20 Reasons We Know the Earth Is Spherical - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@hb20007/20-reasons-we-know-the-earth-is-spherical-8dca3ecdeaf <comment><USER2> I'm off the belief that (honest) flat earthers aren't of that belief due to lack of evidence, but rather due to lack of the trust framework necessary to have faith that those interpreting the evidence are interpreting it correctly.

E.g. a lot of the presented arguments presuppose an understanding of geometry, and that it applies to our universe. But for most people, that amounts to trusting mathematicians and physicists, which is in turn founded on trust in the scientific system and ultimately logic itself.

<comment><USER3> >I'm off the belief that (honest) flat earthers aren't of that belief due to lack of evidence, but rather due to lack of the trust framework necessary to have faith that those interpreting the evidence are interpreting it correctly.

...and yet the same people place absolute faith in arguments supporting the flat earth merely because it defies orthodoxy, and also believe the pseudo- scientific rationales behind them.

<comment><USER4> I'm pretty sure that if you take the set of flat earthers, subtract the people who don't really believe it and are just having fun being contrary, and then subtract out the mentally ill people, you're left with very nearly an empty set; I'm even more certain that if it's not empty, it's utterly negligible. So analyzing what they place faith in and why without reference to "mental illness" in most cases is probably a waste of time; the surface appearance of putting faith in this or that rationale is not the real story. We're talking about people who are legitimately broken in terms of their ability to understand the world and are often unable to engage with it properly in many other ways, too.

As tempting as it may be to then pivot from my statements here and snark about people of a religious mindset different than yours, or ethical or political mindset different than yours, bear in mind that many such people engage with the world just fine. The sort of thing that we actually call _mental illness_ is a qualitative cut above that sort of thing.

<comment><USER5> You just called a bunch of people morons. Take that in for a second. There's thinly veiled circular reasoning in there somewhere, that amounts to saying that mental illness cannot be understood and these people must be mentally ill, implying this were so because you cannot understand them, but not giving any explicit opinion whatsoever. Ultimately you contradict yourself about their ability to engage with the world, too. This is polemic and very bad.

Ultimately, the message was that thoughts and feelings of mentally impaired people do have no bearing on their illness, or if it did, you wouldn't care. Then why comment, if you don't care?

<comment><USER4> "You just called a bunch of people morons"

No, you did. I said they were either deliberately playing or mentally ill, and that you must take that into account if you want to understand. It's the opposite of calling people morons. That was something you brought to this discussion.

<comment><USER5> Calling someone a moron is claiming they are mentally ill. Unless I have lost touch with the world and you think moron translates simply to worthless piece of shit or something of the like.

Edit: I mean, sure, you show some interest, hence my question was actually honest. I didn't expect an honest answer given the attitude, but I had to ask.

<comment><USER6> 1\. No, calling someone a moron does not always mean you're making the claim that they either have a learning disability, or are mentally ill.

2\. Trying to make the claim that this word is completely innocuous, is very unbelievable unless we are to assume you are typing this from a wormhole into the past before this entered mainstream vocabulary.

3\. If you were attempting to use the term in a more clinical fashion, you've completely failed to apply it correctly.

<comment><USER5> >Trying to make the claim that this word is completely innocuous

This is where it becomes obvious that you think that mentally ill -- _the way you used it_ \-- was completely innocuous, objectively true. Hence I might as well, by your own standards, call you a moron, or at least mentally ill, until the opposite is proven. That is, you might indeed be a Psychologist, and not an impostor, but otherwise your use of the term in a more clinical fashion is likewise incorrectly applied, very very likely. Sure this discussion is a waste of your time, if you are an idiot who doesn't understand "these people". PS: This is fun, blaming other people for their faults,not very helpful, but certainly fun getting a sense of superiority. I'm sure you are trying to say the right thing, but between lack of qualification and even contradicting yourself, you didn't, I'm sorry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Just for fun: 200 Proofs Earth in NOT a Spinning Ball [https://aplanetruth.info/2015/08/04/200-proofs-earth-in- not-...](https://aplanetruth.info/2015/08/04/200-proofs-earth-in-not-a- spinning-ball/)

<comment><USER8> >If Earth were a ball 25,000 miles in circumference as NASA and modern astronomy claim, spherical trigonometry dictates the surface of all standing water must curve downward an easily measurable 8 inches per mile multiplied by the square of the distance. This means along a 6 mile channel of standing water, the Earth would dip 6 feet on either end from the central peak. Every time such experiments have been conducted, however, standing water has proven to be perfectly level.

In fact I remember an old story of someone doing exactly that, taking up the challenge of a flat-earther. They set up surveying equipment with a scope at one end of a long placid lake, a pole at the other and one midway. When they looked through the scope at the far pole, the middle pole was clearly higher. "That doesn't prove anything," said the flat-earther, "level the transit." So they leveled the transit, and the middle pole appeared some distance below level, and the far pole some distance below that. The flat-earther declared this conclusively proved the earth was flat. You really cannot win in this situation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The very fact that someone spent its time and effort to write an article like this, means that the trolls have won.

<comment><USER10> I think it's disingenuous to think every Flat Earther is just trolling. People are donating money to the cause, probably by someone scamming them rather than people genuinely interested in science. I think it's important to at least give those people a starting point to find the truth rather than blowing them off completely.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Articles like this could be summarized down to "Because duuuh!"

If you're an adult and the type of person who doubts the shape of the earth, I don't think anything a website says would convince you.

<comment><USER12> No, you haven't seen it with your own eyes. There's no need for argument from authority. There are several well reasoned arguments that the Earth is spherical (e.g., the shadow of the Earth is curved). It's proper to recite them.

<comment><USER13> _> There are several well reasoned arguments that the Earth is spherical (e.g., the shadow of the Earth is curved). _

That argument would prove the Earth is round - but not necessarily that it is spherical. A flat, round disc would also produce a curved shadow.

To play devil's advocate - you would also need to prove that it is Earth's shadow on the moon and not the Sun's shadow. For an example, I made an HD image in paint [0].

[0] [https://vgy.me/8xRkJv.png](https://vgy.me/8xRkJv.png)

<comment><USER12> > To play devil's advocate - you would also need to prove that it is Earth's > shadow on the moon and not the Sun's shadow. For an example, I made an HD > image in paint [0].

Very nice! A great demonstration of how difficult it is to be explicit about all our assumptions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I have thought a lot about why there are so many flat-Earthers, and I think I have figured out the main cause. For flat-Earthers who are sincere and not mentally disturbed, I think the problem is a general mistrust of experts and society in general.

This is because we live today in societies that are so unnaturally large. Human psychology is designed for small foraging tribes where you know everyone personally, and so can determine how trustworthy they are. And furthermore, everyone is strongly motivated to be trustworthy because otherwise they would become social outcasts and could not survive.

In large, complex societies like ours, you are continually being presented with claims by people you don't know personally and so it is quite possible to lose all trust in their truthfulness. This is especially the case in the US today where you have entities like much of conservative media that are actively working to cultivate mistrust.

Unfortunately trust in experts is absolutely essential for a large society like ours to function, and so the problem is how to restore such trust. I think that is a very difficult problem.

</comment><comment><USER15> Some of the reasons are not very compelling. Some thoughts:

4\. Other planets are spherical: This rests on the premise that earth is also a planet. This is also the problem with no. 5.

8\. Shadows of sticks: The earth could be flat and the sun could be small and close.

11\. Gravity: This requires that the law of gravity can be derived independently from the fact that the earth is spherical. That's not easy.

<comment><USER16> > 11\. Gravity: This requires that the law of gravity can be derived > independently from the fact that the earth is spherical. That's not easy.

This can be done by observing the motions of other planets/moons/stars/galaxies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's 2018, why do people still need convincing that the Earth is a sphere?

<comment><USER12> All people are born ignorant, even in 2018.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> It feel very silly that this article has to exist, but here we are!

</comment><comment><USER19> The Earth is clearly a torus.

</comment><comment><USER20> Nah mate. Flat innit.

</comment><comment><USER21> It's not a sphere. It's an oblate spheroid.

</comment><comment><USER22> There Earth isn't spherical, it's spheroidal.

<comment><USER23> Not sure why you've been downvoted, unless it's for pedantry. The Earth is indeed spheroidal, in fact an oblate spheroid - flatter at the poles and bulging at the equator due to the rotation of the earth. Modelling the true shape of the Earth is central to geodesy.

<comment><USER24> There's a danger in pedantry -- outsiders can mistake it for "see: there's no consensus that the earth is a sphere!". Having said that, the earth is not an oblate spheroid -- it's very slightly pear-shaped, and has all sorts of mountains and valleys.

To paraphrase Isaac Asimov in his essay The Relativity of Wrong: "The earth is flat" is a pretty good model. "The earth is a sphere" is much better. And "The earth is an oblate spheroid" is just a bit better than that.

So, let us consider the aim of the essay: to debunk the flat earth claim as many ways as possible. I think they did a pretty good job finding data for which the flat earth model is insufficient, but a spherical earth fits quite nicely.</comment></comment></comment>


Email is broken.  Can anybody fix it? - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/email-is-broken-can-anyone-fix-it/ <comment><USER2> > "Email is bigger than Facebook. Hell, it's bigger than the internet."

Ugh..

Email is a widely successful platform of conversing that hasn't been locked into walled gardens like new forms of communication today, so I fail to see how it's broken. The article seems to set up an alarmist headline that email is broken, just to promote a (nicely designed) email app. None of the underlying protocols are changing anytime soon, nor any of them being displaced by new ones. Rather, Edison is just creating new features on their app.

At a macroscopic level, the biggest problem with email is security. It shouldn't be as difficult as it is to get encryption on emails. Sure, some tech people know how to do it easily, but for the vast public it's something they will never get done (and I'm one of those guys, even though I'm a software engineer.. I claim no expertise of neither networking nor cryptography; any recommendations for email providers?)</comment>


Chem journal yanks paper because authors had stolen it as peer reviewers - <AUTHOR> https://retractionwatch.com/2019/02/08/chem-journal-yanks-paper-because-authors-had-stolen-it-as-peer-reviewers/ <comment><USER2> I actually had this happen to me with my first submitted paper as faculty. Its actually a pretty common practice. I'm so happy to have left science...</comment>


Dell designs music player to compete with iPod ... again - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080730-dell-designs-own-music-player-again.html <comment><USER2> I like Dell. I know I shouldn't, because they're a terrible company, but they're dumb in such a slapsticky way. You can't take them seriously.</comment>


Server Sky - Internet and computation in orbit - <AUTHOR> http://server-sky.com/ <comment><USER2> I don't get it. I really don't. The total power budget for one of these satellites is 6 watts. And it's going to replace a ground-based server that consumes 200-1000 watts.

How can a 6-watt server be an effective replacement for a 200-watt server? And if it is, why not put the 6-watt server in the data center, where it doesn't require a big rocket or suffer radio latency, and it's easy to swap/repair/upgrade?

Now, if these were retargeted as routers, covering the whole world with wireless Internet, it'd be interesting.

</comment><comment><USER3> Cool, I've been thinking about data centers in orbit and on the Moon lately...

Latency and encryption would be interesting issues to overcome.</comment>


Why the 'Weird Internet' of the GeoCities Era Had to Die - <AUTHOR> https://onezero.medium.com/why-the-weird-internet-of-the-geocities-era-had-to-die-383f2870662c <comment><USER2> The weird internet went away not because people on the internet became boring, but because the internet opened up to non weird people. The article talks about how complicated it can seem to build your own site now, but it's easier then ever to build your own website - the whole point is that the internet isn't necessarily dominated by the types of people that are willing to put in that kind of work anymore. Its not like there are some mysterious new barriers preventing you from building a custom site on the internet that have been thrown up now. This post itself didn't have to be on medium - but medium and Facebook and YouTube deliver that "boring, non weird" audience that you want to read your stuff.

<comment><USER3> > but it's easier then ever to build your own website

Is it though? When I was 9, I created a site on Angelfire (and loved the fact that the default page was this craptastic html example where you could view source and kind of learn various html tags relating to lists, tables I believe, and various other things as a quick primer for those uneducated in HTML). I also created one on Geocities (different use cases in the end, but more or less I just wanted to see which was better/easier. Ended up with Angelfire as my main one as you could actually "name" your site as opposed to the generic "city"/"street" name-ish thing of Geocities). And if memory serves, there were other hosts that were similarly popular too. One iirc would allow for subdomains instead of the nesting that Angelfire/Geocities does, but if I believe by default they would have big branding somewhere on your page. Tried it, think there was a work around for that one, but I didn't like battling it so didn't retain.

Now, sure, I can find a host that I can pay $x to host the HTML that I build outright, but I don't know if kids coming up have the same resources I did as it relates to starting up a free site and having a default page with various HTML elements (too many at this point for a single page to be of value. Would probably have to look something like W3Schools or whatever with a list on the left you could go through).

Maybe they exist, but they weren't as obvious as they were then. When I first got online, I found a site that at least a few years ago was still around which was this chat site called 4-lane with the one I went to called Chatterbox. People would link to their pages hosted on Angelfire, and so it began. Now, everything is custom domained so it is hard to locate the Angelfire of today. If you blog, I guess there is Medium that links are posted of pretty regularly, but outside of that, I don't notice.

<comment><USER4> Back in 1996 a friend of mine with no computer training put together a simple website in Notepad and uploaded it to free web space provided by her ISP.

That doesn't happen today. People bumble along with Wordpress or services like Wix, but the customisation options for non-experts are very limited and generic.

Hosting has become much more complicated and confusing, and the web simply doesn't do simple any more. Even a small blog is a moderately complicated project, especially if it uses a build system. And building even a minimal independent commercial site requires very specialised skills and plenty of time.

There really isn't anything equivalent to AF/Geo. And even if there were, CSS and HTML - never mind js - are now so complex beginners can't just pick them up by dabbling.

<comment><USER5> There are still free hosts out there, and the simple HTML of yesteryear still renders fine today.

<comment><USER3> > Maybe they exist, but they weren't as obvious as they were then. When I > first got online, I found a site that at least a few years ago was still > around which was this chat site called 4-lane with the one I went to called > Chatterbox. People would link to their pages hosted on Angelfire, and so it > began. Now, everything is custom domained so it is hard to locate the > Angelfire of today. If you blog, I guess there is Medium that links are > posted of pretty regularly, but outside of that, I don't notice.

followed by later:

> I just mean organically though. Hate to sound old, but back then, Yahoo was > basically a nested index and Google if it was a thing at that point wasn't a > commonly known one. Yet Angelfire, Geocities, etc. were easily located > because sites hosted on them were shared so heavily and drop the > /something/something (edit: from the URL) and it says "hey, you can create > your own for free here".

> I just did a search for "free website" and there was Wix, Wordpress, Yola, > and Weebly. Going to assume those are legit, but the rest of my results > (which were way more common than those 4 entries) were offshoots of > "[best/top/10] web site builders 2019" or some random other ones that won > the SEO game.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> People experience the dismal anti-literate Twitter (concept and style and non- member popup 'experience') and think it's... normal?

And the Twitter embed system is hilarious at times. There is nothing as face- palmy as a controversial tweet that gets embedded in a news article describing it and then the owner deletes it, leaving a news article with a tweet-not- available hole.

Facebook, where you are 10 narrow screens and 1500 back-end js-directed cloud bloat loads loads away from something you saw yesterday? The Modern Web where even scroll keys do not really work anymore?

Or for that matter Youtube, whose text comments are designed to explode into illiterate mush with no hint or hope of proper spaces or paragraph breaks if copied to clipboard? Predatory.

Here we are in the 21st century where people take SCREENSHOTS of things rather than copy information. This is regression, devolution.

Back in the dark ages of 2000 it was considered bad manners to design a system that appeared to scroll endlessly until the web browser simply gummed up and crashed. Search engines wouldn't bother to render any of that. Now it's the preferred way to do it.

And now Google is replacing their results page text stream paragraphs with tile-crap that is rects within rects with acres of white space, and less context.

If only the whole Internet was built like Hacker News.

<comment><USER7> > There is nothing as face-palmy as a controversial tweet that gets embedded > in a news article describing it and then the owner deletes it, leaving a > news article with a tweet-not-available hole.

There _is_ something more face-palmy: when the owner spots that they've been embedded in a news article, and change the post accordingly. The latest issue of Private Eye gives an example of this happening, where the Mail Online embedded a Facebook post about a mis-spelled party banner; the poster (Simon Harris) saw it was being embedded and changed the text:

> For a while, until someone noticed and replaced the linked post with a > screenshot, the article proudly stated: "The Daily Mail is an utter shiterag > that is only read by Middle England tossbags who voted Leave because some > Polish guy called Piotr served them in Tesco, once."

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Gotta love the implicit ageism in the first para's assumption that the web already existed when current web developers first got interested in coding. I wrote my first code on a ZX81, or possibly an Apple II, and I'm still getting paid to build web applications today!

<comment><USER9> same - i had a class in middle school where we programmed animations in hplot on apple IIe

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> > I still run a personal blog on a custom website I built, but every year it > feels a bit stranger, and a little rarer. Many people default to Facebook > Pages or cookie-cutter Squarespace designs, if they have their own website > at all.

Posted on Medium, which is nearly the Facebook equivalent of a blogging site. The author mentions Glitch, for which the first step to getting started is either "clone a project" or start with React, Vue, Ember, Angular, or any other number of nontrivial frameworks. Is this really the same as HTML/CSS into Geocities?

For better or worse (feels like worse), Internet users are becoming consumers of content rather than producers. When this was all still newer (say, 1997-2005), the novelty of having an online presence was still a dominant factor. As that process has become more homogenized and simplified with the rise of social media platforms, there's much less incentive to bother with learning HTML, CSS, and possibly JS just to put some information on a page. Modern social media platforms walk you through profile creation, posting interests and having those lead to like-minded people, contact management, and so on. Everything's just _there_. I think it's a hard sell to try and walk that back to "just do it yourself" for someone without that mentality, and it's amusing to see people keep trying. For those of us who value personal expression over ease-of-use, personal websites will continue to be preferable.

</comment><comment><USER11> > The internet was weirder back then — full of quirky ideas, personal pages, > custom blogs, and far more viable platforms to build on than we have on the > streamlined web of today.

The Internet is not the Web, also what platforms? Sure besides Geocities, many ISP's gave a few MBs for personal html files but for the most part you didn't had your own URL, now you can have that for a few pennies a month. But we're not playing web pages game anymore, it's interactivity bit times otherwise we feel bored without infinite scroll and even a regular forum doesn't cut it anymore (no one wants no register for yet another one).

> In the last two decades, custom stylesheets have become a dying breed.

I'm not so sure about it, at least not for the regular personal pages, you just don't find those as often with "the search engine". Try [https://wiby.me/](https://wiby.me/) to get a feel for it. Maybe we need to resurrect the gopher protocol and make the search unbiased again, hell yeah, Make the Search Great Again!

<comment><USER12> It's strange to say this, since I'm a gopher user and everyone else seems interested in popularizing or resurrecting the protocol, but I hope that never happens. Gopher today is a cool, thoughtful, and quirky place. I think that's because it is a niche. Add the masses and it would be bland-ified.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The article mentions the rise of smart phones as a factor but fails to grasp the real reason for their impact. Smart phones made making web pages much harder.

Before Smart Phones a user could slap together some HTML and perhaps some simple CSS with underconstruction.gif and have an OK looking page. That same page would look terrible on a cell phone because the simple table-based layouts that people could understand do not render well on small screens.

Sure they could rewrite the site but that was a lot of effort. Plus HTML was very much a moving target back then. Much easier to move your "I like potatoes" or whatever page to Facebook, which takes care of everything for you and provides a nice network effect.

If we want the weird web back then we are going to have to provide tools to make websites look good on all screens while still being expressive enough that a child can pick them up but also provide the kind of instant feedback of Facebook likes and comments.

Perhaps Indyweb or Mastodon will be the key but right now they are still to complex for random-j-blogger to deal with.

<comment><USER14>
         simple table-based layouts

Nobody who ever used table-based layouts for anything of substance would describe them as "simple".

Back in those days, websites would regularly specify a minimum screen size (800x600 and 1024x768 were popular) and woe to anybody with a smaller display...

<comment><USER15> Back in the day to get things like "nice rounded corners" required hacks in your tables like 1px empty spacer gifs and rounded corner gifs. CSS may seem less "simple" to learn, but compare it to "borrowing" a copy of Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro and learning that tool just to get something as boringly nice as "rounded corners" that you had control over.

(Source: I rebuilt my blog a few years back mostly specifically to make my 90's kid self envious that I could actually do the LCARS things I had wanted to do back then with no corner gifs or spacer gifs, and in a way that responsively reflows content that TABLEs never could.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I skimmed the article. It's reasonable, but can someone please tell how it explains the "had to die" part of the title or is that just clickbait?

Also to add to what another poster said: after Eternal September (if there was ever a milestone for this) most people on the internet become just regular users. Therefore the internet's offerings evolved to cater to this majority. That's ok (I guess). In my opinion the biggest issue is centralization. Ex: want to have a video channel about guns or hacking? Best pound sand because you don't have a spot on the biggest video platform that currently exists.

<comment><USER11> Some kind of fad of writing to end your title with "... had to die", to me it just indicates that such articles have this sloppy writing style.

One of the subtitles was "Growing up". The Web didn't "grew up" it just became old and we still can't figure out how to use it, hopefully when WASM becomes the standard everyone can live happily.

Centralization is what everyone is familiar with. All those giant social media channels are like tv channels of the past, the Web has never gotten to it's true potential and who knows if it ever will.

<comment><USER17> I don't know if WASM, of all things, will help the web evolve. WASM comes straight from a programmer's/nerd's desire for portability, performance, and "optimal" programming languages (eg choice of PL, reuse of code) above all, but doesn't do anything for content. In fact, it makes browsers and web development even more complex and certainly doesn't take the web into the direction of GeoCities of old.

<comment><USER11> Sorry, my mentioning of WASM wasn't intended to be taken seriously *(should have used /s). I know equal number of people who would be happy as well unhappy about it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> TikTok is the weird internet for kids today the way GeoCities was for those of us who were kids in the 90s.

The internet is still weird. It's just shifted to apps and other communities.

<comment><USER19> > The internet is still weird. It's just shifted to apps and other > communities.

Nah. It's wannabe weird.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> The Internet's still pretty weird. It's possible that it's just weird in a way that's not nostalgic for those of us who cut our teeth on the late-90s / early-00s Internet.

<comment><USER21> Yes. I think many in their 30s and older have missed the new reality.

That more culture is being created on the internet on mobile platforms and apps they've never heard of (and in languages they don't speak) than ever before.

The weird web is alive but it lives in TikTok and WeChat etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I think what's missing in discussions over the death of the old web, is that people fundamentally want their work to be seen, or discovered. The weird web thrived when there weren't many websites out there, and discovery was as easy as being listed in a web directory like what Yahoo! had. You could "surf" them one by one like you can with cable TV.

That ended in the early 2000s as search engines prioritized their own news, sports and entertainment content (Yahoo and MSN especially) and the explosion of blogs made keeping sites in a directory totally un-scalable.

As others have said, the weird web exists on channels like Vine (rip), Youtube, TikTok etc, but the discovery UX is bad because there are so many people trying to show up on your home screen. So the result is most of the content is very standardized, because people want to be seen, and doing what's popular is the 'reliable' way of achieving it.

</comment><comment><USER23> I misread this quote at first:

"For many developers, figuring out how to do something cool on their Myspace page or building a GeoCities site full of animated "under construction" GIFs was the genesis of their tech careers."

I read it as "apex of (my) tech career." It felt like everything since then has been a slow decent into disappointment.

Everything feels so rigid now. Back then it was just fun. Feels like every thing I make now is loaded with anxiety about future changes and scalability and code rot. Tragic that this is gone for me.

</comment><comment><USER24> The weird part of the web still exists. neocities.org is a more modern geocities with the same ability to experiment and modify a static page that geocities had.

You just need to dig deeper and promote parts of the weird web on the new gateways like reddit, facebook, etc.

</comment><comment><USER25> the internet and computer now is much too important to let bug/glitch/exploits/hacks gets away.

I dont think there will ever be bug that will become accidental feature like how Myspace was.

</comment><comment><USER26> And we've traded it for a sea of advertising and astroturfing.

</comment><comment> vincent-toups Love to see someone trying hard to say "capitalism sucks" but not knowing how.</comment>


BritRuby conference cancelled due to gender equality outrage - <AUTHOR> http://2013.britruby.com/?hn

<comment><AUTHOR> Apparently the non-profit conference had thus far a 100% white male line-up and got a lot of negative tweets about that recently. Example: <https://twitter.com/joshsusser/status/269863520135421952></comment>


The Case Against Sharing - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/the-nib/the-case-against-sharing-9ea5ba3d216d

<comment><USER2> [AirBNB, Uber, Craigslist sellers, ...] have "a steamroller approach to laws and regulations that protect workers and consumers"

That begs the central question.

It'd be a clearer case of preserving consumer and worker rights if cities weren't haranguing Uber over insurance while ignoring the comparatively paltry coverage offered by local taxi companies: [http://blog.uber.com/uberXridesharinginsurance](http://blog.uber.com/uberXridesharinginsurance)

Tesla's not part of the "sharing economy," but it's another disruptive model that chafes against legacy regulations.

Most of us are sympathetic with Tesla's fight against the dealers because we see the regulations as utterly irrational, even if they were protecting against injustices 50 years ago. Or maybe we're unsympathetic to dealers because we've been screwed by one. Either way, we find it difficult or laughable to see franchises as a tool ensuring consumer protection and fair play.

The sticking point, of course, is that you can't let every company be its own arbiter of what laws are reasonable and which are not.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is typical of the emerging tech-criticism genre on the so-called left.

It raises some very valid points: job security or lack thereof, lack of protections if something goes wrong, etc. But it doesn't offer a solution. These pieces _never_ offer a solution. That's because they don't have one. Instead they degenerate into vague pining for the good old days.

... like the good old days of taxi medallions, a closed and corrupt insiders club that excludes the vast majority from entry while artificially inflating transportation prices for those who don't have a car readily available.

They also drop plenty of dog whistle terms like "neoliberal" just to make sure you know who the bad guys are. The bad guys of course are the ones doing new things and being _successful_ at it. (gasp! success!)

It's part of why IMHO there actually are no liberals on the contemporary scene. There are just different kinds of conservatives.

It's trivially easy to criticize anything. Do you have a better idea? If not, we're done.</comment>


On the Origins of the 2019-NCoV Virus, Wuhan, China - <AUTHOR> https://jameslyonsweiler.com/2020/01/30/on-the-origins-of-the-2019-ncov-virus-wuhan-china/ <comment><USER2> No doubt they have studied it. In fact I think there is a 2018 CCTV saying how good the Wu Han has helped to discover one (and I looked the screen it is about WIV1- version). Whether they have done the alleged one in the report not technical to know. But we need to investigate as at least they do not have the openness and transparency to ID the source.</comment>


Our Space Policy Chickens Have Come Home To Roost - <AUTHOR> http://www.openmarket.org/2011/08/24/our-space-policy-chickens-have-come-home-to-roost/

<comment><USER2> We really got into this mess more than ten years ago -- there hasn't been any serious investment in NASA since the 70s and yet we expect miracles from that agency which is spread so thin. I see some progress on the private industry front, but it's slow progress to say the least. Sadly I think America won't get serious about NASA funding until China lands a human on the moon again.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Failure of the last two Roscosmos launches leaves the US (and the other ISS partner nations) with no good short-term options for human space flight.</comment>


Wearable Android: Coming to a Wrist Near You - Marakana - <AUTHOR> http://marakana.com/s/wearable_android,1076/index.html <comment><USER2> The "gigantic watches" trend (see [http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/25/fashion/mens-watches- keep-...](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/25/fashion/mens-watches-keep-getting- bigger.html)) comes handy for selling those things.

</comment><comment><USER3> Want! just tried to buy it on Amazon but they don't ship to Australia, trying to contact them directly to get one sent out. Hopefully i can land one soon.</comment>


Applying the Gestalt Principles to Code - <AUTHOR> https://yetanotherchris.dev/clean-code/gestalt-principles/ <comment><USER2> I forget what book it was that I read but it made this very obvious statement about source code being a 2D grid. And this is very apparent with the whole row column cursor tracer shown in editors and in compiler errors. For some reason I always perceived these things as having significance on a per line basis and once I read that code is a fundamentally 2D entity it empowered me to create relationships along the vertical with judicious usage of vertical alignment and creating vertical harmony in my code. It's pretty cool to perceive monospace fonts as allowing a lattice of 2D characters. There's a trade off of course with unnecessary vertical white space in that readability is boosted but the lexer has more characters to ignore.

There was one numerical project I worked on where I had these _x and _y suffixes showing up very frequently in identifiers. Having the code vertically aligned actually made spotting copy paste bugs very easy because you can trace the vertical and find all _x's lumped together or whatever the case may be. Inconsistencies stood out more readily I want to say.

One thing I try to do with the visual aspect of my code is to organize things semantically when possible with a good clear comment that tersely covers the operation: initialize abc, validate xyz, calculate, compute, guard clause: ignore case 1, load config, override X, etc

<comment><USER3> In The Beginning (tm) source code was very explicitly a 2D grid, with column numbers being lexically significant in both FORTRAN and COBOL because columns matter in punch card representation.

Of course, as every Lisp programmer knows, programs represented in almost any high-level language are actually _trees_ , and to force them into a 2D grid of symbols is rather unnatural and awkward. Specifically, almost all 2D grids of symbols are lexically or syntactically invalid programs, and many natural source code transformations require either manual labor or special support from the editor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There's at least one more readability error here that wasn't corrected. The email fields were declared in the order To, From, Subject, Body, but then From and To are swapped when they are added to the MIME message. This breaks parallelism.

</comment><comment><USER5> 100% agree. These optimizations in readability help a lot. Also, a failure to optimize code for readability makes reading code difficult. I once read some code where I immediately concluded that something was wrong because a function was being called from the wrong method. Turned out that it actually was in the right method but there was no vertical space between two methods giving the wrong impression of where that particular method call actually was. I feel quite alone with this opinion though. I see messy code all around me. One particular thing that everybody seems to agree on but that is pretty much objectively bad is the common way to line up lambdas. People do

      some_object.some_method((p, q) =>
      {
         do_things()
      })

while the right way of doing this clearly is

      some_object.some_method(
         (p, q) =>
         {
            do_things()
         })

The 'broken lambda' that one tends to see everywhere is driving me nuts.

The principle is that code already should give the right impression of what is going on at the first glance. Another thing that is quite a spectacular failure in this regard is the google style guide. The indents of 2 tabs combined with braces that do not line up must have been optimized to be as unreadable as possible.

<comment><USER6> See, that's how different people are. For me, the clearest formatting is obviously

      some_object.some_method((p, q) => {
        do_things()
      })

Your preferred version has way too much useless whitespace.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've occasionally fantasized about a code editor that doesn't allow scrolling, so you're forced to break code up in to pieces that fit on a single screen. I think that would greatly improve readability.

That would also help with one of the main arguments against "visual" programming languages - they get too hard to read as programs get larger. Simply don't allow scrolling or zooming the source.

<comment><USER8> > I've occasionally fantasized about a code editor that doesn't allow > scrolling, so you're forced to break code up

But this is easily hackable around. What you really want is a programming language that does not allow functions longer than 25 lines.

<comment><USER7> Ha ha I guess you're right! I can't be bothered to switch to a different programming language just for this feature tho :-)

Anyway then you would get stuck policing exactly how long a "line" is, do comments count, etc...

<comment><USER8> > Anyway then you would get stuck policing exactly how long a "line" is, do > comments count, etc...

A line is 80 characters. Indent is 8 spaces. Comments do not count.

<comment><USER7> Case in point, I prefer an indent of 4 spaces.

<comment><USER8> It does not matter. However hard you "prefer" the value of pi to be 3, it will stay an irrational number. Eight-space tabs are a constant of the universe.

<comment><USER9> not in this universe they aren't - many popular applications indent 4 spaces by default when pressing the Tab key, and render physical tabs as four spaces, for example github ;) tabs of 8 space width are a legacy travesty that wastes space :)

<comment><USER8> Ours is indeed a decadent universe that is slowly being corrupted by powerful forces of evil (such as the 4-space tab brain damage of github). But there are still beacons of light to guide us:

[https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/_sources/process/codi...](https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/_sources/process/coding- style.rst.txt)

[https://wiki.musl-libc.org/coding-style.html](https://wiki.musl- libc.org/coding-style.html)

[https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=style&sektion=9](https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=style&sektion=9)

[https://man.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi/OpenBSD- current/man9...](https://man.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi/OpenBSD- current/man9/style.9?query=style%26sec=9)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Wow, this article does such a good job of concisely explaining these concepts I've been trying to put into words for so long! Definitely going to be sharing with some of the juniors.

<comment><USER11> > Wow, this article does such a good job of concisely explaining these > concepts ... Definitely going to be sharing with some of the juniors.

Not sure this is the type of article for juniors. I don't think it's really a handbook for writing more pleasing code. It's more a statement, that the way we structure and style our code is a design decision. Code's visual design is an area that many programming languages have experimented with mostly over trial and error, but it's not something that is well studied.

New programming languages come out all the time, and they often tout advantages such as speed or security, but they rarely try to justify design decisions based on visual design and readability. It seems like a ripe field to dive deeper into.

<comment><USER10> >Not sure this is the type of article for juniors.

Most definitely. I worded that poorly. I meant "my juniors" as in those with less experience than I, but not fresh out of the oven devs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The article focused on the surface level of code, which I think is important. But the next level is where you can apply the same principles to the class hierarchy or how data flows.

I'm not sure if it's the right word but I've taken to using the word "locality", since it has prior usage in a similar concept in [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locality_of_reference](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locality_of_reference)

</comment><comment><USER13> Tell ya what: for the principle of proximity to be properly implemented, empty lines should be of different height.

<comment><USER14> That's how I keep them -- e.g. different number of line breaks between different items (e.g. 2 lines between import statements and class definition, but 1 line between methods inside the class).

<comment><USER13> That's too crude. What I'm saying is, it should be around 0.5 line height for grouping inside a method, ~1-1.2 between items of a class, 2-2.5 around classes.

Of course, coders' tendency to nest breaks the idea a bit on levels deeper than a method. Though I think with a lot of fiddling some variation can still be achieved.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Does anyone who writes code for a living here actually spend 90% of their time reading code?

<comment><USER16> I spend 90% of my "code time" (meaning time interacting with actual source code in some way) reading it rather than writing it.

At the moment I'm reading [https://github.com/golang/go/blob/master/src/encoding/json/e...](https://github.com/golang/go/blob/master/src/encoding/json/encode.go) to diagnose a problem in my code.

Overall, the readability is good. My only complaint is the terse variable names, which makes the more complex methods more time consuming to follow (because you have to keep going back to refer to their definitions to remember what they are). For example, [https://github.com/golang/go/blob/master/src/encoding/json/e...](https://github.com/golang/go/blob/master/src/encoding/json/encode.go#L704)

<comment><USER17> The variable naming scheme in that code is incredibly consistent with respect to type. That should alleviate some of the problems, and I think the code would be more annoying to read if the variable names weren't terse (like Simonyi Hungarian).

<comment><USER16> Type isn't the important information; PURPOSE is.

When you dive into the code, especially at the point I chose, you are presented with:

        e.string(kv.s, opts.escapeHTML)

And so, you have the following questions: What is e? What is kv? What is s in kv? To answer these, you have to scan upwards. e is encodeState. OK, not too bad. kv is maybe key-value of something? it comes from sv (string value maybe?), which comes from:

        sv := make([]reflectWithString, len(keys))

So a string value? Or a list of string keys? A list of structs, OK. s might be a string value inside, which has ... some meaning I guess? Digging around, I see it defined as:

        type reflectWithString struct {
         v reflect.Value
         s string
        }

So it is a string, but I still don't know what its purpose is. After a bunch of digging around to see how it's used, it looks like s is a string representation of the value, but I'd need to look over more code to be 100% sure.

Now, contrast this with:

        encoderState.string(keyValue.asString, opts.escapeHTML)

Now I know what this calling string() on the encoder state, using the string representation of the key value. "string" is still a bit cryptic. It could be renamed. Looking inside "string" I see that it's writing things, so maybe a better name is:

        encoderState.writeString(keyValue.asString, opts.escapeHTML)

With this version, I know without having to look at any other lines that this code is supposed to write the string representation of a key value to the encoder state, doing HTML escapes. I don't need to look inside the guts of anything to figure this out. I don't even have to leave this line.

This is code U/X.

<comment><USER17> Type is purpose. And anyways, the English alternatives are still vague and aren't really improvements. KV is incredibly standard, even in English conversations (KV store is said more often than key value store). E is not descriptive, but neither is encodeState (WTF does that even mean?). S is a perfect abbreviation for a generic string, calling it string instead isn't much better, really! It's obvious in this case that it is only meant to be a generic string (what else could be meant by reflectWithString?).

I do prefer method names to be descriptive, so verbs are nice. Well, unless we are dealing with very generic lambda code, then there might not be better options beyond f, g, and p.

<comment><USER17> Also, as a rule of thumb: the more rarely something is used, the more descriptive its name needs to be. If something is used often in some code, terseness is more forgivable and even desirable in many cases.

A great example of this is "i" as a standard indexer, or "x" and "y" as horizontal and vertical coordinates. They are used often therefore terseness can be applied and is useful. Also why "KV" is often used to be mean key- value, the concept is just very pervasive. The terseness for variable names in the linked to code seems more acceptable because those variables of consistency and repeated usage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> FYI: "Pragnaz" is not a word. You probably mean "Prägnanz".</comment>


Pitfalls of Card UIs (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://daverupert.com/2018/04/pitfalls-of-card-uis/ <comment><USER2> I find the issue that cards turn into mini web pages all too true...they become endlessly fiddly at times.</comment>


Ask HN: Is there a RSS feed for new startup jobs? - <AUTHOR>

Does any site offer this? Even customization like by location or something? I know a few job sites offer weekly emails or something like that but that's not really what I'm referring to. Thanks. <comment><USER2> [http://rssident.com/mash?t=job](http://rssident.com/mash?t=job)

[http://rssident.com/feeds?t=job](http://rssident.com/feeds?t=job)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. That looks like it's only specific to Craigslist if I'm looking at this right. Was hoping for a more customizable solution base on sites.

<comment><USER2> You can add any site that has an RSS feed.</comment></comment></comment>


One-tap sign-up and sign-in on websites using Google - <AUTHOR> https://developers.google.com/identity/one-tap/web/ <comment><AUTHOR> I noticed this on Hipmunk - I visited the site, and saw "Continue as {my name}." I clicked it and was signed in instantly. Wrote down on my task list to figure out how Hipmunk was doing that, as it was a really neat user experience. It seems this is the answer (and they're even using Hipmunk in the demo screenshots).

Would be shocked if this doesn't become very popular on websites.</comment>


NFL player IQ by position - <AUTHOR> http://benfry.com/writing/archives/147

<comment><USER2> It may not be anything so complicated as smarter people being closer to the ball. It looks to me as if there is an inverse correlation between IQ and the running speed necessary in a position. So the simplest explanation for this pattern is that running speed and intelligence aren't highly correlated, and you can't simultaneously optimize for both.

E.g. you can pick a smart guy to be your center even if he's slow, because he doesn't have to run much. Whereas in a wide receiver or a running back you just want the fastest guy you can find.

<comment><USER3> Here's an explanation for why foot speed and intelligence are inversely correlated:

"Upper body strength is relatively equally distributed between the races, but footspeed most definitely is not. So, tailbacks, wide receivers, and defensive players have a need for speed, so they are disproportionately black. I haven't checked recently, but in most recent years since Jason Sehorn's retirement, none of the 64 NFL starting cornerbacks at the start of the season were white, and none of the 32 starting tailbacks were white. (For some reason, this never gets as much publicity as the perceived lack of black quarterbacks.)"

"As we all know, there is about a 15 point difference IQ gap between whites and blacks, so positions that are black dominated tend to have lower average IQs than positions that are more integrated (or that are white monopolized, such as placekicker and punter)."

( read the whole thing [http://isteve.blogspot.com/2008/07/graphical-data- analyst-be...](http://isteve.blogspot.com/2008/07/graphical-data-analyst-ben- fry-takes.html) )

This seems like a much more plausible explanation of the facts than the "closer to the ball" theory. Are we really that scared of "things you can't say" not to point out something that is obvious to anybody who watches football?

<comment><USER4> As a long time (silent) reader of Hacker News posts and comments, this comment easily ranks as one of the most offensive, and perhaps the most disturbing.

The notion that race fundamentally has anything to do with intelligence should offend any sane, rational, science-minded person who is even just scarcely familiar with the history of the pseudo-science of eugenics and the countless studies debunking it many claims.

However, more offensive than that, I find the fact that this comment is still here and in fact, up-modded, as offensive to the very core…

What the comment says implicitly is that "Blacks are dumber than Whites - DUH." If he had simply typed this, perhaps the comment would have been removed or at the very least down-modded to oblivion so that my reading it would have been my own damned fault.

But what is astonishing (and inexplicable, considering the great number of comments I have read on this forum, lauding and praising the seemingly high intellect of the people who frequent this forum) is that because the poster had the guile to conceal his ignorant comment with more words, not only was this comment given credibility, but many had the sheer audacity to up-mod this nonsense. This is sobering…

But what really woke me up, was realizing that the utterly ignorant comment was in response to PG – who is by all accounts the de-facto host/role-model here. I figured I would scroll down a short distance and see the straight- forward, no nonsense rebuttal I have seen him give to comments much less deserving of a dressing down – no such luck.

I shuddered. To think that this is the same man who writes all those essays wherein the common thread is a brutal application of logic – why the silence here, when given what amounts to a perfect lead-in?

Why not quickly question if it is even possible to test for intelligence? Why not describe what such a test might look like if it is indeed possible? Why not suggest that a time delineated test full of arithmetic might be the worst candidate for such a test (as it implies that computers would then be said to have such intelligence in spades)? Why not question the deep-sinking stereotypical association with speed-in-calculation ability with intellect? Why not?

Let me not speculate as to why not. Let me just say to all who know better, but said and will continue to say nothing – SHAME.

<comment><USER2> If there's one thing more poisonous than racism it's publicly equating the failure to denounce x with believing x. That is a classic tool of demagogues. In fact, arguably _the_ classic tool of demagogues.

So here's a denunciation for you: lexlibra's comment is lame, and yours is 10x lamer.

People who advocate conclusions for which the evidence is weak merely lead one away from the truth, but people who drag debates down to the level of "whoever's not with us is against us" strike right at the heart of it.

<comment><USER3> _lexlibra's comment is lame ... People who advocate conclusions for which the evidence is weak merely lead one away from the truth_

I'm curious what was lame about the comment?

The evidence for the two main propositions is pretty overwhelming. People of West African descent dominate short distance running at the highest levels. For instance, in the past six olympics, all 48 male finalists in the 100 meter dash were of West African descent. Likewise, the speed positions in football are dominated by African-Americans compared to the non-speed positions.

On the second proposition, for whatever the reason, black Americans of West African descent consistently score a standard deviation lower on IQ tests and IQ-like tests ( SAT, Armed Forces Qualifying Exam). The American Psychological Association reports: "The relatively low mean of the distribution of African- American intelligence test scores has been discussed for many years. Although studies using different tests and samples yield a range of results, the Black mean is typically about one standard deviation (about 15 points) below that of Whites (Loehlin et al, 1975; Jensen, 1980; Reynolds et al, 1987)." ( <http://www.lrainc.com/swtaboo/taboos/apa_01.html> ) The existence of the IQ gap is simply not in dispute.

It seems that my explanation fits the evidence better than anything else proposed here. If there is evidence controverting my view, or supporting another, I would be happy to hear it.

<comment><USER5> I don't think there is anything lame about your comment. The article in question explicitly involved IQ, and (because of differential representation by position) implicitly involved race, so your comment was relevant and on point, whether or not any given reader agrees with you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _When asked about the balls he dropped in big spots, he responded, 'What about the ball I caught?'" So while an exceptionally score on a standardized test might suggest dyslexia, the guy's an egotistical bonehead even without mitigating factors._

And that is why Manningham is in the NFL and OP is the one writing about him. Excuse someone for wanting to focus on their accomplishments and not their failures and for having a little backbone -- must be a terrible thing to have. Great athletes who aren't _uber_ confident (whether or not they express it externally) aren't great athletes.

<comment><USER7> I don't know enough people in sports to be sure about this, but my guess is that the people who try to fix their mistakes rather than crow about their successes are the ones who improve over time.

<comment><USER8> There's no contradiction there. You can crow about your successes all you want, so long as you also consistently try to fix your mistakes.

In certain sports, anyway. In other fields -- customer service, for example -- things are different.

<comment><USER7> "Doc, the pill you gave me made me vomit uncontrollably all day, and once I recovered I realized that I was still as sick as before."

"Oh yeah? Well what about all the times I told people to get some rest and drink lots of fluids?"

Yes, I can see how this would be a good success strategy.

(I do agree that it's important to recognize when you're doing the right thing, especially in a creative field. But when you're playing a game according to strict rules, on a team, the need to avoid failure is probably greater than the need to avoid success. Especially when you consider that the people who make it to these teams probably emphasized pursuing success over avoiding failure when they were younger, because someone in the 50th percentile in a professional sport might have been in the 99th percentile as an amateur. If nothing else, they should dampen their individuality to reflect the higher average performance of their peers).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Interesting.

Yet in this study the Wonderlic is keyed to position, not performance in that position.

We know that people largely stay within their positions, and we know that metrics like the Wonderlic and the drafting Combine strongly influence both draft decisions, and fielding decisions. We know that such metrics are designed to correspond with existing ideas: in this case, that quarterbacks were smart and tailbacks not so much.

It is plausible that this correlation represents bias in the decisions of the coaches, not real ability.

In fact, that's what suggested by Malcolm Gladwell. He points out that if you sort by Wonderlic scores, those who come out on top haven't really panned out as great quarterback. If we then look at some of the best quarterbacks of all time, you find that, on the Wonderlic, players are all over the map.

Malcolm Gladwell discusses this, on his talk about 'the mismatch problem'. I highly recommend it. [http://www.newyorker.com/online/video/conference/2008/gladwe...](http://www.newyorker.com/online/video/conference/2008/gladwell)

<comment><USER10> I didn't like Gladwell's talk because he ignored baseball: teams like Oakland and Boston have started to understand what metrics _do_ work in assessing player performance (Michael Lewis wrote about this in detail in " _Moneyball_ ").

By ignoring something because it doesn't fit in his neat theory, Gladwell loses credibility on this topic.

<comment><USER9> You might like to know that Malcolm was asked in an interview elsewhere about Moneyball, and he mentions it as one of his favorite books, and indeed he calls it one of the most important works of nonfiction of the past decade. Apparently he's found a way to resolve these difficulties, but not in a way that found it into a 20 minute talk -- I guess it has to wait for the book.

<comment><USER10> I suppose Gladwell likes _Moneyball_ because it's everything his books are not: a Big Idea that is actually corroborated by all the evidence.

I remember reading _Blink_ and thinking, "hey, this anecdote just contradicted a point he made earlier".

Gladwell is a great storyteller, but he wants so badly to find larger patterns at work that he overlooks the possibility that there aren't any.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The Wikipedia entry for the Wonderlic test has some interesting information as well: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wonderlic_Test>

There's also a "fan-made" sample test online: <http://www.efplfp.stealingisgood.com/wpt.html>

While somewhat indicative of the types of questions you could expect to see on the test the real thing is much more difficult. The questions start out very easy and get progressively more difficult. Many of the questions are not multiple choice either. You write in your answers.

Wikipedia says one football player, Pat McInally, got a perfect score. That's an absolutely huge accomplishment. There is only a relative handful of people in the world capable of that. In fact, the vast majority of people don't even finish. Mensa uses the Wonderlic as one of their admission tests and you can qualify with plenty of room to breathe even if you've left 10 questions blank.

</comment><comment><USER12> Hi, Occam here. This is just a map of the white/black ratio of each position. There is a 15 point difference between the mean IQ of European-descended (white) Americans and African-descended (black) Americans Please note this is something You Can't Say so don't speak publicly of it.

The most interesting thing to note here is that white players score about half a standard deviation higher than the national white IQ, and black players score about half half a standard deviation higher than the national black IQ. Since life is sort of an IQ test, this isn't too surprising. There are a lot bad decisions you can make to screw up your football career before making the NFL - a higher IQ will keep you away from these things.

As always Steve Sailer is indispensable in these matters: "Are football players dumb? Actually, they are fairly smart. The NFL requires draft prospects to take the Wonderlic IQ test. Offensive guards averaged 107, centers and punters 106, quarterbacks and kickers 104. The speed positions averaged lower: halfbacks, free safeties, cornerbacks, and wide receivers averaged from 91 to 94. Still, at both the white positions and the black positions, prospects scored about a half standard deviation higher than the respective white and black national means.

Of course, IQ tests do a lousy job of measuring improvisational mental ability, which football players, especially the black ones, are particularly good at. (See my classic article "Great Black Hopes" for the full story.)"

That article is here: <http://www.isteve.com/blackath.htm>

<comment><USER13> Interesting that you simply term this a "white/black" ratio of each position. Why didn't you call it an "advantaged/disadvantaged" ratio? Why not a "beneficiary/victim" ratio?

If you are trying to chalk up these differences to some kind of genetic disparity, _that_ in fact Has Been Said, repeatedly, for hundreds if not thousands of years, _continues_ to be loudly parroted by certain segments, and has been _repeatedly_ shown to be uninformed swill.

Why don't we see any discussion here about differences in IQ scores of people from different economic classes, in a nation where opportunity (and even access to healthcare) is so disparate between races?

<comment><USER3> I'd suggest reading this article: <http://www.slate.com/id/2178122/entry/2178123/>

"white kids from households with annual incomes of $20,000 to $30,000 easily outscore black kids from households with annual incomes of $80,000 to $100,000."

In an adoption study where black and white babies were both adopted by high IQ white parents, there was a one standard deviation difference ( 15 IQ points) between the black and white children.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> No real surprise that the player who is tackled the most (Tailback) has the lowest IQ.

</comment><comment><USER15> _Don't tell Tufte that I've used the radius, not the proportional area, of the circle as the value for each ellipse! A cardinal sin that I'm using in this case to improve proportion and clarify a point._

I don't understand why this is okay. I imagine he means it was hard to perceive the difference between correctly scaled circles, but that means the data is close, not that you should misrepresent it.

I can see he's written a book about this, so I should assume he has good reasons, but the ones he gave don't seem it.

The problem is that simply scaling the radius exaggerates the difference between numbers because:

        * 26 is 30% more than 20, but
        * a circle with radius 26 is 69% larger
          than a circle with radius 20.

I just read an article criticizing this exact thing, but I can't find it again.

<comment><USER16> Actually both area and radius are completely meaningless as a representation of intelligence. Perhaps some figure that represents percentile score would work better -- something like an empty glass for 0%, a glass half-full for 50%, etc; or something like the circles that Consumer Reports uses for rating products.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Interesting Outlier: [http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2008/writers/the_bonus/07/1...](http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2008/writers/the_bonus/07/17/rolle/index.html)

</comment><comment><USER18> It's not everything though. Dan Marino had a famously low Wonderlic--15. It's definitely believable when you hear him speak, but he still got it done in amazing fashion on the field.

There's a big list here (it's a SWF and takes a while to load, but is very interesting):

<http://www.macmirabile.com/wonderlic.htm>

</comment><comment><USER19> They should compare staff positions instead, as coaches and water boys probably display regular IQ patterns.

<comment><USER20> I'm not sure what you mean here. Do you think the average NFL coach is not of above average intelligence? That job is far too competitive for that to be true.

<comment><USER19> Err, I mean: Instead of comparing linebackers and centers, compare different types of staff on the teams, viz, coaches and water boys, etc.

<comment><USER20> I would be interested in that. It seems coaches need a lot of the sorts of intelligence (social, etc) that the IQ test misses entirely. But I'd be willing to bet they're still among the smartest guys on the team.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I can't say I agree with his conclusion. Lineman are there mainly to be big and collide with other lineman, whereas receivers have a much more skill- intensive job. They have to try to run in pattern while still breaking free of defenseman, but doing so in such a way that the quarterback still knows where to throw the ball. They have to then catch the ball (requiring them to predict its flight path and adjust their path accordingly, an exercise in physics) then run with it and avoid tackle.

I would think 10 extra IQ points would benefit a receiver or a running back far more than a lineman.

<comment><USER21> It is obvious that you have never played football. Go read "The Blind Side" and then get back to us.</comment></comment>


LSP Change char offsets from utf16 to codepoints - Avi-D-coder https://github.com/Microsoft/language-server-protocol/pull/709 <comment> Avi-D-coder Related: My survey distinct implementations shows 11 UTF-8, 10 UTF-16 and 6 codepoints.</comment>


Create your widget with SproutBuilder - <AUTHOR> http://sproutbuilder.com/

<comment><USER2> Finally a Adobe Flex AIR Application that makes sense! - let normal people create their own personal/personalized widgets. +100 for the execution

</comment><comment><USER3> Would be awesome if they let you build simple forms that could be POSTed too.</comment>


Entrepreneurs Can Lead Us Out of the Crisis - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123544318435655825.html

<comment><USER2> My problem with this article and this approach to "saving the economy" make little sense to me. While I believe startups and entrepreneurs who are starting now will lead the next wave of great companies, I don't think giving them money now will yield immediate results that we seem to need.

Yes, startups are strapped for cash, but even if you give them money, it doesn't mean job creation like the tagline of the article says. Growth and job creation won't be significant until the company is more established.

Secondly, most startups want to stay small, not because of lack of capital, but because they can be adaptive and nimble. Again, until the company matures, growing tthe company != growing the employee head count

I feel like instead of smaller startups, there should be something similar for small business. They won't have to go through the hardships of establishing the company and hopefully they'll already be profitable, etc. that a startup won't have/

</comment><comment><USER3> Government's bailout package is inclined towards SUSTAINING the jobs instead of CREATING jobs.

</comment><comment><USER4> At this point I'm not sure deregulation is the answer to anything.

<comment><USER5> There is a difference between good regulation and bad regulation, and they both definitely exist. I'm all for deregulating bad regulation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Everything is good except for SOX, what he proposes would just lead to another internet bubble

<comment><USER7> "Another internet bubble" would probably be less damaging than the flattening of the IPO market, which has decimated venture capital.

When something that is essential for subsistence experiences a bubble (e.g. food, housing) it causes an incredible amount of pain, as we've seen in the past decade. Stock bubbles are, in comparison, harmless. Some people get hurt badly, and some make huge gains, but they aren't so ruinous that one should make huge sacrifices in order to avoid them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Although government isn't great at directly producing entrepreneurs-- that's not its role-- the sort of infrastructural spending Obama is proposing can make the country more hospitable for entrepreneurs.

For example, if this country had a cheap, fast passenger rail system, people would be more mobile. This would lead to further condensation into startup hubs and there might be more of them. Rents in existing startup hubs would go down, which would be an excellent thing.

Also, _universal healthcare_. If the U.S. were to join the First World on this issue, it would be immensely valuable to small businesses, and remove a significant component of the risk inherent in starting a company.

I'd also propose this, although it (by definition) has to come from a private source rather than government: an "educational program" targeted toward serial entrepreneurs. The program would be sponsored by a VC firm and provide support, networking, and possibly (but not necessarily) funding. The VC firm would mentor the entrepreneur while he launched startups for a minimum of 12 years. At the end of the program, he would have the option of a job at the VC firm. Thus, entrepreneurship would have "exit options" that are competitive with (or better than) those of investment banking, law, etc.

<comment><USER8> This is an interesting viewpoint.

Can you point to other situations where an advanced infrastructure created by government led to an increase in entrepreneurial activity?

I ask this because about every state nowadays has special departments and programs to promote hi-tech startups. But of course they are actually only flourishing in a small number of spots. I've worked with a few of these programs, and some are led by extremely talented and skilled administrators. And they're well funded. Is your premise that direct involvement like this will not work but that indirect involvement would? Kind of like putting out a fire by building a swimming pool?

Not trying to mock you or start an argument, but I don't understand how much indirect contributions can actually help. Seems to me, and it's just my opinion, but societies with lots of government-provided goodies actually have less startups. It's the ones where there's this balance between chaos and order where you get the most growth. Not ones with lots of danger or ones with lots of cushions.

<comment><USER9> > Can you point to other situations where an advanced infrastructure created > by government led to an increase in entrepreneurial activity?

Military spending has spawned huge amounts of both direct and indirect innovation. Aviation and the space program, the internet, scores of "trickle down" consumer electronics such as GPS, Popeye (created to sell a surplus of canned spinach after WWII!), the list goes on and on. Plus there's the education of large numbers of the population that would otherwise lack opportunity.

The doctrine of "small government and a strong military" is an oxymoron. Military spending is an extremely effective form of high tech government subsidy. Of course the downside of having a huge military is the temptation to use it inappropriately...

<comment><USER7> Military spending is fine if it's making the country and the world safer. I'll pay for that. But the recent multi-billion-dollar handout to Bush's and Cheney's contractor friends has made the world a lot less safe.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Biased Algorithm Deterrence Act of 2018 - <AUTHOR> https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/7363/text?r=25 <comment><USER2> "Notwithstanding paragraph (1), an owner or operator of a social media service that displays user-generated content in an order other than chronological order, delays the display of such content relative to other content, or otherwise hinders the display of such content relative to other content, if for a reason other than to restrict access to or availability of material described in paragraph (2)(A) or to carry out the direction of the user that generated such content, shall be treated as a publisher or speaker of such content."

Can someone explain the legal implications of this? What does this mean for algorithmic feeds?</comment>


Why reports of Bitcoin's death are greatly exaggerated - <AUTHOR> http://www.coindesk.com/reports-bitcoins-death-greatly-exaggerated/

<comment><USER2> Given how fast the price went back up (two days later, it's basically where it was when the SR story hit), my guess is the dip had little to do with confidence in bitcoins. I'd suggest it was the opposite. We've seen these dips before, and BTC always bounces back. People sold because they expected everyone else to sell, and they wanted to have some cash on hand so they could buy when the price bottomed out. When BTC_USD was at about $90 on btc-e there were something like 750 BTC worth of buy orders at $75. People knew it was going to dip then come back, so they sold so they could buy (self-fulfilling prophecy).

</comment><comment><USER3> > While it's dependent on an at-the-minute market price, the movement of > 27,365 bitcoins on the block chain on October 4, likely from Ross Ulbricht's > stash, nevertheless represents a substantial amount of holdings for the > government.

> In fact, conventional wisdom might suggest that with a governmental body > owning so much of the currency it could create substantial market-maker > powers within the bitcoin world.

I did the conversion: 27,365 BTC = USD $3,426,084.77 at the current rate.

</comment><comment><USER4> Even on timescales of a month, the recent dip is mostly in the noise:

[http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/bitstampUSD#rg60ztgSzm1g10zm...](http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/bitstampUSD#rg60ztgSzm1g10zm2g25zvzl)

On timescales of a year, comparable jumps are common:

[http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/bitstampUSD#rg360ztgSzm1g10z...](http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/bitstampUSD#rg360ztgSzm1g10zm2g25zvzl)</comment>


Why Amazon Is Going to Build Its Own Cellular Network - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@dconrad/why-amazon-is-going-to-build-its-own-cellular-network-29c94b109747 <comment><AUTHOR> Some folks have asked -- is this really a cellular network?

In the strictest sense, Yes -- it's a coordinated group of basestations which together form a large area network.

The network stacks are not (yet) a part of the 3GPP standard. Handoffs are different. Cells can overlap and don't need to be planned in the same way as traditional cellular networks.

But the reason for these differences is to make the network better for IoT -- battery life, number of devices supported, etc.

Also, if LoRaWAN and others aren't cellular, then neither are the emerging LTE IoT standards. They follow similar strategies.

Or, that's my view anyway. Thoughts?</comment>