I Have Nonverbal Autism. Here's What I Want You to Know - <AUTHOR> http://themighty.com/2015/04/i-have-nonverbal-autism-heres-what-i-want-you-to-know/ <comment><USER2> Without video of the typing it is difficult to believe these assisted communication methods. It seems harsh but in the long run it isn't doing the child any good. This RPM thing involves a lot of fees, and if it isn't the real deal then it's horribly exploitative. Recent paper:

[http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/17489539.2014.955...](http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/17489539.2014.955260)

<comment><USER3> Your comment is not very clear. Are you saying the article can't be trusted because the method used to collect the contents of it is not representative of what the author is thinking? Or is influenced in some way? If so, wouldn't it be fairly obvious, e.g. the article would seem like gobbledygook?

Please elaborate! :-)

Edit: This seems adequately explained by another comment: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9563887](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9563887)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Having a rather severe non-verbal (some single words or rote phrase) 11 year old with autism, our biggest mystery is how much she does or doesn't understand about us or about her own condition. Articles like this (again, hopefully written by the subject) help give some potential insight.

Because she essentially has no voice, it's almost natural to talk about her as if she isn't there. As she's grown we've been better about it, but because she doesn't express emotion it's near impossible to imagine what she might be thinking or feeling.

I have several dreams a year where she speaks. I'd expect other parents do as well.

The strangest thing for me is to have a child that has never asked us a single question. We see other families with 3 year olds that continuously ask "Why?" to everything you say. When you hear other parents complaining that their kids won't stop asking questions, I try not to remind them of the alternative.

<comment><USER5> Please don't give up. My son is 16. He still shows fairly severe symptoms of autism. In all these years, I have longed to have one conversation with him, but that has never happened.

However, to my surprise, he is also doing well academically through home schooling. He started out with a lot of prompting but now he can demonstrate his independent skill and mastery on fairly complex tasks - for example multiple choice tests in high school Algebra or English.

By now, we know he is highly intelligent, but he has so many repetitive and OCD behaviors it is hard for him to function in the real world.

He is learning to program and he shows some aptitude for it - he seems to be somewhat good (not yet surprisingly good) at finding bugs in short pieces of code. Our hope is that as he grows older, he will gain control of himself enough to be able to function in some assistive setting.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for sharing. Giving up isn't an option. We've fully accepted the possibility that we may be supporting her for our lifetime, with the hope we can get her to the point of at least some level of personal independence.

I've read several articles related to autism and software testing. We aren't nearly at that level yet, but your son could be a candidate for those programs. Good luck to you as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I am an autism parent, who was similarly skeptical of prompting as many comments expressed here.

My son, who appears completely uncoordinated with random repetitive behaviors, would fit the typical pattern of many of these kids. Even now, if we take him to a grocery shop, his conspicuous behaviors would cause people to stare at him.

Yet, here is an experimentally testable concrete thing he can do: read a complex English passage and answer a series of fairly non-trivial multiple choice questions - for example "What is the tone of this paragraph? a) Irony b) Sarcasm c) Sorrow d) Happiness" type of questions which you cannot simply answer by trivial pattern matching.

No prompting would be necessary and this test has been performed without parents being nearby, on totally new material. In fact, he takes these tests often, partly because we could tell he gets some thrill from getting everything right and that test-taking seems one of the rare times he seems completely focused.

Originally, he was very prompt dependent (as many people mention here), so even I was somewhat skeptical about his real skills, but now I have no doubt.

The reason I mention all this is that no casual observer, not even one who spends hours together with him, would conclude he can do those things. He has no motivation to connect or demonstrate his skills; yet, he now can demonstrate he can do these things independently.

These kids are very complicated, so don't be too quick to dismiss them.

<comment><USER4> _Even now, if we take him to a grocery shop, his conspicuous behaviors would cause people to stare at him._

I sincerely hope you still take him to the grocery shop. My daughter stims, makes loud noises, has OCD behaviors, may hit her head, etc. and I make a point of taking her to the stores several times a week. While it's good for her to practice being in public, I also want the public to see her and that there are others like her. As people with autism being in public becomes less of a novelty, other children and adults will eventually learn how not to stare, or in some situations how to help.

<comment><USER5> Yes, we do take him out, for the same reasons you mentioned. By now, _we_ have lost any sense of shame or suffering about his behaviors. That was the thing we had to master - our own emotional suffering seeing him stared at.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> We need to be very careful with this. And I mean we, the hacker community, we, society at large, and we, people who genuinely want to reach those with communication disadvantages.

I'll start with why: this may not be Philip writing to us. I would like to believe it is, and those of us who may be on the autistic spectrum will not find it difficult to believe that this writing is of the ability they had when they were his age. That confirmation bias is but one of a number of cognitive biases that impel us to find Philip in these words. We are, of course, social creatures, and generally when we read heartfelt things like this we will set aside our critical nature. When presented with new and plausible information in the absence of anything that might indicate contrarily, we err to assume that it is true.

But it likely is not. This blog highlights the "Rapid Prompting Method". This method is not strongly supported in blind tests. There is little empirical evidence that it allows persons with nonverbal autism to communicate, and in fact, decades of failed trials that suggest that this and other methods of facilitated communication do not work. It tugs at the heart strings, and it pains me to say this, but it is sadly almost certainly not Philip expressing these thoughts.

What is rapid prompting? It is a process of rapidly presenting someone with options until they have produced sensible text. In practice, it looks like someone guiding a person who is stimming as a human Ouija board[1]. The practitioner silently omits incorrect options, just as superstitious teens neglect digrams that don't make sense when they are found with a Ouija board.

This may be more than that, I would very much hope so. But the American Psychological Association's position on all forms of facilitated communication is firm: they are fraudulent[2]. Comparing rapid prompting to facilitated communication has already been done, as has been written about in NIH- supported journals[3]. These and other methods are woo, as the skeptical community describes it: not science. This woo is perpetrated by unwitting charlatans[4].

That harsh language is necessary, because we are doing something, I think, much worse than merely mistakenly giving a voice to persons with nonverbal autism. Instead, there are loving, adoring parents and "rapid prompting" experts who are unwittingly casting their voice as another's. Instead of undoing the silence of autism, they are turning people into dummies with a textual form of ventriloquism.

What the hacker community should take from this is this: the desire to help those persons who have nonverbal autism is going to be very strong, but you can do great harm by making something that doesn't work. But if you're hacking something together, if you think you have a way to help, be cautious. Don't give in to the desire to "disrupt" this space. Instead, work with the psychological community, work with those who study neurological development. Don't just make something parents and loved ones want, make something _that works_.

What society should take from this is that when people have their ability to communicate taken from them, it is very easy to put another's voice in their place and have everyone be none the wiser. It is very sad, but that is what happens to many of those "assisted" with facilitated communication. And as always, be skeptical of cures and success stories. It's easy to be swept away by what we want to be true.

And finally, there are people who want to help those with communication disadvantages of all kinds. For those people working on this right now: Take that desire to make something that works, and rigorously apply the skepticism the public should have - but doesn't - to what you're doing. That is vital, it is key, it is the most important thing you can do. Don't allow wishful thinking to turn a child with autism into a puppet.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xp3G8yM2vTg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xp3G8yM2vTg) \- One of many, many similar videos you can find.

[2] [http://www.apa.org/research/action/facilitated.aspx](http://www.apa.org/research/action/facilitated.aspx)

[3] [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24102487](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24102487)

[4] [http://www.science20.com/countering_tackling_woo/blog/why_ra...](http://www.science20.com/countering_tackling_woo/blog/why_rapid_prompting_method_still_doesn%E2%80%99t_pass_evidencebased_test-68146)

<comment><USER7> I agree that the youtube video you linked is not at all convincing as an example of genuine communication.

I don't know anything about Philip's path to get where he is now, but there are a number of videos of Philip using his current method of communication, which appears to be typing on a bluetooth keyboard to an ipad app that repeats his letters and words back to him.

The mom holds the keyboard, but Philip moves his own hand. Mom seems to use a lot of cues to help him keep on track--shaking the keyboard to bring him back to it, repeating his words back to him--but I really don't see her writing it for him, moving the keyboard under his finger to spell things, or "interpreting" vague gestures.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MK_Q60LhgzA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MK_Q60LhgzA)

This one has several minutes of typing where you can see the keyboard and his hand. It's slow, slow going, but it really looks like he's the one doing the writing.

<comment><USER8> I saw the video. In my opinion, the mother gives slightly clues that make him press the button when he has the finger over the correct key. It's not on purpose, it subconscious. For example, it's enough to incline the keyboard a little forward or backward. She moves the keyboard too much. Why does she have the keyboard floating in the air instead of a inclined support?

A clear experiment is to replace the mother with a automatic keyboard shaker. Some device with a button that moves the keyboard randomly to grab his attention again, but most of the time the keyboard is completely still. Also, during the experiment he should not see other persons, because it can send another subconscious cues.

A well known case with less emotional weight is "Clever Hans" [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clever_Hans](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clever_Hans) . It was not a hoax or a scam, it was the unsuspected ability to read some subtle clues. And Hash was a horse and he is a child. He is much more intelligent than a horse!!! He probably is better reading expressions and sublte clues. With some optimism, perhaps he even realized "Etaoin shrdlu" [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etaoin_shrdlu](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etaoin_shrdlu) are the more frequent letters and that makes the typing easier.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> That kid is a really good writer for a 12 year old. Very clear and to the point.

<comment><USER10> Note that this was most likely written by his facilitator, not by him. It was written via a technique called "Rapid Prompting Method", which appears to be a variant of facilitated communication, a method that has been debunked as simply being the facilitator guiding the child, either consciously or subconsciously, to type things that the facilitator is thinking, not that the child is thinking.

See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facilitated_communication](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facilitated_communication) for more information. I also recommend the PBS Frontline documentary "Prisoners of Silence" (transcript: [http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/programs/transcripts...](http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/programs/transcripts/1202.html), video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXw8Ksvyt5Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXw8Ksvyt5Y)), which does a good job both debunking it, and demonstrating why facilitated communication can be quite harmful; there was a rash of incidents in which facilitators imagined sexual abuse allegations from children, leading to substantial repercussions for innocent parents.

<comment><USER11> I didn't realise this kind of thing applied to people with enough motion control to hold a cup of coffee as seen in the photo. Surely they can type on an iPad themselves at that point, without the need for an interpreter or go- between?

<comment><USER12> it is actually not about motion control. It is a fundamental inability to communicate. I don't know much about this specific case, but it is quite possible he could accurately hit arbitrary buttons, but cannot map those actions to a meaning to be communicated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Well this took a dark turn. I never would have known about this RPM thing if I hadn't read these comments.

</comment><comment><USER14> The book "The Reason I Jump" is another excellent take, translated by the author of Cloud Atlas. He wrote this via independent typing (not RPM) when he was 13: [http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Reason-Jump-silence- autism/dp/14...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Reason-Jump-silence- autism/dp/1444776754)

It looks as if the ABA provision was sub-standard (RPM debate aside) as modern ABA in the Verbal Behaviour mold should be adaptive and rely less on the intensive table sessions (which are still a part unfortunately). Done correctly it can provide the tools for communication, although not everyone will be able to speak with words.

One thing that is interesting is that many of the principals of ABA are used in our mobile apps today, I certainly learnt a lot when reviewing the research and formulating my son's programme and vice versa implementing the ideas and concepts to the mobile sphere..

</comment><comment><USER15> >'Let's pretend you are like me. You can't talk, but you have a well- functioning mind'

I thought that one of the few genuine insights made about autism is that so- called autistic people have difficultly reading intentions (their own, or other people's) or even appreciating what minds and intentions _are_. Which is why they appear selfish, and why they're unqualified to make such statements.

Also sceptical that coercing people to behave in socially acceptable ways is necessary or desirable.

People who are basically happy and left to develop autonomously will tend to converge with social expectations as required. Maybe the spontaneous cures of autism are examples of that: happy children, perhaps shielded from bullying, whose parents supported them enough for this lengthy process to occur.

Whereas trying to train people like dolphins risks making them miserable and thwarting that development.

<comment><USER16> > I thought that one of the few genuine insights made about autism is that so- > called autistic people have difficultly reading intentions (their own, or > other people's) or even appreciating what minds and intentions are. Which is > why they appear selfish, and why they're unqualified to make such > statements.

I don't think this is wholly accurate. My understanding was that people with autism commonly have deficient _cognitive_ empathy (they have difficulty discerning others emotions) but not _affective_ or _emotional_ empathy (they get upset if they hear about others suffering).

With sociopaths, it's meant to be the other way round: normal (or better than normal) cognitive empathy, but a lack of affective empathy -- hence their purported skills in manipulation.

<comment><USER15> My guess is that if there's no sense of self or other then there's no getting upset _about_ others: there's just upset or 'upsetness' (which others may misinterpret as normal empathy).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Not the same, but related: a month ago there was a Reddit BestOf'd comment from a self-proclaimed autistic describing his early life and current situation. I found it fascinating.

[http://np.reddit.com/r/science/comments/33czht/study_of_9500...](http://np.reddit.com/r/science/comments/33czht/study_of_95000_children_finds_no_link_between_mmr/cqjwxkm)</comment>


Find Out if You're a Scale-Up Entrepreneur with This Two-Minute Test - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2013/05/are_you_a_scale-up_entrepreneu.html

<comment><USER2> _The sales process is just starting when the customer first says no._

I'm going to go "no" on this, and add that I think this is misguided thinking:

Now to be fair, I'm hardly an experienced sales-person, so I may be proven wrong. But a lot of the sales material[1] I've been reading and working on applying lately suggests a different approach. Instead of focusing on your product and going into "presentation mode" right away, and finding yourself in the mode of having to "overcome objections" the idea is to "Always be leaving" (not "always be closing") and focus on actually diagnosing the customer's needs and actively seek to disqualify them if they don't _actually_ need what you are selling. If they do, you go through a guided process of diagnosis, something akin to the way a doctor diagnoses a patient: you think your doctor is going to try to sell you some angioplasty because they're running a special on it this week, without even checking to see if maybe you really _do_ just have heartburn?

Further, if you buy this approach (no pun intended), part of the idea is that the diagnosis process keeps the customer involved and you actually get them to take ownership of parts of the process... so that, when you get to the end, IF the need actually arises, you won't usually encounter much (if any) objections, as the answer will be obvious.

Of course it'll never be quite _that_ easy in practice, but I'm planning to start applying this model and see how it works for us.

[1]: <http://www.masteringthecomplexsale.com/></comment>


Should children do more enrichment activities? Correcting for endogeneity - <AUTHOR> https://privpapers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3624929 <comment><USER2> I was in disbelief at the paper title, so I looked at the slides: [https://www.dropbox.com/s/4gzotq077orblwq/CaetanoNielsen_sli...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/4gzotq077orblwq/CaetanoNielsen_slides.pdf?dl=0)

Read slide 17. The key assumptions are that: the confounder present at bunching point is representative of the confounder present everywhere, and the confounder affects outcome linearly. The second assumption is what strikes me as too strong, and you can read the paper Appendix C for how they address it. The reasoning is quite weak and they even phrase it as such: "Our main empirical findings therefore do not seem to be an artifact of this linearity assumption". Overall I would take this paper with a grain of salt, from a cognitive science point of view it just makes no sense that doing more reading would have no cognitive benefits (in fact, we know the opposite to be true.)

Also, the paper hasn't even been reviewed yet. We should revisit it after it has been peer reviewed.

<comment><USER3> These kind of papers (those with the theme of "taking any kind of action for the growth of your cognition will always be in vain") seem to have a strong bias toward biological determinism. But God gave human beings the ability to solve problems for the purpose of overcoming nature, which includes the nature of our cognitive type and our cognitive capacity.

<comment><USER4> That's not what it's saying though, it's merely saying that structured enrichment activities are _no better_ at improving your cognitive skills than the other things kids choose to spend their time on if they weren't forced to do structured enrichment.

They even point this out as a specific point in the abstract: You can't compare kids doing enrichment activities to kids not doing enrichment activities while controlling for every other variable to be the same, because it is manifestly true that time spent on enrichment activities can not be spent on other activities, such as sleep or socializing, which _also_ have benefits.

<comment><USER3> > They even point this out as a specific point in the abstract: You can't > compare kids doing enrichment activities to kids not doing enrichment > activities while controlling for every other variable to be the same, > because it is manifestly true that time spent on enrichment activities can > not be spent on other activities, such as sleep or socializing, which also > have benefits.

Please double-check my reading comprehension of your comment. Are you saying that it is not possible to analyze the benefits of enrichment activities as opposed to what normal kids do, because there is no way to have a group of kids who do exactly what normal kids do + enrichment activities, because taking the time to do enrichment activities necessarily knocks out at least one activity normal kids do, thereby making control impossible?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> But after-school programs DO cause a drastic drop in teen crime, alcoholism and substance abuse. Those effects are probably more important. [https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and- families...](https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and- families/iceland-knows-how-to-stop-teen-substance-abuse-but-the-rest-of-the- world-isn-t-listening-a7526316.html)

<comment><USER6> But what is the mechanism of action here?

It's probably just (1) added adult supervision, (2) lack of free time for those negative activities.

<comment><USER7> How about if they discover some books that turn out life changing.

<comment><USER8> Like the series by Carlos Castenada?

Or Huxley's Doors of our mind?

<comment><USER7> Yeah, why not?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > Abstract

>We study the effects of enrichment activities such as reading, homework, and extracurricular lessons on children's cognitive and non-cognitive skills. We take into consideration that children forgo alternative activities, such as play and socializing, in order to spend time on enrichment. Our study controls for selection on unobservables using a novel approach which leverages the fact that many children spend zero hours per week on enrichment activities. At zero enrichment, confounders vary but enrichment does not, which gives us direct information about the effect of confounders on skills.

>Using time diary data available in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), _we find that the net effect of enrichment is zero for cognitive skills and negative for non-cognitive skills,_ which suggests that enrichment may be crowding out more productive activities on the margin. The negative effects on non-cognitive skills are concentrated in higher-income students in high school, consistent with elevated academic competition related to college admissions.

<comment><USER10> This study sends all kinds of red flags for me.

First, they are looking at a very wide range of activities and calling them enrichment. They include tutoring, music lessons, reading, and other "extracurricular activities" as an "enrichment activity." That seems like too wide of a net, as many extracurricular activities and homework likely are a waste of time, therefore diluting the extracurricular activities with positive effects.

Second, if I understand their methodology, they are checking students with no enrichment activities to children with a few minutes a week of enrichment time. Skill acquisition takes more than a few minutes a week, so of course those children would not be receiving benefit.

Third, the results seem absurd. They are saying there are no cognitive benefits to taking music lessons, but I guarantee that the children who took a music lesson is much better at playing an instrument than a student who didn't.

Fourth, there's already a lot of statistical and neurological evidence that reading is good for your thinking and your brain, and I don't think this study overcomes that evidence.

<comment><USER11> > Third, the results seem absurd. They are saying there are no cognitive > benefits to taking music lessons, but I guarantee that the children who took > a music lesson is much better at playing an instrument than a student who > didn't.

They say that since time is finite, the benefit from music lessons seems to be canceled out by lost opportunities of doing other things. It's totally reasonable to think that, in fact if enrichment was positive in net then that would actually mean kids are doing too little.

<comment><USER12> Given the very limited readout of "skills", how could it be otherwise? Nothing in their measurements captures the actual skills taught by music lessons (piano-playing ability, music appreciation, etc).

Perhaps music lessons have some second-order effect on "does neat, careful work", but it doesn't seem impossible that might have opposing effects on other so-called skills too: "too fearful or anxious" for stage fright, "disobedient" for not practicing when told.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> One of the things that they get right in Russia, and even places like England, is that its much easier for a poor city family to have a cottage outside the city or an allotment garden that is subsidized by the state.

And I think benefit to city kids is enormous, as far as an entire new environment to be exposed to. And even the growing of food.

This should a program in North America too. Giant farms have taken almost all the land. And some of it is just a waste anyway. If the government can subsidize growing corn to turn into car fuel. An extremely wasteful energy inefficient process.

Government could be buying some of that land back, and letting return to nature or forest, and allowing building even tiny cottages. For poor families, it could be such a quality of life boost, especially for kids.

</comment><comment><USER14> I agree - homework did nothing for me when I was in school. I could always ace the tests but teachers insisted homework "because" \- never made sense and was a constant source of friction. Jackasses.

<comment><USER15> Homework is totally different for me in university compared to high school. Math in high school was easy. The homework just felt like a waste of time: repeatedly applying what you learned from one example.

In university, homework is everything. If all you do is attend the lectures, you will fail the midterm and final. In order to do well in the course you need to do all the homework which really pushes you to learn. The examples given in lecture are completely trivial compared to the homework problems which can often take hours to solve.

"Enrichment activities" would actually be useful if the content was actually enriched. Advanced students would get a lot more out of school if they were given work that was genuinely challenging for them and took a long time to figure out.

<comment><USER16> I feel similar.

My first collegiate math class, the teacher came in and asked the class, "do you know how to get an A in this class, two hours of math homework a night". I followed this advice and bam, A. Despite the fact that this math class was much harder than anything I did in high school and I was always a B+ math student.

The next semester I followed this advice again but let myself slip a few weeks and bam B+. The next semester I strictly spent the time again, bam, A.

Through upper class years my diligence in school was consistent but I sometimes had to focus on programming over math. I noticed a near perfect correlation between the time I spent on out of class work and my performance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think I'm not quite understanding what they're saying. In section 5.1 of the PDF tsumnia linked, the author talks about how it's not that enrichment activities have no benefit (despite saying actually writing that), is that the enrichment activities have no greater benefit than leisure activities. Did I get that right?

My older daughter loves to read, so she reads a lot, and her teacher (when school was in session) says she's one of the best readers in the class. So is this paper saying that if my daughter had done activities instead of read (like play video games or run around outside) she'd be just as good a reader? That doesn't seem right based on my experience.

Also, I read a lot about the benefits of having children learn to play music, especially starting with a piano. Some studies referenced here: [https://www.lindebladpiano.com/blog/benefits-of-playing- pian...](https://www.lindebladpiano.com/blog/benefits-of-playing-piano). Doesn't this paper suggest those other studies are wrong? I'm kind of slow when it comes to understanding papers like this.

<comment><USER11> > So is this paper saying that if my daughter had done activities instead of > read (like play video games or run around outside) she'd be just as good a > reader?

No, they are saying that your daughters overall cognitive skill would be equal. So maybe she'd be worse at reading but better some other cognitive skill (say, special recognition). Basically there's no free lunch—if you spend on one thing you aren't spending it on something else.

<comment><USER17> Aha, that makes sense. Thanks for the reply.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> People seem to be confusing this and taking it like a personal attack.

Its not saying music is pointless. Its just saying it isnt going to help you in math. And over doing it, may in fact hurt your math due to burnout.

(Sub math for whatever non enrichment activity, sub music for any enrichment activity)

<comment><USER19> That's definitely not what the paper is saying.

People aren't reading the paper, just the headline, is what's happening, and projecting their personal experience onto the 1 liner conclusion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'd have a guess it's because the kids simply aren't paying attention to stuff they're not interested in.

If you want smart kids, just give them what they need to explore, and provide the materials they need for whatever they choose to focus on.

</comment><comment><USER21> Even if their conclusion is correct, which after a quick skim I didn't see how they measured "cognitive" skills the result is kind of dumb.

Working on math problems might not make you a quicker thinker overall, but it will teach you math! The specific skill you enrich will become stronger at the expense of the rest of your life. I agree that time spent not socializing damages the ability to socialize (it's a joke among engineers in school). Clearly we are not making great tradeoffs, but I'm not sure this result helps us very much beyond what we already knew.

</comment><comment><USER22> I worry that people read things like this to inform what they do with their children. A child is a person and its reasonable to explore what they need and want through your life with them. We should always remember that children are not simply another of life's projects to be maximised.

</comment><comment><USER23> I think in my kids it depends on the activity. Some things are better than others I'm sure. Nothing wrong with trying things to find what you like, maybe find your passion.

Is there some perfect version of achieving cognitive and non-cognitive skills. Are people happy if they achieve it?

</comment><comment> kalium-xyz Anyone have a direct link to the actual paper?

<comment><USER24> PDF: [https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/feds/files/2020036pap...](https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/feds/files/2020036pap.pdf)

Slides can be found on the lead author's homepage: [http://carolinacaetano.net/](http://carolinacaetano.net/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> this paper is very hard to read and full of jargon for the non-initiated.

the conclusion is just one sentence and is very clear. but i was left with the feeling with all these big words that i am not supposed to understand what they are studying or their methodology...

<comment><USER26> You're meant to be dazzled by the jargon and trust the Experts™.

<comment><USER27> It's a normal paper for its discipline. We are not the target audience.

(something that Nature did in the redesign that led to me dropping the subscription —I use "table of contents on the cover" as a sibboleth— was to introduce a section of summaries, written for a wider audience, for some of the articles, which I found, on the contrary, to be a very positive move.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I decided to provide my feedback on the paper because judging from some of the comments I've read, some of you did not read it. To those that did read it, remember that the authors are people too and can offer any clarifications or address any concerns you have.

After reading through the paper, I'd like to say the authors did an excellent job addressing a sensitive subject. Part of me likes to think that they, like many of you, thought that enrichment programs were a given positive addition to life. The authors do an excellent job attempting to use mathematics to model human behavior - Sections 2-4 are almost entirely used to explain what they mean and how their equations operate. While reading the paper, I thought about some of the negative comments on this thread about economists. To that, I reasoned that we use mathematics as an attempt to model the world. Physics is our attempt to model the physical world and economics is the closest thing we have to modeling human behavior. If you disagree with that sentiment, become an economist and change the domain or dual major in data science and psychology (or sociology or any other degree used to model humans).

My biggest takeaway from this paper is that additional HOMEWORK does not help in improving a student's cognitive ability. In the paper, enrichment is defined as "investments in children's skills" which 87% of their dataset consisted of homework, reading, or before/after school academic programs. Doing or adding an additional hour of these activities does not provide any benefit to the child. This does not mean that learning is bad, as class time was a separate category, it meant "doing more" didn't help. Again, this is a sensitive subject, and I can agree that the authors don't account for "bad" instruction.

I will say there are limitations to their results, which they do acknowledge. Their dataset is small, but one of the closest datasets we have to mapping long-term human activities. I'd say this limitation grows exponentially because the CDS/PSID dataset they use only addressed 3 days in an individual's life. If I am wrong please correct me, but that is what I assume they used based on the paper. PSID contains 75,000 individuals and they only sampled 4,330 children. However, if you assume a nuclear family (4 people), that means the dataset contains ~18,750 families, which means the sample is ~25%. Again, this is a limitation, but one of the only approximations we have. The other limitation is that they are using self-response surveys, which have limited reliability.

With that, what can we take from this paper? My takeaway is that people are effectively equal but different at the same time. This was addressed with their h(X) value. Using all controllable variables, some h() function exists that produces what they addressed as "ability". This is once again where I, as did the authors, recognize that it is a sensitive topic. It is also one of the additional limitations I would say to their paper - assuming ability is a fixed value.

However, as a discussion point, 'ability' would account for some ugly truths. The g-factor and IQ are methods to address cognitive ability with sensitive undertones. Likewise, it is a commonality that networking is a key factor in successful employment often mentioned on HN. This could be accentuated by their findings that additional enrichment negatively impacted non-cognitive skills. Just because you are smart does not mean you are employable. However, I acknowledge that assessing cognitive ability is a sensitive topic, ripe with misconstruction. Likewise, I think the authors do their best to NOT say your ability is determined at birth.

I would caution against using "ability" as a metric for determining worth. Doing so would encourage early testing to see if someone is "worth the time" and I imagine would be vulnerable to prejudice and confound the features of X, e.g. a low-income child is not worth investing in. Instead, I would argue that this paper doesn't fully address "potential" with their unboservable ε. The job of the individual instead is to identify and maximize their potential (X) or at the very least improve the potential of their future selves (X+1, or children). This would acknowledge the concept of "expertise", or practicing a task makes you better at said task. It still presents an uncomfortable truth that some people aren't able to achieve success in a given task, but does address improving one's self.

I'll end there for some discussion and because it is late.

<comment><USER27> Table 7 p.43 is the list of "cognitive" and "non-cognitive" skills. Figure 12 p.46 shows the "enrichment activities."

From these the conclusions should not be surprising. "Reading a book" and attending a "before or after school program" may help with the non-cognitive skills, but those are only 10% or so of "enrichment" time, and the only non- cognitive skill homework (unless it has changed greatly from my day?) would significantly help with is "Demands a lot of attention."

(silly authors: enrichment isn't meant to develop _skills_ [1], it's meant, by choice of enrichment activities, to develop the sorts of people the children think are "one of us" as young adults, to influence whom they will hang out with, whom they will date, etc.

In _Brave New World_ this starring of sneetches is managed in infancy by hypnopaedic suggestion:

"… all wear green," said a soft but very distinct voice, beginning in the middle of a sentence, "and Delta Children wear khaki. Oh no, I don't want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They're too stupid to be able to read or write. Besides they wear black, which is such a beastly colour. I'm so glad I'm a Beta." There was a pause; then the voice began again. "Alpha children wear grey They work much harder than we do, because they're so frightfully clever. I'm really awfuly glad I'm a Beta[2], because I don't work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green, and Delta children wear khaki. Oh no, I don't want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They're too stupid to be able …")

[1] I like the french idea of "education" (education), as having components not only of "how to" (savoir faire), but also of "how to live with others" (savoir vivre) and even of "how to live with oneself" (savoir être).

[2] the list of "non-cognitive" skills also shows a distinct bias towards (in _Brave New World_ terms) Beta-Gamma ideals. How many of these soft skills does someone from a high SES background need to become, say, President of the United States?

</comment></comment><comment> Chiba-City I doubt it. Mastering an instrument and music reading/writing trains linguistic, focus and cooperation skills. Acting in plays trains memory and cooperation skills and performance skills. Field sports trains spatial reasoning and competition skills. Camping and hiking trains preparation, map reading and cooking skills. And so on. We know what we know and live our lived out metaphors.

</comment><comment><USER28> Sounds like BS

</comment><comment><USER29> The incredible arrogance of economists, blundering into every field that has a convenient data set for them to abuse.

<comment><USER30> Time is the most valuable resource we have, why shouldn't economists study how to most efficiently allocate that limited resource?</comment></comment>


The making of Angela Merkel - <AUTHOR> https://www.ft.com/content/8ce791c2-980b-11e7-b83c-9588e51488a0 <comment><USER2> archive.is it, please.</comment>


How America's Quality of Life Imploded - <AUTHOR> https://eand.co/why-does-america-have-such-a-uniquely-low-quality-of-life-cda909d647d0 <comment><USER2> > "All these things are simply now unaffordable for the average American. And > worse, they are skyrocking in price every year. 66% of Americans choose > between food and healthcare. Do you see what I mean?"

[Follows link]

> "a blockbuster study released Monday by the relief charity Feeding America > ... involved interviews with 60,000 people whose households are served by > the charity."

This cites a source which cites a survey of people served by an anti-poverty charity, and finds they suffer from poverty. Then he restates it incorrectly, falsely stating that it applies to 66% of all Americans. This is a major distortion, and it cuts right to the central point of the article.

</comment><comment><USER3> Here's my pop-culture theory:

1/ US is left relatively unscathed after WW2 becoming the remaining superpower.

2/Unearned power without the corresponding sense of responsibility led to unsoohosticated methods of locking in interest. Domination oriented. Assassinating other countries leaders.

3/To rationalize the disproportionate wealth and actions due to innate "just- world" beliefs the culture evolves to dehumanize others.

4/The dehumanization revolves specifically around democracy and hard work. Hard work due to puratinical bsckground.

5/When wealth is abundant the externalities can be external. However when the rest of the world catches up much of the population has no competitive advantage.

6/The only well off people are those maintaining existing moats. Entrance requires strong status signalling.

7/The same people are already indoctrined into a fend-for-yourself culture and are in a bubble where they don't sense they are lucky. The residual programming is too successful.

8/new "good stuff" is reserved for the deserving. The undeserving are punished more to goad them to be more successful.

Also, a contrarian thought. It's not the rich who are the problem. They actually tend to create ecosystems that generate wealth for others because the capital seeks use.

Instead it's the middle class who can't deal with the guilt created by seeing the less well off. In their hearts they know they are living off moat surplus. Their internal rationalizations create systems that make them feel good instead of doing good. the "punish the wicked" mentality especially creates disastrous consequences. (e.g war on drugs)

<comment><USER4> Not sure how you can conclude it's the middle class and not the rich

What good are the middle class to do when they have to work daily to afford shelter?

Yeah they don't need a McMansion but most do not.

Numerous studies and polls have concluded the people want to work on feeding, clothing, sheltering, and caring one another

But we're induced to grow the fiat economy despite those interests

When the rich are paying pols for tax cuts and to gut the milquetoast healthcare system, yeah it's the lazy middle class

We have to keep making cars most people wouldn't need if the bottom line hadn't been helped by sprawl

This humanities fault as a whole for replacing the Bible and Jesus with economics

It didn't do shit to break the cycle of abiding the mass delusion

Otherwise your summary is legit and as far I've seen, close to the leading academic positions

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is this where coastal elites in one of the most privileged professions of the 21st century declare that there is no problem with American inequality and lack of opportunity?

<comment><USER6> I grew up in Appalachia and the biggest thing in my opinion is the lack of economic migration. After I spent a year teaching computer science remotely in Eastern Kentucky I decided we need to not spend another $ on building up the area but instead help people move away.

\--- Edit spelling wording

<comment><USER7> The middle of the country is of value. Depending on your politics, it is a place of safety from either ocean intrusion or SLBM launches.

Also, do we really want million of people moving to places like Palo Alto? Aside from landlords and people with property to sell, would anybody like that?

Water shortages and pollution are trouble already. Packing in more people just makes things worse.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The "social contracts" in european nations reflect those societies as does lack of one in the US. The author for some reaso correlates the opiod crisis even though he admits there has never been such a "social contract" in the history of the U.S.

Moreover,he lumps "strongmen" with "self-help" and religion with no obvious relation other than people "turn" to them. And generalizes by saying being "joel osteen enough" is what conservatives mean when speaking of family values.

This is how democracy works,americans simply don't have the same beliefs and world views as swedes or portugese.

No strings attached housing for homeless people is cheaper than leaving them on the streets. Treating drugs as a disease instead of a crime is cheaper. Earlier retirement of elders allows younger workers with more relevant skills to join the work force. A more humane prison system would result in less prisoners (cheaper). So,are americans simply unaware of this? Nope.

"Americans" are a diverse group of people with a diverse set of social divisions and conflicts. They simply don't think "free housing" or most anything "free" is a good idea even if free is cheaper than what we have now. Why should a criminal get treated better? Why can't homeless peoole get a low paying job just like immigrants? Etc.... That's how americans see these issues.

The homeless,poor,under privledged are "them" in the eyes of the american popular majority. In western europe,those people are "us" or "our people".

America spends 20% of it's gdp on the military. Yet spend a bit more to solve these societal issues and all the powerful (typically older) people would say "not with my tax money".

That being said,why is everyone so pessimistic? We know these problems. It might take a decade or more for the demographics to shift enough to where we can fix these issues but why panic?

Essentially, America needs to be united. Neither the leaders nor the population seem to have a strong interest in being united,this by itself is the equivalent of having a terminal brain tumor!</comment>


CampaignMonitor raises $250M from Insight Venture Partners - <AUTHOR> http://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/post/4186/campaign-monitor-partners-with-insight-venture-partners

<comment><USER2> Ros from Campaign Monitor here - thanks for sharing the great news. The team are pretty excited about what's to come from here on in! WSJ also did a bit of analysis: [http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/04/16/australias- campaign-m...](http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/04/16/australias-campaign- monitor-raises-250-million-from-insight/)</comment>


Cosette: An Automated SQL Solver - <AUTHOR> http://cosette.cs.washington.edu/ <comment><USER2> So can you brute-force queries until you find something faster, then verify it?

<comment><USER3> Would much rather a computer did that than me

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Does this really use advanced features of Homotopic Type Theory? Does it really require the Univalence Axiom? (Caveat: I don't yet properly understand either of those two things.)

It seems to me that the representation of cardinalities as "Univalent Types" could just as easily be done using Decidable Setoids (eg the number 3 is represented by a Setoid with a decidable equivalence relationship that divides its members into 3 equivalence classes).

There are only four things in this system that require a notion of equality and/or equivalence: tuples, cardinalities, relations (as functions from tuples to cardinalities) and queries (as functions from relations to relations).

I think this could all be done with in ordinary plain dependent type theory, without any HOTT or Univalence Axiom (for example, in Idris, which is apparently incompatible with the Univalence Axiom). Each of the four notions of equivalence would be represented by a corresponding type function.

Have I missed something?

</comment><comment><USER5> > Please register (if you are first time user) or login (if you have > registered)

No, thank you.

</comment><comment><USER6> Amazing.

</comment><comment><USER7> Why?

<comment><USER8> Because it's awesome! You've never had to rewrite a query for some sort of reason other than the results returned (e.g. performance) and really wondered if the original and rewritten query were exactly the same?

<comment><USER9> I ended up building some tooling scripts to do this for stored procedures. It compares the output of the current and proposed stored procedures for all possible parameters and displays the differences and the set of parameters that it used.

It's not formal verification by any means, but it seemed to work pretty well in practice. It would take forever though. I'd start it and walk away for a couple hours when I wanted a thorough test. But my confidence in correctness and performance gain (it measured perf too) was well worth the effort.</comment></comment></comment>


GOP asking for advice on how to improve - <AUTHOR> http://growthopp.gop.com/default.aspx?s=pro

<comment><USER2> Not silencing and suppressing people at your own convention, people who are trying to improve your party rather than compete with it, would be a fabulous first step. Unfortunately many of those silenced and suppressed people have probably gone on to be competitors.</comment>


Square Introduces One Monthly Price for Small Businesses - <AUTHOR> https://squareup.com/news/releases/2012/square-introduces-one-monthly-price-for-small-businesses

<comment><USER2> Just for those who didn't do the math: for this to break even, you would have to do over $10,000 every month in Square transactions for this to make sense. I'm not sure what percentage of the Square market that is.</comment>


Epic fails in security, the Lexnet case [spanish] - <AUTHOR> https://www.elconfidencial.com/tecnologia/2017-08-03/desastre-lexnet-justicia-ciberseguridad-orfilia-rafael-catala_1424504/ <comment><USER2> Translation of Wikipedia page for Lexnet, [https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=es&u=https:/...](https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=es&u=https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexnet&prev=search)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is the result of massive corruption, nepotism and bad practices in spain. Just see the kind of "documentation" that the Lexnet responsibles sent to third party companies: [https://twitter.com/javier_dev/status/890642394260979712](https://twitter.com/javier_dev/status/890642394260979712)</comment>


Show HN: Joyride, flirt anonymously with people you know - <AUTHOR> https://joyride.im <comment><USER2> How do you flirt with someone without them knowing who you are? I mean, how do you know if they are interested. Because they don't know who you are, so how would they be?

Seems sort of strange to me.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback! :)</comment></comment>


Tinder: The new dating/hookup app sweeping colleges - <AUTHOR> http://www.ryot.org/tinder-bender/58918

<comment><USER2> I just tried it in Montreal. There seems to be an unusually large number of attractive females. Every second girl is gorgeous.

Granted, I'm in Montreal, which has a surplus of attractive females. But local OK Cupid usage is pretty low.

Anyone know if Tinder has system generated fake profiles?</comment>


Bus1 – Kernel Message Bus - <AUTHOR> http://www.bus1.org/bus1.html <comment><USER3> The API seems bad to me, the ioctl() is ridiculously overloaded (disconnect, connect, read, and write all go through ioctl(), for example). As an API, this doesn't pass Linus' "good taste" test. As a solution, it's more complicated than necessary.

On messaging in general: this is yet another IPC api from RedHat. They really want to get an IPC api into the kernel over there. However, their proposals seem 'ignorant,' in the sense that plenty of IPC research and work has been done over the last half century (or more?), and their proposals seems focused on their own small use cases. They seem unaware of how others have tried to solve the IPC problem.

On why Linus doesn't want to integrate it: no kernel team is going to want to have yet another poorly-designed IPC stack to maintain even though hardly anyone uses it. That's been done, and IPC in Unix is a mess as a result. Any sane kernel dev would be resistant to this, unless the new proposal is absolutely beautiful, and you can look at it and say, "yeah, that is really great."

RedHat should go out, investigate the research that has been done, become experts on the topic. Learn _everyone 's_ IPC problems, not just they problems they have in their own insular community. Only then create an API that actually is in good taste.

Then begin the political work of getting people to adopt it. Start with the BSD teams. Start with the hobbyist OS devs at osdev.org. When the whole world agrees that it is a good thing, then Linus will put it in the kernel too.

<comment><USER4> In term of linux design ioctl are natural candidates as an underlying mechanism for multi-process communication.

Quoting Steven Doyle

ioctl can be guaranteed by the kernel to be atomic. If a driver grabs a spinlock during the ioctl processing then the driver will enter atomic context and will remain in atomic context until it releases the spinlock. [http://lwn.net/Articles/274695/](http://lwn.net/Articles/274695/)

cooperative multitasking in critical functioning requires thread safety and atomicity.

What, bothers me is what the fuck is an iovec! That is the most important part of the norm and yet it is not defined. My fear is that to accommodate «industry grade level of developers» they will use dynamically allocated structures vs fixed size structure. And we all know that malloc in user space is already the door to hell, but in kernel space, it is a direct nightmare.

What cringes me too is it is a distributed system (and I played quite a lot with them) and they say they have tackled the problem of global ordering of the messages. Well, be it on the network, be it on silicium, I never saw anyone achieve this feature.

I fear they are over promising and they will under-deliver

<comment><USER5> > ioctl can be guaranteed by the kernel to be atomic. If a driver grabs a > spinlock during the ioctl processing then the driver will enter atomic > context and will remain in atomic context until it releases the spinlock.

That's a red herring though. A new syscall implementation can also provide the same guarantees.

> What, bothers me is what the fuck is an iovec!

Pretty sure they're referring to Berkeley-style UIO. Any discussion about those will soon devolve in other types of IPC, in my experience..

> What cringes me too is it is a distributed system (and I played quite a lot > with them) and they say they have tackled the problem of global ordering of > the messages. Well, be it on the network, be it on silicium, I never saw > anyone achieve this feature.

They are claiming there's no global synchronization and a global order. That is textbook impossible, and leads me to believe what's written on the site is either waaay misunderstood or waaay manipulative.

<comment><USER6> > They are claiming there's no global synchronization and a global order.

Need to update your textbook ;) [http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/um/people/lamport/pubs/t...](http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/um/people/lamport/pubs/time-clocks.pdf)

In particular, what we did is described here: [https://github.com/bus1/documentation/wiki/Message- ordering](https://github.com/bus1/documentation/wiki/Message-ordering)

If anything is unclear or misleading, please let me know and I'll try to clarify.

<comment><USER5> I've read both, thanks. I clearly remember the fact the total ordering is "somewhat arbitrary" in Lamport's own words, which is what I pointed out here [[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12803907](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12803907)], too.

I admit I haven't read the implementation to see what kind of bounds you derive, and I couldn't find them in the wiki either. So, I think I'll go with "accidentally exaggerated" instead of "manipulative".

<comment><USER6> "[S]omewhat arbitrary" is a correct description. We take something that is fundamentally partially ordered (real-world events that may happen exactly at the same time), respect the partial order and extend it to a total order. The extension is arbitrary, but I fail to see the problem with that, or how it contradict anything we wrote?

Could you explain what bounds you are interested in and in what way you think anything is exaggerated? I would like to update the docs if necessary.

<comment><USER5> I could. I would rather put it in an email or PR. I'll try to put it together as soon as I have some time.

<comment><USER6> Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A discussion of where Bus1 fits in the bestiary of Linux IPC proposals:

 _Bus1: a new Linux interprocess communication proposal_

[https://lwn.net/Articles/697191/](https://lwn.net/Articles/697191/)

<comment><USER8> Someone on twitter suggested that Apple libxpc should be used. I never heard of it but if someone did, I'll be happy to know more about it.

<comment><USER3> Here you go: [https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/Ma...](https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/MacOSX/Conceptual/BPSystemStartup/Chapters/CreatingXPCServices.html)

It is higher level, though, it is not something you would integrate into the kernel (like bus1 intends to be). OSX has decent IPC though, since it is based on the Mach research kernel from CMU, which was kind of based around the concept of messaging to begin with.

Applescript has interesting IPC concepts as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Although I have brought a lot of high level RPC/IPC systems into production I'm really having a hard time imagining where I could use this.

As far as I understand it gives me a bit more high level features (security, multicast) compared to other IPC primitives (sockets, pipes, ...). However once I'm going to use this my application (or high-level IPC framework) will be locked to Linux and no longer be portable to other platforms. So for any applications that should be at least halfway portable I would prefer something that works on the more common primitives (most likely sockets) and build something more powerful in a cross-plattform way on top ofi it (like HTTP, grpc, Thrift, ...).

A full featured low-level framework makes sense if I have a whole set of applications on top of it which is not intended to be portable and uses it exclusively. Something like the Android/iOS/... platform. But the current ones already have settled on their infrastructure (e.g. on Binder), and even if new ones come up there is a high possibility that they wouldn't like at least something in Bus1 and instead come up with their own solution.

</comment><comment><USER10> There was also a presentation on Bus1 on the systemd.conf 2016: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zN0b6BfgLY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zN0b6BfgLY)

</comment><comment><USER11> Previous thread on HN:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10708177](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10708177)

</comment><comment><USER12> So, Binder? And man, when people call ioctl a bastardized syscall... looks like 9 syscalls in one!

<comment> TD-Linux ... that's pretty much the point of ioctl - a syscall multiplexer in the context of a fd. 9 is pretty low - check out /dev/cdrom or /dev/dri/* if you want to see a lot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> how is this related to systemd(not just technically)? if anything.

</comment><comment><USER14> > Also in the case where there can be no causal relationship, we are > guaranteed

> a global order. In case two events happend concurrently, there can never be

> any inconsistency in which occurred before the other. By way of example,

> consider two peers sending one message each to two different peers, we are

> guaranteed that both the recipient peers receive the two messages in the > same

> order, even though the order may be arbitrary.

How could that possibly work?

<comment><USER5> With their "synchronize-local-clocks" approach, it doesn't.

They are using Lamport's algorithm to synchronize the clocks. However, Lamport's approach creates a _partial_ ordering, and to make that a _total_ ordering you need some mechanism to break "ties". For instance, the PID, or whatever.

The catch is that the relationship derived from this arbitrary tie-breaking mechanism has nothing to do with causality, and therefore the total order it imposes is only an artifact of the mechanism chosen.

Finding a tie-breaking mechanism that corresponds to the sending events is, in Lamport's own words, "not trivial".

<comment><USER6> Indeed that is how we break ties (not exactly the PID, but you get the idea).

The reason this works is that the only time we can have a tie is if there can be no causality between the events. I.e., the two sending events happen concurrently: the two ioctl calls overlap in time, so there would be no way for one to have caused the other.

What problem do you see with this?

<comment><USER5> I foresee a problem where people confuse the wording of "total order on all messages" in the wiki to mean there is a "global total order" \- in other words, that bus1 solves distributed systems and we can all go home - <USER2> building buggy systems on this assumption. I'm not saying the concept is flawed or the implementation buggy, or anything like that.

PS. Neil Brown in the LWN article already conflates "global" and "total" order.

<comment><USER15> I'd suggest reading the hybrid logical clocks paper.

<comment><USER5> I have - I'm actually working with it on a multi-version IPC provider (totally unrelated to bus1 & friends). Is it relevant here? I know they're the latest and greatest, but they're not without problems either.

<comment><USER15> Based on your comments about lamport clocks, etc, I thought you'd find it interesting.

<comment><USER5> It is indeed. Cool applications too. I remember at least GUN - a graph db engine - uses them to great effect, and its author hangs out here, iirc.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Against humanism (2010) - <AUTHOR> https://newhumanist.org.uk/playdice/2419 <comment><USER2> TL/DR I love Philosophy and Theology and the Modern Humanist has taken over a word and changed it to the point that the study of Humanism will be slanted by this modern view. No one should re-define a word so drastically.

> For him, "humanism" was a word parallel to "theism". It just altered the > object worshiped, substituting humanity for God. He called it the "religion > of humanity" and devised ritual forms for it that were close to traditional > Christian ones.

Historical Humanism has been replaced by a modern definition that has no connection to the past. I went on a 5 day discussion on Reddit with the president of the American Humanism Association about this one thing.

Historically all the Reformation was founded by Humanist Philosophy. The founders of Humanism actually were translator of the Bible, but now for some strange reason Atheist/Agnostics want the term to reassemble them and it really frustrated me.

Humanist were Theologians and Philosophers and now Humanism is try to mean Atheist/Agnostic and that is not accurate to the Humanism movement.

To me it is dangerous to take over a term that has centuries of history and then simplify it to mean Humans over God.

<comment><USER3> Words are defined by their use, not by what you want them to mean; use changes over time, and words have multiple meanings. The historical meaning is still there, it's simply not the only one anymore.

> Historical Humanism has been replaced by a modern definition that has no > connection to the past.

Yes, it has, so accept that and move on. The word has taken on a new meaning, to a new group of people who are now the primary reason the word is used and thus rightfully what the word means to most people today.

<comment><USER2> Just go with Atheist or Agnostic why does it need another word?

<comment><USER3> Because they aren't even close to the same thing. It's not another word, it's an entirely different word describing an entirely different thing, a set of beliefs, something that atheism is not.

<comment><USER2> That is not what the American Humanist Society states. That is ALSO my point. [http://americanhumanist.org/Humanism](http://americanhumanist.org/Humanism)

<comment><USER3> Incorrect. Just because humanists are atheists, doesn't mean atheists are humanists. You've failed to understand the difference. Humanism is a belief system some atheists follow, all atheists are not humanists. Being an atheist doesn't make one a humanist, surely you can understand that distinction?

Knowing someone is an atheist doesn't tell you what they believe, it tells you what they don't believe; knowing they're a humanist tells you exactly what they do believe. Humanists are a sub-category of atheists.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Free cross-platform UI kit for Photoshop and Sketch - <AUTHOR> http://www.invisionapp.com/now?utm_medium=paid_content&utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=now_ui_kit_followers <comment><USER2> Maybe useful for a "content" app. Nice effort though.</comment>


How to build verifications into your service or marketplace - <AUTHOR> http://blog.getscaffold.com/how-to-build-verifications-into-your-service

<comment><USER2> I am not going to lie, I clicked that link expecting some profound insight into verification on the internet. All I found was 3 bullet points that can be summed up in the following sentence:

"Make it clear to the user they should verify with fancy and once they have, display it on their profile with a fancy button."

If someone does know where I could find some good reading material on what things I should be verifying and how much weight I should set on each metric. I would love to see them because I am currently toying around with some verification based things.</comment>


Traffic deaths in New York dropped to 200 in 2018, the lowest level in a century - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/01/nyregion/traffic-deaths-decrease-nyc.html <comment><USER2> New York City, not the state</comment>


The Opioid Settlement Will Fund Desperate Counties–But Could Come at Steep Cost - <AUTHOR> https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/10/the-opioid-settlement-will-fund-desperate-counties-but-could-come-at-a-steep-cost/ <comment><USER2> You have to wonder how much money the corporations are funneling into politicians' pockets (legislative, executive, judicial and law enforcement) and institutional pressure from finance/accounting people to bring in funding sooner-rather-than-later to push jurisdictions to settle now instead of banking on bigger settlements later. Furthermore, the public good is not accomplished because massive crimes get swept under the rug and very few executives go to jail for killing millions at the cost of billions.</comment>