Show HN: Learn Chinese Through Novels - <AUTHOR> https://www.getchicory.com <comment><USER2> I studied Chinese for 2 years, and I've been searching for something like this for a while. However I think that this novel (Ah Q) is too difficult for a beginner.

I installed the "Zhongwen Chinese Popup Dictionary" extension for Chrome. It kind of works -- as you hover over characters it shows the definition. But I don't have any good content! I can't find any good beginner level Chinese stories online!

<comment><USER3> 对,鲁迅的文章不适合初学者。推荐一篇散文:《背影》,作者朱自清。这是文章链接: [http://www.ccview.net/htm/xiandai/zzq/zzqsw003.htm](http://www.ccview.net/htm/xiandai/zzq/zzqsw003.htm)

<comment><USER4> Kinda works with [http://popjisyo.com](http://popjisyo.com) : [http://www.popjisyo.com/WebHint/AddHint.aspx?d=8&e=GB2312&r=...](http://www.popjisyo.com/WebHint/AddHint.aspx?d=8&e=GB2312&r=e&s=0&u=http%253a%252f%252fwww.ccview.net%252fhtm%252fxiandai%252fzzq%252fzzqsw003.htm)

<comment><USER3> 是的。酷。

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For people with intermediate proficiency in Chinese, I want to point out that Project Syndicate ([http://www.project-syndicate.org/](http://www.project- syndicate.org/)), a website which is basically a bunch of Op-eds from a host of famous individuals, has its articles translated into Chinese.

For example:

English: [http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/ruble- collapse-c...](http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/ruble-collapse- corporate-debt-by-sergei-guriev-2014-12/)

Chinese: [http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/ruble- collapse-c...](http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/ruble-collapse- corporate-debt-by-sergei-guriev-2014-12/chinese)

Not a bad way to pick up extra vocabulary, if you read them side-by-side!

</comment><comment><USER6> If anyone is looking for a similar tool that works with any Chinese content you like, and is performant even for long texts, you might be interested in my Chinese Text Analyser: [http://www.chinesetextanalyser.com/](http://www.chinesetextanalyser.com/)

It also remembers words you know and don't know and can give you an approximation of how well you'll know a given piece of text before you start reading it (once it has a fair idea of your vocabulary).

Currently Windows only, but it runs under Wine on Linux and an OSX version will be ready soon.

<comment><USER7> This looks like a great tool. I have two questions:

1\. Can it translate characters to pinyin? I can speak more Mandarin than I can read, so being able to see phonetics would be really useful to me.

2\. Do you know of any online stores that sell DRM-free Mandarin ebooks that could be used with your tool?

<comment><USER6> 1) No, and partly on purpose. It's impossible to get 100% accuracy with automatic character->pinyin converters, and is very easy to get incorrect values even for common words and I believe this is a danger for new learners and so for the moment have not implemented this. At some point I hope to start creating curated content with the tool and that will be able to provide the full, correct pinyin.

In the meantime, it does have the ability to show pinyin definitions for individual words (rather than bulk conversion), and it can export tab- separated lists of all unknown/looked up words, including with pinyin, definition, sentences containing the word (with or without cloze deletion) and more, which can then be imported in a flashcard program such as Pleco or Anki.

2) I'm not sure off the top of my head of any Mandarin ebook stores, but this thread on Chinese-Forums has a few suggestions (some of which may now be out of date so check towards the end for more recent sources):

[http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/34090-best- so...](http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/34090-best-source-for- chinese-ebooks/)

<comment><USER7> Cool, thanks for creating this tool!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've spent a huge portion of my life learning how humans learn languages and how to teach them better. I spent my early adulthood in Taiwan where I became fluent speaker and pretty comfortable reader, too. The approach this site uses is _far_ superior to the flashcard vocab word-driven approach taken by duolingo, memrise and so many others.

In my experience, at the beginner level the most important thing is getting a good grasp on phonics and learning some vocabulary. But once a student is even lower intermediate it's a way better to spend time doing Extensive Reading instead of vocab drills. Extensive Reading—reading that is easy enough no dictionary is needed—is still great for building vocabulary, and it teaches colocations, grammar and the target language's culture, too. As ER builds up vocabulary, more and more radio and podcasts become comprehensible. In the long run, lots and lots of input (both reading and listening) and opportunities to use the language extemporaneously in real life is pretty much assured to lead to full bilingual proficiency.

The interesting thing about this app, is it just might allow students to transition from more formal study and into Extensive Reading at an earlier point than they otherwise would. The risk is that students would continue choosing books with a lot of words they don't understand and rob themselves of actually "reading" in its natural sense.

</comment><comment><USER9> I've done my own manual version of this kind of service to learn Chinese. Would definitely pay for something like this!

The biggest problem for me is the availability of Chinese audio books (specifically, non-abridged versions - anyone have recommended sources?) When your reading level is high enough to read novels, the English translation is no longer that important - if I could just get the Chinese audio and text I would be really happy. It looks like this is targeted at beginners. Not sure how helpful it will be for them, but I see a lot of potential for more intermediate/advanced learners. There's always that gap in language learning between text books and real texts that has to be overcome. I think this kind of service could be great for that.

Right now I'm reading Tian Long Ba Bu (天龍八部), and have gone through the first 200 pages like this (simultaneous reading/listening), and it's been really helpful.

Also, a feature request: give an option to display the text in Traditional or Simplified Chinese. There are browser extension to use this, but it'd me more convenient to not have to use it on every page.

<comment><USER10> Only a few people in the HN crowd would be interested, but I imagine that Chinese translations of the Bible are a perfect match for this. Everything's already marked down into chapters and verses for easy organization, and the text is in the public domain too for older translations. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Union_Version](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Union_Version)

There appear to be some freely available online recordings of the public domain text as well. [https://librivox.org/author/1097?primary_key=1097&search_cat...](https://librivox.org/author/1097?primary_key=1097&search_category=author&search_page=1&search_form=get_results)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Chinese is not only about written language. Actually there are two grammar system, written and spoken language. One can learn how to read through novels but not how to speak.

<comment><USER12> I'll just leave this here: [http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html](http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html) (Why Chinese is so damn hard)

<comment><USER3> 象形文字的构词法和拼音文字是不一样的,不能想当然哦。汉字的构词法一般有六种,称为"六书",即指事、象形、形声、会意、转注、假借。有兴趣进一步了解,可以看这里:[http://baike.baidu.com/subview/633/5734721.htm](http://baike.baidu.com/subview/633/5734721.htm)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm really interested in learning chinese, and the interface here is fantastic, well done. But a project like this really lives and dies on the quality of the content, I think - it needs a good set of interesting novels to really get people engaged, and I don't think "The True Story of Ah Q" quite cuts it. Having some popular novels would be amazing. If the framework allows that to be done easily, I'm sure it'll just be a matter of time.

Nice work!

</comment><comment><USER14> I agree with other commenters, this is genius idea but all depends on the available content. Looking at the story, it's not interesting to me, so it'll not keep me occupied and willing to learn.

I'm searching for something like this but frankly there's nothing as far as I know. The best so far is Chinese Breeze series - example book

[http://www.amazon.com/Whom-Chinese-Breeze-300-word- Level/dp/...](http://www.amazon.com/Whom-Chinese-Breeze-300-word- Level/dp/7301141556)

with stories a little, little better than usual. They, though, require that you know at least ~100 basic hanzis to be able to comfortably read. I have 3 or 4 books, I don't remember, and they are fine (just please, a little better story!) Each is around 20-40 pages so not much but kindle versions are also really cheap.

The way I worked with it, was to convert mobi to html and put on local server. That way I could use Zhongwen (mentioned by alexgolive) plugin to help me with words I didn't know.

If anyone knows something similar, please share! I love to read Hanzi, it's super fun when all the spiders :) suddenly start making sense

</comment><comment><USER7> About a month ago I posted about a great science fiction book that was recently translated from Mandarin to English ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8607914](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8607914)). It would be amazing if this tool could incorporate content like "The Three- Body Problem." I realize that international publishing rights is a complex subject to tackle, which is probably why "the True Story of Ah Q" was chosen for this initial release (it's in the public domain, or at least it looks like the english version is: [https://www.marxists.org/archive/lu- xun/1921/12/ah-q/](https://www.marxists.org/archive/lu-xun/1921/12/ah-q/)). However, as many others have commented, this great tool will probably not be used much without great content.

</comment><comment><USER15> I've been using Pleco with the text reader plugin on my mobile with great success. You can load any text file and read and bookmark like a regular book reading app. You can tap on any word to see the meaning and pronunciation, and add an unknown word to a flashcard deck.

With regard to content, I think the Hacker News crowd would most appreciate the San Ti (三体) trilogy (Three Body Problem trilogy). It's the first highly successful Chinese hard SciFi, and every self respecting Chinese nerd has read it. It's a fascinating story, and has a lot of Chinese culture and history mixed in as well.

</comment><comment><USER16> Worth mentioning that Popup Chinese has an extensive archive of short stories, with full contextualized (i.e. not dictionary) definitions and accompanying audio recordings:

[http://popupchinese.com/lessons/short- stories](http://popupchinese.com/lessons/short-stories)

Selections cover a range of material including classical texts like Dream of the Red Chamber, as well as more contemporary and foreign fiction in translation. Materials can be access without signing up, but creating a free account enables click-to-add vocab lists, SRS study tools, and more.

</comment><comment><USER17> The novel used in the sample is a very bad choice. The author has his special style, hopelessly outdated.

Chinese novels are not easy for beginners, my suggestion is to go with novels that're translated into Chinese from English, like Sherlock Holmes. The translator uses good Chinese, and the stories are familiar, therefore you will have an easy time understanding the texts. After all, it's the language you are interested.

To be able to appreciate Chinese novels like a native, especially classic ones, you'll need years of study, starting from Chinese history, classic literature, ...

<comment><USER18> > my suggestion is to go with novels that're translated into Chinese from > English, like Sherlock Holmes. The translator uses good Chinese, and the > stories are familiar, therefore you will have an easy time understanding the > texts

Really? This seems counterintuitive unless China has a really, really good translation industry. In my experience with Japanese translations, you're as likely to get a good translation as you are to get a horrible one (see Harry Potter).

<comment><USER17> of course good translation is rare. The reason I recommended Sherlock is that it was translated back in 1980s, golden age of translation industry in China. after that, things went down quickly as those masters passed away.

<comment><USER3> 是的。

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is amazing, although it looks too advanced without at least intermediate proficiency in Chinese. Would love a few different difficulty levels.

Does anyone know a Spanish learning tool similar to this?

</comment><comment><USER20> Ha! Coincidentally, I was watching a great TED talk the other day on learning the building blocks of Chinese letters! The talk is short but great and inspired me to look into the language: [http://www.ted.com/talks/shaolan_learn_to_read_chinese_with_...](http://www.ted.com/talks/shaolan_learn_to_read_chinese_with_ease?language=en)

Here is the link for the website: [http://chineasy.org](http://chineasy.org)

</comment><comment><USER21> Nice app. I would also suggest [http://lingq.com](http://lingq.com), it is similar but with a huge amount of content for every level. It has text for something like 10 languages, chinese included.

Other similar sites (but not so much content like lingq.com): [http://readlang.com/](http://readlang.com/) [http://lingocracy.com/](http://lingocracy.com/)

</comment><comment><USER22> Super interesting. I'd love to learn Chinese and be able to do this one day: [http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2014/10/22/mark- zuckerber...](http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2014/10/22/mark-zuckerberg- facebook-chinese-tsinghua-university/17750047/)

Though, I'm not sure reading novels like the website suggests is the right approach when starting from nothing.

<comment><USER23> Given that "Zuckerberg Speaks Mandarin Like a Seven-Year-Old"[0], that's not aiming very high.

0: [http://foreignpolicy.com/2014/10/22/mark-zuckerberg- speaks-m...](http://foreignpolicy.com/2014/10/22/mark-zuckerberg-speaks- mandarin-like-a-seven-year-old/)

<comment><USER24> It would be more accurate to say he speaks like a seven year old foreigner. His tones are all wrong. I think the Chinese audience is enthralled that he is attempting to speak to them in Mandarin and are humoring him- I doubt they understand what he is saying too well. That said, good for him for learning Chinese.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> "Ah Q"? It's by Lu Xun, you know what? Even native Chinese high school students fear writings by Lu Xun, mostly due to the difficulty level.

</comment><comment><USER18> Just curious, but why is the symbol for this a Japanese katakana チ (chi)? I assume it goes with "chicory," but it's Japanese...

</comment><comment><USER26> This is a really great concept. I hope you'll be adding a whole range of other books in the future for learners of all level.

</comment><comment><USER27> Seems to be like: [http://www.lingq.com/](http://www.lingq.com/)

</comment><comment><USER3> 看起来不错。有一个小问题:favicon不是一个正式的汉字,只是一个偏旁部首。

<comment><USER28> I don't know what the creators' intentions were regarding the favicon. It is, however, the katakana "chi" (チ), which corresponds to the name "Chicory". Seems bizarre, but that's the connection I saw.

<comment><USER29> Katakata, like zhuyin, is "hanzi/kanji written small", just as hiragana is "hanzi written quickly". I see hanzi/kanji, katakana, and zhuyin (but not hiragana) as all part of the same "alphabet" used to build up hanzi recursively. Many katakana are components of hanzi.

<comment><USER28> Maybe, but this is rather like using a Cyrillic letter in a Spanish-teaching website. "What language are you teaching anyways?"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Is there anything like this for Japanese? Just Googled but didn't find anything interesting.

<comment><USER21> Check out [http://lingq.com](http://lingq.com) , it has a lot of chinese, japanese and 10 or so more languages

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Nice work! I'm thinking about buying the novel but I would like to be able to use Paypal.

</comment><comment><USER32> Come on, where is the option to choose traditional chinese? :P

</comment><comment><USER33> I think you need a Chinese friend. Haha...</comment>


The Internet Is a Surveillance State - <AUTHOR> https://www.schneier.com/essay-418.html <comment><USER2> Schneier has a great article here on the many ways you are being tracked, but I think overlooks the fact that much of this record keeping happened prior to the internet. Almost all public activity generates a paper trail, and before the internet, your phone company, bank, grocery store, even your VHS rentals and public library, were keeping records on you. The internet makes it far far more efficient, but it didn't invent the collection of such records.

I think the focus shouldn't be on the unavoidable "information radiation wake" you give off as you move through the world living your life, but on the ways people utilize this information. The government, and private entities, need to be constrained in how this information can be legally used, not in the collection of it, which I think is impossible.

Consider health records, which lots of people are paranoid about. There's a lot of diseases we might be able to treat if people's health records were available to researchers. One might be able to detect correlations in disease from these records of millions of individual cases. But insurance companies and employers could potentially discriminate against you based on these records, so it is in your interest to keep your medical conditions secret. In cases, if you have a communicable disease, it is understandable you'd want privacy too.

Point being, the biggest danger of loss of privacy is abuse by the state or other private entities, and if we could build safeguards against that, the fact that your phone signals give away your location, or your subway card shows where you've been, might not be so threatening.

<comment><USER3> _> Almost all public activity generates a paper trail, and before the internet, your phone company, bank, grocery store, even your VHS rentals and public library, were keeping records on you. The internet makes it far far more efficient, but it didn't invent the collection of such records._

In addition to efficient, it also made it more convenient and secure to do so. This aspect is huge.

The local video tape rental place may have kept records of every movie you rented, but an agency wasn't going to go in and demand your records from the scumbag owner unless it had a really pressing reason to, as it would potentially blow their investigation/operational security. Scumbag owner would have some guys in dark suits visit him and it'd be all over town in a matter of hours. The end result is that they probably wouldn't sift through your rental records.

Now, with the proliferation of the Internet, the government doesn't even need active participation of the records custodian, they can pull traffic off the wire and warehouse it themselves.

And if it does require active participation from the data custodian, they have nice National Security Letters with highly-threatening gag orders, which have proven to be quite effective.

<comment><USER4> > And if it does require active participation from the data custodian, they > have nice National Security Letters with highly-threatening gag orders, > which have proven to be quite effective.

But they don't need NSL's to get the data. Just as a plain old warrant or subpoena would have been enough to get your local video tape rental place's records of the movies you watch, it's enough to get Netflix's records of those movies.

<comment><USER5> The data offered by my old local video place, though, was pretty minor, and they were small enough that honestly I don't think anyone higher than the local police in the food chain cared.

If you can get Netflix, it suddenly justifies the effort to mine that data and weave it into a larger tapestry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Privacy is an illusion, and a dangerous one. It allows dishonest people to appear honest, and further perpetuates the lie of 'normal'. It closes minds and turns us against other people who are just as human as ourselves. Privacy allows corporations selective access to our data, with the promise that it won't be misused, sold or released to those who wish to do us harm. This is a promise that no corporation can reasonably be expected to keep, if they fall under the jurisdiction of any institution greater then themselves (Like the US government). We have a lot of anxiety around people finding out our secrets, but only because we expect privacy in a world (or internet) where true privacy doesn't really exist. If you do a thing, and you do it anywhere beyond in your own mind, you have effected reality, you have changed the universe, it is public. As terrifying as that might seem.

<comment><USER7> In a country where the average professional commits " _Three Felonies a Day_ " ([http://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target- Innocent/dp/...](http://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target- Innocent/dp/1594032556/)), you're damned right, " _We have a lot of anxiety around people finding out our secrets_ " Basically, our normal lives exist at the sufferance of these "public servants".

<comment><USER6> Selective enforcement has got to go. It's an infringement on all of our rights as human beings. Get rid of selective enforcement, and you get rid of ridiculous laws?

<comment><USER7> But how do you get rid of selective enforcement? If for no other reasons than limited resources, prosecutors have to decide who they'll pursue and how hard.

Disbarring a prosecutor from ever holding elective office is about the only thing I have been able to think of, and it's not hardly enough.

Get rid of the ridiculous laws is more like it. Perhaps our Founders had a point when they were trying to create a limited government? Gerry Ford's best ever quote puts it in the modern context, " _A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have._ " ([http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Gerald_Ford#Address_to_Congress...](http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Gerald_Ford#Address_to_Congress_.2812_August_1974.29))

<comment><USER8> Getting rid of the laws is the obvious move. If smoking pot is a felony, and 30% of the population has done it, then the law that makes smoking pot a felony is obviously a bad law.

A simple way to decide if a law is bad or not is to look at how many people break it each year. Any law that's broken by more than 1% of the population each year should be removed from the books.

<comment><USER9> _A simple way to decide if a law is bad or not is to look at how many people break it each year._

That's one way. I'd go further and say that if the "crime" doesn't have a victim, and involves strictly voluntary / consensual actions & behavior among adults (children may be a bit of a special case) then it is no crime.

I generally agree with Bastiat's[1] sentiments on this:

 _What Is Law?_

 _What, then, is law? It is the collective organization of the individual right to lawful defense._

 _Each of us has a natural right — from God — to defend his person, his liberty, and his property. These are the three basic requirements of life, and the preservation of any one of them is completely dependent upon the preservation of the other two. For what are our faculties but the extension of our individuality? And what is property but an extension of our faculties? If every person has the right to defend even by force — his person, his liberty, and his property, then it follows that a group of men have the right to organize and support a common force to protect these rights constantly. Thus the principle of collective right — its reason for existing, its lawfulness — is based on individual right. And the common force that protects this collective right cannot logically have any other purpose or any other mission than that for which it acts as a substitute. Thus, since an individual cannot lawfully use force against the person, liberty, or property of another individual, then the common force — for the same reason — cannot lawfully be used to destroy the person, liberty, or property of individuals or groups._

 _Such a perversion of force would be, in both cases, contrary to our premise. Force has been given to us to defend our own individual rights. Who will dare to say that force has been given to us to destroy the equal rights of our brothers? Since no individual acting separately can lawfully use force to destroy the rights of others, does it not logically follow that the same principle also applies to the common force that is nothing more than the organized combination of the individual forces?_

 _If this is true, then nothing can be more evident than this: The law is the organization of the natural right of lawful defense. It is the substitution of a common force for individual forces. And this common force is to do only what the individual forces have a natural and lawful right to do: to protect persons, liberties, and properties; to maintain the right of each, and to cause justice to reign over us all._

Where I disagree is the whole "from God" bit, considering that I'm an atheist. I consider the rights he is speaking of, as being a fundamental aspect of being a sovereign individual possessed of self-ownership and agency.

[1]: [http://bastiat.org/en/the_law.html](http://bastiat.org/en/the_law.html)

<comment><USER10> So where do your rights originate from then? Ultimately it comes down to authority. You can say you have the right but so can every other schmoe. I can even argue that you are wrong about your rights and you have no greater authority to say I am not correct.

<comment><USER11> Made up beings are not a greater authority either; rights are given by the consent of the society you live in. That is truly the only place they originate. You can debate endlessly about natural rights and natural law and God this or that, but the simple fact is you can do only what others allow you to get away with.

<comment><USER12> Not _all_ rights are given by consent of society.

A right that you have is one that cannot be taken away. _Traditionally_ this is limited to things that society has agreed not to take away. However we are slowing entering into an age where a new type of right emerges: a right that you seized and society is powerless to take away.

We don't normally think of "PGP'd email can't be read" as a "right", but that is essentially what it is. A right that has been seized, not granted.

These rights are of course vulnerable, just like rights granted by society. Instead of keeping society convinced that the right must remain granted, you instead have to be careful that you remain in a position where society is powerless. In practice, this is quite difficult.

<comment><USER11> Society is never powerless to outlaw something, even if they can't enforce it. It's not a right if it's illegal even if said law is unenforceable.

<comment><USER12> Outlawing is a meaningless gesture if the possibility of enforcement does not exist. They can outlaw seized rights but if they cannot (or do not) enforce their laws then you will remain in possession of your seized rights.

For that matter, this applies even to granted rights. There are plenty of rights that people have that are outlawed by unenforced (and unenforceable laws). Consider for example laws in less enlightened states that specify what sorts of sex two consenting adults are allowed to have. These laws are not enforced, making them little more than monuments to the ignorance of the past.

<comment><USER8> The possibility of enforcement for the example of PGP encrypted email is pretty obviously real: just throw anyone who is found to use PGP in jail for 10 days.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I just don't get it. Hacker news, just days ago had a posting: "Police admit they're 'stumped' by mystery car thefts", and the collective response was something along the lines of "silly police don't know how to use google."

And now, the "hackers" are in disbelief that the US government is actually reading their emails and listening to their phone calls. NSS!

We got what we wanted here, folks. Information is free - free to be created, free to be read, and free to be copied, stored, decrypted and analyzed by anyone with the means and drive to do so.

I don't know who said it, but "Don't put anything online you wouldn't want to appear above the fold of the Wall Stree Journal."

</comment><comment><USER14> I think instead of trying to fight the increased levels of surveillance by both governments and corporations, we need to focus on increasing the levels of transparency. I personally don't really care that governments and other organizations have information about me. There is always an inevitable paper (or electronic) trail associated with using the internet and various services.

But I do care about the fact that the FBI can pull up information about me and I have no knowledge of it. If they collect information to combat terrorism, fine. But the 99.999 percent of innecent people being tracked have a right to be notified (and given a course of action for recourse) when they've been wrongly targeted, for whatever reason.

I know, it's an idealistic dream, but it is more realistic than combating the inevitable surveillance practices that are just now coming to light.

<comment><USER15> What would you expect an FBI informational notification to say? What would they notify you of, that your activities have warranted investigation?

If anything, being notified that I'm being looked at would freak me out more than not knowing. We've entered this weird world of now needing to avoid appearances.

The thing that troubles me the most about the government accessing ALL of my data is the idea of false positives -- or hell, even purposefully spinning one aspect of my data to mean whatever the hell they want it to mean. If we don't have access to the same information, how are we supposed to defend ourselves against accusations?

<comment><USER14> Well, I'd probably expect transparency to at least come in two forms:

1\. Broad annual reports containing the number of individuals were investigated, or whose 'file' was pulled, and the number of investigations that resulted in some sort of prosecution. Basically, give me the figures that show me the efficiency of the NSA investigations. This would help combat just broad pulling of records without specific cause and purpose. You could go so far as to say that after passing certain thresholds of efficiency, their actions would be audited. Note that I realize this is not ever likely to happen, but just trying to give an example of how increased transparency could be done.

2\. Individual notification. This is obviously much more difficult because they wouldn't want to tip off a legitimate threat to the fact they are under investigation. But the general alternative is not acceptable either. The government can't just investigate people and invade their privacy without good reason. So some how, individuals need to know.

The checks and balances of Executive, Legislative and Judicial branches is an effective mode of government, but there is a second 'check': the one by the people. If I don't know my rights are being violated, how can I hold the government responsible?

So, yes, some form of individual notification is necessary. Maybe the notification happens after the investigation is finished. Maybe I'm notified a year late. But one way or another, I have a right to face my accuser.

Those are my thoughts on it anyhow.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I've honestly never really quite recovered from watching the dreams of the cypherpunks die so hideously and completely. I guess it's because the ideas / movement / whatever bubbled up when I was at that age when you think this is going to be the groundswell, my generation is going to cause a fundamental change in the world.

If you're unfamiliar, there was a strong meme in the late eighties through early/mid nineties among a certain set that the perfect storm of public key encryption (still wonderfully unbounded in our minds) and the emerging global network would be a nexus point for personal power in privacy, anonymity and security and in many real ways break down the bonds of the states. It's worth noting that this was about the time that the soviet union fell, and many in the know had gotten a first taste of global presence by hearing about the people in the streets via usenet before it made the news.

It wasn't that I was particularly a hard core believer or activist, at least compared to many I knew. But for those who understood what an immense impact the internet was going to have it seemed to everyone I knew - NSA, hackers, professors, that it was just how it would be. You couldn't hope to spy on pretty much anyone anymore when you could use perfect encryption to scramble a telephone call or an email. Kind of like when you knew everyone was about to have a touch phone.

I was ideologically aligned and mixed in such circles, nerds were still outcasts so not really too big a world, but my life was busy with other things - but I watched from a distance, fascinated with all the ideas and things to come. I'm not sure I've every really been more sure something was going to happen, at least to a very significant degree.

The government was sure too - that was when they came up with CALEA and people got upset but mostly scoffed - there was a real sense that they were just in their death throws.

Things got pretty busy, Internet boom. Company got bought by an agency, every big name anybody needed to be on the Internet yesterday. Was a blast though a bit of a blur - ended up in SF as the whole thing worked itself into a nasty hangover. Can't remember worrying too much about when the cypherpunks were going to win but still knew it had to be coming, err well it's just about adoption.

It really sucks to wake up after a bender and realize that you helped kill the dream that you were just waiting for someone else to make happen.

Working infosec as california recovered put me face to face with reality pretty early in this cycle. Not only was the thing I was so sure of totally not how it went down, with shift from relatively petty financial fraud and wankers to states and srs.bsns abandoning defense to focus solely of offense it's been very hard to square. It's hard to believe many people ever feel so sure about something that turns out so absolutely opposite.

Fuck, at least nobody killed rms.

<comment><USER17> Well, don't completely give up hope just yet! All the tools needed to create the world you mentioned exist today. We have good open-source encryption that can be applied to all sorts of data and hide your tracks if you really want to. What we don't have(yet) is something so easy that the general public can do it. Like, tap a padlock icon on your cellphone and suddenly anything your phone does is encrypted and only the receiving party can decrypt it. GPG/PGP- plugins could be added to just about anything. Hang in there and keep up the fight. Keep explaining your point of view to anyone who will listen. There have been times in history where seemingly-invinsible corporations and/or groups of very privileged people get overturned when the general public "wake up" to what's going on. Even what's going on in North Korea won't last forever, there will be someday that one major incident that domino-effects into the downfall of that whole system.

"And never forget, the internet only knows what you tell it... more or less" \--me!

<comment> loup-vaillant > _Like, tap a padlock icon on your cellphone and suddenly anything your phone > does is encrypted_

Not good enough: you have to _think_ of activating it. And even if you do, most traffic will still be unencrypted, making it easier for spies to tell who may have something to hide, and when they do.

To have real good, actual privacy, everything should be encrypted by default, the internet itself should be a giant scrambling overlay network such as Tor, and people should have symmetric bandwidth to encourage decentralization —no more need for YouTube.

I don't see it happen in the following decades.

<comment><USER18> What's the problem with most traffic being unencrypted? If you have something in particular that you want hidden, it's possible to make sure that it gets hid. What more do you need?

<comment><USER19> You not to know I'm hiding anything at all.

<comment><USER20> Exactly. They may not know what you're hiding, but if they see small portions of your internet traffic are encrypted using a scheme very different from your regular traffic, flags are raised. Then it's simply a matter of sending an NSL to whoever they need to in order to get the content of the message.

<comment><USER21> >Then it's simply a matter of sending an NSL to whoever they need to in order to get the content of the message.

If its done right, there are only 2 people capable of getting the content of the message: you and the intended recipient.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> There are two obvious ways to fight this. First, add a lot of noise. For example, you could change your name to something extremely common. You could broadcast inaccurate data about yourself.

Secondly, whenever you do need privacy, use the social equivalent of a one- time pad. Never execute the same mechanism twice. For example, you could conceivably use a cantenna to access a distant wi-fi spot. You could buy the wireless cards with cash (and walk to the store where you buy it, preferably in a city that you don't frequent - and get there by car with good mileage so that there's limited trace of you being there), and buy a used laptop on craigslist with cash....

While surveillors can be open-minded, to a certain degree access to enhanced tracking technology will also engender a stronger reliance on the streetlight effect - and complete expurgation of the streetlight effect is impossible.

</comment><comment><USER23> > _Google knows exactly what sort of porn you all like_

If only.

</comment><comment><USER24> Those who would stop this cannot: their whole lives are also part of the surveillance state. Politicians,generals, senators, prime ministers and CEO's all: their dirty laundry and skeletons in the closet that they thought were secret are no longer.

No one of power will fight this because they are afraid of becoming its target.

</comment><comment><USER25> I am really surprised how people are reacting to surveillance revelations. These practices or obvious and have been in use for as long as I can remember. Did no one really know about widespread government surveillance? You don't have to look very hard to find evidence. Bottom line: this has been happening for a long time. Do really think that the military released the internet because it made them feel all fuzzy inside? Think about it.

</comment><comment><USER26> why not just flood the NSA with false data? We know what they monitor all data through those big ten companies. Couldn't botnets be configured to just start surfing the internet, maybe doing keywords that would trigger the government monitoring. I assume that enough junk information would fill up the gov. databases that they would have a harder time trying to figure out what's real and what's just useless data.

<comment><USER27> Which would no doubt brand us cyberterrorists if it managed to work.

<comment><USER28> Well, then the system worked! It shook out the terrorists among us into showing their true faces! </sarcasm>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> You'd better encrypt your private data before uploading to web sites.

Recommend to use some privacy oriented apps/sites spideroaks, securekeep.com

<comment><USER2> Encryption doesn't defeat traffic analysis, and a lot of the recently reported surveillance is based on metadata to generate leads.

<comment><USER30> So what if you use something like a Russian VPN or Tor? It seems like that would only be vulnerable to attacks based on exact connection times and to traffic volume analysis, both of which could be avoided by generating fake traffic.

<comment><USER31> Too few people do that. They can afford to tag you for other kinds of surveillance.

If the State wants your head, there's not much you can do even if you're innocent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> There is no reason to trust large companies with our data. We should move to content oriented networking where data is encrypted by default and we can choose what networks our data goes into and how it is accessed.

We should also use peer based grid/mesh networks as much as possible

</comment><comment><USER33> The USA is a Surveillance State.

FTFY

<comment><USER34> If you think it's only the USA, you're fooling yourself pretty hard.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> This is a world where the hacker who identifies the raper gets punished more than the raper himself. What do you expect

</comment><comment><USER7> " _If the director of the CIA can 't maintain his privacy on the Internet, we've got no hope._"

Blah. Ignoring for the moment that he's 6 levels removed from the agents in the field, notoriously the very few of them out there (last time I checked 90% of the CIA is desk bound in the US) are _very_ bad at fundamental trade-craft, with the Camp Chapman attack ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_Chapman_attack](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_Chapman_attack)) as a telling extreme example.

<comment><USER36> Surely we can agree that the director of the CIA is going to be better a maintaining privacy than the average person.

<comment><USER37> Why should I agree to that? The director of the CIA is a political appointee not an uber spy. They probably have more security training than your average citizen but not much more.

<comment><USER38> I think it just says more about the types of people running the CIA. Not the smartest... not very moral... etc

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I always wonder how fast telepests start to call you once you register at some online service with your phone number. UKFast hosting I believe sells your data immediately. Comparison sites do the same.

</comment><comment><USER35> lol, there is no way Guns are going to get banned now. More people will buy guns cause of this. I don't know if the Government did this knowingly or unknowingly.

<comment><USER35> Instead of voting me down, give me a proper argument. I'm stating a fact, if you don't like it counter argue.

This is nothing different than what the us government is doing by abusing their power and the people that can vote down are doing the same.</comment></comment>


Researchers propose solar methanol island using ocean CO₂ - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/06/creative-thinking-researchers-propose-solar-methanol-island-using-ocean-co%E2%82%82/ <comment><USER2> 100meter^2 x 170,000 solar panel units (to replace long-haul transportation fuel) would be a 1700km^2 square, 41km per side. That's a bit smaller than Fiji and more compact. If you add 50% for methanol manufacture it's almost up to the area of Haiti.

So the oceans have plenty of room for it anyway.

</comment><comment><USER3> > electrifying trucks .. has proved intractable in the near-term,

Really?

See [https://logisticsmgepsupv.wordpress.com/2019/06/01/supermark...](https://logisticsmgepsupv.wordpress.com/2019/06/01/supermarkets- and-electric-vehicles/), [https://www.libertyplugins.com/blog/2019/06/07/byd- electric-...](https://www.libertyplugins.com/blog/2019/06/07/byd-electric- garbage-truck-now-servicing-seattle/), [http://mechcrunch.com/2019/05/10/rigterink-logistics- group-t...](http://mechcrunch.com/2019/05/10/rigterink-logistics-group-tests- eactros-mercedes-benz-passion-blog-mercedes-benz-smart-maybach-amg/)

I don't claim they are perfect but it does seem not to be intractable.

</comment><comment><USER4> There's already a highly efficient solar-powered process for extracting carbon dioxide from seawater called "growing seaweed."

It would be far more efficient simply to collect seaweed from the ocean and put it through fermentation and dry distillation processes to produce ethanol and other fuel products. No new technology breakthroughs required.

<comment><USER5> I do believe there is work being done on this. That said, removing carbon from the oceans, burning it and releasing it back into the atmosphere feels a little bit counterproductive to me.

<comment><USER6> At least it will slowdown oceans acidification until people find how to give enough power to the planes without liquid fuel.

In this particular idea I don't like the ship - it will pollute the ocean while transferring the fuel.

<comment><USER7> I ear a lot of talk about airplane pollution, is it actually a significant contribution?

<comment><USER6> Doesn't matter. Point is: while we need airplanes, we need to power them. While we can't power them using "green" sources of power, we should use liquid fuels. And while we need them, this idea (topic-starter) sounds reasonable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This sounds like a brilliant idea. Instead of off-shore wind farms, off-shore solar power generation. Convert the electrical energy into chemical one (methanol) and ship it to the consumers. No need for huge upfront investments (those huge wind turbines must cost a pretty penny), or for large underwater cables to carry electricity inland. These floating solar panels could be deployed far away from maritime sea lines, like in the middle of the Pacific. Plenty of sun. No problem with sandstorms, like for solar farms in deserts. If a hurricane is forecasted, you pack up and move away. No need to buy the land from owners who want to hold out for a better price. What's not to like?

<comment><USER9> > What's not to like?

Salt. Salt makes operating things in the seas an absolute maintenance nightmare.

<comment><USER10> Oh, yesss. Also, bird poop. Seriously - it is already a problem for solar cells on unmanned offshore oil and gas platforms.

<comment><USER8> If this was completely without any obstacles, it would have been brought to market about 50 years ago. There are obstacles for sure, but they don't sound insurmountable to me.

Salt. Salt is a problem for anything that floats on the ocean. Plenty of things do that, it's not such a deal breaker.

Bird poop. You need to either be close to some islands, or in the middle of some migration line. In the Pacific ocean there are millions of square miles that don't qualify for either of that.

Barnacles, mollusks, etc. Maybe you can get away with some special paints, or with periodic cleanup. Mauybe you need to coat the bottom of the floating structure with some film of pesticide-infused plastic. I don't know. But I'm willing to give this idea a chance to succeed. What are the alternatives? Floating nuclear power plants?

<comment><USER10> >What are the alternatives?

This is exactly the right question.

Assuming that the goal is a reduction in atmospheric CO2, there are many alternatives that are at least an order of magnitude more cost-effective. Of those, more land based wind and solar plants are for now the best. The cost of land generally is almost negligibly small - about 0.4% of total for a recent project I looked at. Admittedly, this was in Australia, but given that solar power stations cost circa $0.5 million per hectare in equipment and installation, land (rural land of course) would need to be pretty expensive before it became a significant factor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> What happens to sea life when we restrict the sun over a large area like this? How much microscopic sea life would be killed off in enormous quantities, and would that generate toxicity worse than the CO2 currently being absorbed by the ocean?

<comment><USER12> These secondary effects are what I'm concerned about as well. Seems this would create a dead zone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Why not just do this on the shore instead of a floating ship with unmaintainable floating solar islands? I suspect the more realistic scenario though would be to use a huge nuclear power plant to make fuel by pulling CO_2 from the air.

<comment><USER14> Unless we have costs breakthroughs in nuclear, solar is going to stay cheaper.

<comment><USER15> I doubt solar is actually cheaper for this process right now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Wouldn't it make sense to build these on large lakes and skip the desalination step?

<comment><USER17> One reason that springs to mind is the shortage of large lakes near the equator. Solar "lily pads" would be much less efficient on the Great Lakes or Lake Baikal, and have seasonal swings of output.

<comment><USER18> The Great Lakes in Africa are close to the equator.

<comment><USER19> And they're one group of very few lakes which was the point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> For what I know, about methanol extraction, it depends of various factors. If we can sacrifice portability, we can just pump salt water to a facility, extract the CO2, and pump it back. What I find novel in this approach is the utilization of seawater for the carbon extraction, but the other steps are known or in active research.

</comment><comment><USER21> I wonder about the energy payback time or in that case rather the CO2 payback time. The CO2 released through production of silicon is not negligable (in fact for every silicon atom a CO2 molecule is released regardless of the CO2 released during the energy production)

<comment><USER22> I found an article from 2010 saying that the CO2 breakeven for solar PV was at around the 3-year mark. That article mentioned 225 W panels, the state of the art today is 400W with presumably the same CO2 load to produce. So that would put the payback at more like 2 years. It would get worse again to account for the energy losses in the desalination, CO2 collection and conversion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> This is such a novel idea. This is an example of why we need huge investment in this type of thing(idk if you call it green). I would have never thought of something like this, it won't impact the average person's life and it is carbon neutral. If this exact thing won't solve the biggest problem of our lifetime, something like it will.

</comment><comment><USER24> >…and has an energy storage efficiency of 8% over a 20-year lifetime.

The concept is fun to imagine but these numbers look pretty lousy.

<comment><USER25> The energy is free, so efficiency is only important for comparison reasons. Is there something better we could be doing with that solar panel output? Solar panels themselves are maybe 22% efficient to begin with so this process cuts the efficiently to about 1/3\. Personally, I'm impressed that it's even positive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I couldn't find anything in the paper how or if the channels are filtered. Microorganisms in the water would be subjected to pretty abnormal conditions while being pumped through the acidic and basic channels, so I hope they do filter the water well?

</comment><comment><USER27> Interesting idea, I wonder how it can be protected from rough seas?

<comment><USER28> It says in the article that it would be built in areas of the ocean where break wave heights don't exceed 7 feet.

<comment><USER29> But is that just where wave heights _rarely_ exceed 7 feet? It seems like they would still need some kind of safe mode to deal with once per year/once per ten years conditions. Maybe the could fold up.

<comment><USER27> All the land above sea level between 1'-20' soon (relatively) to be usurped by the measurable volumes of ice being depleted already have lots of pipe and structural (piles and beams) infrastructure protected underground and may could be retrofitted to support the safe mode folding you are suggesting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> SpaceX will be looking for bulk methane and oxygen supply at their offshore Earth-to-Earth transport system within the decade.

<comment><USER31> These floating fuel production facilities could be nice for ships too - refueling en route means you have to carry less fuel and you run more efficiently.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> The most impressive to me, is to read only a single comment worried about the ecological impact and the sustainability

</comment><comment><USER33> Why not produce artifical steam - aka clouds when the wind is right and make it rain over dry country?</comment>


Andrew Cuomo Calls in the Billionaires to Build a High-Tech Dystopia - <AUTHOR> https://theintercept.com/2020/05/08/andrew-cuomo-eric-schmidt-coronavirus-tech-shock-doctrine/ <comment><USER2> It seems like there's a real story here, but it's nearly impossible to get at through the cloud of hyper-dramatized storytelling.

</comment><comment><USER3> Cuomo is using emergency powers to unilaterally direct post-emergency policy. Legislature and courts need to restore the balance of powers. Cuomo's policies have not been a panopoly, rural regions that have not been so intensely impacted by the pandemic have been critically injured by the pandemic response. A government cytokine storm.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm a fan of Naomi's work and have posted it here several times, and I thought the same thing as the events started to unfold:

> It has taken some time to gel, but something resembling a coherent Pandemic > Shock Doctrine is beginning to emerge.

However, if Education, Medicine is ever going to get disrupted, it will be from a tech company, my reservations of M$ notwithstanding, they could at least shift to a model wherein the Certificate model can be implemented in order to circumvent the over-bloated University system in the US. Skill assessments in the 21st century should not be confined to a classroom.

I wish I would have had access to something like this model when I was in school [1], first because it would have been useful to be able to diversify my time into other projects/startups while self-studying for the exam, but also because it could have been done away with the gross over-head costs that contribute to the obscene student debt loads (far exceeding a trillion now) and given me at least a glimpse of what awaited me in the Industry as personal research and self-teaching await anyone going into STEM as a career.

And once again, I agree with Naomi's analysis, but cannot agree with her conclusions:

> It's a future in which our homes are never again exclusively personal spaces > but are also, via high-speed digital connectivity, our schools, our doctor's > offices, our gyms, and, if determined by the state, our jails.

First, I think all of the former aspects are favourable, and can help reduce costs that allow for more competitive pricing, thus accessibility. As for our homes being Jails, I think its been pretty clear that, outside of the Bay Area at least, people were (selfishly or not) able to go outside whenever they wanted to. Some took it as a form of personal protest to start jogging again, as I hadn't seen so many stay at home moms out chatting in the middle of the street while out for a run. No joke, as in: between car lanes. They took advantage of the low car traffic.

I did a mix of 50-50 myself, as I still had to work, but on my off days I just slept at home; I normally would go out to a new restaurant/bakery and my regular spot on weekends, but that's no longer possible now. But the thing I miss the most are my gym routines after work, as I can stay in bed all day and not feel rested if I haven't had a proper work out after my shift(s). I need to completely exhaust myself to decompress and get good sleep.

> It's a future in which our every move, our every word, our every > relationship is trackable, traceable, and data-mineable by unprecedented > collaborations between government and tech giants.

This has already been the case since at least the advent of Social Media and SEO, which is an argument to create another Internet, but that's an argument for a later time... however, I think the concerns here are backward looking. Since 9-11 the mass survielience Industry had accounted for an economic boon for Military Contractors who did the same thing and eroded civil liberties and an yielded ever expanding budget for the Intelligence agencies that rivaled the GDP of entire nation-states.

I welcome the coming disruption in all of those Industries, and remain cautiously optimistic, despite my reluctance to trust Schmidt; what needs to be put in place is legal framework and regulations that clearly define what and how this data is used and stored, and what privacy measures (like in the EU) can be taken to be 'forgotten' from the system should you choose to decline them. I'm pretty sure plumbers, electricians and roofers will still remain a viable career and that system will remain a hands on trade-school.

1: [https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/learning/certification- overv...](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/learning/certification- overview.aspx)

</comment><comment><USER5> > There has been a distinct warming up to human-less, contactless > technology,Humans are biohazards, machines are not.

Let's extract the last layer of humanity in to the digital realm.

Give physical contact skills to Alexa which now on touch warms up to a temperature slightly higher than human body temp and starts to pulsate vibrations in a randomize frequency when you press it against your face.

Do not use Alexa for obvious reasons in the badtube.</comment>


Mystery of honeybee Colony Collapse Disorder is probably solved - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=saving-the-honeybee&print=true

<comment><USER2> It's refreshing to see such care taken to avoid conflating correlation with causation. Even when faced with such a complex system, you can chip away at the mystery if you apply some discipline.

Although I am a little curious about some of the less-mainstream theories: "Other hypotheses were untestable at best, such as claims that the bees were being abducted by aliens." With our pride, we always _assumed_ the aliens would _naturally_ want to abduct us!

</comment><comment><USER3> If you don't want to read through 5 pages of article here is the relevent portion: "But one bee virus stood out, as it had never been identified in the U.S.: the Israeli acute paralysis virus, or IAPV. This pathogen was first described in 2004 by Ilan Sela of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in the course of an effort to find out why bees were dying with paralytic seizures. In our initial sampling, IAPV was found in almost all though not all colonies with CCD symptoms and in only one operation that was not suffering from CCD."

<comment><USER4> The most interesting part IMO was:

 _One of the strains most likely arrived in colonies flown in from Australia in 2005 after the U.S. government lifted a ban on honeybee importation that had been in effect since 1922. (The almond industry lobbied to lift the ban to prevent a critical shortage of pollinators at blossom time.) The other strain probably showed up earlier and is quite different._

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> A completely unscientific observation is that in the Phoenix area, there seems to have been far fewer discussions about Africanized bee hives forming over the past few years.

As far as I can tell, plants are still being adequately pollinated here. I wonder if CCD affected Africanized bees in an equally strong fashion? (The article only mentions European strains of the honey bee.)

</comment><comment><USER6> There is a large variance in reporting on the importance of honeybees. I've seen estimates as extreme as "without the bees most crops will fail," and "its not a big deal, other insects pollinate everything bees do," and everything in between.

Is this the result of sensationalist reporting or disagreement in the field?

<comment><USER7> Commercially, honeybees are essential. There are no other insects which can be so easily harnessed for huge-scale pollination. Without bees, crops would still be pollinated by other insects, but not nearly in the amount needed to sustain current levels of production (and therefore human life).

<comment><USER8> Not "human life", post-WWII American human life.

<comment><USER7> (Current levels of) human life.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Interesting the IAPV was the first proposed reason I heard of - two years ago I think. Seems like the initial thought was the right one.

</comment><comment><USER10> "research has shown that sterilizing old beehive frames with gamma rays before reusing them cuts down the risk of colony collapse"

Where would a beekeeper gain access to a gamma source?

<comment><USER11> Maybe at the beekeeper's store? (I don't know, just guessing).

<comment><USER12> Yep. Why not?

Or someone will go into business as a door-to-door gamma irradiation service: The truck with the lead-lined box arrives at the appointed time, you hand them the frames along with $x per frame, they irradiate them for you and hand them back.

If it's more efficient to truck the frames to the source... well, that works too. A lot of these industrial beekeepers routinely truck entire flatbeds full of hundreds and hundreds of beehives to farms around the country. Occasional stops at the cities where the hive irradiators are available might not be such a big deal.

<comment><USER13> But doesn't this introduce this risk of a nerdy teenager being stung by one of these irradiated bees and manifesting all the traits of a bee, except magnified to human scale?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Identifying the cause of CCD is far from identifying the solution.

<comment><USER9> There are things that can't be solved even if you know the cause, but the majority of the time identifying the cause solves the problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I don't have a lot of time this afternoon -- if anyone else does, would you kindly post a succinct explanation of the real reason why the honeybees were disappearing, where they were disappearing to, and how the problem being prevented? I'd appreciate it. :)

<comment><USER16> Mostly it seems to be a virus, called IAPV, which attacks colonies weakened by poor nutrition, stress, and (possibly) pesticides. But it's actually much more complicated than that, you'd have to RTFA...

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> "beekeepers have had some success at preventing colony loss by redoubling their efforts at improving their colonies' diets, keeping infections and parasites such as varroa and nosema in check, and practicing good hygiene"

... uh no shit.

It's quite pathetic that we've come so far that BEEKEEPERS don't KEEP their BEES.

Between things like this and the financial catastrophe I have very little trust for money. What a shitty measure of success.

<comment><USER18> It is not so much money itself, as money combined with hyperbolic discounting -- some money now is much better than a lot more money later. Sometimes this is a valid decision; if you are going to starve tomorrow, a couple of dollars today is likely far more valuable than twenty thousand dollars next year. After that point, it is a matter of degrees; how much short-term constriction of lifestyle would you be willing to accept for the sake of longer-term reward, or how much long-term pain would you be willing to tolerate for a short-term lifestyle boost? A number of biases and beliefs come into play at this point including: whether you think yourself, or any of us, will be around for the long-term; whether you think that creating a prosperous image for yourself in the short-term will increase your long-term prosperity by playing other peoples' biases about image; whether you think you can gain enough in a short enough time-frame by taking shortcuts and being destructive than the ramifications of your actions will manifest _after_ you get rich, and will manifest in low enough severity that get to stay rich.

The commonality between this and the financial catastrophe is that these people doubled-down on the short-term. In the financial world, they played hot potato with ticking financial "assets". In the bee-keeping world, they deferred basic hive maintenance as long as was possible and still have bees to keep. Some people get rich, some people -- sometimes a lot -- get hosed, and there is a lot of collateral damage. You might argue it is an unethical as all hell, but ethics doesn't enter into it. I get the feeling these people were going to be unethical however we measured productivity; give them a metric and they'll game it for their own ends.

<comment><USER19> bravo. the misunderstanding of economic latency combined with our natural hyperbolic discounting seems to lead to the majority of misunderstandings about economics (besides the basic fallacies and terminology).

It seems that everyone has been infected with short-term thinking and forgotten how to run a regular business. In short-term thinking you don't care about whether or not you're going to do business with anyone again, because you're unsure whether they will be around to do business with. This kind of reasoning is infectious. What we wound up with was a "race to the bottom" in terms of who could make the riskiest highest leverage moves.

<comment><USER20> It's a natural consequence of uncertainty about the future. The idea that everything could change within a few years or a decade is now so prevalent that it affects everyone's medium-term planning, and heavily reinforces the future discount.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Courage to change things - <AUTHOR> http://blog.cloudflare.com/courage-to-change-things

<comment><USER3> Smart move but don't ever stop. I've found that by making just a little incremental design fixes gets paid in a long run.

It takes a tremendous courage to ignite the process of refactoring and wimps in the end pay the price.

When the system gets messy it really does slows the development of new features and even fixing a small bug requires a vast amount of time and labor. Not to mention a stress it introduces to the developers who in the end - <USER2> the company.</comment>


Perlis Languages - <AUTHOR> http://blog.fogus.me/2011/08/14/perlis-languages/ <comment><USER2> I would strongly favor Forth over Joy, but either way concatenative languages are really worth exploring. It seems fair to compare Forth with C, as both deal with hardware and memory rather intimately. Compare a C implementation of a Fisher-Yates shuffle:

      void shuffle(int *array, int n) {
        int i, j, tmp;
        for (i = n - 1; i > 0; i--) {
          j = rand_int(i + 1);
          tmp = array[j];
          array[j] = array[i];
          array[i] = tmp;
        }
      }

With the same algorithm in Forth:

      : shuffle
        1- for
          i 1+ random over +
          over i +
          swap@
        next
      ;

The types, intermediate variables and many of the unnecessary details of the implementation fall away. It's an aesthetic distinction, since we're really trading these for "stack noise" words like _over_ and _i_ , but I find it very pleasing.

C is normally considered an extremely simple, lightweight language. I think the main lesson Forth has taught me is that we can design _much_ simpler languages in the same space without sacrificing power and flexibility.

<comment><USER3> Could you please explain the Forth sample? For instance, which variable is the array?

<comment><USER2> Sure thing.

      : shuffle

This starts a declaration for our word 'shuffle'. This implementation expects the address of the array on the stack with the length of the array on top. Some Forth programmers would leave a comment to this effect like so:

      ( addr len -- addr )

Anything in parentheses is a comment, and this shows the contents of the stack we want as input (read from right to left) before the '--' followed by the contents of the stack we'll get as output. (We leave the array address on the stack. If we want to be void like the C example, add a _drop_ to the end of this definition to discard it.)

      1- for

Subtract one from the length given and begin a _for...next_ loop. This will take the length value off the stack and repeat everything up to the matching _next_ n+1 times. Equivalent to:

      for(int z=n; z >= 0; z--) {}

Our stack now looks like this:

      ( addr )

While we're in the loop, a copy of the loop index can be pushed onto the stack via the word _i_. This actually accesses a secondary stack, so if you nest loops you can obtain progressive indices by using _i'_ and _j_ (or _j_ and _k_ , depending on your Forth dialect.)

      i 1+ random

Add one to the loop index and generate a random number between 0 and this value, exclusive. Our stack now looks like:

      ( addr rand_int(i+1) )

      over +

Over pushes a copy of the second element of our stack. This sequence adds the address of the array to the random index, leaving the address of that cell of the array. Our stack now looks like this:

      ( addr (rand_int(i+1)+addr) )

      over i +

Make another copy of the array address and add the loop index to it. The stack now looks like this:

      ( addr (rand_int(i+1)+addr) (i+addr) )

      swap@

This is a helper word which swaps the contents of two memory addresses. It should be easy to see that this will swap array indices for us in exactly the same way the C code did.

      next ;

Close the loop and terminate the word definition, respectively.

<comment><USER3> Whoa..I'm definitely adding Forth to my "to-learn" list. The concept of a stack-based programming language is completely alien to me and would definitely be worth exploring further. On a side note, is it just me or is Forth's readiblity really low?

[Thanks a lot by the way!]

<comment><USER2> My pleasure. :)

It takes some time to get used to dealing with the stack. The stack plus the fact that there aren't many "structural" symbols like the parentheses and curly braces of ALGOL-derived languages can certainly make Forth harder to skim at first. On the other hand, idiomatic Forth code should be factored into many very small definitions. Aggressive decomposition wins back some readability since everything will be in tiny bite-sized chunks, and it promotes reusing code too. I think personal preference is part of it.

If you're serious about learning more, I'd recommend Leo Brodie's _Starting Forth_ : <http://www.forth.com/starting-forth/sf1/sf1.html>

I hate plugging my own projects, but if you check out my profile I also have several Forth-related things on github.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> A great set of languages. It's true that languages should be mind-expanding, and for that reason I wish C would be included on principle --- everyone should understand pointers --- but I suppose most people have already seen that (the assembler included may make up for it, too).

I'm rather happy that many of these are "modern" languages: Qi, Oz, Kernel, and similar raise my hopes for the field showing that in the interceding 50 years, we _have_ improved upon Lisp, ML, Prolog, and the like.

</comment><comment><USER5> Inform7 is a another perlis language. It's designed for writing text adventure games, but the source code is designed to look like a natural english language.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, that's sort of mind-boggling.

Example: <http://inform7.com/learn/eg/rota/source.txt>

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> What will be a "Perlis language" will necessarily individual. What makes it so for you, is that it have some features that is conceptually new for you. For me BASIC, C, and Simula was Perlis languages, but none of them has features completly unique to them, but I learned new concepts from them. On the other hand Java, Python and Lua were not, because I had encountered their core features previously, and learned little from them for that reason. People with a different background would have a different experience.

Few concepts are unique to any computer language, so I would argue that it should be about learning new concepts rather that a new programming language.

Some of the examples he picks are rather good at that, since they contain concepts not part of the mainstream paradigms, and so will have new concepts for most programmers.

</comment><comment><USER8> Tinkering with new languages is fun and worthwhile to a point, but I honestly feel that my time is now better spent learning new problem domains. Languages matter, but the less tangible skills I've developed working across different domains have been more valuable and fundamental. The things I've learned while studying Machine Learning and DSP over the last year are much more broadly applicable than I would have guessed.

<comment><USER9> What are some broadly applicable things you learned from DSP?

<comment><USER8> When you start to think of any stream of numbers as a digital signal, a lot of the techniques become useful. For example, user interfaces provide a fairly high-resolution stream of quantifiable user events, like touch positions. Often you want to smooth these in specific ways. If you understand how a low- pass filter works, this is easy.

<comment><USER3> Does one need a background in electronics to understand DSP?

<comment><USER8> Not at all. In fact I'd say most DSP these days is done entirely in software.

<comment><USER3> Any tips on where / how to start? Which books / tutorials worked for you? My background is in software engineering and the only thing I know about DSP is a very very basic understanding of the Fourier transform :)

<comment><USER8> This book is free online and is a pretty good intro: <http://www.dspguide.com/pdfbook.htm>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> A few of my own reasons for thinking Joy is interesting:

[https://github.com/raganwald/homoiconic/blob/master/2008-11-...](https://github.com/raganwald/homoiconic/blob/master/2008-11-16/joy.md)

</comment><comment><USER11> I spent quite a few hours a while ago trying to organize languages into different language groups in order to pick which languages to learn next. If you're interested in that see the blog post that came out of that: [http://hacklash.posterous.com/how-to-choose-your-next- progra...](http://hacklash.posterous.com/how-to-choose-your-next-programming- language) .

Just be warned that I'm coming at it from the outside with most of these languages, to make your final decision try and find someone experienced in multiple languages from the paradigm and ask them which to learn the paradigm with.

<comment><USER12> Maybe this could be interesting to you. It was done by Peter Van Roy, of Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming fame.

<http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/paradigms.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think Smalltalk is an other language that's at least fun to explore. Especially if you want to know what OO is really about.

<comment><USER14> Its successor Self shows even more what OO is really about.

<comment><USER15> Its successor, Io, simplifies things even further

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> PerlisLanguage(Prolog).

<comment><USER17> Don't operators have to start with a lowercase letter?

<comment><USER16> Oh. Yeah, I guess you're right. Oh well :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Reading the Eiffel entry, it mentions Design By Contract. This is interesting stuff and I should mention that .NET 4.0 includes Design by Contract in the framework itself.

</comment><comment><USER19> Interesting set of languages. I would include a language focused on coroutines and concurrency as well: Erlang, Go, or Stackless Python for example. Many problems change significantly when seen in the light of concurrency.

</comment><comment><USER20> Call me stupid, because I'm just a lowly PHP developer who's a bit confused as to what new things he wants to learn (for better career prospects), but the first reply just emphasises the balance between verbosity and terseness a language should attempt to maintain.

As a fun learning adventure it's interesting - and, as the article says a lot, mind-blowing - but I can read and understand what is going on in C.

Ask me to explain what Forth, or most if not all of the other examples are doing and you'd be lucky to get more than an, "eeeerrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr...." from me. I suppose that experimentation and innovation are more the point with this though.

<comment><USER21> You seem to think that the trouble you have reading some of this code reflects something inherent in the language (either it's too "smart" for you or simply too weird), but I would suggest the only thing it necessarily reflects is something about _you_ — namely, that you have more experience in some areas than others.

PHP is based on C. It is not based on Forth. Thus, if you only know PHP, C code will be more immediately clear to you than Forth code.

There are some things that make languages easier or harder to read in absolute terms, but when you're brand new, similarity to what you already know pretty much dominates everything else. Similarly, English speakers tend to find Spanish easier than Russian or Chinese.</comment></comment>


Mystery 'alien-like creature' seen in Bristol harbour - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newsvideo/weirdnewsvideo/10497811/Mystery-alien-like-creature-seen-in-Bristol-harbour.html

<comment><USER2> From the brightness, whiteness, and suddenness with which it switched off, I'd be far more inclined to think it's artificial.</comment>


This Stuff Matters: Google's New Privacy Policy (with a few edits) | Nymbus - <AUTHOR> http://www.nymbus.org/blog/2012/02/19/google/ <comment><USER2> I knew I should be reading Google's new privacy policy but I could never get myself to face the boredom. So I'm very appreciative that I've now read it and been entertained at the same time.

</comment><comment><USER3> I wish they had inserted spaces between strikeouts and italic added text. Just to make it a little easier on the eyes.

All in all a pretty fun read.

"...so we know who uses our services on the toilet." tee hee</comment>