Deep-Spying: Spying Using Smartwatch and Deep Learning - <AUTHOR> http://arxiv.org/abs/1512.05616 <comment><USER2> Moneyquote of the summary: "Our results suggest that the complete technological ecosystem of a user can be compromised when a wearable wristband device is worn."

</comment><comment><USER3> Summary:using the motion sensors in the smartwatch, they can figure out which keys you are pressing, and thus read your passwords.

<comment><USER4> I believe a recent episode of the TV series "Minority Report" used this as part of the story.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hey guys! :)

The source code is available at: [https://github.com/tonybeltramelli/Deep- Spying](https://github.com/tonybeltramelli/Deep-Spying)

And a video demo at: [https://youtu.be/ZBwSfvnoq5U](https://youtu.be/ZBwSfvnoq5U)

</comment><comment><USER6> A very interesting caveat from the paper:

"It is important to note that it is assumed that the victim is wearing the WAD on the wrist of the preferred hand used to interact with keyboards. In fact, in our attack scenario it would be harder, if not impossible, for the attacker to infer keystrokes if the victim is right-handed but is wearing the WAD on the left hand for example."

A WAD is any wearable arm band device.

<comment><USER7> Which is how most people.wear watches (especially expensive ones).

<comment><USER6> I don't and none of my friends seem to either.

<comment><USER8> You wear your watch on your dominant hand? That feels very unnatural to me. Just manipulating the straps alone seems difficult, so that's a barrier right there...

<comment><USER9> Not to forget, that most Watches are designed to be worn on the left side. (Position of the Buttons etc.) Smartwatches are improving here, in displaying a rotated screen, but often even these are asymmetrical designed and thus harder to use on the right arm.

<comment><USER10> > most Watches are designed to be worn on the left side.

Yes, for right-handed people. The opposite is true for left-handed people, and left-handed versions of watches.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Before everyone panics, there's an important note on page 70:

>The LSTM model can also successfully classify signals with an accuracy of 19% when the dataset used for training and logging are originated from two different keypads.

Still scary to think how a motivated team could extend this though.

</comment><comment><USER12> There's an important conceptual link between training RNNs and side channel attacks.

I wrote a bit on the topic. Unfortunately, not my finest writing in terms of clarity, but I think it touches something important.

[https://medium.com/@arthurb/traces-probability-and- learning-...](https://medium.com/@arthurb/traces-probability-and- learning-435a1abdcdc#.lrxxssm67)</comment>


Hacking the Brain - <AUTHOR> https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6429408/ <comment><USER2> I haven't found near infrared radiation referenced in the article - I'm using near infrared as a brain hack, by shining a cheap 850nm LED light on my forehead. This has, over the last 2 years, enabled me to code for weeks on end, for 12+ hours a day, with only minor cognitive decline. It's not something I really want to do, but sometimes it's useful.

Before I started the near infrared routine (~5 minutes every other day), 5-6 hours of coding per day was all I could do - eg after coding for 8h, I noticed serious cognitive and emotional decline, and might need to do less the following day. Not anymore - nowadays I can be productive whenever I'm awake, with little side effects. Near infrared radiation is safe (thousands of studies demonstrated only very mild side effects), and is even used to treat Alzheimer's. I have no idea why its beneficial effects are not more widely known - for some people, it's life changing.

Sidenote: 850nm light works way better for me than 830nm.

<comment><USER3> This is the funniest post I've ever read on this website

Either it's entirely the placebo effect, or it somehow actually does something and you're cooking your brain to wage slave even harder

<comment><USER2> A simple "pubmed near infrared brain" web search will yield enough results to dispel your concerns somewhat. Overdosing is of course not desirable, so yes, don't use a 10W laser for several minutes. There are plenty of therapeutic options which make it hard to overdose.

Since you mentioned wage slaving - I chose coding performance as an example, but I could also have mentioned improved guitar playing skills. Or being a better listener. On average, I don't code that much more now, maybe 6h per day (as a freelancer, there's also lots of other things to do).

<comment><USER4> So do you just tape the thing to your third eye or something? Do you have some kind of harness rigged up for it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have a tangential question around brain hacking.

The Flynn effect says we're gaining an avg of 3 IQ pts every decade since the early 20th century. Meaning our great grandparents, on average, would be considered mentally handicapped compared to today's intellect.

Now certain biochemical explanations for the Flynn effect explain raw neurophysiological gains (e.g., iodine fortification in the early 20th century added 5 pts).

So my question: for whatever isn't explained by biochemical enhancement, is there an equal cognitive tradeoff in something less measurable than IQ?

I.e., do our brains act like muscle and the info age as a super gym? Or are we becoming "mentally impaired" compared to our great grandparents in other aspects (e.g., working with our hands, building communities, etc)?

I imagine our neuro-plastic brains try to make use of all of its real-estate. If so, then could it just be that we're growing in measurable ways, and becoming "mentally impaired" in non-measurable ways?

Sounds Ludditic, maybe an expert can weigh in

<comment><USER6> This started going back down in the 1970s: [https://www.sciencealert.com/iq- scores-falling-in-worrying-r...](https://www.sciencealert.com/iq-scores- falling-in-worrying-reversal-20th-century-intelligence-boom-flynn-effect- intelligence)

<comment><USER5> I'm not an expert, but a brief scan of secondary sources (Wikipedia and Our World In Data) show it going back to 1910 in the Americas at least:

[https://ourworldindata.org/intelligence](https://ourworldindata.org/intelligence)

Edit: ah excuse me, I misread. I have seen a question about its recent reversal.

<comment><USER7> I think there's more nuance to the claim from statistical perspective. How is the average estimated, what kind of a distribution does population IQ have, and what factors influence it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It really takes a special kind of mind to take something originally intended to be fun, subversive and/or spiritual (recreational drugs) that's existed for decades or even centuries, and turn it into yet another tool to boost your React productivity by 12.3% on Friday evenings, under the new brand of 'enhancement' or 'hacking'. Because to what other end would that 'performance' boost be put to use?

<comment><USER9> According to what bible/religion are "recreational drugs" (whatever the definition of that is) "intended to be" for fun, subversive and/or spiritual use only and why should anybody care?

A random fun hypothesis by Paul Staments (in my own words): that the neocortex in humans evolved the way it did, because hominids have been consuming Psilocybin mushrooms for millions of years (until Christians and Nixon banned them and pushed the rest of the world to follow). In other words: there's symbiosis between hominids and Psilocybin mushrooms. Psilocybin mushrooms as food = more intelligent hominids (after the trip) = higher survival rate of hominids = higher survival rate for the mushroom due to active conservation by hominids.

Fun fact (according to Staments): Psilocybin mushrooms occur in higher concentrations around human settlements than in "wild nature" (still today).

<comment><USER10> Interesting! That helps explain why Lenin was a mushroom.

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

<comment><USER11> As if it wasn't thoroughly explained enough already.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> For those who don't want to read the whole thing.

Use your brain regularly on many types of tasks, drink coffee or tea, play video games, exercise, and provide your brain with either proper nutrients or appropriate levels of supplements. Too much or too little supplements will have negative or no effects. Everything else doesn't have enough research and some side effects might not be what you wanted. Not to mention there are placebo effects as well.

If you didn't know that before then go ahead and read it. You might get something from it.

<comment><USER13> Also, get high quality sleep. I'm still not sold on video games and coffee/tea. I'll have to look at it more. If you some research that shows the beneficial effects of coffee/tea and video games, please share

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think new forms of human-computer interaction will likely have the largest effect on cognition, whether that's Augmented Reality or Brain-Computer Interfaces or both. It's interesting to see how quickly BCI's are developing and I wonder if AR will actually ever have commercial success. If BCI's are able to 'hotwire' human vision and pass information directly to our brain, AR displays would be rendered obsolete.

The only remaining question is how fast BCI technology can reach that level. If it takes more than 10-15 years, I think there could certainly be an age of AR devices that we soon find ourselves in, where AR goggles parallel our current smartphones. On the other hand, the rate at which the BCI field is progressing makes me feel like society might just 'skip over' this AR stage all the way to BCI's.

</comment><comment><USER15> See also [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_amplification](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_amplification)

</comment><comment><USER16> Sleep 8h each day, eat clean, workout - especially high intensity stuff, watch your stress levels, meditate daily. I've found those to make huge difference if you have the discipline.

</comment><comment><USER17> > This work was supported by the Volkswagen Foundation, Germany.

What an odd area of research for Volkswagen to fund.

<comment><USER18> The Volkswagen Foundation is completely independent of the company named Volkswagen. It was found with the proceeds from the sale of the company to private investors by the state of Lower Saxony and the Federal Republic in the 60s and receives the dividends of the still publicly held shares. It's not a company foundation and Volkswagen has no say in any form. It's just a large public science foundation.

<comment><USER19> Compare the Rockefeller, Carnegie, Ford, Pew, and MacArthur foundations, for the US. These don't represent the interests of Standard Oil, US Steel, Ford Motor, Sun Oil, or Bankers Life & Casualty.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The word "hypnosis" does not appear anywhere in this document, that's a pretty glaring omission, IMO.

<comment><USER20> This is interesting, more?

<comment><USER15> In re: hypnosis in general the books I recommend are: "TRANCE-formations" by Bandler and Grinder, and "Monsters and Magical Sticks: There's No Such Thing as Hypnosis?" by Heller.

For specifically improving "cognitive enhancement" the easiest, safest, and most far-reaching technique involves modifying your self-image. You can reprogram yourself to believe that you're smarter and your mind will modify your behaviour to meet your belief. For better or worse one's intelligence level is generally tied into one's self-image, and the only barrier to being smarter is your natural reluctance to become a different person.

For self-image engineering the best books I've found are "Psycho Cybernetics" by Maltz and "With Winning in Mind" by Bassham.

[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/447454.Monsters_and_Magi...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/447454.Monsters_and_Magical_Sticks)

[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/956297.Trance_Formations](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/956297.Trance_Formations)

[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/155981.Psycho_Cybernetic...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/155981.Psycho_Cybernetics_A_New_Way_to_Get_More_Living_Out_of_Life)

[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/208926.With_Winning_in_M...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/208926.With_Winning_in_Mind)

(But really, read "Prometheus Rising" by R. A. Wilson and do the exercises.)

<comment><USER21> Usually around October, as the temperature falls and the sun sets earlier, I delve more into the esoteric. RAW has always been a go-to and his lessons are eye opening. When I finally manifest my quarter I was ecstatic :)

The Master Key system is an interesting read too [https://www.amazon.com/Master-Key-System-Charles-Haanel- eboo...](https://www.amazon.com/Master-Key-System-Charles-Haanel- ebook/dp/B001H32E6W/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> One extremely important topic wasn't mentioned here - the impact of sunlight. For those, who feel that sunlight is crucial for their cognitive and (more important) emotional base-level, I recommend a great book by Linda Geddes - "Chasing the sun"[1].

One of important findings in the mentioned book was that blue light (as emitted by computer and smartphone screens) inhibits melatonin excretion and thus have negative impact on the quality of sleep and makes it harder to fall asleep. I replicated author's experiment and haven't used smartphone & computer after 8PM (for about a week) and my sleep quality improved greatly.

[1] [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/42603316-chasing-the- sun](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/42603316-chasing-the-sun)

</comment><comment><USER23> I recently read Andrew Gelman's description of these effect sizes from short studies. I think the idea was that if many small interventions created large positive effects then there could also be as many interventions on the negative side and we would not see any effects at all.

Yet there are interventions that clearly create massive net +ve effects, one just has to do experiments which is repeatable and stands the test of time.

Rhetorical Q: Does this IR thingy do that?

</comment><comment><USER24> I'm skeptical of IQ enhancing drugs ever coming about. Intelligence is so complex even the actual definition is a controversial topic.

So far we can show that intelligent enhancement can be predicated on exercise, outside of that there are temporary drugs (e.g. coffee) that "boost" intelligence but in actuality boost attention.

<comment><USER25> "In the first test, conducted in Northern California in the late 1960s, a researcher named Calvin Edlund selected 79 children between the ages of 5 and 7, all from "low-middle class and lower-class homes." The children were randomly divided into an experimental group and a control group. First, they all took a standard version of the Stanford-Binet IQ test. Seven weeks later, they took a similar test, but this time the kids in the experimental group were given one M&M for each correct answer. On the first test, the two groups were evenly matched on IQ. On the second test, the IQ of the M&M group went up an average of 12 points—a huge leap."

From Paul Tough's book "how children succeed"

<comment><USER26> We're all going to be fucked, when it comes to employment in twenty years, then.

Forget the M&M's. Video games are a skinner box on steroids. Kids are going to learn _fast_.

Edit: I may have missed the point -- it looks like motivation improves performance, not necessarily actual "cognitive ability", if we can quantify that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> REad this the other day [https://careclinic.io/low-level-laser-therapy- photobiomodula...](https://careclinic.io/low-level-laser-therapy- photobiomodulation/) same thing??

</comment><comment><USER28> Has anyone here tried Dual N-Back for more than a couple of weeks? Does it really improve working memory and indirectly your IQ?

<comment><USER29> Short answer - it probably doesn't do too much outside of making you better at tasks similar to n back.

Long answer - [https://www.gwern.net/DNB-FAQ](https://www.gwern.net/DNB-FAQ)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Did not see any genetic engineering of somatic cells using viral vectors. I guess that's just too extreme.

</comment><comment><USER31> When it's possible, id like to upload my mind into a machine.

<comment><USER32> What good would this do you? Or the machine for that matter?

<comment><USER33> Really, REALLY targeted ads

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Talk about all these pharmaceuticals .. Shortcuts will fry the hardware.

A dangerous game. Good luck to those who dare. Ill always propone meditation and developing attentive discipline.

<comment><USER25> Not a coffee drinker, eh?

<comment><USER35> Somehow I feel like the Age of Enlightenment occurring at around the same time as when coffee drinking was becoming increasingly widespread in Europe can't have been a coincidence

<comment><USER36> As I understand it, the coffee largely replaced alcohol, so there was an effective two-for-one effect of less depressant and more stimulant consumption.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Icy Mountains of Pluto - <AUTHOR> https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/the-icy-mountains-of-pluto <comment><USER2> Interestingly, they don't look like mountains formed by collisional or extensional tectonic processes to my eye (a geologist who studies mountain formation). They look sort of like diapirs (i.e. lower density material pushing up through a higher-density medium; frozen methane and nitrogen are both less dense than water ice[1]) or vaguely like eroded volcanoes, but without obvious vents. Very different erosional processes could explain some of it, but it certainly doesn't look like typical plate-tectonic or ice-sheet topography. Super cool!

[1]: [https://extras.springer.com/2006/978-1-4020-4351-2/Jenam/Ses...](https://extras.springer.com/2006/978-1-4020-4351-2/Jenam/Session4/4Csatorre.pdf)

<comment><USER3> Postulating here: Is it possible the mountains are a result of gravitational pull of Charon on Pluto's water-ice mantle during pluto's formative years? Or the gravitational affects of Neptune and Pluto's orbital resonance?

<comment><USER4> how would gravity do this?

orbital trajectories are in free fall... tidal effects are all that are left and they are huge, smooth gradients, not tiny highly variable things of the sort that could create surface features like this.

<comment><USER5> Tidal forces do serve as an energy source to drive other geological mechanisms, however they stated in the press conference that Charon is to small to do this, so we need to find another mechanism for how Pluto is still active.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> That's amazing.

The photo of Charon might be the most straight-up gorgeous of the lot so far:

[https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/charon-s-surprising- youth...](https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/charon-s-surprising-youthful-and- varied-terrain)

At least to my eye. It's just such a classic shot of a world.

Anyway: USA! USA! (I kid!) Go humanity!

<comment><USER7> _USA! USA!_

I've seem comments on here that it's not OK to say that, but if you are a US citizen then I think you damn well should be proud of this and I'll applaud anyone who makes space work. It's frikkin' hard.

When I see a Soyuz launch I think "Go, Russia" and I felt similar things when India, China or Japan launch rockets. Just today Ariane put a satellite in space. Go, Europe!

Hell, as a Brit I'm proud of Prospero: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prospero_(satellite)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prospero_\(satellite\))

<comment><USER8> Nations should die and not exist. Shouting nations names with pride is shameful and dumb. Nationalism kills. It's an awful, toxic ideology.

Death to all nations. May no nations exist in the future.

(If you get to spew your ideological bullshit I get to spew my own deeply held and utterly impractical ideological bullshit believes. No, seriously, I want nations to not exist eventually. I think the world would be vastly better without them.)

<comment><USER9> I'm curious if, as an alternative, you'd rather see decentralization (smaller population units), some kind of global superstate, or something else entirely?

We've all seen the poisons of nationalism, but I wonder if what one might call "tribalist" tendencies are so easy to vanquish - assuming one even wants to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The most exciting part is the following:

"The close-up image was taken about 1.5 hours before New Horizons closest approach to Pluto, when the craft was 47,800 miles (77,000 kilometers) from the surface of the planet. The image easily resolves structures smaller than a mile across."

At its closest, the probe was 7,800 miles away, so we're going to get images way clearer than this in the following days, and even this is amazing to look at.

<comment><USER11> It will take approx 16 months to transfer all the pictures it took, because it is transmitting at only 1 kbit/second.

[http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily- lakdawalla/2015/0130080...](http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily- lakdawalla/2015/01300800-talking-to-pluto-is- hard.html?referrer=https://www.google.se/)

<comment><USER12> Your linked article says 2 weeks, not 16 months.

11 photos a day.

<comment><USER13> I don't know why that article quotes two weeks. I've read the 16 months figure in several places and it was mentioned in the press briefings yesterday. There might be a specific subset of data that will take two weeks to get. Perhaps the low-res JPGs of all of the planet imagery.

<comment><USER14> I think it's 16 months to transfer every piece of sensor and imaging data back. The article says it takes ~40 minutes to transfer back a losslessly compressed full resolution image from the LORRI scanner

<comment><USER15> Anyone got info on the software/hardware specs and how they approach prioritizing and storage management? We waited a long time for the Apollo code to make it to Github--what better way to rope in the interest of one segment of humanity than getting more eyes on the code?

I imagine that there wasn't time or power to do patches...but if there was, even the mechanics of that would be fascinating.

Has anyone ran across a good discussion around the computational aspects of New Horizons?

<comment><USER16> [http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily- lakdawalla/2015/0624055...](http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily- lakdawalla/2015/06240556-what-to-expect-new-horizons-pluto.html)

[http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily- lakdawalla/2015/0130080...](http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily- lakdawalla/2015/01300800-talking-to-pluto-is-hard.html)

Some basic info on communication. The wikipedia page has a lot of info.

The most important parts are that it has a redundant pair of 8GB flash drives and they actually upgraded the code in-flight to use both transmitters at once and nearly double the data rate.

I'm not sure how priorities are arranged but it's all going to be sent back relatively quickly in terms of mission lifetime, and I think they managed storage use mostly by putting in plenty.

<comment><USER17> _they actually upgraded the code in-flight to use both transmitters at once and nearly double the data rate_

It was anticipated this would be possible, depending on how the energy budget for the whole craft worked out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Direct link to image gallery: [http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/newhorizons/images/index.h...](http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/newhorizons/images/index.html)

<comment><USER19> Considering the context (the significance of this event to the entirety of humanity), is this sort of nationalism gross to anyone other than me?

[http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/newhorizons/images/index.h...](http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/newhorizons/images/index.html?id=366579)

<comment><USER20> Yes; we could be a little more inclusive and magnanimous; it's an achievement for humanity (or does the U.S. get Pluto now?). I tend to suspect everything we see from NASA is choreographed; this might sell funding to part of NASA's tax base.

<comment><USER21> Europe is larger than the US and should be able to compete but can't for some reason.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> What is even more interesting, the artist Don Dixon more or less accurately predicted how Pluto looks like in 1979.

<comment><USER6> Well, his painting shares some superficial features that look similar to that one photo. Like a similar overall shading from light to dark. Other photos of Pluto look nothing like Dixon's painting. The "Pluto with a Heart" pic, for example.

Dixon's painting is cool, but let's not make it something it's not.

<comment> T-hawk Let's also remember the fallacy of multiple endpoints. Many artists have rendered visual guesses at what Pluto might look like. And many will be totally wrong. We're cherry-picking the best example in Dixon, not a typical one.

<comment><USER15> Great point (love the fallacy of multiple endpoints).

But there also may be some "algorithmic" smarts here in terms of Dixon's interpolation/extrapolation of what cold planetary bodies look like, even with what was known in 1979. Think of an image-generator bot that took some parameters of what was known (distance from Sun, whether it was a gas planet, atmospheric conditions, position relative to the asteroid belt, how size affects features) and kicked out plausible planets. This might be close to what you'd come up with if you made the mistake of forecasting more meteoric impact than actually occurred.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The estimate that this area is very new based on the fact that there are no meteor craters assumes that we know the distribution of meteors and space debris in the outer solar system. Does anyone know if we do in fact know this?

It seems plausible that there would be far fewer things at that distance, so the frequency of collisions would be lower.

<comment><USER24> I believe that NASA expected lots of craters on Pluto due to its close proximity to the Kuiper Belt, which is full of asteroids and other small objects.

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

<comment><USER25> Full is quite relative. The Kuiper belt encompasses a ridiculously large volume of space.

<comment><USER26> Similarly, the asteroid belt is "full of asteroids" that are mostly only a few meters across, with an average distance between each asteroid of a few million kilometers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Emily Lakdawalla's commentary:

[http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily- lakdawalla/2015/0715172...](http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily- lakdawalla/2015/07151720-first-look-at-new-horizons-pluto-charon.html)

</comment><comment><USER28> I don't use "mind blown" too often, but I will in this case. Here I am, sitting on my ass munching on a snack, admiring the mountains of a planet 3 _Billion_ miles away. This is so amazing.

<comment><USER29> *dwarf planet

<comment><USER30>
      class Planet {}
      class DwarfPlanet : Planet {}
      // ...
      var pluto = new DwarfPlanet();
      Console.WriteLine(pluto is Planet);

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> [https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/pl...](https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/pluto- observations-through-the-years.gif)

This is a time-lapse series of images of Pluto over the years - from a couple of pixels to today's mountain ranges. In about three seconds you get a full, visual, easy to read justification and explanation for the whole space budget and science funding - it is awesome.

This is what we want to see - go NASA

</comment><comment><USER32> I am always amazed at how far we've come. I wish I could live 100 years more.

<comment><USER13> I completely agree. I keep saying that nothing interesting happens in less than 10,000 years. Or a million. Compared to the Universe, human lifetimes are instantaneous. Such a pity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Next century's hottest snowboarding destination...

<comment><USER34> I'm very sorry to inform you that at those temperatures you'd be frozen to death. But even once you came out with some cool (hot?) solution for this nicety, you still couldn't ski/snowboard. That's because the snow on earth is relatively close to 0°C, and therefore in that particular stage where ice is lighter (it has more volume) than liquid water. If you apply pressure to it it's easier for the ice to go back to the liquid state and therefore giving you the ability to ski.

At those temperatures it would be as snowboarding on sand. Which is a very loved sport, but not that easy.

<comment><USER35> The sandiness of the snow might not be much an issue in Pluto's low gravity. It would be a bit like skiing on tiny marbles, but with lots of time to recover your balance. He won't be setting any landspeed records, though.

The real problem is getting there and back in time for the end of your two week vacation.

<comment><USER34> Didn't thought of it!

Let's solve that timing issue!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I did not really know what to expect but these photos are amazing and they're not even from the nearest approach!

Who knew the surface would be so crater free?

</comment><comment><USER37> I have seen a number of articles about the lack of craters and the assumption that this means recent geological activity. But that would assume a similar craterization rate to that of the inner planets like Mars and our Moon. I am wondering, is it possible that due to it's orbit, distance and smaller size that the rate is just a lot slower?

whatever, It is just a mind boggling accomplishment, and the photos really are incredible.

</comment><comment><USER38> Also a cool shot of Hydra, for the first time showing its shape.

[https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/hydra-emerges-from-the- sh...](https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/hydra-emerges-from-the-shadows)

</comment><comment><USER39> It's very surprising to me how much (apparent) recent geologic activity there is on both pluto and charon. I had expected them to be much more mercury like.

Pluto was my favorite planet growing up. I never dreamed I'd get to see it up close.

</comment><comment><USER40> I can't help it. I tear up and I get all emotional every time I see NASA pictures of a new planetary surface.

To think a bunch of apes can look at and appreciate mountains 6 billion kilometers away... it's awe inspiring!

</comment><comment><USER41> Nobody has seen those mountains before!

</comment><comment><USER42> I can understand why people like my wife look at these pictures and say, "Meh. That's nice."

The enormity of the distances and what humanity has done is, quite honestly, beyond what our minds are actually capable of fully comprehending.

I'll re-post this for your weekend enjoyment:

[http://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.h...](http://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html)

</comment><comment><USER43> Amazing. Crater-less mountains, and we have no idea how they were formed (or are forming!). Lots of exciting science ahead!

</comment><comment><USER44> Having to come up with scientific lessons on the spot ("this may cause us to rethink..."), for the sake of press releases must be pretty stressful. I'm also not sure that such more-or-less impromptu analyses foster the right conception of how science works.

<comment><USER17> Well, per Emily Lakdawalla's blog quoting scientist Amy Barr ([http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily- lakdawalla/2015/0715172...](http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily- lakdawalla/2015/07151720-first-look-at-new-horizons-pluto-charon.html)):

 _Every time we have looked at a body that has experienced tidal heating, such as Io, Europa, Enceladus, we find that the body has been more active, or is putting out 10 to 100 times the amount of heat predicted by models.

Enceladus taught us that our models of tidal heating for icy bodies were not right, and I think the Pluto/Charon system could be telling us something similar._

And it's not like these people weren't already reviewing the current state of the art in anticipation of how these Pluto images might add to it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> How do they measure altitude of the mountains without a sea level?

<comment><USER35> It's based on the mean surface level rather than the mean sea level.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> This made me wonder, how do they measure the heights of the mountains? Using data from multiple view angles?

</comment><comment><USER47> Why are most of the pics black and white?

<comment><USER48> The camera is monochrome, another sensor gets "color" information. I think even the black and white images are not really "true" images since the sun is really really really far away (not totally sure about that though).

EDIT: LORRIs images are true, Pluto is actually pretty bright (the sun is amazing) and the camera is great (science is a amazing).

<comment><USER49> On Pluto, the Sun is 250x more bright than the moon is on Earth. And moonlight (at a full moon) is pretty sufficient for most things you do with your eyes.

[http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2012/03/15/ba...](http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2012/03/15/bafact- math-how-bright-is-the-sun-from-pluto/#.VabNGcZVhBc)

<comment><USER50> That's because the human eye works across an amazing range of light intensities. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptation_(eye)#Efficiency](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptation_\(eye\)#Efficiency):

 _" The human eye can function from very dark to very bright levels of light; its sensing capabilities reach across nine orders of magnitude. This means that the brightest and the darkest light signal that the eye can sense are a factor of roughly 1,000,000,000 apart. However, in any given moment of time, the eye can only sense a contrast ratio of one thousand. What enables the wider reach is that the eye adapts its definition of what is black."_

Pluto is 30-50 AUs from the sun, so ignoring the effects of any atmosphere, there's "only" a factor of 900-2500 more sunlight on Earth than on Pluto (sun vs full moon is 400,000:1 or thereabouts)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Url changed from [http://www.bbc.com/news/science- environment-33543383](http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-33543383), which is a fine article that adds some info, but perhaps not enough to override the preference for original sources.

<comment><USER52> Thanks. The audio piece by John Spencer in this article is well worth listening to.</comment></comment>


Killing the Golden Goose? The changing nature of corporate research, 1980-2007 [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://faculty.fuqua.duke.edu/~sb135/bio/Science%201%2091%2015.pdf

<comment><USER2> For computer-related technology, there are two key trends I've noticed since at least circa 2000 with respect to corporate research. One is touched on by the article, the other is missed.

In my own experience, a large part of this is explained by the increasing use of trade secret protections rather than patents for the products of corporate research. This is particularly noticeable around computer science, where the academic literature in many areas is years behind the state-of-the-art in corporate research labs that is never published. The research is still being done, it is just intentionally kept invisible. The declining ability to enforce IP rights globally as a practical matter and the rise of virtualized infrastructures and services, which makes reverse-engineering more difficult, has made this an attractive research monetization strategy.

The other major trend is letting startups drive research activity and taking an equity position in the interesting ones, often as cheaper money than more traditional VCs. It is less expensive for large companies to make a venture capital investment in startups solving a problem they need solved than to do the research themselves. 40% of all venture capital is now corporate VC, which reflects this trend. It reduces R&D risk while also putting those companies much closer to potential acquisition targets.

Basically, this new structure is more efficient and of the corporate research that is being done, much less is being publicly disclosed due to the practical limits on IP protection.

</comment><comment><USER3> Breaking from page 17 to 18:

"Finding that European firms display similar reductions in investment in science as American firms is not consistent with the idea that specific regulatory changes in American institutions drive the results of this paper."

This is a clever way to get at what effect SOX and Bayh-Dole have had on private large-enterprise investment in science, but the evidence and argument are a bit opaque. What counts as a "European" vs. "US" firm? Most corporations are global at the scale of interest to this argument. US regulations might still have had an effect, even on "European" firms.

Logically the best they can argue here is that the evidence is consistent with their hypothesis, not that the evidence is inconsistent with an alternative hypothesis that SOX and Bayh-Dole had an effect.

</comment><comment><USER3> Irony alert! Note their conclusion:

" It may well be that other organizations -- smaller firms and universities -- are making up the shortfall in investment in research. According to this interpretation, what is happening is a reallocation of research from large corporate labs to more efficient cient organizations."

The suggestion that universities might be more efficient than private corporations at anything is almost comic.

But this isn't an error. There is actually something quite profound at work. It is indeed the case that "smaller firms and universities" are more efficient at commercializing new technology than most large corporations. But it's not the smaller firms and universities independently; it's the smaller firms and universities together as one super-entity.

In Silicon Valley, the grad students quit and found a startup. Their advisor joins the Board. The university creates the IP. The startup commercializes it.

The puzzle for me ten years ago was this: Where is the licensing revenue for the universities? If they're creating the IP, then how come they're not getting anything back?

The answer is that they are, but in the form of alumni donations. :-D

<comment><USER4> "The suggestion that universities might be more efficient than private corporations at anything is almost comic."

It's not a priori implausible to me. Why shouldn't there be things universities do better than corporations? They're different entities with different structures; it makes perfect sense that they'd have different strengths and weaknesses.

<comment><USER3> Universities are to organizations as cockroaches are to organisms. They're ridiculously inefficient and bureaucratic; but they're also the only form of organization likely to be around in 10,000 years.

<comment><USER5> Universities are bureaucratic, yes. in the same time you can encounter "academic" people there, who are genuinely interested in doing research, even for crappy money. That what they are, that's their nature. In corporations it's more often some a*holes working towards promotions/power not giving a shit about "advancement" or greater good for humanity/society.

All IMHO of course, but based on personal experience in both areas.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Careful Design of Cave Story - <AUTHOR> https://www.soldierfromthesurface.com/games/cavestory/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi all, I'm starting a long-form game design analysis site to provide long- form articles on the topic for others to read, while exploring what makes great games so enjoyable.

I started with Cave Story because it was my introduction to indie games, and I played it at a time where my computer was too slow to run anything else. The game itself was made by a single person, and is incredibly well designed for a passion project that was released as freeware. I think it's a great example of the careful, intentional design in video games.

I'd love to hear any feedback, good or bad, on the content, on my writing, what you'd like to see, or even just the site design in general.

<comment><USER2> I really liked this article. It reminded me a lot about Tim Rogers' Earthbound review, which is my all-time favorite game review article: [https://web.archive.org/web/20080219052007/http://www.largep...](https://web.archive.org/web/20080219052007/http://www.largeprimenumbers.com/article.php?sid=mother2)

I think one easy improvement could be putting some headers throughout, so the reader has a better sense of the outline, structure, and flow of your argument. Personally, I'd also love to see more comparisons across games: like, why does Cave Story matter in the context of the other games of its time (or even games that have come before)?

<comment><AUTHOR> You have no idea how much your comment means to me!! Thank you so much for your kind words.

You bring up really great points! The first, regarding the use of headers, was something that I did think of, but decided against. One problem I had with the usage of headers was the fact that I felt it's too sharp of a context switch while you read the article. While it does allow for newcomers to quickly glance over the content, I felt that it would be better to prioritize the reader that already took the time to read. I tried to make the concept to concept flow as clean as possible. Instead of headers, I wanted to use the images as a way to naturally delimit the content as you read, without breaking your attention.

I'm definitely not sure that what I chose to do is the best way forward! This is actually the first piece of writing I've really released or had anyone other than myself read.

Regarding the second, it was definitely brought up to me it would be interesting to bring more detailed comparisons into the mix! I did a little bit of it with the mention of rogue likes and the Supergiant games. One thing I'm still working on is balancing the content so that it doesn't detract too much from the Cave Story - at the end of the day, the article was meant to be a tribute to the hard work put into the game by its creator, and the amazing qualities of video games.

This was very hastily typed up (I'm actually traveling at the moment), so hopefully my intentions and logic behind the writing makes sense! I definitely plan on thinking more about the points you've brought up to incorporate into my writing in the future, so thank you SO MUCH for the honest feedback!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Wow, that was a pretty interesting article, and that's from someone who had no interest in Cave Story before reading it.

Ths said, are you going to write any more articles any time soon? Because I checked your site, and while I saw another one related to Super Meat Boy, it seemed like those were the only two game design articles you'd written (or articles on the site, period).

That's a shame really, since decent stuff about game design is pretty hard to find online, especially given how some of the people whose sites I used to follow have stopped writing recently.

So keep writing. Your work is more interesting than anything I've seen on a mainstream gaming site in a while.

P.S. Also, if you're interested in reading more on game design, I'd suggest looking up Critical Gaming and reading Daniel Johnson's book on Wario Land 4's design. That's a pretty interesting read in itself.

<comment><AUTHOR> That is the plan! This was the only article I've written so far - I decided to launch it before amassing a number of articles. I'm currently working on one for Super Meat Boy, but this is also a passion project - I'm an engineer by trade, so unfortunately I'm unable to work on this full-time.

Thanks so much for the support! You really have no idea how much that means to me... And awesome, I will definitely check those out - I've definitely been looking for more reading as well. Thanks for the suggestions!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wish there was more long-form writing like this in the gaming world (there's occasionally some good long-form stuff on Polygon that is great, but not quite like this). I haven't played Cave Story before, but after reading through this, Cave Story is going on my list to play. :)

<comment><USER5> You might be interested in this [1] break down of Battle Garegga or this one [2] of Tetris the Grand Master (disclamer: I wrote this when I was still a teenager; I plan to rewrite it someday)

[1] [http://battlegareg.ga/](http://battlegareg.ga/)

[2] [http://bsixcentdouze.free.fr/tc/tgm- en/tgm.html](http://bsixcentdouze.free.fr/tc/tgm-en/tgm.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I loved this game, but I have one major objection to the design, something that afflicts even AAA titles; Getting the "good" ending pretty much requires a walkthrough, since the actions the player must take to achieve it are so arbitrary and counter-intuitive.

</comment><comment><USER7> Do Day of the Tentacle!

<comment><AUTHOR> Definitely a classic. Maybe I'll revisit it with the remastered edition!

<comment><USER8> they are doing a remastered edition????

<comment><USER9> It seems Lucasarts' new owners at Disney are more interested in licensing out their old adventure games than Lucasarts ever was. Since "Grim Fandango Remastered" did fairly well, they're also remastering Day Of The Tentacle:

[http://www.doublefine.com/news/comments/watch_the_day_of_the...](http://www.doublefine.com/news/comments/watch_the_day_of_the_tentacle_remastered_trailer/)

...and even Full Throttle:

[http://www.doublefine.com/news/comments/announcing_full_thro...](http://www.doublefine.com/news/comments/announcing_full_throttle_remastered/)

<comment><AUTHOR> It's nice though, I think it's a great way of introducing a younger who might only be familiar with heavily narrative driven games from Telltale to an incredible generation of point and clicks.

For example, I'd known nothing about Full Throttle prior to this announcement, :P</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Chemists discover how blue light speeds blindness - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2018-08-chemists-blue.html <comment><USER2> f.lux author here, still slogging through the article. It is hard to understand the light levels used because they use "power" (uW, mW) from a laser, and not "irradiance" (uW/cm^2 or mW/cm^2), so which area they have concentrated that light over is hard to understand. All I can see is it is from a laser, so the irradiance could be extremely high.

The human lens filters most light at the peak of the given spectrum for free retinal (383nm), and so once you get to 450nm like an LED, the hazard data in the visual range is 100x less sensitive, see Fig 1 here:

[https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1751-1097....](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1751-1097.2011.00921.x)

It bears repeating that computer screens have <5% the hazard-weighted irradiance of a blue sky. (Can't make a direct comparison with lasers.)

Not sure the conversion to white light is correct, and it is unclear to me right now if this much retinal is available in vivo.

<comment><USER3> Thank you for your input, but I mostly want to thank you for f.lux. It has been one of my favorite things for a long time. It's silly how long it's taken companies to provide a native blue light filter and your product just kicks ass.

If you guys ever wanted to figure out your app on a smart TV (or apple TV), I know there'd be a lot of thankful people!

Also, I'd love to contribute to the ongoing dev of f.lux (I don't think I've had to pay for it?) How might I?

<comment><USER4> I just want to remind everyone that LED backlights emit blue light that isn't eliminated by f.lux or similar utilities.

<comment><USER2> You might want to refer to our measurement project for some numbers:

[https://fluxometer.com/rainbow/](https://fluxometer.com/rainbow/)

Also, you can be below threshold for circadian responses just by being very dim.

<comment><USER5> Looking at your measurement, if I understand it correctly, you are saying that OP is incorrect and flux does in fact reduce the blue light?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm in the process of building a Philips Hue-compatible light therapy LED strip that goes above my bed, and I chose 500 nm cyan LEDs due to this concern. The goal is to have the lights gradually wake me up every morning and help align my sleep cycles, as I suffer from Delayed Phase Sleep Disorder.

Figure 3[0] in the paper seems to show that 500 nm is safe, and that melanopsin has high absorption at 500nm, which has important effects on circadian rhythm[1].

Anyone more knowledgable than me know if this setup is safe?

[0]: [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-28254-8/figures/3](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-28254-8/figures/3) [1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melanopsin#Effects_on_circadia...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melanopsin#Effects_on_circadian_rhythm)

<comment><USER7> Any reason why you are not just buying a Philips wake up light? I have one and it's great. Especially during darker months

<comment><USER8> How long have you been using yours? I have been using one for about 3 years. Initially it worked great, but it seems the light just doesn't do it anymore and the alarm sounds are what eventually wake me up.

<comment><USER7> About a year. But I am having similar experiences.

<comment><USER9> Perhaps try and cycle using the light. Couple months using it, one month off etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > To protect your eyes from blue light, Karunarathne advises to [...] avoid > looking at your cell phones or tablets in the dark.

Can someone explain why it would be worse to look at a cell phone in the dark? It's emitting the same blue light (or less, if the display gets dimmer) as it is in a bright environment. Why is that light more harmful in a dark environment?

<comment><USER11> Because of the way your eyes work. If it is bright, your pupil will be shrunk, to not be blinded by the luminosity. When it is dark, your pupil will be opened wide up.

It is this principle that camera apertures are based on.

Now if you have your pupil wide open in a completely dark environment and put a 100% brightness screen at ~10cm of your eyes, what do you expect will happen ? Our eyes are made for nature, that means day and night, now we have technology that is akin to a handheld sun and you use this at night at 10cm of your face, our eyes are simply not equipped to handle this.

<comment><USER12> ... but I don't put a 100% brightness screen in front of my eyes at night. Do people really do that? Don't they know how to adjust brightness?

Indoors, I use about 30% brightness. As the day gets dimmer, that slides down to about 25%. If I'm reading something in bed, I start at about 10% and as my eyes adapt, go down to 1%. When I'm finding it hard to keep my eyes open, I take that as my signal to go to sleep. Am I ridiculously unusual?

<comment><USER13> This isn't weird at all. I'm jealous of your 1%. The default low on my phone is maybe like 5-10% (I don't know how to check this), and it feels crazy bright when I'm in bed.

<comment><USER14> If you're on Android, I recommend Screen Filter[1] which will draw a semi transparent overlay on top of nearly everything (depending on the phone and/or OS version, it might not dim the status bar, bottom navigation buttons, lock screen, etc.). I use it a lot when reading at night, because the lowest brightness setting on my phone is also too bright for dark-adapted eyes.

[1] [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.haxor](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.haxor)

<comment><USER15> Shades is also a good app on android for dimming the whole screen much darker than the default slider will go.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> For the f.lux Mac users here, do you prefer that to Mac's Night Shift?

I just found this article, which details why f.lux is better than Night Shift. But it's written by f.lux, so it's a bit biased.

[https://9to5mac.com/2017/03/28/flux-developer-says-apples- ne...](https://9to5mac.com/2017/03/28/flux-developer-says-apples-new- competitive-macos-night-shift-feature-falls-short/)

I'm guessing both are better than nothing, but is one actually better than the other?

<comment><USER17> I've been using F.lux for over seven years. Advantages…

\- You have a great deal of control over the blue level. Night Shift's blue level is higher than F.lux's default, and not adjustable.

\- Flux transitions more naturally as the sun goes down.

\- More scheduling options, "disable until tomorrow".

\- the big one: disabling per-app or for full-screen apps. You probably don't want Flux on while watching a movie or binging on a videogame. (I set up my lady friend with Night Shift and watched a movie with her recently, spent the whole film wondering why they made such awful color choices)

<comment><USER18> \- Night Shift is disabled for external displays. That's another killer one.

<comment><USER19> NightShift absolutely works on external displays

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I don't quite understand. Blue light - any blue light - causes blindness? So we shouldn't look at the sky even?

I've never heard blue being a danger other than its effect on the biological clock, so that seems like a pretty bold claim. Ultraviolet, sure...

Though buried in there is something about immune system and vitamin E levels...

I really find it hard to believe that blue light exposure is automatically bad. We have receptors for that specific purpose. Wearing blue light filtering sunglasses all the time as the article suggestions seems a bit ridiculous. Why give up one color entirely?

<comment><USER21> We have chemical receptors on our tongue and in our nose for poisons. We have neurons that detect pain. Just because we can sense it doesn't mean it's not harmful.

<comment><USER22> But those receptors signal something unpleasant - a terrible taste, pain. Looking at blue doesn't cause pain or unpleasantness.

<comment><USER23> On the contrary in fact, I find gazing at the blue sky to be calming and enjoyable, and find it promotes diffuse thinking, which can greatly speed up problem solving.

<comment><USER21> Some people like the smell of ozone.

Ozone doesn't have a smell. What you actually smell is your nose burning. Ozone is a very aggressive oxidizer.

Looking directly at the sun is also a super bad idea.

<comment><USER24> > Ozone doesn't have a smell. What you actually smell is your nose burning. > Ozone is a very aggressive oxidizer.

Wait, what? Do you have a source for this?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> In addition to f.lux, I also use the Dark Reader Chrome extension[1], which dynamically generates dark themes for every page you visit. It seems to make a bigger difference than using f.lux.

1\. [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dark- reader/eimadp...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dark- reader/eimadpbcbfnmbkopoojfekhnkhdbieeh?hl=en-US)

<comment><USER26> Def'ly a great relief for my eye strain - using it during the day too and keeping on by default. One annoyance is that Chrome needs to let the address bar be darkened as well as it stands out like a neon tube when Dark Reader is on.

<comment><USER27> I just use a dark chrome theme with it to get around that issue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> "to wear sunglasses that can filter both UV and blue light"

But isn't this bad with other consequences? I thought the lack of blue/violet light was the cause of myopia? [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5233810/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5233810/)

<comment><USER29> You can't develop myopia or hyperopia after your eyes/skull/orbital muscles are done growing. So this suggestion probably applies only to adults.

Keep in mind that this is _age-related_ macular degeneration. Your photoreceptor cells are protected by the α-tocopherol until "a person's 50s or 60s." You wouldn't need any prophylactic interventions until then.

<comment><USER30> Interesting. My myopia worsened a bit from ages 22-27 or so. Does that mean my skull and muscles were changing still?

<comment><USER31> Actually yes. Doctors have told me that I should wait til 25 to see If I am candidate to eye laser operation because that is the average age where people stop developing his muscle eyes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I use f.lux all day I don't know if I'm particularly sensitive or if it's all in my head but when I turn off f.lux, especially at night, to watch some movie or video I can physically feel my pupils dilate and it almost feels like my eyes go from being at rest to being strained.

<comment><USER33> As a linux user, I have found that Redshift works better than f.lux. It's the first thing that I install on a new machine of mine.

<comment><USER34> Last year use default "Night Light" in GNOME. Very easy and can be enabled in one click like Wifi or BT.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I was recently diagnosed with a condition called retinitis pigmentosa (it basically just destroys your retinas). It's part of a larger condition called usher syndrome (which caused my severe hearing loss at birth). I'm on heavy doses of vitamin a palmitate as well as some other vitamins. Another thing that I haven't done yet but will be doing shortly is blue light blocking glasses, especially since I sit in front of a computer all day. I also use f.lux and night shift on windows and mac respectively. I'm 22 and have lost a significant portion of my night and peripheral vision so I'm still just trying to figure this all out. Any tips are welcome.

<comment><USER36> I'm in my late 30s and was recently diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa too. I've started to use night shift/f.lux on my computers, and reading this article is also motivating me to update my glasses to one with blue light blocking.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I am excited about LED lights for their efficiency, but keep seeing articles like this and don't understand the practical ramifications, like "what bulbs should I buy?"

I messaged Cree on Twitter, expecting a very corporate response, but they linked to some studies (which I haven't yet had time to explore.) FWIW - [https://www.energy.gov/eere/ssl/street-lighting-blue- light-a...](https://www.energy.gov/eere/ssl/street-lighting-blue-light-and- light-night) and [https://www.lrc.rpi.edu/resources/newsroom/pr_story.asp?id=3...](https://www.lrc.rpi.edu/resources/newsroom/pr_story.asp?id=378#.WjLMBFWnGM9) were the resources they suggested.

<comment><USER2> The message is: there is no more risk from LED than older sources, by the metrics we have now.

I would suggest that one problem is that LEDs don't "warm dim" (unless you get some special ones from Philips and a few others), and people tend to dim them less overall.

<comment><USER37> What do you mean by "warm dim"?

<comment><USER2> An incandescent/halogen will go to warmer temperatures when dimmed. So it might start at 2800-3000K but be 2100-2200K at 1% brightness.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> _" The researcher found that a molecule called alpha tocoferol, a Vitamin E derivative and a natural antioxidant in the eye and body, stops the cells from dying. However, as a person ages or the immune system is suppressed, people lose the ability to fight against the attack by retinal and blue light."_

Does this mean that consuming alpha tocoferol can combat the toxic effect of blue light? If so, at what dosage?

</comment><comment><USER39> One solution I use is a 1/8" thick sheet of amber transparent rigid plastic/acrylic. It is designed to cut UV, but it also cuts blue light. I bought a 2'x4' sheet from an online site (since ads are probably not permitted, I will not mention the name of the company), and they cut it to size specifications for me. Out of that I got filters for my 14", 15" and 17" laptops, and a 30" LED TV.

I find it easier on my eyes at night (both laptop and TV), and it has its place since the TV can't run f.lux and redshift.

<comment><USER40> Recommendations of products are fine. Paid promotions or kickbacks are frowned on though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Note that the lens of the eye yellows as you get older which significantly reduces the amount of blue light that reaches the retina. So much so that there is an idea floating around that older people don't get enough blue light to properly make the circadian stuff work and that teenagers get too much.

</comment><comment><USER42> I wear computer glasses at all times when working, and highly recommend them. It greatly reduces eye strain, and filters blue light.

If anyone is looking for a good pair, I buy mine from Gunnar [0] (no affiliation).

[0] [https://gunnar.com/](https://gunnar.com/)

<comment><USER43> Tried these and some Uvex glasses that block 100% of blue light (Gunnars are very low % blocking relatively). Zero impact on my strain. I have seen many others state the same. It's obv there are many causes for strain, just wish I could figure mine out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Many of the comments here are about displays, but what about the LEDs sold as replacement for incandescent and halogen bulbs?

<comment><USER45> Check the spec sheet of the bulbs, specifically the color temperature in kelvin. Ignore the "warm white" and similar marketing terms, they are too fuzzy.

A LED with low color temperature and high CRI should have pretty much the same spectrum as incandescent. If you want really low temperatures look for some retro filament style LED lights.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_temperature#Categorizing...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_temperature#Categorizing_different_lighting)

<comment><USER46> CRI unfortunately is not a good test, it still can produce very high ratings even when the spectrum is spiky.

<comment><USER47> 95+CRI is an indicator for mostly lack of spikes. Look at Yuji (yujiintl.com), they seem to be the only ones selling actual high-CRI LEDs with sane pricing (i.e., no ideological markup).

<comment><USER48> I'd like to try one of these out, but at $20 per bulb it's a a bit steep. Are you able to comment how they compare to the Feit Electric 90+ CRI bulbs sold at Costco for a few dollars a bulb?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> For many of us whose use of these blue-light emitting computer and phone screens is necessary, what can we do about it?

<comment><USER11> Use f.lux or an equivalent (most OS have their own implementation by now) that filters out the blue light at software/rendering level, it's not perfect but you do instantly feel the comfort it brings to your eyes. Been using f.lux for over 10 years and it also helps alot with going to sleep at night. When it's off your eyes/brain thinks that they are in daytime / broad daylight, when it's on I fall asleep 2 or 3 times faster than without.

<comment><USER50> The biggest problem I have with it is that everything looks so much worse that I just wind up turning it off all the time.

Is this so seriously a threat to vision that it's worth it? I don't have the sleeping issues with screens some people seem to report, so I wasn't really willing to commit to it over that.

<comment><USER51> > The biggest problem I have with it is that everything looks so much worse > that I just wind up turning it off all the time.

Change the settings. What you should do is take a sheet of paper and put it next to your screen. Then match your screen's white to the sheet. It's only a bit less blue. There's no need to set everything dark orange.

<comment><USER50> Okay, but that's a trade-off, you're still getting a fair amount of blue light through in that case. How much less blue light do you want? What's optimal for minimizing eye damage if that's a significant risk?

<comment><USER51> You don't want to eliminate all blue from your life. Decreasing it is good enough. What's the point of making your computer screen red if the minute you step outside in the sun you lose any benefit?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Fedora/Gnome has had "Night Light" built into the OS by default. Big difference to eye strain with it !

<comment><USER53> This is not a permanent solution because simply shifting the color temperature has the side effect of generating melatonin and disrupting your circadian clock. You really need a daylight white spectrum and not concentrate all the blue-green energy in one blue spike.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Really surprised there's no discussion here about the ubiquitousness of black- on-bright-white color schemes in apps (including this text box I'm typing into right now, though for the most part, HN uses a soft beige tint for its background; but it's still dark-on-light). It's really quite unnecessary. For code editing I have a light-on-dark Emacs color scheme, which is much easier on the eyes.

Yes, Macs have a setting to invert the color palette, but that's not useful to me — a lot of my windows are dark; I don't want _them_ inverted, and it makes images unintelligible. What I really want is something that doesn't screw with images, but detects dark-on-light text and maps the colors in such a way as to preserve contrast and even hue.

<comment><USER55> For many of us with astigmatism, the trend to default to dark schemes would be quite troubling. They're painfully uncomfortable irrelevant of contrast. There's fuzzing and "halation".

It took me a long time to figure out the why. I love dark layouts in terms of aesthetics, but I cannot use them.

Without being biased, from what I have read so far, the research seems favorable for dark-on-light as long as proper room lighting is achieved and monitor brightness and contrast is adjusted for it. In poor light conditions, the inverse seems to be true.

While there's a reason for current defaults, everything should be optimized for and have options for both black and dark schemes.

<comment><USER54> Fair enough; I don't mind other people using whatever they prefer, as long as I have an option for light-on-dark.

I wonder, though, what the real problem is that you have with dark themes. It could be related to the combination of wide-gamut monitor blacklights and high-index plastic eyeglass lenses. I wrote something about this here: [http://scottlburson2.blogspot.com/2016/01/lcd-backlights- and...](http://scottlburson2.blogspot.com/2016/01/lcd-backlights-and-eyeglass- lenses.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Is this the same blue light as emitted by for example the Philips light therapy lamps?

[https://www.usa.philips.com/c-p/HF3429_60/golite-blu- energy-...](https://www.usa.philips.com/c-p/HF3429_60/golite-blu-energy-light)

<comment><USER57> I use one of these every day, found two things, one from Philips in 2011 with some PDF documents, making claims the light is safe: [http://www.p4c.philips.com/cgi- bin/cpindex.pl?ctn=HF3332/60&...](http://www.p4c.philips.com/cgi- bin/cpindex.pl?ctn=HF3332/60&dct=QAD&faqview=1&refdisplay=EN_DETAILS_BLUELIGHT%20DANGER_NO&refnr=0074803&scy=US&slg=AEN)

2011 was a while ago, this Stack Exchange post from 2013 seems to indicate there is a possibility for macular degeneration with use of these devices, particularly if you are already at risk for the condition: [https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/13891/can- blue-...](https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/13891/can-blue-light- therapy-contribute-to-age-related-macular-degeneration)

Some googling seems to indicate there were rumors of these lights potentially causing issues, and it sounds like the Chemist article may be presenting a scientific basis for that speculation.

Turned off my light for now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> I deeply hate blue leds, never liked them. As an electronics hobbyist I have been used for many years to the old red then green and yellow leds before the blue and later white ones came out, so I rushed out to buy some as soon as I could and while trying them I remember feeling uncomfortable staring at that light, to the point I never used them in anything: they're staying in their box for good. I already know about the blue light altering the circadian rhythm, but didn't back then, so it's possible the brain was sending a message there was something wrong with that light.

</comment><comment><USER59> Can anyone recommend editor color schemes that look good when f.lux is set to heavily filter blue light?

<comment><USER60> I've really started to like gruvbox lately. It's naturally a warm color theme already so I would imagine it should still look good under a heavy blue light filter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> Anyone have suggestions for kindles? A lot of the "screens" I've seen on amazon have pretty terrible reviews.

It's the one major source of nighttime blue light that I consume. I've largely given up using my phone / laptop in the dark, as I decided I'm an adult and can just leave the lights on.

Reading in bed is one of my favorite things, and it bothers my partner to leave the lights on.

<comment><USER62> The contrast of just your screen and focusing in the dark is likely damaging on its own; but you can add the red filter, and, if using kindle app, make the font white on black background.

But yes, as Kindles imply, reading text printed without a backlight is preferable to backlit text, so prefer lights over the backlight.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> [https://zerowidthjoiner.net/negativescreen](https://zerowidthjoiner.net/negativescreen)

I've been using it for some time now.

By default I look at my phone, tablet and computer monitor in inverted mode. Video content is watched as normal.

Makes it way easier to get work done and keep the eye strain to a minimum.

</comment><comment><USER64> Green on black terminals. I actually miss them! Just sayin'

<comment><USER65> Amber. Amber on black.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> I bought a monitor a couple years ago that has a "Low Blue Light" feature you can turn on/off.

At first I didn't like it. It kind of dulls the screen down and makes things look greener. But after using it for a couple months, along with a couple other monitors on my desk, my eyes were getting tired so I turned the feature on and used it for a few days to see if I could get used to it.

When I switched it back off afterwards I was pretty shocked at how much more my eyes were instantly stressed. I turned it back on and have left it on since. I also turned the blue down on my other two monitors. And I can feel the difference when I set them back to their defaults too.

I don't think I'd like it for TV, though I might get used to it as well, but for coding and surfing the web it works for me.

</comment><comment><USER11> Did we not already know about this ? I remember 5+ years ago blue LEDs were pulled off of the market (at least in France) because the spectrum they emit in is way too close to uv and could burn your macula.

<comment><USER67> Wait, is UV light bad for your eyes? Should I be careful about visiting bars with UV light too?

<comment><USER11> Yes, UV rays cause damage to pretty much any organic matter, that's the reason we wear sunscreen, sunglasses, and why cheap "fake" sunglasses can be harmful for your eyes (the glass is simply tinted and does not filter out the UVs, which is what they should be doing)

edit: the way I remember it is that like any type of radiation, anything that goes into your body stays there pretty much until your death, the only way to keep your "uv capital" in good shape is to be proactive about it, cant do anything retroactively. This is why about 1/3rd of Australians will develop some form of skin cancer in their lifetime.

<comment><USER68> I just wanted to point out that most cheap (and therefore plastic) sunglasses are actually perfectly fine in terms of UV protection. Polycarbonate is UV opaque.

If you Google this subject there are several websites where people went out and bought cheap an expensive sunglasses and had them tested and reached the same conclusion: UV protection does not justify expensive Raybans.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> On a similar note, has anyone heard of Felix Gray? I've been thinking of getting a pair of lenses from them. They make lenses that filter blue light and they happen to look pretty good too.

</comment><comment> chroem- It's more than a little amusing to see this at the top of HN only a few days after getting attacked for posting my personal experience with blue light and retinal degeneration.

<comment><USER70> You should post the link. It could be fun to compare the comments !

<comment><USER71> chroem-'s comment: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17634720](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17634720)

Full thread: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17634316](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17634316)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> Can someone say if it is harmful to use a blue light filtering software 24/7? I get its use at night, but would using it from sun up to sun down cause any problems?

<comment><USER30> Only if you never went outside. Otherwise, it shouldn't. Blue light emitting screens are recent, if blue light is off, it's still more light than a book.

But never going outside would mess with circadian rhythm.

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> I wish I had never been privy to this information. All it's going to do is make me paranoid about yet another thing in life.

</comment><comment><USER74> >Karunarathne introduced retinal molecules to other cell types in the body, such as cancer cells, heart cells and neurons. When exposed to blue light, these cell types died as a result of the combination with retinal. Blue light alone or retinal without blue light had no effect on cells.

Does anyone disagree that this is equivalent to looking at a phone?

</comment><comment><USER41> It is already known that you can damage retinal tissue with the light from blue LEDs. At a particular power density blue will be the more damaging colour as it has the highest energy. So the question is if the intensities and duration of exposure encountered in day to day life can cause permanent damage to the retina.

</comment><comment><USER75> Don't want any blue light from your devices at night?

\- AMOLED Android device with a custom kernel that supports color profiles set to fire only the red pixels.

\- Get transparent red film from Amazon and cover your Kindle screen.

\- Wear orange safety glasses at night to dramatically reduce all blue light.

\- Bonus difficulty: Wear red laser goggles. Do not attempt to drive!

</comment><comment><USER76> I wonder if the brightness settings have any bearing on this?

If I don't dial mine way down it's very uncomfortable

</comment><comment><USER77> What would be the right daytime setting in f.lux to reduce the harmful effects of blue light?

The default daytime setting under recommended colors in f.lux is 6500K. I tend to use a daytime setting of 5500K. Is 5500K good enough to reduce the harmful effects of blue light or do I need to go even lower?

</comment><comment><USER78> From the article...

       To protect your eyes from blue light, Karunarathne advises

       to wear sunglasses that can filter both UV and blue light

       outside and avoid looking at your cell phones or tablets in the dark."

Please share any additional actionable advice.

<comment><USER79> Wear Sunscreen

Start a pension.

<comment><USER80> Go back in time and plant a tree.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER81> This might be relevant: [https://forum.justgetflux.com/topic/2446/blue-light- and-the-...](https://forum.justgetflux.com/topic/2446/blue-light-and-the- retina)

</comment><comment><USER82> I don't know if this is a stupid question, but if I set my LED lightbulb to warm-light, or set my OLED phone to blue light filter / warm light, am I still exposing myself to this dangerous blue light?

</comment><comment><USER53> I definitely feel I've been going blind, more than I should with age.

</comment><comment><USER83> Now I'm wondering about the damage of all those Windows crashes and blue screens :-)

Seriously though, the sky is blue, the sea is blue, how come we've evolved into beings affected by blue light??

<comment><USER84> This is affecting people in their 50s+, a lot of our evolution people had and raised offspring before this occurred so there was no evolutionary pressure to keep your vision much past that. It was good enough.

</comment></comment><comment><USER85> One would have thought that the thousands upon thousands of hours of daylight exposure would have already made us all blind if this was actually solid research.

</comment><comment><USER86> Something to consider for VR headset manufacturers and VR software developers? Pumping bright blue light into the eye at close range seems like the worst case.

</comment><comment><USER87> Do we know why bankers chose green instead of yellow for their eye shades? I know they wore them due to eye strain, but why green and not something else?

</comment><comment><USER88> Lots of comments here about blue-less lighting at night, so I thought I'd share my experiences in trying to warm-ify our household lighting. I'm in no way an expert; just sharing some experience.

It all started when we moved in to our current place. The previous tenants had left a bunch of old incandescent bulbs. I guess I had forgotten in the past two decades just how warm colored those lights are. It is a really comforting color temperature and great for getting sleepy before bedtime. Of course when I went to replace them with LEDs the contrast was obvious.

Now enlightened (heh) to the differences I went on a quest for warm colored LEDs. Turns out, that's really difficult. First I bought just any old light with the word "warm". But most LEDs you find are actually "warm white" or "soft white". Basically 2700K and up. Whereas old school incan. is ~2400K. The difference is huge and I was very disappointed.

So I began to filter my searches looking for things in the 2400K range. The local lighting store had _nothing_ (a store completely dedicated to selling lights). Amazon had a few options, but not many. Once you filter by low temperature and dimmable you begin to scrape the bottom of the barrel. Most were off-brand, which I try to avoid since poor quality LEDs will fail early when their cheap power supplies burn out.

I went through a few rounds of orders but finally settled on a set of Philips dimmable A15 lights "with warm glow effect". They are small enough to fit in all fixtures I've run into for those kinds of bulbs. But the best feature is that they change temperature as you dim them. So you have the option of a cooler "soft white" (2700K) at full brightness, or all the way down to 2200K when dimmed! To a non-expert in lighting they subjectively looked the best and gave us the same warm, comforting glow we were looking for at night.

So my advice, if you're looking to upgrade your house to warm bulbs, make sure to look for something 2400K or less.

Others have mentioned checking CRI, and that's important. I don't know the CRI on the bulbs I got. Again, they subjectively looked the best. But there aren't a lot of options in the truly warm color range so it's a feature I had to not care much about.

I also found some really great vintage filament style LED bulbs for a project (vintage style outdoor string lights with corded wiring; built from scratch). They're from a company I found on Amazon called Cmyk. Off brand, but they're the best option I found in that category and their packaging was actually really professional. They are labelled as 2200K, but they look even warmer than that. When dimmed about half way you get just the right amount of glow that you can see the faux-filaments. Super happy with those.

Beyond that you can also just get color-changing bulbs like Philips Hue. Since all this went down I've been slowly upgrading to those instead. That gives you the option to choose really any temperature you want at any point. I'm not sure how the "quality" of light from that setup compares to a real warm LED lightbulb. Obviously you're getting a "warm" color by mixing red and green LEDs so it isn't a true color temperature. But on the other hand you're definitely not getting blue light, which is the important thing. Either way, subjectively they look great and I wouldn't be able to tell the difference. (Usual caveats about buying into a somewhat closed system applies; Philips Hues are sort of the best worst option today.)

</comment><comment><USER30> What about morning wakeup lights? I have one that's daylight spectrum with 93 CRI. Is this generally ok, or harmful?

</comment><comment><USER89> I wear glasses with a blue light filter coating. I'm not sure how much this helps though. Anyone know?

</comment><comment><USER90> So I have switched my coding theme from "Cobalt" to "Solarized Light"

</comment><comment><USER91> So LED bulbs would be even worse, right? Is it time to go back to incandescent bulb?

</comment><comment><USER92> google "blue light mrsa"

Blue light kills cells. It's used in hospitals to kill germs and also use to treat acne. Hand dryers also use them. I'm not surprised it kills certain human cells as well.

</comment><comment><USER43> This or something connected to it is literally ruining my last chance at life but I cannot solve it and there is always a catch. I was disabled long ago by bad surgery and left in lots of pain. My physical career was ended. I was denied social assistance and fell in every crack. Life has never been stable enough long enough to reeducate and rebuild. In suicidal desperation I posted in a few places asking for ideas. A few months back a very kind person reached out to me in response to one of my posts on social topics and offered me an opportunity, a once in a lifetime thing that can work around my issues. In the process of updating my equipment (I had been primarily using a 12yo TN/CCFL having laptop) I experienced severe eyestrain. That sent me down a path of "why" and months later I still have no answer.

Eye doctor said I was ok and found nothing to explain this. I have monovision from Lasik done 20 years ago but it's never been an issue. I tested for and ruled out, to the best of my limited ability, the common gremlins like excesive blue light (always used f.lux/redshift before) and even tried the Uvex glasses that block ALL blue light. Tried PWM free displays and no change. Lowered brightness, changed ergonomics, font rendering, drivers, filters, OLED, ambient lighting. Anything common sense or the internet has come up with doesn't work for me. I even considered it was psychosomatic given the importance of me being able to do the one last thing I could do for any conceivable work and entertainment...sit at a computer...but no tactics to deal with that help. I was thinking about making an Ask HN thread recently but my last experience with that was pretty poor and the offer came from outside of that, but I saw this relevant post today and am desperate so here I am again.

Other than some older, specific stuff like a MBP 2011 17" antiglare screen that I had to sell(panelook.com says it had an RGB backlight but some dispute that), an iPad 2 on iOS (for at least 30min anyway), and a Windows Phone Lumia 635 on Windows Phone 8.1, Any LED backlit display I look at, and ALL modern ones I have found, on any brightness, filter or setting, or OS causes tingling in my face, back of head, and neck which turns into strain/pain/headache. I can replicate it. I can soothe it with time away or using the old, half functional CCFL laptop. I have tried 8 different panels in a Thinkpad, everything Best Buy has, borrowed from people, wasted money buying on eBay and testing. No success or answers.

There is a 10yo/168+ Apple support thread with no solution (was posted here not long ago in fact and most people blamed PWM or said it wasn't a big deal). A forum called ledstrain.org where people much smarter than me have tried to drill down through drivers and dithering and other options. Many of them reduce their quality of life further by using one of the 2 expensive and limited E-Ink displays out there, or hoard specific models of old displays and GPUs and outdated OS revisions they found work for them. I just cannot live even more limited like that since everything else about my life is already shrunk and reduced and miserable. Not being able to use or function around modern LED stuff is not tenable and there is no reasonable solution even on the horizon. Everything in my life is unstable and I have to solve this to get some foundation again. I am even entertaining the idea that this is all a big cosmic prank given how perfect the timing and specificity of this issue is. So, Loki, if you are out there I surrender. You win. Please give me a break.

<comment><USER93> > reduce their quality of life further by using one of the 2 expensive and > limited E-Ink displays out there

Could you elaborate on above? I did not understand the logic behind the sentence. E-Ink displays by themselves do not generate any light as they don't have any backlight or light emitter behind the display. That's why they work in bright sunlight. Some products with E-Ink displays have frontlights for night time reading. Is that what you are referring to? If so, given this article, just turning off the frontlight and using non-blue light sources for lighting is sufficient to avoid this, right?

<comment><USER43> I was stating that having to use the available E-ink displays is a reduction in quality of life because they are small (13"), expensive (~1000usd), and limited in function and performance which makes most web activities aggravating due to lag and ghosting. They aren't a solution, but just a more difficult workaround that shrinks life even more in my case.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER94> Implications for VR?

</comment><comment><USER95> Submitted title was "Blue light is toxic to human eyes". That broke the site guidelines, which ask you to " _please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don 't editorialize._

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

</comment><comment><USER96> Here's the actual study, thanks to sci-hub: [http://twin.sci- hub.tw/6979/4112e16f7195f7f33cd3e861c6345df0...](http://twin.sci- hub.tw/6979/4112e16f7195f7f33cd3e861c6345df0/ratnayake2018.pdf)

<comment><USER97> The post's URL actually includes links to the sci rep paper and the full text pdf paper is available from there for free for everyone. No sci-hub needed.

[http://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-28254-8](http://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-28254-8)

[http://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-28254-8.pdf](http://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-28254-8.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER98> This is a _huge_ problem. Neon light everywhere. I go out at night with sunglasses. The world is littered with light polluting salvages. That and combustion engines. I used to drive one. I used to behave criminally too. Light, sound, air pollution are real crimes. The world is littered with criminal brutes; anyone who uses bright neons, churns a combustion engine, or plays the stereo loudly. Soon the little people will be angry at the 'rich bastards who burn gas with their machines or waste power on overly bright aggressive lights'. Average person will then only afford a handful of KWh per month, and my life will be better. I wont stop any crowd from hanging gas/naphta burners or smashing neons tubes.

</comment><comment><USER99> For this exact reason, I've bought a e-ink 13.3" monitor from here [https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/paperlike-3-a-smart-e- ink...](https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/paperlike-3-a-smart-e-ink-monitor- save-your-eyes-iphone-computers#/)

It's not cheap because it is the only one on the market. Apparently, constructors don't care about this future big health hazard...</comment>


YouTube's Susan Wojcicki: 'Where's the Line of Free Speech... ' - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/aug/10/youtube-susan-wojcicki-ceo-where-line-removing-voices-heard <comment><USER2> This is just a PR stunt, they are preparing for the audits from the White House regarding their censorship practices.

They hope they have nothing to hide but they secretly know that they are biased as f

</comment><comment><USER3> This conversation would go so much smoother if we used the actual descriptive term for "alt-right" and "far right": fascism.

However conflicting it may sound, arguments against freedom of speech and freedom of expression cannot be supported in an economic of free speech / expression. This is not actually a dilemma, because fascist politics are incompatible with these freedoms; one cannot exist when the other is the norm.

And just like in any culture and community, the best way to counter fascism is not incarceration and bans but heavy investment in high quality education, on the one hand, and heavy communal shaming and stigmatization of fascist politics and policies, on the other hand.

<comment><USER4> anyone that is conservative, supports trump, and thinks the left has gone insane is labeled alt right

<comment><USER5> > anyone that is conservative, supports trump, and thinks the left has gone > insane is labeled alt right

Given that anyone in the alt-right would likely have all three of these traits, it doesn't seem like an unfair assumption to jump to.

<comment><USER4> i am all three, there is nothing alt about me

<comment><USER5> Then why didn't you support a more traditional Republican candidate?

Trump was the alt-right candidate, his campaign was as much a repudiation of mainstream conservatism and Republicanism as anything else.

<comment><USER6> You can support the party even though you didn't support the representative being voted in.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The venture capital business in Asia is beginning to rival that in North America - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-18/silicon-valley-challenged-by-china-india-for-venture-dollars <comment><USER2> Comparing Asia to North America is such a false equivalence.

Asia is huge. Like 63% of humanity huge.

Of-course the market in Asia is going to be much more massive.

A lot of rural places in India have better Internet that I have sitting here in a British city - at a much more discounted price.

Everyday millions of people are coming online - internet virgins. They will have their own new taste, needs, etc.

The thing to understand before you think about investing your hard earned money in an asian country - is even though the volume of amazing ventures are a lot more - each smart ventures is followed by 1000s of dumb ones.

The signal to noise ratio in low - unless your are in the market - you will be scammed - this is why a lot of large companies have tried and failed to start industries all over asia.

Anytime you start pouring a lot of money anywhere - govt, scammers, etc all want to dig into you. Red-Tape, bribery, lack of transparency and rule of law.

This is not as overwhelmingly present in European or american markets.

I do not for a second doubt that the market size, growth, etc are going to be insane in asia for the foreseeable future - but there is a question of sustainability - and this requires structural change in government in many asian countries.

Unless you are interested in short term - high risk - high reward outcome. And are more interested in long term investment - then Asia needs some reform before you think about investing big time there.

<comment><USER3> Europe is almost twice as big as the US, yet US technology companies dominate Europe in almost any startup category. So I don't think brushing it away on that basis is helpful.

At the end of the day if it goes as it normally does with technology there are going to be few winners in each industry and many loosers.

If Asia manages to create more successful companies locally they are going to be able to create more successful companies internationally which means just as the US have many in Europe, Asia can have many in the US (Alibaba comes to mind)

It's not a competition, it's a game with no rules and no judges.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Most of that VC is not being invested into innovative ideas, products or business models, but local versions of foreign companies than can't operate in China for diverse reasons, ranging from privacy to foreign ownership restrictions. The value created will be mostly limited to the Chinese market.

<comment><USER5> Meh... it would be hard to compare in practice, given how VCs tend to chase trends in general, funding lots and lots of copycats in the hope that they will fund the last successful player in the field. Or maybe I'm just bitter about the state of fundraising in the valley. ;)

<comment><USER4> VC in emerging markets (I come from one, and work with several) tend to be a bit different than that. cost of capital and uncertainty is much higher, so VC funds have to take a lot less risk, only betting in existing and proven business models. That's why you almost never see a really innovative startup from EMs, risk of an EM + risk of a new business model is just too high for most VCs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Quality vs Quantity.. This is an ideas business. Copy pasting has limitations.

<comment><USER7> Of course all those Ruby on Rails shops in SV are innovating, but Asia is only doing Copy-Paste? I am long on America as much as any other guy, but this kind of hubris has a huge price tag. There is a nice book "Art and Fear", in which Group A was given task to create a quality art and Group B was given a task of creating a lot of art with any kind of quality, at the end of the test, Group B produced better quality art, because they got the practice with the trial and error feedback. Group A suffered trying to get perfect from the get go. So a resounding Yes, to Quantity is a Quality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> 在HN,多少人学习中文?</comment>


GiftRocket's new design has launched - <AUTHOR> http://mikekus.com/archive/giftrocket-has-launched/

<comment><USER2>
      > GiftRocket uses my location to check I'm actually at the pub and
      > when my location is confirmed I get my gift. The GiftRocket
      > amount is transferred into my Paypal account and I pay as normal.

So it's essentially a money transfer between two people but GiftRocket takes their vig and the recipient needs to be at a certain location (or fake the location) to receive the transfer. Depending on the percentage, this could be abused to launder money through the pretense of a gift purchase.

<comment><USER3> We're a payments company in disguise.

<comment><USER4> I like that... Can you elaborate, or is it hush-hush?

Also, what happens when the other person doesn't redeem? (I tried to send myself the free $5 but found the process cumbersome so I didn't redeem). There will be a lot of breakage on this product, which is potentially great for you in the short run but bad in the long run.

<comment><USER5> What specifically was cumbersome?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This isn't really a gift certificate to anywhere. It seems more like just paying your friend to go somewhere. They can redeem the gift, then spend the money anywhere.

Also I may be wrong, but 99.9% of physical stores don't accept Paypal, so your friend would already have to have the gift amount in cash or credit/debit.

<comment><USER5> GiftRocket is a new take on gift cards. Recipients prefer cash to gift cards, but it's tacky to give cash as a gift. We're trying to capture the sentiment of a gift card (I thought of you, I thought you'd enjoy this place) without the restrictiveness of a traditional gift card.

<comment><USER7> "it's tacky to give cash as a gift."

Ouch.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_envelope>

<comment><USER5> Was talking about the US. There are exceptions in the US too (i.e. Bar and Bat Mitzvahs).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> When I purchase the gift card, presumably I'm purchasing via PayPal. The recipient then receives the money via PayPal.

So like - I could just give my friend some money via PayPal and say "hey dude, have a night out on me".

</comment><comment><USER9> Really like the look and feel of the site, but as someone who dislikes gift cards in the first place, it seems like GiftRocket just makes the idea more cumbersome.

</comment><comment><USER10> One of the nice things about gift cards is their atomic portability. I don't see that here. If someone gives me a starbucks card I can re-gift it to a homeless guy on the street. Also how would "any business" work if that business has no physical location?

</comment><comment><USER11> Almost identical to Giftly including the chutes and ladders diagram: <http://begiftly.com/what-is-giftly>

<comment><USER5> We launched well before Giftly. Regarding the how it works page, that's sheer coincidence. Our designer had finished his mocks before Giftly launched.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Incredible work Mike!</comment>