Building gcc-4.7 on Ubuntu 12.04 - <AUTHOR> http://solarianprogrammer.com/2012/04/13/building-gcc-4-7-on-ubuntu-12-04/

<comment><USER2> For those who are building gcc-4.7 from scratch, the cilk/ branch sure looks interesting. It has the Cilk runtime and the cilk extensions to the language built in.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cilk> <http://software.intel.com/en- us/articles/intel-cilk-plus/>

As far as language extensions go, it may seem that Cilk does not add much, but to me the advantage of not manually assigning tasks to threads and work stealing seems like a big win.

Looking forward to try it out in a week. Stoked.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, C++11 has native threads now and OpenMP looks like a good alternative to Cilk.

Any performance reason for which one would prefer Cilk vs OpenMP ?

<comment><USER2> Not to be facetious but, one is C the other is C++ and on occaisons it does matter a lot.

OpenMP is good for Fortran style code, where you decorate loops, although I havent looked at the latest OpenMP standards. But on its own C++11 looks very good. I will (and I do) use it where I have uses of C++ template mechanism. But now I am porting some that stuff to D. Generics is so much less verbose and nicer over all.

Though I love the support for type inference in C++11, it does not play well with expression templates, which is my go to reason to turn to C++ in the first place (perhaps the only one prior to C++11).

<comment><AUTHOR> I know there is a big difference between modern C++11 and C.

C11 has standard threads similarly with what you find in C++11, unfortunately you won't find this implemented by all vendors. I hope to see complete support for C11 threads in GCC and Clang in the near future.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> > I was surprised to find that the process of building gcc-4.7 from sources on > Ubuntu is so complicated, after all, this is a Linux system …

It didn't look all that complicated to me. It seems like it is just the standard steps for installing gcc? Or am I missing something?

<comment><AUTHOR> If you have installed before gcc from sources on Ubuntu you will notice that this time you need to do some extra steps.

A typical build should be as simple as:

./configure --prefix=where_you_want_this_installed make -j number_of_processors sudo make install

this is not the case if you read the various "bugs" reported on Ubuntu mailing lists.

<comment><USER3> I have manually installed a local gcc from patched sources on gentoo, and this seems like the standard procedure.

There might be a few more helper libraries needed now than in earlier versions, but this isn't really complicated...

And the need for setting a few environment variables is hardly very taxing.

<comment><AUTHOR> patched sources ... gentoo ... environment variables ...

Please stop right there and think at the average Ubuntu user, or at a person that has used Windows as his primary OS and just recently has tried Linux hoping to learn/try/test some C++0x/C++11 codes.

Obviously the linked article was not written with a hard core Linux user in mind.

I understand that, from where you stand, this is trivially simple. Just don't assume everyone has your experience.

<comment><USER3> > patched sources

it was for... I don't recall exactly, something non-standard gcc did with templates, possibly? Anyways, they sent me the sources pre-patched, I just compiled it.

> gentoo

that I didn't administer, I only used it. I was a real newbie at the time. I just figured that since you specified ubuntu...

> I understand that, from where you stand, this is trivially simple. Just > don't assume everyone has your experience.

I see your point, though. I might be looking back at it with the rose-tinted glasses of experience. Also, when I first skimmed through it I only read up until the point where it said that it was complicated and then I got interrupted by the real world for a while, building suspense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I like step-by-step instructions like this. Is there an equivalent for OSX somewhere?

<comment><AUTHOR> Same website look at the right links, or go directly here:

[http://solarianprogrammer.com/2012/02/20/living-on-the- edge-...](http://solarianprogrammer.com/2012/02/20/living-on-the-edge- building-gcc-4-7-on-mac-osx-lion/)</comment></comment>


Elon Musk's late-night announcement to raise prices and reopen some stores - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/03/elon-musks-late-night-announcement-to-raise-prices-and-reopen-some-stores/ <comment><USER2> So announcement of the closure was discussed here [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19329600](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19329600)

My comment there was:

"I can't make my mind up on the closures. I just think, in 5 years time when they're having to sell to average people, not just Tesla fans, how are they going to compete with everyone else. Is your Mum or Dad going to buy a (new fangled electric) car, on the internet, sight unseen?

Now its still not necessarily a bad decision now to be closing stores they don't need, but is it going to hamper them later?"

Can I claim victory for my foresight?

<comment><USER3> The shed industry is surprisingly similar to the automotive industry. The major manufacturers sell through either big-store retail or roadside dealerships.

My dad built 10 or so sheds a year on the side (he was a carpenter). When he quit about 9 years ago, I said, "Aha! That's my new business opportunity." I built my first shed and put a picture of it on the Internet. Every shed after that I put a picture up on my webpage with a price. After a few years, I couldn't handle all the sales calls and continue to build, so I hired two guys to build and I spent 3 months putting together an eCommerce store.

The first week of it going online, I got 17 shed orders - 3 months worth of building! It turned out that no other manufacturer had an online store, or even listed their prices online.

I give customers lots of pictures, and they order my buildings, sight "unseen".

I'm able to undercut my competitors by almost a third because there's no dealer markup.

<comment><USER2> "3 months worth of building! It turned out that no other manufacturer had an online store, or even listed their prices online"

And now that the competition has arrived? My concern would be differentiation. You can either compete on price or quality, and its hard to communicate quality online. Unless you can get repeat customers (unlikely I'm guessing) or word of mouth?

I'm guessing we're in different territories, when I think shed I think cheapy rickety thing. they don't take 3 guys a month to make 5!

<comment><USER3> ksshedbuilder.com</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Building a To-Do List with Cloudflare Workers and KV - <AUTHOR> https://blog.cloudflare.com/building-a-to-do-list-with-workers-and-kv/ <comment><USER2> Workers KV went out of beta today, and this is a great tutorial on building a small application entirely at the edge, with Workers for the code, and KV for the data.

I'm the new PM on KV; I'm happy to answer any questions about any of this!

<comment><USER3> I've got small app that is using KV as poor-man time series db and wonder how could I still use it without too much cost. Currently it's writing 50 times per minute every minute, but with bulk write I could write only five times instead.

Given that writes aren't free in GA, I wonder how do you calculate requests, in particular are batch writes counted as single request?

Do you plan exposing more worker friendly way of batch write?

Do you have any plans about atomic counters (could be really useful for rate limiting, abuse control etc)?

Do you plan adding list/range operations for KV?

<comment><USER2> Yeah, I guess (if I got my math right) that'd be $10/month for the writes, 2.1 million per month, first million free, and you'd just go over an extra million.

> are batch writes counted as single request?

Batch write is more of a convenience thing than a cost saving thing; it's billed the same way as if you'd done each write individually.

> Do you plan exposing more worker friendly way of batch write?

Possibly, if there's demand for it. As with any platform, you build a thing, people use it, and sometimes you don't imagine the ways that they use it.

> Do you have any plans about atomic counters (could be really useful for rate > limiting, abuse control etc)?

I agree that this is a feature that would certainly be very useful; I'd like to have it but can't make any promises, of course.

> Do you plan adding list/range operations for KV?

The API does have a list call: [https://api.cloudflare.com/#workers-kv- namespace-list-a-name...](https://api.cloudflare.com/#workers-kv-namespace- list-a-namespace-s-keys)

There's no convenient wrapper for it inside of the worker; this is something people want, so we'll see!

<comment><USER3> Thanks! Appreciate detailed response, all makes sense. One thing I forgot and I'd also love to see is some kind of backup/restore support.

<comment><USER2> Oh I messed up the pricing above, it's not in $5 increments, it's per call. So it will be fifty cents for that extra 100k, not $5. Oops! This is why the computers do the billing.

Backup/restore would be cool! I'll put that in the "ideas" bucket.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Oliver Samwer walks out of an interview with TechCrunch - <AUTHOR> http://eu.techcrunch.com/2011/10/14/oliver-samwer-walks-out-of-an-interview-with-techcrunch/ <comment><USER2> Wow. Accepting an interview, then refusing to give said interview and just basically reading a press release instead... That's pretty weak. I'm not sure what they thought that would accomplish, but I'm pretty confident that it went the opposite direction.</comment>


Ask HN: How to stop a government from censoring my website? - <AUTHOR> Hey,
So I run a website that invites journalists to submit articles and their keep anonymity. The problem is the country where the articles are targeted at (Saudi Arabia) is blocking my website. I think (don't trust me on this one) they're using some kind of a DNS blocking mechanism.
The site translates influential articles about freedom of expression and democracy, and allows people to submit their own articles.
Is there a practical way to _stop_ them from censoring the site?
Thank you. <comment><USER2> Are they blocking archive.org or cache/snapshot sites? It doesn't stop them blocking your site but would allow you to share links, etc.

</comment><comment><USER3> Get out of SA first.</comment>


Ask HN:  Anyone into industrial design? - <AUTHOR>

Specifically for Consumer Electronics devices + casing?  Trying to see if anyone wants to work on a new type of casing for HTPCs.  Lots of interesting problems to solve: airflow, space arrangement, etc. <comment><USER2> I've been interested in learning more, but haven't found any real good sources for getting an intro to the knowledge. I asked a question here a while ago and the best advice given was to look into general design and from there move on.

</comment><comment><USER3> At the risk of sounding like a shill, you should have a look at Shuttle PCs. They have a very elegant and logical way of using a very limited amount of case space.</comment>


Ask HN: Who's Looking for a Co-Founder? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Hi, I'm the founder of Terrament. We're building low-cost, high-scale energy storage to enable our power grid's transition to renewable energy.

We're seeking a co-founder who is a PhD Engineer (civil or mechanical) with experience in large-scale infrastructure.

Thanks! [https://www.terramenthq.com/](https://www.terramenthq.com/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Hey, looking for a cofounder interested in quantum computing! Definitely interested in someone wanting to tackle some of the software problems in this space and figure out a useful application for these computers. Please email me at: saljimeely at pm dot me.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Strong coder with 10+ years experience on all parts of the stack. Former startup founder and worked at lots of tech companies big and small.

I don't have a specific idea in mind, but would love to chat and brainstorm with entrepreneurial people. Email is in my profile, let's get in touch.</comment>


Noam Chomsky: Fake Linguist - <AUTHOR> http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/865339/posts?page=151

<comment><USER2> Wow, very powerful stuff. This article rapidly expands from indictment Noam Chomsky as linguist to indictment of modern academia. As a parent about to pay large sums to one of these institutions for my son's education, it depresses me more than a little.

I don't know anything about linguistics, but the argument hangs together pretty well. It's consonant with what I know about Chomsky as political prophet and myth-maker.

I notice that this article, a decade old, also indicts science in general. The author was perhaps ahead of his time:

[http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21588069-scientific- re...](http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21588069-scientific-research-has- changed-world-now-it-needs-change-itself-how-science-goes-wrong)

[http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21588057-scientists-t...](http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21588057-scientists- think-science-self-correcting-alarming-degree-it-not-trouble)

[http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-mh- feynman-201...](http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-mh- feynman-20131028,0,2450203.story#axzz2kxi4KsdQ)

[http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi- hiltzik-20131027,0,122...](http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi- hiltzik-20131027,0,1228881.column#axzz2j3BBiche)

[http://www.livescience.com/27262-psychology-studies- question...](http://www.livescience.com/27262-psychology-studies- questioned.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, happily a lot of people are realizing that Chomsky's linguistic theories (transformational generative grammar, universal grammar) are the scientific equivalent of ptolemaic epicycles, i.e. overly complex nonsense used to justify their own preconceptions. However he is still fairly influential in syntax (and to a lesser extent phonology) which are two branches of linguistics. Sadly his theories (and his name) get thrown around a lot more than actual pioneering linguists like Edward Sapir (who only gets brought up when people talk about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis).

Edit: see this LL post for an explanation of what I mean [http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2622](http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2622)

<comment><USER3> Chomsky was an early visionary, and his intuition was very good. I would compare him more to Freud than to Ptolemaic astronomers. He started from a single notion, and built a theory around it that was justified by anecdote.

But many of the tools and constructs that fell out of this theory are important. Consider the work with grammar. CTF is equivalent to PDA, but much easier to use conceptually.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, you can't deny that he contributed some ideas that PLT people make use of, but the question here is whether TGG is any good as a _scientific theory of language_ and I think the answer is no. The reason I compared him to Ptolemaic theorists is because he came up with some interesting mathematical ideas, but he doesn't care about systematically collecting data and attempting to falsify the theory. See: [http://norvig.com/chomsky.html](http://norvig.com/chomsky.html)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Microsoft Sells 20 Million Copies Of Vista WorldWide, 244 in China - <AUTHOR> http://startupmeme.com/2007/04/19/microsoft-sells-20-million-copies-of-vista-worldwide-244-in-china/ <comment><USER2> The guys on Reddit pointed out that this was BS - that figure was from one small vendor, who was pleasantly surprised at how much it was selling.

</comment><comment><USER3> It took me a while to see why that's funny. Only 244 legitimate copies in China, with most copies being sold for $1 on the streets.

</comment><comment><USER4> I thought Vista has stricter ways of preventing and checking for piracy?</comment>


Mind Your En And Em Dashes: Typographic Etiquette - <AUTHOR> http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2011/08/15/mind-your-en-and-em-dashes-typographic-etiquette/ <comment><USER2> This is one of my favorite articles on typography. A few of my highlights: 1\. Use one space after the period. 2\. Indent to start a new paragraph (no need to have a blank line and indent). 3\. Use smart quotes!

</comment><comment><USER3> Some of these principles are only applicable to print typography. Also, please don't use fancy dashes or quotation marks as this can cause all kinds of i18n issues when the text is copied or transformed.

<comment><USER4> Which ones do not apply? It seemed like they all applied to the web to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Good article, but I'm still going to use two spaces.

<comment><USER6> Why?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> How pedantic. Two hyphens is a dash, and the "'" character is perfectly usable everywhere you want a single quote or an apostrophe.

Does it really matter how many spaces after a dot one uses, or if dash is really a dash or just two hyphens[1], or how paragraphs are handled? No! _Nobody will even notice!_

Work on actually getting things done, not adhering to the standard this rag of a publication mindlessly pushes.

[1] As it has been done since the dawn of computing.

<comment><USER8> "Nobody will even notice!"

Just because you might not doesn't mean everybody won't.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Which index funds are antifragile? - <AUTHOR> Does Vanguard (for example) offer some anticyclic funds with high risks, high returns? Something to invest, say, 5% our your savings, and to complement an 80% Vanguard S&P 500 and 15% bonds index fund? <comment><USER2> Nope, it's all about the risk percentage that you want to take. They will normally tell you how aggressive and volatile they are with the fund, but there will never be any guarantees with any of these since there is no way to predict the exact future. The only thing you can do is diversify your investments in multiple low and high risk investments.

The mix you decide on will be purely yours in the end, no one can guarantee any type of result. I recommend just doing your own research and market testing to see what works for your short and long term investment needs.

Just remember the higher the possible returns the bigger the risks are.

</comment><comment><USER3> Antifragile != anticyclic

Funds like these might be of interest:

[http://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/090115/top-5-...](http://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/090115/top-5-bear- market-mutual-funds.asp)

[https://www.thestreet.com/story/13427689/1/these-3-etfs- will...](https://www.thestreet.com/story/13427689/1/these-3-etfs-will-protect- you-in-a-bear-market.html)

I don't own any of them, don't endorse them, etc., I just suspect you haven't been searching with the right terms.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your answer.</comment>


Ask HN: Making the move to consulting; where does someone start? - <AUTHOR>

Hey guys, thought I'd post this question after much Googling.  I'm a software dev who's just been made redundant from his job.  I've often thought about becoming an independent contractor for various reasons and now seems like the right time to actually jump in and do it (especially with a bit of a redundancy payout as a buffer).
I'd like to hear from any Aussie folk who've made the switch and how they actually went about doing it.  What was your first gig like? Any war stories? What are the actual mechanics of making the switch (requirements, where to find work, stuff like that).
Basically this is something I really want to give a shot, but I have no idea where to start :) <comment><USER2> I am not an Aussie, but I did eat at an Outback Steakhouse last night!

Sorry.

In all seriousness I have been on my own for almost 15 years and I first made the leap by securing a contract from a client of my former employer. My employer was ok with it because they were moving in a different direction so the first step out the door was like having a job but I changed status from employee to contractor. The wonderful thing was the customer got me for cheaper than they were paying my employer and I got a big raise. Definition of a 'win-win'.

For most people you are going to have to get out there and do some sales work but what I suggest to people making this leap is to sell yourself to an agency, not individual customers. There are lots of consulting firms who need people and they are afraid to bring on full time work because their variations in work are often from contract to contract. If they land a gig for 4 people and 6 months of work yet only have 3 people they have to spend the time and money to go out and hire someone - then once the gig is done they have to keep that person busy. If they can find someone who will work on the project as a sub-contractor it is much more valuable to them.

Doing sub-contract work like this is a great way to give you steady income while you network and build a portfolio of direct customers where you can make better margins.

Another thing I would advise, realize that your rate represents a perceived value. If I tell you my rate is $40/hr then you think one thing - if I tell you my rate is $195 per hour you freak out, say that is crazy and then think - this guy must be amazing if people pay him that. It changes the mindset and even if you cannot get them signed at 195, it makes 150 sound like a bargain. The catch - you have to be worth it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha Outback Steakhouse is awesome :)

That's great that it worked out like that for you to start off with. Sub- contracting was something that I'd thought of - I really need to find my feet before going fully out on my own.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I was a contractor for years and after some time at it I detested it. You get the contractor mentality where you only think of hours worked, and even on days where you are as sick as a dog, you haul yourself to work because... well, because it's 8 hours pay. Holidays become less and less because not only is it the cost of the holiday itself but it's the hours of pay you are missing out on. Double whammy. Plus there is no leverage... the only way to make more is to work more. And the businesses have no respect for contractors; they are the first to go. If you can treat the consultancy role as an interim solution between major gigs, then it's Ok. I think I used jobsearch.com.au and contracted via agencies.

My advise: switch focus to developing a product that you can sell.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the insight. I hadn't thought of the 'double whammy' thing exactly, but it mimics what I've seen other people who run their own business go through.

Developing my own product is part of my plan. One of the things that's pushing me in this direction is the whole "you have to sign all your free time away" IP restriction uncertainty that comes with being a tech employee.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm not an Aussie, but I saw two films starring Paul Hogan.

I'm trying to make this transition as well. I think it basically boils down to the following: Ask lots of people what their problems are (lead generation, paperwork and team coordination appear common themes), explain how you can help them out while using non-technical talk and then charge them. I'm hopefully going to start doing that next week.

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome, good luck :)

I have an upcoming appointment with the career counselling place that work put me onto after the redundancy, so going to see if they can point me in the right direction with agencies, etc.</comment></comment>


Show HN: We made a podcast host then we made a podcast about SaaS - <AUTHOR> https://saas.transistor.fm/ <comment><AUTHOR> This year, I'm building a podcasting startup with my friend Jon called Transistor.fm.

Lots has changed since Basecamp launched in 2004. When they started, there were only 1-2 competitors in a vertical. Now, each category has hundreds of competitors. Some things have gotten easier, but many things (especially marketing, acquisition, and profit margins) have gotten harder.

So we decided to use our platform and record a show about what it takes to build a SaaS in 2018. We have 5 episodes, and so far, people are finding it helpful!

Any topics you'd like to see us cover in future shows?

</comment><comment><USER2> So something I struggle with is placing podcasting into the range of content marketing options. Compared to writing posts, guest posts, building tools, etc. how do you value a podcast listener vs an email subscriber, etc?

</comment><comment><USER3> This is an interesting project. I guess the concept is similar to Gimlet Media's "Startup", but very niche-specific. I just subscribed and will give it a listen.

</comment><comment><USER4> So meta! Excited to follow along to learn about both podcasting and SaaS!</comment>


Education Inflation, Technological Advancement, and Cognitive Surplus - <AUTHOR> http://www.lisazhang.ca/2011/04/education-inflation-technolgoical.html

<comment><USER2> One possible way to mitigate this problem is a Pigouvian tax on signalling (perhaps compensated for by a reduction in income tax).

Signalling is a lot like standing up at a baseball game. It gives you a great view, at the cost of having your legs get tired. Once everyone else starts doing it, your view is no better than before, and everyone is a little more tired than before. But no one can sit down, because they don't get to see the game.

A tax on signalling might reduce the benefits and thereby reduce the amount of resources wasted. Additionally, the people who don't engage in signalling would enjoy reduced taxes.

To begin, I'd propose an education tax, since education seems to be our nation's most expensive form of signalling. You want an education? Fine, but be prepared to pay an extra $5-10k/college year to compensate the people who don't get a job as a result of the degree inflation you cause.

(Obviously, ending subsidies for higher education would also be a good start.)

<comment><USER3> The problem with a fixed cost is for plenty of poeple an extra 10k/year is meaningless but for others it's a huge deal. A possibly better approach would be a 1% increase in your income tax (for life) if you get a Masters/MBA/etc. The net effect is similar (3 mil lifetime earnings = 30k in extra tax). But it scales with income so it attacks the value of signaling.

<comment><USER2> The harm to society is also fixed, so charging a % of profits is a strange way to tax. Think of degree inflation as being a form of pollution.

Now think directly about pollution taxes. Emitting 1kg of pollution to create an iPod is not a bad thing - iPods are more valuable than having 1kg less pollution in the air. Emitting 1kg of pollution to make a sandwich is bad, however, since the value of a sandwich is much lower than 1kg less pollution. The end goal is to pollute only while making iPods, not sandwiches.

Charging as a % of profits or revenues would not create this incentive.

Similarly, the goal of an education tax is to create a disincentive for acquiring a degree for people who won't gain a lot from the degree.

<comment><USER4> "The end goal is to pollute only while making iPods, not sandwiches."

Actually, the end goal would be to reduce the total amount of pollution.

<comment><USER2> Why?

Pollution has a cost and production has a benefit. If $BENEFIT - $COST > 0, we want more pollution.

The problem is that since pollution is an _external_ cost, the producer/consumer has no incentive to accurately make this calculation. As long as $BENEFIT > 0, the producer/consumer will pollute, and society will pay $COST.

The point of the Pigouvian tax is to give the producer/consumer an incentive to make this calculation correctly, and to compensate the rest of society for the costs they impose.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hmm

 _In order to obtain a job, you need to satisfy an employer's stringent and sometimes arbitrary requirements. In order to do so, you must spend extra years of your life in school._

That's a naive analysis - given a pool of unknown candidates (e.g a stack of CVs from people unknown to the hiring manager) he or she will obviously look for "the best" candidates, and lacking any other indication (e.g. from fresh grads with no work experience) will go for the best qualified. It's not the case that employers are driving up the academic requirements - they are merely responding logically to a more academically qualified pool of candidates.

</comment><comment><USER6> On the one hand, the spirit of inquiry and promotion of learning that higher education (should be) driven by is an excellent thing for both "productivity" and society as a whole.

On the other hand, the idea that colleges exist merely as a credentialing system, and the intellectual complacency that pervades much of academia since it can extract such high rents as a gatekeeper, result in a vast misallocation of resources.

Untangling the two (education vs. credentialing) will take time, but with the enormous debt-loads of graduating students these days, I find it hard to believe that today's college students will accept sending their own children through an educational/credentialing system that resembles today's status quo.

</comment><comment><USER7> China's "education inflation" problem is not like ours. The problem in China: it's an underdeveloped economy. This may change in 20 years-- I think everyone in the world hopes it does-- but right now, there are so few middle-class jobs available in countries like China, Vietnam, and the Philippines. The competition is incredibly tight and (as anywhere else) mostly on socioeconomic status and connections, not education.

Our problem is different: technology and the national job market have created The Résumé Blizzard. The cost of sending a CV to an employer has dropped from about $1 (today's dollars) in postage, nice paper, and printing, to $ε in electron-pushing. Most HN posters are relatively successful in their careers and probably send out 3-5 CVs per job search, but there are unqualified lottery-players who send out hundreds or thousands. Front doors don't work anymore-- "closed till the Blizzard ends"-- and colleges and universities now provide a very expensive sorting mechanism for entry-level jobs. The truth is that job-matching is a difficult unsolved problem that no one has solved very well, and the universities and business schools are, at the entry level, the best solution.

<comment> daniel-cussen Charging each applicant would work, and most universities do it, but I believe it's illegal for employers to do.

<comment><USER7> What I don't like about this idea is that, seeing as companies have scads of money and job-seekers generally don't have any, it seems unfair to put fees on job applications. Unless they were limited to a certain level (say, $5.00) I wouldn't support it.

What I would do is create a job-search site where each application costs 1 credit, and encourage employers to spend a lot of time using my well-filtered site. Each member gets 12 credits for free every year, and more credits can be purchased via a premium membership. As the site branched out into a career site, with discussion boards and networking, credits could also be given as a bonus for positive contributions. Limiting the application volume solves the spam problem, though.</comment></comment></comment>


IOS Safari 6.5MB hard limit for html images - <AUTHOR> http://roblaplaca.com/blog/2010/05/05/ipad-safari-image-limit-workaround/ iOS Safari stops displaying images after 6.5MB. This limitation is just one of the many reasons I don't see HTML5 taking over from native apps any time soon. If it is an artificial limit, I wonder if Apple are deliberately limiting the browser so "serious" browser based apps are forced to go through the app store.<p>I have been able to replicate the problem on the iPhone and iPad browser versions of Google Maps, so it doesn't look like some sites are getting preferential treatment. I've logged the problem as a bug with Apple so hopefully they get around to fixing it soon. <comment><USER2> I think I've ran into this limitation when using Google Reader on my iPhone 3GS running iOS 4.0.2. Images will eventually stop loading after viewing a series of image-heavy entries, but will load OK after a page refresh. Very annoying when you generally do heavy browsing on WiFi, where ~6.5 MB is no big deal. It's good to see a potential cause/fix that can be brought to their attention.</comment>


Am I the only person on Earth disappointed by the new Star Wars movie? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@jakefuentes/i-m-the-only-person-on-earth-disappointed-by-the-new-star-wars-movie-b2e58fbcfe9f#.6tbyp2ozk <comment><USER2> I was slightly disappointed by it, but much more impressed by it than I was the prequels.

On balance, it's not much worse than a chapter of the original trilogy. It's meant to be a modern version of a pulp serial and it does work as that. While it does repeat a number of themes and elements from the OT (perhaps too closely for fans of it,) I think it succeeds in expanding upon those in a way the originals weren't capable of.

</comment><comment><USER3> Yeah it was somewhat confusing (why did the Senate not restore order after the last movie? Why are the Senate's own troops called 'the resistance' and not 'the army' or some such?)

Then, after a spectacular job of building character in the first few minutes, they all drop back into one-dimensional fantasy characters so the big special- effects show can start.

Finally, the weight of the fan-service sort of dragged things down. Sure its neat to see the old characters and themes - but the magic of this franchise was its breadth of vision. To recapitulate every significant scene from the original movies was lazy.

Disappointment is the perfect word.

</comment><comment><USER4> No, it was trash and a disappointment. JJ Abrams is the worst director...

</comment><comment><USER5> No. :)

</comment><comment><USER6> yes</comment>


A geek's guide to Shenzhen, the global gadget capital - <AUTHOR> http://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/a-geek-s-guide-to-shenzhen-the-global-gadget-capital-1320107 <comment><USER2> The Chinese characters mean the screen size is 5.5 inches, not iPhone 5.5, and, it is iPhone 6[s] Plus model.</comment>


The Bitcoin Lightning Network might save cryptocurrency from itself - <AUTHOR> https://beincrypto.com/the-bitcoin-lightning-network-might-save-cryptocurrency-from-itself/ <comment><USER2> LN is vapor-ware (borderline fraudulent) that Blockstream is pushing to help kill bitcoin, not save it.

Bitcoin is (was) peer-to-peer digital cash, all it took was Greg Maxwell hijacking the github repo and capping the blocksize to kill the project.

The idea lives on in other projects but the Bitcoin project died with the blockstream takeover.

<comment><USER3> How is it killing Bitcoin? Any arguments, or just trolling? There are at least two alternatives to the Blockstream implementation you can choose from, and LN has the potential to become better cash than Bitcoin (or any hard fork so far) alone could have become, since not every transaction has to be recorded on the blockchain.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> rather than anything saving anything, I see it as a necessary step</comment>


AdaCore University, e-learning center to teach the Ada language - <AUTHOR> http://university.adacore.com/ <comment><USER2> AdaCore, who are the chief stewards of the official GCC Ada frontend, GNAT, have been publishing weekly "gems" that are extremely informative for years.

[http://www.adacore.com/adaanswers/gems](http://www.adacore.com/adaanswers/gems)

Get started..

</comment><comment> vertex-four Ada actually seems to be a pretty good idea for writing performant, security- critical code that has to link with C libraries... such as crypto libraries. Does anyone have any ideas on why it might not be as good as it looks, past the fact that the absolute latest version is proprietary?

<comment><USER3> I spent like 3 days trying to install / compile it on my mac for stm32f4, I couldn't get it to work. I can't imagine doing open source with a compiler nobody can install. I'm pretty bummed, and no other implementation than gnat seems to free. So, the whole language is out of reach.

It's too bad, because i have some real time embedded stuff to write on a very light platform, and I'm stuck with C (I might try to strip some C++ executables again in the future, but I don't think C++ is a suited as Ada would be)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm just going to leave this here because it's outrageously funny

[http://bit.csc.lsu.edu/~gb/csc4101/Reading/gigo-1997-04.html](http://bit.csc.lsu.edu/~gb/csc4101/Reading/gigo-1997-04.html)

<comment><USER5> yeah, keep recycling someone's 15 year old jokes on an even older version of the lang. That's bound to make you feel clever.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is a head scratcher... The most modern educational innovation is being applied for the least modern language. I guess it makes sense. There are lots of in person training programs for Ruby and Python, but not for Cobol or Ada.

<comment><USER2> Ada is quite a long way from COBOL. Having just completed its latest revision about a year and a half ago, Ada is very much cutting edge. Ada 2012 is hardly a maintenance revision like you may find for COBOL; it adds tons of new stuff like contracts and substantial improvements to concurrency and SMP support. Ada 2012 was too long after it's previous revision, Ada 2005, which was standardized in 2007, and was quite more substantial than even 2012.</comment></comment>


OpenAI Trains Language Model, Mass Hysteria Ensues - <AUTHOR> http://approximatelycorrect.com/2019/02/17/openai-trains-language-model-mass-hysteria-ensues/ <comment><USER2> Ilya from OpenAI here. Here's our thinking:

\- ML is getting more powerful and will continue to do so as time goes by. While this point of view is not unanimously held by the AI community, it is also not particularly controversial.

\- If you accept the above, then the current AI norm of "publish everything always" will have to change

\- The _whole point_ is that our model is not special and that other people can reproduce and improve upon what we did. We hope that when they do so, they too will reflect about the consequences of releasing their very powerful text generation models.

\- I suggest going over some of the samples generated by the model. Many people react quite strongly, e.g., [https://twitter.com/justkelly_ok/status/1096111155469180928](https://twitter.com/justkelly_ok/status/1096111155469180928).

\- It is true that some media headlines presented our nonpublishing of the model as "OpenAI's model is too dangerous to be published out of world-taking- over concerns". We don't endorse this framing, and if you read our blog post (or even in most cases the actual content of the news stories), you'll see that we don't claim this at all -- we say instead that this is just an early test case, we're concerned about language models more generally, and we're running an experiment.

Finally, despite the way the news cycle has played out, and despite the degree of polarized response (and the huge range of arguments for and against our decision), we feel we made the right call, even if it wasn't an easy one to make.

<comment><USER3> I've just read i.e [https://twitter.com/gdb/status/1096098366545522688](https://twitter.com/gdb/status/1096098366545522688) and even though it's "best of 25" (I guess cherry-picked by a human) - this is mind-blowing. I am actually having a very hard time believing this is legit generated text.

<comment><USER4> I couldn't be more disappointed with this bullshit honestly. The texts have almost zero coherence and keep repeating the same patterns (which they presumably learned from the data set) over and over again. If this is their best out of 25 samples then they aren't going to fool anyone.

>Recycling is NOT good for the world.

>It is bad for the environment,

>it is bad for our health,

>and it is bad for our economy.

>Recycling is not good for the environment.

>Recycling is not good for our health.

>Recycling is bad for our economy.

>Recycling is not good for our nation.

The first paragraph keeps repeating the <X> is <bad | not good> for the <Y> pattern 8 times.

>And THAT is why we need to |get back to basics| and |get back to basics| in our recycling efforts.

"get back to the basics" is repeated twice in the same sentence.

>Everything from the raw materials (wood, cardboard, paper, etc.),

>to the reagents (dyes, solvents, etc.)

>to the printing equipment (chemicals, glue, paper, ink, etc.),

>to the packaging,

>to the packaging materials (mercury, chemicals, etc.)

>to the processing equipment (heating, cooling, etc.),

>to the packaging materials,

>to the packaging materials that are shipped overseas and

>to the packaging materials that are used in the United States.

It literally repeated packaging 5 times in the same sentence and the overall structure was repeated 9 times. Also what type of packaging is based on mercury?

<comment><USER5> The parts you criticise are the parts I was most impressed with. These sorts of repetitions can be persuasive in writing/arguments, and it's impressive to me that a model learned this type of writing.

<comment><USER6> > These sorts of repetitions can be persuasive in writing/arguments

That is the saddest part. It's not because AI is good, it's because we count saying "X is good/bad" 3 times as a persuasive argument. It won't be hard to learn this kind of "arguing", it's just sad that's what we're teaching our AIs to do and get excited when they do it.

<comment><USER5> > saying "X is good/bad" 3 times as a persuasive argument

I didn't say that it's a persuasive argument, I said that it can be persuasive IN arguments. There's nothing sad about an AI learning it, or people being happy with it, it's very impressive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> >Elon Musk distances himself from OpenAI, group that built fake news AI tool

This is the worst headlines in this matter. This is one of the leading media in India. A language model being touted as Fake news AI tool. This is like calling a car, A run over machine by Ford.

[https://www.hindustantimes.com/tech/elon-musk-distances- hims...](https://www.hindustantimes.com/tech/elon-musk-distances-himself-from- openai-group-that-built-fake-news-ai-tool/story-Q3PkEU6fsJQVkhilpPCQ8M.html)

<comment><USER8> > This is like calling a car, A run over machine by Ford.

That's a great dysphemism. Gonna start using that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> It seems disingenuous that this article fails to quote examples of GPT-2's stunning results, or give any contrasting results from BERT to support the claim that this is all normal and expected progress.

Like many, I was viscerally shocked that the results were possible, the potential to further wreck the Internet seemed obvious, and an extra six months for security actors to prepare a response seemed like normal good disclosure practice. OpenAI warned everyone of an "exploit" in which text humans can trust to be human-generated, and then announced they would hold off on publishing the exploit code for 6 months. This is normal in computer security and I'm taken aback at how little the analogy seems to be appreciated.

<comment><USER10> > Like many, I was viscerally shocked that the results were possible.

Why? There were news about bots writing news ~5 years ago. Given a few simple facts the AI generated the regular info-scarce but fluffy news-piece.

Now OpenAI added better everything (better language models, more data, better "long-term memory" for overall text coherence), and we got better fluff.

It seems like a GAN and a simple Markov chain generator. (Even if it's not that simple of course.)

And maybe it's the equivalent of the "modern art meme" style transferred to AI/ML research. ( [https://i.pinimg.com/236x/71/e1/21/71e12151f4b59d8433d32c126...](https://i.pinimg.com/236x/71/e1/21/71e12151f4b59d8433d32c12676111d4 --modern-art-kid.jpg) )

What I'm trying to convey is that wrecking the net with auto-trolls was already possible, but for some reason Mechanical Turk was cheaper.

> OpenAI warned everyone of an "exploit" in which text humans can trust to be > human-generated

Sokal already did that, and so did [http://thatsmathematics.com/mathgen/](http://thatsmathematics.com/mathgen/) ... but of course this might be qualitatively different, because it can be targeted. (Weaponized, if you will.) But the defense/antidote is the same, but it takes a lot more than 6 months to make people better at critical thinking, but maybe you already heard about the difficulties of that :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Many reactions across here / twitter / reddit seem totally out of proportion. And an odd mix of "stop acting so self-important, this research isn't special so you shouldn't have any qualms about releasing it" and "this research is super important, how dare you not release it".

The strongest counterargument I've seen to OpenAI's decision is that the decision won't end up mattering, because someone else will eventually replicate the work and publish a similar model. But it still seems like a reasonable choice on OpenAI's part–they're warning us that _some_ language model will soon be good enough for malicious use (e.g. large-scale astroturfing/spam), but they're deciding it won't be theirs (and giving the public a chance to prepare).

</comment><comment><USER12> In other fields such as infosec, responsible disclosure is a standard approach. You don't just throw a zero-day out there because you can. Whilst the norms for AI research needn't be identical, they should at least be informed by the history in related fields.

The lead policy analyst at OpenAI has already tried to engage the community in discussing the malicious use of AI, on many occasions, including this extremely well-researched piece with input from many experts: [https://maliciousaireport.com/](https://maliciousaireport.com/) . But until OpenAI actually published examples, the conversation didn't really start.

In the end, there's no right answer - both releasing the model, and not releasing the model, have downsides. But we need a respectful and informed discussion about AI research norms. I've written more detailed thoughts here: [https://www.fast.ai/2019/02/15/openai- gp2/](https://www.fast.ai/2019/02/15/openai-gp2/)

</comment><comment><USER13> > Namely, he argued that OpenAI is concerned that the technology might be used > to impersonate people or to fabricate fake news.

This seems to be a particularly weak argument to make. How is their model going to impersonate someone in a way that a human can not?

<comment><USER14> Cheaper cost to put out a bigger volume of content.

<comment><USER13> Is volume really what dictates whether or not you can impersonate someone? It's never seemed that way to me.

<comment><USER14> It lets you impersonate a crowd, or various crowds.

<comment><USER10> "PR firms" already have an army of fake/paid accounts on every important platform.

This new AI could help them with that. They can let go of the paid writers and hire an IT guy/gal to operate the bots - and the VPNs. (Or they can just pay a lot less to the paid trolls just for their home ADSL/Cable/4G connection.)

But so far this AI is not going to pass a Turing test. Sure, maybe it can be integrated with a chatbot. And it'll be interesting how internet communities will react.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> What if OpenAI didn't write the piece? What if the research was announced by the machine, and the folks at OpenAI are all dead?

<comment><USER16> You joke, but there's a real point here -- many commenters in this thread are complaining that OpenAI's position on this is a marketing stunt. Presumably, if this stuff gets commercialized, it will probably be adept at a few domains first, and I feel like writing good marketing copy will be one of them. So perhaps the bot itself didn't do so here, but it wouldn't surprise me if a self-marketed bot exists in the near future.

<comment><USER15> What if I am the machine and you the last human left alive?

<comment><USER15> You know how when we broke the Enigma we couldn't really let Germans catch onto it, so we had to mask our knowledge of their positions by maintaining statistically insignificant number of accidental wins? Much the same, a good AI should make deliberate typos.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's amazing to me that no one has yet pointed out the blatant irony that their name is OpenAI, yet they are concealing far more than what is typical.

<comment><AUTHOR> I assure you, people have pointed it out...

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Elon Musk was kicked out because he poached Andrej Karpathy from OpenAI to lead Autopilot. Anyways, it was worth it, Andrej is doing an amazing job, and OpenAI is still alive :)

<comment><USER19> > Anyways, it was worth it, Andrej is doing an amazing job, and OpenAI is > still alive :)

Tesla does not even offer their full self driving package anymore. No coast to coast drive yet. Hard to say that's an amazing job.

OpenAI abandons their open source GitHub repos after a year, is now not releasing code, and is always in DeepMind's shadow. Alive, yes. Successful, no.

<comment><USER18> Did you really expect Tesla to launch full driving? They started with being 5 years behind Waymo and without lidars or high resolution mapping, precise GPS sysyem that Waymo has...basically Elon wanted the impossible.

At the same time Andrej dropped out the idea of a fully learned end-to-end model (that's just impossible with the current deep learning technology), and started replacing the somewhat working heuristics with machine learning methodically one-by-one. Also he ramped up the data gathering pipeline.

He needs to build the full simulation, agent systems that can simulate other drivers/humans, implement reverse reinforcement learning...there's so much to do where Waymo is far ahead (but Tesla is ahead in data gathering).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> To what extent is this not just finding text samples written in its training sample and regurgitating it near verbatim?? -Non ml guy

<comment><USER21> If you look at their paper, section 4 is entirely devoted to this question. They present compelling evidence that it is generating original content, the simplest of which is it's ability to write coherently about ridiculous things like talking unicorns that nobody has ever written about in the training set.

[https://d4mucfpksywv.cloudfront.net/better-language- models/l...](https://d4mucfpksywv.cloudfront.net/better-language- models/language_models_are_unsupervised_multitask_learners.pdf)

<comment><USER22> The talking unicorns piece was shockingly good. That is at least as coherent of a news story than the average human could easily invent about it.

Reading that piece gives me the same weird feeling as watching AlphaStar playing through a StarCraft game.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Does someone have a description of the network somewhere? Does it use LSTM for memory or what? Is there anything unusual about the size or structure of the network? Does it use an attention mechanism?

<comment><USER11> I would recommend reading the paper: [https://d4mucfpksywv.cloudfront.net/better-language- models/l...](https://d4mucfpksywv.cloudfront.net/better-language- models/language_models_are_unsupervised_multitask_learners.pdf)

and the previous paper

[https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/openai-assets/research- co...](https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/openai-assets/research- covers/language-unsupervised/language_understanding_paper.pdf)

It's a transformer, not LSTM, and it's very large but not structured in a particularly unusual way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Can you imagine if the teams that worked on the Internet decided not to make it available to the public because of the potential misuses. OpenAI is a joke.

</comment><comment><USER25> I think OpenAI should change org name to ClosedAI.

</comment><comment><USER26> So an article about recycling generated by OpenAI model (best out of 25) already makes more sense than presidential speeches or most of ramblings of average politicians. Can we automate them away as well?

</comment><comment><USER27> How do we know this article isn't just fake news being written by an AI?

</comment><comment><USER28> When a bug is caught on your palm, it pretends to be a dead bug. When a moose is scared, it plays dead moose. When AI wants to fool a human or a captcha filter, it impersonates a human.

Only when a human wants to fool a human, it impersonates whatever possible but a human, then suddenly charges a shitload of ape shit, and then behaves like it never happened.

Without a decent natural language translation or automatic reasoning, which they have not, looks like N-gram where N equals to number of words in language corpus.

</comment><comment><USER29> It's a great marketing hack. That's the real accomplishment here.

</comment><comment><USER30> Ms. Anandkumar nailed it, this is blatant hype bordering on hucksterism. Elon Musk May have left, but his influence remains I guess.

<comment><USER31> First, it's clearly the goal of OpenAI to bring more public attention to advances in the field, specifically to help voters and policymakers consider potential ramifications _well in advance_ of any "truly" groundbreaking work before it's too late. Of course they're "hyping" this technology.

Secondly, have you seen the results? I was dumbfounded and fascinated. I spent hours reading the samples.

Maybe I'm just out of the loop and this truly isn't anything significant, but then that only proves that OpenAI was successful: Now I am aware of the latest advances in NLP and hopefully so too are many more.

<comment><USER32> >Secondly, have you seen the results? I was dumbfounded and fascinated. I spent hours reading the samples.

Yes, I've seen the result. They're nice but, as the article points out, not extraordinary compared to state of the art, _open_ NLP research.

OpenAI's behaviour here smells of Gibsonesque 'anti-marketing', using the misunderstanding of AI and its capabilities in the general population as a means to stir up publicity for their organisation.

This is unethical, misrepresents progress in the field, and produces confusion in the press.

<comment><USER31> > not extraordinary compared to state of the art, open NLP research

> misrepresents progress in the field

Can you point me to some examples of unsupervised learning with similar results? Not asking for rhetorical purposes; I just genuinely was shocked by how compelling their results were, especially given this was unsupervised.

> OpenAI's behaviour here smells of Gibsonesque 'anti-marketing'

I don't disagree that the ethics are questionable, but I think it's highly speculative to suggest that they didn't release the full model _purely_ as a marketing ploy (I'm assuming this is the main objection to their marketing "tactics"). As you say, it "smells" this way, but I fail to see how it's really so clear-cut.

<comment><USER32> >Can you point me to some examples of unsupervised learning with similar results? Not asking for rhetorical purposes; I just genuinely was shocked by how compelling their results were, especially given this was unsupervised.

Model wise this is just openAI's GPT with some very slight modification (laid out in the paper).

Ilya has now commented in the thread and essentially made the same point, this is state of the art performance, but reproducible by everyone because it uses a known architecture.

The secrecy and controversy makes no sense if the model is open, even the methodology of data collection is laid out. There is no safety here assuming that anybody who wants to rebuild the model can do so simply by putting enough effort into rebuilding the dataset, which is not an issue for a seriously malicious actor.

<comment><USER31> > Model wise this is just openAI's GPT with some very slight modification > (laid out in the paper).

> The secrecy and controversy makes no sense if the model is open, even the > methodology of data collection is laid out.

This is exactly why I found the results so compelling: It suggests that this technology is _already_ accessible to some big players: The odds that a Big Corp. or govt agency has already begun using the technology are high, which is precisely why the public needs to start thinking about it.

I cannot know exactly why OpenAI chose to withhold the model, especially given how easy it would be to recreate, but even if we assume that OpenAI withheld the full model purely to drum up controversy, the controversy _is justified_ , as it's very likely that this technology is already in the hands of a few big players.

<comment><USER33> Interesting to think about whether state actors already have such technology.

If they did, I bet it would be used for automated "troll farms".

Like weaponized malicious ELIZA, it would have fake user profiles reacting to keywords, spinning suitable counter-argumentation and/or lies for as long as it takes to change opinions and perceptions, relentlessly, day and night.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> > Fictitious state of emergency

Pretty dumb and disrespectful to politicize a blog post about OpenAI.</comment>


Facebook Adding Display & People-Based Marketing to LiveRail - <AUTHOR> https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2015/03/25/grow-your-ads-with-liverail/

<comment><USER2> People-based marketing has come a long way, but it still lacks deterministic evidence about purchase intent/interest/history. Datalogix does a good job connecting online profiles and advertising to offline purchases, but the industry is by and large focused on probabilistic methods to build audiences.</comment>


Does Watson Prove We've Reached The Singularity? - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/16/ai-paradox/ <comment><USER2> This is easy to answer: no.

Watson doesn't represent a big advance, it's another narrow AI system, and this article is a good example of how the capabilities of such systems are always over-interpreted or misunderstood. The classic problem with narrow AIs is that they don't scale to a larger system, except perhaps in trivial/uninteresting ways.

</comment><comment><USER3> This reeks of "I hear the word singularity one time and I really really want to use it in a headline." TechCrunch should stick to covering Apple rumors/VC beefs and leave the discussion of science/philosophy to someone more qualified.

</comment><comment><USER4> When Watson's language processing abilities are sophisticated enough to understand contextually sensitive ambiguities that humans have no problem with, I'm more inclined to entertain the notion.

As someone that works in NLP and information extraction research, I've gotta say that unless there's some massive technological upheavals, we're not getting to thinking machines for a good long time.</comment>


Opposite of modern - <AUTHOR> https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/hasidism-shalom-auslander/ <comment><USER2> Thanks so much for putting this on here. I have read Auslander's "Foreskin's Lament" and could deeply identify with his critique and eventual rejection of so-called "modern Judaism" (indeed - an oxymoron).

I come from a non-religious Jewish family, but I too was circumcised without being asked at 8 days old (which today makes me resent my parents), I too recited the Torah in a synagogue on my Bar-Mitsva, though I was not really forced to, it was just something everybody did.

Today I live far away from this God-forsaken place called Israel with its ridiculous religious laws, its racism, its recursively fractured society (the more devout you are, the smaller your "community"), its cancerous infiltration of institutional religion into government, its sick obsession with death and martyrdom, its stupid veneration of men-with-yarmulkas, and its infantile particularism.

Today I reject Judaism as an ethnic identity and as a philosophy. For me being Jewish is a biographical detail. It does not define me as a person, it is not who am. I enjoy Jewish humour as much as anyone and embrace my father's painful experiences during WWII, but it cannot mean that I'm better or more important than someone who's not a jew.

I am grateful for having escaped this Jewish reality distortion field. I'm grateful for being able to live and raise my kids in an egalitarian society that transcends ethnic and or religious origins and instead embraces solidarity and rationality, indeed _modernity_.

Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité

<comment><USER3> If infantile religious endoctrinement was avoided, then it would only take one generation for religions to disappear almost entirely.

<comment><USER4> Maybe the religions that we are familiar with today, but new religions will take their place.

Why?

Well, explain where the universe came from. Explain consciousness. Explain what happens after we die. Can you?

I didn't think you could. There are no human accessible answers to these questions. Humanity will forever be confused when we ponder them.

I love the scientific method but it in principle cannot answer these questions.

<comment><USER3> I fully agree on what you said. But the question is, as always, about proportions and statistics: how many people adhere to a religion today because their parent told them they would go to hell otherwise, versus how many choosed actively by seeking a spiritual answers in questions not answered by science?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Not going to defend Hasidism, but this article was pure contempt.

As CS Lewis would call it, chronological snobbery:

> Barfield never made me an Anthroposophist, but his counterattacks destroyed > forever two elements in my own thought. In the first place he made short > work of what I have called my "chronological snobbery," the uncritical > acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the > assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account > discredited. You must find why it went out of date. Was it ever refuted (and > if so by whom, where, and how conclusively) or did it merely die away as > fashions do? If the latter, this tells us nothing about its truth or > falsehood. From seeing this, one passes to the realization that our own age > is also "a period," and certainly has, like all periods, its own > characteristic illusions. They are likeliest to lurk in those widespread > assumptions which are so ingrained in the age that no one dares to attack or > feels it necessary to defend them.

<comment><USER6> Contempt is sometimes warranted. If the descriptions in the article are accurate (from the spitting to the running over with a car), contempt is absolutely the appropriate response and the kind of temporal relativism that denies that is wrong.

<comment><USER7> It may be warranted, but it is not productive. If you really want change, you need to understand the reasons behind people's culture and actions, and have an open dialogue about those reasons.

<comment><USER8> You can, and often must, understand the reasons behind people's actions while still condemning them - but you should condemn the actions, not the people.

<comment><USER9> Why? If people make condemnable actions, they become condemnable themselves.

<comment><USER10> Which is preferable to you. That those people be punished appropriately for their actions but continue to believe that they were justified; or that those people are genuinely persuaded they were wrong, repudiate their former beliefs and actions and work to undo the damage.

Personally I believe in both, where criminality is concerned. Appropriate sanctions and rehabilitation are the ideal. For non-criminal prejudice and discrimination, I think the latter is perfectly acceptable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > "An end to all apologetics!" cried the Lubavitcher Rebbe, and for once, I > agree with him. There was no reason, in his opinion, to harmonize faith and > science.

On the contrary, I think we _must_ rediscover the relationship between metaphysical philosophy and observation-based reasoning. For whatever reason the current culture pulls communities apart and forces hate and conflict where, in my opinion, fighting over the tension between "science" and "religion" is unneeded and unhealthy.

The fact of the matter is that each religion is based on a certain set of metaphysical axioms. Scientific reasoning is based on a particular subset of those axioms. To hate, confuse, and fight over the implications of that is such a waste.

<comment><USER12> > The fact of the matter is that each religion is based on a certain set of > metaphysical axioms. Scientific reasoning is based on a particular subset of > those axioms.

I'm genuinely struggling with this. In what way are the axioms of science (by which I think you mean rationality) a subset of the axioms of (all?) religion?

<comment><USER11> "We can learn truths about the universe through observation of matter and reason."

I'm sure some collaboration and editing are due on that particular phrasing, but that's the general premise behind science. And, perhaps with fringe exceptions, religious people are fine with that axiom. Exhibit A is all the religious scientists throughout history and up to right now.

<comment><USER13> Which directly contradicts some of the basic tenets of most religions which state that god is the sole source of truth and HE is unfathomable...

<comment><USER11> I dispute that the basic tenets of most religions include rejecting information about heritability gained from cultivating plants in a garden.

<comment><USER10> Semantics. Religions largely don't reject all that much, people in them do and the fact is an awful lot of religious people reject evolution and the principle of natural selection on the grounds of their religion.

[http://news.gallup.com/poll/21814/evolution-creationism- inte...](http://news.gallup.com/poll/21814/evolution-creationism-intelligent- design.aspx)

<comment><USER11> Well, yeah, the conflict is poor understanding of semantics.

I think most of the contention is people talking past each other, and I think we're at risk of that happening here, too. I'll try to be careful.

How old the universe is and whether there is a creator are theological and metaphysical questions. Whether species change over time in response to changes in their environments is an empirical question. You can't disprove a theological axiom with empirical observation. The universe could have been created in the middle of my typing this post up. There's no scientific way to prove that an omnipotent being didn't set it up that way.

So the fundamentalists need to accept that a creator could have created a universe with evolution in it. And anti-fundamentalists need to acknowledge that they can only prove that the universe _looks_ really old when we extrapolate backwards from existing evidence.

One metaphysical question is "Could an omnipotent creator create a universe with evolution?" I think the answer is clearly "yes". The people who object at this point usually object to the "Why would a creator do that?" That's an entirely different _theological_ question, one that doesn't affect science a single bit.

<comment><USER10> This is a similar issue to that posed by Descartes' Demon, which continuously creates the illusion of a universe around you. How do you know whether you live in a real world or an illusion?

The best solution I know is that you must proceed on he basis that what you perceive is accurate, otherwise you might as well give up as the alternative is that nothing is knowable or has any value. There is a congruent theological principle that a good god would not so deceive it's creation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> A bit of a clickbait title ("Opposite of modern" as of this post.) Was expecting something more computer-ish and related to Transport Layer Security.

Then again, "A personal response to the history of Hasidism" (actual title) would not have received as much attention.

<comment><USER15> I thought clickbait was "you'll never believe what happens next" and "one weird trick." A far cry from this submission.

<comment><USER11> Yeah, I thought the title was actually understated compared to the body of the article.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Modernity != progress. This is not to say that the Hasidic mode of life is right (or wrong), just that the term modern is being misunderstood here. When people use the word modern in a context like this, they usually mean to say that a movement could not have existed in a previous era in time, that it is as much an artifact of the 18th-21st centuries as the Enlightenment.

I do think that arguing that Hasidic Judaism is modern and thus good is a dubious argument, I just think the author of this piece is conflating several terms.

</comment><comment><USER17> I have not read the book he read, but I did grow up in a similar environment (and lived in the same Meah Shaarim neighbourhood for a few years), I think part of the issue is semantics.

He conflates modernity and progressiveness, while the book sees both progressives and reactionaries as modern. Hassidim are both modern and reactionary.

<comment><USER18> He argues that the book conflates 'modern' and 'contemporary'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I don't quite agree with the author about modernity. I argue that the modern Ultra-Orthodox are modern, specifically in the way they justify their beliefs. Most of what I'm going to say is just a summary of this lovely paper by Haym Soloveitchik then at Yeshiva University: [https://www.lookstein.org/professional-dev/rupture- reconstru...](https://www.lookstein.org/professional-dev/rupture- reconstruction-transformation-contemporary-orthodoxy/)

The basic point is that modernity has destroyed tradition as a justification for a way of life. Look, before people were often happy to say "We do this because our ancestors did it." and that alone was enough. And when the sacred texts was a little off with tradition, people were happy to try and make sure that they could be read to agree with tradition. But now, you have to try and fall back and argue from higher authority. In the end this often looks the same, but it lends much greater power to those who interpret sacred texts, and pushes people to more and more extreme interpretations.

There's a book I just read, Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms by Gerard Russell. It's a travelogue though the Middle East meeting the small religious movements that survived Christianity and Islam over the last ~2000 years: Mandaeans, Yezidis, Coptic Christians, Samaritans, and the Kalasha. The Kalasha are a tiny group of pagans who live on the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan, and one of the interesting things that comes up when Russell visits them is that they don't really have explanations for a lot of their rituals. They do things because their parents did them, and so on. and it's troublesome because when faced with Islam, or outsiders, it's hard for them to justify what they're doing, there's no intellectual basis.

And I think that, on a much smaller scale (Judaism has had a more formal intellectual basis for a long long time) is what modernity, chiefly through literacy and improved communication, brings. I also think that blanket rejection of groups like the Ultra-Orthodox or fundamentalist Christians as "dated" or just wrong isn't very helpful, certainly they're not going away any time soon.

</comment><comment><USER20> > What happens, I wonder, if this boy discovers at the age of fifteen that the > deepest love he feels is for another man? Or less dramatically, if he wants > to eat a cheeseburger? I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that his > father's response will be anything but modern.

I wonder very much how modern Shalom Auslander's response would be if his son at the age of fifteen decided to become a Hasid …

<comment><USER17> Shalom Auslander wouldn't disown his son. He wouldn't refuse to go to his wedding (unlike children of Hassidim who marry people who aren't Jewish). There's a world of difference between what he would do and what Hassidim do to their children when they become irreligious.

You also need to take into consideration that Auslander had a very negative upbringing as a Hassid, and therefore his supposed lack of tolerance could be put down to PTSD - Hassidim don't have the same excuse.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Archived copy that can be read without JS enabled:

[https://archive.is/1g9QG](https://archive.is/1g9QG)

</comment><comment><USER22> Modernity as indicating a sense of progress, as opposed to simply distinguishing "now" from "then", is itself ... modern. Roughly 1897.

[https://www.etymonline.com/word/modern](https://www.etymonline.com/word/modern)

There's also the Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy, in Christian faith, dating to the 1920s & 1930s, largely a response to WWI and what was seen as dislocations imposed by the rapid advance of modernity (in the ... modern sense) as technology and industry developed especially ~1860 - 1920.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamentalist%E2%80%93Moderni...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamentalist%E2%80%93Modernist_Controversy)

</comment><comment><USER23> I like this discussion from a "modern" perspective. I think there are three not-modern things and in my opinion it's quite clear how to handle them.

1) There's the thing that survived modern trends and still exists. That is a useful thing, a kind of truth that has been found and embodied in this thing. People should learn about it, no matter if it's 10 months old or 1000 years. Language is such a thing, forks are such a thing, Vim is such a thing. If you don't use this thing you are bound to rediscover it under a different name. E.g. Unix attempted to be the platform neutral programming environment, then some people forgot about it. So they developed Java as platform independent programming environment. Now if you look at both, you find a lot of great things, but they are similar. And you also find that both have not fully succeeded in their goal of being platform independent.

2) There are emotional attached things. They are objectively viewed not really valuable anymore, but people get sentimental about them. This is an individual experience and therefore must also be an individual decision to use or not use. E.g. old tv shows with mediocre ratings. You might like it or not like, but another person can feel different because they have/haven't seen it in their childhood. The correct approach is to let each do their own thing in this area.

3) There are old things that haven't survived the connection to modern things. Strict hierarchical organisations for instance. A more flexible, democratic organisation usually ends up beating a strict competitor. That's why we now have republics, federations etc instead of kingdoms. You should stay away from them and not support anybody who attempts that. People try to sell this as sentimental with words like "in the past everything was better". Screw it. We don't live in the past, we live now. And if it would really be that good this thing would still be there.

Sadly we have a lot of discussions in society if obvious category 3 things might actually be category 1 for some abstract reasons. It's unnecessary to discuss. Communism is dead. Faschism is dead. Islamic Traditionalism is dead. Get off these horses.

Instead we should discuss category 1 things that are interesting from a modern perspective. For instance in school we learn that slavery is dead, but if you learn and learn and learn about the global economy you find there is still an awful lot of slavery out there. Women get cought and sold, or forcefully married. Children are used for 16h/day jobs without any pay. Prostitution itself only has a very small minority of really free participants. How the fuck can something like slavery survive? What is actually good about it? This kind of thing would be an interesting discussion in my eyes, because there is some value there to be learned about our morals and reality. Talking about if dead horses are really dead is a waste of time tho.

<comment><USER11> I think "modern" perspectives are also being attacked from a progressive perspective. Freedom of speech, for instance, is losing its appeal as different groups see speech itself as despicable and on par with physical misbehavior. I guess you could group that into your #2, but in a future- looking perspective, towards some sort of utopia where everyone has pleasant thoughts and words.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Looking for what to build. How to leave this stage? - <AUTHOR> Lately I haven't found anything that makes me excited to build. I like to build products, but feels like spending energy in the wrong or on a non promising product is waste of time. How to find what to build? <comment><USER2> I think it would be helpful to figure out what you've tried. Classic (but helpful) advice is to create something to solve a problem that you currently have. Is there anything that you find annoying and could be automated?</comment>


Fake copies of our website made us disappear from Google search - <AUTHOR> https://www.angliaresearch.co.uk/articles/fake-copies-of-our-website-made-us-disappear-from-google-search/ <comment><USER2> They don't even need to copy your website.

Anyone can point a few hundred domains to a few haproxy instances with LetEncrypt certs, then point the backend to anyones website. They just need to change the header to the backend to request your domain instead of the proxy domains. Easy to do. They are not copying the website, just proxying. Google will see that as the same thing and SEO downrank your site. With cache enabled, the proxied versions may even be faster.

</comment><comment><USER3> This could be done on anyone. I feel bad for businesses who rely on traffic from google.. One more nail in the google coffin since they'll most likely ignorore it or its too small for them to fix...</comment>


The Real Paranoia-Inducing Purpose of Russian Hacks - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-real-paranoia-inducing-purpose-of-russian-hacks <comment><USER2> And meanwhile the US Department of Defense, as of 2009, had 27,000 employees working in public relations / propaganda and contracts out the development of astroturfing software. Government-paid shills are not unique to Russia, and this article does nothing to prove that Russia was involved with the DNC emails.

Beyond that, it doesn't matter who leaked / hacked the emails. If Putin was behind it, then he did a great service to open democracy in the US.</comment>


MS-DOS Source Code Released - <AUTHOR> http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/microsoft-ms-dos-2-0-source-code/

<comment><USER2> Wow, this is going to be a great read. First impressions: pretty decent comment to code ratio, only about 30k lines of actual code, all of the code uses carriage-return newlines (though who knows if that's an artifact of archival) as does FC.ASM for its find_eol subroutine, some files include what looks like manually-maintained revision history, and right there in STDSW.ASM we have feature flags.

One interesting comment in DIR.ASM:

        ;       DS:SI Points to asciz string of path (no leading '/').

and in SYSCALL.txt's documentation, everything uses forward-slashes as directory separators. EDLIN.ASM and FORMAT.ASM on the other hand make clear that the directory separator is backslash on PC;

        mov     ax,(char_oper shl 8)    ;get switch character
        int     21h
        cmp     dl,"/"
        jnz     slashok                 ;if not / , then not PC
        mov     [dirchar],"\"           ;in PC, dir separator = \
        mov     [userdir],"\"
        mov     [optchar],"/"           ;in PC, option char =

Looks like early DOS supported both?

<comment><USER3> > Looks like early DOS supported both?

Yes, according to [http://blogs.msdn.com/b/larryosterman/archive/2005/06/24/432...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/larryosterman/archive/2005/06/24/432386.aspx) which says:

> they coded the OS to accept either "/" or "\" character as the path > character (this continues today, btw - try typing "notepad c:/boot.ini" on > an XP machine (if you're an admin)). And they went one step further. They > added an undocumented system call to change the switch character. And > updated the utilities to respect this flag.

> And then they went and finished out the scenario: They added a config.sys > option, SWITCHAR= that would let you set the switch character to "-".

> Which flipped MS-DOS into a *nix style system where command lines used > "-switch", and paths were / delimited.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> MSDOS, is my first ever love. I still remember it's most of commands. dir on a lazy day and dir /w was a relief. then the windows 3.x came along. Jesus Christ! everything got changed, I have got mouse, no more CLI. simply create a folder and open them with a mouse click!. Then I totally forgot about it. Until now, when I started learning linux. I couldn't recall it what was it like, because CLI looked troublesome for me, (a mac user now) because I have not used it since the days of DOS, and few days later i figured, OMG! it's like DOS and it changed everything about the Linux shell for me. Instead of hating it, I started loving it and prefer to use it wherever I can just to please myself and recall my memories of the first love DOS!

<comment><USER5> its like dos but much much better :D

<comment><USER4> Yes indeed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm really enjoying reading this. I went spelunking for the EXE header to find any references to Mark Zbikowski (who is still immortalized in PE-format EXE files today).

v20source/exec.asm, line 95:

        exec_signature      DW  ?               ; must contain 4D5A  (yay zibo!)

There are a couple of other references, too.</comment>


Ask HN: How to Make Money from Web Scraping? - <AUTHOR> What are some ways to make money from web scraping?
Few options that I can think of, are:
1. Scrape and sell data
2. Scrape public data and publish as a website. Make money with ads / subscriptions
3. Build price comparison websites
4. Offer web scraping services.
Any real life examples / use-cases out there? <comment><USER2> If any HN community members are doing web scraping that may benefit from residential proxies rather than datacenter IPs, I can get you set up with some free test credits on our residential proxy network: [https://packetstream.io](https://packetstream.io)

We tunnel requests through real opt-in residential ISP users.

Send us a message via our contact form and we'll load up your account with some test credits.

Happy scraping!

<comment><USER3> That's badass but how do they stop from being banned?

Like if I scrape Craigslist enough and get that IP banned the resident can't visit Craigslist?

I don't know enough about this to understand.

Or would it cycle through the proxy IPs real fast?

<comment><USER2> > Or would it cycle through the proxy IPs real fast?

Exactly. PacketStream lets you change your visible IP with each request. If you need a persistent IP/geolocation that can be configured as part of the request.

<comment><USER3> That is totally badass. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Possibly one more item is " _scraping to gather analytics and trends_ ", the revenue comes from using machine learning to predict trends based on the scraped data from social media, news etc... in most cases the raw data isn't as valuable as the patterns or predictions you can see in it...

Example -> [https://meetglimpse.com/](https://meetglimpse.com/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Very interesting. Your project?

<comment><USER4> Not my project, was on "Show HN" a few months ago.

But I did try to use Web-Scraping a few years ago, when I was trying to set up a crypto-currency [1] arbitrage... but there were a lot of risks and challenges... could be another option for you though.

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> So not to be decisive... but if you have a skill such as a talent for scraping why not look for a value-add for the world compared to primarily "rent- seeking" activities like the above. (Advertising is never a good way to make money)

Why not set up a scraping system that helps people improve accessibility by alerting them to flaws in their sites?

<comment><AUTHOR> Good idea. Can you elaborate this a bit?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Easy Real Estate Investments = Oxymoron? - <AUTHOR>

Have any of you purchased real estate solely for the passive income?  And how did you go about it?  I have a contact that sells turnkey rentals and some cash saved up but I want to get opinions/stories before I go any further. <comment><USER2> "real estate solely for the passive income"

Now that is an oxymoron in my opinion. Real estate even though on the surface seems passive (rent it out while you sit on a beach) is far from that. There will be periodic maintenance, dealing with renters and god forbid you get bad ones, big item expenses once in a while (you bought a 15 year old house and even though the last owner did upgrades, you suddenly have to replace the roof), rent collection (this one can be painful too).

Investing in real estate is not always a bad thing depending on your capacity and the location/market of course. But please be aware that becoming a landlord is not passive at all even though you will not be working at the property on a daily basis.

<comment><USER3> Agree with you. There is nothing passive about becoming real estate landlord.

Property management firms can manage only so much and cost a lot. They will come to you for most big expenses and decisions. Unless you have lot of rentals, property management firms tend to be expensive and you barely break- even on one or two properties.

Another issue with rental real-estate is squatting and defacing of the property if your property stays vacant for a month or two and not in good shape.

From passive income aspect, it is better to invest in REITs to get exposure to real-estate or join property management/ real-estate partnerships as LP/GP.</comment></comment>


Lit Nerds: TS Eliot's Wasteland - well referenced  - <AUTHOR> http://world.std.com/~raparker/exploring/thewasteland/explore.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Why do I think this belongs on Hacker News? Because 1) this poem itself is one crazy hack of densely packed meaning within meaning and 2) the site is the best of all lit resources I've seen online, period. If you want to be a great hacker, you've got to know how people think around you, and to do that you've got to understand our culture.

Why this poem matters: If you've read a significant number of classics, you'll notice we've recently undergone an extraordinary change in the way we view reality. This poem is about the fall out of this shift and where we are going next. However, the cultural currents are not something you can just say explicitly. They have to be experienced to be understood, and that is what this poem is for.

Website background: If you've read the Wasteland before, you probably know the poem is basically a collage of reference upon obscure reference to classical and contemporary poetry. Very confusing, yet mysteriously intriguing, for the literary novice like myself.

This kind soul has done a very good job hyperlinking all these references to their sources.</comment>