Inventory of CO2 available for terraforming Mars - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-018-0529-6 <comment><USER2> I love the idea of colonizing Mars, on a purely romantic level. But on a more practical level, let's compare Mars with Antarctica as candidates for large human populations.

Mars: no oxygen, atmospheric pressure essentially zero

Antarctica: breathable, oxygenated air

Mars: maybe a little salty ice below the surface near the poles

Antarctica: Covered with freshwater ice

Mars: 34 million miles away across empty space

Antarctica: a few hundred miles away by boat

I mean, Antarctica, or the bottom of the sea, or the peak of Mount Everest all _wipe the floor_ with Mars on every metric you can think of. And I know that various people have suggested that Mars might be a useful second home for humanity in case some event wipes us all out.. but really, if we get wiped out it's going to be self-inflicted, and compared with the difficulty of setting up a viable colony on Mars, the difficulty of sending a few nukes over there is negligible. It just doesn't buy very much insurance. Sorry to be a downer but this is pretty farfetched.

<comment><USER3> >Mars: maybe a little salty ice below the surface near the poles

Erm, there's more than a million cubic kilometers of water ice in the poles that's literally oceans worth, the liquid water below the poles is only of interest for astrobiology.

>I mean, Antarctica, or the bottom of the sea, or the peak of Mount Everest all wipe the floor with Mars on every metric you can think of.

Except Antarctica is on Earth. The point of colonizing an off-world body is so that we can spread ourselves out.

Earth = eggs in one basket. A super volcano like Yellowstone could easily kill 90%+ of our species in the first year after an eruption and most of the other animal (and plant) life. Big rocks have smashed into Earth before and will again. A pandemic could easily spread across the planet in months decimating population and launching us back into the stone age as you just lost most of the people that knew how the power plants work, how medicine worked, how making concrete worked, how growing crops in worthwhile quantities worked.

Mars isn't about gaining more resources, it's about giving humanity an extra life.

<comment><USER4> If we're going to live in underground habitats on Mars for humanity-backup, isn't it easier to just build underground habitats on Earth?

A few hundreds of meters down and the nuke risk is negligible. You can stockpile enough for hundreds of years at ~0 shipping cost. You can set up fortified ducts/purification systems to get oxygen from the surface -- with backup allowing a small population to live long enough for the surface to get tolerable.

Heck, even a full blown self-sustaining underground habitat doesn't seem out of question, since there's water readily available, plenty of perhaps geothermal or nuclear power power, and construction minerals. Destroying the Mars habitat might not be too much more difficult comparing to destroying this colony. If it has less than 10,000 or so colonists the US gov. or similar might even have a chance of keeping its location in secrecy.

Sure it doesn't cover all possible scenarios, but in terms of backup a conflict-resistant habitat here on Earth seems like the best bang for your buck.

Welcome to Zion.

<comment><USER5> In the long run, ensuring the continued survival of humanity is not sufficient. We must also preserve our space-launch capabilities.

It's a lot more difficult to launch through a rock ceiling, radioactive atmosphere, and a cloud of Kessler Syndrome fragments, from a gravity well 1G deep, than it is to launch from the surface of a rock with barely any atmosphere, a bare handful of satellites, in a well only 0.38G deep.

Also, bear in mind that you won't just be stockpiling food, but sufficient biodiversity to reassemble a viable ecosystem, and sufficient industry and education to preserve a viable economy. Otherwise, you still die when the nutri-mat and atmo-pure machines finally break down.

It's certainly easier to dig a deep hole and build a bunker in it, but that expense does not advance the end goal. It is merely insurance against a temporary setback. You still need to establish a launch-capable society on another planet, or everything dies anyway when the sun expands.

Then, after that happens, someone will still be around to say, "It would be cheaper and easier to colonize and terraform _Venus_ than to send generation ships every which way."....

<comment><USER3> >and a cloud of Kessler Syndrome fragments

Ugh, don't get me started there. Musk wanting to do all these internet satellites interests me but seriously gives me nightmares too in regards to Kessler syndrome.

<comment><USER6> Starlink's birds are, according to publicly available information, to be put in a quicky decaying orbit.

<comment><USER5> In the event of a nuclear war, as suggested by an ancestor post, someone will almost certainly attempt to use anti-satellite missiles as part of their first-strike protocol--especially against those satellites suspected of providing early warning for ICBM launches. Same deal for radar tracking sites. Blind the enemy. The enemy launches everything they have because they're blind, and think your missiles are already incoming.

Maybe someone launches anti-ballistic-missile missiles, and scores a few hits. Debris is spreading to all kinds of orbits. Kessler Syndrome will be the least of our problems as the bombs fall, but it'll be a pain later, after the fallout clears.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> >The only greenhouse gas present in high enough quantities on Mars to warm it up is carbon dioxide

Annnnnnnnd that's why some plans call for manufacturing far more efficient greenhouse gasses in situ. You can also Free the oxygen locked in the regolith itself with enough energy (so enough time). You could hurl smaller comets and asteroids at the planet to add to the atmosphere.

[http://www.pnas.org/content/98/5/2154](http://www.pnas.org/content/98/5/2154) for an example of making other greenhouse gasses.

The polar caps alone have more than a million cubic kilometers of dry ice and more than a million cubic kilometers of water ice, the regolith over the entire planet is also lousy with both in varying concentrations which will release as the planet thaws.

When we actually have the technology abilities to influence the Martian atmosphere in any appreciable quantity, eventually getting the atmosphere up to a decent pressure will be more than doable given the interest.

Remember, just few decades ago we didn't even think Mars had water and now we know there's more than a million cubic kilometers of water ice (and there's something like 50,669,625,000,000,000 gallons/191,805,395,565,860,992 liters of water in the caps alone).

The real problem with ever properly terraforming Mars is the nitrogen which still isn't that big of an issue as again you can import it from comets and asteroids or heat silicate to release nitrogen.

Hell we could get to Mars, dig a 5ft hole and go "woah! There's all kinds of organic material down here, this must have been an ancient ocean teeming with life!" and have all sorts of usable stuff for terraforming frozen in thick layers of permafrost.

<comment><USER7> Using low units (liters) so that the numbers look big, can be misleading. To put it in perspective: The CO2 mass in the polar ice caps is 1/5000 of the mass of earth atmosphere The water mass underneath is 1/4 of the volume of water in the mediterranean sea.

<comment><USER3> >The water mass underneath is 1/4 of the volume of water in the mediterranean sea.

And Mars has about 38% the surface area of Earth, roughly the surface area of all the dry land on Earth. For Mars that's a hell of a lot of water.

>The CO2 mass in the polar ice caps is 1/5000 of the mass of earth atmosphere

Which is more than enough to sustain above freezing temperatures when melted. Add in what is frozen in the regolith all over the planet as permafrost and you're well on your way to a pressure humans can survive without pressure suits. Which allows you to start bringing in comets/asteroids as well as heating various rocks to release various gasses as energy generation allows.

It makes terraforming quite doable for even our current civilization and if we crack affordable fusion (we almost certainly will, probably in our lifetimes assuming middle age or younger now) energy generation becomes a non-issue and then it's just a matter of setting up shop on Mars, again with largely (if not entirely) automated facilities that start chugging away generating 'designer' greenhouse gasses to start the runaway greenhouse effect to melt the caps.

<comment><USER8> The Mediterranean Sea was/is not enough water for each of the human civilizations that has ever lived on it's borders. Let alone the entire (habitable area of the) planet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Step 1: Go to Ceres

Step 2: Build Very Large Railgun™

Step 3: Make Ice Block Harvesting Robots

Step 4: Fire railgun for approximately a crapload of years, changing Ceres' orbit to collide with Mars.

If you get the math Really Quite Spot On, you may be able to slow Ceres while putting the ice projectiles on a highly elliptical orbit that will also hit Mars. Get the final collision right as well, and you could spin up Mars a bit (closer to 24hr days, though I think I'd like 28 better TBH), or slow it's orbit down a bit.

It'd probably take a couple centuries, and the cool down period might take the same, but when you're done you've got loads of water, a touch more mass, and a great little bootstrapped planet.

<comment><USER10> Why would you need to build a railgun? Nuking Ceres a bunch of times at the correct angle should achieve the same thing.

But - there's a non-zero chance that this collision, whether by railgun or nuke, endangers life on earth. Problematic, but I love the idea otherwise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Even if there was enough carbon dioxide, is seems likely that solar wind would erode away any terraformed atmosphere as some believe happened in the past[1] due to the lack of shielding from a global magnetic field.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Mars#History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Mars#History)

<comment><USER3> >Even if there was enough carbon dioxide, is seems likely that solar wind would erode away any terraformed atmosphere as some believe happened in the past

It will. Over MILLIONS of years. That happened on a geological time scale. People clutch to this claiming 'the solar wind will blow it away' but fail to realize how long this process takes.

<comment><USER11> Thanks. That's true, though to be fair, the kind of changes needed to terraform Mars also normally happen on geological time scales. That's not to say it can't be done faster, but as others have mentioned, plans to terraform the planet are incomplete if they don't address the issue of solar wind.

<comment><USER3> >the kind of changes needed to terraform Mars also normally happen on geological time scales.

Not when humans are involved. All you need to do is raise the average temperature 5C to create a runaway greenhouse effect on Mars. While that's more than we've done on Earth, what we've done here was entirely on accident.

With an actual effort... we could probably do that in a few decades with technology not much more advanced than what we have now. Just doing something like the Russian Znamya project (orbital mirrors), and a little bit of seeding the polar regions with carbon to help absorb sunlight, we could bathe the caps in sunlight 24:37 687 days a year. That combined with creation of 'designer' artificial greenhouse gasses could get you to the runaway process quicker than the natural human lifespan and if you kept generating your own greenhouse gasses/reflecting light to the surface/importing smaller comets (smaller so you're burning the bulk up in the slowly thickening atmosphere instead of impacting and throwing up dust), you could get it there in a few centuries and have the process largely, if not entirely, automated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Could anyone comment feasibility on the 'Cowboy Bebop'-style para-terraforming postulated on Mars by creating a small non-domed, livable section inside of a large crater, where the crater walls are high enough to 'contain' enough of the greenhouse gases being produced by the settlements? [0] Would we be better off just building huge domes, or digging underground?

[0][https://i1.wp.com/www.inetres.com/gp/anime/bebop/02/bebop_02...](https://i1.wp.com/www.inetres.com/gp/anime/bebop/02/bebop_02_04.jpg)

<comment><USER13> Not exactly this one but you could dig moholes. I guess a mohole deep enough to get you 1 atm would be too hot for humans but I will not even try to do the math.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> it strikes me that the terraforming goal is often expressed to be habitable to humans... Why not some economic middle ground? For example, if the oxygen was sufficient for me to survive ~1hour, it would add a bunch of safety in case of ripped suit etc. In many areas of life these middle grounds are much easier/faster to accomplish than the "pure" solution. Maybe that concept applies to colonies on mars too?

<comment><USER15> One decent "middle ground" would be if you could step outside using just an oxygen mask instead of a full spacesuit. Unfortunately the conclusion of this paper is that there isn't nearly enough CO2 to reach the required pressure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Title reminded me of this board game called Terraforming Mars: [https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/167791/terraforming- mars](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/167791/terraforming-mars)

For me, each play-through has taken hours but after finally playing it correctly (first two times I played I misinterpreted some crucial rules), I enjoyed the game quite a bit.

<comment><USER17> I'm curious how much scientific research they did for the cards.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> ... by relying on the greenhouse effect from carbon dioxide.

And you wouldn't want to do that, anyway, since it would result in a carbon dioxide concentration too high for an eventually breathable atmosphere. What you really want there is water vapor and perfluorocarbons.

But cranking those out takes time. Mars might be warm in 1000 years.

Still, shorter than the trip to another star.

</comment><comment><USER18> I was curious about the potential for other compounds. SF6, per molecule is about 22,000x better than CO2: [https://whatsyourimpact.org/high-global- warming-potential-ga...](https://whatsyourimpact.org/high-global-warming- potential-gases)

And there is a seemingly nice paper here on the potential for designer gas mixes: [http://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/98/5/2154.full.pdf](http://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/98/5/2154.full.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER19> Would it be impractical to just send a bunch of large asteroids to collide with Mars to get the minerals and gases we need?

<comment><USER3> Impractical? That just depends on what resources you have to tackle the problem with.

Identifying candidate comets and asteroids is the first step, then coming up with some sort of propulsion system is the next step. You won't need a lot of thrust at once, you'll just need continuous thrust for weeks, months or even years. Nudge the body into an intercept with Mars and wait. Could easily take decades (if not longer) to start impacting depending on where in the system you are shopping.

Good news is, comets and asteroids already come reeeeeallllllly close to the rocky planets so it's just a matter of meeting them far enough out and applying just the right amount of thrust.

Bad news is, if your math isn't right... whoops you just put something on a collision course with Earth BUT you'd detect this WAYYYYYY before it would happen and you'd just apply more thrust, unless of course something happened to your propulsion system so you'd absolutely want something out there that could move fast enough to intercept, land, apply thrust.

Impacting won't do much though to raise temperature or atmosphere, the atmosphere is thin enough you won't burn up much right now so you'd still need to thicken the atmosphere up some another way.

<comment><USER19> Actually found an interesting article about this. Sounds like it's just more of an energy expense with a small amount of benefit.

[https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/16898/what- would-b...](https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/16898/what-would-be-the- effect-of-increasing-the-mass-of-mars)

<comment><USER20> That link discusses bringing mass to Mars to increase its gravity.

This conversation is about bringing gas to Mars to thicken its atmosphere.

They're very different ideas, and the second one is a lot more interesting than the first.

<comment><USER3> Easiest way to increase the atmosphere would be to add material though, in this case comets and asteroids that had significant amounts of ices (and hopefully lots of metals, even meteoric iron would be extremely valuable on Mars as a source of easy to process metal).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Not with that attitude.

<comment><USER22> Attitude doesn't trump facts or reality.

<comment><USER23> If $deity wanted man to fly he would have given him wings.

(enter Montgolfier, Lilienthal, Santos-Dumont, the Wright brothers, etc)

Flying faster than the speed of sound is impossible, there is a wall out there which will crush any plane trying to break through it.

(enter Lippisch, those British researchers who realised a moving tail can keep a plane stable across the sound barrier but for some reason were not allowed to test their ideas in practice, Bell Aerospace and Chuck Yeager)

Notice the pattern?

<comment><USER22> > Notice the pattern?

No.

For ages, people have sought to convert lead to gold though alchemy. Some skeptics said that was impossible or uneconomical.

(Enter... no one)

Turns out the skeptics are right and no amount of positive attitude and can-do spirit can change that fact.

Terraforming Mars is a lot closer to alchemy than powered flight, if the literal matter needed does not already exist on Mars. If we have the technology for space-tugs that can transport an atmosphere's worth of matter to it, I doubt we'd still be interested in the project.

<comment><USER23> Transforming lead to gold is possible, it takes a particle accelerator and a lot of energy but it can be done. It has been done in 1980 at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) in California [1] although they started with bismuth instead of lead.

Arthur C. Clarke had the following to say on the subject:

1: When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

2: The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

3: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

While terraforming Mars is certainly a daunting prospect the single fact that there is not enough CO2 to create enough of a greenhouse effect to warm the planet does not seem enough of a reason for me to give up on the prospect. There are more effective greenhouse gases than CO2, methane comes to mind. What is not readily present on Mars can be 'liberated' from it chemical bonds or deposited there by means of inbound objects rich in the required substance.

[1] [https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or- fiction-l...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-lead- can-be-turned-into-gold/)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws)

<comment><USER22> >> For ages, people have sought to convert lead to gold though alchemy. Some skeptics said that was impossible or _uneconomical_.

> Transforming lead to gold is possible, it takes a particle accelerator and a > lot of energy but it can be done. It has been done in 1980 at Lawrence > Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) in California [1] although they started > with bismuth instead of lead.

I know that (see emphasis above). The process you cite is _utterly_ uneconomical. It is impossible to transform lead to gold in _all_ practical senses.

> What is not readily present on Mars can be 'liberated' from it chemical > bonds or deposited there by means of inbound objects rich in the required > substance.

Again, the technology and resources required to transport an atmosphere's worth of matter to Mars likely have far more beneficial uses that a terraforming project, such as the construction and provisioning of large habitable space stations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> > Plans to do so have included dropping thermonuclear weapons at the planet's > poles – an idea supported by Elon Musk.

This is misleading at best. Elon hasn't endorsed one way of terraforming Mars. He has said it's a question best left to Mars settlers.

</comment><comment><USER25> Would it not be easier to build and maintain a space station in a stable Lagrangian point? Gerard O'Neill described a roadmap to one in 1976 in [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_High_Frontier:_Human_Colon...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_High_Frontier:_Human_Colonies_in_Space)

The ideas were brought to life in Hideo Kojima's Policenauts, which is an interesting, rather detailed illustration of how the whole thing might work out. Somehow, I find the idea of a space station like that more exciting than the idea of colonizing Mars.

</comment><comment><USER26> The amount of capital required (both human and material) is too large to achieve colonizing Mars, even in a small capacity. It's a pipe dream, never going to happen without some science-fiction physics-bending solution (teleporting, free energy, etc).

Let's spend those countless billions on improving conditions here.

<comment><USER27> > The amount of capital required (both human and material) is too large to > achieve colonizing Mars, even in a small capacity.

Sending people to Mars would cost a few times as much as the construction (inflation adjusted) of the US interstate highway system. [1] There is a reason physicists, economists, and engineers, but usually not Linux container experts, are consulted when evaluating megaproject proposals.

> Let's spend those countless billions on improving conditions here.

How do you propose we allocate those billions? Who do you delegate to allocate those billions? Is the marginal benefit of that reallocation greater than the marginal cost of killing off all interplanetary colonization efforts?

[1] [https://spacenews.com/op-ed-mars-for- only-1-5-trillion/](https://spacenews.com/op-ed-mars-for-only-1-5-trillion/)

<comment><USER26> > How do you propose we allocate those billions?

I propose we don't collect the billions in the first place.

> Sending people to Mars would cost a few times as much as the construction > (inflation adjusted) of the US interstate highway system. [1]

Sending a few people and even establishing some kind of 'base' is not the same as colonizing. That's just the cost of getting 9 crews there and back. If the article is implying Apollo-sized crews, that's not very many people.

Heavy machinery, concrete, steel/aluminum, fuel, everything needed to create structures. The costs will be innumerable, and for what benefit? So potentially a select few people get to fly to Mars and live there?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> A heartfelt discussion about terraforming Mars. This is HN at its most entertaining. I'm serious. Thank you!

</comment><comment><USER29> Reading through this led me to also Google the unrelated issue of estimates of how long fossil fuels will last at current pace. I'd never thought about that before, and I am actually now concerned about my child's future. (Which of course I worry about other things, but is a first for that aspect.)

Without a major shift in energy source, soon, we will never be able to leave our planet. Humanity will end here.

<comment><USER30> A long time. With uranium, ground-fuels will last even longer.

Sun's supposed to explode and consume the planet soon though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> pfft, Why bother. I reckon the first serious population on mars will be miners and industrialists.

They'll mine the crap out of it, setup horribly polluting industry and makes shit to sell elsewhere.

</comment><comment><USER32> idk why you can't just grind up a shit-ton of plastic and create sand-plastic electrostatic differential on the surface to produce more green house gases, ch4

</comment><comment><USER33> Judging by the abstract, they set aside and don't even consider the question of whether we could change humans to meet Mars halfway.

</comment><comment><USER34> Lets not be too optimistic.

The biggest problem for mars is not pressure, but nitrogen.

You can make oxygen from CO2, obviously. But where do you get nitrogen?

</comment><comment><USER35> This article is essentially an opinion article. It is paywalled, and the Abstract contains no actual quantitative data on which to judge the contents. It uses "today's technology" as some sort of viability deteriminant, but this is really kind of tautological: we haven't really perfected the art of sending large payloads to Mars, yet. We struggle to do about one ton. So _of course_ current technology is insufficient.

They speak of CO2 greenhouse effect not being sufficient to cause sufficient warming... But that's kind of obvious, isn't it? Because if it was sufficient with easily accessible reservoirs, that'd imply Mars is in some sort of unequilibrium state that could randomly trigger into a partial runaway greenhouse effect (to terraform the planet, not make it like Venus) without even our intervention.

And another thing, warmth is fairly easy to address. What's critical is _pressure_. I'm much less interested in the amount of CO2 to heat the whole planet by itself than I am in the amount of CO2 needed to exceed the Armstrong Limit (0.9psi, the minimum pressure you can survive without a pressure suit and only a forced air oxygen mask) at the lowest points on Mars (like Hellas Basin). That's not addressed in the abstract at all, and I'm not about to pay for an article that doesn't even bother to answer such a basic question in the abstract as what _mass_ of CO2 exists in these reservoirs (from which one can easily determine the pressure... Mars needs about 6e16kg of additional volatiles added to its atmosphere to reach the Armstrong Limit in Hellas Basin... Mars' atmosphere is currently 2.5e16kg).

Every terraforming proposal I've seen does something like this:

1) Increase albedo of surface via dust on the poles or black powder.

2) Increase greenhouse effect by industrial production of super greenhouse gases that are far more effective (>20,000?) than CO2.

3) Increase insolation of Mars via giant orbital mirrors (more realistic than you might think, as you can use micron-thick solar sail type material).

4) Adding more volatiles from exterior sources like comets or asteroids or moons.

5) Vaporize very deep reservoirs of volatiles using fission or fusion or geothermal or sunlight or impact energy, reservoirs not considered here.

Many of these require "new" technology, but the principles behind each one are pretty well understood.

...it's simply impossible to have a serious discussion of this paper as it's paywalled and contains no quantitative information in the public abstract. Instead, it serves as just a conversation piece for what people already think about Mars terraforming.

</comment><comment><USER36> And yet again, there isn't a single link to the paper anywhere in the article. A pop-up autoplaying video doesn't replace good journalism.

[https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-018-0529-6](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-018-0529-6)

<comment><USER37> This is a much better article. The current one is just click-bait. I'm glad I read it but I'm even more glad it was with the context of other comments on HN.

<comment><USER38> That is because Nature Perspectives are written by real scientists for a wider audience than their niche. Not only are those articles scientifically more accurate, but the writers usually try to engage in a dialogue with the readers, which you don't often see in today's journalism.</comment></comment></comment>


How I hacked my room hunt in SF - <AUTHOR> http://polaske.tumblr.com/post/65469856095/how-i-hacked-my-room-hunt-in-sf

<comment><USER2> Great, now craigslist is going to be filled with a couple real rooms for rent, the usual spam, and a bunch of "hacker" spam.

<comment><USER3> Agreed this is horrible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Unfortunately this fails the categorical imperative test. If everybody did this, the system you are using would be much worse off. You are benefitting at the cost of other people's wasted time and effort.

So I wouldn't brag about it too much.

<comment> __--__ It's the methodology that's interesting, not the specific context or results.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Was considering of doing a similar thing for accepting candidates for my house. My plan was to take all the responses, strip all references to locations, and then randomly send them to every listing in every other major metropolitan area. The one that got the most callbacks I would then callback. In the end, my roommates read through all the responses and I didn't have to do any work.

<comment><USER6> This means you trust the average populations opinion.

<comment><USER5> That was another problem

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I can imagine an unethical candidate reposting a duplicate job (or several copies) and then replying "sorry, no thanks" to the competition.

This introduces an interesting dynamic: how can you verify that a post you're replying to is genuine?

</comment><comment><USER8> Very interesting... having never had to apartment hunt before in an area I was unfamiliar with, I find it fascinating that I would've overlooked sounding interesting in my emails and kept things pretty stock.

</comment><comment><USER9> You mean... If you make yourself sound like a somewhat normal and interesting person people will want to live with you? I don't understand how this was a breakthrough for you.

</comment><comment><USER10> Well that ended abruptly.

</comment><comment><USER11> Cool. Easy hack I'll try next time I look for a place.

</comment><comment><USER12> Thats a pretty sweet way to utilize startup strategies you have learned on the job to benefit you personally.</comment>


Imagine NoSQL – how John Lennon might have said it. - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/p/94a9f5e231b2

<comment><AUTHOR> TLDR:

Imagine there's NoSQL, It's easy when you see. No ORM below us, Only MongoDB. Imagine all the people, Coding for results…</comment>


Schools Are Deploying Digital Surveillance Systems - <AUTHOR> https://mobile.edweek.org/c.jsp?cid=25919951&bcid=25919951&rssid=25919941&item=http%3a%2f%2fapi.edweek.org%2fv1%2few%2f%3fuuid%3d8805A088-82E5-11E9-B21E-B4F258D98AAA <comment><USER2> > Evergreen Public Schools in Washington state, for example, started using the > company's service this school year. Between September and mid-March, the > system flagged more than 9,000 incidents in the 26,000-student district. The > overwhelming majority-84 percent-were for minor violations, such as > profanity.

The fact that the system even monitors for profanity at all tells me its purpose has a lot more to do with student surveillance than it does with student safety.

<comment><USER3> I don't nessecarily have an issue with surveillance systems as they act as force multipliers for all sorts of noble causes.

Surveillance systems should strictly be used for physical safety, anti- vandalism, and loss prevention purposes. You're not preparing kids to succeed by micromanaging them from behind a series of monitors. At all. People who intend to use the system to punish the kids for swearing by no means should be allowed access. The teachers and even the principal really shouldn't even have access to reduce the temptation to abuse the surveillance system. If they keep getting access the surveillance system should be thrown in the trash.

Bosses who use similar systems to keep their employees working can also expect nothing better than mediocrity and a widespread CYA mentality.

<comment><USER4> What noble causes do they currently act as force multipliers for?

<comment><USER5> Classification of people into a permanent class hierarchy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> To fight this, I don't think we should be talking about privacy or rights. That's all very important, but society is already fairly desensitized to that language, and the pro-surveillance side can literally point to the dead bodies of real children.

Instead, we should be talking about how deleterious it is to the character development of our children. Among other problems, they are being demanded to conform to an increasingly narrow range of acceptable behavior, and conditioned to develop about as unhealthy a relationship with authority figures as possible.

<comment><USER7> That won't work either though.

I can hear it now:

<sarcasm> "Well, if by 'increasingly narrow range of acceptable behavior' you mean 'not molesting the girls and refraining from committing school shootings' then maybe they should have systems like this!" </sarcasm>

You need to have some arguments not centered around the idea of behavior. Because that idea will be thrown back at you almost immediately. Behavior is exactly what these people will say they are trying to change.

<comment><USER8> It's so crazy considering the kids are exhibiting the exact same behavior as their parents 20-30 years ago. Puberty isn't new...

<comment><USER5> From some distance it looks to me like kids today are aren't exhibiting the same behavior as their parents. Their parents were oh so much much worse behaved.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I cannot believe that these people are so dense:

> _" Why would it have a chilling effect if the superintendent of the school > might see something that slips through the system about someone went > hunting?" he asked. "There's no threat."_

How is the following not harm?

> _He pointed to a recent incident in which Social Sentinel flagged a college > student who threatened on Twitter to shoot his professor for scheduling an > early morning exam. (The student, who said he intended no harm, was > arrested.)_

<comment><USER10> They're not dense. These people consider that kind of stuff perfectly acceptable because they have a world view in which living in totalitarian society is acceptable. Their world view simply does not align with yours or mine. They simply do not consider the use these kind of systems to be fundamentally incompatible with free society the way you or I do.

<comment><USER11> > These people consider that kind of stuff perfectly acceptable because they > have a world view in which living in totalitarian society is acceptable.

Except they don't. The moment the totalitarian society started to demand conformance to something they don't like, you can be sure they would object.

<comment><USER12> They move the goalposts to the new normal, see "problems" still happening and apply the same solution iteratively to absurdim.

<comment><USER5> When organizations spend money on a 'tool' they will find a justification for it's existence.

30 years ago the city I lived in bought a helicopter for the police. So they could 'spot criminals from the air'. They actually appear to use it mostly to look for teenagers hanging out in parks after hours.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> _" The local Brazosport Independent School District had recently hired a company called Social Sentinel to monitor public posts from all users, including adults, on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms. The company's algorithms flagged Lafrenais's tweet as a potential threat. Automated alerts were sent to the district's superintendent, chief of police, director of student services, and director of guidance. All told, nearly 140 such alerts were delivered to Brazosport officials during the first eight months of this school year..."_

OK, I think we really need to investigate protecting the privacy of our youth. This is effectvely acclimating our children to minimal privacy as enforced by authoritarian organizations.

<comment><USER14> Unfortunately, it's pick one.

Either:

1\. Allow for potential bullying and sexual harassment and other things kids put each other through.

2\. Monitor every single thing they do and police them at all times.

We as a society need to make a choice. You cannot have a perfectly safe and positive environment at all times for children(and adults) without constant and detailed monitoring.

My guess is that the correct answer lies somewhere in the middle. Ignoring that reality and avoiding handling this at the regulatory level will result in groups going either all the way to one side or all the way to the other.

Edit: I'm shocked how insane and unrealistic the people downvoting this are. I feel so unbelievably bad if any of you have children or vote on any policy that has to do with children. Awful people. Just awful.

<comment><USER15> Its popular to create false dichotomies. Like this one.

How about: monitor them sometimes and train them into good behavior patterns, so as to create a population of civil citizens

You can have zero tolerance for bullying and harassment, without 100 surveillance. Like any civil society.

<comment><USER14> _> You can have zero tolerance for bullying and harassment, without 100 surveillance_

You absolutely, positively, cannot have that. Bullying is an all day every day thing with children. Especially boys. The only way you prevent it all the time is to never leave boys alone in a group with no monitoring or supervision.

Edit: If you are downvoting or disagreeing with this, you are part of the absurdly unreasonable expectations we have for our children. Especially boys. And are likely part of the reason 1 in 6 boys are diagnosed with ADHD for not meeting these insane ideals.

<comment><USER16> _> Bullying is an all day every day thing with children._

Kids tease each other, they call each other names, they occasionally get into fist-fights, but that's not necessarily bullying. Bullying is systematic and targeted harassment; it is entirely right and proper that we should not tolerate it.

If a kid is a bully, he's an asshole. He shouldn't necessarily be expelled or even necessarily suspended, but someone needs to make it _crystal clear_ to him that his behaviour is unacceptable and will not be tolerated, otherwise he'll grow up to be an asshole and raise his kids to be assholes.

Don't drag ADHD or insane ideals into this and don't suggest it's some sort of modern mollycoddling. Internet surveillance and helicopter parenting is no substitute for moral leadership and the teaching of values. The idea that kids need constant monitoring is symptomatic of a profound societal cowardice, an abnegation of responsibility for teaching children to be decent human beings.

The solution to bullying isn't constant surveillance of children, it's teaching children how to stand up for themselves and instilling them with a sense of duty to stand up for their peers. It's creating a school community in which bullying isn't something to be swept under the carpet, but something to be fought vigorously. It's leading by example, taking the time to listen to children and treating them with the same respect that you expect them to show others. That's not easy, but it's our duty.

<comment><USER17> > If a kid is a bully, he's an asshole. He shouldn't necessarily be expelled > or even necessarily suspended, but someone needs to make it crystal clear to > him that his behaviour is unacceptable and will not be tolerated, otherwise > he'll grow up to be an asshole and raise his kids to be assholes.

It's not entirely clear that this is true all the time.

I was reading a reddit thread the other day where the subject turned to bullying, people who were bullied, and people who were bullies.

There were several there who seemed sincere in that they claimed they had been bullies, but as they grew up, they grew out of it (some were "young bullies" \- aged 8-10 or so, and grew out of it as teens, others were teens and worked it out as they became adults) - but were remorseful about their former actions. Many expressed the wish that they could apologize to those they tormented or hurt. Others noted that they had been able to do that; or noted that they had their bullies apologize to them. Some said it helped, others said that while they appreciated it to an extent, they still kept those people at arms length, as they didn't trust them. Others still mentioned becoming friends (in one case, their bully became their best man at their wedding!).

Yes, this is all anecdotal, and should be taken with a grain simply because "internet/reddit". At the same time, I don't think we can paint these people with a broad brush in either direction.

<comment><USER16> My words were slightly carelessly chosen, but I think it's reasonable to say "...otherwise he's highly likely to grow up to be an asshole and raise his kids to be assholes". Some people do grow out of it, some people do learn decent behaviour of their own volition, but that's far from guaranteed. I do wonder what proportion of those people who "grew out" of being a bully actually got away scot-free and just changed their ways ex nihilo, and what proportion realised that they were gradually becoming a pariah and decided to sort their act out.

Conversely, I can't think of many people who were genuinely kind and decent children but grew up to become nasty thugs; the only examples that spring to mind involve severe trauma or brain injuries.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Ah Clute, Texas. Howdy from Brazosport class of 2002! This is the second article mentioning this area on HN I've seen in the last 3 years or so. The first one mentioned Brazosport as the dropout capital of the entire USA. So I doubt anyone within a 100 mile radius of there has ever heard of HN (but waiting to be proven wrong).

Edit:

I guess to add more context. This is probably an example of a small, underfunded, school district being coaxed into purchasing something it doesn't even need, or the administration doesn't even understand.

<comment><USER19> The school district I graduated from, around the same time, hired some consultant who used Brazosport, TX as the role model on how to improve their NCLB related standardized test scores. It did not turn out well.

<comment><USER18> Brazosport (in the mid 1990's) had very good scores on the standardized tests. But that was literally all they taught. And this was the TAAS test which had very little content in it.

<comment><USER19> This is the straight up propaganda they were selling: [https://www.mcall.com/news/mc- xpm-2001-04-01-3363949-story.h...](https://www.mcall.com/news/mc- xpm-2001-04-01-3363949-story.html) .

<comment><USER18> Wow talk about nostalgia!

Mrs. Sale was the elementary principal in the 1990's. She was nice, though I never got sent to her office in elementary school. My trouble years started after 5th grade. In 5th grade my teacher was Mr. Davis. The only man teacher in the elementary. There were plenty of rumors going around about how he had the hots for Mrs. Sale. And in the article's date of 2001 and with the new name of Mrs 'Sale-Davis', I guess the rumors were right!

I was a Karankawa in 7th grade and a Mayan in 8th. I never knew what the purpose of the 'pep rallies' were. Just figured it was what all schools did. I don't even know what was talked about, I was just happy to get out of class. Sometimes my buddy and I would try to pick up rocks on the way to the gym to throw at people from the stands. Or a couple of times we'd sneak to the bathroom and hide out there but that was really boring. I did think it was somewhat strange that we organized our grades and classes into Indian tribe names. Gang violence was all around us and it seemed to be an inappropriate parody.

Even more interesting is the resistance in 1992 it speaks of with some teachers quitting over the new ideas. I know in the early 1990's, several teachers and counselors moved from Brazosport to its rival a few towns over 'Brasozwood'. Perhaps that was the reason. I only knew of that because I briefly attended Brasozwood in the 8th grade and later in life found a collection of year books from the two schools and was perplexed that many of the administrators I knew from Brasozwood were listed in the Brazosport year books of the 1980's.

>"Brazosport is unabashed about admitting it teaches to the test."

I guess the question is, "but is that right"?

"I know you're heading to the bathroom to tuck in that shirt," she tells a 10th-grade boy, who smiles widely before ducking into the men's room." <\-- heck that was probably me!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Schools in certain parts of the US, usually with more unruly students from lower income backgrounds, are pretty much set up like prisons. You can't leave the premises as the exits are heavily guarded, there are cops present, there are various sorts of checkpoints where things are searched. Now it looks like the prison follows you home into your private life where you might be planning something nefarious. It's a bit of a mess.

<comment><USER21> >Now it looks like the prison follows you home into your private life where you might be planning something nefarious.

Just getting them warmed up for the parole process later on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I bullied a kid in middle school to the point where he switched classes. Teachers didn't panick and kick me out, rather they listened to both sides and let us figure it out. We talked and became really good friends, even to this day!

Humans aren't perfect. I'm not saying bullying is good, but the best solution is not to punishment. I'd certainly spiral out of control and become a monster had I been kicked out.

Scandinavian pedagogy is great!

</comment><comment><USER23> "the secret [to creating fiction about technology that stays relevant] is basically to assume that people will be really stupid about technology for the foreseeable future."

Cory Doctorow on the anniversary of "Little Brother" [https://craphound.com/littlebrother/](https://craphound.com/littlebrother/)

</comment><comment><USER24> I always lose a few magical internet points when I say this, but, if possible, avoid public schools.

<comment><USER25> And what have we learned about private institutions?

But that leaves us with homeschooling...

<comment><USER24> Homeschooling has come a long way. It's a sacrifice, for sure, but far easier now than it was even 20 years ago.

<comment><USER26> You're complaining about an authoritarian public school system, but are replacing it with an even more authoritarian solution. Homeschooling keeps the child under the parent's eye 24-7 and completely captive to their worldview and idea. If that worldview and idea is for them to be "schooled" in helping their dad run his landscaping business, or being prepared to be married off, well, good luck.

Public school is important precisely because it is public. It gets the kid out to realize society exists and to deal with it as it exists. Homeschooling to me is bad because the child is dominated by their parent too much and it's not something that can really be fixed except with great effort by the child later in life.

<comment><USER18> >Public school is important precisely because it is public. It gets the kid out to realize society exists and to deal with it as it exists.

Perhaps your public school was better than mine, but what I was conditioned into socially while in high school did not line up at all with "the real world".

At the age of 20, after many months of deep thought about my life's direction, I literally realized I needed to throw out everything I learned/was indoctrinated into by the public school and start over. The sad thing is, thanks to facebook, I've looked up many of my old high school buddies. They are still the same. They are 30+ years old now and act like they are still 15. Still playing the same video games, listening to the same kind of music, still showing the same attitudes, still not having any responsibility.

Which is the point I realized when I was 20, why send your teenager into an institution that will condition him/her into acting like a typical teenager? A person with a "teenager" mentality will never be a CEO, will never own a company, will never be successful and will never make wise choices. And why would they? They already know everything and can't be taught a dang thing.

Its clearly a two way street. I've seen some terrible products of homeschooling and I've seen some really good ones. But that brings the question of if the "terrible products" of homeschooling had went to public school, would they have been better off? I've going to assume probably not.

<comment><USER26> You don't know the opposite though.

The kids that fail are barely educated; they may have fourth grade level math. They end up indoctrinated totally by their parents worldview or unable to function with others. They have no real way to connect with others because there isn't even the shared topic of "public school sucks." CEO isn't an option for them; hell a life apart from their parents barely is.

I think people romanticize it way too much, and there is the HLSDA which really pushes a lot of narratives about it. The blog Homeschoolers Anonymous is inactive, but a good reference on some of the issues.

<comment><USER18> >You don't know the opposite though.

I've seen good and bad products from both public and non-public. So I don't know what you mean by opposite. The worst case was my own friend's brother whose mother pulled him out of public school after he failed the fourth grade for the 2nd time. She said the school was "full of mexicans" and she'd just teach him herself. But she never did anything... He has been arrested many times for selling drugs, which he did because he could never get a "normal" job as he had no ID or birth certificate (his mom lost all that). Thankfully through prison he learned how to read and do math and he was given a prison ID card which can be used in place of a birth certificate to get an official ID card from the DMV. But he's' still not doing too well... But that's the worst case, and his brother that graduated from public school isn't doing much better.

The point I make is, the parents should know what is best for their own children and they should have their children's best interest in mind. Sure, some don't and or can't but they still need to have options. But as a society of sovereign individuals, this is what we allow. To overreach this area through government regulation will just end up with a loss of rights and a poorer ending (that has already been played out in other countries of the past)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> This is nasty, but the unpleasant truth is that these schools are just rationally responding to public pressure and doing CYA. Every time there's a school shooter, the first thing the parents and media do is dig through his angry Facebook posts and go, "Look at all these red flags! Why wasn't anything done?". Well, now the schools are doing something. It's not the _right_ thing to do, and it's not going to fix anything, but getting angry at the schools isn't going to cause them to change course: they're responding to public demand. You need to start talking to parents and educating _them_.

<comment><USER6> Wouldn't increased monitoring also increase their liability when something does go terribly wrong?

<comment><USER2> My first thought exactly. If the school "knew" about it and dismissed the alerts as a false positive I would have to imagine that opens them up to far greater liability than simply not knowing about the behavior in the first place.

<comment><USER7> > _If the school "knew" about it and dismissed the alerts as a false > positive..._

Knowing what you know about liability, ask yourself, what are the real chances of the school knowing something and dismissing it as a false positive?

I think if you search your heart you'd probably come to the conclusion that the fact that the school will follow up on every little thing is exactly the problem. Not everyone means "I'd kill for that test answer sheet" when they write "I'd kill for that test answer sheet".

<comment><USER2> > I think if you search your heart you'd probably come to the conclusion that > the fact that the school will follow up on every little thing is exactly the > problem.

The issues of school administrator overreach and school district liability for negligence are not mutually exclusive.

> Knowing what you know about liability, ask yourself, what are the real > chances of the school knowing something and dismissing it as a false > positive?

Knowing what I know about liability and knowing what I know about compliance monitoring systems with high rates of false positives is precisely why I said what I said.

Negligence = known or should have known of X

Efforts to hold schools accountable for shootings have historically been difficult because the plaintiffs must show (1) but for the action of the school, the injury would not have occurred and (2) the injury was a foreseeable result of the school's negligence.

This monitoring system creates actual knowledge of a potential threat where most law suits over school shootings have had to argue the school "should have known" _and_ requires the school to take make a record of their decision for every alert (investigate or ignore).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Teach them early that we don't live in free societies any more. How else would you go about building tomorrow's distopia?

We actually need the opposite: we need schools that create educated, crtically thinking individuals that don't hessitate to work together for thw future.

</comment><comment><USER29> I think this is just a strategy for moving the Overton window.

"Look what we can do! Instead we opted in for this [vendor] MITM proxy and cameras in each classroom that snoop on your kids' activities! Much less invasive ;)"

</comment><comment><USER30> I was (and still am) against the monitoring, restriction and limiting of student devices at school. I find it deeply disturbing that children are going to be monitored when they aren't even on school grounds, it's nightmarish. Every day homeschooling my future children looks exponentially better.

</comment><comment><USER31> if you've ever been to a middle school or a high school as a student, you know that these surveillance systems are probably already being used to crush innocent dissent.

imagine how many times you made a snide remark about a teacher or a principal to your peers in confidence. now, the target of your jeer will know that you're talking shit -- and, much like if they were to overhear trash talk about them in the hallways, they won't tolerate it. and so a bunch of harmless children will be caught in the surveillance net, and punished for normal behavior.

even worse, down the line you can be certain that state actors will gain access to the data sets produced by surveillance. then, in these kids' dossiers, they'll be marked as having anti-authoritarian tendencies as a result of their childhood discussions which were snooped on. throw in a social credit system, and someone may have a childhood remark following them for life.

<comment><USER32> > if you've ever been to a middle school or a high school as a student, you > know that these surveillance systems are probably already being used to > crush innocent dissent.

This may sound hyperbolic to some people (my schools were fine), but it is very true that school administration has a tendency to attract petty authoritarians. Who is easier to rule with an iron fist than powerless children?

I sometimes see things like the laptop spying scandal [0] and realize that I was very lucky to avoid these sorts of people as a kid.

[0] [https://www.computerworld.com/article/2521075/pennsylvania-s...](https://www.computerworld.com/article/2521075/pennsylvania- schools-spying-on-students-using-laptop-webcams--claims-lawsuit.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> It's not clear from the article how the system monitors encrypted social media traffic. Perhaps Twitter as it is public afterward, right? Or does it look for public posts to local groups in Facebook? Or everyone has location tagging on posts on other sites?

How are these companies getting their information to analyze?

<comment><USER34> They just look at public posts, I guess.

What puzzles me is this:

> Social media monitoring companies track the posts of everyone in the areas > surrounding schools, including adults.

Do Facebook, Twitter, etc expose geotags in posts?

<comment><USER18> I'm wondering the same. There's another company that does the same[0] and probably several more. I know I've read reports of police departments getting more lucrative access into private facebook posts. Perhaps it is the same for a company trying to "help" a school district as well.

0:[https://geolistening.com/](https://geolistening.com/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Do any of the naysayers here work in a public capacity- teacher, law enforcement, military/intelligence, etc? Have you ever been solely responsible for the security and well-being of more than, say a half-dozen total strangers? It's a hard problem, a continual tweaking of what we would see as engineering trade-offs, usually performed by people with minimal training, support, or reward who are stuck with the responsibility by default.

Supposedly we're here because we want to apply technology to hard problems- well, here's one of the hardest, and here's how it's been applied so far. Let's have a more reasonable discussion than a bunch of thin-veiled whining about how it will affect our torrents.

<comment><USER36> I have, yes. However, I don't believe it's always necessary to have experience doing something in order to understand how it works - humans developed pretty well in ways to enable us to share experience with one another.

Anyway, as I see it first we should agree on what exactly the problem is; in this case, it appears this was created to solve the problem of mass shootings in schools.

If that is the problem, this solution goes well beyond what is necessary to solve it. Further, it remains to be seen whether this solution actually works to solve the problem at all.

So you have something that might work but definitely does a bunch of unnecessary things. At best, you have an incredibly inefficient solution and at worst something that actively harms people.

<comment><USER35> How does it go beyond? The systems discussed either grab public social media, or monitor information created on the schools' machines. I don't know that there is a reasonable expectation of privacy on either.

<comment><USER36> First, I'd say monitoring profanity, the word 'gay,' mentions of drugs and sex, etc. does not have bearing on the primary issue at hand: gun violence. If you can outline for me how giving a student body principal information on a student setting up a dating profile serves to solve the issue of mass shootings, I'd appreciate it.

Second, the systems discussed pull information from student's phones and directly monitor communication using school email addresses. The former is an issue for obvious reasons and the latter is an issue because you actually should have a reasonable expectation of private communication through mail.

The fact that it is possible for the school to read your mail is immaterial. It is possible for the government to read your mail. The government does not get to do so, despite the many, many crimes committed through the mail and by people that receive mail.

<comment><USER35> Actually, thinking about it, mass violence is probably secondary in these systems to predicting suicidal behavior. And while you can argue a principal shouldn't have to worry if a kid is bullied into suicide, or whether an underage girl is using a dating site to find external validation, you better believe they'll be the first ones blamed when a 15 year old girl goes missing after meeting a guy on a dating site she accessed during math class.

But I don't know of anywhere that provides you a computer, email address, whatever, without language saying they are for approved use only and can be monitored. From what I read the 'pulling information' was after a device was connected to a computer, most likely caused by school administrators and students not understanding how the system reacts when it sees a new drive attached. This isn't invading kids deepest darkest secrets, like asking them to accept a cacert or whatever.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Non-Mobile Link: [https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2019/05/30/schools-are- de...](https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2019/05/30/schools-are-deploying- massive-digital-surveillance-systems.html)

</comment><comment><USER38> I was the type of high school student that would deliberately spam profanity and other things that would trigger this system just to spite the administrators. Privacy through obfuscation: when alarm bell rings all the time then the alarm bell becomes meaningless.

</comment><comment><USER39> I figure the psychological damage will create even more school shooters. _shrug_

</comment><comment><USER40> Dang could we possibly get a new title on this? The default one is a bit clickbaity.

<comment><USER41> Also a link to the non mobile site please

<comment><USER37> Non-Mobile Link: [https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2019/05/30/schools-are- de...](https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2019/05/30/schools-are-deploying- massive-digital-surveillance-systems.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> This should be fairly easy to DOS

<comment><USER7> Not quite as easy as your Jedi Hand Wave-y assertion makes it out to be. Letting the Authorities acclimate children to this sort of environment is dangerous for society.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Ideas for an APP,I am a Data Science Analyst and I know Django very well - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I would like to see an app that shows the most used memes on a social media platform so that I know which memes not to use.</comment>


Anglican: A Probabilistic Programming System - <AUTHOR> https://probprog.github.io/anglican/index.html <comment><USER2> I am the author of the most of current Anglican code base. Anglican's name indeed comes from the Church of England, Church being the name of an influential probabilistic programming language [https://cocolab.stanford.edu/papers/GoodmanEtAl2008-Uncertai...](https://cocolab.stanford.edu/papers/GoodmanEtAl2008-UncertaintyInArtificialIntelligence.pdf) . Frank Wood, the inventor of Anglican, moved to Oxford from the US and the name reflects the move.

Clojure was chosen because it was a modern lisp which was apparently easy to deploy (leveraging the JVM). That choice was given to me (I learned Clojure to join, but new Common Lisp well before). Original Anglican syntax was Scheme- like, for Church compatibility, but we switched to Clojure syntax later.

Anglican has been a platform for a number of research projects (and some practical applications). Now Anglican is in dire need of new maintainers or it will stagnate (I am not working on Anglican code base anymore, doing other things: [http://infergo.org](http://infergo.org) among others). One low- hanging fruit which unfortunately refuses to fall is automatic differentiation.

</comment><comment><USER3> Anyone interested in learning probabilistic programming, this is a great book that has integrated code written in WebPPL.

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

<comment><USER2> Another book from the same source:

[http://dippl.org/](http://dippl.org/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> why did they pick Clojure to do probabilistic programming?

btw, Python programmers have the option of pymc3 [https://docs.pymc.io/](https://docs.pymc.io/)

<comment><USER5> Why not? I think lisps could use a visibility boost in the various data sciences. Also probabilistic programming tends to be highly declarative, which works well in a language family where "code is data" is a core philosophy.

At first glance, maybe Common Lisp would have made more sense. As far as I'm aware, the CFFI is pretty good, which means you can interact with other machine learning code that is largely written in C under the hood.

That said, there is a mature machine learning ecosystem for the JVM, not to mention the prospect of running massive probabilistic models on Yarn or Spark.

By the way, there are many probabilistic programming languages in addition to PyMC3. There are Stan, Edward, Pyro (fairly new), and even the venerable BUGS/JAGS.

<comment><USER2> One advantage of Clojure compared to Common Lisp is very well implemented parallelism and corresponding functional data structures. Something which is hard to find for Common Lisp implementations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There are also WebPPL[1] and ProbLog[2].

[1] [http://webppl.org/](http://webppl.org/)

[2] [https://dtai.cs.kuleuven.be/problog/](https://dtai.cs.kuleuven.be/problog/)

</comment><comment><USER7> It took me a second to figure out why they chose their project name. Clever.

(edit: maybe not? The good reverend was not CofE)

<comment><USER8> I don't know what CofE is but always assumed that they named it Anglican in reponse to Church.

<comment><USER9> CofE is an abbreviation for the Church of England (parent church of the Anglican Communion).</comment></comment></comment>


Chubby Buddy Mobile App - <AUTHOR> http://try.chubbybuddyapp.com <comment><AUTHOR> We get it - exercising is tough, but we believe it should be fun. That's where the Chubby Buddy App comes in!

With the Chubby Buddy App, you can create a personal fitness buddy to help you stay fit; whether he stays chubby or becomes lean and strong is up to how active you are!

Don't forget to feed him, customize him and go on fitness-based adventures with him!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Go to try.chubbybuddyapp.com to get an exclusive invitation to our closed beta!</comment>


Nu programming language - <AUTHOR> http://programming.nu

<comment><AUTHOR> On GitHub: <https://github.com/timburks/nu>

The readme there gives also a better introduction to the goals and design decisions of the language.

Basic design:

* Lisp-like.

* Native calls are directly possible from within the language, so you can easily call C code.

* Uses the ObjC runtime.

Example of a Cocoa application: [https://github.com/timburks/nu/blob/master/examples/RandomAp...](https://github.com/timburks/nu/blob/master/examples/RandomApp/nu/randomapp.nu)

</comment><comment><USER2> It looks like it will never graduate to be a stand-alone language. Even though, it looks like it could be less terrible than Objective C for some design patterns.

<comment><AUTHOR> What do you mean by stand-alone?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The site appears to be down. More information here:

<http://www.radtastical.com/stories/nu>

<comment><USER4> Oops. It's back now. Sorry about that, I intend to upgrade that site but have been taking on some new things lately and haven't had much time. Also, I don't really follow Hacker News, but a friend pointed this post to me. Feel free to follow up with me any time on Twitter, email me at tim at radtastical dot com, or come see me at one of the meetups that I organize. <http://meetup.com/sviphone>

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The site is down now, but when I checked this page a few weeks ago it hadn't been updated in 2 years.

<comment><AUTHOR> Cache: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:bcZL8j8...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:bcZL8j8tYgUJ:programming.nu/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk)

The last update was September 2, 2011 with the release of Nu 2.0.1.

On GitHub, the last commit was 14 days ago.

<comment><USER5> Oh that's not bad at all; my mistake.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > The service is not available. Please try again later.

Great stuff.</comment>


Alice in Python projectland - <AUTHOR> https://veekaybee.github.io/2017/09/26/python-packaging/ <comment><USER2> Python's package management makes a mockery of the famous Zen of Python: _" There should be one--and preferably only one--obvious way to do it."_

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

<comment><USER3> There are two reasons I am not in favor of python. First and foremost its packaging sucks.

I have wasted far too much time wrangling pythons packaging systems. Incompatibilities between pip, setuputils, distutils, virtualenv, eggs, C modules, and wheels I have literally given up. I love and use python but I no longer package it and deploy it for others to consume. Try to package a protobuf3/grpc system these days into a .deb, its a nightmare. Even the grpcio devs use docker containers to build packages because python has such a nightmare of a system.

I'll leave the second reason out for the sake of context

<comment><USER4> Do you think that's easier, harder, or about the same as Make, Maven, Rake, etc.?

<comment><USER5> Ruby has one packaging format that is essentially unchanged since 2004: RubyGems. There have been improvements in making it easier to convert a gem to a native package since then (even though I think that's a fool's errand), but the fundamental packaging system hasn't changed (although indexing and serving has).

<comment><USER4> I'm not a Rubyist, but in my experience there are few Ruby packages with non- Ruby dependencies. That makes packaging much easier.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Funny to see the name Alice in the context of Python. Alice [1][2] is a Python-based environment for creating animated, interactive 3D scenes, created by Randy Pausch and his students. They picked python intentionally for its simplicity at a time when it wasn't yet well known.

[1] [http://www.alice.org](http://www.alice.org) [2] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_(software)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_\(software\))

<comment><USER7> Yep, playing around with Alice in the early 2000s was actually the first time I ever encountered Python.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Very good article. It is really astounding the amount of work that needs to be done in the python ecosystem!

<comment><USER9> What do you mean by; "astounding the amount of work that needs to be done in the python ecosystem!"?

Can you provide examples of different ecosystems that would compare favorably in your opinion?

<comment><USER10> I write both python and haskell for my day job. I think the latter has much better project management when it's paired with Nix. Even without Nix, stackage and even just dealing with Cabal is much easier than the mess in the Python ecosystem.

<comment><USER11> The stability of the Haskell ecosystem is something I just can not understand.

It's not enforced by policies, the tooling isn't much more helpful than in any other language, and it is not more mature than any widely used ecosystem. It feels like Haskell libraries just need less changes.

<comment><USER12> (I've never seriously used Haskell) I wonder if the strong static typing has something to do with that. That eliminates many if the common bugs found in Python programs.

<comment><USER4> In my experience, type errors in Python get discovered during testing. So, I doubt that's the reason.

Perhaps the nature of Haskell discourages changes, making the community more stable.

<comment><USER13> > In my experience, type errors in Python get discovered during testing

That would be the optimistic view. In reality, `NoneType has no attribute Foo` errors happen in production all the time.

<comment><USER4> Perhaps because someone got into the (bad) habit of returning Nones instead of raising errors. Errors should never pass silently, etc. The older Python APIs have that C habit of sentinel values, but more modern style is to raise an error on failure.

<comment><USER13> Functions implicitly returns None if you forget to provide a return value on any of the branches. This is an error that can easily slip past eyeball reviews, since this is caused by the _absence_ of something.

<comment><USER4> Shouldn't unit tests be exploring all the code paths? I know that's tough to enforce, but it's ideal. Regardless of whether you use a static analyzer.

And Python does have static analyzers, including for typing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Very good writing indeed. However, the metaphor here gives me the feeling of "enough internet today"... Btw, the anchor link to #project-structure don't work. Hope you (if you are the author) fix that soon.

</comment><comment><USER15> In the refactoring section, it says:

      Note that if you don't have if __name__ == '__main__',
      the code won't run anything since the function is
      initialized but not executed

Isn't this backwards? That test isn't required to make the code run, it prevents the code from running if the file _is imported as a module_.

<comment> cup-of-tea Yeah, it's written slightly badly, but it means if you don't include that _block_ then nothing will run. The way it's written makes it seem like using the ifmain construct isn't optional, which isn't a terrible thing to teach.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The "python hides the hurt" example isn't great. First, he's missing the imports on the python side (which can be just as verbose as java imports). Second, he's talking 10 lines of code in java (plus closing braces) vs 6 in python, but with a little bit of tweaking you could easily drop 2 of those lines in Java. Third, if you were to import guava or some other library that makes handling files more streamlined, you could get to an equivalent number of lines in the Java example.

<comment><USER17> 1\. The Python in that example requires no imports. 2\. I think the author (Vicki) is a she.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This was really helpful for me, someone who does Ruby most of the time. The programming parts of Python aren't hard, but I'm simply unfamiliar with the layout of things.

</comment><comment><USER19> i learn about good practices testing some python cookiecutters where you can find a lot of practical project clues :)</comment>


Doom for Windows - <AUTHOR> http://www.alexstjohn.com/WP/2016/10/02/doom-for-windows/ <comment><USER2> >>Windows is obsolete. The connected world of computing has left the old Windows OS paradigm far behind.

Except the guy couldn't get the Google Docs version working. Instead opting for another desktop environment in the form of OS X.

This article is infuriating, the guy shows up unprepared to give a ppt, wastes 15 minutes trying to load his ppt, rants about Microsoft's demise.

<comment><USER3> Seriously.

> We have the usual struggle getting connected, so the Google Docs version of > the presentation is out.

> Finally, I use my iPhone 6 to get my Windows laptop connected to the > Internet so PowerPoint can download the correct font for my presentation.

He complains about connectivity issues which force him to use PowerPoint, then connects to his hotspot and continues to use PowerPoint. Unreal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think Microsoft's downfall will not be Windows getting worse, but Linux getting better.

<comment><USER5> Too bad that both are getting worse.

<comment><USER4> I haven't had that experience.</comment></comment></comment>


The Cuckoo's Egg - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo%27s_Egg <comment><USER2> This is the only book I've read in a single sitting. I started at about 5p one day, and finished about 7am the next day. I seriously couldn't put it down. What's great about this book vs. a book like "Takedown" is the author doesn't pretend that he's a mastermind for being able to track down a criminal. He is quite humble and candid telling the story. I read the book probabaly 20 years ago, but one candid incident still pops into my head occasionally and always makes me smile. It's the time when his shoes were wet, but he had to meet with an FBI agent, so he put them in the microwave to dry, when the FBI agent arrived, he asked if there was a tire factory near by. Kinda sticks with me as there used to be a rubber factory near where I lived that had a pretty bad smell.

<comment><USER3> Same here, I read it all one Sunday.. couldn't put it down.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The Cuckoo's egg is a must read for anyone persuing a career in Devops or Security - It covers such a wide range of debugging techniques and ways to track down unusual behavior, that it's still a relevant read and great primer. The early anecdote about 'mirroring' the typing if his hacker by hooking up line printers to phone lines is particularly ingenious - using `tee` as a tool for the same effect has saved my hide many a time, and helped me understand complex systems. Introspecting median output is great tool (see also printf debugging).

On a different note, Cliff Stoll is himself a great dude, fun and witty and very friendly. I bought a Klein bottle[1] from him as a present for my father, who loves it, but the real treat was for me - I went in person, and he gladly took an hour of his time to show me his warehouse and custom robot he uses to manage it, and chatted about everything - Life, The Universe, his book and his business and software problems (I was at a videoconferencing startup, and he'd also done some work with telcos that proved relevant and illuminating). If you have a chance, buy a bottle and have a chat.

[1][http://www.kleinbottle.com/](http://www.kleinbottle.com/)

<comment><USER5> In the mid-1990s, I corresponded briefly with Cliff, and he seemed amicable enough; The one thing I recall from our emails is that he was adamant that he didn't persecute 'hackers', apparently pursuing a semantic split between 'hacker' and 'cracker'.

I talked a lot with Hans Hubner as well afterward when he worked at Art+COM, a good bit more than Cliff. I found Hans to be extremely generous, the sort of guy who was just flattered that you sought him out and would literally create an account on his Unix and VMS hosts if you just asked, despite the expensive metered rate he was paying for TCP/IP access at the time. He didn't talk much about the whole Cuckoo's Egg saga though.

Very nice people on both sides; Makes you wonder how much of it was circumstance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> "The book was chronicled in an episode of WGBH's NOVA entitled "The KGB, the Computer, and Me", which aired on PBS stations on October 3, 1990"

I think it's this one:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcKxaq1FTac](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcKxaq1FTac)

Oh,me I'm ROFL: an actor is identical to one of X-Files "Lone Gunmen". When he explains the beeper to his wife I needed the oxygen. It's like "Doctor Who vs hackers" :-)

<comment><USER6> Debugging of networks with logic analyzer, counting round trip with the oscilloscope's divisions, what glorious times ! :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I highly recommend this book. It's easily accessible, fun to watch the story spin out, and recalls the magic of early UNIX and dial-up internet. Cliff Stoll is quite a character - check out his TED talk to see what I mean.

<comment><USER8> "Early UNIX". Ouch. The events of the book took place in 1986, at which time UNIX was more or less like what we use today. Except for the absence of modern scripting languages, a modern user could use UNIX from 1986 with very little problem. I tend to think of "early UNIX" as things like V6 UNIX from the 1970s, but to be fair to you, much more time has passed from 1986 to now than did from the dawn of UNIX to 1986.

<comment><USER7> Fair point - as you say I was thinking more of the relative lengths of time before and after the events in the book happened (at least in my limited knowledge), but your interpretation of "early" is probably the one that most people would go with first.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I can still remember watching the NOVA episode of this in the early 90's

[https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x61qlf6](https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x61qlf6)</comment>


"Blackhole" interpreter in PyPy: new optimization in PyPy 1.3  - <AUTHOR> http://morepypy.blogspot.com/2010/06/blackhole-interpreter.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+PyPyStatusBlog+%28PyPy+Status+Blog%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

<comment><USER2> Fascinating article, I love compiler design.

I wonder if code cache locality (of the interpreters) ever becomes and issue or is that level of concern irrelevant because that's ages away from being the bottleneck. What other issues (besides maintainability) does this approach have.

</comment><comment><USER3> Very cool stuff, but in what situation does the code run the same for one thousand times or more and then all of a sudden cause a guard condition to fail. I know it must happen with some frequency, hence the blackhole interpreter, but what is the most common scenario?

<comment><USER4> The thing is in case of tracing you don't record all paths taken, just the one at the hot point. So say you have if that takes every path every second go, the JIT will compile just one path at first. Then the guard will fail every second iteration, hence the blackhole. Of course at some point JIT will realize guard fails often enough and will compile another path, so you'll get a tree. And so on...</comment></comment>


A VC: Pincus Talks To Howard - <AUTHOR> http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2007/08/pincus-talks-to.html <comment><USER2> Nice, interesting, piece of advice:

"...this is known to all startups: when we stopped trying to do something really revolutionary, which was fix your computer, and we started saying let's just diagnose what was wrong, that's when our sales took off."</comment>


Omnidirectional conveyer belts from Intralox - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqLYhhV7u7Y <comment><AUTHOR> Could you pair this surface with a virtual reality headset and make an infinite world to explore?</comment>


Show HN: Automatic consolidated Expense tracking and Bill reminders - <AUTHOR> http://finartapp.in <comment><AUTHOR> Introducing an android app to securely & automatically track expenses & get bills due reminders based on texts received on your phone from authorized service providers. Consolidates data at one place from various accounts & cards. Intuitive visualization & category trends. 'Private mode' to provide complete data security. Would love your comments</comment>


How To Become A Good Theoretical Physicist - <AUTHOR> http://www.phys.uu.nl/~thooft/theorist.html

<comment><USER2> Does a similar page exist for Comp Sci?

</comment><comment><USER3> Good article. Atrocious formatting.</comment>