This Is Your Life in the Midwest - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@ehnertm/this-is-your-life-in-the-midwest-935b97b6c50#.hj8h57jze <comment><USER2> > ...you dream about what your life would have been like if you left the > Midwest after college and moved to Silicon Valley or Seattle. You think > about how much money they make out there. Then you remember that money > doesn't buy happiness and you're content with settling down and having a > family...

You try out cost of living calculations and they say you'd need to make 250% your current salary on the west coast. Annoyed at the seemingly impossible move, you tell yourself they'll be rioting over water shortages soon anyways. After all, do you even want to be near the coast when the oceans rise?

<comment><USER3> Having read the inspiration article, I chuckled at the seemingly satiristic tone.

Then I read this one and cried. There's a lot of truth here (I live in WI).

>You try out cost of living calculations and they say you'd need to make 250% your current salary on the west coast. Annoyed at the seemingly impossible move, you tell yourself they'll be rioting over water shortages soon anyways. After all, do you even want to be near the coast when the oceans rise?

And this. This is so true.

<comment><USER2> I didn't feel that the author was really from the Midwest. The inspiration article felt like a self-mockery which is what made it special... but the Burger King stuff was where this really started to sound like the outside looking in. I felt the need to apply some actual midwestern(Detroit, MI) thoughts/barbs. =)

<comment><AUTHOR> Author here. I'm actually from Milwaukee WI and currently living in KC.

This was taking parts of people's lives I know and have met and throwing on a huge pile of satire.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Wow! My life in the Minneapolis strongly resembles my former life in Seattle. I have walkable/bikeable neighborhods, good local restaraunts and food coops/farmers markets, etc etc

The problem isn't the Midwest, it is suburbia. I've know contractrs at MS like in the article. Plenty of folks in Boston or Northern Virginia or RTP are living in the far suburbs and working in unsatisfying jobs they aren't good at... nothing to do with the Midwest.

<comment><USER5> To take this a step further, you don't even have to be in a substantial city to get the walkable atmosphere. Granted you'll suffer a smaller variety of restaurants, but there are towns of just 10k or 20k that manage to get things right, and some of them are really cool places.

It's really all about suburbia. It's isolating, expensive, and unproductive. The places that come to grips with this fact soon (or already) will face a much less painful contraction in the future. And they won't find themselves with a bunch of impoverished people stuck out in suburbs that no one else will live in.

<comment><USER6> Suburbia is all about cost per square foot. It's not going anywhere. It'll just be apartments rather than single family detatched.

At least in the US, we're not exactly constrained by land availability. And as you may notice, the sustainability of NYC and SF style property prices isn't guaranteed.

<comment><USER5> The constraint isn't the amount of raw land, but rather the necessity of productive density if we are to afford the level of public services that most of us are accustomed to.

I have nothing against people living in sparsely populated areas, but the people living there now are mostly not seeing true costs of their lifestyles. If they weren't so heavily subsidized, they would probably have a lot more wells, septic tanks, and gravel roads; the school buses would not run to their houses; and they would have slower emergency response times and less police presence.

Faced with those painful realities, I expect more people would choose dense living. That's not to say they'd have to. Me personally, I just hate driving and love eating, in both cases too much to commute by car.

<comment><USER6> So eat while you drive, man :) ( I too hate driving, but live suburban and have been extremely lucky in being able to keep commute times to a minimum - like on the order of five minutes ).

Productive density is constrained by things like how accounting works, how we can't get out of our own way, by other things that are like public choice economics. At each job I've had, I've seen people walk away from millions of dollars, either in increased sales or reduced cost because somebody just didn't understand it ( or rather, did understand it all too well ).

I couldn't agree more - people who live farther out should expect less services unless they're prepared to pay what they actually cost. In cases like California, the Pubic Choice Theory stories about water are ... interesting enough that it's a central plot element from a movie from the 1970s - "Chinatown".

I've lived on well water and septic.

This being said, I don't think real estate development public debt is even on the radar as a threat to anything. They can always raise rates...

<comment><USER5> Lol, I meant that I need the energy consumption of walking to support my carb- eating habit. I can handle the time commitment of eating mostly.

As to the policy questions, I admit that I don't know how to solve that one. I know a start would be to clean up the mess made by FHA standards. And I think a lot of places have moved, or are starting to move, away from Euclidean zoning, which is a step in the right direction, if not a very large one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> So get rid of the camper and ATVs, take 1500 sq feet off the house, _REALLY_ evaluate if your wife's job covers the costs of it, drive an old car, at least buy frozen food at Sam's/Costco rather than Burger King and it's quite different, isn't it?

Kids' college? They'll have to do it themselves. Hopefully, there's one near enough to work out, or they can qualify for scholarships.

But, of course, drinking beer at work outweighs all that...

</comment><comment><USER7> Having felt the way the author expresses in this article, I can honestly say the sentiment expressed here has nothing to do with the suburbs, the Midwest, or having a corporate job. It has everything to do with settling and accepting the status quo. I could list a number of things the person here could do, but seriously, this reads like someone who is not happy with his current situation but does not want to put the effort into changing it.

<comment><USER6> It's easy to get in a rut. It's especially easy when you have a lot of distractions.

Kids are a big distraction. One of the magical things about my wife is that she handles a lot of distractions for me. Most women just won't. It's slightly unfair to her, but she's a Professional Mom and extremely good at it. As has been noted in literature, it's all but impossible to price this.

The downside is - one stream of income. And it's been pretty scary when I've gotten laid off.

<comment><USER7> > Kids are a big distraction.

I understand the sentiment, but this lines has always bothered me. I try to find ways to incorporate my children into the things I enjoy and want to do...

<comment><USER8> There's only so much you can do with this. When children are really young, you just can't bring them a lot of places, such as nice restaurants, because they're too disruptive, so that means that for the first 5-7 years, you have to hire a babysitter if you want to do anything "adult".

I like to go hiking and road biking on weekends. You can't do this with kids; they just can't keep up. A 6-year-old isn't going to be able to do a 10-mile hike or a rock scramble with you, nor will she be able to ride 40 miles. You can do really easy hikes or bike rides, but those are pretty boring and do little for physical fitness (which is the other reason I do them, so I don't have to spend hours a week at the gym to avoid health problems). When the kids get to be teenagers they can probably handle that stuff, but that means there's 12+ years where you either don't do that stuff at all and get fat, or you hire a babysitter.

If you have other interests like listening to classical music concerts, or rock concerts, you can't bring kids to that stuff either; at one they'll be a disruption and at the other they'll be miserable. Again, when they become teenagers, they _may_ be interested in those things ( _maybe_ , doubtful though because you're interested in them), but again that's a long time to wait, and now they're almost in college!

Honestly, having kids would be fun if it weren't _such_ a huge time-sink, and you actually had help doing it instead of having to do it all by yourself (as with most parents I see these days), or if you're really lucky, with one partner who's also really busy with work.

It's no wonder the birthrate is so low these days in developed nations. I really think society needs to rethink its social norms and customs if it wants to reverse this, unless they can figure out how to greatly increase lifespans so it becomes normal and feasible to have kids at ~50-75 years old after you've established yourself financially and can afford to take off 5 years or more and only work part-time or not at all without ruining your future career. Also, polyamory would be a lot more sensible for raising kids; having adult time is easier when there's, say, 4 adult people in a household so one of them could volunteer to be babysitter for the group's kids, and there's more hands to share chores, and more incomes to share among the family.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm confused because the article is written by Max Ehnert who from looking at his linkedin has only been working as a software dev for roughly two years. He's painting the picture of a life he hasnt lived?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a satire article not completely reflective of my own life but more of a mix of people I know. (I'm the author)

<comment><USER9> Ah. Thanks for clarification. Sorry I was just confused. I assumed that but it seemed many took it as your story.

<comment><AUTHOR> No problem. I added a footer in the article stating it's satire.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I was in Kansas City the other day. Seems like a place where a software developer could actually afford to live in a hip urban neighborhood a short Uber ride away from work, even with a family. Good luck doing that in San Francisco.

(Also, having kids doesn't mean you can't be hip and urban. Urban centers are full of kids! We went trick-or-treating in Capitol Hill last year, and it was hard to fit in the sidewalk with all the parents and kids.)

</comment><comment><USER11> Damn, this is even more depressing than the other one.

Apparently the secret to happiness is not having kids. And not spending more than you make. Actually that last one is true.

<comment><USER8> Both are true. Having kids basically dooms you for 20 years; raising kids as a single parent is a miserable task. And before you say anything about married couples raising kids, remember that 50% of first marriages end in divorce, so the odds are not good. And that number doesn't include people who just stick together in unhappy marriages. If you can find someone really great for you and you can find a situation where you can have kids without it ruining your life, then you're really lucky. Most parents I've seen have a miserable time of it.

Not spending more than you make is a big, big factor too, that many Americans seem to have a big problem with. From what I can tell, they simply do not understand the concept, at all. They basically seem to think they "deserve" a certain lifestyle and level of spending, and just do that, regardless of how much actual money is coming in, and simply refuse to look at ways to economize or maximize the value they get for their spending (such as by not eating out all the time because they're too lazy to cook).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think I must miss the point of articles like this. Is this author trying to warn us of downward spirals he's seen? Impart his priorities upon us?

There are a lot of articles here that try to isolate and analyze pivotal traits or habits. This is the opposite, throwing everything you can imagine into one big, confused soup of "what caused what?".

It could also be that this is a common mindset, but I just haven't met these people.

I just wish the suburban experiment would die already: it's quite a hellish existence to have to endure, just because you didn't take the time to learn about all the odd artificial incentives that push people toward that unproductive and isolating pattern of life.

<comment><USER6> I really read the article like a "Trouble Brewing" "Far Side" cartoon. Guy thinks "going into management" will mean the skies will open up; guy is overleveraged and one layoff away from bankruptcy, maybe divorce, who knows? Guy is clearly not "management material" in the eyes of his employer, which is a dwindling enterprise with probably an end date.

The main thing he: he depends on credit vendors for establishing limits on spending.

I've lived in 'burbs all my life, and most people are pretty happy with it. I mean it's _nice_ to have a forced exercise program with "walkability" but it's hardly critical and hard to substitute for.

<comment><USER8> >I've lived in 'burbs all my life, and most people are pretty happy with it. I mean it's nice to have a forced exercise program with "walkability" but it's hardly critical

Given the obesity epidemic in America this days, I think you're wrong here about the criticality of walkability. Go to Manhattan sometime and see if you can find any fat people. Now go to suburban Atlanta and see how many people are so fat they need motorized carts just to shop at Walmart.

<comment><USER6> Bluntly, I don't think we understand the obesity problem.

<comment><USER8> I think a lot of it is fairly obvious: diet and exercise. My evidence is pretty simple: look at cultures (including local cultures) where everyone drives everywhere, versus cultures where everyone walks everywhere. You just don't see morbidly obese people in cultures where they're forced to walk a lot; it's mainly an American and Western phenomenon (it's worst in America and Mexico). Diet is probably another big factor: in obese cultures, calories are cheap, but the food quality is generally very poor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> People are taking these articles too seriously. Obviously, this is very tongue in cheek.

</comment><comment><USER13> What a horribly cynical article. I would hate to be a member of this person's family and read it. Perhaps I'm missing the irony of him being bound to his position in life by the choices he made, but I don't really feel bad for him.</comment>


Small World 2019 Photomicrography Competition - <AUTHOR> https://www.nikonsmallworld.com/galleries/2019-photomicrography-competition <comment><AUTHOR> More like #97 here - [http://www.justinzoll.com/microscopiclandscapes](http://www.justinzoll.com/microscopiclandscapes)

I set Sulfamic Acid 3 as wallpaper.</comment>


Conservancy Joins in Cisco V. Arista Amicus Brief - <AUTHOR> https://sfconservancy.org/news/2018/jan/03/cisco-v-arista/ <comment><USER2> The accompanying blog post [https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2018/jan/03/cisco- v-arista-am...](https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2018/jan/03/cisco-v-arista- amicus-brief/) is much more interesting.

</comment><comment><USER3> Linux would not have existed if copyright had been asserted in a similar manner in the 90s</comment>


Evolution 'favours bigger sea creatures' - <AUTHOR> http://m.bbc.com/news/science-environment-31533744 <comment><USER2> Reading down through the article kindly submitted here after first reading the previous comments, I see, "Certain key events, also highlighted by the study's authors, deliver an extra boost. Most obviously, at the stages when land animals like reptiles and, later, mammals returned to the water, the size graph lurched upward.

"It was the return of mammals, after all, that eventually produced the modern giants of the sea: whales.

"'You can see in the data, there is this trend to increasing size - but a real kick comes when you have these air-breathers re-entering the water,' Dr Berenbrink told the BBC.

"'Then you have a sort of a step change in size.'

"Breathing air delivers extra oxygen to an animal's tissues, he explained, allowing them to sustain bigger bodies beneath the waves."

Oxygen-delivery systems indeed have to be crucial for animal life on land or in the sea. Fish and their gills simply can't bring in as much oxygen for an energetic large-mass lifestyle as whales and their lungs can. It would be interesting to find out how much whale blood deoxygenates as it flows through the tissues of the largest whales. The duration of movement on one breath for whales is already quite impressive compared to what most land mammals can achieve, so whales probably have some good adaptations for efficient use of oxygen from each breath.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have a dream, that someday a science editor will read an article in which the word "average" appears and then suggest that the word "median" should also appear.

TFA: " _Today 's tiniest sea critter is less than 10 times smaller than its Cambrian counterpart, measured in terms of volume; both are minuscule crustaceans._"

Presumably we're talking about _Stygotantulus stocki_ , which is 94 µm long. That's already smaller than a lot of bacteria, so I'm not sure how much more it could possibly shrink? There is an effective lower bound here.

TFA: " _But at the other end of the scale, the mighty blue whale is more than 100,000 times the size of the largest animal the Cambrian could offer: another crustacean with a clam-like, hinged shell._ "

Leaving aside the apples-to-rutabagas comparison of clams and mammals, is there any physical reason why whales are the largest animal we could imagine? They're big, but so is the ocean. There is no effective upper bound in sight.

Average is not a meaningful statistic in this case.

<comment><USER4> Also, does "less than 10 times smaller" mean e.g. 9 times smaller, or e.g. 11 times smaller? From context I'd guess that TFA intended the latter, but it's horrible writing.

<comment><USER5> I think it means 9 times...I think. Sometimes reading statistical comparisons in the news is just insufferable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Reminds me about this Memory Palace (a short podcast) about lobsters: [http://thememorypalace.us/2010/08/episode-33-lost- lobsters/](http://thememorypalace.us/2010/08/episode-33-lost-lobsters/) – not very long ago they used to be gigantic compared to now. Evolution of the moment often favors animals that aren't as easy prey for humans.

Somewhere else I read, I think a comment in AskScience about how insects used to be gigantic, an evolutionary biologist noted that over time species evolve to become larger. I would infer that given a set of ecological constraints, bigger is usually better for intraspecies competition (having already settled upon a successful niche for the species in general). But then things change, the species itself must compete anew as the ecology changes, and there can be resets, reverting back to smaller more efficient forms.

Another thing alluded to in the article is that there's some complexity to simply maintaining larger forms. E.g., breathing air is more efficient if you have to bring in large amounts of oxygen. The crustacean line simply hasn't explored these areas. So even if there were always advantages to larger forms, not everything can just get bigger. But it always leaves the question, what about dinosaurs? So odd that the only true remnant seems to be birds that went down such a different path.

</comment><comment><USER7> I like the insight that air breathing animals have stronger energy input systems than those with gills. Respiration in mammals is an energy system evolved for land, where the constraints involve 5 degrees of freedom and normal g. The ocean has 6 degrees of freedom and reduced g. So in the case that an organism's niche can be improved by evolving to be larger and they have an energy system which can support more flesh, doing so is easier in the ocean than on land. It's true for all ocean animals but it's especially true for mammals.

</comment><comment><USER8> "larger species likely took advantage of being able to move faster, burrow better in sediment, or eat larger prey" \-- larger species burrow?

<comment><USER9> The study was not just about whales. It also covered lots of kinds of invertebrates.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm suspicious - maybe larger animals didn't fare so well as fossils? Or maybe atmospheric oxygen has increased or something, that directly drove evoloution. The claim that larger is better is groundless without some engine to drive that claim.

<comment><USER11> More likely you need more complex structures overall to support a larger size which take time to evolve. Consider air breathing whales are significantly larger than any fish in part because they can use Air for oxygen, but also because their bones are stronger. But, also such animals have more body mass and take longer to grow so they need significantly better defenses vs cancer.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Beating spam - <AUTHOR>

The startup I'm working on requires a support ticket system thats currently receiving vast amounts of spam.
Anyone have any suggestions / know of any systems for getting rid of spam that do not lose legitimate emails?
I've been considering grey-listing, but delaying some support requests would just make our support seem worse than it is (generally we get < 10 minute responses). I've filtered through GMail before, but occasionally their filter chokes and starts marking lots of legitimate emails as spam.
I'm considering writing my own system combining other ones I find (automatically white listing known clients). Does anyone have any experience with sending human verification messages? I know occasionally I'll be sending them to email addressed faked by spammers, but I'll check SPF records before sending (and if people get annoyed it should really be their/their isp's responsibility to get the records up?) <comment><USER2> For an off-the-shelf system, I find SpamAssassin pretty good. Unless you crank up the threshhold really aggressively, I haven't found it to give false positives, though it does sometimes give false negatives.

</comment><comment><USER3> Can you use Postini? That's been our favorite.</comment>


Show HN: The Flux Challenge in 139 Lines of JS - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/kennytilton/flux-challenge/blob/master/submissions/kennytilton/README.md <comment><USER2> I was previous linked to your Cells library because I'm trying to do something very similar [1]. Matrix seem to be in a similar vein (at least from the sample usage here).

Could you tell me if any of your libraries allow live editing of formulas? (Adding new ones, editing existing ones and deleting some.) If yes, do the new input (cI) need to be declare manually?

I've also seen these slides [2] in your repo. Can you say a bit about the solution to "The Glitch"? As you've noted there, topological sort isn't enough if there are conditionals.

I also couldn't tell what "Glitches and RoboCup Sim" was about from just the PDF.

Finally, when using a cells-like library, do you get "discontinuous jumps" when cells are no longer suitable (or the network becomes too complicated) and fallback to imperative callbacks? Or do you manage to used cells for everything?

[1] [https://github.com/asrp/persistent_doc](https://github.com/asrp/persistent_doc) [https://github.com/asrp/guitktk](https://github.com/asrp/guitktk)

[2] [https://github.com/kennytilton/cells/blob/master/Lisp- NYC-20...](https://github.com/kennytilton/cells/blob/master/Lisp- NYC-2018-02v1.pdf)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The Flux Challenge is "tailored to touch Flux's weakest spots", especially "coordinating multiple async data sources", so Flux solutions are sought, but other approaches to state management are welcome.

The Challenge author used his own reactive framework and RxJS: [https://cycle.js.org/](https://cycle.js.org/) [https://github.com/Reactive- Extensions/RxJS](https://github.com/Reactive-Extensions/RxJS)

My solution leverages my Matrix data flow library (versions in Common Lisp, CLJ/S, and JS). Matrix is much like the JS MobX, if you know that.

[https://github.com/kennytilton/matrix](https://github.com/kennytilton/matrix) [https://mobx.js.org/index.html](https://mobx.js.org/index.html)

Moral: The data flow paradigm is well-suited to smoothly absorbing external input, so the async feeds of the Flux Challenge are right in the data flow wheelhouse.</comment>


Ask HN: Should we take our dev's advice? - <AUTHOR>

I am not a coder, and I would like to get HN's advice.
Our website is a marketplace for digital downloads. The entire system is built on Laravel, and we're currently looking into options for adding in a blog and tutorial section that will require a CMS.
That said, our dev is recommending that we use Craft (https://buildwithcraft.com/) as the CMS for the blog, tutorials, and for the rest of the site. We'll then move the Laravel system that handles our user system and products into a subdomain. It would look something like  browse.oururl.com instead of oururl.com/browse.
He said the only other option is to hack something together using Laravel Bootstrap, (https://github.com/davzie/laravel-bootstrap) or something similar, for handling the blog and tutorials. The drawback is that it wouldn't be as robust.
Should we be concerned about using a subdomain for this purpose? Will there be any performance issues? SEO issues? Low T issues?
Maybe we're making a mountain out of an ant nipple, but it's hard not being a coder and not knowing any better. I though I'd ask HN's advice before giving the go ahead.
Thank you in advance for your advice.
-T <comment><USER2> Moving content from one URL to another is going to create SEO issues. The issues aren't permanent, but if you rely on search traffic for cashflow, you just can't do it.

It's possible (but not necessarily as performant) to have your Craft code running at oururl.com/blog and oururl.com/tutorial, but your Laravel code running at your other URLs. It really just depends on how your server is configured (and which server you're using).

Generally speaking, I think there are reasons to use subdomains (addressing different regions perhaps, definitely when running a different SaaS codebase).

For your purposes, I don't see a good reason to use a subdomain, and it does add a little complexity related to configuration, cookies, SSL certs, and user perception.

<comment><AUTHOR> He told us that it wouldn't be possible to have Craft running as you mentioned though, and that we'd need to set up subdomains and have two instances of Craft running. One for blog.oururl.com and one for tutorials.oururl.com

<comment><USER2> Your dev doesn't know what he's talking about. Get rid of him. You obviously don't trust him enough to be working with him in the first place, if you're coming here for a second opinion.

Craft has the concepts of "singles" (pages) and "channels"[1]. You only need one copy of Craft running.

I can't recommend a file structure without knowing how your current URLs are constructed, but there definitely is a solution that doesn't involve subdomains.

Just as an example, let's say you install Craft to /craft and your existing Laravel code is in /laravel.

You'd configure your server such that "/tutorials/[whatever]" is always directed to /craft/public_html/index.php, and "/products/[whatever]" (assuming /products is your current URL prefix) is always redirected to /laravel/public/index.php.

All that said, Craft may not be the right solution for you. WordPress isn't particularly well-engineered, but it's totally free, there are millions of themes and plugins for it, and the considerations involved in deploying/managing it are discussed to death online. In short: it has a massive community, and that's important when it comes to saving time/money.

1\. [http://buildwithcraft.com/docs/sections-and- entries](http://buildwithcraft.com/docs/sections-and-entries)

<comment><AUTHOR> He's now decided that the subdomain idea is a bad one, and that we'll run the site on Craft, stick the Laravel portion in a folder "browse" and use the .htaccess file to manipulate the urls so that nothing changes.

Does that make sense?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> You should be able to run both pieces in different environments and set up a reverse proxy to offer them at different paths under the same domain.</comment>


MLMs like Avon and LuLaRoe send people into debt and crisis - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/1039331/mlms-like-avon-and-lularoe-are-sending-people-into-debt-and-psychological-crisis/ <comment><USER2> I took 'force people' out of the title since that's bound to provoke the boring sort of title-protest. But I'm not sure what a better title for this piece would be.

On HN a good title is accurate, neutral, and uses representative language from the article. If anyone can suggest one, we can change it again.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think the word placement is important in this instance because it's factual, not just for descriptive purposes - the story outlines how the business model and the legal structure (contract agreements, etc) and the management actively collude to force the sellers into debt (from mandatory purchases by any means) and psychological crisis (from internal worry and external harassment).

An alternative to "force" could be "pushes" or "coerce".

<comment><USER2> Ok, I've restored the title you submitted it with (which is more or less the article URL) except I took out 'psychological', because that's guaranteed to be baity.

Sorry for the trouble!</comment></comment></comment>


Use a Wii Balance Board with Linux - <AUTHOR> http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/linux-wii-balanceboard/ <comment><USER2> This would be a neat way to input a password</comment>


The end of open: BBC blocks its podcasts on Google [UPDATED] - <AUTHOR> https://podnews.net/article/bbc-blocks-google <comment><USER2> It's almost like people (ie, the BBC) don't understand that in an OPEN ecosystem you don't always get exactly what you want. And they fail to recognize the inherent virtue of being open for its own sake.

It seems that some people want to _claim_ to be part of the Open Web ecosystem and claim to promote open standards, open culture, etc. but without the actual, ya know, "open" part.</comment>


OsmocomBB – Open-Source GSM Baseband - vezzy-fnord http://bb.osmocom.org/trac/

<comment><AUTHOR> This would allow a truly OSS phone, with no backdoors. Neat! Where do I buy one?

<comment><USER2> Alternatively you can go the Neo900 route, where the baseband processor is in fact a separate USB module which can be separately turned off - just placed on the same PCB.

[http://neo900.org/](http://neo900.org/)

More about feasibility of a "OSS phone with no backdoors" \- [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahPFCFooBv0&list=PL-s0IumBit...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahPFCFooBv0&list=PL-s0IumBit8Mofxj0Fn2kH6RB9VtnKS4K)

<comment><USER3> Why do people talk about the Neo900 as though it's a real product that exists or can be bought? Has anyone seen any evidence it's anything but vaporware?

<comment><USER2> Well, I see the work being made on it by myself and already watched similar project (GTA04) reaching its goals. Plus that's me who you can blame personally for any delay with the Neo900 website content or newsletters... ;P (and if you find linked talk hard to listen, you can blame me for that as well ;])

<comment><USER3> it's been well over a year since the neo900 project was announced, and I've never seen _any_ goldelico project actually ship more than a handful of prototypes.

I really hope the neo900 succeeds, but sending money to goldelico is generally a bad bet.

<comment><USER2> Neo900 has been announced at the moment when all interested parties agreed on "it seems feasible, let's do it". There was no prior investment, the development could start only _after_ raising funds. It simply takes time - especially when organizational burden turned out to be a bit more challenging than initially assumed.

All of Goldelico customers who paid for GTA04 already received one long time ago. I don't count latest fundraiser for its new revision[1], since it will be fully refunded if not enough people will preorder to actually produce a new batch.

Also, Goldelico is "just" a contractor doing work for Neo900 UG, which is the actual entity running the Neo900 project.

But I think we're getting a bit off-topic here. #neo900 on freenode might be a better place for that ;)

[1] [http://shop.goldelico.com/wiki.php?page=GTA04A5](http://shop.goldelico.com/wiki.php?page=GTA04A5)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Of the compatible phones, only Sony Ericsson J100a appears to support North American GSM bands, and eBay doesn't have any of it on sale, at least not at the moment.</comment>


The Last Days of the Polymath - <AUTHOR> http://www.moreintelligentlife.com/content/edward-carr/last-days-polymath

<comment><USER2> The whole is greater than the sum of the parts. I think that any hardcore specialist will be missing out somewhat on the synergy that knowledge of the various parts of the universe provides. But given our educational advancements we're much more well rounded in terms of education than people a century ago. So in that sense we're all polymaths. And having a general understanding of a variety of topics can still produce some synergy towards increased understanding of the universe or any specific topic.

Our intellectual capabilities haven't changed but the amount of knowledge we know amasses. So eventually, which is happening now, we'll reach a point where it is no longer possible to be at the head of multiple (at least scientific) fields because there is too much to remember. Part of the reason for this is because people have specialized terminology and field specific nuances that must be learned ( as opposed to having concepts described in common language).

Art is an exception, because it does not advance quantitatively like science. So we should still be able to excel in specialized knowledge and be able to artistically express ourselves. This is also why, as the article mentions, lots of people write. It's a form of expression. Anyone can write as long as they have a good idea, and anyone can paint or compose since the difficulty in doing these things has remained constant.

<comment><USER3> I agree with everything you said with one exception. It will be possible at some point to be the head of multiple science fields because our method of learning and storing information is changing completely.

We're making this fundamental shift from storing as much as we can in our heads to storing information outside our heads and learning more efficient ways of looking things up.

As the depth and breadth of our collective knowledge base increases so will our capacity to access, make connections and implement that knowledge.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It is a very good article. I read it last month in the paper version of the magazine, while on holiday and stroke a chord as I always considered myself to be one. We all have a current advantage over our predecessors in that knowledge is now so much more freely available.

As science and engineering expands it tends to fragment into specializations. Although I have always been advocating that specialization is for insects, the reality of life is that you need to be top notch on one or two fields and a generalist in as many as possible.

</comment><comment><USER5> I like studying all sorts of different things, even if it's not deemed the best route to success these days. I don't usually do what I'm supposed to do, anyway.

</comment><comment><USER6> "if...then, yes, you have to specialise," says Chris Leek, the chairman of British Mensa, _a club for people who score well on IQ tests._ "

</comment><comment><USER7> Actually I have heard many scientists utter something along the line of --

       "I find the barriers between disciplines often quite an artificial creation here doctor, the more I study the more I see the connections that bind this universe together becoming clear to me. It is the way of the future."

\--Proff. Friedrick Von Slick (fictional super villain in audio drama/podcast Red Panda)

<comment><USER8> That sounds like a paraphrase of something George Polya said.</comment></comment>


Why this works?  - <AUTHOR> http://six.pen.io/

<comment><AUTHOR> I think it works best for native English speakers very well. I was in 2% as I am not native English speaker. Interested to know how these relation works? Do you guys know any other such psychological tricks? Please share.

<comment><USER2> Why do you think this is related to language? We don't think in words, we think in images.

Now if we were to presuppose that cultural priming has something to do with this, we might be closer to the truth (i.e. people in Western world have carrot as an archetype of vegetables, while people in e.g. Philippines might see cabbage as the representative of veggies).

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Weird.

When asked for a vegetable I immediately was thinking Cabbage but for some reason Carrot popped into my head.

Yeah.

<comment><USER4> When asked for a vegetable I immediately though of a banana, then my brain said 'VEGETABLE, stupid', and I thought of a cabbage instead.

<comment><USER5> +1 Cabbage. That's too much cabbage to be a coincidence, I'd say.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> That's weird, I was still thinking 6.

<comment><USER7> right, but what vegetable did you pick?!

<comment><USER6> 6

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> it says ARROw down > cARRot See the resemblance?

<comment><USER9> Good point!

It also says vegetable, which starts the same way cabbage ends. That may account for so many people thinking cabbage.

<comment><USER2> People might be lying and also 3 people is not "many" ;)</comment></comment></comment>


The Pitch Deck That Makes Investors Say Yes - good-day https://hackernoon.com/the-pitch-deck-that-makes-investors-say-yes-c7p3udp <comment><AUTHOR> Perfect timing for me :D

One more thing that I see in good pitch decks: an intro slide about the "Context" or "Change" that is driving the startup. There was a good Medium post about it - will try to find it.

</comment><comment><USER2> Very insightful. Will keep in mind these pointers when I create my pitch deck!</comment>


Ask HN: How much do you make from Google AdSense per day? - <AUTHOR> I'll go first - $125 averaged over past 30 days. Also, would be helpful to know if you're concerned about ad blocking. <comment><USER2> OP, we're close, I'm averaging 130 USD/day for 2016. It jumps all over though, and I might see 200 USD days, and 90 USD days, even though traffic and clicks remain level. It's from a single site. About 60% of my users run ad block (young, male, tech audience, mostly on desktop).

Ad revenues drop year after year. I think it's a dying business in its current form.

I think an API should be available for advertising. The API would provide the name of the advertisement, the description, colour scheme, image, and more. Then, developers can use that information to work the advertisement into their site in an attractive and seamless manner.

[http://i.imgur.com/9ecRa5o.png](http://i.imgur.com/9ecRa5o.png)

An example is above. Instead of having a leaderboard advertisement for Chrome, HN could get the advertisement details, and insert it into the site to resemble a post. Every site could then style the advertisement their own way.

I think it's less annoying to users, fast to load, users are more likely to read and click it in comparison to a banner they're blind towards, advertisers would get more for their money, and publishers don't need to destroy their site with gaudy flashing boxes that everyone ignores. It's a win-win-win situation, and my vision for the future of advertising.

Personally, I'm looking to drop AdSense in the near future and try alternative revenue streams. I worked hard to develop my community. I don't like pushing some ugly, irrelevant, tracking filled ads on my users, in exchange for a few cents on every thousand impressions. It's a business that needs fixing, because advertisers are getting ripped off, users are bending over or forced to install ad blockers, and publishers need to keep pushing more and more advertisements to make the same revenue they earned last year. I'm surprised Google hasn't been more innovative in this space considering it's their bread and butter.

<comment><AUTHOR> I definitely agree that revenue ad is on the decline. 3 years ago it was fairly common to average $300 days - now it's roughly half.

The current plan is to upgrade to DFP within the next few months and maybe try to sell direct ads to companies related to our niche which is extremely popular.

How did you find out how many of your visitors are blocking ads?

<comment> lama-dot-io Hi taAdSense, I've built a tool that does exactly what you need regarding your site's adblock usage. If you want more info or wish to try it out, I'm giving away some free trial accounts to gather some feedback while the main site gets finished. Contact is: email@example.com

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> ~25$/day. I have 10 wordpress websites on various niche topics that get a range of traffic. I'm not worried about ad blocking. Most of my sites are on topics for non-technical people who generally don't run them.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't know anything about your sites, and please ignore the following feedback, but I think you should focus on building 1 amazing site as opposed to trying to maintain 10.

<comment><USER4> Maybe his in not maintaining them? Passive income.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> 0.01 per day, with a lucky hit of a buck or two now that then. Usually ad- blocked under 1%, unless a blocker repeatedly clicked around my site.

<comment><AUTHOR> How are you tracking how many of your visitors using an ad blocker?

<comment><USER5> I don't know if this is correct, but I just look at my AdSense stats for pageviews vs ad impressions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> $0.25 for a simple childrens app

</comment><comment><USER6> About $3 a day, with only 700 views a day. I'm happy with that ratio.

</comment><comment><USER7> About $10-$20/day on 1.5M pageviews/month. My cpm/ctr sucks.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd recommend optimizing your ad placements and types.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> how do you make 125 dollars per day? I am interested to know

<comment><USER9> With a lot of traffic. To make that kind of money you need to get at least 500 000 unique visitors per month and probably more. It depends on the niche and ads positioning as well.

<comment><AUTHOR> Optimized ads are key & traffic was roughly half.

<comment><USER10> With that traffic you can earn much more selling ad space directly.

250k targeted viewers are great for someone who wants o build a brand.

<comment><AUTHOR> AdSense is about 25% of our revenue & agree that we need to focus on selling ads directly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Per day I get around 0.25€, on a forum with ~500 members

<comment><AUTHOR> Maybe you might have more success with affiliate marketing.</comment></comment>


An inch-long universal text encoder - <AUTHOR> http://jmac.org/encoder/

<comment><USER2> Good idea. However, there are problems.

Thermal vibration will make the atoms move about 10^−11 m. Therefore you won't be able to measure the length of line with a precision better than that. Therefore you will be able to encode without loss only 9 decimal digits, or 7.8 hexadecimal digits.

Also, you have to consider where you print this line. Paper expands depending on ambiant humidity, with factors on the order of 0.05%, which means that you will be able to encode without loss only 3 or 5 decimal digits.

If you print it on something like a metalic piece, then expansion will depend on the temperature, between 4.5 for W and 61 for He, so you won't be able to encode any digit.

Unless you calibrate and maintain a controlled environment, such for example, the very costly and sophisticated controlled environment maintained around the etalon meter (before the meter was redefined in function of the speed of light and the duration of 9192631770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom).

<comment><USER3> There's also the issue of gravity waves, and don't get me started on the Planck Length. I believe the vendor's claims for the encoding of arbitrarily large document collections are _considerably_ overstated!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It might be worth mentioning that this is quite similar to arithmetic coding, which is a real and effective compression technique.</comment>


IE10's 'Do-Not-Track' Default Dies Quick Death - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/06/default-do-not-track/

<comment><USER2> The whole concept of DNT is just stupid. It's misleading users and won't work.

By telling users you have better privacy simply because your browser adds a random header tag onto requests you're misleading them. Sites have no obligation to obey it and it will give users a false sense of security.

We already have proven, well defined method of DNT already: private browsing. This works by simply removing resources after the session ends. There's no reliance on servers, so it will always work.

<comment><USER3> > Sites have no obligation to obey it and it will give users a false sense of > security.

Until appropriate legislation comes into play. It worked reasonably well with the Do Not Call lists.

<comment><USER4> Or if a large portion of the industry decides to voluntarily adopt the standard, to counter the _threat_ of legislation.

A number of large ad networks have already announced support for DNT. Sure, there will always be sites that ignore the header, but there's also a realistic chance that it _will_ give users a meaningful choice about how their behavioral data is used by many of the biggest sites they use most often.

<comment><USER5> If a large portion of the industry adopts it and that prevents legislation, the end users have an even more false sense of security.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I apologize in advance that this will probably end up looking a bit like a rant.

I'm sorry, but what is the deal with web-based _tracking_? I see comments like

> Whenever you visit a website with an ad, DoubleClick knows you looked at > that article, and uses that to build a profile about your preferences. I > don't think when your average joe reads an article that it is fair that > their preferences are being tracked in this way.

and I honestly wonder how this sentiment can be so common, given the realities of our current society (note: this comment is not meant to say anything bad about that comment's author, it's just a convenient example of a trend in the discourse on this topic).

First, we give up many "rights" as tradeoffs for other things that we want. We have the right to the pay from our jobs, but that doesn't mean that we are entitled to get things from the store for free. We have to give up ownership rights of our money in order to trade it for goods and services. We have the right to free speech, but that doesn't mean that someone can't ask us to leave their home or other property if we say something that upsets them. We give up our right to say whatever we want by going onto someone else's property. This sort of situation is so common that it would be impossible for me to list all of the times in which we are faced with it here. However, this argument would not be complete unless I also stated that web-based tracking is in exactly this category: someone has set up a situation where your computer can exchange data with their server. However, in doing so, it is possible that they will notice that you have done so and keep a record of this fact. In other words, if you, through your computer, communicate with a company or individual, _that company or individual may know that you communicated with them and what the contents of those communications were_. You are giving up your right not to be known to have performed a behavior by a set of potential witnesses in exchange for _performing that behavior in front of those witnesses_. It's unreasonable to say that, just because you are communicating through computerized agents the other party should not be able to keep a record of your exchange.

Second, it is unfathomable (edit: To me. Please, tell me how your opinion differs) that this could be an issue for people because this is the state in which we constantly live. Every time you leave your house, your neighbors may take notice. Every time you go to the store, your actions are recorded (tracked!) by security cameras. The clerk knows what you bought and may recognize you as a regular customer. If you use a credit or loyalty card, the store keeps keeps a log (tracks) your purchases and builds a demographic profile. At a casino, the floor manager watches you gamble over security cameras. If they notice you winning a lot, they may ask you to leave for the day. I could go on like this all day. The point is that there are _all kinds_ of times where we are tracked and where the only way to opt out is not to have dealings with the tracking entity or to not go out in public. There are all kinds of businesses built around or supplemented by tracking people. It seems to me that the tracking-things-you-witness ship has already sailed and if people wish to bring it back into harbor, they will first need to establish a reasonable test that makes it clear when tracking is actually abusive. It seems very unlikely to me that any test that wasn't specifically designed to do so would label all internet-based tracking as abusive, as some people seem to do, while calling these other behaviors OK.

Am I wrong? Am I just an asshole?

<comment><USER7> I think you're just upset because DNT might affect your income?

Tracking does not mean looking at server logs (or by analogy, reviewing security camera footage), it means things like cookies, Flash cookies, beacons and KISSmetrics.

Chances are DNT idea will have little effect. People raised issues with cookies back in the 1990's and in rerospect it hasn't impeded websites from tracking. People were forced to opt-in to cookies and everyone became desensitised to them over time. Now people don't even think about not accepting cookies. Tracking has gotten very aggressive though. Some of the behavioral tracking ideas are really pushing the limits.

DNT is hardly a draconian measure. Be glad that the web is still very much unregulated in comparison to meatspace.

<comment><USER8> What browser forces you to opt-in to cookies?

<comment><USER9> Try to turn cookies off and see what still works.

Some people still build sites that have basic functionality with JS off. Nobody bothers to do the same for cookies.

<comment><USER7> Exactly. There was a time when the idea of users accepting/rejecting cookies on a per-site basis seemed plausible (though it might be annoying for the user), but those days seem long gone. Cookies are on by default and my guess is few users change those settings. DNT might be viewed as another attempt, however futile it may seem, at giving users some choice.

It's true a good portion of the web still works well without Javascript. This seems like a good thing as Javascript can be a mixed blessing. Enabling it comes with both benefits and risks. Like cookies, a user could selectively choose which scripts to allow, one at a time (remember the embedded Java applet days?), but this can quickly become more trouble than it's worth.

Perhaps a difference of JS from cookies is that with Javascript the user might sometimes see what the actual benefits are and they might be more enticing than those of cookies, e.g., "To see this cool doodad, you need to enable Javascript." It is very clear what the benefit will be: the doodad.

Contrast this with "To use this site you must have cookies enabled." Terms like "provide a better user experience" might be used to describe the need to enable cookies. But the specifics are usually absent.

If all websites were reasonable, and no one abused their ability to manipulate and track end users, things like DNT would probably not be necessary. But we know that's not the case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Turning on DNT by default is a great way to ensure it will be utterly ignored.

So I quite support the requirement that people explicitly enable it.

Remember the DNT is voluntary - but if everyone does it by default, then there is nothing left to track, so websites will have no interest in paying attention to the flag.

<comment><USER11> > then there is nothing left to track

Isn't that the whole point? Websites may not have interest in tracking disabling policies, but a lot of people do. Maybe these advertising companies ought to incentivize users to opt-in to sell their data instead of the other way around.

<comment><USER12> The whole business model is that users don't care if they're tracked, so let's track them (and others) and do things for them that we couldn't before

I can see Google fully implementing DNT on the basis that users don't care, and for the few that do they're happy to comply

But making it default to on, especially if no one gives a damn is the death knell to the whole business model

Suddenly you have to pay for everything.

Although I would be interested in using DNT if out had more granular control to block certain entities

<comment><USER10> > Suddenly you have to pay for everything.

I wonder if we'll see sites who honor the header, but require that it be off in order to access content.

<comment><USER13> Na.. that will be too much work for the user, plus disabling DNT will mean it's disabled for everyone, not just the said website. It also does not make alot of sense, disabling DNT does not make site any money directly. So it will only raise suspicion in a casual user's minds, that why would the site need to track him/her when there is no apparent monetary profit to the site.

Instead they can show a banner that DNT is enabled and when it is disabled, the banner is gone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Good for privacy litigation. "My client had DNT in her browser set to 'on' and the company intentionally ignored this and tracked her actions on the web, vioalting her right to privacy and causing monetary damages in the amount of $________."

Web developers might hate it, but DNT could be potentially good for end-users who want to make privacy claims. It's just one extra header. A few extra bytes. Meanwhile things like XML and JSON, which add considerable bloat to web responses, are accepted without any complaint.

<comment><USER15> On the other hand now every single line of code that gets changed has to reviews by a lawyer to make sure it is compliant with the DNT legislation. And if your a startup, the best way to take you down is probably a couple of frivolous DNT lawsuits.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Does the current spec take into account that unscrupulous ISPs (I'm thinking about hotel WiFi in particular) can strip the header before forwarding a request to a server?

<comment><USER15> It says they shouldn't do that. But you are never going to see enforcement, stripping headers can be sold as "security" to hotels who have no clue what they are doing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Now imagine if Chrome made incognito browsing the default and you had to access a submenu to get a cookie keeper. Disrupt the web!

<comment><USER18> I don't think google is going to be the one leading the charge against targeted advertising.

<comment><USER17> I realise this, I used Chrome as the example as I imagine it has the largest audience of users here. I wish I could set incognito per site. I.e. opt in to cookie keeping. e.g. set cookie_keeping=true for gmail.com.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Honest question, why do people care if they are being tracked? The amount I care is quite far off from the amount everyone else seems to care, could someone educate me on why I need to care more?

<comment><USER20> The same for me. Why should I care if I'm tracked? And if I don't want to be tracked I'll use private browsing (it's not just for porn, you know?). If I want even more privacy I'll use a clean vm, or if I'm going paranoid I could use an anonymous proxy or similar.

<comment><USER21> Consider bubbling, e.g. Google returns search results consistent with your previous clickthroughs. You end up seeing only results you agree with; it insulates your searching experience from disturbing foreign ideas like evolution or liberalism.

Tracking can be done by servers, using a workstation signature (ip/port, installed software versions etc, been discussed in other posts), it doesn't require your client station's consent (cookies).

<comment><USER20> Yet, when I look for "python", I'm not interested in snakes. When I look for "eclipse", it's almost sure that I'm not looking for astrological phenomena or (spare me!) books. It's incredibly useful to write "cinema" without having to specify which city I'm obviously in. The point is: I want to be bubbled. In almost every situation, apart from reading opinions, it is the right thing to do for me. In my humble opinion, the bubbling effect is overrated and (should be) avoidable with private browsing. Am I wrong?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> So instead IE10, on first run should just pop up a very scary looking dialog filled with text on why the user should choose the "do not let websites track me" button instead of the "Let websites track me" one.

It is not default, the user has to choose.

</comment><comment><USER23> An issue sidestepped by this article is whether the statement in the second paragraph is correct:

> ... tech and ad companies who say they comply with Do Not Track could simply > ignore the flag set by IE 10 and track those who use that browser.

That doesn't quite work. Web servers don't know what browser is on the other end of a connection. Yes, they know the "User-Agent:" line, but that is not the same thing.

Claiming to follow a privacy standard, but then ignoring it based on a conclusion reached via fallible means, is a bit scary. It strikes me as the beginning of a slippery slope, regardless of what position Microsoft ultimately takes with IE 10.

<comment><USER3> So don't forge your headers.

I don't see how this would be slippery at all.

<comment><USER18> The parent's point is that some of those IE10 users aren't just stuck with a default, they really did intend to turn DNT on.

<comment><USER24> Which is why DNT makes zero sense to be on by default.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> What is the situation if a user agent, on installation/upgrade, asks a user to update their DNT status but in doing so defaults to on? The user has to explicitly agree to turning this setting on (as they have to accept the configuration before proceeding), and is able to turn it off, but most people will just click through anyway.

<comment><USER10> If too many people turn on DNT websites will start ignoring it.

<comment><USER26> Most websites will just ignore it from day 1 anyway.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> This is sad. DNT is may be a good thing.

Whenever you visit a website with an ad, DoubleClick knows you looked at that article, and uses that to build a profile about your preferences. I don't think when your average joe reads an article that it is fair that their preferences are being tracked in this way.

We should survey the public and ask: "Do you think it is okay that internet ad companies use the type of article you read to target ads that are more likely relevant to you?"

That is a reasonable question that gets to the crux of the issue. Retargeting and profile targeting may be borderline unethical, but Google and I both make good money doing it. I am not sure it is right, but we both have a vested interest in making sure we can continue.</comment>


US Treasury Secretary claims that AI's impact on jobs is 50-100 years away - <AUTHOR> https://www.axios.com/tech-reacts-to-mnuchins-dismissal-of-ai-impact-on-jobs-2328061287.html <comment><USER2> Watch the longer clip that starts at 33:02 (and importantly carries on much longer): [https://www.c-span.org/video/?425894-1/treasury-secretary- st...](https://www.c-span.org/video/?425894-1/treasury-secretary-steven- mnuchin-talks-axios-cofounder-mike-allen&start=1982)

In context, it is clear that he is referring specifically to the idea of massive structural unemployment rather than the long-standing situation where new technology displaces jobs but people find new ones. I think this can be regarded as pretty mainstream. His AI referent is specifically clarified as not being self-driving cars (he expects) but r2d2 robots that can replace human interviewers (he doesn't expect soon).

</comment><comment><USER3> I have a computer playing DOOM on a shelf in this room, right now actually. I've poked and peeked around the code and I'm really starting to get a good understanding of the structures and methods used by the software. I've started designing better AI bots to play Doom, some of them fail to learn better than others, and others I make do learn better, and faster. Later I plan on implementing an AI inside a hex-bug creepy crawling robot toy.

Did I mention, I'm a high school drop out, if that doesn't strike fear into you, I don't know what will. In this "the golden age of information" there is no excuse to not learn something. 50-100 years? I don't imagine it taking more than a few years, but only if the money was in the right spot, so maybe, yeah, 50 years.</comment>


Heinlein and Clarke discuss the Moon landings as they happen (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/12/heinlein-and-clarke-discuss-the-moon-landings-as-they-happen/ <comment><USER2> I remember how school physics teachers face lit up when the discussion about moon landing came up. He told that there was great speculation and differing opinions on what would happen next (like Heinlein and Clarke do here) but nobody thought that next 50 years would be just "Boldly going where Yuri Gagarin has gone decades before".

Simple rule for futurology: Economies of scale + incentives >> inspiration + technological ability.

Our smartphones match or outpace what science fiction of that time thought possible. Internet has transformed our culture in just few decades. In space only satellites are good business and they make just $260 billion revenue per year. There is not enough ROI in space to justify investing significantly more money into it.

<comment><USER3> > nobody thought that next 50 years would be just "Boldly going where Yuri > Gagarin has gone decades before"

Pretty comically dramatic undercounting of what has been accomplished since Yuri Gagarin.

Hubble alone embarrasses that premise. The ISS does as well. What New Horizons recently accomplished, by itself, is enough for me to feel entirely comfortable with what we've accomplished as a species over last 50 years regarding space. The same goes for Curiosity on Mars.

The sole issue is the lack of understanding and appreciation for how difficult these truly extraordinary accomplishments (of which there have been many others I didn't list, such as Voyager or Rosetta) are compared to merely blasting someone into an orbit around the planet.

<comment><USER4> I don't think anyone is undercounting what has been achieved, or overestimating the importance of Gagarin's flight (which _was_ important as a stepping stone).

It's that all the achievements you mentioned happened pretty much on a shoestring budget compared to Apollo era. 'nabla9 is right about how economics beats ability, but it's still a fucking tragedy if you think what we could have had by today, if humanity poured a bit more money into space.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As it happened. At our little country school, there was great deal of effort to set enough televisions so we could watch the event live.

What I find amusing was seeing a video recently by a film producer/director talking about the difficulties of that time of faking the moon landings. What I took away from the video was that it was cheaper to send men to the moon than it was to build all the film and storage technology to fake the moon landings.

<comment><USER6> These 'fake' instrumends left behind continue to function. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Laser_Ranging_experiment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Laser_Ranging_experiment)

<comment><USER5> That has been one of my little favourite things about the whole "fake" debate and the question that goes with it. "How were these instruments placed so precisely on the moon, if they weren't put there by a man?"

<comment><USER7> To be fair, you don't need a manned mission to install a retroreflector. The Soviet pre-Apollo Lunokhod landers included similar reflectors and they work fine.

<comment><USER8> Valid point, but with a crucial correction: The Lunokhod landers landed on the moon way after Apollo 11 [1] so they are in no way pre-Apollo.

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

<comment><USER7> Oops, right! I read that the Apollo retroreflectors were improved based on Lunokhod experiences and got confused. Presumably the text was referring to the later Apollo 14 and 15 reflectors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> BBC Space Race (2005) is a great 4-part series about this (albeit a bit overdramatized):

* [https://youtu.be/xcLphSY8PX0](https://youtu.be/xcLphSY8PX0)

* [https://youtu.be/kefm18yAFco](https://youtu.be/kefm18yAFco)

* [https://youtu.be/UxTf-kWbYk4](https://youtu.be/UxTf-kWbYk4)

* [https://youtu.be/wZI8uLCsjlU](https://youtu.be/wZI8uLCsjlU)

</comment><comment><USER8> IMO, the best way to experience the Apollo 11 landing is on [1].

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

<comment><USER10> Spacelog transcripts are also very well made: [http://apollo11.spacelog.org/](http://apollo11.spacelog.org/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Here's a joke Arthur C. Clarke told me about the Navajo and the moon landings: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NEh8nspzXw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NEh8nspzXw)

</comment><comment><USER12> If there ever was a good time for a book recommendation, check out "The Calculating Stars."

Probably the most impactful part of the book is the appendix, where it's made abundantly clear how much of it was based in reality.

</comment><comment><USER13> The US didn't fake the moon landings, the American politicians faked that it was about anything but beating the USSR. They supported it and sold it as a research project to further humankind, as dipping our toes in the cosmic ocean.

Then, after the Russians were beat, the interest among the decision makers cooled off.

<comment><USER14> It was clear from the beginning it was about beating the Soviets. The fear of the USSR achieving space superiority was very real at the time, especially after Sputnik. JFK even said in his moon speech the US needed to establish "a position of pre-eminence" and would do so with the landing.</comment></comment>


Warrior Diet for Geeks - <AUTHOR> http://adamhallett.com/?p=1369

<comment><USER2> I've done this diet in the past and just started another cycle of it. I love it and highly recommend people try it. However, the point of this diet isn't so you can pig out on candy bars and still stay in shape. You can easily eat over maintenance in one meal and end up gaining weight on the warrior diet.

The basic premise is to under eat for about 20 hours followed by 4 hours of over eating. You still need to watch what you eat during that 4 hour period, should be high protein, whole grains and veggies. You will go through about 2 weeks of hunger pains at first, but afterwards its great and should experience big gains in energy and focus.</comment>


Clothing became the No. 1 online sales category for the first time in 2015 - <AUTHOR> http://recode.net/2016/04/01/clothing-biggest-online-sales-category-comscore/ <comment><USER2> IMO Amazon hasn't gotten clothing right. Could be my narrow perspective as a tech guy though.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. It's a weird shopping experience because unlike other online clothing retailers there's no consistent aesthetic. It feels like walking through a flea market, but some of the items are expensive high-end luxury.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The best thing about buying cloth online is that you buy before you put it on, thus there is an exciting wait period between when you purchased the item and it arriving in the mail. This expectant feeling is highly addictive and I believe is responsible for a lot of periodic buying that syncs with delivery time. If anybody has access to buying patterns perhaps you could confirm/deny if this is true.</comment>


Parsing CSS with Parsec - <AUTHOR> http://blog.jakubarnold.cz/2014/08/10/parsing-css-with-parsec.html

<comment><USER2> I've used Parsec + Doctest and it was a dream.

> I'd recommend writing a lot of unit tests for your parser. It's easy to play > around in the REPL and test things out ...

Doctest feels like a REPL in your source, making it extremely easy to write automated testing. Now I'm wishing for better integration in Sublime Text, so it will tell me if I have an error in the editor, without hitting the terminal.</comment>


Cities from the sea: the true cost of reclaimed land - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/may/02/cities-from-the-sea-the-true-cost-of-reclaimed-land-asia-malaysia-penang-dubai <comment><USER2> I find it mind boggling that we're doing these ocean cities. In Denmark we're doing it as well, though mostly by using old unused habourspace and not by reclaiming land. The result is really expensive real estate in locations that will be hit by climate change the hardest.

We haven't managed to do much about climate change in the past 35 years and now we're at a point where we need to change our society so radically in 3-5 years that it just won't happen.

Since it won't happen, that million dollar apartment with ocean view is sort of a scam. Because that's really not where you want to live in 20 years. Right now the best place to buy property is in one of the few geographical locations that won't get absolutely fucked by climate change, and reclaiming the ocean is the opposite of that.

</comment><comment><USER3> Instead of reclaiming land from the sea, they could just build floating cities. e.g. [https://www.seasteading.org](https://www.seasteading.org)

<comment><USER4> The main problem with this approach is the maintenance cost. Not that flood prevention in a typical beachside property is a low cost.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> As mentioned din the intro, Japan (and HK) have been doing this for quite some time and have had success with it.

Looks like the issue is the pace of the development along with marine ecosystem disruption (they throw in a bit about fishers, but that's a distractive side issue).

So that makes me wonder, in places where land near the sea is more or less unimpeded by mountain, can they not just as easily, and perhaps more so, carve wide channels and create similar land-sea living environments? Do all you shaping and digging and then at the end, blow the dikes and let the sea rush in and settle.

Instead of taking land to the sea, bring the sea to land.

<comment><USER6> Japan is a world champion at destroying marine & terrestrial ecosystems. Virtually all of Japan's coastline (yes, seriously) is covered in tetrapods, _all_ of its rivers except one (1) have been dammed and largely encased in concrete, 41% of its old-growth forests have been uprooted and replaced largely with a monoculture of cedar [3], etc.

[1] [https://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2007/07/22/general/tetrapo...](https://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2007/07/22/general/tetrapods/)

[2] [https://ejatlas.org/conflict/nagaragawa- dam](https://ejatlas.org/conflict/nagaragawa-dam)

[3] [https://www.nytimes.com/1995/01/17/science/japan-s-cedar- for...](https://www.nytimes.com/1995/01/17/science/japan-s-cedar-forests-are- man-made-disaster.html)

But hey, landing at Kansai or Chubu airports (built entirely on reclaimed land) is kinda neat...

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Pretty interesting article. Sadly, while reading, I had a hard time not dreaming about whether we could afford a home here in SF if they filled in, oh, 1/4 or so of the bay with high rise housing. :(

<comment><USER8> There's plenty of fill in San Francisco. You just might not want to be in a building there when an earthquake hits.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Never fear, the ocean will take it all away again in 20 years.</comment>


Shop Walmart and more of your favorite stores, faster - <AUTHOR> https://www.blog.google/products/assistant/shop-walmart-and-more-your-favorite-stores-faster/ <comment><USER2> Wow, I never knew about Google Express. I've been using Amazon Prime Now to get my groceries, so this makes things even easier.

</comment><comment><USER3> Why is this flagged and dead? This looks like a legit link (Google's official blog), about a legit topic (E-Commerce).

<comment><USER4> Unfortunately. It's a very important news. I don't understand what's going on here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Google is slowly working on taking over the world, or at least the internet. It is scary how much power we give them.

</comment><comment><USER6> I sure wish Australia had something, anything, that came even close to the experience of Google Express or Amazon Prime.

Grocery delivery is typically limited to specific supermarkets or online stores with high delivery costs and horrendously shitty web apps that do everything they can to get in the way of you actually making a purchase.

I just want to be able to click a single button and have something I need show up on my doorstep the next day, instead of having to pay $20 per delivery just to have some underpaid Australia Post courier toss the parcel somewhere into my yard from the street several days after it was due to arrive.

</comment><comment><USER7> I love Google Express, but it seems that they keep getting further from the ideal.

While I wasn't thrilled with the subscription, the advantages of a simple $15 order size made it less of a hassle.

And I still can't get groceries from them.

<comment><USER2> Try Amazon Prime Now for groceries. Where I live [1] they are partnered with Sprouts (which is similar to Whole Foods). Or Instacart.

Edit1: [1] In Los Angeles Edit2: What do you mean by subscription? They still seem to have an order minimum (that varies by store).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I can see how this could be mutually beneficial for both Google and Walmart. Both of them are trying to compete with Amazon and Alexa, and this gives Google Home shopping capabilities as well as promoting Walmart's online offerings.</comment>


4 Page Guide to Core Data - <AUTHOR> http://www.mikebz.com/2014/06/4-page-guide-to-core-data.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Quick Guide: How to Use Core Data for Your Next iOS Project

In my last iOS project, I decided to use Core Data by Apple. My goal was simple: to store some data in my iOS app and be able to perform CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) operations. While there are long guides on how to properly use Core Data, I thought none of them gave me the information I needed in a concise and accessible way. If you are exploring Core Data for your project, and you have some background knowledge of database interfaces, I hope this 4 page guide gets your application up and running in no time.</comment>


Your Lead Architect Doesn't Really Understand Cloud - <AUTHOR> http://thenewstack.io/genius-techie-doesnt-really-understand-cloud/

<comment><USER2> Unfortunately cargo cult architecture is the norm, and doing things right is the exception.

I worked at some place where the "architect" had designed a REST architecture that almost worked on a LAN, but run it over the WAN and it would take 40 minutes for the application to boot. I got that down to 40 seconds but had to fight over every inch because I was violating the architectural purity of the scheme.

One day he had such a freak-out that he had a vertigo attack we called the ambulance, but he refused to get in.

Then my boss quit and the out-of-town consultant told me that since he's the one who is inflexible, we should do it all his way. Well, a recruiter called the next day and I quit the day after that. Mr. Spaz left six months later.

Mr. Spaz was a big fan of guids because they were globally unique, but then he made a "guid" that was all zeroes and argued about that. Of course, a few years later I was working with a hotshot who didn't think guids would be unique so he had to add more stuff to them to make them so.</comment>


The banks fighting COVID - <AUTHOR> NOT. Or I probably do not understand something. They're closing many branches and tell people to use very few that are opened. They say it is because they care about public health and want to reduce chance of transmission. My thinking is that by closing branches they're encouraging more people to come to fewer places. This increases the concentration and hence I think it actually increases the chances of transmission. <comment><USER2> Let me find reasons why this can make sense. On one hand, this decreases the motivation to go to banks. On the other, it is possible to outfit each of the opened branches: instate a ticketing system to control the number of persons within the building, instate shifts where only the youngest staff goes to work, etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> I do not think anyone is "motivated" to go to the bank. It is a big time drain to stand in line. People go there when there is no other option mostly. I personally have to go sometime and I absolutely dread it. As for limiting number of people inside the building you'll just create big line up outside with the same results. It will also clog people moving on sidewalks.</comment></comment>


WordPress Caching: What's the best Caching Plugin? - <AUTHOR> http://www.tutorial9.net/tutorials/web-tutorials/wordpress-caching-whats-the-best-caching-plugin/

<comment><USER2> My site has a lot of dynamic content, so complete page caching doesn't help, nor does query caching or widget caching, so I had to figure out an alternative to all of this.

I installed X-Cache on the server to use as an opcode/bytecode cache (20% speedup) and to use as an extension of WP Cache's object cache mechanism. The latter I found to be immensely powerful.

I just surround ANY section of code in the template file (for example a menu) with the following snippet. This way I reduced page generation times from 350-500ms to 50ms.

      <?php
      if (false === ($top-menu = wp_cache_get('top-menu','menus'))) {
      	ob_start();
      	?>

      	<?php
      	$top-menu = ob_get_contents();
      	ob_end_clean();
      	wp_cache_set('top-menu', $top-menu, 'menus', 86400);
      }
      echo $top-menu;
      ?>

<comment><USER3> The ob_ family of functions are one of PHP's hidden gems.

</comment></comment><comment> mkr-hn I've been using W3 Total Cache for a while. No problems so far. It's great for me because I don't like tinkering on the backend for something like this. I could go in and make it better with this or one of the technically superior plugins, but this one was 99% there the moment I installed it.</comment>


Alton's Rules for Coding in a Real Language (Such as C) …  - <AUTHOR> http://www.utm.edu/staff/acoalter/reference/documents/languages/c/rulesForCoding.html

<comment><USER2> Anyone have any idea when this was written? Some of it seems a little bit dated although I would not be surprised if Alton still holds these beliefs.</comment>


Tesla is asking hourly employees to go home early and take time off to cut costs - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-reportedly-cutting-worker-hours-supply-of-small-parts-2019-3 <comment><USER2> I really think Tesla will fail, and worry what that will do to the stock market and/or tech industry. Things don't add up over there, and pain will be unleashed sooner or later.

<comment><USER3> Equity might get wiped out, but there are billions of dollars worth of assets within the corporation (besides liquid cash and equivalents). If it fails, it'll be a reorg.

[https://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/tsla/financials?query=balance-...](https://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/tsla/financials?query=balance- sheet) (NASDAQ: TSLA Company Financials)

Disclaimer: TSLA investor

<comment><USER4> Yes, I believe the stock will fail, but the company will survive sans Musk. These are actions of a desperate company, I was about to buy a Model 3 and after he dropped the prices, laid people off, dropped the price of those extra features, etc. I got scared off.

<comment><USER3> I don't think they're desperate per se yet (note: not willing in thread to haggle over the definition of desperate; they have at minimum $2 billion cash on hand at the moment). Are they moving fast and ruthlessly? For sure, but they should be fine as long as they're selling ever unit coming off the factory line.

There are buyers for the 3, S, and X, somewhere in the world.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> UPS did this with us a lot back when I was working for them. They hired too many people because they thought they were going to get a lot of contracts when DHL nosedived. Pretty likely that Tesla over hired to make their numbers and are waiting for attrition to reduce their staffing now that things are leveling out. Easier than laying off, especially with unions.</comment>


The Physics of Brute Force (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://pthree.org/2016/06/19/the-physics-of-brute-force/ <comment><USER2> >where 0 Kelvin is defined as a system devoid of energy

This is not true, in quantum mechanics at zero kelvin (so in its fundamental state) a system has a non zero energy. See this: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_harmonic_oscillator#Ha...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_harmonic_oscillator#Hamiltonian_and_energy_eigenstates)

<comment><USER3> You're right. Zero Kelvin means no _entropy_.

<comment><USER4> Is that true either? E.g a metastable glass structure sent to 0k probably still has an entropy?

<comment><USER5> [edit:] Third law states 0K is impossible. That's the obvious and simplest answer. So everything bellow assumes the limit as you approach 0K.

I think in that case you reach a paradox because temperature is a quantity (typically) defined in thermodynamics, i.e. systems in equilibrium. A metastable glass is not in its ground state, therefore not in equilibrium, therefore not technically within the purview of thermo. This might seem like a cop out, but a similar question was asked in my qualifier. The answer, glass is not technically described my thermo and at 0K the whole thing breaks down [1]

Sure we still talk about entropy and temperature of glass, but it's stretching the definitions.

Another way to look at it, though, is that at 0K there is only one state available to the system (even though it is a glassy one). Therefore call the glass a new state of matter, and set S=0. If that feels weird because it's not the ground state, consider that glass' constituents, Si and O, are not in a ground state either, that'd be Fe. You don't have any problems dealing with metastable Si and O, do you? Either way, 0K makes no sense!

Also, it's weird (actually wrong) to even think about materials at 0K. In classical thermo your heat capacity is zero. In modern physics your atoms' "positions'" are fully determined, therefore their "momentum" is fully undetermined. So 0K is a state that makes zero sense.

[1] I forget the question. I think it was like this: the entropy of glass has a greater slope than the crystal, therefore, if you cool the glass low enough it will achieve a lower entropy than the crystal. How can a glass have lower S than its crystal state?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Of course, current computers are nowhere near capable to try out substantial portion of all 256 bit keys. It requires massive amount of energy and time to perform single bit operation, much larger than kT for room temperature T (several orders of magnitude). Not mentioning costs of trying out the resulting bit sequence for validity as a key. That should be the argument for "256 bit keys are enough".

There isn't any fundamental energy cost imposed by physics here, however. Both because 1) bit flipping can be done in a logically reversible way, just go systematically from 0 to 2^256 - 1 so Landauer's assumptions do not even apply 2) Landauer's idea has been criticized for being vague/badly reasoned. Most weirdly, Landauer assumes that erasure of a bit register in general requires that thermodynamic entropy _k_ ln 2 per bit is acquired by the environment. It seems people are confused and can't distinguish information entropy and thermodynamic entropy here. In real computers, erasure of bit register decreases information entropy by _k_ ln 2 and increases thermodynamic entropy (by HW-specific amount) associated with the register. These are two different kinds of entropies.

In short, real world energy costs are far higher than Landauer's limit due to current tech limitations, and possible energy cost savings in the future aren't hard limited by Landauer's limit at all. Landauer's idea is simply too problematic. Don't rely on it for any argument about real world.

Finally, don't learn physics from computer science guys, even if their name is Bruce Schneier. Just as you wouldn't learn computer science from physics experts.

</comment><comment><USER6> > _" One of the consequences of the second law of thermodynamics, is that it > requires energy to do a certain amount of work."_

No, that is a restatement of the First law of thermodynamics. Second law states that it is impossible to systematically (cyclically) extract heat and turn it completely into equivalent amount of work.

</comment><comment><USER6> > So, we'll run this ideal computer at 2.72548 Kelvin.

The record for lowest temperature is 1e-10 Kelvin and there is no theoretical limit as to how many zeroes can be added. So there is no hard limit, given good enough cooling/thermal isolation, the energy cost can be brought down. In theory, it can be brought down to zero.

<comment><USER7> This is addressed:

> To run a computer cooler than that would require a heat pump, which means > adding additional energy to the system than what is needed for our > computation.

<comment><USER6> That does not address it. It is true that heat has to be removed to maintain the lower temperature. But the rate at which this has to be done depends on heat generation and quality of isolation. If temperature inside is 1e-100 K, energy cost of only bit flipping becomes negligible. Energy cost of refrigeration depends then on how good the isolation is. With better and better isolation, the cost goes down, the only limit is zero.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The problem is I don't need to search the whole key space. Even with very goods encryption algorithms, there are faster attacks. They're not FAST attacks, mind you, so the keys are safe, but they are FASTer.

<comment><USER9> I think most of the time there is some attack on a cipher which is faster than the most obvious brute force attack.

Sometimes the speed-up is a little, sometimes it is a lot.</comment></comment>