Stop SESTA: Amendments to Federal Criminal Sex Trafficking Law Sweep Too Broadly - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/09/stop-sesta-amendments-federal-criminal-sex-trafficking-law-sweep-too-broadly <comment><USER2> This sounds suspiciously like the Estonia leak. Specifically like the more extreme Option B part of the leak.

[https://edri.org/leaked-document-eu-presidency-calls-for- mas...](https://edri.org/leaked-document-eu-presidency-calls-for-massive- internet-filtering/)

</comment><comment><USER3> TL;DR: EFF is against criminal liability of internet platforms for the actions of their users...specifically in this instance for a law targeting liability for sex trafficking.

To understand this position from a legal perspective it's helpful to understand _mens rea_ , or the mental intent of the criminal.

There are all kinds of legal standards, from knowing/willful all the way down to strict liability, including between such as reckless and negligence.

Strict liability is a very rare standard in criminal law, but basically means you will be guilty of a crime regardless of your intent. The most common/famous example from law schools is statutory rape. Normally crimes require some form of intent, but in the case of statutory rape the act alone is enough to convict. The extreme hypothetical is the case of a man meeting a girl at a bar that is 21 and over. The man takes a woman home, who should be 21 based on the circumstance, but in an abundance of caution checks her ID and confirms she is 21. Turns out she committed her own crime of possessing a fake government issued ID and she is really 16, the man has no legal defense based on lack of intent (lack of knowledge, willfulness, or even recklessness or negligence). The act occurred so he is guilty.

There is another line of cases regarding "burying your head in the sand". Example, you take a package from person x who pays you $1M to deliver it to address Y. Turns out it's drugs, the common defense would be, there was no intent to possess or transport drugs, but case law holds you can't escape criminal liability by burying your head in the sand.

I think the EFFs position is a slippery slope, sure we don't want criminal liability of internet platforms where they really didn't know about sex trafficking and even would have stopped it if they had known, but we don't want platforms claiming a la Uber, we are just a tech platform if people are using our platform to break laws we aren't liable for that. Yes, platforms should be liable when they help hide and facilitate crimes, especially in the case of Uber where their business model is facilitating drivers in illegally operating as taxis or rides for hire (as they do/did in many jurisdictions).

<comment><USER4> Disagreed completely. In my view it is enough for a platform to comply with legitimate requests for information from LE and have a team that handles user- generated reports of illegal/rule breaking activity that occurs on the platform. Anything more is placing an undue burden on these companies and either making some technologies dangerous to use/invest in (bitcoin can be used to sell drugs) or barring small companies from particular business opportunities because they would require too much monitoring overhead.

Let's trust the laws that already exist to handle things that have been illegal for a long time.

<comment><USER3> >Let's trust the laws that already exist to handle things that have been illegal for a long time.

So in other words I can create an Uber for murder for hire, and I'll connect people who want someone dead and people who will do the job; ill process the payment and take a cut. If the two conspirators get caught fine, let the laws that exist work it out...but I escape any liability "because I'm just a tech platform". All I have to do is respond to LE subpoenas during the murder investigation, that's what you are suggesting.

Don't get me wrong I agree with points about bitcoin, that it serves as a legit technology and shouldn't be outlawed because it might be used for illegal transactions, but the arguement is not that "banks already engage in money laundering for drug dealers and other illegal businesses, and at worst they pay fines, no one has gone to jail; therefore, bitcoin should remain unregulated so even one else can engage in money laundering".

<comment><USER5> No running a platform explicitly for murder for hire is already illegal.

<comment><USER3> I know it's extreme,but no there is no law about a murder for hire tech platform, just laws against various types of murder, all distinguished by the criminal intent.

It's like saying many jurisdiction had laws against unlicensed taxis and illegal rides for hire, and we know Uber willfully operated in those jurisdictions...drivers have been arrested and fined, but nothing happened to Uber.

So using real world examples, yes I would like to see platforms be liable where they knowingly and willfully operate to break the law. If people could interpret that reasonably, they would understand I'm not suggesting what is obviously being interpreted or projected onto my comments.

<comment><USER5> > I know it's extreme,but no there is no law about a murder for hire tech > platform, just laws against various types of murder, all distinguished by > the criminal intent.

Rico?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ripeness for Refactoring - <AUTHOR> https://michaelfeathers.silvrback.com/ripeness-for-refactoring

<comment><USER2> Two of my guiding principles for development are mottoes I heard repeatedly from emergency medicine professionals:

1\. "Don't just do something, stand there!" Are you _sure enough_ that the first "obvious" response is going to do significantly less harm than good? If not, wait a second, think, and try again;

2\. "If you don't write it down, it _never happened_." At least not the way you (think you) remember it, and what you _do_ remember is lacking a detail that will turn out to be critically important. Having information that you trust, available at need in usable form, leads to _dramatically_ better decisions out to several sigma from the mean.

"There's never time to do it right, but always time to do it over." I'm currently employed in one of the most pathological examples of this that I've come across in a 35-year career. Development using agile processes is a game- changer, but it's the worst of all worlds when the most essential things that _make_ for agile development — like pairing, or small iterations — are cast aside because "we don't have time for that".</comment>


Best of Show: PDP-7 and PDP-11/40 emulation - <AUTHOR> https://www.ioccc.org/2018/mills/hint.html <comment><AUTHOR> Here is the C program: [https://www.ioccc.org/2018/mills/prog.c](https://www.ioccc.org/2018/mills/prog.c) It is a PDP-7 emulator that can boot the most ancient known snapshot of Unix. This is running Unix from 1969 where the compiler is 'bc' (no 'cc' yet) then, he wrote a PDP-11 emulator _in PDP-7 assembly_ and uses the PDP-7 to emulate a PDP-11 to boot BSD 2.9.

<comment><AUTHOR> For context, this is from _The International Obfuscated C Code Contest_ [https://www.ioccc.org/](https://www.ioccc.org/)

<comment><USER2> Also, the 26th IOCCC has now started, if you are inspired!

[ Submitted as news: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18764925](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18764925) ]

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> We are in the strange situation with these emulators that all code ever written can be executed today, no problem. Have some Fortran-II code for the IBM 1401? No problem. Want to run some Analytical Engine code (a machine that couldn't even be constructed)? No problem:

[https://www.fourmilab.ch/babbage/emulator.html](https://www.fourmilab.ch/babbage/emulator.html)

Can you really say that this early code is obsolete? I think not, it's just different.

<comment><USER4> Dolphin runs Wii. Code, Xenia does XBox360 - but the future for XBoxOne emulation looks bleak.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is amazing.

Make sure to view it on a sufficiently wide browser to see the ASCII art of a torn piece of punched paper tape.

<comment><AUTHOR> The program would be impressive if it was clearly written and commented.

<comment><USER6> The contest is about obfuscated C. Clearly written or not, I'm impressed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If anyone wants to mess around with a PDP-11 simulator, you can get it up and running with Docker in 1 command.

Details are at: [https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/run-the-first-edition-of- unix...](https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/run-the-first-edition-of- unix-1972-with-docker)

</comment><comment><USER8> Way back in the early 80's when I was in high school I had an off campus class where I took a course on PDP-11 assembly language. Sadly we had to run our code in a PDP-11 emulator on a DEC System 10 and it was incredibly slow but I do remember how much I liked the PDP-11 instruction set. I wish I had kept the book from the class.

<comment><USER9> All the old DEC manuals are online. For example, the PDP-11/40 system manual:

[http://bitsavers.informatik.uni- stuttgart.de/pdf/dec/pdp11/1...](http://bitsavers.informatik.uni- stuttgart.de/pdf/dec/pdp11/1140/DEC-11-H40SA-A-D_PDP-11_40_System_manual.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Can anyone explain the background of this for a youngin like me whose first computer was Windows XP?

</comment><comment><USER11> _The short version is we have gone so far back in the history of UNIX that we don't have filesystem paths yet._

Incidentally, the same was true of MS-DOS: no paths in version 1, only drive letters; directories and paths were introduced in version 2. However, early UNIX doesn't seem to have drive letters...

</comment><comment><USER12> Where do people like this exist and how can I hire them? Really...

</comment><comment><USER13> typo: "Thompson re-wrote a filesystem emulation he had been experementing with" should be experimenting

</comment><comment><USER14> This is the best thing I have read this year. I expect I will still be able to say that next month.</comment>


Scrap Metal Prices - <AUTHOR> http://www.scrapregister.com/scrap-prices/united-states/260

<comment><AUTHOR> I was actually found interesting the value of used cellphones per pound but there are many things that I would never have imaged had so much scrap value.</comment>


On Modern Documents - <AUTHOR> http://www.camoy.info/docs <comment><USER2> Nonsense. Documents need to "survive". Web pages end up getting trashed every time someone updates a "standard". PDFs can be read years later.</comment>


Ask HN: Is there a way to confuse websites which track you? - <AUTHOR>

By confusing I mean, is there a way to send false information to websites that track you, like fake searches and fake website visits. I understand that its possible to not get tracked in the first place, but I want to support websites I like and therefore I don't want to use any ad-blocking software. <comment><USER2> I'm a bit confused by the question: If you want to support the websites you're visiting, why send false information? Wouldn't that have the same effect as blocking their ads (since you'd be killing their ability to serve relevant/contextual ads to you)?

<comment><USER3> He wants to see contextual ads for a random person each time he visits, so that the advertiser still pays up.

It could be done by sending a x-proxy-for header with a random ip address, within normal home-user ISP ranges if you wanted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> whitelist the domains you want to support</comment>


Show HN: Treetop – Accurate linux process tree CPU & memory usage (dotnet core) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/turbo/treetop <comment><USER2> Why does this use dotnet?

<comment><AUTHOR> I see no reason not to. My reasons are:

\- To see how well dotnet core 2.0 works

\- To test Rider support of dnc 2 with a smaller project

\- Have access to standard IO libraries that already handle all fringe edge cases and give meaningful exceptions

\- Have access to a JSON encoder without adding an external dependency

The point of my side project is to learn and break things. This is not a product.</comment></comment>


America's elderly seem more screen-obsessed than the young - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2019/08/14/americas-elderly-seem-more-screen-obsessed-than-the-young <comment><USER2> As my grandmother's Parkinson's progressed, she had to give up knitting. Then she gave up all the crafts that she had spent her days on. As things got worse, she could no longer go for walks or visit the neighbors. She stopped cooking, too, another thing she loved. Then she couldn't hold a book still enough to read it, and the contraptions we'd set up for her also stopped working since eventually she lost the coordination to turn a page in a book. We got her an iPad and she could vaguely swipe so she could read. Eventually she needed help even with her iPad.

My point is that the elderly aren't necessarily hypocrites. They have a very different lifestyle than you do. The challenges they face are different, what they're capable of is different.

My father is perfectly able-bodied, but you can only golf so many times a week and I think he's gotten sucked into the news and his screen. He just doesn't have anything else meaningful to do with his time.

<comment><USER3> I've had different experiences with my 70+ year old friends.

That experience is, of course, self selected for folks who have stuff that they will do with younger folks like me... mostly playing music. But I believe that folks that age are capable of a whole damn lot, assuming that they didn't do a shit-ton of coke or something in their 30s.

My dad is pretty far into Parkinsons, and I think that the disease has more to do with why he doesn't do stuff than anything. It's not that he's not "capable" of stuff... it's that he doesn't want to. That is a fine distinction, I know, and I can see how folks don't think it is even a real distinction. My mom describes the issue with Parkinsons as "I've fallen and I don't want to get up".

I wouldn't bother typing that all out, except that I feel like there is a point worth mentioning to people who don't have a lot of older friends:

there's nothing necessary about stopping doing a lot of what we do as we get older.

Eventually, we all get pain and/or a loss of senses, but it's not (I believe) as completely show-stopping. We don't have to give up on living.

I went rock climbing with a 68-year-old last month, and though the climb wasn't super hard, it was certainly a run for my money... it was 5.6R grade IV, and she led the 45M run out pitch, and the 6km of hiking on the return didn't seem to phase her.

Her feeling was that a lot of folks just stop trying around age 60. Their goals become "let's take the RV to AK some time this year" instead of "I'm going to write the best novel that I have written this year" (that was one of her goals).

She is exceptional, I think.

Still, my point is: if you can golf, you can do a lot more than do FB when you're not golfing.

And I hope there are folks who remind me of that as I approach those ages.

<comment><USER4> > That experience is, of course, self selected for folks who have stuff that > they will do with younger folks like me... mostly playing music. But I > believe that folks that age are capable of a whole damn lot, assuming that > they didn't do a shit-ton of coke or something in their 30s.

I don't understand why you disregard selection bias as insignificant. That factor deserves more than an offhand, brushed-off aside.

The reality is, the old people who _you_ regularly interact with are XYZ. We can't conclude anything about old people in general based on your personal experiences.

<comment><USER5> For me, his data that the old people he interacts with are XYZ are both comforting and a motivational existence proof.

<comment><USER6> Sure, but it _really_ does depend on who you interact with. My aunt runs a care home, and I had this discussion with her once - she said something like "oh I dread getting old, you can't do anything anymore, your memory goes, you can't go to the toilet by yourself, you can't dress yourself, moving anywhere can kill you....being old is horrible!", to which I replied that you know, you probably feel that way because 100% of old people you interact with on the daily basis are like this. Those who are well just don't go into care homes when they are old, so you never see them, but they are definitely out there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> m-i-l Some elderly people who live alone like the TV on for company - in many cases they aren't even watching it properly, they just have it on in the background to feel less lonely, like there are other people in the house with them. The article even alludes to this albeit in negative terms "this includes time spent engaged in other activities while the television is blaring in the background". But it is a very different pattern from being "screen-obsessed" and "waste hours ... fritter on chat-shows and repeats of soaps". I think the author could benefit from showing a little more sympathy towards people who have circumstances different from their own.

<comment><USER7> We mostly got the grandparents on facebook because they kept complaining about not getting photos in the mail anymore. This give them the ability to see the photos of the grandkids and great grandkids in the system that their kids and grandkids actually use.

Of course I'm more than a little nervous about facebook radicalization and scams, but we made sure she does things like not use her real photo and luckily my aunt that lives nearby is very tech-savvy and paranoid. But unfortunately facebook seems to be the best option for helping more isolated elderly people connect with their families.

<comment><USER8> Preface: this is going to sound like an advertisement, but I promise I'm not connected in any way. I just like the idea.

Have you heard of NanaGram? ([https://nanagram.co/](https://nanagram.co/)). It's a service that regularly mails physical copies of photos to someone you choose, and it's one of the most "of course that should be a product" products that I've seen recently.

<comment><USER9> It's a winner of an idea, because Facebook lets us work around the _real_ goal of grandparents when they ask us for regular updates; attention. Giving our elderly family members ways of passively observing us defeats their goal of wanting us to talk to them, but a NanaGram is a specific, actionable gift that demonstrates this abstract, "Well they must be thinking of me!" concept that they can then extrapolate however they need.

<comment><USER10> @otras thanks for sharing. It's an honor to be mentioned on HN like this.

One of the big goals of the product is to increase interaction between loved ones. I wrote about this a bit more at [https://nanagram.co/blog/niche- start](https://nanagram.co/blog/niche-start) — we have a feature, which allows you to list names and phone numbers of you and your siblings on a cover photo. I get reports all the time of grandparents who go down the list, dialing each grandkid to talk through the photos with them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> My mother and her friends are completely lost to Facebook addiction. It's like they grew up without any immunity or incoulation from video games, MySpace, etc. and Facebook hit with full force to their naive social media immune system. It's like crack, you can't get them off of it. Reminds me of the first time I played Everquest. My mother will be at actual family events like birthdays and instead of interacting is mindlessly scrolling her feed in a room alone on a couch instead of making actual memories. It is the only "socialization" she and her friends seem to do now and that is a terrible thing in my opinion.

<comment><USER12> I see the same thing with my parents though on closer inspection of the data, 65+ yo users use their smartphone less than all the other cohorts on the hart.

<comment><USER13> In my experience older Facebook users can spend a lot of time on their desktop computer, too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This matches a pattern I think I noticed in the last few years (maybe it was there all along): those who want to protect the weak by forbidding some aspect of life are often the ones that seem to somehow struggle with it themselves.

E.g. sexuality. Those with a healthy sexuality are literally never the ones asking to protect the youth from it. It is always those for whom it is connected with shame and stigma. So the most safe route to become afraid of the sexualization of the youth seems to be to have shameful sedual thoughts yourself. And because you, a (in your self image) controlled person have troubles with your dirty mind, how bad must it be for the youth?

So when it comes to assigning priorities to potential problems, one seems to look to themselves and extrapolate from there.

I saw similar patterns with parents that have troubles with their TV habits and extrapolate that onto the (in their eyes comparable) activity of siting on a computer.

The problem with computers is, that you can't really tell what your kid does unless you spy on it or have the trust bond to ask them. They could be playing games, socialize, watch porn, read the news, watch videos, learn programming or editing software — who knows.

The generation of obsessive television watchers thinks kids are doomed because of the internet. The generation of wild parties belives the youth is unhinged (despite evidence against it). Etc. Just because it was aproblem for you doesn't mean the next generation even wants it.

I have cousins that are around the age I threw my first wild parties and they didn't even go out ror a drink yet, befause it literally doesn't interest them.

<comment><USER15> This is usually called projection.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> There seems to be a pattern where a new, addicting technology sinks its claws in, and the it requires a certain amount of youthful malleability to realize the problems it causes and grow out of it. And the older you are, the less of that adaptive ability you seem to have.

My mom plays the most mind-numbing mobile and Facebook (yep) games, instead of realizing there's a bigger world of much higher-quality content out there. Gen Z seems to have the hindsight about social media to resist some of the effects it's had on millennials. Etc.

<comment><USER17> Gen Z I'm around literally do not post anything that isn't ephemeral and for friends only, or at all. Also more and more routine social media detoxes.

Posting IG photos? Posting to your story? they'll straight up tell me "thats not the move, you don't want to do that"

Its group chats or bust.

Millennials spent so much time rejecting vertical videos, stories, and all that stuff and are the main ones using the older social networks for that.

<comment><USER18> Agreed. I'm one of those oddball half-GenX/half-millennials, but I spend a lot of time around Gen Z's. (Not in a creepy way, I'm just the eldest cousin in a huge close extended family.) I think the way Gen Z handles tech is awesome. They're quick to apply skepticism, common sense, and a concern for privacy. I think us oldsters could learn a lot from them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> There is nothing about technology that inherently makes it more alluring for young people. In the future we should actually expect that it will be the elderly who possess the most knowledge about a wide variety of technology and are also the heaviest of users of it.

This expectation that young people would be more predisposed to technology grew from incorrect notions of their natural learning abilities and the technological adoption curve.

There is a generation of people who were born at precisely the right time such that technology was simple and analog enough for them to understand from a young age, and from that point grew in complexity at a pace that was proportional to their own mental development, allowing them to seamlessly transition into more advanced technologies with clearer intuition about how it works. Whatever the next best thing was, they were certain it was better than whatever came before, because progress was exponential for so long, and they had actually _seen_ everything that came before. This may be the _only_ generation that is so obsessed with technology, because all their life has been nothing but exponential technological advancement, and a belief that technology can do anything.

It cannot.

The new generations coming into this world where everyday technology is the best it has ever been and probably the best it will ever be quickly come to understand that, and have no expectations of better things to come. For that they will look elsewhere, back to the old ways. The vintage, the analog, the fleeting.

<comment><USER20> IMO and in my direct experience, all of my favorite tech has gotten objectively worse over the last few years.

\- My phone cannot play music through headphones and charge at the same time. Nor can I use any old pair of headphones with it, and most pairs have to spend time charging before I can use them. My phones 5+ years ago did not have these major usability problems.

\- I ordered food while in NYC recently using an app. Out of 5 attempted orders, 4 were stolen by the driver and only 1 order arrived in reasonable condition. The other orders took ~3 hours to sort out. Ordering a pizza 5-10 years ago? No way is that gonna get stolen 4/5 times.

\- Google Search on Android (voice) has gotten way worse. It used to offer functions like always offering to search the web (it's Google!), or letting me quickly review past audio search results. Now I cannot see any more past results without _redoing_ the search and waiting for the response. I also cannot find _any way_ to perform a web search on ~50% of my queries. Typing on a desktop computer is way better than voice searching on Android, but I used to have a stellar experience voice searching on Android. It's gone. Will it ever come back?

\- Many websites are nearly impossible to use now. I barely use the web because there are so many intrusive ads.

Maybe my point is made. In many many cases, the last few years have seen a sharp drop in technology utility for many regular younger. None of this stuff _needs_ to be getting worse, but it is.

<comment><USER21> This has happened at other times in the past as well. Video games stagnated in the 80s pre-Nintendo, Microsoft's "embrace, extend, extinguish" killed a lot of innovation in the 90s. Macs died a slow an horrible death before Jobs' revival...

Technology cycles and we're at the end of a large one. Consolidation, regulatory capture and gaps between generations cause this IMO.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I see that in mine and my wife's parents. It is a pretty good indicator of how much their lives suck or do not suck. The lonelier, less engaged with the world they are the more screen time. And who can blame them.

<comment><USER23> I was surprised to see that this was the only comment specifically calling out loneliness (and although you didn't call it out by name, depression).

Maintaining a social life takes work, maintaining one into your 70s even moreso; particularly if certain sacrifices which were seen to be necessary at the time were made to raise children who later leave.

Divorce is more common than 40 years ago (I'm not taking a moral stand here, I'm all for leaving toxic relationships but friends are often lost as collateral damage), and grandchildren less.

Social media and television are to our social lives what fast food is to our need to eat.

I'd speculate that if you normalised for loneliness the screen use by age would become a much flatter line.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Unfortunately, a lot of this is spent watching corporate news-product, leading to heavily warped worldviews.

<comment><USER25> I've yet to find a news source without an agenda, corporate or non-profit

<comment><USER26> [https://www.afp.com/en](https://www.afp.com/en)

Agence France Presse is a bit of an oddity in terms of structure. Legally a corporation, it has no shareholders and is forbidden by its bylaws to receive public subventions. It mostly sell news feeds to other medias.

You may be surprised by the clear design and the absence of ads.

It is managed by an assembly of 18 people, mostly representatives from local medias (who are all biased in different ways) and 3 members sent by the government. Its finances are managed by specialized magistrates.

In my opinion it is a great model organization of private-public collaboration and an example of correctly set incentives for a good neutral news agency.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> The graph at the top clearly shows _flat_ TV habits from 2015 to 2019 for the elderly (and more TV use than younger demographics); and increasing computer and smartphone use _but_ still less than younger demographics, even after increase.

So comments about how the elderly might be more succeptible to social network addition seem off the mark. They are still using computer/smartphone less than other demographics, not more.

Props to well-designed infrographic at the top, anti-props to the clickbait title which has contradicting implications.

</comment><comment><USER28> I feel guilty for enabling this by buying them smartphones. Now my parents are in a room watching their respective daily soaps/Whatsapp junk viral videos and propaganda on Youtube for hours everyday (and late at night as well).

</comment><comment><USER29> Can confirm. My mom is a Facebook power user and doesn't even know it. She cares so much about what her high school graduating class is up to; including spats in comments about politics, etc.

My father on the other hand is old school and never opted into social media.

</comment><comment><USER30> if I am asked "do you read or watch TV" I read, by 10:1.

but, if I am asked "do you spend time in front of a screen" the answer is different because I read on a kindle.

I'm in the age cohort in question btw. I gave up TV about two years ago, around the time I also stopped doing FaceBook.

</comment><comment><USER31> Retired individuals said to have more free time.

<comment><USER32> Except that they should have less required work screen time because they're retired? A large variety of today's jobs involve sitting in front of a computer 4-8 hours a day, so on the face of it, retired people have more options.

But the observations of this article aren't that surprising to me. What doesn't require screen time these days?

Mainly exercise, in-person socializing, and reading paper books.

Exercise and in-person socializing seem to be naturally reduced for older people. (Of course I can think of a few people that are exceptions)

And even reading paper books is less of an option for older people with reduced vision. My grandfather lived to a very old age and I believe it was easier for him to watch TV than to read books.

Ironically I feel like almost everything else involves a screen: travelling seems to increase your attachment to your phone, socializing with family is often done through a screen, anything in "media" like making music or video often involves a screen, etc. Planning vacations, doing your taxes, financial planning, etc. are all very screen-centric IMO.

<comment><USER31> If you look at the graph, which is the very first thing in that article, it's mostly TV viewing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> That's surprising, not because of the amount that elderly watch TV (here my grandfather won't move from the living room when the cricket's on), but because I thought more people under the age 60 would be behind a computer 8 hours a day.

<comment><USER20> > but because I thought more people under the age 60 would be behind a > computer 8 hours a day.

They are, but it isn't counted here (this is "media consumption only", not all screen time) confusingly enough.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Older people may watch a ridiculous amount of television but I've only seen young people staring down at their phones while using the urinal.

<comment><USER35> Honest question: what's wrong with using a phone while you use a urinal?

<comment><USER34> I don't understand why people are so addicted to their phones they literally can't even take 15 seconds to concentrate on pissing anymore.

In addition to that you're at a row of urinals with a camera out. It's just straight up weird to me.

<comment><USER36> I don't have to concentrate to pee, so I don't see an issue with looking at my phone while I'm standing there

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> The use of "obsessed" is a pretty aggressive conclusion - just because people do something a lot doesn't mean they're obsessed. I'm not obsessed with laundry and vacuuming because I have a dog that sheds a lot.

When I was a kid, my grandma was in a retirement home, and every time I'd go over, she'd have the TV on and blasting at full volume. She wasn't obsessed, there just wasn't much else she could do. She was in bad physical shape, so she couldn't leave her room easily. Her eyes were bad, so she couldn't read or engage in a lot of other activities. Her options were the TV or talking to her kids on the phone, and you can only do the latter for so many hours a week.

Millennials/teens/whatever group of young people you want to compare them to are more physically fit and able to get around, plus they have larger social networks. That enables them to do a much broader range of activities than the elderly, so of course it's likely they'll divide their time among more things than the elderly will.

<comment><USER38> 10 hours per day looking at a screen certainly fits the bill for "obsessed", I'd say.

<comment><USER37> When you have difficulty getting out of your house and there aren't many other activities you can do? Obsession is a state of being actively preoccupied with something - it's not defined by an amount of time spent doing something. You have to consider the context and the mental state, not just the length of time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> How does someone in their 50s watch six hours of television a day?

I'm 63 and even on days when i am not working I'd be hard put to find six hours to sit in front of a television.

I'm not American; but I can't see what difference that should make.

</comment><comment><USER40> "Fox News did to our parents what they thought video games would do to us."

-Ryan Scott

<comment><USER41> All cable news is trash. The world would be better if the entire medium went away.

<comment><USER42> It used to actually be OK... Before that big event a bit under 2 decades ago. I recall that as being the most meaningful turning point. That's when "the thing the airport left on over the terminal" became 'news-entertainment' (ad funded hell) and the 24/7 non-stop news-cycle truly gained momentum.

Want to make the news better gain? Kill ads.

<comment><USER43> I don't know man. It probably got worse around that time, but it sure seemed like it was already News Entertainment during the first Gulf War.

<comment><USER42> I'm willing to agree: my baseline was "OK" not "actually good".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Isn't it mostly a consequence of more available free time and possibly boredom?

<comment><USER45> And a realization how empty life has become without constant worries and work to fill it in. Yeah digital media are also addictive, but primarily they are a better reality than the physical

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> oh how the turns have tabled

</comment><comment><USER47> And it's only going to get worse.

</comment><comment><USER48> It makes sense - this is still a novelty to the old(er), but it's been part of young people's lives since they were born.

<comment><USER49> Look at the charts. This is mostly television they are talking about. TV is not a novelty for anyone anymore.

<comment><USER50> Computer and TV (while the largest slice) are holding steady, Smartphone is the one ballooning.

But these are _mostly_ people at home, not in the job market so what should they do instead, volunteer, read? I dunno if I would castigate them for this.</comment></comment></comment>


Disrupting open-source communities: NSA operation ORCHESTRA - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwcl17Q0bpk <comment><AUTHOR> A discussion on Reddit for those who want some commentary: [https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1xpaie/nsas_op...](https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1xpaie/nsas_operation_orchestra_undermining_crypto/)</comment>


Thoughts on Writing Code for Money - <AUTHOR> http://samsoff.es/posts/thoughts-on-writing-code-for-money

<comment><USER2> I'm a writer. I write technical manuals for a living, and prose (essays, blog entries, fiction) as an avocation. I know how to separate writing for pay and writing for the love of it.

I also write code, so I do know how intellectually intertwined coding and writing as pursuits can be; I also know that doing anything for pay can not and should not _ever_ be compared to creating a child. It's just offensive to everyone involved.

That said, here's the real takeaway from all this: I know my work (whether it's a UINavigationController or a chapter on configuring a firewall for port forwarding) is not a part of me; it's a gig.

I've known people who have quit their job because the company they worked for was dropping their manual from the documentation set. I mean, they were _so_ enamored with their work, they were willing to part ways over it. There are some I work with who refuse to write documentation for other products in other areas of their company, simply because they've "got a good thing going with that development team". I say, "who cares?"

If you can't (or won't) distance your emotions from the work you do for people, it's time to just do it all for yourself. Become a solopreneur working on solutions to problems and inefficiencies you see in the marketplace, like patio11 did in the bingo card industry. That'll be the only way you'll be truly free of self-confliction.</comment>


Bjarne Stroustrup is catching up - <AUTHOR> http://flyingfrogblog.blogspot.com/2015/08/bjarne-stroustrup-is-catching-up.html

<comment><USER2> >> Looking at "modern" C++ makes me angry. I wasted so much time learning all of this incidental complexity that just gets in the way of software development.

C++ was a huge part of my life as a developer back in the late 80's and early 90's. I used it. I taught it to other developers at major corporations. I once met Bjarne at a conference and he signed my copy of the ARM. It wouldn't make sense to view all of that period as wasted time. C++ was the best tool for a lot of tasks for a long time. It was the most powerful and expressive implementation of OOP (imo) at a time when we were just beginning to understand higher levels of abstraction in program structure. Yes, we've moved on, and it would be strange if we hadn't. I don't see any reason to regard the path we've traveled as a waste, though.</comment>


The Stories That Bind Us - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/17/fashion/the-family-stories-that-bind-us-this-life.html?src=me&ref=general&_r=0

<comment><USER2> As much as I hate to resort to stereotypes I suspect many people browsing HN are generally guilty of neglecting family in favour computers - this is bad for literally everyone. The question is: "what can be done?" ...well posting this story was a good start :D</comment>


My Empire of Dirt - <AUTHOR> http://nymag.com/print/?/restaurants/features/37273/

<comment><USER2> _Eating local is expensive and time-consuming, which is why this consumerist movement will not easily trickle down into mass society._

And it's bad for the environment too based on the studies Superfreakonomics quoted. Why? It turns out transportation is a minor contributor to food related emissions:

 _Transportation represents only 11 percent of food emissions, with delivery from producer to retailer representing only 4 percent._

You need the book to go into full detail but the crux of it is that large, optimized farms are significantly less destructive to the environment on a proportional basis than small, local farms. The people behind the study said that cutting out one meal of red meat and dairy per week would have a better result than eating entirely locally produced food.

Some quotes here: [http://abcnews.go.com/2020/Books/superfreakonomics-read- exce...](http://abcnews.go.com/2020/Books/superfreakonomics-read- excerpt/story?id=8848071)

<comment><USER3> This is not true. The book you cite, 'SuperFreakonomics,' by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, apparently misquotes the original research on which they base their claim. Here's a quote from the book[1]:

"Even the 'locavore' movement, which encourages people to eat locally grown food, doesn't help in this regard. A recent study by two Carnegie Mellon researchers, Christopher Weber and H. Scott Matthews, found that buying locally produced food actually increases greenhouse-gas emissions."

But compare that to how one of the two authors of the original study, Christoph Weber, actually summarizes their findings[2]:

"The point of the paper was to say that yes, you can lower your footprint by eating local foods, but you can do more on average by eating differently. It's not that eating local is a crock."

In that light, it seems as if Levitt and Dubner either misunderstood the paper by Weber and Matthews or preferred to portrait it in a light that helps make their own book look profound and surprising.

[1] [http://abcnews.go.com/2020/Books/superfreakonomics-read- exce...](http://abcnews.go.com/2020/Books/superfreakonomics-read- excerpt/story?id=8848071)

[2] <http://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/es900427m?cookieSet=1>

<comment><USER4> You're quoting the authors' summary of their opinions, not disagreeing with Superfreakonomics' interpretation of their data. There's a big difference.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What I really enjoyed about this article was hearing how difficult his experience really was -- and you can tell he A) actually knows what he's talking about and B) is still understating the difficulty. I've always assumed that I would "know how to survive off the land" -- my outdoor self-confidence pretty much comes from time backpacking in the Scouts as a kid, and from reading a lot of Heinlein. And I have power tool experience, and I can do physical labor. How hard could it be?

So at the beginning of the article, I was thinking "this seems incredible, I would love to do something like that." In the middle, I was beginning to appreciate how horribly difficult and unpleasant it would actually be. And by the end, I was realizing that if I absolutely had to live off the land on my own, without society to bail me out, I would almost certainly screw something up and starve. I think almost all of us would.

Anyway, you might have already known that. But for some reason this article hit just the right note to make me aware of the arrogance I've always had about how hard surviving via subsistence farming would really be. I'm going to go eat some cereal now and get back to work on the startup in the morning.

<comment><USER6> I thought he was being way too ambitious. If I _had_ to make something like that work, my focus would be on potatoes and possibly a cow for milk, but it would of course depend on more land, the correct climate and probably better timing. He seemed dead-set on eating meat every day, which seems to me to have been very unrealistic, especially with such a tiny amount of land, unless he was cheating and using bought grain etc. to feed the animals.

<comment><USER7> You can probably go for eating eggs every day.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Title is a reference to NIN's _Hurt_ , (beautifully) covered by Johnny Cash:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmVAWKfJ4Go&feature=relat...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmVAWKfJ4Go&feature=related)

<comment><USER9> More trivia: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurt_(Nine_Inch_Nails_song)#Mus...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurt_\(Nine_Inch_Nails_song\)#Music_video_2)

Read the Reznor quote.

<comment><USER10> _Wow. [I felt like] I just lost my girlfriend, because that song isn't mine anymore… It really made me think about how powerful music is as a medium and art form._

To have your own work transformed in such a profoundly moving way has to be among the greatest possible creative experiences.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The author started way too fast and was surprised he would burn out so quickly. If you are trying to set up a small self sustaining ecosystem you don't dump everything in all at once. Anyone that's done an aquarium will tell you that. You start with one thing, stabilize it, add another thing, stabilize, rinse and repeat.

After reading this the only lesson he learned was how to waste $11,000. Off the mark he's growing tomatoes, corn, potatoes, eggplant, raspberries, etc. Nothing is mentioned about the watering and fertilizing cycles of the plants. Which is pretty damn important. And these aren't the easiest vegetables, except maybe the tomatoes and the cale.

I've started my own little terrace garden this summer and so far I've learned getting started is expensive and no matter how smart you think you are, read the directions. I basically spent $200 last month on what basically amounts to soil, pots, hand tools, and seedlings. And this is only to grow herbs.

My objective is to get out from under the thumb of my local grocery store. Last time I went shopping they were charging $3 for a bag of lettuce! If things work out by the end of summer I won't be paying for something like that again.

<comment><USER7> Why did you have to spent $200? Would you give a small breakdown?

My housemates and I have recently started growing stuff in our garden. We did not have to buy soil and pots, only some seeds and tools.

<comment><USER11> Organic soil 25lbs (10kg) : $11

Handtools : $25

Garden hose : $20

Garden hose attachments : $18

Seed packets $4 x 8 : $32

Various pots : $70

Primer and varnish : $40

Now that I think about it it probably wasn't my wisest shopping. But I live in the city and to get to a gardening center would take a few hours by bus or metro.

But these are sunk costs, you only need to by seeds once, you only need to pots once, a big bag of soil costs almost the same as a small bag and can last a while. If this little experiment works out I will have learned a lot from the experience and have the required material.

But I'd never spend $11,000 on the first run. That's a really expensive education. If anything the guy proves that "his" urban farm is unsustainable.

<comment><USER7> Thanks for the breakdown.

Did you get a box (or whatever) to make compost in? I guess even now you have lots of kitchen waste, that will make for great soil. I heard used coffee powder is good for most potted plants.

A worm compost is fun, but other methods work as well. You can compost not only food wastes, but also most kinds of paper.

If you want to go really crazy, go the humanure route (<http://weblife.org/humanure/default.html>). Needs a bucket and some saw dust and a compost heap. Make sure you separate the phases.

By the way, what's the advantage of organic soil over just taking a shovel and digging up some dirt?

<comment><USER11> I'm not composting this year. If things work out I'll probably start a little later. My last heap turned to kindling since I never watered it, it was in a remote part of a farm and I forgot about it.

The city did send me a flyer saying they are starting a composting project and asking for interested citizens to respond.

The reason I went with organic soil instead of sticking plants in the ground is because our building is from the 1960. Lots of things were fashionable then like lead paint and asbestos. I already have a sealed ventilation shaft that has asbestos on my property. The dirt itself could contain anything. I've already picked out broken glass, garbage, rags. All of this is in the dirt. Like the Obamas, I don't want to find out my lawn has high traces of lead.

Going with my own soil I have control of what's in it and what, eventually, goes into me. BTW, my mints and basil have started to pop up. 2 fresh ingredients I no longer need from the store.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This article reminded me of something I've always wanted to do before I grow old; make an automated farm. What drives me crazy is the idea of an integrated system that gives me high quality produce at the maximum possible efficiency.

If we use something like hydroponics then we can precisely control the nutrients the plants get. Further, since they grow inside a greenhouse we don't need to use any pesticides at all. Further, we can control the amount of light they receive to optimize for maximum growth, and by stacking such units one on top of the other than we don't have to worry space at all. So a massive 500 acre farm can be theoretically reduced to a one acre farm with 500 decks of plants in an efficient arrangement.

In fact, someone else way smarter than me has already though of this and developed the idea to quite a long extent (see: <http://www.verticalfarm.com/>). Has anyone over here ever tried something like this? Are there more awesome people like Mr. Howard?

<comment><USER13> To address one of your points, just because the crop is inside a greenhouse (or even indoors!) does not mean you won't get pests. Anyone who has had fungus gnats or spider mites even in their far-spaced house plants can attest it happens :(

<comment><USER12> Yes, but as loewenskind pointed out. It is exactly like quarantine. think about it this way if we can keep entire football fields dust free for years at a time to fabricate micro-processors then surely we can do this?

Something that really amazes me is that technology has been pushed to limits that we can't imagine. Who would have thought that we are now engineering things 100 atoms apart? Unbelievable.

<comment><USER7> > [...] then surely we can do this?

There's a difference between technologically possible, and economically feasible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The author, Manny Howard, was on the Colbert Report tonight. This guy was incredibly deadpan, one of the more enjoyable Colbert guests that I can remember.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's what prompted me to look him up. I caught parts of the interview while browsing the web, and decided that he sounded interesting enough to warrant a quick search, and this article turned out to be better than the interview (at least from an information perspective).

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Nice Nine Inch Nails reference ^_^

</comment><comment><USER16> Permaculture FTW</comment>


Meraki, the cheap Wi-Fi guys, get $20 million - <AUTHOR> http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9839817-7.html

<comment><USER2> These guys executed a very incredible PR hit this week. They're all over the news in lots of different outlets.</comment>


Ask HN: How to split traffic in A/B testing? - <AUTHOR>

I've been reading up a lot on A/B testing lately on HN. Since sequential A/B testing is not recommended due to external factors, I'm just curious as to how someone is suppose to split web traffic (say 50/50 without using hardware to balance). <comment><USER2> The way A/Bingo handles this is to assign every user a unique ID, and for each test take the MD5 hash of their ID concatenated with the test name. That gives you some big ol' integer. Modulo the number of choices gives you the number of the choice to show them. This is extremely fast, durable, and has very little state, which are nice things to have in an A/B testing algorithm.

<comment><USER3> So that means, that all you need is their UID, and for each subsequent page hit, for a particular test, the test choice to show them is deterministic. But, where does the even distribution of test choices come from? The hash or UID or the combo of the two?

<comment><USER2> MD5 hashes mod a small number can be assumed to be randomly distributed. Hypothetically assuming I had evidence to the contrary, I would shortly be very famous in some circles. Practical results bears the expectation out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Which programming language do you use?

Maybe someone has already built a framework for you to use?

I personally used ABingo for Ruby on Rails (<http://www.bingocardcreator.com/abingo>), Visual Website Optimizer (<http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com>) and Google Website Optimizer (<http://www.google.com/websiteoptimizer>) for any technology.

The advantage of running a technology specific tool is mainly because of performance. Most technology-agnostic tools execute a javascript on your page to be able to execute the A/B testing logic where ABingo for example is executed on the server side (no additional http request)

What generic tools give you though is the ability to change your tests without changing your code.</comment>


Our war on fish and how they feel about it - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.harvard.edu/philg/2018/10/16/our-war-on-fish-and-how-they-feel-about-it/ <comment><AUTHOR> For an animal species with the capacity to reflect on the wider world, we don't have to be nutty animal liberationists to conclude that overall we're a pretty nasty lot.</comment>


Unker Non-Linear Writing System - <AUTHOR> https://s.ai/nlws/ <comment><USER2> What a fascinating concept, especially this part:

> We have only started to develop how to hold a conversation in UNLWS itself. > As we currently have it, it's a very, very different kind of thing than > linear atomic turntaking. Rather, it's a sort of ongoing mutual edit of a > shared structure, where revision history playback (or live observation) > expresses the 'conversational' tone expected by linear conversation, and the > fixed form expresses the integrated totality of what the participants have > expressed. Different ink colors help to distinguish participants, but there > are no boundaries preventing one participant from using another's ink as > part of their own expressions. Indeed, there are a few special > conversational variants of glyphs which are meant to be easier to drop in to > an already-drawn passage than the normal forms; these are recognizable by > their use of two ink colors. (It's a pity that it's so fiddly to edit pencil > or pen drawings.)

I can't help but wonder how this would look like applied to instant messaging: We are used to seeing our conversations arranged in differently colored bubbles, but how would our form of communication change if we instead communicated on a collaborative surface where we could freely choose which color to use and where to add our thoughts? (Similar to how Slack already introduces a small amount of non-linearity in the form of threaded conversations, but applied on a much larger scale, so that non-linear collaborative communication becomes the default instead of an afterthought.)

<comment> karl-j I took note of that part too, it reminds me of this article [1] posted on HN recently. It contrasts the fleeting and context dependent flows of posts on social media ("the stream") with enduring wiki style interlinking of posts where the context is embedded in the linking ("the garden"). It consider it in the context of personal note taking, and I feel what you mention is the garden approach to conversation, as opposed to the normal stream approach.

I wonder what the medium would have to be like to be useful for instant messaging, since not all things being said need to endure or benefit from linking. Maybe the ink fades unless new things are written nearby, proving its relevance?

[1] [https://hapgood.us/2015/10/17/the-garden-and-the-stream-a- te...](https://hapgood.us/2015/10/17/the-garden-and-the-stream-a- technopastoral/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Perhaps well-implemented collaborative sketching could be the medium that turns conversations from streams into gardens (and it's the only way of chatting in UNLWS I can imagine).

Some of the challenges I see:

— Tracking where the conversation is being advanced, since it can happen at any place in the sketch.

— Sketching, while can be more informative than text, is tricker to conform to smaller mobile screen sizes.

— Ideally it should not be limited to two dimensions only, but multi- dimensional sketching poses hard UI challenges.

<comment><USER3> Tracking: if you're asking a question or otherwise anticipating where the other will add, there are relatively few places to look.

Also, we use different colors per author in multi-author utterances, which makes it easy to spot another's writing.

Of course, unless you have an animated or history-preserving medium (which we assume we don't), then reconstructing the order of conversation might be difficult. That is entirely in keeping with our sense of what is "natural" to a non-linear language. The order in which something was written is temporal, and everything temporal is linear, so it's disfavored semantically & grammatically.

We prefer to challenge concepts like "conversation" at the root on such issues, rather than try to adapt UNLWS to afford them.

Sketching: we assume an infinite plane writing canvas. In practice, this means eg that one can use scaling to fit anything anywhere. However, we generally do not make use of images, unless it's purely quotative.

We do have e.g. graphs grammaticalized, though (inspired by Tufte's _sparklines_ , but with a few more affordances from not being in a linear embedding.)

3d+: We considered that early on — and it's addressed in my essays on language design — but we rejected it as too under-constrained and difficult to work with in practice.

However, I've recently been thinking about a UNLWS-ish _tactile_ 2.5D concept, which would use texture and a shallow height dimension — like a topographic map, not like an ants' nest. That's still in early conceptual stage, and not documented anywhere except a couple posts on CONLANG-L.

<comment><AUTHOR> > we rejected it as too under-constrained and difficult to work with in > practice

I'm imagining a conversation as a space containing multiple regular UNLWS planes, intersecting at certain [binding?] points.

Such an approach would ideally leave dimensionality to the medium, language itself could remain under same constraints as before.

A conversation plane would be viewed in 2D, but certain points could indicate connections outside of current plane. For such a point, viewer can pull up a projection that shows connecting conversation planes in some way (possibly 3D or pseudo-3D).

Of course, there are some technical challenges in implementing a medium that works this way, and it's unclear how groundbreaking or useful it would be in practice (after all, all conversation planes should be possible to represent as areas on one larger plane, just with longer connecting lines).

<comment><USER3> I have two concerns with that, above the (major) technical challenges: 1\. we wanted this to be writable using colored pens 2\. if we add a dimension, we must add it for real.

#2 is to me the vastly harder problem. Just like in UNLWS, we _always_ have to challenge our own assumptions in order to get a sense for what would be "native to" a two-dimensional written langauge, we'd have to do the same for 3D (or 2.5D). Merely slapping 2D planes together with some links would not come anywhere even close to a robust use of the medium, just like merely having English sentences branch off from each other isn't anywhere close to a robust use of two-dimensionality.

Fully 2D language is already an extremely conceptually challenging problem, at least to me. Hardly anyone has even tried. There are fundamental challenges, like "how do you tell a joke when you don't control the ordering".

I don't think anyone is currently able to do 3D in a way that would truly serve the medium - and the medium would need to be much better defined, since humans' inability to actually see anything 3D instantaneously (we see 2D with an imputed distance and assumptions about what the rest looks like) implies that there must be interaction-in-time of some sort (like, at minimum, moving your head or the object in order to see the whole thing). That's going to be very specific to the medium. Are we talking about arbitrary 3D disconnected polytopes, ants' nest casts, convex hulls, computer-manipulated 2D, VR goggles, ...? Those all have radically different affordances.

Simultaneously, it would trivialize problems in 2D that we have to deal with. E.g. in 3D, there's no circuit wire-crossing problem, whereas in 2D, Borromean rings e.g. have unavoidable collisions. It would be cheating to use 3D in some shallow way to get rid of that issue, without also dealing with 3D's own problems.

Design constraints are a _good_ thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This reminds me of the film Arrival and relates to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis [1]regarding how language affects our perception and cognition. It's certainly a very interesting design (there's a hieroglyphic electrical circuit quality to it), but it wasn't clear what we can infer or gain from this non-linear form of writing. I feel like non-linear thinking is naturally how our brains work (or has more potential to work), but not how we have been trained to decode symbols, so it'd be interesting to see how this type of language might alter our cognition.

Would this help us look at ideas more holistically? Would this help us be more sensitive to relationships rather than just the objects? Could this open up new patterns of thinking? Lot's of interesting questions.

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

<comment><USER5> I believe that understanding relationships between units (objects, people, etc.) explains high intelligence, especially in autism, more than most average thinkers assume. People tend to fixate on the unit, and presume a relationship apropos between units. So, if we give core focus to memorizing the relationship _then_ the unit, we may actually reinforce the neural pathways for both units and the abstraction between them without additional repetition.

My long-term memory is more efficient when I learn something from multiple angles. So, I don't look at basic algebra and just think, "X and Y are placeholders for numbers." I also think, "X can contain the value Y expressed as X=!Y." and "X can be a function of X expressed as X=X(X++)." and so on. This kind of ad-hoc modeling is about testing and defining the context of a relationship between units. And in that respect, I can say, anecdotally, that I consume information quickly and rarely have recall errors.

<comment><USER6> Fascinating. Can you explain this: "X can be a function of X expressed as X=X(X++)."

This is my (incorrect) attempt to make sense of the equation: X++ = X + 1 (?) X() What does this mean? How can X be a function?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> After going through the phase of admiring this new and intellectually stimulating thing, I went on with an exercise of imagination about how it would look like for a society to have evolved somehow into using this at large. Each new word (or at least morpheme) has to have its own signature/ideogram that has to be learned and remembered. For a lexicon of any practical use that would mean thousands of ideograms. That feels quite a burden. An improved solution that I'm able to imagine just now may be to have ideograms only for abstract relations (like for prepositions) and keep "ordinary" words (as the nouns and verbs, at least) formed by a much smaller group of simpler constructs, like we do with alphabet letters?

Good stuff, nevertheless.

<comment><USER8> Ideograms clearly _can_ work, and pretty dang well, as demonstrated by ancient China. Some phonetic representation would be nice too. Either way, you'd likely see common structures evolving into ideograms. Very interesting.

<comment><USER3> FWIW, we deliberately decided to have no phonetic representation at all, to avoid any linearizing influence.

Yes, it would need a large number of glyphs. Not so many as speculated above, though — e.g. we have one glyph that covers communicate, say, tell, hear, speech (all senses), etc. (with some mix-ins for sensory modality); another one that covers give, receive, gift, sell, etc.

Linear languages with European structure need way more words, because the syntax isn't very able to represent the shared concept between these with a single word. We can.

And yes, common structures do get turned into glyphs, or reduced forms.

We also have a barely-explored concept about glyphs being fractal (i.e. if you zoom in, it's actually the shape of an underlying utterance whose syntax "draws" the higher order glyph). This presumably would be a sort of literary or poetic form. (I have composed one very simple example.¹)

¹ [https://s.ai/poetry/distant_love](https://s.ai/poetry/distant_love)

<comment><USER9> I love this idea so much that I would like to learn the language. Is there a group or something I could join? Does anyone want to make a group? I'm sure we could work something out with an online drawing app.

The possiblity of getting ideas out of my head and onto paper without having to linearise everything is very exciting.

<comment><USER3> There is now: [https://join.slack.com/t/ulws/shared_invite/zt- ewevpfmf-s1r3...](https://join.slack.com/t/ulws/shared_invite/zt- ewevpfmf-s1r3lzEX02QMgglC3ECkZw)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm Sai, co-creator of UNLWS. AMA(relevant).

<comment><USER10> Are you still working on it, is there a community I could join to try having a conversation using it?

<comment><USER3> Yes, we're still working on it. (E.g. we were discussing the concept "only" a couple days ago.)

Right now, our main blocker is technical: we want a JavaScript based method for rendering it from a DSL, because making, loading, & maintaining images in the doc is a huge pain.

We've provisionally decided on using Cytoscape.js, but it needs some extensions to work for us — e.g. cubic splines (it only has quadratic) and relative angles of attachment for edges to nodes. My areas of expertise are mainly back end web dev & analytics, and Alex's are mainly academic math & coding competitions, so JS isn't particularly easy for either of us.

We'd appreciate help with this. It's on my GitHub¹; get in contact personally² if interested.

As for a speaker community, we don't have one currently, though over the years we've had around 3-4 people express interest. We never really considered it something that others would want to do (though we've always been quite interested in getting feedback, suggestions, etc., and we'd be willing to engage in in-UNLWS dialogue).

However, this seems like roughly the critical mass needed for such a community, so I'll try to set one up. Please contact me directly², and LMK any platform preferences.

¹ [https://github.com/saizai](https://github.com/saizai) across a couple recent repos

² [https://s.ai/contact](https://s.ai/contact)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Reminds me of this [1] blog post which was on HN a while ago about Yukaghir's (a paleosiberian group) semasiographic writing system.

Also related is this conlang that was posted to r/conlangs maybe a couple years ago that I can't seem to find now. The idea was that you can represent elementary ideas with shapes and then connect those shapes in a non-linear fashion and add slight variations to specify certain semantic properties, allowing there to be numerous different "correct" readings.

Also, shameless plug of my blog [2] where I've been fleshing out a similar idea (albeit not focused on writing) for the past few months. It takes inspiration from Discourse Representation Theory and semantic graphs.

Edit: Just read about halfway through and the similarities between your conlang and mine are striking. I'd go so far as to say that yours is just a really interesting visual representation of mine.

[1] [http://historyview.blogspot.com/2011/10/yukaghir-girl- writes...](http://historyview.blogspot.com/2011/10/yukaghir-girl-writes-love- letter.html)

[2] [https://rpandey.tech/blog](https://rpandey.tech/blog)

</comment><comment><USER12> Somewhat related: Sylabitsa, a Hangul-style syllabary for Polish. Described in its current rendition in [1], but previous ideas of the author included vertically stacking syllables, thus making the alphabet potentially infinite and non-linear.

[1]: [https://sites.google.com/site/qrczakmk/sylabitsa](https://sites.google.com/site/qrczakmk/sylabitsa)

</comment><comment><USER13> Completely Offtopic: How does one get a single letter domain name?

Especially with a premium tld, and even moreso for a personal blog it just seems unreal.

<comment><USER3> Anguilla permits them. I had to buy off a squatter.

But Sai is literally my full name (I'm mononymous), at the time it was affordable to buy off the squatter, and the per year registration fee isn't too high. So I think it's certainly been worth it.

<comment><USER13> That's awesome, saw in the bio that it was actually your name too which was even cooler. I spent some time going through {X}.ai domains, surprised many are actually on sale.

Find it impressive because I always feel as though I missed out on the golden era of short domains long ago and that's clearly not the case.

Hopefully you hold onto that mate, it seems like a good patch of digital land :)

Really enjoyed reading through your other stuff too. It's great to see personal sites not so focused on one thing only.

<comment><USER3> Thanks! People are complex. It's my personal site, not a topical one, so it likewise has on it basically whatever I think would be interesting to put up. ;)

I'd welcome any feedback you have on the rest. Feel free to contact me directly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> They have a bogus link [http://eaworld.conlang.org/relays/relay19/relay19.php?ring=3...](http://eaworld.conlang.org/relays/relay19/relay19.php?ring=3&torch=04&ringlish=N&tlit=n&torchlish=y&reverse=n) which I am not able to decipher.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for reporting the broken link. Alex has fixed it in the document. The content is now at [https://000024.org/conlang/relay19/index.html](https://000024.org/conlang/relay19/index.html)

Google "conlang relay" to learn more about the context for which this was made.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Holy shit. I'm blown away by this. Imagine the ability to use these as training inputs for language processing. Just add one more representation to the bucket of things to train models on. Very fascinating. Favoriting this.

<comment><USER3> Could you elaborate? How do you see this as relating to NLP?

FWIW, I very strongly recommend Rick Morneau's monograph _Lexical semantics of a machine translation interlingua_ ¹. It was a major influence for me, and is squarely intended for NLP model-internal usage.

¹ [http://www.rickmor.x10.mx/lexical_semantics.html](http://www.rickmor.x10.mx/lexical_semantics.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Interesting similarities between signals and Sumerian cuneiform.

1\. [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b9/72_Goeta...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b9/72_Goeta_sigils.png)

2\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuneiform#/media/File:Sumero-A...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuneiform#/media/File:Sumero- Akkadian_cuneiform_syllabary.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER17> I love that "eat" looks like Pac-Man.

<comment><USER3> Actually IIRC, that was our inspiration for it. ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Doesn't this just boil down to "GOTO may be useful"?

</comment><comment><USER19> This could be utterly beautiful if fused with Dialogue Mapping:

[http://www.cleverworkarounds.com/2009/09/10/the-practice- of-...](http://www.cleverworkarounds.com/2009/09/10/the-practice-of-dialogue- mapping-part-1/)

</comment><comment><USER20> Programming is a non linear writing system. Now that I think of it ... if you replace functions names with logograms you get a top to down writing system of sorts.

<comment><USER3> Not really. Programming is very linear in all forms I know¹.

1\. There's a start point. UNLWS has none.

2\. There's a mandatory canonical traversal order of the text (the compiled instruction pointer, at base). UNLWS has none.

3\. Structurally — i.e. even ignoring execution — it's mainly a tree, not a graph (parent class > child class > instance > function, e.g.). There are some parts that are directed graphs, like mix-ins and some RDBs. True multigraph structure is fairly rare. UNLWS is pervasively a fully connected multigraph with some directed edges (like irrealis).

…

Programming is, however, similar to UNLWS in that both are isomorphic to predicate calculus (e.g. functions, like UNLWS glyphs, are n-ary predicates). I think that's what you're probably catching on.

It is an important feature… but I think you're missing the more essential nature of non-linearity.

(It took me several years to grasp enough to start making UNLWS, so don't feel too chastised. It's a very difficult concept. :p)

I believe that complex circuits (as in wiring) and flowcharts _do_ have the non-linear nature, though. Perhaps it'd help to think of those?

¹ I don't know functional programming or constraint satisfaction systems. It's possible those are different.

<comment><USER21> The actor model is non-linear. Reading the code gives you almost no clue on the order of execution.

<comment><USER3> That seems to me to be more like multithreaded linear than non-linear per se.

There are multiple linear components, and it's not obvious how they emergently interact — but they don't quite have the interconnectedness and non- directedness properties.

(I think that it's impossible for anything that's time-embedded to really be non-linear, short of time travel, since time is so fundamentally a directed linear vector.)

It's certainly a related concept, and these are aspects of non-linearity, but to my view it lacks some essential Buddha-nature of the full thing.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


LHC: First reconstructed Beauty Particle - <AUTHOR> http://lhcb-public.web.cern.ch/lhcb-public/#current_news

<comment><USER2> Yes, essentially what this is supposed to mean, is that the detector is (statistically speaking :) working.

Although B - or beauty - physics was the selling point at the time for the experiment, very few are deeply excited about it (SLAC BaBar did the same, and some CDF/D0 experiments). But perhaps the most intriguing was the beautiful Belle, from Japan. And don't forget, that ATLAS and CMS can do the same B physics also, being General Purpose detectors. So nobody is expecting great surprises, therefore people would rather focus on (very) _rare decays_ , for which this detector is very well suited for, in hoping to find (another) thing not fitting the Standard Model (current holy grail, somewhat crippled anyway). All other GP detectors are "matroska"-like, trying to fish in a big soup of collision-events (many wonder about the event trigger on ATLAS, meaning how would they pick out interesting events from all the mess of the collisions...)

This detector is more like a fixed-target experiment detector (albeit working with colliding beams from the collider: actually the beams are defocused to generate _less_ collisions, to have a "cleaner" picture). It is a "single arm spectrometer", used by those, who are leading experts in particle oscillations (B_0-s oscillate between states, useful for matter-antimatter studies). Antimatter and symmetry violations were proven with K oscillations; then around 1 TeV, B (particle) factories became "common place". And now, one might expect some particle oscillation at higher energies also, currently at 2x3.5 TeV, which is in the making...

</comment><comment><USER3> What does this mean? I mean, I guess this tells us the LHCb is working correctly, but other than that I'm not sure what this tells us.

<comment><USER4> Yes, it just tells you that the detector seems to work. High energy physics experiments mostly rely on statistical analysis of large numbers of events these days. There are occasionally situations where there may be a single decisive "golden event", but b-quark physics left that stage decades ago. Now it is mostly about tiny, tiny differences between normal matter and antimatter that only manifest themselves in b and anti-b quark decays and which may explain why there is so much more matter than antimatter in the universe.

[And ugh, when did CERN PR resurrect that stupid "beauty" moniker, everybody has been using bottom and top instead of the pretentious beauty and truth for the third generation quarks since I can remember.]

<comment><USER5> As an ex (european) physicist, my experience is beauty/bottom have always been used interchangeably.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> From what I can gather "Beauty Particle" is the newer name for popular culture's "God Particle"?

<comment><USER7> No. Did you read the description on the page?

 _The Beauty Particle (called B+) is composed of an anti-quark b (that has a very short lifetime of 1.5 thousandth of a nanosecond!) and a quark u."_

The God Particle (the Higgs Boson) is a fundamental particle, it is not composed of smaller particles.</comment></comment>


Guys, Here's What It's Actually Like to Be a Woman - <AUTHOR> http://observer.com/2015/10/guys-heres-what-its-actually-like-to-be-a-woman/ <comment><USER2> I skimmed it. I skimmed the previous comments on the previous submission of this piece 11 hours ago. This is really awful stuff.

Yes, women live with threats to their welfare from all sides. So do men. Sex is inherently risky. A baby could result. You can catch an STD. Women can get knocked up and abandoned. But, hey, men are sometimes trapped by women who got intentionally pregnant by them while claiming to be on the pill and IIRC it is estimated that around 5% to 10% of babies have a different biological father than the man who raised them and honestly thinks it is theirs. One study apparently concluded that women who were having affairs were engaging in sexual practices that would make it more likely they got pregnant by their illicit lover than by their SO.

In my opinion, this is an incredibly crappy piece of writing. It in no way helps women and if you are a guy hoping for tips on how to better understand women so you will have an edge in dating, this is not good advice.

From what other people here are saying, the author of the piece started as a pick up artist. This piece reads to me as "pick up artist, trying to sound PC." Pick up artists also try to "understand women" \-- in a totally shallow fashion so they can better manipulate them. This article similarly treats women as a monolith, as if all women feel exactly the same way about men, dating, sex, you name it.

If you want a better relationship to a woman, take some time to get to know her better and skip reading crap like this.

/opinionated old woman

</comment><comment><USER3> Previously: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10424623](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10424623)

</comment><comment><USER4> "By Tucker Max and Geoffrey Miller"

At the risk of getting piled-on here, I'll say this: the last thing the world needs is another dude speaking for women.

<comment><AUTHOR> One of the first thing the world needs is to get past the idea that when someone speaks about sensitive issues facing group X, that they're automatically attempting to speak "for", or "on behalf of" group X. And that the import of what they're saying can be weighed (and/or dismissed outright), accordingly.

The issues addressed in the article are complex, and sadly, quite pervasive; we could benefit from multiple perspectives, in seeking ways to address them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Unfortunately I suspect this only reflects a small part of what it's like to be a woman. This doesn't cover any of the experiential disparities between men and women in the workplace, which I imagine are equally great and perhaps even more oppressive.</comment>


Simple Testing Can Prevent Most Critical Failures - <AUTHOR> https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi14/technical-sessions/presentation/yuan <comment><USER2> I really enjoy going to usenix and watching usenix presentations. Almost all of them include the PDF and a pretty good quality of the presentation (and plus audio for those who only wish to hear). Also the presentation mode is awesome - presentation and speaker are on the same page. I just can't stand at camera person or video editor switch between presentation and speaker constantly. I want to read the slides, as much as I enjoy the gesture of the presenter.

I think one take away is not just handling exception, but actually monitor exceptions and make use of the exceptions. Very recently I was debugging an application inside a container. The code caught Exception (base class of all exceptions), well, I had to ask developer to log the stacktrace. Finally the stacktrace revealed the actual problem and I was able to write a PoC to test and narrow down the root cause to the security of the container.

With linter and static analysis we probably can encourage developers "hey look you are catching too much or too little."

Lastly, planning for failure by doing HA design is critical. In AWS we have to prepare for underlying host going bad (which in turns means we have to stop and start to move EC2 instance to a different host). It's easy to say but actually hard to do as often applications are not truly stateless. PoC failure, stress test, performance testing are necessary.</comment>


What happened to my Live Bookmarks? - <AUTHOR> https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/live-bookmarks-migration?as=u&utm_source=inproduct <comment><USER2> I've reinstalled a backup I kept of FF 36 - my entire workflow has been gutted over the years.

1) Lost Tab Groups as of FF 45 (the add-on isn't a full replacement of old functionality)

2) Lost many, many, many addons with FF 57 including a very specific tab management that an addon called FireGestures allowed for: using a context menu to navigate my tabs.

3) Lost Bookmark descriptions with FF 62, also lost the Developer Toolbar

4) Now losing Live Bookmarks with FF 64</comment>


Covid-19 Vaccine Shipped, and Drug Trials Start - <AUTHOR> https://time.com/5790545/first-covid-19-vaccine/ <comment><USER2> _Moderna loads its vaccine with mRNA that codes for the right coronavirus proteins which then get injected into the body. Immune cells in the lymph nodes can process that mRNA and start making the protein in just the right way for other immune cells to recognize and mark them for destruction.

As Dr. Stephen Hoge, president of Moderna, told TIME earlier this month, "mRNA is really like a software molecule in biology. So our vaccine is like the software program to the body, which then goes and makes the [viral] proteins that can generate an immune response."_

That's pretty interesting, has this worked for any other virus?</comment>


Dijkstra Manuscript Archive - <AUTHOR> http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ <comment><USER2> I think some curation is in order. I have found that studying Dijkstra's mathematical documents have been great for developing methodical, analytical thinking. They have also been indispensable for developing a taste for elegance in notation and proofs.

All of this translates directly into developing a taste for elegant (programming) interfaces and well structured architectures.

In the past, I put together a curated list of pdfs for anyone who wants to start studying and practicing Dijkstra's mathematics. Here is what I recommend:

EWD1300 - The notational conventions of the mathematics : <http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd13xx/EWD1300.PDF>

After that, I have this collection of EWDs and other documents that offer the best, graded, introductions to the idioms and concepts of Dijkstra's mathematics:

<http://bit.ly/ewdcollection>

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm not formally trained in CS, are there "modern day Dijkstras" in the field that I should read up on? I'd like to stay up on the underlying technological advances in computing, and it's just fun to read up on this stuff.

</comment><comment><USER4> Incidentally, the maintainer of the archive, Ham Richards, taught me and thousands of beginner Computer Science students Haskell in the introductory CS class. I sometimes wonder what he thinks about Haskell's recent popularity.

I don't recall using imperative programming languages until at least sophomore year.</comment>


Spacewalking astronaut copes with frayed tether, bad jetpack - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2017-10-spacewalking-astronauts-blurry-camera-robot.html <comment><USER2> Sometimes I forget how much danger astronauts constantly put themselves in to further human kind. They're literally at the end of where we are as a species with a frayed rope.

They're the modern day version of Magellan and his crew.</comment>


Why is everyone so upset about the new MacBook Pro? - <AUTHOR> It seems like the entire tech community is up in arms about the new MacBook Pro. Let's remember stripping connectivity is nothing new for Apple. I have not missed my DVD drive for a day. It's increasingly rare that I find myself plugging in a USB drive, external display, or SD card. The SD card slot and HDMI port also ~~are~~ were fairly recent additions to the line. The running commentary seems to be "Pro is for professional," by which they really mean to say "Pro is for _creative_ professional."
For the few times per year I download pictures from my camera I will be happy to grab a dongle. Why? Because there's not a big air pocket where there once was an SD card slot. The machine is lighter, thinner, brighter, faster, all of which are steps in the right direction. USB C is fast and versatile. Yes, it will be sad to lose the MagSafe. Yes, it's expensive. Yes, I will miss the escape key. The criticism seems a bit premature, though.
The only thing that baffles me is why did they leave the headphone jack? And why is the iPhone 7 still Lightning and not USB C? Not enough courage. <comment><USER2> It's just nothing special compared to what Microsoft is doing.

On TV Microsoft is advertising touch-screen computers used by artists to make art for stage sets, film, etc. Developers like the Unix personality in MacOS, so Microsoft is adding a Linux personality to Windows 10.

That is, a significant move into Apples turf.

Also Intel chips have not gotten that much better in recent years for laptop uses; you have to jump a long interval in time to feel an impact. Skylake's strength is the "Super Tablets" in the $999 price range that Microsoft wishes you would buy. They could have skipped Skylake and gone to Kaby Lake which would give a 10% increase in clock speed, which would have been noticable, particularly bundling in other x86 improvements, but they didn't.

Big picture is that Apple is focused on phones and the consumeration that entails. You can replace a cash register for a tablet, but if your work is creative you need a PC.

<comment><USER3> what exactly is so special about what Microsoft is doing? A touch screen on a desktop? We had it for years. Faster processor? Not really...

<comment><USER2> The "Super Tablet" is a very good idea it just is stuck in a weird place.

Part of what is cool about a low-cost tablet (say $150) is that you don't feel that bad about losing it or wrecking it so you can beat on it hard and do things that I would not with a PC.

Something like a Surface costs a lot more and changes the psychology, a lot for me.

Microsoft has that new dial that you can use with the Surface AIO and also HP and Intel are doing interesting stuff with 3D Cameras which again could be game changing for creative work. Microsoft also has Hololens and the entertainment franchise around XBox which goes up against Apple TV, iTunes and all that.

Not everything Microsoft sticks but they are throwing many things at the wall. If anything they got in trouble with Windows 8 by being ahead of their customers and anticipating that "Super Tablet" would catch on faster than they did. They will be back however, at the very least because if you follow the thinness assumption that Apple is based, they will beat laptops.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've been happily using Macs for 14 years. I routinely do things like burn DVDs, plug in USB and FireWire devices, use external displays, transfer photographs from cameras, etc.

I may be content with a current Mac, but it seems to me that the path Apple is on is moving away from what I personally want. I remain presently undecided, but I am starting to consider non-Apple alternatives for my next computer.

I'm not mad, though. Things change. I wish I could still realistically be using Commodore Amiga computers, but I'm not.

<comment><USER5> 'memba video toaster?

<comment><USER4> I never owned one, but I used one briefly. I had some other brands of genlock, video capture, & video editing software, and used Imagine 3D and Brilliance for 2D graphics. It's been so long now, I don't remember the details of the other items. I got an Amiga planning to do software development on it, but became engrossed in multimedia production instead...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Because it's expensive and is a sidegrade to anyone who owns a MacBook Pro from 2012 and newer. I don't know why any developer would upgrade their MacBook Pro if they bought one in the last few years.

Call me when the MacBook Pro has an OLED screen.

</comment><comment><USER7> I for one, am looking forward to it -- my company ordered our new MacBook Pros yesterday.

I think the new touch bar is going to be the target of much elisp diddling on my part. And frankly, I don't care about connectors.

</comment><comment><USER8> "Let's remember stripping connectivity is nothing new for Apple."

I think you answered your own question.

</comment><comment><USER9> Lack of more RAM.</comment>


MongoDB as a service - <AUTHOR> http://www.mongohq.com/home <comment><USER2> Wait a minute... If you need mongodb your app would probably be on a big scale right? In that case wouldn't you eventually self host your DB servers?

It's not that hard to setup a mongodb for testing and dev. So what's the use case for this type of service?

<comment><USER3> So what's the use case for this type of service?

I don't have a direct answer. But like to see people actually doing things and looking at what happens.

<comment><USER2> I guess I can see it being useful for testing if it is free, but if this is meant for easy setup for small sites, they don't need mongodb. And if it's for use by a large site, they probably wouldn't outsource it's database systems for long.

Anyways as long as it's free, it's an interesting service and honestly I'm going to try it (been pretty lazy about upgrading my mongodb install).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> wouldn't the latency of a roundtrip across the internet kill the usefulness of such db-in-the-cloud services?

<comment><USER5> I imagine its hosted on EC2, in which case, if you are too, it wouldn't matter. I imagine that if they get popular, nodes in Rackspace and a few other popular providers wouldn't be hard to do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Just setup the damn thing on your machine; takes about 7 minutes.

<comment><USER7> Sure. But what about replication and fail-over? It's pretty easy with MongoDB, but not 7 minutes, and it do involve some system administration.

This is a perfect match for e.g. Heroku. With Heroku + (MongoHQ|Couch.io) you don't need to do any system administration yourself, which is a huge plus for many.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> see also: <http://couch.io/>

These kinds of services are pretty neat.

</comment><comment><USER9> Where is this hosted?

<comment><USER3> Amazon.

<http://www.whoishostingthis.com/http%3A%2F%2Fmongohq.com></comment></comment>


Parts of the Viral Glitter Bomb Video Were Indeed Faked - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-rober-admits-youtube-glitter-bomb-video-was-unwittingly-faked-2018-12 <comment><AUTHOR> Here's Mark Rober's explanation: [https://twitter.com/MarkRober/status/1075767629703372800](https://twitter.com/MarkRober/status/1075767629703372800)

</comment><comment><USER2> stop spreading fake news!</comment>


Hacker News Upvote - <AUTHOR> https://upvotes.club/buy/hacker-news-upvote/ <comment><USER2> They also sell flags, somehow im not surprised. Anything the HN community can legally do to hurt this company? From their page: _If you are from or located in a jurisdiction with laws that require us to provide refunds, and you proceed to place an order with us, you waive and forego all rights to a refund, no matter what other factors may be brought into consideration._ IANAL, but this seems dubious to me. Could a wave of credit card chargebacks be fruitful?

<comment><USER3> Hopefully management will find out.

It will be very easy for them to buy a few updates and catch the upvoters in a sting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hacker News Comment

$7.50

"We recommend buying at least one comment with each post, in order to shape opinions from the get-go. Anchoring is a powerful psychological weapon."

[https://upvotes.club/buy/hacker-news- comment/](https://upvotes.club/buy/hacker-news-comment/)

Well, this anchor is for free - buying HN upvotes/ comments seems unfair and distorting.

</comment><comment><USER3> I voted this up so that it would get attention and the people involved would get whacked.</comment>


Postico (PG Commander 2.0) first beta - <AUTHOR> https://eggerapps.at/postico/

<comment><USER2> It's the thing I've been looking for since Sequel Pro, but or PostgreSQL.

I've been using it in Alpha and it's really the best DB client I touched since Sequel Pro.</comment>