Animals are no less emotional than we are - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/08/opinion/sunday/emotions-animals-humans.html <comment><USER2> I think it's just human conceit, that which drives us to think we are special, as an individual, as a species, as a planet in the universe, that also makes us not want to see that animals also feel a range of deeper emotions.

You can look at ducks and see a mother making sure all her little children are following her into the lake and are safe. Is it love? Why not? We call love a profound feeling but is it really? Isn't love a function that helps us take care of our young and survive as a species? An alien, who had never encountered our planet before and perhaps thinking they are the intelligent life while the beings on Earth are just 'responding to stimuli' wouldn't see the emotions humans feel. As ducks to humans, humans to these aliens. Ducks and humans alike would appear just to be going through the motions.

<comment><USER3> Isn't it also "human conceit" to think that other species should always be thought of as having emotions and consciousness? No other animal engages in such.

Perhaps it's the other way around from how you put it. All animals by default share the conceit you describe. It is not unique to humanity, and does not deserve the label of "human". The bear does not lament its catch, the whale does not wonder at the inner life of a fish it accidentally swallows. The uniquely human conceit that we engage in is the one we are both engaging in right now. The exercise of putting oneself in another's shoes.

By the definition of the word, doesn't that make our species special?

<comment><USER4> >The bear does not lament its catch, the whale does not wonder at the inner life of a fish it accidentally swallows.

Neither do humans, of course. Do you stop and grieve for the chicken you just grilled and ate?

Obviously animals are capable of recognizing that other creatures have emotions, too--any dog or cat owner can tell you that. But clearly, like us, they don't always choose empathy.

<comment><USER5> I have to see vegan bears and vegan whales, I only know humans who are able to decide not to eat other animals based on their beliefs.

<comment><USER6> It's not quite what you're looking for, but animals have at least been shown to exhibit preference of what species animals they will eat.

Consider a dog which has been raised around cats, which might hunt a rabbit but not another cat.

<comment><USER7> >It's not quite what you're looking for, but animals have at least been shown to exhibit preference of what species animals they will eat.

Occam's razor says that most wild animals exhibit preference of what species they'll eat based on taste and availability of food, not because of ethics. I said most because I'm not a wildlife biologist and there always seems to be strange outliers, but I have a hard time believing an omnivore/carnivore, such as a bear, would willingly choose vegetation 100% of the time because of ethics when there's plenty of game of its preference to eat.

>Consider a dog which has been raised around cats, which might hunt a rabbit but not another cat.

Most domesticated dogs that were raised alongside cats won't eat them because they've learned that they're not allowed to. The ones that do attack children and other pets are frequently euthanized.

<comment><USER8> Dogs raised alongside cats never even try to eat them to begin with. You don't need to teach them it's not allowed. There must be another explanation.

<comment><USER7> >Dogs raised alongside cats never even try to eat them to begin with. You don't need to teach them it's not allowed.

That's an absurd statement. While tempers of dogs vary from one to the next just like humans, I vehemently disagree to the extent that I'm hesitant to believe you've ever raised a puppy, or even have been exposed to many dogs for that matter. Plenty of pet dogs behave more like their wolf ancestors than others.

<comment><USER6> I've raised dozens of dogs, and like humans, some need some coaching about good behavior and some get along just fine without ever needing discipline.

That's a separate issue from the one I raised, namely that animals display species-oriented preference in their dietary range, and that for some animals this preference can be emotionally/socially based.

<comment><USER7> >animals display species-oriented preference in their dietary range, and that for some animals this preference can be emotionally/socially based.

If there is any species-oriented preferences outside of taste and availability, it's purely out of a symbiotic relationship that they benefit from. Wolves aren't going to stop hunting deer unless the deer somehow provide additional sources of food that the wolves realize only exists because of the deer's help.

<comment><USER9> I've read about wolves that they eat only the meat they are taught to eat (and different pack of wolves in different places hunt different animals.) So a wolf may literally starve to death while sitting near a corpse of some animal if it doesn't know it can eat it. May happen to pups if their pack dies or to wolves who were brought up in captivity.

The source is in Russian from a zoologist who studied wolves: [https://sovet.blocknote.info/articles/443/serdtse-volka- semy...](https://sovet.blocknote.info/articles/443/serdtse-volka-semya)

Some behaviors are instinctive, some are taught, some are the result of emotional conditioning (hence people taming and domesticating animals).

<comment><USER7> >Some behaviors are instinctive, some are taught, some are the result of emotional conditioning (hence people taming and domesticating animals).

You agree with me.

<comment><USER6> Cannibal cults disintegrate whatever wishy-washy point you were trying to make here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's strange to me that this is still considered controversial. Even long- duration emotional effects like depression is very obvious in pets after the loss of other/companion pets in a home.

<comment><USER11> It's hard to get a man to understand something if his accustomed lifestyle depends on his not understanding it (to paraphrase Upton Sinclair). It's harder to justify eating meat and supporting factory farming if you believe animals have emotions. I'm not a vegetarian myself but I think that is more uncomfortable for me than for someone who doesn't believe animals have emotions.

<comment><USER12> > I'm not a vegetarian myself but I think that is more uncomfortable for me > than for someone who doesn't believe animals have emotions.

If you don't mind me asking, what do you think is making you still eat animals, given that you are aware of their suffering?

<comment><USER13> There's a reason we call it beef and not cow. There's a reason we generally don't serve food in a form that still looks like the animal (most common exception being fish, which people are less likely to see as an emotional being). Meat is delicious and nutritious, and it's easy to avoid thinking about what goes on in the feedlot or the slaughterhouse, so the cognitive dissonance is easy. This is one reason videos exposing inhumane practices are so powerful, even to people who already knew such conditions exist.

How about animals we eat that are treated well? If a cow lives a happy life, is slaughtered as humanely as possible, and wouldn't have existed if not for our demand for meat, does that make that meat ethical? Maybe even more ethical than not eating it? (Of course this is an incomplete picture if you want to consider externalities such as cow farts contributing to climate change.)

<comment><USER12> > How about animals we eat that are treated well? If a cow lives a happy life, > is slaughtered as humanely as possible, and wouldn't have existed if not for > our demand for meat, does that make that meat ethical? Maybe even more > ethical than not eating it?

If that's a general argument, then the same thing goes for humans, so it'd therefore be better to have a human child and eat it (if it's slaughtered as humanely as possible), than not having a child, right?

Whenever we argue this way about a non-human animal this way, it's worth considering whether we'd feel the similarly of about a human being with similar mental capacities. Otherwise it might just be our speciesism leading us into motivated reasoning.

Of course, part of the problem with the argument is the false dilemma between killing someone and them never having been alive. Additionally the assumption, that it's harmful for someone non-existent to never be brought into existence, is an odd one. If we accept it, birth control would be highly immoral, and rape could often be justified as being in the interested of a potential unborn child... which is actually what's happening here with farmed cows, because they're being forcefully inseminated non-stop, and you're arguing it's for the benefit of the unborn calf.

If we buy this premise, we'd also have to support a hypothetical cannibalistic farming industry rearing captive human children for food, because otherwise those children wouldn't exist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I like how quickly this line of thinking leads to panpsychism.

Alright, so your dog has some level of cognition – sensations, emotion, joy, pain. Perhaps less complex than a human, but nevertheless nonzero. Because whatever computations happens in its brain _feel like_ something from the inside.

How about a frog? Less, but still nonzero.

How about a worm? Less, but still nonzero. But hey: we can already model a worm's nervous system [0]. And if consciousness is just what computation feels like from the inside, then torturing the model worm creates real pain (or the worm-equivalent of pain, whatever that emotion is).

Something interesting to think about.

[0] [http://openworm.org](http://openworm.org)

<comment><USER4> We can, without lapsing into full panpsychism, state some ethical paradoxes about the way we can observe animal emotion, versus the way we actually treat animals.

For example, it's widely accepted that pigs are extremely intelligent animals, capable of feeling pain and suffering to a degree more sophisticated even than young children.

And yet treating young children with the same level of disregard-for-suffering that we routinely, banally treat pigs with is considered a capital crime.

At a certain point, we'll have to resolve this societal cognitive dissonance. I strongly suspect it will end up being resolved with animals being granted a far greater degree of legal protection from pain and suffering than they have now.

<comment><USER15> Another way for resolving the dissonance, is to assume that torturing young children is worse than torturing pigs because young children can become more sophisticated than pigs.

But i agree with you that eventually we'll stop treating animals the way we treat them now, because growing meat in a lab will be cheaper, making majority of the people indifferent, and allowing the minority of the people who care to pass stricter laws (though i am not sure if that would work for fish, and for abolishing all the hunting).

<comment><USER16> I don't really think that it just comes down to can-become-more-sophisticated. Assume we had children that never grow up, and we can tell which ones. Assume even that they just mysteriously from the forest, so they don't have parents/owners. I really can't see the legal system changing to permit us to treat them in the same manner we treat pigs.

<comment><USER15> I can't see the legal system changing either, but thousands of years ago after a hungry winter i can't believe people feeding the non-growing children, or letting the real children to die because they don't want to kill and eat the 'broken' children from the forest.

Many hunter gatherer societies were ok with killing ill or unwanted children, because those who didn't do that didn't survive.

<comment><USER17> I don't think anyone was making an argument based on human behaviours thousands of years ago, or how an argument based on primitive cultures is relevant. Unless your point is that if these hypothetical forest-children existed, modern society would be okay with farming them en-mass in cages for their meat?

I don't know any vegans or vegetarians who refuse to acknowledge the reality of eating for survival - the issue is based on choice, and if you have the luxury of choice why would you decide to eat another sentient being.

<comment><USER15> My argument is that eating them would become an accepted thing, and then at some point society would be having debates about replacing their meat with some other kind of food, very similar to what our society does about animals now. And my guess is that in that situation again the course of action would be mostly determined by economics of farming.

> and if you have the luxury of choice why would you decide to eat another > sentient being

It's not a completely equivalent choice, but also a little bit of inconvenience in the form of not eating the favorite types of foods or often having to take supplements (e.g. B12), and most people seem to have a healthy dose of selfishness. I personally am not convinced that farm animals are intelligent enough to justify the urgent action, instead of waiting until artificially grown meat becomes cheaper and resolves the issue in a natural way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Just one of the many reasons I am vegan.

You can eat a healthy, fulfilling diet that meets all your nutrition requirements without consuming meat or dairy and contributing to animal suffering.

We have the choice to avoid imprisoning, mutilating, and killing animals to survive, by eating a plant-based diet.

I've been vegan for many years and have never felt better or happier. You can too.

[https://www.vegansociety.com/go-vegan/how-go- vegan](https://www.vegansociety.com/go-vegan/how-go-vegan)

[https://rightasrain.uwmedicine.org/body/food/want-go- vegan-h...](https://rightasrain.uwmedicine.org/body/food/want-go-vegan-heres- how-do-it-healthy-way)

<comment><USER19> >We have the choice [...]

Do you think other species have less of a choice because of their limited emotional response? If so, can you consider the implications? (rather than being the butt of the age old joke)

<comment><USER18> I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. I don't care to argue about whether we should avoid causing emotional and physical suffering to other beings.

Carnivorous animals kill to survive, unlike all of us living in the modern world.

It's not just the killing, it's the whole process of enslaving, breeding, raping, mutilating animals just to serve our tastes. If you think I'm being melodramatic don't take my word for it. You can see the terrible suffering inflicted on animal farms and slaughterhouses only a quick google search away.

It's not necessary. We aren't living in the bush having to kill another animal in order to live.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Not arguing with the contents of the article, or its applicability, but is there a large mass of people who think that people are more emotional than animals?

Wouldn't the logical straight-forward way of looking at it would be that because humans have higher abstract intelligence/thinking capabilities, they should obviously be less emotional than animals? All animals have is basically emotion (well dolphins and monkeys probably have some simple symbolic language, but nevertheless), while humans have both emotion, and also the logical apparatus, the thoughts, the prefrontal cortex to inhibit (that's its function in a nutshell - selective inhibition) the rest of the (emotional) intelligence, thus making the general operation of an individual less emotion- based, as compared to a generic animal?

<comment><USER21> >because humans have higher abstract intelligence/thinking capabilities, they should obviously be less emotional than animals? //

I'd imagine that the thinking goes that emotion requires self-reflection. Being depressed isn't really a thing if I don't even realise it's me that is depressed because I have no conception of self.

If there is no higher function that can decide to suffer pains then pain is irrelevant, reaction is not emotion.

<comment><USER9> Lots of animals pass mirror test, so we can safely assume that they are self- aware to some extent.

This method is believed to be highly imperfect though as not all animals rely on visual perception as their main info channel. So some animals that do not pass the test may be self-aware, we just don't know how to research it properly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> One of the most interesting explanations of emotions that I've read is that emotions are subconscious _predictions_ produced by the brain (sorry, didn't save the link). For instance, happiness is a subconscious prediction of safety. Depression is a subconscious prediction of death. It's like super- scalar execution -- the event hasn't happened yet (and may never happen), but the brain has already calculated its outcome and signals its estimation through emotions.

A few conclusions:

A) Anything with brains has some kind of emotions. The bigger the brain the more developed emotions are.

B) Emotions in animals has nothing to do with "soul" or anything transcendental. It's just a way the animal brain works. Humans can feel empathy to animal emotions because they are also technically animals.

<comment><USER23> This is one of those "non-explanations" you often get from modern neuroscience (in this case from the cult of "predictive coding"). There is absolutely no explanatory power here with regard to the nature of emotions. It just assumes its conclusion. The brain should just make its prediction and the behavior should happen in experiential void. Why is there any feeling associated with this prediction? There's no explanation for it that doesn't engage in obvious handwaving. And even if you accept one of the handwavy answers, it still doesn't even remotely approach the questions that people actually care about, like: why would the prediction give this specific quality of feeling, rather than some other?

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> An intriguing idea brought up in the book Flow, is that perhaps animals feel things better than us.

One of the conditions of flow is that the individual focuses on that one thing and doesn't think about anything else.

Humans are constantly juggling several things in their heads at one time. When we brush our teeth, we think about how we're going to be late. When we play with our kids, we're also worrying about that problem at work or the unpaid bills.

But the lion does not need to do this. When the lion is hunting, they focus 100% on it. When it eats, it enjoys its meal, not having to worry about the next kill or food preservation. When it sees a sunrise, it can sit there and enjoy the sunrise, without pondering what it has to do in the next few hours.

<comment><USER25> But maybe the DO think about the next kill while looking at the sunrise. Who are we to tell?

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> The weirdest thing about the "do animals have emotions" debate is that we now know that the emotion-handling parts of the brain (the limbic system, particularly the amygdala) are shared by not only by all mammals but also by reptiles and birds. The limbic system is ancient and fairly well-preserved; there's not much special in a human amygdala compared to a mouse one.

</comment><comment><USER27> When I took classes with Daniel Dennett, he was always amazed at the strength of convictions people had about consciousness even without education in the area.

This is an unpopular opinion, but the human intuition is not a good discriminator of consciousness: "Dennett (who argues that consciousness is unique to humans), claims that intuitive attributions of mental states are "untrustworthy", and points out that "it is, in fact, ridiculously easy to induce powerful intuitions of not just sentience but full-blown consciousness (ripe with malevolence or curiosity) by exposing people to quite simple robots made to move in familiar mammalian ways at mammalian speeds (1995).""[1]

Personally, I'll be agnostic until consciousness is much better understood.

[1][https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness- animal/](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness-animal/)

<comment><USER28> I come from the opposite direction: I'm not so sure humans are all that conscious. My personal theory goes something like:

* Consciousness is a side-effect of the brain running "what-if" scenarios that include anticipating it's own actions. Self-awareness. This definition allows for non-human consciousness, but also doesn't take a stance on it, as it also allows for a range of awareness, rather than a binary state. (that said, I'll talk in binary terms for simplicity)

* Consciousness is calorically expensive - the brain shuts it down when it isn't needed, because it stops adding value then in terms of survival.

* Side effect: The primary job of consciousness is to figure out how to turn the unexpected into the routine, which in turn shuts down consciousness.

Result: We spend a lot of time NOT self-aware, then back-fill that we must always be self-aware when we consider that time (because we are self-aware during that consideration). Impossible to self-measure, but my personal guess is that we spend somewhere between a high number of minutes to low number of hours "sentient" each day.

Note: I'm using Self-aware/consciousness rather broadly here. Even if it's illusion, there's a state of having that illusion (or however to phrase that) and a state of not being aware that you aren't even considering...anything. (Dang it is hard to describe that without using language that assumes awareness).

<comment><USER29> That would explain why spending a few hours meditating can feel like a very long time, being more conscious than usually.

Edit: On the other hand, when meditating deeply, one does not run what-if scenarios. Quite the opposite. Nevertheless, awareness is particularly strong in this state.

<comment><USER28> I have limited mediation experience, so I don't claim to be definitive at all, but I'd equate the feeling to asking "what if..." and never finishing the question...indeed, getting COMFORTABLE with never finishing the question, but the question is there. Or maybe you're trying to be aware without asking the question, and I'm still terrible at it.

Definitely an aspect I'll consider more of. Thanks for the thought!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I believe they are more emotional in many ways - more driven and consumed by their emotions. Especially in social animals emotional reactions are inescapable for them. Humans are able to overcome emotion through higher level thinking and effort.

Also depends on one's definition of emotion. Is fear an emotion?

<comment><USER20> IMO fear is widely viewed as one of the simplest emotions, yes. Or at least, it can be: the word can be used to reference different aspects of fear, one of which is the emotion of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Opinion: Your Dog Feels as Guilty as She Looks

Science does not need opinions. The question is worth asking, but this article does not seem to be backed by any kind of research or experiments.

<comment><USER32> Yea. The entire argument appears to be a single anecdote about some guy's dog acting really upset after biting his hand.

Quoting the article:

> For the longest time, science has depicted animals as stimulus-response > machines while declaring their inner lives barren. This has helped us > sustain our customary "anthropodenial": the denial that we are animals. We > like to see ourselves as special, but whatever the difference between humans > and animals may be, it is unlikely to be found in the emotional domain.

Isn't this just a strawman in service to an applause light?

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> What's the surprise here? If anything I would expect animals to be even more emotional than humans. Emotions are something primal, something that came to be before conciousnes. Animals are emotional and all they ever do is act on their emotions, whether that is: hunger, fear, joy, lust, etc.

The human-specific part of mind is the rational part, planning, reflecting, self-correcting, etc. Animals never come close to humans in this regard.

</comment><comment><USER34> The purpose of emotions was proven by accident. Emotions exist as a physiological component of the brain to help make complex cognitive decisions on the fly. It is safe to think of this as a short circuit around analysis paralysis, but it also comes at a cost of various cognitive biases.

It should be no surprise that animals have emotions similar to humans since the physiology of many animal brains is not incredibly different from human brains.

The discovery: [https://www.smh.com.au/national/feeling-our-way-to- decision-...](https://www.smh.com.au/national/feeling-our-way-to- decision-20090227-8k8v.html)

It was hard to confirm the discovery because people with no emotion are rare, but some of it was arguably confirmed later through interviews with John Wayne Gacy who demonstrated much of the same behaviors but had learned to compensate and fake it for much of his life.

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

</comment><comment><USER35> This makes me think of Wittgenstein's point that words shape our reality and also limit our perception of reality. "Emotion" is a word that's a human construct.

Going along with this human construct, I wonder what the boundaries are among humans and animals when it comes to "emotions". Are there certain emotions that animals have that we can't tap into and, therefore, never experience?

And to go further, what role do sensory organs have with emotions? Does access to certain sensory organs influence this? For instance, fishes have access to the lateral line system to help them sense pressure gradients and their surroundings. It could be that they have unique emotions.

</comment><comment><USER36> [https://outline.com/Dumckz](https://outline.com/Dumckz)

</comment><comment><USER37> We _are_ animals.

<comment><USER38> And tomatoes are fruits.

But there are multiple actual definitions of words and very often "animal"1 = non-human "animal"2

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> _Expression Of The Emotions In Man And Animals_ by Darwin, Charles

Publication date 1873

[https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.43657/page/n3](https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.43657/page/n3)

</comment><comment><USER40> I have some early memories from when I could barely talk. Back then, the world was composed almost entirely of emotions. They completely dominated the scene. Not only that, but my brain was smaller and less physically developed, so I had reduced capacities as well.

I think animals are exactly the same. Of course, animals' brains never develop past that stage ruled by emotion.

As a result of this, I believe anyone can do a thought experiment to see the world as an animal sees it: just think of very early memories from right when you first learned to talk. That is what being an animal is like.

<comment><USER41> Don't know about you personally, but normal human babies certainly aren't at all like animals.

The sheer, mind-boggling rational and learning capacity needed to learn highly symbolic and abstract things like language and arithmetic means that babies are 'smarter' than adults.

(If by 'smarter' we mean the capacity for learning, mental models and abstract generalization.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Well, sure. I don't think anyone who's encountered an angry cat can deny that cats are capable of anger.

Equivalently, you could say our emotions are the subjective experience of our ancient animal instincts.

</comment><comment><USER43> You can't make global claims about 'animals' based on dogs. Humans created dogs, we extricated them from the harsh reality of evolution in order to serve as workers and companions to us. It's no surprise we bred them to match our emotional viewpoint. The reality of nature is _extremely_ harsh by human standards. It's largely an emotionally cold and deadly place that is entirely removed from most humans day to day lives.

<comment><USER44> In fact animals don't die in a nice way. They end up either eaten alive or left behind by the herd to die of thirst when they are too old or too sick.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> I remember a documentary about octopus reproduction, the mother would spend their final hours heating water around the nest then as a last gesture would go die as far as possible from it, allegedly to avoid attracting predator around "her" corpse. I have no idea if the sacrificial narrative is to be trusted but I was nearly tearing up.

</comment><comment><USER46> The word 'animals' is far to generic to have any meaning in this context. Obviously social mammals that we share many of our brain structures with experience reality the same way we do. But this is far less obvious in animals like reptiles, fish, and the like.

</comment><comment><USER47> The author showing monkeys getting emotional about unfairness [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dMoK48QGL8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dMoK48QGL8)

</comment><comment><USER48> Was this up for debate? My understanding was always emotion is just animal survival instinct kicking in. The BIOS. The dumb part of your brain the should fight to override.

</comment><comment><USER49> The human forebrain may inhibit some emotion. Injury tonthe fore brain- trauma, stroke, dementia plaques- sometimes results in highly emotional people.

</comment><comment><USER50> Do we need to be reminded that humans are animals?

Humans have large egos, but aside from that we're not particularly special.

</comment><comment><USER51> New York Times: "Here I go overstating a vapid point again"

The easy part is pretending animals are like us, even if there's no rigorous reason to believe they are. The hard part is trying to figure out why the tiger isn't immoral for killing the gazelle.

<comment><USER8> You're going against the scientific consensus if you're suggesting animals don't have any emotions. Do you have any reason to believe that they don't?

Whether tigers hunting for survival is immoral seems entirely tangential to whether animals can feel.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> I was pretty surprised when I saw this video about a dog watching Lion King movie and getting sad: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHKC958R8Z8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHKC958R8Z8)

<comment><USER53> Uhh, I'm skeptical. My dogs do exactly that any time they see something on the TV that looks like something they would chase. I suspect that's what is going on here. I doubt the doggy is aware that Mustafa is dead and Simba is now an orphan.

<comment><USER54> Yeah. They've also got tens of thousands of years worth of selective breeding for cueing off their owners.

There are what I'd call clear examples of animals expressing emotions. I'm not sure this one'd qualify.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> Related question: can animals have religious thoughts?

<comment><USER56> Religion is a philosophy, and philosophies are the models we construct of reality in order to explain and predict. It seems undoubtable that many animals construct models of reality, and indeed we have seen them display behavior consistent with models we would associate with religion. Elephants, for instance, appear to practice some form of reverence for their dead by visiting and touching their bones.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Quite obviously emotions are a continuum that correlates with intelligence.

The most intelligent animals feel/express the most sophisticated emotions.

To think otherwise would be clearly contrary to science (i.e. you believe in souls transcending to the physical world; OR you believe that a deity made an 100% equitative distribution of emotions among his creatures, from the worm to the dolphin).

This point is defended in Hofstadter's works.

</comment><comment><USER41> So what?

Since when is 'emotion' is some sort of validation of personal worth instead of a condition you need to learn to live with?

<comment><USER58> Same reason restaurants compete to provide interesting flavors instead of just serving water and nutrient cubes. Emotions are what provide interest in life to most people. My impression is that you have them too but their expression has been a source of stress for you, possibly due to negative reaction from others.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> Please someone at YC invented meat-alike alternatives so we don't eat animals for the sake of everything.

Not really an animal lover, just think we don't really need consume animal meat to live longer/happier, there got be some other options.</comment>


Farse, an iOS Client / Parse.com Service Clone Using Apache Solr and Obj C - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ralph-e-boy/farse

<comment><AUTHOR> I made this proof of concept clone of Parse.com / iOS sdk client thinking that I could run Solr on ec2 and not have to deal with parse.com and maybe have some more flexibility. It runs pretty easily on a mac if you download the solr client. There is a pdf doc in the repo, I welcome all feedback that anyone has on it, good or bad. I am particularly interested in whether or not anyone has thought about creating the same type of thing in other ways and has done so, or if anyone thinks this is a project worth continuing.</comment>


Opening up BBC Sounds to others' podcasts and commercial radio - open-source-ux https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/aboutthebbc/entries/d1624a77-bd3d-48c3-ad42-301f19263364 <comment><AUTHOR> I commented on the BBC website but I might as well post it here too:

As a proud listener, viewer and supporter of the BBC, this is one part that seems really unfortunate. Why should I need an account to listen to BBC content? All the pages on the BBC website that pretend to answer this question are evasive and dodge the question. What do you have to hide?

Please re-consider. Allow your content to be made available via open standards, like some of your podcasts. Let us choose how to consume the content that we fund.

Please let me use whatever device and app I want. I don't use a Google account on my android phone because I value my privacy. That means I can't install the Sounds app. Please let me listen to the BBC without having to have a Google or Apple account.

Please let us listen to radio without being tracked. Trust is already eroded given the evasive wording on your help pages.

Please think of those people in the UK who don't have a post-code (like visitors) or email address (like the elderly).

And please come clean about why you need personal details to listen to the radio.

<comment><USER2> I worked at the BBC when this account requirement was rolled out. The idea behind it is honestly about improving the user experience. If you're logged in, they can keep your progress saved across devices (so for iPlayer that means across platforms like Computer, Phone, Xbox etc), and they can learn more about you to promote recommendations on what to watch. People broadly speaking really like this, it's one of the best features of Netflix as an example.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't doubt the good faith of individual implementors such as yourself. But, like the official BBC communications, you fail to address the _compulsory_ nature.

To draw a very apposite analogy, YouTube on Android requires sign-in for minor functionality. There's no 'back' button and you can't bookmark videos for later. The UX is deliberately crippled unless you sign in: clicked video by mistake? Good luck getting back to the previous one.

This is a choice they made. It's not beyond the whit of an Android app to store bookmarks locally and sync them when you sign-in. Or to maintain a history for a back button.

The ostensible reason is "so you can have a uniform experience across all devices". The real reason is "so we can use your data to shift ads". We all know this, and it's part of the Google value proposition. It's free because they exploit your data.

The BBC is something different altogether. It's partly non-profit, has no shareholders, funded in a unique way, and, without wishing to seem mawkish, something special. Emulating commercial SV companies leaves a very bitter taste in the mouth. That combined with the privileged place it holds in public life, is not a nice combination.

Maybe Netflix has some nice features. Maybe the BBC can adopt them. But if they really are for _my_ benefit, let me opt in, don't make it compulsory.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> > Reach has been growing and only a small proportion of listening is online. > However, we should heed the lessons of other industries and change before we > have to.

I too have been wondering how long podcasts will remain using RSS before being utterly demolished by paid for platforms.

Can you imagine if we had TV content shared over RSS? Actually pirates have distributed content through RSS for a long time and it was a much better UX than anything offered by the big players.

Good on the BBC for thinking ahead and taking difficult steps to protect consumers.

<comment><USER4> _"pirates have distributed content through RSS for a long time and it was a much better UX than anything offered by the big players."_

Perhaps if viewed through a technical/hacker lens. But platforms like Netflix, Spotify, and iPlayer have been successful at attracting (paying!) users precisely because their UX is so much better.

Better than traditional TV boxes, and also better than the pirate world.

<comment><USER5> As long as there is only 1 or 2 platforms, which you have to choose and pay for. If there are too many fish in the see and you have to pay for all of them, people will pay for none of them.

<comment><USER6> This is already a problem in sports, especially football/soccer. Many leagues/competitions are spread out among several streaming services.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Ouch. The comments really hurt to read. I understand the frustration.

The only thing i really need of a podcast is an rss feed. Why make it complicated .

</comment><comment><USER7> How about letting me download the Android app in Europe, thanks.

</comment><comment><USER8> So many words. What does it mean?

</comment><comment><USER9> What does this mean? Will BBC podcasts no longer be free?

</comment><comment><USER10> I love the Radioplayer and to date I can't get my head round Sounds. It just hasn't got the same functionality unless one wants to listen to music. Radio plays, comedies et al are my listening menu. It seems that things are gradually being removed from the iPlayer. I'm old so not important to the new BBC.

<comment><USER11> I'm still a iPlayer Radio user and don't really plan to switch to Sounds anytime soon, due to missing functionality. (I listen to podcasts on the Apple app)

But I haven't seen anything being removed from iPlayer Radio yet.

BTW - you can find non-music stuff in Categories below the fold on the Sounds app - so there's Drama, for example.

No more granular categorisation into Crime, Historical etc - which is a shame

<comment><USER12> Not sure why you're being downvoted. Sounds is utterly terrible. It's really difficult when they push it so much on the radio (ie. minimum 4 times per hour mentioned on radio 6 in the morning. I though, yeah ok then i'll support and give it a go. It's (well, when I tried it a while back) missing casting, an alarm, downloading, and easy way to search and find radio programmes, and a whole heap of other "base" features.

I am genuinely shocked as to why they're pushing it so hard, especially given that the current iplayer radio app is fantastic.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: I built a live Bitcoin price aggregator with multiple indexes - <AUTHOR> http://live.bitcoinindex.es/ <comment><USER2> So, assume I already have Bitcoins on Coinbase and have a verified account to sell them easily. Theoretically, my plan for free money would look like this:

\- Say I have 11 BTC on Coinbase.

Wire $10k to OKPAY ($25 bank fee, 0% OKPAY commission)

Send OKPAY money to BTC-E, $200 fee (2%).

\- Now I have $9,775 on BTC-E.

Within ~1 second of each other, I enter a market order to buy 10.754 BTC on BTC-e for $9,775, and sell 10.754 BTC on Coinbase for $10,488.21 (after their 1% fee).

These are the real market rates at the time of this post (accounting for book depth). I make $488 with no risk other than holding the Bitcoin for awhile, which anyone holding Bitcoin does anyway.

Before I attempt to do this and find out the hard way why it ends up costing me money in the process, could someone please kindly point out the flaw in my plan?

<comment><USER3> Correct, expect arbitrage is risky in illiquid markets. Here your BTC will take a while to get into your wallet after buying them on Coinbase or BTC-e (about 10 days on Coinbase). Your wire transfers will also take a few days to clear. During these wait periods the prices of BTC will be subject to wide swings.

And at last, your arbitrage profit will get severely eaten by the fees of the banks and BTC exchange platforms.

It's never easy to make a profit in an arbitrage scheme (unless you have a crushing competitive advantage such as transaction speed): if it were easy, enough people would use the scheme, bringing the price differences back to a range were turning a profit would be difficult again... so if there are significant price differences between exchanges, it's a signal of arbitrage difficulty.

<comment><USER2> I already have the Bitcoin in Coinbase though, I don't have to wait for anything. It's true that the wire transfer will take time, but the value of the dollar isn't going to change much in that time. If my only risk is the Bitcoin fluctuating in that time, it seems like free money for anyone who is already holding Bitcoin and would already be subject to that risk.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'd love to see this, but also including exchanges across different currencies (e.g. CNY) and normalized.

Kind of like [http://bitcoinaverage.com/](http://bitcoinaverage.com/) does, but with a nice chart like [http://bitcoinindex.es/](http://bitcoinindex.es/).

I suspect the visualized data will be much more interesting, since different local economies behave differently. For example, when BTC was "crashing" yesterday to $850 USD, Chinese trades were still holding well about $1000 USD. Eventually the arbitrage opportunity becomes too big and the gap is closed. Watching this is fascinating.

</comment><comment><USER5> Now that I have a huge stash of bit coins I was thinking of making a service/startup where you could lend out your bit coins to people who would agree to pay you back a slightly higher number of coins in the future. Kind of like a bank but not corrupt and full of banksters like the federal reserve and JP Morgan. Once I have traction I can IPO but instead of sell my shares for cash I would sell them in bit coins.

I think it would have some kind of restful API.

<comment><USER6> Why would anyone want to borrow money in a deflationary currency (Bitcoins) rather than an inflationary one (dollars)?

<comment><USER5> You want to borrow bit coins so that you can improve your business and then pay back the coins with increased profits due to the improvements. Isn't that obvious? I'm not interested in dollars because I don't think they are particularly useful. I convert all my dollars to bit coins whenever I can. Look at the price of bit coin in dollar terms and you'll see everyone else is doing the same thing.

Do you think the API for borrowing a deflationary currency should have a different API than an inflationary one?

<comment><USER7> Your conversion makes sense (USD -> BTC) so long as both mantain the current trend (BTC increasing in value wrt USD). Why? It's like investing in a stock or commodity that's increasing. I invested extra cash in a few stocks, including TSLA, while it was on the rise. This gave me a better ROI than holding USD or investing it in a CD or other low interest rate account.

But as a borrower, deflation blows. If I borrow 100 BTC and the terms of the loan are that I have to pay back 100 BTC + 10 BTC as interest, but the value of BTC has increased by another 10% I'm really paying 21% interest on the loan.

But as a borrower, inflation rocks. If I borrow 100 USD and the terms of the loan are that I have to pay back 100 USD + 10 USD as interest, but the value of USD has decreased by 10% I'm really paying 0% interest on the loan (actually, I might be able to beat inflation and come out ahead).

This goes back to what I mentioned in another thread [1] about buying and selling in either type of currency.

Let me hand wave some things, we'll assume that the real value of an item or ROI is static, and only the nominal value is changing with inflation or deflation.

Inflation: I borrow money to buy an item. I pay interest on the loan, and gain the benefit of having the item today rather than a year later when I would have saved up the cash. Over that year I pay off the loan, but with inflation I may get a discount of sorts on the item. If inflation is 10%, the nominal value is 10% higher the next year. If the interest payment is less than 10% I've saved money. If it's more than 10%, hopefully there was a profit in having the item now rather than later or I lost money.

Deflation: I borrow money to buy an item. I pay interest on the loan, and gain the benefit of having the item today rather than a year later when I would have saved up the cash. Over that year I pay off the loan, but with deflation I have an added cost. If deflation is 10%, the nominal value is 10% lower the next year. If the interest payment is negative ~10%, I've saved money. If it's higher, then hopefully there was a profit in having the item now rather than later or I lost money.

In fact, that matrix is essentially the same. Borrowers win in inflation (or might), while lenders might lose (but it beats leaving the cash under the mattress where it will lose value). Borrowers lose in deflation in most circumstances, while lenders win as long as borrowers don't default too often. Lenders under deflation have to be confident that the expected ROI of their loans will beat the deflation rate, or they might as well leave the cash alone. Lenders under inflation are virtually guaranteed that reasonable loan practices (subprime mortgages being an example of _unreasonable_ loan practices) will be better than sitting on the cash if the economy is otherwise stable.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6811101](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6811101)

<comment><USER7> I realized after reading other posts that I did, in fact, hear a _whoosh_ earlier.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Firstly, that's very cool. Well done!

Secondly, I know hardly anything about bitcoins - but here all I see is an arbitrage opportunity. Buy bitcoins from BTC-e and sell them on MTGox, which seems to be consistently around 150 (I assume USD) different.

Am I missing something here?

<comment><USER9> It is impossible to withdraw USD from MtGox.

<comment><USER10> Excuse my ignorance, but can you elaborate?

<comment><USER11> People have said they're nearly insolvent. They're also being sued I think. So, withdrawing USD from Mt. Gox you're screwed... I waited 3 months and gave, up, converted my dollars into bitcoin and sold it elsewhere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Sorry to break it out, but the plural of index is indices :(

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The server had a blip making me lose about an hour of data, but I was really excited to show it to you.

<comment><USER13> This is pretty cool!

What do you use for a stack?

<comment><AUTHOR> Super small. Node JS/express and flat files for history.

<comment><USER14> I want all time history! But on serious note, if you could dynamically add other "indexes" as well as show other currencies besides USD, that'd also be good. But I'm assuming this is a side project you're just messing with?

<comment><AUTHOR> Master plan: Add many other indexes. Let you choose the one you want. Let you embed it wherever you want. And more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> That's great. I put up a simple autorefresh page at: [http://btcpricenow.com](http://btcpricenow.com) \- still gathering my thoughts on Litecoin. [http://bitcoinwisdom.com/](http://bitcoinwisdom.com/) seems to be best for realtime charting.

</comment><comment><USER16> It'd be great if you could include an overall average of the exchanges and also convert USD into other currencies.

</comment><comment><USER17> V.nice. There's a plethora of applications for good dynamic graphing. I'd suggest adding a time axis.

</comment><comment><USER18> Do you have any data on volume of trades you could add? I'm curious as to how liquid the market is.

</comment><comment><USER19> This is awesome. Where can I donate?

<comment><AUTHOR> Donate here! 1FXxhiSRtEcJ9s6YteTyvV2uk2bvJqR9vC

<comment><USER19> Thanks, grab a couple of good beers :).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Looks good! X and Y axes with price/time ticks would be really useful...

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! To get Y value at least, hover over a series and it'll give you the price at that point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Just an FYI - for some reason the HTTPS Everywhere plugin kills your site.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for letting me know! We don't support https (yet) so that could be why.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Shows a blank page for me or a "Whoops, something went wrong!".

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep. You guys are hugging it to death. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Looks good. Perhaps add BTCChina, and label the horizontal axis?

</comment><comment><USER11> Are you working on re-upping it? I would like to see.

<comment><AUTHOR> You mean a server issue? If re-upping means re-selling the data, send me your ideas. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Looks nice, would like to see cavirtex exchange.

</comment><comment><USER25> Nice, is this on github or similar?</comment>


Congress prioritizing space by creating a U.S. Space Corps military branch - <AUTHOR> https://armedservices.house.gov/news/press-releases/mark-release-subcommittee-strategic-forces <comment><AUTHOR> Proposed Bill - HR 2810

> > [http://docs.house.gov/meetings/AS/AS29/20170622/106134/BILLS...](http://docs.house.gov/meetings/AS/AS29/20170622/106134/BILLS-115HR2810ih.pdf)</comment>


What Would Steve Jobs Say? - <AUTHOR> http://logiccolony.com/2010/01/04/What-Would-Steve-Jobs-Say.html

<comment><USER2> Im guessing he would ask why his name was used as link bait.</comment>


Ask HN: When, if ever, will 128-bit CPUs become mainstream? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> There are actually two different sides to this question.

When people refer to "64-bit" CPUs, generally they're referring to the address space. 64 bits of address space increased the addressable memory by a factor of 2^32 over 32 bit processors. That's a vast increase, and we're nowhere near exhausting it. Even current supercomputers are massively parallel, so individual nodes typically only have a few GB of memory. The largest memory server that I'm aware of uses up to 4 terabytes of memory, so that's a factor of 1024 beyond 32 bit addressing, or 42 bits. That leaves 22 bits of expansion, each one doubling the capacity of the last. I expect that won't be exceeded before 2100 at a minimum.

On the other hand, there's the size of the general-purpose and other registers. That's currently 64 bits also in AMD64 processors (including Intel's). There are, however, specialized vector instructions that currently operate on 256 bits at a time (AVX) and the next generation due in 2015 will operate on 512 bits at a time (AVX-2).

So, on address space the answer is "not anytime soon". On the processing side, the answer is "we're already beyond 128 bits". :-)

<comment><USER3> >The largest memory server that I'm aware of uses up to 4 terabytes of memory

What is that server used for?

<comment><USER2> I was referring to the Oracle servers for large in-memory databases.

They may have new models out, or I wasn't aware of the highest end model...the current high-end model will address 32 terabytes of RAM:

[http://www.oracle.com/us/products/servers- storage/servers/sp...](http://www.oracle.com/us/products/servers- storage/servers/sparc/oracle-sparc/m6-32/overview/index.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> ElectronCharge already gave a good answer, but I would like to add a little extra information. There already exists 64bit only processors, as in they have no 32bit instructions or registers. The reason they didn't take off in the consumer market is because they simply cannot run 32bit programs or any existing consumer operating system. Intel sells these 64bit only machines to labs were they can actually make use of the full memory addressing, as in putting terabytes of data into RAM, and also only need 64bit operations.

The 256bit and 512bit registers and instructions are reserved for specialty hardware, IE graphics cards were you need to do floating point arithmetic.

One more aside, the reason we call 64bit processors AMD64 is because AMD subverted Intel by releasing an architecture which had both 32bit and 64bit instructions, while Intel was creating 64bit only processors.

Also I love this question, because it was the first question I asked in my kernel development class, but the answer I got was "all will be explained in due time"

<comment><USER2> Hi, just FYI the AVX instructions are on Intel CPUs. They're the latest incarnation of SSE basically, and are for scientific, multimedia, and other other FP heavy SIMD amenable problems. I didn't diverge into GPU territory since the question was about 128-bit CPUs.

GPUs are a different avenue to exploit massive FP power, if your problem is sufficiently parallel.</comment></comment>


I like Unicorn (Rack HTTP server) because it's Unix - <AUTHOR> http://tomayko.com/writings/unicorn-is-unix

<comment><USER2> There's a good reason most Ruby and Python projects don't rely heavily on system calls: portability. If you care at all about portability, it's just easier to not hit the system calls directly, otherwise you'll have to detect host OS and make sure you're using the system calls properly.

If threads are "out", then pre-fork is _way out_. Just look at the history of the Apache project. I realize this all happened before the RoR era, but Apache used to use a pre-fork MPM almost exclusively. In more recent years it has added the threaded MPM and the async MPM. They have also put in the work I mentioned above to achieve cross-platform compatibility.

I'm just using Apache as an example here; I'm not suggesting that we should all use Apache. It's just funny to me to see a post that basically says, "All the stuff we've been doing for the last 5 years is _out_. We should be doing the same stuff they were doing _15 years_ ago, but in Ruby this time around instead of C."

Maybe software trends are like music trends? Everything from 5 years ago is lame, but the stuff from 20 years ago is _super groovy, man_.

<comment><USER3> Counter example: nginx, which uses fork(), and seems to smoke Apache while offering features like binary reloading without dropping connections (not sure if Apache supports this but I seem to remember no - please correct me if I'm wrong).

Portability is not always necessary - when talking about fork() and friends you're talking about trade offs.

When I'm only ever deploying to Unix environments, I accept the lack of portability in exchange for features I value.

<comment><USER2> That's not really a counter example. nginx does indeed fork off child processes, but it uses async I/O in each child process. It doesn't use the traditional pre-fork process-per-connection model that Apache's pre-fork MPM uses or that Unicorn is using.

<comment><USER3> nginx relies heavily on system calls at the expense of portability.

<comment><USER4> Hello!? nginx is a POSIX network application written in C. Of course it uses syscalls. As the previous poster pointed out you are also wrong in that nginx uses anything like a prefork model. It _may_ fork of a process or more if it detect that it is running on a SMP system to take advantage more than one CPU. But each process has a strictly async io architecture handling request/responses within a big loop.

<comment><USER5> The _point_ of the post you are responding to is that it uses syscalls. I'm not entirely certain what about that warrants a "!?"; could you enlighten me?

<comment><USER4> The '!?' was aimed at Mr. defunkt who said that

       nginx relies heavily on system calls at the expense of portability

Its a oxymoron as you cannot expect a C application that mostly do network and disk i/o not to use syscalls. That said, the author of nginx does an admirable job of reducing the numbers of syscalls and make the application as efficient as possible. In this context a syscall i.e. a kernel call is heavy and something one want to minimize.

The blog post on the other hand was talking about using syscalls from _Ruby_. I can understand Ruby programmers who wrinkle their nose at this. If you want your Ruby application to be portable then using, for instance, fork is not the best idea. In fact, programing anything long lived such as a server in Ruby is not the best idea. The GC in 1.8.x leaks memory over time and it is a common case that Ruby servers has to be restarted often as they consume all memory on the machine they run on. Adding fork on top of this is bad. A fork will copy the whole Ruby interpreter into the new process and you will end up with a lot of top-heavy processes - not a good idea unless you sell RAM. Basically, using Ruby as a systems programming language and for applications that are long lived is a bad idea.

<comment><USER6> Nonsense. My multitudes of small web services, many of which have been running months without a restart and while taking up no more memory than they did at the start say you're wrong. Even if there are some obscure bugs, and there undoubtedly are, that doesn't make ruby an unsuitable language for systems programming.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This book (<http://www.unpbook.com>) and this book (<http://www.kohala.com/start/apue.html>) are both very good. Not to mention keeping abreast of new stuff in the Linux Kernel at <http://www.lwn.net> or <http://kernelnewbies.org/LinuxChanges>.

As productive as dynamic languages make us, I think we sometimes forget that this is all typically built on Linux/C, and that's not changing anytime soon. A _good_ hacker should at least have a basic knowledge of what's under the hood.

<comment><USER8> > [...] and this book (<http://www.kohala.com/start/apue.html>)

> are both very good.

this refers to the first edition of APUE - there is also a very good (IMHO) second edition co-authored by S. Rago (a former collegue of W. Richard Stevens):

<http://apuebook.com/>

(first edition: 1992, second edition: 2005)

The second edition mainly adds better coverage of POSIX (much of which was developed after the first edition was published) and current UNIX variants (Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, MacOS X) while leaving out obsolete stuff.

<comment><USER7> Thanks! Rago is the copy I actually have on my bookshelf, didn't notice the site I linked was only the first edition. Guess with Steven's unfortunate passing they made a new site.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> fork() in Ruby would be much better if MRI's garbage collector wasn't so awful -- because it marks every reachable object in each collection cycle, it's impossible for MRI processes to take advantage of the kernel's copy-on-write memory sharing post-fork. You can't even just let the processes gobble up space and let the kernel's VM sort it out -- anything that gets swapped out will have to be paged back in to be marked by the GC. _Churn._

<comment><USER10> almost all GCs are awful

<comment><USER11> _almost all GCs are awful_

 _Wrong_ \-- almost all of the _most visible_ GCs in the most popular languages are either 1) still awful or 2) were formerly awful for such a long time, they're still living it down.

It's a vicious cycle.

        - GCs have a bad rep.
        - Precocious programmer implementes their own dynamic language.
        - They settle for Mark/Sweep or ref counts to "get it done"
           (Hey, GCs are all awful anyhow, yeah?)
        - Many people experience the awfulness.
        - GCs have a bad rep -- REPEAT

Chicken & egg? GCs were bad. Experts have since figured out how to make them good. The programmer culture in general is slowly getting this knowledge by diffusion.

The VisualWorks GC is so good, as a lark, I once put an infinite loop into the app I was working on that did nothing but instantiate new objects. I could barely tell it was there!

<comment><USER10> so the 'almost all' in my above is wrong? you basically said what I said, but with your favorite smalltalk GC.

<comment><USER11> Yes, the GCs you've heard of constitutes an encyclopedic listing of them. </sarcasm>

Hmmm, you just gave me an idea. Interview question to see if prospect _knows what he doesn't know_. Does she/he even have the order of magnitude right on that?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm sorry I'm coming to this with the thread dead. I was on a boat for a team- building offsite most of yesterday.

People also overlook the great benefit of fork(2) for static languages: it's like GC for your address space. In a long-enough-lived multi-threaded C/C++ program, heap fragmentation will eventually eat you just as badly as a memory leak would have. Since there's no GC to compact the heap, the only real solution for memory-intensive servers is scheduled restarts.

A good, old-fashioned fork(2) resets the address space to a known-ok state; after the client connection is done with, whatever fragmentation the request has introduced disappears with its container process. The canonical, ancient structure of UNIX servers (fork after accept) was what enabled those servers to stay up for months and years at a time, but very few people made that connection. When processes were the only concurrency primitive available, we saw only their costs, and assumed threads would be better, since their costs were lower. In some ways, processes were the devil we knew, and threads an unfamiliar devil; in addition to all the usual complaints (e.g., about how hard it is to synchronize), threads mean that the global heap lives forever.

</comment><comment><USER9> Jakob Kaplan-Moss thought it'd be an interesting exercise to port Ryan's code to Python: <http://jacobian.org/writing/python-is-unix/>

</comment><comment><USER13> _Threads are out. You can use processes, or async/events, or both processes and async/events, but definitely not threads. Threads are out._

Can anyone expound on this? Because the author certainly doesn't.

<comment><USER14> It's not clear whether he's saying that threads are bad in Ruby, which is true because of the GIL, or that threads are bad in general, which is just unfounded bashing.

<comment><USER15> > which is just unfounded bashing.

i'm always surprised to hear things like this. it's certainly not unfounded - it's just so obvious and universally accepted that it doesn't require explanation - one would think.

<comment><USER13> I think it may be obvious to people with a c/++ background, but when I was in school in the early 2000's, they taught you concurrent programming in Java via threads.

And the concurrency primitives and frameworks in languages like Java and C# are so easy to use there's a whole generation of us who think that threading is the easy way to do concurrency.

<comment><USER16> threading is not easy in java. Check out <http://www.javaconcurrencyinpractice.com/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The master has passed away, but here is the real deal (tm) in Unix:

<http://www.kohala.com/start/>

There is nothing more I can say -- I am so in awe...

</comment><comment><USER10> When I read stuff like this, I should go... Yay, they are back on the path. However, I'm stuck on the... why are they even off the path in the first place? Why should rediscovery of processes and the 'select' call be news?

... I should just write a big blog post about this ... (which I'll never do... to busy working :-)

</comment><comment><USER18> I don't know much about Ruby or 'threads vs processes', but his blog sure is refreshing and simple!

<comment><USER19> At least last time I checked, he was running a custom written blog engine that several of us in #sinatra made a bit more generic. It's probably been heavily modified or even replaced since then. Link: <http://github.com/rtomayko/wink>

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> That's fine and dandy, but when I want to use your libraries with JRuby or MacRuby, I'm SOL. I kind of like the portability of avoiding fork() and exec() for those reasons.

<comment><USER21> Well, it's a Rack web server. Just use one that works on those, problem solved. That's the whole point of Rack.

<comment><USER20> Point taken. In the general case, though, (i.e. we're talking about more than Rack awesomeness) I think it's important that people keep this in the back of their minds. I was burned on this recently with the use of the Daemon Kit gem in a project.

It's definitely a "do-better" on my part to more closely examine the libs I'm working with, but as an author in a language wherein numerous OSes and implementations of the interpreter are used, it's something to keep in the back of your mind as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Why didn't they use Twisted?

<comment><USER23> Good question, may be even build on Tornado, though it seems that Unicorn is written in Ruby.</comment></comment>


Renaissance Builder Leon Battista Alberti: Mr. Humanismus (2000) - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/books/00/12/03/reviews/001203.03bouchet.html <comment><AUTHOR> From his bio, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_Battista_Alberti](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_Battista_Alberti)

 _" Alberti (1404 – 1472) was an Italian humanist author, artist, architect, poet, priest, linguist, philosopher and cryptographer; he epitomised the Renaissance Man .... Cryptography historian David Kahn titles him the "Father of Western Cryptography" .. "the earliest Western exposition of cryptanalysis, the invention of polyalphabetic substitution, and the invention of enciphered code."_

From the article:

 _"..his treatise on painting and his later magnum opus on architecture .. have proved his most enduring works .. this revolution ''radically changed both the social structures that created buildings and works of art and the products that resulted.'' ... Alberti expounded a methodology for artists akin to the preparation of an oration and thereby laid the foundations for what became the academic tradition in art down to the 19th century..

..Alberti determined to become an engineer like Brunelleschi and observes that the word engineer derives from the Latin ingenium, or brilliance of intellect, as well as ingenia, the weapons or devices that an engineer created..

..The picture that emerges here is of a scholar-actor, subtle and labile, who marshalled his knowledge of antiquity and his creative talents to forge a new role for himself as adviser to artists and power brokers alike."_</comment>


First live musical session between Earth and ISS - <AUTHOR> https://cdm.link/2018/07/watch-kraftwerk-jam-with-the-iss-and-esa-astronaut-alexander-gerst/ <comment><AUTHOR> Provides some of the background info on how they made this happen, surprised it hasn't been done before or maybe it has?</comment>


Cloud-based monitoring for scripts, jobs, apps and batches - <AUTHOR> http://www.pushmon.com/cms/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi. We're releasing a free, cloud-based monitoring solution for scripts, scheduled jobs and batches. PushMon is unique since existing hosted monitoring solutions check public facing services. It instead waits for URL "pings" and if the URL is not called on schedule, an alert will be sent. Say you have a database backup script that runs every 5 AM in the morning. If the backup script runs successfully, let it call the PushMon URL. If the URL doesn't get called because cron doesn't run properly or if the script fails, an alert will be sent by 6 AM. We're wondering what you guys think. Feedback much appreciated. Thanks!

<comment><AUTHOR> You can use the invite code "HackerNews_tp".</comment></comment>


WWDC 2016 Platforms State of the Union - <AUTHOR> https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2016/102/ <comment><AUTHOR> If you're not in Safari or don't have the App, you can get the video in HD here: [http://devstreaming.apple.com/videos/wwdc/2016/102w0bsn0ge83...](http://devstreaming.apple.com/videos/wwdc/2016/102w0bsn0ge83qfv7za/102/102_hd_platforms_state_of_the_union.mp4) and SD here: [http://devstreaming.apple.com/videos/wwdc/2016/102w0bsn0ge83...](http://devstreaming.apple.com/videos/wwdc/2016/102w0bsn0ge83qfv7za/102/102_sd_platforms_state_of_the_union.mp4)</comment>


Pentagramma mirificum - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagramma_mirificum <comment><USER2> Pentagramma is also a genus of ferns. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagramma](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagramma)

<comment><AUTHOR> Curiously, Gauss's pentagramma is properly a neuter noun while the ferns are feminine, either by mistake or inheriting the gender from filix (fern).</comment></comment>


Low Level Programming of the Raspberry Pi in C (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://www.pieter-jan.com/node/15 <comment><USER2> If you need a little bit more determinism the beaglebone has a PRU (programmable realtime unit), a separate processor that can pass data back and forth to the main RAM.

[http://beagleboard.org/pru](http://beagleboard.org/pru)

I was able to use one to read in an 8 bit parallel bus at around 8MHz without having to build a separate board with appropriate MCU.

<comment><USER3> Had a quick scroll through the docs there, thanks for the link! One thing that's not clear to me is the degree to which the PRU has register-controller peripheral modules like an MCU, or are you essentially bit-banging everything (which definitely has its appeal after the hours you can spend wrangling with the stupid timers and DMAs on a CM3).

How is the community? Are there ready to go modules for common tasks like actively rectified H-bridge control, CANbus control, etc? (I know the processor itself can do CAN too, but say I have a hard realtime requirement on my CAN network...)

<comment><USER2> It is basically a raw MCU without any peripherals. I think the main purpose is so you can implement just about any basic peripheral and novel ideas in code, so it is essentially a bit bang but like most MCUs you can read/set an entire IO bank in one go. Since it is separate and basically deterministic except for some ram latency jitter whatever you implement that works should be as solid as any purpose built peripheral. It takes some assembly though. It is absolutely great for basic IO stuff that an arduino class MCU could do where the bandwidth is too high for dealing with the GPIOs with standard linux scheduler latency.

I played with it a couple years ago and the community appeared small, but it is straight forward enough that the examples and docs are likely all you need. I bet the community is stronger but it isn't going to be on stack exchange.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, they are excellent for bit-banging protocols, which is really handy if you come across some weird digital interface. I've used it for interfacing with a scanner head, which is a fairly quirky parallel interface.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Sure it's low level in that you're poking at physical memory registers, but to me, low level in this context (thinking microcontrollers) means replacing the Linux kernel binary with your own application that does its own direct memory poking.

<comment><USER6> Low level: directly accessing hardware. To immediately equate low level with 'you need to roll your own kernel' is a redefinition of terms that makes no sense to me. After all, even a Linux device driver still makes use of all the facilities the kernel provides and yet it is _definitely_ low level programming.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> There used to be one in Rust but it seems that this year it reverted back to C.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/7pymd9/stanford_cs140...](https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/7pymd9/stanford_cs140e_operating_systems_writing_a/)

</comment><comment><USER8> Check out ultibo.org It is Pascal, not C, but runs down on bare metal.

</comment><comment><USER9> Is there a Raspberry PI emulator that exists that I could test my code on before attempting to load it onto the device?

<comment><USER10> I use the pre-built image from Azeria Labs. It's a Linux VM with QEMU set up for Pi/Raspian out of the box.

[https://azeria-labs.com/arm-lab-vm/](https://azeria-labs.com/arm-lab-vm/)

<comment><USER11> Those instructions are not using QEMU to emulate the Pi. They tell QEMU to emulate an entirely different piece of hardware (the versatilepb board) and run the raspbian userspace on it. You certainly won't be able to test any code for the Pi that directly accesses the hardware like that. (QEMU does have some limited real rpi emulation support, but those instructions don't use it.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Is this the kind of thing that might be good for a kid (9) to learn as a first step into real CS?

</comment><comment><USER13> Very cool! Has anyone seen a Rust equivalent of something like this?

<comment><USER14> I came across this [1] a while ago. I haven't spent any time reading it yet so I can't exactly recommend it, but it seems pretty good.

[1] [https://github.com/rust-embedded/rust-raspi3-OS- tutorials](https://github.com/rust-embedded/rust-raspi3-OS-tutorials)</comment></comment>


Russia has weaponized the American press - <AUTHOR> http://www.vox.com/world/2016/10/17/13245200/russia-wikileaks-american-press-democracy <comment><AUTHOR> Is there any evidence of this? or is it just US election time</comment>


Windows Solitaire Inducted into the World Video Game Hall of Fame - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/05/windows-solitaire-inducted-into-the-world-video-game-hall-of-fame/ <comment><USER2> The artwork on the cards was drawn by Susan Kare, a legend in the industry starting with her work on the original Macintosh.

[https://www.aiga.org/medalist-susan-kare](https://www.aiga.org/medalist- susan-kare)

You can buy a set of playing cards with her art on them.

[https://www.areaware.com/products/solitaire- cards?variant=14...](https://www.areaware.com/products/solitaire- cards?variant=14622412804)</comment>


PayPal has a smart new homepage - <AUTHOR> https://www.paypal.com/uk/webapps/mpp/home

<comment><USER2> Having just completed a Paypal integration for a Backbone.js app (my.jetbets.us), I can pretty confidently say that what Paypal needs is a much better-documented API to interface with a dramatically simpler set of products/pricing plans.

There are like three ways to do everything with Paypal, but it is never clear which of those ways works with the plan you are on, or which of these ways would be "best" or "simplest" or "cheapest," or even why they are different.

The "Square"-ified home page looks nice but my god they make it hard to use their product.

<comment><AUTHOR> I really agree. I'm using paypal at quicklytest.it at the moment and there are 3x ways to handle the subscriptions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It's like what people have been saying for years...

PayPal, three things you need to work on: customer service around people's money, better api docs, and above all, a brand new homepage

</comment><comment><USER4> Shame it now replaces the + in my email address with a space when storing/retrieving it from a cookie.</comment>


As Tiangong 1 heads to earth – here is the top 50 big_reentries.txt - <AUTHOR> http://planet4589.org/space/misc/big_reentries.txt <comment><USER2> I'm surprised that Columbia (just the orbiter by itself) was 40% heavier than Skylab.</comment>


A Link to the Shadow Inc. App That Blew Up the Iowa Caucus - <AUTHOR> https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/z3b3g9/here-is-a-link-to-the-shadow-inc-app-that-blew-up-the-iowa-caucus <comment><USER2> Security experts also decompiled the app: [https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/3a8ajj/an-off-the- shelf-s...](https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/3a8ajj/an-off-the-shelf- skeleton-project-experts-analyze-the-app-that-broke-iowa)

<comment><USER3> Thanks. As basic (and utterly unnecessary/counterproductive) as this app (client) is, it looks like the real villain is the server side.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Ob: [https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_Ref...](https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_ReflectionsonTrustingTrust.pdf)

E voting shouldn't exist. How badly it was implemented is moot.

<comment><USER4> This isn't e-voting. The job of this software was to accomplish basically the same thing as emailing some numbers to headquarters and entering them into a spreadsheet. Precinct officials reporting their results can (and should) check that the results they reported are the same results received at the state level. You can see from the results that have been made public [0] that the precinct numbers are very easy to check by hand, and the math to combine the results can and should be independently checked by, say, copy-pasting the numbers into an Excel spreadsheet. No trust required, none of the complications involved in recording and verifying individual private ballots.

Even if the software was compromised, the incorrect numbers would be detected by independent checks — the same checks you have to do anyway to guard against data entry errors and typos in Excel formulas — and the correct results could still be calculated. There was no way a hack could have done anything worse than delay the release of the results, leak the results prematurely, or possibly induce the party to release some manipulated initial results if they were careless enough not to do any internal verification before releasing the results to public scrutiny.

Everything involved in running an election can be done poorly. If we unconditionally rail against software being used at all, then sure, we can show off our clean hands when something goes wrong. But we accomplish nothing to stop someone who doesn't know better from hiring a contractor who, like in this case, doesn't do the job responsibly.

This software should exist. It should be subjected to an independent security audit, thoroughly tested, supplemented with user training, and trusted only if the results are independently verified at every step. Which is to say, not really trusted. But it should exist.

[0] [https://results.thecaucuses.org/](https://results.thecaucuses.org/)

<comment><USER5> It's electronic voting. "Votes in transit" (Scott 2019):

Why Electronic Voting Is Still A Bad Idea: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs)

It's also a standard incrementalism tatic.

<comment><USER4> These are not votes. These are public tallies that can be verified by anyone who was present at the precincts.

> It's also a standard incrementalism tatic

This assumes the public is smart enough to make an informed distinction now but will lose that ability in the future.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The amount of code, libraries, and resources needed to make this glorified calculator on a "smartphone" is truly overwhelming.

Could literally do the same thing extremely well with an ncurses program and a damn ssh link back to home.

Could literally have done the same thing with Google docs.

But no it's gotta be an app so Susan can use her smartphone. This is an official event, not an ad hoc conversation during soccer practice. Yet, apparently no one could setup a small desktop or a laptop to handle a singularly simple task and do it well.

Instead, social onus and seemingly common wisdom says everything must be a fancy looking app, and proceeds to throw 60k down the drain to accomplish nothing.

I'm impressed.

</comment><comment><USER7> The link to the APK is in the last paragraph of the article.</comment>


Ask HN: Best OS for a slow netbook? - <AUTHOR> I have an Acer Aspire One 722-C6Ckk, which has 4GB of RAM, AMD C-60 APU at 1 GHz (apparently it's dual core but I actually think it's a single core with multi threading, but with "modules" instead of threads, as AMD used to do earlier).
It's from 2012. It's HDD died so I put in an SD to CF and then a CF to SATA adapter and put in a 32GB UHS-1 SD card and I upgraded it's battery to 6 cells and put in a new keyboard (but white because it was cheaper) since the old one wore out too much and keys popped off, and it seems like a nice computer, but IT'S SO SLOW!
Windows 10 is unbearable, Windows 7 is also very slow, Starter edition used to be better but it only supports 2GB of RAM and I have 4GB so it seems like a waste. It only works acceptably on old Linuxes like Ubuntu 10.04 or 12.04 but not anything newer, even with 14.04 it's too slow. [tried with xfce and lxde, unity won't even run properly on it]
With Windows XP is nice and fast but that OS is so ancient I don't wanna touch it with a 5 meter stick let alone run it on a laptop.
By slowness I mean it takes long to load websites in Firefox, it takes long to boot, scrolling is unresponsive, etc., I used to use Zorin OS Lite when it was so lightweight but that was 6 years ago, nowdays it's much heavier and slower.
I wish there was a Linux like Windows XP, not in looks but in speed. Something old but supported... I'm currently installing Ubuntu Server 64bit on it and will try to install some openbox GUI or something, but I don't have high hopes...
My ultimate plan is to give this laptop to my dad, but I simply cannot give him something so slow I cringe every time I have to boot it up.
Is there anything I don't know, or has this world just abandoned all old hardware, and nowdays you need a Core i5 and 16GB of RAM just to run Windows 10 and Chrome... ? <comment><USER2> As mentioned by others lubuntu and xubuntu are fairly lightweight and I've used ubuntu variants on netbooks in the past and where reasonably fast. From ubuntu server you should be able to install the different desktops anyway, but seems a slightly harder route! Saying that look to the browser, chrome tends to be memory hungry, due to multiple processes, and firefox is heading (headed?) that way, which tends to be bad on limited resource computers. I'm finding firefox slow on my old laptop now. There are some other views here [http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/5-lightweight-linux-distros- ide...](http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/5-lightweight-linux-distros-ideal-intel- atom-processor-pc/)

</comment><comment><USER3> > It's HDD died so I put in an SD to CF and then a CF to SATA adapter and put > in a 32GB UHS-1 SD card

Seems like there's a chance the SD->CF->SATA adaptor might be slowing things down? Cheap, low capacity SSDs can be had on Amazon for chump change...

</comment><comment><USER4> Any GNU/Linux distro with a lightweight WM/DE will do.

I'm using Arch Linux with i3 on a dual core with 2GB of RAM and it works like a charm.

I even dual boot Ubuntu on this machine and have no issues.

</comment><comment><USER5> You can look into Arch Linux, it's super light-weight and should be all you need!

</comment><comment><USER6> >I wish there was a Linux like Windows XP, not in looks but in speed

I've never tried it out, but have you looked into reactOS?

[https://reactos.org](https://reactos.org)

<comment><AUTHOR> I have, but that is a terrible idea for a laptop, because it has no driver support so the battery would last less than an hour instead of the 6 hours it does with windows 7.

[https://reactos.org/wiki/Supported_Hardware/Video_cards](https://reactos.org/wiki/Supported_Hardware/Video_cards)

(Look for Radeon HD 6290)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I recommend Tiny Core Linux and neverware. Neverware might not work on your laptop though because support isn't always very good. I have run TCL on desktops with MBs of ram.

</comment><comment><USER8> Xubuntu is probably your best bet for weight:usability ratio. Also look into lighterweight firefox alternatives as it has added a lot of bulk over the years.

</comment><comment><USER9> You can take a look at LXLE and Lubuntu. Both are lightweight and are intended to have low resource system requirements

</comment><comment><USER10> Your best option is to get some money and buy a better laptop.</comment>


Chicago Yellow Cab company files for bankruptcy after $26M verdict - <AUTHOR> http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/chi-yellow-cab-files-for-bankruptcy-hours-after-jury-awards-26m-verdict-20150318-story.html

<comment><USER2> One of the ironies of people complaining about Uber's regulatory arbitrage (which I've done at length myself), is that it ignores that cab companies are masters at it. They're set up as highly undercapitalized corporations that don't have the assets to pay any significant judgment. In some cases, individual cabs are set up as legal entities such that liability is limited to the cab itself plus the minimum insurance policy.</comment>


Building a data warehouse with MySQL and Perl - <AUTHOR> http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/databases/2007/04/12/building-a-data-warehouse-with-mysql-and-perl.html <comment><USER2> When I think of a data warehouse, I think of a huuuuuge database to rule all databases. This sounds more just like one big database.

(I used to be a mini-DBA at SBC, which reportedly had the 2nd largest commercial data warehouse in the world. Wal-Mart is #1.)</comment>