Ask HN: How to quantify tax deduction for donations? - <AUTHOR> I'm working on a project that would integrate really well with donating money to some non-profits.
I know that donations = tax deductions, I found tons of info on how to do that and caveats, but I'm not able to find quantitative examples. Like if my revenue is $R, I'd have to pay $T in taxes. If I donate $D, then taxes will only be $X.
I'll certainly ask an accountant for advise, but was wondering if anyone has experience and would like to share some numbers.
I'm mostly interested in the case of an LLC in CA, but any other experience is welcome, as I'm sure others here would benefit. <comment><USER2> "For example, if you are in the 33% tax bracket, the actual cost of a $100 donation is only $67 ($100 less the $33 tax savings). As your income tax bracket increases, the real cost of your charitable gift decreases, making contributions more attractive for those in higher brackets. The actual cost to a person in the lowest bracket, 15%, for a $100 contribution is $85. For a person in the highest bracket, 35%, the actual cost is only $65. Not only can the wealthy afford to give more, but they receive a larger reward for giving."

<comment><USER3> Note that the person in the lowest tax bracket is likely not itemizing their deductions, so their cost is more like 100%.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Just in case you're not talking about cash donations directly to the recipient, but talking about donated labor, labor is not deductible as a donation.

Except for the amount that the donating entity paid money to the individual employees providing labor to the charity. Is the LLC taxed as a "C" corporation? Then that's the entity claiming the deduction for paying wages. Did the LLC elect to be taxed as a proprietorship or partnership? Then you'll have to ask your accountant. Possibly labor is not deductible, if the owner is providing the labor.

Anyhow, for labor, no pay, no deduction. This prevents individuals claiming their hourly rate is $10,000 an hour, and deducting the "donation" of their time.

For your personal tax return, you need to have enough deductions on Schedule A [0] to cross the threshold of more than your "standard deduction", which depends on your marital and family status, to have the cash donations, or in- kind material donation be particularly deducted.

If you own a house, your interest on the mortgage will put you over that "standard deduction" threshold. See line 40 of Form 1040 [1], and the instructions [2] at page 39, for a start.

      [0] https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f1040sa.pdf
      [1] https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f1040.pdf
      [2] https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/i1040gi.pdf

</comment><comment><USER5> It is a simple equation -- the amount of your donations is subtracted from your taxable income. That's it.

However, all the rest of the tax code then applies -- deductions, brackets, etc. So putting it into context isn't quite as simple. What if you were 50 dollars above the start of a new tax bracket. Then the first 50 dollars of your donations will have a larger impact than the rest of it. What if you were just shy of having enough for itemizing deductions to make sense, but donating 30 more dollars would make that difference? There are a lot of thresholds to figure out and deal with, which are more than anyone but an accountant could really step you through.

I'm sure it could be done -- plenty of tax software companies do it. But a quick answer in a HN comment probably can't break it down for you... you'll have to do the research and analysis.

</comment><comment><USER6> Does something like this do the trick?

[https://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=content.view&...](https://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=content.view&cpid=40)

\--> Like if my revenue is $R, I'd have to pay $T in taxes

That part is harder to answer, but not necessarily as important as the latter. What you can more easily find it "if I donate $100, what do I get back?"

</comment><comment><USER7> it's going to depend on your tax bracket, but deductions just lower the amount you are taxed on (assuming you itemize, if you just take the standard deduction they don't help at all). If your tax rate were 25% and you itemize, then a $100 donation should knock about 25 off your bill if I understand correctly.</comment>


Juno Solves 39-Year Old Mystery of Jupiter Lightning - <AUTHOR> https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=7151 <comment><USER2> I guess even after 8,000 years of marriage there are still new things to discover. I'm glad they worked things out, after the whole bull-cow thing.

</comment><comment><USER3> Link to the mentioned Nature letter: [http://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-018-0156-5](http://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-018-0156-5)

Link to the mentioned Nature Astronomy letter: [http://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-018-0442-z](http://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-018-0442-z)

</comment><comment><USER4> Dumb physics question: "Jupiter's orbit is five times farther from the Sun than Earth's orbit, which means that the giant planet receives 25 times less sunlight than Earth."

Would the amount of energy from the sun be the square root or the cube root? I assumed the latter because space exists in three dimensions.

<comment><USER5> I never understand what 25 times less means. Why not "a 25th?"

<comment><USER6> Put on your descriptivist hat, it's just the way things are now.

<comment><USER7> The term descriptivist means the opposite of what you believe it to mean.

<comment><USER8> Not any more! :-D

<comment><USER7> Ha! Now that is descriptivist! :-D</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is your new idea routine? - <AUTHOR>

Put another way, once you come upon what appears to be a legit startup idea, what steps do you take (in order)?
For instance, do you first scour the market for similar startups? Do you ask friends what they think, or whether or not your idea is technically feasible?
What's your process? <comment><USER2> Here is my typical routine:

      1. DON'T write it down*
      2. Write it down
      3. Look for existing services
      4a. If any exist from step 3, start using them.
          -If satisfied => keep using it and get on with life.
      4b. If no services exist, or I am dissatisfied with existing services,
          => share idea with friends and colleagues.
      5a. If ( feedback is overwhelmingly positive OR I need it right now )
          AND ( I have time ) => start developing.
      5b. Otherwise, add it to the long list of things I'd like to make some day.

* I don't write it down for the first few days, because it's a simple way for me to filter out all the fleeting uninspiring ideas that probably wouldn't have taken off. If I forget about them, then I must not have been that inspired by it; and if I wasn't inspired by it, then there is no way I could have inspired others with it or created any passion for it.

It's hard for me to otherwise filter out these uninspiring ideas, because when I first have them, I'm inherently biased. I tend to be in love with the idea that I thought of something novel, and it's difficult to distinguish between that excitement and excitement for the idea itself.

<comment><USER3> 1\. DON'T write it down

2\. Think about it for weeks and months and years.

3\. Tell my various entrepreneurial friends about it and bask in the glow of their compliments.

4\. Congratulate myself on being smart.

5\. Dream about making so much money I could punch a cop and get away with it.

6\. Dream about how great my life is going to be when I'm harpooning great white sharks from a helicopter that can turn into a boat.

7\. Curse the idiots who came out with a product months or even years after my idea except it's executed all wrong and I woulda done it so much better.

8\. Curse the same idiots who are now making so much money they can punch a cop and get away with it plus have that boat-helicopter thing.

9\. A few weeks later I come up with a great idea. See step 1.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I go through a process called "Will the Dog Eat the Dog Food." It was taught to me by my entrepreneurial mentors.

After you have the idea and thought out the product some, you test whether the market will respond to it. I start with a few key friends and my two entrepreneurial mentors. If it passes them, then I go a wider test. I determine potential target markets and I survey them or I literally pull out the phone book and I call strangers. I even stood at a mall once with a candy bowl and talked with people about my idea.

If you don't talk to customers, you won't ever know what the customers want.

<comment><USER5> great approach. if you can't find 10 people or even 5 that would pay for the product, there's no point.

and if you can't even get yourself to go look, there definitely no point

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The most important thing is to translate idea (typically, a solution) into an underlying problem. Then, validate the problem:

        Who has this problem?
        Talk to them, do they really have this problem?
        How many people have this problem? Would they pay for a solution?
        Is there another solution for the same problem
        that is easier than your initial solution?

After that I just make a pause. After a few days/weeks I revisit the idea with a fresh look.

</comment><comment><USER7> I highly recommend you read "Making Ideas Happen" by Scott Belsky (the99percent). I was already using Evernote for much of my idea-keeping but this inspired me to organize it better. The initial idea is but one piece of the puzzle. As you brainstorm (no matter where) you need to record the ideas and then take action. Too many ideas die not because they were bad but because a plan of action failed to take root.

My routine: 1) write down the idea and all related points in Evernote and that goes in backburner tagged appropriately. 2) Mindmap the idea out. 3) Start wireframing

\- note this is just fleshing the idea out. All the while be searching for competitors and testing out what they have done. Take note of likes, dislikes, and not implemented differences with you.

4) Check google trends and keyword generator to see how many people have been searching for your solution. Do not be discouraged if you don't find a lot here... sometimes things really are novel (like, what keywords would one search for if looking up a twitter like service?). 5) Start talking to everyone about your idea. Hit up tech meet-ups and anyone who would be your potential client regarding the idea. People will be really nice and say nothing but good things. Do not let this idea ego-stroking go to your head (think about it... when have you ever asked another entrepreneur the hard question "why?" when you're really thinking the idea is without merit?). Ask everyone you share the idea with "How would you improve upon this?" or "Is there anything out there that you've seen like this?" or "Is there anything about this that you think is off?". When asked people will volunteer their honest opinion (or complete misunderstanding of the concept). Again, don't take any of this wrong... you may just be lead in a whole new direction or be given some great ideas to add to it that you never considered. 6) Take it all in and break it down to its absolute core. Then take that core and break it down again. Take all the esoteric meaning you've given it out and break it right down to the true MVP. Then get coding.

</comment><comment><USER8> Ze Frank summed up the way I deal with ideas as I don't want to get addicted to brain crack.

<http://www.zefrank.com/theshow/archives/2006/07/071106.html>

1\. Take a shower and think it over.

2\. Tell a few friends I trust.

3\. Create the quickest and dirtiest version to see if it even has legs. This includes looking up who is doing something similar...

4\. Show that to friends in #2

5\. Walk away for 3 days and not think about it.

6\. Come back and review the thing again and decide if I want to continue with it.

One thing I've learned is it is best to get others involved...early before you waste too much of your energy. If you can get someone else excited enough to want to help that usually means your idea has possible legs....or you are a good salesman/woman/person.

Regardless...engage early and engage often. Nothing is built in a vacuum.

</comment><comment><USER9> Here's mine.

      1. Ding! "Woah, what a great idea..."
      2. Research. Spend the whole night up researching.
      3. Brainstorm. (On paper!!)
      4. Share with someone you trust or might be interested in working at the project. *Be careful here
      5. Start looking for a domain. (I find this part the hardest lol)
      6. Start sketching on paper. Logo and UI.
      7. Research again, this time for logo and UI inspiration.
      8. Design > xhtml > code > launch v1 ASAP!
      9. Get feedback.
      10. SEO
      11. Repeat 9 and 10.
      12. Repeat 12.
      13. Improve > fix > launch more features.

Goood luck amigo! :)

<comment><USER10> I got stuck in an infinite loop at 12 and never made it to 13 :)

<comment><USER11> I didn't make it past 11 :) i jott things down in my backpack account.. If it Has any potential to make money I'll run it past my dad and a few mates.

<comment><USER9> Heh, yeah. Add a 10.1 there then that says "Ignore future infinite loops" :)

There is something we all need to remember.

-Have a great time doing it.

It's one in a life time experience. Find good people to do it with and rock the hell out of your market :P

Cheers!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Do basic market research. Of course, look at existing services but also, more broadly, look at the target market as a whole. How big is it, who are the customers, whether they would be willing to pay and how much, how competitive and expensive advertising in the niche is, look at industry blogs and trade magazines, basic keyword research, etc.

That's just scratching the surface, you can and should obviously do a lot more to validate an idea, like dry testing.

</comment><comment><USER13> Think about:

\- potential customers: businesses or consumers? If you're targetting businesses be aware of a large sales cycle; that means you'll need more working capital. Lots of customers or just a few? If there are lots you have more power, but it also means a certain type of business model. If there are few, they will have more power, namely to negotiate prices. The worst situation: you have one customer, government.

\- potential suppliers: businesses or consumers (eg user generated content)? These mean different business models. Lots of them or just a few? If there are lots of them you'll have more power (eg. price negotiation). If there are just a few (or worse, just one), you might have problems down the line.

\- potential competitors: are there any (if none, perfect!). Are there just a few or lots of them? Just a few might mean that its an available market but it might mean that it's a difficult market to get into, namely in terms of initial investment. Lots of competitors means that its easy to enter that market, competition his big and that means a constant price fight.

\-- MV

<comment><USER14> "potential competitors: are there any (if none, perfect!)." ... or it could indicate that there is simply no market for this idea. Seeing a few competitors at least validates the idea & proves that at least some other companies think there is a market for this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> When I get any sufficiently-interesting idea (generally, I decide to write it down when I'm trying to code but find myself distracted by the new idea), I open ~/random/ideas.md and start writing down the premise.

A lot of outcomes may follow. I may get a few sentences in, look at it, say "that's stupid", delete it, and go on with my life. I may just write down the basic idea that I've been thinking about, push it up to the private GitHub repo that holds it, and come back to it later if I have more thoughts on it. Or I may get on a run where I keep expanding on the idea and making it better; then I may start researching to see if it's already been done, how doable it looks, etc. Then I'll usually send that fleshed-out writeup to a few trusted friends to see their thoughts.

Then, if it's a small enough idea, I'll try to find time to hack together some kind of MVP soon. If it's a bigger idea or it's a busy time for me, it'll sit in my ideas file 'til I get to it, if I get to it.

</comment><comment><USER16> I have a book consisting of archived ideas that are either useless, intriguing , or the could have been or the could become the next 'big' thing. Perhaps.

Rather than write down and archive, ACT NOW, cause making yourself believe that ten other people have wireless connections to your mind and can steal any thoughts from you will ensure that you are outraged and encourage you to set out with a goal in mind; make your product ten times better than what you originally set out with.

</comment><comment><USER17> 1\. Think to myself, "I wish I could do (something outlandish and probably impossible, like teleport)." 2\. Keep thinking that for a few days. 3\. Break down the idea into components that would enable me to do it. 4\. Cycle through those components in my mind for a few days. 5\. See if a component arises that is particularly compelling. 6\. Start the usual process of searching to see if it exists, validate with friends, etc...

</comment><comment><USER18> Usually I just use the Google keyword tool to see what the market is like.

1\. come up with 10 keywords you'd use to look for something like that 2\. see how much exact match traffic happens for each keyword 3\. see what the average CPC is for each keyword.

Most ideas get thrown out, since they aren't a must haves. If they were...people would actually be searching for them.

</comment><comment><USER19> I recently purchased some Crayola Window Crayons, if something pops into my head I will take a crayon and write it on my mirror, luckily my wardrobes have large mirros on them so got a lot of space to write with. I then leave it up there for a while, where I will always glance at it, then work it slowly out in my head, either remove it completely or add to the idea.

</comment><comment><USER20> I will ask a few close friends about the idea, then build a quick landing page than explains the idea and asks for email signups.

I post on Hacker News and analyze feedback. After looking at the feedback, I decide if I should proceed with the idea.

</comment><comment><USER21> Ask yourself does it really solve at least one of the three:

1) Fix a PAIN point that people will pay money to make the PAIN go away.

2) Make them more money.

3) Entertain them enough that they'll be willing to pay.

</comment><comment><USER22> I ask my friends what they think but that's mostly to get excited. The truth be told is that my friends are not my target market. I build a landing page using UnBounce.com and then throw $200 of AdWords at it.

<comment><USER6> Thanks for Ubounce link! Really a cool tool.

Will use for my next project :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I email it to myself and label it for perusal. Every once in a while I go through my idea folder and apply it to current situations.

</comment><comment><USER24> I just posted a news link about it. Here it goes again: [http://www.symbyoz.com/render.jsp?assetID=e8a873cc- df75-4de9...](http://www.symbyoz.com/render.jsp?assetID=e8a873cc- df75-4de9-b890-52638e42fccc)</comment>


Honda Plans to Leave Britain as Brexit Draws Close - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/18/business/brexit-honda.html <comment><USER2> I remember working in telecommunications in "high-cost" sites. Even when there wasn't a portfolio consolidation due to some merger, people were constantly living with the fear of heaving their jobs moved to "lower-cost" countries.

When I read such news, I automatically wonder how much of this is because the company wanted the option to move some other place anyway and now Brexit gives them that excuse. I'm not saying that's always the case (especially with smaller companies or what is referred to as the "Mittelstand" in Germany). But in a climate where an employer can simply open a new site in a more forward looking region/climate (and be welcomed with state funding promises by that country), it would make sense.

EDIT: this guy on twitter has been tracking the companies that plan to downsize or leave UK due to brexit: [https://twitter.com/uk_domain_names/status/10669721715185582...](https://twitter.com/uk_domain_names/status/1066972171518558208)

for the automotive specifically: [https://twitter.com/uk_domain_names/status/10539482087984168...](https://twitter.com/uk_domain_names/status/1053948208798416896)

<comment><USER3> Moving back to Japan is hardly the low cost option.

<comment><USER4> They already have factories and extensive supply chains in Japan, so it's not necessarily all that expensive, especially if the Swindon plant needs re- tooling for new models. Typically such decisions coincide with plant and tooling refresh cycles.

Remainer though I be, looking at it objectively I suspect this has more to do with the recent EU trade deal with a Japan. Cars made in Europe were exempt from import duties, but now that import duties on cars from Japan are going away that incentive is going away with it.

But then making cars in the UK may become liable to EU import duties after brexit, and we wouldn't benefit from reduced duties selling our native cars into Japan either, so there are a lot of increased risks over here.

Brexit hasn't happened, so it's hard to draw a straight line between any one event like this and Brexit. That doesn't mean it isn't a factor and we do know investment in the UK has collapsed over the last few years, particularly in manufacturing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> luka-birsa I'm literarly hanging on the edge of the seat in this self inflicted catastrophe that is Brexit.

I view it as an experiment in what happens when common sense fails to win in an election.

I'm a EU citizen and Brexit will have negative impact, but I really want them to see this through, preferably in a no deal fashion.

I want to see what happens. Was it realy project Fear, or - what I belive - this will spell total shit for UK for comming years and decades.

<comment><USER5> It will be "total shit" because the EU wants to punish the UK so the other European countries stay in line.

<comment><USER6> Hardly punishing. We can no longer use the pool because we resigned gym membership. That's not exactly innovative. The same deal for paying members and non members would be a very unusual association.

It will be total shit because those who most vocally backed Brexit are amongst the first relocating themselves and their businesses. Like Britain's richest Jim Ratcliffe, Dyson etc.

<comment><USER7> "Using the pool" is not a good analogy here.

The EU has been trying to force airlines to become majority EU owned. That's not a "pool" that's being "used". It's a simple economic attack in retaliation for leaving.

The EU also tried to force euro clearing out of London _again_ , although it appears they just gave up on that and ESMA decided the EU would allow it to continue in the UK. Which is odd because losing the financial passport was supposed to spell certain doom for the Euro clearing market, but apparently it wasn't that easy for the EU to forcibly relocate all that business. Being able to sell services to people in Europe is not a pool - it's the absence of artificial blockades.

The EU is doing or threatening to do lots of things that aren't comparable to a sports club. In fact it would appear that most of the "benefits" of EU membership appear to merely be the absence of various forms of economic attack. There's no technical reason why the EU has to implement these policies after all. It's just that if they didn't impose artificial penalties on non- members, membership would be even less attractive than it already is.

<comment><USER6> Great. European carriers get the strongest protections for delays, lost luggage and what have you. Something UK citizens can keep.

Doesn't, to me, seem an economic attack. A non EU carrier can still fly to and from the EU. It merely _potentially_ limits flying slots within the EU. Want to fly Paris to Madrid route, be an EU carrier. That seems to hold with the analogy. Pretty sure US and other nations have limits on internal routes too.

Incidentally, in preparation for a no deal farce, Ryanair are reregistering some planes in the UK to still have the option of flying our few internal routes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's worth noting that a lot of major car manufacturers have raised concerns about this:

\- Nissan cited Brexit as a reason for not building one of its latest models in England

\- Jaguar/Land Rover is cutting jobs citing 'geopolitical reasons'

\- Toyota has warned against Brexit

All taken from: [https://www.bbc.com/news/business-47225787](https://www.bbc.com/news/business-47225787)

As an expat, I'm fascinated to see how Brexit will play out.

<comment><USER9> It's interesting how every company that suddenly leaves the UK as the deadline approaches says it's due to some other reason and factors.

Even if it were true, it does bring up that when you destabilize an economy by adding uncertainty it puts you at more risk when weathering the other normal economic bumps. So what breaks the camel's back may not be Brexit, but you've added a lot of burden to make a straw a bigger concern now.

<comment><USER3> > It's interesting how every company that suddenly leaves the UK as the > deadline approaches says it's due to some other reason and factors.

Nobody wants to get in a fight with the Brexit press.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> [https://outline.com/advb7U](https://outline.com/advb7U)

</comment><comment><USER11> "All European market production is being consolidated to Japan, where the company is based"

Doesn't seem to be related to brexit.

<comment><USER12> There is only one Honda plant in the EU. Also because of the new trade deal between the EU and Japan it's possible cheaper for them to export from Japan than a UK because of the brexit (regardless if there is a deal)

<comment><USER13> > There is only one Honda plant in the EU

That's not correct; there is an auto parts factory in Belgium and a light- machinery plant in France ( my lawnmower and generator hail from there ).

They are also planning to close the Civic production factory in non-EU Turkey which produced the saloon to import to the EU, to complement Swindon's hatchback.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Meanwhile Austria's chancellor Kurz is visiting Honda [1]...

(Austria has a strong automotive industry)

[1] [https://www.bundeskanzleramt.gv.at/-/bundeskanzler-kurz- sued...](https://www.bundeskanzleramt.gv.at/-/bundeskanzler-kurz-suedkorea- und-japan-bieten-viele-chancen-fur-oesterreich)

</comment><comment><USER15> Per the BBC, this has nothing to do with Brexit:

"Honda said the move was due to global changes in the car industry and the need to launch electric vehicles, and it had nothing to do with Brexit."

[https://www.bbc.com/news/business-47287386](https://www.bbc.com/news/business-47287386)

</comment><comment><USER16> Good update on Brexit yesterday from Last Week Tonight:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HaBQfSAVt0s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HaBQfSAVt0s)

This answered a lot of questions that I (an American) was wondering about the current state of things.

The most telling moment is when a man who imports flowers says that his entire business will probably be ruined by Brexit, but then goes on to say that he voted to leave. When pressed further about whether he considered his business when he voted, he says "I didn't really think about it."

<comment><USER17> You Americans might laugh at this, but then you voted Trump. Us Aussies have our own shitty politicians, so we are not laughing.

<comment><USER16> Are you familiar with the show? No American viewer of Last Week Tonight is so lacking in self-awareness that they would condescendingly "laugh" at Brexit as if their own country was doing fine. There's nothing contradictory about thinking Brexit and Trump are both fiascos. The point of the segment (and the show in general) is to inform, not to laugh.

Also, no American host would ever really do a segment like this. John Oliver is British so he has a unique sort of soapbox being the host of a show whose audience is primarily in the US. That cross-cultural dynamic is one of the things that makes the show unique.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> —-

<comment><USER19> How is Amazon's pulling out of NY related to Brexit?</comment></comment>


Ruby java python or lisp - <AUTHOR>

I have shortlisted the following languages to learn . which one should I learn first.And which are the best sources books,videos for learning them. i have previously done c and c++ <comment><USER2> Try every one of them. I saw your submissions and comments. The time you spend asking these type of questions here at HN would be better spent learning. My guess is you are procrastinating.

<comment><AUTHOR> ok i'll start but which book should i refer for ruby

<comment><USER3> For python I can't recommend a book. Dive in to Python is available online but to be honest the best thing to do is just start using it. It's just not hard.

DIP: <http://www.diveintopython.org/toc/index.html>

Tutorial: <http://docs.python.org/tut/tut.html>

Std Modules: <http://docs.python.org/modindex.html>

Std Library Reference: <http://docs.python.org/lib/lib.html>

good luck

<comment><USER4> I'll second dive into python. I thought it was an excellent read. The book does a good job of teaching the language while showing a lot of practical examples.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Consider starting with Scheme and reading SICP.

</comment><comment><USER6> I've started recently with LISP and it's been a rewarding experience. I've noticed that it's just more flexible than the C-like languages. For example, I have been able to get the factorial of a number as big as 3000 in a very short time! That was simply not possible with a C-like program. I've used Emacs with the "Superior Lisp Interaction Mode" preloaded, upon the suggestion I got from useful book "Practical Common Lisp by Peter Seibel" (It's available on line at gigamonkeys.com)

I have also acquired the book "ANSI Common Lisp by Paul Graham", which is a classic and no-nonsense book. I personally find Paul Graham's approach quite refreshing.

Having seen Ruby being employed in various environments, I've also started to learn Ruby. It's a multi-paradigm and dynamic language and hope to use it in a RoR application development. It kind of forces you to think dynamically and that helps you to write more efficient code, I guess.

So far, I couldn't find enough time for either Java or Python.

And oh, lastly I must say: C++ with templates (STL) is quite indispensable. If you master C++ with all its features like STL, you'll find that it can handle a whole lot of things quite elegantly.

</comment><comment><USER7> Since you already know C++, learning Java really won't expand your mind at all so I wouldn't waste time on it. My personal recommendation would be Lisp...

</comment><comment><USER8> Learning to spell "python" would be a good start.

</comment><comment><USER9> python</comment>


An office with no walls - <AUTHOR> https://blog.whoishiring.io/an-office-with-no-walls/ <comment><USER2> I don't have a problem working with other people on a project, I just don't need anyone near me while doing so.

Yes, it might force me to be more productive if I have 5 people around me always watching me, but I gladly sacrafice this kind of increased productivity for more freedom.

That's why I'm working remote.</comment>


Goldstone admits he was wrong - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/03/world/middleeast/03goldstone.html?_r=1&hp

<comment><USER2> I wonder if this will get as much media attention as the original assertion ...</comment>


Ask HN: Why aren't we spending more time to research harnessing solar energy? - <AUTHOR>

I just watched this movie
http://www.youtube.com/homeproject
This fact shocked me:
In one hour the sun gives the earth the same amount of energy as that consumed by all humanity in one year (Fast forward to around 1:26:20)
That is a staggering amount of energy.  Shouldn't we be spending more resources in trying to build, say a solar car, than an electric car? <comment><USER2> The trouble with your example is that a car is not a dyson sphere. A car is a few square meters, which means that with a 30% efficient pv panel (double the efficiency of the current standard), you'd only be getting around 15hp at noon. That's enough to toddle around a closed track at 30mph in a carbon fiber frame built by a university, but not enough to outdo a bicycle in real-world applications.

Fixed solar power plants are more promising, but they're not perfect--Sure, a square 100 miles on a side in Arizona could supply a lot of power, but not to New York or Seattle, even over the best HVDC lines. And 1,000 square miles is a helluva lot of monocrystalline silicon. Solar thermal looks more promising, especially for keeping the power going at night, but it's far from a panacea, and there's lots of companies working on it. I've invested in a few of them.

<comment><USER3> You are are right about that. Of course you could look at the question laterally - solar energy comes from fusion, so if we could master fusion, we would cut out the middle man.

ITER is trying hard, but I can't help feeling that if we had a modern day Manhattan/Apollo type project for fusion energy we could make faster progress.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> yes, we should. the issue is that its not just one technology that needs to improve for making solar energy viable to become the serious heavy power provider, but many different interlocking technologies. batteries, for example.

<comment><AUTHOR> True. Tesla Motors got $465 mil loan from the US govt, what about the companies that are working to produce solar energy based products? Shouldn't the govt support them at least as much as they support companies like Tesla?

<comment><USER4> tesla is clearly a special case. the government doesn't normally hand out loans, and in this case it only handed out loans to financially viable car companies. other car companies got government loans that aren't as technologically cutting-edge.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The amount of energy we can usably harness from the sun is a lot less than is radiated to the earth. Its useful to drive at night and on cloudy days. People also demand similar performance from their future vehicles as they get now.

If you're interested in these sort of questions, I highly recommend the following book which I got a few days ago. I'm finding it both sobering and exciting:

[http://www.amazon.com/Sustainable-Energy-Without-Hot- Air/dp/...](http://www.amazon.com/Sustainable-Energy-Without-Hot- Air/dp/0954452933/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1246389614&sr=8-1)

<comment><USER5> Oh, I just found out that this book is also available online: <http://www.withouthotair.com/></comment></comment>


The real reason there aren't more female scientists - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-6usiN4uoA <comment><USER2> Garbage.</comment>


Tikzcd – A simple visual editor for creating commutative diagrams - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/yishn/tikzcd-editor <comment><USER2> Tikzcd is a LaTeX package for easily creating commutative diagrams with Tikz. This seems to be an editor which outputs tikzcd LaTeX commands.

Many thanks for sharing this though. It is very easy and convenient to create simple diagrams with tikzcd, but I often struggle to make larger and more complex diagrams look nice.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is pretty cool! I would love to see this kind of tool (including the LaTeX output) available for other kinds of diagrams. Sequence diagrams, box- and-line diagrams, etc.

<comment><USER4> It's not terribly hard to do by hand once you get the hang of it. I used to do my control systems homework with TikZ.

<comment><USER3> Diagrams for homework is easy. The tool almost doesn't matter.

What gets hard is when a diagram is describing something you don't have control over, such as a system built by dozens of engineers, or a product that is still being influenced by changing requirements. In those cases, I often want to build an initial diagram, then extend it quickly and in a version- control friendly way, or even in a way that can be generated.

<comment><USER5> Extending a Tikz diagram (by additional lines/nodes, I assume?) just means adding more Tikz commands to draw the additional parts. If you mostly use automatic or relative placement, the diff will be fairly compact. If you use manual placement, you'll get some noise from the adjustments required to make space.

Caveat: I have only used Tikz for homework. However, I didn't usually have control, and the diagrams occasionally had to change when I realized I forgot some part.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I made all diagrams in my thesis with this tikz gui: [http://tikzit.sourceforge.net](http://tikzit.sourceforge.net). Tikzcd looks more polished, Tikzit more general.

</comment><comment><USER7> Is there any similar tool for string diagrams? They can be very expressive on paper, but it would be much more convenient to manipulate them on a computer.

</comment><comment><USER8> Pretty cool, I'll definitely give this a go the next time I need to draw diagrams. I wish there would be a reset button for the line curvature and that ctrl-z would undo though.

</comment><comment><USER9> Reinventing plantuml and dot I guess. Go have a look at those as well, they have their uses and are awesome.

<comment><USER10> I don't know PlantUML or dot very well, but it seems to me neither of them are visual editors? Also, tikz diagrams are used a lot in mathematics writing and presentations, which seems to be a very different use case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is awesome! Creating tikz diagrams by hand is a pain.</comment>


Ladder of Algebraic Structures - <AUTHOR> https://jwkennington.com/blog/algebra-ladder/ <comment><AUTHOR> I first encountered a diagram of algebraic structures at the end of Jeevanjee's second chapter, "Vector Spaces", which elegantly summarizes the high-level differences in structure between sets, vector spaces, and inner product spaces.

I've attempted to augment this map along two dimensions: a structure dimension that aims to measure the number of attributes an algebraic object has, and a specificity dimension that measures the number of constraints placed on each attribute.

This is aimed primarily at mathematical physics, and is intended as a quick reference -- it's obviously incomplete and isn't a substitute for Hungerford, Lang, or [insert favorite algebra book].

I hope you find it as helpful as I did in making it!</comment>


Unabomber's Manifesto(Industrial Society and Its Future) - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/unabomber/manifesto.text.htm <comment><USER2> Wow, the section "the psychology of modern leftism" is pretty much point for point criticism of the modern left by the modern right.

Were those critiques in the air at the time or was he just a nascent conservative?

<comment><USER3> There's a pattern of left-leaning mathematician he fits into, that I also see in some other mathematicians, one example being LKY and probably his son. People who would have equality of outcome as a goal, but see through the bullshit, aren't inclined to play along with it, are smart enough to understand concepts of trade-offs and incentives, and stay tied to reality instead of drifting off into a world of words and analogies. They look kind of right wing, but they'd support an inheritance tax that real right wingers would oppose.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Please don't reward violence by posting this. The ideas in this manifesto led its author to kill.

His victims deserve better from us.

<comment><USER5> >The ideas in this manifesto led its author to kill.

So did the ideas in the Declaration of Independence. Asimov's Foundation trilogy inspired violence. And the Catcher in the Rye. And the Bible.

Let's not pretend many of the concepts in this manifesto haven't become mainstream within the tech community. Many here would agree with the premise that modern technological society (specifically the web) has done more harm to humanity than good, would agree with its criticisms of leftist and PC ideology, and that effecting meaningful change within the existing corrupt systems of government is impossible.

This manifesto has shaped modern tech culture and politics in profound ways and it does no good not to acknowledge the degree to which many here would agree with it in principle. It should be read and it should be discussed openly.</comment></comment>


The Language Barrier Is About to Fall - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-language-barrier-is-about-to-fall-1454077968? <comment><USER4> This article is BS. Machine translation has been improving but it's still nowhere close to being able to provide real-time translation of spoken languages, and I bet anything it won't be there after another decade. I know for a fact that Baidu is throwing lots of money and people at fundamental R&D in translating Asian languages, and it's no piece of cake.

As for "earpieces whispering nearly simultaneous translations", it would be a cool party trick but I doubt they'll work in real life.

These moonshot projects have been around for decades, and they make for some cool entertainment at conferences and demos in very tightly controlled settings. As for the predictions that "the software in the cloud connected to the earpiece in your ear will re-create the voice of the speaker", the author should take up writing bad science fiction.

<comment><USER5> It depends on what the bar for "good enough" and "fast enough" is. Remember that Google Translate, just one example, was pretty feeble to start but has proven itself to be adequate for most needs now even if a lot of the meaning gets lost in translation.

Could that be paired up with Google Voice? Absolutely.

It's not easy, but it's inevitable.

<comment><USER6> I wouldn't say there are that many situations where Google Translate is good enough, to be honest. It's not so different from an automatic way of looking words or phrases up in a dictionary.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm currently living in a country where I don't speak the language. I can't believe how incredible translation tools are. Even though I don't understand when people speak to me, I can write and read emails, and accomplish things that would be incredibly more difficult without this ability (e.g. talking to my insurance agent). And when I say I can read and write emails, I mean it can do so in about 1.5x longer than a native one. I have developed very basic abilities in the language (in the 2 months I've been here), and so I constantly use translation tools and check in both directions -- translate to the language, modify it to make sense according to my understanding -- translate it back to English -- all within the space of a couple of minutes.

I still miss out on learning more idiomatic expressions, but I imagine those will come in time. In the meantime, I am able to get a surprising amount of business done, in ways that would have been impossible before.

Not to mention that continuously doing all this translation of my written communications is making me learn the spoken language much faster. Although, for that, nothing replaces actually speaking with people, of course! ;) But it's much easier to bootstrap actual conversation when you've been learning individual words by reading and writing.

Overall I would say that automatic translation tools have made it possible for my life to move in directions that where language would have been a serious roadblock in a previous era.

<comment><USER8> What is the other language, and how similar is it to English (or other languages you know)? (Beofre you answer, my predicted answer is "very similar".)

<comment><USER7> Similar enough, certainly. More similar to my second language. (I know French, I'm learning Spanish.)

It definitely lowers the barrier, but don't think there's no barrier just because it's a "similar" language. I'm claiming that automatic translation has accelerated my learning, not that learning it would be impossible otherwise.

Nonetheless it is quite difficult to live somewhere where you don't speak the language, no matter what tools you have available. Mostly it doesn't matter, but when you find yourself arguing with administrators... or the police...

(I almost got into a bike accident the other day. I wasn't even all that worried about my health, I was mostly scared of having to talk to people, hospital/police/insurance..! or argue with the guy who hit me...)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I suspect real-time machine translation is within reach if the speakers are trained to use a restricted subset of their native language. Moreover, I suspect that this approach could be both realistic and useful.

This restricted subset situation is _de facto_ already the case; existing tools don't handle regional dialects and colloquialisms. I just tried "嘘じゃねいぞ" (uso ja nei zo!) in Google Translate and it came up with rubbish because it doesn't know that "nei" is a variant of "nai".

The kinds of restrictions I'm thinking of are deeper: avoidance of the full variety in sentence structure, and excessive complexity, like compounded of relative clauses. Not to mention language-dependent tricks like double meanings depending on puns, and generally all figures of speech that do not translate.

A restricted subset of your native language is something which you already understand, and learning to speak it is easier than a whole different language.

People doing business abroad would just study that for a few weeks as part of the workflow.

The dialect could become richer and thus less restricted as time goes on, making it easier to use. It could be customizable as well, to a particular speaker's idiosyncrasies. If a given speaker often uses some figure of speech out of habit, it could just be defined for that speaker, with a hand-crafted translation to various languages.

<comment><USER10> > A restricted subset of your native language is something which you already > understand, and learning to speak it is easier than a whole different > language.

It's interesting to note that before machine translation, there have been attempts to try to standardize restricted subsets of English as a way of making it easier for non-native English speakers (for example "Basic English" and "Basic Global English").

However, I think both in the case of communication with non-native speakers and in the case of machine translation, it's actually not that easy for native speakers to anticipate what phrasings will be problematic.

These existing efforts have had the problem that reducing vocabulary can actually make the resulting language more reliant on things such as verb colocations that are actually harder for non-native speakers. Machine translation has an advantage that it can presumably understand a rich vocabulary, so it might be possible to get somewhat better results by using as precise words as possible while keeping the sentence structure simple. Still, especially with modern statistical machine translation, and perhaps even more so in the future with recurrent neural network-based translation, it may not be that easy to predict potential pitfalls in an attempt to work around them. It actually might have been easier to train people to get better results (at least for specific language pairs) with older, rule-based translation systems, since they were more predictable.

In either case, there presumably needs to be a certain level of accuracy before people can start attempting to tweak it by their choice of wording. I don't think we are there yet, especially for English <-> Japanese. I just tried entering "I'm not going to tell him that." in Google translate, and it gave me "私は彼のことを言うつもりはありません。" ("I'm not going to mention him.") This is a fairly simple sentence, with no colloquialism, and yet Google Translate fails utterly. This is much more concerning than something that can be easily worked around, such as not knowing colloquialisms such as "じゃねー".

<comment><USER9> Obviously the program must have figured out that there are two clauses: "I'm not going to X", where X is "tell him that". How the heck does it go from there to "kare no koto wo iu". If we translate just "tell him that" alone we get ことを彼に伝えます which is okayish. If it would just stick some version of _that_ into the "watashi ha ... tsumori wa arimasen" pattern, it would be progress.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've been learning Japanese as of late, and automated translation tools are near useless for anything but sentences that are just a few words stringed together (and even then, nonsense is often returned as soon as a tiny bit of slang or metaphorical language is used). I also have friends who speak languages that are not part of the top 10 most spoken in the world (eg Finnish, Hungarian, etc) and trying to translate their Facebook statuses returns complete garbage.

Between languages that are fairly close to one another (such as French and Spanish), sure - you can pipe text from one language to another in Google Translate and the results will be mostly understandable (although still very awkward). But anything else, and automated translation still has ways to go. Turns of phrases, idioms, general syntax etc. are fairly similar between languages that are closely related, so automated translation has an easy job there (with the caveat that it starts falling apart as soon as slang or more colloquial expressions are used). But step any further than that, and it's a lost cause.

The article also assumes that there's a 1:1 mapping between everything you can express in every language, and that it's just a matter of software finding the right mapping for whatever you're saying into the destination language. But any translator will tell you that this couldn't be further from the truth - there are many things I can say in English to my Californian friends that don't really work in a French conversation with my Parisian friends (let alone in Mandarin or Japanese). At best you'll be met with blank stares, and at worst you'll be breaking etiquette in major ways. Part of learning a new language is learning the space of what can be expressed and how in that language.

For these reasons, I don't really buy the whole "earpiece that automagically lets you speak with anyone in the world" anytime in the next few decades. Which is fine, because learning languages is fun :)

On the other hand, I'm currently in the Netherlands for a conference, and everyone speaks flawless English. I've had a similar experience in Germany, Sweden, and a bunch of other countries (but not in my country of origin, France, where being terrible at English seems to be a point of pride). So maybe taking a page from their book when it comes to education is a better idea than waiting for technology to let us be lazy.

<comment><USER12> Exactly. I've been taking Japanese recently, too, and the grammatical structure of the language alone is enough to show that the "real-time whispering earpiece" as an impossible concept: in English, the verb usually comes near the beginning of a sentence. In Japanese, it's near (or at) the end. Translating one language to the other therefore requires a mental "tape delay", while you map the one grammar onto the other.

Even when you hear bilingual, fluent translators converting Japanese to English, there's often a weird disassociation between the words the speaker is using and the words coming out of the translator. The translator is buffering the words and translating in logical units. Even if you grant the benefit of the doubt and call this "real time" translation, I know of know translation system that is capable of any sort of similar kind of judgment with an unbounded input stream. Deciding where to begin/end translation requires knowing what the original sentence intended to express. And computers still suck at that.

<comment><USER13> German, one of English's closest languages, also does the "verb at end" for many constructs (e.g. past tense, future tense, "must"/"should"/"can")

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think people are overestimating the word "language barrier". People often forget that the language barrier is not a one-sided problem. Communication is a collaborative effort (unless we're just spying them). I bet that something like keyword spotting for commonly used 3000 words is already pretty feasible, and that would greatly reduce the language barrier. Perfect translation is neither possible nor necessary to induce mutual effort.

(By the way, I've seen so many US tourists in Europe who don't even try to speak a single word in their language. They don't seem to know that a simple "thank you" in their native tongue would greatly reduce the barrier and change their sentiment towards the US. In this sense, I believe that technology is more or less neutral to mutual understanding, because not knowing a language (or the idea that not knowing a language is acceptable) can have adverse effects.)

Edit: a few grammatical errors. Damn my Japaneseness!

<comment><USER15> > (the idea that not knowing a language is acceptable)

It's not? I'm in big trouble. There are more than 6,000 languages I do not know.

<comment><USER16> The point is probably "it's not acceptable to assume 'everyone knows English, but most are just too lazy to use it'" rather than "of course you're supposed to be fluent in any language" ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Yet another journalist who doesn't understand how languages actually work.

Other languages aren't just "English with different words and syntax". A single word can have dozens of different meanings, the set of different meanings of a word needn't be the same across languages. And even if you know the context the meaning doesn't have to be unambiguous. A perfect translation would need to recognize plausible ambiguities and retain them across languages.

Language is not code. Language is an expression of thoughts in a form that builds upon vaguely defined tokens. It's amazing that human language communication works this well at all given how ambiguous and faulty it actually is in practice.

<comment><USER5> Even English isn't English as innuendo and alternate meanings cloud understanding of it constantly. Even the simple phrase "I'd hit that" means any number of things depending on the speaker and the context.

This doesn't even touch on how sometimes British English needs to be "translated" to American English, like in the case of Harry Potter being adapted with many words changed.

Likewise it's almost impossible to express the nuance of something like "that's so fucking fucked" in a language lacking a word of similar versatility.

I'd argue there's no such thing as a "perfect translation". That's why people who translate novels have a considerable amount of work to do to pick, from all possible translations, the one that best represents the tone and intent of the original author.

I still think it's possible to come up with a passable translation automatically in real-time. It's inevitable.

<comment><USER17> Sure, but translations are lossy. No 1-to-1 translation can ever completely emulate perfect fluency.

<comment><USER16> You can get pretty close though ;) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akbflkF_1zY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akbflkF_1zY)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The problem is that we still haven't been able to write a system to accurately recognize the words that are being spoken. Differences in diction, dialects, and accents make it difficult to accomplish. Just look at what Microsoft, Google, and Apple are doing - as good as they are, they're nowhere close to where they need to be.

Even once we solve the voice capture issue, I suspect that we'd still run into many areas where the computer would have problems determining the proper context necessary to accurately translate the text. Whatever system is performing the translation would have to maintain a history of the conversation in order to have any hope of understanding context, and at a gathering where you could have multiple conversations occurring at the same time, the process gets even harder.

I think the only part of the author's belief that we're close to achieving is being able to have the computer use the original speaker's voice. Siri and Cortana could already sound more human, but people are currently more comfortable having them sound robotic. I'm sure that will change in time, however.

</comment><comment><USER16> "...in ten years time." To quote XKCD's translation (sic!), "we haven't finished inventing it yet, but when we do, it'll be awesome." [https://xkcd.com/678/](https://xkcd.com/678/)

This is the same tired old story that keeps on making rounds for the sixth decade now - "machine translation kind of sucks now, but it will be solved within the next decade!!!!!!!!1!" This is still very much a current paper - note the publication date: [http://www.mt-archive.info/Bar- Hillel-1951.pdf](http://www.mt-archive.info/Bar-Hillel-1951.pdf)

<comment><USER5> To be fair, translation today is significantly better than sixty years ago. For one, the output is often usable as-is, and with some tweaking is even better.

I've known several people that have learned English by leaning heavily on automated translation until they got a firmer handle on it. If you tried that in the 1970s you'd still be trying to figure out what the word "the" means.

<comment><USER16> Sure, it's better - in the "pre-MT" and "post-MT" systems (although it's called "crowdsourcing" these days). For standalone MT, the output is just- about-recognizable; nowhere near the babel-fish-like gadget WSJ is presenting as "just about to happen."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> 真有意思。I see a lot of dismissals of the projections in this article. Thirty years ago, just as I was working for several years as a Chinese-English interpreter, I would have agreed with all those dismissals. I no longer agree. As some of the subcomments here have pointed out, all that automated translation and interpretation have to do is become less expensive than either a) learning the relevant language yourself or b) hiring good-quality human translators and interpreters. Automated translation and interpretation is already well along that path.

A crucial skill for a professional interpreter or a casual language-learner is "lexicalization," figuring out what the correct match is between what is possibly a phrase in one language but only a single morpheme that is part of a larger word in another language. But the huge advantage automated translation solutions have is shared learning and long-lasting memory. If the lexicalization is built into a database, for example a database kept by Apple, Google, IBM, or some other multinational provider of translation services, that learned information can be deployed in products over and over and over again. In the end, that's all that it takes for automated translation and interpretation to do better at equal cost (or as well at less cost) compared to human language-learning or human language services. I got out of interpreting for a living years ago, because I finally came around to the understanding of how little I could compete with the worldwide efforts made with new technology to tackle language problems. I still think learning natural modern human languages is a very intellectually enriching activity, and all my children do that, but we expect to live in a world a decade from now with very good real-time interpreting and translation systems for a wide variety of language pairings.

</comment><comment><USER20> The idea that one can translate words without understanding what is being said, seems rather similar to an idea that one can infer the meaning of words from their constituent letters. Meaning not only works simultaneously on so many technically inaccessible levels (context, expectations, allusions, previous experiences, etc.), anything mildly interesting (not to mention proper literature), is based by definition on a _deviation_ from established meanings.

<comment><USER21> So, we need to translate text to an artificial language, which is well understood by both humans and AI, and then render same meaning in native language of listener.

Slovakian or Ukrainian language should be good base for that artificial language, because they are easy to parse and are well developed, with large enough dictionary to cover most cases. Moreover, Ukrainians are very cheap right now, because of war with Russia.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Compare this line from the WSJ article:

> A decade from now, I would predict, everyone reading this article will be > able to converse in dozens of foreign languages, eliminating the very > concept of a language barrier.

with these excepts from The Guardian at [http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/feb/10/texas- regi...](http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/feb/10/texas-regional- accent-siri-apple-voice-recognition-technology) (referenced two days ago on HN at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11077168](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11077168) ):

> Y'all have a Texas accent? Siri (and the world) might be slowly killing it

> Voice recognition tools such as Apple's Siri still struggle to understand > regional quirks and accents, and users are adapting the way they speak to > compensate.

> ... "I've had a bunch of people from Australia and India say they only > really get along with Siri if they fake an American accent," said Lars > Hinrichs, a sociolinguist at the University of Texas at Austin.

<comment><USER23> To be fair, having not tried Siri for a year or two, it has gotten much better at dealing with the Glasgow accent ; )

I recall around 2000 having to fake a US accent in order to get an airline's voice response system to put me through to a human.

<comment><USER5> You probably have to fake an accent to communicate with some American call- centres as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> It must work offline. One of the reasons is that tourists often don't buy a data plan (imagine a tour of Europe with a different country every couple of days) and wifi is not where you might need machine translation most, on the road.

<comment><USER25> Many European mobile contracts allow a bucket of roaming data (400MB per month for me). Not sure what's the status for prepaid SIM cards that tourists from outside of Europe would likely have.

Also, the roaming costs in EU are regulated, with likely price decreases also in the future: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_roaming_regulat...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_roaming_regulations)

<comment><USER26> A number of prepaid providers are offering data roaming plans now. See this list: [http://prepaid-data-sim- card.wikia.com/wiki/European_Union](http://prepaid-data-sim- card.wikia.com/wiki/European_Union)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> If I access this article via a google search, it is still paywalled. I see experts-exchange seems to be doing this again also. I thought this was against google's terms & conditions, no?

<comment><USER28> Google has terms and conditions to be listed in search?

<comment><USER27> Ya, the page when you click through has to be the same as that indexed by google, I think it might be referred to as cloaking?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> > _You could host a dinner party with eight people at the table speaking eight > different languages, and the voice in your ear will always be whispering the > one language you want to hear._

And at this hypothetical dinner party, what would the earpieces whisper in English (or most other languages) when the Japanese guests said いただきます?

Some words just don't have a translation in other languages.

[https://www.google.com/search?q=いただきます&tbm=isch](https://www.google.com/search?q=いただきます&tbm=isch)

<comment><USER30> «Bon appétit» would be an adequate translation for most English speakers (even though it's French). A more "pure" English translation would probably be a grace of some kind, which serves more or less the same purpose (although I can also see some atheists bristling at a grace where they wouldn't bristle at いただきます or bon appétit).

<comment><USER29> Not really. My Japanese roommate would say いただきます _when by himself at his desk_ before eating a candy bar. It would be surprising if even one English speaker in the world regularly says "Bon appétit" in that situation.

The question isn't, "How do you say いただきます in English." The better question is, "Do English speakers have a set phrase they say right before eating." And the answer is no they don't.

<comment><USER9> In context, the question is in fact what should come out of the English- speaking listener's earpiece to explain the "itadakimasu" utterance from the Japanese speaker, whether or not the English speaker has a custom of uttering anything before any meal or snack.

Suppose English speakers _did_ always say "Bon appétit", even when eating alone and just a snack. It's still not the meaning of "itadakimasu". Wishing for gusto in eating is not the same thing as humbly receiving the meal/snack.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I live abroad and speak far from fluently in a foreign language. I'm personally invested in machine translation improving, and I really hope it does.

> Today's translation tools were developed by computing more than a billion > translations a day for over 200 million people. With the exponential growth > in data, that number of translations will soon be made in an afternoon, then > in an hour. The machines will grow exponentially more accurate and be able > to parse the smallest detail. Whenever the machine translations get it > wrong, users can flag the error—and that data, too, will be incorporated > into future attempts.

If this is the reasoning that we will be there in 10 years, it is ridiculously optimistic. I'm pretty sure that there is a exponential fall off from common phrases to a long tail of more nuanced, not as often uttered language. A million people punching in "where is the bathroom?" is not going to make the machine know how to impart the acerbic wit of a phrase from a Palahniuk book to a Japanese business man. Good luck finding someone skilled enough in both languages and cultures to be able to correct the error.

Real skills in multiple languages requires an intellect to parse the situations. While I personally hope that will one day be achievable with AI, I have to think that we are still a long way off.

</comment><comment><USER32> The benefits to this kind of thing are being able to be very specific and go deeper into the subject matter with one's second or third languages. Plus I might argue that smaller languages won't need to die (if everyone can get along and do business in their own tongue). The drawback is that perhaps people who learn languages in the near future will seem like those who study Latin ever since it became a "dead" language.

<comment><USER16> Note the qualification of "small- _er_ " languages: you are implying "languages which are still large enough that a translational layer is _economically_ feasible. Small languages (let me pull a number out of thin air and assume <20 million speakers) would still be doomed. Guess what: that means English, French, Spanish, Italian, Russian and Polish for Europe, everyone else kindly GTFO, we don't have resources for implementing your languages.

<comment><USER32> Sorry, I don't quite follow your intended meaning, but I will try to expand on my initial comment below.

If it no longer matters what language someone speaks, a language with fewer speakers than others wouldn't need to become extinct, as will happen without tech-aided interpretation. Of course, the viability of a language isn't solely connected to the ability for a native speaker to do commerce in it, but I would imagine it's nonetheless an important factor.

From Wikipedia's article 'Lists of endangered langauges':

"While there are somewhere around six or seven thousand languages on Earth today, about half of them have fewer than about 3,000 speakers. Experts predict that even in a conservative scenario, about half of today's languages will become extinct within the next fifty to one hundred years."

I would hope that even languages with 3,000 speakers could be 'saved', in the scenario I propose (assuming a Wikipedic-style worldwide effort - <USER2> conjunction with the tech sector, governments and linguists - to get as many languages as possible implemented).

<comment><USER16> Well, that's the "let's assume unlimited resources (inc. time), suddenly nothing is a major problem" scenario.

The actual scenario tends to be "but you have a choice of all these 20 languages; are you just lazy to learn a _proper_ language that's on the list?" My native language has about 10 million users, so I get this a lot (and consequently, most of _my_ digital UX is in English - significantly less hassle for me).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I speak Arabic, French, English and Spanish; the last 3 are "easier" to translate interchangeably. Good luck breaking the Arabic barrier, each Arab nation has its own dialect and no one hardly speaks "traditional" Arabic anymore. The language itself is very rich and dense, even machine text translation has a long way to go, let alone real-time voice translation. This article is fiction at best.

</comment><comment><USER34> I thought this was about how the entire world is getting to a point where they are able to speak and understand basic English.

There are certainly countries and population groups that do not speak English well, but it has changed significantly the last 10 years.

I wonder if we will get there before 100% accurate automatic translation.

<comment><USER16> The entire world*, sure.

(the part of it inside my social bubble; smartphone and internet connection strongly advised, other terms and conditions apply, void where prohibited.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> This "real time whispering earpiece" sounds an awful lot like a bluetooth headset...

</comment><comment><USER36> For an example of the state of automatic translation c.2010 I give you this:

This is question, engish is faulty therefore the right excused is requested. Thank google to translate to help. SORRY!!!!!

At often, the goat-time install a error is vomit. To how many times like the wind, a pole, and the dragon? Install 2,3 repeat, spank, vomit blows

14:14:01.869 - <USER3> [edu.internet2.middleware.shibboleth.common.config.profile.JSPErrorHandlerBeanDefinitionParser:45] \- Parsing configuration for JSP error handler.

Not precise the vomit but with aspect similar, is vomited concealed in fold of goat-time lumber? goat-time see like the wind, pole, and dragon? This insult to father's stones? JSP error handler with wind, pole, dragon with intercourse to goat-time? Or chance lack of skill with a goat-time?

Please apologize for your stupidity. There are a many thank you

(from [https://lists.internet2.edu/sympa/arc/shibboleth- users/2010-...](https://lists.internet2.edu/sympa/arc/shibboleth- users/2010-09/msg00304.html) )</comment>


Read-Eval-Print-λove v004 – Production Rules - <AUTHOR> http://blog.fogus.me/2017/01/27/read-eval-print-λove-v004-production-rules-has-landed/ <comment><USER2> I loved his Lisp and Forth posts.

</comment><comment><USER3> Expect some lov€ :f

I'm the mood for log these days.</comment>


Firebug 1.12 – New Features - <AUTHOR> https://hacks.mozilla.org/2013/08/firebug-1-12-new-features/

<comment><USER2> Love the new features. I still find myself using Firebug over the built in dev tools in either Chrome or Firefox. The Firebug team has done a really tremendous job over the years. Keep up the good work!

<comment><USER3> Yeah, firebug still has quite a lot of polish compared to the others.

Perhaps it has to do with the contributors being expert UI developers, and firebug developers second. Whereas the other tools are mostly developed by employees who do full time dev tool development, but not so much work using the tools.

But I know others mostly prefer chrome tools. The same people often get stuck in firebug or in IE dev tools.

Anyway... GREAT WORK FIREBUG TEAM! xo

<comment><USER4> I fail to see how Firebug has a better UI then WebKit Developer Tools?

As far as I am concerned they are the same in that regard. And since both of those tools are not built by "developers", but by "frontend engineers" it doesn't really matter.

I spent like 15 minutes trying to figure out how to attach Firebug to the browser window. Only to find out that the upward pointing arrow in a gray circle means attach to browser window. On WebKit I click an icon that looks like a browser window with developer tools.

The resources tab in WebKit is ten times better then the mishmash of CSS/Script/Net/Cookies tabs all spread out.

Anyways that is just my opinion, and as far as I am concerned Dragonfly was the best.

<comment><USER5> Think what s/he's saying is that it helps that they use their own tools for UI dev versus those who hammer on the browser and made comparable tools, not that Firebug has a better UI.

<comment><USER4> That's fine, but I think it's a bit far fetched to say that the people who work on WebKit/Blink developer tools don't use the developer tools.

<comment><USER6> It's true.. the Chrome DevTools are a webapp, and the engineers behind it use the DevTools _on_ the DevTools as their primary means of development. (Enter inception joke here). From what I can tell, the same is true with the Safari Inspector and the IE F12 Tools.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "Copy as cURL" is great! I'm curious to see if it even builds POST requests properly..

Edit: it does! It includes all the headers, the POST data, etc...

<comment><USER8> Even the cookies. It's been in webkit for a while. SO USEFUL.

You can also use it to leech stuff from login/captcha protected download areas like rapidshare or the apple dev center. No more failed browser downloads of 1gig files! Just add -C to your curl command!

<comment><USER7> I think it's actually "-C -" to tell it to automatically figure out where to restart.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The list of improvements might be the most exciting I've ever seen for any software, ever. Seriously...great work!

</comment><comment><USER10> Very annoyingly, in the FF 24 beta, Firebug basically crashes the browser every time you open it (or switch to another tab and then back). Not sure if it's FF's problem or Firebug's, but it's really annoying.

<comment><USER11> Firefox's, certainly. It would be good if you reported it on Bugzilla.

<comment><USER10> Thanks, I had meant to ping someone about this, but keep forgetting. Filed: [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=908174](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=908174)

<comment><USER12> Interesting, you don't have lag when first opening it? I was investigating pretty much the same thing yesterday, in the end my problem was that the JSD was ridiculously slow to toggle, but firebug is already working to move to JSD2 so I can't really complain too much. There is a test extension you can use attached to this bug.

[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=815603](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=815603)

I was getting something like 100ms to pause and 10000ms to unpause. With 5 tabs loaded and a couple hundred tabs unloaded. I disabled the javascript parts of firebug for general use, which does avoid the problem most of the time.

<comment><USER10> Aha, you're right! Disabling the Script tab helps immensely. It's a shame since I need the Script tab for a lot of work, but it's not too much of a pain to disable/reenable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Is there work going on to build Firebug on top of the built-in Firefox debugging tools?

The two don't seem to work well together at the moment.

<comment><USER11> Not really, no. There was some talk about adding a Firebug panel to the built- in tools, but nothing has really come from it, and any deeper UI integration is probably out of the question for being too much work. But suggestions about how to make it better are still welcome, of course.

The main thing we have gotten out of the new devtools are new cool APIs, e.g. for debugging, paint flashing, CSS auto-completion, profiling (though we haven't gotten around to using most of them yet).

<comment><USER14> For everyone interested, the issue related to the built-in tools integration can be found here: [http://code.google.com/p/fbug/issues/detail?id=6320](http://code.google.com/p/fbug/issues/detail?id=6320)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I don't know if it's just on my machine but I prefer the built-in tools for a quick debug because FB is so damn slow.

</comment><comment><USER16> I worked in Firebug for sometime but since Chrome came up with WebKit tools I never looked back,...

</comment><comment><USER17> What a great release, it's hard to tell with new feature I liked more :)

</comment><comment><USER18> But does it support blackboxing? - ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uaFBvItTJrE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uaFBvItTJrE))

<comment><USER14> Not yet, though it's something I suggested some time ago: [http://code.google.com/p/fbug/issues/detail?id=4888](http://code.google.com/p/fbug/issues/detail?id=4888). Let's see if we can get that for the next version.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Great, that seems to have fixed several bugs I've been encountering as well (if I switched tabs the firebug UI would disappear).

</comment><comment><USER20> I only miss those two features

      - Pretty print
      - Hot code replace</comment>


Trinity Nuclear Test Site Open House – Saturday, April 6 - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsmr.army.mil/Trinity/Pages/Home.aspx <comment><USER2> In the same day, the Very Large Array has its open house. So get to Trinity as early as possible (warning: crowds), see as much as you can, and then head 80 miles west to see the VLA. When I went, the guided tours were given by the Chief Scientist himself!

[https://public.nrao.edu/event/vla-spring-open- house-2/2019-0...](https://public.nrao.edu/event/vla-spring-open- house-2/2019-04-06/)

<comment><USER3> One of the fascinating parts of VLA is they allocate observing time in 5 minute chunks. When the next time comes, all 27 dishes move in unison to the observing region. Its is like a living creature.

<comment><USER4> I wouldn't imagine that every five minutes is allotted to a different observation? If that were the case the duty cycle would be terrible because the dishes would spend an inordinate about of time moving.

I could be wrong? Perhaps they're very fast?

<comment><USER5> I understood it as such that every observation uses integral multiples of five-minute intervals.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you're in Las Vegas, the National Atomic Testing Museum is very worth a visit. The last time I was there they had a traveling exhibit of Soviet nuclear propaganda that was fascinating, and there's a lot of info on Trinity and other testing sites. I found the quality of the exhibits to be very high.

<comment><USER7> One of my favorite museums! It's small, but super well done -- and has a gift shop filled with neat little stuff (like the Fatman + Little boy earrings I bought for my girlfriend (which I thought were way cooler than she did...))

I generally avoid Vegas like the plague, but if I ever go back, that's on the top of the list to visit again.

<comment><USER8> Fatman earrings? Is she still your girlfriend?

<comment><USER9> "Fat Man" was the code name for the nuke that was dropped on Nagasaki.

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

"Little Boy" was the code name of the nuke dropped on Hiroshima

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> For anyone considering going to this: There's not much to see. It's basically the short stone obelisk you see in the picture, sitting in an otherwise unremarkable desert. (A fence encloses maybe an acre of surrounding land, but things look the same inside as out.) There's a small one-story home a few miles away where the original test was viewed from that you can go inside, but it's also unremarkable.

I'm really glad I went, but it's more of an intellectual pilgrimage than anything else.

<comment><USER11> I met a traveler from an antique land Who said: A vast Obelisk of stone Stands in the desert... near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a metal drum lies, whose thickness, And shape, and awe inspiring scale, Tell that its sculptor well the intent read to let survive within these lifeless things, The force which they had summoned;

And on the pedestal these words appear: 'I am become death, the destroyer of worlds' Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The glassified green sands stretch far away

<comment><USER12> Yeah. That's what it's like.

I've been to Trinity and to Hiroshima. Both shake me from someplace deep.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I love this area of New Mexico. Other than Trinity, you can go see:

\- White Sands National Monument (spectacular otherworldly landscape)

\- Cloudcroft and the surrounding nature up in the mountains, including an old train trestle on a cliff

\- Sunspot solar observatory

\- Ruidoso, which has skiing the right time of the year

\- Three Rivers Petroglyph site, well-preserved rock art created by native tribes on a hill a few centuries ago

\- Valley of Fire, a dried up lava flow

\- Carlsbad Caverns, a massive cave and national park

EDIT: Forgot to mention very dark and starry skies up in the mountains!

<comment><USER14> I feel like NM is underrated by people who haven't been there. In addition the the attractions you mentioned there are very scenic areas with camping and hiking all over the state. Santa Fe is a great little city right next to an 11,000 ft mountain. Albuquerque is fun too.

I'm currently camping in the mountains close to White Sands. The weather is great and the area is beautiful.

<comment><USER15> You and OP didn't mention the Bosque del Apache. It's a few miles south of Socorro. Every year thousands of birds migrate to there. It's a beautiful sight to behold in the perfect setting to see for miles into the distance.

NM is definitely underrated, but it's hard for me to not see some problems of course. It's got problems from being remote and sparsely populated. It's a desert with plenty of water issues/disputes. It's got good and bad history. Plenty of things to see and do that are beautiful to behold or experience. But I'm even more glad it's not ruined with overpopulation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> There's a lot of mixed reviews of New Mexico in this thread. I would encourage people to go. If you are a fan of the outdoors of Utah and Colorado, archaeology, and can appreciate the food, I'd highly recommend a road trip. The Gila Wilderness, White Sands, Lincoln National forest, Albuquerque, the various Pueblos, Chaco Canyon, Bandelier, Valles Caldera, Abiquiu, Taos, Santa Fe, Santa Fe National Forest (east part, north of Pecos) are all wonderful places to visit for a day, or more in the case of the forests if you want to camp and hike. I personally haven't been to Carlsbad Caverns, but it's probably worth it too, though out of the way.

Even better is to do a giant road trip circuit between the northern parts of New Mexico abd Arizona, and southern parts of Utah and Colorado. You can also easily hit San Juan National Forest/Mesa Verde and Durango, Moab and Arches/Canyonlands/Capitol Reef, Escalante, Zion, and the Grand Canyon without too much driving between them all.

<comment><USER17> I'm sorry you had to post this, but amusingly my coworker who lived in NM previously, Socorro to be exact (graduated & worked for NM tech), did not have many nice things to say about the town or NM overall. A terse summary of his description would be "If you want your car broken into or stolen and/or house robbed then move to NM."

Though, that's his opinion. I visited with my parents when I was much younger. We went to Taos Valley and I remember it was a really beautiful place. Ski during the day and jump in the pool at night.

<comment><USER16> Socorro sucks. I'd be jaded if I had to live there. My parents pushed me to go there NM Tech, but I had been going to high school in Utah and would rather go there for college. NM Tech actually said in their brochures at the time (2003) that "students often live on campus or in one of the many affordable trailer parts nearby" or something to that effect.

If it's any indication, I did move back to Albuquerque in 2009 to try to find a job after graduating with a degree in Physics - because I did miss the culture and the place, even though I loved Utah too, but I couldn't make it work at the height of the recession. Utah wasn't much better - I had to take a part time mobile app QA position, but more of my adult friends were there.

There are pure science jobs available at Los Alamos but they can be a bit hard to come by, I would consider moving back to Santa Fe for the right position.

I would also say that Albuquerque does have my favorite weather. Winter shows up but it's not obnoxious, same with summer. September is the best month for a nice trip

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> For those in the area, the Spring VLA Open House is also taking place on the same day.

[https://public.nrao.edu/event/vla-spring-open- house-2/2019-0...](https://public.nrao.edu/event/vla-spring-open- house-2/2019-04-06/)

<comment><USER18> The VLA is much cooler.

<comment><USER19> Do you mind explaining a bit? I'm trying to decide whether to go to the Trinity site or the VLA.

<comment><USER18> So first: if you're willing to spend the night in Socorro it's pretty easy to do both. Trinity is about an hour drive and it takes about 2 hours to see it all (it'd be an hour but you have to wait for the shuttle to the house and back) then it's 2.5 to 3 hours to the VLA (don't speed through Magdalena, rez cops love to post up there) so you can be there by early afternoon.

That said. The Trinity site is some plaques, a shack and New Mexico scrub land; the VLA is (if in a close configuration) a dramatic sight, some plaques and New Mexico scrub land AND if it's an open house: the chance pick the brains of operations people.

That's the big difference, open house VLA you can talk to people who's lives are the VLA; Trinity you can talk to people who volunteered to keep tourists from doing anything stupid.

<comment><USER18> Also Also: feel free to stop by the New Mexico Tech physics department, they might not admit it but they're all willing to shoot the shit about telescopes and bombs at the drop of a hat.

<comment><USER20> Agreed, there's lots of interesting stuff to do around that part of the country if you can finagle the necessary access. Or at least, there was, back in the 'Star Wars' era.

My first visit to NM was on an ISEF-sponsored trip in 1983, when the science fair was held in Albuquerque. We didn't visit the Trinity site (or at least I didn't), but we got to play with a CO2 laser at Sandia Labs, chill out on the couches encircling the Cray 1 at Kirtland AFB, and watch the NMIMT 'Terminal Effects' group blow some stuff up in the desert. (Un)fortunately the demo was conducted with conventional explosives only, but it was still fun to watch.

There was also a gigantic wooden trestle spanning a canyon in the same area, wrapped in giant Helmholtz coils for testing aircraft under various EMP conditions. I imagine that's all done via simulation these days.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Weird, I feel like I know the place after playing that Infocom adventure 'Trinity' many decades ago. Perhaps one day I will visit the site in person to complete the circle...

</comment><comment><USER3> I went a decade ago. You can visit VLA any weekday too.

When I went I could still see some trinitite, the green glass from bomb surface sand melting.

Also not far away is Roswell with a UFO museum. For the most part it is an oil production and immigrant town.

Along the way you pass through Lincoln County where Billy the Kid met his end. There are various legendary events there.

<comment><USER14> Roswell is worth an afternoon but it's one of the more boring areas of the state.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm surprised nobody has mentioned Roswell, NM. There you'll find a museum full of humorous oddities and it can be entertaining to check out.

</comment><comment><USER3> I believe they have restored the first Saturday in October date also (suspended a few years after 9-11). However that weekend is also the Albuquerque Balloon Festival. So you have the bonus of viewing this event. But at the same time competing busy travel arrangements with this very popular event.

</comment><comment><USER12> The Nuclear Museum in Albuquerque is pretty amazing too. It's big, with a lot to see both inside and out.

</comment><comment><USER23> It's really a very interesting place to visit, if only to see the vast emptiness of the test range. I went last time it was open and it was definitely worth the trip.

Particularly amusing are the ranks of bleachers sitting out in the middle of the desert (so people can watch weapons tests).

</comment><comment><USER24> Related: does anyone have the lyrics for the Hiroshima/Nagasaki Requiem? [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyaLeoX9JlY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyaLeoX9JlY)

</comment><comment><USER25> Trinitite collection season is upon us again!

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

<comment><USER14> I sure hope not.

> It is now illegal to take the remaining material from the site

You should not be removing anything from government property or parks. Leave no trace.

<comment><USER26> Leave no trace in a wretched and empty monument to man's cruelty to man?

Odd sentiment.

<comment><USER14> Yes, exactly because of what you said. Remnants should be left for others to see.

"Leave no trace" wasn't quite the right thing to say since you're going there to see human traces but the sentiment is clear.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> When I visited years ago, some folks brought a spectrometer and analyzed some samples. Spoiler: Lots of radioactive elements around. A memorable part of a Radiation Vacation.

</comment><comment><USER28> I would go if they reenacted the test. I am generally a pacifist but a nuclear explosion still must be an awesome sight.

<comment><USER20> It would be environmentally problematic to set off nukes as a tourist attraction, but I actually think that will need to be considered at some point. It won't be long before no one alive has seen a nuclear explosion in person, and I don't think that will be a good thing. The same people who currently deny the Apollo landings, evolution, vaccines, Sandy Hook and so forth will move on to "nuke denial."

They will argue that no such bomb could ever have been made, and that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were false flags, or some bullshit along similar lines. Or worse, they will argue that nukes are just bigger versions of ordinary bombs, perfectly kosher for use in any scenario that would otherwise justify dropping bombs on the enemy of the day.

So an argument could be made that we should light one off in the desert every Fourth of July and sell tickets, just to pre-empt this particular subculture of stupidity.

<comment><USER29> It doesn't really matter that a tiny minority believes that. There's absolutely no legitimate justified need to reenact nuclear detonations with actual nuclear detonations to prove it ever happened to deranged low IQ skeptics. It's OK that we have a handful of deranged low IQ skeptics who have nonsensical beliefs. It's OK to just ignore them. It's not critical or even marginally important that society spend much time seriously addressing the most fringe of their beliefs.

<comment><USER20> _It doesn 't really matter that a tiny minority believes that._

I would've agreed with you until relatively recently. Lately, those people seem to gain more political power over the rest of us in every election.

I'm not that serious about setting off nukes to educate, impress, or otherwise remind them, though. For one thing, there's absolutely no reason to believe it would work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> TLDR? Link seems to time out.</comment>


Messenger – Go library for building Facebook bots - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/paked/messenger <comment><USER2> Hey! Author here, happy to answer any questions about this library or the Facebook messenger platform in general.</comment>