How can we develop transformative tools for thought? - <AUTHOR> https://numinous.productions/ttft/ <comment><USER2> Honestly this is the area I'm most excited about. SRS is just one facet--- correct choice of input media, datatypes, and mental models are a big deal here.

I'm a math undergrad. And one thing that drives me crazy is how mich _rewriting_ I do. What I want is a semi-tangible expression tree that I can manipulate and "snapshot" (to show my work) into Latex. The Latex rendering was easy, but figuring out what "core tree manipulation ux actions" are is another thing.

Similarly--am I the only one tired of typing? I'd kill for a gait analyzer or a haptic glove that let me program while walking through the park.

Some of this stuff sounds farfetched, but looking at emacs, or chorded stenotype machines, or paredit, really drives it home that we could be doing so, so much better, with very little new tech required.

When I was a kid I had mild synesthesia where I'd tie the words "fourth" and "favorite" with a feeling of "reaching." I still today associate clojure's map with spreading butter, or reduce with "rolling up." Chinese abacus math, developed to the point where thr actual abacus is no longer necessary, is a thing to behold. The human mind seems to make these connections easily and automatically. Why not leverage that?

I'd love if text became just the shared human-legible bytecode for our own personal interfaces.

(Check out this clip: [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cHIo96yBf70](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cHIo96yBf70) where some people get fed targeting data from an AI plugged into all the camera feeds---and note especially around the middle of the video how the girl customizes the interface on the fly)

<comment><USER3> I'm currently working on a structured editor which is at its core a customizable rewriting engine; you specify a grammar, and essentially all editor actions are rewrites on that grammar. My current target grammars are for simple LISPy languages because of the simplicity, but my original (and eventual) goal was/is as a tool for exploratory mathematics. I've always felt mathematical manipulation as more of tactile, synesthetic phenomena than a verbal/linguistic one; I feel like the current state of haptic input is not quite up to reifying this yet, though it is improving very rapidly these days! So I'm trying to tackle some of the software side, and seeing what can be done towards this goal with extant input devices.

What I've done is pretty rudimentary so far, but I have a talk about it here if anyone is interested: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnbVCNIh1NA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnbVCNIh1NA)

<comment><USER4> Style checking that enforces a single representation for a given ast, seems now a thing in javascript land. One less worry for often-novice programmers.

Which makes code files simply an ast storage format. And makes people's text editors and language modes into an representational ast editors. So... it seems industrial use of semantic editing has finally begun?

Relieved of the impedance mismatch between code-as-ast and code-as-richly- expressive-text, perhaps there's an opportunity here to quicken the innovation and deployment of non-traditional editing? At a time when XR seems likely to be creating the next "great software rewrite".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Daniel Dennett introduced the introducing notion of Intuition Pump, which I would say definitely qualify as transformative tools for thought.

They are thought experiments designed to focus attention on important features of a question and to deflect them from getting bogged down in hard-to-follow details.

Google talk by Daniel Dennett on Intuition Pumps [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q_mY54hjM0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q_mY54hjM0)

</comment><comment><USER6> This is a _very_ interesting subject!

1) We _know_ that our minds can do so much more. Why? Review the various well- documented feats of memory/computation that people have been capable of. This is like seeing a fellow human run a mile in less than two minutes.

2) Question is: Why cannot these levels be attained by more people? My hypothesis is the way our brains are trained in childhood. Baby Mozart, etc. toys aside, the way baby brains gather information and are trained are limited by their bodily abilities, which are puny.

3) The answer seems to be to devise a way to feed information-reach, highly non-normal stimulus to young brains, e.g. using heads up displays. This is the method described in _Mimsy Were the Borogoves_ ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimsy_Were_the_Borogoves](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimsy_Were_the_Borogoves))

This sounds nightmarish and we also don't have the technology currently. But in the intense competition for colleges/high-schools and even middle schools who knows what can happen?

P.S. Also wanted to mention Hinton's models/toys with which he claimed to have learned to intuitively think about 4th dimensional objects, they are described in his book [https://publicdomainreview.org/2015/10/28/notes-on-the- fourt...](https://publicdomainreview.org/2015/10/28/notes-on-the-fourth- dimension/).

<comment><USER7> Particularly interesting to think about the memory feats of the ancients--who didn't even have computers. It really makes you wonder what kind of secret techniques ancient bards and philosophers used.

<comment><USER8> There's a few factors at play. To name a couple:

1) A lack of ability to outsource memory to the written word. I forget who it was, but either Plato or Aristotle was famously against writing because they said it would degrade human's capacity for memory (and "learning" if I recall correctly, though this was arguably wrong).

2) Perhaps even more importantly, the content of the time was shaped to the available medium. It's no accident that epic poetry from the oral tradition universally contains huge amounts of redundancy and pattern: meter, repeated adjectival phrases, character epitaphs or titles, etc.

<comment><USER9> I don't know if it's the same thing as (not only the philosophers, but also many great orators of ancient Greece/etc) the capacity to recite e.g. entire epic poems from memory, but have always found Vedic Chanting (Pathas) fascinating-

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If you measure at the level of humanity instead of the individual human, the last two advancements for tools of thought were the mobile phone and the Internet. The Internet speeded up access to information and computing. The mobile phone made that information and communication always accessible.

Furthermore, the real revolution was in making both of these widely accessible. This nourishes and harnesses far more human potential.

<comment><USER11> There's a third revolution impending, when people learn to write their own ad- hoc software and build custom automations for themselves. This will require much simpler development tools, but we're almost there.

Apps sort of make this possible in a limited way, but it's common people is limited to whatever developers thought of. Therefore their needs are mediated by a caste of priests, which have access to the sacred knowledge for building and adapting the available tools.

A widespread literacy for building automations would change the current focus of smartphones for media consumption and multiply common people as builders of automations (with all its implications in society in terms of security and new dynamics of people interacting with automations of varying quality).

<comment><USER12> Is this what Apple Shortcuts is trying to achieve?

[https://apps.apple.com/au/app/shortcuts/id915249334](https://apps.apple.com/au/app/shortcuts/id915249334)

<comment><USER11> I don't know Shortcuts in depth; but the problem with "rule based" tools like this is that they typically don't allow users to build new abstractions, so they don't really count as general programming languages. (You can create first-level abstractions, but they compose poorly).

But yes, being able to create small automations over your own data is a start (see the large success of a tool like IFTT).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> As a long term user of Anki, I think the hype here is too much. Spaced repetition helps you learn facts, but that is such a limited representation of what learning something means. I get that the point of a mnemonic medium is to improve your memory, but the focus on memory in and of itself is reductive. Memorising things helps no one gain a better understanding. If anything, it's just a way to avoid the mental effort of real comprehension (roughly analogous to a google search for a solution rather than solving a problem yourself).

Edit: I love Michael Nielsen's work, but I don't love his glorification of this tool.

<comment><USER14> I am one of those guys who had a 4.0 GPA in college but I never used spaced repetition because what I was doing seemed to work well enough. Post-college I tried it for learning japanese and it seems like a downgrade from my usual approach.

The best way to learn something is by contextualizing it. For example it doesn't matter if you forget a math formula if you know how to re-derive it. If the formula is truly important, every time you access it, the entire DAG of knowledge leading up to that formula will be "refreshed". This is a very natural spaced repetition that erodes from the edge of your knowledge graph since the basic building blocks are refreshed so often. New knowledge is extremely easy to acquire, and your graph can be "refactored" every so often.

The space repetition apps I have use doesn't have a similar concept of interrelationship. For example it's possible for you to learn the flashcards for "three" and "one" but not know the word for "two". This is insane way of doing things. You are just refreshing random isolated nodes. Not only does it make it a lot harder to learn (since random out of order information is harder to compress), the knowledge graph you build is a tangled mess that's not as usable and doesn't degrade gracefully.

<comment><USER15> The space repetition apps I have use doesn't have a similar concept of interrelationship. For example it's possible for _you to learn the flashcards for "three" and "one" but not know the word for "two". This is insane way of doing things. You are just refreshing random isolated nodes. Not only does it make it a lot harder to learn (since random out of order information is harder to compress), the knowledge graph you build is a tangled mess that's not as usable and doesn't degrade gracefully._

I found it helpful to break content down into constituent parts, but also to make cards unify those constituent parts. So, there will be cards about individual facts, but also cards that relate those individual facts. And eventually cards that related the cards that related the cards that related the individual facts.

Also, I cemented my understanding and intuition of the Unit Circle using this approach.

<comment><USER16> > _Also, I cemented my understanding and intuition of the Unit Circle using > this approach._

What do you need to do to "cement understanding and intuition of the unit circle"?

The common diagrams shown in high school trigonometry courses – e.g. [https://etc.usf.edu/clipart/43200/43215/unit- circle7_43215_m...](https://etc.usf.edu/clipart/43200/43215/unit- circle7_43215_md.gif) – basically involve only 2 meaningful facts: a rhombus made of two equilateral triangles has a long diagonal with squared length of 3, and a square has a diagonal with a squared length of 2. (a) These are fairly easy to figure out, and once understood are quite easy to remember, and (b) all of the derived factoids are pretty much trivial.

Students are typically taught this material in a quite terrible way, unfortunately.

<comment><USER15> I memorized the facts and then was able to figure out the relationships after the fact.

That may be a brute force way of doing it, but it works for me.

<comment><USER16> My point is that there's very little there. People shouldn't need to go to extensive effort or need a special system or method to learn 2 simple facts. Taking a simple thing and wrapping it in a big pile of obfuscation is a poor way to teach/learn. (That this is taught this way is not the fault of students.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> here is a different idea: we don't need [new] tools for though. Our entire history is made up of using tools to basically enhance our abilities - mental, communication, design you name it. Our native possibilities are quite limited (eg you cannot hold a list of more than 5-7 things in your head at once). We figured this out a long time ago and have tooling to augment these abilities. Writing, Language, Computers they are all tools that literally make us superhuman.

<comment><USER18> 5 or 7??

I can easily imagine much more things simultaneously:

1, 2: 2 cars are parked at the side of the road

3: a third car is driving and going to pass the 2 parked cars.

4: a cat runs out from between the parked cars on the street

5: a dog chases the cat

6: with a pulled taut leash

7: pulling the dog's owner on the sidewalk out of balance,

8, 9: causing the owners hat to fly off, and her groceries to fall out of her free arm

10: a fourth car crashes into the surprised car

11: an elderly couple looking at the scene in pure horror

...

Now if you meant we could only hold 5 or 7 scenes or complex thoughts at once, then yeah, that could be true depending on the complexity of those thoughts or scenes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Extremely boiled down TL/DR: The author's invention is a spaced repetition system built into an essay, so instead of having the cards isolated, the cards are embedded in the text itself.

At a technical level, that's certainly innovative, but I'm doubtful about whether it's actually an improvement on classical SRS. In my experience, one of the most important things for an SRS deck is speed of reviewing: a given card should take less than 1 second to review and rate. This is necessary if you're going to maintain decks with tens of thousands of cards. I find my brain does a remarkable job of reconstructing the surrounding context, so having the cards embedded in the original text would just be a time sink for me, I think.

<comment><USER19> From reading earlier discussions of the quantum computing tutorial, I am pretty sure most of its readers do not even use classical SRS in the first place.

<comment><USER7> Yes, I was struck by the really exceptional and beautiful presentation/layout of OP's page. Perhaps the real contribution is less "build a better mousetrap" and more "market the hell out of mousetraps". If OP can show more people the light of SRS, that will be fantastic!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Here is a related blog post by one of the authors that describes the "classical" ways of thought transmission (background for the current project).

[https://andymatuschak.org/books/](https://andymatuschak.org/books/) [VERY LONG] via [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19887424](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19887424)

</comment><comment><USER21> Programmers/computer scientists will make better progress on "transformative" "tools of thought" if they spend a few years collaborating with psychologists/sociologists/political scientists/economists/historians on their problems first.

Those that do will have a leg up over those that dont.

Right now it's like watching people working on calculus without spending enough time on algebra and geometry.

</comment><comment><USER22> Here is a link to an interactive explorable that focuses on much of the same content: [https://ncase.me/remember/](https://ncase.me/remember/)

</comment><comment><USER23> The premise of the article doesn't make sense. Tools can only train thinking ability, they cannot extend it. Thinking and reasoning must be fixed at the root.

<comment><USER24> A quick read to see how mediums and tech fundamentally affect "thought" is Neil Postman's "Amusing Ourselves to Death".

<comment><USER23> The fact that my comment was down-voted makes me feel like 'John the savage' from 'Brave New World'.

From my PoV, it seems that most people don't really understand what 'thinking' means.

<comment><USER24> I'm curious (genuinely) how you define thinking in a way that it's unaffected by the dominant mediums of communication and culture. Maybe you can recommend some reading material?

<comment><USER23> In my view 'critical thinking' is real thinking. There is a lot of misinformation and a lot of what we perceive as knowledge is in fact rhetoric. You need to learn to take everything with a grain of salt; sometimes that means you need to unlearn things along the way. Doubt is important.

I think it's good to read a variety of books with opposing viewpoints or with viewpoints which contradict popular ideas.

For non-fiction, the books 'Black Swan' and 'Fooled by Randomness' by Nassim Taleb were eye-openers for me. Also, I found an interesting synergy between Nassim's books and the book 'Thinking fast and Slow' by Daniel Kahneman (which is a book about human psychology). Also, I enjoyed reading 'Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World'.

I don't read much fiction but it can be interesting sometimes. I read 'Brave New World' by Aldous Huxley many years ago and it's a book that appears to be becoming more relevant with time. I find that watching foreign films can also help to diversify my thinking.

<comment><USER24> Thanks for explaining.

> 'critical thinking' is real thinking

Most of critical thinking is awareness of uncertainty. It is abductive reasoning. It's about 'most likely' conclusions and 'best explained by' situations. Which is why:

> You need to learn to take everything with a grain of salt

That's uncertainty. And once you are in the realm of uncertainty (which is almost always), society and culture take a large role in affecting your decisions.

A tool for thought helps navigate that uncertainty, so you have a _better_ understanding of systems, which likely translates to making _better_ decisions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This was a fascinating and wonderful read. As someone who also works on tools for thought, here's my review and criticisms. The material is long so this will be longish too.

 _Review_

The bulk of the essay is on what the authors refer to as "the mnemonic medium". A mnemonic medium, of which they use their work, Quantum Country, as a motivating case-study is an essay format which embeds flash cards containing carefully constructed questions and combines them with spaced-repetition to improve recall of the presented material.

The authors argue very convincingly that memory is an important and undervalued aspect of expertise. Much of the initial struggle in learners is from a lack of basic fluency in the vocabulary of an area. They show, including with supporting data from the aforementioned work, that this significantly increases recall of material (nearly all if the reviews were done properly). Even if you want creativity and think you can just look things up as needed, having the material readily available in memory will serve as a potent catalyst to one's creativity. The over-head is reasonable, they estimate 4 hours to read the material and ~100 minutes of spaced review to achieve months or more of retention on material.

They talk about the more typical sense of mnemonics, such as the method of loci and memory palaces. Such methods they argue, do not generalize well to different learning domains, especially more abstract areas.

They also point out the weaknesses of their method. Including requiring general motivation, a reason to learn the material and difficulty of crafting good atomic connected questions. Finally, they discuss why not much progress has been made in the area (funding of public goods problem), other mediums such as video and the executable book/notebook format and what inspirations can be drawn from video-games interface-wise and art generally from an evocative and emotional perspective.

 _Criticism_

The simplest criticism is if the results will generalize. The topic matter on the technical aspects of quantum computing has already selected for a probably uncommon sort of person.

It is the authors' stated goal that they produce a method with broad applicability. Although they spend some time on the weaknesses of their approach, they could have spent a bit more on nearby failures. Engelbart had a bootstrap program, where each set of tools propelled us to ever more powerful augmentations. One major problem Engelbart found was that once people reached proficiency at one level, they had no interest in further gains. The complexity of peripherals has gone down over time (from multibutton mice and chorded keyboards to pointing with fingers) and people simply were not interested in learning complex peripherals. Some discussion of the difficulties faced by [http://witheve.com/](http://witheve.com/) at getting something with broad applicability and lessons from it would have been informative.

There is much work to be done in ending the dumb users trope and also in educating people that many things worth doing will be difficult. Engelbart often pointed (he was against voice as a primary control) out that you can't talk your way down a ski-slope yet people are happy to learn the difficult task of skiing. How to get that engagement generally?

The next major criticism is the difficulty of content creation. Writing a text is already difficult but writing one that is clear and with carefully crafted embedded questions will be much more difficult again. We can see hints of this in the quite low publishing rate of the Distill publication where a large aspect of the low rate is due to the difficulty of content creation. We are still several generations out from tools which ease the creation of interactive and tasteful (where interactivity is actually illuminating rather than a distraction as is often the case) executable notebooks.

The authors mention differential geometry as an example. Such texts are difficult not only from subject matter but also because they are often presented in a user hostile manner. With key information, including on notation, left out. This has been fine historically because these books are meant to be used in a supporting environment with lecturers and assistants. However, learning these autodidactically adds in an immense artificial layer of difficulty from ambiguity. It seems like an obvious thing but material written in a clear manner with no external support needed is already rare. Going beyond that will be a tall ask.

The fairly self-contained aspect of quantum computing might not transfer to differential geometry. To do that properly, one would also need to have material for adjacent topics such as multilinear algebra, differential forms, calculus of variations (for some motivating problems), analysis and some topology. That is a very large stack to get through and can be quite discouraging for the learner even with the dream of near perfect recall. The time investment might scale differently too and might require more of a fraction of study time.

For the creators, by the time you get to multimedia, and the need to do this is an accessible (accessible to blind, deaf, etc) manner, an already difficult task becomes nearly unmanageable. Perhaps, narrow AI tools (the authors do point this out too but also see Rainbows End by Vinge for a fictional take on this) will ease some of this but basic UX and API design for interactive education will also be pivotal and are sorely lacking. I do not believe the authors sufficiently acknowledge this.

The authors seem to make the mistake that experts will be the best authors of such media. I am skeptical of this. Very few experts maintain the empathy required to communicate with novices. I suspect the best approach and this is hinted at by the author with their example of Norvig's notebook, is someone either with exceptional empathy or who has just mastered the material, recording notes for themselves and then sharing. But it will take a while yet before such tools are in place.

Finally, the authors also discuss BCIs. Their examples of new modes of thought suffer from the same criticisms they have for the Logo programming language and creating properly motivated and connected questions, perhaps worse. From what little we know, this will not be just a matter of interfacing with visual areas but also with broad wide reaching networks in the intraparietal sulcus, inferior temporal cortex, angular gyrus, hippocampus and frontal areas just for a start. These are all involved in complex problem solving and will differ in detail from person to person. How to get a non-superficial interface beyond super low latency I/O is a great challenge and simply beyond the horizon of what is today imagineable.

This is as long as I'd feared it would be but I hope someone finds it useful.

<comment><USER13> That was wonderful, thank you.

> someone either with exceptional empathy or who has just mastered the > material, recording notes for themselves and then sharing.

Great stuff. Mr Nielsen lands firmly in the first category.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Had a feeling it was the quantum country guy from the start, besides focusing on just techniques on the brain and mnemonics we also need to see the various inhibitors, it was earlier posted here in HN [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6429408/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6429408/)

</comment><comment><USER18> I have this idea that refuses to leave me alone, but I don't really have the time and dedication to investigate it, so I'll just give this one away here:

I believe a lot of effort in reading stems from parsing: words can be ambiguous in sense ("ball" could mean a spherical object or a festive event; "work" could mean a result of working, or it could be the verb [they work], or it could be an imperative [work!], ...). So disambiguating sentences containing words of degeneracy G1, G2, G3, ... have a total disambiguation space of G1 x G2 x G2 x ... interpretations. Then there is also grammatical disambiguation.

There was the recent paper showing how transformers effectively provide each instance of a word with not just it's sense but also its grammatical position encoded as vectors, with the root at the origin, its children a unit distance away, and their children another unit distance away from their parent etc... This turned out to be essentially the Pythagorean theorem.

Now let's make another oversimplification: let's pretend the human ear hears volume logarithmically (or at least understands the logarithmic scale for intensity, very plausible since different resonators emit exponentially decaying sound with half-lives that depend on the properties of the object [transmission at the boundary conditions]). On top of that make the assumption that the discernible frequency bins form essentially a constant Q transform (i.e. equal temperament bins, a good but rough approximation, see Plomp and Leveldt). This insinuates we can present a vector as a list of decibels for each frequency bin. My choice for audio is mostly because it would take 0 effort for the listener to align the auditory sensors: even if we rotate or move our heads very fast, there will be no appreciable doppler effect to a speaker, let alone headphones. If we chose visual intensities or graphs, we would have to either look at the same point on the screen for prolonged periods of time, or alternatively shift the image in our brains.

So the idea would be to have a fraction of the frequency bins correspond to the sense vector, and the rest of the bins for the grammatical positioning vector. Then sequentially play the vectors in a sentence (or in any order really, since in theory the grammatical position is encoded in part of the spectrum).

We could create multiple choice questions by playing a sentence (senses and grammar positions), then repeating the sound of a word of choice's sense without grammar frequency bins, and have the user select the right word in a different sentence, to make sure we are recognizing the _sense_ specifically.

Then "hear" pre-parsed texts, but scramble the word order to force the user to rely on the grammar vector component of each word.

Then, later, generate sentences that are ambiguous without grammar vectors: the unordered set of {cat, mouse, sees, the, the} "rendered to sound" twice with different grammar vectors: once with the meaning "the cat sees the mouse" and once with the meaning "the mouse sees the cat" and the user cas to connect the sentence audio to the right written sentence, to verify the user is interpreting the grammar vectors.

Who knows how fast we could be hearing text? Could we learn to hear text as fast as we can see _and abstract_ visual scenes, if parsing is done for us by transformers? "A picture says a thousand words"</comment>


Mathematics as thought - <AUTHOR> https://aeon.co/essays/the-secret-intellectual-history-of-mathematics <comment><USER4> I was a bit disappointed that this article did not offer more practical examples of the ties between the development of mathematics and the history of ideas in general.

For instance, the vision of mathematicians like Hilbert and Russell of a cohesive mathematics defined from first principles seems a very Victorian notion that the universe is knowable if you simply search hard enough. It's the same enlightment frame of mind that resulted in intellectual creations like the Oxford English Dictionary.

Similarly the results of Gödel, Church, Turing, and others showing the limits of mathematical consistency seem of a piece with the confounding discoveries of Quantum physics, which replaced the static models of classical physics. They seem to correspond with a darker vision of the limitations of human intellect that emerge in abstract art and poetry like Eliot's 'The Wasteland' around the same time.

If you push this too far you end up sounding like an idiot (perhaps this is already there) but there are clearly discernible connections across science, art, literature, and politics both now and deep into the past. It might be a personal projection but Brahms concertos always strike me as the music of a people who believed in an orderly, Newtonian universe and upheld the static political order of the Ancien Regime.

At the end of the day most intellectuals read the same books and attend the same salons, however defined. There is continuous cross-fertilization between different realms of thought. The resulting connections are there if you just look for them.

<comment><USER5> Related book: [https://www.amazon.com/Mathematics-Roots-Postmodern- Thought-...](https://www.amazon.com/Mathematics-Roots-Postmodern-Thought- Vladimir/dp/0195139674)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> "How mathematics works rests on no absolute timeless standard, despite what many assume today, given its precision and efficacy"

Exactly this is key to teach people to like math, stop trying to train me in it. It's like math has become so saddled with politics or ego that people want to train everybody in the same system of values and they are willing to lie to get you to use to the same symbols, the same way of thinking, etc. Disclaimer, I'm really bad at math. But I hate how math and physics are taught, it should always be taught from a spirit of exploration as if you are discovering new islands or continents and you get to name the things you discover. Try getting a math professor to admit that he doesn't actually have an intuitive understanding for any of the stuff he teaches. I believe the vast majority probably don't have any such understanding but they are understandably scared to admit it. It's a cycle of lies. Who are you to say that I have to use that particular symbol or term to describe this math? People have a large stake in interopability between mathematicians so they teach us these symbols as if they are facts of nature when in reality they are just arbitrary drawings that people invented to name stuff that they found in nature. Fields of math stack on top of each other because they happen to work together but in reality we dont know why. They just do and it's interesting that they do so we keep doing it that way because it works and hasnt broken yet and it's useful. There were cultures that did math with a completely different set of symbols, not just symbols but even way of thinking. Multiplication, addition, entire base ideas were thought of differently. Yet our current way of doing math is taught to us as dogmatic, accept it or you are a troublemaker. No wonder people dont like math, nobody wants to be a slave to somebody else's ideas and value system. Every math class should start with something like "This is the symbol for addition: '+'. This was invented by some person, you could use something else, you could try to find some other way to add numbers but the way we teach you to think has proven to be fairly fast and convenient so we teach it." That in my opinion is how you make people interested in math because you treat them as equals instead of subjects to be trained in your favorite cultural way of doing math. Math should be seen like a weird natural phenomenon that we observe, from the getgo. From childhood on. Explain it like that and I believe kids (and adults) will love to discover more about it.

<comment><USER7> _Try getting a math professor to admit that he doesn 't actually have an intuitive understanding for any of the stuff he teaches. I believe the vast majority probably don't have any such understanding but they are understandably scared to admit it._

Mathematicians are famous for embracing the fact that they have no intuition. For example, here's a famous quote from Geoff Hinton:

 _To deal with hyper-planes in a 14-dimensional space, visualize a 3-D space and say 'fourteen' to yourself very loudly. Everyone does it._

And here's a famous quote from G.H.Hardy:

 _In mathematics, you never understand things; you just get used to them._

The idea behind both of these quips is that there is no intuitive way to visualize these weird mathematical objects. The main reason people struggle with math (in my experience) is that they assume there must be an intuition. There's not. Math is weird. And all mathematicians feel that way about math.

<comment><USER8> >Mathematicians are famous for embracing the fact that they have no intuition.

That's just plainly false. Mathematics is _all_ about intuition.

That's how we all _know_ that Riemann hypothesis is true, regardless of whether there's a proof of it. Or that Fermat's Last Theorem holds.

That's how we still _do_ math, even though we never really had a solid system of axioms for it -- and Godel showed that, in some sense, it's not even possible.

That's how even famous theorems were proven after many attempts, with people accepting proofs with errors in them.

That's how Calculus was invented before the notions of the limit, derivative, and integral -- the most fundamental ones! -- were solidly written down. Newton and Leibniz built up the math upon heresy, and everyone took it, because it _felt right_.

What you are writing about is _surprise_ that mathematics still gives to practicing mathematicians.

And your first quote is a trick on how to _extend_ one's intuition, not _abandon_ it!

<comment><USER9> We know that FLT is true because Andrew Wiles has proven it. We don't know that RH is true. We have strong reasons to believe it is true since we have discovered directly a large number of roots on Re(z) = 1/2 and none anywhere else. I do believe intuition exists in the process of doing mathematics, but I don't think either of these are good examples.

<comment><USER10> How about in the process of reading a proof? Each single step is validated by the intuition of the reader.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Nice parallel with Iverson's 1979 Turing Award Lecture, "Notation as a Tool for Thought": [http://www.eecg.toronto.edu/~jzhu/csc326/readings/iverson.pd...](http://www.eecg.toronto.edu/~jzhu/csc326/readings/iverson.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER12> Opening up with the claim that computer software is "based on the ideas of Claude Shannon" is strange. Does anyone seriously believe that Shannon's contributions to the foundations of computing stand so far above others'?

<comment><USER13> Turing - On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem - <USER2>

Shannon - A Mathematical Theory of Communication - <USER3>

Shannon calculated the entropy of arbitrary symbol systems over noisy communication channels, and made some first steps towards practical data compression algorithms.

Turning formalised the concept of computability using an abstraction of a mechanised logic system.

I'd say Turing wins easily - we still say logical systems are Turing Complete rather than Shannon Compatible.

<comment><USER14> Don't forget Shannon's 1937 master's thesis, _A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits_.

<comment><USER15> Yeah, he actually had the idea that you could use the 19th C Boolean logic and switching circuits to do mathematical operations, making modern computers possible. It's disappointing that he's not better known for this, to say the least. e.g. that _anyone_ on here doesn't know his huge importance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > For instance, say you're in a race at school. You do surprisingly well and > beat most of your classmates. All things being equal, the next time around, > you're actually not likely to do as well, relative to the other runners.

If the events are independent (as I believe the author is assuming at this point), then your performance in the first race has no effect on your performance in the next race, right? Maybe it's just a poor choice of wording, but it comes dangerously close to reinforcing a common misconception about probability (Gambler's fallacy).

<comment><USER17> No, the author is not assuming that. And in fact the opposite is true.

The assumption is that your performance on any given race is some combination of luck and ability. If you perform extremely well, it should be assumed that both were in your favor that time. The next time you'll still have whatever ability is in play, but you are unlikely to have luck.

The result is that your performance is likely to be good, though not stellar. You racing one day or the next are not independent events - your ability creates a correlation. But your performance one day is also not a linear prediction of your expected performance the next.

This is called regression to the mean. It comes into play in everything from stock picking to poker players.

<comment><USER18> You are committing the gambler's fallacy. There's no reason to expect your "luck" (whatever you mean by that) to decrease rather than increase the next time you race.

This is _different_ from saying that you are likely to win again. You're just as likely to win as you were the first time around, which may be high or low depending on ability.

<comment><USER17> No, I am not committing the gambler's fallacy. Though I can see why you might think that. There are enough things that sound similar.

I'm instead talking about a more subtle detail. Which is that selecting a group based on performance results in selecting people in part for having been lucky. They were lucky to have done that well that time, were lucky to be in your group, and their future performance probably won't be as good.

The result is called regression to the mean. See [https://academic.oup.com/ije/article/34/1/215/638499](https://academic.oup.com/ije/article/34/1/215/638499) for an example of statisticians talking about it. See [http://onlinestatbook.com/stat_sim/reg_to_mean/index.html](http://onlinestatbook.com/stat_sim/reg_to_mean/index.html) for a more introductory tutorial. And see [http://wmbriggs.com/post/63/](http://wmbriggs.com/post/63/) for an example of an article discussing this counterintuitive phenomena in the context of sports. (Namely the "Sports Illustrated curse" \- the future performance of athletes whose performance was good enough to get them on the cover of Sports Illustrated drops after their article appears.)

<comment><USER18> I think I see what you mean now.

If you roll 20 dice and select the highest, the next time you throw that very same die it'll probably have a lower value, simply as a consequence of outcome-dependent selection + a fixed probability. It's not that the probability has changed, just that you didn't choose the first outcome according to the true generating distribution.

Comparing this highest value with the highest value across _all_ coins when you toss them all again a second time is a different matter. It's no more likely to be lower than higher.

It's best to avoid using the term "luck" altogether in discussions of probability, since it's easy to misinterpret.

<comment><USER17> That's exactly the right idea.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I thought this was a really beautiful article. All I have to add is that it seemed to avoid discussing philosophy as a discipline, even when it seems impossible to ignore. For example:

>Perhaps more than any other subject, mathematics is about the study of ideas.</comment>


Nero vs MPEG-LA - <AUTHOR> http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2010/05/nero_vs_mpegla.html <comment><USER2> I think the patent count is a bit inflated due to many of the patents being the same thing patented in different countries.

I also don't get what's bad about the pool having a large number of patents. If you want to use H.264, don't you want all the relevant patents in the pool, so you can buy just one license to cover them all?

<comment><AUTHOR> If the patents aren't essential - that is, you don't actually need them to implement the standard - then requiring companies to license them is just a way of transferring more money from licensees to certain patent holders. And it increases the chance that the pool will be able to block or intimidate any competing standards.</comment></comment>


Steve Jobs To Take 'Medical Leave Of Absence', Stays On As CEO - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/17/steve-jobs-to-take-medical-leave-of-absence-stays-on-as-ceo/ <comment><USER4> Hope he is okay. If it is pancreatic cancer again, his odds are not good. My aunt had it, beat it, then it reoccurred four years later. She did not make it the second time. Only 2% survive. Good luck, Steve. Whether you like Apple or not, tech is much more interesting with Steve Jobs around.

<comment><USER5> Truly sorry to hear about your loss. Actual pancreatic cancer is virtually incurable, and far too few resources are allocated to its research versus less deadly cancers.

For example, breast cancer affects around 207K people (yes, even men get it, albeit rarely) and ends up killing around 40K people a year. Pancreatic cancer affects 43K people, and ends up killing 37K every year. [1]

All cancer research is important, but we should really step up as a society when it comes to cancers that happens to be a dead sentence over the course of 5 years or so.

I personally donate to the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network, and you can do the same here: <http://www.pancan.org/>

[1] <http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/types/commoncancers>

<comment><USER6> It's difficult to decide what should be funded, just because you throw money at a problem doesn't mean a solution will suddenly appear. For a look into the history of cancer research I recommend [http://www.amazon.com/Emperor-All- Maladies-Biography-Cancer/...](http://www.amazon.com/Emperor-All-Maladies- Biography-Cancer/dp/1439107955)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Steve Jobs will eventually leave Apple. This is a fact. The question becomes "When he does leave, will Apple be damaged by it"? The press will undoubtedly claim its demise (as they have been for decades), and 10 years ago I think this might have been true - the corporate ethics that have made Apple successful were not in place. Now, with the executive team he's built and trained, I suspect his presence is vastly less important. The design team with Ives, operation team with Cook, etc. know what's making things work. He's been "absent" a lot in the last few years, yet it's been the strongest period for the company - clearly, something works when he's not at his desk.

The damage will be in PR. He's an almost unrivalled corporate showman, and few companies are as associated with their CEO as Apple. Whoever gives keynotes in the future would be wise to develop their own style rather than copy his. There may also be collateral damage in ruthlessness and vision - we constantly hear how he drives new products, and kills off "failures" early. However, the more I read recent interviews with anonymous Apple employees, the more I see he seems to have reformed the company in his image. It's impossible to gauge how much actual presence he's had over the last few years, and it seems quite likely the press have over-egged his effect. As long as his successor is not a radical corporate reformer, and is willing for a few years to be seen as an "Heir to Jobs", it seems likely to me things will roll on quite successfully.

I suspect Jobs will "retire" either this or next year. When they replace him, if they don't promote from within, then any CEO should: absolutely not engage in a massive expansion/race to the bottom; introduce change slowly rather than play with Apple like a new toy and; rely on the corporate team that's been built until they deeply understand what's working and what's not.

In many ways, Job's eventual departure (hopefully based on choice, rather than necessity) could be good for Apple. I firmly believe a little of his control freak nature could be sanded off the company to their advantage. They should drop the "Control for control's sake" direction they've been taking recently, and stay focused on the core corporate ethics that have bought them success - a high degree of perfectionism, technical risk taking, user focused design through everything, and a great marketing team. It won't be exactly the Apple of today, but given some of the…hostile decisions over the last 3 years, it might actually be an improvement.

<comment><USER8> To be honest, I'm not sure I buy the whole greatest corporate showman thing. In fact I'd even say some of the other Apple execs have a more natural presence on stage.

I thunk Jobs is successful because the product sells itself in most cases, and he doesn't (have to) bullshit you. Of course he's also involved in making the product, which is a different matter.

<comment><USER9> I wonder what he actually _does_ over the course of a week, hour by hour. It'd certainly be fascinating to be a fly on the wall.

<comment><USER10> While not hour-by-hour in any sense, this is the only description I've ever heard of Jobs' day-to-day activities:

 _"I have one of the best jobs in the world. I get to hang out with some of the most talented, committed people around and together we get to play in this sandbox and build these cool products. Apple is an incredibly collaborative company. You know how many committees we have at Apple? Zero. We're structured like a start-up. We're the biggest start-up on the planet. And we all meet once a week to discuss our business… and there's tremendous teamwork at the top and that filters down to the other employees… and so what I do all day is meet with teams of people and work on ideas and new problems to come up with new products."_

(<http://d8.allthingsd.com/20100601/steve-jobs-session/>)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think we should all take a few moments to reflect on the debt that computer users and developers everywhere owe to Steve Jobs for his work in these last few years. Yeah, most of us have our differences with him (I am not a fan of the "closed garden" approach), but there is no denying that he opened huge new markets and product categories that all of us will benefit from.

It takes a lot of drive to do that kind of work while having such major medical troubles. I really believe that what drives him is the desire to give the next great thing to users, and to take Apple to new heights. Money can't be the motivator - he's got plenty, and it's probably not at the top of his list anyway, during such life and death struggles.

Speaking for myself - I recently had some surgery which was nowhere near as complicated and life-threatening as what he went through - I know I wouldn't have the drive and commitment to return to work in such a big way, especially if my family was already taken care of financially. So - thanks to Steve Jobs and best wishes for his health, and no, I don't think it's right to wish for him to return to work soon - he will decide how to spend his energy, and he's already spent more of it at Apple than anybody had the right to ask.

<comment><USER12> Absolutely. I'm in the mindstate to do this today, as we celebrate one of history's great leaders (MLK). It may sound like a ridiculous comparison, but I put the two together as my biggest heroes: people who put their vision for the future of humanity ahead of their own well-being.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Modern medicine keeps us alive long enough to eventually die of cancer. I lost my mom a year ago. I wish his family well. It must be tough for them.

<comment><USER14> This. This is one of the most commonly misunderstood aspects of medicine today.

As a society, we have become exceptionally good at treating pathological diseases. This is how we know we will eventually cure AIDS because we fundamentally know how to do this kind of medicine. (And it appears like an AIDS vaccine, and perhaps even a cure is closer than we think.)

Unfortunately we are terrible at treating any aging-related disease. Diseases such as those that relate to the fundamental breakdown of the metabolic process, cancer or Alzheimer's. We just simply don't have the research and experience to treat these diseases in anything less than a crude way.

For those unaware, Chemotherapy and Radiation are probably some of the least- precise medical treatments we apply on any broad scale today in modern medicine. We try to radiate or kill your cancer cells before we kill the rest of your body. Seriously.

Anyways, more research on aging-related disease is critical if we want people to keep living longer. If we don't, then we should just focus on pain management and let people die as they grow older.

<comment><USER15> _This. This is one of the most commonly misunderstood aspects of medicine today._

AFAIK, it's actually true. If we live long enough, we'll all get cancer. In the case of men, it's a near certainty we'll get prostate cancer if we don't die of something else first.

Also, 85% of us have Cytomegalovirus, which basically executes a DOS attack on the memory of your immune system, eventually resulting in immune deficiency. However, the progression of CMV is so slow, we'll almost certainly die of cancer before this happens.

<comment><USER16> And cancer isn't one condition, it's many many conditions, so if they cured prostrate cancer you'd likely get another one. The chances of a single "cure for cancer" is basically zero.

<http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive/phd042009s.gif> gives a nice summary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17>
      "In the meantime, my family and I would deeply appreciate respect for our privacy."

<comment><USER18> But he's the CEO of a _publicly traded_ company. And not just any CEO, but like the soul of Apple.

<comment><USER19> What's your point? Don't you think he should have some privacy? The man might be extremely sick, and at worst could potentially be dying. Why does it matter if he's the CEO of a publicly traded company? What does that have to do with his right to privacy when he's ill?

<comment><USER20> I agree that he should have some privacy but as the CEO of one of the largest publicly traded companies the state of his health is something investors need to know.

<comment><USER16> No, it's something they'd _like_ to know, and would be useful to know, but there's a difference between that and need to know. So long as everyone (within reason) has the same information and that information is honest, then the market is fair because they're all in the same boat.

After all, where would it stop? "Jonny Ive has had a break up with his other half and is really down, he's meant to be working on the new iPhone but he's really off his game...". "Inform the shareholders!"

It's similar to the difference between "in the public interest" and "the public are interested".

<comment> brown9-2 I don't think anyone here is asking for his white blood cell count or wants to know the name of his doctors and what kind of medication regime he is on.

I would imagine everyone here agrees with his right to privacy on the details of his illness; however what some of the GPs are saying is simply that the overall status/summary of his health (i.e. he has cancer, or not) needs to be disclosed.

<comment><USER16> That much information would be basically useless. Saying someone has cancer could mean anything from "they're going to have a few hospital appointments but will be fine" to "they'll be dead within a month".

So that's useless to you (unless you're just being morbidly curious in which case you have no business here anyway) so you'd ask "well, what type?" and they'd usually say something pretty similar to the last answer so you'd go "what grade?" and they'd say something pretty similar again - <USER2> narrower, but maybe not and certainly with very wide error bars which would cover both death in the short term and survival of 5 years plus (which for cancer is close to a cure).

So, still none the wiser, certainly in any way that would allow you to better judge Apple as a company, you'd say "how advanced is it?" and most of the time the answer would yet again be pretty similar but they'd say that different people respond to treatment very differently.

So then you'd need to ask "what the treatment protocol is he going to be on?" and they'd say the same and then you'd ask how's he's responding at which point you basically _are_ asking for his white blood count (though I believe that's actually only used to judge whether a patient should have chemo at any given point in time rather than an indication of success / failure / health as far as the cancer goes).

He's clearly unwell enough to ask for an extended absence, it's not the flu. That's all you need to know.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21>
      It's safe to assume that he's going to conquer this one as well.

Safe to assume that despite not knowing the reason for this leave or how serious it is? :/

<comment><USER22> I think it's meant as a courtesy and out of respect, rather than as a hedged statement.

<comment><USER16> Maybe but a simple get well soon and our thoughts are with him and his family would have been better rather than an unsubstantiated prognosis.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> It is vastly impossible to run something like Apple in a successful way with just an outstanding guy like Jobs, you need N outstanding people. While he is a for sure a remarkable personality in the computer industry and the "soul" of Apple, I think they'll be able to succeed even with N-1.

On the other hand, generational turnover is very, very important. Maybe at some point, even a terrific figure like Jobs may be as bad as it is good for Apple. For instance, how much big role he played in the culture of closure of Apple?

So it is even possible that an Apple without Jobs could be, all in all, a better company.

</comment><comment><USER24> First of all, on the pancreatic cancer note - what he had was a curable type of cancer, a rare form, not your typical pancreatic cancer. What really is far more likely is transplant rejection, and his doctors probably asked him to take some time off and are going to play around with his immunosuppresant medications. Just a guess though.

Hopefully he will return because without him Apple really is not the same company, despite their ability to succesfully execute on their planned projects. A visionary has to plan for the future, and Steve Jobs isn't just the CEO of Apple, but kind of a new type of media mogul. He seat on Disneys board surely holds sway, and Apple is going to need his influence to further it's push into TV, movies and publications - he is the man, for example, Murdoch or Igor are going to want to speak to.

I do wish him a speedy recovery.

</comment><comment><USER25> Best wishes to Steve and family.

</comment><comment><USER26> It is a holiday in the US, today, right? At least, the markets are not open. The timing of this announcement is almost certainly not a coincidence.

On a more personal note, good luck, Steve!

<comment><USER27> Plus, Apple announces earnings after the market closes tomorrow.

<comment><USER28> I just want to let you know that I accidentally downvoted you. I meant to upvote you, as I think your point is a valid one, but my thumbs are too fat for my iPhone. Sorry.

<comment><USER27> No sweat. Have you tried <http://ihackernews.com>?

<comment><USER28> It loos good, but it's missing the ability to check my comments for responses. HN really needs to implement reddit's orangereds.

<comment><USER27> Notifo. That's how I'm responding within a couple seconds of your posts :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I lost my dad on 31st December, 2010. He had a cancer in his rectum, which eventually reached his lungs. My mom and I are still trying to recover from our loss :-(

<comment><USER30> I lost my mom to cancer when I was 20. I can only tell you the truth - <USER3> takes a long time for the pain to _subside_ , but it never truly goes away. The only thing you can do is to talk with friends and family and to tell stories about your dad to keep his memory alive. It's been 13 years or so since then and recently I got married and we had our first kid. We "adopted" a very good family friend to be a surrogate grandmother to our son, not in replacement of my mom but just to fill the void.

I know this goes against the ethos of HN, but life is really not about software. It's about people. Get out there and live life and meet people. A lot of exercise and playing loud angry music was also really good for me for a while.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> This is a sad day, I wish all the best to Steve and his family.

Maybe this is not the best place to ask, but does anyone know about Steve's eating habits? I know he was a frutarian at a certain point and then changed to fish/vegan (particularly sushi), but would really like to know more.

The reason is that I am in need of drastic personal changes regarding diet/exercise and thus trying to incorporate a vegan/vegetarian diet, which has been very difficult for me. I know that cancer is a multi-factorial disease, but it still scares me that some apparently very healthy individuals (such as Jobs or Linda McCartney) have such tough health problems. I feel very well when I manage to stick to a vegan diet, but would like to know more about longterm effects.

<comment><USER32> I think whatever you may learn about well-known peoples' eating habits will be self-reported. It may be beneficial to appear as a vegan or vegetarian, but we'll never know exactly what do celebrities actually eat. Also, as you noted, their habits may change during their lifetime.

If you're seriously interested in healthy eating habits, I would suggest to look at sources or studies on the subject, rather than trying to emulate the celebrities diets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Just today I was thinking of why Jobs works so well for Apple: could it be that he doesn't let the company become complacent? Every other big company seems to become complacent. There simply is no need to invent radical new products if you are still bringing in money by the truckloads. But I could imagine for Steve Jobs it is not the revenue that makes him happy, it is the optimum product. So if a product could be better, Apple employees will have fires under their asses.

Anyway, I wish him well.

</comment><comment><USER34> Liver failure killed my mother. Cancer killed my father and grandmother. They're both ugly, ugly diseases. While I'm not thrilled at the way Jobs used his money to get himself on as many transplant lists as he could, it's still not anything I'd wish on anyone.

Best of luck to him and his family.

<comment><USER35> _While I'm not thrilled at the way Jobs used his money to get himself on as many transplant lists as he could, it's still not anything I'd wish on anyone._

I have cystic fibrosis, which accounts for a really high percentage of lung transplants in the U.S. (something like 1/3 of adult and 1/2 of pediatric lung transplants, IIRC) and people with CF sometimes get other organ transplants as well. Transplant itself is really hard on the body and then you take anti- rejection drugs for the rest of your life. Sometimes it doesn't go well and people die after transplant. The stories are pretty heart-wrenching. I can't help but feel it is Frankensteinian and I wish there was more research into preventing and reversing organ degeneration/failure. My feeling is transplant is kind of "glamorous" and glitzy for the medical world whereas preventive medicine is boring -- if you avert crisis, there isn't any real "news" to report: "These people didn't get gruesomely ill and didn't suffer horribly. Film at 11". It just doesn't sell.

I don't envy anyone facing transplant, money or no money.

<comment><USER36>
        > Transplant itself is really hard on the body and then
        > you take anti-rejection drugs for the rest of your life.

It would be nice to have genetics research advance to the point where we're able to grow our own organ replacements. Elsewhere in the comments people have suggested donating to cancer research. An alternative I would humbly suggest is donating to organizations that participate in stem cell or other genetic research.

If conquering cancer is a while off, replacing someone's cancerous organs with healthy new organs that exactly match their own DNA is a good way to save more people as cancer research is ongoing. It also has myriad benefits beyond just cancer such as helping amputees, burn victims, and so on.

<comment><USER35> I used to have a hole in my lung. The tissue regenerated. I'm a former homemaker and homeschooling mom. Currently a divorcee with an entry level job I can't get promoted out of. Stating that I have done this and therefore I know it can be done -- and it doesn't take fancy technology -- is met with incredulity, to say the least. Suffice it to say, I have strong feelings on the matter but it's probably best for me to try to leave the subject alone at the moment.

Peace.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> The sad fact is that Apple will never be the same after Jobs.

I think he embodies a unique ability to see the heart of a new technology or aspect of technology and to focus in on the critical part or parts, ruthlessly getting to what he sees. It's not just a design sense (like Ive), nor a good sense of what consumers really "want." And there are plenty of downsides to this unique gift. (We can all cite plenty of examples.)

I don't think we've seen that from anyone else, even at Apple, over the years, so there's no real replacement possible.

I think it's even spilled over to Pixar's success, which is pretty amazing.

(Maybe Alan Kay rivals it, in a different world.)

</comment><comment><USER38> This sounds serious. I wish him all the best.

</comment><comment><USER39> Get well soon, Steve!

</comment><comment><USER40> Get better, Mr. Jobs.

</comment><comment><USER41> AAPL is down 7.96% on the Frankfurt bourse (markets closed today in the USA due to MLK Day) today, see:

[http://www.boerse- frankfurt.de/EN/index.aspx?pageID=35&I...](http://www.boerse- frankfurt.de/EN/index.aspx?pageID=35&ISIN=US0378331005)

</comment><comment><USER42> > _"It's safe to assume that he's going to conquer this one as well."_

        v = (SteveJobs = immortal || TechCrunch = journalism);
        print v

        $> FALSE

<comment><USER43> You just assigned SteveJobs to immortal...

<comment><USER44> You mean assigned immortal to SteveJobs.

<comment><USER42> There is a Basic syntax error.

But obviously that is not it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Draft John Sculley?

</comment><comment><USER46> Apple stock is about to take a beating :/

<comment><USER47> Yep, no doubt. If only for this reason, Apple needs to figure out Apple sans Jobs.

<comment><USER4> My guess is they have, just not publicly. (Easy to argue the merits of that.) Pancreatic cancer doesn't leave too many survivors so I am sure the management team thought a lot about life without steve, at least at that time.

<comment><USER47> I agree, but I think it's less of an internal logistics issue and much more of a public image issue: Steve Jobs is so much the face of Apple as it sits currently, every time there's news about his health the stock fluctuates and that isn't good.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Efficacy of elderberry extract for treatment of influenza a and B virus (2004) - <AUTHOR> https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15080016 <comment><USER2> "Elderberry Supplementation Reduces Cold Duration and Symptoms in Air- Travellers: A Randomized, Double-Blind Placebo-Controlled Clinical Trial"

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4848651/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4848651/)

</comment><comment><USER3> There's an old joke:

Q: Does chicken soup _actually_ help people recover from colds more quickly?

A: It can't hoit! [ed: "hoit" = the word "hurt" with a strong regional/cultural accent applied. For some reason it's part of the joke.]

I wonder if it's sensible to apply similar reasoning to traditional remedies such as elderberries, when (a) we have at weak evidence supporting their efficacy, and (b) no reason to think they're harmful.

<comment><USER4> The official guidance regarding Vit C supplements is just that; they're cheap and harmless, so why not?

<comment><USER5> One of the possible contributing factors to the 1918 influence death rate was the use of aspirin to treat patients. It was put under the "can't hurt" bucket.

While something harmless like a food product seems like a harmless enough recommendation, remember aspirin is a chemical equivalent to white willow bark tea.

Edit: a sample source for increased influence mortality with salicylate therapy

[https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/49/9/1405/301441](https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/49/9/1405/301441)

<comment><USER4> I don't think anyone with a medical degree thinks of aspirin as harmless. If you have any issues with bleeding, it can kill you. Vit C is different, but let me be clear that I'm not endorsing it. AFAIK there is no known toxicity related to Vit C, it's ubiquitous in most modern diets, and has no secondary effects such as blood thinning.

Aspirin is often thought of as harmless by some, but it's a powerful drug with numerous effects. Vit C is just ascorbic acid.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I can anecdotally vouch for this. A friend told me about elderberry a few years ago when I told him I had flu symptoms. I went to Whole Foods around 7pm and bought the extract. Took a double dose with Vit C and D and tons of water every 4-6 hours. One ibuprofen as needed to keep my temperature down. Woke up the next day around noon and the flu was gone. Been using it ever since.

<comment><USER7> Did it work the next time around as well? I am curious to know.

<comment><USER6> Every time I get achy and feverish I hit it hard and the symptoms go away in 24 hours or so. Seems to be working.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The study is from 2004. If the claims are as described i.e. symptom relief 4 days earlier. This would be better efficacy than tamiflu.

<comment><USER8> The duration of cough and days missed from work are not significantly different in the two groups. The number that is improved with elderberry is a self assessment score for a number of factors about how the patient feels. Their congestion and mucus production got under control faster.

It's worth mentioning that the study was commissioned by the company selling the elderberry infused foods and syrups more than 10 years ago and notes in its abstract that it needs to be replicated.

Found a PDF at: [http://www.sambucol.co.il/_Uploads/dbsAttachedFiles/sambucol...](http://www.sambucol.co.il/_Uploads/dbsAttachedFiles/sambucol_research2004_international_medical.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Not a drug so not a lot of money to be made long term. I'm really surprised this even got funding to be studied. Spend money marketing something that isn't unique or patentable is usually a loosing game. For example if you pitched this on shark tank you'd have no investors because it's not defendable.

<comment><USER10> Finding a good shark tank pitch is not the purpose of academic research.

<comment><USER9> Most research is funded by companies wanting to make money in the long run. This is the point I was trying to get across; thanks for letting me clarify this point :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> These things are always underresearched, but there's more evidence than just this. For example:

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/11399518/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/11399518/)

[https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ethan_Basch/publication...](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ethan_Basch/publication/259696401_An_Evidence- Based_Systematic_Review_of_Elderberry_and_Elderflower_Sambucus_nigra_by_the_Natural_Standard_Research_Collaboration/links/02e7e534e9f25f02b4000000/An- Evidence-Based-Systematic-Review-of-Elderberry-and-Elderflower-Sambucus-nigra- by-the-Natural-Standard-Research-Collaboration.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER12> Has it been replicated?

</comment><comment><USER13> Maybe Monty Python was on to some lost knowledge with their "your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries"?

Or not...

<comment><USER14> So, did she spread the plague to everyone but your father?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> 1\. single study

2\. from 2004

3\. small sample size (60 patients)

4\. flu symptoms self-reported by patients

5\. no proposed mechanism of action. how exactly does elderberry cure the flu?

and, oh yeah...

6\. most published medical research findings are false [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1182327/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1182327/)

7\. everyone please just get the flu vaccine!

<comment><USER16> Current flu vaccine is only 10-30% effective.. No thanks.

<comment><USER15> You are spreading FUD that's harmful to public health. The CDC has replied to the 10% figure circulating in the media: [https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/season/flu- season-2017-2018.ht...](https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/season/flu- season-2017-2018.htm)

The 2018 flu season is ongoing. How could there be any conclusive research about vaccine effectiveness in the 2018 flu season when we're right in the middle of it?

The CDC is unequivocal about getting vaccinated.

      Everyone 6 months of age and older should get a flu vaccine every season.

[https://www.cdc.gov/flu/consumer/vaccinations.htm](https://www.cdc.gov/flu/consumer/vaccinations.htm)

<comment><USER16> 10% number is from Australia. USA is not the only country in the world, you know that right?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> So many ways this could have gone wrong. The taste; the look; the mouth feel could have given it away. People know they are using a placebo; they'll report differently.

I'm imagining that elderberry extract is a commonly-used Norway thing, so the test subjects would have been set up perfectly to identify the placebo?

<comment><USER8> According to the study:

 _To make the study blind, the placebo syrup had an identical appearance and taste and was supplied in the same type of bottles. The placebo syrup did not contain the elderberry extract, but was otherwise identical. Both syrups were produced and supplied by Razei Bar Ltd (Jerusalem, Israel)._

<comment><USER17> Yeah yeah. And if you've been taking it all your life, that's all whistling in the wind. No way is anything with flavor 'identical'.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: HTTP/HTTPS Man-In-The-Middle proxy built with vanilla Python. - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/synchronizing/mitm <comment><AUTHOR> Hello!

This is just a simple project that allows the creation of a man-in-the-middle proxy utilizing primarily the Python Standard Library. Other than the use of termcolor[1] for pretty-print, the project is built on top of asyncio[2], ssl[3], socket[4], and http[5] module.

This project does not use advance techniques to read SSL traffic. Instead, it assumes that the user will either install the generated certificate unto their keychain, or allow bad certificates to go through. This was a weekend project developed for a larger project I have in mind.

[1] [https://pypi.org/project/termcolor/](https://pypi.org/project/termcolor/)

[2] [https://docs.python.org/3/library/asyncio.html](https://docs.python.org/3/library/asyncio.html)

[3] [https://docs.python.org/3/library/ssl.html](https://docs.python.org/3/library/ssl.html)

[4] [https://docs.python.org/3/library/socket.html](https://docs.python.org/3/library/socket.html)

[5] [https://docs.python.org/3/library/http.html](https://docs.python.org/3/library/http.html)</comment>


Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) Update - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-elastic-block-store-ebs-update-snapshot-price-reduction-more-piopsgib/ <comment><USER2> > We are reducing the prices for EBS snapshots by 47% for all AWS Regions.

This is one of the reasons I love AWS. Sure things some may be priced higher than alternatives ( _cough bandwidth!!_ ) but I don't recall prices ever rising. Once you build something sustainable, your marginal costs only go down over time.

<comment><USER3> What competitor of theirs has raised prices over time?

<comment><USER4> VMware?

[insert pedantic "VMware doesn't compete with AWS" arguments here]</comment></comment></comment>


Clasroom with grass walls and yoga balls designed for kids with ADHD - <AUTHOR> http://www.i24news.tv/en/mobile#content/84795 <comment><USER2> Proper link: [http://www.i24news.tv/en/news/israel/society/84795-150906-yo...](http://www.i24news.tv/en/news/israel/society/84795-150906-yoga- balls-and-grass-walls-an-experimental-israeli-classroom-for-kids-with-adhd)

<comment><USER3> Yup, this is much better than the posted link.

I absolutely love that creative approach. This is non-technical hacking on an elevated level and, for once, for tangible human benefit.

Chapeau to Lior Ben-Shitrit.

<comment><AUTHOR> The lack of innovation inside classrooms is partially because drugs seem like an easier hack.</comment></comment></comment>


Recursive Filesystem Entries - <AUTHOR> http://blog.wesleyac.com/posts/filesystem-recursion <comment><USER2> This is super neat! If it weren't for the FAT limitations you could make one of those SD cards that fake their capacity actually "contain" a file as big as the misreported capacity.</comment>


Glastonbury myths 'made up by 12th-century monks' - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/nov/23/glastonbury-myths-made-up-by-12th-century-monks <comment><USER2> "as they rode, they again came upon a burial site of St.Mikey, it was already the 7th one, the last along that particular road."

<comment><USER3> Similar quote from "The Name of The Rose:"

[https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/849150-and-don-t-succumb- to...](https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/849150-and-don-t-succumb-too-much-to- the-spell-of-these)

Where is yours from?

<comment><USER2> Strugatsky brothers, "Hard to be a God".</comment></comment></comment>


Drink Tons of Coffee Everyday and Give it to Your Kids Too - <AUTHOR> http://men.webmd.com/features/coffee-new-health-food

<comment><USER2> I'd just been considering trying to give up coffee. I guess that plan is out the window!

<comment><USER3> Er, I would recommend giving it up, or at least cutting back. There was a period in a previous programming life where I drank 10 cups of coffee a day. At the end of one weekend after I had been yelling at everyone in the family for about two days, I quit cold turkey.

And those were four days of serious discomfort. Headaches, cravings for coffee, distractions. But after a couple of weeks, I was fine and didn't drink any coffee for several years. The scary part was that my sleep became different after I quit. More calm.

Now, I drink about one cup of decaffeinated a week, max.

If you decide to try, it is useful to have a major distraction to keep you busy, like working in a startup, or a cross-country hike.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This article should be down voted. it says that people should take a lot of coffee, it's insane. In their words: "Want a drug that could lower your risk of diabetes, Parkinson's disease, and colon cancer? That could lift your mood and treat headaches? That could lower your risk of cavities? If it sounds too good to be true, think again. Coffee, the much maligned but undoubtedly beloved beverage, just made headlines for possibly cutting the risk of the latest disease epidemic, type 2 diabetes. And the real news seems to be that the more you drink, the better."

Now, consider the risks of taking too much coffee (from <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caffeine>):

Main symptoms of caffeine intoxication. An acute overdose of caffeine, usually in excess of about 300 milligrams, dependent on body weight and level of caffeine tolerance, can result in a state of central nervous system over- stimulation called caffeine intoxication (DSM-IV 305.90), or colloquially the "caffeine jitters". The symptoms of caffeine intoxication are not unlike overdoses of other stimulants. It may include restlessness, nervousness, excitement, insomnia, flushing of the face, increased urination, gastrointestinal disturbance, muscle twitching, a rambling flow of thought and speech, irritability, irregular or rapid heart beat, and psychomotor agitation.[89] In cases of much larger overdoses, mania, depression, lapses in judgment, disorientation, disinhibition, delusions, hallucinations, and psychosis may occur, and rhabdomyolysis (breakdown of skeletal muscle tissue) can be provoked. In cases of extreme overdose, death can result. The median lethal dose (LD50) given orally, is 192 milligrams per kilogram in rats.[2] The LD50 of caffeine in humans is dependent on weight and individual sensitivity and estimated to be about 150 to 200 milligrams per kilogram of body mass, roughly 80 to 100 cups of coffee for an average adult taken within a limited time frame that is dependent on half-life. Though achieving lethal dose with caffeine would be exceptionally difficult with regular coffee, there have been reported deaths from overdosing on caffeine pills, with serious symptoms of overdose requiring hospitalization occurring from as little as 2 grams of caffeine. Death typically occurs due to ventricular fibrillation brought about by effects of caffeine on the cardiovascular system. Treatment of severe caffeine intoxication is generally supportive, providing treatment of the immediate symptoms, but if the patient has very high serum levels of caffeine then peritoneal dialysis, hemodialysis, or hemofiltration may be required.

It is insane to write and publish articles like that, without warning people about the risks of caffeine general high usage, and overdose.

<comment><USER5> Well said.</comment></comment>


Things I learnt during, and about, my PhD - <AUTHOR> http://jamie.ideasasylum.com/2008/07/things-i-learnt-during-and-about-my-phd/

<comment><USER2> Ok, I think I can condense this to one sentence:

 _If your adviser is an asshole, you probably won't graduate and your grad school experience will suck. Don't._

If you want to get a Ph.D. and do research, pick your adviser very carefully. It is the _most important decision_ of your research career. Grad school isn't like school, it's an apprenticeship.

Pick your adviser (the person you are apprenticed to) on two factors: the success of their past students and how compatible you are personally with them. Their field should be peripherally related to yours, it doesn't have to be very close (1).

I had a great experience in grad school. I also had two great advisers.

(1) My advisers study scattering theory and complex variables. My Ph.D. was in computational physics. It wasn't a serious problem.

<comment><USER3> That's a bit like saying that you should pick your parents wisely. (Or perhaps, that you should pick your wife carefully -- but you only get three dates to decide!) It's wonderful advice...in retrospect.

The problem is, you can't judge anything _useful_ about your adviser in the time that you have to do it. For those who don't know, at a good school, you'll get a "rotation" (a quarter/semester "working" in your prospective adviser's group), after which you'll have to decide their suitability as a mentor for _years_ of challenging work. If you're lucky, you make a good decision, and grad school is happy. If you're _lucky_.

That said...there are plenty of other ways to go wrong. Your adviser is a big part of the success formula, but not the only part. Not by a long shot.

I'm happy that you had a good experience with your adviser, but I know enough miserable grad students to know that it isn't the norm. Personally, this guy's essay hit _way_ too close to home....

<comment><USER2> There is useful information about advisers. Perhaps not as much as is desirable, but certainly enough to avoid making bad choices. Very important: what happened to their old students?

My adviser: all students got academic jobs (some multiple offers) and finished in 5 years (5 years from B.S. to Ph.D. is normal for math). The most recent student, with whom I had overlap, said he rocked.

Another adviser I considered: fastest student took 6 years. One student took 9.5 years, and told everyone "pick a different adviser". Several never graduated. I scratched him off my list.

As for the "three dates", it's not optimal, but you can eliminate some bad choices. If the guy forgets to show up for "date #2"? He'll probably do that a lot. He probably doesn't care. One guy (perfectly decent fellow) was very formal, which doesn't really work for me. Several women students mentioned to me they want someone encouraging. The point of the meetings is to judge whether your personalities are compatible.

There is information out there, but lots of people don't actively seek it out. Then they become miserable grad students. One guy in my year ignored the advice of "9.5 years", and went on to become a miserable grad student (and now a happy actuary with an M.S.).

I had a fantastic adviser, which might have been luck. I had an adviser who didn't suck, which was the result of good choices.

<comment><USER4> _My adviser: all students got academic jobs (some multiple offers) and finished in 5 years (5 years from B.S. to Ph.D. is normal for math). The most recent student, with whom I had overlap, said he rocked._

Okay, great! I feel confident in recommending your advice: If you want an academic job _and_ can find an adviser like this, go to grad school. Otherwise, do not go.

Of course, if everyone followed this advice I think you might be able to fit all the world's grad students in a high school classroom, because _your adviser was freakishly good_.

How does the funding work in the math department? Lots of the theorists I knew seemed to be TAs almost until the day they graduated -- and in their field, unlike the experimental sciences, salary seemed to be a major fraction of the expense of keeping a grad student. In the experimental wing, where it can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to keep (e.g.) a genetics student stocked with reagents, the whole problem of adviser choice has an additional, frustrating degree of freedom: If your adviser doesn't have money to hire you, it doesn't matter that she's the greatest person in the world.

It might be possible to find someone who scores highly on the flush-with-cash axis, the graduates-students-on-time axis, the good-reputation-in-field axis, the track-record-of-successful-students axis _and_ the provides-useful- research-advice axis... but such folks have their pick of grad student talent, and once they're done the other students have to pick among the remaining advisers, balancing the various factors and hoping to get lucky. Or, of course, they can quit, which is probably a better idea, though it is hard to make yourself do it once you've gone that far.

One overwhelmingly useful thing is to have independent funding. I had a fellowship and I cannot overstate how helpful it was -- I was able to shop for advisers in situations where my fellow students felt trapped by financial realities. If you find yourself headed for grad school, apply for every fellowship you can.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The worst thing about a PhD for me was the artificial size of it. A really good PhD is probably a natural series of ideas that spin off from a single theme - but in my case it was a single idea excessively dragged out. Smaller, quicker iteration on ideas is so much more satisfying and better for creativity.

I kind of hope that more people fill their 'do something creative' niche with startups in the future. Its more satisfying, not least because other people caring about what you do is _essential_ for a startup.

</comment><comment><USER6> The one thing that I failed to find in the article was a clear and concrete reason that he wanted to get a Ph.D. I don't think anybody should get a Ph.D. to "get some ideas off [their] chest." You don't need a degree to give you permission to build cool stuff.

Also, I wonder where he went to school, because at every school I've been to, there have always been many resources to go to for support. You could always talk shop with more seasoned graduate students for honest advice on classes, advisors, or places to work outside the office. If you want books, there are many books available devoted to advice on how to finish your dissertation, find a research topic, or manage your time. Even for magazines, the Chronicle of Higher Education has articles and advice for the burgeoning and established academic. Yes, you have to do most of the research and your dissertation won't write itself, but it doesn't have to be one man fighting the academic windmill alone.

</comment><comment><USER7> I enjoyed my PhD right up until near the end, supervisors from my experience aren't as bad as the guy in this made out, mine were very helpful.

The only time I stopped enjoying my PhD was in my last year when I had to totally focus on one small niche and that got a bit boring.

Looking back I wouldn't recommend it unless you want to stay in academia afterwards, or if you're really interested in the tiny area you will inevitably focus on.

Anyway I submit in two weeks and the experience has shown my that I need to go commercial. Then I can enjoy playing about with whatever I like in my own time for fun!

</comment><comment><USER8> _The stipends available to a PhD student are actually very good, especially if you've come directly from the pasta & baked bean-eating life of an undergraduate._

Things must be better in Ireland than in the US with regard to grad student funding. Some of my friends get paid $1000/month as physics and engineering PhD students.

<comment><USER9> Sister's doing a PhD here (or there rather, from your POV). Back of the envelope calculation, she'd be earning roughly 10% more than the minimum wage if you view a PhD as a 36 hours/week job (I wouldn't).

Pretty sure that that's close to the norm for PhD pay though.

(Sorry, no hard figures to compare, due to a feeling that I shouldn't discuss someone else's financial situation candidly online, even if details probably just a google away).

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> obligatory: <http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1040>

<comment><USER11> But, but... what happens when the Professor _IS_ a Ninja?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Quick screen recording plugin/software? - <AUTHOR>

What do you guys use to screen capture?  I find that often I need to record a quick session to show a client a bug, rather than a series of screenshots a small video would be nice. <comment><USER2> For screen capture: <http://markup.io> (its fantastic) For quick video: <http://screenr.com>

Both are great.</comment>


Australia had "automatically" blocked all access to schoolstrike4climate.com - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/environment/live/2019/mar/15/climate-strikes-2019-live-latest-climate-change-global-warming <comment><USER2> Missed the second part of the sentence "on Education Department network computers". Not really news.

</comment><comment><USER3> Ineffective. Circumventing government imposed website blocks is trivially easy. It is a waste to even try.</comment>


Blockchain-enforced ponzi reaches 250 participants – uses an Ethereum contract - <AUTHOR> http://www.ethereumpyramid.com/ <comment><USER2> > In case it's not clear yet: This is less about getting insanely rich and > more about demonstrating what an Ethereum contract can do. Where previously > you would have needed a middleman, who has a lot of control over the process > (maintains a list of participants, administers payouts, etc.), you can now > have a programmable, transparent and incorruptible middleman on the > blockchain.

Technologically speaking, this is pretty neat. I just wish the tech demo was absolutely-anything-else.</comment>


Safari 5's 'Reader' Nudges Web Publishers to App Store - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/06/safari-5s-ad-blocker-nudges-web-publishers-to-app-store <comment><USER2> Last time I checked, adBlock is a welcomed thing and one of the most popular among Firefox and Chrome extensions. Now apple did it, and everybody is crying and said this would hurt publishers. We actually are only seeing this "Reader" feature in the desktop Safari, not MobileSafari (at least for now). There is also no App Store for desktop. So why this is nudging web publisher to App Store since there is no "Reader" on iPad/iPhone and no App Store on your desktop?

I don't see this too different from the "Popup Blocker" feature. Remember the days when popup window was the standard way to display ads. Now pretty much every browser comes with popup blocker.

It's just time to change how you build and place your advertisement. Don't be annoying, otherwise, there will be people rushing to get rid of the things people hate to please the users. There is no law against it.

<comment><USER3> > Now apple did it, and everybody is crying and said this would hurt > publishers.

Not even that, Reader is not an ad blocker it's a reformatter, it's a built-in Readability and nothing more. And you have to see the page before you can even _trigger_ readability, so really it's not like it's disappearing your ads.

> I don't see this too different from the "Popup Blocker" feature. Remember > the days when popup window was the standard way to display ads. Now pretty > much every browser comes with popup blocker.

In fact, Reader is much less anti-ads than popup blocking ever was.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I downloaded Safari 5 more or less as a routine update, but I must say I'm very pleasantly surprised by its speed and Reader. S5 rocks on Snow Leopard.

That said, S5 is still plagued by some of the problems I had with earlier versions - such as "completed 7 of 8 items" ... (I'm waiting), not logging in to my univ's network, etc. So Chrome it is, for now.

<comment><USER5> If you enjoy Reader in Safari, may I suggest the Readability Redux extension for Chrome?

[https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/jggheggpdocamnea...](https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/jggheggpdocamneaacmfoipeehedigia)

(It's basically a port of arc90's Readability to Chrome.) In a perfect world, it would do something similar to the Reader-esque lightbox styling, but it's proven to be pretty usable for me regardless.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is a way of sticking it to Google that I can really get behind. Does it also block the Analytics tracking bug?

<comment><USER7> Also a way of sticking it to web publishers who collect roughly 70% of the money from google-placed ads and 100% of direct ads

<comment><USER6> The sooner people actually ask me for money instead of force me to be brainwashed by people selling sugar water, the better.

<comment><USER8> Believe me when I say that you are _by far_ the minority. _By Far_. I run a web site with over 16,000 registered users. They use the web site regularly and I get countless emails from people telling me how much the site has helped them. And yet, less than 2% pay for a cheap upgrade which gives them a access to a heap of new features and some amazing downloads. I've had one donation _ever_ (in over five years) and every time I ask for support or offer membership upgrades I loose massive amounts of email subscribers.

Whilst it's true that my marketing skills (or lack thereof) are partially to blame for these reasonably pathetic results, it's also compelling empirical evidence that you are in the minority (less than 2%).

If it wasn't for the on site advertising, which barely covers hosting costs, I would have shut the site down years ago. It eats up way too much of my time as it is.

<comment><USER6> Nobody is going to pay for something they can get for free. You set an upper bound on the price when you gave your content away.

My guess is that the porn companies, which make you buy annoying subscriptions, make a lot more money that way than they would with some Google text ads. It's because they don't set the price at $0 and then ask for any amount of money. The set the price at $30 and ask for $30. Don't have $30? No soup for you.

<comment><USER8> A lot of what I'm selling is not given for free. And the point wasn't my lack of success, but the fact that you said you'd give your money to someone who asked for it.

I'm just saying that even if this was true (which, based on what you just said, is not the case) that you would be the minority by a long, long way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I find the timing hilarious. Will Safari's Readability clone also block iAds? Can we get an add-on to block out annoying iAds in app store apps? Somehow I doubt it.

<comment><USER10> Given that it is a feature of desktop Safari, I don't see how it could possibly affect a program on your iPhone.

<comment><USER9> Yes... exactly.</comment></comment></comment>


Facebook's Memcached Multiget Hole: More machines = More Capacity - <AUTHOR> http://highscalability.com/blog/2009/10/26/facebooks-memcached-multiget-hole-more-machines-more-capacit.html

<comment><USER2> the title should be != More Capacity

<comment><USER3> Yes, as in - this is not sarcasm; the actual article title is: "Facebook's Memcached Multiget Hole: More machines != More Capacity"

<comment><USER4> Right.

Though, to argue with the article's title -- while a straightforward addition of more memcached nodes did not solve their capacity problem, the strategy of _replicating_ nodes & load balancing read requests between them appears to be a solution to this particular capacity problem; so more machines = more capacity, so long as they are organized appropriately.

<comment> brown9-2 I'm not very familiar with memcached - is replication and load balancing built-in, or something facebook added on themselves?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Being a little smarter on the client side can help a lot here.

If you store and retrieve an object only to server # (object.id % numservers), you don't face this issue. (Obviously you could use a better hash than %.)

<comment><USER4> This would help to distribute requests for individual objects, but doesn't help for multi-get requests. The problem is adding more nodes increases the number of actual requests a multi-get call needs to make (assuming you're asking for a sufficient # of objects they are likely to be distributed across all nodes). This decreases the # of keys requested per node but _increases_ the total number of requests to the cluster. Because the bound was on throughput of requests (bound by CPU), minimizing the number of keys per request to a node doesn't help.

The proposed solution is to instead replicate nodes and load balance read requests. In this case, this doubles your read capacity, though you must write twice (or N times depending on your replication level).

<comment><USER6> It's worth noting that that solution only works if you have much fewer writes than reads, but that's probably true for most people. A really simple way of doing this that all memcached clients should be able to handle is to set up two separate memcached clusters, write to both, and randomly read from either of them. That way you don't replicate nodes, you replicate the entire cluster. :-)

A better solution would be to consolidate your items, i.e. make sure that items that often are fetched together with multi-get end up on the same server, however this requires a lot of extra knowledge about your data, and it's not very likely that this knowledge is available.

<comment><USER7> > It's worth noting that that solution only works if you have much fewer > writes than reads, but that's probably true for most people.

Is it true of tweets? How about e-mail? What facebook content works that way? (IIRC the discussion of their new image store, one of the motivations was that most pictures were never viewed.)</comment></comment></comment></comment>