A brief history of government efforts to stop people from wearing masks - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/1721901/hong-kong-anti-mask-law-a-history-of-mask-bans-around-the-world/ <comment><USER2> Montreal did the same thing during student protests in 2012 [1]. It came along with another special law enacted to restrict protests[2]. Both were later contested and dropped.

In my opinion that was extremely unproductive. It galvanized protests even further and the most common chant became "la loi special on s'en calisse" (roughly "we don't give a shit about your special law") as we were defying it. In essence, it just eroded police and state authority for an entire generation. I still strongly feel that I don't have to follow laws that I find immoral or unethical. I am not sure this is good.

[1] [https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%A8glement_P-6](https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%A8glement_P-6)

[2] [https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loi_78_(Qu%C3%A9bec)](https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loi_78_\(Qu%C3%A9bec\))

<comment><USER3> > I still strongly feel that I don't have to follow laws that I find immoral > or unethical. I am not sure this is good.

I think that is definitely good. If everyone followed laws simply because "it's the law" then no one would ever think critically about whether those laws were morally justifiable or not, or if they did they would shrug it off because "breaking the law is wrong". But such questions are important to ask, and while it may be impractical for _everybody_ to do so, I'm glad there are people like me & you that pay attention to whether the law is actually making the world better or not.

(obviously, determining whether a law is ethical or not can be very tricky; you can't just go around breaking laws because you don't agree with them - there needs to be e.g. clear moral ground indicating that there is some collective thought that the law is immoral/unethical)

<comment><USER4> On the other hand, if everyone follows only the laws they think are moral, you're going to have to accept the civil disobedience of those that disagree with you as well.

<comment><USER5> You'll have to accept it either way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A bunch of European countries have this. Some for several decades. Germany has had it for 3 and while the law states that its punishment is up to one year of prison, states seem to have in general reduced the sentence to 500-1500 Euros. [1]

Not really arguing pro or against, but I do find there to be a bit of hypocrisy in the media coverage.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti- mask_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-mask_law)

<comment><USER7> In germany we have also a awesome law, that forbids "passive weapons" on demonstration. Yes, sounds good. Peaceful demonstrators should not have weapons.

Only that "passive weapons" means all kinds of protections, like helmets, thick gloves and gas masks. So when he police hits you, how dare you to try to protect your head or face.

<comment><USER8> Well, yeah. You choose to wear a helmet because you expect to get hit. If you didn't expect to get hit, you wouldn't feel the need to wear a helmet.

This is a de-escalation technique that functions well in advance of a potentially violent situation.

Edit: for people downvoting, I would love to read your opinions too! The down arrow isn't a disagreement button. It's supposed to indicate a person isn't contributing to the conversation. Otherwise you're just enforcing groupthink.

<comment><USER9> good point.

I wear my seatbelt everyday when I drive my car because I'm expecting a car accident. Strangely enough, it has yet to happen and I have yet to need my seatbelt. What a waste!

I think I'll just stop wearing it.

<comment><USER8> There's an element of intent which your sarcastic response doesn't really account for. But yes clearly everyone who wears a helmet to a protest does not intend to start a physical attack.

That doesn't mean it's not an effective preventative measure and de-escalating technique.

<comment><USER10> Police standards and the populace's standards of what constitutes legal gathering and protest are often quite different, as evidenced by the unnecessarily harsh deployments against protesters as seen in Hong Kong and less recently in the US. More often than not, police forces make the first move in otherwise legitimate protests either with direct oppression, false- flag tactics, or unnecessary displays of force (or potential force).

A helmet is entirely necessary in peaceful protests because the authorities resisting the demands of the protest do not play fair.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> _At its core, face mask bans pose a question about power: who gets to wield it, and who gets to place limits on it. The masked person can look but not be seen—an enormous and liberating power particularly in today's age of surveillance. For the state and those in authority, the mask represents a threat because their power is in part drawn from knowing exactly who you are.

For many in Hong Kong, the face mask ban is a reminder of the asymmetrical balance of power that they are protesting so hard against. While citizens are now prohibited from wearing masks in public assemblies, police officers will continue to be able to conceal their identities_

<comment><USER12> > The masked person can look but not be seen—an enormous and liberating power > particularly in today's age of surveillance.

It's only liberating if the masked person acts ethically. As we've seen in Portland, when masked "protesters" commit violence against civilians, it's the antithesis of "liberating". Remember that the anti-mask laws in the US south were enacted to limit the nefarious actions of the Klan.

IMO, HK has gone so far that the masks are a fake sense of security. The police will drag you off, mask and all, and know exactly who you are. Either the HK people have to accept using guerrilla tactics or they will eventually be swallowed by the CCP.

<comment><USER13> Here in France, at most protests you'd find groups of masked 'protestors' who usually have nothing to do with the protest and are just here for acts of violence against the police and random acts of degradation and looting

<comment><USER12> Don't forget masked "protesters" who are actually police infiltrators attempting to turn a protest violent.

<comment><USER14> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_provocateur](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_provocateur)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I don't recall the use of masks being prevalent during either the anti-Vietnam War demonstrations or the Civil Rights demonstrations of the '50s and '60s.

The adoption of masks is probably driven by the digital imaging chip and the ubiquity of digital photos and videos. If the police don't image you, your friends and the media probably will.

<comment><USER16> I've seen multiple reports during the current round of Hong Kong riots of China sympathizers aggressively filming the faces of protesters. The whole "we'll get a photo of you protesting and then deal with you later" thing is a central theme in these protests.

<comment><USER17> Aggressively filming protestors? Are you sure?

[https://video.h5.weibo.cn/1034:4423697482642911/442369763922...](https://video.h5.weibo.cn/1034:4423697482642911/4423697639229801)

I really don't understand why hackernews is so extremely one-sided on this issue.

Edit: yeah there we go, down voted immediately.

<comment><USER18> Can someone please give some context on that video? Who's the boy? What is everyone doing? The video is creepy.

<comment><USER17> As bakuninsbart says above, yes. These are the "journalists" that produce most of the news you see regarding the protests on the streets. Go search for more live feeds to seem more of these "journalists" in general being a nuisance and aggressively filming the police to catch and report of every single mis-step. Trust me, its not the protestors that are aggressively being filmed.

And to add more context in an unbiased way. Man in white is white collar worker in central district. I don't know if he's done anything to provoke protesters as pretext.

"journalists" being a general nuisance, possibly trying to provoke him. He says something inaudible, something like "are you a journalist" or "what are you reporting on" or generally along the lines of wtf are you doing.

Journalist starts taunting him, saying he can't understand him. He leaves for the office with people swearing and shouting profanity. He turns around and says "we are all chinese people". More swearing. Some "journalist" closes the door and prevents him from entering. Some masked guy comes out of know where to hit him. Granted he wasn't looking to do serious damage but still a dick move and uncalled for. The guy goes in and someone throws an umbrella at his head. Journalists rush after him after pausing for a while probably because they don't know what else to do.

Glorious isn't it

<comment><USER19> >Trust me

Do you attend the protests and view these or other activities yourself? Or just reporting on Twitter?

Journalists are helping keep everyone safe, by filming, which discourages most from violence, on both sides. They film both police and protestors.

Just do understand that for many HKers, they believe this is a fight where losing means what happens to Uighurs and Tibetans happens to them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Estonia has had a mask ban since around 2008 I think, after the Bronze Night riots. [1]

This does produce ridiculous results occasionally. My friend was briefly detained by the police for wearing a ski mask on a long winter walk. It was -25°C outside.

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

</comment><comment><USER21> In Denmark police will video record demonstrators face really close by, some suspect they use it for feeding facedetection from Palantir.

Disguising your face is also illegal in Denmark.

<comment><USER22> Yeah, it's not weird that the laws are coming now that the police (and by extension the government) have the technology to actually use our faces.

The protestors in Hong Kong really do have a reason to protect their identities from China, so do (peaceful) protestors from any state. Freedom of speech should be allowed for anonymous persons as well.

<comment><USER23> HK protesters are peaceful?

<comment><USER24> Exceptionally so, especially when compared to some "protests" seen in the US and some other "First World" countries, and the stakes of those protests are also usually quite low compared to HK. I've actually been extremely surprised at the restraint shown.

<comment><USER25> Not true. Just in the past few hours:

Bank set on fire: [https://twitter.com/YuxuanMichael/status/1180140543973580800](https://twitter.com/YuxuanMichael/status/1180140543973580800)

Train with passengers on board attacked: [https://twitter.com/liamstone_19/status/1180188091312558081](https://twitter.com/liamstone_19/status/1180188091312558081)

Mob beat up one person: [https://twitter.com/liamstone_19/status/1180175432236195840](https://twitter.com/liamstone_19/status/1180175432236195840)

Undercover officer petrol bombed: [https://twitter.com/BMMRobertson/status/1180126411169894400](https://twitter.com/BMMRobertson/status/1180126411169894400)

<comment><USER19> > Undercover officer petrol bombed

That is literally the video of the _off duty cop_ shooting a 14 year old in the leg. The mob that attacked him with sticks and petrol bombs were in response to him discharging a firearm in an area that crowded, and hitting a young teenager. What kind of misinformation are you trying to spread? Do you post Twitter instead of news because you are afraid of people hearing the whole story?

[https://www.hongkongfp.com/2019/10/04/breaking-man-shot- off-...](https://www.hongkongfp.com/2019/10/04/breaking-man-shot-off-duty- hong-kong-police-officer-protesters-attack-vehicle/)

<comment><USER25> Sounds like you're justifying the mob's response, which is the attempted murder of a police officer.

Nobody knows yet, at least no reports of, why the firearm was discharged. Maybe it was accidental. Maybe it was deliberate. Mob justice is not the answer.

By the way, you link to Hong Kong Free Press - give me a break. I wouldn't call them Fake News but they are very biased.

They are similar to the NY Times who literally are fake news. The NY Times had the audacity to claim an 18 year old who was shot a few days ago was unarmed.

[https://twitter.com/maodunzedong/status/1179797585638445057](https://twitter.com/maodunzedong/status/1179797585638445057)

Well everyone here on HackerNews can use their own eyes and see what the NY Times failed to see. An armed protestor (with the blue board) beating an officer on the ground and getting shot after he struck another officer who had his weapon drawn.

[https://twitter.com/qingqingparis/status/1179736413534744576](https://twitter.com/qingqingparis/status/1179736413534744576)

<comment><USER19> It sounds like you're justifying the attempted murder of a child.

HKFP might be biased towards democracy and freedom of the press, but not as biased as posting shill Twitter accounts.

The NYT uses unarmed in the American sense of the word - the 18 year old was _not_ carrying a firearm.

I can scroll through Reddit and find 10s of examples of police doing the same to protestors, and yet as someone that has actually gone, the real HK police seem very professional in the face of a difficult job. _Other_ police and gang members that are enlisted to help during the night on the other hand...

Are you up posting from 2AM-6AM because of insomnia, or because you post from an armchair in a different timezone?

It seems to me like if it were your country, and you had no $$ or foreign passport to hide, you would have a different opinion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Keep in mind that facial recognition is probably only one part of a modern identification pipeline. There's every reason to think that some sort of gait signature, history of clothing purchases, and cellular data could be combined to identify a person with some level of confidence, to say nothing of simply blanketing a city with enough cameras to "rewind" back to when the person didn't have the mask on.

<comment><USER27> Gait detection not likely to be useful in a massive crowd. Clothes are not custom, change over time, and can't be used to identify someone because they aren't linked to an identity (Joe buys John a shirt as a gift; John buys his son a shirt; etc.). I suppose rewinding is possible but the computational cost of doing this for thousands of people is probably immense.

<comment> seph-reed Not with eye in the sky tech.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> the-dude The Netherlands has introduced a ban on face-covering masks this year, but the ban is restricted to public places like public transport, schools and governmental institutions.

Although the current interest is probably related to HK, the ban in The Netherlands seems to be related to the introduction of the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burqa](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burqa) in the public domain.

<comment><USER28> Probably still better than Ticino in Switzerland, which banned face-coverings in public to apparently target burqas but instead of making setting-dependent exceptions, made exceptions for health and safety (reasonable) as well as local festivals (i.e. protecting some traditions but not others).

[https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/ticino-burka-ban-hits- football-...](https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/ticino-burka-ban-hits-football- fans-the-hardest/44306466)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> There's been a lot of talk in the U.S. of anti-mask legislation because of antifascists. A federal bill: [https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th- congress/house-bill/6054...](https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th- congress/house-bill/6054/text)

There's also been a lot of talk at local levels.

</comment><comment><USER30> The article makes good pro-mask points. But--as is not mentioned in the article--some such laws have been passed to stop violence from groups like the Ku Klux Klan.

<comment><USER31> This particular point was very uncompelling and lazy (to be clear, I'm pointing the finger at the article, not _you_ ).

The Klan didn't get away with horrific acts of violence because they were legally allowed to wear masks—they got away with it because it was socially acceptable to terrorize, beat up, lynch, and kill people who were not WASPs. The police and other civic leaders were often members, and even when they weren't, they had tacit and sometimes direct alliances with Klan members. This led to law enforcement looking the other way when violent acts occurred, and they simply did not enforce _plenty_ of existing laws that made the Klan's violent behaviors already illegal. Plenty of violence occurred without masks on. And even when the masks were on, law enforcement had more than enough cause to arrest people and unmask them.

Arresting, prosecuting, and convicting individuals who engaged in already- illegal acts of racially motivated violence is what stopped Klan violence. Beyond that, brave infiltration efforts to expose their inner workings and publicizing membership lists contributed further. An endless stream of newspaper articles documenting and decrying Klan activity as un-American helped, too.

Yes, the anonymity provided by the hoods _emboldened_ horrible people to threaten and intimidate others, as well as commit horrific acts of violence. _But the violence happened because it was allowed_. Suggesting anti-mask laws stopped the Klan only whitewashes the past—and absolves political leaders, law enforcement, and American society itself, of their central role in allowing that violence to happen for decades. Klan violence didn't stop because masks became illegal—it stopped when people refused to continue looking the other way. And it took way too long for that to happen.

<comment><USER32> That's mostly true, but I think you're going a little too hard against the role of the anti-mask laws. Nobody is saying they were the main weapon against the Klan or were essential or anything like that. They were a useful weapon against them though.

I don't have solid sources on this, but I'm pretty sure the masks were most useful for Plausible Deniability. Local officials didn't really want to fight the Klan, true. They still had to answer to State and Federal officials and out-of-state newspapers though. Klan members wearing masks allow them to claim to anybody asking tough questions that they can't do anything more against those people because they don't know who they are. (And allow them to deny some of them are infact members)

It's often tough to discuss logistics issues like this on boards. Everybody wants to find One Big Reason for something, and declare every other reason irrelevant. In reality, most large efforts to solve large issues require lots of different tactics. Often, no one tactic is "key" or "essential", but they all help out a little to achieve a goal. Taking away any one won't doom you or anything, but it will make things take a little longer and go a little harder.

<comment><USER31> I'll leave you with some quick thoughts:

— I wasn't searching for one big reason, and I wasn't declaring all other reasons irrelevant. I provided several reasons that are exceedingly well documented in Klan-focused histories for the decline of Klan violence (seriously, go read some histories and see how prominently mask laws play in the events).

— Alabama passed the first anti-mask law in the South in 1949—roughly 20 years after the national (2nd) Klan and its violent activities had been exposed and its membership severely dwindled (turning the Klan into a splintered group of uncoordinated and smaller local and state groups).

— The post-WW2 (3rd) Klan had alliances all the way up the local, county, and _state-level_ political and legal ladder. They had direct alliances with _governors_. Local officials weren't having to deny anything, because there was rarely anyone to answer to higher up the chain. In the states this occurred, hooded Klansmen weren't really a thing like the 2nd Klan, and the violence continued without masks. The feds didn't get involved until _way late_ —FBI and the like cared about chasing communists more than they did Klan violence when it mattered.

— The 3rd Klan became a notable and present force of violence and intimidation throughout the South _after_ the Alabama anti-mask law (and the other state laws that followed)

— The Klan robes and hoods most people envision were a staple of the 2nd Klan, and basically copied the costumes in _Birth of a Nation_ —that is, 20+ years _before_ mask laws (when they might have been helpful; at that time Klan membership numbered 3M-6M).

— The first and second Klan were organized and national. The third Klan was local and state specific, and never reached the membership levels of the former—yet mask laws didn't stop Klan violence during this period.

— Alabama is a funny example—it passed the first Southern mask law thanks to a Klan-hating governor, and it later had a Klan-allied governor.

By the way, this period and the issues society struggled with was pretty much the focus of my graduate school work, and years of study since.

<comment><USER32> Well that's a lot of interesting detail, thanks! If they were indeed passed after the fall of the generation of the Klan that liked to use masks, then why did anyone bother to pass them? Had it gotten to the point of just virtue- signaling how against the Klan they were?

<comment><USER31> It's complicated? I don't think it'd be fair to call it virtue-signaling in a blanket fashion, no. Despite the overwhelming decline of 2nd Klan membership across the country, racism was still deeply entrenched in American society. Most Americans in heavily racist areas saw this as normal. A minority disagreed, and some were in positions of power to act on those convictions.

I believe it's more than fair to interpret the mask laws as being fueled by recognition (by some) that times were changing, and a desire to avoid _returning_ to the hooded times of the 2nd Klan. They were likely interested in preventing hooded Klan marches and intimidation acts—for example, Georgia's 1951 mask law came a couple years after a group of hooded Klansmen stood outside a polling place to deter black citizens from voting, iirc.

I also think it's wise to keep that interpretation balanced by recognizing that while perhaps not quite virtue-signaling, the mask laws—when viewed alongside the horrible racist violence allowed in the states that had mask laws—were passed by some people who wanted to unmask the Klan, and others who realized it was politically expedient to be seen doing so. In some cases—notably those states who allowed post-1954 Civil Rights-era violence and allied with local Klans—it provided an appearance of doing something, while then turning a blind eye toward the mask-free violence occurring in their states, and forging alliances with local Klan members.

Ultimately, to understand the period, its actors, and their motivations, we're left digging through whatever records exist of public arguments made at the time for the mask laws, and looking carefully at who made the arguments, and how those arguments square with their actions in their states. Sadly, I'm not sure if there are many publicly available records online of that sort for someone to dig through.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Governments want to secure their ability to remove your eyeballs with the help of 40mm grenade launchers that shoot "non lethal" rubber projectiles.

</comment><comment><USER34> one of my favorite historical antecedents is a document from the 12th century in london in which local businessmen and authorities are complaining about the hooded apprentices who get off work, get drunk, and start trouble in the streets.

Some things are truly eternal.

[https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1584317/Hoodies- were...](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1584317/Hoodies-were-the- scourge-of-Medieval-London.html)

</comment><comment><USER35> From the article: "Does heavy make-up count as a mask?"

Near-future: "Does a full-facial e-ink tattoo, dynamically reconfigurable, count as a mask?"

<comment><USER36> Facial paint is included in the loose definition of "facial covering" for the HK anti-mask law

<comment><USER35> Thus, my question about tattoos. :-)

<comment><USER37> If you tattooed your whole face you are basically making yourself more easily identifiable. You can't take it off so you are now the guy with the full face tattoo.

But I doubt they could outlaw your face. What are they going to do? Cut your face off?

<comment><USER35> I suggested a full-face e-ink tattoo, dynamically reconfigurable. A programmable tattoo. Turn it on. Turn it off. Raise your cheekbones. Add a third eye. Or wrinkles and freckles and a bruise. Turn on some lip gloss and eye shadow. Change your skin tone. Confound image processing. Have some fun.

> If you tattooed your whole face you are basically making yourself more > easily identifiable.

Turn it on and off and configure it as desired. E-pigment sits under your skin. Unlike a mask, it's part of you but only when you want it to be. I think this could reduce identifiability.

<comment><USER38> E-ink tattoos are as real as my girlfriend.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Wow, I can't imagine that going over here in Japan. Nearly the entire population wears masks when sick or when trying to avoid getting sick. They're sold in every convenience store, all different kinds, paper, cloth, foam, with or without various medicinal stuff added.

They are also a problem for anyone who has an iPhone with FaceID

</comment><comment><USER40> If your goal is to evade biometric recognition by your local oppressive government: try makeup:) I work in the field and can tell you that 1) it's cheap and easy 2) no presents sensor technology can detect it 3) detection algorithms will be spoofed and confused 99% of the time if well done. And it's not a mask ;)

<comment><USER41> Gas masks deal with CS gas (I find it ironic that CS gas is banned by the Geneva conventions, but using it against civilians is fine).

Goggles reduce the chances of eye injury due to debris, rubber bullets, police batons, etc. A decent face mask extends this protection to the rest of the face.

<comment><USER42> As are dum dum bullets - which is even weirder

<comment><USER15> Soft, expanding bullets stop more easily when they hit something. Full metal jacket military bullets penetrate things like auto bodies, walls, etc, and pose a greater threat to innocent bystanders.

Plus, the real reason is that in war, wounding the other side is better than killing, since the wounded have to be treated, evacuated, supported, etc., and their presence is demoralizing to the enemy.

<comment><USER42> Its an offence against the Geneva convention, NATO militaries are worried they will be accused of war crimes if they introduce bullets that could be considered dum dums

<comment><USER15> Actually the 1899 Hague Convention, and the US is not a signatory. The US reserves the right to use expanding bullets when there is a clear military necessity. Until 2010 the prohibition only applied to warfare between military units, not to combat with irregular or civilians units. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expanding_bullet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expanding_bullet)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Noticeably absent from this discussion: Anti-mask laws as a method to combat terrorism from the Ku Klux Klan. Presumably no one is talking about it because it complicates the simple protestors-good/government-bad story.

> Many anti-mask laws date back to the mid-20th century when states and > municipalities, passed them to stop the violent activities of the Ku Klux > Klan, whose members typically wore hoods of white linen to conceal their > identities....

> A three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second > Circuit upheld a New York law on the ground that wearing a Ku Klux Klan mask > did not convey a protected message beyond that conveyed by wearing a hood > and robe.[2] Other courts have struck down anti-mask laws. For example, > Tennessee and Florida state laws have been invalidated on the grounds that > they were unconstitutionally broad.[10] An ordinance in Goshen, Indiana, was > struck down based on First Amendment doctrine that specifically protects > anonymous speech and anonymous association, especially for unpopular groups > like the KKK.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti- mask_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-mask_law)

> In 1845 New York made it illegal to appear "disguised and armed." Most anti- > mask laws [in the US] were passed, however, in response to the Ku Klux Klan, > whose members used masks to hide their identities as they terrorized their > victims.

[https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/1169/anti- mask-...](https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/1169/anti-mask-laws)

> In the United States, anti-mask laws were first passed in the 19th century > to combat various threats of violence—among them, the killing of Hudson > Valley landlords by tenant farmers who dressed up as American Indians, and > also the growing violence of the Ku Klux Klan.

[http://jtl.columbia.edu/the-inexorable-anti-mask- movement/](http://jtl.columbia.edu/the-inexorable-anti-mask-movement/)

Here's a serious analysis of how one might tailor an anti-mask law while avoiding the most serious free-speech issues, at least in the narrow sense of passing constitutional muster in the US.

[https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=30...](https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3009&context=flr)

<comment><USER44> This rarely gets mentioned, same as the racist history of gun control.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> One bit of this that I've always found interesting is that it makes it just a little bit harder to suppress dissent in cities in colder climates.

Of course, cold tends to have a literal "chilling effect" on activity as well (see: crime rates in summer)!

</comment><comment><USER46> The UK police have been able to do this for a while. I haven't been involved in activism for years now, but if I remember correctly they used to be able to make people remove face masks within a particular area during demonstrations.

</comment><comment><USER42> A bit lacking, Bans on masks started in renaissance Europe , with people only being allowed to wear them during carnival.

</comment><comment><USER47> The Republic of Venice restricted the use of masks in the 18th century. Nothing new here.

</comment><comment><USER48> Just wear a burqa instead, they wouldn't dare complaining about it...</comment>


"How-do-you-feel dinners" for startups - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/thinking-about-startups/f2d7474784c6

<comment><AUTHOR> Like Buffer uses the tactic "Default to Transparency", with Open Salary, Open Revenue data and sharing internal email conversations.

This might be a shortcut to better work/life transparency between co-founders?

</comment><comment><USER2> It's the soft things in relations that really make a difference, so embracing those and building that into the DNA of the team is most probably of utmost importance. Great piece.

<comment><USER3> Agree. Joining brisk.io I was first introduced with the concept of how do you feel lunches and even though it makes you feel a bit uncomfortable the first couple of times, it is definitely bearing its fruits!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is a really hard think when starting a company. The team is of course one of the core parts of a startup.</comment>


The Quest for Zero Login, Part 1 - <AUTHOR> http://drfloob.com/blurbs/12:the_quest_for_zero_login_part_1 For the TL;DR crowd: my thoughts on how to build a community site without a required login system.  How to structure an anonymous community with user-generated content / assets.
I've been working on this idea for the past few months, and have only come to a rough solution.  I'd like to put the idea out there, see who else is working/has worked on it, and get some feedback.
To be frank, I'm working on this for a project I don't intend to monetize, so maybe it's not right for the community, but I think you might find it interesting anyhow.
Thanks all, feedback appreciated! <comment><USER2> How is it possible to have a meaningful implementation of "voting, tagging, or some reputation-earning scheme for the content itself" without an accompanying concept of identity?

<comment><AUTHOR> The content has its own identity. It would gain reputation. You, the creator, would not.

Problems: It devalues the individual, and an essentially anonymous vote system would make gaming logic and moderation interesting (but feasible) problems of their own. If these are solved well, the votes have meaning.

They're significant trade-offs, but every option has them.

<comment><USER2> I got that, but it seems to me for there to _be_ reputation, some identifiable entity must be able to "give" it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> How do zero login sites deal with spam? Fancy javascript?</comment>


HAKMEM (1972) - <AUTHOR> http://www.inwap.com/pdp10/hbaker/hakmem/hakmem.html <comment><USER2> Item 70, The chess problem "stolen from Chess for Fun, Chess for Blood" by Lasker is problem 66 from that book [1]. The problem as stated in the memo is wrong: the white bishop is on the eighth rank, not the seventh, so it should say Bishop on KB8, not on KB7. The problem in FEN is then:

5B2/6P1/1p6/8/1N6/kP6/2K5/8 w - - 1 1

The version from Lasker's book is _much_ more interesting. It happens that the version from HAKMEM is also a mate-in-3, but kind of a mundane one, relative to Lasker's anyway.

[1] Lasker's book is on Google Books, and you can see the relevant page (page 145) [https://books.google.ca/books?id=y90UTQeLeeIC&pg=PA145](https://books.google.ca/books?id=y90UTQeLeeIC&pg=PA145) (spoiler: the solution is described on that page).

</comment><comment><USER3> It's worth mentioning that many aspects of HAKMEM have found their way into "Hacker's Delight", one of the more impressive CS books ever published IMHO.

[http://www.hackersdelight.org/](http://www.hackersdelight.org/)

See also Guy Steele's forward to the book, in which he talks about its relationship to HAKMEM.

[http://www.hackersdelight.org/foreword.pdf](http://www.hackersdelight.org/foreword.pdf)

<comment> cup-of-tea I wouldn't call it a computer science book. It's certainly one of the most impressive programming books, though. These days I do most of my program in languages like Lisp and Python and I am a bit sad that I don't get to apply the bit fiddling type hacks found in that book.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There are a lot of pearls in this - I would call it lab book.

A while ago, I made a slow Clojure implementation of a generalized version of Bill Gospers continued fraction arithmetics from the HAKMEM

[http://github.com/timrichardt/stern-brocot- tree](http://github.com/timrichardt/stern-brocot-tree)

<comment><USER5> Ten years ago, I implemented Gosper's continued fraction arithmetics in Python: [http://sun.aei.polsl.pl/~mciura/software/cf.py](http://sun.aei.polsl.pl/~mciura/software/cf.py) My module can also compute exp() and log() as well as trigonometric and inverse trigonometric functions. Here are slides from my presentation about it: [http://sun.aei.polsl.pl/~mciura/cf.pdf](http://sun.aei.polsl.pl/~mciura/cf.pdf)

<comment><USER4> Great, I will definitely have a look at it. Did you implement exp(x) for any continued fraction x?

<comment><USER5> Yes. The key to that is approximating reals by the second Ostrogradsky series (or, more properly, Ostrogradsky-Sierpiński series): x = ⎣x⎦ + 1/q₁ − 1/q₂ + 1/q₃ - 1/q₄ + ⋯, where the denominators qₖ are greedily chosen as the largest possible. The following formulas are true: exp(1/q) = [1; q−1, 1, 1, 3q−1, 1, 1, 5q-1,…], exp(x + y) = exp(x)exp(y), and exp(x - y) = exp(x)/exp(y). The algorithm keeps two most recent partial sums of the O-S series: sₖ₋₁ and sₖ. As long as the partial quotients of exp(sₖ₋₁) and exp(sₖ) are equal, it emits them; otherwise, it computes the next partial sum sₖ₊₁. Similar formulas work for tan(x).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Interestingly, there's not only theorems but also conjectures in this list.

Interesting bit:

 _> ITEM 125 (Polya):_

 _> CONJECTURE: If a function has a power series with integer coefficients and radius of convergence 1, then either the function is rational or the unit circle is a natural boundary._

 _> Reference: Polya, Mathematics and Plausible Reasoning, volume 2, page 46._

Has this conjecture been proved or disproved by now?

<comment><USER7> Yes, this was proved by F. Carlson in 1921 and it is known as the Pólya–Carlson theorem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is a classic. IMHO, HAKMEM should be required reading for everyone who programs computers. Likewise, everyone should own and read Hank Warren's _Hackers Delight_. For advanced practitioners, Knuth's _Art of Computer Programming_ (particularly Volume 4) has some similar material. All explore the deep relationship between mathematics and programming.

</comment><comment><USER9> Item 1 (expressing (p/q)! in terms of other (p/q)!) has no general solution still, as far as I know, but can easily be handled empirically for medium- sized n with the PSLQ algorithm.

Item 96 ("Solve go") can be made tractable by setting the board size to n=2.

<comment><USER10> _Item 96 ( "Solve go") can be made tractable by setting the board size to n=2._

At first I thought this was an "assume a spherical cow"-style joke, but no, it turns out there are _386 billion_ possible games you can play on a 2x2 Go board:

[http://tromp.github.io/go/legal19.html](http://tromp.github.io/go/legal19.html)

<comment><USER9> I thought indeed that I was making a "spherical cow" joke. I was actually thinking of this: [https://tromp.github.io/java/go/twoxtwo.html](https://tromp.github.io/java/go/twoxtwo.html), so only 1446 nodes after pruning.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> _> Programs below this line are considered unfeasible._

[http://www.inwap.com/pdp10/hbaker/hakmem/proposed.html#item9...](http://www.inwap.com/pdp10/hbaker/hakmem/proposed.html#item94)

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm glad they provided this in 'html' format.

<comment><USER13> I'm looking, but cannot find some way to view the whole thing as a single HTML page (as it should be), so "wget -m -np" it is ..

<comment><USER14> A single page version is here: [http://hakmem.org/](http://hakmem.org/)

<comment><USER13> Ah, that is indeed very nice - thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Is there a modern (latex) version? Reading the math on those pages is an arduous undertaking.

<comment><USER16> Here: w3.pppl.gov/~hammett/work/2009/AIM-239-ocr.pdf

<comment><USER15> Thanks a lot!</comment></comment></comment>


Parrondo's Paradox - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parrondo%27s_paradox <comment><USER2> Through losing you gain such a better signal to sample regarding facets to improve. You are able to discover other winning strategies which may be distinctly separate from an otherwise winning strategy. Without losing, how can you truly understand how to be the winningest?</comment>


Jolla Tablet - <AUTHOR> http://jolla.com/tablet <comment><USER3> I have a Jolla phone and I love it. I guess I'm among the luckier ones as my phone doesn't have any of the wiggly sim/battery problems. It's been very stable for me for the past 8 or so months I had it.

I love the battery life. Perhaps thanks to using Qt/C++ instead of a higher level language/framework, or perhaps thanks to me being social-medially- challenged, the standard 2200 mah battery takes me for a good chunk of 48 hours.

Yes, there aren't much apps for it, (there was a time when you could practically download the entire Jolla store to your phone) but almost all of the apps are open source. If you're craving for the latest episode of Brain Crush Saga, you're not in the target audience anyway.

There are also a couple of factors which make it a unique offering:

-It's not from Google, it's not from Apple, so I'm a bit more comfortable privacy-wise.

-The concept of "The Other Half". It's sort of a "hardware app" that you can use as the back cover of your phone. For example, there's a kickstarter for a The Other Half Keyboard running right now: [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2028347278/tohkbd-the-o...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2028347278/tohkbd-the-other-half-keyboard-for-your-jolla).

-No front-facing buttons! Huge success design-wise. Not gorgeous like the N9 (reportedly due to some patent issues), but still very eye-pleasing.

All in all, very cute device, but definitely not (yet) for everyone.

As for the tablet, I expect to be a lot more productive with it compared to the toys on the market now, especially thanks to it being an Intel-based device with a proper Linux distribution. And at ~200$ for this kind of device, to me it's a bargain.

The Indie GoGo page is buried far down the page, so here it is for your convenience: [https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/jolla-tablet-world-s- firs...](https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/jolla-tablet-world-s-first- crowdsourced-tablet/contributions/new?perk_amt=204&perk_id=2484192)

Keep up the amazing work, Jolla team, you _are_ making a difference.

Disclaimer: No affiliation, just a happy customer.

<comment><USER4> Wish I wasn't having those problems :/

<comment><USER5> After taking my battery and SIM card out and putting them back in a few times, those glitches no longer occur for me.

I get about 48h of light use though. Battery life used to be worse, but I was able to tell an indexing service to only run after boot and not during use. Might be updates overwrite user customizations, so I need to do it again.

After that update the phone refused to talk with Debian Wheezy and Windows 7 over USB but Ubuntu 14.4 LTS works just swimmingly now, and it's what I use on my desktop anyway. That update finally resolved an issue with the screen not wanting to unlock, and now it's smooth sailing.

I'm actually quite happy with the phone. I expected issues when I bought it and since I'm proficient with Linux I can solve them from the command line interface. The phone won't let me copy-paste from the GUI to the CLI; as per a bug report this functionality is pending robust sanity checking and security. The keyboard is very sensitive in just the right way and once I got used to the UI Android started to feel like a bygone era. I'm Finnish, and during the holidays I'll probably be expected to advise my relatives on whether or not they can upgrade their tablets to Jolla's new device.

Note that just yesterday Nokia announced a new Android tablet: [http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-30096603](http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-30096603) An odd coincidence?

(p.s. I had only just learned to use QtCreator for Symbian when the Microsoft deal was announced. Jolla relies on Qt, so getting started with Qt was in fact not a waste of time. I'm looking forward to learning functional C++14!)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Ignoring the Generic company marketing video, it looks promising.

Sailfish is an interesting OS, it has RPM package manager and looks like they've proprietary Android compatibility layer. It also uses Qt/QML for apps which is interesting.

The specs look good too when compared to the other rivals in the range[1]

[https://images.indiegogo.com/file_attachments/1026232/files/...](https://images.indiegogo.com/file_attachments/1026232/files/20141118091830-comparison- table.png?1416331110)

Does anyone here use a Jolla device?

<comment><USER7> I have Jolla phone and I have mixed feelings about it. Sailfish OS is interesting - learning how to use it has steep learning curve (but once you get used to it, it's perhaps faster to do something with it than on any other phone). It is sometimes unreliable (my Jolla randomly shuts down, sometimes several times in a row, see [https://together.jolla.com/question/7144/jolla- randomly-shut...](https://together.jolla.com/question/7144/jolla-randomly- shuts-down-10819/)). There are other quirks here and there, guys from Jolla are fixing them one after another, but I would say that Sailfish OS is still in beta state.

It is really developer friendly device. It has awesome SDK and it isn't trying to restrict you by any means. But even that, there are not really that many applications for Sailfish OS and only few of them are good. And there is literally no official client for anything and that brings problems - <USER2> example, several people were banned from WhatsApp for using Mitakuuluu (WhatsApp client for Sailfish OS). There isn't full-featured Facebook client, there isn't client for my bank account or for my operator. App for public transport for your country? Nope, it isn't there. Sure, you can use Android apps (not from Google Play though, you have to use Yandex store or Amazon store), but: 1) There are no Google Play Services - that means no integration with Google Account, no maps, no that pretty cool Google Inbox app, Google is moving a lot of things into Google Play Services, 2) there will be problems with any non-trivial app. Games are OK, but GPS tracking? Didn't work when app wasn't active (so you have to have screen on). Wanted to try Pressy? Doesn't work, it wants to access your Google account. Besides, if you are buying this device convicted that you will use Android apps on it, why not buy Android phone?

To end this comment with something positive, I could say that this is "OK" device. It is impressive that they are able to build this device with that small team. They are listening to community, they are updating their OS frequently. Besides some quirks, Sailfish OS is as good as any other mobile phone OS. It runs fast and it is based on Linux, Qt5 and even Wayland compositor. You can be more confident that you are not being watched (at least they say). Your inner geek will be pleased. But at the end of the day, you will look at other people phones, they are playing that new cool game, using that new cool app you always wanted to try, trying that new HN or Reddit client, using Google Inbox, using Instagram Hyperlapse, using their expensive gadgets, fitness trackers, using their phones to find how will they get home and your phone has just suddenly rebooted again.

<comment><USER8> > _App for public transport for your country? Nope, it isn 't there._

Except, of course, for Finland: [https://openrepos.net/content/w01w13/reitti](https://openrepos.net/content/w01w13/reitti)

<comment><USER9> And for Dublin: [http://www.softwareontheside.info/2014/03/sailbus- dublin.htm...](http://www.softwareontheside.info/2014/03/sailbus-dublin.html)

One of the city bike apps also supports Dublin along with a lot of other cities in Europe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think it would be good for all to have something like this. We need an alternative mobile platform that is not enslaved to one of the giant ecosystem producers with their respective Reality Distortion Fields.

Personally, I would like an OS that supports compilation to native code without having to polish every single bit manually (like Android forces you to do if you dare to use C instead of Java).

What I definitely don't need is Android by another name — for now, I just hope it will be better.

<comment><USER11> As of Android 5 everything is native, including Java.

EDIT: [http://developer.android.com/about/versions/android-5.0-chan...](http://developer.android.com/about/versions/android-5.0-changes.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I would love to see a low-spec laptop with detachable keyboard with some Linux desktop environment when the keyboard is connected, switching to Sailfish OS when used in tablet mode. If it had long battery life and had good support of additional screens (to avoid disasters when running presentations) it would be a perfect device for me.

<comment><USER9> I plan to use mine with an apple bluetooth keyboard I'd say you'll need some external device for screens though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Here's the link for their Indiegogo page: [http://igg.me/at/jolla- tablet](http://igg.me/at/jolla-tablet)

</comment><comment><USER14> Their crowdsourcing campaign is doing quite good. [https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/jolla-tablet-world-s- firs...](https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/jolla-tablet-world-s-first- crowdsourced-tablet)

Personally though I'm a bit disappointed that they went the crowdfundign way on this. They didn't have any problems selling their mobile phone, and it's doing quite good as far as I've seen.

Also I hope they do continue to produce it afterwards, but this item in the FAQ leaves me wondering:

> Will the tablet be available also for general sale or only through > Indiegogo?

>If there is demand, we'll consider all options. In any case, the Indiegogo contributors will get the tablet first and with the lowest price at the time of delivery.

<comment><USER11> I am yet to see any on the wild. Even Windows Phone has better sales.

<comment><USER15> I wonder how many of the Windows Phone users are Microsoft employees or affiliates. After all they're still a big company, with 127K employees around the world.

<comment><USER11> I get to see quite a few devices on the wild in German trains.

In the southern and eastern European countries, where we traditionally only use pre-paid phones and contracts are out of reach for most pockets, it is easier to spot Android and Windows Phones than iOS devices.

Are the ones using Windows Phones all Microsoft employees and affiliates then?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> They need to make a high-end phone, a Z3 Compact competitor with a nice screen, camera, solid build + their backwards-compatible TOH v2 (faster data transfer) and then they'd be golden

Moving to a new UI size without resolving all phone-related problems? A bad idea IMHO

</comment><comment><USER17> I've had a Jolla phone for most of 2014 and I can say I'm not happy with it.

What drew me to it was the open source OS but it's very immature and needs a lot of work. It also needs a lot of new adopters to improve its ecosystem of apps.

The android compatibility is shaky at best and ruins the entire user interface experience of the sailfish OS.

The whole phone does not feel robust, not at all like the OnePlus for example which is my currently active phone, or the iPhone 4 that I previously used.

All this makes me very reluctant to purchase a Jolla tablet.

<comment><USER18> I'm still using the Jolla phone and I think it's ok and it's getting better. Compared to Android phones its user interface is cleaner and doesn't come with preinstalled apps that I don't use.

<comment><USER5> Regarding preinstalled apps: My Nexus 7 did a lot of outright bitching when I first got it. I even had a bit of black tape over the front-facing camera for a while since Google's Byzantine privacy practices had made me genuinely not trust the device.

My Jolla is the opposite from this. On my Jolla, I am root.

<comment><USER19> > a bit of black tape over the front-facing camera for a while since Google's > Byzantine privacy practices had made me genuinely not trust the device.

I genuinely don't get this.

You don't trust the OS not to spy on you, so you covered the camera? Fine. But if you don't trust the OS, how do you stop it from, say, uploading everything you type to Google? OK, perhaps you have a highly restrictive firewall, or only use it offline (reading ebooks?)

But in that case, what's the point of the black tape over the camera? It now has no way of contacting the mothership; all you've done is restrict your ability to take pictures.

Surely the better idea would be to compile an AOSP build for the N7 (or maybe just get CyanogenMod if you're less paranoid?) and you basically have a tablet which you completely control without buying a Jolla (with an equivalent app ecosystem and less bugs)?

Note that there are definitely reasons to get a Jolla phone; for example the fact that AOSP on the N7 is unsupported by google -- just saying I don't fully understand the tape on the camera when you don't trust the OS.

(maybe it was just a figure of speech; in which case, ignore me -- it didn't come across that way in your comment)

<comment><USER5> It's basic OpSec. You disable the services you don't need. You always build security in layers.

Some devices, e.g. a Dell All-in-one PC, come with a little latch that you can pull in front of the forward-facing camera. It's often not just the mothership that is the target of these measures. It could even be family who misguidedly install spyware.

<comment><USER19> >It could even be family who misguidedly install spyware. That's an application installed by the user; But this won't protect you against the core OS (the Dell's with a camera shutter is not meant to protect you against Microsoft).

Your original comment seemed to indicate it's was Google's privacy policies you were protecting yourself against. And Google supplies the OS -- most of which is open source.

Comparing the open-ness of the SW, both of them are equally open or closed. The Sailfish UI is closed source (but you get something close using Mer) -- As for android, just GApps is closed (which, I would argue, is better than the Sailfish situation)

So, if you are motivated to not use android due to paranoia; my recommendation is to run a AOSP build with F-Droid as an app store. There are many reasons to use a Jolla phone. Privacy alone is not a reason to switch ecosystems (as I said earlier: there are other, more compelling reasons).

And of course, you need the black tape covering your camera on both the Android and the Jolla (which was your original statement I disagreed with :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Watching Jolla has been interesting, there seems to be a huge amount of potential in Sailfish, and though I have a friend who owns a Jolla phone and seems to be frustrated by it often I'm still interested in this.

It sort of reminds me of Android's G1, a phone I had an loved for the fact that I could make anything on it, even if it was rough around the edges. I look forward to seeing where they take this and how they smooth out issues.

</comment><comment><USER15> Is there a technical reason why new devices don't support SDXC (high capacity sd cards)? Is it more expensive to implement, with licensing fees and whatnot? We have 64 and 128 gb cards nowadays, and 256 and higher are coming. Huge storage might be a compelling differentiater for a niche product like this one.

<comment><USER21> My Jolla phone has a Samsung Pro 64GB microSDXC card in it (Btrfs formatted, "raw" without partitions). It works well.

Samsung seems to call it "64GB microSDHC Pro" in some places though, so the problem here might be terminology and not actual lack of support.

I can't see any reason why the tablet wouldn't support such a card.

<comment><USER15> The specs say "up to 32gb", hence my question. But that's great news that 64gb works. Would 128 work as well?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> What an annoying site.

<comment><USER23> I agree. Am I getting so old that I just don't get it anymore? (Sigh, I guess I'll just get it out of the way now. That's not music that's noise. And slow down, where are you going that you have to get there so fast.)

<comment><USER22> > Am I getting so old that I just don't get it anymore?

The blink tag was hip once, too, so I have some hope that these fads will pass when the so-called "user experience experts" move to greener pastures.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Sigh, no 3G or LTS. This beautiful tablet is useless to me if it works only on Wifi; it really kills the "mobility" aspect of a tablet. I can't use the navigation which effectively renders the GPS useless.

Am I missing something here? Because I would love to have this tablet.

<comment><USER25> If it's true that it can run Android apps, you can use an offline navigation application that uses OpenStreetMap data.

For example MapFactor Navigator provides turn-by-turn navigation and works reasonably well.

<comment><USER24> Thanks for pointing out OSM.

I used navigation as an example. In general though I really don't get the idea of wifi-only table. I commute regularly and get most of my non-coding work done during that time; e-mail, responses, catching up on news and a whole bunch of things. Also when I'm out I carry my tablet around, just in case.

And I have a dumbish phone which I use for making/receiving calls :-)

<comment><USER26> Instead of upgrading my phone to 4G, I bought a 4G hotspot, and now everything talking wifi can use it. Count as an advantage that this way no hijackable baseband processor is running inside your tablet, and as a disadvantage that now also entities that only track wifi MAC addresses can track your movements.

(Also an advantage over using the phone for data is that by using a data-only SIM, your ISP won't do some nasty stuff like blocking VoIP. In the end, I may go back to a dumbphone, too.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Somewhat OT, but in case someone from Jolla or the "Sailfish Alliance" is reading these comments I just don't think Sailfish can take off with many developers if the main application development language is C++. Rust will be hitting 1.0 early next year and it would be nice for the Sailfish, Qt, and Rust communities to have official, corporate backed rust bindings for Qt and Sailfish's APIs.

<comment><USER28> C++ as the default means that things like MOAI can come onboard as rapidly as possible. That's a good thing, yo - it means freedom and variety - and also, very important, compatibility with an existing plethora of libraries and sources. Ports are a very important aspect of their strategy, I think .. and C++ opens the door for lot of things, one of which is of course an alternative language environment, albeit portable. But, then again, things like MOAI mean that getting the host up and running on Jolla is probably going to be easy, and then .. suddenly .. there are hundreds of potential apps to be brought to the platform ..

<comment><USER27> You do realize I called for Qt bindings right? C++ is going nowhere... C++ will always be an option that's needed... especially for games. I actually like C++ but developing in it provides too many unnecessary hassles for many apps.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> All this magical scrolling features is causing my browser to lag. I use chrome on OS X. Why use such fancy effects if it is ruined by bad performance?

<comment><USER30> I use chrome on osx on a 5 year old macbook pro (bottom of the line at purchase time) and the site ran perfectly smooth.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I currently use Android tablets for taking notes at meetings, Drive document editing, and access to my calendar and contacts. If I could get that with a OS (other than Windows) where I could install Eclipse and/or Android Studio and get HDMI out, I'm in. I wonder if Jolla's (Myriad's?) Android compatibility works on this?

</comment><comment> tommy-mato I've seen Jolla before a couple of times. I know that it says it runs android apps, but is there an easy/user-friendly way to get _access_ to the android apps? or is it all just "download the apk from somewhere and install it".

If it can't stand alone it'll fall over in this market.

</comment><comment><USER32> I probably won't use it (I'm not a tablet person and my iPad hasn't been touched for months now) yet I pledged for one unit as I think it's important to support such independent efforts in our "bipolar" mobile world.

</comment><comment><USER33> I'd be interested in a Jolla phablet (with stylus), but only as long as it wasn't made with dubious labour practices using coltan sourced from dodgy mines.

</comment><comment><USER34> I know the Jolla phone isn't available for sale in the US but is there anyone using a one in the US? And if so what carrier(s)? And any particular issue(s)?

<comment><USER35> I've spent couple of months in southern California and I was using my Jolla with a sin card, that I bought there (T-Mobile). It worked without any issues, also I didn't have any problems with roaming using my European sim card.

<comment><USER36> Were you able to use 3G data though? Or at least multimedia messages?

<comment><USER35> There were no problems with 3G data, didn't had a chance to check out LTE. I've successfully received a copule of MMS-es with pictures, I haven't tried sending any.

<comment><USER36> Wow! But I thought t-mobile was 1700MHz / 2100MHz! I don't want to believe that you're lying to me, but... You've gotten my hopes up that I can use this on WIND in Canada.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I was interested in Jolla since the start, but the phones hardware was just... uninteresting. This looks nice though, at least for those with use for a tablet.

</comment><comment><USER38> i'm curious about why did they go to "third"? there is a very big third Firefox OS not including WP. i can understand an OS based on Android. i can understand contributing to Firefox even forking. it has some real support from telecoms, open development process. apart from being a regional product which can get away with 3rd party app stores i dont get this write-a-mobile-os-from scratch.

<comment><USER39> It's not quite from scratch; Maemo/MeeGo/Sailfish is older than WP8 and FxOS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Seems like this might be really fun to hack with (I would love a more open, vaguely nice mobile device), but I'm sceptical about the lack of a firm processor choice at that price... Even i it is an 'early adopter one'.

If I thought they weren't going to reach their goal I'd go for it, but doesn't look look like they'll have any issues there!

I liked a lot of the Jolla ideas on the phone too, hopefully this'll be great!

</comment><comment><USER41> "Jolla seeks to revive Nokia platform."

I am confuse. Is this the Nokia N1 in a different guise?

<comment><USER42> No. Jolla is a bunch on ex- Nokia people who wanted to keep working on their then-current project.

Nokia allegedly started working on N1 when Microsoft deal went through.

<comment><USER43> I've heard the N1 is mostly Foxconn with some software (zlauncher) and industrial design from Nokia.

<comment><USER44> sounds like every apple product.

<comment><USER45> Well no. Foxconn only does manufacturing for Apple. In this case Foxconn also handles sales and distribution and even much of the actual electronics/hardware design. Think of it as Nokia is to Foxconn as Nexus is to Asus/LG/Motorola

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> The Nokia N1 tablet running Sailfish OS would have been a nice combination.

</comment><comment><USER47> So it's very close to the Nokia N1 specs?

</comment><comment><USER48> Nice, but LTE would make it a killer

<comment><USER49> And also would inflate the price. I don't mind WiFi only. And in the worst case you can make a WiFi hotspot from your handset.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Are there any details on the GPU?</comment>


Why I started reading more once I got rid of my books - <AUTHOR> http://ryanwaggoner.com/2010/11/how-i-read-more-by-getting-rid-of-my-books/ <comment><USER2> From [http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really- se...](http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-serve.html) :

The Amazon Kindle e-book reader (whose name suggests it's intended to burn people's books) has an Orwellian back door that Amazon used in 2009 to remotely delete Kindle copies of Orwell's books 1984 and Animal Farm which the users had purchased from Amazon.

From <http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/freedom-or-copyright.html> :

We still have the same old freedoms in using paper books and other analog media. But if e-books replace printed books, those freedoms will not transfer. Imagine: no more used book stores; no more lending a book to your friend; no more borrowing one from the public library—no more "leaks" that might give someone a chance to read without paying. No more purchasing a book anonymously with cash—you can only buy an e-book with a credit card. That is the world the publishers want to impose on us. If you buy the Amazon Kindle (we call it the Swindle) or the Sony Reader (we call it the Shreader for what it threatens to do to books), you pay to establish that world.

<comment><AUTHOR> Nah, no more than buying the original iPod helped usher in a dystopian future where the music industry controlled us all. Just the opposite happened; once the industry shifted to digital, the anti-DRM pressure rose to the point where DRM could be done away with. It's already happening with ebooks; look at the torrent networks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> That "what about the kids" thing seems to be a popular theme... I wonder about it myself in my own thinking about the Kindle: <http://journal.dedasys.com/2010/11/26/kindle-thoughts>

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I ultimately decided that it's probably more our nostalgia and attachment or our own way of life than anything else; just like our grandparents probably lament the downfall of records in favor of digital music.

<comment><USER3> It's not just that. Going from records to tapes to CD's for instance was all pretty linear. Not being able to physically look through what you've got is a different matter altogether though, and part of what I feel dubious about. How are they supposed to just browse around, picking up things, having a look? Something like the Kindle is still a bit crude for that sort of thing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, I don't plan on having kids old enough to be browsing most of my books for at least another decade. Have to think the technology will have evolved quite a bit by then.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Synchronicity. In the last few weeks I've been thinking about getting rid of most of my books, for two reasons:

1\. They make moving much harder. I'm young and I would be interested in working in different places. Owning too much stuff can tie me down to one city.

2\. Before long it won't be possible to unload my second-hand books at the book exchange. Kindles are taken up mostly by hardcore readers and they will probably drive a lot of book exchanges out of businesses. I need to act now before other Kindle owners come to the same realisation and flood the market with their paperbacks.</comment>


#commswithoutcode - <AUTHOR> http://www.upwire.com/?hn-002 <comment><USER2> If it meets the guidelines and you're seeking feedback, this might make a good "Show HN".

Guidelines: [https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html)

Might do better with a more descriptive title, though. The current one seems to be relying a bit on "if you build it they will come".

Good luck.</comment>


Yellowstone has a 50sq mile "Zone of Death" where you can get away with murder - <AUTHOR> https://www.vox.com/2014/5/22/5738756/you-can-kill-someone-in-a-section-of-yellowstone-and-get-away-scot <comment><USER2> In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.</comment>


First Large-Scale Quantum Simulation of Topological State of Matter - <AUTHOR> https://www.dwavesys.com/press-releases/d-wave-breakthrough-demonstrates-first-large-scale-quantum-simulation-topological <comment><USER3> I'll try to give here a crash course on how simulating quantum systems on a quantum computer works - not for the actual computer type in the article (D-Wave's quantum annealer) but on a traditional gate-based quantum computer.

So, we have this thing called the Schrodinger equation. For our purposes, all you need to know is that it's an equation which can perfectly describe the behavior of a quantum system as it evolves in time. Examples of quantum systems include a single electron sitting in a magnetic field, photons going through closely-placed slits, or entire biomolecules doing biomolecule things.

Simulating things on computers is great because of how darn easy & cheap it is compared to running the same scenario in the real world. We want to simulate quantum systems on computers. We simulate quantum systems by trying to mimic the action of the Schrodinger equation on the quantum system. However, (as Feynman famously pointed out in _Simulating Physics with Computers_ [0]), classical computers are very bad at this. They take exponential resources to simulate a quantum system. Now, if you have a computer that obeys the same physical laws as the quantum system it's simulating - a quantum computer - <USER2> might be able to simulate the system with only linear resources.

Let's take a very simple quantum system. Consider a single electron, sitting in a magnetic field. Electrons have a property called _spin_ which is affected by magnetic fields. Electrons can have their spin be up, down, or some superposition thereof. We want to know how the spin of the electron changes over time as it sits inside the field.

There are three steps involved in simulating this quantum system:

1\. Encode the system's _start state_ in a form understood by a quantum computer - a qbit, which is a 2-vector [a, b] of complex numbers where |a|^2 + |b|^2 = 1. We'll say the qbit [1, 0] represents spin up, and [0, 1] represents spin down. Other states [a, b] where both a and b are nonzero mean the electron spin is in superposition of up & down. Here, let's say we start in spin up - so [1, 0].

2\. _Compile_ the Schrodinger equation into a series of quantum logic gates for execution on a quantum computer. This is the real meat of the problem, more on that later.

3\. Decode the _end state_ back into the physical world. After the start state has been put through all the logic gates, we want to decode the result to the same spin state we would've had if we'd set up a real electron in a real magnetic field and let it actually evolve over time (within some acceptable error).

Pretty simple so far, right? All the magic happens in step 2 - how do we compile the Schrodinger equation into logic gates? It revolves around something called the Hamiltonian. The Hamiltonian is a component of the Schrodinger equation, and is a matrix which represents the energy of the system. That brings up a lot of questions around how exactly a matrix corresponds to the energy of a system, but it's a (fascinating!) rabbit hole we'll sadly have to avoid. Let's just look at an example.

Consider again our plucky electron in a magnetic field. Suppose the magnetic field points upward along the Z axis. This means the Schrodinger equation for our system is e^(-i H t), where e is Euler's constant, i is the square root of -1, t is a scalar variable representing time, and H is the Hamiltonian matrix - here, the 2x2 Pauli-Z matrix in column form Z = [[1, 0],[0,-1]]. How can we compile this equation into a quantum logic gate?

Turns out you can do it through basic algebraic manipulation. There are some tricky intermediate steps involving expanding e^x into the Taylor series[1] and back into trig functions[2] but at the end of the day you have:

e^(-i Z t) = cos(t) 1 - i sin(t) Z

where 1 is the 2x2 identity matrix and Z is the 2x2 Pauli-Z matrix from above. This just so happens to be a common primitive gate on a quantum computer, called the Rz(t) operator[3] which performs a rotation of the quantum state vector about the Z axis (actually what we use is Rz(2t)). So, we can apply this single quantum gate to our encoded start state, end up with our end state, and decode it back to a real physical spin state!

Now, of course this is a very simple example with a single qbit, but you can build up from there. I'll be writing a much longer guide on this which I hope to release at the end of next week. If you're interested in quantum computation in general and not just quantum simulation, I have a 1.5 hour talk on the topic aimed at computer scientists here[4]!

[0] [https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~christos/classics/Feynman....](https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~christos/classics/Feynman.pdf)

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_series#Exponential_func...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_series#Exponential_function)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_series#Trigonometric_fu...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_series#Trigonometric_functions)

[3] [https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/qsharp/api/prelude/microsof...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/qsharp/api/prelude/microsoft.quantum.primitive.rz?view=qsharp-preview)

[4] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_Riqjdh2oM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_Riqjdh2oM)

</comment><comment><USER4> A preprint of the paper can be found on ArXiv here [https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.02047](https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.02047)</comment>


Nosaka Akiyuki and Legacies of Imperial Japan - <AUTHOR> https://www.eastasiaforall.com/home/2017/2/16/nosaka-akiyuki <comment><USER2> Is it me or is the episode called "Ep.2:Grave of the Fireflies and Nosaka Akiyuki"? Can't find anything else in PocketCasts at least...

</comment><comment><USER3> Congratulations, your page is completely blank.

<comment><USER4> No it isn't. I and most people can read it just fine. It's completely blank for _you._

Choosing to turn javascript off then complaining when javascript-enabled pages don't work is your problem, not the author's.

<comment><USER5> So, as the man said, the page is completely blank. This is indisputable.

A bit further down the road, some script may populate it with content, but the page itself is blank. Shoddy craftmanship.

Edit: The page is blank _even_ with scripts allowed. All content is provided by _third party_ scripting.

<comment><USER6> I wrote a web browser that ignores all text in <p> tags. Every page I look at is blank! Shoddy craftsmanship!

<comment><USER5> Ignoring text in <p> tags goes against any version of html-spec. Ignoring scripts does not. Ignoring external scripts most emphatically does not.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


5G Technology and induction of Coronavirus in skin cells - <AUTHOR> https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32668870/ <comment><USER2> Wow.

This is absolutely batshit crazy article. I picked first author in the article and it contains more and more crazy. [https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=Fioranelli+M&cauthor_i...](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=Fioranelli+M&cauthor_id=32668870)

For example: "Formation of Neural Circuits in an Expanded Version of Darwin's Theory: Effects of DNAs in Extra Dimensions and within the Earth's Core on Neural Networks"

Are these GPT-3 generated science articles or what?

<comment><USER3> Quite. Guess they had a spare Sunday....</comment></comment>


GitHub's Engineering Blog - <AUTHOR> http://githubengineering.com/ <comment><USER2> And Esty: [https://codeascraft.com/](https://codeascraft.com/)

Netflix: [http://techblog.netflix.com/](http://techblog.netflix.com/)

Facebook: [https://code.facebook.com/posts/](https://code.facebook.com/posts/)

Instagram: [https://instagram-engineering.tumblr.com/](https://instagram- engineering.tumblr.com/)

Pinterest: [http://engineering.pinterest.com/](http://engineering.pinterest.com/)

These are all excellent blogs to keep up on in your free time.

<comment><USER3> Oddly enough, Tumblr doesn't seem to support HTTPS for subdomains, so Instagram's is just [http://instagram- engineering.tumblr.com/](http://instagram-engineering.tumblr.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> That is one of the fastest loading and most lightweight blogs I've seen. Total load time was 341ms for me. Anyone know what's running it?

<comment><USER5> [https://github.com/poole/poole](https://github.com/poole/poole)

[http://jekyllrb.com/](http://jekyllrb.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Another engineering blog that people might not know about:

[https://engineering.linkedin.com/](https://engineering.linkedin.com/)

</comment><comment><USER7> The real shame here is that `samlambert`'s user name isn't `SLAMbert`.

<comment><USER8> haha, people do call me Slambert.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> These are some of the top sites' engineering blogs which I collected over a period of time - I removed those which have already been posted:

Google: [http://googledevelopers.blogspot.com/](http://googledevelopers.blogspot.com/) [http://google-engtools.blogspot.com/](http://google-engtools.blogspot.com/) [http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/](http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/)

YouTube: [http://youtube-eng.blogspot.com/](http://youtube-eng.blogspot.com/)

Baidu: [http://usa.baidu.com/category/baidutechblog/](http://usa.baidu.com/category/baidutechblog/)

Yahoo: [http://yahooeng.tumblr.com/](http://yahooeng.tumblr.com/) [http://yahoodevelopers.tumblr.com/](http://yahoodevelopers.tumblr.com/)

Wikipedia (closest I could find): [https://blog.wikimedia.org/c/technology/](https://blog.wikimedia.org/c/technology/)

Amazon: [https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/)

Twitter: [https://engineering.twitter.com/](https://engineering.twitter.com/)

eBay: [http://www.ebaytechblog.com/](http://www.ebaytechblog.com/)

Microsoft: [http://microsoftengineering.com](http://microsoftengineering.com)

FourSquare: [http://engineering.foursquare.com/](http://engineering.foursquare.com/)

Apple (closest): [https://developer.apple.com/](https://developer.apple.com/)

Paypal: [https://www.paypal-engineering.com/](https://www.paypal- engineering.com/) [https://devblog.paypal.com/](https://devblog.paypal.com/)

Dropbox: [https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/](https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/)

Edit: More (collected from this link: [http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-top- startup-engineering-bl...](http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-top-startup- engineering-blogs)):

Yelp: [http://engineeringblog.yelp.com/](http://engineeringblog.yelp.com/)

Quora: [http://engineering.quora.com/](http://engineering.quora.com/)

Yammer: [http://eng.yammer.com/blog/](http://eng.yammer.com/blog/)

AirBnB: [http://nerds.airbnb.com/](http://nerds.airbnb.com/)

Square: [https://corner.squareup.com/](https://corner.squareup.com/)

Flickr: [http://code.flickr.net/](http://code.flickr.net/)

Soundcloud: [https://developers.soundcloud.com/blog/](https://developers.soundcloud.com/blog/)

Cloudera: [http://blog.cloudera.com/blog/](http://blog.cloudera.com/blog/)

Slideshare: [http://engineering.slideshare.net/](http://engineering.slideshare.net/)

Heroku: [http://engineering.heroku.com/](http://engineering.heroku.com/)

Pinterest: [http://engineering.pinterest.com/](http://engineering.pinterest.com/)

<comment><USER10> And Trello is the only one to take advantage of the .engineering TLD! :)

[https://trello.engineering/](https://trello.engineering/)

<comment><USER9> Great use of that TLD! :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Seatgeek is pretty good too: [http://chairnerd.seatgeek.com](http://chairnerd.seatgeek.com)</comment>


You are the nth person alive on earth - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-15391515

<comment><USER2> The world population has DOUBLED in my lifetime. That is a fact that I hadn't realised nor ever wanted to realise.

<comment><USER3> It's only alarming if you believe that the human population is close to the carrying capacity of the Earth. Given that the densest population centers are also the richest, this seems unlikely. Environmental and associated problems are not the result of brute numbers.

All of these population graphs play the same trick on your eye by using a vertical scale set by the current population. This is an understandable choice, but as a side-effect it makes the current growth look "vertical", when in fact for an exponential the location of the "knee" in the curve is purely an artifact of the vertical scale. If you graph the world population in millions, the current situation looks terrifying; if you graph it in billions, it looks alarming; if you graph it in trillions, it looks like we've got nothing to worry about.

<comment><USER4> Not to mention that the richest places are actually having less than two children per woman.

<comment><USER3> Indeed. Due in part to lower birthrates in rich countries and increasing wealth across the board, demographers predict that the current population growth will flatten out around 2050, at an estimated 8-10 billion people. Humanity faces many problems, but "overpopulation" isn't one of them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If your birthdate is 11/11/1967, then half the world is older than you and half the world is younger.

<comment><USER6> Not exactly. There were 3.500m people alive then, and about 7.000m now, but because many of the 3.500m died and were replaced over those 44 years, you would actually be older than more than half of the world with high probability.

According to the figures provided, 77.500m humans total in 1967, 83.200m total now, so 5.700m had been born since then, but the population only increased by 3.500m, meaning 2.200m people had died since 1967. Without stronger data, it's impossible to say whether the people dying tended to be older or younger than a certain age, so it's not possible to say with any reasonable certainty what the actual fixed point is, or even the ratio of people younger or older than you.

Though, Wolfram Alpha reports the median age of the Earth to be about 27,6.

<http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=world+%7C+median+age>

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> India here [1]. A couple of interesting things:

1\. That's a lot of births, and a lot of deaths :-O

2\. 68 people leave the country every hour?! Woah, that's some serious brain drain going on there. (assuming a net outflow against 'immigrants' would primarily be natives of the country)

[1] <http://i.imgur.com/Mv3zl.png>

<comment><USER8> Probably not the best place to mention this, but I am in a way offended that BBC doesn't consider PoK or Jammu&Kashmir to be a part of India!

<comment><USER7> Noticed that as well - most international maps leave out PoK when showing India, but taking away J&K in its entirety _was_ a bit much!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wish it had links to the GapMinder graphs for your country tagged with your years. [http://www.gapminder.org/videos/what-stops-population- growth...](http://www.gapminder.org/videos/what-stops-population-growth/)

<comment><USER10> This is great, everyone should watch this.

Also the guy does fantastic chart presentations :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Once I have the time I should calculate the number of people who grew up to be older than 15 during the history times -- most of the births must have been of those who didn't grew up.

</comment><comment><USER12> What an amazingly effective demographic gathering tool the BBC has created :)

<comment><USER13> To those concerned, a request with your provided info appears to only be sent to their servers once you arrive at the Results step (which itself is mostly just a recap of the previous step).

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I was very impressed with this until I realised that everyone with my birthday will get the same result as me so the count is not accurate with out a specific time of birth. Just saying.Great idea all the same.

<comment><USER15> That probably wouldn't help a whole lot either since it's unlikely that this is based on a huge central repository of world births and their associated times. Does most of the world even track those?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Nothing but a clever way to collect some aggregate data on their readers. :)</tinfoilhat>

<comment><USER17> You are clearly mistaking the BBC for some grubby commercial organisation.

Ta, Person 4,282,072,850.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Ok, so I'm Bulgarian, male. Life expectancy 69 years - 10+ years less than the average for the western world. Poor me...

<comment><USER19> In my city (Hamilton, Ontario, Canada), there is a 20+ difference in life expectancy between the most affluent and most impoverished neighbourhoods. Even within countries, averages mask deep inequalities.

<comment><USER20> My city Vancouver, has the average life expectancy in Canada - but this is due to the population mix (lots of Japanese centenarians) not due to the medical benefits of rain.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I spotted this earlier today. Interestingly it get's my age wrong at the end despite putting in my full date of birth in the beginning. The output is one year above my actual age. I have a December birthday and I can only assume it simply counts the years and assumes you had your birthday before October.

<comment><USER22> Are you sure you used European style dd/mm/yyyy? I made that mistake the first time.

<comment><USER21> Indeed I did. Tried it again this morning with the same result.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This whole concept is really fuzzy for two reasons.

first, there's no dividing line between us and our human-like ancestors.

second, this depends on the precise moment life begins. Quite a few people claim to believe that human life begins at conception - if that's the case, in order to be consistent, they should count life starting from conception, which would at least double the total historical human population (due to natural miscarriages, not just abortions).

</comment><comment><USER24> If you're more than 101 years old it won't let you play

<comment><USER25> If you look at the the chart there is a large jump in the data. "Notes on the data: Only birth dates after 1910 can be accommodated and only countries with populations of more than 100,000 people are included. Where available, the UN's medium variant and average figures from 2005-2010 have been used. World and country population clocks are estimates based on the latest UN figures and growth rates. They may not tally precisely with other clocks because of the way this application is configured."

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Hmm, says I'm the 77 billionth (and change) human who ever lived. More than I would have guessed.

</comment><comment><USER27> Most of the developed world has now got a lower than replacement birth rate (except, typically, the US):

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub-replacement_fertility>

Can't we extrapolate and say that in a few decades that's going to happen to the developing world too?

In other words, that graph is nonsense?

<comment><USER28> I don't think it's set in stone. Some countries which previously had very low fertility rates have seen a recent upswing, notably France and a few Scandinavian countries.

<comment><USER29> Is this accounting for immigration? The US has the same issue: the white population reproduces at barely above or barely below replacement (it varies), but immigrants have much higher fertility. And, weirdly enough, comparable infant mortality.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I can't get the "Go" button to do anything in Chrome :(

<comment><USER31> I had this problem originally. It's not Chrome. :-)

I originally entered in my birthdate as 06/30/1980, but they are using European date style. As such, it would have to be entered as 30/06/1980 to make sense.

<comment><USER30> Ah, right you are. I feel dumb for blaming Chrome.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> DanI-S Can you imagine Fox News building something like this? I'll always be proud of the BBC.

</comment><comment><USER32> 03/10/1959

</comment><comment><USER33> dont forget to count the fallen..

<comment><USER34> The 76 billons ones.</comment></comment>


Housing Market Is Raising Serious Red Flags - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-10-15/housing-prices-may-have-entered-a-cyclical-downturn <comment><USER2> Interesting take, I have to say it feels on target to me. It's hard to imagine how housing prices can go much higher since you need willing buyers for that, and basically everyone I know now, most of whom have good jobs but aren't homeowners, feel that they either can't afford housing or wouldn't want to risk it in what feels like the peak of a bubble to them. That kind of broad sentiment shift is part of what pops bubbles, so to me the question is just how widespread that sentiment is.</comment>