Roman Britain in Black and White - <AUTHOR> https://www.the-tls.co.uk/roman-britain-black-white/ <comment><USER2> This whole thing strikes me as sad. The argument could have gone an entirely different way.

Taleb blasts the nature and tone of the argument, concluding "scholarship is dead in the UK,"([https://medium.com/incerto/something-is-broken-in-the-uk- int...](https://medium.com/incerto/something-is-broken-in-the-uk-intellectual- sphere-7efc9a1f154a)) but the irony is that if it's ending, it's ending in part because of behavior such as his.

I actually agree in general with his perspective on the cartoon, but found his behavior unacceptable. The other side of the argument isn't unreasonable, even if you conclude it's maybe not the best side of the argument.

In some ways it doesn't matter, but I'm getting tired of the right setting up this dynamic where they engage in ad hominem bullshit, and then act offended when other side responds. I say this as someone who often identifies with the right--it's alienating and pushes reasonable people away. Rather than apologizing about not being respectful of Professor Beard, he becomes defensive and somehow tries to rationalize it.

Next time Taleb, could you please just take the high road in your behavior? Even if the other side is totally full of shit, and acting inappropriately, you'll look better and everyone will win by being the better one. I even agree with you and you've turned me off of your own damn arguments.

Jeez.

<comment><USER3> > I'm getting tired of the right setting up this dynamic where they engage in > ad hominem bullshit

its not different than the way the left attacks people as: racist, homophobe, mysangist, uneducated, hillbilly, etc.

the last one i find quite interesting, a party that is supposed to stand against stereotypes, labeling, and skin color references uses hillbilly / red neck a lot.

<comment><USER4> Calling someone out for being racist or bigoted in some other should be acceptable, because that behavior is not acceptable. Preventing people from being called out on their bigotry is tolerating intolerance, and we shouldn't have any of that.

I do agree it is not a real rebuttal if the other side has a point unrelated to their bigotry.

<comment><USER5> Well not only that, but it's also like saying that an officer using force should be acceptable. It's true, but it doesn't mean that it's the only way to handle a situation, and often, claims of racism and bigotry are used to end an argument as if it were an argument itself. I'm not saying that "the left always does that", but each side had their share of desperate ad hominem attacks, and racism accusations is one often used by those on the left (though on the right it's used, just either reworded, or subtly redefined).

<comment><USER3> thats exactly what i am saying

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's not an isolated incident. The same show depicted ethnic people in questionable situations.

– Sub-Saharan Celts [http://i.imgur.com/WSHbj36.png](http://i.imgur.com/WSHbj36.png)

– A Sub-Saharan English Nobleman, 1215AD [http://i.imgur.com/Y5WFtXO.png](http://i.imgur.com/Y5WFtXO.png)

– A Sub-Saharan blacksmith, Iron Age Britain [http://i.imgur.com/XptrQDP.png](http://i.imgur.com/XptrQDP.png)

– A North-African Norman priest [http://i.imgur.com/5JHBzMN.png](http://i.imgur.com/5JHBzMN.png)

The criticized video was supposed to be " _An exploration of life in Roman Britain shown through the eyes of a typical family._ " [http://i.imgur.com/tg25juJ.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/tg25juJ.jpg)

<comment><USER7> Christ, this needs to be further up. All this discussion of whether or not the cartoon was politicized becomes moot when they have dark-skinned Celts.

<comment><USER8> Celts are a fabricated identity. The modern representation arose out of trying to have a pan European ancestry and identity in the 19th century.

<comment><USER7> Do you have a source for this? Who exactly were the Romans conquering if not Celtic Britons?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm kind of amazed at how seriously people are taking this.

The guy is the editor for a literal conspiracy theory website that condones the idea that Sandy Hook was staged by the US government. And long list of even more ridiculous and appalling things.

They make their money selling pseudoscientific "wellness" products of the kind that Gwyneth Paltrow sells on Goop.

The main star of Infowars recently admitted it was just an act of entertainment because if he didn't a divorce court would have ruled him a danger to his children based on things he says and does.

Back to the matter at hand, he's literally proposing a conspiracy theory, based on an educational cartoon, for children, about the Roman empire. Just let that soak in.

The BBC are, in this theory, intentionally promoting "mass uncontrolled immigration" to children via animations about the Roman empire. Step 2 ???. Step 3. White Genocide.

It's an embarrassment to us all as a species that this passes for political discussion today.

<comment><USER10> "The guy?" Which guy? What website?

<comment><USER11> The '"alt-right" commenter' referred to in the second paragraph kicked the whole thing off, and was then replied to by Mike Stuchbery here: [https://twitter.com/MikeStuchbery_/status/889846960139751424](https://twitter.com/MikeStuchbery_/status/889846960139751424)

Unfortunately twitter doesn't seem to be presenting the thread of Mike's replies any more, which seems like a failing of the platform.

<comment><USER12> Do you mean these replies?

Al Binnie-Lubbock @alastairis · Jul 26 Replying to @MikeStuchbery_ and @PrisonPlanet I enjoyed this thread apart from the ableism in the first tweet. Not cool.

4

38

Mike Stuchbery Mike Stuchbery @MikeStuchbery_ · Jul 26 I apologize unreservedly. I will do better.

<comment><USER11> No. Mike originally replied in a thread of several messages, each a reply to the previous one. When I first read the thread a few days ago twitter would show you all his replies in one page so you could read through them. The Telegraph seem to have replicated the thread into the article they've written about the incident: [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/07/27/alt-right- comment...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/07/27/alt-right-commentator- gets-schooled-historian-diversity-roman/)

My guess is that as the thread became popular and more people replied to parts of it, twitter favours presenting more of the recent replies and the original thread becomes harder to see.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Mary Beard's proper title would be Prof. Beard of course. Something she extended the courtesy of to him, but apparently he couldn't be bothered to extend the same to her.

The falling back on 'I got more citations than you, so ner' isn't exactly a good look either.

<comment><USER14> Taleb calling people Ms and Mr here was obviously about being firm. As in Agent Smith saying "MISTER Anderson". If anyone wants to suggest that Talib pulled some kind of gender card on her, that's pathetic. It actually strengthens the idea that academia needs to be wary of identity politics creeping in (and also bad manners).

Btw Taleb was a huge fan of Beard. Until a few days ago that is.

<comment><USER13> Nice use of the passive voice there.

In what way am I 'pulling the gender card' exactly?

<comment><USER14> That's what the Ms vs Prof thing was about.

<comment><USER13> It would have been equally sloppy in the circumstances to use "Mr Beard" had Taleb been arguing with a man. When arguing with someone on their academic specialism using an incorrect title looks like a subtle (but deniable! how cute) insult. No gender politics required.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The author, Mary Beard, is a classicist and the UK's top Roman scholar. She's also the author of the critically acclaimed _SPQR_ : [https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/18/books/review-in-spqr-a- hi...](https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/18/books/review-in-spqr-a-history-of- ancient-rome-mary-beard-tackles-myths-and-more.html)

<comment><USER16> For those who haven't read the book, SPQR is an excellent piece of writing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's interesting that she decided to leave out the fact that Taleb's comment on citations was him firing back after she called anti-fragile et. all "pop risk books": [https://medium.com/incerto/something-is-broken-in-the-uk- int...](https://medium.com/incerto/something-is-broken-in-the-uk-intellectual- sphere-7efc9a1f154a)

<comment> ar-jan Also, even if you disregard the "pop risk books" qualification, her argument comes down to "what did you publish on Roman Britain", instead of engaging with Taleb's argument.

<comment><USER18> Taleb is disregarding the entire field of history because it is 'Anecdotal' as opposed to 'Statistical'. Since there are no 'statistics' from the period he is acting like he knows as much as one of top living scholars on Roman history. The written and archaeological record shows that auxiliaries were often stationed far from their home territories, but I guess that was all part of a 2000 year plot to make Britons accept immigrants.

<comment> ar-jan No, all he's saying is that you cannot ignore genetics, and that genetics is more reliable than fragmentary historical records. And that those Roman auxiliaries would have been Mediterranean, not sub-Saharen Africans.

<comment><AUTHOR> > and that genetics is more reliable than fragmentary historical records

Geneticists disagree.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I like the article in The Atlantic about this.

[https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/08/dna- roma...](https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/08/dna- romans/535701/)

As it says, it's mostly people talking past each other.

Taleb is unnecessarily un-collegial though.

</comment><comment><USER19> I'd say that this is roughly on par with depicting Jesus as a white western European, but I don't see any right wingers complaining about that.

<comment><USER20> Jesus often gets depicted to match the local population. In Korea, for example, he looks Asian. The difference is that it's done for religious purposes, whereas an "educational historic video" like those made by BBC are expected to have different motives and standards of objectivity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> It should be clear to anyone who has read this article by Dr. Beard (or her phenomenal book _SPQR_ ) that it isn't really up for debate whether there were Roman soldiers and civilians in Britain who came from the far reaches of the Empire and beyond. Yes, including from Africa. Whether we would have looked at these people and said they were "black" is, as Dr. Beard explains, pretty unanswerable (not to mention a vain attempt to view the ancient world in terms of group identities that are very modern indeed).

Dr. Taleb and others show a massive ignorance of how the studies of history, archaeology, and biology work when they assert that we can just "look in the genes" for an unambiguous record of _every damn person who has ever set foot on the British Isles_. But a misguided desire to hold history to the same evidentiary standards as, say, physics or mathematics - including by physicists and mathematicians - is nothing new.

What's more worrisome is the determination of some to willfully ignore historical evidence that might challenge their worldview.

Look around the Internet - there is a new revisionist history of the Western world that is being pushed, one that holds a shared "white" or "European" identity as paramount. These are the people who came after Dr. Beard as they come after anyone who challenges their views.

These people are undoubtedly far less numerous than they appear; they use bots and multiple accounts to make themselves appear more legitimate. This itself is dangerous, as it may cause bystanders to view these people as more mainstream than they truly are (and it's no secret that people ascribe more credulity to an idea when it seems widely accepted).

This is not going to get better as neural networks improve at writing tweets that sound human.

<comment><USER22> You're making it sound more complex than it is. If Roman Britain was ethnically diverse then what happened to the diversity? It's just not represented in the modern population.

Furthermore, a study is probably incorrect if it can't withstand sanity checking from simple population models based on data we do have from the time (e.g. Roman garrison sizes).

> Look around the Internet - there is a new revisionist history of the Western > world that is being pushed..

The revisionism is actually that Roman Britain was ethnically diverse. To paraphrase the source of this controversy, Paul Joseph Watson: If Roman Britain was diverse then modern day Japan is ethnically diverse.

The "we are all immigrants" narrative is pushed to justify mass immigration and open borders. This might make academics like Beard feel cosmopolitan and P.C. views might draw the attention of the Guardian and boost her book sales, but tens of millions of people are suffering from the consequences of these policies and feel alienated by an elite that they feel is working against their will and best interests.

> These people are undoubtedly far less numerous than they appear; they use > bots

Paul Joseph Watson has over 1m subscribers on YouTube and his videos have hundreds of thousands of views. This places his daily circulation higher than most newspapers. While only a small percentage of those people may agree with his views enough to push them online, that is still a lot of people.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to reading "Skin in the Game" and wonder whether this story will become another anecdote of Taleb's "Intellectual Yet Idiot" social class.

<comment><USER23> > If Roman Britain was diverse then modern day Japan is ethnically diverse.

I don't understand the argument this is making. Could you clarify?

<comment><USER24> East Asian countries, Japan included, see ethnic and cultural homogeneity as a good and desirable thing (and are quite openly racist and xenophobic as a result).

OP is making a joke -- if you want to call Romain Britain ethnically diverse, you might as well call Japan ethnically diverse. The term becomes meaningless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Go to Google Images, type in "European people history" and note the first ten results. That is what this is about.

<comment><USER26> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bomb](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bomb)

<comment><USER27> In other cases where Google's algorithms have come up with something embarassing, they have corrected it. It is revealing that they have chosen not to do so in this case.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Romans were in Britain 2000 years ago. In 2000 years, with negative environmental selection - maybe the gene for black skin was turned off. Everyone is focusing on skin color, what about curly hair or ...

This is all silly any how.

</comment><comment><USER29> Prof. Beard is hiding behind the bad behavior of her opponents, there is no cogent answer to the question..

where are the genes ?

<comment><USER13> In her article, she points out that the same study failed to find Norman genes either. So I might ask similar questions about them: where are the Norman genes? Is the Norman invasion of Britain a hoax perpetrated by the alt-right of yore?

etc. etc.

(In other words: it's a legitimate question, but the way Taleb is using it as some kind of gotcha! query suggests that he isn't really asking it in good faith.)

<comment><USER30> > it's a legitimate question, but the way Taleb is using it as some kind of > gotcha! query suggests that he isn't really asking it in good faith.

Or, more generously (as to Taleb's character) that the implicit premise (if there were ethnic diversity, we would have robust genetic evidence) justifying his argument is itself not based on a well-informed understanding of the context.

<comment><USER31> It really isn't. It's very hard to identify genetic influences that go that far back, especially given the subsequent major migrations to the British Isles. You would be hard-pressed to demonstrate that Romans ever lived there if all you had were the genes of modern Britons.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


UCSD Nobel Laureate Roger Tsien Dies - <AUTHOR> http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/2016/aug/31/roger-tsien-dies/ <comment><USER2> I was fortunate to see him talk at UCSD recognizing his Nobel prize in 2008. Standing room only, isles filled with folks sitting down likely against fire code. Despite the vast number of people there to see him talk, he was astoundingly humble and basically described how everyone else did the hard work and deserved his award; he was just merely connecting the dots. A great individual who will clearly be missed.

</comment><comment><USER3> He was my "academic grandfather" (I did research in Amy Palmer's lab at CU Boulder). The number of applications of the fluorescent proteins he helped develop into research tools is staggering. The article mentions their use in cancer and HIV research, but those are just a couple of applications -- at CU we used fluorescent proteins in combination with the phenomenon of fluorescence resonance energy transfer ([https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Förster_resonance_energy_tra...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Förster_resonance_energy_transfer)) to measure metal ion concentrations in various parts of the cell (my work was specifically calcium ions in mitochondria) in real-time (we were looking at amyloid precursor proteins to investigate Alzheimer's disease). It's hard to overstate how useful this research tool is. Roger will be missed.

</comment><comment><USER4> Roger's creative use of fluorescent protiens is a significant foundation of modern molecular biology. A huge number of therapies, technologies and underatanding of biology come not just from our ability to 'see' the biological tools themselves, but from the idea that a novel biological tool can be made from conferring the properties of one protien with the properies of another. Unfortunate to lose him.</comment>


The "Newspaper" Industry Will Die, The News Industry Will Not - <AUTHOR> http://blog.newscred.com/?p=129

<comment><USER2> I don't know why this bugs me but have you considered updating the newscred blog's permalink structure so that the urls are indicative of the date and or post title and not just an entry number?

<comment><USER2> wp admin panel --> settings --> permalinks

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks for the tip. its always bugged me too, but I just didnt spend time looking for the option. i can change it now, but do you know what happens to all my URLS that have been bookmarked, saved, indexed by Google etc. Does the change only affect new ones going forward?

Thanks for the heads up!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Gilbert and Sullivan have a line: If everybody's somebody, then noone's anybody. I think this applies to online journelism. There are so many news outlets, blogs, etc. to be found online (such as huffingtonpost, politicalwire, thedrudgereport, to name a few for politics). This is so saturated that little distiungishes these, unless they are tied to "big names". So, for example, I always go to cnn.com if there is a big news story. It is about TRUST. I know I will never be misled by CNN. Good, honest, journelism that cares about "TRUTH, JUSTICE, and THE AMERICAN WAY" to coin a phrase, like "The Daily Planet" will never be outdated. So today we have a proliferation of online blogs and so on that more or less cancel each other out. When it comes to "hard news", news when it matters, such as the site I went to at around 8:45 AM EST on Sept. 11, 2001, that was CNN.com, not "thedrudgereport". True, trustworthy news organizations will have to have an online presence, streams to mobile phones, etc. but gadfly news blogs will never replace "The Daily Planet". Or won't until Lex Luther becomes CEO of google, that is, lol!</comment>


Great hand-drawn map of social network world - <AUTHOR> http://xkcd.com/c256.html <comment><USER2> I don't think Second Life is anywhere near as big as Warcraft, and perhaps not even as big as some other mmogs. It just got tons of press and positive exposure. The game seemed to be unusually interesting to journalists, politicians, and other high-profile people.

The most recent estimates I've found put regular users somewhere around 310,000, which does mean it's growing pretty fast but it's also not even in the same league as WoW which had 8.5 million during the same timeframe. In other words to compare the 6 million figure given by Second Life, it might make more sense to compare box sales.

[http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=199203108&subSection;=All+Stories](http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=199203108&subSection=All+Stories)

<http://mmorpgchart.com/>

</comment><comment><USER3> Didn't anyone notice the significance of country shape and social network? Take a look.

Facebook is clearly Italy. Myspace vaguely China. WoW and Second Life definetely Australia, New Zealand. The Icy North is a very widened North America, (AOL Texas), (Yahoo Games, Florida) Digg is DEFINITELY a dog with Fark as its head.

<comment><USER4> The Icy North is undisputably Russia. It even has the Kamchatka peninsula.

<comment><USER5> The whole map looks like an oddly distorted eastern hemisphere:

The 'Myspace Bands' occupy approximately the position of Korea, and Hainan is represented by 'interactive myspace memes' (I think that's what it says)

the 'angsty blog sites' occupy Thailand/Cambodia/Vietnam/Laos,

various of the archipelagos look like federated micronesia, the Philippines, and Indonesia,

Japan is in there somewhere skewed and split (secondlife/wow + broadcaster/flickr/last)

Compare: <http://worldatlas.com/webimage/countrys/as.htm></comment></comment></comment>


Google update - <AUTHOR>

is hacker a reckognized language?
 google has added it to thier list on search engine, but its not in the hacker's dictionary. <comment><USER2> <http://www.google.com/intl/xx-hacker/>

</comment><comment><USER3> can you point to the 'list' you refer too?</comment>


Left wing or right wing? It's written in the brain - <AUTHOR> http://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/news-articles/1012/10122301

<comment><USER2> _Using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanners, Professor Rees and his colleague Dr Ryota Kanai at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, UCL (University College London) analysed the brain structures of ninety young adults who had reported their political attitudes on a scale from 'very conservative' to 'very liberal'. They found a strong correlation between an individual's view and the structure of the brain, particularly two regions._

Maybe someone can correct me but this also looks like "we MRIed a small number of students and then compared so many brain structures that we'd be bound to find some sort of correlation with their dubious self reported political leanings."

<comment><USER3> Agreed. One wouldn't think of analysing, say, _Firefox_ by photographing inside a computer.

That, coupled with the depressing tendency in politics to think that people who disagree must be mentally ill somehow, makes the whole business shudder- worthy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The projection of as complex and multidimensional a thing as political views onto a one-dimensional left-right or liberal-conservative axis is necessarily an oversimplification. For example, would libertarians be classified as conservatives using this analysis because of their free-market emphasis? Would big-government neocons be classified as liberals because of their fondness for big government? If that is the case, I expect that a lot of "lefties" and "liberals" would demonstrate a "right-wing" or "conservative" mindset (and vice versa) if they participated in a similar examination.

<comment><USER5> It's simply that the vast majority of people fit in that left-right axis.

<comment><USER6> I really don't think them majority of people fit on a simple line. It's more that that is presented as the only option.

<comment><USER5> If we plot a Nolan chart, people would be heavily clustered along the leftwing-rightwing diagonal, with some variance, of course, but a strong trend nonetheless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What worries me most about this is that a prominent UK university is using the American term "Liberal" to mean left wing.

Outside the US "liberal" generally means what we call classically liberal in the US or borderline libertarian.

That liberal means left wing in the US is extremely confusing for non Americans.

<comment><USER7> I've noticed that in the US, the term "liberal" carries a high level of baggage, and seems to elicit reactions from all sides. I suppose that this could be due to the influence of right-of-centre talk radio, where the term seems to be particularly demonized.

Here in Canada, "Liberal" is a major political party, as is "Conservative". With that said, we have several other parties in Parliament, as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> As noted (towards the end of the article): correlation does not imply causation.

</comment><comment><USER5> Strictly speaking, the brain is the physical manifestation of the mind, so aspects of the mind would be bound to be related to physical phenomena in the brain. What's uncertain is if this study actually found a physical thing, or random data.

</comment><comment><USER9> As someone who grew up hyper conservative and has been becoming liberalized ever since - I can't help thinking this study is off. Did my brain structure really change, or was I a lib-brainer the whole time?

</comment><comment><USER10> And here I thought we just voted how our parents do.

</comment><comment><USER11> Breaking news: mental cognitive models are reflected in brain structure. Film at eleven.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you decide whether or not to try a startup? - <AUTHOR> I've been agonizing over the past few weeks & months whether or not to "try a startup" -- and by that I mean executing on an idea, beginning to write the code, actually trying to solidify these ideas and traversing whatever the next steps I have to figure out are.
I'm 26, have a good job as a SWE, relatively stable life all things considered.. and yet I feel like over the past year I've been going through a sort of "quaterlife crisis" where I feel like I could be doing more with my life, and challenging myself in different ways.
It's probably due to the fact that I've been browsing HN and learning about startups very heavily since coming across this forum but I feel like that "challenge" is executing on this idea and founding a startup -- it's constantly on my mind but I've been hesitating to throw myself all in for reasons which I haven't really come to terms with.
It genuinely feels like there is this itch that I just need to scratch. I understand that starting a company is hard, I've read many times that a start up is the hardest thing the founder(s) have ever had to do, for some reason that is even more appealing to me because as mentioned at this age I'm left wondering what else is there in life and feel myself looking for a great challenge.
TL;DR: To founders and co-founders, what factors led to you ultimately starting a start up, how did you asses your feelings and come to the decision to just "do it"? <comment><USER2> Sell something. If someone wants to buy from you, then solve the problem of delivering that thing they want to buy.

Don't solve a problem until you have a paying customer to solve it for.</comment>


Ask HN: Why can't I disclose how many options my last start up paid me? - <AUTHOR> The company I just left raised $71 million at $500 million valuation. This is public data on crunchbase.
But the company lawyer says the amount of options I received and their worth is proprietary information and cannot be shared. I don't understand how this can harm the company. Can someone please enlighten me?
I should be able to share how much or how little I got paid. <comment><USER2> _" I don't understand how this can harm the company."_

Maybe some employees got more shares than other employees with similar job titles, and the company doesn't want the lower-compensated employees to find out (since it may cause them to quit or ask for more money).

Also, employees of your company may have gotten less equity than employees of other, similar companies, and that information may be used by these other companies to recruit employees of your company.

The interests of the company in keeping this information private may be at odds with the interests of the company's employees.

<comment><AUTHOR> But companies cannot forbid employees from sharing how much salary we make. I don't understand how options are any different. I should go find an employment lawyer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I think the reason for this is the same as the reason why companies do not disclose salary information of their employees.

<comment><AUTHOR> But legally we are allowed to disclose salary information.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is there something about this in your contract?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not allowed to disclose proprietary information. But I don't understand why this is sensitive. My question is why companies try to protect this in the first place.

<comment><USER4> Is "proprietary" defined in your contract?</comment></comment></comment>


How Bicameralism Helps Explain Westworld - <AUTHOR> http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2016/12/how-bicameralism-helps-explain-westworld.html <comment><USER2> > consciousness begins when a being (be it human or host) stops believing that > the voice inside their own head is a message from the gods

Yep, let's define consciousness based on "gods" and "voices".

> People didn't develop consciousness until about 3,000 years ago.

Consciousness is too flexible a word, it means whatever people want it to mean. It has moral, religious, philosophical, neurological and even physical definitions. It is almost as devoid of exact meaning as the concept of God. It includes the waking and dream state, experience, mental states, emotions, motor control and consciousness of consciousness. There is no commonly agreed upon definition of it in neurology, psychology or related fields - not only we can't explain it, we can't even define it. Let's not play ping-pong with inexact concepts.

Instead of consciousness, we should use the reinforcement learning paradigm - an agent, perceiving its state in the environment, selects an action as to maximize its reward. From time to time, a reward/cost signal might come, and that is used to learn better behavior rules.

That's it, all concrete and clear, no need for concepts that can't be defined. We can explain human, animal and artificial agents with the same paradigm. The three aspects of RL: perception, action selection and behavior learning (credit assignment) are all expressible in terms of neural networks and can be studied in biological and artificial systems.

Watching AI progress so much in the last 4 years, inventing mechanisms for perception, attention, memory, behavior - I have come to realize that consciousness really isn't magic, there's no ghost inside, no universal field, no special quantum entanglement. It's not inexplicable, "what it's like to be a bat?", "does the Chinese room have real understanding?", or "qualia is irreducible" and a "hard problem" \- these are all armchair experiments.

The problem seems hard because brains are extremely complex in their minutia and there is no intuitional pump to help us make the leap. Yet brains are not really so complex in their general makeup, because the code for the brain + body can be stored in 800 Mb of DNA, of which probably a very small portion actually encodes the brain architecture.

<comment><USER3> I've started to think that a lot of what we are isn't present inside our heads although it informs them. Things like books, culture which are all intergenerational memories. We're constantly immersed from the earliest developmental stage in what dawkins called our extended phenotype. Of all the animals humans have the most extraordinary extended phenotype, particularly our information infrastructure.

If we take the much vaunted abilities of humans over computers, such as creativity, and we had a human being who was brought up without any contact without any exterior sources of information such as reading materials or other humans to play with then I doubt their 'human ability' would amount to much. It'd be arguable whether they were a true human. They'd seem developmentally disabled to other humans though biologically they could be in rude health.

When you look to monkeys and other animals like ravens you find they test better than we do on a range of cognitive tasks and yet we are us and they are them. I believe there really is something different about us but that may exist at the collective level instead of the individual.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Who's Got a Bullet-Proof Web Dev Consulting Contract? (USA) - <AUTHOR> Care to share it? It should cover "agile" model of Time & Materials and have some terms for a 'retainer' or deposit.<p>thanks! <comment><USER2> Many lawyers will have this and be happy to give it to you for a fairly reasonable fee. Mine charged me $150 (30 min of work).

Asking people to share something they paid for is irritating. Trying to use someone else's legal work, which may have been customized for their business or their state, is risky.

And, finally, though I'm not a lawyer, it's my understanding that legal contracts can be copyrighted. Sharing them might be copyright infringement, I suppose. I'm not sure, though.

<comment><AUTHOR> [http://Docracy.com](http://Docracy.com) seems to solve this. Sharing is caring.</comment></comment>


GNU Hyperbole 6.0.1 for Emacs 24.4 to 25 is released - <AUTHOR> http://savannah.gnu.org/forum/forum.php?forum_id=8629 <comment><USER2> yes but what is gnu hyperbole ? what does it do? screen? screencast? videos ? samples ?

<comment><USER3> The GNU Hyperbole home page has been updated to include screenshots, some video links, and more detail. V6.0.2 with some great new features is also out.

See the home page here: [https://www.gnu.org/software/hyperbole](https://www.gnu.org/software/hyperbole).

See the 6.0.2 what's new announcement here: [https://savannah.gnu.org/forum/forum.php?forum_id=8644](https://savannah.gnu.org/forum/forum.php?forum_id=8644).</comment></comment>


Programming in the 1960s - <AUTHOR> https://www.slideshare.net/lenbass/programming-in-the-1960s <comment><USER2> I worked for Unimation, the company that invented Robots. The 'research lab' consisted of myself and Ming. We were, I believe, the first people to ever connect a computer to a robot. It was a PDP-1103 ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDP-11#/media/File:DEC_LSI11-2...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDP-11#/media/File:DEC_LSI11-23.jpg)) connected to a 6-axis industrial robot ([http://www.robothalloffame.org/inductees/03inductees/unimate...](http://www.robothalloffame.org/inductees/03inductees/unimate.html)).

We built a board to talk to the robot by replacing the robot plated-wire memory ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plated_wire_memory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plated_wire_memory)) with our wires. We ran into two problems. The first was a hardware bug. We had a 'ground loop' ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_loop_(electricity)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_loop_\(electricity\))) when we connected the 5-volt DC computer buss to the 440-volt AC robot. The computer was unhappy.

The programming bug was more subtle. Ming's computer card required a 'trash read' (read-and-ignore-results) in order to initialize the card. So the first read of the robot position required 2 reads, the first result was ignored and the second result was used. Normally I wrote machine language using paper tape. But that week I got a BLISS language compiler ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLISS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLISS)) from a programmer at CMU. It was a super-optimizing compiler. The machine language program worked. The BLISS language program did not. Ming finally convinced me that the BLISS program, despite what the source code said, was NOT issuing an inital double-read (using an oscilloscope on the data lines). The bug was that the BLISS compiler figured out that the first read results were never used and that it could optimize the first read away, no matter what the source code said. Props to the BLISS guys.

<comment><USER3> What drove the robot before that, just a bunch of relays? Or manual input?

<comment><USER2> The robot had a 'teach mode'. You used a hand controller to move the robot to a position, pressed a 'teach' button, and then moved to a new position. The values from the 6 position encoders were written to the next memory location when the teach button was pressed. To run the robot you just step the memory and move to the recorded position.

Ford had a long (multi-mile) production line. It took weeks to set up a new line, part of which was taken up by robot programming. You had to move the product line a few millimeters, teach a new robot position, and repeat. Our research problem was to teach the robot standing still and then, given information from an encoder on the production line, compute the path that the robot should take to hit the moving position. That would reduce the robot programming time to a few minutes.

Really a simple problem. A 7-degree of freedom, non-collision robot path in real time based on static data, programmed on a micro with 8 kilobytes of memory, including space for initial data.

Bill Perzley was the 'head of research', on loan from Condec Corp. He was a genius and a super-intense cigar smoker (the harder he thought, the more smoke was generated). He worked out the exact memory data BY HAND to make sure I got the right answers by program.

Bill and I flew out to SRI International to learn how to compute robot joint positions from (Richard) Lou Paul. On the flight back to Connecticut we sat in the back of the plane near the restroom studying our notes. Bill was puffing on his cigars. By the end of the flight you couldn't see all the way up the cabin. Those were the days.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> When I worked at IBM Research we got access to the latest hardware (IBM RS/6000) and the latest software (AIX), written by guys down the hall. This machine was "blazingly fast" for its time and had a useful feature for us. You could add a new disk drive and dynamically extend your filesystem over all the available drives. We grew to a 3-drive system which contained all our master source code.

One day a hard disk failed. The system couldn't reboot because the operating system needed "quorum" (all the drives) and, in particular, it needed part of the operating system on the failed drive. So we lost ALL of our source code. You didn't keep sources on your own drive because you used SCCS to check them in/out and you didn't have enough space for very much.

All eyes turn to me. Sigh. The game was to hook up a disk drive to another machine, open the drive for raw read, and read the drive sector by sector. The theory was that the failed drive could still be read, just not certain sectors. Anyone who tries this will discover that there are a LOT of details about drives they never knew, such as "overflow sectors" and file-system layouts and log-file formats. Plus there are multiple copies of code pieces because the new version is allocated but the old version is in "free space" but not reclaimed. All in all, it was a long time recovering the source tree.

Raw read works. You knew about that, right? You can handle head/track/sector maps on your SSD, right? You know your B-trees cold and your log-structured filesystems, right? Forget the Order of an algorithm. Can you recover vital company assets from a failed hard drive?

Fun times. Don't you miss them?

<comment><USER4> Miss those times?

Nothing specific to those times about having a terrible backup strategy..

Magtape existed from the very early days and definitely was around during this fiasco.. similarly people still don't run backups when they should..

which reminds me, I need to kick off an offsite backup :)

<comment><USER2> So, backup to tape... Story there. I did a backup system on the mainframe to tapes. The first issue was that the machine room operators would 'recycle' the tapes they dismounted. So while we thought we had backups, the operators just assumed they were 'scratch tapes'. Second, after having solved that problem we found that a tape was giving us hundreds of thousands of duplicate records. When I visited the actual tape drive I could see that the drive found a bad spot on the tape, did 'auto-recovery' to reread the tape, rinse and repeat. The end result was a physically transparent section of tape. I used to carry it around in my wallet to explain that even backups fail.

<comment><USER5> Was that before tape catalogs and volume labels? That was well before my time.

In the OS/MVS environment I was in in the 80s, the job's JCL would identify a data set and a relative version number (+1 when creating, 0 for current, -1 for its predecessor, etc.), then the tape catalog would look up the volume number, which was written on the tape case itself (and _usually_ correct). If the operator mounted a wrong tape (either wrong dataset or version), the tape would be kicked off and you'd be prompted again ("you dummy humans can't even handle _unpacked decimal?!_ ")

It was typical that backup copies be made via an additional DD pass.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> I was a mainframe systems programmer. Every so often the system would crash. Step 1 was to visit the machine room and look for the toolbox. The on-site IBM maintenance guy would randomly power down and open cabinets to perform "preventative maintenance" so the system wouldn't crash due to hardware failures. Occassionaly he powered down our disk drives.

One of the standard hardware debug methods was to 'swap cards' with a working unit. We had many controllers for our terminals (connected by coax to the office desks). When one failed they would swap cards with another controller until the first started working. Then they would order a new replacement for the failed card.

As a result we had a 3-day outage. Each controller was purchased at a different time so the controllers had cards with different versions (different 'yellow wires' for patches). Eventually a bad combination of controller cards caused the channel (an IBM closet-sized box) to be confused. That caused the CPU to be confused (since it needed channel 0). So the CPU refused to boot, which IBM maintenance tried to debug by changing cards in the CPU. Sigh. We had to bring in one of the mainframe designers to debug it.

<comment><USER6> I was watching the VAX-11/780 at college get repaired by the DEC tech. She told me of her most difficult case: a randomly crashing 11/780\. They checked everything (I believe she said that they eventually replaced every card!) and finally found a little piece of metallic gum wrapper -- it'd blow around in the fans and eventually bridge two pins, crashing the machine. They'd shut it down to look at it, it would settle to the wires above the fans, and wait its next chance.

Glad I work in software :-)

<comment><USER7> I worked my way through college by wirewrapping prototype boards. The last step was to get a magnifying glass and carefully inspect the board, pin by pin, looking for any stray tiny bits of wire, or any wire hairs sticking out. For soldered boards, I'd examine for any tiny solder bridges.

Doing that would save a ton of debugging time :-)

Since wirewrapping is a long obsolete technology, here's what the boards looked like:

[https://microship.com/wp- content/uploads/1974/07/wirewrap.jp...](https://microship.com/wp- content/uploads/1974/07/wirewrap.jpg)

<comment><USER8> Wirewrapping is still done, it's pretty common for copper telephone lines and T1 circuits at the central office.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> My first industrial programming job was at Unimation.

Grab the edge of the table. Line up your wrist and your forearm. You'll discover that you can move your wrist/forearm combination without moving your hand. That is, there are multiple possible solutions that will place your hand in that position.

The Unimate 2-arm robot had that problem. When the wrist/forearm aligned, the wrist violently twisted one way while the forearm violently twisted the other way yet the hand never moved. Nobody knew why but it was clearly "the computer's fault".

I was given the paper tape that ran the robot (binary code for a Data-General Nova computer). I asked for the 'source code' but they had the program written by contractors who had gone out of business and they never asked for the source code. It turned out that the program was trying to compute tan(0/0) when both the wrist and forearm encoders read 0. All I had to do was rewrite the trig routines (in fixed point/real time code) to avoid the issue. In binary. Using a pin-punch to modify the paper tape (a block of metal with 8 holes and a round metal pin that fit through a hole to punch the tape, yaknow... like you used in your CS courses) by finding a JMP instruction I could mangle properly to jump to the new subroutine address, compute the result, and jump back.

See what you're missing?

</comment><comment><USER2> Unimation had the first 2-arm robot, a research project for Ford. I was in charge of programming the Nova (Data-General) computer (by toggle swithes first, and then by paper tape).

We were assembling a transmission control unit. It changed gears based on rotation speed by sliding a calibrated spool valve against a spring. The spool valve was a TIGHT fIt. It controlled oil flow to shift the transmission. You couldn't insert it by hand without it jamming. The robot was so precise it could insert it easily.

The robot was made of aluminum and had to be run until it reached operating temperature because otherwise the joint lengths were not right. Everything had to be perfect.

Assembling involved picking up the control unit, placing a small cover, driving two screws, turning the controller over, inserting a spring, inserting the spool valve, placing a second cover, inserting two screws, and put the finished assembly away. Repeat.

We made hundreds of these. The robot was FAST. REALLY FAST. In a fit of misplaced confidence we invited Ford senior executives to a demo (I HATE THAT WORD). They had invested a LOT of money so I guess they should see what they bought.

On the day of the demo, during warmup, the robot managed to mangle its fingers on a fixture. Our machinist made a new set from raw materials while we smiled and chatted with the Ford executives and warmed up the machine.

Demo time. We lined up near the robot, with the Unimation chief engineer and the project engineer, and the 3 Ford senior execs in front, Ming and I behind and out of the way.

Push the button.... The robot picks up the control unit, places the small cover, throws the screws at the Ford people, turns the controller over, throws the spring at the Ford people, picks up the spool valve (a solid steel piece) and... We hit emergency stop (the big red button). I nearly died trying to keep from laughing watching Ford execs dodging flying parts.

We recalibrated the robot and re-ran the demo, which worked fine.

</comment><comment><USER2> An old programming meme is the "Halt-and-Catch-Fire" bug. It turns out that this is a real bug.

The X11 system used to require knowledge of monitor characteristics in order to install it. So you had to know things about the clock rates, flyback time, etc. to use a monitor. There were many X11 threads about finding the settings for a new monitor since the manufacturers were not very forthcoming with them.

A bad setting for these monitor parameters would cause the monitor to overheat and potentially catch fire.

On another thread, the Pentium processor had the 'FOOF' bug ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_F00F_bug](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_F00F_bug)). A user-level, non-priv instruction 'F00F' (in hex) would cause the processor to halt. It was normal to send someone an executable that contained that instruction just to force them to reboot their system.

So some dimwit (umm, me?) decided that deliberately setting the X11 params incorrectly followed by F00F would essentially cause the system to "Halt-and- Catch-Fire". Fortunately we unplugged the monitor before it got too hot.

<comment><USER9> > The X11 system used to require knowledge of monitor characteristics in order > to install it. So you had to know things about the clock rates, flyback > time, etc. to use a monitor. There were many X11 threads about finding the > settings for a new monitor since the manufacturers were not very forthcoming > with them.

Oh boy, I remember those days playing around with xfconfig and hoping for the best.

When I got Slackware 2.0, my card was a Trident that could only do 640x480 by default, anything higher required playing with that configuration.

<comment><USER10> I remember an early Linux from around 1999, had to dig around xfconfig as well. The book I used as guide had scary all uppercase letters mentioning be extra careful.

And getting sound and modem working took me several days. Especially the WinModem caused troubles, as basically major parts of the modem functionality sat in the Windows modem driver, so getting it to work on Linux was not funny - but I got it working.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> Out-of-position welding occurs when you have a seam between two pieces of metal and the seam is not horizontal. Companies would spend a lot of money to build fixtures to rotate their equipment in mid-air so seams could be flat and they did not require Master Welders but could use lesser-priced regular welders. Some industries, such as making super-tankers, cannot do this and have to employ Master Welders.

I was hired because I did machine vision in grad school (using punched card images because the the school did not own a camera). My job was to use the camera to optimize the 'puddle' of molten steel as it melted so the seam was precise. But some bright spot figured out that we could use current-feedback from the arc instead (so we never bought a camera).

We created a robot that you could just guide along a seam to be welded, press a button, and it would weld the seam. It was light-weight and could be clamped anywhere so it was extremely portable and perfect for things like ship- building.

Everything ran off my PDP-11/40 computer which we loaded using paper tape off a teletype machine. We shipped the robot, computer, and teletype to Detroit for the demo. Just for precaution because something might go wrong I used mylar tape instead of paper tape. We get to Detroit the night before. The investors would be in a big hall next to the demo room where we had the equipment. Joe Engelberger ([https://www.robotics.org/joseph- engelberger/about.cfm](https://www.robotics.org/joseph-engelberger/about.cfm)) was to give them a big speech and then bring them in for a demo.

The truck arrived that night. We started unpacking. The robot was fine. The PDP-11/40 had all of its circuit boards in a heap at the bottom of the box. The teletype had a big V dent in the keyboard (up to the Y-row of keys) because the fork-lift smashed it. So we reset the PDP-11 boards and rewired the teletype so we could start/stop the paper tape reader and give commands by switch without using the keyboard. Then we tried to load the program but it wouldn't work. It turned out that the memory-address chip on the PDP-11 memory board was cracked. So we ran out to Radio Shack as soon as it opened in the morning, bought a replacement chip, a soldering/desoldering gun, and some solder. We replaced the chip while someone stood at the back of the lecture hall signalling Joe to "keep talking". Finally we loaded the paper tape and it worked. Oh, the joys of programming.

</comment><comment><USER11> Always entertaining to read about these stories.

The elevator shaft issue with the bigger computer was fun. We once rented some co-located space in a data center that had a small door and 19" servers couldn't pass without inclining them (which got tiring and stressful after a few servers, specially if we heard some loose component moving in the chassis). Nothing compared to having to modify the building for a different computer!

Wikipedia has a great page about this era: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_computing_1950–79](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_computing_1950–79)

</comment><comment> 52-6F-62 My grandmother worked in the oil industry around that time. I think she was at Gulf in the 60's / 70's before moving on to Shell and retiring in the later 80's.

When I was too young and unknowing she would lecture me about her work in Fortran and other languages in her systems analysis work. Unfortunately she lost her mind and passed away before I had the chance to question her in my own better state about her work.

</comment><comment><USER12> I think slide 21, "Me ~1980" is dated a couple of years too early. VT220's were introduced in 1983. Doesn't matter, that's what it looked like. That was my desk too. Although I had an overhead bin.

Chasing commas, in amber, at 9600 baud, 8-bit, no parity, one stop bit.

<comment><USER2> Which reminds me... When I moved from front panel switches to hooking up a teletype I ran into a problem. The teletype was a current-loop device ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_current_loop_interface](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_current_loop_interface)) and the computer used voltage. I took the computer apart (a Data-General Nova), looked at the interface circuit for a while, and realized I could get current-loop if I made some minor hardware mods involving cutting some circuit traces. Fresh out of school on my first job it was kind of nerve-stretching to mangle a very expensive computer board (DG liked a single giant motherboard). Nevertheless, I persisted. And it worked. Whew.

Surely CS grads today learn electronics, right?

<comment><USER13> "The only person more dangerous than an electronic engineer with root privileges is a programmer with a soldering iron."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> One of my early jobs in the late 60s/early 70s was with a small government group providing online data processing services to various local hospitals. The system ran on two CDC computers, a 1700[1] and a System 17. These were originally intended for things like process control, but this group had added a home-grown multiuser timeshare system on top, then an online pathology application system on top of that!

My first experience in this group was watching them debug a problem. They had an old FORTRAN listing spread out over a table-sized (10Mb!) disk drive unit. The bug was in 5 lines of code, but it just didn't make any sense - it was as if one line was simply not being executed.

Eventually one of the guys went over to the command console and looked at the object code on disk. "Hey, that 'IF' statement isn't in the object code!". More head scratching ensued, until someone looked more carefully at the grubby thumbprint at the start of that line on the dirty old listing.

Under that grubby thumbprint was ...

[can anyone quess?]

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDC_1700](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDC_1700)

<comment><USER15> A stray character in the comment field (cols 1--7)?

Tell us!

<comment><USER14> A 'C' in column 1 - FORTRAN's comment indicator! So the statement was there, but commented-out. The 'C' was exactly under the thumbprint at the start of that line on the dirty old listing. No-one had thought what might be under that thumbprint :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Undergraduate mid 1970s (c.f. slide 3 in OA): "Coffee batch". Put your cards in with a job card. Go and have coffee. Come back and pick up the output (Algol 68 so usually a mistake or two).

Postgrad early 1980s: Card punch on mainframe. I recollect some dumb terminals and some access to minicomputers. Supervisor bought an Apple II and a floppy disk drive so things got saner later on.

Happy days.

<comment><USER17> I remember in the late 70's going into our terminal room and meeting one of our engineers who was checking on the progress of her job she was running on an ICL mainframe down at AWRE and she sighed and said "48 jobs in the queue" presumably it run the next day

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> It was 1981, but this technology got me my first date. Community College Fortran (77) class, punched (IBM 029 keypunch) cards fed to a 360 emulator running on a Burroughs 6800. Had to hand the cards in at a window, wait anywhere from hours to the next day for a green bar printout usually laden with errors. Lots of time spent desk-checking, going over cards. Because of the setup and the time involved, the keypunch/window room was a sort of social center. After some initial struggles, I sort of got the hang of things, to the point where people would ask for help. I didn't think anything of offering the help. One day a girl said 'Let me buy you lunch, as thanks.' She had other plans romance-wise, but we were friends for years, and it was the first time I even had an inkling that being a geek didn't have to mean a life alone.

</comment><comment><USER5> "They had an IBM 360/44... what we would now call a RISC machine"

Wow, I wasn't even aware of that... I thought the instruction sets of the 360 series were all compatible.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System/360_Model_44](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System/360_Model_44)

</comment><comment><USER19> I learned how to program in 1968. My high school in Scottsdale, Arizona had a computer class. I didn't know about the class and didn't enroll in it, but I saw the Teletype in the corner of the math classroom and asked about it, and they let me use it after school.

Dialup computer time was expensive; I think the school paid $30/hour - in 1968 dollars! So you couldn't just stay online and type in your program interactively. You would punch your entire program onto a paper tape and then feed the tape back through to print it out locally so you could check it. Then you'd dial up, feed the tape through again, wait for the results to be printed, and hang up.

This video gives a pretty good idea of the Teletype sounded like. Listen to it with headphones or speakers turned up:

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

Yes, it hummed like that the entire time it was turned on, and the keyboard and print mechanism were both _loud_. At a later job I had, you could tell when the mainframe went down because you could hear people up and down the hall bashing on their keyboards in frustration.

A bell rang somewhere around column 72 (you can hear it in the video), and if you got to column 80 the print head would just start typing over the same spot over and over again.

At the end of each line you pressed three keys to punch these characters onto your tape: Carriage Return, Line Feed, and Rubout. Carriage Return moved the print head to the first column, Line Feed advanced the paper, and Rubout was a character that was ignored by the print mechanism and by the computer you dialed up to. This extra character gave the print head and paper feed some time to catch up when you ran the tape through.

Rubout was also how you corrected errors. Being character code 0x7F, it punched out all the holes in one row of the paper tape. Whatever other character was there before, it was now a Rubout. So you would hit Backspace to literally move the paper tape and print head backwards. Then Rubout to punch away the error, and start typing again. Of course you had a mess on the paper at this point (both your old and new characters printed at the same spot), but the tape would be OK.

The next summer I got a job at the timesharing company the school used, and it was an amazing experience to type in a command and get a response back from the computer within a few seconds, without having to worry about the cost of being online.

My official job title that summer was "Night Operator". That way they only had to pay me $2/hour. But it was OK, their timesharing service shut down at night and I got to do whatever I wanted with the SDS Sigma 5. I found the Algol 60 Report and the the assembly language manual and went from there.

It was my first personal computer!

</comment><comment><USER20> so ibm360 are the roman gauge of elevators ?

<comment><USER21> Maybe the other way 'round: I've heard that IBM designed their equipment to fit in standard elevators (whatever that may have been).</comment></comment>


Why no central repository for data used by social networks, Web mail, IM? - <AUTHOR> http://www.thestandard.com/news/2008/04/03/syncing-our-online-lives

<comment><USER2> The potential privacy issues could be a bit sticky here.</comment>


Ask HN: How to "soft" launch a public ledger idea? - <AUTHOR> I've been working on a public ledger idea. Its very unique. In a not so complete nutshell it helps charities gain public momentum though a special mining process.
I am struggling on how to do a "soft launch". If I launch to soon and I'm not done my idea will probably be copied. If I wait to launch, what if I never feel it is finished enough to launch. A catch-22. Part of me feel I should start talking about it as it is really very different.
Any advice? <comment><USER2> I don't think you should worry about your idea being copied. First, there may be other people who have had the same idea independently.

Second, the reason people say things like "ideas don't matter, execution is everything" is because any idea you think you have will have myriad assumptions baked in that will be unique to how your mind works. Other people who nominally have "the same idea" won't really have the exact same idea. (This is why there are, for example, so many Christian sects: because millions of people who call themselves Christian have different ideas about what it means to be Christian, as hopefully a relatable example.)

Just start by putting up a web page or creating a github repo or similar and maybe tweet it or post it to HN or otherwise share it through whatever channels are comfortable and familiar for you. Unless you already have well developed channels where lots of people are very interested in everything you say, it can be surprisingly hard to get any traction. You are probably overestimating the attention your idea will receive.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not so concerned about the attention but rather I am in love with my idea and if someone with unlimited resources comes along, I don't want to feel like I gave away something I loved before I really take it for a creative spin. That being said I do want creative suggestions and creative help that a public GitHub repo might attract.

<comment><USER2> I really love the presentation scenes in the movie _The Hudsucker Proxy_. One is a circle on a crumpled up piece of paper and he says "You know, for kids!" His idea is a hula hoop. Later, he has a circle on a larger display and says the same thing: "For kids!" It's a frisbee.

Here's a clip of one of them:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fn8rXglFMuQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fn8rXglFMuQ)

The odds are very high that your first attempt to explain your idea will sound equally silly and unintelligible to most other people. Things like elevator speeches tend to take a lot of time to develop. Conveying anything succinctly and well, especially anything new, is very challenging. Most people have no idea how bad they are at until they start that communication process in earnest.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> People will copy you, especially if you release it as open source. I promise you that. But they will most likely fail. Release it to a small audience without much fanfare and build up customers/users that way. In the public ledger world the only important part is attracting users. Copycats almost always fail to do that.

Ubiq, Expanse and the other million ETH clones have never came close to duplicating ethereum's success even as some of them have added innovative new features.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the reply. My goal isn't about being the next big thing in public ledger options. It's about trying to help people realize they can help others and help themselves without needing to understand all the technical background.

I guess it stems from realizing that I spend $12 each day on coffee and I could just spend $6 and make someone else happy with the other $6.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Yes, launch. Nobody has time to copy you, and if someone has, you still have a time advantage.</comment>


The Harmful Consequences of Postel's Maxim - <AUTHOR> https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-thomson-postel-was-wrong-00 <comment><USER2> Look at HTTP. How many implementations correctly and interoperably handle line folding? Comments in headers? Different line endings? Stick to a small subset and you're fine. Actually use the spec as written and it is hopeless. These crazy semi-freeform text protocols are a curse. They do not make implementation easier. They trick people into thinking they made it easier.

</comment><comment><USER3> A physical world example is USB Type C: you may have a high-speed Thunderbolt drive and a high-speed Thunderbolt computer, but you may unwittingly use a cable that doesn't support that (though it may even support some other high- speed protocol) so the whole apparatus will silently fall back to a very slow rate without informing the user. No problem for you and me, but possibly a problem for some unfortunate user.

Since none of the cables or ports are visibly labeled with their capabilities you have to know what you're doing.

<comment><USER4> > Since none of the cables or ports are visibly labeled with their > capabilities you have to know what you're doing.

I don't know about all of them but my cables and ports have visible Thunderbolt logo (small thunder symbol).

<comment><USER3> Your Type C ports and cables? What machines and where do you get your cables?

<comment><USER4> Dell XPS 9350 has one Thunderbolt port [0] and Dell Thunderbolt Dock TB16 has attached Thunderbolt cable [1]. I agree it's not a big, representative sample but still...

[0]: [http://cdn2.ubergizmo.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/dell- xp...](http://cdn2.ubergizmo.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/dell- xps-13_9350_13.jpg)

[1]: [https://i1.wp.com/geardiary.com/wp- content/uploads/2017/02/d...](https://i1.wp.com/geardiary.com/wp- content/uploads/2017/02/dell-thunderbolt-dock- tb16-MO-3.jpg?resize=750%2C457&ssl=1)

<comment><USER3> That is excellent. If only more vendors (I'm looking at you in particular, Apple) would do this.

The USB ss logo is absurd (not Dell's fault). Nobody knows what all those almost-identical names for different kinds of USB mean.

<comment><USER4> > If only more vendors (I'm looking at you in particular, Apple) would do > this.

I'm not really using Apple cables but a quick search shows that this adapter [0] has a small Thunderbolt logo on the USB-C connector.

[0]: [https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MMEL2AM/A/thunderbolt-3-u...](https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MMEL2AM/A/thunderbolt-3-usb- c-to-thunderbolt-2-adapter?fnode=8b)

> The USB ss logo is absurd (not Dell's fault). Nobody knows what all those > almost-identical names for different kinds of USB mean.

I agree. To one-up this on the other side of that laptop [1] is a USB PowerShare port with even more elaborate logo. It's just... super confusing.

[1]: [https://geardiary.com/2016/03/07/charging-usb-devices- with-y...](https://geardiary.com/2016/03/07/charging-usb-devices-with-your- dell-powered-off/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I know the FOSS FreeSWITCH VoIP b2bua has a TON of "hacks" to "Be liberal in what you accept" which is a mess of things to support, to clean up after the commercial entities that don't follow SIP specs.

e.g. SONUS information: [https://freeswitch.org/confluence/display/FREESWITCH/RTP+Iss...](https://freeswitch.org/confluence/display/FREESWITCH/RTP+Issues)</comment>


NeXTstep Manual, Systems Programming with Objective-C and Driver Kit (1995) - <AUTHOR> http://www.nextop.de/NeXTstep_3.3_Developer_Documentation/ <comment><USER2> Relevant video from 4 years earlier: [https://youtube.com/watch?v=j02b8Fuz73A](https://youtube.com/watch?v=j02b8Fuz73A)

As someone who has developed for Apple platforms for the better part of a decade now, it's pretty amazing just how little Cocoa/AppKit have changed over the years. Only in the past couple of OS releases are we starting to see some larger shifts. The crazy part is that this hasn't really hurt the APIs at all; sure, some bits are starting to look a little dusty and could use some attention, but even so Cocoa (both mobile and desktop variants) remain the best UI toolkit for consumer-facing application development. Qt, GTK, etc get the job done but aren't nearly as pleasant to use.

<comment><USER3> I got my first mac laptop a few months ago and I dabbled a little bit in OS X development with swift. Outside of raywenderlich.com I had a lot of trouble finding up-to-date resources/tutorials. I realize part of this is because Swift is moving so quickly, but it seems to be that Desktop-based application development is eons behind web and mobile application development in terms of educational material, and that it is probably holding the ecosystem back IMO.

Is it the case that developers prefer to write API documentation over tutorial/implementation based documentation that is common with other platforms (mainly web)? I feel like this approach can be debated on its merits, because it definitely raises the entry level for newcomers.

<comment><USER4> TL;DR - the web is just easier because it's so highly abstracted, and thus attracts a larger audience of new developers - and materials aimed at them. Educational material for desktop developers is plentiful but often at an advanced level only, because...

I think part of it is that the barrier to entry on the web is much lower. I've developed in objective-c forever, along with any number of other languages and platforms, and there more power available to you, the more you need to understand the underlying architecture.

The web is about as abstracted from the machine as it gets. Add to that that web rendering engines and HTML, CSS, and even JavaScript are very, _very_ forgiving, so it's just easier for someone new to get started.

I was actually excited about the first couple iPhones in terms of resource scarcity to programmers. Tons of people jumped into iOS programming and for the first time in a while (or for many, the first time ever) were forced to consider what a lack of RAM and an underpowered CPU meant, and I helped coach many people through the finer points of memory management, allocations, (even with ARC) and Big O algorithm considerations.

Finally, native desktop software is just more powerful, and their is so much more you can do with it (and so, much larger standard libraries, SDKs, etc.) File IO isn't something you consider much in JavaScript on the web. Neither are parallelism, race conditions, IPC, networking, OS resource allocation, long running processes, native drawing and rendering, and so on.

Desktop programmers need to consider all of this a lot, and so generally tend to have some experience before getting into it (or work with a mentor/co- worker with a high degree of knowledge at first, as happened with me even post-CS degree). So materials written for desktop development tend to assume a certain pre-existing level of software development experience, and aren't aimed at new developers.

Edit: as someone else said, Big Nerd Ranch stuff is pretty good.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I worked at a job that had NeXT machines on every desk. Using this OS was the best computing experience I have ever had. For 8 months I used the Mail.app, the VarioData based customer database, etc. Everything worked great and the "flow" was unparalleled.

Concerning CPUs etc a 33 mhz 68040 and 32mb RAM worked pretty well. Grayscale was adequate, though I did appreciate having the upgrade to color. More RAM was always better.

<comment><USER6> A place I worked at did a trial of NeXTSTEP back in the 90's when they ported it to other architectures. I got to play with it on a high end HP PA-RISC workstation...it as amazing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Exactly how advanced was NeXTstep in its time, compared to say Windows 95?

The object oriented API alone seems to me like a huge step ahead. Imagine if Steve Jobs never left Apple and got to ship these things under the better- known Mac brand, possibly stealing a lot of Microsoft's thunder.

EDIT: It's also interesting, and maybe ironic, that the legendary Doom which went on to make PC/DOS a relevant force in gaming, was developed on NeXTSTEP, with some parts coded in Objective-C. [1]

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_Doom#Programmin...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_Doom#Programming)

<comment><AUTHOR> It was a great experience, I could only see a cube for the first time in 1999 as I had to port a particle engine from Objective-C/Renderman to Windows with Visual C++ and OpenGL.

But Windows 95 was away ahead from other UNIXes in terms of IDE and GUI development experience. Most had nothing more besides Motif + C to offer.

To this day Mac OS X is the only UNIX with SDK tools that can rival the likes of VB and Delphi in native development offered already in Windows 3.x.

<comment><USER8> > To this day Mac OS X is the only UNIX with SDK tools that can rival the > likes of VB and Delphi in native development offered already in Windows 3.x.

If the Gnome foundation would focus on Gtk+Vala+Glade it could have been a fantastic development platform. I don't know much about the state of Vala today though, too bad because it's blazing fast and can use any Gobject library. Unfortunately the docs are just bad compared to Apple or MSDN, the need to find a better way to organise the information on their site or move to a new CMS...

<comment><USER9> I honestly still don't understand why MS didn't push their version of 'interface builder' they had with VB6 after they went .net. In my view .net was such a step backward - a huge library to load even though the OS comes from the same vendor, way more boilerplate than VB. Why not give VB6 decent networking and database capabilities instead?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I miss named parameters and categories the most from Objective-C

What features do those of you who no longer work with Objective-C miss the most?

</comment><comment><USER11> I learned to program from these manuals. It's wonderful to know they're available online. Wonderfully clearly written.

</comment><comment><USER12> Ah, the good old days. I built a mini DB with the Indexing kit. What I discovered was that the kit itself wasn't 100% functional & some of the API/Function calls didn't work. But I had an amazing time programming on a NeXT computer. I was young (early 20's) and did lot's of trial and error with the IX kit.

</comment><comment><USER13> Interestingly, I was just in my storage garage moving stuff and have the full NeXTSTEP 3.3 manual set with discs from 3.3 and 4.x in a plastic box. It weighs a ton.

It is still my favorite platform both from a programming and user point of view. I miss the menu system and still curse the Mac toolbar (particularly on my 34" 21:9 monitor). It was a joy to program and the amazing framework were a revelation compared to Win32 and its follow-ons. It is amazing what something designed for Smalltalk-like message passing and a runtime can get you. Windows 95 and NT were pains in the butt to program in C++ while VB at least was closer to NeXTSTEP in productivity. I generally prototyped my interfaces in Interface Builder and then redid them in VB if needed. Its sad how much was lost on the way to OS X.

</comment><comment><USER14> The sheer purity of that UI still gives me the chills.

</comment><comment><USER15> Indeed, the good old days. I has a slab for a while in 95 (actually, I still have it), it was pretty slow though for development. Running on HPPA was much better. Many fond memories.

</comment><comment><USER16> My NeXT Cube still works great, though I need to try to patch it for Y2K sometime. :-)</comment>


Deciphering the Business Card Raytracer - <AUTHOR> http://fabiensanglard.net/rayTracing_back_of_business_card/index.php <comment><USER2> Hi there, code author here. I've been lurking here for years, but couldn't resist an invitation like this.

I've always enjoyed Fabien's analyses so it's great fun to see what he makes of my own code. Anyway, a few clarifications from what I remember of this. (I wrote this '09, and I don't have my old notes in front of me right now):

* The `n` value returned by the trace function, `T()`, is the surface normal. It returns this whether it hit the plane or a sphere.

* The `r` vector in `S()` is the reflection vector off whatever was hit.

* The mystery `c` point in the `main()` function is the offset from the eye point (ignoring the lens perturbation `t`) to the corner of the focal plane. Note below that we're nominally tracing rays for pixel (x,y) in the direction of a _x+b_ y+c. At the image midpoint, this should be `g`.

* "although I suspect this to be a side effect: This is not how soft-shadows are done." True. There are true soft shadows in this, but this isn't where they're computed. That's the job of the randomization where `l` is computed in `S()`.

Anyway, please feel free to ask any questions about it.

<comment><USER3> #define op operator

#define rt return

Then replacing the corresponding inline tokens shaves off another 25 bytes from the source without affecting the output or (arguably) the readability.

Sorry, my inner obfuscator couldn't resist :-)

Beautiful bit of coding, btw.

<comment><USER4> Can you pastebin.com it so we can see what it looks like ?

<comment><USER3> [http://pastebin.com/ktukPBHE](http://pastebin.com/ktukPBHE)

I reformatted it so it would justify right like the original but for some reason Pastebin likes to reflow things.

It turns out the single-character tokens 'u' and 'w' were not being used so repurposing them for the #defines leads to a saving of 46 characters at the cost of an extra line. There are a few other recurring tokens but you hit a point of diminishing return.

One should not, however, lose sight of what an awesomely clever hack the whole thing is. Reminds me of some of the text-flow layouts in old illuminated manuscripts, or the more modern variations here (like the one with the light- bulb): [http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/02/11/award-winning- new...](http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/02/11/award-winning-newspaper- designs/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you want to make your own, like Fabian Sanglard did, take this block of binary numbers and draw your initials (left-justified) with 1's:

      0001110000010001110
      0010000000000010000
      0100000000010010000
      0100000000010001100
      0100000000010000100
      0010000010010000010
      0001110001100011100

That's my initials, cjs. If you unfocus your eyes, you can see the letters pretty clearly.

Take each line, top to bottom, and convert to decimal:

[http://www.mathsisfun.com/binary-decimal-hexadecimal- convert...](http://www.mathsisfun.com/binary-decimal-hexadecimal- converter.html)

Edit Paul Heckbert's code (lines 12-13, the "G" array), replacing the numbers from right to left with the decimal values. In other words, the last number in the array is the top line of the binary block above.

Clean up the justification and you have your business card raytracer, courtesy of Mr. Heckbert.

I probably could have coded this in the time that it took me to draw my initials in binary pixels.

Also, here's a version with the camera moved slightly farther out so that the letters don't clip:

[https://gist.github.com/chrissnell/6656963](https://gist.github.com/chrissnell/6656963)

<comment><USER6> thanks.

what exactly were you referring to with "I probably could have coded this in the time that it took me to draw my initials in binary pixels."?

<comment><USER5> I could have coded something to generate customized versions of the original source, given three ASCII initials.

<comment><USER6> Come on, Chris. I'm a big fan of the humblebrag, but you would still have to draw the binary pixel version of each letter (because C doesn't come with binary pixel array versions of the 26 letters) - so it would be 8 times as much work at an absolute minimum (26 characters versus the 3 that you did), even if the code to embed them in the array were a completely obvious 1-liner, and so was the code to clean up the justification.

Let's not flatter ourselves :)

<comment><USER5> Didn't mean to come off as arrogant but there are existing tools that would make this a lot easier. figlet(1) would make the pixel conversion pretty easy. Pixels to binary really isn't that hard. You could do it with a regex.

<comment><USER7> Another way is to use the netpbm toolkit. First, use its ppmdraw command to rasterize each character to a canvas, then convert that canvas to xpm format (you have a separate canvas / picture for each character). The xpm format has the nice property that it is also a valid C structure. Real easy to then convert to whatever you want.

Oh, and the netpbm toolkit has not only stand alone binaries, but it also has a C library for each of the conversions that it includes. Seems to be an older under-rated toolkit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Would the wasted empty space in a #define return <pick a single character> make up for the several return statements that I see? That is why typedef statements are nice, you can ; terminate them!

<comment> matthew-wegner The original is also 1337 bytes, which might explain any padding!

<comment><USER2> Guilty as charged!

I stopped trying to minimize it when I noticed that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It looks like his site is taken down due to bandwidth limit reached. Use [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://fabiensanglard.net/rayTracing_back_of_business_card/index.php) till it's back up.

</comment><comment><USER10> I like this extremely short postscript raytracer I saw quite a few years ago:

[http://www.is.titech.ac.jp/~sadayosi/lab/h-takasi/ops.html](http://www.is.titech.ac.jp/~sadayosi/lab/h-takasi/ops.html)

      %!IOPSC-1993 %%Creator: HAYAKAWA Takashi <firstname.lastname@example.com>
      /C/neg/d/mul/R/rlineto/E/exp/H{{cvx def}repeat}def/T/dup/g/gt/r/roll/J/ifelse 8
      H/A/copy(z&v4QX&93r9AxYQOZomQalxS2w!!O&vMYa43d6r93rMYvx2dca!D&cjSnjSnjjS3o!v&6A
      X&55SAxM1CD7AjYxTTd62rmxCnTdSST0g&12wECST!&!J0g&D1!&xM0!J0g!l&544dC2Ac96ra!m&3A
      F&&vGoGSnCT0g&wDmlvGoS8wpn6wpS2wTCpS1Sd7ov7Uk7o4Qkdw!&Mvlx1S7oZES3w!J!J!Q&7185d
      Z&lx1CS9d9nE4!k&X&MY7!&1!J!x&jdnjdS3odS!N&mmx1C2wEc!G&150Nx4!n&2o!j&43r!U&0777d
      ]&2AY2A776ddT4oS3oSnMVC00VV0RRR45E42063rNz&v7UX&UOzF!F!J![&44ETCnVn!a&1CDN!Y&0M
      V1c&j2AYdjmMdjjd!o&1r!M){( )T 0 4 3 r put T(/)g{T(9)g{cvn}{cvi}J}{($)g{[}{]}J}J
      cvx}forall/moveto/p/floor/w/div/S/add 29 H[{[{]setgray fill}for Y}for showpage

</comment><comment><USER11> There are two other small ray tracers that can be examined. Both are winners of the International Obfuscated C Code Contest.

Matt Zucker won in 2011 and Anders Gavare won in 2004.

They can be found here, [http://www.ioccc.org/years- spoiler.html](http://www.ioccc.org/years-spoiler.html)

(The 22nd IOCCC is open for entries until 2013-Oct-03)

</comment><comment><USER12> Very nice article and straight to the point. It's really nice to see a pithy discussion and impressive demonstration.

</comment><comment><USER13> I love this kind of thing. I've made a similar one (minus texturing) in Javascript, drawing to a Canvas; my current version is 975 bytes. Output, full source and live demo here: [http://gabrielgambetta.com/tiny_raytracer.html](http://gabrielgambetta.com/tiny_raytracer.html)

</comment><comment><USER14> The output file is .aek but I can't figure out what to do with it. My Google- fu is failing me this evening.

How do you view the output?

<comment><USER15> If you're using Linux or OSX, run it like this:

      ./aek > aek.ppm

That will produce an image in .ppm format. ('The world's second-dumbest picture format.') You'll probably have to convert it to a more widely supported format. Make sure you have the netpbm package installed, and then run, say:

      pbmtopng aek.ppm > aek.bmp

<comment><USER16> What is the worlds dumbest picture format then?

<comment><USER17> Raw data without any header, I suppose. You must know or guess the width and height to properly decode the image.

<comment><USER18> Guessing the dimensions of an image with _n_ pixels is equivalent to factoring _n_ , so good luck with that! And only if your luck is really good (prime width and height) will there be a unique solution—actually you still don't know whether to choose portrait or landscape. It gets even more interesting if you don't know the number of channels or the pixel format.

<comment><USER17> Well, you can check if the image matches common resolutions and aspect ratios - if there are 307200 pixels, for example, a pretty good guess is that it's 640x480 (or 480x640). You'd need a human to see if the image looks correct - actually, with a simple GUI, it wouldn't take a human very long at all to figure out the correct aspect ratio. This could probably be automated easily enough using some pattern recognition - the "shearing" pattern caused by guessing the width wrong is pretty linear and well-behaving.

<comment><USER19> Minimize the gradient ...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Along the same lines, albeit much less compact - a 99-line Path Tracer (the next evolution from a straight-up raytracer, performing global illumination calculations):

[http://www.kevinbeason.com/smallpt/](http://www.kevinbeason.com/smallpt/)

</comment><comment><USER21> The same thing, implemented in Go:

[https://github.com/kid0m4n/gorays](https://github.com/kid0m4n/gorays)

</comment><comment><USER22> This is really single piece of sh*t I like most for a while... simple and elegant</comment>


A psychology of the film - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-018-0111-y <comment><USER2> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qeauwu2uIwM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qeauwu2uIwM)

The part that starts at around 8 minutes in.</comment>


Police in Canada Are Tracking People's 'Negative' Behavior in a 'Risk' Database - <AUTHOR> https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/kzdp5v/police-in-canada-are-tracking-peoples-negative-behavior-in-a-risk-database <comment><USER2> If the data in the database is "de-identified" then how does it eventually lead to interventions?

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't understand what's so bad about this as a program.

<comment><USER4> Here are a few quotes that are, hopefully, explanatory of why it's bad:

> One Ontario social worker, who participates in a Situation Table and spoke > to Motherboard on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to > speak to the media, expressed worry about the high number of minors being > evaluated for intervention, and having their information added to the RTD, > _because of "how often [interventions] are done without consent."_

And:

> According to Israel, there is a risk that if authorities don't refine the > data in the RTD over time to determine if a specific risk factor actually > leads to increased crime or harm, flawed predictions could influence > policing decisions.

Finally:

> "We can't have processes that are based on using exceptions to privacy law, > with no transparency or accountability as to how [Hubs] are interpreting > those exceptions," she said. "Privacy is a human right. It can't be eroded > just to make someone's job easier."

So it boils down to:

\- no consent \- flawed data that influences predictive algorithms (which are not transparent and not audited) \- privacy is a human right, this tracking program violates that right (at least as it is currently implemented)

If you live in a democracy, you can expect certain rights (and of course the responsibilities that come with those rights). If you're a taxpayer, you can also expect certain things of your government.

Essentially this boils down to "Canada is a democracy, not an authoritarian regime that monitors and tracks people".

<comment><USER3> No need to patronize. I read the article. Obviously it has problems that need to be addressed. I just don't find the program as a whole to be conceptually objectionable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> While I think there are some causes for concern here, especially bearing in mind the high value Canadians place on individual privacy, there are positive elements to this.

>Hub assessments and interventions often involve people who are especially vulnerable. For example, many cases focus on minors: in North Bay, Ontario, 45 percent of those deemed to require an intervention in 2015 were between 12 and 17 years old, [according to a report] in the Northern Ontario Medical Journal.

The part of this quote from the article wrapped in square brackets links to this report: [http://www.nomj.ca/2016/12/11/mobilization-hubs-support- peop...](http://www.nomj.ca/2016/12/11/mobilization-hubs-support-people-at- risk.html)

Here is an excerpt:

>The mobilization hub deals with all ages. Witmer says in North Bay the number of seniors requiring services has increased. Police often get repeat 911 calls from elderly people who may have no family supports. Witmer points out that 65 per cent of the top risk factors at the North Bay table are related to mental health issues. "With mental health, it's not someone who has committed a crime, it's where they're moving in that direction. Police would maybe get 10 calls from the same person, someone who is off the rails. If we can go in and support them and get them connected before they really go off the rails then that's helped the system," said Witmer. He recalls one case where a panhandler with mental health and alcohol issues was the subject of repeated public complaint calls to the police. The case went to the mobilization hub and, together, the agencies helped the man find counseling, housing, and additional supports to get him off the streets.

This program has the potential, as in the case above, to keep people out of the criminal justice system and divert them to community programs that can assist them. In past situations like this would likely be handled with an arrest.

I would encourage everyone to take anything Vice Media says in regards to Canadian government (or really anything except pop culture) with a grain of salt. They are critical of the government and police 100% of the time regardless of who is in power and refuse to recognise positive changes when they occur because outrage gets more views.

>Documents obtained by Motherboard from Ontario's Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services (MCSCS) through an access to information request show that at least two provinces—Ontario and Saskatchewan—maintain a "Risk- driven Tracking Database" that is used to amass highly sensitive information about people's lives.

This statement implies that this database is kept a secret, when in reality if you Google 'Risk-driven Tracking Database' you get a fair bit of information on it. In addition every document and resource they reference in the article has been published publicly by either the federal government or various municipal and regional governments.

To imply that this type of policing is new or unprecedented ignores the Peelian Principles originating from London in the 19th century used as a model for police across the Commonwealth. The first of these 9 principles is as follows:

>To prevent crime and disorder, as an alternative to their repression by military force and severity of legal punishment.

<comment><USER6> > They are critical of the government and police 100% of the time regardless > of who is in power

What on earth is wrong with that?

<comment><USER5> You cut out the part of my sentence in that quote which says what's wrong with that.</comment></comment></comment>


Ways to Simplify 'Sign In' - <AUTHOR> http://baymard.com/blog/simplifying-sign-in <comment><USER2> The article quite well describes some of the valuable features of a good login UI.

The login page is (often) the first place a user encounter your site. If that page creates a sense of repulsion in the user or forces him to struggle, the user is probably left with a feeling that your site is against him. That's not something you want.

Its not difficult nor time-consuming to implement a proper login UI. However, surprisingly many sites don't pay enough attention to it.

<comment><USER3> Well said.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've often wondered this myself when designing login forms, but doesn't identifying which field failed expose a security issue? A malicious user could use the feedback to determine if accounts exist or not. This seems like a concern to me.

<comment><USER5> Half of the advice in this article is terrible. Never tell the user which field they got wrong. Also, if you're going to allow signing in from any page then every single page needs to be transmitted over HTTPS in order to prevent a man-in-the-middle attack. The author really needs to think of issues outside of plain usability before writing articles like these.</comment></comment>