It is perfectly OK to only code at work, you can have a life too - <AUTHOR> https://zeroequalsfalse.press/posts/it-is-ok-to-only-code-at-work/? <comment><USER2> Well.. this assumes that coding (all coding?) is a burden.. I agree with the article in that coding _for_ work, outside of normal work hours, isn't something to strive for. I did that a lot when I was young, but that was not only when it was necessary due to the strained time schedules we had then, it was also because I literally hungered for it. I needed to. So I would go back to work after dinner and hack away to figure out how the OS worked, deep inside, for example. Writing or modifying device drivers, writing tools that extended the OS functionality, that kind of things. Back when things were new.

These days I don't, as a rule, code for work outside of work hours. But I need to code in my spare time. That's when I can do things that really interest me, side projects where I can enter the 'flow', something I nearly never can do at work anymore. I have to go into flow mode now and then to keep up my ability for concentrating on problems (and yes that's necessary to keep up my work performance too). A few years back the constant interrupts at work degraded my performance so much that I spent my three week holiday in various cafeterias, with a laptop and documentation, and worked all day on my hobby project, finally re-learning to enter the flow again. As in "I looked up, and five hours had passed". Myself, laptop computer, documentation, coffee, food available. Happiness.

<comment><USER3> If that's what you want to do with your time, cool. This article is aimed at people who don't want to do that but feel like they have to.

<comment><USER4> The article states that by not coding at home you can "have a life, too", implying you won't have one if you code at home. This idea is repeated in the article, suggesting to me that it is more than just clickbait.

That's dumb. Of course you can "have a life", regardless of whether your hobbies include something you also get paid for. Denigrating folks as not having a "life" for this reason, even as a rhetorical device, is dumb.

<comment><USER5> I think you might be reading into it too much. It's not an angry article, and it never dismisses people who do like to code outside of work. The title is meant to support people who don't want to code in their free time. Maybe they chose those particular words poorly, but it doesn't take away from the overall premise.

The author even says, after listing activities one might do outside work, "But is it really necessary? That is for you to decide." It's about not needing to feel obligated to be into all that, not disallowing it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Semi related to this, if you do code after work (because you enjoy it), it's OK to code without it being a "startup".

I often get bogged down with "how do I monetize, market, and maintain this", which just kills my motivation. Just because something isn't marketed and monetized doesn't make it invalid; outside of work coding has brought me numerous benefits:

\- Learning new things. Not because I feel like if I don't I'll fall behind, but because I like learning things I don't get to experience at work.

\- Expressing yourself. I like being able to execute on my vision without worrying about what my employer wants. Or, if its a game I'm making, using that coding to express an artistic vision.

\- Meeting people. You can still talk about your project at meetups or online without trying to "sell" it.

<comment><USER7> I think it's only the HN crowd that tries to look at side-projects from the monetization angle. (How else do you explain the frequent 'what's your side- business' posts? Also, this is a VC's site after all.) There are many computing cultures - people making games for gamejams, working on quines, writing code for GameBoys, contributing to Firefox, Arduino hackers. Maybe finding one of those groups will change your mindset?

<comment><USER8> I'm curious about the proportion of people who started visiting HN because of ycombinator vs those who came just because someone told them it had good discussions.

I'm of the latter group.

<comment><USER9> I came through pg's essays on Lisp (and not startups!), stayed for the discussions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Totally this! My father is/was a stage and costume designer in the theatre.

He worked so hard during the week (and weekends - theatre people keep some heavy hours!) that he rarely did many passion projects (though he did manage to fit a few in). But when he did they were on things that we really important to him, and that he gave himself the time to enjoy the process, and results and the iterations to follow.

I think he's always set me to have a good work life balance, and when I look back at the life he built for himself (and for us) it makes me really proud.

Now he's 'retired' he is in over-drive. He and my mother are slowly hand- painting their entire house, nothing is safe from redecoration. He's also painting loads of portraits and writing far more. Great to see a 78 year old man have so much drive and energy for creativity. I hope I do too at his age.

</comment><comment><USER11> I think this goes deeper than coding, we live in a world of "Give it you're all", but really the only thing we should be giving it all for is what makes us happy. Over the last 25 years of coding, I've always stuck to the 9-5 (ish), 5 days a weeks. I'm not rich, but do alright and I'm fairly happy. I actually have time to do things that are not coding outside of work. The world needs driven people that give it their 'all', but we shouldn't give those a hard time that just give their 'bit'

<comment><USER12> I don't think the world needs driven people. Maybe a few, but not many for sure. So maybe things get produced or invented at a slower pace, but people have time to enjoy a meaningful life, well sign me up.

<comment><USER11> Yes, I aggree, a few driven people is probably enough. There is a really interesting book called 'in praise of slow' which has the idea as its main point

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Does a lawyer do law outside of billable hours? Some do pro-bono. But not the majority.

Does a doctor practice medicine outside of his hours? Again, some work at free clinics, but generally no.

Do veterinarians like it when you ask them to take a look at your cat when they're not in clinic? No. Almost always no.

Work is work, leisure is leisure. If coding is leisure for you, that's great.

<comment><USER14> > Does a lawyer do law outside of billable hours?

Yes, all of them study law outside of work clients pay them to do; in fact, they are _required to do so as a condition of licensing_ , it's called continuing education requirement.

The same is true of virtually all licensed professionals.

Programmers aren't licensed professionals, so they don't have a licensing requirement for continuing education. But the programmers that _are_ professionals, even if not licensed are doing continuing education anyway, and hands-on projects that aren't for paying clients is frequently a big part of that.

(Now, professionals with good employers will often be paid to do continuing education on work time, and that's true of programmers, too. If you have 20% time, your continuing education projects may not be "side projects".)

<comment><USER13> Studying law isn't practicing law.

Yes, all professionals should be reading and continuing their education. I read tons of technical publications. But I rarely commit code.

But working full-stress cases outside of your actual work? Sounds like a good way to burn out.

<comment><USER14> > Studying law isn't practicing law.

And doing side projects isn't practicing the trade that would be regulated if programming was a regulated profession.

> But working full-stress cases outside of your actual work?

Whoever said programming side projects should be "full-stress cases"?

<comment><USER13> > _Whoever said programming side projects should be "full-stress cases"?_

That's what the context is here. There's a notion in the software development profession that you should have a side project which you put near full-time hours and / or effort into. Because you love coding so much you can't stop.

Be it your future start-up, or contributing to an open source project (or 3).

Studying law is equivalent to reading the tech news / seing what other people are doing / keeping up with best practices. Actually writing a project using it is another level of complexity.

It's the difference between reading and analyzing the arguments of a legal case and reconstructing and presenting the arguments yourself.

<comment><USER14> > That's what the context is here.

I disagree.

> There's a notion in the software development profession that you should have > a side project which you put near full-time hours and / or effort into.

There's a common notion that you should be doing practical learning, including side projects, outside of "normal" paid work. It is far less common, however, to encounter the idea that it should be near full-time hours (and it's not clear to me what "full-time effort" distinct from hours even could mean.)

> Studying law is equivalent to reading the tech news / seing what other > people are doing / keeping up with best practices.

No, it's not: in fact, this kind of professional reading is often expressly excluded from the definition of activities that apply to continuing legal education requirements. Lawyers do, as a practical matter, need to do the equivalent of what you are talking about, but in addition to not as their CLE requirement.

<comment><USER15> My wife is an excellent lawyer. She spends "NOWHERE" the same amount of time as I do to stay in touch with whats happening in the field.

She has to read new laws once in a while (sometimes even once per year). To be relevant I as a Software Developer have to read about new stuff DAILY, while writing to my own blog, do side projects from time to time and learn other stuff i need for my current work.

I would not be lyin when i say being a good software developer (in the eyes of industry) costs you around 20h of work extra per week.

<comment><USER9> > _To be relevant I as a Software Developer have to read about new stuff > DAILY, while writing to my own blog, do side projects from time to time and > learn other stuff i need for my current work._

No, you don't. To be relevant, you just have to know a little JavaScript. You can find a good-paying job with that.

What you described is something that's correlated with personal love in the craft, and which can help you get better at it (then again, it also makes you more frustrated about professional life). You can fake it, of course, if for some reason you feel you need to,.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I hate that this has become so entrenched, and I hate that my previous jobs don't allow me to use samples from their codebase in my portfolio. I hate feeling like my github or bitbucket are sparse and this is somehow a sin. Just give me a takehome project and I will show you how I program, it is really that simple! Don't force me to waste my precious time making little toys in my spare time to potentially amuse someone. Yes I could make a minesweeper clone in a day, no I don't want to.

Most of the fun of programming for me is the mathematics and theory portion, I like to implement or toy around with algorithms and write little half finished scripts. That is fun for me, but is that presentable? Nope.

<comment><USER17> > Just give me a takehome project and I will show you how I program, it is > really that simple!

I once applied for a job where that was the entry exam: they gave you the specs for a program about a month in advance of your interviews and you were expected to bring in the solution you wrote. The task was intentionally extremely difficult (they specifically warned you about that).

Although I didn't get the job, I really did appreciate that approach to skills testing. I thought it was brilliant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> People are allowed to do whatever they want. Any claims of lack of passion or work ethic are opinions and anecdotes of individual experiences.

There is limited time in a day and in life, you can't spend hours on multiple hobbies and interests without compromise and without eventual burnout within ones capabilities.

Feel like this kind of do's and don'ts of when to spend time and how much time to spend coding is a recurring topic that should be put to bed in the developer world. Those who want to shine above the rest will always and should pursue that goal, those falling below that bar is perfectly fine, it's all about personal wants and needs at the end of the day.

</comment><comment><USER19> So what happens when your company's roadmap consists of technical slop and they won't pay you to learn things like differentiable programming? Do you think they're going to pay you to write Vue.js until you retire?

This strategy might work for a few years, but is a long-term career hazard. You are in charge of raising your own bar.

<comment><USER20> Honestly, this is a good reason to consider a job change. You can learn new/other tech on your own, sure... but not nearly as efficiently as you can in-situ.

Besides, the tech itself is rarely the limiting factor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> If I have a piece of advice to juniors about this is: burnout is real.

I used to have personal projects that didn't pay off in any way beyond personal learning, and they sure were taxing on my life.

Now I have a job that I enjoy and is challenging enough. For the last year I have been making a conscious effort to change how I deal with personal projects. I try to take on tasks that are low effort, and not feel guilty about dropping something if I feel that it doesn't work, or it's starting to require too much from me.

</comment><comment><USER3> Anecdotally, I've been a professional software engineer for around 10 years at top tech companies. I'm currently have similar pay and seniority as a Google L6. I've very rarely worked more than 9 hours in a day, and in those 10 years, I've spent less than 100 evenings coding on personal projects. So yeah, it's possible for sure.

<comment> barry-cotter That's around $200,000 in cash and up to about double that in stock and bonus according to

[https://www.levels.fyi/](https://www.levels.fyi/)

Most recently from Zürich, $448,000 210k Cash| 190k Stock 48k Bonus

<comment><USER22> Thanks for the explanation and link. I have no clue what levels at google are or correspond to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> It is perfectly OK to only code at work, but you need to ensure you are learning and developing at work. Almost all programming related fields are still growing and changing rapidly. To stay relevant you need to invest in learning and self improvement. This can definitely be done as part of your job, but it's also something you can achieve by coding outside of work.

Regardless of how you do it, ensuring that you are continuously learning and staying relevant is important.

<comment><USER24> You absolutely should be learning and growing on company time.

<comment><USER25> Yup, this is the real reason behind concepts like "10% time". Play with new stuff on your side projects, not on production systems.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I became a coder because I find it useful, valuable, and creatively stimulating.

The only time I _really_ enjoy coding, in the sense that 12 hours can pass by in the blink of an eye, is when I'm working on my own things. So by the time I'm done working for ~8 hours a day I'm bursting with excitement for when I get to fire up my development VM and code for another 6 hours.

I get excited learning new things about my field. I get excited encountering and solving new problems. I get excited when I am able to form connections between isolated domains of knowledge and create work that is more valuable than the time I spent on it.

Programming is engineering, but it is also art. I am an engineer, but I am also an artist. I live to create; writing useful applications, making video games and writing music are all ways I do this. My career path has and will continue to be a reflection of these values.

I understand if some people chose to become programmers just for the money. I hope you are at least treating my field with respect and not just getting by with minimal effort while eroding employer/employee trust and dragging down the median salary.

But consider that you could be making money in a field you are truly passionate about, blurring the lines between what is "work" and what is a "personal project". This is what it means to become successful in life, not wads of cash.

</comment><comment><USER27> Ah man, I wish my work was "only coding", wouldn't that be nice.

</comment><comment><USER28> Yes, and similarly it's also possible to be into coding both at work and at home and to still have "a life" where you're doing what you're enjoying.

</comment><comment><USER29> I recall this as a standard 'canned' interview question. The goal was to assess if the applicant had a general passion for software development as well as a drive to learn new things. While I had no particular issue with the goal of the question at the time, I always felt it a bit one dimensional. At a different job in a more corporate setting, I find the push to be just the opposite. Time-off is time to unwind, use it as such. I believe companies have found success in this cultural imperative as a means of preventing turnover and burnout.

</comment><comment><USER30> Personally, I feel like if I didn't develop software outside of work, I would start to see software development as work, rather than a skill, just like being able to write or play a musical instrument.

I think, for your own sake, if you're skilled at something, you should try to use that skill on your own terms. Many arduous professions are the practise of enjoyable skills on someone else's terms (be it an employer or a market): driving, cooking, gardening, etc.

</comment><comment><USER31> I work in Front-End and have always had side-projects with coding involved (Games, Websites, CLI-Tools).

Some of my career's and company's circumstances (no senior front-end-devs for reviewing and mentoring around, mostly work on classic websites/web-shops) make it necessary. It's the only way to keep my skills somewhat up-to-date and to improve beyond what I do at work.

Coding and building is fun to me, so I was ok with this. After getting kids though, my available home-coding-time shrunk to almost zero.

My employer does allow and pay for conferences/workshops, but there's nothing as good for learning as a real project with more senior team-members, I guess.

I really don't want to leave after 8 years of building reputation and seniority, and start from scratch elsewhere, in a big unknown.

How do others cope with that?

<comment><USER32> Well, same here on the kids. I wrote /bin/ps for Linux and maintained the procps package for about a decade. I also did significant work on Tux Paint and a little Linux kernel work. I managed just fine with 3 tiny kids and a job, and later with 5 small kids and no job. Adding back a job, I hit my limit. This is one way that Open Source projects die.

Since then, the situation has only gotten more extreme. My family size goes to 11, and yes that is one louder than 10. Soon I'll have a dozen, all homeschooled.

I got one kid interested in following in my footsteps, so sometimes I get to have fun teaching him. Mostly, there just isn't time for anything extra. One factor that helps is that I'm in a different part of the industry. You're in "Front-End", which might mean you need to learn a new javascript framework every year. I mostly write in C, for which the last update was 8 years ago and the last significant update was 20 years ago. When I'm not doing C, I'm doing a wide variety of different kinds of assembly language. That changes, but one is expected to constantly refer to the manual. So really I've gone a quarter century with no significant change. I am pondering the value of learning rust, but I certainly don't have to scramble each year to learn the hot new thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Yes. It is ok. I hate that we've made it a norm to expect everyone to have the same hobby -- exactly the thing you do at work, and it better damn well be a hobby that you can monetize.

Some people code and live on the MeetUp circuit when they're not coding. I do those things on rare occasion, but I've got a wife, a small child, and other hobbies.

I like that this article reminds all of us to not normalize overwork.

That said, it seems anti-hustle is becoming the new hussle, and yes, it's ok to code on your own as well if you enjoy it, want to learn, etc. You just shouldn't HAVE to.

</comment><comment><USER34> It's sad that this has to be said. I have lots of side projects that involve making stuff, music, electronics, restoring old computers and the like. Very occasionally these projects involve writing some code, but it's the exception rather than the rule.

If you want to write code for fun and it makes you happy then go for it! But by no means feel obliged to. It doesn't make you any more or less of a programmer.

</comment><comment><USER35> On one hand: duh. On the other: if you also code at work as a step on a ladder you'd like to climb, coding more than just at work is a common method of getting ahead of people who don't. Then again, that doesn't require not having a life, so the ultimate position I'd take would be: find a balance but make sure that it doesn't turn in to complacency.

</comment><comment><USER17> I love to code, and do so not only at work but at home as well.

That said, I was unaware that there are people who feel _pressure_ to code in their off-hours. That's silly. On your own time, you should do whatever helps you live a good life and be happier. If that includes programming, there's nothing wrong with that. If it doesn't, there's also nothing wrong with that.

</comment><comment><USER36> > There is often pressure inside Software development for Software developers > to code outside of work hours.

Funny. What I actually noticed is the pressure to _not_ code outside of work hours. :-P

It feels like hobbyist hacking is increasingly falling out of place, even to the point of gaining antagonistic feelings about it.

</comment><comment><USER37> Idk, I have found the best programmers all love to code. Unless you are a prodigy talent, you are going to have to program a lot on your own to be able to even be good enough to land and keep a job at a good company.

</comment><comment><USER38> i like 4 hours a day, everyday, weekends too. Even on vacations I like to get 4 hours of coding in and THEN enjoy non-coding activity. But lots of coders seem stuck in i must do a full 8 hours a day M-F only.

</comment><comment><USER39> I enjoyed the juxtaposition of the article's content with a banner about listening to coding podcasts

</comment><comment><USER40> Off-topic: is that a marquee tag at the top of the page?

</comment><comment> rich-tea Yeah. It's also perfectly OK to code outside of work. It's still "having a life" but it's my life and therefore my choice.

<comment><USER41> Obviously. But no one is being pressured to _not_ code at home by their peers and employers.

<comment> rich-tea Except when they imply that it's "not having a life".

<comment><USER41> Some guy with a blog accidentally implying a mild insult is hardly the same thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> No it's not, not if you want to want to claim to be a true professional.

I have never met a professional that only engages in their craft at work only. Professionals practice their craft all time especially outside work.

Work time is game time. Work time is not the time to engage in Research but strictly development. Unless you work for an R&D lab. It is the engaging in research instead of development that's the cause of software projects failing and having all sorts of issue. When it's D time, it's time to simply apply all the best principles that you know, nothing else.

This means, you must practice (research) off hours.

Can you imagine a math professor that only practices mathematics only when they teach? Or a musician that only plays music only during performance?

It's okay to only code at work if you are just a code monkey and not a professional. In that case, don't expect the high rewards of the industry, don't claim to be a "professional" granted that the definition of a professional is one that does it only for money.

Look at the very best in the industry, just think of them, name em. They all code outside of work. Jeff Dean, Norvig, Linus, Stallman, Carmack, Wolfram

<comment><USER43> Spending 100% of work time coding reminds me of the startup world. Eventually it leads to a culture where people get locked in the same patterns and don't try new things. If you work at a larger company, there's always down time for watching conference videos, side projects, etc. I've found encouraging people to spend some of their work time learning makes for better developers.

<comment><USER42> There's no difference between work and living. it's all the same. This work/life balance is crap. Working 100% of the time is bad, but the idea that your only can work in an allocate piece of time for intellectual work is the most ridiculous thing ever. Doesn't matter if you write music, write code, or writing a book. You work when your mind is ready to go. To refuse to work when your brain is ready is a strong signal that you don't have passion for this. If you're engaged in manual labor then sure, but for all intellectual work there's no boundary. It's perfectly NOT okay to preach these rubbish about being mediocre. The interesting thing is the very people who also code anywhere, tend to be very balanced and also enjoy their life outside of coding.</comment></comment></comment>


Major Earthquake to Rock California Soon? - <AUTHOR> http://video.foxbusiness.com/v/4584933/a-major-earthquake-in-north-america-imminent/

<comment><AUTHOR> See also: [http://www.cbn.com/cbnnews/healthscience/2011/March/Major- Ea...](http://www.cbn.com/cbnnews/healthscience/2011/March/Major-Earthquake- to-Rock-California-Soon/)

</comment><comment><USER2> I'm not so sure about all that. Seems dying fish or beached whales is just his theory. Doesn't seem to prove anything.</comment>


Tinker, tailor, soldier, sandbagger: sometimes TV from the 70s holds up - <AUTHOR> http://www.quartertothree.com/fp/2017/08/27/tinker-tailor-soldier-sandbagger-sometimes-tv-70s-holds/ <comment><USER2> The Prisoner (1967-1968) is mesmerising.

Le Voyage dans la lune - Georges Méliès 1902 (link provided) holds up after 115 years. Don't be so surprised! Timeless storytelling and design transcends it's delivery medium.

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

To the people questioning whether good television is still being made, yes of course it is, it might just take you a few years to find it. True Detective, Fargo, Utopia are all great. A la carte streaming (eg select any 10 shows, 10 movies, $10/month) is the future for media consumption. Which platform will deliver this first only time will tell. At the moment original content is the model and there are some evident growth pains.

<comment><USER3> Is there a place here for Blake's Seven, (esp the early episodes) and of course Tom Baker's Dr Who incarnation? Incidentally, for those who didn't know, Douglas Adams wrote some classic episodes and was script editor (head writer) on Dr Who for at least a season or so.

And I think Dad's Army remains a classic, about the Home Guard in WWII, with some of the finest comic actors.

There's even a case to be made for The Sweeney and the Professionals which dealt with grittier more modern reality stories, darker sides of law and intelligence enforcement which is often glossed over in the modern glitzier procedurals.

Aha, and though maybe it was largely in the 80s, how about Minder?

<comment><USER4> I feel compelled to add "Yes Minister" to your list, if only because of the excellent writing and characterisation of Sir Humphrey & Jim Hacker.

(There was a recent remake; it is not worth watching.)

<comment><USER3> That's a great point. I have no idea why I also didn't mention Fawlty Towers, possibly the greatest sitcom ever made.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Maybe it's just that people only remember the good tv shows/films/music/things from those years and ignore the boring chaff.

Maybe there are just as many good tv shows these days.

but in my opinion the vast majority of current tv shows/films/music/webcontent is utter undiluted mind numbing banal drivel and there isn't a circle of hell worthy enough to hold those responsible.

<comment><USER6> > _Maybe there are just as many good tv shows these days._

Check out _Top of the Lake_ , it's well-written, well-acted, & doesn't overstay its welcome. Season two just came out!

I think modern shows are dominated by 'must-see' spectacles or sensationalist attention-grabbers, because people watch them in droves and advertises will pay for slots. Weirdly, the modern BBC only makes shows like this, even though they don't rely on advertising.

Part of the charm of _The Sandbaggers_ is that they clearly made it for pennies, so they had to make the characters and dialogue interesting to fill in for car chases + stunts + exotic locations + top-shelf actors (i.e. the complement of Bond films).

<comment><USER5> yep top of the lake is good, thanks.

i suspect my comments were a wee bit too strong but it was after cycling through every channel twice and finding nothing.

<comment><USER7> Honestly, it does feel like the current crop of TV is somewhat weaker than it has been for a while. (I'd argue that Top Of The Lake, which is 4 years old now, doesn't fit in "current crop".)

That might just be a taste thing on my part, or it might be a response to the tremendous commercial pressures that were forcing execs to look anywhere, everywhere for a story a couple of years ago.

<comment><USER8> There's a second series of Top of The Lake, it finished airing in the UK last week, it's definitely current. Apparently coming to the states next month.

<comment><USER7> Oh, didn't know that. Cool. Added to my to-watch list :)

<comment><USER6> I mentioned it 5 comments up…

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I had never heard of this show, but speaking about wacky British 70s series that still hold up, I think The Avengers should be up there, for similar reasons: great acting, out of this world plots, mixed with a quaint British attitude.

The Emma Peel era was the best, you can check out all the episodes here: [http://theavengers.tv/forever/peel.htm](http://theavengers.tv/forever/peel.htm). Almost all episodes are gold, but my favorites are The Cybernauts and Honey for the Prince.

<comment><USER10> Thanks for the link, I've tried searching for torrents of the show before but only ever found those other avengers.

<comment><USER11> I love older uk shows and finding legitimate streaming content is endlessly frustrating. It might be a niche market but the promise of the Internet was it was supposed to address the long tail. So much is sitting on the shelves due to lazy rights holders or only has limited geographical distribution.

<comment><USER12> That presupposes the originals still exist, which in too many cases isn't true - the BBC erased many tapes to reuse, not expecting ever to retransmit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The Sandbaggers is amazing; I found it to be more memorable and "realistic" (not that I could know) than le Carré.

Also, all episodes are on YouTube: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKg_t- Prhqk&list=PLmRu2axUu2...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKg_t- Prhqk&list=PLmRu2axUu2LELJvHzRdnNbEZpZ-ApzpgX)

</comment><comment><USER14> I love Smiley's People as well as the BBC version of the Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. It's one of the smartest spy genre movies ever. I'd definitely think about watching this. But, maybe:

 _" This makes me want to quit watching. I'm not sure I have the stomach to know a storyline and its characters are going to be abandoned. That's one of the two main problems with TV as a medium: that it might end too soon or that it might go on for too long."_

BTW, I really liked how this article was written.

<comment><USER15> Sandbaggers was a great show. Watched it on PBS as a kid. The ending is absolutely gutting. I hadn't realized it was supposed to be a cliffhanger. Emotionally, it works very well.

<comment><USER16> There's also an episode where they get back the lead's (Marston's) love interest from East Germany. Without providing any spoiler's, the ending of that episode left younger me in shock for days. Still one of the most powerful (fiction) TV moments I've ever seen. I think it was "Special Relationship" season ending in Series 1. But don't watch just that one. Watch them all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Strange nobody is mentioning "Life on Mars" (2006).

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

Modern Brit officer has an accident and goes back in time(?) to being a cop in the 70s. There was a US remake that didn't quite get it.

</comment><comment><USER18> It amazes me that someone could see Darkplace and think it was set in anything other than the 80s...

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OO-ZGP68-3w](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OO- ZGP68-3w)

<comment><USER19> ... especially as they prefixed it with a station ident for a channel that _did not exist in the 1970s_.

* [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_CIEYUF9Rg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_CIEYUF9Rg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Plenty of shows from the 1970s still hold up today: MASH, Hogan's Heroes, Columbo, The Incredible Hulk, Battlestar Galactica, Sesame Street, Monty Python's Flying Circus, Roots, etc. It was a great decade for TV, especially if you consider shows like All In The Family (which doesn't really hold up anymore, but is basically Married With Children for the 70s), Good Times, Mork and Mindy, etc.

<comment><USER21> I still think about The Six Million Dollar Man. For the past decade I've been working out how a new season could be written for that show (and the book, Cyborg) and I think there's a ton of potential there. The story arc about a destroyed man, the struggle to rebuild and recover, and the protagonist's dealing with being a literal tool of the military.

First though, the surgery budget would need to be increased. These days, a six million dollar man is a person that's had a kidney transplant.

<comment><USER22> There was a Bionic Woman reboot in the oughts that failed to do justice to the concept, so it will probably be another decade before we see it tried again.

<comment><USER21> I've been watching for news and there have been a bunch of projects started but none have gone the distance. Mark Wahlberg is supposed to play Steve Austin, but the project has been delayed a bunch of times (it was supposed to come out this year and has been pushed into next year).

Before that, there was going to be a comedy version (like the Starsky and Hutch reboot a few years ago). I'm so glad that never made it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> A lot of classic British TV shows from the 70s and 80s hold up really well today. After all, Fawlty Towers was a 1975 and 1979 series, with other greats from the era including Dad's Army (1968-1977) and Steptoe and Son (1968-1972). Blackadder and Only Fools and Horses were good in the next decade as well, and that's only counting some of the comedy ones.

As for whether TV now is better or worse... well, probably the same to be honest. Sturgeon's Law reigns supreme where any fiction is concerned, so every generation will have about 90% utterly forgettable crap and 10% amazing classics. The crap just gets filtered out over time as people choose to preserve the stuff that truly matters.

[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NostalgiaFilter](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NostalgiaFilter)

Either way, there's really not any one era where 'no TV shows' or 'all TV shows' hold up well.

</comment><comment><USER24> I'd really like to see a Sapphire and Steel reboot.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDGmv6zRM84](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDGmv6zRM84)

<comment><USER25> Some of Sapphire and Steel was amazingly terrifying, given how low budget it was. But I suspect modern film makers would not be able to avoid ruining the ambiguous feeling of the series by trying to depict what is going on in the larger scale.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I watched The Sandbaggers twice now. While the sets, props and circumstances are dated, the main ideas and principles still hold, imho.

For a more up-to-date take, read Greg Rucka's excellent Queen and Country comics (the main, and mini series). Not only is it "inspired" by Sandbaggers, but it sometimes borrows actual plots and plays them out. I had fun time at a comics convention talking to Rucka about it, and he is a Sandbaggers fan :).

</comment><comment><USER27> Slartibartfast.

Just a heads up that Richard Vernon plays Slartibartfast in Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy.

I hope one day to have a machine that can speak with the voice of Richard Vernon (as Slartibartfast "My name is unimportant."), or of course Peter Jones who was the voice of The Book in HHGTTG.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Jones_(actor)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Jones_\(actor\))

</comment><comment><USER28> I love the sandbaggers. People say how great the recent adaption of "The Night Manager" is, but for me this and Alec Guinness George Smiley rank as all time great British espionage shows.

</comment><comment><USER29> Uhhhh, what does this have to do with Hacker News?</comment>


What happened to Hacker News - <AUTHOR> http://blog.imranghory.org/what-happened-to-hacker-news

<comment><USER3> It switched from "Startup News" to "Hacker News" and the guideline is stated as "Anything good hackers will find interesting, which isn't limited to just hacking."

Then the site became popular, and so everyone thinks "I'm on Hacker News, and I can contribute anything I think is interesting." With the enormously wide range of interests covered by the entire population now on HN, there is no focus. Everyone clamours to be the first to submit the latest piece of gossip about any company or person remotely connected with technology. Or companies. Or anything, really.

In particular, though, the "welcome" message asks for things that are "deeply interesting". One thing is for sure - we don't get that.

My interests are in math, science, education in math and science, theoretical computing, elegant hacks, and running a business. To find anything about those I have to hunt deep in the stack, because they rarely make the front page. HN is no longer a sensible filter for stuff I want.

In fact, I don't think it really serves anyone well any more.

I'll bet this item now gets flagged into oblivion. Any discussion of the current state of HN is regarded as "meta" by the majority and seen as criticism of them. The democratic nature of HN's voting system implies that the majority rules, pretty much everyone can flag, and as I know to my cost, flags will effectively kill an item.

 _Added in edit: this is now less than two hours old and has 26 points - <USER2> should be on the top page, and it's actually down at 156. Flagged to death, despite the fact that it should be interesting to everyone here._

</comment><comment><USER4> My wish is that the moderators would more ruthlessly prune the politics/economics stories. They draw in anyone and everyone (who doesn't have opinions on those things?), rather than people interested in startups and tech. And the debates are old, old, old. I'm reading an interesting book now, Grand Pursuit ( [https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0043RSK4Y/ref=as_li_ss_til?tag=de...](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0043RSK4Y/ref=as_li_ss_til?tag=dedasys-20&camp=213381&creative=390973&linkCode=as4&creativeASIN=B0043RSK4Y&adid=0NXZ0XFJESBKJ4F40PDA&); ) about the history of economics and some famous economists. And a lot of the very same more state, less state, right vs left stuff was being argued about 100 years ago... it just goes around and around and around, it seems.

<comment><USER5> And hacker-psuedo-elitism aside, most of the people commenting on politics and economics aren't any more informed on the subjects than people right off the street.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The content is dictated by the community. There is still a significant amount of start-up info and stories but you are right on one point, the site has evolved from being almost exclusively start-up orientated to one that contains content of interest to Developers, Hackers and entrepreneurs.

Essentially, popularity happened and the site evolved to reflect the increased deomgraphic now reading HN.

<comment><USER7> Exactly. I wouldn't say it's a bad thing. In fact, the quality of discussions hasn't boiled down to BS in spite of the popularity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> PG explicitly switched the site from just Startup News to Hacker News.

Sorry you missed it.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, I have sort of the opposite complaint: too much startup-scene drama news (e.g. anything having to do with Techcrunch), not enough _hacker_ news (in which I'm willing to include "anything remotely technical").

<comment><USER10> Start up drama doesn't not really help "founders meet and talk", so I would say it is just as off topic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> for me (as a new member) I really like HN for one reason, and one reason alone - the quality of the discussions. The people here seem smart, civil and informed about their posts (and the one's who aren't get voted down). That, to me, is far more useful than startup news, all the time (not that I have any problems with startup news I actually like it).

<comment><USER12> I agree. Although you can find these discussion elsewhere on the 'net, I appreciate the level of discourse here and like to read the tech take on politics or economics of whatever. That kind of stuff is meaningful in a lot of people's lives and can even affect their businesses. I just gray out the rest of the noise in my head.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Personally, I don't know the first thing about hacking, and I don't have any particular affinity toward startups. The reason I visit HN on a daily basis is because it's a great cross-section of news that delves into design, development, tech law, tech businesses large and small, and yes, even a little bit of politics and economics. And often, the comments can be incredibly insightful. I find articles, software and businesses here that I otherwise wouldn't find.

</comment><comment><USER14> Ok, so here is my 5 minute solution: I just flagged every piece of content that I think does not belong on the homepage, now I'll scan the first 3 pages of the 'new' section and upvote all those articles that I think should be there.

If everybody else does the same thing then this should correct itself.

I'm betting that it won't make a bit of a difference. Want to try?

<comment><USER15> What exactly is this meant to be the solution to? That some random blogger missed the transition from Startup News to Hacker News?

What do you think flagging does?

Why are you so special that the current voting system should be changed to fit your preferences?

<comment><USER14> Flags will push content down on the homepage, early flags on the new page stop content from getting on the homepage at all.

In other words, flags are a crude mechanism that you can use to modify the rankings, effectively they are downvotes.

It won't take many flags to clear the homepage of the political and mainstream content. My guess is that it won't matter because that same strategy can be used against content that is on topic. And I've seen that happen, plenty of times.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> There are only so many "Five reasons why we do a lean startup" self-promoting blog posts to go around, and _even_ those get tiring after a while…

I'd say that there's still a lot of startup content, probably not less than at the beginning. The percentage might be a bit down, because nowadays a lot of people use this as their primary news site and don't want to switch between HN for startup content, and e.g. reddit/r/programming for tech stuff. News for startup guys doesn't have to center around startups all the time.

And as some others have said: _Hacker_ News.

</comment><comment><USER17> I always wondered why it was 'hacker news' but clearly run by a company that promotes startups, and not hackers in general.

As happy as I am that it turned into 'hacker news', I see it turning into 'general news' and it makes me sad. This is the best hacker news site out there right now, and finding a replacement will be tough.

</comment><comment><USER18> One tiny (?) change would make my day: Purge (dead) links from the 'new' section as soon as it's flagged to death.

Quite often I follow that section and see most interesting subjects to 'make it' in minutes or to drop off the page due to (dead) spam links.

<comment><USER9> Isn't it that way by default? In any case it's a preference; make sure "showdead" is set to no in your prefs.

<comment><USER18> You're right, of course, and I'm an idiot. I somehow expected showdead to affect nothing but comments.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> What I'm interested in is why there isn't the 50 bitcoin stories a day submitted anymore. Actually, I'm glad the bitcoin stuff stopped getting submitted so frequently. Might as well submitted links about Amway or Metabolife.

</comment><comment><USER20> What happened to Hacker News? It evolved.

It's not like some evil troll is upvoting Google and MS stories.</comment>


I have an idea for an app but can't code it. Offering 50% equity. (Quora) - <AUTHOR> https://www.quora.com/App-developpers-I-need-someone-who-would-like-to-be-my-partner-50-50-I-have-an-idea-of-app-but-cant-code-it-Let-your-email-below-who-wants/answer/Ryan-Franklin-4?share=0a6208a2 <comment><AUTHOR> Not my question obviously, but I loved the real world response by somebody who sounds like they really went through and learned all the mistakes the questioner is about to go through.</comment>


Deep learning can save fish - <AUTHOR> https://blog.wolfram.com/2019/04/11/fishackathon-protecting-marine-life-with-ai-and-the-wolfram-language <comment><USER2> Plane patrols over protected areas are 10k /per hour, this solution seems orders of magnitude more efficient.</comment>


Run Windows 1.01 in your browser - <AUTHOR> http://jsmachines.net/demos/pc/cga-win101/xt-cga-win101.xml <comment><USER2> As there seems to be a lot of interest in emulators in the browser, here's my effort: I ported an emulator for classic Mac and IBM PC to the browser.

Mac System 7 Demo: [http://jamesfriend.com.au/pce- js/](http://jamesfriend.com.au/pce-js/)

Windows 3.0 Demo: [http://jamesfriend.com.au/pce-js/ibmpc- win/](http://jamesfriend.com.au/pce-js/ibmpc-win/)

IBM PC doesn't have mouse support... Yet. For Mac OS it's writing the mouse position directly into memory, but I've yet to add that hack for Windows.

<comment><USER3> Wow, awesome! For the Mac one with mouse support, you might want to add ".emscripten { cursor: none; }" to your stylesheet so the host cursor doesn't cover up the emulated one.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for that, I'd assumed that would run afoul of some kind of click- jacking protection but fortunately it seems I was wrong :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I am really enjoying a lot of the retro things being posted recently. Sadly, they miss out some of the details. Like Elite being playable at 4 MHz, but really hard at 25 MHz, because that's how clocks worked then, and that's what the turbo button did. (It was a de-turbo button, turning your machine into a slow machine for compatibility. If it was connected, that is.)

And this makes me wonder about the Wayback machine. I can retrieve an old web page, but can I recreate the experience of posting to that site? Is anyone archiving the various social network sites code, so that the Future People can recreate the experience of Friendster or Facebook or Myspace? Or are the Future People going to have to guess by looking at screenshots and videos?

One of the first (perhaps the first?) commercial games for Windows was "Balance of Power". I think it either came with a weird runtime version of Win 1.0, or a voucher to get it, for people running dos.

[http://theodor.lauppert.ws/games/bop.htm](http://theodor.lauppert.ws/games/bop.htm)

<comment><USER5> it came with an embedded windows runtime - I think it was Microsoft not sure quite yet how they'd license it.

<comment><USER6> > it came with an embedded windows runtime - I think it was Microsoft not sure > quite yet how they'd license it.

The Windows port of Microsoft Excel also initially came bundled with a Windows runtime. It wasn't really until Windows 3.0 that you could start take Windows as a prereq. Before then, very few systems had Windows installed.

Wait a minute. "Windows Runtime" has a different meaning nowadays. Microsoft is really reusing a lot of its existing trademarks for Windows 8, isn't it? "Surface" was also a trademark that they already owned, for a giant touchscreen table.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> >><machine id="ibm5160" class="pcjs" border="1" width="980px" pos="center" style="background-color:#FAEBD7">

Tag of the future

<comment><USER8> Indeed.

What I might coin the "cloud tag".

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Every time I see an emulator like this on HN, my mind is blown.

Can someone explain to me and any other run-of-the-mill hackers reading this, how an emulator like this is made?

I wouldn't even know where to start.

<comment><USER10> Run-of-the-mill hackers should know this.

You pick a sufficiently low-level abstraction layer and implement it in Javascript. Everything above that layer 'just works'TM.

<comment><USER11> It's like drawing. [http://i.imgur.com/RadSf.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/RadSf.jpg)

<comment><USER10> Hahaha, precisely. Or drawing turtles!

<comment><USER12> Drawing turtles? [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtle_graphics](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtle_graphics)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Played Reversi in Windows 1.01. Still lost. I will go hang my head in shame now.

<comment><USER14> The key to Reversi is to win the corners (EDIT: you can lose while still winning 2-3 corners, but losing the corners gives the opponent a much greater chance to take large chunks of the edges and then purse to turn whole rows). To win the corners, you must avoid the spots 1 out from the corners. To avoid being forced to take the spots 1 out from the corners, one strategy is to avoid the edges as long as possible, and then try to only take edge pieces with at least one gap to the corners, and one gap to the opponent.

You also want to keep your options open, to prevent being forced into taking the wrong piece near the edge or corners.

A simple strategy that works against this version relatively often is to at the start look for positions that will take some of the opponents pieces while ideally _increasing_ your possible moves, while being as far from the edges as possible. Then when you are forced to put a piece near the edges, put it near the centre of an edge (as far from corners as possible).

By then the options will be so constrained you can start looking a at consequences of each option, with the goal being to avoid putting pieces near the corners.

I'm not a particularly good player, and I got 3 out of 4 corners on my first attempt by just relatively haphazardly following the above, which means the default settings and/or overall strength of this version is pretty weak.

<comment><USER6> > _I 'm not a particularly good player, and I got 3 out of 4 corners on my > first attempt by just relatively haphazardly following the above, which > means the default settings and/or overall strength of this version is pretty > weak._

It defaults to Beginner. Use the "Skill" menu to change it to Master. It'll be much more challenging, and the AI will take a _lot longer_ to calculate its move.

(Remember: This is Windows 1.01, so you have to hold down the mouse button to use pull-down menus.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The first time I ran this something went wrong I somehow didn't manage to even boot in to windows but found myself at the command line, with only the DOS floppy disks available.

The true Windows 1.01 experience.

<comment><USER16>
      C:
      CD windows
      win

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I love that windows 1.x had a tiling window manager. I think it's kind of a shame that mode died for so long.

<comment><USER18> Back in Windows 8. And improved in Windows 8.1.

EMACS, of course, never lost it.

<comment><USER19> I only wish it was a bit more flexible in W8 :(

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> All these features, and Reversi! [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGvHNNOLnCk](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGvHNNOLnCk)

</comment><comment><USER21> Even better, Zork: [http://jsmachines.net/disks/pc/games/infocom/zork1/](http://jsmachines.net/disks/pc/games/infocom/zork1/)

And it appears to save your state between runs, which is nice.

<comment><USER22> So that's:

1\. Zork

2\. running in the Infocom Virtual Machine

3\. running in an IBM PC emulator

4\. running in Javascript

6\. running in x86 machine code

and x86 maintains backwards compatibility with that original IBM PC through

7\. hardware instruction set translation

It's nice to know all those transistors aren't sitting idle.

<comment><USER23> For fewer layers (and faster playing) you can use Parchment: [http://iplayif.com/?story=http://www.batmantis.com/zorks/zor...](http://iplayif.com/?story=http://www.batmantis.com/zorks/zork1.z5&vm=gnusto)

Though the status line doesn't work... I should fix that.

And if you like Zork, try these modern classics:

Lost pig: [http://iplayif.com/?story=http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if- arc...](http://iplayif.com/?story=http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if- archive/games/zcode/LostPig.z8)

Spider and Web: [http://iplayif.com/?story=http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if- arc...](http://iplayif.com/?story=http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if- archive/games/zcode/Tangle.z5)

<comment> s-macke Great. I like those interactive fiction and will play Lost pig :) What is missing is some sort of save game option via web storage. And maybe you should give some example links on the first page. _bookmarked_

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> After Bellard's JSLinux, it was just about time till more OS will be ported to JS.

[http://bellard.org/jslinux/](http://bellard.org/jslinux/)

<comment><USER25> After PCjs and Bellard's, try Virtual x86, which can emulate FreeDOS, OpenBSD, and KolibriOS.

[http://copy.sh/v24/](http://copy.sh/v24/)

As a hack, all of these JavaScript emulators are awesome to play with. But in reality if you need performance for something in the past decade, like a N64 or newer arcade emulators, JS is still orders of magnitude slower than dynarec emulators written in C. I hope something like PNaCl will come along to bridge the performance gap.

<comment> s-macke N64 might work. With WebGL support of course. And I hope too for a really new standard for web programming. Java was the answer for some time, then Flash, now Javascript. The big companies should sit together and agree on one standard with typed variables. The JIT compilers of Javascript will reach there limits sooner or later.

<comment><USER25> So I worked on a defuct N64 emulator, TRwin, back around 2000. Thirteen years later and thanks to the power of the modern web, my PC that's literally orders of magnitude faster runs the best JS emulator like a slide show. Using native code, my celeron400 with a Voodo card could run it full speed.

JavaScript is a toy language. But I do agree that strong typing and restrictions on GC like asm.js would help the situation. Unfortunately we can't rely on the standards bodies to make good decisions. Static typing was supposed to be in ECMAScript 4 back in 2008, but they abandoned it back in 2007.

It's still painfully clear to me the we are going backwards with all of these bloated poorly designed layers in HTML5 and I have little faith in the standards bodies.

[http://hulkholden.github.io/n64js/](http://hulkholden.github.io/n64js/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This an insanely great emulation. Including the loading times.

</comment><comment><USER27> the mouse tracking is fucked. it leaves the windows if i go to try and click the top right corner

<comment><USER28> It'd be nice if they implemented Pointer Lock: [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/WebAPI/Pointer_Lock](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/WebAPI/Pointer_Lock)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> As someone who really enjoys the history of computing, this is awesome! I don't think I've ever had a chance to play with Win 1 and probably wouldn't have gone through the trouble of getting it running myself. This and others like it would be neat for the Computer History Museum to have on its site.

</comment><comment><USER30> I can't seem to successfully reset the calculator after a divide by zero.

It's funny how when I closed Windows and ended on the DOS prompt I mindlessly typed "win" & enter. Some habits never die I guess.

<comment><USER31> "C" key works for me as expected, where is problem?

<comment><USER30> Yes it does, for some reasons I'm an idiot that was using buttons on the left and didn't see the C.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Windows 1.01 feels much closer to Mac Classic than Windows 3.1 does. (Button appearance, close button on left, menus must be held down to stay open, "Get Info" instead of "Properties".)

</comment><comment><USER33> It's really mind blowing how it's written entirely in javascript

</comment><comment><USER34> Wow, it had been a long time since I'd played DONKEY.BAS. [http://jsmachines.net/demos/pc/donkey/](http://jsmachines.net/demos/pc/donkey/)

<comment><USER6> Bill Gates and Neil Konzen wrote DONKEY.BAS. His name doesn't show up in the program listing, though, even on PC-DOS 1.0. :-(

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Interesting to see Helvetica ("Helv") in Windows 1.0 Write. According to a quick Wikipedia, Arial was only introduced with TrueType in Windows 3.x.

<comment><USER36> It's actually MS Sans Serif not even trying to hide the fact it's a ripoff. It's still in Windows 7 (don't know about 8), along with a TrueType version. Major differences between MS Sans Serif and Helvetica are the uppercase R and G. The overall typeface has a little more vertical stress. It's a way better ripoff than Arial; it's a shame Arial became so ubiquitous in that capacity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I tried to unmaximize a window by dragging the title bar like in Windows 7 or GNOME 3. I have no idea why I expected that to work.

<comment><USER22> Were you confused by the dead mouse scroll wheel, too? Or was that just me?

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I still suck at Reversi. :(

</comment><comment><USER39> There is some issue with the mouse. When I click on terminal.exe and try to click on "File", the mouse is coming out of the emulator. You would probably want to create an interface like a VM, where the mouse comes out of the emulator only when you press some combination of keys.

<comment><USER40> That'll probably impossible in the browser due to security reasons: otherwise misuse could trap the user on a website

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Nice, this one runs on an iPad mini! Not much slower than on a computer.

</comment><comment><USER42> Unbelievable... I never knew how Windows looked before 3.0 - thanks!

</comment><comment><USER43> I wonder what the license it. The guy from copy.sh promised to make it open source, but didn't yet. Can I hope?

</comment><comment><USER44> Yep, still as slow and glitchy as I remember it :)

This trend of retro computing is a wonderful trend.

</comment><comment><USER45> Glad it boots to desktop, not metro.

</comment><comment><USER46> the left top menu looks like bootstrap collapse :-). Nostalgia for sure..good work

</comment><comment><USER47> i am not sure but i am not able to do it.

</comment><comment><USER48> where is qbasic?

<comment><USER49> In the MS-DOS Executive, click the A-Drive, and the double-click on BASICA.EXE (Basic Advanced).

QBasic didn't come until MS-DOS 5, the demo uses MS-DOS 2.

<comment><USER6> > QBasic didn't come until MS-DOS 5, the demo uses MS-DOS 2.

Actually, the demo is PC-DOS 2.0, not MS-DOS 2.0. Notice the disk that's in the emulator's drive. Also, IBM replaced all of Microsoft's copyright notices:

      The IBM Personal Computer DOS
      Version 2.00 (C)Copyright IBM Corp 1981, 1982 1983

If they're using real disk images, then they must have an actual IBM ROM BASIC in the emulator. PC-DOS BASIC(A) would only run on a true-blue IBM machine, because it called into the ROM BASIC. In contrast, MS-DOS BASIC(A) was implemented entirely in software and would run on any clone.</comment></comment></comment>


Facebook's only weakness: Mobile - <AUTHOR> http://www.extremetech.com/computing/116661-facebooks-only-weakness-mobile <comment><USER2> "We do not currently directly generate any meaningful revenue from the use of Facebook mobile products, and our ability to do so successfully is unproven."

I don't think it will be a problem if management is aware of it and is taking measures to correct it. Also, smarthphones evolving will also help them. Good for them to have identified their main risks and weaknesses.

I also disagree that relying on advertising revenue is such a bad risk for Facebook: so does Television and their business model has been succesful for a loong time. Not to mention their largest rival Google also relies on ad revenue.

<comment><USER3> "I also disagree that relying on advertising revenue is such a bad risk for Facebook: so does Television and their business model has been succesful for a loong time. "

It's not a problem to rely on advertisements as a main source of revenue, but Televisions have commercial breaks. What Facebook is afraid of is that most of their users won't even use the website at all, and only the mobile app. Or to continue the Television metaphor, it's like having all the TV watchers switch from TV, to TVs without commercial breaks. _poof_ goes the revenue.

<comment><USER4> This makes a lot of sense to me now. I have been scratching my head at some obvious and simple things Facebook left out of their otherwise fantastic mobile applications on the platforms I use. Windows Phone has a great built-in Facebook client, but when I'm viewing my status, all I can see is how many people "Like"d it. To see who it was, I have to go to their website. Likewise, I can't add new friends from it. On WebOS (IMO the best Facebook client I've used, but I've never used the iPad app), it's fantastic but there's absolutely no Facebook Chat support anywhere in the entire OS. On Android, Facebook and Facebook Chat are two different apps. Both need to be running to get the "full" experience, and I'm sure there are still things missing.

It seems every platform is missing something, and it makes sense that they would deliberately give you basic functionality to use but require you hit their website for the full experience (and full ads). In a world of "apps just launch the website", Facebook is taking the opposite approach. Apps are the gateway drug to the full version.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have always wondered why Facebook does not display any ads in their apps - after all, the traffic generated by mobile devices and iPads must be substantial. Perhaps that was the reason why they did not plan any iPad app at first - forcing users to view ads? I'm sure that they will do fine, though - the desktop won't die soon. I often find myself switching to the browser version because I can't stand typing more than a few words with a soft- keyboard.

</comment><comment><USER6> That is far from their _only_ weakness. They have really weak ad-clicks-per- users numbers. They rate at which they add new users has been slowing drastically.</comment>


Financial Backtesting: A Cautionary Tale - <AUTHOR> http://www.philosophicaleconomics.com/2015/12/backtesting/ <comment><USER2> The biggest problem with back-testing in finance that I've come across is that markets change.

Nowadays markets change every 5-10 years,this is my own personal belief here, which means you can't do too many meaningful comparisons over longer time periods. Couple that with the fact that most bull markets last for 5-10 years and this means you can't really tell how your active portfolio will perform.

Or put another way, strategies that work on a macro level tend not to work very well. Anything of the flavor of "if the market does X for past 5 days, then buy Y and hold until Z happens tend not to be reproducible or testable in a meaningful way."

What does work, again from personal experience, is arbitrage. Arbitrage is everywhere in the financial markets.

\- 5 year bonds that are 2 years old look just like 3 year bonds that were just issued, assuming all terms are the same.

\- The A and B shares of a single company tend to follow a constant pattern

\- 2 different ETF's that follow the same index(say SPY) tend to move together,

\- exchanges that tend to cross at midpoint( most dark pools) and price via the SIP tend to offer a half penny latency arbitrage opportunities

\- when two companies merge the price of the target will converge on the deal price at the closing.

\- low latency arb where stock prices follow some commodities price, banks vs currency rates, oil produces vs WTI, etc

These are all examples of things that you can meaningfully back-test and model.

Jim Simmons of Renaissance Capital once remarked that there is no signal in the market data at a macro level, I tend to agree with him and the author.

<comment><USER3> The way I understand this is that a lot of it comes down to articulating useful prior distributions over some of the outcomes to be predicted.

The kind of backtesting that this post explores, which is basically the bread and butter of "quantamental" asset managers (lolz CRSP Fama/French data), is almost always performed in a frequentist set up where you plan to regress outcomes (portfolio returns) on a simple set of "easy to understand" predictors, like price momentum over some trailing time period.

You might have to do a few cross-sectional or time-series adjustments, like the Fama/MacBeth regression and some poor man's time series smoothing of coefficients, but it's basically just a really large, really crappy OLS model, where the plan is to just torture the vendor data sets until you get out whatever kind of statistical significance you need for a marketing whitepaper and/or pitchbook entry to shop around to unsophisticated board members in client organizations.

This is the whole "which 1000 tests did I do before I showed you the results" thing from this article, and it just amounts to simple p-hacking (or t-stat hacking) which is a well-known Bad Thing To Do.

Clients are already very sensitive to things like transaction costs, so the clients probably would have demanded that the analysis be carried out net of transaction costs in the first place. But transaction costs are easy for a paying client to get their head around... for non-quantitative client board members, getting their head around nuances of p-values and regression models is actually quite hard, even if these are statistics 101 for the finance professionals working with them.

But the amazing thing is that while everyone's busy worrying about p-hacking (and _never_ Bonferroni-correcting reported results, if they even know how many researcher degrees of freedom [1] are involved in the first place), no one is talking about the fact that all of this is in the service of a frequentist-style analysis of _Prob(Data | market hypothesis)_ , rather than a Bayesian-style _policy_ question that seeks to analyze _Prob(market hypothesis | Data)_ and necessitates some use of expert-derived priors about the probability of some market hypothesis in general.

In the case of a momentum strategy like the one studied, the market hypothesis would need to be about modern market conditions, the causal underpinnings of price momentum as a predictive factor, and whether or not its efficacy will improve or decrease when you condition on the _modern_ market situation.

And crucially, _this_ is the part that active managers are (like everyone else) very bad at. They can't articulate accurate or informative priors about the current status of something like the causal underpinnings of price momentum any better than anyone else.

If you are seeking to pay someone for a _policy_ analysis, e.g. what should I think about the posterior probability _Prob(market hypothesis | Data)_ , then you shouldn't be paying them for the _easy_ part of that analysis -- the part where you write down some silly likelihood function due to heroic OLS assumptions and optimize it for parameters and update a portfolio position based on those parameters. That part is borderline _trivial_ if you have decent software engineers to make sure the code is not excessively buggy (yet most quantamental shops don't, and they're still letting portfolio managers do this shit directly with SLOPE in Excel and then making Ivy MBAs translate it into poor Python or MATLAB code for "production") -- the _hard_ part is actually articulating informative priors.

I think overall, it higlights a need for client organizations to become a bit more sophisticated about the sorts of forecasting models that quantamental managers use. Then they can begin applying market pressure by firing managers that do bang-simple things like OLS in a crappy dev environment, and hopefully create competitive pressure to make quant shops shift to more rigorous Bayesian methods, or _at least_ make the rampant researcher degrees of freedom and p-hacking problems transparent so they can be mitigated.

Of course, a lot of this is moot because a very large amount of the business done with quantamental asset managers is based on nepotism and cover-your-ass blame insurance. For example, suppose you are a non-technical board member of the entity charged with managing the pension plans for some state's retired firefighters. You are paid money not _just_ based on whether the pension plan's assets improve, but also on whether you did due diligence when hiring an active manager (read: you hired a fancy consulting firm who told you what you wanted to hear), and whether you are in a position to fire firms if they seem to do a bad job, or create pockets of plausible deniability by crafting "data journalism" accounts about a market downturn that "no one could have avoided."

Because these board members are the ones with most of the interaction with quantamental shops, most quantamental shops end up turning into shoddy data journalism mills -- need a story to explain yesterday's bad returns to the rest of your board? We're on it. Whadya want? Something about oil & natural gas? Something data mined about some random earnings reports? Just let us know. We're your one stop shop to rationalizing away yesterday's returns. Just don't ask us what will happen tomorrow.

In this sense, clients rarely punish quantamental shops. In fact, many of them are _handsomely rewarded_ for doing p-hacking and shoddy data journalism as long as it covers the ass of some client board member who doesn't want to lose his bonus because of a downturn in the S&P 500 and needs to sell a story to his bosses fast.

If that kind of stuff doesn't go away, there will be no actual prediction- based incentive for the asset managers themselves to ever improve. Why work hard to write good code and do proper statistics when you can make bank by selling shoddy data journalism?

[1] [http://andrewgelman.com/2012/11/01/researcher-degrees-of- fre...](http://andrewgelman.com/2012/11/01/researcher-degrees-of-freedom/)

<comment><USER4> You make it sound like Bayesian-type analysis is somehow fundamentally impervious to p-hacking and is therefore clearly superior to frequentist for this purpose; do you have any actual references in support of this -- because I am personally having serious doubts about that, in particular given how bad people are at coming up with priors (and when they do, wouldn't these priors be usually backward-looking anyway?)

<comment><USER3> No statistical method is impervious to malicious attempts to subvert it. That said, reasoning between two different models on the basis of _magnitude of t-stat_ is _inherently_ flawed. That is, such an inference process doesn't possess the properties necessary to lead to the conclusions people try to draw from it, _even if no malicious intent is present_. When you add this to a situation where the temptation is high for things like p-hacking, it _actively encourages_ poor statistical hygiene.

Whereas, with Bayesian statistics, you'd have to _go out of your way and do something that is glaringly fishy_ to do the same thing. Hiding it from people is generally a lot harder than hiding what you're doing with generic p-hacking.

One of the main reasons for this is that the model's reliance upon assumptions is usually far more transparent in a Bayesian model. You are forced to publicly declare your dependence on assumptions encoded in the prior. In the frequentist case, many people _don 't even consider_ that there are prior assumptions that may not hold about the data, and indeed they often report results which are incorrect because they did not account for basic things, like how their data is encoded, or non-ignorable experimental designs.

One of my favorite papers about this sort of thing is "Let's Put the Garbage- Can Regression and Garbage-Can Probits Where They Belong" by Christopher Achen [1].

Of course, the same thing can happen in a Bayesian setting. Someone can use an off-the-shelf Bayesian model fitting tool without understanding what it is doing, and they could use standard prior distributions for analytical convenience or ease of coding, and then later try to package their result as some "fancy Bayesian analysis" when it really suffers from low stats quality just like the dumb t-stat comparison would have.

But it's _harder_ to do that in a Bayesian setting without it drawing a red flag (I guess, unless you just tell bald-faced lies about what code you wrote, but that's a different story).

The bigger point is that you don't trust just one thing. You don't look at a single description of model fit or comparison, like two t-stats, and draw a conclusion. You should plot the residuals, make calibration plots, ROC curves, histograms of where your observations fall based on predicted outcome variables, etc. There is _never_ any sort of cookie cutter approach that will tell you whether some backtest should be believed.

As for the usefulness of managing this stuff in the form of articulating priors, one quote I always liked was in response to a critcism of Bayesian methods' reliance on a prior, where some academic said something like "So and so is standing on the front porch with a shotgun ready to shoot down any assumption that comes over the hill -- meanwhile, the back door is wide open for any assumption to run in."

If we set aside the fact that _any_ statistics procedure can be misused, or can be reported upon without proper skepticism and due diligence, then I still _do_ further believe that frequentism, in general as an entire epistemological half of statistics is simply a failed project, especially for any type of problem that is a _policy_ problem, which inherently requires access to a posterior distribution conditioned on some information.

But, I don't want to derail this thread and turn it into yet another philosophical debate about whether frequentism can be used as a basis for probability theory that corresponds with reality or not.

[1] [http://www.columbia.edu/~gjw10/achen04.pdf](http://www.columbia.edu/~gjw10/achen04.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Gotta agree with Jerf - what happened seems obvious. Someone else got there first - and we know pretty much when - and by now their algorithm includes sophisticated filters and refinements. They're pulling in only the best low hanging fruit now and competing for it, too - by buys near the end of the day, say. Margins are much lower now and the stated crude algorithm can no longer compete.

My first paper-and-pencil investment strategy in stocks was precisely this momentum one, when I was about 14, around 1970. So, this wasn't an opportunity that was going to persist forever. (What made it non-viable in the past was the high cost of broker fees.)

</comment><comment><USER6> Well written article. I kinda fear for some people I used to work with. They've got a "model" that turns over the portfolio 1.5 times a year, backtested since around 2000. Sometimes it's hard to get people to understand that what they're doing is totally crazy.

What the article is hinting at is a very specific part of the scientific method: mechanism.

When you hypothesise about something, you are also guessing at how exactly the effect comes to pass. So for instance you surmise that incident radiation induces a current in conductors, lessening the amount of radiation beyond the point of incidence. This mechanism would have some interesting experimental results, namely that non conductors would not shield anything, whereas conductors can be used to shield say a phone from EM radiation. It also means if your shield was conducting but very thin, it might not work.

In the financial sphere, you rarely have the luxury of being able to test mechanisms. There's a huge amount of data, and it's quite easy to find structure, but the apparatus itself is rarely exposed.

This leaves you with two areas of research: arbitrage, as in what Chollida1 says, and presumed mechanisms.

Since the first area has been explored by him, I'll look at the second.

So let's say you used to work in a large pension fund, and that pension fund always did its trades starting at 3pm, and filled whatever wasn't done in the auction. You meet some colleagues, who do the same. Since you now have a glimpse into a causal mechanism, it's pretty reasonable for you to look at a model where things that have traded a lot since 3pm continue in the way they were going.

There could be lots of similar mechanisms in play, coming on and off as the market evolved.

</comment><comment><USER7> Does anyone have current performance data for the _Dogs of the Dow_ or Motley Fool Foolish Four (?) strategies?

</comment><comment><USER8> If you were an investor in 1985 and you did this analysis and ran out-of- sample tests, you would have 15 years of profitability before the algorithm starts generating losses. After a few months of losses you would discard the algorithm and search for a new one. What am I missing?

<comment><USER9> why would you imagine a few months or losses indicated the strategy didn't work anymore?

<comment><USER3> Exactly. This is a form of counterfactual bias. It's easy to imagine how you were "almost right" and give yourself credit for that, but it's much harder to imagine when you were "almost wrong" and correctly penalize your thinking in proportion to the almost-wrong-ness.

It's easy to imagine you would have turned off the strategy at a convenient time, but it's hard to imagine that you would maybe rationalize that it's just a short slump or something and keep the strategy going.

And for any hard rule you make like a priori committing to turning off some strategy if there are X consecutive months of bad returns (for reasonably small X), you can construct some counter-example strategy where, if you had just had the foresight to hold on to month X+1, you would have made a ton of money and there was some after-the-fact obvious reason why months 1 through X had the poor return, and "smart" investors would have understood this and...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent." \- John Maynard Keynes</comment>


Yahoo! Co-Founder Jerry Yang Named Chief Executive Officer (Yahoo press release) - <AUTHOR> http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/070618/aqm723.html <comment><USER2> "Fostering a culture of winning?" Ouch. Can't imagine Google saying something so corporate. Plus it makes it painfully clear that this is to be a departure from the previous culture of losing.

Yahoo probably will do better now, though. Jerry's a hacker, and that's what Y needs.

<comment><USER3> The lack of a "culture of winning" sounds like someone's knock on Semel that bubbled up from boardroom debate to press release subtitle.

In this context it actually sounds more like a campaign promise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Just what yahoo needs. Hope this changes Yahoo, the way Jobs changed Apple after Sculley.</comment>


At NeXT, Steve Jobs Was 'obsessed' with Returning to Apple - <AUTHOR> http://www.cultofmac.com/398371/at-next-steve-jobs-was-obsessed-with-returning-to-apple/ <comment><USER2> Of course he was. It was his. No surprise here.</comment>


Seinfeld and Celebrity Computer Endorsements - <AUTHOR> http://www.globalnerdy.com/2008/08/21/seinfeld-and-celebrity-computer-endorsements/ <comment><AUTHOR> An entertaining trip down memory lane.</comment>


Facebook iPhone App Adds Recording and Sharing Video - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2013/01/28/facebook-app-update/

<comment><AUTHOR> Here comes Vine clone from Facebook. Invent, which is hard, but there is always CLONING!!

</comment><comment><USER2> how can i give points to this article?

<comment><AUTHOR> Click on the triangle icon shown before the title.</comment></comment>


Explain It to Me Again, Computer - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2013/02/will_computers_eventually_make_scientific_discoveries_we_can_t_comprehend.html

<comment><USER3> Very good article. It makes the point that science is heading in an unprecedented direction where the complexity of what is happening is too difficult for a single human mind to understand. In fact, I would say it's almost _arrogant_ to assume that our 1100 grams of processing power is capable of understanding the incredibly complex interactions that build and build upon themselves.

This is the reason for computational science. Imagine trying to render a photorealistic scene analytically. There's just no way you could do that. Exactly integrate the rendering equation over complex geometries? It's unfathomable. There's a reason the Schrodinger equation has only been solved analytically for systems of just a few particles (not to be confused with _exactly_ , which is possible with numerical methods).

Eventually science experiments will be conducted by setting up your initial system, plugging in the relatively simple laws of physics, and letting it go (well... if we solve the n-body problem).

I don't think biology will ever be "understood" in the same way that derivatives or diffusion or gravity is understood. There's so many levels of nested complexity that it is totally mind-boggling, and I'm surprised more biologists aren't impressed by the sheer fact that any of it works at all.

<comment><USER4> I don't think what your describing is science. At it's core science is a question of experimentation and running complex simulations can't truly provide new information, just validation. That said, there is a great temptation to call many things science because it lends credibility even if you go though the motions and ignore why honest experementwtion has value in the first place.

<comment><USER3> What?!?

>Running complex simulations can't truly provide new information, just validation.

This is entirely and absolutely false.

I think you may want to read up on simulation (FEM, molecular dynamics, etc.). It's my research field. For instance, Quantum Monte Carlo has been used to calculate energy levels to a ridiculous level of agreement with experimentally measured values. There's plenty that can be learned about reality that can't currently be studied through experimentation because it's either 1) too expensive or 2) impossible to study with current technology.

Also, I wouldn't say science is "about" experimentation. It's about prediction. Any theory that can more accurately predict a system's future state than another theory is the better science. And simulations can do this better in many cases than experiment.

<comment><USER5> A simulation is just a way of finding out what the _current_ model predicts (maybe... assuming things like roundoff and truncation error didn't mess things up).

What if the current model is _wrong_?

An experiment in the real/natural world is the only way to find out if a model (or its simulation) is wrong. You have to ask nature.

<comment><USER3> Quantum mechanics (or QFT) isn't likely to be found wrong anytime soon. And if it is, it will be to such a degree that it has almost no day-to-day consequences (much as how GR is only considered for particle physics and satellite synchronization).

What I mean by this is that the whole nature of chemistry and biology is already rooted on a very secure foundation. So as simulation capabilities increase, you can be sure that these have a very high probability of modeling the "higher-order" phenomena correctly. Even superconductors and superfluids can be modeled correctly. The only things that may not be correct would be the high energy limit of quantum gravity models. But simulation in this area is almost (and may be?) nonexistent.

Now... having stated that we have an almost perfect description of the underlying reality for any practical phenomena we would be interested in, it is true that this model is currently mostly unamenable to calculation. The amount of computation required to reach chemical accuracy is very high and we may not have that capability for quite a while. So we make concessions and approximate things. For example, wavefunctions are modeled as Slater determinants which satisfy the wavefunction's antisymmetry but do not take into effect all the correlative effects (like electron-electron interactions).

It is a scientific and mathematical challenge to characterize exactly how much these models are off from the "true" solution. Most of the time, you have a good idea if the approximation you are using will work for your domain. If I want to fold proteins, I don't need anything more accurate than CHARMM (describes pairwise interactions; it's a non-reactive potential). But if I want to study Cooper Pairs (in superconductors) I'm going to need to make many less approximations, and it will be a much more expensive model computationally.

<comment><USER4> QM says nothing about the validity of your simulation. Worse we are incapable of simulating something as complex as a single helium molicule using the full QM model for 1 second using 1 days computing power on any current supercomputer. Even protean folding is forced to greatly simplify what's going on to the point it's often wrong. ( Proteans are not folded in a vacuum.)

Want to simulate a cell? Even with hardware 10^100 times faster you can't use QM, it's all models of models. None of which are 100% accurate, but that's no reason you can't Kidd yourself.

<comment><USER3> Am I missing something or did you not read the post you replied to?

<comment><USER4> From a practical standpoint Chemistry is not based on QM. You basically said QM > Chemistry > more complex things, my counter argument is even fairly simple. Chemistry is way to complex to model from pure QM. So, even at your first step your model is making simplifications. And 10^100 times the processing power does not get you to the point where you can model even the simplest cell for a meaningful time-frame.

Even at the timescales of atomic explosions and the best hardware / software around those models are vary simplified.

PS: That's not to say you can't make useful simulations, but trusting them to be accurate without testing is not science.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't really think it matters if we can fully understand a theory, as long as that theory makes predictions that can be verified. For example, if a computer-generated theory gives the ability to build a radio that is a million times more efficient at spectrum utilization, and products can be built from it, that theory is still useful even if it is uncomprehensible.

<comment><USER7> I very much agree that you don't have to understand the details of how something works for it to be useful. Whether that's a theory, a car or a computer, the world is full of things that are too complex for me to understand _fully_.

But if you don't truly understand something, I think you've given up control of that thing to someone else. Someone else has to do the thinking for you.

Once that happens, you'll have a hard time doing something new in that area, or even applying whatever it is you're supposed to know to new areas.

Understanding isn't the only thing that matters, but it still matters.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think this is giving humanity way too much credit. We're only going to care about profitable ideas that algorithms come up with.

Imagine an electronic intelligence with a profound understanding of TV shows. Who would possibly want to hear what it has to say?

<comment><USER9>
      Who would possibly want to hear what it has to say?

Television executives.

Everything has an application, and many fewer of those applications are useless than you'd think. Plus there are higher-order effects to consider, mostly related to the tools people develop to attack interesting problems. The classic example is the space race: how useful is it to be able to fire four- hundred-foot-tall fuel tanks into space?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Interesting article, but I think that the humans will probaly evolve in ways that will extend their capacity of understanding. It may start by people living longer and then someday they will have memory implants and maybe even processing power implants.

</comment><comment><USER11> We know that the mind is Turing complete. What the author is suggesting is that it's possible for there to be some science or mathematics that is beyond the capability of our mind to comprehend. (and that it's possible that there's science or mathematics that may be derived by computers that we may not fundamentally be able to understand)

However, any attempt to compute or derive new science/mathematics outside the theoretical capabilities of our (Turing complete) minds on merely Turing complete computers is doomed to failure (at least, until we get some computers better than Turing complete ones).

<comment><USER12> Turing complete is really only meaningful for a computer with infinite time and storage; humans are limited in both. Just as a smarter human can understand something a less smart human can't, computers will eventually understand many things we can't wrap our heads around.

<comment><USER11> True, but assuming in this future humans have developed brain enhancements, the issue of storage space and computing power becomes less relevant. Though I suppose the whole idea of brain enhancements would render the author's point null anyways...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It doesn't help that most research papers are behind paywalls, or in forgotten books long out of print but still in copyright (and owned by the publisher, not the author), buried and not scanned theses, or technically published in patents but then also unusable by anyone interested.

</comment><comment><USER14> Science is not an agglomeration of random observations and facts - it should not get more _complicated_ as more is discovered - if the theories and tools like maths we have do not explain the theories then we are doing something wrong with the fundamental tools (maths stats)

I accept there is more and more unknown or unexplained - but that is not to say the theories we have are not explained with the same set of "unreasonably effective" tools

<comment><USER15> > it should not get more complicated as more is discovered

But it does for the simple reason, that you need to read more and more papers just to know whether or not someone didn't already do your research, or if there isn't already a growing body of evidence against the theory you're trying to develop.

[http://lesswrong.com/lw/kj/no_one_knows_what_science_doesnt_...](http://lesswrong.com/lw/kj/no_one_knows_what_science_doesnt_know/)

Scientific progress is about to hit a self-complexity boundary due to the amount of knowledge we amassed - we have a huge overhead on adding any single new piece to a puzzle. Our brains are not good enough for handling it anymore, we need computers to help.

EDIT

And also because of that, I believe there's a huge amount of undiscovered facts lurking in all the discoveries we already had described, that no one noticed before because it requires correlating different papers from different disciplines (think about the more messy fields, like biology/medicine). Finding a way for computers to effectively do that work for us will likely result in some amazing progress.

<comment><USER14> Is that really true?

If so one should force the release of copyright papers from the publishers at gunpoint tomorrow. And make google dedicate half it's employees to indexing it

I suspect though that there are so _few_ scientists working on most areas that the research is old or outdated across the majority of fields.

And it rather indicates a lack of fundamental tools - for example studying insect species - it's well know that there are millions of species to every insectologist(?) - yet Linnaeus classification is three centuries old - <USER2> could imagine a production line of genome mapping - put insec into machine out comes its genome - oh look that is not the species we were thinking of

The tools (mechanical) and the tools (mental) need to integrate large branches if science are what is needed - not a fear over the vast number of facts we have acquired</comment></comment></comment>


Ballmer promises Windows 8 PCs, slates and tablets in 2012 - <AUTHOR> http://www.winrumors.com/ballmer-promises-windows-8-pcs-slates-and-tablets-in-2012

<comment><USER2> Microsoft is a for-profit business, so we'd _expect_ them to constantly be working on stuff like this. The mere possibility of derivative products is not news! There aren't enough specifics to even call this an article. This is mere marketing, and we shouldn't be helping Microsoft to do it.</comment>