Ask YC: This is our tech, how can we make this into a product that people want? - <AUTHOR> http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20827824.800-cellphones-reveal-emerging-disease-outbreaks.html

<comment><USER2> > _When Madan trained software to hunt for this signature in the cellphone > data, a daily check correctly identified flu victims 90 per cent of the > time._

I'm very surprised by this - it strikes me that I'd expect it to be hard to tell from such data that it wasn't a stomach upset, tiredness, onset of disease or simply a heavy cold. Indeed 90% sounds like it might be higher than correct identification via an interview with a doctor.

> _[...] in Rwanda between 2006 and 2009. He saw a clear reduction in people's > movement, which may have been due to the disease. But the outbreak was > caused by floods, which also limited mobility. Distinguishing between the > two possible causes on the basis of phone data alone was impossible, he > says._

Makes me the 90% figure highly suspect.

That aside I wonder if it wouldn't be easier to have a smart phone app that gives you epidemiology info in return for entering your health status for the day. To encourage continued use a sort of diary function and stats could be added. Wouldn't this be more predictive than monitoring movement, and less intrusive?

<comment><AUTHOR> The 90% is a misquote, good catch.

The actual accuracy is between 60-90%, depending on clusters of symptoms, and apparently that was stripped somewhere during editing. Oh well.

<comment><USER3> With a range that large, I would be highly suspect that when you did get 90%, it was just fitting the data. And how would you even confirm if they had the flu - even a doctor could misdiagnose mild flu, which adds more noise.

60% really means very little if it's a binary choice - flu or no. You'll be right 50% of the times no mater what.

<comment><USER4> >60% really means very little if it's a binary choice - flu or no. You'll be right 50% of the times no mater what.

What? Just because something is binary doesn't mean it happens half the time.

<comment><USER3> Hmm, yeah... good point on that. I'll leave my comment, but I take it back :)

<comment><AUTHOR> With severely unbalanced classes, overall accuracy is not a good metric. So we use recall of the symptom class, and how it varies with the precision. Recall = 0.6 to 0.9. All results are based on cross-validation.

There is a lot more sophistication we can add (e.g. markov properties), these are almost first-order results.

Nonetheless important to validate with other populations. That would be a big part of testing any product.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think a very strong possibility lies with the very experiment described in the article. Flu is a huge issue at college campuses, high schools, etc. Every level of education involves cramming a bunch of individuals in to small spaces with high amounts of contact (more so than in a prison, for example). In higher education, sexual activity and drinking (i.e. sharing cups) further increases risk of infection. My campus of 5,000 undergrads turned into a textbook example of mass hysteria during last year's swine flu scare. I can only imagine how many hours of education must have been lost through the whole ordeal.

So build an enterprise level system and sell it to individual universities. The school installs your application on each student's phone and receive an aggregate view of anonymous data through a back-end interface. This could give them a real-time look of how the infection is spreading through their community and allow them to be far more responsive in prevention measures. What if they could receive warning that the 3rd floor of Residence Hall A had signs of a potential outbreak? Just bring in those students for a preemptive checkup and stop the bug dead in its tracks.

Of course there is a boat load of legal and privacy issues to sort out for this type of intrusive monitoring. Nothing that couldn't be overcome I don't think (IANAL). I know that my school installs an app on all of our athlete's Facebook accounts for monitoring purposes so this isn't too far off from that.

Good luck with whatever path you choose! I'm always open to discussing startup strategy so feel free to drop me a line.

</comment><comment><USER6> Anmol - you're building an information business. And at scale, IMHO, they're fabulous. Health information seems like a massive market, and this seems like unique data. (Think about financial consumers who care about health data in addition to the pharmas.) I'll assume your app scales so that you get critical mass of input, but once you have that in your sights, here's how we constructed our information business.

In my experience, the best information businesses are founded on a core of primary research - data that you find/generate that no one else has. Once you build that database, you build the products. You might be surprised, but here's what many information products look like - I'm a fan of doing it in this order:

1\. A big honking CSV file of the primary data. For customers that have their own models, which your early adopters will likely have. Ours did.

2\. A CSV file of derivative analytics (the output of your prediction tools perhaps?). For customers who want your algorithmic take on the underlying data.

3\. Reports (manually written). People buy your analysis of the data. We found a majority of the potential market doesn't want Tools or data files (even if they're Wall Street "quants"). They just want answers - and by virtue of having the data, you're an instant expert. Reports have the nice benefit of being A) tangible B) easy to consume and C) subscribe-able (repeat revenue!) They have a bonus of being delicious chum for the media sharks.

4\. Reports (automated, for scale). Subscribers get the latest insights each week, month, etc. Best not to automate until you see which of #3 are most popular.

5\. Now come the technology Tools. #3 and #4 above will be excellent test beds for your prediction tools. Doing it in this order, you won't have to build any front end applications until you understand what predictions people pay for. One way to build a tools-based product line is to give the tech away for free and have the customer subscribe to the latest data.

You might also find that a great consumer-facing website is powerful for the information business. We don't have those skills in our company, but have found that when we pull it off even a little, institutional buyers begin as personal, individual consumers. A great consumer facing site/app is a perfect way to reach them.

rock on.

</comment><comment><USER7> At the direct-to-consumers level, think "I've fallen and I can't get up!" Automatic detection of illness and alerts for the old and infirm could be a potential market, though research on college students is not going to be at all effective for monitoring old people. And, if it can only detect trends rather than a specific individual situation, then it won't work in this context.

As others mentioned, making it a standard part of all phones might be something you could sell to governments, particularly in areas where flu frequently becomes epidemic.

It's a public health issue, which isn't usually an extremely easy to go-to- market area, I would think. Since it doesn't cure people of the flu, and doesn't help prevent it in any particular individual, it has nearly zero market value for any individual. I wouldn't even have a reason to install it for free...what good would it do me?

Is there some element of your research and tech that can be generalized to spot other kinds of trends? Trendspotting is extremely valuable, particularly to marketers...Google would probably acquire a company that can effectively trendspot from mobile devices, and even if they didn't, a mobile ad platform with trendspotting would be incredibly lucrative.

<comment><AUTHOR> The challenge with 'think I've fallen' is that you constantly have to ping the accelerometer. From a battery-life perspective, that kills the smartphone. Also, its hard to distinguish those pings from

For that particular application, its better to use custom body-worn hardware (e.g. fitbit).

Regarding spotting trends in face-to-face networks, we've done similar analysis political opinions during the 2008 election campaign.

Results here: <http://web.media.mit.edu/~anmol/political-2.pdf>

<comment><AUTHOR> __pings from device forgotten at home. sorry about typo.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> My personal opinion: if you can REALLY do what you claim then you should get every country's equivalent of the CDC working with you to MANDATE that this be part of every phone, and then of course you get the revenue from IP licensing.

In fact, I would broaden the scope a bit: make it like the "Emergency Broadcast System" for phones, only two-way.

Lots of privacy implications and the carriers and handset manufacturers would hate it, but I can certainly see it doing long term good.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thoughts? We're thinking of individual-level prediction tools, but there are other ways of using this approach. e.g. at the community / city scale with mobile operator data.

<comment><USER9> I don't know if you'd get the same quality of data, but it seems like you could get the same kind of data from a user's Foursquare (location) and Facebook page.

Now that I think about it, I imagine most young people use Facebook messages/wall posts more than phone calls and texts.

Or perhaps a browser plugin that anonymously reports browsing habits.

<comment><AUTHOR> The demographics that seem important (e.g. baby-boomers), use mobile phones but not necessarily FSq.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Interesting.

Questions

1\. How fast can you spot a trend? 2\. How is the tracking working? 3\. How precise is it.

I could imagine traffic would be a good area to look into.

<comment><USER2> >3\. How precise is it.

I've just been away in the Midlands (UK) and used Google Maps on a mobile for the first time. The triangulation of position was only accurate to about 1500m radius and then would switch between positions quite often. Such info would look much like a user that was moving quite a lot - I expect it could be filtered out but this sort precision (and lack of accuracy) appears common in the UK.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I would market this to pharmaceuticals as a way to effectively gauge demand geography. The value added for them would be supply chain optimization.

<comment><AUTHOR> good idea. we had an initial chat with one of the major ones. They'd like to see more traction of course.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Have you looked into SBIRs? www.sbir.gov/

BTW, small world, my SO knows Eagle :P

<comment><AUTHOR> very briefly. We're comparing the time + effort spent crafting an application (which apparently is quite large, for first-timers) and not fitting the ask VS simply building it and approaching consumers / partners.

If you have particular insight on any SBIR proposals related to our work, do share. Thanks!

ps. yes, Nathan is a friend.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> just make an app that warns you if any of you friends cell or computer use changes. I'd pay to see which of my friends might be getting sick. Luckily, each new health scare will drive up demand.

</comment><comment><USER14> Seems like you have something that public health officials would want, and _maybe_ mobile carriers, if the privacy issues can be solved and having it installed wins them some points with their regulators.

If you want to make something businesses want to pay for, see if the same predictive models work for forecasting product demand and other economic activity. What is the effect of a movie release on patterns of communication and movement? Can profiles be (semi-anonymously) correlated with other tweets/purchases, so you know that learning about a certain product, or buying it, changes behavior in some way?

</comment><comment><USER15> Apply to YC:)</comment>


My soft tools list - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/skyseraph/Soft-Tools <comment><USER2> I´ve got another one for you. If you´re interested in project management tools, check out [http://zenkit.com](http://zenkit.com) Zenkit basically includes all the features you need, like Kanban Board, Mind-Map, Calendar View and so on.

<comment><USER3> The page has a contact email address and instructions to add more services.</comment></comment>


Cassandra 0.6 released - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/date/20100413

<comment><USER2> If you're not interested in business-speak, here's a link to actual change log: [https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/cassandra/tags/cassandra-0....](https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/cassandra/tags/cassandra-0.6.0/CHANGES.txt)

This is apparently a pretty big release. Included are significant performance increases, since memory-mapped IO is finally used on 64 bit machines. Also, reasonable Hadoop integration.

</comment><comment><USER3> The blog is not responding, so read the official mailing list announcement: [http://www.mail- firstname.lastname@example.com/msg010...](http://www.mail- email@example.com/msg01086.html)

</comment><comment><USER4> I love their business-speak.</comment>


Awesome TEDx talk: more Duolingo details from reCAPTCHA founder - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQl6jUjFjp4

<comment><USER2> I love the mention of CAPTCHArt</comment>


The Secret, Absurd World of Coronavirus Mask Traders and Middlemen - <AUTHOR> https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-absurd-world-of-coronavirus-mask-traders-and-middlemen-trying-to-get-rich-off-government-money <comment><USER2> I live in Japan and when things got bad, a box of mask that normally sold for $20 USD would be priced at $100 + on Amazon. It's quite easy to make a buck when you are taking advantage of people's panic and paranoia</comment>


SanDisk Announces 1TB SDXC Card - <AUTHOR> https://www.sandisk.com/about/media-center/press-releases/2016/western-digital-demonstrates-prototype-of-the-worlds-first-1terabyte-SDXC-card <comment><USER2> This is a duplicate of the previous discussion from this morning. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12539310](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12539310)

<comment><USER3> Yes. We've moved all the comments there. Thanks!</comment></comment>


Online Resources to Inspire Great Content - <AUTHOR> http://www.ginzametrics.com/blog/4-online-resources-to-inspire-great-content/

<comment><USER2> Surprised they didn't mention Google news.</comment>


Dubai Hamas assassination: how it was planned - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/dubai/7251960/Dubai-Hamas-assassination-how-it-was-planned.html

<comment><USER2> Good article. While this was almost surely gov sponsored, it would be cool if this turned out to be a literal "killer startup". I'd love to see a startup that killed terrorists as a service. They could probably pull in decent revenue, and if they keep their alliance to the western world, would be serving humanity quite well.

<comment><USER3> Not all things that need to be done need to be "startupified".</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Setting up social voting rules?   - <AUTHOR>

I'm looking for pointers to setting up a site based on social voting (like HN or StackOverflow) to prevent the system from being badly gamed or ruined by troublemakers (like the joke that americaspeakingout.com turned into). For example: tips on how one decides on points allocation, rewards/demerits, badges, etc. <comment><USER2> Limit the reward for voting badly and increase the chance that you'll get publicly and anonymously hand-slapped.

On HN and StackOverflow:

1\. These are not places that non-techs would tend to frequent, and they mostly evolved into more serious areas, unlike Slashdot, which gave points for "funny", etc.

2\. People are typically serious enough to self-regulate or community-regulate via negative voting.

So, I'd not provide points for funny, and I'd cut off editing and negative voting early after the post (like HN), as continuous negative voting is demoralizing.

One more thing: general forums are more likely to get vandalized.

<comment><AUTHOR> By general forums, do you mean forums that allow anonymous posting (versus requiring an account) or do you mean sites that have a broad topic (versus a narrow focus like HN)?

<comment><USER2> broad topic/community. Vandalized might have been too strong a word. Just mean that the broader the topic and community, the more likely it is to attract spam, ridiculous posts, etc. and for your case, ridiculous voting.

I wouldn't say that HN is necessarily all that narrow of a topic (it is somewhat open, even though it is primarily tech entrepreneurs), but the community is more narrow.</comment></comment></comment>


Comtypes: How Dropbox learned to stop worrying and love the COM - <AUTHOR> https://tech.dropbox.com/?p=393

<comment><USER2> COM is a necessary evil when integrating with Windows, Office, Visual Studio, or any other big/old Microsoft product. That's just _how it works_.

The .NET framework actually does a pretty good job of hiding the complexity from you, but having done some serious integration with VS, let me say that's an abstraction leak that I wouldn't wish upon my worse enemy.

<comment><USER3> I never thought the .NET Framework did enough complexity hiding to justify a 60MB installed size, especially if it was just providing a bit of plumbing to get you back down to the COM level.

Most COM interfaces support late binding, so you can easily call them from a language like JavaScript, which is already installed in Windows as part of the platform. Ten years before node.js existed, you could run this JavaScript on Windows 2000 to read and print a file:

        var fso = new ActiveXObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject");
        if ( fso.FileExists("myfile.txt") ) {
           var ts = fso.OpenTextFile("myfile.txt", ForReading);
           WScript.Echo(ts.ReadAll());
           WScript.Quit(0);
        } else {
           WScript.Echo("File Not Found");
           WScript.Quit(1);
        }

<comment><USER4> Well, that's a facetious argument if I've ever seen one :). .NET does a lot more than just interface with COM or the Windows API. VB (pre .NET days) had much better integration with OLE/COM and the runtimes were like 1mb in size at worst.

I've always thought of COM as one of those almost brilliant pieces of technology that somehow got completely ignored. Of course, it's still commonplace in the Windows world, but the concept facilitates reusability so much, it's a shame it wasn't adopted by other platforms.

<comment><USER5> I think Mozilla used something similar in Firefox: <https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/XPCOM>

Other than that I don't know any other companies who did something like COM.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Semi related: Not sure how many people have played with PowerShell/COM, but it's fun to toy with. Haven't used it for anything too useful (yet) but for example, to delete all the comments in a Word document in a couple lines:

$a = New-Object -com Word.Application

$a.visible = $false

$a.Documents.Open("{absolute path}").DeleteAllComments()

Better examples: [http://www.simple-talk.com/dotnet/.net-tools/com- automation-...](http://www.simple-talk.com/dotnet/.net-tools/com-automation- of-office-applications-via-powershell/)

<comment><USER7> And this and VBA is why office is so irreplaceable. I wrote a report generation tool in 1999 with word 97. It picked a report definition off a file share, assembled documents from fragments on disk (up to 50 pages a pop with tables, graphs etc) and emailed them or printed them. 2000 documents an hour on a single Pentium pro 200 with 128mb of ram on NT. It took 2 days to write and was used until 2009 by 9000 users

This was just word, com and nothing else. Even the application host was an instance of word.

I doubt it could have been done with anything else then or now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Provocative title for a pretty generic article.

1\. Summary of COM, a widely used technology

2\. Summary of comtypes, a python package for interacting with COM

3\. One example of a gotcha they ran into with comtypes and arrays of COM objects.

Conclusion: meh.

<comment><USER9> How is the title provocative?

<comment><USER8> The title, "How Dropbox learned to stop worrying and love the COM" is a reference to the film "Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb". The object taking the place of the atomic bomb in the variant title is COM. To me this implies that the article will describe why people worry about COM and why they're wrong. I did not find it to contain either.

Admittedly I have never seen the movie, which wikipedia describes as a "dark comedy satirizing the nuclear scare". I suspect the article doesn't follow along those lines either.

<comment><USER10> > I have never seen the movie

You should fix that.

In addition, the bomb in question was the result of an ill- conceived Doomsday device to prevent the use of bombs.

In other words, this title suggests that as part of a policy of mutually assured destruction, Microsoft created a device to unleash COM if it ever sensed it was being attacked. They just forgot to tell anyone about the device (why didn't you tell the world!?!) and now we are all living with the fallout.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Am I reading this correctly? they are using comtypes as an exploratory tool, but the photo upload feature was written in something else...

(I haven't disassembled the dropbox dlls, but there aren't any obvious python signatures in the install directory)

If the above is wrong, I would love to know what they are using!

<comment><USER12> No, Dropbox is using Python and comtypes in its actual product.

<comment><USER11> Any idea what they are using to package the Python into the exe?

I've tried py2exe and all of the similar packagers that I could find, and every one of them requires brittle incantations to get everything packaged (I'm using a lot of graphics and number-crunching code beyond standard python, but all from the package index). I guess on the scale of Dropbox this is probably not a big issue. On my scale (1), it's one of the reasons I've started using C# (an unexpectedly awesome experience so far, btw). I need the fastest possible path to one-click exe files that non-technical (bio/chem) researchers and RAs can run. I've belatedly realized that the overhead of doing this in python is really too high.

[edit: found this SO answer: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2678180/how- does-dropbox-...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2678180/how-does-dropbox- use-python-on-windows-and-os-x) but it doesn't give specifics. In particular, AFAIK, none of the packagers can eat libpython.dll into a larger exe files]

[edit: interesting - [http://blog.codepainters.com/2012/09/17/python-care-and- feed...](http://blog.codepainters.com/2012/09/17/python-care-and-feeding-the- dropbox-way/) ]

<comment><USER13> SharpDevelop and IronPython will give you one-click packaging to exe. IronPython has a built-in compiler, so really you can use it with any IDE.

IronPython is actually very cool if you want/have to live in .Net Land: it's mature, simple, and supports Python 2.7.

<comment><USER14> ... but an EXE that has a dependency on the .NET runtime

<comment><USER15> Like every other application on Windows.

<comment><USER16> Some people just really, really liked Windows 2000 and they aren't giving up on it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > _So, the following code_

      for i in range(100):
          print idevice_item_array[0]

> _actually crashes Python because it creates and destroys a hundred > IDeviceItem objects, resulting in a hundred calls to Release on the real COM > object. After the first Release call, the COM object is considered deleted._

This doesn't sound like a "gotcha". It sounds like a huge bug that comtypes needs to address.

</comment><comment><USER18> If you read Don Box's book on COM he takes you through each part of it explaining in detail why it is the way it is. Every point is justifiable and the book is convincing.

However it clearly didn't work as a whole as Microsoft felt the need to replace it with .Net for application level programmers.

</comment><comment><USER19> _"COM is Love"_ \- Don Box [1]

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Box>

<comment><USER20> What do you expect, he wrote _the_ book on it.

<comment><USER19> And I wrote the forward to _the_ book on it :-)</comment></comment></comment>


Installing Windows 10 Technical Preview on a VHDX - <AUTHOR> https://bedecarroll.com/2015/01/28/install-windows-10-tech-preview-on-vhdx/ <comment><AUTHOR> This is an old post but it still works (duh); personally I find DISM way the best and painless one - you can do this even more _comfortable_ with Disk Management for creating disk image and EasyBCD to manage, backup entries.

Windows installation will continue after reboot if you pick DISM scenario and shortly after take you to the OOBE.</comment>


Analyzing 10 years of startup news with Machine Learning - <AUTHOR> https://blog.monkeylearn.com/analyzing-10-years-of-startup-news-with-machine-learning/ <comment><USER2> Was anything found that was not already well-known?

The article states:

"Wrap Up

... we've scraped hundreds of thousands of articles, created text classifiers... and gotten insights from the results. _The only way to perform an analysis like this is using machine learning and natural language processing, since there's no way we can get a person to read through and interpret 270,000 articles. "_

I would have to say

\- there's always sampling, and

\- ask or read the reports of an expert, since they live in their respective news spaces.

<comment><USER3> why asking an expert when you can ask the data?

<comment><USER4> Because you need an expert to make sense of the data? Which is why I am trying to transition to data science from sysadmin at the moment. So I don't need no stinkin middle men.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Why is machine learning/NLP needed in this analysis?

The categories/keywords are well known, and I believe that simple statistics would suffice to produce the type of results shown.

Of course, the text would have to be scanned and the dataset cleansed/filtered first. But those techniques predate ML/NLP.

</comment><comment><USER6> 50+% of the articles they found are the self-published like noise around fundraising and launch. Throws those obvious fluff out

</comment><comment><USER7> Why publish this and not public the code they used to interface with MonkeyLearns API? Missed opportunity.

<comment><USER8> They published the code, you can check it out here: [https://github.com/monkeylearn/startup-news- analysis/blob/ma...](https://github.com/monkeylearn/startup-news- analysis/blob/master/Try%20out%20the%20events%20and%20industry%20classifier.ipynb)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is a nice summary for those who haven't spent the last ten ten years in the startup sene, thanks!

</comment><comment><USER10> Interesting to see fundraising articles peaking out in 2014, I think we are definitely seeing a bear market.

<comment><USER11> Couldn't it actually mean the opposite? If fundraising is not newsworthy, it could also be because there are so many of those out there that fewer make the cut.</comment></comment>


Defcon 22 videos and slides - <AUTHOR> https://media.defcon.org/DEF%20CON%2022/DEF%20CON%2022%20video%20and%20slides/

<comment><AUTHOR> A torrent is also available[1] The official page seems under heavy load ATM.

[1] [https://www.defcon.org/html/links/dc- torrent.html](https://www.defcon.org/html/links/dc-torrent.html)

<comment><USER2> I'm surprised to see that Defcon recommends the closed source uTorrent.

<comment><USER3> While not being open source, BitTorrent Inc. does promote the open standardization of the protocol[1], and employs the creator of bittorrent, Bram Cohen[2], as chief scientist.

μTorrent is, I think, the best suggestion for a client for people who need client suggestions. (having tried a large number of very mediocre competitors, free, open, or otherwise)

I usually stick to rtorrent on the commandline, but that's a shitty suggestion for helping bring awareness to hacker issues.

1\. [http://bittorrent.org/](http://bittorrent.org/) 2\. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bram_Cohen](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bram_Cohen)

<comment><USER4> Personally, I think qbittorrent is a better general suggestion.

[http://www.qbittorrent.org/](http://www.qbittorrent.org/)

<comment><USER5> I've used both utorrent and qbittorrent and the only difference is the latter does not have any ads bundled.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Highly recommend checking out "Hack All The Things - 20 Devices in 45 Minutes" by CJ Heres & Amir Etemadieh & Mike Baker & Hans Nielsen. [https://media.defcon.org/DEF%20CON%2022/DEF%20CON%2022%20vid...](https://media.defcon.org/DEF%20CON%2022/DEF%20CON%2022%20video%20and%20slides/DEF%20CON%2022%20Hacking%20Conference%20Presentation%20By%20CJ%20Heres%20&%20Amir%20Etemadieh%20&%20Mike%20Baker%20&%20Hans%20Nielsen%20-%20Hack%20All%20The%20Things%20-%2020%20Devices%20in%2045%20Minutes%20-%20Video%20and%20Slides.m4v)

This is the GTVhacker group that hacked the GoogleTV.

"Weaponizing Your Pets" with Gene Bransfield is definitely also worth checking out. "The War Kitteh and Denial of Service Dog."

[https://media.defcon.org/DEF%20CON%2022/DEF%20CON%2022%20vid...](https://media.defcon.org/DEF%20CON%2022/DEF%20CON%2022%20video%20and%20slides/DEF%20CON%2022%20Hacking%20Conference%20Presentation%20By%20Gene%20Bransfield%20-%20Weaponizing%20Your%20Pets%20-%20The%20War%20Kitteh%20and%20the%20Denial%20of%20Service%20Dog%20-%20Video%20and%20Slides.m4v)

<comment><USER7> Here are two mirrors for the first video "Hack All The Things - 20 Devices in 45 Minutes".

West coast mirror: [http://comp.adrenl.in/DEF%20CON%2022%20Hacking%20Conference%...](http://comp.adrenl.in/DEF%20CON%2022%20Hacking%20Conference%20Presentation%20By%20CJ%20Heres%20&%20Amir%20Etemadieh%20&%20Mike%20Baker%20&%20Hans%20Nielsen%20-%20Hack%20All%20The%20Things%20-%2020%20Devices%20in%2045%20Minutes%20-%20Video%20and%20Slides.mp4)

East coast mirror: [http://lelandbatey.com/DEF%20CON%2022%20Hacking%20Conference...](http://lelandbatey.com/DEF%20CON%2022%20Hacking%20Conference%20Presentation%20By%20CJ%20Heres%20&%20Amir%20Etemadieh%20&%20Mike%20Baker%20&%20Hans%20Nielsen%20-%20Hack%20All%20The%20Things%20-%2020%20Devices%20in%2045%20Minutes%20-%20Video%20and%20Slides.m4v)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I was having trouble streaming the talks from defcon.org so I decided to mirror it here [http://126.96.36.199/](http://18.104.22.168/) I will probably kill the server in about a week, when load to Defcon servers go down.

The default file indexer for Nginx truncates the file names which makes it hard to find a video, but just appending the file name should play the correct video.

<comment><USER8> I added a page to show the full title of videos to make it easier to find specific talks.

[http://126.96.36.199/videos.html](http://184.108.40.206/videos.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The official page under heavy load, here's a temporary mirror located in Switzerland.

[http://22.214.171.124/DEF%20CON%2022%20video%20and%20slides/](http://22.214.171.124/DEF%20CON%2022%20video%20and%20slides/)

</comment><comment><USER10> any recommendations?

<comment><AUTHOR> Mass Scanning the Internet is a must-watch.

Edit: it's available youtube : [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOWexFaRylM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOWexFaRylM)

<comment><USER11> +1 to this. During the presentation they scan the entire internet for open VNC ports that do not require authentication. There were many found (thousands?), the most surprising being a mainframe that looked like it controlled a railway interchange. I was the guy who gave them the iPhone backdoor port ;-)

<comment><AUTHOR> IPv4 space is officialy small now :)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Click-to-run, Microsoft makes Office 2010 available over the web - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.technet.com/office2010/archive/2009/11/06/click-to-run-delivering-office-in-the-21st-century.aspx Is it just me, of does it seem like Microsoft hasn't learned yet and is still trying to not make real web apps?<p>At any rate, the streaming technology sounds cool. <comment><USER2> Reminds me of that fake Office I heard about the other day: <http://fakeoffice.org/></comment>


Show HN: Your very own communication trainer - <AUTHOR> https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/sonero-master-speaking-skills/id1490469448 <comment><AUTHOR> Hey everyone, I'm the guy who built this. My speaking skills were terrible for a long time and I joined Toastmasters which helped me a lot. I wanted to marry that concept with AI. I'd love to hear your feedback!</comment>


Ask HN: Possible to take automatic screenshot of webpage at same time each day? - <AUTHOR>

Need to get a screen shot of a web page at the same time every day to track some stats for my company. Unfortunately I'm asleep at that point every day. Any way to automate this? Looking for a solution for Mac OS. <comment><USER2> <http://www.paulhammond.org/webkit2png/>

<https://github.com/coderholic/PyWebShot>

</comment><comment><USER3> It'd be dead easy with PhantomJS. A script to do it would look something like:

\---

        p = new WebPage()

        p.open "http://example.com/whatever", (status) ->
            console.log "☆ LOAD STATUS: #{status}"
            p.render "/Users/Shared/screenshot.png"

\---

If you want to get fancy, you can code your script to render only a subregion of the page. Phantom can automate pretty much anything you can do yourself with a browser.

<http://www.phantomjs.org>

</comment><comment><USER4> Not quite a snapshot but diphur.com checks each hour 24/7 for changes and presents you with what only changed.

</comment><comment><USER5> Selenium is another option <http://seleniumhq.org/>

</comment><comment><USER6> if you can't find it and you need it. ...MAKE it! ,or pay some one to make it and monetize it. anyway the links given should be good.

</comment><comment><USER7> check out url2png

<comment><USER8> Nice, checked these guys out and looks great. You know they're legit since they give you some alternatives if their pricing plans isn't to your taste.

<http://url2png.com/alternatives/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> would love this!</comment>


Blockchain technology could improve the reliability of medical trials - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21699099-blockchain-technology-could-improve-reliability-medical-trials-better <comment><USER2> Maybe I'm missing something, but neither this article or the paper discuss why blockchain is better for this use case than a distributed database.

At least then you wouldn't be subject to bitcoin transaction fees for every data entry. Even if they created their own blockchain network, you'd still have to reward miners for their work.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm no expert but the guy who was the author is a medical doctor who knows very little about programming. So I'm sure you're right -- but he just wanted to use pre-existing tech.</comment></comment>


Amazon Takes a Swipe at Paypal's $4B Acquisition - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/amazon-honey-security-warning/ <comment><USER2> Amazon does the same thing though (tracking users across the web). [https://www.alexa.com/toolbar](https://www.alexa.com/toolbar)

</comment><comment><USER3> I had never heard of it, but if it is enough of an existential risk to amazon's profit that they pull a huge front page banner about it, I'm excited to try it.</comment>


Why Some People Think 2+2=5 - <AUTHOR> https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/math/a33547137/why-some-people-think-2-plus-2-equals-5/ <comment><USER2> 2+2=5 for large values of 2.

(Calculus and limits revision mid-semester back in the old days. It was funny at the time. You had to be there. Probably.)</comment>


CRISPR Gene drives thwarted by emergence of resistant organisms - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/news/gene-drives-thwarted-by-emergence-of-resistant-organisms-1.21397 <comment><USER2> I had to chuckle when multiple people insisted it was guaranteed to work, when I pointed out that biology has many ways of surprising you.

We so often assume that biological systems follow simple causality paths and operate in a linear regime. In reality, nearly all biological systems contain homeostatic feedback mechanisms that self-regulate, they sample enormous complexity space in a single generation, and nothing is linear.</comment>


Humai Wants to Resurrect Humans Within 30 Years - <AUTHOR> http://www.popsci.com.au/science/medicine/humai-wants-to-resurrect-humans-within-30-years,412164 <comment><USER2> One strategy would be to collect all the signals that leave the brain through the spinal cord over a long period of time. Then try to write a program that generates the same signals.

The result would be the inverse: a living body controlled by a program.

The fact that cryogenics destroys your cells seems like an insurmountable obstacle. Freezing causes expansion. There's nothing of value to salvage after that.

I wonder if they could experiment with ways of overcoming this?</comment>


How to make your own Chromebook - <AUTHOR> http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2385282,00.asp

<comment><USER3> I hate to be negative, especially given how coveted CR-48s are/were, but after about a week of getting mine I just had to put Ubuntu on it. Yeah, I spend 70% of my time in the browser, but I just can't give up that other 30% (dev stuff). It's not really worth having a laptop for me without a decent text editor/full ssh capabilities.

It might serve the masses well, but my point is if you're the type of person who would make your own you're probably better off not doing so.

<comment><USER4> What are your ssh complaints? I've been able to ssh into another computer and use vim and other cli tools without a problem, but I'm not an ssh power user by any stretch.

<comment><USER5> Are you able to do this without Jailbreaking?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _and at around $400 for a Chromebook, you would certainly expect some better hardware than what Samsung and Acer are offering._

I think the low-ball hardware is very deliberate. If Google can prove this level of hardware can work just fine for it's purpose, it disrupts the market further. For $700+ you could definitely get better hardware than what is available on the iPad or iPad 2, but you certainly pay more for that device, don't you?

</comment><comment><USER7> > and to top it off, you'll have a spare Windows 7 license that you can give > to your mom

I'm pretty sure it won't work that way (legally). That license is very unlikely to be transferable for use on any machine other than the one it was bought with.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, even when you change motherboards your Win 7 stops working

<comment><USER9> That is very much false. I just installed a new motherboard, and I simply needed to re-activate.

<comment><USER7> Windows is much better at this than it used to be. XP used to have hassle if moving between single-CPU-single-core and anything else or vice-versa, or any change that altered ACPI support, but Vista/7 cope better with such changes. Getting XP to cope with a switch between SATA controllers is something of a black-art (or so I'm told, I've never needed to try) especially pre SP3. Moving between "specialist" controllers can still be "fun", but then again it would be for any OS.

Linux has traditionally been easier to cope with when a complete hardware change is seen by the OS, partly because most standard distros have kernels with every common controller type compiled as a loadable module, partly because it is easy to install the relevant modules before the change (if you have the relevant knowledge, of course) and because it is easier to make changes if it fails to boot post-change using a live CD of some sort - <USER2> greater resilience to core hardware changes is probably what the previous poster is alluding to, but for most (though still not quite as many) hardware configurations commonly seen on home machines and work desktops/laptops modern Windows variants survive the transition pretty well too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think the price difference _may_ be accountable for in the specs. Most of today's netbooks come with spinning drives, and an SSD upgrade would cost $50-$100 more.

<comment><AUTHOR> All things considered, I'm not sure whether an SSD is really necessary for an OS that runs Web apps. Nice, for sure, but...

I wonder if there's a significant difference between HDD and SSD boot and return-from-hibernate times.

<comment><USER11> Instant On really benefits from the fast sequential times and random cache hits from the low latency/high IOPS. I would imagine there is a lot of paging on a low memory machine.

The first generation macbook air users said that the SSD made up for the weak CPU in day to day use.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Will they get the battery life? The boot time? If they can, I'd be interested in going this route.

<comment><AUTHOR> It should be comparable. It's hard to say, without putting two machines side by side and seeing which one boots fastest/lasts the longest :)

If the hardware is the same, though, performance should be the same.

<comment><USER12> There's no such word as "should".

<comment><USER13> If there isn't, there should be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> But then you don't get the 100MB "free" 3G data plan from Verizon.

</comment><comment><USER15> Best trying to do your Apple I

<comment><USER15> Any ironic comment receives an automatic downvote?

I can explain... I think that the Chromebook is a real shame, I remember in the dot com era people making specific appliances and many of them have more than a browser there.

The Google thinking is to me:

"if all you have is a browser, everything looks like html"

or

"if all you have html, everything looks like a browser" ?

<comment><USER15> Seems like punishment instead of logic.</comment></comment></comment>


Advent of Code – solve a puzzle every day - <AUTHOR> http://adventofcode.com/ <comment><USER2> Fun! Thanks for the share.</comment>


Waiting for browser support: makeshift responsive images - <AUTHOR> https://kjaermaxi.me/makeshift-responsive-images/ <comment><AUTHOR> Every single article I've read on responsive images has adopted the same angle: they're fantastic, and you should use them now.

In this post, I'm presenting a less popular opinion, namely that the new specification for responsive images is nowhere near having enough browser support, especially in the very devices that need it. That's why I explored an alternative way of having a sort of makeshift responsiveness to images.

Obviously, it's not perfect, and I wrote why in the conclusion, but it did get me some pretty decent performance improvements!</comment>


Ask HN: What are your favorite non-technical books? - <AUTHOR>

<comment> house9-2 Open: An Autobiography (Andre Agassi) [http://www.amazon.com/Open-An- Autobiography-Andre-Agassi/dp/...](http://www.amazon.com/Open-An- Autobiography-Andre-Agassi/dp/0307388409)

</comment><comment><USER2> Siddhartha by Herman Hesse. By asking specifically for non-tehnical books, I'm assuming you're a technical person looking for something to clear your mind. This book is perfect.

</comment><comment><USER3> Hunger Games.

I'm not really a book reader but I got hooked with the first movie and decided to read the books.

</comment><comment><USER4> Dune, by Frank Herbert.

The Chronicles of Amber, by Roger Zelazny.

The Count of Monte Cristo.

Lord of the Rings.

</comment><comment><USER5> _Breaking Clean_ Judy Blunt

 _A River Runs Through It_ Norman Maclean

</comment><comment><USER6> myths of innovation - Scott Berkun ,$100 startup , business model of you , built to love , wtp.</comment>


How do I start a group/discussion/meeting in my town? - <AUTHOR> How do I start a group/discussion/meeting in my town?
I am a software engineer and I live in a not very active town. I like the idea of contributing to the community in some way, and I would like the idea of starting meetings, a group, something like that where we could discuss about technology, learn things, discuss projects/ideas etc.
How would you do that from scratch? <comment><USER2> [https://www.meetup.com/](https://www.meetup.com/) makes it very easy to start a group -- you can then promote it and get people to attend and tell others

I've started a group over a decade ago, there are 500 members on the meetup.com site and we have anywhere from half a dozen to 20-30 people show up at any given meeting.

<comment><AUTHOR> Meetup is unfortunately not very popular here (i'm not in the US)

<comment><USER2> Where are you based?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Take your idea to your local public library. They might be able to help or give suggestions of paths you could follow.

<comment><AUTHOR> that's a more feasible idea in this area. I'd might do this</comment></comment>


Wolfram Rule 30 Prizes - <AUTHOR> https://www.rule30prize.org <comment><USER2> It is pretty hard in general to prove that calculating things takes at least O(n) time, so I wouldn't expect that one to be solved any time soon.

Personally, I am curious if there is any cellular automaton that has something like 3-dimensional rotational symmetry. If our universe can be described by a cellular automaton, it isn't obvious to me how such a symmetry could arise, but I wouldn't be surprised if someone figured it out.

<comment><USER3> For what it's worth, Stephen decided that network was a better model for the universe than a cellular automaton, and thought that space might emerge as a property of that network rather than be "defined in", as in a cellular automaton.

[https://www.wolframscience.com/nks/p475--space-as-a- network/](https://www.wolframscience.com/nks/p475--space-as-a-network/)

(In the preceding section he discussed some constraints that a cellular automaton would put on the universe model, but didn't dismiss the idea for that reason)

<comment><USER4> I can't open this link for some reason (uBO?), but the title reminds me one very clever Wolfram's article where he brags about (as usual) about how he derived GTR equations from his graph model. That article had a bunch of comments with and one of them stating that in such a graph model there is always a reference frame. Wolfram didn't respond to that comment.

<comment><USER5> I haven't followed this closely, but did SW provide a paper showing how he derived GTR from the graph?

<comment><USER6> He made the claims but not sure if that paper ever appeared.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> An aside: 3D cellular automata [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_W-n510Pca0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_W-n510Pca0)

<comment><USER8> Very beautiful and artistically rendered! Those would make great fireworks and weapons in Minecraft!

From a different engineering perspective, Dave Ackley had some interesting things to say about the difficulties of going from 2D to 3D, which I quoted in an earlier discussion about visual programming:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18497585](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18497585)

David Ackley, who developed the two-dimensional CA-like "Moveable Feast Machine" architecture for "Robust First Computing", touched on moving from 2D to 3D in his retirement talk:

[https://youtu.be/YtzKgTxtVH8?t=3780](https://youtu.be/YtzKgTxtVH8?t=3780)

"Well 3D is the number one question. And my answer is, depending on what mood I'm in, we need to crawl before we fly."

"Or I say, I need to actually preserve one dimension to build the thing and fix it. Imagine if you had a three-dimensional computer, how you can actually fix something in the middle of it? It's going to be a bit of a challenge."

"So fundamentally, I'm just keeping the third dimension in my back pocket, to do other engineering. I think it would be relatively easy to imaging taking a 2D model like this, and having a finite number of layers of it, sort of a 2.1D model, where there would be a little local communication up and down, and then it was indefinitely scalable in two dimensions."

"And I think that might in fact be quite powerful. Beyond that you think about things like what about wrap-around torus connectivity rooowaaah, non-euclidian dwooraaah, aaah uuh, they say you can do that if you want, but you have to respect indefinite scalability. Our world is 3D, and you can make little tricks to make toruses embedded in a thing, but it has other consequences."

Here's more stuff about the Moveable Feast Machine:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15560845](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15560845)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14236973](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14236973)

The most amazing mind blowing demo is Robust-first Computing: Distributed City Generation:

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

And a paper about how that works:

[https://www.cs.unm.edu/~ackley/papers/paper_tsmall1_11_24.pd...](https://www.cs.unm.edu/~ackley/papers/paper_tsmall1_11_24.pdf)

Plus there's a lot more here:

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

Now he's working on a hardware implementation of indefinitely scalable robust first computing:

[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1M91QuLZfCzHjBMEKvIc-A](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1M91QuLZfCzHjBMEKvIc-A)

<comment><USER9> > Very beautiful and artistically rendered! Those would make great fireworks > and weapons in Minecraft!

Someone coded similar things in minetest, the open source clone of minecraft:

[https://forum.minetest.net/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=17608](https://forum.minetest.net/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=17608)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> What are the implications of positive/negative answers to these questions, and/or what else aside from "because it's there" motivates answering these questions?

<comment><USER11> Who knows? Answers to these questions might spur discussion on connections between cellular automata and other computational constructions. I think that's Wolfram's angle -- justify the cellular-automata-is-everything tack that he's been on the past 20-30 years.

<comment><USER8> Maybe it's a scheme to drum up attention for his new upcoming line of "Rule 30 Wearable Cellular Automata Clothing and Fashion Accessories".

[https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/fbz/knityak-custom- math...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/fbz/knityak-custom-mathematical- knit-scarves)

They make great tattoos too:

[http://i.imgur.com/mct1AFX.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/mct1AFX.jpg)

[https://geekytattoos.wordpress.com/2011/04/14/wolfram-2-stat...](https://geekytattoos.wordpress.com/2011/04/14/wolfram-2-state-3-color- turing-machine/)

That one is actually quite controversial:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfram%27s_2-state_3-symbol_T...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfram%27s_2-state_3-symbol_Turing_machine)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Oh My Gosh, It's Covered in Rule 30s

[http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2017/06/oh-my-gosh-its- covere...](http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2017/06/oh-my-gosh-its-covered-in- rule-30s/)

HN discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14458955](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14458955)

</comment><comment><USER8> I gave some links to visualizations of CA basins of attraction including Rule 30 in my previous post about "Garden of Eden" configurations:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14468707](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14468707)

There's a thing called a "Garden of Eden" configuration that has no predecessors, which is impossible to get to from any other possible state.

For a rule like Life, there are many possible configurations that must have been created by God or somebody with a bitmap editor (or somebody who thinks he's God and uses Mathematica as a bitmap editor, like Stephen Wolfram ;), because it would have been impossible for the Life rule to evolve into those states. For example, with the "Life" rule, no possible configuration of cells could ever evolve into all cells with the value "1".

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_of_Eden_(cellular_autom...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_of_Eden_\(cellular_automaton\))

For a rule that simply sets the cell value to zero, all configurations other than pure zeros are garden of eden states, and they all lead directly into a one step attractor of all zeros which always evolves back into itself, all zeros again and again (the shortest possible attractor loop that leads directly to itself).

There is a way of graphically visualizing that global rule state space, which gives insight into the behavior of the rule and the texture and complexity of its state space!

Andrew Wuensche and Mike Lesser published a gorgeous coffee table book entitled "The Global Dynamics of Cellular Automata" that plots out the possible "Garden of Eden" states and the "Basins of Attraction" they lead into of many different one-dimensional cellular automata like rule 30.

[http://users.sussex.ac.uk/~andywu/gdca.html](http://users.sussex.ac.uk/~andywu/gdca.html)

The beautiful color plates begin on page 79 in the free pdf file:

[http://users.sussex.ac.uk/~andywu/downloads/papers/global_dy...](http://users.sussex.ac.uk/~andywu/downloads/papers/global_dynamics_of_CA.pdf)

I've uploaded the money shots to imgur:

[http://imgur.com/gallery/s3dhz](http://imgur.com/gallery/s3dhz)

Those are not pictures of 1-d cellular automata rule cell states on a grid themselves, but they are actually graphs of the abstract global state space, showing merging and looping trajectories (but not branching since the rules are deterministic -- time flows from the garden of eden leaf tips around the perimeter into (then around) the basin of attractor loops in the center, merging like springs (GOE) into tributaries into rivers into the ocean (BOA)).

The rest of the book is an atlas of all possible 1-d rules of a particular rule numbering system (like rule 30, etc), and the last image is the legend.

He developed a technique of computing and plotting the topology network of all possible states a CA can get into -- tips are "garden of eden" states that no other states can lead to, and loops are "basins of attraction".

Here is the illustration of "rule 30" from page 144 (the legend explaining it is the last photo in the above album). [I am presuming it's using the same rule numbering system as Wolfram but I'm not sure -- EDIT: I visually checked the "space time pattern from a singleton seed" thumbnail against the illustration in the article, and yes it matches rule 30!]

[http://imgur.com/a/lKAbP](http://imgur.com/a/lKAbP)

"The Global Dynamics of Cellular Automata introduces a powerful new perspective for the study of discrete dynamical systems. After first looking at the unique trajectory of a system's future, an algoritm is presented that directly computes the multiple merging trajectories of the systems past. A given cellular automaton will "crystallize" state space into a set of basins of attraction that typically have a topology of trees rooted on attractor cycles. Portraits of these objects are made accessible through computer generated graphics. The "Atlas" presents a complete class of such objects, and is inteded , with the accompanying software, as an aid to navigation into the vast reaches of rule behaviour space. The book will appeal to students and researchers interested in cellular automata, complex systems, computational theory, artificial life, neural networks, and aspects of genetics."

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

"Basins of attraction in cellular automata", by Andrew Wuensche:

[http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/1099-0526(200007/...](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/1099-0526\(200007/08\)5:6%3C19::AID- CPLX5%3E3.0.CO;2-J/full)

"To achieve the global perspective. I devised a general method for running CA backwards in time to compute a state's predecessors with a direct reverse algorithm. So the predecessors of predecessors, and so on, can be computed, revealing the complete subtree including the "leaves," states without predecessors, the so-called "garden-of-Eden" states.

Trajectories must lead to attractors in a finite CA, so a basin of attraction is composed of merging trajectories, trees, rooted on the states making up the attractor cycle with a period of one or more. State-space is organized by the "physics" underlying the dynamic behavior into a number of these basins of attraction, making up the basin of attraction field."

Pencil drawing from the very early days before automatic computer drawing was perfected:

[http://www.ddlab.com/r30Pencil.gif](http://www.ddlab.com/r30Pencil.gif)

If you like the book, you'll love the code!

[http://www.ddlab.com/](http://www.ddlab.com/)

[http://www.ddlab.com/screensave3.png](http://www.ddlab.com/screensave3.png)

[http://uncomp.uwe.ac.uk/wuensche/2006_ddlab_slides1.pdf](http://uncomp.uwe.ac.uk/wuensche/2006_ddlab_slides1.pdf)

[http://uncomp.uwe.ac.uk/wuensche/meta.html](http://uncomp.uwe.ac.uk/wuensche/meta.html)

[http://uncomp.uwe.ac.uk/wuensche/boa_idea.html](http://uncomp.uwe.ac.uk/wuensche/boa_idea.html)

[http://uncomp.uwe.ac.uk/wuensche/downloads/papers/2008_dd_ov...](http://uncomp.uwe.ac.uk/wuensche/downloads/papers/2008_dd_overview_preprint.pdf)

<comment><USER12> The third link is a dead link, but it looks like it's up here now: [http://users.sussex.ac.uk/~andywu/gdca.html](http://users.sussex.ac.uk/~andywu/gdca.html)

The PDF is here: [http://users.sussex.ac.uk/~andywu/downloads/papers/global_dy...](http://users.sussex.ac.uk/~andywu/downloads/papers/global_dynamics_of_CA.pdf)

<comment><USER8> Thank you! I fixed the links, and added the link to the Doctor-Seuss-like pencil drawing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> d-d Haha, this is just P versus NP for $970,000 less in prizes.

</comment><comment><USER13> So I typed a couple of digits into OEIS, which returned [http://oeis.org/A080847](http://oeis.org/A080847), "mu(n) + 2", where mu is the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%B6bius_function](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%B6bius_function)

This doesn't appear to be true for arbitrarily many digits, and I'm struggling to see how the two fields may even be connected. Some properties appear similar, eg. the Möbius function, too, appears to sum up to 0.

</comment><comment><USER14> If I were still in grad school, I would get lost in this. Alas, days gone by...

</comment><comment><USER15> I love the fact that this is #1 on hn with a 30k prize.

Meanwhile the major tech corps would kill for that kind of bang per buck.

<comment><USER16> Reading the prize guidelines Wolfram gets the right to publish the proofs but that's it, which seems fair. Big tech companies perhaps have to pay more because they own the work product and it's presumably for some commercial reason?

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Computing the nth cell clearly takes at least 1 time unit, and by the definition of O(), we have 1 = O(n). I'll be claiming my $10,000 now.

(More seriously, don't confuse O() with Ω() and Θ(), folks: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_O_notation.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_O_notation.))

<comment><USER18> Would you mind providing a little more detail of your reasoning?

For example, say that someone shows that the most efficient algorithm for computing the value (0 or 1) of the central column of the nth row of rule 30 starting with a single 1 cell (i.e., the system under consideration for the prize) takes time n^2. Wouldn't one then say that the complexity of the calculation is O(n^2)? One couldn't say that it's O(n), surely?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> love this phrase: "naturally constructed" numbers, suggesting that the numbers we use every day are themselves computational conveniences, and possibly that another number construction could be useful at other scales.

<comment><USER19> I thought maybe this was a reference to constructivist mathematics, to refer to only this numbers that are algorithmic and exclude numbers we know exist in ℝ but have to be proven to exist using the axiom of choice.

<comment><USER7> maybe, probably, it was. But the idea that a measure of one of these rules can be interpreted as a number sparked my imagination.

I have to say also that interpreting the grid as space itself, and color of the square as the presence or absence of a particle is pretty compelling. When I think of it that way, then the proportion of each color matters a lot, as it would be the way equilibrium is expressed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Has anyone seen a version of Rule 30 for a 2D array, instead of 1D? I'm doing some searching but can't find one. Somewhat tangential to my angle of attack, but would be helpful to me.

<comment><USER21> What? Rule 30 is on a 2D plane.

EDIT: Oh I understand now! Each generation is 1D. Thanks for explaining! :D

<comment><USER22> Quote from previous link, in answer to a similar question comparing CAs (1d) to Conway's Life (2d):

"The pictures you're looking at, one of the axes is time. One row "becomes" the row below it. Each time-step iteration adds a row to the bottom, while the rows above it are immutable (because they are in the past)."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Anybody got a mirror? The link seems to be dead (or overwhelmed).

</comment><comment><USER24> For some context, Wolfram published a book of collected papers called "Cellular Automata and Complexity" [1] where he classified Cellular Automata (CA) into four broad categories:

        I. Convergent uniform final state
        II.  Convergent simple pattern final state
        III. "Random"
        IV. "Complexity"

Where "Complexity" essentially means Turing Machine Equivalent [2]. See also [3].

Later, Wolfram self-published "A New Kind of Science" (ANKoS). ANKoS is abysmal and barely readable but, from what I can understand from what little I read of it, Wolfram updated his understanding and instead basically classified CA into two categories, either 'simple' or 'complex', where, again, 'complex' means Turing Machine Equivalent.

If I remember correctly, I think Wolfram even used Rule 30 as a basis for random number generators somewhere (Mathematica?).

Considering the tenor of the problems, maybe Wolfram is still essentially classifying CA into his four initial categories as it looks like he's pushing for the idea that "Rule 30 == 'random'".

My personal take on this is that the idea that there are basically "two" classifications of CA, either 'simple' (non-Turing Machine equivalent) and 'complex' (Turing Machine equivalent) is correct. Though it might be the case where the more 'random' a CA looks, the harder it is to do the reduction to TME, maybe even going so far as having a diverging reduction cost.

Regardless, this is why these questions might be interesting. Is Rule 30 TME? If so, then that answers question 3 (O(n) simulation is essentially saying there's no "shortcut" and you're basically doing full computation). Questions 1 and 2 are, in my opinion, shades of the same TME question, where non- periodic is another way of saying there's no short-circuit computation and calculating the average is getting at the unpredictability (read 'required computability') of the cells.

If Rule 30 isn't TME but still requires O(n) cost to predict, that's also pretty interesting as it requires as much computing power to predict it but isn't as powerful as a Turing Machine. From a broader perspective, this gets at the whole "randomness vs. determinism" idea, as this is a deterministic system that, for many purposes, behaves randomly. This idea is probably old news to this crowd but there's a close link to TME and randomness that is still not completely understood and investigations into CA of this sort are another way to tackle this idea.

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/Cellular-Automata-Complexity- Collecte...](https://www.amazon.com/Cellular-Automata-Complexity-Collected- Papers/dp/0201626640/)

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

[3] [https://www.wolframscience.com/nks/p231--four-classes-of- beh...](https://www.wolframscience.com/nks/p231--four-classes-of-behavior/)</comment>


Ask HN: What is your learning plan for 2020? - <AUTHOR> Some companies encourage employees to come up with a learning plan each year. These usually include what, why, and how for each thing you're interested in learning.
What are you planning on learning in 2020 and what resources do you plan to use to do it?
I'm looking forward to learning: Graphql - a deep(ish) dive Statistics - brushing up with an intro course Devops - will finally read Project Phoenix and see where that takes me <comment><USER2> I turned 40 a few months ago so I am going to start fortifying my existing skillset to knock some rust off, make it compatible with the sprint to the public cloud, and just try to be hungrier than any of my younger peers so that I don't start getting painted into a corner before I am able to financially call it quits. I figure if I can beef up 10 more years of legitimate problem solving, I can sorta coast my way out for a meager retirement and shift to rice, beans, and dog walks til entropy gets me.

</comment><comment><USER3> Assuming you mean _Phoenix Project_ , I _highly_ recommend reading Goldratt's books: _The Goal_ , _It 's Not Luck_, and _Critical Chain_. They're the inspiration for _Phoenix Project_ and cover a good bit more material. I can't say they're great novels, they're no worse than _Phoenix Project_ with regard to their prose, but they aren't stellar either. But if you really want to see where Theory of Constraints and Critical Chain Management come from, read those and it'll help make parts of _Phoenix Project_ make more sense (at least it did for me).

<comment><AUTHOR> Oops that was what I meant! Thanks for the recommendations.

Do you know if there are any books that are inspired by (or squeals of a sort) to _Phoenix Project_?

<comment><USER3> I am not aware of anything that is a sequel to _The Phoenix Project_ itself. In many ways, it seems to be almost the conclusion of the idea of agile/lean software development borrowing from the classical ideas of ToC, Lean, Toyota Production System, etc.

If you want more readings that are not novels, but cover translating the ideas from manufacturing/production to IT and software development I'd suggest any books by Mary and Tom Poppendieck [0] and to explore their "bookshelf" [1]. The bookshelf is in reverse chronological order, so don't take the order to be an indication of anything positive or negative.

[0] [http://www.poppendieck.com/people.htm](http://www.poppendieck.com/people.htm)

[1] [http://www.poppendieck.com/reference.htm](http://www.poppendieck.com/reference.htm)

<comment><AUTHOR> Funny you mentioned Mary and Tom Poppendieck as I just saw them for the first recently at the O'Reilly Software Architecture Conf. Are they quite well known in the field or is this just coincidence?

<comment><USER3> I think they're pretty well-known, but my part of industry likes to pretend that nothing has changed since 1985. So I'm busy reading what I can and dragging us into the modern era. I came across them via references from some other book or site. I don't recall where, now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> For me it's the following:

I want to improve my APL(Dyalog/co-dfns), Rust, and Coq skills to passible levels, i.e. being able to comfortably use them and writing code in an idiomatic style.

I also want to improve my skill with SystemVerilog and VHDL. I'm decent with HDLs but I need a lot of work with regard to my testbench writing, translating specs to a TB, and using the random constraints based testing(similar to property based testing in the SW world).

I'm trying to properly pick up C++ template meta-programming and improve my familiarity with minimal to zero cost abstractions w.r.t FP and HOF.

Outside of programming skills, I want to start learning some project management skills, i.e. feature breakdowns, timeline estimation, and the basics of when/how to pivot.

Finally, I'm trying to learn how to tell when I start falling into one of my biggest issue as a developer and how to curb it: getting stuck on an idea and overlooking better alternatives.

It's a bit to take on but I'm young and don't have too many commitments so I figured it shouldn't be too unachievable.

<comment><AUTHOR> > getting stuck on an idea and overlooking better alternatives

Care to elaborate on this at all?

<comment><USER4> For me the issue basically boils down to getting hung up on a certain way of doing something or implementing some feature/subsystem.

An example is reinventing the wheel in a (what is in hind sight) pretty janky way of handling dependency injection because I for whatever reason was hung up on minimising dependencies. It was in C++ and within a month I had realised my mistake but the damage to the code was already done.

I should note that the overall principle of my design/decision I still think has value but it was implemented poorly due to entirely pointless self-imposed constraints.

I've gotten better about this but I still occasionally see myself getting hung up on what are ultimately pointless details and self imposed constraints.

One of the problems for me has been finding where to draw the line on my self imposed constraints since a lot of them help me write better, more maintainable code but when taken to extremes they can occasionally negatively impact my work and cause long-standing technical debt.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I want to grind Leetcode and tackle FAANG interviews. Working at companies like Microsoft and Google looks very fun and the pay obviously goes without saying.

</comment><comment><USER6> Brushing up on some social skills. Been reading How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie, and The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey. I'd be curious if anyone on here has good recommendations for this area.

On the tech side I'm going to try to develop my python skills a little more. Expand my DevOps knowledge in my current professional stack which will mean Azure DevOps. Perhaps sprinkle in some LeetCode. I don't really want to grind it, but I would like to move someone warm like Florida, and it'll probably be a good idea to study a bit.

<comment><USER7> > anyone on here has good recommendations for this area

Never Eat Alone by Keith Ferrazzi

<comment><USER6> Looks good. Added to the list. :D

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm learning Elixir & Vim this year. I hope to become productive with vim and make it my primary editor by replacing PyCharm, Sublime Text 3 & nano by the end of this year :)

I am also taking notes of all the resources that I'm finding useful and have some plans to utilize my spare time to publish those as a series of blog articles(hopefully). Merely to share my vim & elixir journey on my personal blog[0] :)

[0] [https://wasi0013.com/blog/](https://wasi0013.com/blog/)

</comment><comment><USER9> Last year I learned the basics of Elixir and wrote some toy projects with it. This year I'm starting to delve into the more advanced aspects of Elixir and I'm hoping to get into Elixir web development with Phoenix before the end of the year.

As part of the Elixir learning process, I've been writing a series called Learn With Me: Elixir at [https://inquisitivedeveloper.com/](https://inquisitivedeveloper.com/), so that other people can learn Elixir along with me.

At first the idea was just to help other people out in learning the language by explaining it from my perspective as I learned it, since there aren't large numbers of Elixir learning resources out there, but I found out that writing about Elixir and explaining it has been enormously useful in helping me learn. It helps me to think about the topic in more detail and I feel motivated to answer questions that pop up in my head while I'm writing, leading me to understand Elixir better.

So for anyone wanting to learn something, I recommend writing about it as well. Attempting to explain it to others has a learning value all on its own.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm trying to get more comfortable with ML (I have an okay theoretical understanding of quite a few things, but very little experience writing actual code).

My plan is to expose myself to new concepts or go more in depth on things I already know about (planning to go through a few books I have been meaning to, for example), and then whenever my memory fails me about something I already understood, go back to the best resources on that subject that I have saved from the first time I explored it.

This sort of spaced repetition works wonders for me.

I'll then complete a couple of courses to familiarize myself with syntax of at least one commonly used framework (thinking fastai which uses pytorch, give me suggestions if you got a better one).

I've also started reading the SRE book from Google after developing an appreciation for my coworkers who do that sort of thing.

I also want to study music (guitar specifically) but I don't know if I can find a good resource that includes material to study on a weekly basis for example or if I will have to get a tutor.

</comment><comment><USER11> I am pursuing certifications in Configuration Management. Completing 8 days of training with CMPIC and taking a certification exam through NDIA.

I build CM tools, so maybe I'll sound a bit more confident. So far, the training courses have reinforced my intuitions about how CM is performed in the enterprise. I'm feeling more able to tackle our engineering inefficiencies.

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm looking forward to using Golang. I built my personal website using Hugo and was very pleased with the simplistic nature of Goland. I Will also probably work to use more VIM in my daily editing for easier navigation. Also going to be learning website design, because I can build any feature, but I sure dont know how to make it pretty :'D

<comment><USER13> Careful with vim, you won't be able to go back to a normal editor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I am currently a trainee, so learning is essentially all I'm doing at my job. Also, I plan to take the CFA Level I exam in December. While my company does not support this, at least I can access the office on weekends where I have Wifi.

If anyone has advice for the CFA exam (or comments on the usefulness of the qualification), I glad for comments!

<comment><USER15> > or comments on the usefulness of the qualification

What are your goals?

What work do you do now?

Why are you posting about an investment finance exam in a tech board?

<comment><USER14> > What are your goals? Maximize salary over the next few years.

> What work do you do now? "IT Inhouse Consulting", but basically I'm making > myself familiar with the IT department of the firm.

> Why are you posting about an investment finance exam in a tech board? My > employer is an asset management firm, which I should have mentioned.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm taking a break from work related stuff. I'm focusing internally, build up my willpower, build up spiritually, build up my physical body. It's the year to kill bad habits and start new ones. Maybe dive into philosophy, psychology, economics, literature (i.e. cramming TV Tropes). Anything non-work.

</comment><comment><USER17> My main aim is to get to grips with Reinforcement Learning. I'm using

* Stanford's CS234 class which is on youtube and has assignments at the course page [1]

* Textbook freely available from Sutton and Barto [2]

I'm hoping to use it in a project with Lean [3] to make an AI that proves theorems.

I'm intending to move to emacs (well, spacemacs) for all my non-Java text editing so I'm also investing time in that.

[1] [http://web.stanford.edu/class/cs234/](http://web.stanford.edu/class/cs234/)

[2] [http://incompleteideas.net/book/RLbook2018.pdf](http://incompleteideas.net/book/RLbook2018.pdf)

[3] [https://leanprover.github.io/](https://leanprover.github.io/)

</comment><comment><USER18> This year I want to focus on transitioning to being a remote developer. Due to the corona virus I have been given the opportunity to be remote but I am finding I might as well be remote because my commute is long and most of the details I need would be better handled by email/text.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm quite interested in Kotlin and the Kotlin Multiplatform / Native project, I would like to try building a cross platfrom mobile app with it using Jetpack Compose and SwiftUI when it all matures a bit. I've also been watching the Rust hype train for the last two years and wondering when to jump on. I'd also like to finally finish SICP which I never get around to doing and finish a few side projects.

</comment><comment><USER19> Core CS:

* DSA - Princeton Algorithms, CS61B UCB

* Computer Systems - CSAPP, CS61C UCB

Tools/Frameworks:

* Intermediate Apache Airflow

* Elasticsearch

* Django

* AWS

</comment><comment><USER20> I'm wanting to learn Graphql as well. Specifically I want to learn a good JAM stack to match with Hasura. I'd like to learn a more functional way to build web apps with a database first approach to the architecture.

</comment><comment><USER21> Mostly continuing certifications in InfoSec. Got OSCP recently, will be getting GWAPT in a few months. Looking to earn OSWE before the end of the year.

</comment><comment><USER22> I am interested learn machine learning or AI course because both are top trending concepts in 2020.

</comment><comment><USER23> 1\. learn .net core

2\. doing youtube

3\. push MVP into production</comment>


Y Combinator Companies Didn't Like Boston? - <AUTHOR>

Did any of this sessions YC group enjoy the city of boston? Im a Boston native and out of everything I have seen so far it seems that the overall feeling was that Boston doesnt make the cut and most of the YC companies will be moving  to the Valley. Is this mostly based on investment opportunities. Or your experience here as well. <p>Did you guys even really have a chance to go out and have a good time in the city? <comment><USER2> I threw a party over the summer at my place in Cambridge, and there were a few of us who actually went out often. But we had gone to MIT so we knew what was fun. So, yes -- it has everything to do with investment opportunities. There are a few companies planning to go to New York for the music companies. (This includes us)

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool. Yeah I was hoping you guys got to go out a bit. Thats cool that some of the music companies are choosing NYC. Makes sense. Which company are you with? Reble is that still the name?

<comment><USER2> Yep that's still the name. Sort of keeping low for now.

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool. Let me know if you ever want any feedback or anything like that. Im always down for brainshares.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I worked in Boston for a summer once - Joe's American Bar and Grill on the waterfront (next to Marriott and Aquarium). I can safely say that I wouldn't rush back to living in Bean Town. Sorry but the Blue Laws suck, if you're going out you had better know of a party cos 2am is a bit early for a European. I also worked in a Law firm in New York for a yr or so and can safely say Boston, as a business and legal center, has a bad rep for being stuck up for no apparent, earned, reason. The weather sucks, the city doesn't have enough clubs and it's nightlife centers around that square which really is square. There's my tuppence worth. Woohoo Red Sox!!!!!!!</comment>


Online Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Course - <AUTHOR> http://palousemindfulness.com/selfguidedMBSR.html

<comment><USER2> I'm using [https://www.headspace.com/](https://www.headspace.com/) for two years and it had a huge impact on my life.

Being mindful is a cognition pattern of introspection and self-awareness. More invested hours lead to a higher "skill" like in playing music or programming.

So you should train your brain on a regular basis to make this behavior more dominant in your thinking processes.

</comment><comment><USER3> Mindfulness for your work: [http://focusr.co/](http://focusr.co/) (i.e., instead of being mindful to your breath or some aspect of your environment, you can practice mindfulness by bringing your attention back to your current task).

<comment><USER4> That's Flow:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_\(psychology\))

<comment><USER5> I think flow is the more the state achieved, whereas mindfulness is learning to notice when flow is not achieved, or is achieved for the wrong thing.

For example, I can be in flow while coding, but if things get too frustrating I may drop out of flow. Mindfulness for me is noticing quickly that I am frustrated. If I don't, I may end up in flow while reading Hacker News; being mindful helps me recognize that state rather than getting caught in it until noprocrast boots me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Mindful in May is also happening this month and those that subscribe are taken through a great course in mindfulness with daily emails.

[http://www.mindfulinmay.org](http://www.mindfulinmay.org)

</comment><comment><USER7> > whether they live in Moscow, Idaho or Moscow, Russia

That's a funny way to put it.

I can say from personal experience that actively learning to be mindful - meaning present and sensing - instead of constantly being obsessed with thoughts and mental picturing of the future and the past - has a very positive impact on my well-being and that of the people in my environment who I communicate and interact with.

I am definitely going to give this course a try.

</comment><comment><USER8> I meditate daily. I use Passage Meditation and it has made my life a lot better.

For those interested in exploring, here is a link to the free online course: [http://www.easwaran.org/introductory-passage-meditation- cour...](http://www.easwaran.org/introductory-passage-meditation-course- introduction.html)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> When I was looking for mindfulness resources on HN, one of the fundamental books on the subject was referenced in one of the comments: "Full Catastrophe Living" by Jon Kabat-Zinn. It is a fat book, more than 700 pages, and I proceded to read some shorter books on the field. Eventually, I came back to the book and now have almost finished it.

The linked course is based on the materials and the MBSR programe developed by the author of the book, Jon Kabat-Zinn, but I see that the author of the course has found and included some excellent additional audio and video resources.

</comment><comment><USER9> These kind of things turn on all my bullshit/cult flags - does anybody here have any experience with this particular course or better yet scientific evidence that it works?

<comment><USER10> It is used within the British NHS, which means that a standards body has determined that it is evidence based.[1]

See also: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindfulness#Clinical_applicatio...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindfulness#Clinical_applications)

Personally, I've found it difficult to keep up the practise (meditating every day), but when I do remember it does improve things. Even as a one-off activity occasionally it is good for introspection, and identifying subconscious sources of stress allowing you to act on them.

[1] NICE aren't perfect, but they do a reasonable job.

<comment><USER11> > It is used within the British NHS, which means that a standards body has > determined that it is evidence based

Hang on, that's not how it works. (For one thing health is devolved in Scotland so you have seperate English, Scottish, and Welsh NHSs. (Not sure what happens with NI.) More importantly:

[http://www.nhs.uk/conditions/homeopathy/Pages/Introduction.a...](http://www.nhs.uk/conditions/homeopathy/Pages/Introduction.aspx)

> Homeopathy is not available on the NHS in all areas of the country, but > there are several NHS homeopathic hospitals and some GP practices also offer > homeopathic treatment.

So, it's possible to get a stupid pointless "treatment" on the NHS. You might want to write to your local clinical commissioning group if you want to stop them spending money (about £4m per year) on homeopathy.

<comment><USER12> To be fair on NICE, from the same page:

"NICE currently does not recommend that homeopathy should be used in the treatment of any health condition"

"Some homeopathic remedies may contain substances that are not safe, or that interfere with the action of other medicines"

"there is no evidence that homeopathy is effective as a treatment for any health condition"

"Some people who use homeopathy may see an improvement in their health condition due to a phenomenon known as the placebo effect"

I'm not sure what the phrase 'NHS homeopathic hospitals' means. Does it mean more than what is implied by the paragraph following the one you quoted, that some people that work for the NHS also work privately on alternative medicine like homoeopathy.

I'd also be interested to know more about the £4m per year.

The page on mindfulness has a very different tone [1] to the one on homeopathy.

[1]: [http://www.nhs.uk/conditions/stress-anxiety- depression/pages...](http://www.nhs.uk/conditions/stress-anxiety- depression/pages/mindfulness.aspx)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Brazil's Digital Backlash - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/12/opinion/brazils-digital-backlash.html <comment><USER2> My first impression when I read articles like this (and I'm sure many of you are thinking the same thing) is to come up with a distributed xmpp OTR/pgp blah blah. But the reality is that the law simply must work.

What kept the government from tapping your phone lines before? It's quite easy to do, after all. It's respect for the law and consequences for breaking it*

We can spitball distributed messages systems all day but we MUST demand laws that respect the constitution and accountability of public officials.

*theres also the cost factor, and I believe these distributed encryption systems add considerable cost.

<comment><USER3> you have no clue what you are talking about.

> What kept the government from tapping your phone lines before?

The law. Separation of powers. etc.

Police would need a court order to tap on your phone line. There was a loophole about phone records (time and numbers called) but that was it.

<comment><USER2> That's the same point I'm making! The protection and respect for law and due process is the only long term solution.

<comment><USER3> the discussion was about a law that gives more power to LEO in one case (online) than the already stabilished (phones)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


North Korea's tablet comes pre-loaded with 'Gone with the Wind' - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/11/04/north-koreas-tablet-comes-pre-loaded-with-gone-with-the-wind-heres-why/ <comment><USER2> > And sometimes, North Korean officials meeting with U.S. envoys have been > known to quote from the novel during negotiations.

I can only imagine those negotiations:

\- Mr. Supreme Leader, you must recall your troops from the DMZ or we will stop all medical and food aid!

\- Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn.

</comment><comment><USER3> The article also links to this product review of the tablet by 38 North which is a fascinating read: [http://38north.org/wp- content/uploads/2013/10/SamjiyonProduc...](http://38north.org/wp- content/uploads/2013/10/SamjiyonProductReview_RFrank102213-2.pdf) (PDF)

It is interesting to see how things happen in that country. It is such a strange environment for technology infrastructure and skills it is really interesting to see how they handle it and what ends up getting produced there.

</comment><comment><USER4> I like the fact it has a TV tuner! The extendable antennae might be a bit wonky, but I would love to use my tablet to pick up radio and/or tv. there is no guarantee of internet connectivity in an emergency so I am curious why no tablets that I have seen offer similar?

<comment><USER5> I think in Japan and South Korea, a lot of smartphones(and perhaps tablets) allow TV reception.

<comment><USER6> When I was in Japan in 2008, my friend's cell phone screen could rotate out 90 degrees (into a traditional 16:9 TV-looking layout [1]) and he could watch quite a few TV channels on it that way.

This wasn't something he was paying for, it was just part of his base plan apparently..

[1] [http://images.gizmag.com/hero/9604_8070843257.jpg](http://images.gizmag.com/hero/9604_8070843257.jpg)

<comment><USER7> It's called 1seg and is part of the Japanese digital terrestrial OTA TV network (the regular digital OTA broadcasts contain a low-bandwidth stream for mobile devices to pick up).

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1seg](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1seg)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "particularly useful for understanding how modern capitalism spread to all of the United States" because it shows how the exploitation of black slaves was the economic foundation of the American colonies and describes the Civil War as "a struggle between the bourgeoisie of the north and the landowners of the south."

This sounds like North Korea's reality warp field but I dont think its too far off in a sense.

<comment><USER9> If slavery was the foundation of the economy, then wouldn't the economy have collapsed when slavery was abolished?

<comment><USER10> Yes. And it did, well locally anyway. My great grandfather (maternal), fought in the civil war for the South to preserve his "right" to govern his affairs the way he saw fit. Reading some of his letters would ring chords in the Libertarian movement today. His thesis was that a government "of the people" should be "of the people" all the way down, and by that he meant that he believed that states were better able to make laws about how their citizens were treated and lived than Washington was (which he felt was 'controlled' by rich industrialists in the North). His children suffered tremendously post-war when all of the processes and mechanisms by which their economy operated were uprooted all at once.

Now sometimes that is the only way that you can change things enough. Just rip the bandage off and damn all the hairs its going to pull out. I don't have a good analogy for the impact it had on them, perhaps if the government suddenly outlawed the use of cars or any form of non-public transportation it would throw a similarly sized wrench into the mix.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I thought it had Microsoft Word which I thought was very interesting.

<comment><USER12> I doubt it. I think it was a mistake on QZ's part, maybe from bad translation. It must've been some other free office suite.

<comment><USER13> There's still something that looks like a legit copy of Fieldrunners (judging from the icon on page 3 in the PDF[1]) — I wonder if DPRK government actually licensed it from Subatomic Studios.

[1] [http://38north.org/wp- content/uploads/2013/10/SamjiyonProduc...](http://38north.org/wp- content/uploads/2013/10/SamjiyonProductReview_RFrank102213-2.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I suspect that among the current generation of tablet buyers, it's more well known than in the US.

</comment><comment><USER15> And default background image of Dennis Rodman high-fiving Kim Jong-un!!!</comment>