"Two days ago the police came to me and wanted me to stop working on this" - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/shadowsocks/shadowsocks-iOS/issues/124#issuecomment-133630294 <comment><USER2> I was visiting China recently (my first time there). I thought bypassing The Great Firewall was going to be as simple as an "ssh -D" SOCKS setup, or a "ssh -w" tunnel. Oh boy, I was wrong. If you try this, or even a basic OpenVPN setup, you will quickly find out your VPN works fine for about 5 minutes, but then latency increases to 5sec, 10sec, 30sec(!), and then everything times out. After some research I read online the government does deep packet analysis and uses machine learning to find heuristics to guess which TCP connection or UDP stream is likely being used as a VPN. When they think there is a high probability a VPN is detected, they simply start dropping all the packets.

Encryption is not enough. You need to disguise your VPN traffic to make it look like standard HTTPS sessions (since they don't block HTTPS). For example in a traditional HTTPS session, if the client browser downloads, say, a 500kB image over HTTPS, it will send periodical empty TCP ACK packets as it receives the data. But when using a VPN that encrypts data at the IP layer, these empty ACK packets will be encrypted, so The Great Firewall will see the client sending small ~80-120 bytes encrypted packets, and will count this as one more sign that this might be a VPN.

That's why people in China have to use VPN tools that most westerners have never heard of: obfsproxy, ShadowVPN, SoftEther, gohop, etc. All these tools try to obfuscate and hide VPNs. I have a lot of respect for all these Chinese hackers like clowwindy who try to escape censorship, as it takes more technical prowess than you think to design a VPN that works in China.

<comment><USER3> How do multinational companies' china offices get through the firewall? For example if my company uses Google apps, how do I ensure that my china office has access?

<comment><USER4> Pay one of the telcos (i.e China Unicom) for an MPLS circuit out of the country.

Also, international performance in general can be quite bad at peak times (i.e 30% packet loss), I suspect due to Comcast-style management of international transit. But if you buy a transit circuit from Unicom, no problem!

Edit: to add to the grand parent, I've actually found ssh -D/-w0 (for a TUN device) quite reliable from China. What I really want to do is run multiple connections from different end points with a routing protocol to do fast- failover.

<comment><USER5> > Pay one of the telcos (i.e China Unicom) for an MPLS circuit out of the > country.

Don't suppose you could explain to us network plebs how that would bypass the Great Firewall?

<comment><USER6> It's a private network/route with traffic containing nothing but corporate data. Most multinationals facing this situation route out through HK, with a secondary failover usually in Taiwan or Singapore. Works a treat, but is costly and latency can be subpar.

It also doesn't solve the problem of mobile access to Google Apps for Chinese workers (Google Play Store & apps are not bundled by many (any?) Chinese OEM handset makers or carriers. You can root & sideload, or you can purchase phones outside the country and ship them to your employees, but even if you do this, there is still no guarantee they'll be able to access Google's apps while on cellular networks.

<comment><USER7> Google Apps will drain your battery when they can't access Google's servers. Roaming with a China Unicom Hong Kong sim card, like the cross border king, will give you gfw free access.

<comment><USER8> > Google Apps will drain your battery

Google Apps will also drain your battery if you are in a region where Google has no network-location data yet, because then Google will turn on your GPS, and send to their servers the pair of GPS-coords and strength of networks.

If you live in a suburb in Germany where almost no networks are known to Google, this means if you enable location services your GPS will try to get a fix 24/7, eating your battery in about 2 hours.

This is probably going to be an issue in China, too, considering that Google doesn't have location data there.

<comment><USER9> I think you can turn this off. My phone has a setting called 'Scanning always available', which says "Let Google's location service and other apps scan for networks, even when Wi-Fi is off.". If I turn off this setting, and turn off wi-fi, then the problem you point out should be avoided, right?

<comment><USER8> Yes.

But if you turn on WiFi and Location at the same time (which is not uncommon), then it will suck your battery dry in seconds. Turn any of those two off, and it works.

<comment><USER9> Oh. My phone has three options for 'Location mode':

\- High accuracy (GPS, wi-fi, mobile)

\- Battery saving (Wi-fi, mobile)

\- Device only (GPS)

From what you say, it sounds like 'Device only' would save more battery than 'Battery saving'?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> For people who are not aware of this: Shadowsocks is a popular and very simple tool to circumvent Great Fire Wall in China. It is written to reduce characteristics in network traffic so that GFW cannot easily block it by deep traffic analysis. clowwindy is the original author.

<comment><USER11> Who is the target audience of this software and how does it work? Do non technical users set this up on a VPS provider and then connect to it? I'd imagine most developers in China would just SSH tunnel their way out.

<comment><USER10> SSH dynamic port forwarding is no longer working for years. It is so easily picked up by GFW and minutes later it is gone together with the whole SSH connection. So does PPTP and L2TP VPN. GFW has been upgraded so many times for the past few years. The target audience is developers. The install is super simple via one line of `pip install`, the start code for daemon is also one line with the configuration inline or through <10 lines of json. On the client side the author and other contributors developed native clients that allow connection by supplying just 1 password and 1 server address. Super simple and highly reliable to this day.

<comment><USER12> Why not just wrap all your SSH packets as HTTPS?

<comment><USER13> I believe that the traffic patterns (up/down request amount and timing) will still look sufficiently different from a 'normal' https connection to be detected and cut off within an hour.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is the end of a century. People in China had used 4 kinds of tools to skip the GFW: freegate, openvpn, goagnet, shadowsocks.

freegate is a traditional http proxy or socks proxy built by Falun Gong ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falun_Gong](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falun_Gong)). They built lots of software with the same technology: freegate gpass freeu dynapass... People share this kind of banned software sending to each others just like teenagers share adult videos. After update of GFW, it become un- available and un-usable.

openvpn turns break GFW as a business, people sells openvpn account at $1.66 a month regularly. They sell this kind of services package including pptp l2tp ssh openvpn to those who need a free network.

goagent is a free software written by Phus Lu. It use Google's application engine as server so you can use it without paying money.So it replaced openvpn since it cost $0. After China banned Google, this way become more and more hard.

shadowsock is a protocol designed by clowwindy. It become a environment. People use python, C, nodejs, golang, rust, obj-c, java to write their own client and server. Some organization share their server for free, some people sell account and provide high speed. shadowvpn works as a VPN while shadowsocks works as a socks5 proxy, but share the same technology.

This is the end of shadowsocks. I means recently more and more evidence shows that GFW has finally find a way to recognize shadowsocks's packets. Then they stopped the development of shadowsocks.

That's all. The winter of China's network comes.

<comment><USER15> > I means recently more and more evidence shows that GFW has finally find a > way to recognize shadowsocks's packets.

Hmm... okay, so they defeat shadowsocks by recognizing the packets.

> Then they stopped the development of shadowsocks.

But if they already had shadowsocks beat, why do they make a public show of shutting it down?

Sounds more like they recognize that they _don 't_ have the GFW technology to defeat shadowsocks on-going development over time. Which suggests all you need is a new developer.

<comment><USER16> I don't know if this is the case, but I think it's entirely possible to know that shadowsocks is being used widely without being able to do anything about it at the network level. I think that's plausibly how shadowsocks is designed to avoid the GFW in the first place.

For example, if their capabilities to identify shadowsocks traffic is not particularly specific, filtering would result in undesirable impact on other traffic. They can also have other out-of-band estimates for the extent of shadowsocks use (presence of the software on seized or searched equiment, observed chatter, informants, etc).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This wasn't a thorough deletion. The shadowsocks-iOS project has been switched to the 'rm' branch, but the 'master' branch still contains all the source code: [https://github.com/shadowsocks/shadowsocks- iOS/tree/master](https://github.com/shadowsocks/shadowsocks-iOS/tree/master) There's also a downloadable 2.6.3 release with a built .dmg and source code: [https://github.com/shadowsocks/shadowsocks- iOS/releases](https://github.com/shadowsocks/shadowsocks-iOS/releases)

Even if it does get completely removed, a duplicate exists on GitLab: [https://gitlab.com/mba811/shadowsocks- iOS](https://gitlab.com/mba811/shadowsocks-iOS) (No guarantee that it has all the commits prior to deletion, or that it hasn't been modified from the original in some way.)

I can only hope the police in clowwindy's country don't know how to switch GitHub branches.

<comment><USER18> Years ago, news said China "banned" bitcoin, years later miners in China live just fine. I guess this is not going to be so different.

<comment><USER19> The only thing that's "banned" regarding bitcoins in china is that financial institutions arn't allowed to trade them. You can mine them, you can set up companies that mine them, you can trade them if you're not a financial institution.

<comment><USER20> And as an aside they're the easiest way to exchange money when overseas. It's like a bank where the bank meets you at your hotel and gives you cash, and you never have to worry that your PIN won't work or your home bank will decide not to honor your transaction for fraud protection.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I find this comment amazing:

[https://github.com/shadowsocks/shadowsocks- iOS/issues/124#is...](https://github.com/shadowsocks/shadowsocks- iOS/issues/124#issuecomment-119921778)

Even with root account, you are not in full control of your Mac - you are sandboxed by Apple.

<comment><USER22> This is the result of a recent change in OS X 10.11, called System Integrity Protection.

It's a big step in the wrong direction [opinion], especially because it does nothing to verify "integrity". It prevents changes to the System directory by conventional means (and injection into system processes).

If malware were to figure out a way to disable SIP from userland, it could install itself in such a way that nothing short of disabling SIP could uninstall it.

<comment><USER23> Does booting an alternate OS still work to get around it, or have Apple thought of that route and somehow blocked it too?

(I have limited experience with OS X - only briefly played around with driver development and bootloaders in the 10.4 era with osx86 - and I did have to boot from the DVD a few times when I made the system unbootable.)

This raises the question, what good is root if it's not really root anymore?

<comment><USER24> > Does booting an alternate OS still work to get around it, or have Apple > thought of that route and somehow blocked it too?

It's easier than that. It's just a kernel argument to disable it. Simply add "rootless=0" to your boot-args and you have control of your machine back.

I'm running the 10.11 beta and I've already had to disable rootless because I like to have /usr/local as a symlink to somewhere else and by default the rootless configuration prevents writes to /usr. :-/

<comment><USER25> Apple has stated that the "rootless=0" boot argument to disable System Integrity Protection is temporary and will be gone in the GM version of El Capitan. Allowing this route to disable the feature would defeat the entire purpose of it.

<comment><USER26> Source? They said in the WWDC session ([http://asciiwwdc.com/2015/sessions/706](http://asciiwwdc.com/2015/sessions/706)) that the process to disable rootless may change during the beta, but didn't say that it won't be possible in the GM.

They know that rootless will break some applications/drivers, plus some types of development may need it disabled.

<comment><USER25> The supported mechanism for disabling System Integrity Protection is via the recovery partition.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> As a Chinese developer, I got more and more disappointed to my country.

I'd read a book written by LinYutang, called My Country and My People. All my understandings of my country after reading this book are not same as nowaday China.

What's wrong? I don't know. I just wanna have freedom for Googleing. I just wanna the people in this country be happy not only because they get enough to eat.

<comment><USER28> Don't worry, western leaders have figured out one doesn't need democracy or free speech for capitalism to function, China set an example. So with all the spying , ban of encryption , limits on freedom of the press with laws such as "the right to be forgotten" or making illegal to criticize cops or politicians in Spain , we have already entered in a post democratic era . And people in Europe take their freedom for granted forgetting they had to fight to death to win their freedom at first place.

<comment><USER29> The right to be forgotten is actually a powerful mechanism to protect individuals. Though, the law should possibly revised such that it only applies to individuals that are not a public figure, who can prove to have little or no range of responsibilities.

<comment><USER30> The right to be forgotten flies in the face of capitalism. You cannot assume you act in perfect self-interest without total and perfect information. The first can be easy to acquire, the second harder.

The right to be forgotten impedes on total information awareness and the desire to make the perfect rational decision with your money.

This is a good thing. Total information is not perfect information because of bias and context. Someone seeking such information will process it through a biased lens and never attain perfection. In that case, the individual under the lens will lose out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> "Two days ago the police came to me and wanted me to stop working on this. Today they asked me to delete all the code from GitHub. I have no choice but to obey.

I hope one day I'll live in a country where I have freedom to write any code I like without fearing.

I believe you guys will make great stuff with Network Extensions.

Cheers!"

<comment><USER31> Not being facetious here - what country do you live in that you think the government can't/won't interfere with your code?

<comment><USER32> Perhaps I am misunderstanding your use of English, because it is difficult to see how this is not a facetious question.

There are relatively few countries in which the government both could and would interfere with someone's publication of code, and I think only in China is there both widespread computer use and internet access, on the one hand, and state security actors (the civil police, actually) who have the sophistication and funding to intervene with specific projects such as this one.

Did you mean to ask what country he was in?

<comment><USER33> The US does "interfere" with the publication of some code. I'm thinking of cryptography code. Quoting from [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_the_United_States) .

> Since World War II, many governments, including the U.S. and its NATO > allies, have regulated the export of cryptography for national security > considerations, and, as late as 1992, cryptography was on the U.S. Munitions > List as an Auxiliary Military Equipment. ...

> As of 2009, non-military cryptography exports from the U.S. are controlled > by the Department of Commerce's Bureau of Industry and Security. Some > restrictions still exist, even for mass market products, particularly with > regard to export to "rogue states" and terrorist organizations. Militarized > encryption equipment, TEMPEST-approved electronics, custom cryptographic > software, and even cryptographic consulting services still require an export > license

> ... Other countries, notably those participating in the Wassenaar > Arrangement, have similar restrictions.

<comment><USER34> But in the US, you can sue the government: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernstein_v._United_States](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernstein_v._United_States)

<comment><USER33> I think you mean "at least", rather than "but"? You'll notice the WP quote I gave includes restrictions post-Bernstein (and links to that case). Even these restrictions count as 'interfer[ing] with someone's publication of code', no?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I've been using this anti-censorship software for about 2 or 3 years. It's the most stable one of all anti-censorship softwares I've ever used. For those who's not in China mainland, you can not imagine how many breaking-wall softwares we've ever used.From ssh -D,pptp,L2tp/ipsec,to OpenVpn. In order to access twitter,someone even create twitter api proxy such as Twip,btw,the creator was ever forced to "drink tea" with the police ,too. The Chinese gov just blocks any sites they want and frighten anyone who is "troublemaker". Best wishes for the gov,and for the heroes who is creative and brave to develop all these anti-censorship softwares.

</comment><comment><USER36> On this note, we've been trying to upload gigabytes of data via rsync from Europe to China (we are software company who are trying to deliver tools to our Chinese customers..). Connection used to be fast when it was night time in China, but lately the connection has been really slow or unusable. Is there any alternative way to get lots of packages from Western countries to China?

<comment><USER37> Ship it on an usb drive. (use encryption)

<comment><USER38> And get confiscated by China customs..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> What an awful government, simply horrible!

Now imagine, one manager coming to you with an idea:

"Hey, here is a great way to make big money: we fire all our expensive US workers and move the whole production chain to China, people are much cheaper there and governement will keep it that way!"

Would you adore such a greedy $$$hole and make him manager of the century?

Just another crazy idea: Imagine we would produce all our hardware for all our communication devices in a country with such an authoritarian neandertal- government! Oh, wait...

</comment><comment><USER40> As the author of tun2socks (which is currently used under the hood in shadowsocks-android and Psiphon3 for system-wide proxying), I wasn't even aware this effort was in progress. Very sad to see it stop.

</comment><comment><USER41> [https://github.com/Long-live- shadowsocks/shadowsocks](https://github.com/Long-live-shadowsocks/shadowsocks)

The original repositories have been/are being reset. (Some branches were not removed.)

Non-obvious ways to search for forks as the network graph is unavailable for larger projects.

[https://github.com/search?utf8=&q=shadowsocks+language%3APyt...](https://github.com/search?utf8=&q=shadowsocks+language%3APython+fork%3Atrue&type=Repositories)

<comment><USER42> You may not be able to see a list of the forks via the web interface, but you can (albeit less conveniently) see them with the JSON API:

[https://api.github.com/repos/shadowsocks/shadowsocks- iOS/for...](https://api.github.com/repos/shadowsocks/shadowsocks-iOS/forks)

And you can paginate like this:

[https://api.github.com/repos/shadowsocks/shadowsocks- iOS/for...](https://api.github.com/repos/shadowsocks/shadowsocks- iOS/forks?page=2)

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Main site for the software: [https://shadowvpn.org](https://shadowvpn.org)

Were the repos mirrored anywhere, or would that present a risk to the original author?

<comment><USER32> It's hard to see how that would present a risk to the original author, given the current circumstances as we know them.

What is described was a visit from the police in which they asked him to take down his own Github distribution. He clearly hasn't been arrested, and although he may be being fined, he doesn't mention it. You will notice that his message encourages others to continue work and is generally unhappy and defiant.

If this was a matter of any seriousness with regards to state security, it seems more likely to me that the repositories would be simply shut down without explanation.

My expectation based on my own few encounters with the regular civil police[1] is that those who specialize in computer matters are unlikely to be idiots; I assume they will know how version control systems work. It would probably be overly cheeky of him to actually contribute to someone's fork, or work on similar software, but there shouldn't be any negative consequences based on what we've heard.

My experience in China is limited, and someone else might offer contradictory insights, but that's what my expectation would be based on that experience so far.

[1] an edit to clarify: "In China."

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> At Lantern ([https://www.getlantern.org](https://www.getlantern.org)) we make censorship circumvention software that shares some similarities with Shadowsocks but that also uses p2p. Since the @clowwindy announcement we're the #3 trending repository on GitHub basically because a ton of Chinese coders have been starring it - [https://github.com/trending](https://github.com/trending)

</comment><comment><USER45> And there are more than 500 forks. I'd say good luck deleting that :D

<comment><USER17> I downloaded the source code on principle. It's good to know there are plenty of online copies.

<comment><USER45> same did I. Seems like it's pretty good written piece of software, so might be good exercise to hack it a little bit and maybe learn something

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I am living in Iran and shadowsocks was by far the best tunneling software I have ever used, and believe me I've used almost ANYTHING!

I appreciate the efforts of clowwindy and it's talented developers and hope the development keep going.

That might be nice if some independent organization take ownership of the project so other individuals feel safer contributing to it.

<comment><USER47> It's not like the source code isn't still there, in the initial 'deleted' repo, not to mention several hundred forks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Anyone able to verify clowwindy is okay and the encounter with police ended at that? Their twitter seems to be accept-only now.

<comment><USER49> clowwindy showed up on twitter saying he's ok but has to drop maintenance. I guess he's physically alright.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Holy shit, clowindy was asking me questions related to this issue just last week.

This is a scary wake up.

</comment><comment><USER51> While I understand what the gov is trying to do, who's to say somebody else that doesn't live in China maintains the project and puts it on GitHub for all the world to see?

<comment><USER52> Maybe they are going to block or attack GitHub again until GitHub takes down all clones of it.

<comment><USER53> They will, one day. anyway Gmail was gone, which I think is the most impossible site to be blocked.

PS: nice to see you here. :)

<comment><USER54> I was shocked to see Gmail blocked, given how many business users were dependent on it. Previously they didn't censor websites critical to business and economy, but now they seem to be prioritizing control of speech over economic development.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> I know there are plenty of copies out there, but in case anyone needs a link, here's my (unmodified, except for the rm branch/removal message) fork:

[https://github.com/jasondenning/shadowsocks- iOS](https://github.com/jasondenning/shadowsocks-iOS)

</comment><comment><USER56> I seldom wonder; what is that the Chinese government aims to gain from all this oppression? What any government hopes to gain? North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, China, Russia (?) etc....What exactly do they want?

<comment><USER57> Like most governments around the world, they tend to think that "change = defeat". The US, UK, Canadian, and Australian governments are not really any better in this respect. They don't really understand the internet, and are therefore (sometimes justifiably) frightened by it.

Governments, by definition, are meant to "Govern". Most see that the the rules of governance that they, as experts, have defined, should be "The Only Rules". They have a vested (if only intellectual, but rarely is this the case) interest in seeing people follow these rules. Any discussion, or debate, regarding alternative rules, is obviously being pushed by people who don't know what they're talking about.

It's oppression based on consensus and bureaucracy. Sometimes it's nefariously directed, but often it's just pigheadedness and arrogance that lead to decisions like this being made.

Although, sometimes it's just downright manipulative pricks holding the reigns. Hopefully this is less frequent than it actually appears to be. I'm giving these governments the benefit of the doubt, though they haven't done much in recent years to deserve it.

<comment><USER56> Spot on! Governments are shit scared of the internet, probably even more than terrorists, probably because internet is a tool for the mind. A free mind has boundless optimism and spirit, and an oppressor cannot reign over such a mind.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> > I have no choice but to obey.

Did he ask a lawyer? Because it looks to me there are two possibilities. One, he was not doing anything illegal in which case the police had no authority to stop his activities. Two, he was indeed doing something illegal in which case he can be glad he got out of it with what appears to be only a warning.

<comment><USER59> I didn't get where he/she is from.If I were him and I was in US I would fight back with legal system, but if I were in china and Iran I would run away (sadly because there is no reliable legal system in these countries)

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> Right about now in China, GFW HQ:

\- Hey guys, we are on front page of HN again!

\- Yaay, lets upvote!!!

</comment><comment><USER61> In China, People give their country another name --- West Korea.

</comment><comment><USER62> A lot of people set up shadowsocks on their VPS and then spread it to their circles. It's the growing community and that more people are communicating with each other via means the party can not control that upsets the party. This will not stop, it's our fight for freedom.

</comment><comment><USER63> I am confused .. did the Chinese police come and ask him to stop working on it? Which country is he in?

<comment><USER64> China

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> Knowing as much as I know about China, I somehow feel it was considerate of them not to arrest the person or hack into his computer. They sent some guys to make him stop. May be I have a very bad impression of the Chinese government.

</comment><comment><USER65> From Wikipedia:

> The Streisand effect is the phenomenon whereby an attempt to hide, remove, > or censor a piece of information has the unintended consequence of > publicizing the information more widely, usually facilitated by the > Internet.

<comment><USER52> If you control virtually every aspect of media in a country, I don't see how Streisand effect works...

<comment><USER66> Because hackers will always find a way.

<comment><USER67> Tell that to the RIAA and MPAA, and every politician wanting more surveillance and censorship. The reality is that law, and money, and force currently, and always will, trump a geek at a keyboard.

Further, please consider that you don't have to kill a thing to control it. Even when something is technically possible, and arguably inevitable, it can still be neutered and effectively subdued. It's all fine and well to say things that suggest the human spirit will always triumph - that's optimism - but the human body can still be held in chains. A technical solution that is only accessible to a tiny set of people, under the right theoretical conditions, does not make freedom a solved problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> So how did the Chinese police find clowwindy?

His contact information doesn't look readily available online.

Did Chinese authorities contact Github, which readily complied with information that led to him being located?

<comment><USER69> It's really not that hard for the cops to track down someone in China. Besides, clowwindy didn't take any precautions before. I believe clowwindy once revealed the company he worked for.

<comment><USER68> Do you have a reference for clowwindy revealing his employer? I didn't see anything about that.

Cops can do a lot of things, but they don't pull information from thin air. Github would be one source of information.

It's odd that this entire, and very popular, discussion on HN doesn't delve into how this individual was found.

It's also interesting that your reply is from a new account with only this comment.

<comment><USER70> All ISPs in China are government-owned. It is believed that the government can locate any IP. Then it's only a problem of finding his IP by monitoring.

<comment><USER68> That may be possible, but no source had made that claim as far as I know, in this case or any other. Also, Github uses SSL. It would be interesting how they distinguish one user's Github connection from all the others originating in China.

Again, how the Github user was actually located by Chinese police was not disclosed or even discussed here. It's interesting that mentioning this has resulted in two comments by new accounts, solely to blame Chinese authorities as discovering the user on their own, with no evidence for it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> This feels rather suspicious to me. Either the police are complete idiots (because people have forked his code and you can still get it from the forks) or there is more to the story.

It would make more sense to just send a DMCA takedown for that plus all forks to ensure that the streisand effect doesn't come into play. Because now I gotta grab a fork and squirrel it away - even though I'm in the US I feel like this is important stuff to keep.

<comment><USER57> If you were a US developer hit by something similar, you may have been sent an NSL, and would therefore be unable to discuss it at all. The DMCA would only apply if you had been accused of copying, or creating a derivative work.

I find it interesting that the Chinese police have told him to shut it down, but have not put any restrictions on telling people he's been told to shut it down.

Who has the greater freedom in this respect?

<comment><USER71> > The DMCA would only apply if you had been accused of copying, or creating a > derivative work.

See my reply here [1].

> I find it interesting that the Chinese police have told him to shut it down, > but have not put any restrictions on telling people he's been told to shut > it down.

Don't you think that signals there is more to the story? I doubt some friendly people knocked on his door and asked him nicely to remove the code. Then after he did it - they told him to have a nice day and left him with some tea and biscuits.

My gut feeling is there is more to the story than what is in the one line comment in the issue tracker.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10102631](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10102631)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> Any knows a good shadowsocks tutorial for OS X? I'm going to China next week but I need to keep working while I'm there. I need to access Gmail, Github, AWS, etc. I can't get it to work with the few tutorials I found: the connection appears to freeze, and only certain browsers respect the OS X socks settings (no command line tools).

<comment><USER73> Hey, you could use a GUI client named GoAgentX on github. You could find the download link at this address.

[http://shadowsocks.org/en/download/clients.html](http://shadowsocks.org/en/download/clients.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> Quote: "Two days ago the police came to me and wanted me to stop working on this. Today they asked me to delete all the code from GitHub. I have no choice but to obey.

I hope one day I'll live in a country where I have freedom to write any code I like without fearing."

I claim that the west is hardly better: Just say "copyright law".

</comment><comment><USER75> 687 forks. Good luck to the authorities!

</comment><comment><USER76> Is this then a sign that the network architecture of back hauling everything to SF in order to send it back to Beijing so one can update ones neighbours wall, that architecture is flawed and needs to fall back to a peer to peer approach - one that truly can route around censorship

</comment><comment><USER77> oh,this seems to be a controversial question.The point is how to regard GFW in China.To be honest,every countries has its censorship.However,the point is GFW in china is opaque,which is not accepted.A man has rights to know what he want to know,and for gov,managing should be public.As for the author of shadowsocks,it is very sorrowful that she is asked to stop his work,which helps many Chinese people.For developers,this is what their work needs;for users,this is chances to see the real Internet.Remember everyone does not want to oppose gov,they just want to see something useful for their jobs,which also includes some politic news against Chinese gov.

</comment><comment><USER78> This saddens me personally, as I once worked with this guy; he is very productive and talented developer. Imagine how god-awful he feels now, threatened by police and forced to stop committing to his very own projects.

</comment><comment><USER79> I happily bypassed the great firewall using [https://github.com/apenwarr/sshuttle](https://github.com/apenwarr/sshuttle)

</comment><comment><USER80> Long live the shadowsocks.

People who do not yield to the GFW already made backups of all the repos under github.com/shadowsocks. And new tools to bypass the GFW is under development.

</comment><comment><USER81> Tangential, but the icon is from 星空のメモリア, a Japanese game. It has not been turned into anime, so can he read Japanese decently, or just using random pics?

<comment><USER82> Might be translated in to Chinese.

</comment></comment><comment><USER83> Have we all forgotten corkscrew ?

[http://agroman.net/corkscrew/](http://agroman.net/corkscrew/)

</comment><comment><USER84> But censorship when the citizens can travel in and out of the country carrying USB,SSD and hard drives will not work.

<comment><USER85> Do you honestly think you can carry USB and SSD to China without border officers confiscating it?

<comment><USER86> Maybe I'm lucky but I've done that many times and so far the customs never bothered

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER87> So, isn't the real question how to get you into a more liberal country so you can continue your work?

<comment><USER88> That's true. But immigration for Chinese is much more harder than you think. Even in China, it is not completely free to move from one province to another.

<comment><USER87> I can imagine that this is not easy. I'd like to hear some ideas to that though, as I lack all the details on what's going on there (just been there once on a business trip - and I know they treat foreigners with money much different)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER89> Oh dear, I hope the clones of this repo on Github don't cause the GFW to block Github altogether.

<comment><USER90> Government used to block Github in past few years. Then lots of programmer strongly disagreed with it.

however,browse github has been harder in 2015.

I love my motherland but i really hate what the government has done.

sorry for my poor english

</comment></comment><comment><USER91> what was this?

<comment><USER52> Shadowsocks is the most popular solution for circumventing China's GFW these days. It has the advantage of obfuscating the traffic, thus making it hard for GFW to detect it, unlike say SSH or OpenVPN traffic, which are easy to detect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER92> Cancerous governments desperate for control. Swim away.

</comment><comment><USER93> How did/does this tool compare with obfsproxy?

</comment><comment><USER94> IPv6 is the powerful tools over the GFW

</comment><comment><USER95> I'm not American, but still catches the eye that this currently stands at "911 points"!

</comment><comment><USER96> > I hope one day I'll live in a country where I have freedom to write any code > I like without fearing.

Can the author reach the US by whatever mean and apply for political asylum? That 'fear that they will suffer persecution due to: ... Political opinion'[0] seems legit.

[0] [http://www.uscis.gov/humanitarian/refugees- asylum/asylum](http://www.uscis.gov/humanitarian/refugees-asylum/asylum)

<comment><USER97> > I hope one day I'll live in a country where I have freedom to write any code > I like without fearing.

Frankly I don't know if we are that country. :(

<comment><USER98> In the context of a Chinese hacker fearing prison this is awfully cynical hyperbole.

<comment><USER99> It's obviously far worse in china, but still.

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

<comment><USER97> Agreed. And even in the small world of my college, this happened for a student writing some filesharing code.

[http://dailyprincetonian.com/news/2003/05/peng-riaa- settle-i...](http://dailyprincetonian.com/news/2003/05/peng-riaa-settle- infringement-case/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER100> as a sidenote I encourage all people with talent to leave countries with suppressive regimes. I think they should be erased from their position. One way to do that is to encourage everyone to leave their country. One can argue that staying in a bad country may one day help to build it up again, but on the other hand, nothing hurts bad people in power more than complete brain drain.

<comment><USER101> China is ~20% of the world's population (1.36 billion of 7 billion).

If everyone in China left China, and assuming the rest of the world is living as a family of four (play along), then every home in the world outside of China would have to take in one Chinese refugee.

"Leave" is not a viable strategy at scale.

<comment><USER102> You don't need _everyone_ to leave, just a relentlessly growing percentage. At some point the system starts to crack, and either they relent or it breaks.

In the USA, there is the fundamental notion of "consent of the governed" \- if enough people won't submit, the government cannot function.

<comment><USER103> That's true anywhere, and it's what governments of all stripes worry about and steer. Western ones do it with a bit more finesse, but there's little fundamental difference. It's why Chomsky talks about 'manufacturing consent', and why marketing is an important field for Western governments, as covered in some detail by Adam Curtis. The UK government even have a unit dedicated to 'nudge theory'.

<comment><USER104> The US government makes it very hard to leave, no finesse involved. To renounce your U.S. citizenship, you have to pay a fee of over $2000, pay huge "exit taxes", and provide six years of tax compliance proof to the IRS. [http://money.cnn.com/2014/12/10/pf/taxes/expat-passport- citi...](http://money.cnn.com/2014/12/10/pf/taxes/expat-passport-citizenship- renounce/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER105> Any technology can be used for both good and bad. There's nothing inherently wrong with technology.

<comment><USER106> No, that is not true. Look at the atomic bomb for example. The technology here is not just nuclear fission – the bomb itself has a lot of unique technology.

There can be a lot inherently wrong with technology, and there quite often is.

<comment><USER107> What about all the Peaceful Nuclear Explosions (PNE)? The nuke is extremely destructive and extremely dangerous, but its not inherently wrong, they have been used to close gas wells by the Russians, and I am pretty sure the US had the plowshares program.

There are definitely some arguments that we could have used conventional explosives for those purposes, but my point is that a nuke is just a tool, its the people who decide to use it admirably or despicably.

<comment><USER106> We might just fundamentally disagree an the whole tool ideology.

Imagine this device: It only has button, pressing it will torture every human beeing in earth for 100 years and then wipe out what's left. Trying to disassemble or analyze it will do the same.

Would this still classify as "just a tool"? (peaceful uses: explaining the importance of restraint etc.)

This is not supposed to be an analogy, but a serious question, because I don't believe that guns dont't kill people. And if we disagree on such a fundamental question, I don't think an internet debate could have a sensible outcome .

<comment><USER108> Guns alone don't kill people (at least if they're not programmed to do so automatically), but as humans sometimes act irrationally, one could say if the population had less guns then there will be less deaths by gun shot.

<comment><USER109> The sole purpose of a gun is the kill/destroy more efficiently because knives and forks were not.

<comment><USER108> Nothing really has just one purpose. I admit that the person who built the weapon may have done so with the idea of killing in mind, but nobody can stop me using the gun to crack a nut or scare animals using a blank cartridge. Ultimately is a person (or a machine built as an extension of somebody's will) who points to something and pulls the trigger.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER110> I don't see the Great Wall of China as inherently evil. I don't think Chinese people would benefit if we (the west) had free reign to impose all our extreme capitalist beliefs on them. Maybe they are not ready for it.

It's arrogant for us to believe that we are on the 'free' side of the firewall. I don't see how one side is more free than the other - Both sides are subjected to constant brainwashing by various media - Be it at the hands of a suppressive government or those of greedy corporations.

<comment><USER111> Capitalist beliefs? They're just as capitalist as us, even more so these days (especially in Western Europe).

<comment><USER110> I am aware of this effect (my wife is Russian) but I would still argue that they are not capitalist in the same way that we are (though they do come across as hyper-capitalist on a superficial level - As in; they are big consumers and they like to show off their social status).

One thing that really surprised me about Russian and Chinese people though is how well they take care of their friends and family (for example, they are often very willing to share their money to help each other) and how genuine they are compared to westerners. I know it's a big generalization but it's something I noticed.</comment></comment></comment>


Listen to Sam Altman's Startup Playbook - <AUTHOR> https://startup-playbook.netlify.com/#toc <comment><AUTHOR> You can now listen to Sam Altman's Startup Playbook just like a podcast, on the go!

We are a startup currently going through the YC Startup School and we'd love your feedback, please send us your thoughts.

</comment><comment><USER2> Awesome!

</comment><comment><USER3> Love it!!</comment>


Feynman Algorithm (2014) - <AUTHOR> http://wiki.c2.com/?FeynmanAlgorithm <comment><USER2> There's a quote under "Skill theory" on that page from Feynman:

> "Right. I don't believe in the idea that there are a few peculiar people > capable of understanding math, and the rest of the world is normal. Math is > a human discovery, and it's no more complicated than humans can understand. > I had a calculus book once that said, 'What one fool can do, another can.' > What we've been able to work out about nature may look abstract and > threatening to someone who hasn't studied it, but it was fools who did it, > and in the next generation, all the fools will understand it. There's a > tendency to pomposity in all this, to make it deep and profound." \-- > Feynman, Omni 1979

The "what one fool can do" quote from a calculus book is probably from Calculus Made Easy that was posted on HN a couple of days ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14161876](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14161876)

In Calculus Made Easy, the exact quote is "What one fool can do, another can. -- (Ancient Simian Proverb)".

<comment><USER3> I dont know if the book you had was correct, but in one of his interviews, Feynmen had mentioned he used a book called 'calculus for the practical man' ([https://www.amazon.com/Calculus-Practical-Man-J- Thompson/dp/...](https://www.amazon.com/Calculus-Practical-Man-J- Thompson/dp/1406756725)) i think.

<comment><USER4> Yes. On page 6 of the book "The Pleasure of Finding Things Out" by Richard P. Feynman is a story:

"There was a series of math books, which started _Arithmetic for the Practical Man_ , and then _Algebra for the Practical Man_ , and then _Trigonometry for the Practical Man_ , and I learned trigonometry for the practical man from that. I soon forgot it again because I didn't understand it very well but the series was coming out, and the library was going to get _Calculus for the Practical Man_ and I knew by this time by reading the _Encyclopedia_ that calculus was an important subject...and then the calculus book finally came out ...and I went to the library to take it out and she looks at me and she says, "Oh, you're just a child, what are you taking this book out for, this book is a [book for adults]." So this was one of the few times in my life I was uncomfortable and I lied and I said it was for my father, he selected it. So I took it home and I learnt calculus from it..."

 _Calculus for the Practical Man_ was first published in 1931 when Feynman was about 13 years old, which fits the story (he was waiting for the book's publication).

So that would point to Feynman's calculus book being "Calculus for the Practical Man" by J.E.Thompson rather than Silvanus P Thompson's "Calculus Made Easy", whose second edition came out in 1914. I would not be surprised that Feynman read and used both.

The two books are quite different in approach, _Practical_ having, to me, a rather unique physics orientation and being a more demanding text.

<comment><USER2> > So that would point to Feynman's calculus book being "Calculus for the > Practical Man" by J.E.Thompson rather than Silvanus P Thompson's "Calculus > Made Easy", whose second edition came out in 1914. I would not be surprised > that Feynman read and used both.

It's just that the quote on fools is very prominent in the beginning of Calculus Made Easy, and the author continues to hilariously refer to both other people and himself as fools. I searched inside Calculus for the Practical Man [1] on archive.org for the word "fool" without a single hit.

I'm sure Feynman read both, but I was interested in the origin of the quote, since I learned it a few days ago and think it's very inspirational. Feynman was constantly arguing that everyone has the capacity to figure things out, it's just that they rarely practice it.

[1] [https://archive.org/details/calulusforthepra000526mbp](https://archive.org/details/calulusforthepra000526mbp)

<comment><USER4> scandinavegan says: _" I'm sure Feynman read both, but I was interested in the origin of the quote, since I learned it a few days ago and think it's very inspirational."_

As I continued reading I found the relevant quote to the second text, Calculus Made Easy, on page 194 of Feynman's "The Pleasure of Finding Things Out", where Feynman states:

"I had a calculus book once that said, 'What one fool can do, another can.'"

While he doesn't name it, that's almost without a doubt "Calculus Made Easy". Both calculus texts are thus referred to in Feynman's "The Pleasure of Finding Things Out". In the index of that book, under the topic "Calculus", the pages of both references can be found.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The algorithm might not be a trite as it seems at first.

In particular, I find the first step to be extremely valuable:

 _Write down the problem._

Part of my bag of problem-solving tricks is to start by writing a question for StackOverflow. The point is not to post the question for someone else to answer, but for me to frame the problem in such a way that it can be written about clearly enough for someone else to understand it.

I find that about 50% of the time I have the answer to my own question before even hitting the post button.

<comment><USER6> My algorithm went like this:

        1) Write down the problem.
        2) Try several established strategies to solve it.
        3) Get stuck, resign self to failing out of school
        4) Go to sleep
        5) Write out the answer over breakfast

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I honestly do not wish to bash on the implementer, but it's an absolute disgrace what they did to c2.com.

It feels like an April Fool's joke.

<comment><USER8> The only good thing is that the database is available via web calls. The bad thing is that the code to render the text is insane (take a look: [https://github.com/WardCunningham/remodeling/blob/master/sta...](https://github.com/WardCunningham/remodeling/blob/master/static/index.html)). Even the goal of the 'remodel' (really, more of a demolition) is crazy: 'The original wiki rewritten as a single page application.' That's like saying, 'roast beef, now with added concrete and carpet!'

I just don't get how someone can think the change is a good idea.

<comment><USER9> I hate JS single-page apps, but as far as c2 goes, I think the idea is to eventually make it distributed. To make that work requires two parts:

\- Some way for the page to communicate with other instances (e.g. bittorrent, or whatever, implemented in JS)

\- Some way to display the results (i.e. a JS renderer)

The easiest part is the JS renderer, so it makes sense to implement that first. With a JS renderer, the server side rendering can be thrown away. Now that it's a single page using JS calls to fetch data, it's a much easier target to make distributed: "just" switch out where those calls get their data from.

I'm glad such experiments are going on, and don't mind putting up with this awkward in-between phase in the mean time.

<comment><USER8> Actually, I think that the IndieWebCamp guys have it right with WebMention: [http://indieweb.org/webmention](http://indieweb.org/webmention)

A _page_ shouldn't communicate with other instances; _servers_ should. The server can render the result of input from other instances once and display it to readers many times, rather than forcing each reader to rerender it itself. The 'some way to display the results' then becomes … static HTML.

I think static HTML is rather easier than a JavaScript renderer.

> With a JS renderer, the server side rendering can be thrown away.

That's a bit like saying, 'with a single can of soda, you can get rid of running water!' Replacing server-side rendering with client-side JavaScript is strictly worse.

<comment><USER9> > A page shouldn't communicate with other instances; servers should.

That requires a server. The point of c2 is it's a wiki: you can edit the content just by browsing to the URL and clicking a button. Sure, self-hosted static HTML sites are a really good solution to lots of problems; editing wikis isn't one of them.

The alternative view is that visiting the page brings up your own personal server, allowing you to participate in the network; it just so happens that the server is written in JS and runs in a browser tab.

> The server can render the result of input from other instances once and > display it to readers many times

This is exactly what decentralising a site is supposed to avoid: wiki is an experiment in collectively owned content; removing central points of contact/ownership is the next step.

> > With a JS renderer, the server side rendering can be thrown away.

> That's a bit like saying, 'with a single can of soda, you can get rid of > running water!'

Maybe a better analogy is selling seeds rather than vegetables: you save yourself costs on transport, storage, refrigeration, etc. by offloading a bunch of cultivation work on to your customers. It's exactly the wrong approach if you're trying to run a supermarket. If you're an experimental botanist, and a few specialists keep asking you for produce, it's probably a good idea to save yourself time and money by empowering them with seeds.

> Replacing server-side rendering with client-side JavaScript is strictly > worse.

It's worse, but not strictly so; for the reasons I've listed above.

<comment><USER8> > That requires a server. The point of c2 is it's a wiki: you can edit the > content just by browsing to the URL and clicking a button.

If I want other people to see my edits, then they need a way to know that I made them, which requires some agreed-upon rendezvous point — i.e., a server.

> This is exactly what decentralising a site is supposed to avoid: wiki is an > experiment in collectively owned content; removing central points of > contact/ownership is the next step.

So support a federated system, in which one user's server contacts another. Without servers, how will I see your edits when your browser is offline, or simply no longer visiting the page? Your edits will have to live somewhere else — a server (whether it's your server, my server or c2.com's server is beside the point: it's a server).

> Maybe a better analogy is selling seeds rather than vegetables: you save > yourself costs on transport, storage, refrigeration, etc. by offloading a > bunch of cultivation work on to your customers. It's exactly the wrong > approach if you're trying to run a supermarket. If you're an experimental > botanist, and a few specialists keep asking you for produce, it's probably a > good idea to save yourself time and money by empowering them with seeds.

I thought the whole point of Ward's Wiki was to be a neat place to discuss computer science & programming — in your analogy, to be the supermarket. Sure, it's a high-tech supermarket, conducting some really neat experiments.

If I lost my favourite supermarket because the owner decided to go into experimental botany and didn't bother to pay his supermarket rent, I'd feel similarly upset.

> > Replacing server-side rendering with client-side JavaScript is strictly > worse.

> It's worse, but not strictly so; for the reasons I've listed above.

It's strictly worse if one has disabled JavaScript (as everyone who truly cares about privacy & security does): the site no longer works, and one gets no benefits at all.

<comment><USER9> > requires some agreed-upon rendezvous point — i.e., a server.

Or a P2P network with a DHT. This can be done right now with a dedicated client (BitTorrent, BitCoin, FreeNet, IPFS, etc.). There are existing browser plugins which will opportunistically use a P2P protocol instead of HTTP, e.g. if you get the IPFS firefox extension, enable the "DNS lookup" option, and visit chriswarbo.net it should fetch the page via P2P. Projects like IPFS are currently experiments, but are aiming for browsers to eventually support (something like) them natively, alongside HTTP/HTTPS/FTP/etc.

Projects like WebTorrent are trying to implement this kind of thing in JS.

> Without servers, how will I see your edits when your browser is offline, or > simply no longer visiting the page?

Again, distributed storage (DHT, etc.).

> I thought the whole point of Ward's Wiki was to be a neat place to discuss > computer science & programming — in your analogy, to be the supermarket.

I've been told many times that my analogies are terrible ;) In this case, the supermarket represented some commercial Web site, with a clear separation between business and customer, where the business wants as much ownership and control as possible, and will go out of its way to keep customers happy (as long as it's profitable).

From what I can tell, Ward is doing this for the love of it. There is no profit to chase, so any project costs (like running a server) are a drain, and make it more likely to collapse. Removing those costs helps the project, even if it inconveniences visitors. Like the botanist, who wants to get on with their research rather than spending time growing produce for others.

Likewise, the visitors are contributors, not customers. They're not just after some product with as little transaction friction as possible (at least, the most valuable ones aren't; I assume most visitors just read something then leave). They're already investing their time into the project, so making things a little less convenient might be acceptable, if it means the project can stay afloat.

> It's strictly worse if

That's not how "strictly worse" works. If you claimed it's worse, I would emphatically agree (I hate single page JS "apps"!)

"Strictly worse" means that it is not better in any way; that the old version is a pareto improvement over the new one. It's not. There are reasons one might choose to do this. Those reasons are not ones that a commercial Web site should choose (exactly the opposite, in fact; they're like the supermarket); they're not ones that a static informational site should choose (e.g. they might choose to host on IPFS, but shouldn't go down the JS route); they shouldn't be chosen if identity/ownership are the goal (like indieweb, where self-hosted/managed servers make sense).

They do make sense if you want to throw a collaboration platform out into the world, with the only goal being to see what happens. That's what wiki was, so it makes sense.

<comment><USER8> Everything you write about a DHT is true, but … that's not what Ward's Wiki is doing.

It sounds like what it's doing is a very, _very_ good fit for what the IWC guys are up to — and it could all be done without JavaScript!

> "Strictly worse" means that it is not better in any way; that the old > version is a pareto improvement over the new one.

Viewed in links, lynx or eww, the old version _is_ a Pareto improvement over the new, because the new version is nothing but a blank page, while the old version was full of information.

<comment><USER9> > Viewed in links, lynx or eww, the old version is a Pareto improvement over > the new

Again, if you're qualifying the statement, it's not pareto. On transparency, water is a pareto improvement over Coca Cola. On growability, wood is a pareto improvement over steel.

The old version was an improvement over the new one; the new version is worse. They're not "pareto" or "strict" though, and I'm interested to see what the next steps are, building on this new foundation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Whenever the Feynman Algorithm comes up, I'm tempted to share "Stop Treading Water: Learning to Learn" [0] by Edward Kmett. It's a great talk and I highly recommend it if you haven't watched it (or frankly, if you already have :).

[0]: [https://yow.eventer.com/yow-2014-1222/stop-treading-water- le...](https://yow.eventer.com/yow-2014-1222/stop-treading-water-learning-to- learn-by-edward-kmett-1750)

<comment><USER11> Thank you

<comment><USER10> You're welcome :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Archived copy, which can be read without JS enabled:

[https://archive.fo/I403G](https://archive.fo/I403G)

<comment><USER13> Which appears to block me for using a VPN service.

I looked for it on wayback.org, which now requires Javascript, itself, just to use its interface. And the one archived result is just a page-load spinner.

Looked for it in Google Cache. Spinner.

I guess it's time to go back to books and print.

<comment><USER12> Here's a plain text version:

[https://gist.githubusercontent.com/anonymous/0f377b79eb4bae5...](https://gist.githubusercontent.com/anonymous/0f377b79eb4bae5e3f2161ff569dce8d/raw/b34b398ea6148276c6897f26b108259625dde40f/gistfile1.txt)

<comment><USER13> Thank you. And pardon the partially rhetorical nature of my initial response.

I... "grump" a bit, that way, every so often, as I hate to see the "open" web become -- from my perspective -- less and less so.

(All the more so for what is essentially static content.)

P.S. I don't consider Javascript-delivered content as libre as other, as the client has to trust that the scripting won't compromise them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> My algorithm is usually along the lines of:

        * Think of a problem
        * Think real hard
        * Write down a solution
        * Write down the problem

</comment><comment><USER15> This site used to be one of my favorite examples of content over presentation. What happened?

<comment><USER16> Youngsters.

<comment><USER17> I'm not sure what you mean by 'youngsters'\--c2.com (and the associated wiki) are still maintained by Ward Cunningham, and the effort to rewrite the wiki[1] is hosted under his GitHub account and appears to have been his decision. It appears to have been motivated by a desire to "federate" the wiki, though I'm unclear on what exactly this vision entails.

[1]: [https://github.com/WardCunningham/remodeling](https://github.com/WardCunningham/remodeling)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> There's an oral-history interview of Feynman where the interviewer brings up his notebooks, saying something like "where you recorded your results" \-- Feynman interrupts like "no, it's where I worked them out". He's emphatic about it after being questioned again.

The "Feynman algorithm" is an OK joke, and gets at something real, but I think it smacks a little too much of putting words in the guy's mouth. It has a flavor of mystification that goes against the spirit of a lot that he said in his lectures. There was a lecture explicitly on problem-solving methods in the "Tips on Physics" volume.

</comment><comment><USER19> > 7 requests, 691 KB, 19 s

?!? What is going on there?

<comment><USER20> They redid their UI last year to be more Web 2.0, which would've still been a mistake, if a less grave one, had it been competently executed.

I wonder if it's still serving a complete list of article names to every visitor? If so, that all by itself is probably a big chunk of that 691K. If not, God knows what they're doing now - I don't have a console on my phone, and won't switch to my desktop just to dissect the latest mistakes of rampant NIH as applied to the modern web.

<comment><USER19> The long request goes to "[http://c2.com/wiki/remodel/pages/FeynmanAlgorithm"](http://c2.com/wiki/remodel/pages/FeynmanAlgorithm") which seems to be just the articles' text. But there's also a names.txt which is ~640K (260K gzip'd). Hm.

<comment><USER20> Yup, that's the one. Hooboy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Feynman was a particularly interesting, intelligent, but also a very moral person. He said in an interview in his older years, while tearing up: 'I know the difference between right and wrong.'

Of science, my favorite bit from him is that 'in science, it does not matter what your last name is, how brilliant you are, how beautiful your theory is, all that matters is if it experimentally agrees with nature. That's all that science is'[1]

After devoting his time to science, he indulged in sex, drugs and art, and in the meantime had a great deal good to say about not just nature, but about morality as well. My type of person.

1-[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OL6-x0modwY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OL6-x0modwY)

</comment><comment><USER22> >I had a calculus book once that said, 'What one fool can do, another can.'

A link to a pdf file of a copy of an old calculus book from early nineteen- hundreds showed up on HN a week or so ago. I read the first couple of pages. That quote is likely referencing that particular book. I have lost the link now. Anyone remember?

Edit: sry, that was weak Googleing from my part. Here it is: [http://djm.cc/library/Calculus_Made_Easy_Thompson.pdf](http://djm.cc/library/Calculus_Made_Easy_Thompson.pdf)

<comment><USER23> "Calculus made easy". Just search for it.

<comment><USER22> Yeah that's the one, thx.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _There are people who solve a problem the same way that you do, just much much faster._

Apparently, Murray Gell-Mann was one such person. I had a professor like that. He was constantly blurting out your next thought just as you were on the verge of forming the words. Gell-Mann did this so often, that his grad students once played a trick on him by meeting up and thinking out a new series of conclusions ahead of time, just so they could blurt out the next conclusion just as Gell-Mann was about to speak it.

</comment><comment><USER24> Occurs in: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14190069](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14190069)

</comment><comment><USER25> This is as useful as

      * Write down the problem.
      * ???
      * Profit

<comment><USER26> Not if you were Richard Feynman. That is sort of the point of the article. Can or should more people be able to do this? Amusingly, Rob Pike claims some of the best programming advice he ever got was from Ken Thompson. The advice amounted to: when you are stuck, stop, think hard, and then fix the problem.

This advice could be seen as amusing rhetoric to stop and think more often.

<comment><USER27> A variation I've heard is "Don't just do something. Stand there!"

<comment><USER28> This is something we try to instill in our new ops people. If you don't understand what's going on, don't do anything. There's nothing to be gained by quickly applying the wrong solution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I want to share a look at this from a bit different perspective.

As a kid, I would fix, trade and sell older radios and TV's for money and other things. I fell in love with vacuum tube era things. They are beautiful and it's all human scale. You can see the parts. Back then, I didn't have much. Our family was in poverty a lot of the time. Reasons. That's not a big deal, and in fact, was of great benefit to me personally. It kind of forced exploring the world and meaning to get something out of it. I needed it!

Anyway, I had a couple of old ratty texts from the 50's era that explained the theory of operation. And I had various toys and projects that showed parts of that theory to me. A crystal radio, for example. I must have reread that text 50 times.

At first, I understood very little. Being young, much of the higher level stuff would blow right by. But the general concepts were there.

So, imagine being faced with the radio. You don't have much, no fancy test gear, etc...

I submit Feynman didn't fix the radio. It's still broken in a sense. But, what he did do was make that radio, imperfect or broken, damaged, as it was, perform as needed. He moved the problem out of the way.

This is important. The radio is a system. It's designed to do a task, and it's parts are designed to perform to a specification or other. Each radio is kind of unique too. Whatever flaws it has gets compensated for.

Problem: Noise in the radio audio

Think real hard:

Here, one can start to analyze the radio, take the theory of operation and identify where noise might be coming from. This means one has sufficient understanding to solve the problem in the first place. The heavy lift is realizing it!

But, say one does not possess that level of understanding. I didn't back then. Not until many years later, lots of fixes under my belt, and some kind souls giving me test gear.

So then, as a system, what's still possible? Fixing the radio may not be an option due to lack of components, understanding, tools.

Move the radio Swap the tubes Modify antenna Change power source Change adjustable things in the radio Remove something from the radio Etc...

For each of these things one CAN do, which of them may resolve noise?

In this way, the problem shifts from, "fixing it", which implies the radio is brought from a flawed state to an acceptable one. (just less and more minor flaws really)

That is what Feynman did. A poor component at one stage of the radio may perform another task just fine. Swapping the tubes does that.

For many years, I would get this gear from people. And it was a lot of, "look at the problem", "think real hard", "execute solution."

And a bunch of that boiled down to what I could do, not so much what should be done, or needed to be done. And a lot of that was successful. Try stuff, observe, try more stuff, observe. After a time, which stuff to try boiled down to a potent set of things. More successes.

I would get an older TV, for example. Maybe it had a red tint, or the picture bloomed. One could make adjustments in the set to re-balance the picture, or improve focus, limit overall brightness, and any number of things to bring that particular system into a functioning order sufficient to perform the task required of it. Still broken, in the technical sense. New components would very likely improve it, but a removal of one, or replacement with similar one, even removing one, tweaks to the unit, all could combine to make it perform.

In my following of Feynman, I find a consistent theme where he was very good at understanding basic understanding. The calculus book he refers to contained some general solutions he found could solve a very broad set of problems. Rather than explore all the solution sets and struggle to apply them, he would take a very useful one and max it out, applying it everywhere. Where it would not work, or was impractical, he would seek another one.

I see this as a very important aspect of this awesome problem solving ability he demonstrated. Collecting things like this, as well as taking problems from various angles:

What can be done, and could it help? What has been done before? What should be done. Combine things done before. Guess at possible new things to be done. etc...

seems to be major contributors to this skill.

Feynman often mentioned puzzles. When you combine a "gauntlet" of puzzles and Feynman's natural ability to recognize fundamental understanding with time and a zeal to solve, his remarks about "not being a genius" have some real merit!

Now, he was, and that's not really a matter of serious debate. But, the method, to him, is more about doing the work to be lucid. Solve, solve, solve, refine tools, collect new ones, solve, solve, solve...

The difference here, between Feynman, and us ordinary mortals, is the breadth and depth of that lucidity.

Those skills I learned in my early youth still apply today. I can't tell you how many times I've arrived at simple ways to "fix" something, just based on what could be done, and inferences on what must be true. It's theory of operation, coupled with broad experience and that "gauntlet" of puzzles run with "the tools"

Each of us can do this. Some of us can do it extremely well in a given domain too.

I feel Feynman never did appreciate his skill and lucidity about reality itself, the world, it's parts. Few of us have that.

But, the Feynman way of looking at things, solving problems, collecting tools to solve them with, being observant, and inference:

What is possible? What can we do? What must be true? Etc...

Is something everyone can cultivate to varying degrees, depending on our affinity for a given domain, personal attributes, and resources.

I know this is a zen like argument, but he didn't actually fix that radio. He made a broken one, or flawed one perform better.

And in that last bit is an important realization:

We state the problem. Fine. But, we need to also state the goal too.

Given a goal, the problem may be too limiting. A solution may appear out of reach, or not be seen due to a problem statement constraining things, or masking things.

Work backward from the goal and sometimes one can factor the original problem statement away. And in the doing of that, arrive at a solution that gets it done, or renders the problem a non problem.

And I'll add Feynman did the work. A lot of it, and he credits that to a lot of his insights. Solving a bazillion puzzles will turn anyone into a much better solution finder, and he's right about that.

Do the work. Seek the puzzles, and keep at them. Over time, one gets an internal sort of understanding that is more broadly applicable.

</comment><comment><USER20> Feynman was a fascinating person, and remains well able to reward further interest - his autobiographical works being a fine place to start.

Generally I'd also try to recommend a work by someone with a less favorable but still well founded perspective, for comparison. But I have yet to encounter anyone who takes such a view of Feynman. Perhaps the closest is the article [1] on his time at Thinking Machines, whence comes this matchless quote:

> Whenever it came time for his daily bowl of soup he would look around for > the nearest "girl" and ask if she would fetch it to him. It did not matter > if she was the cook, an engineer, or the president of the company. I once > asked a female engineer who had just been a victim of this if it bothered > her. "Yes, it really annoys me," she said. "On the other hand, he is the > only one who ever explained quantum mechanics to me as if I could understand > it."

[1] [http://longnow.org/essays/richard-feynman-connection- machine...](http://longnow.org/essays/richard-feynman-connection-machine/)

<comment><USER30> Was Feynman sexist? A quick googling finds nothing.

<comment><USER31> > _Was Feynman sexist?_

In the same way, and probably much less, that any male was in a totally different era of the 60s and 70s...

<comment><USER32> The above described behaviour was at the very least extremely bad manners .. even in the 60s/70s.

<comment><USER33> Why is asking people for something is bad manners? Especially as you put it "extremely bad manners"?

<comment><USER34> I suggest that you try asking random women in the office to bring you soup and see how that goes.

<comment><USER35> Heh, for an even better reaction he should try asking random _men_ in the office to bring him soup.

Depending on his workplace, things could become physical :D

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Oh no. What used to be the best designed website in the whole internet is now, too, a slow mess that doesn't work in javascript, uses several trackers and loads half a megabyte to display few screens of text.

Who the hell thought that slapping some annotations on top is worth this price to pay? Why not add stories to it, too?

<comment><USER37> It won't even load for me, I just get an infinite spinner gif. Tried turning my browser extensions off, still no luck.

<comment><USER38> Ditto...</comment></comment></comment>


Does CSS Grid Replace Flexbox? - <AUTHOR> https://css-tricks.com/css-grid-replace-flexbox/ <comment><USER2> I appreciate having more options with css but I do think css grids is coming too fast and it's going to contribute to developer confusion.

Most developers are still getting used to flexbox and now there is something new to learn.</comment>


Ask HN: Experience with Flipped/Inverted Classroom? - <AUTHOR> Does anyone have experience with a flipped or inverted classroom (that is, content delivered online, outside the classroom, homework and activities inside the classroom)?  Especially, does anyone have experience with this and also with traditional approaches?<p>Did it work for you?  Did you learn better that way?  Did you find the classroom time to be more of a waste in the inverted system? <comment><USER2> YES! I'm going back to college to finish my degree. I'm seeing this a lot and it's sort of difficult to get used to.

So the thing is, in some classes I think it could be totally fine. But in others I'm not so sure. For example I'm taking the statistics 1 and 2 to brush up. The first one was given by an instructor that's an enormous inverted classroom type. I aced the class and the thing is it feels like I didn't learn a single thing. I can barely tell you anything about statistics. It moved sooo slowly and we spent so much time at every tiny step. He'd talk for 10 minutes and make us get together with our groups to talk about what he just talked about. I'm now in the 2nd class and honest to god it feels like I've learned and retained more the first 2 days than the previous 11 weeks. The new professor is more "inverted-lite" almost as if she was told by the dept they need to do this (from my understanding the schools push it hard) so the group stuff still happens but it's a lot less frequently and we're always working on our own thing and not having the group turn in the assignment.

I can see how it can work. Especially maybe with the Arts or soft science classes. With a talented instructor and implemented correctly. But honestly it feels like a cost savings thing. A method to have larger classes by making the students learn for themselves. If this way really works for some people then I wonder if a 100% online course might serve some of them better.

</comment><comment><USER3> Inverted or not, classroom time is always inefficient. For math/science, do problem sets. For humanities, write reaction papers. Submit online and receive feedback. Rinse, repeat.

The European lecture format is a thing of the past. Asian active learning is the way to go.

<comment><USER4> Asian Active Learning? Never heard. Can you explain more?

<comment><USER3> Drilling. For every gifted individual who integrates knowledge just by listening, there are dozens if not hundreds of us normal folk who integrate by repetitive "doing." The factor by which arithmetic proficiency among Chinese fourth-graders exceeds that of American fourth-graders is roughly the time required to complete their homework (for my kids in US, homework takes 10 minutes on average).</comment></comment></comment>


Why So Many Smart People Aren't Happy - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/04/why-so-many-smart-people-arent-happy/479832/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> It's difficult to comment on this without sounding arrogant or entitled, but still I personally think this interview misses a couple of points I've seen in my own circle of friends.

1) Smart children are raised with expectations of doing great things _because they are smart_. If you have two children and one is obviously smarter than the other, the burden of your hopes and dreams will naturally fall on the smarter one, and equal accomplishments between the two will not have equal praise. Later in life this turns into being unhappy because you feel like you could do more _because you are smart_. It's a constant burden.

2) Being smart brings with it a certain level of ability to "peer behind the curtain" so to speak, and see just how dirty the real world is. It can make it seem like sinking time and effort to make meaningful changes is just futile because of how many things are messed up. And that kind of mindset saps happiness in a hurry.

<comment><USER3> "Peer behind the curtain" goes both ways.

I like to think I'm much happier knowing how wonderfully magnificent the universe is, rather than staring at the ceiling.

<comment><USER4> I think it's a bit sad, really. Baring a discovery that fundamentally changes how the universe as we know it works, we'll very likely never communicate with another form of life. We'll never leave our solar system. We'll probably never even see images of other solar systems, much less galaxies. The universe is an amazing thing full of stuff that would probably sound far-fetched in a science fiction novel and we'll never even get to know whether it exists. If I could be dumber and more preoccupied with the material lifestyle of most people, I'd probably be happier.

<comment><USER3> You're being pessimistic.

We went from inventing powered flight to landing on the freaking moon in less than 70 years.

In any case, I suspect that you may not be satisfied no matter want reality was. If you had interstellar travel you wouldn't be happy without intergalactic travel.

Even if you only see your own planet, creation is beautiful. (FYI, you happen to be living on the most amazing planet known.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > If you were to go back to the three things that people need—mastery, > belonging, and autonomy—I'd add a fourth, after basic necessities have been > met. It's the attitude or the worldview that you bring to life. And that > worldview can be characterized, just for simplicity, in one of two fashions: > One extreme is a kind of scarcity-minded approach, that my win is going to > come at somebody else's loss, which makes you engage in social comparisons. > And the other view is what I would call a more abundance-oriented approach, > that there's room for everybody to grow.

The best part of his analysis, IMHO. I don't even like being around zero-sum people.

<comment><USER6> It's just so hard to believe the abundance view! I wish I could. Our economy simply does not reward people for being good or ok at things. You have to be amazing. So you are forced into competition simply to survive and pay for your existence.

<comment><USER7> The US produces more than enough food for everyone on the planet. There is ample room across the nation to build enough housing for everyone. Why don't we do it? Because the zero-sum neoliberal worldview has been ingrained in the American mind thanks to absurd concepts of exceptionalism and "individual liberty" and so the prevailing sentiment of the day is "fuck you got mine" in the biggest christian nation on earth.

<comment><USER8> > zero-sum neoliberal worldview

This makes about as much sense as "the laissez-faire fascist worldview" or the "growth at any costs environmental worldview."

<comment><USER9> I think it's a great description then for an emerging worldview that simultaneously believes in too big to fail for banks but not in people, champions social equality but supports laws that allow racial profiling by police and TSA, and believes the war in Iraq was a mistake but that we should support Isreal unilaterally

<comment><USER8> That's not what "zero-sum" means.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The only people I recognize, time and again, as having an "abundance mindset" are people who prioritize wealth and material objects first and foremost, because they recognize there's a whole lot of that stuff out there for the person willing to go out there and get it however they can. Otherwise, I kind of see the term as not very useful. Actually, it might be inherently wrong.

A major part of the 'unhappiness' that I see a lot of "smart" people deal with is kind of the opposite of this "abundance" thing - in reality, there aren't enough of 'everything' to go around. Good jobs, reasonably priced things, work-life balance, adequate sick and vacation time, opportunities to advance in a company...it's not that smart people reject these things, it's that some of the conditions are pretty un-sympathetic to merit and integrity based approaches. For all the talk about the US having a very mobile system of social and economic status - which I think it does, global context in mind - it's still a bell curve of haves and have nots. Being smart enough to see that conditions are not very appealing doesn't jack up the seratonin feelings of "oh everything is just great" in my neighborhood. Relevant quote:

 _Peter Gibbons: Our high school guidance counselor used to ask us what you 'd do if you had a million dollars and you didn't have to work. And invariably what you'd say was supposed to be your career. So, if you wanted to fix old cars then you're supposed to be an auto mechanic.

Samir: So what did you say?

Peter Gibbons: I never had an answer. I guess that's why I'm working at Initech.

Michael Bolton: No, you're working at Initech because that question is bullshit to begin with. If everyone listened to her, there'd be no janitors, because no one would clean shit up if they had a million dollars._

</comment><comment><USER11> The word "smart" appears in the title of the book being publicised, and in the title of the article, but appears _nowhere else_ in the article. The comments here, and the title of the article, are quite misleading about the content of the article.

"Smart" has little or nothing to do with it. It so happens that whether you're smart or not is _not_ a predictor of your happiness. The article might as well be called "Why so many people born on Tuesdays aren't happy."

<comment><USER12> I'm amazed that your comment is so low here. Typically, title misdirection is something which HN users seem to viscerally dislike.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> There is a great quote from Mad Men on happiness.

"But what is happiness? It's a moment before you need more happiness."

Happiness is like a high that we chase. When I was 25, I was unhappy. But, I was making 150k a year, was very healthy, had good relationships with parents, siblings and friends. I had everything that I needed. I had a good social life and a good job that challenged me intellectually. I was working hard towards my long term goals of climbing the corporate ladder. I had many hobbies that I devoted serious time to. Yet, there was a sense of unhappiness. An "is this all to life" feeling.

I'm 27 now. I still feel like this on some days, but what has made is better is the notion that I can use my skills to help other people improve their lives. I've also learned not to pay too much attention to how you feel/what you're feeling.

/rant

<comment><USER14> Wait 'till you hit 30.

<comment><USER15> I'm 4 months out, don't leave me hanging!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Smart people suffer from isolation, they can't easily find friends that can keep up with them. If you have an IQ of 135, there is maybe one person as smart as you in 100 people. If your IQ is 145, then it's 1 in 1000. They have little chance of socializing on their level, so most of the time they have to hold back. In extreme, that creates a state of feralization - they are like lone humans amidst animals, so they are almost alone.

<comment><USER17> There is no rule that you can only socialize with people "on your level". This can turn into a self-fulfilling prophesy where people impose this view that a lack of intelligent peers is problematic, and they feel and become isolated as a result.

It can be a problem if the population adopts an anti-intellectual strain of thought, which I think persists in America to some degree. It is important to have people who are supportive of other people's intellectual interests. But even intelligent people can be dismissive of intellectual pursuits, especially if they're outside their own set of interests.

It is possible to have a good social life with people who have had less education, or are not as intelligent. There are ways to lead a satisfying intellectual life without having access to the Stanford CS department happy hour, and this is more true now thanks to the Internet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Has anyone considered the flipside to this? Maybe a lot of unhappy people just assume they're "smart" instead of depressed or other mental illness, or are just asocial personality types. I've met more than a few mediocre people who have this attitude and engage in talk about "sheeple" and such, but they're not remotely exceptional intellectually. In fact, most of them are fairly average or perhaps do slightly better than average in one small area in their life and play that up as justification for their greatness.

I think its easy for the depressed or people who are just misanthropes to hide behind a "the world will never understand my genius" attitudes we see portrayed in the media. They see themselves as a John Nash or a misunderstood artist, when they're just, well, ordinary.

This isn't a hypothetical in my world. When we do hiring its hard to filter out the asocial smart guy from the asocial bullshitter for technical jobs, especially for entry-level. Shockingly, I find the asocial bullshitter personality is mostly unaware at how terrible he is for the job he's applying for. Maybe its Dunning-Kruger or just old fashioned arrogance, but it can be hard to spot. We have a bad hire like this and its incredible how much damage he has done to the department and how he's unwilling to accept that he's, at best, below average. Instead he engages in this "tech master" personality with non-technical staff that is bizarre to witness, especially when you listen in and hear that 50% of what he's saying is just completely and obviously wrong.

<comment><USER19> I think you've described 'delusional' perfectly.

It is indeed a massive epidemic, as far as I can tell. A lot of people are in on the game and perpetuating it however - so what can one expect?

<comment><USER20> More than 80% of people still pray to sky gods, delusional is the normal state of most human beings.

<comment><USER18> I don't care if you pray to a pet turtle. If you're competent and easy to work with, you're okay in my book.

Oh, the guy in my earlier posting? Strict atheist. I don't think religiosity has any bearing on intelligence.

<comment><USER20> How competent can you really be if you're delusional?

> I don't think religiosity has any bearing on intelligence.

I think it has every bearing on intelligence; they are highly correlated[1] and the science backs this up.

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I think it's because generalized intelligence isn't a thing, and if you're an early reader, or an early computer user, so end up scoring far from the norm on early tests, the identity of being "smart" is assigned to you for life - and the only thing left for you to become is a disappointment. This leads to perfectionism, which is crippling.

[http://www.hillaryrettig.com/perfectionism/](http://www.hillaryrettig.com/perfectionism/)

[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/hillary- rettig/perfectionism-a...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/hillary- rettig/perfectionism-and-addicti_b_396056.html)

</comment><comment><USER22> Understanding something doesn't mean you are able to:

\- solve anything; \- improve anything; \- even do anything at all.

E.G: I know very smart people, perfectly understanding the theory of social interactions, knowing second to second the dynamic our group is engaged in, and yet, absolutly enable to flirt with the girl they fancy. And it makes them miserable.

</comment><comment><USER23> It doesn't surprise me in the least, because smart != wise. Academic achievement does not require wisdom on how best to live, and wisdom is not dependant on academic achievement.

<comment><USER24> Yep life for smart people is problem oriented for which they have to find solutions.

Thats how we are raised; in a problem/solution format.

<comment><USER23> That's one possible interpretation, but just to be clear I didn't say they were mutually exclusive, I said they weren't dependant. It's possible to be both academically gifted and wise, but one does not depend on the other to exist.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I think people who believe to be smart and depressed might be a slave to their own pride/ego. They may have high expectations that comes with a high cost to their well being.

</comment><comment><USER12> Great cursory assessment of capitalism and happiness:

>On the face of it, it might look like I'm saying that capitalism in general is not very good at promoting an abundance mindset. But I don't think that that is entirely accurate. If you were to break capitalism down into two very important tenets, one is the freedom of movement of people, thought, and goods, and the freedom of choice. The second aspect is a distribution of resources according to people's abilities rather than according to people's needs.

>That first tenet of capitalism, I think, is beautiful, and I wouldn't let go of it. And if that ideology comes with the baggage of distribution of resources according to abilities, then I take that package, rather than a package where you restrict people's freedom of thought and what kinds of choices they can make, even if it's combined with a distribution of resources according to people's needs.

</comment><comment><USER26> Because human intelligence is overrated [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11572527](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11572527)

</comment><comment> atom-morgan Pair this article with "Average Americans Think They're Smarter Than the Average American".

[https://www.nationaljournal.com/congress/2014/05/12/average-...](https://www.nationaljournal.com/congress/2014/05/12/average- americans-think-theyre-smarter-than-average-american)

</comment><comment><USER27> "For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow." \- Ecc 1:18</comment>


Voluminous: Finding Public Domain Books - <AUTHOR> http://voluminous.wooji-juice.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> Anybody actually use this yet?

It's a commercial app for OS X for finding, downloading, managing, and reading public domain books.</comment>