Why I am tired of writing pull requests - <AUTHOR> http://gist.io/3444052

<comment><USER2> That's really too bad. For the record, I've written a couple hundred pull requests - no really! - and those that haven't been accepted have been because

      - The project is no longer maintained (I fork or rewrite better in this case)
      - I was actually doing it wrong
      - My pull didn't have tests and that was the convention (gotta respect conventions)
      - The author wished to keep my feature out for some random reason, but either gave me a hook or showed me how to override behavior in a clean way.

When the developer refuses to pull for not one of these reasons, it's usually because they don't have time. Which is fine, I totally understand that. I do that myself - I currently have 17 open PRs that I've sent and 20 from others in projects I maintain - so that's expected.

I would also say that when a PR isn't merged because the developer wants to write it himself, it's probably a stylistic issue and your implementation doesn't fit in with his vision for the project. You can't just pull in every request that comes by, otherwise the code becomes a complete shit-show and then debugging, maintaining, and extending it is a nightmare. I can personally attest to this, having committed this faux pas myself.

<comment><USER3> I always figured the unwritten rule for every developer is to always follow the existing code's style regardless of their own opinion of it.

<comment><USER2> That's not always the case, and sometimes if you don't know the language very well - in my case, Ruby - then certain patterns aren't available to you and it looks hokey without you realizing it.

<comment><USER4> Completely forgivable. This pull request[0], on the other hand, is probably more along the lines of what mirsadm was thinking of.

[0]: [https://github.com/Aaronius/Stupid-Table- Plugin/commit/fbf3d...](https://github.com/Aaronius/Stupid-Table- Plugin/commit/fbf3dcab2ec8e4381529dc23b0e2727bbac1d18b)

<comment><USER5> [https://github.com/Aaronius/Stupid-Table- Plugin/commit/fbf3d...](https://github.com/Aaronius/Stupid-Table- Plugin/commit/fbf3dcab2ec8e4381529dc23b0e2727bbac1d18b?w=1) people.

<comment><USER4> I have no clue where that commit is coming from. How do I get to it? Thanks.

<comment><USER6> It's the same commit you linked to, but ignoring whitespace changes (&w=1, like diff -w).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The first thing you should always do is create a ticket. There you can discuss if its worth spending time on a patch and what the best implementation could be. Pull requests that come up out of nowhere usually end up in the end of maintainers' queue.

Or you can continue calling people who maintain free and open source projects in their spare time douchebags and neckbeards.

<comment><USER8> I cam here to say this. If something is going to take you more than 15 minutes to do, it's better to coordinate it with the project maintainers first. If it takes you less than 15 minutes, you didn't invest enough to be bitter if your code isn't accepted.

<comment><USER9> Or you can do that, proposing a trivial enhancement, and have

1) The maintainer tell you "that isn't the designed behavior" (no kidding it doesn't do that now, that's why I want to enhance it!)

2) It marked it as a duplicate of the last handful of people that wanted similar features

3) The ticket closed

I'm looking at you, jquery-ui

<comment><USER10> ad.1: "Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail." :) The argument that the dev doesn't want particular functionality can be perfectly reasonable, and might be a sign that he's even a good one and consciously fights to avoid software bloat...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> He describes a social problem which is very dependent on the actual maintainers, but blames it on the mechanism.

Yeah, some projects have prickly/uncooperative maintainers... so what? That's true regardless of the collaboration mechanism used, and there's no obvious reason why pull requests make this problem worse than other mechanisms.

Indeed, I would guess that pull requests make things better than many other methods, because they (1) make it much easier to review changes, (2) make it much easier for the submitter to update his changes in response to comments, (3) handily keep the discussion and patches all together in one easily accessible place, and (4) maintain a record of the request, helping to avoid the "forgot about it" problem that you get with e.g. patch requests on mailing lists ("Subject: ping" :).

Frankly, given the attitude in his rant, it seems pretty likely the problems he apparently has with maintainers aren't entirely the maintainers' fault...

<comment><USER12> It doesn't seem like he's ever committed to open source before because none of this is new. So maybe Github _is_ the problem in that it lowered the bar for this guy to put in just enough effort to get his feelings hurt.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I will pass absolutely no judgement on you because I have no idea who you are, what you do, what the quality of your code/work is, but have you considered that maybe there is actually something wrong with the pull requests?

With no references to examples if what you're talking about, it comes off as a bit of a temper tantrum. But that's just what it feels like, but I have no idea because I have nothing to look at to form an opinion.

<comment><USER14> Even if he's misguided, he's trying to contribute. His description of someone finding a problem with his code could be written by someone who is a poor coder and doesn't understand why. However, it also doesn't sound like the people who rejected his pulls were very convincing at explaining why.

I think the point of the article is that the pull requests he's made came to nothing other than rejection. Nothing about the experience led him to believe he should make pull requests in the future. Even if he's a poor coder, I think that's a poor result and is worth talking about.

<comment><USER15> Well said.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> From the Google Guava team, regarding the difficulty on the other end of people accepting random pull requests:

[https://plus.google.com/113026104107031516488/posts/ZRdtjTL1...](https://plus.google.com/113026104107031516488/posts/ZRdtjTL1MpM)

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3691587>

<comment><USER17> Yes. I ironically I've seen this contributor's sentiment shared internally in Google too (about many projects).

The real scaling challenge is in managing precisely this problem. It's not easy to solve.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Link to your GH profile?

I've written dozens of pull requests and most of them either get merged, or I get a concise explaination about why they're not being merged.

probably 3/5 I have to go through a few iterations of hack and rebase before they go upstream. I'm fine with this.

With some more background maybe we can offer feedback about why your code isn't making it upstream?

</comment><comment><USER19> I can't say I've had a similar experience on Github, or heard anything of that sort from the many developers I know who write pull requests (or even just submit issues) on Github.

I think there should be an expectation that getting a pull accepted on a huge repo like Node or Rails should be a bit hard. When code is being used by thousands of people and companies, it's important that a lot of thought and care is put into even the smallest changes.

And finally, there is an easy way to end the negativity: respond to it by doing what they say. If they want you to do it in a different way, make a separate pull request and leave it up to the maintainers to choose the best one. Best never to argue on Github. If there's a disagreement, answer it with code.

I understand where the OP is coming from. This certainly does happen from time to time, and it's awful when it does. But I think this post is overblowing it. I certainly hope he does try sending pull requests again!

</comment><comment><USER20> I'm with you. I added parallel test execution to PHPUnit, which its maintainers have been promising since 2005. When I started writing it, they found me and encouraged me along. So I spent two weeks on it at 16 hours a day. When I was done, they invented reasons not to merge. When I was done fixing the reasons they had invented, they said they didn't want to merge it because they were going to write it themselves.

<comment><USER21> PHPUnit has a very definite style to its code, perhaps the changes didn't follow the style closely enough.

Do you still have a fork? I'd love some parallel test execution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> A project I maintain has an experimental branch that takes most pull requests unless they have obvious issues (which I ask the author to fix). Only things I have not accepted so far were major GUI changes that I considered confusing. (I did accept one change that basically redid the entire GUI because it was awesome). The merges back to the master branch are several months apart, but I think it's a good idea to do deep quality control on the code AFTER it's merged to keep contributors engaged.

</comment><comment><USER23> So anyone who won't accept your pull request or doesn't think it has merit is a neckbeard living in a basement?

Yeah, this isn't totally emotion-driven or biased at all.

</comment><comment><USER24> This is highly subjective. Every project and maintainer is different.

Personally, I try to be 100% positive whenever I interact with anyone who has put their time and energy into improving a project that I maintain because I am 100% grateful for their effort. If I think that their code could be better in some way, I make that suggestion to them in a positive way. If they don't want to take my advice, then I'll merge their request and make the improvements myself. Heck, even if their code breaks something I'll still merge it in-- then fix it myself while retaining the intention of their code.

Being negative towards contributors is counter-productive.

</comment><comment><USER25> I've found that if it's a pull request of any significance, if you want it merged it's good to hop on IRC and talk to one of the maintainers and get their take on it. That can head off a lot of issues and save a lot of your time. Then if you still need the change, you know up front that you'll be maintaining your own fork.

</comment><comment><USER26> The good thing about this post is that it reminded me to be better at expressing my gratitude when finding solutions to my problems in pull requests. This makes the person who made the pull request understand that the work was appreciated even if it wasn't pulled and I would imagine that a request with many "thank you" comments would be more likely to be pulled.

</comment><comment><USER27> Some projects are more receptive to pulls from authors outside the core team than others. Namely, large projects in use by thousands of people.

Most library authors truly appreciate these kinds of pull requests.

Bitching about pull requests in such a generalized way is destructive behavior and having it up-voted here surely isn't good for many of the impressionable people that read news here.

</comment><comment><USER28> I'm newish to github and submitting pull requests but the OP's experience is very unfortunate and orthogonal to mine. People I don't know and who are better devs than I am have all been very nice.

I started using a small PHP framework plugin written by a guy who did everything right. I want to contribute eventually, so I asked him what his license choice will be and some questions that would hopefully keep our code in sync.

He was really polite and helpful, and wants to do an MIT-style license.

I forked his github project just to keep my pull requests and work stuff outside of that cleaner.

Not really sure what solution the OP is looking for. If your pull requests are universally rejected, perhaps you could change your approach.

Github is only the best software sharing platform anyone has devised thus far in our young discipline. You can't even message people privately, you can open a new Issue though.

</comment><comment><USER29> Sounds like a case of entitlement. Why would you waste your time working on something and not know if it is wanted or not?

It's your fault for not planning ahead.

</comment><comment><USER30> Maybe he wants some constructive criticism?

But does he get that a) people are short on time, b) if your code looks/feels like it's too much work to review, the reviewers may procrastinate, and c) no one is actually obligated to accept your unsolicited contribution?

I feel like, pre-Github, this anger would be happen of the course of a few e-mails on a mailing list, and then instantly put in check by a more mature person. There would be no misconceptions in your feelings toward the project, and vice versa -- you could either take it or leave it.

Now, it just builds and festers, until it comes out in a blog post, where probably zero of the original parties even see the concern.

Can we bring back mailing list flames?

</comment><comment><USER31> This is not really the norm, but it does happen every now and then that pull requests are refused cause "they'll do it themselves". At which point you may think "my code sucks that much?"

Then when they do, they just copy your pull and put no credits, and there, you understand. Classic :P

But then again, it's not the norm. I don't give a fuck about pull requests or anything similar anymore since a long, long time. I just put it there for anyone who wanna take stuff, but the fixes are generally for my own use. And I'm usually too lazy to fork and fix the world, anyway.

</comment><comment><USER32> On the other hand, I've actually taken projects with unmerged pull requests, and pulled them into my own repo to use the new functionality/bug fixes. So they aren't necessarily just sitting there uselessly.

<comment><USER33> It might be worth commenting to that effect on the pull request. It'd at least provide a morale boost to the author of the request; and showing that someone out there is already using the changes might even make the maintainer more likely to accept them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I wrote a piece a while back, which I think retitled would make a good companion article, "Why I am tired of merging pull requests" <[http://blog.ezyang.com/2010/05/i-hate-patches-confessions- of...](http://blog.ezyang.com/2010/05/i-hate-patches-confessions-of-an-open- source-developer/>);

</comment><comment><USER35> I have had similar things happen to me.

<https://github.com/joyent/node/pull/3710>

I sit and argue my pull like crazy but it is just getting derailed :/ oh well.

<comment><USER36> Unless I'm confused, aren't you also the author of that gist?

<https://gist.github.com/3444052> your names on that one.

<comment><USER37> The original gist is on the bottom of the revision stack on the right, it was by an anonymous user.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I have to say I haven't had this issue. Generally I accept quality pull requests to my projects within days. Pull requests I have sent to other projects have been merged in within a couple weeks at worst...

Perhaps in the future it would be worth discussing your changes with the developer ahead of time to see if that feature is something he wants in his core product. That could save you some time and effort in the future.

</comment><comment><USER39> Engage core developers not the ivory tower bastards. If the core team is not helpful and you think you have a good idea, fork!

As well if you PRs are bug fixes then there is no excuse, if they are feature additions / changes then you might want to invest into a fork, do some cool work and then get noticed. Maybe they'll merge!

I haven't had any trouble getting my PRs accepted takes about a week to three weeks.

</comment><comment><USER40> Before going into all the hassle, you should talk in their conversation channels, IRC or mailing list, about your approach and why you want to make this change, get the core developers involved into your development.

I get this every time at work, and sometimes I just don't have time to review something that looks unneeded, from my point of view, and something I can't review, since it's too big of a change.

</comment><comment><USER41> I don't know man, it sounds like your code might not be very good. I'll have to make that assumption if you don't provide any examples, because I've never seen something like that happen. Especially not for 20 straight pull requests.

You don't have to look very far to find douchebag programmers, but I've always had friendly encounters on GitHub.

<comment><USER42> I was going to make a sarcastic comment about the silliness of the thought that since you haven't had the same experience then the author's complaint is invalid.

I don't think it's necessary though.

After all, if it hasn't happened to you then there's no way it has happened to someone else, right?

Plus, your automatic assumption that he's a bad coder is part of the problem the author is complaining about. You know nothing about his code therefore an assumption, positive or negative, is not something you can make.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> What happens more often to me, is that the pull request gets ignored. The gist.io [1] repository itself is a perfect example of this. 5 open pull requests, most of them now more than a month old have been completely ignored.

<https://github.com/idan/gistio/pulls>

</comment><comment><USER44> I haven't done enough pull requests to comment on the author's experiences...but one of my only was a trivial change...almost one of personal taste...to Twitter Bootstrap and I was disproportionately excited when it got acceptd. I'm assuming there's a disproportionate letdown for the inverse situation

</comment><comment><USER45> I usually give constructive feedback on pull requests I can't accept and then they either drop the request or fix it. Seems to be a pretty common pattern for projects in active development.

</comment><comment><USER46> Ah the peril of general claims with no specific examples.</comment>


ARM-Ed Mac: Not Again or for Real This Time? - <AUTHOR> https://mondaynote.com/arm-ed-mac-not-again-or-for-real-this-time-a3548eece86 <comment><USER2> Comments moved to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22521793](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22521793).</comment>


Goodbye, Docs Team - <AUTHOR> https://blog.rust-lang.org/inside-rust/2020/03/27/goodbye-docs-team.html <comment><USER2> The end of a team dedicated to documenting an unsuccessful replacement for C++, developed by a failing internet browser company.

What kind of world do we live in??</comment>


Tracing child abusers: Where was this picture taken? [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/av/stories-47660347/tracing-child-abusers-where-was-this-picture-taken <comment><USER2> I was able to see a presentation about this topic one time by ICE. It tragic in two senses:

1) The crimes themselves are absolutely intolerable to society.

2) The lack of serious resourcing the seriousness of this crime should warrant.

Part of the presentation was specifically on identifying the location a sequence of photos was taken in the hopes that it would narrow down the search radius for the offender. The team that did the work were members of the ICE HERO program -- one of the coolest veteran-to-civilian programs I've ever seen [1][2]. The folks literally spent weeks "driving" around likely areas in Google maps trying to identify the location. Because the photo was taken from an angle that the car wouldn't have seen, they weren't able to use any automation at all and it literally took a human's intuitive understanding of 3-D spaces to eventually figure it out.

However, what was really tough was that the HERO program only exists because it offers an internship that costs very little to DHS -- they simply can't afford a large group of full-time staff.

I urge anybody who can to petition to better fund anti-child abuse programs.

1 - [https://www.ice.gov/hero](https://www.ice.gov/hero)

2 - [http://www.herocorps.net/](http://www.herocorps.net/)

<comment><USER3> How does the effectiveness of tracking down individual cases in this way compare to e.g. improving the eoconomic incentives overall? Commercial child abuse is mostly a result of deprived economic circumstances, in which people see more benefit in selling their children rather than giving them the best future possible, if I'm not mistaken.

I don't intend to spoil the enthusiasm here, but wouldn't supporting welfare hence be a more effective measure than investing in fancy tech? That latter only increases the deterrants which seem hard to increase any further to begin with.

<comment><USER4> Economic incentives aren't going to encourage someone to not sell their child for deplorable purposes; if you don't emotionally care for your child, money isn't going to make you care. On the other hand, if you can use a non-profit to pay terrible/uncaring/abusive parents to hand over their children voluntarily (surrendering parental rights) and to get sterilized to prevent the harm of any more children, that is a cause I would write checks to all day long.

Disclaimer: I am a parent, and have fostered neglected children.

<comment><USER5> projectprevention.org pays serial child neglecters to get birth control

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Here the direct link to the picture database [https://www.europol.europa.eu/stopchildabuse](https://www.europol.europa.eu/stopchildabuse)

<comment><USER7> [https://www.europol.europa.eu/sites/default/files/styles/eur...](https://www.europol.europa.eu/sites/default/files/styles/europol_large/public/images/2018-2-g9.png?itok=SOJEIEuK)

That card looks like a pokemon card with a Google Chrome logo. Frustratingly familiar.

<comment><USER8> The thing on the back looks surprisingly similar to a package of "Yerba Rosamonte"[1], which would place this picture in Argentina/Uruguay. But it's too low res to say whether that's the case, or just pareidolia.

[1] [https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=yerba%20rosamonte&t...](https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=yerba%20rosamonte&tbs=imgo:1)

<comment><USER9> It looks like something else once looking at the same picture with the adjusted light (using Photoshop):

[https://ibb.co/1K1kZR1](https://ibb.co/1K1kZR1)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Some of the techniques a group on 4chan used are interesting: [https://www.ign.com/boards/threads/remember-when-4chan- users...](https://www.ign.com/boards/threads/remember-when-4chan-users-got-a- terrorist-training-camp-bombed-by-russia.455038424/)

<comment><USER11> Remember when 4chan weaponized agains Shia LeBouf's flag and were able to determine the location of the ground flag based on the contrail evidence of the flight path of what the camera could see. The camera was only pointing at the sky, with the flag in the image. They were able to determine approx latitude due to the live stream revealing the sunset - and then comparing the paths of planes seen in the camera with flight data...

Then they drove to the location and took out the flag

Joe Rogan on it:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AoBK1_ixiro](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AoBK1_ixiro)

Some random on it:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-ABXvbMSc4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-ABXvbMSc4)

<comment><USER12> I am not one to doubt the impressive capablity of a hoard of highly motivated 4chan autists, but it does become a lot less spectacular of a feat if you consider LaBeouf was spotted in a Greenville, TN diner around the same time as the flag hunt was underway (which was twitter knowledge). I thought their triangulation efforts through driving around, beeping a car horn, and listening if the sound came through on cam audio was the most impressive part of their detective work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Looking at the swingset photo ([https://www.europol.europa.eu/sites/default/files/styles/eur...](https://www.europol.europa.eu/sites/default/files/styles/europol_large/public/images/333s.jpg?itok=qQWK_hlz))

That's an interesting design of swingset; not one I've seen before.

Unlike the bog-standard swingset in the US, which is typically all steel tube, that one looks like it has extruded (aluminum?) verticals and then a tubular horizontal weldment as the top piece. Further, the horizontal looks like it was hot-dip galvanized as a finished unit. The verticals were painted before assembly, not after, because of the bare-metal bolt heads. The fasteners are presumably stainless, since I don't see any rust marks below them. It's got an interesting bearing/bushing at the top of each chain, probably to make it not squeak; that strikes me as a fairly luxe feature.

I couldn't find any similar ones searching around online, although my Google searches don't turn up many European models at all (thanks, Google).

The photo doesn't go up enough to be sure, but it looks like the top bar is an unbroken one-piece section. That would make it pretty bulky and awkward to ship. (The vertical pieces look like they come apart into about 4 ft sections, which means they were likely palletized at one point. Maybe the extrusions are not done in the same place as the rest of the manufacturing..? That's certainly plausible.)

If someone recognized the design/model, I think that would probably be a significant clue towards the photo's location; at the very least, the manufacturer would probably have a fairly good idea of where they normally sell to.

<comment><USER13> Replying to myself because I got an email from a user with a match:

[http://igra23.ru/katalog/karuseli-kacheli- balansiry/kacheli-...](http://igra23.ru/katalog/karuseli-kacheli- balansiry/kacheli-oblachko-dvojjnye-na-derevyannykh-stolbakh-s-podvesom-na- cepi.html)

It has the swept-bend tubular corner reinforcements, the polyethylene (or some other kind of plastic) panels on the upper corners, etc. The only difference I can see between the product photo and the Europol one is that, in the Europol photo, the top bar seems galvanized rather than painted. But that's the sort of thing that could easily change as a product is marketed.

It appears the company is out of Krasnodar (Краснода́р), located in southern Russia.

<comment><USER14> This is an exact fit. Great job

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I wonder if people who use a popular photo sharing site like Google Photos would be in favor of there photos with location meta data being used for a project like this.

I think I would if I could trust that it was only being used for something like this & not commercial advertising type projects.

</comment><comment><USER16> This should be a subreddit. Reddit is pretty good for these things, they have a big, global audience and a great comment system for such things.

e.g. [https://www.reddit.com/r/whatisthisthing/](https://www.reddit.com/r/whatisthisthing/) works great.

<comment><USER17> They also have a habit of mis-identifying people and hounding them down.

<comment><USER16> well this material seems luckily carefully selected and without I persons visible. A found place is also pretty easy to verify.

<comment><USER17> Sure. But I think Pizzagate has shown us that there's enough weirdos out there who'll show up to a place demanding answers.

And don't forget, people are strongly died to locations. If Reddit decides that a particular photo is located at 287 FM 772, that's someone's house, and a name can easily be associated with it. Nobody wants to receive a Google alert that their name is suddenly popping up in /r/find-a-pedophile

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> What incentive could be added to have people view these photos on a regular basis? I think facebook could be one answer with it's global reach. They could do an official page or something and offer real discounts at partnering restaurants or stores from around the world if you spend time each month viewing all the pictures. Imagine the reach they could have. At the same time I feel that there should not be a business of restaurants and the like selling coupons on abuse photos but I think the greater good of finding these kids may be there. The reason I add a type of payment is because it is my belief that though people do mean well, without an incentive they are less likely to view these images. Or perhaps if add companies put those kind of pictures on the websites instead of ads I would disable the adblocker.

<comment><USER19> What's wrong with money

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Photo number 9. The box shows a picture of an Asteraceae that fits well with Cichorium intybus, a vegetable cultured in temperate areas (from Europe mainly), and the colours of the Romanian flag.

[https://www.europol.europa.eu/sites/default/files/styles/eur...](https://www.europol.europa.eu/sites/default/files/styles/europol_medium/public/images/2018-5-g28.png?itok=oMUT8Ms6)

over the green square, appears a whitish blur that could easily say Cicoarea in a stylised way (or maybe is just another picture)

</comment><comment><USER20> This is also a good article, not sure if it's been featured here before. [https://www.bellingcat.com/resources/case- studies/2018/11/08...](https://www.bellingcat.com/resources/case- studies/2018/11/08/europols-asian-city-child-abuse-photographs-geolocated/)

</comment><comment><USER14> Can't identify the background trees at this low resolution, but there is a small Fabaceae tree in the photo that looks like either Robinia pseudoacacia or Sophora. This trees have heavy seeds that do not go very far. Some bigger trees from one of this species could probably be seen near this area. Maybe in the streets (or in a garden).

[https://www.europol.europa.eu/sites/default/files/styles/eur...](https://www.europol.europa.eu/sites/default/files/styles/europol_medium/public/images/13s.jpg?itok=wm1V3Ktl)

Robinia is a fully hardy and widespread species that can be found in almost all Europe and USA, USDA area 1a.

<comment><USER14> Just realized that is the same area as this second photo, so if is Asia nothing of the former is appliable. The list of possible fabaceae trees is much bigger then. There is a pinnate-leaved palm also, so in principle areas colder than -12 could be excluded (USDA 8a).

[https://www.europol.europa.eu/sites/default/files/styles/eur...](https://www.europol.europa.eu/sites/default/files/styles/europol_medium/public/images/2018-6-c20.png?itok=-5CgP08Z)

<comment><USER14> Ok, I was looking at the medium size. At larger resolution the photo is more interesting that it seems. Four different threes and something more. They should examine it more carefully.

The big trunk in the background is from the same Fabaceae also. Senna could show a similar bark and leaves. Senna siamea from Thailand for example looks similar. There is a sapling of something that looks like a Psidium also and maybe a Schefflera. All tentatively.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> In this photo there is a small tree at rigth that is partially clipped. Compound leaves with five leaflets. Probably Fraxinus. Fits well. Temperate area in this case.

[https://www.europol.europa.eu/sites/default/files/styles/eur...](https://www.europol.europa.eu/sites/default/files/styles/europol_medium/public/images/2018-5-g13.png?itok=XpgbNRoj)

If is Fraxinus excelsior (probably) Europe. If Fraxinus pensylvannica: Eastern half of USA or Argentina.

<comment><USER21> The writing on the backpack looks Cyrillic to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Andrew Sullivan used to run a contest doing something similar albeit less serious and with remarkably good results

[http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/vfyw- contest/](http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/vfyw-contest/)

</comment><comment><USER23> If there can be a first sort done by AI and then human contribution to try to narrow it better it might be helpfull.

Like « this picture seems to be located in this area/country » and then people from the area could have a look.

I'm pretty sure people would like to help.

<comment><USER24> It would be great if that was possible. But in the meantime human beings are amazingly good at this kind of thing. Our brains are highly optimised for this kind of work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Do not reverse search images on Google.

</comment><comment><USER26> Should be solveable with a NN trained on Matching Google Streetview and the images..

<comment><USER27> Google Street View is limited to what you can see from the street. It would not work for several types of location.

<comment><USER28> Very true, but the article says there are 40 million images. Likely will work for a non-zero portion of the images.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Hopefully we'll come to a point soon where AI and deep learning can help out in this space. I remember models being trained that could predict the country based on a street view photo with a high degree of accuracy, which would be a good first step. The next one would be to either match a top-down satellite photo with a picture, or figure out a way to match street view photos based on similarity.

Given that Google actually has the data as well as the skills and computing power to help out Europol, I'd have hoped they'd be jumping at the opportunity to do so. At the least it would make for great PR, but perhaps they're afraid of the possible privacy issues and discussions as well (I can already see the headlines: "Google knows the location of any yard appearing in a photo!").

In any case, it's telling how humans are so good at this stuff and picking up on clues and patterns. It'll still take a while before machines are as good.

<comment><USER30> That's not really how any of this works—you can't simply throw a bunch of unrelated data at some algorithms and expect usable output. (There's also no such thing as "deep learning".)

Law enforcement and related organizations already use machine learning quite a bit, particularly for image enhancement. Yes, Google does have a lot of images of various locations from a top-down perspective, but that isn't helpful for accurately determining a location from the images that Europol collects.

Also, keep in mind that Europol is only posting images here when all other means of determining location and identity have been exhausted. The images are usually indoors and don't contain enough information for ML to be of any significant use. You might be able to narrow it down to a probably country based colors and design patterns, but that's hardly sufficient and not solid enough evidence to actually do anything.

<comment><USER31> > There's also no such thing as "deep learning".

What do you mean by that?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_learning](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_learning)</comment></comment></comment>


The Final Days of a Tax Haven - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-11-15/the-final-days-of-a-tax-haven <comment><USER2> So the elephant in the room here is that the US is increasingly a tax haven. Not for US citizens. For everyone else.

The reason? The US might throw it's weight around with FATCA and many things before it to get even moderately sized transactions reported to it and to have assets of US citizens reported but the problem is the information doesn't go the other way.

So the result is those dodging taxes in the EU will probably treat the US as a financial shield to hide wealth from their governments.

<comment><USER3> I'd really like to see non-US residents putting money into real estate pay a huge tax, to discourage purchase of condos and single family homes. There's no reason, to purchase these items and leave them empty, as a hedge against whatever is going on in their country. I'm not exactly sure where to draw the line, but if you send a kid to the US for school, and they live in your condo/house, that's fine. But, do we want speculators from outside the country purchasing and leasing back to US residents? Seems like a bad recipe.

<comment><USER4> Not sure why "speculators from outside the country" are worse than those from inside the country. Personally, I would prefer we encourage efficient land use by everyone, regardless of their nationality.

One elegant taxation system to accomplish that is the land value tax: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax)

<comment><USER5> isn't the most efficient land use just letting the free market work without taxation? if land is best used as a store of value for someones money then thats what it is.

<comment><USER6> Land is required for things necessary to human existence and it's not really possible to make more of it so if the market determines that the "best" use of it is for storing money society should probably step in and overrule the market.

<comment><USER7> Uh huh.

That's all well and good until someone decides to apply that reasoning to something else, like, say....the Internet.

You really think all that wireless spectrum is finding it's best use sharing cat videos? High-bandwidth video emojis?

They aren't making any more RF spectrum either.

One man's "common sense solution" is another man's "free market distortion".

And there is PLENTY of land to go around....so.....bad example. You could give nearly every single person on the planet plenty of room to live in Texas. That's without going vertical into multi-story buildings.

Ultimately the best use of people's labor is whatever they want to do with it. If that's buying houses, great. Beanie babies, faberge eggs, gold ingots, whatever.

Do you really need all that crap you own?

<comment><USER8> RF spectrum is highly regulated, by the way.

<comment><USER7> Less than you might think.

It's treated like real-estate with RF "zoning rules".

But very wide swaths of the RF spectrum are essentially a free -for-all. You could argue that the most valuable parts (UHF) are used for stuff that could only be described as "non-essential" e.g. cat videos.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If I understood correctly, this says Vanuatu is unhappy that it got gray- listed for dubious tax practices, whereas other tax havens weren't. This will affect the price of "imported food, such as rice, and fuel."

> The offshore financial sector kicks in only about 4 percent of the country's > annual output of roughly $800 million, but its existence requires an > ultralow tax environment that deprives the government of some revenue.

Not sure I get this. I don't see a rational reason why such tax havens should exist in the first place. If efforts are made now to regulate them, surely that's a good thing. Hope they will be able to transform their economy anyway.

<comment><USER10> These are small countries with a number of sophisticated ex-pats who have placed themselves in positions of power to control local regulations. The result of this control is an influx of offshore funds which they manage as financiers, local board members, solicitors or other enabling corporate professionals.

These individuals make very respectable incomes doing very little work living in an area with a rock-bottom cost of living and propagate their status in society by imposing regulations that lock in the need for their services, like local directorship quotas for local companies. An individual can sit on 30~ or so local boards for $20,000 a year each with a PO box for an office. That's a cool half-mil per year to sit on the beach, drink out of a coconut, and read a few pages of board materials a day.

This isn't the case for all companies, but it sure is the case for some.

<comment><USER11> Even if what you describe sounds terrible and immoral, thing is, it's not illegal, and it's a consequence of how our capitalistic/bureaucratic system works. Let's fix the root cause instead.

<comment><USER9> indeed - it has been pointed out elsewhere that slavery/ beating your wife/ ... used to be illegal. It is up to us/ our democratic system to fix this.

<comment><USER11> You can enforce international laws about human rights, but not about economy.

<comment><USER10> Sure you can. We just don't. If you think the EU and the US couldn't get an international tax harmonization treaty that allowed countries to follow revenue into specified haven countries and tax the cash flows where the revenues were generated, you're nuts.

Viewed as distinct, large nations have a fuckton more negotiating leverage than Vanuatu's financial industry.

The real issue is that Vanuatu and other similarly placed tax havens aren't distinct. They are run by sophisticated professionals for capital holders in developed countries.

Those are the same people who are at the bargaining table; those who know about the issue in depth or that have substantial capital involved all benefit from the wealth extraction the current international regime provides.

<comment><USER11> Interesting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The tightening of the screws against tax heavens gives me warm fuzzies. The rich will retreat to Bitcoin soon.</comment>


Adobe Flash: A Look At Browsers, Codecs, And System Performance - <AUTHOR> http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/adobe-flash-10.1-performance-hardware-acceleration,2805.html <comment><USER2> As usual Tom's provides good researched articles. This one is no different. Good read!</comment>


Hayden: I'd lose all respect for Russia if they haven't fully exploited Snowden - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2014/05/23/former-nsa-director-i-would-lose-all-respect-for-russian-if-they-havent-fully-exploited-snowden/ <comment><USER2> I see Hayden hasn't given up on his "Snowden is helping the Russians, therefore the enemy" narrative.</comment>


Inside Story of a Texas Grocery Chain Running in the Chaos of Hurricane Harvey - <AUTHOR> https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/inside-story-what-took-keep-texas-grocery-chain-running-chip-cutter/ <comment><USER2> >Join to create your newsfeed for free

Paywalled, I am not interested in signing up and spamming all of my friends.</comment>


Travis needs your help - <AUTHOR> https://love.travis-ci.org <comment><USER2> It'd be nice if Travis CI took a step towards distributing itself more easily. I've got spare bandwidth and spare CPU cycles: why not provide downloadable Vagrant boxes or scripts to allow me to run a couple of CI VMs locally? I did look through their site for this kind of info, but didn't manage to find anything particularly easily.

</comment><comment><USER3> Pardon me for being ignorant, but what exactly is Travis CI? I can't find any information on that site or on the github repo page. If I don't know what it is, I can't donate.

<comment><USER4> It's a CI system with _amazing_ github integration. All you have to do is add a small config file [1], create an account, and then enable the post commit hook (a nice little on/off toggle) and your project is now being tested on every change [2]. It also has easy to incorporate badges you can put in PR's to show that your changes pass [3].

[1] <https://github.com/tedivm/Stash/blob/master/.travis.yml>

[2] <http://travis-ci.org/#!/tedivm/Stash>

[3] <https://github.com/tedivm/Stash/pull/37>

<comment><USER5> But aren't you testing new code _before_ pushing to Github anyway? Still wondering about Travis' use case.

<comment><USER4> You'd think so- I know _I_ am- but it's really nice seeing a pull request with that badge there saying it's passed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I would donate in a heartbeat if they had mono support. Without .NET it's just not that useful to me.

</comment><comment><USER7> For anyone wondering: they have received $101.391 from 547 donors in 102 days of campaign.

Ah, the first payment is actually one of the guys testing if the payment process works on production; amusing.</comment>


Linus on copyright and "fair use" - <AUTHOR> http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/475654/focus=476049

<comment><USER2> One big issue with this is that fair use is a US concept and is much more reasonable than many other countries. The UK is fairly black and white about copyright.

<comment><USER3> Actually, we do have fair-use these days, it was added to UK law in 2004:

<http://www.copyrightservice.co.uk/copyright/p09_fair_use>

But, in most ways it is less permissive than US 'fair use'. There again, most of the US fair use rationale isn't codified per se, but based on court interpretation and precedence, and since the UK has nowhere near the level of precedence in that area, it's understandable.

The UK fair use policy DOES offer some slightly more permissive commercial uses however, for example recent spates of youtube videos being pulled because a commercial song was playing on a radio in the background would be 'fair use due to incidental usage' under UK law.

<comment><USER2> I think you've been misled. That's an international company's website that is using "fair use" as a catch all term for similar legal concepts. I don't think that page is specifically talking about UK law (e.g. _"The actual specifics of what is acceptable will be governed by national laws, and although broadly similar, actual provision will vary from country to country."_ ) and I believe the 2004 date is just when they updated that page.

I coincidentally just attended a briefing on copyright given by our lawyers on Thursday and the basic message was that the exemptions are complex and incredibly tight and have gotten much tighter recently (particularly "non- commercial" is a shadow of its former self).

From Wikipedia:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_dealing>

 _"Fair dealing is an enumerated set of possible defenses against an action for infringement of an exclusive right of copyright. Unlike the related United States doctrine of fair use, fair dealing cannot apply to any act which does not fall within one of these categories. In practice, common law courts might rule that actions with a commercial character, which might be naïvely assumed to fall into one of these categories, were in fact infringements of copyright as fair dealing is not as flexible a concept as the American concept of fair use."_

The fact that "fair dealing" is a list of narrow exemptions in the legislation, rather than a general concept is why we're still waiting for new legislation that will allow us to legally rip CDs to put on our iPods while in the US a judge can decide that it is "fair use".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Date: 2006-12-14 16:52:15 GMT (2 years, 48 weeks, 6 days, 19 hours and 23 minutes ago)

Pretty old news.

<comment><USER5> I hadn't seen it before. I think he gets it 100% correct as well. Good to see things like this to contrast the ridiculous fundamentalism some free software people spout.

<comment><USER6> This is a fairly serious issue in some free software places (eg. Slashdot). It seems that copyright when used by big corporations is evil and restrictions are good, but when the GPL gets weakened by them it's suddenly a bad thing. Unfortunately, you can't have it both ways, sometimes in life you need to take the bad with the good.

<comment><USER7> _It seems that copyright when used by big corporations is evil and restrictions are good, but when the GPL gets weakened by them it's suddenly a bad thing._

Keep in mind that the GPL is not an end in and of itself; it's a cute little legal hack to create a self-contained domain that simulates a world without copyright, with a one-way boundary to ensure that things stay inside that domain (there's a fairly straightforward game theory analysis of why this gives GPL-style licenses a competitive advantage over BSD-style licenses, but that's getting off topic).

So, in that context, it actually makes sense to simultaneously support strict enforcement of the GPL and oppose copyright.

Of course, most people don't think copyright is intrinsically immoral and thus won't find the above perspective persuasive, but I'm pretty sure that's roughly where people like RMS are coming from.

<comment><USER6> That would be true if it weren't for the fact that the GPL requires distributors to publish source code as well as license their derivatives under the GPL. So it's not just a copyright-free zone, like Creative Commons Share Alike is.

<comment><USER7> Requiring GPL on derivative works is the one-way boundary I mentioned; the simulated "copyright-free zone" in question is comprised of all GPL-licensed software, so anything existing wholly within that realm isn't impacted. The purpose of the derivative license requirement is to discourage external dependencies creating copyright-by-proxy inside the GPL zone.

I don't actually think the source code publishing requirement is necessary; something like CC BY-SA would probably suffice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> 2006

</comment><comment><USER9> jeff merkey is still around? lol, he's an odd one</comment>


VW Says Emissions Cheating Was Not a One-Time Error - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/11/business/international/vw-emissions-scandal.html <comment><USER2> I just wrote a blog post about this, frankly I don't believe a word of their explanation:

[http://jacquesmattheij.com/volkswagen-and-the-blame-the- engi...](http://jacquesmattheij.com/volkswagen-and-the-blame-the-engineer- game)

If the engineering department by its lonesome could do this then VW was out of control and had a completely incompetent compliance department. By far the simpler explanation is that they were ordered to do so from above.

Don't they understand that by continuing these games it is only getting worse? In the long term they'll have to admit it came down from the top if they want to rescue the VW brand they're doing enormous damage here.</comment>


Google detects Edge users visiting its sites, urges them to switch to Chrome - <AUTHOR> https://tech.slashdot.org/story/20/02/23/2252200/google-detects-edge-users-visiting-its-sites-urges-them-to-switch-to-chrome <comment><USER2> Sounds like a public service</comment>


Top 10 most useful webapps of 2008 (Posterous, Disqus, Anyvite) - <AUTHOR> http://lifeinlists.com/2008/12/top-10-useful-webapps-2008/?disqus_reply=4465669#comment-4465669 <comment><USER2> I have used Mint in the past, and it has not always been completely accurate in reporting through email the amount of money I have in my bank accounts. Though it is handy in keeping track of where money goes, this is a bit of a deal breaker for me.</comment>


Don't use the HTML picture element (most of the time) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.cloudfour.com/dont-use-picture-most-of-the-time/

<comment><USER2> Why would anybody ever use something unfinished and not thought out like that? Thats like buying an iphone.</comment>


Games Console - <AUTHOR> https://mitxela.com/projects/console <comment><USER2> Be sure to read the whole series, the interesting screenshots of the oscilloscope and discussions on gameplay start on page 7 ( [https://mitxela.com/projects/console/retroracer](https://mitxela.com/projects/console/retroracer) )

To the author: if you read this, it is was _not_ a waste of time. I would love to read more about your short projects. Don't wait 4 years to document the next one!

</comment><comment><USER3> Very nice! I couldn't find any mention of videos of the games in the article, but he did publish some later on: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTGOEe8f8ls](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTGOEe8f8ls)

</comment><comment><USER4> This is a great little read, full of the author discovering useful tips along the way. The case is retro gorgeous on the outside, even if it's a kapton- wrapped horror on the inside.

The fact that having built this thing one of the author's first projects is a BF interpreter adds icing to the cake.

</comment><comment><USER5> How have I not come across this website before?

Check out the projects page.

Props to the Author

</comment><comment><USER6> I love absolutely everything about this.</comment>


New Photon Release of Eclipse IDE Ships with Full Rust Support - <AUTHOR> https://www.eclipse.org/org/press-release/20180627_new-photon-release-of-eclipse-ide-ships-with-full-rust-support.php <comment><USER2> EDIT: Found it under the _" New and Newsworthy"_ button [6].

The lack of feature list and screenshots in the _" new"_ Eclipse Photon page is astonishing [1].

Compare that with the landing page for Xcode [2], SublimeText [3], Visual Studio Code [4] and/or Atom [5].

They need a better marketing team if they want to appeal to the young programmers looking for a real IDE.

[1] [https://www.eclipse.org/photon/](https://www.eclipse.org/photon/)

[2] [https://developer.apple.com/xcode/](https://developer.apple.com/xcode/)

[3] [https://www.sublimetext.com](https://www.sublimetext.com)

[4] [https://code.visualstudio.com](https://code.visualstudio.com)

[5] [https://atom.io](https://atom.io)

[6] [https://www.eclipse.org/photon/noteworthy/index.php](https://www.eclipse.org/photon/noteworthy/index.php)

</comment><comment><USER3> Haven't tried Rust with Eclipse, but the IntelliJ rust plugin [0] is already quite good and getting better on a weekly basis. Most things work in community (free) IntelliJ, and with CLion you also get pretty a pretty solid debugger UI.

[0] [https://intellij-rust.github.io/](https://intellij-rust.github.io/)

<comment><USER4> I like the JetBrains IDEs, but the Rust support will likely become a paid feature in the future. Go support was free while it was being developed, but the Go plugin is now only for the Ultimate Edition.

<comment><USER5> It's MIT licensed. It's not clear to me that it's developed by jetbrains at all, but if it is, there will probably always be an open source version, if only because it gets forked.

<comment><USER6> I believe there is some 'official' support for that plugin, I vaguely remember reading that JetBrains was devoting a small amount of resources to aid in its development. Though I can't imagine it would effect the license

<comment><USER7> The author of the plugin works at JetBrains and works on it on his day job.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> After using Eclipse for C++ (CDT) off and on for a while now. I've come to the conclusion that when set up properly there's no better C++ tagging system (F3 Open Declaration) and auto-complete in any IDE except perhaps Visual Studio. It works so well that people like myself who dislike Java still use it on C++ projects out of the sheer advantage it gives you when browsing through a code base. I don't know what they've been up to there on the CDT project, but they sure have managed to get it right.

<comment><USER9> I used to think that before I tried using Qt Creator. Your project doesn't need to be a Qt project for you to use it. Make sure you enable the clang code model plugin. It's a bit slow but otherwise flawless.

<comment><USER8> Certainly willing to give it a try. I can say that I can't imagine any tagging system to be any better than CDT, so at best it may be comparable. Though if the system is comparable with an interface that's faster than Eclipse, it would be quite nice.

<comment><USER10> Having used both, Qt Creator is so much better than eclipse that it's not even funny. Of course, you first have to forget your eclipse habits and learn the equivalent QtC ones - in particular using the locator ([http://doc.qt.io/qtcreator/creator-editor- locator.html](http://doc.qt.io/qtcreator/creator-editor-locator.html)), and the available refactorings ([http://doc.qt.io/qtcreator/creator-editor- refactoring.html](http://doc.qt.io/qtcreator/creator-editor- refactoring.html)). Recent versions also ship with a clang backend for completion ; it also supports clang-format and clang-tidy natively, with inline fix-its that are shown automatically.

<comment><USER11> Qt blog has quite a few complaints regarding completion performance delays on Windows from several seconds.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> How is eclipse in 2018? For many years, I loathed working in it, but it might have improved in the intervening years. I've paid for intellij for a long time, but I remember daily crashes and 5 minute boot times for the springsource flavor (needed to work with grails.)

<comment><USER13> Plain-jane Eclipse works better for me than IDEA for my hobby Java coding. On my late 2015 Mac, Eclipse much snappier and the font-rendering is better. IDAE takes 3+ mins to launch. Eclipse takes 20s on a cold launch. To be fair I am not using any plugins and not doing any JEE stuff.

I just can't get IDEA to respond to clicks in less than 10s. There's obviously something wrong with my setup.

<comment><USER14> I have that problem in IDEA if I enable 1) IDEAvim, 2) ligatures, and 3) relative line numbers.

That may be idiosyncratic but if you happen to match, there you go. Either turn off relative line numbers (absolute are fine) or ligatures.

<comment><USER13> I'll give that a try. Thanks.

<comment><USER14> Sure thing. Going from relative to absolute took my startup time down from holy crap to a couple of seconds and eliminated a bunch of pause/stutter after code changes, especially with large files. Started right when I moved to Fira Code, and took me forever to find the footnote in a random GH issue (think in the IdeaVIM repo, but might have been the Nerd Fonts repo) that mentioned the behavior.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Awesome. Can't wait to give this a try. I haven't done much with Rust yet (just "Hello, World" basically), but I'm an Eclipse user, so this will be handy. Having solid Rust support in my favored IDE will reduce the friction to using Rust a little bit at least.

</comment><comment><USER16> Well, not a great start - the console is throwing Java exceptions, and when I ask for a code completion, it just spins for a while and eventually fails.

I'll continue to poke at this, I think. For me, the competition is Sublime Text with a bunch of Rust plugins. It took a while to set up and it's not super snappy, but it works decently. I would like to replace this setup with something more "out of the box" and better integrated.

For anyone interested in rust IDE, maybe check out [https://areweideyet.com/](https://areweideyet.com/)

</comment><comment><USER17> And if you are looking to get into Rust, The Rust Programming Language by No Starch Press is just out: [https://nostarch.com/Rust](https://nostarch.com/Rust)

<comment> pure-struggle I think the same guys published it here for free:

[https://github.com/rust- lang/book/tree/master/2018-edition/s...](https://github.com/rust- lang/book/tree/master/2018-edition/src)

<comment><USER18> Yes; it's rendered here: [https://doc.rust-lang.org/stable/book/second- edition/](https://doc.rust-lang.org/stable/book/second-edition/)

The contents may be the same, but the physical book is way nicer, IMHO. I happen to love physical books, though... and the PDF is much nicer than our current "click print to PDF" solution.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Is this is using LSP, and therefore RLS, I hope it doesn't suffer from the constant silent aborts I get using the Rust plugin on VSCode. Everything is nice and fluid with Auto complete, error and warning tagging, and definition- on-hover, and then BAM it just stops with nothing to explain when, how, or why. Restarting RLS does nothing, and closing and reopening the workspace might work but there is no guarantee.

How's it working here and in IntelliJ(which I've been using for Scala and Dart for sometime, but feels heavy)?

<comment><USER18> There have certainly been some serious stability bugs lately, but we're also working on fixing them. Please file bugs!

<comment><USER19> Thanks for all of your work! I realized how gripe-y this sounded coming back and reading it now.

I also would like to mention, that I updated this evening and found it to be much more stable, even if sometimes it hiccups for a minute or two. I think actually turning off VSCode's word-based auto-complete for Rust files will help, as I won't get false positives.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Excellent! Sounds like some great improvements on top of an already amazing tool. I have to say that they've really come back from some serious missteps a few years ago.

</comment><comment><USER21> Rust? The big news here is support for the Language Server Protocol! Now, finally the UI of IDE would be decoupled from the language service.</comment>


Show HN: My first web app trains your ears - <AUTHOR> http://www.earbuilder.com/ Hi HN,
I've been taking guitar lessons and one thing that is recommended to most musicians is ear training - where two different notes are played and you must identify the number of steps between the notes. My app, Earbuilder, should help with that process.
You can find it here: http://www.earbuilder.com/
It's my first web app, and my first real foray into JavaScript. You can take a look at the source and you'll see that it's pretty poorly structured, but I've picked up a book and hopefully things will improve with my second web application.
Please let me know if you have any comments, suggestions, or hate because I'm looking to improve this over the coming weeks! <comment><USER2> Big fan of this app - definitely something I'll make use of.

One idea though: something that as a singer I would find useful is the ability to select a single base note and practice against that but without the base note being played each time - if that makes sense.

This would be handy because a big challenge for singers (or players of instruments without clear note separation) is placing the notes you hear relative to the key you're in.

I realise it's a lightweight app and making it too feature-rich wouldn't necessarily be a good thing, but I know a lot of people would find it helpful.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's awesome feedback and something I wouldn't have come up with - so thank a lot! I'm going to release a newer version with more "Settings" options so that people can customize a bit more.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> (I suck at HN. I thought I could post text AND a link... anyway, here's what I wrote.)

Hi HN,

I've been taking guitar lessons and one thing that is recommended to most musicians is ear training - where two different notes are played and you must identify the number of steps between the notes. My app, Earbuilder, should help with that process.

You can find it here: <http://www.earbuilder.com/>

It's my first web app, and my first real foray into JavaScript. You can take a look at the source and you'll see that it's pretty poorly structured, but I've picked up a book and hopefully things will improve with my second web application.

Please let me know if you have any comments, suggestions, or hate because I'm looking to improve this over the coming weeks!

</comment><comment><USER3> I like the idea, and I'd like to use it, but...

• How can I have it play chords instead of just intervals?

• Bug: suppose I select A and Unison, press Play, then answer Unison. When I play again, two apparently separate instances of the sound are played. This is extensible for multiple notes/intervals

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the reply,

\- That's not a feature yet but I'll definitely add it to the todo list since people train in both ways.

\- Whenever you answer, the sound plays again: if you get it wrong it repeats, if you get it correct then it plays a new interval. But I can see how that isn't clear so I'll change the wording / possibly animations.

Thanks again!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Looks awesome, great idea!

I have one feature suggestion, could you make a demo mode or way to preview the sounds. I do not have an ear for notes and have no way to learn the sounds. The functionality might already be built in, I couldn't figure out where it was though.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't quite understand what you mean by preview the sounds? Do you mean like previewing the intervals? I can add small buttons next to each to give you a glimpse - thanks for the suggestion!

I was mostly going off the assumption that people would select one or two intervals at a time, learn them through error, and then select a few more but this is an easy change for more clarification.</comment></comment>


Airbnb Grows to a Million Rooms, and Hotel Rivals Are Quiet, for Now - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/12/business/airbnb-grows-to-a-million-rooms-and-hotel-rivals-are-quiet-for-now.html

<comment><USER2> Something that this article hasn't touched on, but I'm sure will be a big issue in the coming years, is the legality of Airbnb's service. Right now they are cruising along without much risk in that area, but that's only because its a new service. Here in Portland there are already some people who are purchasing properties from out of town just so they can rent on Airbnb, which for our town is putting even more stress on the exploding rent market. I have a feeling the other foot is going to drop on many of these sharing services at some point.

source: [http://www.wweek.com/portland/article-23993-hotel_california...](http://www.wweek.com/portland/article-23993-hotel_california.html)

Not that I'm personally against the service, I think its a great alternative to traditional motels/hotels, but it should be more for people looking to share an unused room than as a way to get more bang for their buck on their rent.

<comment><USER3> I've been noticing a bunch of random people hanging out on my street (a cul- de-sac) in Santa Barbara recently and found that one of my neighbors is renting their rooms on Airbnb. I'm totally fine with it, except that the street already has limited parking. More cars equals less street parking for my family which sucks when we have to carry our 3mo old daughter + groceries a long ways down the street.

<comment><USER4> Do you think Airbnb renters have more cars on average than someone renting the place more long-term?

<comment><USER5> Yes, if the Airbnb hosts rents out additional rooms. Now those rooms have additional cars where without those renters, only the owner would have one (or two) cars.

<comment><USER4> But why wouldn't whoever was renting those rooms long-term have a car?

If you're comparing "single person in a house with multiple bedrooms" to "multiple people in a house with multiple bedrooms", then it's fairly obvious that the latter case would have park more cars on average.

But if there are people renting those rooms, I don't see how it matters if they're there for the weekend or for a year.

<comment><USER3> Not all people who host on Airbnb would rent those same rooms out long term though. It is common for people to live in a home and not have every bedroom occupied by a car owning adult. Sometimes the extra rooms are used as offices or guest bedrooms or children's bedrooms. I have no idea when my neighbor would be doing otherwise.

My point though was less about Airbnb causing the problem and more about stating that city officials need to think about how these sorts of scenarios affect citizens when they are making planning decisions.

Would there be enough parking with all of the bedrooms in this complex were occupied by a driving adult?

Or what happens when the condo design had to include a two-car garage, but tenants use the garage as storage and then park on the street?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> One of the things that drew me to use Airbnb several years ago was the ability to book a stay somewhere that was less expensive yet more interesting.

I was recently looking for a place in Chicago as well as Kyoto and had a hard time finding listings that weren't dirty looking, had no charm, or weren't just as expensive as a hotel. I'm sure they exist, but there are just so many listings in some cities, sifting through them can be a real pain.

<comment><USER6> In my recent visit to Seattle I settled down for a hotel. Airbnb were too expensive for two people. Maybe I was booking too late though

<comment><USER7> Are you guys looking at rooms or apartments? If the answer is apartments, then why wouldn't they be more expensive?

You get a kitchen, a living room, internet, laundry, etc. stuff that isn't part of the hotel deal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think as airbnb starts to be more about capitalized companies purchasing and then renting residential properties we might come to remember why it was we have zoning laws in the first place.

It all seems fine and dandy(not so much if you live next to someone aggressively renting) when you have rich neighborhoods renting to rich transients ("professionals" in the article).

Whats the impact in poor and middle class neighborhoods having their transient population massively increased by airbnb slumlords?

<comment><USER9> Oh, better not let the poor or even middle class use the same tools and get the same advantages of us rich elite.

Only professionals can act with responsibility, we must task our politicians and police to put down any attempts by the poor to improve their lot in life.

<comment><USER8> Reread my comment where I said "seems fine".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The issue is the granularity of regulation in that the details and legality of airbnb is decided not on a national or state level but by the municipal authorities, from a regulation standpoint it's totally unmanageable and unenforceable. Your average airbnb host isn't subject to the same hygiene or safety certifications let alone business and tourism taxes. I cannot imagine there to be a million Airbnb rooms that are compliant with all relevant by- laws.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that the hotel industry has in the past actively fought against normalising the laws that affect them because I bet... They exploit them too.

</comment><comment><USER11> Airbnb gets people travelling who might otherwise stay home.

People who get a bad airbnb booking always jump to the nearest hotel.

As airbnb gets even more massive, the hotel industry could benefit from the spillage of people who otherwise wouldn't travel.

<comment><USER12> You have any data to back that up? Seems airbnb at least at first was for the more adventurus who are already traveling.

<comment><USER11> Only anecdotal. I think you are correct, the early adopters were confident travellers.

However the brand is so well known that ordinary people are talking about it, in my observations. Combined with cheap air travel it is magnifying tourism in my circles.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Approcity - Hackers helping hackers get users - <AUTHOR> http://www.approcity.com If you're like me, your number 1 problem is: How do I get users?<p>Approcity is a totally free link exchange network for web app developers. Feature a customizable (and non-blocking) bar on your website / blog / girlfriends site. When anyone clicks an app that is featured on your bar you will be rewarded with karma. Karma gets your app(s) featured on other people's bars.  Its reciprocity for web apps! I've also included some safeguards to prevent the overly-clever from unfairly racking up their own scores. <comment><AUTHOR> If you're like me, your number 1 problem is: How do I get users?

Approcity is a totally free link exchange network for web app developers. Feature a customizable (and non-blocking) bar on your website / blog / girlfriends site. When anyone clicks an app that is featured on your bar you will be rewarded with karma. Karma gets your app(s) featured on other people bars. Its reciprocity for web apps! I've also included some safeguards to prevent the overly-clever from racking up their own scores unfairly.

<comment><USER2> Nice idea!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm using it on my site <http://cAPPtion.tv> at the top. I like the fact that it doesn't look like an ad bar - it looks like a legit "Here are the apps I'm featuring" bar.

edit: I work with the Approcity main dev.</comment>


$500 million more for facebook? - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/10/25/facebook-taps-into-hedge-funds-for-500-million-more/

<comment><USER2> There is a beautifully YouTube-eque comment I thought you may enjoy:

"trust, when ppl get tired of Facebook, IT WILL FAIL miserablly!!!

Why?

1\. There's another bubble coming next year because too much money put into web 2.0 stuff, trend, ....etc

2\. As more and more Social Network out to the mkt, ppl will just switch to different sites whenever they like.

3\. Facebook is too much "ego", if he is smart...then get 15B now for real.

4\. What if there's a SN raised no where but become a big hit in China? it will generate more users than other SN in the USA.

5\. You can NOT rely on ADVERTISING stream...try come up more creative products or strategy!"

wow.

</comment><comment><USER3> Does anyone know of any regulatory or institutional reasons why it may be easier for a hedge fund than a venture fund to make truly speculative investments like this? Or is this (if even true) just a one off outlier?

<comment><USER2> I think it is a question of scale. A half billion dollars is a lot of money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> D. E. Shaw.</comment>


A new way to poll users? - <AUTHOR> We created a new Poll widget to make gathering feedback from your users to be very simple!
As we gear for launch, Pollr is looking for feedback on our product!
Please take a look!
https://www.producthunt.com/posts/pollr-net <comment><USER2> Nice.. We'll be using it on EpisodeCalendar.com :D</comment>


Math Limericks - <AUTHOR> https://www.futilitycloset.com/2017/04/29/math-limericks/ <comment><USER2> I thought I'd try my hand at a small collection for Hindley–Milner.

        [Var]
        When given a var'iable X
        that's already in the context
        with some type called T
        then obviously
        that T is the type of that X.

        [App]
        Encountering two terms abreast
        where the former's a function, you test
        that the function can take
        what the argument makes;
        its result gives the type of the rest.

        [Abs]
        The term "lambda from X to E"
        infers as the type A to B
        if the context, extended
        with X represented
        as A, says E typechecks as B.

        [Let]
        The type that is lastly inferred
        when a term's bound with "let" to a word
        —and the body can cope
        with that name bound in scope—
        is the type that the body incurred.

        [Inst]
        If you don't find it too esoteric
        and you happen to have some barbaric
        too-general expression
        then at your discretion
        you can choose a type that's less generic.

        [Gen]
        If the type of a term could abide
        any type that a user supplied,
        and the name occurs not
        free in context, you've got
        a type var that's forall-quantified.

The meter could stand some improvement, but nobody expects limericks to be perfect.

</comment><comment><USER3> A favorite of mine:

      There once was a young lady named bright
      Whose speed was much faster than light
      She set out one day
      In a relative way
      And returned on the previous night.

<comment><AUTHOR> One of my favourites too, although it's related more to relativity than to maths.</comment></comment>


[ANN] Quepy hangout tomorrow (DB queries in natural language) - <AUTHOR>

The people of the Quepy project will offer an open hangout tomorrow to talk about it, answer questions, and help people who want to start using quepy. Quepy is a python framework for database queries in natural language.<p>Quepy project: http://quepy.machinalis.com/ Hangout link: https://plus.google.com/u/1/events/cvtrlucmf9jkm78nk3sg2qpgc1k <comment><USER2> You will be talking about the framework?</comment>


Prevent Business Intelligence Leaks by Using UUIDs Instead of Database IDs - <AUTHOR> https://blog.lightrail.com/prevent-business-intelligence-leaks-by-using-uuids-instead-of-database-ids-on-urls-and-in-apis-17f15669fd2e <comment><USER2> It's an interesting idea. I like that UUIDs are not recommended to be the internally stored id. I do wonder about overall performance. UUIDs are rather large. Now you're going to start weighing down your DB since the column has to exist and have a value. Then you have to index them. I think, depending on the database, their size tends to cause the DB to have a lot of work which can start to write through your SSD life.</comment>


Making Moves for Women in the Workforce : Just Do It : Glassbreakers - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@laurenmosenthal/just-do-it-a3a80647873a

<comment><USER2> I love this!! Really interesting to get a product perspective on this process</comment>


Show HN: Cookie – An android app to keep you motivated - <AUTHOR>

So the app is pretty simple. Everytime you open it, gives you a compliment. And then asks how you feel. So whenever you're feeling low or need motivation just open it and enjoy! :)
APK and Screenshots: https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B0yBs8S3b4bdN3NmMWwyRko3eUk&usp=drive_web
You can send me feedback/share it with you friends from within. Hope everybody likes it.
Edit1: Ill update it with more quotes or you guys can leave quotes that you would like to read in the comments, and I can add those too.
Edit2: Permissions are so that you can send me feedback via the app, and for pushnotifications in case there's an update. <comment><USER2> Hi, design-wise, it looks pretty clean and polished.

One thing though, the animation for me was way too slow. Try speeding it up.

Being more objective, I don't really understand the point of it. Sorry.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey. Thank you :)

Yup, ill add faster animations, and also give an option to get another compliment without closing the app (like a 'redo' or 'another' button)

Thats okay, I had this made for myself, and read a post on reddit, /r/SomebodyMakeThis/ , so decided to post it online for everybody else, in case others wanted something like this. :)</comment></comment>


The Swiss Army Knife of Hashmaps - <AUTHOR> https://blog.waffles.space/2018/12/07/deep-dive-into-hashbrown/ <comment><USER2> One thing worth trying out as well are the folly::F14 hashmaps ([https://github.com/facebook/folly/blob/master/folly/containe...](https://github.com/facebook/folly/blob/master/folly/container/F14.md)), which has a roughly similar design. You can find some discussions on the performance tradeoffs by the SwissTable and F14 authors at [https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/hashtable- benchmarks/-...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/hashtable- benchmarks/-nT-3fESXq8/1ckpGBiAAgAJ).

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a fantastic explanation of developments in hash tables in general.

If anyone is interested, I recently released a scalable hash table for Node.js (@ronomon/hash-table), designed to store literally billions of elements without stressing the GC.

At first, I tried writing a native addon module for Node.js in C (using SIMD), but the Javascript-to-C call cost was just too high, and doubled latency. In the end, I was surprised to find that writing directly in Javascript proved faster than the C module with SIMD, simply by avoiding the bridging cost.

Also, instead of linear or quadratic probing (or double hashing or triangular probing), I used cuckoo hashing, but with a twist. Normally, in the case of a naive cuckoo hash table, if an element is not in its first bucket, then its second bucket must be fetched from memory, causing a cache miss, which for a hash table is embarrassingly slow. This is why SwissTable and F14 tend to avoid naive cuckoo hashing.

However, in our design, the first bucket includes an 8-byte coarse-grained bloom filter (k=1, or a single bit per element). If the element is not in this bloom filter, the element is guaranteed not to be in either of its first or second buckets, and a cache miss can be avoided nearly 90% of the time. Using cuckoo hashing in this way then starts to produce major advantages over linear probing: no tombstones, higher load factor (which has knock-on implications for resize latency), and constant time worst-case lookups.

More design details are here:

[https://github.com/ronomon/hash-table](https://github.com/ronomon/hash-table)

</comment><comment><USER4> I read TFA discussion of performance issues for hashmaps, and I see that deletes are something of a serious hindrance. As I often use hashmaps for a single-pass accumulation or transformation of data, I suspect that a hashmap without a delete operator might be designed to give superior performance in many such cases. Is this so, and are there any such implementations of hashmaps, mutable but with no delete method?

<comment><USER5> Bloom filters are an example of a hashing data structure that does not support delete. So yes, such a tradeoff can be made.

Maybe some DHT implementations also make deletion hard? (In general, I'd much rather mark something as invalid than delete it.)

<comment><USER6> I think GP is talking about improving performance just by omitting deletion support in hash maps. For example the tombstone marking in the original article won't be necessary. Experience tells me that for a host of data structures (vectors, BSTs, hash maps and many others), omitting deletion support can simplify the code a lot as well.</comment></comment></comment>


IfItWereMyHome.com: Your Life in a Different Country - <AUTHOR> http://www.ifitweremyhome.com/ <comment><USER2> "The lottery of birth is responsible for much of who we are. If you were not born in the country you were, what would your life be like? Would you be the same person?"

No. So it's not random (not a lottery).

</comment><comment><USER3> This is cool but I would love it to also tell me what the differences would be in my income, cost of living and education.</comment>


Mark Zuckerberg's effort to disrupt philanthropy has a race problem - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/08/16/chan-zuckerberg-initiative-black-employees/ <comment><USER2> why can't it tackle other problems? does every charity now have to "tackle racial inequities"? is cancer not enough?</comment>


First test of new theory of gravity - <AUTHOR> http://earthsky.org/space/1st-test-eric-verlinde-gravity-theory-gravitational-lens? <comment><USER2> I wonder if someone can say if this is very serious science, or fringe type stuff.

<comment><USER3> Not a physicist, but looks like this was done by researchers at a legitimate observatory: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leiden_Observatory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leiden_Observatory)

And results published in a journal from Oxford: [http://mnras.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2016/12/09/mnr...](http://mnras.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2016/12/09/mnras.stw3192)

So that's a good sign. Can't say much more than that though, since my knowledge of the field is minimal.

<comment><USER4> He's well-qualified. His background is in string theory.

His theory is described in this paper: [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1001.0785v1.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1001.0785v1.pdf)

And the Wikipedia article about it is here: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropic_gravity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropic_gravity)

It's argued here that there's observational evidence against it: [https://www.technologyreview.com/s/425220/experiments- show-g...](https://www.technologyreview.com/s/425220/experiments-show-gravity- is-not-an-emergent-phenomenon/)

I'm not familiar with the areas of physics the theory draws on. I am familiar with General Relativity, which agrees very well with observations, and (I think) makes fewer assumptions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> obligatory XKCD link: [http://xkcd.com/1758/](http://xkcd.com/1758/)</comment>


Heroku's Waza Conference: Art and Technique - <AUTHOR> http://quickleft.com/blog/heroku-s-waza-conference-art-and-technique

<comment><USER2> I think it's cool that Heroku treats programming as art and a form of craftsmanship. I'm not a Ruby developer, but looks like it was an awesome conference!

<comment><USER3> > I'm not a Ruby developer, but looks like it was an awesome conference!

Heroku does more than Ruby, you know. ;)

<comment><USER2> I always associate Heroku w/ Ruby. Good point.</comment></comment></comment>


Interview with Olivier Tassinari, Co-Creator of Material-UI - <AUTHOR> https://opensource.christmas/2019/5 <comment><USER2> I think their move to monetize by providing paid products like premium themes and support services can be an interesting approach for open source in general. I'd rather pay for something extra, than pay for the generic open source product</comment>


Vespa, a 72-Year-Old Italian Star Barely Showing Its Age - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/27/business/vespa-scooters-resale-values.html <comment><USER2> The Piaggio museum in Pontedera (Tuscany) is impressive and I'd recommend a visit. [https://www.museopiaggio.it/en/museo/](https://www.museopiaggio.it/en/museo/)

There you can see first hand a lot of this history. And unlike all the museums of car manufacturers in Italy, this one is free.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Electric versions are scheduled for release in April 2019: [https://newatlas.com/vespa-elettrica-electric- scooter/52117/](https://newatlas.com/vespa-elettrica-electric-scooter/52117/)</comment>


Michael Crichton: Aliens Cause Global Warming - <AUTHOR> http://126.96.36.199/search?q=cache:pyBTmzXP0DkJ:www.michaelcrichton.net/speech-alienscauseglobalwarming.html+chriton+aliens&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us&client=firefox-a <comment><USER2> He makes some good points, but I think he exaggerates his evidence. In particular, while the Drake equation and TTAPS equation both have unknown terms, at least some of the TTAPS equation terms can be estimated through observation and experimentation -- a far cry from "none of the variables can be determined. None at all." Insisting that a line of inquiry be abandoned simply because it is difficult to measure exact values seems contrary to the investigative spirit of science. Of course, Crichton is correct that we should not be drawing firm conclusions from fuzzy numbers.

Likewise, just because many scientists share a consensus about something doesn't mean they are necessarily wrong; scientists share a consensus on the ineffectiveness of Laetrile, the relative harmlessness of aspartame, and the unlikelihood of cell phones causing cancer. These things are hard to prove absolutely, and may even be incorrect in specific circumstances, but in absence of better evidence, a consensus is the best we can have.

I found this juxtaposition funny:

 _There is no shortage of other examples. In the 1920s in America, tens of thousands of people, mostly poor, were dying of a disease called pellagra. [...evidence of pellagra as dietary problem...] They continued to deny it until the 1920s._

Also this one:

 _When he said it wasn't enough, he put the critics' essays on his web page and answered them in detail. Scientific American threatened copyright infringement and made him take the pages down. [...] Speeches contained on this site are the property of Michael Crichton and may not be reproduced, copied, edited, published, transmitted or uploaded in any way without express permission._

<comment><USER3> Other people in this thread make other very good points, but I think this one needs to be said.

If I have a single unknown variable in an equation, and I have no way of estimating it, or knowing its variability, or anything, then anything I put down will most likely be wrong and will likely be off by several orders of magnitude.

Let me give an example. You are playing a first person shooter and you are told that you are going to pick how much ammo you'll need for the entire game at the beginning of the game and that if you pick too much "bad things will happen". How do you possibly decide? You can estimate based on other games you played, but if you look at all of them, you'll realize that they all need very different amounts! The number you pick when you start the game will be completely arbitrary and will have VERY different effects on the gameplay.

Let me give another example, you are playing the stock market on a day trading scheme. You want to know if you'll profit, so you look on google finance and see a chart that is trending very slightly up but with a lot of variability. You say, well it looks like it is going up RIGHT NOW! Indeed you execute the trade and then you realize this: You have no idea when the end of the spike is. You have no idea when to pull out, and indeed the time you do will have a heavy financial impact.To paraphrase from the show House MD, there is a right answer. You may have no way of knowing what the right answer is, but you'll still be wrong if you're wrong.

This is the point that the guy was trying to make. When you know nothing, the only thing you can do is manipulate the equation to suit your perception. In the end you will only deceive yourself.

<comment><USER4> > If I have a single unknown variable in an equation, and I have no way of > estimating it, or knowing its variability, or anything, then anything I put > down will most likely be wrong and will likely be off by several orders of > magnitude.

Actually if you know nothing about the variable then you will almost certainly be off by an infinite number of orders of magnitude (log(infinity) = infinity). Saying that you might be wrong by several orders of magnitude implies that you do know quite a bit about the range of the variable.

By definition most judgements are based on incomplete information. Otherwise no judgement is needed. So the argument that an action should or should not be taken because the evidence is not 100% complete is spurious.

<comment><USER5> Most of the Drake Equation factors are fractions in the range [0, 1]. So you do know a lot about the range of the variable.

<comment><USER6> But that's just self-deception facilitated by using a linear instead of a log scale. It's easy to choose a conservative "really small" number of 1% or .01%, but what's to say that you're still not off by many orders of magnitude?

<comment><USER7> In simple terms, this bound tells us that the probability that aliens exist lies somewhere in [0,1].

<comment><USER4> By definition all probabilities lie in this range. It doesn't change the fact that within this range of R (Real Numbers) the number of logarithms are uncountable.

In simple terms... for every real number >1 (let's call that number x) the number 1/x also exists. Mind blowing huh!

.. Also I was primarily talking about the TTAPS equation which seemed to be the main focus of the parent's threads.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> this is really depressing. are all of you asleep at the wheel? this essay is NOT ABOUT GLOBAL WARMING. global warming is only the latest in a long line of scientific studies that have become corrupted due to the influence of politics. The details of the current case are not important. Whether or not anthropogenic global warming is true is not important. What is important is the way scientists are behaving. If scientists are reduced to squabbling children as soon as there is some blood in the water what hope does the rest of humanity have?

This essay is one of genuine concern over the direction of humanity. And as the best hope we have for a rational future, concern over the direction of science.

<comment><USER9> He does take sides in the debate though, by framing Lomborg vs. Scientific American as Galileo vs. The Church. Since we know Galileo was right, the reader is of course supposed to assume that Lomborg will also turn out to be right in the face of blind dogma. Therefore Crichton doesn't have to address the actual criticism towards Lomborg.

However if Lomborgs book is indeed bad science, then the strong rebuttal from scientfic circles is fair.

By the whole framing of the issue Crichton imples that it is SA and the "consensus" which is politicized. However Lomborg is himself a political figure (advisor for the right-wing Danish goverment in environmental matters). That does not make him wrong, but it implies we have to look at the actual content of the rebuttal to determine who has the better case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Oddly enough, I was at this speech. I left with a lot more respect for Crichton as a scientific thinker, and I almost read the book he was publicizing at the time, Prey.

<comment><USER11> Being a libertarian is good practice for developing this kind of skepticism, as governments often use specious statistics to support their current agenda. Second-hand smoke is one such area, as Crichton mentions. Anti-drug campaigns are also horrible for pulling numbers out of thin air.

<comment><USER12> It's also good to be skeptical of libertarians denying externalities:-)

<comment><USER13> Libertarians don't deny externalities; they just recognize that some of them can't be measured.

<comment><USER4> Just because something can't be accurately measured using current technology doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

<comment><USER13> Which is what I just said...

<comment><USER4> We all seem to be in furious agreement then as that was what the parent post to yours also said.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I faintly remember discussing another Crichton article of the same gist on HN?

While I did not make it to the end, I feel there are two strategies at work in this article:

A) Talk so much that your opponent loses the ability to focus and becomes vulnerable for injection of any meme you slip into the speech.

B) Draw random analogies and take advantage of the flaw of the human brain, that is "addicted" to drawing analogies if there are none.

Because ultimately he says "look, there were false things that were believed by a lot of people. Global warming is believed by a lot of people, therefore it must be false". That is simply a logic error. I wonder if Crichton was aware of that (and since he was intelligent, I suppose he was), because if so, I consider the article a disgusting, dishonest attempt at manipulation.

<comment><USER4> As most good story tellers are he was surely a skilled manipulator of human thought and emotion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I had always wondered how that whole global warming thing happened.

</comment><comment><USER11> Ya'll are a smart crowd. What do you say to the argument that being skeptical about anthropogenic Global Warming is like being skeptical about gravity or evolution?

<comment><USER16> I say it is a silly argument.</comment></comment>


An Open Letter to John Hanke and Niantic - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@yangcliu/an-open-letter-to-john-hanke-niantic-6a32325b67a8#.w87td41k1 <comment><AUTHOR> 50M unique users with 11M daily unique is an astounding achievement when Pokemon GO has 80M downloads.</comment>


Apple's Inductive Charging Patent Finally Surfaces - <AUTHOR> http://www.patentlyapple.com/patently-apple/2011/08/apples-inductive-charging-patent-finally-surfaces.html <comment><USER2> I'm confused. I thought the main advantage of using inductive charging is that it could be a massive convenience boon. For example you could just place your mobile device on a charging pad and return when it's charged. This solution doesn't look to have any advantage over a standard charger. In fact it seems much more cumbersome and fiddly.

What am I missing?

Edit: I hope I haven't come across as snarky. I'm just surprised that this is what they've patented. I expected something else. Something more Apple and less Heath Robinson.

<comment><USER3> Not snarky--I feel the same way. Maybe it's not for a product that they intend to make, but just another piece for the patent portfolio?</comment></comment>