleagues, because some of them are simply too formally minded to "pull themselves out" enough to interpret such statements generously. I do think some subset do use this sort of denigrating approach to cement their authority, which I find silly.

<comment><USER3> Any tips for people who are quick to be dismissive? Asking for a friend, he often is not generous with his interpretation of peoples' questions.

<comment><USER4> I don't think there's much better advice than what the OP has already said: train yourself to wonder if there's a deeper question that the asker might be asking. Ultimately it's a question of humility. I think dismissiveness is often motivated by an assumption that the asker has made a simple rookie thinking error, and that an involved answer isn't worth your time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Whenever I have to ask a semi-complicated question my brain does a mad scramble to assemble what I already know, what I think I know, what the other person knows, what I've already tried, my assumptions, why I want to know it...

</comment><comment><USER6> I think this is related to X-Y problems where someone wants to do x, thinks that y is the way to accomplish it, but can't do Y either, and so goes online to ask about Y.

Everyone else knows that Y is a weird or unusual thing to be doing, but either helpfully tries to explain how to do it, which won't solve their real problem anyway, or tells them that Y is dumb and they're dumb for asking about it.

A really helpful answer would try and think about what could motivate someone to ask about Y, and if unable to think of one, will ask why on earth they want to do Y and what are they are really trying to do.

Similar to this situation is that they're asking a question _because they want to know something about the world_ and trying to meet them halfway or ask clarifying questions is much more helpful than literally answering their question as asked.

<comment><USER7> To their credit, the economics SE recently answered the question "why is the price of oil negative?" with an explanation of futures, and not with "it isn't"

<comment><USER8> The closest thing I've experienced is the value of a CRT computer monitor in my locale, which is a negative 15 dollars because you have to buy a sticker from the city in order to dispose of it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> prosaic-hacker I have ask this half baked question many time in many places and I have received the lower tier answers all the time.

Driving on a multi-lane highways with no traffic (yes it can happen, eg upstate NY Adirondacks overnight ) you can straighten the road shifting lanes to always be on the inside of the curve. Calculate the shortest path.

I once vaguely phrased this what shortest line that can be drawn between two parallel curved line a constant distance apart. I think this is mathematically half baked and could be restates.

<comment> dan-robertson One thing to note is that this shortest path won't typically be much shorter. Consider a circular ring road. The circumference on the inside is pi * d and on the outside is pi * (d + w), where w is the width of the road, so the amount you save by driving on the inside is pi * w which is probably less than 100m.

In a more general simplified case where you always stick to the inside of every curve and jump from left to right for free, the amount you save compared to sticking to the middle lane is the line integral:

      \frac14 w \int k \mathrm ds

where k is the curvature (strictly speaking k should be an adjusted curvature of 1/((1/K) - (w/2)) where K is the actual curvature).

Because roads are not very curvy, the integral of k will be small and so the distance saved is very low. And note this is an overestimate because it doesn't cost in changing from side to side

<comment><USER9> In motorsports it's known as the _racing line_.

You're right, the gains are small for the average road user :)

Wikipedia article [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racing_line](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racing_line)

<comment><USER10> The real gains come not from decreasing the distance travelled (sometimes the racing line does the opposite), they come from limiting the radius of the turn so you can carry more speed through. At least thats what I've learned from playing Grid 2 for far to many hours.

<comment><USER9> Yep, that Wikipedia article talks about that, and one it suggests are further too [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trail_braking](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trail_braking)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is a good approach and good advice for better communication in general: you have to listen to both the exact words and the intent behind them. Coming from technical fields, many of us are rather biased to dismiss what others say for technical reasons only, when if we cared a bit more to look into what they are really trying to say or figure out, we could help them, understand them, and start much more interesting debates. This is too often seen in political debate too, though the bias here might come from a different side (if you can nitpick on the form of an argument, you don't have to care about anything else).

</comment><comment><USER12> I really loved this breakdown.

Two useful related thoughts:

1\. [https://www.perspectiveapi.com](https://www.perspectiveapi.com) via Google that rates comments based on their utility and toxicity

2\. Generally adding emotional intelligence and psychology into the picture instead of focusing solely on answering the top-level question directly. Being able to emphasize with the person asking the question is invaluable in figuring out the best way to frame your answer.

Sooooo many developers could use a healthy dose of improvement in #2.

</comment><comment><USER13> This illustrates more than anything the Dunning–Kruger effect. Dilettantes and dabblers with a little knowledge often tend to be the more nasty on online forums, while actual experts have the humility of not just knowing the limits of their knowledge but more importantly have enough information to contextualize even those questions which might appear dumb to an untrained mind.

<comment><USER14> and often people answer not to help the questioner (and future readers) but to show off the little knowledge they have

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> On the Physics SE a similar cluster of questions are asked about the finiteness of the speed of light e.g [https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/230703/do-we- kno...](https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/230703/do-we-know-why- there-is-a-speed-limit-in-our-universe), why the Principle of Least Action exists, and the "paradox" of size of the universe being larger than it's age x c

<comment><USER16> The linked question on "why is C finite" is a good example. Each answer is basically just "the speed of light is finite because the field I know most about (cosmology, relativity, etc.) breaks in this specific way when it's infinite".

Having said that, I do believe the correct answer is some form of "we don't know". But that would be considered a half baked answer according to the author. It's also deeply unsatisfying on an emotional level.

So all the answers are basically modifying the intent of the asker in order to answer related questions which _are_ satisfying. This is compounded by the StackExchange community upvoting highly knowledgeable answers. Fortunately you can see the disputes on these answers also get upvotes in the answer's comments.

<comment><USER17> In theoretical physics, "why X" stands for absolutely nothing more than "please derive X from some other principle". Some people will use Y to derive X. Others will say that's not a _real_ explanation, you really should use Z to derive X. And yet others will flip the derivation around and say that X really _is_ the fundamental principle, and use it to derive Y and Z! (The route one takes depends on what one views as "more fundamental", a metaphysical notion that nobody agrees on.)

It's completely fair if you don't think any of the answers were satisfying, but it's not like there's another option on the table.

A lot of laypeople think that a _truly_ satisfying answer must be mechanistic -- something like "there's an invisible jelly everywhere and it wobbles at a finite speed, and that is the speed of light" \-- but the 20th century taught us that this completely natural desire is actually counterproductive, because you have to add piles of epicycles to hide the jelly's other effects.

<comment><USER16> Yeah. I think answers which aren't technically correct but are highly knowledgeable and deeply related are still very useful.

>"there's an invisible jelly everywhere and it wobbles at a finite speed, and that is the speed of light"

As a layperson, is this analogous to "the electromagnetic field is everywhere and wobbles at a finite speed"?

<comment><USER17> "Field" is the abstraction we use in physics to say "there is a value associated with each point, and we're just _not going to say_ whether it's representing the displacement of some invisible jelly, or the rotational velocity of some invisible tiny gears, or if it doesn't even make sense to ask the question". When we say the electromagnetic field wobbles, we just mean some abstract value is going from positive to negative and back.

I know that sounds unsatisfying, but there's good historical reason for doing this. Maxwell, for example, had a rich intuitive understanding of the electromagnetic field as a set of many invisible jellies and gears pushing on each other. His original equations were also 5x longer than the modern form and impossible for anybody else to understand, plus all the extra ingredients made tons of predictions that played poorly with relativity. The sheer butchery one needs to make intuitive pictures like this compatible with relativity is so high that we've basically collectively decided to give up. We now say fields _make up_ real jellies and gears, they're not _made of_ jellies and gears. They're just fields.

<comment><USER16> I gotcha. Not the right way to think about it. To be clear, you're saying fields are essentially virtual mathematical notions from which emerges actual stuff?

Given the premise that fields are explicitly not consisted of an "invisible jelly", I'll ask what is definitely a "half-assed question" -

How and where _do_ fields "exist"? Where are they in the standard model? Intuition says maybe they reside in spacetime near particles. I have a hunch from QFT that the fields are technically "everywhere" and are merely highly excited into particles when energy transforms the field in certain spots.

I doubt either of my guesses is the right answer but I'm mostly just curious how literally you mean to take the viewpoint that fields are "virtual" in nature.

Since this is a half-assed question, feel free to give a half-assed answer.

<comment><USER17> > To be clear, you're saying fields are essentially virtual mathematical > notions from which emerges actual stuff?

Perhaps, but I think that's a bit unfair. There's no dividing line between "mathematical notions" and "actual stuff". For example, when you poke a bowl of jello, it springs back, so it feels like "actual stuff". But in terms of the mathematics, it's because the configuration of fields that corresponds to compressed jello has a higher energy value than when uncompressed. In other words, while we don't assign intuitive properties like "solidity" and "elasticity" to fields, the relation between the fields and those properties in macroscopic objects is quite direct!

> How and where _do_ fields "exist"? Where are they in the standard model? > Intuition says maybe they reside in spacetime near particles. I have a hunch > from QFT that the fields are technically "everywhere" and are merely highly > excited into particles when energy transforms the field in certain spots.

Indeed, they're technically "everywhere". You commonly hear that for the Higgs field, but it's true for all others as well, such as the electron field, whose excitations are electrons.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Earlier today, on the subject of why I made a particular design choice, I went straight for tier 6. I absolutely could have promoted my response to tier 5, or even 4, but I was too focused on prevailing as correct to see that one can affirm the reasons why someone is asking a question without necessarily seizing on the more absurd aspects of the question. I think I'll be more mindful of this in the future.

Terrific article.

</comment><comment><USER19> I don't know. My main gripe with StackOverflow is question getting closed for being opinion based or not worth debating. When constant debate is actually fun and interesting. (And you don't have to watch the threads if you don't care.)

<comment><USER20> If you like constant debates and open ended questions, why not use Quora, or maybe even reddit.

<comment><USER21> Has Quora gotten any better for content? Maybe I just don't use it right. It is on my list with Technet for sites that are entirely garbage. Every time I was led to Quora the answers were always 3 top comments of different companies advertising something.

<comment><USER20> It has begun resembling the real world, just like any platform that gets too many users. But I doubt if you ask things like open ended debate questions you are not willing to see 1-2 ad answers, as long as there are other high quality answers. Many people are on quora posting high quality answers. Some examples: 1\. Cliff Click 2\. John Romero

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I think people may give half hearted questions to get better answers. Maybe half hearted questions get more interaction by people trying to clarify things, or perhaps the answers are written with more common language than jargon?

Could there be other reasons (apart from "Questioner Is Stupid" or Troll) to ask vaguely formatted questions?

</comment><comment><USER23> 6\. I can't do it, so nobody can.

I am much too emotionally invested in intellectual honesty...

</comment><comment><USER24> It's "tiers of answers", not "tired of answers".

<comment><USER25> Fixed. Thanks!</comment></comment>


Analysts Wary of LinkedIn's Stock Surge - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/23/technology/23linkedin.html

<comment><USER2> Best part of the story:

"Price-to-earnings comparisons for other hot Internet companies, like TheGlobe.com or even Netscape on their opening days, are difficult as they did not have any earnings."

</comment><comment><USER3> To those who are thinking about shorting it when that becomes available:

If you buy LinkedIn at $100, the most you can lose is $100. But if you short at $100, your loss can be infinite.

As a short seller, you could run out of money before the promoter(s) runs out of ideas.

Being short a stock, while seeing some promoter taking the stock up would be quite agonizing.

You may be right about it being overpriced, but that's not enough. When it comes to shorting, it's the timing that you have to get right. And that's really hard.

It's okay to just sit this out.

<comment><USER4> _If you're long LinkedIn at $100, the most you can lose is $100. But if you short at $100, your loss can be infinite._

This is what put options are for.

<comment><USER3> That's true.

But IMO, to make it worthwhile, you still have to get the timing right. That's the hard part.

Identifying a bubble is relatively easy. What you don't know is how big it'll get and when it'll pop.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> LinkedIn was smart to go public before Facebook.

However, $8B for what essentially amounts to a glorified harassment tool for recruiters is a bit ludicrous.

<comment><USER6> LinkedIn could be turned into the world's best job board. But it is currently built like an old-fashioned dating site. It's like Match.com for jobs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> $15 million profit, $8 billion valuation

LOL

<comment><USER8> Yep, Bubble 2.0 is upon us. I just hope people can put two and two together this time and get out before it bursts.

<comment><USER9> You are like these crazies announcing the end of the world. Yes, it will happen eventually, but if you don't know when, you're not adding anything to the debate by stating the obvious.

<comment><USER8> The end of the world and a bubble are two entirely different things. I can also argue that your statement didn't add anything either without stating the obvious.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> _"Linkedin IPO: net revenue $100M, market cap $4B. Google IPO: net revenue $800M, market cap $24B."_ <http://twitter.com/akkartik/status/72519743835348992>

Seems pretty reasonable.

<comment><USER11> To know whether it's reasonable, you need to know not only the amount of revenue but also the revenue growth rate. I don't have the numbers in front of me, but my impression is that LinkedIn's revenue growth, while substantial, is not in the stratospheric territory that Google's was.

(There's profit to consider too, of course, but the business models of these two companies are similar enough that one would expect them to have similar margins.)

<comment><USER10> Turns out linkedin doubled revenue YoY. <http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/27/linkedin-files-for-ipo>

Google (gross revenue) was at 3x. [http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1288776/0001193125041...](http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1288776/000119312504142742/ds1a.htm)

All this is details. It's pretty clear that prices aren't crazily inflated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> LinkedIn were played here. That valuation was insane they reminded me of those tech companies like Excite who went down the drain. On the other hand Facebook's strategy was really conservative and wise for not going public yet.

<comment><USER13> Facebook can raise a billion dollars over lunch at this point.

Apart from the onerous reporting requirements once you go north of 500 shareholders, I don't see why they would bother to go public unless a very large shareholder started pushing for it. And even then it seems possible to unload multi-centimillion chunks in private exchanges.

<comment><USER14> I'm sure all their large investors are pushing for it. Given the, uh, irrational exuberance we're seeing, they may well get more for their stake in a very liquid market, and it probably easier to buy or sell in public rather than on the secondary market.</comment></comment></comment>


Nokia's new Symbian site is open - <AUTHOR> http://symbian.nokia.com/blog/2011/03/31/we-are-open/

<comment><USER2> Strange, I was expecting to be redirected to the Windows Phone 7 site.</comment>


The Relative Weirdness of Birds - who-knows https://theweek.com/speedreads/908969/whats-deal-birds-magnificent-scientific-paper-examines <comment><AUTHOR> It's mildly amusing, sure, but publishing a rehash of a joke made on April 1st two weeks later, on April 15th, feels like seeing someone lag in real life. The paper should have been just left alone to be discovered by someone later as a fun curio. Especially since The Week seems to be a completely serious website the rest of the time, what a weird choice to publish that article two weeks after April Fool's.

<comment><USER2> It's not just a joke, it has a serious purpose.

From the article > _it does seem to prove his point: That the Scientific Journal of Research & Reviews is among dozens of "predatory journals" that publish low-quality or unreviewed papers, often for an exorbitant fee._

<comment><USER3> Following the thread of the substantive academic issue through the links,

[https://predatoryjournals.com/about/](https://predatoryjournals.com/about/)

[https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/01/18/librarians- li...](https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/01/18/librarians-list- predatory-journals-reportedly-removed-due-threats-and-politics)

We arrive at a 2013 essay by University of Colorado librarian Jeffrey Beall:

> To boost the open-access movement, its leaders sacrifice the academic > futures of young scholars and those from developing countries, pressuring > them to publish in lower-quality open-access journals

> The movement relies on unnatural mandates that take free choice away from > individual researchers, mandates set and enforced by an onerous cadre of > Soros-funded European autocrats.

[http://triplec.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/525/514](http://triplec.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/525/514)

Still working on what to make of all this ...

<comment><USER4> The closed-access traditional publishing field fears the loss of their business model in favor of open access, in which researchers and the public can read articles without a paywall. To do this, they have tried to focus the attention of the public on low-end obscure open-access journals which they term "predatory journals" and hope that this discredits the idea of open access in general. The problem is that while bad open access journals certainly exist, so do bad closed-access journals.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The paper about which is written there is:

[https://irispublishers.com/sjrr/pdf/SJRR.MS.ID.000540.pdf](https://irispublishers.com/sjrr/pdf/SJRR.MS.ID.000540.pdf)

and, to warn anybody expecting more, ends with:

"Acknowledgements

We thank Big Bird from Sesame Street for comments on the manuscript. Several trained monkeys transcribed videos."

Also: "Published Date: April 01, 2020"

In short: meh. Doesn't even appear to be funny, especially especially when "covered" on April 15, 2020, for my understanding of what is actually funny:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yL_-1d9OSdk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yL_-1d9OSdk)

.

<comment><USER6> Summary much appreciated though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm an _English professor_ and I get email from predatory journals all the time. They often have weird, incredibly expansive titles _(The International Journal of Business, Science, and Human Culture_ \-- something like that).

I don't really understand how they manage to stay in business, though. We all know that there's a difference between _Cell Biology_ and this kind of fly-by- night nonsense. In some disciplines, journals are quite explicitly ranked by "quality," acceptance rate, etc. Certainly, my colleagues would know immediately if I was publishing in some venue like this; it just wouldn't "count."

Perhaps this scam is intended for another group? Some quack scientist (say) wants to create a giant verifiable CV of their "publications?" Or someone needs some kind of scholarly credentials as a humanist or social scientist, but is unaffiliated?

The whole thing is a bit mystifying to me.

EDIT: I don't mean to imply, by the way, that "unaffiliated" scholars are somehow forced to do this. I know quite a few independent scholars who do excellent work and publish in high-quality, peer-reviewed journals.

<comment><USER8> > I don't really understand how they manage to stay in business

I suspect they follow the vanity press model and charge authors publication fees.

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

</comment></comment><comment> ezequiel-garzon Allow me an academic masterpiece released this April Fools: "Defining the Really Habitable Zone", [https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.13722](https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.13722)

</comment><comment><USER9> [https://irispublishers.com/sjrr/pdf/SJRR.MS.ID.000540.pdf](https://irispublishers.com/sjrr/pdf/SJRR.MS.ID.000540.pdf)

<comment><USER10> > We suggest that planets in the Really Habitable Zone be early targets for > the JWST, because by the time that thing finally launches we're all going to > need a drink.

LOL.

<comment><USER11> Footnote 6 is great too:

> 6 Yes, gins and tonic, not gin and tonics. You want multiple gins, not more > tonic.

Or the note on Table 1:

> Note: all coefficients assume a pressure of 1 bar, as one simply cannot be > in more than one bar at any given time. Once you find a good bar, you should > stay in it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Exhibit A: Shoebill: [https://www.google.com/search?q=shoebill&tbm=isch](https://www.google.com/search?q=shoebill&tbm=isch)

<comment><USER8> I see your shoebill and raise you a cassowary. They make it very plausible that birds are descended from dinosaurs.

[https://www.google.com/search?q=cassowary&tbm=isch](https://www.google.com/search?q=cassowary&tbm=isch)

Kiwis are pretty weird too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Is this usually a legit journal??

<comment><USER6> No, it says so in the article that it's a predatory journal.</comment></comment>


The Hummus Manifesto - <AUTHOR> http://sixkidsandafulltimejob.blogspot.com/2010/07/hummus-manifesto-part-1.html <comment><USER2> Why working on .NET with C# would hinder a start-up culture?

Product scalability? Is that important?</comment>


State of Scala compilation times (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://www.triplequote.com/blog/2018-state-of-scala-compilation/ <comment><USER2> Projects about faster Scala compilation:

[1] [https://medium.com/@gkossakowski/from-kentucky-mule-to- faste...](https://medium.com/@gkossakowski/from-kentucky-mule-to-faster-scala- compiler-project-brief-d878495cad3b)

[2] [https://github.com/twitter/rsc](https://github.com/twitter/rsc)</comment>


DataChile: New Visualization Engine for Chile's Public Data - <AUTHOR> https://es.datachile.io/ <comment><USER2> Might be easier to read in English: [https://en.datachile.io](https://en.datachile.io)</comment>


Logic, Explainability and the Future of Understanding - <AUTHOR> https://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2018/11/logic-explainability-and-the-future-of-understanding/ <comment><USER2> > even though the underlying rules (or underlying "language") used in > different areas of mathematics are different, there ends up being some way > to translate between them—so that at the next level of abstraction the path > that was taken no longer critically matters.

This and the previous arguments made me feel much better about the value of using proof assistants to advance mathematics! For example, there's been quite a bit of controversies surrounding the usage of e.g. Coq to prove the 4-color theorem; folks complain that although the proof can be verified, brute-forcing it doesn't provide us with further mathematical insight. But that might be fine, since we'd use the proof to build up other abstractions, and if we felt the need, we can always come back and re-prove 4-color using a more humanly explanable method.

The other nice insight is that maybe we get to define "simplicity" with a bit more rigor than how we usually define it (I'm aware of Clojure's definition of it): a few number of somewhat orthogonal axioms, that enable the biggest reduction of quantity of steps needed when proving things with said axioms. For software engineering, this means having relatively few primitives, that are composable enough to greatly simplify a program either statically or dynamically. No need to try too hard to reduce the axioms/helpers into a single one, as the ratio of utility might tip to the wrong side.

It's also cool to notice that such common definition of simplicity might change depending on what new concepts we assimilate. Also interesting that you can somewhat quantify it by using a probability distribution over the common use-cases of your axioms!

<comment><USER3> This paper posted this week...

SPIRAL: Extreme Performance Portability

      This paper provides an end-to-end discussion of the
      SPIRAL system, its domain-specific languages, and code
      generation techniques

[http://users.ece.cmu.edu/~franzf/papers/08510983_Spiral_IEEE...](http://users.ece.cmu.edu/~franzf/papers/08510983_Spiral_IEEE_Final.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I got lost quite a bit on this, but luckily I stayed through the end.

> It's a similar problem in natural science. You see some elaborate set of > things happening in some biological system. Can one "reverse engineer" these > to find an "explanation" for them? Sometimes one might be able to say, for > example, that evolution by natural selection would be likely to lead to > something. Or that it's just common in the computational universe and so is > likely to occur. But there's no guarantee that the natural world is set up > in any way that necessarily allows human explanation.

<comment><USER5> I remember a quote, I think it was from Asimov, that really enlightened me. He explains that before Newton's law of gravity, we had ways to calculate orbits and planets positions. It involved complex abacus but a model existed. The fact that he worked so hard, trying to find a simpler model was, according to Asimov, an essential act of faith in "the intelligibility of the universe". He argued that this was a principle of faith held by many fundamental researchers.

<comment><USER6> I'm pretty sure that the previous methods were imperfect, so it wasn't simply that we wanted a "simpler" method, but one that would stand the test of time.

<comment><USER7> lv is citing an Asimov quotation on Newton's actual motivations, not the motivations Newton plausibly had or you think Newton had.

Trying to infer the motivation from the result is exactly what aakilfernandes's quotation is referring to!

(Whether Asimov had done his research on this is another matter.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If you liked that you'll like this: [http://www.markability.net/](http://www.markability.net/)

It's a walk-through of George Spencer-Brown's Laws of Form.

It turns out all logic can be modeled by simple containment, and there's a complete basis (discovered by Bricken):

        A() = ()
        ((A))B = AB
        A(AB) = A(B)

One interesting thing about LoF notation is that every expression is also a schematic of a logic circuit. The letters are inputs, the expression is the output, and each container represents a logical (multi-input) NOR gate.

Another interesting thing about it is that it's significantly more efficient to derive proofs in LoF notation than conventional notation. (Often a proof that takes several pages in conventional notation will be less than a dozen lines in LoF.)

You can write a simple SAT solver that doesn't require the input expressions to be put into a Normal Form first.

\- - - -

As Wolfram and others have pointed out: It's _relatively_ easy to program computers to search for new proofs and such[1], the trick is making it "surface" the human-interesting ones.

[1] E.g. DeepAlgebra [https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.01044](https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.01044) [https://github.com/przchojecki/deepalgebra](https://github.com/przchojecki/deepalgebra)

> We outline a program in the area of formalization of mathematics to automate > theorem proving in algebra and algebraic geometry. We propose a construction > of a dictionary between automated theorem provers and (La)TeX exploiting > syntactic parsers. We describe its application to a repository of human- > written facts and definitions in algebraic geometry (The Stacks Project). We > use deep learning techniques.

<comment><USER9> Yeah the Laws of Form notation is very elegant and provides a really profound conceptual foundation. Always loved the book and the people who've tried to take it even further (some surprisingly good discussion on the LoF yahoo group over the years)

<comment><USER8> The idea of imaginary Boolean values is pretty striking, eh?

I find it fascinating that some people have a near-mystical experience with LoF while others sniff at it as just another notation that doesn't add anything fundamental.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Investing in opensource systems like Coq, Agda, etc, seems more promising. They both work on improving their experience based on the latest achievements. Mathematica is very expensive and proprietary for the most of the world.

<comment><USER11> There's a difference in the kind of things that proof assistants like Coq can do and what computer algebra systems like Sage can do. One can still use CAS like Sage to prove things and not just do numerical computations, but it's a bit of a different approach

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's interesting that a single formula "encapsulates" all of Boolean logic, but I fail to see why having a single formula, rather than two or three, makes things simpler rather than more complex. The proposed formula with 6 NANDs is almost impossible to intuitively understand. Why give up axioms that are easier to understand, like the Peano axioms, or even the pair of 4-NAND and commutativity axioms, just because you want one formula?

I do see some value in it, but the idea of "simpleness" being captured by "least number of formulas" seems shortsighted.

</comment><comment><USER4> > But how many axioms does one need? And how simple can they be?

In this article, what does "simple" mean? At first I assume it is "simple to understand" but clearly thats not the case.

<comment><USER13> I'm guessing Kolmogorov

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> A nice short read for an introduction to equational logic: [http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/gries/Logic/Equational.html](http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/gries/Logic/Equational.html)

The Leibniz rule in particular carries a lot of weight.

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm guessing he's not talking about first order logic when he's talking about defining 'logic' with a single axiom because it seems to me there are a whole hell of a lot of steps missing to go from his axiom to 'proving' anything at all.

<comment><USER16> 0th-order. Propositional logic, boolean algebra.</comment></comment>


Rust 0.9 released - <AUTHOR> https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/rust-dev/2014-January/007753.html <comment><USER2> Wasn't this release supposed to finally offer a Windows package which works out-of-the-box?

I just tried it. Only got an error message about a missing GCC component. Seriously, a ~90MB download and that still does not include all the GCC dependencies?

We still have to somehow manually setup a version of MinGW compatible with this particular build? Who is in charge of the Windows port? A Linux user who cross-compiles from an Arch box? No way a Windows user would think that Windows package is acceptable.

I mean, I am not paying anything for it so it is not that I think I have the right to demand better packages but you are losing out on a massive amount of feedback from the Windows world by only offering such downloads.

You are largely limiting yourself to determined people who are already familiar with MinGW-based C/C++ development on Windows (that is a _small_ subset of Windows devs). What about people coming from - say C#? You expect them to fiddle with a MinGW setup just to build "Hello World"?

Sorry, but for me this experiment with Rust ended just like the 0.8 one. Downloaded Windows installer, ran Windows installer, tried to compile Hello World, got error message about missing components, uninstall, delete.

<comment><AUTHOR>
      > Wasn't this release supposed to finally offer a Windows
      > package which works out-of-the-box?

Nope! No idea where you got that impression.

      > Who is in charge of the Windows port?

We keep asking for people knowledgeable about Windows to step forward and lead the effort to port us off MinGW and onto MSVC, and none ever have. Would you like to volunteer? :)

To clarify, the _goal_ is to be using the native Windows toolchain by 1.0, if at all feasible. Servo has to work on Windows, after all.

<comment><USER3> I just started looking at Rust and like what I see so far. I may be able to help; I worked on the Windows port of Go and put together the MinGW build environments as well as the binary installers.

If someone can point me to a list of outstanding issues/requirements and a contact person it'd be much appreciated. Note, I've already found this [https://github.com/mozilla/rust/issues/8996](https://github.com/mozilla/rust/issues/8996) and this [https://github.com/mozilla/rust/issues/1237](https://github.com/mozilla/rust/issues/1237).

I'm assuming the workflow notes at [https://github.com/mozilla/rust/wiki/Notes](https://github.com/mozilla/rust/wiki/Notes) are up to date?

<comment><USER4> I personally don't know what's necessary now, but if you feel like joining #rust or #rust-internals on irc.mozilla.org (which I recommend :) ), then vadimcn and klutzy are the people to talk to. (IRC handles match their GitHub names.)

<comment><USER3> ...doing it now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> A selection of some of my favorite aspects of this release:

1\. The (yet-ongoing) removal of managed pointers, leaving us with one fewer pointer type. Final tally of built-in pointer types: unique pointers, mutable references, and immutable references.

2\. The dead code detection pass ([https://github.com/mozilla/rust/pull/10477](https://github.com/mozilla/rust/pull/10477)), contributed by a student of the University of Virginia's Rust-based systems programming class ([http://rust-class.org/pages/using-rust-for-an- undergraduate-...](http://rust-class.org/pages/using-rust-for-an- undergraduate-os-course.html)).

3\. The `Any` trait, giving us on-demand dynamic typing ([https://github.com/mozilla/rust/pull/9967](https://github.com/mozilla/rust/pull/9967)).

4\. The clean abstraction of green threads and native threads out into their own libraries ([https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/rust- dev/2013-December/00...](https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/rust- dev/2013-December/007565.html)) such that any library that makes use of the stdlib will work regardless of which strategy the user selects.

We're not quite in the home stretch yet, but there are very few hard blockers left on 1.0. Here's the list that I can think of:

1\. Dynamically-sized types ([http://smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps/blog/2014/01/05/dst-...](http://smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps/blog/2014/01/05/dst- take-5/))

2\. The extension of rvalue lifetimes ([http://smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps/blog/2014/01/09/rval...](http://smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps/blog/2014/01/09/rvalue- lifetimes-in-rust/))

3\. Struct single (note that's _single_ ) inheritance ([http://smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps/blog/2013/10/24/sing...](http://smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps/blog/2013/10/24/single- inheritance/))

4\. Niceties and sugar to support custom smart pointer types to complete the excision of managed pointers

As far as I know, the devs are still aiming for a 1.0 release in 2014. The 1.0 release will _not_ necessarily mean that the language is done evolving or ready for production use, but it _will_ mean that the developers will begin honoring language-level and library-level backwards compatibility. I would expect _at least_ two more unstable point releases (i.e. 0.10 and 0.11) before a 1.0 release occurs.

<comment><USER5> Inheritance may not make 1.0.

<comment><USER6> I'm finding that my OO code style these days is very composition heavy with pretty much no inheritance use. I think given Rust's type system, I'm not going to miss inheritance much.

<comment><USER7> I believe Rust wants inheritance primarily for Servo, because the DOM is defined in terms of inheritance.

<comment><USER8> If that is the only use case I would rather want another solution to keep the language minimal. Just like the garbage collection was moved to a library.

<comment><USER5> Can't really do it. I tried. The type checker just plain has to know about inheritance for it to work and be safe.

The good news is that's an extremely constrained sort of inheritance, very unlike traditional OO in that it doesn't have base classes--it's just a special extension to the trait (typeclass) system that allows you to require that structs begin with a certain set of fields. In fact, I don't even call it inheritance these days--I prefer the name "structural constraints".

<comment><USER9> ooh, is this like record subtyping? Have you seen ermine [https://github.com/ermine-language](https://github.com/ermine-language) or Ur/web? [http://www.impredicative.com/ur/](http://www.impredicative.com/ur/)

[edit, on #rust it was explained to me that its only for pointers to structs, but thats fine by me]

<comment><USER4> If anyone is interested, the proposal for Rust is detailed in [http://smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps/blog/2013/10/24/sing...](http://smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps/blog/2013/10/24/single- inheritance/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> As always, drop by irc.mozilla.org #rust if you'd like to chat or ask questions. We're a friendly bunch!

[http://chat.mibbit.com/?server=irc.mozilla.org&channel=%23ru...](http://chat.mibbit.com/?server=irc.mozilla.org&channel=%23rust)

</comment><comment><USER11> I really want Rust to succeed, but I'm not a systems programmer. Do people feel that there is still a place for Rust among those who typically work with higher-level languages? The functional aspects and type system of Rust look really appealing, and I'd love to do my part to help it do well by actually using it.

<comment><AUTHOR> I was exclusively a Javascript/Python/Java programmer before jumping into Rust. If you're looking to learn a systems language with real bare-metal capabilities, Rust's safety features will go a long way towards keeping you on the straight and narrow as you figure out the concepts essential to low-level programming.

And because Steve seems reluctant to plug his own book, here's Rust for Rubyists, which is an introduction to Rust geared towards users of higher- level programming languages: [http://www.rustforrubyists.com/](http://www.rustforrubyists.com/)

<comment><USER12> This reminded me that I needed to actually release the 0.9 update I wrote over the weekend! Thanks :)

<comment><USER13> Thanks kibwen for the link, and thanks steveklabnik for writing this. I've been interested in Rust and this looks like a nice way to get my feet wet.

<comment><USER12> You're welcome! Feedback appreciated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'vr been 'stalking' Rust for quite some time, but never got around to diving in. I'm essentially a web programer who's been building fairly large web based systems. I'm sick of dealing with programming languages that consume shitloads of resources (CPU, memory, whatever) for doing essentially trivial stuff (compared to the amount of resources they use).

Will Rust be able to help me write super-efficient web programs, than run blazingly fast and dont gobble-up RAM?

Besides, how painful/easy is string manipulation in Rust?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, Rust will super-efficient, blazingly-fast, and memory-lean. But it's not nearly as good at rapid prototyping as, say, Ruby, so you'll have to temper your expectations.

String manipulation in Rust is currently lacking while we work on the API. We also strictly enforce that all strings are UTF-8, so while this gives us great confidence that we're future-proof it adds a whole lot of difficulty in implementing a fast and correct means to work with strings.

<comment><USER14> Can you elaborate why UTF-8 makes things harder? Is it because 1-byte no longer means one character? So, something like calculating a string's length is also tricky. Is that it?

Also, where can I read about the general direction the string manipulation API is going to take?

<comment><AUTHOR> The bigger problem is that Unicode is immense and complex, and trying to implement the full specification is rather daunting.

There's no real documents concerning the future of the string API, right now people are just implementing things as they need them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> So is the next milestone 1.0 or 0.10?

<comment><USER12> 0.10

<comment><USER16> with finalized pointers?

<comment><USER12> What do you mean?

<comment><USER16> These deep changes with pointers holds me back to try out rust. Last I checked rust was a week ago, none of the pointer related documentation or examples were compatible with the head revision. Putting energy of the released version felt bad as that will break soon but head is not that useful without documentation. The same goes since summer, I'm looking for a stable codebase with documentation and base libraries.

<comment><USER17> If you're looking for a stable language you shouldn't use Rust right now. The language is still changing every few days.

If you have a bit more time to spend it's fun, though -- I spent a lot of time in the IRC channel. The people in #rust are really helpful and will answer all your pointer questions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > normalized to Unicode normalization form NFKC

I'm wondering why they chose NFKC (compatibility composed from) instead of NFC (canonically composed form).

`ª` would become `a`, losing its _super_ type. `ᵤ` becomes `u`, losing its _sub_ type? `Ⓐ` becomes `A`, losing its _circle_ type. As for multi-codepoint mappings, `¼` would become three tokens `1⁄4`, where `⁄` (U+2044) _doesn 't_ map to `/` (U+002F).

<comment><USER19> Maybe you are referring the reference [1], which indeed mentions NFKC. As far as I know there is no consensus of the normalization form [2] and the current implementation is not guaranteed to stay, which is why Unicode identifiers are gated behind a `#[feature]` flag.

[1] [http://static.rust-lang.org/doc/0.9/rust.html#input- format](http://static.rust-lang.org/doc/0.9/rust.html#input-format)

[2] [https://github.com/mozilla/rust/issues/2253](https://github.com/mozilla/rust/issues/2253)

<comment><USER18> Yes, I started reading the reference. The normalization form issue is different to the #[non_ascii_idents] feature, though.

The issue 2253 does mention address it, but all the comments mention the issue of NFC/NFKC normalization specifically for filesystem lookup and for program identifiers, but not for the lexing stage. That issue is obviously the best place to continue any conversation about it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Rust does seem to do lots of good and interesting stuff. I was trying to find a small number of languages covering all paradigms, and Rust featured on the final list:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7026970](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7026970)

</comment><comment><USER21> Of course I welcome removal of GC syntax, but I am getting in doubt on when Rust language specification can be stabilized. Version 0.9 seems it must be stable now, but they're still putting big changes on the language.

<comment><USER22> In general: One cannot expect a 0.x version to be stable/won't be followed by a incompatible version. A 1.x version is a different story.

<comment><USER23> Well, it's understandable where the concern is coming from. We've seen 0.x releases of Rust for nearly two full years now, and even the most recent ones have had significant changes. While we've heard that a 1.0 release is planned for sometime during 2014, there's little to suggest that things are actually stabilizing. It isn't Perl 6 yet, but the ongoing lack of stability is making some potential Rust users become skeptical.

<comment><USER5> There have been fewer and fewer breaking language changes over time. The migration from 0.8 to 0.9 was less of a burden than the migration from 0.7 to 0.8, and so on. There is also a lot of progress on making a list of blocking issues, and at this point if anything can be added backwards compatibly it is almost always not a priority for 1.0.

Making a safe programming language that doesn't require GC or a runtime (while allowing allocation) has literally never been done before in industry. It has taken time to get something usable. The current overall design seems pretty workable now, as evidenced by all the projects people are starting to write, so I think it's basically just a matter of finishing off rough edges at this point.

<comment><USER12> If anyone's curious, here's all it took me to update Rust for Rubyists from 0.8 to 0.9: [https://github.com/steveklabnik/rust_for_rubyists/commit/ae2...](https://github.com/steveklabnik/rust_for_rubyists/commit/ae27bcfc349450e3491e420c71f93357fb4c0f6d)

<comment><USER24> Thats actually a lot less than i'd expect.

Kinda curious on the do N.times -> for foo in range(0, N) changes. I thought I remember a recent post from you about that. Any reason for the switch? (I ask as someone thats used ruby too much myself and is currently switching cold turkey to plain old C while rust gets a bit more mature)

<comment><USER19> It's since `do` now does not apply to stack closures [1]. `Do` still supports owned closures (that's what used to be called `~once fn()` in 0.8 and renamed to `proc()`) but they can be called only once which defeats the whole point of `times` (unless you are fine with `N.times(|| { ... })` syntax).

[1] [https://github.com/mozilla/rust/issues/10815](https://github.com/mozilla/rust/issues/10815)

<comment><USER24> Very interesting thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Are there any plans to further simplify and/or pare down the language?

<comment><USER4> Yes, the @ built-in pointer is being removed as special, replaced by library types like Rc and Gc (for reference counting and garbage collection respectively). There's a vague suggestion for ~ to become a library pointer too, but I don't think this has been totally accepted by the core team. (This would leave only raw pointers and references actually defined in the language.)

There are some plans related to simplifying how vectors and trait objects ("dynamically sized types" or DST) interact but I don't understand them well enough to be able to explain. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> OT: Is Rust using operator overloading? Is user-defined operators a possibility in the future? I googled it and the most I could find was this:

[http://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/1le6vu/i_wrote_a_proto...](http://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/1le6vu/i_wrote_a_prototype_parser_combinator_in_rust_and/cbyh50y)

<comment><AUTHOR> Operator overloading, yes. But we place some restrictions on which types you can overload in order to keep things sane (oversimplified explanation: you must have declared the types yourself in order to overload operators on them). We also discourage the wanton overloading of operators to mean completely random things, as you might have encountered in C++.

As for user-defined operators, if you mean something like Haskell's custom infix operators then no, I don't believe there are any plans for those.

<comment><USER27> > As for user-defined operators, if you mean something like Haskell's custom > infix operators then no, I don't believe there are any plans for those.

Do the Rust designers actively oppose having them, or just not have any concrete plans to add them?

<comment><AUTHOR> Merely lukewarm, I think. There are simply much higher priorities to focus on at the moment. Who knows what Rust 2.0 might hold!

<comment><USER28> I've always found the profusion of infix operators in Haskell to be heinously confusing, and seriously degrades readability and usability of libraries.limits on the o

<comment><USER26> The problems I see with infix operators are:

\- It's not necessarily obvious what is an infix operator

\- Precedence and associativity

I think Haskell has solved the first one: with all non-alphanumeric symbols in expressions being infix operators, and likewise for alphanumeric functions written with backticks.

But precedence and associativity is not obvious, since that is something that you can customize. I think that user-defined infix operators with some severe limits on choosing precedence and associativity is a good compromise (many use backticks on functions in Haskell, and that has a default precedence).</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Wheel patented in Australia (2001) - <AUTHOR> http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn965-wheel-patented-in-australia.html

<comment><AUTHOR> My brother was recently awarded a patent on a device he'd invented (a mechanical device used in the construction industry), but now it seems the ~$7,000 it cost him may have been wasted.

</comment><comment><USER2> So basically their new system is... useless? :/</comment>