Y Combinator Challenge - Mission Accomplished - <AUTHOR> http://astartupaday.wordpress.com/2008/09/26/y-combinator-challenge-mission-accomplished/

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for all the great comments and support throughout this series of posts. Besides the enjoyment of brainstorming through each of pg's ideas, by far the best part of this experience was the chance to discover the Hacker News community - you guys rock.

Also, I'd really appreciate it if you could let me know which (if any) of these ideas you think might be worth pursuing. Someone posted a comment here a while back suggesting that after the challenge is over, I take the next 30 days to take the best idea and actually build it out. It might be a fun project to take on - contact me if you're interested in helping out (kleneway at hotmail).

<comment><USER2> If none of these ideas captures you to the point where you can make the decision on your own, you might want to wait before starting a company.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not looking to start a company, just looking for a fun weekend project to hack on. I've got some thoughts on which one I want to take on, but it never hurts to get some feedback from the community.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> So you must be a trillionaire now?

Seriously, take one of the ideas and run with it. Ideas are easy. Execution is what counts.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's the plan. Three things:

1\. I have a lot of respect for what you guys think and wanted to get some input on which one to tackle.

2\. It's more fun for me to work on a project with other people than to go it alone. This is my way of trying to find some new people to work with.

3\. I'm 100% not in this for the money. This is a side project for me - I love coding, I love brainstorming ideas, and I love getting feedback. If I were a trillionaire, you know what I'd do? I'd come up with some ideas, throw them out there, and hopefully find some cool people to work on it with me.

<comment><USER4> If I were a trillionaire, I would have some more interesting uses for that kind of money. Run my own projects, absolutely, but I'd hire great people to take care of the actual and experimental coding.

Futzing around with other people's APIs is one of the most frustrating parts of coding for me. Only reason I code myself is that I'm better at doing it than anyone I could hire. Only real advantage over outsourcing is the ay it pushes you to the edge of innovation because you can see the technological possibilities before other businesses do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The site builder but oriented around plugging it into other sites. You create something like Weebly but focus purely on letting other sites give it to their users (for profile pages, or entire sites). Charge for the service.

<comment><USER6> Isn't that what CushyCMS does (minus the charging in most cases)?

<comment><USER5> I hadn't seen CushyCMS. Just checked it out. The way it works seems entirely different from what I'm talking about. I want to be able to add a page designer to my site for my many thousands (or millions) of users. Or whatever I want. CushyCMS wants FTP/SFTP information for single site and it's not at all clear whether I can integrate it into my own site.

<comment><USER6> Oh I see what you mean. Then you want eXponent CMS. www.exponentcms.com. I'm good friends with the people who developed it, and I've used it myself it's a great package.

Lets you edit pages with a WYSIWYG interface instead of plugging in code or dealing with text templates. Give it a shot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> So what? The whole thing seemed like a waste of time. There's a million people out there who can shit ideas on a list of possible areas- the only thing that matters is actual execution.</comment>


Tim Cook On OS X Mountain Lion - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204880404577226864202052768.html

<comment><USER2> This should be more popular, it's a compelling read.</comment>


Dasher: Writing text really fast without typing or speaking - <AUTHOR> https://inventability.net/articles/reviews/dasher.html <comment><USER2> This would be awesome for people who are disabled. Voice input is still a pain and only works with a limited number of applications. If you could somehow switch between keyboard and tracking for the mouse pointer, this could give full use of a computer to many people.

<comment><USER3> Dasher was developed largely with disabled people in mind. Have a look at the various human interface devices you can dash with:

[https://help.gnome.org/users/dasher/unstable/specialneeds.ht...](https://help.gnome.org/users/dasher/unstable/specialneeds.html.en)

[http://www.inference.eng.cam.ac.uk/mackay/abstracts/OneButto...](http://www.inference.eng.cam.ac.uk/mackay/abstracts/OneButton.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The android keyboard version of Dasher is available in the F-droid repo: [https://f-droid.org/app/dasher.android](https://f-droid.org/app/dasher.android)

</comment><comment><USER5> This is really awesome. It looks hard, but it isn't. Here's a talk from 2007 that explains it well [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpOxbesRNBc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpOxbesRNBc)

</comment><comment><USER6> Wow, this looks really cool. Looks like something you could do while exercising, like with a stationary bike or treadmill.

</comment><comment><USER7> Appears to be really hard to pull off. How many hours of training does a person need to achieve let's say 20wpm?

<comment><USER5> People seem to pick up Dasher pick up pretty quickly [http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/dasher/users.html](http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/dasher/users.html) and the demo makes it seem much easier than it is [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpOxbesRNBc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpOxbesRNBc)</comment></comment>


It's Time for the Elites to Rise Up Against the Ignorant Masses - <AUTHOR> https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/06/28/its-time-for-the-elites-to-rise-up-against-ignorant-masses-trump-2016-brexit/ <comment><USER2> Probably not the best turn of phrase.

I've observed an interesting trend however, which is that as the world ages (life expectancy rises and the number of people over the age of 65 grows faster than the number of people under 35) it seems to empower the politics of nostalgia. "Back in my day ..." and all that. I was really impressed at how Bernie Sanders got the younger generation motivated and out there. We need more people to do that because I feel like it makes no sense at all for people who have perhaps 20 to 30 years left to live being the deciding vote on issues that are going to affect the country for 50, 60 or even a hundred years.</comment>


Pirate Android developer steals game and publishes on his own account - <AUTHOR> http://androidcommunity.com/total-jerk-developer-steals-beta-game-he-was-supposed-to-be-testing-publishes-to-android-market-20110111/ Has anyone else ran into this sort of thing? it's a really distrubing trend? <comment><USER2> Thats pretty ridiculous I wonder if google is planning on cracking down on things like this or if they can at all? I a lot of pirated copies of other games as well countless SNES game rips ..etc</comment>


Will Trump White House tear down journal paywalls? Many anxiously await decision - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/05/will-trump-white-house-tear-down-journal-paywalls-many-anxiously-await-decision <comment><USER2> Why don't we just wait non-anxiously?

[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20%22no%20harm%20in%20waiting%22&sort=byDate&type=comment)

<comment><AUTHOR> Sounds reasonable to me. At the same time, I think articles about potential new government policies are somewhat different than software release announcements and the like. It's usually easier to influence government policy before it's announced than after.

(And I'm not a fan of the "anxiously" in the title, either. :) I considered trimming off everything after the question mark, but I wasn't sure if that was kosher.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It's amusing that TFA never mentions Sci-Hub, [0] which arguably renders it all moot.

0) [https://sci-hub.now.sh/](https://sci-hub.now.sh/)

</comment><comment><USER4> To think that a decision like this rests on the whims of the most incompetent public official (and his cronies/family)in known history of the developed world is remarkable.

The decision might come out in favor But the point still stands. When we have public officials that are incompetent everything is just random. In a way it forces us to break the illusion of how we see the world and exposes the reality. Life is fragile, we take things for granted and everything is just random

<comment><USER5> Honestly is random all that bad? Should eventually trend towards 50/50 positive/negative which I'd take any day of the week considering how useless most government is.</comment></comment>


Free private GitHub for 2 years - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/redeem/tech-summit-2016 <comment><USER2> "Coupon can't be redeemed any more times."

Seems like the offer has expired.</comment>


5 Steps to Take Control of Your Data Online - <AUTHOR> https://www.instagram.com/p/BfeN80VAQBd/ <comment><USER2> Good start! What is the difference between Search Encrypt and DuckDuckGo?</comment>


What Privacy Experts Said Would Happen - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/06/travelers-images-stolen-attack-cbp/591403/ <comment><USER2> If there was ever an administration more deaf to "I told you so," I've never seen it.

Too bad this will change nothing.</comment>


Panda: a tool for hackers and designers - <AUTHOR> http://usepanda.com <comment><USER2> I think the feeling of 'missing something' is a false fear. If something is really good, or really popular, you will see it (like 2048). When you need inspiration you can find it. But what most people need to do (myself included) is seek inspiration less and do more work.

<comment><USER3> Yes, there is something as too much of a good thing.

Even if I mostly browse Hacker News, I usually see quite a few in-depth articles that would really merit more attention than what I usually I give them, just because I'm distracted by the next shiny news item.

At some point, it ceases being inspiration and "professional interest" and becomes entertainment, or just distraction.

(This is just how I feel personally, I don't want to diss the app that looks very nice).

<comment><USER4> You're right, but a lot of inspiration comes from serendipity. Just randomly clicking and hitting a link that sparks for you. It's why I created [http://skimfeed.com](http://skimfeed.com) to scratch my itch.

Additionally I've found focusing on the work of others rather than "news" works best. Show hn, tutorials, questions and answers on topics of interest (stack is huge), new plugins, that sorta thing. That way you're improving even in your downtime.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This seems like a muddled UX to me - either it could all be integrated/aggregated and filtered or it should be more focused to start.

I'd also say from the UX perspective there's a bit of an expectation that [ left side in a list right side in expanded view ] tends to denote a relationship between the two when in fact there is none.

Feels like an aggregator that didn't want to _just_ be an aggregator. It does look pretty, though.

<comment><USER6> >I'd also say from the UX perspective there's a bit of an expectation that [ left side in a list right side in expanded view ] tends to denote a relationship between the two when in fact there is none.

I agree. I clicked the links on the left expecting some sort of in-page action, but was met with tabs being opened which is counter-intuitive to what one has come to expect with in-site/in-app menus.

Or perhaps I've just been spoiled by UI's like that of Alien Blue for Reddit?

<comment><USER5> Or Gmail. Or countless others.

If you're going to split the screen I think it needs to be split in half for there to be an expectation that they're independent, unrelated elements.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This might not have been the best name for a product, given the very popular Pandas[1] package that will probably win in Google.

[1]: [http://pandas.pydata.org/](http://pandas.pydata.org/)

<comment><USER8> This was my first thought as well. However...aren't we going to run out of names eventually for projects? Unless we all start making words up which defeats the purpose of a memorable named (unless you're Google).

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I have to say that while all the info was in front of me, it still took me a while to understand what i was looking at...

</comment><comment><USER10> Looks nice, really like the left sidebar.

Since this site only works with a 5 sources at the moment, it could tell me a bit deeper info about the links it's getting, besides the title.

4 of 5 sources (exception being sidebar.io) feature 2 similar metadatas: # upvotes and # comments. They're important metrics for me as a browser figuring out what's important. Show these on the page (optionally?).

And look how much work I have to do to say, see news from HN and DN:

1) load page (shows HN for instance) 2) click hamburger 3) click DN icon 4) (close hamburger?)

If this is an aggregator, it could do more to make this my awesome news dashboard, showing content from everywhere mixed together. Maybe mix HN, DN, and sidebar (textual content, i.e. titles) in the "text list" sidebar. Your hamburger menu would hide/show these from the mix. And same with Dribble/Behance (visual content) - show them as a mix in the right side. Or just keep separate sections/columns for each source.

Though either way, I like the color coding to indicate what source I'm looking at, e.g. blue for DN, orange for HN.

There's definitely value in this, and that value is a special purpose RSS-like reader bringing similar sites into a unified happy design aesthetic with crisp UI.

</comment><comment><USER11> The Popular/Latest buttons are a nightmare. It's only by using the 2x/1x button I realised that clicking on the button changes the view to what was previously on the button.

</comment><comment><USER12> This is a fun little tool. I keep the "use as website" bookmarked on my toolbar. This tool actually used to be called "geisha" and the logo was of a geisha girl. IT was deemed offensive so they changed it to Panda. I personally like to use it just for inspiration before I am getting ready to do a new design. Not to copy anything, but just to get my creative juices flowing.

</comment><comment><USER13> I already use it, but the last update with "Latest" and "Popular" switches made me a little confused. When I press "latest" button, does it switches to latests or already showing the latests? Maybe a slider switch instead of toggle switch would be more clear.

Also, as a non-designer user, I'd like to use designs section to see 9gag items :)

So, It's a great, every-day-use tool for me :)

</comment><comment><USER14> Supernice feed that is simple for me to use. I clicked the buttons and everything seemed easy enough to understand. I don't really get some of the comments here as I find the UI easy to understand as in I clicked everything, it worked, then I understood it.same as I do for every new site I encounter..

(Disclaimer: Friend of one of the guy's behind this.)

<comment><USER15> Whenever I see a panel on the left of some main content I expect it to do something to that content.

Perhaps the problem is that the Dribble side feels like the main content for the page. I mean, you can even hide the left panel to let the "main content" take over the whole screen!

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> No offense, but I think "a tool for hackers and designers" is a pretty bad title for what you want to publicize.

</comment><comment><USER17> I actually really like Panda but it's old news [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7386597](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7386597) the Geisha renaming thing was pretty high profile as far as our community goes/happened so quickly...so I dunno how it was missed

<comment><USER17> yeah yeah, downvote, whatever. One nice thing DN has is when you submit a new link it searches and says 'that link was posted x hours ago, are you sure you want to post it again?'

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I think it's a sweet solution conceptually even if it needs a bit of work on the UI to be more intuitive. Not a designer myself, but I see the value in being able to indulge in a sort of binge scrapbooking.

(Disclaimer: Also a friend of one of the guy's behind this.)

</comment><comment><USER19> Small bug: when clicking on an "Ask HN" or any HN link that just drops to the comments section, an error page [0] appears.

[0] [http://usepanda.com/app/item?id=7743604](http://usepanda.com/app/item?id=7743604)

</comment><comment><USER20> Previously seen as Geisha: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7319937](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7319937)

However they renamed due to seeing their name as belittling to female developers/designers.

</comment><comment><USER21> Personally don't really have much time to browse through but its a nice tool for quickly browsing through at a glimpse. Looks really nice too

</comment><comment><USER22> If you design every day, this is definitely a good way to simplify the supply of inspiration. Decent start.

</comment><comment><USER23> Would be awesome if this incorporated inbound.org and growthhackers.com

</comment><comment><USER24> Really like the UI. Reminds me of Designspiration.

</comment><comment><USER25> I like the chrome extension

</comment><comment><USER26> Very complicated UI

</comment><comment><USER27> The internet just got a little more distracted

<comment><USER28> Which is why I don't use it anymore. It's nice to use in the beginning, but it starts to get detracting every time you open a nice tab.

<comment><USER29> hey! that's why we've created the web version as well, so you can have it whenever you want instead of having as your start page [http://usepanda.com/app](http://usepanda.com/app)

<comment><USER30> Are you guys from Cape Town?

<comment><USER29> no I'm from Istanbul and William is from London, and now we're in Berlin :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> love it</comment>


Vic Gundotra: Pseudonyms are coming to Google Plus - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/110215372857969443518/posts/b9czpBv3MBy

<comment><USER2> This still misses the issue by making a distinction between "real names" and pseudonyms in the first place. Fine you might now be able to go by a pseudonym, but are you still required to sign up with a Google Approved real name? Will Lennart Poettering's Google+ be unbanned? [[http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/google-doesnt-like-my- name....](http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/google-doesnt-like-my-name.html)] Will they keep auto banning names they don't like? They seem to continue to fail to get it. :(

<comment><USER3> At least one other problem is that the term Gundrotta used, 'pseudonym', implies it will be connected to their primary account and real id, rather than being an entirely separate account under a anonymous persona. Hence, it doesn't sound like it will offer dissidents and whistleblowers real protection from a government order to Google for their identity.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't understand. Why wouldn't a dissident or whistleblower just create a separate account under a fake but real-sounding name, then use their preferred pseudonym?

It seems to me that the issue wasn't about anonymity from government, since that's easy with a fake name. The issue was about respecting people's choice of self-representation, which this policy does in a way that more accurately mirrors our analog procedures.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Let's wait for official word, instead of rumor. This twitter-able statement doesn't really say anything except that Google is listening... It doesn't say what they heard, or what the full reaction to it is.

He states that they are 'moving away' from the Real Name policy, but... Is that his interpretation of what was said, or was that actually said? We don't know. He probably doesn't even know.

<comment><USER2> I think it was said best here [http://www.jwz.org/blog/2011/10/eff-declares- premature-victo...](http://www.jwz.org/blog/2011/10/eff-declares-premature- victory-in-nymwars/)

<comment><USER5> As long as they allow pseudonyms, that is in fact a victory in the "Nymwars", which were always more about pseudonymity than anonymity. Again, if you require strong anonymity, there are far better places to publish. From what I've seen, Google requires you to enter a phone number when you create an account in the US and some other countries. You can still get a prepaid phone in cash, but the point of sale and cell tower pings can still geolocate you to a city, possibly even a few blocks, so for strong anonymity, you're better off using a service that doesn't require phone / SMS confirmation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Why is identity tied to a name? Identity is such a fluid construct, and the arbitrary forcing of it into First/Surname seems on one hand anglocentric, and on another hand, trying to impose on online identity the vestiges of real- world identity that we don't need on here.

I would think given the discourse around online identity (i.e. <http://www.juliandibbell.com/> and <http://www.mit.edu/~sturkle/>), including feminist discourse, socio-political, etc that we would beyond this.</comment>


Ask HN: What was your biggest fuckup of 2014? - <AUTHOR>

As a counterpoint to all the 'look what awesome stuff I did this year' articles...<p>What didn't work out for you this year? What would you do differently if you could? <comment><USER2> I was involved in a state department funded project. It was all around human rights and security, so it had some real virtue, but on the other hand, people in that sector are frequently nasty; apologetically rude well past the point of being 'bluntly honest,' very full of themselves around their 'mission,' even when other approaches, like outright commercial ones, work better, and in this case tiresomely sexist and ultimately being and fulfilling a hierarchical top-down world (not surprising given the funding source and eventual status in the buddy network) while making all kinds of noise about being a progressive organization.

After a few years working on the project I'd put in some good ideas that led to $1M+ in funding (mostly grants) and lifted the company from hand to mouth to a real thing. And in general I really helped to shape the organization in positive ways. Unfortunately the person with the direct connection to funding really didn't understand development, wanted me to be something I wasn't, and really had poor people skills as evidenced by the trail of people he'd burned over time. So early this year things got so heated that I left. I've been around for a while and from experience might have left without burning bridges, but while I wasn't rude, I made it very clear that I didn't appreciate what was happening.

Eight months later it still bothers me, because I should have seen it coming, and because I wasn't able to change it, nor did I find a way to turn it to my advantage.

<comment><USER3> <quote>Eight months later it still bothers me, because I should have seen it coming, and because I wasn't able to change it, nor did I find a way to turn it to my advantage.</quote> I'm dealing this due to a failed project (last year was spent on it). I (and other team members) did see it coming though. I'm still sad/mad that our higher ups didn't heed credible guidance.

<comment><USER2> Well, more correctly, I did see it coming, but it was like seeing a train wreck happening in slow motion and not being able to stop it. Everyone else on the team found it a problem too, but they wouldn't really organize (or assert themselves in general). But c'est la vie, there are other good opportunities.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Well... I launched a sale on my online shop and forgot to enable stock control.

Which results in my selling about 20 more t-shirts than I had available. Ouch.

I decided to be open about the mistake and the next day I manually sent an email to everyone whose order couldn't be fulfilled to explain what had happened.

The surprising thing was that everyone was cool about it. Honesty for the win :)

<comment><USER4> _The surprising thing was that everyone was cool about it. Honesty for the win :)_

People generally respond well when treated like people. Some don't, which is unfortunate. That's both a popular and silly reason for one (businesses, people with a pulpit, etc) to treat people like unruly masses as a defense.

</comment></comment><comment> anon-11235813 I ran out of runway for my startup, so I took a contract job as a PM in a well-funded startup that has little or no traction.

Company is full of senior management-type guys who have their eyes on the big payout, but because they're well-funded and don't know what they're doing, they want to offshore everything. That's right: they're offshoring a new product that they themselves do not grasp. The only specs are some existing code they bought and whatever comes out of their mouth in a sales meeting. This makes what would normally be just a clusterfuck turn into a royal, 5-star clusterfuck.

I just saw them take 15 people and 3 months to do what 1 guy could do in 2 weeks. And they did it with 20-hour days, yelling, and all the other drama. If it wasn't destroying people's lives like a meat grinder, it'd be a comedy.

Now I have to find a way to ditch these assholes before they ruin my life too.

</comment><comment><USER5> My biggest mistake was not vetting companies enough when interviewing. Not catching big warning signs and thinking naively that I can work 60+ hour weeks for 1+ year with a significant amount dedicated to coding in tight deadlines - while I made most deadlines fine (the one I failed was due to no planning allocated to estimating the time to complete my team's work by product), it has seriously burnt me out & I've had to reduce my work time to ~35 hours a week (at least to no complaints)

I need to trust my instincts more & be more cautious with such big moves.

</comment><comment><USER6> Not planning for 2015. I didn't save money as I should have and now I'm spending an indefinite amount of time (minimum 3 months) starting in March with no income (due to attending a bootcamp). I didn't expect that I would be doing this and now I'm trying to survive on nothing so that I can have some breathing room for months while I'm learning and looking for a job.

It's some added stress that I don't need and I'm working as much overtime as I can now when instead I should be spending my time studying/preparing for this class.

And the apex seals in my RX-7's engine finally went and it needs a rebuild. :( That's probably not going to get done till at least next year, but now I'm regretting dumping so much money into this car.

</comment><comment><USER7> I focused on building an awesome product for my client and ended up doing free work for them (on the assumption they'd get funding and be able to pay me).

Never happened, the client got an awesome product, some free work, and I had no new work lined up afterwards.

Currently in the middle of a cashflow crisis.

<comment><USER6> Sorry to hear that; that's a rough situation. I made a similar mistake in my early 20s and didn't get paid on a $20k contract right after it. I couldn't afford a lawyer to get myself paid. Those were hard times.

This seemed to happen a lot to designers but I've seen them start to take a much more ruthless/professional approach to their business.

I know this doesn't help your situation right now, but this video is some fantastic guidance going forward: "F __* You, Pay Me! " [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVkLVRt6c1U](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVkLVRt6c1U)

<comment><USER7> I've watched this video, loved it.

Just to be clear here though, I said I wouldn't charge for that time, so it was a mistake on MY part.

I did get a great example for my portfolio though.

<comment><USER6> As long as you don't work on spec ever, we're cool. lol

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> my marriage :(

I honestly don't know what more I could have done. You can give 1000% and keep pushing forward, but if the other person isn't giving anything and keeps putting you two steps back, there really isn't any hope in salvaging.

<comment><USER9> That doesn't sound like something that was your fault. Sorry it didn't work out man :/

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I quit odesk this year. For a significant part of the year I was out of work. In retrospect I could have made a smoother transition.

A couple of bad clients. Didn't listen to my gut feeling and worked with them. Sucked up months of my time first in working for them and then getting them to pay me. Lesson: upfront payment :) as a sign of good faith.

I think I did okay with friends and family which always a relief to know :)

</comment><comment><USER11> Here's a handy guide I wrote for how to learn from your mistakes:

[http://scottberkun.com/essays/44-how-to-learn-from-your- mist...](http://scottberkun.com/essays/44-how-to-learn-from-your-mistakes/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Scott. I liked this line a lot "Don't equate making mistakes with being a mistake".

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I started smoking... Trying to stop now.

<comment><USER13> Good idea. All power to you.</comment></comment>


Apple acquires FoundationDB - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/24/apple-acquires-durable-database-company-foundationdb/

<comment><USER2> Comments moved to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9259986](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9259986).</comment>


Why we are withdrawing the NHS Common User Interface - <AUTHOR> https://digital.nhs.uk/blog/transformation-blog/2019/why-we-are-withdrawing-the-nhs-common-user-interface <comment><USER2> I've responded to their email address about what would come next - in short I think they should publish high level requirements and principles that should be met by each platform. Rather than trying to create everything first party, they should allow a mechanism for taking on board permissively licensed assets (or pull requests to their requirements and principles) as effectively donations.

The NHS has a lot of good will in the UK and they would be an ideal, if not THE ideal, co-ordinators of an open source health programme. Creating a unified look and feel for web services would be a good proof of concept, but I believe this could be extended to other libraries, components or even full systems/solutions in time.

<comment><USER3> What exactly do you mean? Have you seen the new service manual? They welcome contributions from outside NHS Digital, anyone can contribute to it in theory, so long as you can show there's a real need [1].

The NHS are doing more in-house, where it's sensible. For example the NHS Business Service Authority are building a replacement for [https://www.jobs.nhs.uk](https://www.jobs.nhs.uk) whereas before it was basically entirely out sourced to the private sector.

[0] [https://beta.nhs.uk/service-manual/](https://beta.nhs.uk/service-manual/) [1] [https://github.com/nhsuk/nhsuk-service-manual- backlog/blob/m...](https://github.com/nhsuk/nhsuk-service-manual- backlog/blob/master/docs/CRITERIA.md)

<comment><USER2> Is this not what is being withdrawn?

But still, just going by the link you have a list of principles:

[https://beta.nhs.uk/service-manual/design- principles](https://beta.nhs.uk/service-manual/design-principles)

Which are all well and good, but are more akin to a 'vision' than technical design principles (especially with regard to preference of tradeoffs, data management, priority of platforms etc).

The rest of it seems to be strongly geared towards the web. It may well be that the NHS only wants to collaborate on public-facing web services, much like GOV.UK and the Government Digital Service, but this would need to be either extended or abstracted to be applicable to, say, administrative systems.

<comment><USER4> > Is this not what is being withdrawn?

What's being withdrawn is their original CUI, linked in the article [0]. From what I can tell, this is very distinct from their new digital service manual, which seems to be replacing the old CUI.

> ...but this would need to be either extended or abstracted to be applicable > to, say, administrative systems.

Based on nothing more than a rough skim of the CUI, admittedly, it seems like the original was a very web/interface-oriented design system in the first place. A focus on web components makes sense, since administrative systems can be implemented with a web-based frontend, and web design systems can be adapted to other user interfaces, because they provide a set of baseline, expected behaviours to replicate.

[0]: [https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160921140920/ht...](https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160921140920/http://systems.digital.nhs.uk/data/cui)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I spent quite a bit of time implementing the medicines management parts of this for a product that I don't think ever shipped (I, and the majority of the dev team left at around the same time due to concerns around management direction). I definitely thought that side of things seemed well thought out, and there was a lot of value in having consistent display of medication details and dosing across systems to try to make it as clear as possible for the users.

</comment><comment><USER6> I can't tell you how bad UI design is in existing EMRs.

Last night I spent 15 minutes trying to get FirstNet (a Cerner system) to accept a medication order so I could discharge a patient.

The problem? Inconsistent UI.

      - Firstly, the patient had incorrectly had a medication allergy to codeine recorded; and I was trying to prescribe a medication containing codeine. The patient had had nausea and vomiting in response to previous morphine administration, which is a drug side effect (Mild), not a drug allergy. So this was the information I was trying to encode.
      - So, I removed the codeine drug allergy.
      - But then, because there were no allergies recorded, it wouldn't let me prescribe a drug unless the drug allegies had been reviewed.
      - So I entered the allergy recording section; which has a UI which is not only totally inconsistent with the hodge-podge of the rest of the application, but *inconsistent within itself*
      -

This is the screen for adding a drug allergy. [https://ibb.co/Y7gs85h](https://ibb.co/Y7gs85h) Guess what bit I have to fill out first?

Hint: It is not what you think.

I must fill out the right side of the screen first, because as soon as I either __double-click on Morphine __on the left hand side, or Hit the 'select' button left-of-middle, it considers that I have completed the details I need to enter, and closes out of this screen. So the _1._ at the top is a lie!

So, now I am trying to start by completing the right side of the screen, from 2 down. [https://ibb.co/kcgYJw2](https://ibb.co/kcgYJw2)

      - Note that I have changed the reaction type in 2. from 'Allergy' to 'Side effect'.
      - Now I have to select the side effect; in the search pane on the left.
      - It's vomiting, so I select it once. I can now double click on Vomiting! Horray!
      -

So, now to fill out the remaining details. Be careful not to click ahead, or it will close out; forcing you to have to restart the process all over again.

Now, I have 2 more steps to complete. I need to confirm that this is the correct set of allergies and I have reviewed it. [https://ibb.co/nM1fXtB](https://ibb.co/nM1fXtB)

      - In a UI change, I now need to click the green tick in the top left to proceed.

I can't even bear the pain of going through the last step because once I had navigated all of the above, a final UX change on the page where I need to over-rule the Clinical Decision Support Dialogue that is trying to warn me that because there is a side-effect to Morphine and I am prescribing Codeine, would I like to proceed. A somewhat useful notice, as they are the same class; but really frustrating and since I had just coded it as a mild side-effect, not a severe allergy, I would hope that an intelligent CDSS would recognise this and stop giving me alert fatigue.

In my state of fatigue (14 hour shift after a 10 hour shift the day before), I inadvertently clicked the wrong UI elements and had to repeat the process so many times that I actually started documenting it because it was so fucking ridiculous. I was trying to use the system as it was intended; To actually record accurate information that would be of benefit in future patient encounters. The system _actively worked against me achieving this aim_.

EMR Designers should be first against the wall when the revolution comes.

To bring this a bit more back on topic, it would be lovely if there were consistent UI standards. But the horse has bolted so far. I can't see how we are going to get human centred design on more than a fraction of deployed EMRs at any point within the next 15 years; the infrastructure and licensing deals that have been done are too established and the inertia too slow.

The NHS actually does have an eMR that it has built itself - Leeds - [https://www.digitalhealth.net/2018/01/leeds-teaching- hospita...](https://www.digitalhealth.net/2018/01/leeds-teaching-hospitals- trust-electronic-health-record/) Apparently it is pretty good (relatively speaking!)

<comment><USER7> > EMR Designers should be first against the wall when the revolution comes.

It's just so mind-boggling how this shit doesn't lead to more people dying. I swear, the more critical the thing, the shittier the UI.

<comment><USER8> >It's just so mind-boggling how this shit doesn't lead to more people dying.

Medical errors do cause a lot of deaths: [https://www.npr.org/sections/health- shots/2016/05/03/4766361...](https://www.npr.org/sections/health- shots/2016/05/03/476636183/death-certificates-undercount-toll-of-medical- errors)

I don't know if any significant portion of that is linked to bad UI design in EMR software, but it wouldn't surprise me.

<comment><USER9> See [https://khn.org/news/death-by-a-thousand- clicks/](https://khn.org/news/death-by-a-thousand-clicks/) for examples

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If I were making this decision, or the decision about what should come next, I would be trying to create quantative evidence about what works and doesn't work to inform the choice. I didn't see that in the article.

<comment><USER11> I wouldn't. That kind of user testing is _extremely_ time consuming, and often pointless because it's obvious what works and what doesn't.

Google famously did silly amounts of AB testing on button colours and whatnot, but material design is much better than any of that achieved and that was just fine by getting some good graphic designers and thinking about it.

<comment><USER12> But material design is garbage?

<comment><USER11> I think you're probably in the minority.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> People may also be interested in this:

"Researchers and innovators requiring access to data to help solve complex health and care challenges are invited to apply to participate in Health Data Research UK's Sandbox."

[https://www.hdruk.ac.uk/news/call-for-applications-to- test-3...](https://www.hdruk.ac.uk/news/call-for-applications-to- test-37-5m-new-uk-health-data-research-services/)

</comment><comment><USER13> TLDR version: "it's making it too hard to privatise services"</comment>


Women Earn 51% Less Than Men Over 15-Year Time Span - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-28/women-earn-51-less-than-men-over-15-year-time-span-study-shows <comment><USER2> The compound effect of this is much worse than it looks because the money that you have that you can make work for you is the _surplus_ and when you earn that much less your surplus drops by a much larger percentage still.

</comment><comment><USER3> This article is a little bit confusing to me, where did the 80% figure come from? is it just because those studies looked at one year? would the pay gap increase if longer term studies were done?</comment>


Separating Android's encryption and lockscreen passwords (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://copperhead.co/blog/2015/07/08/android-encryption-password <comment><AUTHOR> I tried out CopperheadOS earlier this morning. The encryption password/pin combo was working, although I ended up flashing back to stock nexus so I can install Signal again.

It's listed as abandoned, so it doesn't look like the change is going to be upstreamed: [https://android- review.googlesource.com/#/c/154841/](https://android- review.googlesource.com/#/c/154841/) (also in article)

Is it just me, or is that page awfully quiet?</comment>


Paper: It's Time for Low Latency - <AUTHOR> http://www.scs.stanford.edu/~rumble/papers/latency_hotos11.pdf <comment><USER2> This is an interesting article, but as usual it will probably take a bit longer than predicted before all of this is in place.

> While the speed of light limits latency in wide area networks, electrons can > traverse 100m of copper cables and back in about 1µs

It's not the electrons that move that quickly, it's the information. Think of it like a filled garden hose. If you turn on the tap the water will come out at the other side very quickly, but the time it takes for the water to go from the faucet to the other end of the hose is much longer. Similarly the drift velocity of electrons in a copper wire is very low, generally less than a millimeter per second.

<comment><USER3> The drift velocity isn't important. The velocity under an EMF (aka, a signal) is much closer to the speed of light. An individual electron doesn't move far, the first will displace another, so on to the other end of the conductor, but the electrons are moving very fast when a signal is imposed.

ADDED: It occurred to me that I better point out that "drift velocity" is the normal movement of electrons in a conductor without an imposed voltage, that is when the wire is just sitting there.

<comment><USER2> That is not true. The drift velocity is the average velocity of the electrons due to the electric field. If there is no electric field, the drift velocity is zero. The term you're looking for is the Fermi velocity.

If you really want to be physically correct we'd have to admit that it doesn't really make sense to talk about the velocity of a single electron, since you cannot really follow a single electron. But by analogy to a water hose, it is sensible to define the velocity as the average velocity of water particles, instead of looking at a particular particle which is also moving randomly due to heat. This is the drift velocity. An alternative is to look at the average speed (the length of the velocity vector). Then we'd be talking about the Fermi velocity (which isn't the speed of light either BTW), but from the quote in the article it's clear that this is not what they mean, because they are talking about the velocity at which electrons move through a cable as a signal, not the velocity at which one electron moves randomly due to quantum mechanical effects.

If you don't agree with these definitions of drift and Fermi velocity, check their respective wikipedia pages.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> A lot of this is bufferbloat - modern systems tend to be strangled by designs created back when a server had 1-2 cores, often not tightly coupled, and I/O vendors realized that by reducing the number of interrupts by having a big buffer resulted in a performance win for CPU bound processes, but incurred a latency penalty.

On modern systems with 4-16 cores per machine, there is more than enough CPU to spare in the vast majority of cases. Therefore, binding I/O interrupts to a specific core and reducing buffer size can greatly reduce latency, at a cost of more time in the driver code, but those CPU resources wouldn't be used otherwise.

</comment><comment><USER5> As the paper mentions, latency of this magnitude is already available to HPC using RDMA on top of InfiniBand or 10GigE. I don't think 10GigE will be a special purpose interconnect that much longer and IP over OFED (OpenFabrics, the very low-level API to handle these kinds of devices) is terrible, so I wouldn't be surprised if we see some applications start looking at OFED (probably initially via MPI because that exists and is stable, but eventually via new communications libraries) for achieving very low latency using RDMA and polling instead of OS primitives.

<comment><USER6> Does the average programmer find RDMA difficult to use? Explicit buffer management and reuse / reregistration seem like a rather heavy burden on the application. I think the paper provides good value in raising that abstraction to something more usable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is it me or is it a growing trend that 'academic' papers are omitting their publish date. Its frustrating to read a paper without this context.

<comment><USER8> If you look at the URL, it's from HotOS '11.

<comment><USER7> What century?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think this is a good paper overall, but they're not taking the state of the art as their baseline. They say 5-10 us may be possible in a few years, but <4 us is already on the market: "In TCP testing, server-to-switch-to-server mean latency was as low as 3.6 microseconds." [1] (Perhaps the authors are unaware of OpenOnload because it came from industry.) Complaining that "normal" switches, NICs, and software are behind the state of the art doesn't seem like a topic of research.

[1] [http://solarflare.com/09-14-11-Solarflare-Arista-Complete- Ul...](http://solarflare.com/09-14-11-Solarflare-Arista-Complete-Ultra-Low- Latency-Testing)

<comment><USER9> The lead professor (John Ousterhout) has extensive experience in the industry. The project also involves a number of industrial collaborators (e.g. Jeff Dean from Google).

The 3.6 us you cited is only the network latency. Ousterhout and his team are working on 5us RPC calls. Why is this hard? If the program context switches three times, it will miss the 5us threshold.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> TLDR version goes something like this "There is hardware support for low latency networks, thus the OS community should make use of it."

Overall the paper is weak. It contains arguments without experiments. Section 5 (which I think is the main section) claims a lot of things without presenting data, experiments and evaluation.

<comment><USER11> > It contains arguments without experiments.

Unfortunately, that's due to the nature of the conference. HotOS/Nets/etc. Such conferences encourage such papers to stir up some discussion.

If you're interested in knowing more about what they're doing, you can check the website where they document everything: <http://fiz.stanford.edu:8081/display/ramcloud/Home>.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> > While the speed of light limits latency in wide area networks, electrons can > traverse 100m of copper cables and back in about 1µs

You can reduce latency by making the cable runs straight, vs. winding around underneath streets. That actually accounts for a significant amount of time, and might be an interesting problem to research.

<comment><USER13> So, theoretically, wireless should have lower latency, on this factor. Line of sight.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Meh. It's pretty clear to me that with the mobile push low latency isn't happening. I suspect it's more likely that we'll encounter latency hiding techniques.

<comment><USER15> You should read the article. The article discusses how low latency can be achieved in a _data center_. The specifically discuss why they are interested in intra-datacenter latency vs. attacking latency across the internet as a whole.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm curious why an application-layer concept such as RPC is making an appearance on a paper that discusses network architecture. Perhaps they are using RPC as a short hand for any roundtrip between two machines?

In any case, some background to the precise definition of RPC and why I find the use here objectionable: [http://www.infoq.com/presentations/vinoski-rpc- convenient-bu...](http://www.infoq.com/presentations/vinoski-rpc-convenient- but-flawed)

<comment><USER11> They discuss application layer concept because that's (end--end latency is) what ultimately matters. If you have a network with 1us RTT and the network stack contributes 10us latency, you have to architect the OS so that latency is minimised.</comment></comment>


EPA: Pruitt will launch program to 'critique' climate science - <AUTHOR> https://www.eenews.net/stories/1060056858 <comment><USER4> In principle this sort of technique seems like something that could benefit any sort of science, including climate science, immensely. The number of studies with unreproducible, and likely flat out wrong results, is scarily high. (And yes, there is certainly real critique that can happen in climate science, not on whether or not climate change exists at this point, but on details of certain papers, and even topics like "how realistic is the clathrate gun hypothesis".)

Unfortunately in practice this likely ends up being the government sponsoring the same sort of bullshit that the oil companies have been putting out for ages, and not real critique. Red team/blue team is also a unfortunate name given the political connotations...

<comment><USER5> "And yes, there is certainly real critique that can happen in climate science..."

The kind of critique that routine happens within the scientific community, over time. Scientists are highly motivated to prove the majority wrong, because that's how you make your career, by finding something new that everyone else missed.

By contrast, the EPA 'critique' will be a political charade, a circus of crackpots and shills assembled by the administration to rationalize its predetermined policy decisions.

<comment><USER4> If that kind of critique was happening routinely we wouldn't have 50% of scientists not being able to reproduce their own paper [0]. The sad truth is that incentives have aligned so that sufficient critique doesn't happen, and that showing some paper doesn't reproduce isn't going to make your career. Government funding to encourage such critique would be great.

I don't disagree on this likely be(com)ing a political charade.

[0] [http://www.nature.com/news/1-500-scientists-lift-the-lid- on-...](http://www.nature.com/news/1-500-scientists-lift-the-lid-on- reproducibility-1.19970)

<comment><USER6> I think your take-away from the reproducibility crisis shouldn't be that science is corrupt, peer review is stuffed with cronies, or scientists don't know what they're doing, it should be that _science is really fucking hard_ :

[https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/science-isnt- broken/#pa...](https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/science-isnt- broken/#part1)

My old boss at Google used to run the data science program for Search - <USER2> is basic business intelligence, not even the natural sciences. He gave an hour and a half long presentation once on all the ways our experiments can and have gone wrong. It included everything from browser bugs disrupting logging, to service outages that happened in the middle of the experiment, to current events that change the normal traffic pattern, to software bugs that trigger failsafes that shut off the experiment but don't affect the control. By the end of the presentation, engineers were asking "So how is it that we actually get anything _right_?"

My brother-in-law is an actual scientist - he does cancer research, studying gene expression within head & neck tumors. The time it takes to get one rigorous, publishable result is measured in years. And it can be derailed by months by something as simple as a tech mixing up lab samples.

The thing is, when people use examples of these techniques going wrong as examples of why science is untrustworthy, they forget that _normal human reasoning doesn 't even bother trying_. It's basically a given that most of the stuff you "know" is false. What would be the reproducibility stats for an everyday human belief like "vaccines cause autism" or "the economy does better under Democratic presidents" or "vitamin C prevents colds"?

The virtue of science is in being less wrong, it's not in being right. Which, given how often the average human is wrong, is something I'll happily take.

<comment><USER7> > everyday human belief like "vaccines cause autism"..

A bit funny that you have to tell this, considering where this originated from..

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The IPCC has already done the work of summarizing climate science.

The role of government is to respond to those truths with estimates of the negative impacts and estimates of the cost of mitigation and then come to a consensus around actions.

This is just obfuscation designed to drive a wedge between accepted science and policymakers. Obfuscaters just want to avoid making the hard arguments over their desires to have either zero mitigation or to actively accelerate human caused climate change.

It's a perfectly fine position to hold that climate change is happening but that you don't care. It's not fine to lie about it happening purposefully create and spread lies in the public space.

Just make the argument that the money would be better spent elsewhere.

</comment><comment><USER9> Has anyone ever got Pruitt in front of a camera and asked him the following question?

"Contaminants in our air and water cause X billion dollars of added health care costs and lost productivity to Americans every year. Rising sea levels and extreme weather patterns cause Y billion dollars of damage to real estate and crop yields every year. What is the EPA going to do to control these losses?"

I really want this anti-science conservative to answer the question about what he really cares about: the wallets of people who own lots of things. His side doesn't care about "good science" or objective truth, and they don't care about the public's well being. They care about money above all else and I think that's where the discussion should be focused.

<comment><USER10> Critiquing a hypothesis is part of the scientific process, not "anti-science". If the science is sound, it will withstand scrutiny.

I have followed this debate closely, and I haven't seen anyone on either side put forth detailed policy proposals other than voluntary carbon caps. In my opinion, advanced technology will solve this problem before any major policy changes are needed.

<comment><USER11> Unless you he scrutiny is biased and meant to discredit the science that is. Republicans lie about scientific consensus on climate change all the time. Do you think, it by some miracle this review is not biased, that they will suddenly accept those findings?

Vested interests have vested interests. Reviews of publications doesn't change that.

<comment><USER12> Real science should even welcome biased, hostile scrutiny. Actually, that's the best kind of scrutiny.

Read Blaise Pascal's work where he demonstrated how to create a vacuum experimentally. At the time, everyone thought that was impossible. Pascal calmly addresses tons of detractors (many of whom had real skin in the game). If climatologists can't do that, then their work SHOULD be questioned.

<comment><USER13> This makes the naive assumption that the people evaluating the conversation are rigorous logicians who are not moved by emotional appeals and bad logic that confirms what they want to believe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> As an interesting note, the Murray referenced in the article is the same Robert Murray that threatened to (and then did) sue John Oliver after his segment on coal this month [0][1].

[0]: [http://money.cnn.com/2017/06/22/media/john-oliver-coal- king-...](http://money.cnn.com/2017/06/22/media/john-oliver-coal-king-murray- lawsuit/index.html)

[1]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aw6RsUhw1Q8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aw6RsUhw1Q8)

</comment><comment><USER15> I predict that this will be the new primary source of propaganda undermining public belief in climate science.

<comment><USER16> If it is done by experts in good faith this will probably be a good thing to strengthen the signal/noise ratio in climate science.

<comment><USER17> It will not. We've already done this [http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/30/opinion/the-conversion- of-...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/30/opinion/the-conversion-of-a-climate- change-skeptic.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all)

It didn't help.

<comment><USER18> Yep. I remember conservatives crowing about how this was a study by a climate skeptic and respected scientist and they'd be willing to accept the results. Of course, when the results weren't what they wanted, They turned against the whole thing.

Brings to mind Gingrich and his "Mueller is an excellent pick" tweet a few months ago, only to completely flip his position a few weeks ago. These people are unredeemable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The title is kind of misleading. From the article:

>The program will use "red team, blue team" exercises to conduct an "at-length evaluation of U.S. climate science," the official said, referring to a concept developed by the military to identify vulnerabilities in field operations.

<comment><USER20> As Senator Franken pointed out, the scientific process itself is a "red team, blue team" exercise, and the settled result of that process, the consensus view of climate scientists, is that human-induced climate change via carbon emissions is happening and is a real threat.

The article title is technically correct, in that at least one of those teams will be on the "critique" side. It is also substantially correct, germane, and honest in implying with its scare quotes that this new effort is superfluous, unless it is an effort to gum up the works with climate denial.

<comment><USER21> Great clip of Sen. Franken explaining to Rick Perry how science works:

[https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4674659/franken-vs-perry- clim...](https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4674659/franken-vs-perry-climate- science)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The worst legacy of Trump will be his denying of climate change. USA is the greatest polluter of the world. Their carbon output per capita is ten times greater than everybody. The country always stopped every tentative to slow climate change. Now with Trump they will accelerate it.

<comment><USER23> We're not even in the top 10 once you take into account weather and GDP: [http://grist.org/climate-change/some-like-it-hot-or-cold- how...](http://grist.org/climate-change/some-like-it-hot-or-cold-how-weather- affects-carbon-emissions).

<comment><USER11> Per capita you are the highest, and historically as well. That's slowly changing and may not be true in the future as other nations industrialize, but you can't escape the facts.

Edit: downvotes, but no comments? Nice. Care to point out why I'm wrong?

<comment><USER24> I agree. Per capita is the only fair measure when comparing countries,. Although it's scary to think about china and India catching up on that measure...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'm speechless, but also habituating to that feeling.

It's as if we reincarnated oil barons from the early 1900s and appointed them all to lead the government without telling them it was 2017.

<comment><USER26> Imperialism is timeless.

The weirdest part of it all is how these folks are now on the sharp end of capitalism. They're rapidly being dismantled at a more local level by on-site generation, which simply needs less global infrastructure to meet demand.

So now we have these folks with massive empires largely based on the promise of future capital, with heavily leveraged current holdings. They have incentive to act against efficiency and the market to preserve the investments they made. In any other scenario folks would probably say that they "deserve to lose".

<comment><USER27> > The weirdest part of it all is how these folks are now on the sharp end of > capitalism. They're rapidly being dismantled at a more local level by on- > site generation, which simply needs less global infrastructure to meet > demand.

I wish the climate change alarmists could realize that 90% of what they're freaking out about is a non-problem. It'd just take a small amount of focused investment (cogeneration and AC time-shifting tech, etc) to make the energy industry obsolete.

<comment><USER26> I think it's a very big problem for my descendants. This is something I am sensitive to as my parents and grandparents have left America in such a terrible state for me to inherit, and now resist any attempts to yield power.

The energy industry is fighting against both economics and ecology to maintain dominance. It does so for lots of reasons. It has no right to exist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> If they did the same for their health care proposals, tax cuts, increase in defense spending and other stuff I would be totally onboard.

</comment><comment><USER6> This effort is ultimately kind of laughable. Coal is going to collapse not because any global warming regulations, but because it is no longer cost competitive with natural gas, solar, or wind. And many jurisdictions have committed to upholding the Paris Accords with state & local laws. [1]

It's a dying industry that will die out for the normal reasons - <USER3> forces - regardless of what the federal government does.

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

<comment><USER4> It will still "benefit" plenty of other industries, such as oil, natural gas, etc

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Anybody notice what the coal guy said?

 _" Carbon capture and sequestration does not work. It's a pseudonym for 'no coal,'" Murray said while waiting for a ride outside DOE headquarters. "It is neither practical nor economic, carbon capture and sequestration. It is just cover for the politicians, both Republicans and Democrats that say, 'Look what I did for coal,' knowing all the time that it doesn't help coal at all."_

So "clean coal" is BS just like I thought? Is this guy trying to shoot himself and Trump in the foot or what?

</comment><comment><USER29> Sometimes I think too much focus is being put on climate change as the reason to reduce fossil fuel consumption, while all the other good reasons get less attention. The US economy has a dangerous dependence on finite resources. Its cheap availability and consumption has devastated country sides, caused pollution, wars, economic instability, disconnected societies, obesity, the list goes on.

</comment><comment><USER30> I honestly don't think this is going to be politically solvable without violence. If it comes down to civil war the evil billionaires will have more money for weapons. My prediction for the next couple centuries is an increasingly ruthless dictatorship controlled by a billionaire class trying to prevent revolt while civilization slowly collapses.

</comment><comment><USER31> Kind of an open question here. I am not a climatologist and neither are most people. Climate science is subtle and easy to misinterpret (and hence, spin) on the mater of anthropogenic climate change, or ACC.

To the average person, myself included, the arguments made by both "sides" (ACC exists, ACC does not exist) are equally convincing. That is, both seem logical and well-argued at the superficial level we can understand without training.

To the average person, myself included, both "sides" have a profit motive in fudging the numbers. (If ACC exists, the energy industry will fight because it ultimately harms their profits. If ACC doesn't exist, the academic lobby will fight for their prestige and grants)

Both sides are, ultimately, dirty, due to politicization if nothing else.

Both sides, ultimately, cannot be simultaneously correct.

And so I ask: Who should be trusted, why, and how, given the limited number of hours in the day available to people who aren't directly involved in climatology as their day job?

For bonus points, do any of the answers to those questions not boil down to the genetic or appeal to authority fallacies?

(The snark below in response to a legitimate, good-faith question is leading me to believe this topic cannot be discussed among reasonable people)

<comment><USER32> Neither we nor our politicians should adjudicate scientific results and pick and choose what makes sense to us. We are not qualified. Scientists have a process as well as peer review which determines valid vs invalid results.

I subscribe to 'Science' magazine which is one of the most respected publications among scientists (along with 'Nature' magazine). The consensus among scientists is settled: ACC is real. ACC deniers do not get published in respected science magazines because their peers do not respect their results.

Scientific results should be settled by the peer group of scientists, not by politicians or the general public (see vaccine conspiracies for example).

<comment><USER33> How is consensus settled, when there are renowned scientists out there who object the CAGW hypothesis? Roy Spencer, Richard Lindzen, Judith Curry, Freeman Dyson - are they all bought and paid for by oil industry?

<comment><USER34> Freeman Dyson is not a climate scientist at all and never has been. Roy Spencer isn't a "renowned scientist"; he's a paid oil-industry shill. Lindzen used to be a scientist; now he's retired and gets paid to be a Cato Institute shill. Judith Curry also used to be a scientist and quit her academic job; presumably being a shill pays WAY better.

So, basically, yes, they are all bought and paid for, or, they simply have no credentials or knowledge of the field in question.

<comment><USER33> Dyson is a renowned physicist interested in climate science. I believe that his physics/math skills and general intelligence allow him to be quite competent in climate issues.

Lindzen retired only in 2013. I don't see how this makes his opinion about CAGW less valuable, especially given the fact that he was skeptical about CAGW hypothesis for a long time.

"Judith Curry also used to be a scientist and quit her academic job; presumably being a shill pays WAY better." \- where's the proof that she is a "shill"?

Roy Spencer is a renowned scientist in my book: "Roy Warren Spencer is a meteorologist, a principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, and the U.S. Science Team leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer (AMSR-E) on NASA's Aqua satellite. He has served as senior scientist for climate studies at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center."

Again, where is the proof that he is oil industry's shill?

<comment><USER35> To my knowledge, Freeman Dyson has no peer reviewed research contributions in the climate literature. That should be the price of entry, otherwise there is nothing of substance to critique.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Can they launch a program to critique thermodynamics, gravity, planetary motion, and evolution too?

<comment><USER37> Do you really see those things as having equivalent sureness of proof as climate change? I grok the things you listed quite well, and I've been following climate science as a hobbyist for years, and by comparison climate science is a mess compared to thermodynamics and even evolution. And I say this as a person who fully believes that anthropogenic climate change is happening.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Didn't the oil industry already try this tactic for the past few decades?

<comment><USER39> I think Al Franken referenced some time where some Koch brothers funded institution already did this. That's also ignoring the fact that this is already how science works for the most part

<comment><USER40> In the video, Al Franken pointed out that the Koch brothers had funded a "red team" of climate skeptics - and the skeptics (or at least one of them) became believers and stated as much. Oh snap!

<comment><USER41> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Earth_Surface_Tempera...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Earth_Surface_Temperature)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> "A lie ain't a side of the story. It's just a lie." \-- The Wire

</comment><comment><USER42> Now, look over here! And not at Cancer study controversies!

<comment><USER36> Maybe they could launch a program to 'critique' cancer? Is cancer actually bad? Does anything actually cause it? Is it even real? Let's hear both sides of this debate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Talk about wasteful, frivolous, and counterproductive government... This is the politicization of settled science and at cross purposes with the agency's mission, but what else is new in 45's America?</comment>


A Response to "What's the Point of a Professor?" - <AUTHOR> http://www.thetattooedprof.com/archives/356#comment-1030

<comment><USER2> >These professors will knock on a dorm room door if one of their students has missed several classes and is in jeopardy of being on academic probation (this may or may not have been someone who looked remarkably like me). These professors are on the hospital floor for 8-hour clinicals with a cohort of 19-year-old Nursing majors. They help find translators for a Bosnian student's parents (who don't speak English) to open up a bank account in town. They sit through interminable afternoon meetings and then teach a three-hour Social Work seminar two nights a week. These professors go to their student's graduation parties, they get thank-you cards from grateful students (and relieved parents*), they go to former students' weddings, they are invited to law school commencements for former advisees.

It's good that, you, the author do that. It sounds like you're the sort of professor that the article wants to see. But let's not pretend the majority do this, especially at R1/R2 universities, or the article was specifically saying you were failing your students.

<comment><USER3> Yep. I'm a current student and the thought of a professor doing some of the things listed here is comical.

<comment><USER4> _Yep. I 'm a current student and the thought of a professor doing some of the things listed here is comical._

I'm an adjunct now and was a grad student, and doing some of these things is actually dangerous: [http://www.amazon.com/Blue-Angel-Novel-Francine- Prose/dp/006...](http://www.amazon.com/Blue-Angel-Novel-Francine- Prose/dp/0060882034) or [http://chronicle.com/article/Sexual- Paranoia/190351/](http://chronicle.com/article/Sexual-Paranoia/190351/). Most of the time of course they won't be dangerous, but it only takes one person to really fuck up a career.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There are colleges that focus a lot on teaching -- Rose Hulman, Harvey Mudd, Swarthmore, etc. I think the problem is that people want academic fame as well as good teaching.

However a lot of fame comes from, I think, path breaking research (and startups) coming out of universities -- that's why you see the universities' names in newspapers. That's why US news ranks those universities as having great departments (in their disciplines of speciality)

So if you want that you by necessity have to value research and entrepreneurship in profs a lot higher than you value teaching.

What one can try and get is good teaching colleges which may not be necessarily famous for research, etc. but are still popular with recruiters for recruitment out of ugrad. The colleges mentioned above do do that. There are other colleges too -- University of Warsaw is a very popular recruitment ground for big tech companies like Google even though it's not on the same level as a top US school for research. University of Waterloo and Brown are a couple of others that come to mind that are popular with recruiters to a bigger extent than their rankings would indicate. Perhaps we need more advertisment of such options.

The other possibility is for prestigious schools to hire more teaching fac. But that would mean taking resources away from research oriented fac. So the market dynamics make it hard to do that.

Ideally universities would have the financial resources to hire both teaching and research oriented fac but given the current political climate...

<comment><USER6> In my view, a huge issue is that no matter how you try to recruit and manage separate research and teaching faculty, it will always quickly devolve into a caste system.

At the university where I taught math as an adjunct, the teaching and research faculty didn't even interact with one another.

<comment><USER5> Teaching and research fac have very different goals though so I don't think it's a bad thing if they don't interact much.

There's a lot of ego on part of some research fac though, I agree that that one should try and address.

<comment><USER6> That's fair enough. In fact, I never even met my supervisor, which was just fine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Oops, the correct link should be: [http://www.thetattooedprof.com/archives/356](http://www.thetattooedprof.com/archives/356)

<comment><USER7> Can a moderator please fix the link?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Link to the original Hacker News discussion here:[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9518814](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9518814)

As a recent graduate, I much more agree with this author than the author of the original.

</comment><comment><USER9> I am pretty disappointed with my academic experience at University for the same reasons that NYTimes highlighted, and I don't agree with this "tattooed prof" but it's just my experience.

</comment><comment><USER10> I don't know that any of my professors did the stuff he mentions. However, he's quite right about the piece he was responding to.

</comment><comment><USER11> > And I'm really hacked off when that scolding comes from obliviously > pretentious Older White Male Professors

Stopped reading here, because the piece is obviously racist.

If the author is trying to evoke a stereotype, say that explicitly. To say it this way, even if it's not _meant_ , provides cover for actual racists (which are growing---see the "white privilege" movement).

"Racism" is properly defined as any view that implies that a person's _ideas_ are determined by their race. See also Marxist class-ism, which is the same thing applied to economic class.

Rather, individuals are individuals, and they have free will. Nothing _determines_ the content of a person's mind.

<comment><USER12> The author explicitly invoked a stereotype, as you requested. I'm not sure why you didn't read it that way.

<comment><USER13> It's even capitalized.</comment></comment></comment>


Anyone work for Facebook? Been banned for 48 hours and don't know why - <AUTHOR> I have one FB account. I have not spammed on Facebook. I have an open dev account and an empty application.
I got an official Facebook warning about one year ago for creating a group "For every 100 people that join this group Apple will donate a laptop to a needy child." I think it got to 250 people in an hour and then it was gone.
I had a middle name listed on Facebook as "rupertmurdochsucks" which was kind of a running joke. The only thing I can think of is that I recently contacted support about a bug that switched my class year to "Alum." They told me how to fix it and I did. But then maybe the CS person reported me for having a fake name, which seems really stupid, especially because they won't tell me what is going on.
 I emailed email@example.com as instructed and just got an autoreply.
Can anyone help me out? <comment><USER2> You seem to have a talent for getting banned from various places.

<comment><AUTHOR> just on the internet

<comment><USER3> at least now I understand why you go by 'rms'

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I used to work for a huge community site and we would ban people we didn't like just because it was fun to watch them panic. It sounds like you actually broke their TOS (fake name, spam group) so you're probably out of luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> fake middle name, it was in between my real first and last name

<comment><USER4> that's enough for a bored fB employee to nuke your account.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've had a number of friends who have been banned from facebook for what seem to us as the tinyest infractions (fake unoffensive funny middle name for example). They usually get a reply from disabled@facebook explaining why they were banned within a few hours. Perhaps email again? Be sure to be poilte and apologetic, they sometimes will reinstate your account if they're in a good mood.

</comment><comment><USER6> How many laptops were donated to needy children?

<comment><USER3> 2.5

Duh!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Consider it a blessing. I got banned for setting my personal name to the name of my FB app development project. Now I can't control my FB app so I stopped supporting my FB app. It was a waste of time anyway.</comment>


Leaf – Machine Learning for Hackers - <AUTHOR> http://autumnai.com/leaf/book/leaf.html <comment><USER2> There's so many of these, you'll have to put more of an explanation of what makes this different, other than "it's for hackers, not scientists" (whatever that means).

Also it seems to use the standard method of stacking layers, rather than allowing you to describe an arbitrary computational graph which seems (to me) to be the far superior method (see CNTK's Network Description Language).

<comment><USER3> I think CNTK and Tensorflow and Theano, too, have a declarative approach, representing the computation via a computational graph. Which in my opinion is beneficial for research. But for a hacker or a software developer who wants to build an application, this creates an unnecessarily steep learning curve and feels unintuitive. (I have the feeling, that this an important reason why Keras, Lasagne and co. exists)

Leaf takes an imperative approach and explores an easier API (only Layers (Functions)[1] and Solvers (Optimizer Algorithms)), reusability through modularity and abstractions that keep the implementation and concepts to a minimum or rather abstractions that feel as familiar to a hacker as possible.

For future versions e.g., we want to explore what is practically possible with auto-differentiation via dual numbers and differentiable programming.

[1]: [http://autumnai.com/leaf/book/deep-learning- glossary.html#La...](http://autumnai.com/leaf/book/deep-learning- glossary.html#Layer)

<comment><USER4> My understanding is that Google developed Tensorflow to provide a single pipeline between the data science model and a production system. The idea is to avoid a translation step between modeling the real world and implementing it in production.

Of course, most people don't have the resources of Google with a layer of data scientists and another layer of software engineers [and maybe a layer of data engineers in the mix too]. So the idea of a tool tailored to a small team's needs rather than those of Google seems like an interesting niche.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A bit off-topic: does anyone know a good resource about when to use neural networks, when genetic algorithms, when bayesian networks,...? I know the basics of some of these algorithms and I could implement them (with some googling), but I wouldn't know which one to choose for a real-world application. Some kind of overview of strength and weaknesses of different AI approaches?

<comment><USER6> Straight off the bat you can split machine learning algorithms into whether or not you need to be able to see how a decision has been made. For example, Neural Networks are probably really good at diagnosing patients, however due to them being blackbox, they require a great deal of trust (in real life). Whereas decision trees could show the path taken to make a disagnosis.

<comment><USER7> That issue is only true for legal reasons. And even then it's entirely speculation what an actual court would decide.

If you actually cared about your patients, then you would use whatever method has the highest accuracy. False predictions mean injury or death. Using a suboptimal method means people die.

The best of both worlds is to use the whatever model gets the best predictions. Then train another model which is understandable on the output of the first one. I.e. generate random data, see what predictions the good model makes. Then the understandable model has infinite data to train with and doesn't need to worry about overfitting.

But still, the utility of being able to understand the model is limited. It's just a big set of parameters, without any reasoning or explanation of why the parameters are what they are.

<comment><USER8> Your account seems to assume that people will faithfully adhere to the suggestions of any model. In reality, not only have statisticians had a hard time accepting more prediction-centered approaches [1, see comments at end], but these approaches may need to win over practitioners and lay-people in the field in which they are being applied (e.g. how much do doctors value prediction over interpretable parameters).

I like machine learning, and prediction centered approaches--but there are many factors (such as adherence both by doctors and their patients) that are important, here. In a sense, the model needs to take into account "model type" into its predictions, which could lead to a model that predicts disease treatments well, but believes it should not be used!

[1]: [http://projecteuclid.org/euclid.ss/1009213726](http://projecteuclid.org/euclid.ss/1009213726)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Machine Learning for _Rust_ Hackers. I had to read one page in to check, but it looks like it's not a cross-language framework - you need to be fluent in Rust to use this.

</comment><comment><USER10> Cool work! Kudos. Will try this. FYI - I have been doing a similar project for evolutionary algorithms using Erlang OTP/Elixir. I plug `Collenchyma` (part of Autumn Architecture) to do number-crunching and computationally intensive tasks. I'm curious about how >distributed optimization of networks is done. :) (y)

</comment><comment><USER11> This is not the simplified abstraction I'm looking for. Give me an ML library that exposes the API using metaphors I can understand a relate to and I'm all over it. Leaf is still using terms and concepts I don't understand.

<comment><USER3> We think it is more beneficial for collaboration if we stick to the common naming of layers, functions and concepts than using metaphors. We provided two links, which help to get you started with that.

But with Leaf it becomes very easy to create modules (Rust crates) that expose layers/networks/concepts, which can have a metaphorical name.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> A bit out of topic, but has there been any research done on learn-time topology optimisations? E.g. Start with 4-4-4-4 network, remove some little contributing nodes/connections during training, resulting in 4-3-2-4 network with similar accuracy as 4x4, but higher performance?

Intuitively I think that there should be connections activated for less than x% of inputs that could be removed entirely. In some cases this would mean removal of whole node. Would interesting to read something about such an approach.

<comment><USER13> Something like this?

[http://arxiv.org/abs/1603.09382v1](http://arxiv.org/abs/1603.09382v1)

<comment><USER14> Stochastic depth is just a form of regularization over layers, it doesn't save any parameters or remove any connections.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This isn't a machine learning library, it's a NN library, that's way more restricted

<comment><USER3> Well, it has a bias towards NN and deep learning for now, as this was our initial focus for the proof of concept, but the architecture of Layers and Solvers should allow it to express any machine learning concept/algorithm. We are actually working on it (verifying it) with James from rusty-machine[1][2].

[1]: [https://github.com/AtheMathmo/rusty- machine](https://github.com/AtheMathmo/rusty-machine) [2]: [https://gitter.im/AtheMathmo/rusty- machine](https://gitter.im/AtheMathmo/rusty-machine)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Any relation to the O'Reilly book of the same name? [http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920018483.do](http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920018483.do)

Otherwise, this is a bit confusing.

</comment><comment><USER17> It seems like this project is re-discovered on HN every few months.

</comment><comment><USER18> A bit off-topic: Does anyone know how this sort of documentation was built? Looking for something similar for a project. Would love to know.

<comment><USER3> We built it with mdBook ([https://github.com/azerupi/mdBook](https://github.com/azerupi/mdBook)), which describes itself saying "Like Gitbook but implemented in Rust"

<comment><USER18> Thanks :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> hackers != software engineers. The meaning for 'hackers' is completely different when you check the hacking/infosec community.

<comment><USER19> The thing is that as hacker is a cool word, people tend to become cool by bending reality. It's the same as renaming Ecmascript to Javascript because Java is cool. However I do believe that yes, having curiosity and passion to modify the inner working of things could be called hacking, the banalization of the term is something sad. Like a 'project for hackers'. Sorry, but you don't need to be a hacker to use it. If this project be necessary to accomplish something at your work, you'll need to learn the minimum, thus not configuring a 'hacker' way of doing it. Of course is somewhat hard to expect someone to agree with me, as I am at 'Hacker News' right now, hehe.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I don't see how this is for "Hackers"? It has nothing about security applications.

<comment><USER21> For most people nowadays the word hacker means a guy who pirates stuff and steals your facebook accounts, but the original meaning is just a clever programmer.

<comment><USER22> Visits Hacker News, pretends not know what 'hacker' means in this context. Nice try OP.

<comment><USER23> "For most people nowadays the word hacker means"

He isn't talking about HN readers but Joe Public. A few days ago our head of creative strategies passed my machine when I was doing a load of work in a terminal. He asked what I was doing and if I was a hacker. (I told him it depended what you define as a hacker).

<comment><USER24> Lets ignore how you actually don't know what the guy was saying and are instead projecting, a NN library with fairly rough documentation that's hosted on github is relevant to Joe Public how?

<comment><USER23> I have no idea what your comment means. Apparently I am projecting, but beyond that it makes no sense to me.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>