Fukushima's surfers riding on radioactive waves - <AUTHOR> https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/inpictures/2016/08/fukushima-surfers-riding-radioactive-waves-160826095748798.html <comment><USER2> That's pretty rad.

<comment><USER3> Nice :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's not difficult to get a Geiger detector and measure the radiation level in the water, and compare it with the radiation level of water far away. IIRC the additional radiation level is tiny.

Moreover, water is a good radiation shield, so you don't get the radiation from the whole sea, but the radiation from the nearby water. See [https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/](https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/)

[I'd recommend not drinking the water there, just in case there is some isotope that may accumulate. But I'd prefer to get a good analysis of this part before being to worried.]

<comment><USER5> Here's a map of Japan's radioactivity [0]. For those unfamiliar 1 Sv (Sievert) of _ionizing radiation_ equates to a 5.5% chance increase of eventually developing cancer. It is also the maximum allowed dosage to NASA astronauts over their career.

Radiation dosages are also difficult to calculate and Sv's have a weighting factor for where the radiation is taken in. The Wikipedia article [1] has a decent introduction to how the unit works, but you should really consult a higher grade text.

[0] [https://jciv.iidj.net/map/](https://jciv.iidj.net/map/)

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

<comment><USER6> For those also unfamiliar, a nano Sievert is one billonth a regular Schedule, and a reading of 8500 nSv/h, or 8.5 µSv/h, would take 4860 days of constant 24 hour exposure, or a bit over 13 years, to reach a single Sv of radiation exposure. 8.5 µSv is also equivalent to 85 bananas, or 1/5th the exposure of flying from NY to LA.

Mind your units.

<comment><USER7> Here's the visual!

[https://xkcd.com/radiation/](https://xkcd.com/radiation/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm always amazed at how little attention the Fukushima disaster gets.

<comment><USER9> It got a huge amount of attention at the time. The situation there seems stable now though, I'm not sure what's left to report?

<comment><USER5> I'd argue that it even still gets a fair amount of attention. There's a post on HN at least every 6mo, if not more often.</comment></comment></comment>


HTML5 terminal/SSH client goes 1.0 with Quake-style demo (press ESC on any page) - <AUTHOR> http://liftoffsoftware.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> Full disclosure: I'm the man behind Gate One and Liftoff Software. I'll be watching this thread to answer anyone's questions.

</comment><comment><USER2> your logo looks very similar to my friends record label - <http://www.velocityrecords.com/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Hah, interesting. Fortunately we serve different markets so there shouldn't be any conflict there.

For reference, to make the Liftoff Software logo I just used the Unicode airplane symbol, skewed it a bit, then drew that curved tail on the end of it. It was meant to look like a bit of clip art I remember from ages ago that was for an imaginary travel company.

Once I had the figure drawn I tilted it slightly so it would look a bit like a smiling Pac Man. It took me about an hour and I think it turned out alright. The primary motivating factor for the design was to make something that was easy to scale down into a favicon.

<comment><USER2> Yeah I'm sure its all good. I just thought it was funny. I love your product though. Such a great idea. Planning for favicon is always good too :)</comment></comment></comment>


Importance of "working out" math in school for a programmer - <AUTHOR> I have lately notices my interest in algorithmic computing and a solved a couple of Project Euler problems but, this brought down my interest in actually working out math in school. My question always is when a computer can do it so fast why are you making me do it ? This is demotivating me and I want to know how far am I correct. Bringing up the logic s fine but add, subtract huge - ass floating digits ? Is it worth it ? <comment><USER2> If you work it out you know it in your bones, if you know how to push the buttons you know how to push the buttons. The neurons you need to make the calculations can be applied to other situations, if you don't have that pattern in your head because you only ever pushed the button then you can never use that pattern any where else.

I'm speaking as one of those kids who could always do maths and that's how I do it, maybe there's another way but a lot of people I've spoken to who is the same agrees, with some exceptions. I view it as a skyscraper each level of learning requires the underneath level to be solid, if each level is a little wonky, then as you get higher and higher it can all come crashing down. Once you know how though,and have worked through the problems a few times, then use the calculator by all means.

An example: addition is commutative, if you know your sums, then this is pretty obvious, so when you do group theory, commutation is obvious, because you know 1+2 = 2+1, and you wonder why this is an issue, if you don't know you're addition tables then commutation is a strange thing, you can see it's something thats useful but why's it a big deal. Same with the identity element, then you can move onto rings and fields with the same level of understanding. If you don't know the basics in your bones then each of these concepts gets a little more rubbery.

Edit: or maybe look at it this way - if you're a writer and don't know the rules of grammar in your bones you'd be a lesser writer than some who does. Why would maths be any different?

</comment><comment><USER3> If the exercise is demotivating there are two potentially useful things that can be gained. First, it is an opportunity to practice a discipline around doing the grunt work necessary for expert practice. The second is that doing that grunt work may be too high a price to pay for expertise in a particular field (i.e. that the field is not for you).

From my personal life, at one point I thought I wanted to be a chemist. I loved the theory to the point that I _enjoyed_ reading the organic chemistry text book. But I also had to take analytic chemistry which was five credit hours and two days of lab a week and I only got a D by setting the curve on the written final...and the way I did that was by reading the analytic chemistry textbook cover to cover in the three preceding days, I had long since stopped going to lab.

In retrospect (retrospect at the time), I realized that I had always hated science lab. The reason I hated it was because science labs are designed around getting the correct answer that is already known...i.e. the teacher wrote down the composition of the unknown beforehand. [1]

Later having spent time in creative studio environments, I can rule out that my dislike was from the shared space. What I love about studio environments is people are being creative and feeding off of each other. Sure it's competitive, but the competition belongs to the players and wowing and being wowed by one's peers is different from the rote exercise that is an undergraduate science lab.

So I never became a chemist and that's because I never really had a personality for a career as a scientist. It's almost certainly a good thing for me that I did not. Which does not mean that is the case for everyone.

Anyway, the two things are not orthogonal. A person can strive to develop grunt work discipline in a field in which they have no interest in pursuing further. The discipline has value because even my neighbor the painter gets up some mornings and paints paintings to sell because, you know, it's money.

Good luck.

[1]: Looking at it now, it seems absurd that the standard practice involves keeping knowledge secret.

</comment><comment><USER4> I worked as an embedded developer for many years and I hid the fact that I struggled terribly in maths and had in fact had failed higher level courses several times.

I've felt for the better part of three decades that my colleagues who were proficient in maths had superior capabilities and this has always been reflected in disparities in pay and promotion.

I took early retirement and returned to uni to learn something new... After all these years I'm still struggling with maths but if there is one thing I've learned with near certainty is that the learning process all but demands working out all the maths with pen & paper. I think it's just part of the way the human brain works.

</comment><comment><USER5> * Working something out step-by-step always helped me remember the logic behind algorithms.

* I have also learned along the way that the math that I took time to work out stayed on in my memory for longer.

* Sometimes, the beauty of the algorithm is in the details.

* By repeating a certain exercise for different numbers, I have come upon special cases of the problem that enhanced my understanding of the problem.

</comment><comment><USER6> I think it all depends on what sort of programming you want to do. I do a lot of internal web development for a business. Math is rarely used beyond the basics. Algorithms and such just aren't needed. Problem solving and applying logic to an problem/project is... but the high-end maths? Nope.

So... decide what sort of work you want to do, and plan accordingly.

</comment><comment><USER7> Project Euler is like weightlifting for your brain. And don't think that computer is so fats that you just bruteforce the answer. Some problems are computationally expensive so naive solution will take you too much time and you will need to think about more clever solution.</comment>


Atlassian just broke Sourcetree Mac and Windows with 2 updates - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&vertical=default&q=sourcetree <comment><USER2> Yeah, it's a bit of a mess, the team are looking into fixes. In the meantime it appears a downgrade is a reasonable workaround. Links to known-good versions:

[http://downloads.atlassian.com/software/sourcetree/SourceTre...](http://downloads.atlassian.com/software/sourcetree/SourceTree_2.1.dmg)

[https://downloads.atlassian.com/software/sourcetree/windows/...](https://downloads.atlassian.com/software/sourcetree/windows/SourceTreeSetup_18.104.22.168509.exe)

(Disclaimer; I'm Atlassian employee, although not on Sourcetree so I don't have any special insight.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks.

The team now acknowledged the problems on Twitter and is said to be working on fixes: [https://twitter.com/sourcetree/status/699624992003244033](https://twitter.com/sourcetree/status/699624992003244033)

("Funny" that this is the first public mention of @sourctree of any update - nothing on the blog, Twitter feed...)

<comment><USER3> We launched the beta to get feedback before officially posting the blog, tweets, etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> Beta? I upgraded from one of these normal popups that come when I start the app. When I do "Help" -> "Check for Updates" it still offers me 1.8.1 without any beta label. Am I overlooking something?

<comment><USER4> I think they mean "we launched the beta" and then made it the stable release not that you're on the beta channel</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Who Gives a Crap donates $6m to water charity - Pete-Codes https://www.smartcompany.com.au/coronavirus/who-gives-a-crap-covid-19-chairy-donation/ <comment> tony-allan Well done guys! We need more companies like Who Gives a Crap to inspire us all.</comment>


Tesla just killed one of the biggest benefits for customers - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-to-begin-charging-for-superchargers-2016-11 <comment><USER2> Yeah very sensational headline noticed how it starts with "Tesla just killed". That's certainly not one of it's biggest benefits since you were already limited on how frequently you could use the chargers (you weren't able to use them all the time for regular charging, only meant for large trips or when far from home area. So the amount of extra you will have to pay not/how much you saved, will be negligible compared to how much the cars cost. So while it's a neat feature certainly not a big deal and of course wouldn't be practical to continue offering it forever as they grow, yet they are still giving another 1K for free per year which will cover the majority of people who have that years big road trip.

<comment><USER3> > you weren't able to use them all the time for regular charging

But that in itself was a reduction from the original position, as of 2014:

 _How often can I Supercharge? Is it bad for my battery?

Supercharging does not alter the new vehicle warranty. Customers are free to use the network as much as they like._

Which was diluted in late 2015, with letters being sent to 'excessive' users, and now for 2017 with limits to inclusive usage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Actual announcement: [https://www.tesla.com/blog/update-our-supercharging- program](https://www.tesla.com/blog/update-our-supercharging-program)

And relevant section:

> For Teslas ordered after January 1, 2017, 400 kWh of free Supercharging > credits (roughly 1,000 miles) will be included annually so that all owners > can continue to enjoy free Supercharging during travel. Beyond that, there > will be a small fee to Supercharge which will be charged incrementally and > cost less than the price of filling up a comparable gas car. All cars will > continue to come standard with the onboard hardware required for > Supercharging.

</comment><comment><USER5> Haha wow look at this sensationalist headline. The blog post they wrote actually frames it pretty generously! Did anyone expect this to last forever?

Maybe I'm biased though because I ordered mine before the cutoff date :D</comment>


Long Bets by Confidence Level - <AUTHOR> https://www.jefftk.com/p/long-bets-by-confidence-level <comment><USER2> Hi! I wrote the original software for Long Bets some years ago. I can't speak officially about the project, as I was just a coder. But maybe my take here is useful.

I enjoyed the article, and think the analysis is correct as far as it goes. If your goal is to donate maximum dollars in the future, a Long Bet may not be your best choice. I just think that's rarely the goal.

The main issue here is that nobody does a Long Bet so that their charity gets more money eventually. The Long Now's mission is to promote long-term thinking. Long Bets in specific promotes clarity and accountability via carefully-stated long-term predictions and bets.[1] Take, for example, Bet id 362: [http://longbets.org/362/](http://longbets.org/362/)

St. Warren of Omaha was not trying to maximize money to his charity. He has approximately infinite dollars; this was a rounding error. He was trying to make a point very publicly. He thought that hedge funds were generally horseshit, and that most investors would do far better making simple, straightforward choices rather than giving their money to people who promised to do wonders: [https://money.cnn.com/2018/02/24/investing/warren-buffett- an...](https://money.cnn.com/2018/02/24/investing/warren-buffett-annual- letter-hedge-fund-bet/index.html)

What he was buying was not a specific dollar gain, but a clear, visible test of contrasting views. And it worked wonderfully; this bet was in the news off and on for more than 10 years.

I believe another goal of most people doing a Long Bet is to support the idea of long bets and long-term thinking, so I suspect that they look at the Long Now's rake as another donation to a charity they like. This analysis values that at zero.

I'd note also that for truly long-term bets, this analysis discounts the fact that the bettors will be dead. I think our current longest bet runs from 2002-2150. For a mere $1000, I doubt there's a donor-advised fund in the world that will agree to act as trustee for 150 years, selecting the most appropriate charity at the time of resolution. And of course no DAF will provide the clear record and eventual judging of a bet.

And really, if one's goal is giving money to charity, I suspect the best thing to do is give the money now. Whatever need they're addressing is presumably urgent enough that they'd rather spend the money today than put it in a long- term fund. And if it isn't (as is perhaps the case with the B-612 Foundation [2], which is saving up for a satellite), the charity in question is probably a better judge of exactly how to invest the money until they're ready for it. At the very worse, they money could be given with the restriction that it be used as an endowment.

So I look at this analysis as a good start, but definitely not complete given who actually uses the service.

[1] It's very much in the spirit of the Erlich wager: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon%E2%80%93Ehrlich_wager](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon%E2%80%93Ehrlich_wager)

[2] [https://b612foundation.org/](https://b612foundation.org/)

<comment><USER3> > The Long Now's mission is to promote long-term thinking. Long Bets in > specific promotes clarity and accountability via carefully-stated long-term > predictions and bets.

Unfortunately, they completely undermine this when they allow bets/predictions to remain on the website even after a challenger has agreed to take the other side of the bet but the original poster declines to participate. Long Now does't even make a note of this online.

> Take, for example, Bet id 362:

Note for other: this is a highly unusual example, since it's the most high profile bet on the site.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I did something similar last year with [https://www.gwern.net/Long- Bets](https://www.gwern.net/Long-Bets) . The even-odds restriction is a major one, and I think sabotages all of LB's goals. Why do prediction markets like PredictIt do more in a week or so than LB has done in almost two decades? It's hard to say that LB has been more of a success in getting people to put their money where their mouth is or bringing more rigor to public discourse (compare how often PredictIt or other betting markets are cited in political analysis to how often LB is cited... ever).

<comment><USER3> I agree with your complaints and indeed years ago I independently wrote an email to LB complaining about the fact that predictions could remain on the site even after challenges had been rejected. However, directly comparing LB to PredictIt seems unfair. LB is just not a big priority for the Long Now Foundation, and I expect it took vastly less investment to launch or for continued operating expenses. It's not surprising it accomplished less.

Edit (in response to your edit, I think): Sure, public exposure has not been commensurate with contribution. Not shocking, but frustrating.

<comment><USER4> > LB is just not a big priority for the Long Now Foundation, and I expect it > took vastly less investment to launch or for continued operating expenses. > It's not surprising it accomplished less.

Sure, it's not a priority - _now_. Because it failed. But it had quite a splashy launch and they had high hopes and really pulled in their board of luminaries for the initial batch of predictions. It launched so long ago it could have dominated any emerging online prediction markets. It had the opportunity, a useful goal, a nonprofit backing, tremendous goodwill, and celebrity. But instead, even something like Augur, a weirdo cryptocurrency project which formally launched hardly a year ago, will turn over more in a month or two than LB over 2 decades.

<comment><USER5> > But instead, even something like Augur, a weirdo cryptocurrency project > which formally launched hardly a year ago, will turn over more in a month or > two than LB over 2 decades.

Maybe I'm just missing something, but Augur seems pretty dead to me? I only see three bets currently open (one about the UK general election, two about NFL games).

That being said, the Long Bets project was always about high-profile _individual_ bets, not the larger markets that Augur seemed to be trying for.

<comment><USER4> What are you looking at, [https://predictions.global/](https://predictions.global/) ? An estimate of $2.6m at stake sounds pretty good to me, compared to LB which has like $40k at stake right now.

It's also worth noting that as part of the migration to Augur 2, Augur 1 is supposed to be gradually shutting down: [https://www.augur.net/blog/v2-transition- update/](https://www.augur.net/blog/v2-transition-update/) [https://www.augur.net/blog/v1-cutoff- update/](https://www.augur.net/blog/v1-cutoff-update/) So that may be reducing activity.

<comment><USER5> I was looking at the site that's linked from the augur.net home page, which now only lists two markets:

[https://cloudflare- ipfs.com/ipfs/QmaM5kLjo21i2eCSiaDQh4S1dG4...](https://cloudflare- ipfs.com/ipfs/QmaM5kLjo21i2eCSiaDQh4S1dG4vUdFkgKYQjQUiD66wHg/?ethereum_node_http=https%3a%2f%2feth- mainnet.alchemyapi.io%2fjsonrpc%2f7sE1TzCIRIQA3NJPD5wg7YRiVjhxuWAE&augur_node=wss%3a%2f%2fpredictions.market:9002#!/markets)

I don't know enough about Augur to understand what the difference between the two sites is. What does seem strange to me, though, is that predictions.global claims that $2.6M is at stake, but the top 10 markets sorted by "money at stake" only sum up to roughly $288k at stake. (The last one in the list is under $1k, too, so I have a hard time believing that the remaining $2.3M is all in the long tail.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The humany truth is that public bets, particularly long bets, are less about making profit and more about stating your view boldly and publicly. Within this context opportunity costs barely matter.

<comment><USER7> Just to underscore the point I understand you to be making:

 _Good name in man and woman, dear my lord,

Is the immediate jewel of their souls:

Who steals my purse steals trash; 'tis something, nothing;

'twas mine, 'tis his, and has been slave to thousands;

But he that filches from me my good name

Robs me of that which not enriches him,

And makes me poor indeed._

[https://www.enotes.com/shakespeare-quotes/who-steals-my- purs...](https://www.enotes.com/shakespeare-quotes/who-steals-my-purse-steals- trash)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It seems a bit limiting that they only deal with equal stakes/odds, i.e. we both bet $1000 for/against an event. Allowing for variable odds would make the deal better for events which you had less confidence in, solving the problem highlighted.

<comment><USER9> Variable odds don't solve the core problem which is that "half the investment income" is a high enough fee that you need a very large edge before you do better than just putting the money in a donor-advised fund.

<comment><USER8> Changing the odds is the only way to increase your edge... but admittedly, that 'half the income' will become a very large fee, such that the odds you need to offset this would make it unlikely that someone would take the other side of your bet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Binary options meets long bets, interesting idea, but illiquid Markets make lousy predictions

<comment><USER8> Without variable odds, there is no information here to be discovered, since there will always be as much money for & against the bets. The liquidity doesn't come into it.

<comment><USER11> Unmatched offers could still provide _some_ information.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> is 7% a reasonable 90 year return? I would guess closer to 1-2% would be reasonable over that time frame, which puts you in the black at year 90 even at 90% confidence.

<comment><USER9> These are nominal returns, but when you say 1-2% it sounds like you're talking about real returns?

I use nominal returns in the post because Long Bets keeps half of the investment income without any accounting for inflation.</comment></comment>


Canvas vs SVG performance on iPad - <AUTHOR> http://techblog.floorplanner.com/2011/03/07/canvas-vs-svg-performance-on-ipad/

<comment><USER2> Painting a single rectangle against a timer resolution of 1 millisecond (which the browser won't even do) pretty much tells you nothing.

<comment><USER3> Yes, exactly. I have a little web game that renders in SVG, and it puts up ~8000 shapes on the screen, updates at about 5hz on most desktop machines. This is ok, since it's basically a panning map that doesn't get panned much. If I switched to Canvas, it'd run quite quickly, but I'd lose all the wins from using the DOM.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't think these test results are anywhere close to accurate. Why is the iPhone 4, which has better specs than the iPad 1, 3x slower in the Canvas test? What OS was used on each device? How many test runs were done, and what was the variation like in each?

<comment><USER5> this might help answer part of your query (from the comments)-

Timothy Fitz Says: March 8th, 2011 at 6:38 pm The iPhone 3GS almost always ends up being the fastest of the iPhones. While the iPhone 4 has a faster CPU, they both have the same GPU (PowerVR SGX 535). While the iPhone 4 has twice the ram (which is fully addressable by the GPU), and could have a faster CPU clockspeed (I couldn't find reliable sources), at the end of the day the iPhone 4 needs 4 times the fill rate to meet the increased resolution of the retina display, and it doesn't have even close to 4x the fill rate of the 3GS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I believe this test proves little useful across different browsers on different OS/hardware because setInterval and setTimeout cannot fire faster than 8-10ms on most browsers and every browser handles a "1ms" request differently.

<http://dbaron.org/log/20100309-faster-timeouts>

However the _postMessage_ trick is near realtime:

<http://dbaron.org/mozilla/zero-timeout>

<comment><USER2> The point of a settimeout or setinterval is that it will always process in the next run loop. I don't see how postMessage actually provides anything over calling a function directly.

<comment><USER6> When I update to setZeroTimeout in those canvas vs svg demos, the drawing is so fast there is horizontal tearing and the frame rates are in the thousands.

Which means the FPS with setInterval is actually measuring how long it takes setInterval to fire, not how long it's taking to draw under the different methods.

<comment><USER2> But that's a feature you don't _really_ want. You're blowing away your cpu on something that can only display 60 times a second.

<comment><USER6> The code in question is a benchmark of how fast two different render APIs work. The only way to do that reliably is to take the question of the timer firing rate out of the equation. I doubt you'd use setZeroTimeout in most realworld environments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Somehow I doubt that SVG is being completely repainted every time its coordinates change. And since the repaints are asynchronous, I don't see how you could time them from within JavaScript.

<comment><USER8> I guess that not repainting everything can be an advantage of SVG. Can you think of a way to time repaints better?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I did not know that Android does not support SVG. What's the reason?

<comment><USER10> it is my understanding that it is coming in honeycomb, i saw a bug report i think about it just last week that was then several months old</comment></comment>


In Switzerland, it's now illegal to boil a live lobster - <AUTHOR> https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2018/02/16/new-swiss-law-pain-free-deaths-lobsters-flushing-goldfish-down-toilet-breaking-law-according-new-swi/341412002/ <comment><USER2> It's at this point you'd probably want to go read David Foster Wallace's essay "Consider The Lobster", an assignment he took from (I shit you not) Gourmet Magazine, which begins with a sort of Illinois Country Fair style travelogue from the Maine Lobster Festival and "ends", if you can call the back 2/3rds of an essay "ending", in a discussion of the meaning of pain and its applicability to the specific nervous system anatomy of crustaceans.

Suffice it to say: Wallace is not convinced that the knife through the head lets you off the hook so easily.

<comment><USER3> What is worse, causing pain or killing?

If we consider an extreme case of someone going through a horrible torture, but the next day waking up as healthy as before, and without some kind of mental illness, and without losing significant amount of his time, or opportunity, would it be any different than a game? Would most people try such a game, where they play for someone getting executed in middle ages?

My guess is they would, so fear of the pain is misplaced, and death is the horrible part. And therefore killing painlessly doesn't let one off the hook, since it is still killing. (And if one thinks killing is ok, then some amount of pain should be ok too.)

<comment><USER4> I absolutely, 100% would not volunteer to go through a "horrible torture."

I certainly wouldn't do it for "a game." I don't think I would do it for any amount of money or other benefit, either. What you're proposing is (seemingly) no benefit beyond the experience of being tortured--which coincidentally you are going you erase when you delete the mental illness.

Anyway, you're wrong, nobody would sign up for that. People who are afraid of roller coasters don't ride them. Everyone's afraid of torture.

<comment><USER3> > I absolutely, 100% would not volunteer to go through a "horrible torture."

Even if it was to unlock a new level in a game, or to remove a tooth? :)

More seriously though seems like i didn't manage to express what i wanted to say in my comment.

My point was that people are afraid of torture, and many other things (like roller coasters) because there's a large chance to die in the end. And without that chance the whole thing is just some neurons being active, and is not a big deal.

Your point about needing to erase all memory of the experience to not get mental illness is very interesting. I'd expect the brain to be more stable, but we don't know enough about the brain to say for sure.

<comment> crooked-v > or to remove a tooth?

The point of tooth removal in dentistry is to end pain, not to cause it.

<comment><USER3> Sure, but if you do not have the proper painkillers, it's hell of a lot more painful than the pain it ends. You are trading long term nagging pain, for short intense one, which is totally worth it, but is a lot of pain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's also illegal to own a single guinea pig or parrot (because they are prone to loneliness): [https://www.zmescience.com/other/feature-post/guinea-pig- swi...](https://www.zmescience.com/other/feature-post/guinea-pig-switzerland/)

<comment><USER6> I am a vegetarian, but I'm more troubled by these totalitarian laws. Yes, I know they 'are just helping animals,' but throughout history, too often tyrants strip your liberties in the name of of moral righteousness.

<comment><USER7> In what way does it strip one's liberties to be required to keep at least two guinea pigs if one must keep them?

The "liberty" to keep exactly one guinea pig: that is just silly.

<comment><USER6> That's exactly the point. The first steps in the path to illegitimate authority is to start legitimizing it using these low-hanging fruits.

This is just textbook play calling. Removing net neutrality starts "we just want to help hospitals and police have faster internet, don't be ridiculous." Drug prohibition, the War on Terror, the TSA, police militarization. It all, every time, comes with "they're just trying to do something good and it doesn't seriously affect you." Except maybe thre TSA, because when someone starts searching _you_ all of a sudden everyone is a civil libertarian.(1)

The problems 1) One can always make the argument that "those are just not worthwhile freedoms." 2) The idea that using the threat of violence from the government to solve every problem is the actual path to tyranny.

1-[https://theintercept.com/2018/02/05/the-nunes-memo-and- katie...](https://theintercept.com/2018/02/05/the-nunes-memo-and-katie-roiphe- article-show-how-concerns-for-due-process-and-civil-liberties-are-highly- selective-and-self-centered/)

<comment><USER8> We already have laws about which animals can be kept as pets. This is hardly an egregious extension of that power.

The law is very plainly there to prevent guinea pigs from being abused. It is not there to extend the government's power.

What an extremely odd thing to argue.

<comment><USER6> The concept is about 'what constitutes legitimate authority?' After all, consider your argument:

>'we already have laws about which people can get married. This is hardly an egregious extension of that power. The law is very plainly there to protect children.'

What you're advocating by disavowing the above, yet allowing the topic is to say you: "agree with authority when it happens to agree with my moral compass."

Sayinf "disagreeing with this is an extremely odd thing to argue," reveals the fact that the original intentions of the founders of this country (assuming you live in the States), as well as those of Enlightenment figures, that government is only legitimate whwn it is limited, is so odd and alienating to you makes me think that no wonder humanity always turns itself in to tyranny, over and over again.

<comment><USER9> You might consider that Switzerland is probably the most democratic country on earth and "legitimate authority" quite directly means "the will of the people". If it wouldn't, they could easily change it as everybody can submit a law change suggestion (sorry, I don't know the correct term) and with enough inital support everyone can vote on the issue. They vote on far-ranging things several times a year, there can be no tyranny in this context.

<comment><USER10> > _If it wouldn 't, they could easily change it as everybody can submit a law > change suggestion (sorry, I don't know the correct term)_

Referendum to kill an existing law, popular initiative to propose a new one.

They use different tricks when they're extending their power. This is definitely not one of them.

Laws they suspect could be overturned by voters they create 2 simular but separate ones shortly after each other, so people get tired of fighting it etc.

It definitely doesn't involve guinea pigs.

<comment><USER6> It's not that anyone ever sat around a board room with an evil plot involving the protection of guinea pigs. It's that it is so normal that the state act as your parents, which was never the intention of Western democracies, that nobody even thinks "should we really be letting ourselves hand over so many decisions to a monopoly on violence?"

<comment><USER11> I get the point you're trying to make, it's just that you have picked the perfect counter-example to make it against. Both with animal protection (no human will profit) and with Switzerland (we as citizens can force a popular vote against any law our elected government is about to pass, or even propose new laws).

<comment><USER6> You're right that Switzerland is just about the least concerning place in the world in terms of government tyranny. However, there are problems with only starting to be critical when the government starts confiscating your phone at the airport, reading your email, etc. At this point you've even set precedent that they _should_ be allowed to do those things, just so long as it can be justified as good, or even "the will of the people." So in this case we have ourselves to blame for this being in this mess.

And this kind of government js actually quite a shift from the type of democracy that Enlightenment figures helped developed for us, which gave us so much in the world.

Governments are responsible for most of the evil in the 20th century. Culling that probably starts with thinking about what a legitimate government should be permitted to do in the first place.

<comment><USER10> I completely agree with you in general, even in Switzerland we're not safe[0]. You just picked a really shitty example, and in europe we're in general a bit more pro government than in the US.

[0] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_files_scandal](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_files_scandal)

<comment><USER6> Err, the "shittiness" of the example was deliberate. Of course I could point out violations that everyone would agree with, such as the TSA confiscating your electronics. That threat is personally threatening to people, so all of a sudden they're civil libertarians.

Consider another example: what benefit is there in the government spending so much time and money giving due process, health care and other rights to murderers, child predators or terrorists, while free, good people go without healthcare? It's not because the criminals deserve it. If I advocated human rights for these people when we didn't have them, you would say the same thing you are now: "I agree with human rights, but you just picked a really shitty example." The point is this: to consider what constitutes legitimate government.

<comment><USER10> > _while free, good people go without healthcare?_

Doesn't happen in Switzerland.

> _If I advocated human rights for these people when we didn 't have them, you > would say the same thing you are now: "I agree with human rights, but you > just picked a really shitty example."_

Nope, I wouldn't. In fact I got heavily downvoted on HN before because I advocated for freedom of speech even for terrorists.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The article does not do that good a job at explaining what the law going into affect first of March actually says.

The law extends compulsory stunning ("Betäubungspflicht") before killing, already in effect for vertebrates to certain types of crustaceans. So the lobsters will likely be still alive when thrown into boiling water but stunned with e.g. electric shock.

Also the media frenzy causing lobster issue is only a part of new legislation aiming to improve conditions of animals held as pets, for sport, in laboratories or to be eaten.

[https://www.tagesanzeiger.ch/schweiz/standard/Hummer- muessen...](https://www.tagesanzeiger.ch/schweiz/standard/Hummer-muessen- kuenftig-vor-Kochen-betaeubt-werden/story/14589713)

</comment><comment><USER13> The common procedure I was taught when growing up was chilling the crayfish (stick it in the freezer until it goes to sleep) before killing it [1]. It really takes very little effort and make no discernible difference whatsoever to the end result.

It's interesting that this method wasn't one of those listed, because I was under the impression that it was quite effective.

[1] [http://kb.rspca.org.au/What-is-the-most-humane-way-to- kill-c...](http://kb.rspca.org.au/What-is-the-most-humane-way-to-kill- crustaceans-for-human-consumption_625.html)

<comment><USER14> The Swiss probably don't cook much live lobster or crayfish anyway, so chilling the live crustacean hasn't occured to the lawmakers. Yes, it's way easier than electrocuting, so thank you for sharing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This has to do with the fact that we in Switzerland once voted (in the early 90s) to constitutionally recognize animals, and giving them dignity. The dignity of the creature it was called. This is the reason also why you are not allowed to own just one single guinea pig or a lovebird.

<comment><USER16> So, if you own two and one dies, what happens?

<comment><USER17> > Rent-A-Guinea Pig Service Takes Off in Switzerland

[http://m.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/hope-for- lonely-...](http://m.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/hope-for-lonely- rodents-rent-a-guinea-pig-service-takes-off-in-switzerland-a-787336.html)

<comment><USER16> Lol that is awesome. Thanks for the link.

I feel for the poor introverted guinea pigs of Switzerland though. No chance for a peaceful quiet life free from the squeaking of another pig.

<comment><USER18> Human introverts still go crazy in solitary cell. It is kinda the same.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> So you will crush a roach or swat a fly? I am all for humane chicken faming methods, et.al. However we are the top of the food chain and we eat everything below. That means it dies. My friends dogs will try to eat his chickens and it is not pretty (he trains the dogs not to of course.) I have a forest full of dear behind my house. I heard the very loud screaming of an animal the other day. One of the deer was lunch for a mountain lion. This is the way it works. If you have an issue with it then do not eat lobster or do not eat meat. I like lobster. If you told me I could do something simple to make their death more human I would, but it's still going to die and I am still going to eat it.

Edit: English is hard :)

<comment><USER20> Fascinating thoughts, maybe you shouldn't live in Switzerland.

<comment><USER21> Thanks captain obvious, Although maybe a more insightful response would have been pointing out the contrast between the modern culture of switzerland and that of nature which lacks major intrusions by humans.

<comment><USER20> I think the contrast is between the modern culture of Switzerland and that of the US, where people feel that their right to kill animals inhumanely is too important to be legislated away.

<comment><USER21> Or maybe it's a difference in a country that isn't as bought and sold on the idea that you can fix everything by passing a law.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> _That means cats must have a daily visual contact with other felines, and hamsters or guinea pigs must be kept in pairs. And anyone who flushes a pet goldfish down the toilet is breaking the law._

Say what? So in Switzerland I can go to jail for not making a play date for my cat, or buying a little friend for my hamster?

What's next, you can't kill a spider that's creeping around your house?

People need to understand that there's always intended or unintended consquences for all laws. And laws like this have a tendency to make nasty precedents for other stupid-ass laws.

This is just more anthropomorphic emotional immaturity.

<comment><USER23> It's as easy to catch a spider and throw it out as to kill it. So fo the right thing and have a respect for a little wild animal.

<comment><USER24> If it's poisonous, killing is considerably easier.

<comment><USER25> Venomous. Poisonous is when you die from eating it (like a pufferfish). Sorry if I come off as pedantic, I just see this very often and think it's a pretty basic distinction.

<comment><USER26> But is the venom also poisonous?

<comment><USER27> Most venom isn't poisonous, as your gastric juices denature the proteins and enzymes which make them dangerous. Big HOWEVER though, is that if you have a cut or any route to your bloodstream in your mouth or throat... then you can be envenomated that way. In addition some animals are both venemous and poisonous, such as tarantulas with urticating hairs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> > and Kunfermann said offenders could land in a lot of hot water

Is there serious journalism being made anywhere these days? I feel like these subtle puns everywhere detract from the reading experience - not everything is for entertainment.

<comment><USER29> Seems a bit overreacting dissing the whole of journalism for the odd pun seen in an article. Eg: John Oliver's late night show is, objectively, quite good journalism (even if he denies it) though it's not very "serious".

<comment><USER30> > objectively, quite good journalism

Eh.. I dunno. I've watched, and will continue to watch, every episode of Last Week Tonight, however, I don't consider it "objectively good" journalism at all. I enjoy it as a silly, biased take on current events from a funny guy.

The "Amnesia effect" applies equally well to Oliver:

>"Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> This morning I looked out of my kitchen window and saw a falcon picking apart a small animal (bird I think). It took an incredibly long time for the animal to stop moving. That's death in nature. We can and should strive to do better.

<comment><USER32> Agreed. We should destroy an many animals in nature as possible to prevent them from reproducing and causing more suffering.

All animals should only be allowed to be raised in captivity and killed as humanely as possible.

And from there it follows that we must capture and enslave all humans, to prevent them from causing pain and hurting each other as they would given their own devices.

<comment><USER33> > Agreed. We should destroy an many animals in nature as possible to prevent > them from reproducing and causing more suffering.

There is a fantasy series with this motif. It's called The Second Apocalypse, by R. Scott Bakker, and the first book is called the Prince of Nothing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> The weird part of all this is lobster was considered garbage only about a 100 years ago.

I live in a rural area and the farmers would use whole lobsters as fertilizer on their fields. This only after anyone bothered to collect them from the beaches, no fishermen were catching them.

Even when people did eat them anyone who did was poor. My mother in her mid 70s said to me kids at school who had lobster were mocked because everyone knew they were poor "Eww lobster".

I wonder what the Swiss law says about shellfish such as clams, mussels, quahogs, geoducks etc. all those are boiled. Compassion is one thing but outright lunacy is another.

<comment><USER35> _> My mother in her mid 70s said to me kids at school who had lobster were mocked because everyone knew they were poor "Eww lobster"._

That explains Doctor Zoidberg

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I think the only logical solution is to learn to communicate with the lobsters. Then we can establish diplomatic relations, and learn of their ways. Only after we truly understand the lobster can we say what is a dignified way for them to go.

Who knows maybe one will even run for president one day.

<comment><USER11> Funny thing you should say this about lobsters in particular. In Charles Stross' novel "Accelerando" simulated (uploaded) lobster brains got smart enough to reach out for help and escape their experiment. They eventually become a superhuman being, living in space.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> > _That means cats must have a daily visual contact with other felines_

Wow, really? Why? Cats are loners, they don't need to be around other cats. In fact, my cat _hates_ other cats, giving her daily visual contact with other cats would basically be torture.

<comment><USER38> The law is actually far more sensible and says that "Cats kept on their own shall have daily contact with humans OR visual contact with members of their own species." Some people like harping on the Swiss animal protection laws as horrible tyranny but I feel really bad for any animals whose owners don't follow such basic standards of decency.

This PDF is the actual text of the law, the cat-specific part is section 11: [http://www.zuerchertierschutz.ch/fileadmin/user_upload/Tiers...](http://www.zuerchertierschutz.ch/fileadmin/user_upload/Tierschutzthemen/pdf/Tierschutzverordnung_e.pdf)

<comment><USER37> Thanks! That sounds a lot better than what was mentioned in the article.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> The bar for infringing on people's freedom should be high. Laws should exit only to protect human interests. That can include things like preserving biodiversity. But to use the power of the state against people for the sole purpose of protecting animal interests is unjustified in my opinion.

I believe we have a moral duty to treat animals well, and certainly to avoid causing needless suffering. But not all moral duties justify state compulsion.

<comment><USER40> Do you disagree with most animal cruelty laws then? What about dog or cock fighting?

<comment><USER39> One of the strongest arguments for banning cock/dog fighting is that it inculcates moral depravity in its participants. To stand there and take pleasure in causing suffering in living things can only serve make you callous to human suffering as well. It seems justified to ban it, at least as an organized, large-scale enterprise.

<comment><USER41> By the same token, a gradual increase in the legal and customary respect shown to animals could inculcate a growing respect for our fellow humans.

<comment><USER39> I realize I've laid out a slippery slope. That's why I was hesitant. The strongest case is for banning organized, large-scale animal cruelty done for depraved enjoyment. But I don't think we should prosecute people because we don't like, for example, that they use electric shock collars to keep their dogs from running off.

I'd summarize my position as: 1) animal interests for their own sake are not a legitimate end of government coercion, and 2) the moral character of the people is a legitimate end, but we should be very hesitant to use coercion for social engineering.

<comment><USER42> You're not holding much water to be honest. Pick one: a) animals are incapable of suffering b) we shouldn't care if animals suffer c) we should care and pass laws

<comment><USER39> My argument is the option you're omitting:

d) animals suffer, we _should_ care, but we should not pass laws when their _sole_ purpose is to prevent that suffering.

There is more to a society that what it compels at gunpoint. We can abhor behavior without proscribing it by law.

<comment><USER42> What is law if not the ability to arrest controversy?

<comment><USER39> Are you arguing that the solution to all controversy is to pass a law? You are proposing to solve all problems at gunpoint.

What space for different conceptions of the good, for diversity of values and preferences, could exist in such a society?

You must have limiting principles for when we should resort to the remedy of the law. Perhaps yours are different than mine, but I doubt that you have none at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Question: what is the maximum water temperature that a lobster can survive in?

If that maximum is less than the boiling point of water, then another question: how carefully is the law drafted?

If the law actually specifies boiling, is it just going to result in cooks bring the water to a boil, taking it off the heat, letting it drop to a little below the boiling point, and then inserting the lobster, where it still dies but not as fast?

<comment><USER44> >If the law actually specifies boiling, is it just going to result in cooks bring the water to a boil, taking it off the heat, letting it drop to a little below the boiling point, and then inserting the lobster, where it still dies but not as fast?

Yeah, make stupid rules, play stupid games. This seems like a feel-good law. I wonder how enforcement will be.

<comment><USER45> i can imagine heavily armed lobster police bursting in the kitchen of an unsuspecting cook.

<comment><USER46> Judge Trudy will handle the situation. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfpg- YoQj60](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfpg-YoQj60)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Let me get this straight. You're saying that we should organize our societies along the lines of the lobsters?

<comment><USER48> We also benefit - by learning to treat animals better, we'll learn to treat each other better.

<comment><USER36> If you treat me like your dog I'll probably end up punching you in the face. Just saying.

<comment><USER49> And on the flip side, if you treat your dog like a human, it'll probably wind up being a misbehaving menace.

<comment><USER47> That is a worthy point. Some dog owners, particularly those getting their first dog, treat their dogs like humans, which is bad both for humans and dogs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> My first reaction was that this was silly, but I tried my best to follow along and have some empathy for the lobster. They had me right until electrocution...

</comment><comment><USER51> \- The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated. -

Mahatma Gandhi

<comment><USER52> [https://animalsmattertogod.com/2013/09/13/mahatma-gandhi- hoa...](https://animalsmattertogod.com/2013/09/13/mahatma-gandhi-hoax-quote- greatness-of-a-nation-and-its-moral-progress-can-be-judged-by-the-way-that- its-animals-are-treated/) A rather lengthy article that doesn't find any references to a primary source.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> As a Swiss person, I would say that I don't care either way. As least as long as they are dealing with this crap they have less budget for computer surveillance.

</comment><comment><USER54> I'm torn on the subject.

There's a Korean restaurant in Queens that serves live seafood (octopi chopped in front of you; hot pots with live scallops cooked at your table): [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dfu9MzeEMxo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dfu9MzeEMxo)

I don't have a problem with chopping up an octopus at the dinner table, but I probably wouldn't want to see a chicken clubbed to death before it lands in plate.

On a different subject, I'm not sure that 'dignity' is a well-defined concept or that it applies to death in the first place. Is bleeding out from a cut throat as per the kosher slaughter method [1] less or more dignified than boiling alive in a pot?

[1] [https://www.wikihow.com/images/thumb/7/73/Properly- Slaughter...](https://www.wikihow.com/images/thumb/7/73/Properly-Slaughter-a- Cow-Under-the-Kosher-Method-Shechitah-Step-6.jpg/aid345855-v4-900px-Properly- Slaughter-a-Cow-Under-the-Kosher-Method-Shechitah-Step-6.jpg)

<comment><USER55> Octopuses are some of the most intelligent creatures on earth. Eating or cutting them alive is nothing short of savage, and no better than serving live dog or chimpanzee.

I'm all for regulations that end unnecessary animal suffering, especially when the whole purpose of it is to do nothing more than add novelty to a meal. We evolved to eat meat. We didn't evolve to torture our meals.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> So some humans think they finally have the luxury of seriously considering animal ethics while some other humans would still kill for survival. Meanwhile, the earth or the universe continues to not care.

<comment><USER57> I agree that we should pay more attention to people that are suffering.

But I think the rationale of such laws is somewhat valid. Can you imagine a person who is totally emotionless when torturing an animal but is also very compassionate towards human beings?

I think in some ways human ethics and animal ethics are connected.

Though if you ask me whether Switzerland has gone too far, I'm still hesitant about yes/no.

<comment><USER56> Imagine grandpa gutting fish and shooting animals with a rifle all day to come back and give children a goodnight kiss. I am not the one lacking imagination.

<comment><USER57> That's not the kind of torture i meant. Rifle or knife should be acceptable to most people. (This process is simple. Experienced butchers even work fast and clean.) Switzerland law is also about killing the lobster instantly so it's the same.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> "...dipping it into salt water and then thrusting a knife into its brain."

So for a few seconds it will think it's being released back into its natural habitat and then seconds later its brains are dripping down some chef's knife.

The article talks about "animal dignity", but how is that giving them any form of dignity? They are still being killed unnaturally.

NOTE: I'm not some animal rights person and I do eat meat without thinking, and no I've never seen the inside of a slaughter house (and yes I think that would probably scar me for life).

<comment><AUTHOR> > The article talks about "animal dignity", but how is that giving them any > form of dignity? They are still being killed unnaturally.

The point is to minimize unnecessary suffering. If you have to kill it, don't prolong it.

<comment><USER58> Yes but dignity is usually related to respect and honor.

When was the last time you killed and ate something out of respect?

They should change that phrase to "reduce cruelty towards animals" and then it's fine. Say it as it is basically.

<comment><AUTHOR> > Yes but dignity is usually related to respect and honor. When was the last > time you killed and ate something out of respect?

I don't kill what I eat, but most communities and cultures where this is a regular occurrence have long traditions of respecting the animals being sacrificed. One form of respect is to minimize the animal's suffering (both when it's raised and when it's killed), another is to use all parts of it, another is to not have an unfair advantage when hunting it, and so on. It's not one dimensional.

One of my all-time favourite comments on HN deals with this beautifully:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12655610](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12655610)

<comment><USER59> That really is a beautiful comment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> > "then it dies within seconds," he said.

Perhaps worth keeping in mind that smaller animals tend to run at a faster "clock speed". Seconds might feel rather longer to them. (E.g. [https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/small-animals- liv...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/small-animals-live-in-a- slow-motion-world/) though that's about vertebrates.)

</comment><comment><USER61> Switzerland law makers are pragmatic (most of the time). The main target of the law is not the individuals but the industrials.

</comment><comment><USER62> Wtf. Should chopping the head off a chicken be illegal as well? How about shooting a cow in the back of the skull? What if it's suffering? Is it ok then?

<comment><USER63> They're not making it illegal to kill lobsters.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> >The new lobster legislation that boils down to...

not the best choice of words

</comment><comment><USER65> Lobster fishing is not a big industry in Switzerland so this shouldn't cause too much inconvenience.

</comment><comment><USER66> Hahahaha this is too stupid. How can these be less cruel?

"Two methods are recommended: Electrocution or sedating the lobster by dipping it into salt water and then thrusting a knife into its brain."

Maybe the lobster actually feels a litle pleasure on the boiling water before going main-dish, like you reader on a jacuzzi, having an exoskeleton and all sure helps.

Stupid laws. Better fix that corrupted banking system first.</comment>


Show HN: Aggregator for Show HN + ProductHunt + Kickstarter Etc(pre-launch) - <AUTHOR> http://central.watch/

<comment><USER2> This doesn't look like it's ready for launch yet. None of the links, except for Sublime Text (which looks like a test link) work. If I were you, I'd consider getting making this a working MVP before posting to HN. That way, the people who check it out will stick around.

Edit: On another note, I can't wait to see the finished version!

<comment><USER3> I agree, needs a bit more work before Show HN worthy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hm, I can't tell how good this will be and if it will beat RSS. There's not enough to go on.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, excited to roll out the proper v1 - personally, I did not like the experience of opening so many different tabs to check out featured products so the same page navigation play is where I would say that it might be better than pure RSS

In the meantime, I'n curious, is there something you can think of that might make the application more valuable?</comment></comment>


Launch HN: Deepgram (YC W16) – Scalable Speech API for Businesses - <AUTHOR> Hey HN,
I'm Scott Stephenson, one of the cofounders of Deepgram (https://www.deepgram.com/). Getting information from recorded phone calls and meetings is time-intensive, costly, and imprecise. Our speech recognition API allows businesses to reliably translate high-value unstructured audio into accurate, parsable data.
Deepgram started when my cofounder Noah Shutty and I had just finished looking for dark matter (while in a particle physics lab at University of Michigan). Noah had the idea to start recording all audio from his life, 24/7. After gathering hundreds of hours of recordings, we wanted to search inside this fresh dataset, but realized there wasn't a good way to find specific moments. So, we built a tool utilizing the same AI techniques we used for finding dark matter particle events, and it ended up working pretty well. A few months later, we made a single page demo to show off "searching through sound" and posted to HN. Pretty soon we were in the winter batch of YC in 2016 (https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/27/launching-a-google-for-sou...).
I'd say we didn't know what we were getting ourselves into. Speech is a really big problem with a huge market, but it's also a tough nut to crack. For decades, companies have been unable to get real learnings from their massive amounts of recorded audio (some companies record more than 1,000,000 minutes of call center calls every single day). They have a few reasons why they record the audio — some for compliance, some for training, and some for market research. The questions they're trying to answer are usually as simple as:

  - "What is the topic of the call?"
  - "Is this call compliant?" (did I say: my company name, my name, and "this call may be recorded")
  - "Are people getting their problems solved quickly?"
  - "Do my agents need training?"
  - "What are our customers talking about? Competitors? Our latest marketing campaign?"

 It's the most intimate view you can get on your customers, but the problem is so large and difficult to solve that companies pushed it into the corner over the past couple decades, only trying to mitigate the bleeding. Current tools only transcribe with around 50-60% accuracy on real-world, noisy, accented, industry-specific audio (don't believe the 'human level accuracy' hype). When companies start solving problems using speech data, they first want transcription that's accurate. After accuracy, comes scale — another big problem. Speech processing is computationally expensive and slow. Imagine trying to get into an iterative problem solving loop when you have to wait 24 hours to get your transcripts back.
So we've set our sights on building the speech company. Competition from companies like Google, Amazon, and Nuance is real, but none of these approach speech recognition like we do. We've rebuilt the entire speech processing stack, replacing heuristics and stats based speech processing with fully end-to-end deep learning (we use CNNs and RNNs). Using GPUs, we train speech models to learn customer's unique vocabularies, accents, product names, and acoustic environments. This can be the difference between correctly capturing "wasn't delivered" and "was in the liver." We've focused on speed since we think that's very important for exploration and scale. Our API returns hour-long transcripts interactively in seconds. It's a tool many businesses wish they had.
So far we've released tools that:

  - transcribe speech with timestamps
  - support real-time streaming
  - have multi-channel support
  - understand multiple languages (in beta now)
  - allow you to deeply search for keywords and phrases
  - transcribe to phonemes
  - get more accurate with use
 Some of those are better mousetraps of things you're familiar with and some are completely new levers to pull in your audio data. We've built the core on English but now we're releasing the tools for all of the Americas. (aside: You can transfer learn speech and it works well!)
Accuracy will continue to improve for transcription, but I think we can do more. It's such a large problem, and we really want to make a dent in "solving speech". That means asking, truly: "What can a human do?"
People can, with little context, jump into a conversation and determine:

  - What are the words? When are they said? Who said what?
  - Is this person young/old? Male/Female? Exhausted/energetic?
  - Where is there confusion?
  - What language are they speaking? What's the speaker's accent?
  - What's the topic of the conversation? Small talk or real? Is it going well?
 Some of those things are being worked on now: additional language support, language and accent detection, sentiment analysis, auto-summarization, topic modeling, and more.
We'd love to hear your feedback and ideas. <comment><USER2> (FYI your [https://deepgram.com/v2/docs](https://deepgram.com/v2/docs) links are giving "error": "Not Found" JSON responses.)

I love progress in this space. Something I also think is necessary, though, is innovation in the discoverability interfaces around speech data. Can you search over potential transcriptions weighted by their likelihood, rather than just doing full-text search on the most-likely transcriptions? Can you visualize multiple potential transcriptions inline without overloading someone's visual cortex with information? Can you one-click-to-listen to any specific line? Can you enable people to switch conversations on the fly to an "off-the-record" mode, with such confidence that the default can be that every conversation is highlighted? Can you do all of this from Slack? Can you make setup a one-click process with Twilio OAuth? Can you do all of this from a web app that requires no coding?

All this, I'm sure, is part of an ecosystem that will be built on tools like yours, and that ecosystem fundamentally depends on the quality of the data - so it makes sense for you all to focus there first. But to the extent you want to capture the entire "stack," there's a tremendous space for someone to take the level of "passion" for data quality and apply that same instinct to quality-of-experience.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a seriously fertile area where you get to "define the new interface".

It's a big problem though, since few buyers know they want those things. Around 95% of customers come into it with "give me the transcripts" and discover over time they want these other things too (some graphical, some technical). They just didn't know it was available.

New GUIs and data representations is a big part of it. Getting accuracy and scale in place is a big part. Building awareness and distribution of what's possible now is another big part.

Re: JSON Error; We fixed that doc link error you saw (it was pointing in the wrong place since we _just_ updated it).

The real docs link is: [https://brain.deepgram.com/docs](https://brain.deepgram.com/docs)

<comment><USER2> Tableau (and the general business analytics space) have done a good job at reframing the problem as: "don't think about what you want as a leader at a company; instead, democratize data access so your team can decide what it wants, and pay for democratization not for your own features." See for instance: [https://www.forbes.com/sites/briansolomon/2016/05/04/how- tab...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/briansolomon/2016/05/04/how-tableau- built-a-3-billion-data-empire-on-top-of-beautiful-charts/#5622a32610ea)

Arguably Elastic is a success story about bridging the worlds of an API-first technical stack with a democratized non-technical analytics framework. And they started by just powering excellent search, and building value-add layers over time. But they built into a then-vacuum of API offerings, whereas there are many other (potentially inferior, but well-funded) speech-to-text APIs. I'll be avidly following you guys as you navigate the space, and hopefully you're able to find some good "hooks" or uniquely-easy-to-roll-out integration stories that strike a balance between focus on technical excellence and driving awareness in a super-linear way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> > _Noah had the idea to start recording all audio from his life, 24 /7_

Want this as a product. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> You find out very interesting things even randomly sampling your life in audio.

We still come back to this for fun. The original device was an intel edison but recent variants have been based on the raspberry pi zero w.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Do you plan to offer something around one-shot machine transcription with offline/on-prem search?

I have ~200k hours of legacy audio I'd love to be able to do a fuzzy (phonetic?) search on, to pull content from and get real (human-edited) transcriptions of important stuff to resurface it, but there's not a lot of incentive to push it through a service for a quarter million dollars and then also pay to store and search it, since we're currently doing without it. Doing it at extremely low priority, delivering it over a long span of time, for an order of magnitude cheaper, with our IT standing up some stock fuzzy search engine, is a pretty easy sell, though.

<comment><AUTHOR> We do custom models (train the full DNN, not just tack on a new text language model) using transfer learning and it works for small numbers of examples too.

Glad to hear you asking about fuzzy search. That's something we do (it's actually what Deepgram started on!). It's not in the docs at the moment (tends to confuse people who are looking for transcription, we're working on how to present it in a better way). You can submit with queries and get back confidences and timestamps.

Many times the model doesn't need any training but it does increase accuracy if you do training and can get really good if it's focused (it's a lot like wake word detection -- we don't offer WWD as a real product yet either, just saying the challenges are similar). Best thing to do is search for phrases if you can, that really helps signal/noise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hi! Thanks for sharing and I have a few questions.

\- How does your WER compare to other engines? [https://medium.com/descript/which-automatic-transcription- se...](https://medium.com/descript/which-automatic-transcription-service-is- the-most-accurate-2018-2e859b23ed19)

\- How do you gather data?

\- Where do you see your long-term differentiation? Is it the features you build on top of other engines or is it the engine itself?

Disclaimer: I led engineering for temi.com (a competitor of your's) but am no longer affiliated with it.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a metric that's hard to nail down because there is so much parameter space that you are flattening into one number. Also it doesn't address the "I care about these five high value words (that are made up), can you recognize them?" like product names and company names.

There's ~4 types of audio:

Phone call \- close microphone \- conversational \- low bandwidth audio \- two way conversation \- more industry specific terminology

Meetings \- 2-5 people \- conversational \- far away mic \- better bandwidth audio \- more industry specific terminology

Broadcast \- usually good diction \- close mic \- good bandwidth audio \- more general terminology

Command&Control (saying to your phone: "go to <this address>") \- close mic or array or mics far away \- short audio chunks, 2-10 seconds \- spoken in a way that makes it easier to recognize (learned behavior) \- usually a lot of widely known named entities are said

In that full aggregated line up I bet we'd be in the 22-24% WER pack. That'd mostly be because we focus only on phone calls and meetings. We don't try to improve command&control/broadcast/podcast type yet. Broadcast because it's perceived as lower value (so customers tend not to pay for good recognition for it [we do train models to make them better for specific customers/verticals(usually a reduction of errors by 20-40%), but the buyer has to have a budget for it for now, but there are ways to make it cheaper in the long term]), command and control because you have to have a fleet of devices out in the field collecting data and driving use cases and we don't have customers there yet.

<comment><USER5> I guess maybe a better way to ask is which acoustic environments do you excel in?

In terms of gathering data, I'm curious how to plan to get the 15K audio hours it takes to train each of these models. The most you want to segment it (like through acoustic environment or genders), the more data you need. Do you have a cheap way of generating high quality data?

<comment><AUTHOR> If you're training from scratch around 10k hours is needed to get a good model, but when you are transfer learning you don't need nearly that much (100 hours gets you a lot).

We excel in phone call and meetings settings. I.e. the typical sales/office/support environment.

<comment><USER6> Baidu trained their DeepSpeech model with 6000 hours of English to get a model similarly accurate to Google/Microsoft, it may just be the type of quick model your using that needs 10k hours to achieve good results.

Mozilla's DeepSpeech is quite interesting, languages like Turkish can get a decently usable (~20% WER) model with just 80hrs of training data (no transfer learning, starting from a clean slate).

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, all good points. One thing to consider is that generalization is a big problem. It's easy to get good on a specific dataset nowadays (like 5-10% word error rate level on academic datasets), but that same model might do 40% WER on data in the wild.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This looks interesting. Curious what the pricing is? I don't see it on the website.

<comment><AUTHOR> Price starts at $1/hr billed in 1 second increments. Frequently we charge less than that, since the price is dropped with volume, and that's typically businesses have a steady amount running through them (a few thousands hours). Medium usage scale would be $0.25-0.75/hr (e.g. 10,000 hours to 100,000 hours a month scale). Large usage is around 10,000 hrs+ per day and the price can be much lower per transcribed hour (like $0.15/hr).

That's the ballpark for cloud + batch mode. If it's cloud + realtime it's a little more. If you need it on premise it's a little more (we work with integration partners to do parts of it).

Pricing for speech is interesting since there's more than just how many $/hr in the equation. Usually businesses care about turnaround time, throughput, failover/availability, and a collection of features. So we usually want to talk about those goals and price accordingly to support 'em. I definitely wish I had a better way to frame it than "it's complicated"!

<comment><USER8> What about custom models?

<comment><AUTHOR> There's no additional charge for training a custom model when your usage is a minimum of 10k hrs/mo.

<comment><USER6> So basically a $10k monthly commit is required to train a custom model? Would it be possible to pay for the training itself if you are a lower volume user?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> With multiple speakers, can you identify who is speaking?

If you were in a conference room with multiple threads of conversation, could you tease out all of them?

<comment><AUTHOR> Best to say "yes! but only some of the time". It's something we're working on right now. You can be 80% accurate, by some metric, but it's still not good enough usually to pass a human's sniff test. Good speaker labeled audio in various settings is hard to find.

There are several ways to look at this problem too.

L1: exact speaker is known (voiceprint) and can be picked from all humans with accuracy, even when others are talking L2: exact speaker is known from a subset of people, even while talking in a conversation with others L3: speaker1,2,3,... are identified accurately L4: speaker changes are identified accurately

L1 is a really hard problem. L2 is fine if you don't care about the time domain (knowing exactly when they spoke), but is harder if you have to accurately detect changes. L3 is about as hard as L2 but the big goal isn't who anymore, it's when. And L4 is easier, kinda like putting line breaks in when human transcribing a file. Not too bad. All of them need better data sources.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> How does this compare to Trint in terms of speech recognition performance?</comment>


Building a realtime location app with ARKit, CoreLocation and Pusher - <AUTHOR> https://blog.pusher.com/realtime-location-app-arkit-corelocation-pusher/ <comment><USER2> It would be interesting to figure out the sources of error here. I am assuming Pusher is able to get sub-100ms in pushing the data? I'm guessing the rest of the error is due to a combination of: a) GPS positional error (GDOP, deflections of signals in the atmosphere etc.). Which is why the car appears on the pavement and 10m forward. b) GPS time delays. Which is why the "virtual" car appears to be moving slower.

</comment><comment><USER3> The video looks pretty lame tbh.

<comment><USER4> I'm going to go a limb here and assume it's a proof of concept. The article is pretty thorough at explaining the process, which can be refined if the user decides to go further.</comment></comment>


Netbooks are really going down, but not only due to the iPad   - <AUTHOR> http://ipadwatcher.com/2010/09/19/netbooks-are-really-going-down-but-not-only-due-to-the-ipad/ <comment><USER2> > If you go through the netbook models currently available on the market they > are very similar to the initial 10 inch netbooks.

Blame Microsoft. They dictated a set of maximum hardware specifications that netbooks had to conform to if they wanted a reasonably-priced license for Windows. Netbooks can't advance any more quickly than Microsoft wants them to, and MS has little interest in promoting cheap laptops.

I know it's popular these days to claim that Microsoft never deserved their reputation as a bully-boy, but this is an example where the Windows monopoly has a real, damaging effect on innovation.

<comment><AUTHOR> Netbook manufacturers gave up Linux too easily. I originally got my with Linux and only replaced it with Windows because I needed to write about a Windows- only software.

Just as is currently the case with the iPad, I think most early adopters of netbooks didn't really care that they were on a different OS. They just cared that they could browse, email, use social networks, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> My fiancee has a 10 inch netbook that she got back in 2008. She only needs it for casual browsing from the couch, and writing email. She's been looking for the right tool for the job for the last few years. She started with a Nokia n800, but she said the browser was too slow and it "wasn't a real browser". Then she got a Viliv S5 (running Windows XP) but she didn't like having to use a stylus. The netbook was fine, but needs to be plugged in now that the battery is old, and it overheats. Then we got an iPad as a gift, which she likes, but she doesn't like that it doesn't have Flash, and since it's the WiFi only version, she has to carry a MiFi around too or tether it to her phone and at 10 inches it's bigger than any of her purses and too heavy to hold for long. I've caught her several times putting it down and picking up her HTC Evo to just browse using that.

I think that if anything will truly kill off the netbook, it will be something in between an iPad and an Evo. Maybe that 7 inch iPad will be it.

<comment><USER4> Or an iTouch, or would the screen be too small?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> You'd think an article about the supposed decline of the netbook would have at least one data point to support the thrust of the article.

I'm actually thrilled with my netbook which I've been using for the past year. Most of the time it sits on my desk connected to an external keyboard, mouse and monitor (all three of which suck pretty badly on the AspireOne). It's a little slow but entirely useable. Several times a week I grab it and head off to an external site where I use it to take meeting minutes. I'm happy to trade off the limitations for extreme portability. If this one died I'd buy another (although probably with an SSD drive)</comment>


Why We Need Steve Jobs - <AUTHOR> http://www.newsweek.com/id/203361/output/print

<comment><USER2> I have to agree with the Article.

Jobs is truly a visionary when it comes to technology. The article is not really clear on why he is unique. Here's my perspective.

Steve Jobs has the unique ability to see where the next big technology opportunity is.

Look at his track record - Apple II, Macintosh GUI, Pixar, iPod and now the iPhone.

Walt Disney is the only other visionary I can think of that could repeat his success - animated cartoons (took advantage of TV's) and theme parks.

I don't consider myself a fan boy just a student of business and technology.

<comment><USER3> "Apple II, Macintosh GUI, Pixar, iPod and now the iPhone"

Have to admit, that's one hell of a score card.

Gates can take credit (as much credit as Jobs gets for above) for Windows, Office, and XBox. Then I'm sure Thomas Watson gets credited for some insane amount of stuff during his time running IBM.

Any other technology leader deserve to be in the above conversation, in terms of overseeing products with an outsize influence on the industry?

<comment><USER4> Macintosh GUI was pioneered at Xerox PARC, not at Apple. But Steve was smart enough to see the value in it and bring it into the marketplace with the Lisa. The Lisa flopped, and over in another building there was a team developing Macintosh. Steve got involved and the rest is history.

<comment><USER5> And the original design for the macintosh was utter trash and it wouldn't have even made the history books. The idea behind it was supposed to be a "toaster with an friendly interface". It would be like doing a $300 netbook, but with 1980s technology. It was going to compete with the Atari, not IBM.

Cut and Paste made the Macintosh. Double-clicking made the Macintosh. Beautiful (for the time) typography defined the Macintosh. The "Start-up" chime. The Fast boot sequence. The abandoning of legacy 5.25" floppies. All of these design decisions were Steve's. And love it or leave it, he made something remarkable and lasting. Something that inspires people to sign on for the "cult of mac".

<comment><USER4> well I was 15 years old when my dad bought our Mac, the Mac 512k. I thought it was a brilliant design, it easily fit on a desktop, was portable from room to room, it had a gorgeous display (compared to other computers at the time), and it came with a good word processing (MacWrite) app and a fun graphics app (MacPaint). I think making the computer small made it easier to approach for a lot of other people. You know, less intimidating. I've read quite a few books about the Mac, and they had their eyes on IBM, not Atari, as their primary competitor. And I think we have to credit Jef Raskin for a lot of the design decisions, after all, he was the one who started the Macintosh project in the first place, although his original vision for it was more like a netbook than what it eventually became. I still have my Mac Plus at home, sitting in a box, and it still works perfectly as it has since 1989 when I got it before entering university. It's the same form factor as the original Macintosh, and it's a design icon in the computer world.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This article is just utter trash. I usually stay away from "technology reporting" in the "traditional media," and this is a great reason why.

The author is simply a cheerleader for Apple. I was expecting an actual argument as to why Apple "needs Jobs back now." The author even uses the language used to deride Jobs (Dear Leader, etc) but nonetheless succumbs to the propaganda.

As far as this line from the article:

"I would go farther and argue that not only does Apple need Steve Jobs—the world needs him. In an age when the pace of technology innovation keeps accelerating so much that we often feel overwhelmed, we need someone who can package new technology, make it accessible to us, and deliver it to us in a way that makes it simple, useful, and reliable."

I find less cult-like propaganda in Scientology commericals than this drivel.

Also, not to defend Microsoft but to engage in a FUD campaign by stating that their latest _beta_ OS because it supposedly crashed is totally ridiculous and bias does not begin to describe it.

I think to those not already converted (not "switchers," but those converted to the Apple/Steve Jobs cult) this article is just totally laughable.

<comment><USER7> One would be wise to not take the article at face-value. It is written by Daniel Lyons, famous for his parody of Apple fanaticism in the now-defunct blog Fake Steve Jobs. When Steve took ill, Daniel quit that blog and attempted to start one under his real name, and it was one of the most spectacular flameouts I've ever seen on the web.

The guy can be a great writer at times, but I wouldn't trust him to be genuine.

<comment><USER6> I was vaguely familiar with that. To me that kind of stuff is basically 4chan jibberish.

The problem with this position, for me, is that all of those kinds of justifications are irrelevant as this is a Newsweek article. As well if this was such a sarcasm or parody, I would expect a little more of it and more wit. Here, it is just "Bad argument... prattle prattle ... Windows 7 crashed ..."

<comment><USER7> I'm not sure I understand your use of the word 'justification'. (I'm don't know anything about 4chan or what someone there might try to justify.) I was certainly not trying to make apologies for the author by warning you away from the apparent meaning of the text. Quite the opposite: I thought the article had no value whatsoever - but because of the subtext and the context.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm not all that sure whether many people really always buy the newest and greatest Apple stuff. Those who really buy the 3GS even if they already own the 3G seem to me to be a rather crazy fringe group. I want to use my MBP for 5+ years. I feel no desire whatsoever to get the latest and greatest. Sure, that's only me, but in the article it's also only Lyons and consequently his claims are not much more than a cute little anectode.

<comment><USER3> The number is certainly not zero.

I worked alongside a consultant once who was in love with all things Windows. He really knew it well, was on top of all things Windows development, and did a good job developing Windows apps, as far as I could tell (I was the one developing in Java on my Mac).

Every time a new iPod would come out, he would immediately sell the model he had, and buy the new one, without exception (this was pre-iPhone).

If you always want the latest and greatest in terms of consumer electronics, you almost have no choice but to buy each new Apple product. Jobs is a big part of making Apple the must-have brand for the early adopter consumer with an ample wallet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> "PC on which I'm running the beta version of Windows 7"

I'm sorry, but it is people like him who give Apple fans a bad name.

<comment><USER10> It's true though. I've had my Macbook for a few years and my roommate has had his for 5. I can't remember a time when it broke down. On the other hand, my sister has a Dell, my co-worker has a Dell, both of which have lost keys on the keyboard, have weird noises you can't turn off, runs slow as shit, and can't be repaired without an accompanying traumatic experience in customer service.

<comment><USER9> This wasn't what my comment was about, but I can't resist: sorry, but EVERYBODY I know who has a Mac had problems with it at some point or other. I recently bought a MacBook because of iPhone dev, and sure enough, I'll have to let it serviced because the line out connector is broken. Even though it is within warranty, it will cost me several days without the MacBook just because of a crappy headphone jack. They won't even order the replacement part in advance, so it costs me another day to bring in the MacBook, wait for them to check if it is really broken, then come back a couple of days later when the part has arrived. If that isn't bad service, what is?

I never had problems with any other non-Apple notebook or PC - seriously, not even a crashed hard disk. (Edit: to clarify, I agree that this is all anecdotal evidence, I just wanted to counterpoint the "all non-Macs fail" story)

Also I don't know what Dell customer trauma you are talking about - maybe they should have paid for the next day on location service then? Would still have been cheaper than a Mac Notebook, and more efficient. To be cheap and then complain is idiotic.

Of course they probably bought shitty consumer notebooks from Dell. Rule: always buy from the business line (this goes for all companies). (Note: I despise this practice of offering trashy consumer devices, Apple really scores against the competition in that respect).

<comment><USER11> It's always anecdotes and random chance when it comes to "X's hardware sucks!"

I've had lots of hardware that failed: HPs, Dells, Seagates, Western Digitals, Apples, and just about everything else. For day-to-day use I still ( _currently_ ) prefer Apple and OS X... to each their own.

<comment><USER12> > It's always anecdotes and random chance when it comes to "X's hardware > sucks!"

You're right that all companies probably produce bad and good stuff over time. From a business point of view, I think the ability to get a given level of service is much more important. I.e., failure, sooner or later, is a given. How are they going to help you deal with it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> More like Mr. Lyons needs filler material. Now.

Dan (Can I call you Dan? Maybe you prefer faux-Steve?) Please don't come back until you can bring some actual insight to the table.

Next.

</comment><comment><USER14> How is a beta of Windows 7 expected to be as reliable as a released version of OS X?

I'm a Mac user, and I much prefer OS X to Windows (XP/Vista), but, come on, what a weak anecdote!

<comment><USER15> anecdotes like these are always kinda painful to read... even a lot of comments it seems on here tend towards them however.

      "I hate microsoft.  The other day I tried windows 7, it
      sucked and I know a lot of people who had problems too."

these irrational fanboys (of all types) need to die in a fire. (bye karma points, it was worth it)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Apple kool-aid at its best.

<comment><USER17> No doubt.

I saw "Daniel Lyons" under the title and the first thing that came to mind after seeing that and the title was "Why's that? So you can start writing FSJ blog posts again?"

... I then read the article and I suspect I wasn't far off the mark.

<comment><USER18> FSJ did, in fact, start posting again last week.

<comment><USER17> _"FSJ did, in fact, start posting again last week."_

I rest my case then...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I do think the article was a bit much.

At the same time, I notice that during Steve Jobs's absence, the iphone mostly just treaded water, making only fairly incremental improvements to the same basic functionality. A few more years of this and Apple will lose its edge. So Apple certainly needs Steve Jobs, or someone else to fill his role, even if the rest of us don't.

</comment><comment><USER20> This naive view that only the leaders, not the people that design and create the products, is the kind of stunted thinking that led us into this recession.</comment>


Facial recognition for chimps searches the internet for stolen baby apes - <AUTHOR> https://www.fastcompany.com/90292089/facial-recognition-for-chimps-searches-the-internet-for-stolen-baby-apes <comment><USER2> Speaking of "other animals", why isn't this being used for human babies?</comment>