Young, talented and fed-up: scientists tell their stories - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/news/young-talented-and-fed-up-scientists-tell-their-stories-1.20872 <comment><USER4> "if you pay a man a salary for doing research, he and you will want to have something to point to at the end of the year to show that the money has not been wasted. In promising work of the highest class, however, results do not come in this regular fashion, in fact years may pass without any tangible result being obtained, and the position of the paid worker would be very embarrassing and he would naturally take to work on a lower, or at any rate a different plane where he could be sure of getting year by year tangible results which would justify his salary. The position is this: You want one kind of research, but, if you pay a man to do it, it will drive him to research of a different kind. The only thing to do is to pay him for doing something else and give him enough leisure to do research for the love of it. "

\-- J. J. Thompson"

<comment><USER5> Sorry if I'm missing the point of this quote, but it seems wrong to me that you "can't point to something to prove the money wasn't wasted".[1]

You can always do some variant of "we tried this, it didn't work; in the future, you no longer have to spend money to see if this will work." Right?

[1] Removing the triple negative: it should always be possible to prove the money accomplished something.

<comment><USER4> From a business perspective, you're right enough. Academic research is not business oriented -- and Thompson was saying that it should not be.

When discovered, there was nothing particular monitizable about quaternions, and they were not found as a consequence of any business enterprise looking for new tools -- but Hamilton didn't starve to death because he failed to capitalize on them. 80 years later, suddenly we rediscover the fact that we've solved gimbal lock and can easily describe quantum states.

<comment><USER5> The quote is referring to proof of _progress_ , not proof of _profitability_ , which is a separate issue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I got my biomedical engineering PhD, and was a neurology professor at a top children's hospital doing brain/epilepsy research for a few years. Literally my dream job for most of my life. I left it two years ago due to many of the reasons listed, and got a job going quant/algorithmic trading at a prop firm. I have never been happier, it is a hell of of a lot less stressful, I may actually pay off my student loans before I retire, we just bought a house, and obviously don't regret it for a second. Most of my old friends at my old job are jealous; they have psych or bio backgrounds, and have more or less hit their ceilings in terms of where that skill set can take them. For engineers who know how to code (I was a core contributer to www.bci2000.org for a decade+), math is math, and it doesn't matter if it is doing real time processing of brain signals or market data.

<comment><USER7> Doesn't it feel like a waste of your talents to have society employing you full-time to make rich people richer via gambling in the financial markets rather than something more beneficial to society?

I don't blame you at all (I'm sure your quality of life is magnitudes of order better, and I'd do the same in your position) and this isn't personal at all, it just pains me that our brightest graduates are working in finance rather than something like curing cancer.

<comment><USER6> I hope you aren't downvoted for this, as this is basically my exact thought process for the last few years.

> make rich people richer

It is prop trading, so we are making ourselves richer, technically. We do a lot of charity work and donations with schools, etc.

> Doesn't it feel like a waste of your talents

Absolutely. However, I also like not having to beg my toddler to eat the food in front of him because payday is 10 days away, every credit card is maxed, and who knows how we will get to the grocery, which is what happened sometimes during my postdoc 3-7 years ago. Student loans were coming in at ~$1500/month when I'm making $2500/month. It was very difficult, and I was deeply depressed. When I finally landed that professor position, my workload got worse, and while there was a pay increase, I still wasn't going to be buying a house anytime soon. This was NOT an expensive area. We ended up living with my parents for a while (me, my wife, and 3 kids). The math just wasn't adding up, and there wasn't an end in sight. Adding in trouble getting grants, not wanting to restart the faculty job search, I started looking at industry. I applied at a few prop trading firms on whim, and mine ended up being a great fit.

I was pretty successful doing the actual research, but my particular niche (neuroscience+software methods and tools) isn't really funded by grants. I even got several rounds of good publicity for some of my PhD work, and did international interviews, etc. I was a very good scientist, but that doesn't cut it any more; new investigators are competing with established labs and members of the AAS who are submitting 30 grants per cycle. I was doing some very cool work with kids with epilepsy, which would greatly improve outcomes. I was a very valuable member of our collaboration; that research more or less came to a halt when I left, though I have been able to help out through consulting from time to time. So, what I did was in high demand and highly worthwhile, but there was a disconnect with getting the funding.

Am I being greedy? Maybe. There is that saying "you have to love yourself before you can love others." I think that might apply financially as well, particularly with regards to your family. It wasn't worth seeing my kids live in the stress of living paycheck to paycheck, going to crappy schools in crime-ridden areas that we can afford, with the added possibility of losing their dad because everyday he wonders if today is the day he drives off a bridge on the way home or something. If that means that my epilepsy research doesn't get done...then so be it. Vote for people who will increase research funding. So, when the offer came in and it was 3X what I was making as a prof, without considering bonuses, the weight of the world left my shoulders.

<comment><USER8> The cost of education (Fees) are going higher. Research/Researchers are not getting funded. Where is the money going to? Infrastructure of the universities?

<comment><USER9> My younger brothers undergraduate research mostly focused on answering this question in the University of California system. His conclusion is that funding was overwhelmingly going to the administrative faculty and has been doing so since UC let the administrative faculty have the most say in how he universities are run.

<comment><USER7> What could be done to change this?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I would say "stay as far away from academic research as you possibly can" is the best advice someone can get these days. It is an awful, stressful waste of the prime of your life.

From what I saw in biomed only 1/10,000 or so will end up with the time, skills, and appropriately ambitious project to allow a decent job to get done. The rest will be forced to produce BS (literally, most of it is just misinformation at this point) or quit before even graduating.

<comment><USER11> >I would say "stay as far away from academic research as you possibly can" is the best advice someone can get these days. It is an awful, stressful waste of the prime of your life.

On the other hand, spending some years pursuing a PhD can be a great time to build skills and introspect in life. I grew a lot in that time in a way I don't think I would have with a job.

Of course, if you have a very stressful advisor, it isn't worth it.

<comment><USER10> Actually, my adviser was quite laid back. As a result, I was _able_ to build a lot of skills in order to complete my project. However, notice I said _able_. I had to self-teach and self-fund to do it, the academic stuff was really just an obstacle.

I think something like a basic income would allow the a certain type of person to achieve the same, and do it much faster and cheaper than getting a higher degree. I wonder if that is one reason why most of these problems started when higher education/research became less of an "elite" activity, ie as discussed in subnaughts link in this thread: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12805406](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12805406)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> In the HN spirit, where's the opportunity? How can we help improve the life of researchers?

Start ups trying to help:

Science Exchange (YCS11) [https://www.scienceexchange.com/](https://www.scienceexchange.com/) : outsource parts of your research to companies

Instrumentl (YCS16) [https://www.instrumentl.com/](https://www.instrumentl.com/) : identify and push relevant grants towards applicable research

Experiment (YCW13) [https://experiment.com/](https://experiment.com/) : crowdfunding platform for scientific research

Transcriptic (YCW15) [https://www.transcriptic.com/](https://www.transcriptic.com/) : a robotic cloud laboratory for the life sciences

LabGuru [https://www.labguru.com/](https://www.labguru.com/) : inventory management and lab notebook

Lab Spend [https://labspend.com/](https://labspend.com/) : tracks spending and finds savings on supplies and chemicals

<comment><USER13> As a former scientist, current startup person: please stop. This is crass. Startups that sell services to scientists aren't helping with the fundamental problem (i.e. there aren't many jobs, and there isn't enough funding once you have a job). Crowdfunding is nice in theory, but just makes the problem of vanity science worse than it is right now. Crowds don't know shit about science.

If you want to help researchers, vote for people who will _increase scientific funding_. Much of this crunch is _directly_ attributable to congressional budgetary cutbacks since the early 2000s:

[http://www.faseb.org/portals/2/images/opa/Factsheet_Restore-...](http://www.faseb.org/portals/2/images/opa/Factsheet_Restore- NIH-Funding-Graph2.gif)

(Oh also: encourage your local billionaire(s) to stop funding ridiculous vanity projects, and do scientific good by giving grants to researchers who are already doing peer-reviewed work. Or just encourage them to give their money to the organizations that exist and do a great job of this, like HHMI, or the Gates Foundation. How _refreshing_ it would be to hear a nouveau riche Silicon Valley dudebro stand up and say: _" I want my money to have the tiniest chance of curing cancer in my lifetime -- a task so impossibly large that even my vast wealth and gigantic ego cannot possibly tackle it alone -- so I'm making a massive charitable donation to the National Cancer Institute!"_ Alas...)

<comment><USER14> Frankly, crowdfunded science scares the hell out of me.

Pretty much every time I've seen it, it consists of some fringe researcher promising one weird trick to cure A, B, and C. They don't get funding through traditional channels, because actual experts recognize the subtle-but- inescapable reasons they won't succeed, so instead they go to crowdfunding to squander a bunch of public money.

I'm sure this _could_ work, genuinely viable projects lack funding all the time, but it's generally because they weren't sexy enough for the grant committee. If the NIH thought it wasn't exciting enough, what are the chances the general public will choose it over some guy promising to cure cancer with nanomachines?

<comment><USER15> Yes!

The problem with funding science is simply the size of the pot; the way it's dolled out is actually quite reasonable given all the problems it could have.

Sure, you'll have cases of grants not getting funded because it runs contrary to the prevailing wisdom, and that is bad, but the magnitude of this problem is often overblown. You can swim against the current if you're careful about it and make a compelling case, absolutely.

Compare this to the issues of having anyone other than scientific peers judging the merits of work, and you'll see the easy advantage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> In the mid 90's, Caltech's David Goodstein predicted an impending "Big Crunch" in science, writing: "We must find a radically different social structure to organize research and education in science after The Big Crunch."

The essay is long but well worth reading: [https://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html](https://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html)

</comment><comment><USER17> My comment from a few days ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12717765](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12717765)

When I was first exposed to the research "environment" during my Diplom studies (undergraduate - graduate, early to mid 90ies), I immediately recognised that if you actually love research and knowledge, academia was the last thing you ever want to get into. No surer way to kill the spark.

Now that I've gone back to do my PhD, the only reason I can do something I consider meaningful is because I am not a regular PhD student. Interestingly, that's also the feedback I get, though as "helpful" advice that while what I am doing may be both good and important, it is unlikely to lead to success in academia. With the implication that I should stop doing it and concentrate on something more reasonable. Fortunately, I am not particularly interested in success in modern academia, so I get to do something I consider both good and important.

A related issue is that there really is no such thing as a senior researcher. Instead, professors are turned into research managers, responsible for helping their charges' careers, who then also turn into research managers. Actual research appears to be mostly a still not entirely avoidable side-effect. (And this seems similar to the way the only real way to advancement in industry is to switch to management, all dual-track equivalence rhetoric aside).

</comment><comment><USER18> I feel for these scientists. I understand what they went through- I went through it myself during the run-up of biomedical training in the mid-to-late 90's. After being a PI at a national lab for a few years, trying to get funded against more experienced scientists (some of whom copied my ideas!) I decided to move to industry.

Now I have a job with a well-defined 20% time dedicated to research with effectively no limits on what I can do. I don't need to ask for funding- the resources I need are just expenses I charge against my company's effectively infinite budget. If I want to write a paper, I do- and those papers get cited far more highly than my previous papers, because my employer's name is gold.

My salary is high enough that I maintain a lab in my garage and self-fund most of my experiments.

This path doesn't work for everybody (the number of positions in industry that allow this freedom is limited) but in my experience it allowed me far more time to be a productive researcher than if I had tried to be a professor at a tier-1 university or a researcher at a national lab.

Interestingly, my PhD training (in biomed) turned out to be ideal for being a data scientist, and my personal interests that I pursued during my training turned out to be ideal for working at my firm. In some sense, PhD programs produce the best programmers and researchers in industry, along with teaching a fair amount of how to deal with politics, which is critical in both academia and industry.

<comment><USER19> OT: pics of lab?

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I am finishing up my postdoc now. I went back to do a PhD from IT because I loved the field I was entering and ended up really enjoying my PhD. I learnt a lot, got exposed to some great minds, and raised the bar for my own standards of quality, efficiency and intellect. But now, after two years of a postdoc for a tenure track professor in the US, my academic dreams have unravelled. I am looking for jobs in industry even though I am being encouraged for academic track.

From my experience, it seems like the classic scientific research method of the old guard who I was mentored by is fading. The greats in my field would concentrate on one topic, work slowly, wrap it up, move to a new topic, and cultivate protoges. Now, the people securing tenure-track and tenure all seem to have half a dozen diverse projects to start with (to see which one suceeds and look hungry) - I see a lot of corner-cutting in their research - <USER2> bold is rewarded over detail and care.

Most of my peers whom I respect for their research output and well-roundedness haven't made the cut for academia. A cynical sure fire recipe for making tenure in academia? 1. Have a great knack for politics; 2. put yourself ahead of your students by treating them as monkeys for publishing with no regard for their scientific development; 3. cut corners (tell yourself you will fix it when you get tenure); and 4. be a narcissist - you can't afford to do anything that doesn't impact your track record positively (outreach counts!). That is not to say there are not some great people who have got positions - but the criteria for who makes the cut has changed sufficiently that it feels like it is being played by those who are willing to play the rules of the game. The worst part is that there is rarely any consequence down the line - once you have secured enough funding the community overlooks all but most severe transgressions.

</comment><comment><USER21> I'll put my 2 cents in here too.

PhD in bioeng. Not planning on academia. Unfortunately, most of my cohort of grad students are ... blind?... to the data that we all know is out there. I'm part of 2 groups on campus that specialize in industry networking and start- ups. We do monthly happy-hours where we pay for the beer and nachos and we also bring in speakers that have PhDs in industry to talk about the transition and network with them too. We get a lot of people (30+) to show up to these events.

But they are ALL 2nd or 3rd round post-docs. Almost no actual grad-students. I've talk to them. They all know that they have no real shot, they all know the odds in the lottery. They do not care. The only thing I can think is that these 22-27 year olds really think they can out-work each other and 'make it'. Past data in their lives says that they have always done so, and the next time should be no different. It's amazing that such smart people can be so damn bullheaded. Scientists are people too, including the stupidity.

</comment><comment><USER22> I'm curious why this field hasn't been "privatized" to some degree. Why doesn't division of labor apply? Why not have scientists go off and do their research and rely on a team that is skilled at hoarding grants or publishing works from raw data? I imagine it's probably due to some institutional barriers (e.g. you can't get funding outside of a university context).

I imagine the reason is as always - our leaders are two-faced in their support of science. They claim that it's a national issue but fail to make professorship even remotely competitive in the hard sciences. This kind of thing raises the most righteous indignation in me. We have a nation of know- nothing politicians claiming "We need more kids in STEM!" without doing anything to address the quagmire academia has become, largely because of over- competition for resources.

For all of this myopia around STEM it's largely a misnomer. No one in industry cares about climate science, geology, theoretical physics, abstract algebra, topology, combinatorics or number theory - at least not in the dollars and cents view. They may care insofar as there's a cash benefit, but not to the degree that they care about building better oil pipelines, faster algorithms and more efficient fabrics. So what we end up with is a world where Nike, Facebook and Exxon Mobil attract the best talent - a world where PhD's are basically forced to quit their jobs in order to go make money for the bourgeois.

<comment><USER23> > Why not have scientists go off and do their research and rely on a team that > is skilled at hoarding grants or publishing works from raw data?

Partly because science is very specialized. If I work on something new, then it's possible there is very few people in the world that know it or will easily understand it. I couldn't have someone else write a paper or grant proposal based on it - either they wouldn't understand it, or they are a fellow scientist who wouldn't want to do it either.

The mistake, in my opinion, is making the number of papers published a metric on which you determine a scientist's worth. Just like most metric-ization of society today, it's a bad idea.

<comment><USER24> I disagree on your first point- I think that there could be someone else who could write a grant proposal for me, provided that they a) expressed an interest in grant writing over benchwork / data analysis and b) were fluent enough in the field's literature to be able to translate my ideas into bureaucratic prose more elegantly and efficiently than me. Such a hypothetical individual might have some overlap with the "scientific popularizer" roles that we see cropping up with figures like Neil deGrasse Tyson or Bill Nye, in the sense that they could serve as a conduit between scientists and funding (whereas popularizers serve as links between scientists and the general public).

The issue is that this kind of idealized division of labor can't exist in the current climate- there just isn't enough money to distribute a researcher's load across multiple specialists. This results in researchers being expected to juggle advising, grant writing, committee work, publishing, coding, analysis, and teaching, which creates more stress on researchers and poorer quality results.

I do agree with you on your second point though- publish or perish is academia's equivalent to rank and yank.

<comment><USER24> As an aside, I doubt that psychology would be experiencing nearly the number of issues that it is now with replicability if psychologists were able to delegate their analysis to an in-house statistician for verification. Or maybe it would (assuming that the poor application of statistics is more of a socio- political issue, which might very well be the case).

<comment><USER10> >"the poor application of statistics"

It is actually statisticians who are at the root of the problem. There is no proper way to apply the statistics most people are taught (NHST). However, everyone tries (and fails) to come up with some way to use the stats because they can't believe they were taught to perform such a waste of time ritual. See here for a decent overview: [http://library.mpib- berlin.mpg.de/ft/gg/GG_Mindless_2004.pdf](http://library.mpib- berlin.mpg.de/ft/gg/GG_Mindless_2004.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> None of my research friends that have gone to industry regret it... Some of my friends that have gone on to academic jobs regret the decision.

</comment><comment><USER26> I've been in biomedical research for 15 years, and I am leaving the lab atm. Many of my peers are as well. It's not a viable or enjoyable career anymore. Funding is extremely political, and proposal reviews border on arbitrary. Typically, the funding has been decided by seniority and politics, and the review is justification.

I imagine that it will get better eventually, but I can't wait for that to come to pass, and I can't in good conscience advise others to do so.

<comment><USER27> If you don't mind me asking, are you moving to somewhere in the biomedical industry?

<comment><USER26> Yes, I started my own company. Doing something that I have wanted to for a while.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Many of these people will leave for academia. Some of them have spare time, or maybe will have spare time after their kids are grown, or will be able to retire early. Then they could become citizen scientists [1], independent scientists [2], etc.

Like independent film or video games, they couldn't compete head-on with big budget research. But they could presumably make progress in areas ignored by them: longer term, more fundamental research for example.

When I was a postdoc at MIT, it was common for the grad students to want to have a "lunatic fringe" track at conferences or an "unconvential ideas" seminar. But once you're in the heirarchy/buerocracy of academia, you understand why those don't exist. Perhaps independent scientists could actually do them?

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen_science](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen_science) [2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_scientist](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_scientist)

<comment><USER24> This is why I'm a fan of open data / data sharing, and why I wish federal grants would more emphasize intermediate steps that could lead to papers rather than the production of papers themselves. The barriers to data collection are quite large (it's at least $1 million to acquire an MRI scanner in my field, neuroimaging; a huge fixed cost that most individuals would never be able to afford), but the cost of hosting those data once they're acquired is trivial. Once up on the net and publicly shared, anyone can take a crack at the the data and see what they can find.

<comment><USER29> Funding bodies emphasize data sharing more and more. However, that is along or after a publication.

No one has figured out academic attribution of data-only in a satisfactory way yet, but some noteworthy attempts exist. E.g. [https://www.elsevier.com/connect/new-data-journal-lets- resea...](https://www.elsevier.com/connect/new-data-journal-lets-researchers- share-their-data-open-access)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I understand this article is mostly about the pressure of finding grants and doing research, but the role also includes teaching. I would be curious to hear, based on the experience of others, how much of the money generated by teaching a class goes to the professor.

Something like:

% = ($ Professor paid per Class) / (Students per Class * Number of Credits for Class * $ Charged per Credit)

At least by my calculations based on my own experience, 90% of the revenue here gets sucked up by overhead with only 10% going to the person teaching. If a non-profit was run this way, it would get shut down.

</comment><comment><USER31> Pure math phd here, now working in finance.

On a personal level I wish I could've been a research professor.

But on an objective level, in pure math the invisible hand of the market is acting correctly. There's already so much amazing pure math published, you could devote your whole life just to understanding 1/100th of the math published in the 1990s, to say nothing of the stuff published in 2016.

We don't need more basic researchers right now.

Sucks though that a lot of people (like me) have to watch a life dream crumble, though.

<comment><USER32> Do we need more finance people? I wouldn't say we "need" much of anything; we could go any which way.

So who says the invisible hand of the market is acting correctly if it makes your life dream of being a research professor crumble and forces you into finance work instead?

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> The problem I faced - and still am, to an extent - was that during my PhD I was given no support or really any information at all about the possibility of a life and career outside of academia. I was fortunate enough to be offered a postdoc position in the same group that I did my PhD (particle physics) before I'd actually submitted my thesis. However 6 months later I desperately needed a change and managed to find another postdoc as a research scientist in the Medical Physics department of a cancer hospital.

Medical physics research has felt more fulfilling than particle physics, but I'm now in a position where my current contract expires in around 9 months, and with a mortgage to pay and a family to support I have to decide between: looking for yet another short-term postdoc position (in a hopefully related field of physics) - ending up in exactly the same position in 2-3 years; starting to apply for grants and funding with my current research group - <USER3> very stressful process with no guarantees of anything; moving into industry / private sector - assuming that it'd be possible to find a company that had a need for the very specific knowledge base and skills that developed over the past 7 years.

Or all of the above, at the same time, while trying to continue working my current research projects.

As someone that has always had an interest in computing, data analysis and software, but has ended up approaching them from a physics-based direction, I don't feel qualified to compete with computer science/statistics grads for most of the software development or data science jobs that I see advertised.

I'm sure that there are other fields out there that would suit me, but having never had a non-academic-research job, I'm struggling to know where and what to look for. Does anyone have any practical advice for moving away from an academic career path?

<comment><USER34> >I don't feel qualified to compete with computer science/statistics grads for most of the software development or data science jobs that I see advertised.

I suspect you are more qualified than most oracle-developer-turned-data- scientists

Give it ago. review some of open source projects that can leverage your math or data understanding skills. Contribute to those. Use that as your experience/resume

<comment> hash-set I hate to burst your bubble, but outside of the major metros, there are few data science type jobs that are any good. It's an up-and-coming field, maybe-- but as someone with a PhD and a lot of software development experience, making the transition has been tricky (am still working on it). It may be a good track or it may fizzle out, we'll see.

A few superstars will do well, the rest will be an urban myth of potential prosperity and happiness.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> yeah, i left science for the reasons the article outlined.

it's a big weight off of my shoulders. i tell people who are thinking of going into science not to do so, now.

<comment> hash-set Me too. I loved it. I could not think of a better way I could have spent my 20s. But I was going broke and had to get out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> "as a young researcher moving to the private sector, he's had to prove himself all over again."

This is true and is worth anyone making the switch keeping in mind. Commercial companies want a commercial track record before they trust you with important decisions.

</comment><comment><USER37> i hear this is the same problem in politics. a ton of fundraising and very little politicking or whatever it is politicians use to do normally during the day.

</comment><comment><USER38> "mediocre science", that line says it all.

</comment><comment><USER39> The main problem with science is the lack of agile methodologies -- the scientific process is ripe for disruption.

<comment><USER40> Is this sarcastic?

<comment><USER39> Satire :)

<comment><USER40> Excellent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> hash-set Having gone through a lot of what is discussed in the article, I have concluded that academic research careers are for rich people only. I didn't even have student loans, but the pay was ridiculous given how many years of my 20s I spent in school, i.e. not making any income. Retirement is a real thing you know? So is getting old and having poor health.

The comments on the nature.com page are interesting, too. No matter how much you love your career and your research, there is more to life.

Also, you can see how climate research has become a total echo chamber--the people fighting over the scraps of funding will gladly sell their souls to a communist lie if that's what it takes to get by.

<comment><USER38> > I have concluded that academic research careers are for rich people only.

100% correct. There is a lot of artifitial barriers with the only purpose of deter the poor, introverted, physically disabled, unable to lie convincingly, or coming from incorrect countries to pass.

Maybe we should warn young people to not spending too much time doing science until reaching 50 years old or so. Science, as we understand it currently, is not much different to doing drugs. Will slurp all your money with some glimpses of a promised paradise, isolate you from friends and family, will boost your stress levels, increase your probability of having cancer and will damage your health. Your opportunities of having children or a good life will be seriously handicapped. I wonder why is not forbidden still.</comment></comment>


Judge suggests DMCA allows DVD ripping if you own the DVD - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/10/judge-suggests-dmca-allows-dvd-ripping-if-you-own-the-dvd.ars <comment><USER2> This ruling is inherently limited.

It is not rendered by an appellate court and is not binding on anyone but the parties immediately before the court. It poses two issues of broader interest - (1) whether a school that buys DVDs can legitimately convert the contents of the DVDs into streaming format without violating the anti-circumvention rules of DMCA and (2) whether it can stream such content broadly within its closed network without infringing copyright because such use is fair use - neither of which is answered in a way that gives the ruling any precedential value (as to issue 1, the parties did not brief, and the court did not discuss, the DMCA anti-circumvention rules but only the anti-trafficking rules; as to issue 2, the holder of the DVD rights had given express "public performance" rights to the school, which the judge took to authorize the challenged activity and which basically takes the discussion out of the fair use realm and puts it in the category of a dispute over the meaning of a licensing provision).

With oddball facts and oddball law, and somewhat cursory treatment of the key issues by the court, the ruling is purely a symbolic one for fair-use advocates. Nor is it likely to be appealed, as it stems from a motion to dismiss that the court granted but with "leave to amend" (meaning that it can be refiled with sharpened allegations). The ruling may be found here: [http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/document/UCLA_Streaming...](http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/document/UCLA_Streaming_Video_Ruling.pdf).

Hate to throw a wet blanket over this but I think this fairly sums up the significance of the ruling.

</comment><comment><USER3> "The perfunctory nature of Judge Marshall's analysis makes him seem less like a hardcore DMCA reformer than a judge who didn't do his homework."

Wow, a judge rules correctly, and because he didn't spend pages talking about your pet subject, he's an idiot?

Cripes, no wonder we can't make headway against DRM if zealots insult everyone who isn't a zealot.

<comment><USER4> The fact that he didn't spend pages talking about it is not the issue, but that he didn't when there's a large amount of case law that interprets the anti-circumvention clause of the DMCA completely differently. The second update to the story provides a more likely reasoning for the lack of analysis:

"Update: New York Law School's James Grimmelmann emails to suggest an alternative explanation or the shortness of the judge's DMCA analysis. He notes that the plaintiffs focused their arguments on the trafficking provisions of the DMCA, but ignored the circumvention provisions. Since the plaintiffs didn't raise the circumvention issue, Judge Marshall didn't need to address it. He dismissed the lawsuit without prejudice, so Ambrose can amend its complaint and try again."

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The article seems to gloss over the difference between owning a DVD and merely "licensing" it. As far as I know, I don't legally "own" any DVDs because the all have shrink-wrap licenses that say I don't own them, but just have a license to use them.</comment>


Augur, the oracle of web3, plans its rise from the ashes - <AUTHOR> https://decrypt.co/8470/fixing-augur <comment><USER2> I'm really looking for this markets to come out and work. I tried to find a way of looking how the market forecast some events (like the price of soy for example) but I don't know where to start.</comment>


Web developers, what SaaS tools would you like to see created? - <AUTHOR>

There are a lot of SaaS tools popping up nowadays. In the midst of all of these tools. What are some that don't yet exist that you would like to see created to make your life easier? <comment><USER2> There's one tool I've always wanted - An analysis tool for my database queries. Something which directly injects into my framework (Django/RoR etc) and gives me detailed analysis of the time and memory used by the queries.

AFAIK, New Relic provides one such tool but I think there's still a long way to go.

</comment><comment><USER3> serious, modern, WYSIWYG HTML / CSS / JS editor.

<comment><USER4> macaw looks good

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Baremetrics for PayPal would be great.

<comment><USER6> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8783103](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8783103)

Any good?

<comment><USER5> Yep, looks interesting. Will give it a try (added myself for the beta test), are you affiliate with them ? Thanks for the head up.

<comment><USER6> Not affiliated, just remembered the "Shown HN" post when I saw your comment :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> draw with my voice - to make vector graphics.</comment>


A new take on an old design (London Underground Map) - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2011/07/london-underground-map

<comment><USER2> IMHO, geographic accuracy is an all-or-nothing feature of a network diagram. If it doesn't help you decide between walking or riding, then it should optimise for riding.

This map lacks Beck's clean, diagrammatic style without really adding much, in fact, unless you look very carefully, it seems not to include the fact that Mornington Crescent is on the Charing Cross Branch.

Beck's map works because it completely ignores the world above ground, and allows you to navigate the system at a glance.

That said, I have seen one advantage to this map. Platform Compass directions. For example:

Stations on the Piccadilly Line, from Turnpike Lane to Cockfosters have East- and Westbound platforms. This doesn't make sense when read in conjunction with Beck's map, which draws that as a vertical line, which most people would interpret as North/South. On this map, you can easily see that East means towards, and West, away from Central London.

<comment><USER2> On the very local scale, this map seems to work (the relationship between Leicester Square and its 4 neighbouring stations looks about right).

On a larger scale, it doesn't seem to work. I looked at a few journeys I regularly take on foot: two @ 1 mile, one being about twice as far as the other on the map. Another two @ 2.5 and 3 miles, which were 4 and 5 times the distance of the shorter mile, respectively.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Just visited London for vacation a few weeks ago. As a non-Londoner, I have to say that I like the new version much better. I can already see several mistakes that I made when choosing which routes to take-- mistakes that I doubt I would have made had I had access to this map. Bravo.

<comment><USER2> Could you give some examples?

In Zone 1, the stops are so frequent that the number of stops is normally far more significant than the distance between them; and in the outer zones, you rarely have a choice anyway.

<comment><USER3> Mostly it has to do with where things are in reality on the surface rather than taking wrong routes. You can look at a map of London and try to correlate the stations on that map with the "official" non-geographical version, or you can have a map of London and a map of the tube system that's fairly close to it. Just going off the Thames alone makes it easier to figure out where the best place to get off is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> There's a similar geographically accurate map on wikimedia, but without the simplifications, such as making the section of the circle/district line through from Notting Hill Gate to Edgware Road straight. Removing some of the curves and the other changes, while relatively small, really makes the map easier to read. [http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/08/London_Un...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/08/London_Underground_Zone_1.png)

As an aside, there's some details on wikimedia about how the geographically accurate maps are plotted: [http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/London_Underground_geograp...](http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/London_Underground_geographic_maps)

</comment><comment><USER5> This map might make it easier to see how the tube reflects the geography, and so conjure a better image of London, but it makes using the tube system much harder.

As case in point, the fork in the Northern line at Kennington is much harder to comprehend and the number of tourists who get bewildered by this feature on the current map is large enough as it is.

It also still misrepresents a lot of the distances between stations, (Old St to Farringdon is a long way, much further than Old St or Moorgate to Liverpool St). If you are going for a concept of geographical correctness it has to be very exact or a complete abstraction.

</comment><comment><USER2> Another odd thing about this effort, is that it solves a problem that doesn't exist any more.

The TFL Journey planner will take you from anywhere in London to anywhere else in London using the most appropriate route; Google directions include both public transport and pedestrianism; GPS is on a lot of people's phones; and Legible London fixes the problem for the technophobic.</comment>


Twitter partners with Square to add campaign donation buttons - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/09/15/us-usa-election-twitter-idUSKCN0RF1WC20150915 <comment><AUTHOR> Why use Square (not a traditional payments API company) and not Stripe, Braintree, or WePay?</comment>


Why Land on the Moon? (1963) - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/63aug/jastrow.htm?single_page=true <comment><USER2> "We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard." (JFK) [1]

Probably my favorite quote of all time. Those were the times.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwFvJog2dMw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwFvJog2dMw)

<comment><USER3> I always found that quote incredibly pointless. If you just want to do something because it's hard, there's lots of options, the cheapest is to turn up the difficulty on a game.

Don't waste tax payer money sending humans to the moon for no scientific purpose - leave that to the machines. Hard things can be wasteful too, just because something is hard doesn't make it valuable.

<comment><USER4> Come now. We've wasted a lot more tax payer money on endeavors with much less reward.

[http://thevietnamwar.info/how-much-vietnam-war- cost/](http://thevietnamwar.info/how-much-vietnam-war-cost/) Vietnam War cost more than putting a man on the moon

[http://www.reuters.com/article/us-iraq-war-anniversary- idUSB...](http://www.reuters.com/article/us-iraq-war-anniversary- idUSBRE92D0PG20130314)

Imagine how $2 trillion of R&D would have changed the world.

<comment><USER3> I agree we've definitely wasted far more money in far worse ways, but it still doesn't change the fact it's wasteful scientifically and economically speaking, just because there are bigger wastes doesn't mean we should accept all smaller ones, this is known as the "fallacy of relative privation" or "not as bad as" fallacy.

<comment><USER4> When you say wasteful, you mean not the most efficient?

Because science and engineering benefited from the project. we are better off for having done the project. However, we could've gained the same knowledge in other ways, for less money.

So, if it costs of $25 billion to put a man on the moon, and the same knowledge could have acquired for $15 billion, you think the effort was wasted?

<comment><USER5> I get the feeling many forget the value in simply inspiring generations of people; think of all those who have increased aspirations as a result of that event - what is the worth / value of that?

<comment><USER6> Or maybe the fact that we didn't do it would inspire a new generation to achieve something (going to the Moon) that is still out there to do. I don't think anyone is forgetting the inspirational value, just challenging whether it was value for money.

For what it's worth the moon landing had a profound effect on me. I was 6 during Apollo 17 and still remember looking up at the moon and knowing there were people on it at that moment.

<comment><USER5> You may be right, it's very hard to measure these things. Though that's part of my point too - why are people so sure when they claim it's a waste? (they should at least consider they might be mistaken)

Living around the time of Apollo 17 must have been very interesting. I was born a few years later, with no more manned trips to the moon. In line with your point, I guess I had to find other things to motivate me!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I use the moon challenge as a time, before cable, when the media was the glue that kept the country together.

One single view repeated over time.

Then, imo, cable and now the internet has changed glue to acid that breaks us apart.

I have not changed but how we get information and news has.

Can we have another moon moment? Probably not but to me the better introspective question is am I adapting to how information is sought, ignored and processed by me???

<comment><USER8> It's hard to have a "moon moment" in times where there is a large population that think we never landed on the moon, and half the country believes in alternative facts.

<comment><USER7> And the third half have trouble with statistics.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> A brilliant example of competition driving human achievement. Pity we lacked a more worthy opponent, though; otherwise we might well now be on Mars. Or they might - it'd be a win for the species, either way.

<comment><USER10> The scientists from 1963 were right even then: the robots were enough to explore the Moon, transporting human flesh and bones around and keeping them alive is not something that directly increases our knowledge of the Universe. The "man on the Moon" was a political, not a scientific project.

The worst place on Earth is still better suited for human life than either Moon or Mars or any other object in the Solar system. We depend on almost all, compared to the other objects, unique properties of the Earth. And the other stars, which could have the planets more suited for us are many light years away. The humanity must learn to respect the Earth. We won't get a way to easily survive without Earth no matter how we'd like to.

Global warming or a nuclear weapon "accident" are too probable to wipe out what the humanity achieved up to now for us to ignore the necessity of urgently solving these. Not to mention even more "inconvenient" questions of the whole approach to the use of all the Earth resources.

We still have to clean up our own backyard first. There is no known reachable second Earth waiting for us and we won't discover it by experimenting with the survival of a few persons on Mars. The human life is not self-sustainable there and it won't be even if we create some "colony."

<comment><USER11> What makes you think human life on Mars is not sustainable? Mars has everything we need to live.

<comment><USER12> Except air, water, food and protection from space radiation?

<comment><USER13> We can generate/recycle most if not all of these from or on mars. Surely not trivial, but possible. Air, water, food are a loop we already know well, and structures arent new...

<comment><USER10> We don't have even sustainable use of the Earth resources, even if the Earth is actually suited for human life, but you somehow imagine that we'd be able to do better on Mars, which isn't suited for life at all, having no magnetosphere?

Please study where the energy on Earth comes from and how the rare materials are obtained.

The basic assumption of all "Mars colonies work" theories is the functioning Earth civilization that supports it, paying a lot for it (at least in resources and work) to support it.

The argument for having a Mars colony is "in case something happens to Earth." But "in case something happens to Earth" the Mars colony dies. It's that simple.

<comment><USER14> > We don't have even sustainable use of the Earth resources, even if the Earth > is actually suited for human life, but you somehow imagine that we'd be able > to do better on Mars, which isn't suited for life at all, having no > magnetosphere?

Is a magnetosphere the only way to shield from radiation?

> The basic assumption of all "Mars colonies work" theories is the functioning > Earth civilization that supports it, paying a lot for it (at least in > resources and work) to support it.

Supply ships are essential for the bootstrapping of any colony, but Mars does have everything we need long term.

> The argument for having a Mars colony is "in case something happens to > Earth." But "in case something happens to Earth" the Mars colony dies. It's > that simple.

It's not simple, it's actually quite complex and interesting. Read up on Mars exploration, everything has been addressed except for the will of the people.

<comment><USER10> > Mars does have everything we need long term.

Earth doesn't have it for the long-term high-tech life under our current ways of life. We use hydrocarbons as the main source of energy, and we used up half of them in just 100 years. The other significant source of energy is liquid water in the atmospheric cycle, completely not existing on Mars, due to the lack of the comparable atmosphere.

We have problems with the small changes in weather here on Earth, consider the weather conditions there if we would try to mess up with the atmosphere there.

If you tell me "nuclear energy" \- look how fragile it is on Earth. In Mars environment it's even more. The life on Mars is not self-sustainable. Having a colony there won't allow us to discover the solutions which we lack right now on the Earth.

<comment><USER11> Solar works on Mars. Nuclear energy is not fragile.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Damn it guys. We've been on the moon! We actually launched rockets carrying people off the planet to _the moon_.

What the fuck. If that doesn't give you butterflies and plaster a massive childish smile on your face, I'd conjecture that there's something wrong with you.

<comment><USER9> It helps not to know in detail the difference between the space program we had, and the one we could have had. If you've seen _2001: A Space Odyssey_ , its entire first act, and a fair fraction of the second, were predicated on the assumption that the Apollo missions would serve as the preliminary to _real_ human space colonization which their architects intended that they be.

For those excited about the concept of space colonization who wish to stay that way, I don't suppose I can unreservedly recommend detailed study of the US manned space program's history, especially not that post-1969. To say that such study can be disillusioning beggars language. It does, though, answer a whole slew of questions which all more or less boil down to: "What the hell _happened?_ " But it's up to each interested individual to evaluate for herself whether the acquisition of such knowledge is worth more or less than the fatigue its possession is likely to inflict on her idealism.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> It makes me sad when I think of the sacrifices made by previous generations for the greater good, to consider that in our time we're happy to gamble with the future just to make things more comfortable for us in the present.

In the 1940s, millions of people made the ultimate sacrifice to defeat tyranny, then in the 60s huge amounts were invested into technology, transforming society, but we can't even agree on a carbon tax to start to pay for the mess we're making, never mind trying to come up with ways to reverse the damage.

A green economy should be our generation's Moon landing. Massive investment in basic research and into renewables, energy storage and transport, and improved materials could again transform the world, and benefit all of us, but I guess if you can't physically see your enemy then there's just not enough urgency.

</comment><comment><USER17> I recommend the book 'Flight' by Christopher Kraft. It's a quick read, and a really enjoyable history lesson about the development of the US space program.

</comment><comment><USER18> That was completely unconvincing. Sending people to the moon was a mistake. Totally a job for robots.

<comment><USER19> They didn't have robots in 1969, at least nothing that could do almost anything useful. They did send a bunch of automated probes to orbit and the Moon back in those days, and most of them failed because the tech was so poor, and the few that didn't fail didn't do much useful science anyway.

<comment><USER20> To be clear, Venera 7 landed on Venus and transmitted data in 1970. We did have robots (probes, landers) that while crude by today's standards, did serve a scientific purpose.

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

<comment><USER19> Venera 7 lasted less than an hour and only transmitted one or two crappy images, along with some sensor data. Granted, humans can't do any better on the surface of Venus due to the temperature and pressure, but humans _can_ do far better than that on the Moon with ~1969 technology, and they did. Humans brought back many kilograms of rock samples, they set up a bunch of experiments, they drove around for hours on a buggy (in the later landings, not Apollo 11); they did FAR more than any lander of the time could possibly have done.

<comment><USER20> I'm thrilled that we went to the moon, and am glad we did. Venera is just an example of a possible alternative to what we chose to do by sending humans in that era. Less science for less money.

1969 space technology was the result of a mandate to get humans on the moon. A mandate to get robots on the moon would have likely radically increased the ability of these robots to collect data as compared to what Venera accomplished.

I'm still +1 for human exploration.

<comment><USER19> You're forgetting that we _already sent_ landers to the Moon before we sent people. We didn't get much out of them. We just didn't have the technology, and the public wasn't going to be excited by a campaign that went like this: "it's too dangerous and expensive to send people to the Moon, so we're going to invest a ton of money into robotics technology so we can send robots there in 40 years!" A mandate to put robots there any faster wouldn't have worked; we just didn't have the technology. We developed a _lot_ of our current computing technology IN the Apollo program itself, so the reason our computer- driven automation is so good these days is because we _did_ send people to the Moon, instead of waiting and hoping for technology to improve.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Can be read as a question about real estate.

The moon was not claimed for the USA (though a USA flag was planted). What if the moon was less like Antartica, amd more like California?

</comment><comment><USER22> After USA got schooled by a bunch of "commies" who were able to make history by putting the first human and satellite in space (among other things), America had to prove to the world that a nation as filthy rich as theirs was not a total waste of space and was still capable of rivaling the dirt poor USSR which only a few decades ago consisted primarily of illiterate, toothless peasants.

US claimed that they did it for mankind, yet they never shared any knowledge, technology, or offered any assistance to other countries to allow them to make the similar advances in an effort to progress our world towards bigger goals. Who knows, maybe mankind could've been on Mars by now if everyone had the know-how. The whole thing was an impressive, yet selfish and ultimately useless, feat.

Well, at least all the American kids can now claim that "they've" been to the moon.

<comment><USER23> What are you talking about? Have you heard of the ISS? Hubble? NISAR? The Apollo-Soyuz Test Project? In what world does NASA not share its knowledge and technology?</comment></comment>


How to afford anything - <AUTHOR> http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/how-to-afford-anything.htm <comment><USER2> Literally a list of "Don't"s, even the paragraphs are titled with "Don't do A".</comment>


Ask HN: Open-source requirements management? - <AUTHOR> Does anyone know an open-source requirements management tool?<p>Something like Polarion Requirements or DOORS, just smaller and open source. <comment><USER2> If you mean an open-source project I don't know. But if you need something free for open-source : [https://gemnasium.com/](https://gemnasium.com/)

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm looking for an open-source project, yes.</comment></comment>


If I were starting out now (in startup land), I would clone threewords.me  - <AUTHOR> http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2011/02/if-i-were-starting-out-i-would-clone-threewordsme.html

<comment><USER2> Kinda huge assumption that you are going to go viral. Mark himself said in some earlier thread that he has been trying many things for many years and this was the one that took off.

Bottom-line is that you can predict what would go viral as much as you can predict what would be fashionable. Not that much.

<comment><USER3> You don't have to predict. That's why you clone :)

<comment><USER4> Some things seem like they're a one-shot though, e.g. the Million Dollar Home Page.

<comment><USER3> But this doesn't seem like one of them IMHO.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Good idea. I'm on it.

<comment><USER3> Are you for real?

<comment><USER6> I'm guessing you caught that sarcasm, but for anybody who is unaware - he's the one who made threewords.me

<comment><USER3> Oh, I caught it, but it is still a valid question :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Somewhat related question:

If a viral project takes off and a month later 95% of your traffic has died off, but you find yourself with 10 million email addresses (signups), is it ethical or even legal to promote a completely unrelated project by emailing everyone?

I'm sure you could word it in a way that doesn't seem too spammy ("Thanks for checking out xxxx, try our new project: yyyyy").

I'm in this situation.. I've held off so far, as tempting as it is, because I hate spam myself..

<comment><USER8> Can you update your original project with something worth mailing people about, then include in its footer and in the footer of the mail-out, something along the lines of:

"The Makeee network includes OriginalProject.com and the all new NewProject.com (has to be seen to be believed!)."

Or:

"PS. If you've got time, please check out my latest project - I'd really appreciate your feedback."

Or, perhaps a little spammy, do a joint mail-out for two projects in one newsletter?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> First, it's fun. I can't argue that that may be the case.

Second, you'll learn a ton by working with millions of users. This is predicated on the huge assumption that your viral platform attracts millions of users, and that a large number of these (assuming every new internet entrepreneur is doing one...) are sustainable.

Third, it will pay off. Mark's pay-off, I'm sure, was more than he initially envisioned. That amount, to my knowledge, however, remains undisclosed. I don't believe enough evidence exists to assure such a payoff and create such confidence.

Fourth, you can use the user base to launch another startup. Sure, 1% of ~10M users is cool. But that, again, rests on the assumption that you can build up that base of 10M users.

I realize that this formula may have worked, and that value could likely be created from cloning it. Cloning just _may_ work. I can't shake off the feeling, though, that a bit of misinformation is being spread here.

[edit for clarification]: Of course, both the author's post and my response is solely opinion, which makes my use of the word misinformation, well, misinformation. What I mean to say is that I can't help but draw comparisons to "get rich quick" schemes, where opinion was packaged in such a way that people _took_ it as fact.

<comment><USER10> > Sure, 1% of ~10M users is cool. But that, again, rests on the assumption > that you can build up that base of 10M users.

Also, he forgets that there are numbers less than 1%.

<comment><USER3> 1% wasn't chosen out of a hat. I see it in real (startup) life a lot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> 1) although you can hope for it, you can't guarantee something will become viral. threewords.me could have just as easily been another "project" had it been pushed out at the wrong time, sent to the wrong people, etc. etc. there's a lot of luck involved. i'm glad it took off the way it did. Mark made sure he would maximize the viral potential by having it easily shareable, etc, but that alone didn't make it viral.

2) i'm just jealous that he got real time experience in learning to scale his servers to support the crazy growth in users. not many people in the world have experienced viral growth with their webapps or startups. so congrats to Mark.

</comment><comment><USER11> it's on now, baby: fourwords.me

(fivewords.me, sixwordsme.com.au, etc.)

<comment><USER12> Cool, and then when the enumerable infinity of naturals is registered, let's go transcendental.</comment></comment>


FBI Removes Recommendation to Encrypt Your Phone - <AUTHOR> https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150325/17430330432/fbi-quietly-removes-recommendation-to-encrypt-your-phone-as-fbi-director-warns-how-encryption-will-lead-to-tears.shtml

<comment><USER2> I am _so_ mirroring a copy of this page in case they send a takedown demand to the Internet Archive.</comment>


Having trouble with the IRS site? Try all caps - <AUTHOR> https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2020-04-27/irs-website-hack-coronavirus-stimulus-checks-all-caps <comment><USER2> Fun fact: The IRS Economic Impact Payment (EIP) site for non-filers is run by Intuit. [0]

You gotta love those who lobby against simplifying tax processes and harvest data on behalf of the IRS. And, I'm absolutely convinced Intuit will treat that sensitive data with the utmost respect and would never, ever resell a list of people who haven't filed taxes in a couple of years in order to discriminate against them in loan applications, leases, and purchases.

0\. [https://www.freefilefillableforms.com/static/privacy_stateme...](https://www.freefilefillableforms.com/static/privacy_statement.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> So this worked for me, but I hadn't tried since a couple weeks ago (maybe the all-caps thing was fixed by yesterday?). What's funny is that the subsequent step (verifying tax info) had a couple of other old-school slightly bad practices:

\- Blocking copy-paste of my bank account information

\- Input value for income can't contain commas or a dollar sign

\- Obscuring input field of SSN as if it were a password (I suppose this might not seem wrong to some folks, but technically SSN isn't a password and most other sites I've used don't treat it like a password)

<comment><USER4> An old college friend of mine from 30+ years ago used to write his SSN on every college book he bought. He also used an engraver to etch his SSN into every tool he owned. The SSN was't all that important back then. I can't say when it became something of potential value.

Sadly he passes many years ago. His wife called me in desperation. She needed to get rid of and donate a bunch of tools and hardware filling their garage. However, _everything_ had his SSN on it, I mean, he had an amazing collection of Snap-on tools with his SSN engraved on everything, down to the screwdrivers.

She trust me implicitly. We took everything out of their garage and donated it to our local high school's robotics club. The caveat was: The kids had to help me grind off the SSN from every single tool they got. That was an interesting week.

<comment><USER5> You wasted a week. :)

SSN for deceased people is published broadly in various forms.

<comment><USER4> Well, I had to honor a widow's request.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Fun Fact: USPS prefers that the address is written in all caps. [https://pe.usps.com/text/pub28/28c2_033.htm](https://pe.usps.com/text/pub28/28c2_033.htm)

So I bet there is some internal API that searches or something for an address with all caps.

<comment><USER7> I tried to change my address today on [https://moversguide.usps.com](https://moversguide.usps.com)

In the address form, there is a field for PO Box. It is labeled "PO Box". One would assume you should type your PO Box number in this field, e.g. "1234". That is incorrect. You must enter the entire string "PO Box 1234". In a field that is already labeled "PO Box"

<comment><USER5> I think that field can be used for other box purposes. "PO Boxes" are exclusively offered by the USPS, but there are private providers that provide a "PMB" mailbox, which depending on the situation may just a number. I think military post office may use that field as well.

It's been a long time since I've had to look at it, but there is a Postal Addressing Standards document that covers all of the various use cases. It actually gets pretty interesting when you need to get a letter delivered to a customer mailbox at a UPS store in an area with rural mail delivery.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Been checking everyday without success. I haven't gotten a refund in several years, so I knew from the FAQ they would not have direct deposit info, even though they pulled the money I owed out using the same bank info.

Tried all uppercase for my street address and it worked.

</comment><comment><USER9> For what it is worth, errors are being hammered out. The first few times I received "unspecified error" then tried it again one day and it worked like a charm.

<comment><USER10> Same, frankly given so little heads up I'm amazed things have gone as smoothly as they have

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This may be the reason why every accountant I know live and breathe in perpetually CAPS LOCK ON mode.

</comment><comment><USER12> [https://archive.md/oP5AW](https://archive.md/oP5AW)

<comment><USER13> Thank you! The current Internet is not usable, all those paywalls. I miss 2000s.

<comment><USER14> Having trouble with the LA Times site? Try without Javascript

       curl https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2020-04-27/irs-website-hack-coronavirus-stimulus-checks-all-caps?_amp=true|sed -n 's/.*<title>/<title>/;/footersubscribe/d;/<h1/,/<\/h1>/p;/<title>/p;/<blockquote/p;/<p>/p' > 1.htm

       firefox ./1.htm

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> What bothers me is that they provide a single line to enter your information instead of the same form they have on your tax return.

For probably good reasons they won't tell you if your input information is valid, if you intentionally put in a bad address it will tell you "payment status unavailable."

It's annoying because I don't know if my issues are because of my tax status or my input information. A form would help with that. Particularly because my street has ambiguous naming and I don't know if it's what the street sign says, what the USPS prefers, or what is written on my tax return.

</comment><comment><USER16> I tried a 100 times but then used the shortened version of north and drive (ie N and Dr). And it worked. Shame on me for using the address spelled out on a letter from the IRS.

</comment><comment><USER17> I accept that I have a number of beliefs that are considered heretical to other programmers. = Should be for testing equality, not assignment. Null should equal null in SQL. Whitespace is a bad delimiter.

But my most heretical belief is that the _only_ thing that should be case- sensitive is passwords. Any system that is case-sensitive by default will eventually break your heart about it in the stupidest possible way.

<comment><USER18> I agree (with pedantic caveats not worth mentioning) with everything you've listed, unless you're using the regex view of what whitespace is and think the \t character is a bad delimiter, well then, that's where I draw the line.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I just tried this and, well, it worked for me (TM) - it had not worked previously.

</comment><comment><USER20> This is not so surprising for someone that has worked a lot with legacy systems.

Deep down somewhere there is a LIKE 'EML STREET%'. Making it case insensitive will kill the performance because the index cant be used.

<comment><USER21> Right, but the system could convert the value to all caps after you enter it, no?

<comment><USER22> The contractors who designed this would need more time and money to add that feature. Probably 4 weeks, 100K.

<comment><USER23> I was about to say.

It could almost be a 2-liner Javascript (gasp!), 1 to import jQuery (more gasps!) and 1 to run all inputs through toUpperCase()...

The bill will be 95K, thanks!

<comment><USER24> To be fair, the 95K (imaginary, I know, but let's just roll with that) is not for paying you to write those four lines, but rather to pay you for your investment in knowing that you only have to write those four lines.

Same as the restaurant bill is not equal+margin to what they spend on food, it's also everything else like rent, salaries + margin.

<comment><USER25> Or rather, the 95K also includes the formal verification testing for the boatload of downstream systems that get the data.

That is usually what makes cost in government projects explode as they are an utterly wild mix-and-match of code and hardware that is from the earliest era of mainframes 60 years ago to stuff that has been made in the last half year. Alone testing for encoding issues can take weeks... because most testing has to be done and verified manually.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I was trying almost every day including yesterday, did this and it worked. If it is required to be all caps it'd be nice if the site said so... I guess maybe they just finally loaded my data.

</comment><comment><USER27> The payment status not available message was (still is? I don't need to check it anymore) a general error message.

Also noticed the page is running Google Analytics. Might that be a privacy issue?

</comment><comment><USER28> The sovereign citizen types are going to make hay with this one.

</comment><comment><USER29> I got mine by typing my address in all lowercase, so ymmv :)

</comment><comment><USER30> Also abbreviate address terms: RD, LN, ST, not Road, Lane, Street.

<comment><USER31> Yes but also try with periods after all abbreviations. Ave. St. Ln. Ct. Apt. [https://twitter.com/eruditechick/status/1253703820430827521](https://twitter.com/eruditechick/status/1253703820430827521)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> could this be because it bypasses a cached response? does it work if one just changes capitalization of any character? (i have no deal with the IRS so cant test myself)

</comment><comment><USER33> COBOL like caps?

<comment><USER34> Yeah that was my initial reaction as well - seems like a clue that everything gets devolved to a COBOL backend.

It really wouldn't surprise me.</comment></comment>


Khronos Vulkan API 1.0 release iminant-OSS hetero computing and graphics API - <AUTHOR> http://wccftech.com/khronos-group-vulkan-api-release-imminent/ <comment><AUTHOR> I am super excited for this. It's a key piece missing to the puzzle of modern high performance computing. It should allow for much more flexible and portable implementations that will make the most of whatever hardware it is currently running on. It will be easier to share memory between compute and graphics threads and it will not be bound to vendor specific hardware.

<comment><USER2> > It should allow for much more flexible and portable implementations

I wish I shared your optimism, but without any support on Mac/iOS and Windows support only for desktop apps (I don't think Vulkan will be available for Windows Store apps, though I'd love to be wrong) I don't know how portable Vulkan is going to be in practice.

Once the middleware matures I'm hoping it'll be a good thing for predictability, though. And I'll be surprised and disappointed if tooling to compile DX12 and Metal shaders to SPIR-V doesn't appear in fairly short order, so if you're using an API abstraction layer then _apps_ should be getting more portable.

<comment><AUTHOR> My optimism may be getting the best of me. I don't really see this as a silver bullet that will solve all our problems in a single stroke, but I think it's a place to start for a sane approach for heterogeneous computing.

when I say "much more flexible and portable implementations" I'm mostly talking about GPGPU code.

I hear what you're saying, here's to hoping that SPIR-V will be able to fill in the gaps.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> There have been several recent threads about the Vulkan API: [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=vulkan%20points%3E10&sort=byDa...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=vulkan%20points%3E10&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&prefix&page=0)

The current article falls in the "announcement of an announcement" category, which is basically always fluff. If the release is imminent, we can have a discussion when it exists.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry about that. I missed the other discussions. I am pretty pumped to give this a spin.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> An open standard is not OSS, so using those terms here is pretty disingenuous. You might get AMD to release an open source driver. Not sure if they actually intend to release a real, performany driver, or just a launcher with hooks into an ICD

</comment><comment><USER5> What's up with this title? "Khronos Vulkan API 1.0 release iminant-OSS hetero computing and graphics API" Is OSS hetero computing a new buzzword?

Actual article title is: "Release of Next Generation, Vulkan API is Imminent – Khronos Group Confirms, API Getting Final Polishes"

<comment><AUTHOR> trying to add some more context but I was limited to 80 characters.

These guys can explain it much better than me:

[https://www.khronos.org/vulkan](https://www.khronos.org/vulkan)

my excited fanboyish rant:

It's an open source cross-platform performance oriented heterogeneous computing API that enables you to build fast low level code that does a good job of supporting massive GPU style concurrency as well as CPU style threads and switch between them at runtime.

With this API it will be easier to write fast parallel code that will make the most of whatever hardware is available while breaking down the barriers that arise when managing threads on both system and GPU memory.

In my opinion it is the foundation for the next generation of HPC. I am interested in this from a performance and from a language perspective. I'd like to see things like PyCuda and PyOpenCL for vulkan and hooks into other higher level languages like Go.

Maybe even whole new languages/runtimes built using the vulkan API as the foundation.

I know I sound a little crazy here but this is something I've been waiting for for many years. Ever since I ran into issues with cuda and opencl.

<comment><USER5> Ah, that 80-char limit is irritating...

I would love to see Vulkan take off and get good adoption. Ultimately, though, it's going to come down to how good the driver support is, I think. If there is a serious effort and buy-in from the major vendors and OS providers, then it might take off. Otherwise, it might just be another thing, and contribute to the fragmentation in the GPU space.

Will Apple continue with their Metal platform, instead of, or in addition to Vulkan? Microsoft will back DirectX 12 by default, and if it is a situation where NVidia or AMD or Intel have to provide decent Windows Vulkan drivers, we're back to the same situation OpenGL is in. I don't know enough about the situation in Android-land. General-purpose GPU usage is interesting, but if Vulkan is going to gain mindshare, game developers are the ones that are going to have to pick it over any of the alternatives.

<comment><AUTHOR> Game devs are always the first ones aren't they?

Valve is on board:

[http://wccftech.com/vulkan-reason-create-dx12-backend- valves...](http://wccftech.com/vulkan-reason-create-dx12-backend-valves- ginsburg/)

Nvidia is on board:

[https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NVIDIA-V...](https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NVIDIA- Vulkan-Nearing-Release)

Google is onboard for Android:

[http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/08/android-to-support- vu...](http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/08/android-to-support-vulkan- graphics-api-the-open-answer-to-metal-and-dx12/)

Of course it's too early to know if it will get traction but I am stoked to get a chance to play around with the API. I have a few simulations that no longer work in PyOpenCL and I'm dying to try porting them to something like vulkan.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnOmy1ly6M0&list=PLCN- Ml6vUJ...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnOmy1ly6M0&list=PLCN-Ml6vUJ- JTiqdvcHd0vZVSXDpw_RcW)

<comment><USER6> That n-body simulation is very cool.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks! Here's the archived google code project page containing everything:

[https://code.google.com/p/stableorbit/](https://code.google.com/p/stableorbit/)

But I suspect you'd be more interested in the Github branch if you felt like taking a look at how I and a friend butchered some pyopencl example code and got it working:

[https://github.com/ubernaut/stableorbit/tree/pyopencl- nbody](https://github.com/ubernaut/stableorbit/tree/pyopencl-nbody)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Earth to warm more quickly, new climate models show (By 2100, could rise 6.5C) - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2019-09-earth-quickly-climate.html <comment><USER2> And the really scary thing is that anything above +8℃ has a very real chance of flipping the planet into a Venus Scenario. Recent work has shown that the Earth sits at the very inner edge of the solar system's habitable zone. As the sun has aged across billions of years and burned through its fuel, it has heated up and moved the zone outward. As such, the planet could have had higher greenhouse gas levels in the past with life still surviving, but it cannot have such levels now without life dying and the planet becoming a second Venus. At +8℃, equatorial cloud cover becomes impossible to generate, and the amount of oceanic heating accelerates. Methyl Hydrates begin boiling off everywhere, and it becomes too hot to live between the 60th parallels - humanity (or what's left of it) must pack itself around the poles to survive. At some point, the amount of greenhouse gas creation exceeds the ability of life to counteract said gases, and things heat up until all life on the planet dies.

<comment><USER3> The scariest thing to me is that people think their actions won't make a difference.

I was speaking to an organization about reducing its flying. In the spring they wouldn't consider it. One 16-year-old girl, Greta Thunberg, sailing across the Atlantic put the initiative on the table.

She didn't plan to influence that organization but she did.

We all have that potential.

I've given one TEDx talk on environmental leadership [http://joshuaspodek.com/my-tedx-talk-is-online-find-your- del...](http://joshuaspodek.com/my-tedx-talk-is-online-find-your-delicious) with a second in a few weeks [https://www.tedxwaltham.com/tedxwaltham-2019](https://www.tedxwaltham.com/tedxwaltham-2019). My podcast [http://joshuaspodek.com/podcast](http://joshuaspodek.com/podcast) is creating role models among globally renowned people.

I've become somewhat of a role model -- in my fourth year of not flying, I haven't filled a load of trash in over a year, I pick up litter every day -- and people write me to tell me they're doing it, as are their friends.

These results aren't enough, and some disasters will happen, but each person's actions contribute, including yours -- mostly by leading others to contribute too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Curious if anyone here has evaluated any of these models? I've done a cursory search and haven't found a source to play with. I'm curious to know what variables were included, what variables were excluded, how the future is being predicted, and to what degree the creators any of these models have been accurate in predicting the future previously.

Does anyone have a good explanation as to why it's prudent to attempt to predict anything about anything 80 years in the future?

Also curious if there is evidence of predicting the future in any field. If so, I'm wondering what the accuracy rate is one month out, one year out, five years out, etc.

I've done some modeling with sales data, trying to predict demand in a given market based on a series of variables. The issue is how much weight to put on each variable. With lots of market research and historical data, we were able to get decent estimates a couple of months in the future. Beyond that? It was complete speculation. Especially if we missed an important variable, which is common, since its impossible to know what variables will (and won't) be relevant in the future.

I imagine climate modeling is more complex than my sales models, meaning more variables that were included, more variables that were excluded (especially the ones that are unknown unknowns), and a much larger margin for error (especially as time increases).

I raise this as I haven't seen any push back from the HN community on articles like this. Not sure if I'm missing something, if it's political bias, or a fear of ostracized for questioning these reports. Either way, I'd be fascinated to see some deeper analysis on the topic from the minds on this forum.

Have humans ever created a complex model that has enabled us to predict the future with any degree of accuracy? If so, how far into the future and with what degree of accuracy? If not, what is the purpose of a model extrapolated out to 2100?

Trying to imagine when technology will reach X milestone (AGI, for example) reminds me that it's probably wise to be less sure of our predictions. The last US presidential election reminded me of this too.

<comment><USER5> The DOE Energy Exascale Earth System Model is on GitHub: [https://github.com/E3SM-Project/E3SM](https://github.com/E3SM-Project/E3SM)

Here is some analysis of how the predictions made by some climate models have done: [https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-well-have- climate-m...](https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-well-have-climate- models-projected-global-warming)

They have done a remarkable job since the 1970s.

<comment><USER6> Unpopular opinion warning: Not an expert here but I worked on NASA's "Mission to Planet Earth" program for a few years. Cherry-picking of models that produce results that meet the current agenda is not uncommon. Just as researchers have a (deserved IMHO) reputation for publishing data that concurs with their topics...

<comment><USER6> [https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...](https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0200303) [...]" found 64% of surveyed researchers reported they had at least once failed to report results because they were not statistically significant (cherry picking); 42% had collected more data after inspecting whether results were statistically significant (a form of p hacking) and 51% had reported an unexpected finding as though it had been hypothesised from the start (HARKing)."

[https://www.env-econ.net/2017/07/cherry-picking- results.html](https://www.env-econ.net/2017/07/cherry-picking-results.html)

[https://ori.hhs.gov/videos/case-study- list/3037](https://ori.hhs.gov/videos/case-study-list/3037)

[https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/early/2018/03/08/171075511...](https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/early/2018/03/08/1710755115.full.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> In a world with such high climate sensitivity, is there still a realistic pathway to an acceptable outcome? SSP1 2.6 was already highly optimistic and with these two new models even it doesn't keep us below 2 degrees.

<comment><USER7> Perhaps it's time to start considering how to choose to live given unacceptable outcomes.

<comment><AUTHOR> > Perhaps it's time to start considering how to choose to live given > unacceptable outcomes.

Maybe I am misunderstanding your statement, but to which period of time are you referring to? Your lifetime? 3 generations?

The long now includes a non-zero probability of a collapse of atmospheric oxygen, and complete human extinction within ~3600 years. [0]

[0] [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5138252/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5138252/)

<comment><USER8> I may be misunderstanding it but that paper reads as completely ridiculous.

We haven't had a hypoxic atmosphere in the history of the earth since the evolution of photosynthesis (that's a 2 Billion Year track record). The support for the plausibility of the author's hypothesis is that if you fit a _parabola_ to the data over a certain time window, you get 100% decrease in atmospheric oxygen in a few thousand years??

That model is just nuts. By the same token it predicts we will have negative oxygen shortly thereafter.

<comment><AUTHOR> I would love to have someone convince me that this paper is utter rubbish, so I really appreciate your comment. I am also likely a bit annoying as I don't have a science background.

However, you said:

> We haven't had a hypoxic atmosphere in the history of the earth since the > evolution of photosynthesis (that's a 2 Billion Year track record).

This research seems to disagree, doesn't it? [0]

> Climate change triggered by volcanic greenhouse gases is hypothesized to > have caused the largest mass extinction in Earth's history at the end of the > Permian Period (~252 million years ago). Geochemical evidence provides > strong support for rapid global warming and accompanying ocean oxygen (O2) > loss, but a quantitative link among climate, species' traits, and extinction > is lacking. To test whether warming and O2 loss can mechanistically account > for the marine mass extinction, we combined climate model simulations with > an established ecophysiological framework to predict the biogeographic > patterns and severity of extinction. Those predictions were confirmed by a > spatially explicit analysis of the marine fossil record.

[0] [https://science.sciencemag.org/content/362/6419/eaat1327](https://science.sciencemag.org/content/362/6419/eaat1327)

<comment><USER9> In the first article, fitting that data with a parabola+trigonometric is a very big red flag. The error interval for the quadratic coefficient must be huge, but I can't find it.

It may be fit with a line+trigonometric to get some approximation for the next few years (10? 100?). With a line you get 50000 years to the 0 oxygen level, that is less alarmist than 3600 years.

Also, without a good model it's a bad idea to extend these projections too much. There are a lot of natural process that depend on the concentration of oxygen and will change. For example, under 15%-10% concentration of oxygen you can't burn wood so you solve the problem of forest fires [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limiting_oxygen_concentration](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limiting_oxygen_concentration)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Maybe only Peak Oil can save us. How much carbon is there? Surely we _can 't_ continue unabated indefinitely?

<comment><USER11> With new tech like Fracking, there's a lot of un-tapped resources still unfortunately :/

<comment><AUTHOR> Indeed. My intuition here is that climate change is an investment problem at this point. The technological solutions already exist.

How do we convince all investors to walk away from a nearly guaranteed and superb return?

This is the main problem which we currently face in my view.

<comment><USER12> By hampering the viability of non renewables via a steep carbon tax, read more here:

www.forbes.com/sites/howardgleckman/2018/10/10/bill-nordhaus-the-nobel-prize- climate-change-and-carbon-taxes/

The real barrier is making something like this policy imo

<comment><USER10> Or just making them illegal outright.

But the whole world has to participate...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A Pinatubo, Laki, or Krakatau event can easily move the ground truth of climate change.</comment>


Computer virus hits US Predator and Reaper drone fleet - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2011/10/exclusive-computer-virus-hits-drone-fleet/ <comment><USER2> This article is from 2011.

</comment><comment><USER3> "it may be a common piece of malware that just happened to make its way into these sensitive networks" \-- well, that's comforting! </s>

<comment><USER4> Well no-one makes a big fuss about getting the common cold now do they?

<comment><USER5> They might if you worked in the CDC, with sensitive stuff.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> They should check their OS's privacy policy, this has become a normal behavior for a machine in 2017.

</comment><comment><USER7> This story is so old that it's not allowed out after dark.</comment>


RIMs Fate Hangs On BB 10 - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2012/09/27/technology/rim-blackberry-earnings/index.html?hpt=hp_t3

<comment><USER2> I'm bearish on Rim.

All of these announcements seem to be much ado about nothing.

They're fundamentally worse than the Nokia announcement, because Nokia at least left the possibility of a Q4 launch open. Personally, I'd think Rim would be better off shutting up and surprising the world with bb10.

In technology, secrets are currency, and despite the big security emphasis at Rim, they get everything leaked. It's actually kind of humorous. If you recall, BGR got their start by revealing blackberries WAY early. This is just another example of the folks in Waterloo not understanding that to really come back, you'd have to surprise people.

I just played with BB10 and I don't think it's anywhere near iOS or Android today. I don't think it'll get much better with another 6 months of wasted development.

Color me unimpressed.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you learn a new programming language? - <AUTHOR> I have planned to learn Go, Elixir and probably Rust/C++ too in next 2-3 months. I would like to learn what is your approach? Especially when you already know the basics of a programming language. Do you think of a certain project first and then write code? If yes, how do you get ideas?<p>Thanks <comment><USER2> So personally, I'd never recommend or try to learn that many different languages in the next 2-3 months. Even if you did you would know only a tiny surface of each language and just make yourself dangerous instead of productive.

Pick one language and spend a minimum of 3 months, better to spend 6 months to learn the basics and be productive. Honestly, IMO, it takes at least a year of active use to be sufficiently good at a language.

My personal method is to find a tutorial on the basics of the language and start there. Doing some basic hello world type projects and then dive deeper and deeper. Afterwards for me I like to take something I have implemented recently and do it in the new language (if appropriate). This lets me understand differences and do a true comparison and find parts of the language I likely didn't fully grasp during the tutorials etc.

To be fair too, unless you have active projects where you can utilize the new language, learning one now is not going to stick with you after a year. I personally will learn a language just to learn it, but I also recognize I won't retain a lot of the details unless I am actively using it on real work.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for a detailed response.</comment></comment>


The Logitech Craft keyboard's giant button is a tactile dream - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2018/6/18/17475164/logitech-craft-keyboard-button-creative-input-dial <comment><USER2> This made me think about cars and all those screens...

Good on Logitech. Real movement. Love it!</comment>