Snowden is Heading for Iceland - <AUTHOR> https://www.aftenposten.no/nyheter/uriks/Piratpartiet-Snowden-mellomlander-pa-Gardermoen-7238358.html#.Ucb0cOsyF7w

<comment><USER2> Pirate Party: Snowden has a stopover at Gardermoen

According to the Russian news agency the possibility exists that Edward Snowden will stay overnight at Venezuela's embassy in Moscow. On Monday a plane will leave for Havana.

This has also been confirmed by Wikileaks on Twitter: "Edward Snowden has just landed in Moscow."

It is currently unknown what happened after Snowden landed around 3 o'clock Norwegian time.

The Russian news agency Interfax reports in the meantime that the former CIA- agent has been met by representatives from Venezuela's embassy after he landed. That way he can avoid setting foot on Russian soil and therefore does not need a visa.

Snowden is a former CIA-employee and stands behind extensive leaks on American surveillance. He had been located in Hong Kong until Sunday.

Unknown destination

There circulate different rumours about where Snowden eventually will travel.

The only thing WikiLeaks will say about Snowden's flight from Hong Kong is that he will go to "a democratic land".

Alternative 1: Norway

One alternative, and maybe the most sensible, is that he will try to get himself to Iceland.

TV2 reports that the Norwegian Private Party will meet in secret with Edward Snowden at Gardermoen on Sunday evening during the stopover on his way to Iceland.

The party reported on Twitter that its leader Østein Jakobsen himself will meet Snowden at Gardermoen.

\- We have been informed from our international umbrella party, Pirate Parties International (PPI) that he will have a stopover in Norway. The reason for that is this is probably the fastest and easiest way to get to Iceland, says Tale Østrådal of the Pirate Party Norway to TV2.

The Pirate Party's leader Øystein Jakobsen reinforces that the hints whether Snowden will come to Norway are based on rumours from contacts in the international pirate party network, writes NRK.

Alternative 2: Iceland

Officials in Hong Kong informed the USA on Sunday that Snowden was on his way to Moscow. He left Hong Kong aboard an Aeroflot plane on Sunday morning. According to WikiLeaks, he has diplomats and legal advisors with him on the plane, while they had helped him with travel documents, a safe exit from Hong Kong and political asylum in a democratic land.

[etc. etc. etc., nobody is probably going to read this, but this is a quick and sloppy translation that should not be too far off...]

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Google translate kept giving me error messages. If someone can provide a link that works, I'll replace the current one.

EDIT: I cannot replace the link, but here it is: [http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=no&tl=en&js=n&prev=...](http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=no&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.aftenposten.no%2Fnyheter%2Furiks%2FPiratpartiet- Snowden-mellomlander-pa-Gardermoen-7238358.html%23.Ucb0cOsyF7w)

<comment><USER3> The news content of the article is that the Norwegian Pirate Party claimed on their twitter feed that Snowden is going to Oslo next: [https://twitter.com/PiratPartiet_No/status/34878871367489945...](https://twitter.com/PiratPartiet_No/status/348788713674899457)

The rest of the article is some fairly loose speculation re: whether he's really coming to Norway, will be heading to Iceland (perhaps via Norway), or will be heading to Latin America as previously reported.

<comment><USER4> So they say that Pirate Party International instructed them Snowden will land in Oslo. Maybe a trail that was planted (but more likely misunderstandings).</comment></comment></comment>


An Introduction to Codemods: Refactoring JavaScript with JavaScript - <AUTHOR> https://www.reaktor.com/blog/an-introduction-to-codemods/ <comment><USER2> Hi! I wrote this, ask me anything :)</comment>


Against Disenchantment - <AUTHOR> https://aeon.co/essays/enlightenment-does-not-demand-disenchantment-with-the-world <comment><USER2> Metaphysical subjects like this are mostly a matter of taste, but I can't resist pointing out there are bias and errors in this.

> the defining feature of modernity is that people no longer believe in > spirits, myths or magic.

Religion is excluded from all this "enchantment" talk. I don't know if it is because of the personal belief of the author, or because it would hurt most of the American readers. E.g. Christians generally believe in miracles and saints, or at least they believe that some kind of omnipotent spirit watches over them. Isn't that the most common form of magic?

> Chasing the domination of nature, humans began to dominate each other. [...] > led toward the objectification of humanity; the concentration camps and > Gulag followed.

This is absurd. When Tamerlan destroyed cities and killed hundreds of thousands of people, there was no desire of dominating Nature, nor "enchantment". Three thousand years ago, Assurbanipal organized large scale transfers of populations, and he claimed he tortured civilians routinely. Many "enlightened" religious wars led to huge atrocities, where the opposite side was treated worse than cattle. And of course, slavery and "sub-human races" are an old invention totally unrelated to the domination of Nature. Modern tools led to powerful acts, but "objectification of humanity" is nothing new.

[edit: typos]

<comment><USER3> The article hit on this exact point with a rather interesting quote: "I should note that disenchantment should not be confused with secularisation. The sociological evidence suggests that de-Christianisation, while usually equated with secularisation, often correlates with an increase in belief in spirits, ghosts and magic – not the reverse.".

The article is more about animism than magic. Personally I find the confident, sometimes bordering on militant, rejection of animism by some to be no less peculiar than the no less confident adoption of others in religions undoubtedly invented by men. Why? We know that our brains seem to drive most of our decisions through various complex interactions with the rest of our body. And when these actors are manipulated, our behaviors thus change. This seems like a clear enough argument for determinism that would clearly run contrary to animism, but there's one little problem.

"Me." I am standing here believing that I am the one choosing my words, formatting my text, conveying my thoughts. Why would I be observing this, imagining myself to be the one engaging in such actions? If you write a program to generate a pseudo-random number I think everybody would agree it's quite absurd to imagine some being briefly flickers into existence, imagines himself picking a number, and then flickers back out of existence. Yet how does this notion become any less absurd as the program becomes more complex? You have to engage in extensive hand-waving and appeals to unknown and untestable facts to argue against animism in this case. Quite ironic then that it is this same behavior that people use as a critique of animism.

Don't take this as an endorsement or condemnation of either side. If anything it's an an appeal against radicalism on either side: believe what you want, try to persuade _interested_ others if it gives you satisfaction, don't escalate beyond that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This has relevance to the magic of AI and the disenchantment feeling when we understand it.

What we need is Feynman's enchantment at integrating scientific understanding with awe, where they aren't in opposition. Where learning the biology of a rose can enhance appreciation.

E.g., "Wow, such a simple algorithm can create intelligent outcomes"

<comment><USER5> In the tech industry it doesn't feel to me like we're erring toward disenchantment. If anything, it feels like we're imbuing enormous numbers of mundane things with magical properties and cult-like followings to go along with them.

There's a massive ecosystem of merkle trees which are purportedly going to completely transform humanity through how we transact payments.

There are multiple glamorous conferences, dedicated to banal things like process schedulers, that an outsider could easily mistake for Sunday Mass at a megachurch. Furnished with altars reserved for an evangelizing priesthood sermonizing the congregation. We sometimes even live stream them too!

Contrasted against being disenchanted, we're constantly generating enormous amounts of enthusiasm about what we do, why we do it, and even every nook & cranny of how we do it.

I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing, but it does stand in sharp contrast to the idea that we're wallowing in disenchantment.

<comment><USER6> What a way to look at things. I agree with you. Also, that makes me think that there's even the term "evangelist" used in the tech talks...

<comment><USER7> The central definition of magic at use here is that an act is magical to the extent that _control_ is removed from _causation_. Something went my way, but I didn't directly do anything in order to make it happen, and there's no _rational_ way to ascertain how. It's as if I waved my hands and my will just manifested.

The key is that behind every act of magic is a hidden jungle of complexity that the magical practitioner must master. A wizard masters arcane correspondences, which largely involve study of magical _law_ , which is a rational domain divorced from human intention. If you mumble the words right and have just the right slice of frog lips, then your fireball goes boom. Or your code has to pass the syntax checker before it can get on with semantic evaluation.

A priest masters the domain of human emotion and feeling, learning how to harness these things to earn mastery over _divine_ power. If enough people believe a thing to be true, the truth manifests, called by a higher power into physical expression in the world. Or your startup manages to find funding because YC gave you their stamp of orthodox approval.

You can't dispel magic because that means that there's no longer any complicated domain that we fail to understand but will pay dearly for a guide through it. Any time you have that, the emergent property of people willing to front-load time and effort for later riches and the dramatic flair for making it all look easy will manifest.

<comment><USER6> ... and there's also the Placebo Effect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> In some areas, superstitions persist because scientific research isn't doing all that much to dispell them. The science is controversial and available evidence isn't straightforward. Consider how many people think about nutrition and diets. Often people choose what to eat based on invisible attributes associated with food (labelling) that we as consumers can't observe directly.

Opaque processes can do it too. With the rise of targeted advertising, coincidences can easily be interpreted as the result of someone watching you whether they are or not.

<comment><USER9> Countless millenia of empirical observation has the stronger scientific claim.

I'd like an elementary theory of nutrition, but evidence first.

<comment><USER8> You don't have direct access to past observations. Most were never recorded. At best you have highly filtered and biased summaries.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm glad to know there's a name for this. The world has definitely become less enchannted in the last 30 years, and even the last 10. I imagine this process has been roughly continuous since ancient times, and that would be consistent with my understanding of history.

It's not as straightforward as the fraction of people who believe in magic, though that is certainly related and decreasing. It's also the importance of art, the importance of holidays, how easily we have sex, how much violence we tolerate...

</comment><comment><USER11> Up until recently I had only known of most of max Max Weber's thoughts through the books written by other thinkers (I had only read his "Protestant Ethic" about 10 years ago) but as I'm about to finish his "Economy and Society" [1] I more and more realize that we live in a Max Weber world, we have been doing so since the advent of capitalism (I'd say since the early 1400s by which time the Italian city states had "invented" most of capitalism's basic tools).

I remember an interview from back in 2002 or 2003 with today's most wealthy man, that is Jeff Bezos, and I was stuck by his insistence even back then of measuring and counting almost everything that involved Amazon's business, there was no room for happenstance or of "we think of taking that business decision because [insert some intuition-based thing]", everything was rationalized, there was no room for "enchanted" solutions (the ones involving intuition, for example), disenchantment had already taken place.

Couple of years later (I think around 2005-2006) I also remember the partial furore caused by a Google designer who had decided to leave the company because he was unhappy with Marissa Mayer's decisions of using certain colors on the Google front-page based on A/B testing alone, there was no room for "artistic thinking" anymore (not his exact words, but the general idea of his post back then), a specific blue nuance had to be chosen only after A/B testing, there was nothing left to the designers' imagination. Again, a big step towards rationalization and a big step away from the "enchanted" artistic work.

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

<comment><USER12> If you're interested in Weber, you might find Erich Fromm interesting as well. He studied under Weber's brother in Germany, fled to America during the rise of Nazism, and wrote a monograph for the officials and State Department types who would later coalesce CIA about the conditions which lead a democratic people to turn to Fascism. The monograph was later expanded into a book called _Escape From Freedom_, which is widely regarded as the first work of political psychology.

<comment><USER11> > If you're interested in Weber, you might find Erich Fromm interesting as > well

I did read his "Sane Society" just recently and he was almost like a revelation to me, I didn't know about "Escape From Freedom" and the story behind it, I'll sure be checking it out, thanks for the recommendation!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Bloody hell, that was one of the most uselessly long-winded essays I've ever read! Do you actually expect to find any fairies, gods, ghosts, successful sorcerers, etc, or not? Worse, the basic question is never even posed: why should we tie our conception of society and our meaning-making capacities, as applied to our own lives, to belief or disbelief in the supernatural?

After all, if the "supernatural" existed, it would just be _more natural_ , more _stuff with causal powers_ , which would therefore be intrinsically tied into the rest of the causal order of things.

<comment><USER14> You're right I think (about the "supernatural", not the "uselessly long- winded" bit, although I feel ya.)

Here's the thing that bother's me: _both_ the superstitious people and the enlightened (in the sense of disenchanted) people are missing the point.

There is _always_ a boundary between the known and the unknown.

(Just to pick a wacky one at random: there is no scientific evidence one way or another that "ghosts" are or are not made of "dark matter".)

I am not a scientist, but I am an amateur: I love science. Carl Sagan is a hero of mine. So one day I attended a Reiki session. What's Reiki? (Spoiler alert: NO ONE KNOWS! But I'm getting ahead of myself...) Reiki is the name given to a kind of healing energy (apologies to any physicists reading this) that can be channeled by people to engender healing effects.

So, I'm sitting in this chair, and this person is waving her arm at me from about a meter away, and damned if I don't feel _something_ "filling me up" as it were.

Now I've felt e.g. high voltage fields, I'm no stranger to the Van de Graff generator and it's potential (no pun intended) to enable various party tricks.

This wasn't an electric field. For one thing I could feel it within the volume of my body and (somehow) extending into the space around me. For another it _heals_. I don't want to get into the personal details, but it accelerates or engenders healing on mental, emotional and physical planes simultaneously.

Now my first reaction, after the awe waned a little, was, "OMG let's do science to this!" But _neither_ the Reiki practitioners _nor_ the scientists that I have met are interested.

If someone were standing here in front of me I could affect them with Reiki "energy" and demonstrate a "supernatural" phenomenon at will. As you said, it is just "more natural, more stuff with causal powers". But in my experience the intersection on the Venn diagram of "Science People" and "Reiki People" is very sparsely populated.

<comment><USER13> >If someone were standing here in front of me I could affect them with Reiki "energy" and demonstrate a "supernatural" phenomenon at will. As you said, it is just "more natural, more stuff with causal powers". But in my experience the intersection on the Venn diagram of "Science People" and "Reiki People" is very sparsely populated.

Well dang. _A priori_ , I'd jump to a psychosomatic explanation, since your body's interoceptive afferents are _extremely_ noisy, and so using top-down beliefs to engender an illusion that a vast energy is filling your body _ought_ to be easier than generating other sorts of hallucinations.

(Why yes, this is my research field. Why do you ask?)

But we should still be _testing_ this sort of thing. Assuming it _is_ psychosomatic and nothing more complicated than that (which is already pretty reasonably complicated), what is it about the Reiki session that _allows_ engendering powerful psychosomatic effects?

<comment><USER14> > But we should still be _testing_ this sort of thing.

Yes!

I did some informal experimentation in the years following my introduction to Reiki. Nothing you could write a paper about, but I ruled out (to my own satisfaction) simple psychosomatic or placebo effects.

> ...a psychosomatic explanation, since your body's interoceptive afferents > are extremely noisy, and so using top-down beliefs to engender an illusion > that a vast energy is filling your body ought to be easier than generating > other sorts of hallucinations.

I agree, but that's what struck me about the incident I described: no one told me what was happening or what to expect. As a "sciency" kind of a person, I was astonished by the sensory impressions. I'm not prone to hallucinations generally (I used to work with self-hypnosis a lot and I'm pretty well- calibrated to my own "interoceptive afferents". It would have been very strange for my nervous system to have presented hallucinations to me without "telling me", so to speak.) The other astonishing thing was that at that time in my life I was suffering from severe depression and immediately as the Reiki treatment concluded the depression lifted and I felt (wonderfully!) normal for the rest of the evening. The effect wore off but the depression was never as severe again after that. I can offer no explanation why or how someone waving her arm at me for a few minutes could have done _that_.

> what is it about the Reiki session that allows engendering powerful > psychosomatic effects?

Indeed.

Since then, I have sometimes demonstrated Reiki with people without telling them much about it beforehand. Some people feel nothing. One woman, a very spiritual Christian, jumped because she felt "a tingling clear up to my shoulder." Some feel warmth, others tingling or vibration, etc...

And Reiki seems to be effective on animals, even at a distance without physical contact or even motion. E.g. I can stand still and "beam" Reiki at a sick animal and it will get better. I would _love_ to do this in a proper experimental set up. It has just never come together.

For what it's worth, from the viewpoint of rational materialism, that Reiki aids healing is one of its _least_ astonishing properties.

<comment><USER15> >Since then, I have sometimes demonstrated Reiki with people without telling them much about it beforehand. Some people feel nothing. One woman, a very spiritual Christian, jumped because she felt "a tingling clear up to my shoulder." Some feel warmth, others tingling or vibration, etc...

If you asked me at any time to list off what I'm feeling now, I'd probably list a bunch of things like those that I wouldn't have noticed before being asked to consider what I'm feeling. If you told me you had done something right before that could plausibly affect me, I'd be suspicious you had something to do with it, even though it's most likely coincidental.

The fact that you weren't told the full explanation doesn't mean it couldn't be psychosomatic. People respond to visible attention, especially if it's done in a unique way. A proper test would either have to show that the person still gets the effect without them noticing any attention on them, or show that the person doesn't get an effect when there is the same kind of visible attention on them but the practicer is secretly not beaming Reiki to them. The practicer might act or interpret the subject's responses differently when not actually beaming Reiki, so a double blind study would be necessary. You could have an interviewer explain to a subject that you (in another room where the subject and the interviewer can't see or hear you in any way) will beam Reiki into the subject, and the interviewer records how the subject says they feel. During the experiment, you flip a coin and only beam Reiki if it lands on heads. (It's important that the placebo sequence is random and not known to the interviewer. The easiest way to avoid accidentally communicating the sequence ahead of time to the interviewer is to only decide whether it's a placebo run or not during the individual experiment after you're split up from the subject and interviewer.)

Another kind of experiment that can be done is to see if Reiki can be used to communicate information through timing. Put the subject in one room and you in another where the subject can't see or otherwise perceive you at all. The subject is told that you will beam Reiki to them at some point, and they need to write down the time as soon as they sense it. In the other room, you write down the time and set a fifteen minute timer. You roll a d10 and then wait that many minutes before beaming Reiki to the subject and writing down the time of that. You wait until the timer goes off before exiting the room and telling the subject that the experiment is over. (Subjects might be likely to think they feel Reiki when they hear you coming over to them to end the experiment, or they might think they feel Reiki randomly after a longer wait, so you wouldn't want the time you end the experiment to be linked at all to the random time you beamed it to them.) Then you collect all the written times and see if the times you beamed Reiki line up to when people received it. (I'm not sure if it's strictly necessary, but you could also add a control group by making it so after you leave the subject to your own room, before you roll the d10, you flip a coin to decide whether or not you'll actually beam Reiki to them. Imagine you ran the main experiment without controls, and the analysis on whether the individual times lined up was inconclusive and you didn't know what to make of it, but on average they said they felt Reiki after five minutes, and you knew you beamed it on average after five minutes, so you thought it was a success. But if had a control group and knew they also said it happened after five minutes on average, that would tell you that the main group's results had nothing to do with Reiki.)

If the social interaction between the Reiki beamer and the subject is important -- well, that would be a hint it's a psychosomatic effect -- there's still a further double-blind test that could be done. You could train a group of people to be Reiki practitioners, and then you could train a second group to be Reiki practitioners but change some detail that causes the Reiki beaming to not work, and then set both groups loose on some subjects and compare the results of both. It's not perfect because you might teach the two groups differently, you might accidentally teach the control group a different version of Reiki that still works, the control group might work out the missing detail, or the control group might notice the lack of results and act differently, but it's still something.

<comment><USER14> First of all, thank you for responding in the spirit of the thing. Cheers!

Experimental design for Reiki would be a big challenge. Without getting into a lot of details (that would sound outlandish anyway) much of these suggestions wouldn't work.

Whatever it is, Reiki is exquisitely sensitive to intention of the people involved. It only "cares" about healing. If your intention is to test Reiki, it won't work. Reiki doesn't care. If your intention is to heal people, it will work but you'll also heal the control group. There's no way to use Reiki _not_ to heal some people, you see? You can't administer "placebo" Reiki.

> you could train a second group to be Reiki practitioners but change some > detail that causes the Reiki beaming to not work

You couldn't though: if a student were worthy the "fake" training would work anyway; conversely a "real" training would not work for a student who wasn't worthy.

Like I said above, I don't think Reiki can be studied scientifically, although I'd like to try.

<comment><USER13> >Whatever it is, Reiki is exquisitely sensitive to intention of the people involved. It only "cares" about healing. If your intention is to test Reiki, it won't work. Reiki doesn't care. If your intention is to heal people, it will work but you'll also heal the control group. There's no way to use Reiki not to heal some people, you see? You can't administer "placebo" Reiki.

Ascribing emotion and intention to a hypothesized nonliving object is a step too far for me. Put up or shut up.

<comment><USER14> I never said it was nonliving.

The most parsimonious hypothesis I have come up with is that Reiki is life. (That's a bit of a cop-out because both terms are somewhat loosely defined so there's enough wiggle room to simply equate them, and it doesn't really add much to a _scientific_ conversation does it?)

Check out: "What Bodies Think About: Bioelectric Computation Outside the Nervous System - NeurIPS 2018"

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjD1aLm4Thg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjD1aLm4Thg)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736698](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736698)

Reiki could be as simple and (relatively!) unremarkable as some kind of biological near-field communication ( [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near- field_communication](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-field_communication) )

> Put up or shut up.

Honestly, I'm just some weirdo on the internet. I'm in SF, if you're ever out this way hit me up and I'll demonstrate Reiki for you. There are Reiki practitioners in your city no doubt. If you're really interested you should go meet some of them. I'm willing to keep answering your questions but if you want to really see hard science doing some wild "supernatural" stuff, Levin's work (above) is much more worth your time.

Cheers! :-)

\- - - -

edit: I was rereading my replies and it occurred to me that since, as I told AgentME, there is apparently no distance limit to Reiki, we _could_ attempt a demonstration. To wit: if you reply within, say, 24 hours with a time (Pacific Standard if you would be so kind) I'll go ahead and do a distance treatment on you. The image from your Github account is enough to "dial it in". (For sake of parity I'll tell you that I'm "calroc" on that site. You can see what I look like. ;-) Maybe nothing happens, maybe something. YMMV

@AgentME, same offer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is something the situationalists addressed with the theory of derive. There are plenty of people carrying on in that tradition, including my own project.

</comment><comment><USER17> > _Furthermore, the widely repeated claim that modern science necessarily > produces disenchantment is equally a mistake. It fails on a philosophical > level because it has been impossible to successfully and fully demarcate > 'science' from other domains. As Larry Laudan, the greatest living > philosopher of science, has shown, 'there are no epistemic features which > all and only the disciplines we accept as "scientific" share in common' and, > moreover there is no unitary scientific method._

There is, however, a result they share in common:

> _The rise of the natural sciences is credited with a demonstrable, ever- > quickening increase in human knowledge and power; shortly before the modern > age European mankind knew less than Archimedes in the third century B.C., > while the first fifty years of our century have witnessed more important > discoveries than all the centuries of recorded history together. Yet the > same phenomenon is blamed with equal right for the hardly less demonstrable > increase in human despair or the specifically modern nihilism which has > spread to ever larger sections of the population, their most significant > aspect perhaps being that they no longer spare the scientists themselves, > whose well-founded optimism could still, in the nineteenth century, stand up > against the equally justifiable pessimism of thinkers and poets. The modern > astrophysical world view, which began with Galileo, and its challenge to the > adequacy of the senses to reveal reality, have left us a universe of whose > qualities we know no more than the way they affect our measuring > instruments, and — in the words of Eddington — "the former have as much > resemblance to the latter as a telephone number has to a subscriber." > Instead of objective qualities, in other words, we find instruments, and > instead of nature or the universe — in the words of Heisenberg — man > encounters only himself._

\-- Hannah Arent

You might say that's being blind and alone, and knowing it. I _still_ don't agree that this necessarily needs to lead to pessimism or nihilism or disenchantment, I am joyful because I want to be, not because I have reasons for it I couldn't dissect and disappear with "rational thought".

But what I observe is that, we seem to have regressed from that, we love to pretend objectivity is even available to us, and think science is somehow the opposite of "mere subjective experience". It's still just subjective experience, on a larger scale by more people, but that doesn't make it fundamentally different. Heisenberg knew this, we no longer, and I wonder why that is.

> _How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the > entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its > sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? > Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all > directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through > an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not > become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to > light lanterns in the morning?_

\-- Friedrich Nietzsche, "The Parable of the Madman" (1882)</comment>


'Blade Runner 2049' about learning you're not the main character in your story - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/act-four/wp/2017/10/17/blade-runner-2049-is-about-learning-that-youre-not-the-main-character-in-your-own-story/ <comment><USER2> This title is kind of a spoiler if you haven't seen the movie. Mods, consider changing it.

<comment><USER3> +1, the title is absolutely a spoiler.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why are there more Windows exploits and vulnerabilities? - <AUTHOR> Are there more Windows exploits and vulnerabilities knows and documented because of the larger user base or because it is less 'secure' than Linux/OS-X? <comment><USER2> > Are there more Windows exploits and vulnerabilities knows and documented > because of the larger user base or because it is less 'secure' than > Linux/OS-X?

Yes.

You may think this to be a flip answer, but it isn't. Both factors play a part. Windows is notoriously insecure because of how it evolved (at the hands of so many people over so many years, with different priorities and skill levels), but it is the primary target of hackers (a) because it is full of gaping holes, and (b) because of its large installed base.

</comment><comment><USER3> What metrics do you want to use for purposes of this conversation? I.e. where do we look for vulnerability counts?</comment>


The Devil's Party: On Milton's Lucifer - <AUTHOR> https://theamericanscholar.org/the-devils-party/ <comment><USER2> I'm guessing that Paradise Lost [0] isn't standard reading for HN'ers, but I have to say that when I read it for an exam when I was 17, I loved it (compared with the Shakespeare that was also on the syllabus). The article reminded me why:

Lucifer being cast out of heaven...

      Him the Almighty Power
      Hurled headlong flaming from the ethereal sky
      With hideous ruin and combustion down
      To bottomless perdition, there to dwell
      In adamantine chains and penal fire...

On seeing Eve for the first time:

      That space the Evil One abstracted stood
      From his own evil, and for the time remained
      Stupidly good of enmity disarmed,
      Of guile, of hate, of envy, of revenge,
      But the hot Hell that always in him burns...

Superbly visual writing, for a book published in 1667.

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

<comment><USER3> I agree. It is one of my favorite poems. There are also very good audio book recordings avaialable.</comment></comment>


Drowning Doesn't Look Like Drowning (2010) - <AUTHOR> http://mariovittone.com/2010/05/154/ <comment><USER2> Practice spotting someone drowning from real videos of public swimming pools: [http://spotthedrowningchild.com/](http://spotthedrowningchild.com/)

It's good but not perfect since the lifeguard thankfully rescues them before they drown but it's still a good exercise. I can do this exercise fairly reliably but I'm not perfect either.

A few years ago I saved a man from drowning _but_ I very very nearly didn't: [https://medium.com/@ideasasylum/i-saved-a-man-from- drowning-...](https://medium.com/@ideasasylum/i-saved-a-man-from-drowning- today-1994833cff4)

<comment><USER3> Seems insane to allow non-swimmers to use floating tubes that can flip over without also wearing personal flotation devices.

Even with a lifeguard, what if multiple people need saving at the same time, or the lifeguard just doesn't notice it after a long time with no interventions require.

<comment><USER4> > _" Seems insane to allow non-swimmers to use floating tubes that can flip > over without also wearing personal flotation devices."_

Years ago I worked as a lifeguard at a public pool where the policy was no flotation devices unless you proved yourself a capable swimmer (able to confidently swim 50 yards.) The rule seemed counter-intuitive for a lot of people, but I'd say it worked well. We never had any flotation-related incidents.

Nonswimmers needed to stay in the shallow end (where to be sure there was still a drowning risk) and because they had to not use any floats, the chance they'd panick was reduced (panicking usually happens when conditions suddenly change, such as when somebody falls off a pool noodle even if the water is shallow enough to stand up.) Taking floats away from non-swimmers, as well as some other common sense policy such as no rough-housing, greatly reduces the chance of anything going wrong.

<comment><USER5> I remember experiencing exactly that failure mode as a kid-- slipping off of a floatie in the deep end before I was a confident swimmer and needing to be rescued.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I witnessed once a guy drowning in the sea. There were signs all over the beach that it was very dangerous to swim there at that time of the year. The sea was a bit rough but the waves weren't that impressive. Nonetheless, a guy went for a dip although not very far in the sea, maybe waist-level. Eventually, he realized he wasn't able to go back to the beach, got carried by the current and called for help. Fortunately, he was rescued by a surfer.

I certainly wouldn't have gone in the sea considering all the warnings, but at the same time, I didn't really think the guy was in danger while being so close to the beach. I think it was a good lesson.

<comment><USER7> That sounds like a rip current. A rip current moves out to sea faster than you can swim, but they typically aren't very wide. The key is to swim parallel to the shore till you're out of the current, then you can swim in. It can be scary though and obviously panicking is about the worst thing you can do. People will often try to swim against the current till they tire and then they unfortunately may drown.

You can sometimes identify a rip current from the beach as a stream of bubbles/whitewash moving out to sea by they are often hard to spot.

<comment><USER8> I've always heard them called "rip tides", not "rip currents".

But whatever you call them, I got caught by one many years ago, when I was a kid.

It was Wrightsville Beach, near Wilmington NC. My friend and I were swimming near the pier.

It was all fun and games, for what seemed like a short time.

We kept checking, and the pier never moved. Until one time we checked, and the pier was gone.

Well, really we were gone and we didn't realize it. We were so far out into the ocean that we could barely see the end of the pier, much less the beach. I don't know how far out we were, but research indicates the pier is currently 1200 feet long. Ask yourself how far out you would have to be and not be able to see the pier from that far out.

Fortunately, I had been well-taught in school, and knew that we had to swim perpendicular (well, more diagonal) to the tide. We couldn't fight the tide and try to swim directly to shore, otherwise we would tire out and never make it. That part had been drilled into my head quite well by the school system of Wilmington, NC.

So, we started swimming perpendicular to the tide.

I also know that we couldn't swim south, since that's the direction the pier was in, and we didn't want to risk running into the pier.

So, we swam north. For what seemed like miles. We managed to keep the beach in view, barely.

When we did finally make land, it was way the bleeping heck to the north. We definitely couldn't see the pier from there.

So, we started our long trek to the south, walking through the wet sand, because we didn't have shoes.

I don't know how long it actually took to get back to where our parents were, but it sure seemed like hours and hours.

When we finally got there, they had never noticed that we had drifted out too far, or that we were gone at all.

Things could have turned out very differently, if not for the school system of Wilmington, NC.

<comment><USER7> Funny, I grew up in Miami but currently live in Raleigh and have been to the NC beaches many times. I'm pretty sure I always knew them as rip currents. But now I wonder if I learned them as tides and started calling them currents at somepoint. Tides is definitely a misnomer:

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

I've been caught in one before too but nothing so dramatic!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Also, this video: Can you spot the drowning child?

[https://www.stuff.co.nz/life-style/parenting/69540825/can- yo...](https://www.stuff.co.nz/life-style/parenting/69540825/can-you-spot-the- drowning-child)

<comment><USER10> This video actually shows the Hollywood styled drowning. It can look a lot different from this, and I suspect that's what the original article is about, though it's currently unavailable so who knows.

People who are drowning can look like they are just floating, or sitting in the water, with their heads barely sticking out and no splashing, yelling or any sort of alarming thing going on. The reason for this is that they are dog paddling in an upright position, but rarely get their mouths and noses out of the water. They can be in this situation for quite a while before they actually drown, with no real visible signs.

We're a costal nation(Denmark) and each year tourists drown. It's especially tragic when children drown 10-15 meters from their parents that never noticed something was wrong.

If anyone _especially children_ is dead quiet in the water you definitely have to check if they are ok.

<comment><USER11> TFA was about instinctive drowning response [1], which seems (to my amateur eye) to be what's happening in that video.

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Quite a few previous discussions: [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Drowning%20Doesn%E2%80%99t%20L...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Drowning%20Doesn%E2%80%99t%20Look%20Like%20Drowning%20points%3E10&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0)

<comment><USER13> Speaking as a member of the community I'm good with this one reposting every summer. Super important IMHO.

<comment><USER14> Agreed. I've seen this come around every summer for the past few years, and I don't mind reading it again (especially considering I'm up at the cottage right now with our young children).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Yeah, my 7 y/o got a bit off her depth in a hotel pool once and was doing this. In fact she did it like 3 times, and I had to rescue her each time.

So it's really stuck with me that people drown 'very quietly', and to stay alert whenever my children are in water.

</comment><comment><USER16> Site unavailable due to capacity problems. However, as others have pointed out, this (or similar) articles have been submitted and discussed many, many times.

That doesn't make it interesting or unimportant, and I respectfully suggest people should read some of them.

In particular - READ THIS:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1492894](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1492894)

 _Added in edit:_ This has been discussed more often than the search given by dang suggests. Here are some, with the number of comments:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16978769](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16978769) (13)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16939063](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16939063) (0)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14313067](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14313067) (1)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11667755](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11667755) (74)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11658854](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11658854) (0)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9947237](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9947237) (40)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9685842](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9685842) (1)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7581288](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7581288) (0)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5856312](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5856312) (0)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5822917](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5822917) (0)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4028232](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4028232) (0)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2393594](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2393594) (10 (mostly meta))

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1647662](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1647662) (2)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1492835](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1492835) (127)

<comment><USER17> > In particular - READ THIS

In fact, do NOT read it.

Do not take advice on HN (or any Internet forum) about situations involving safety; people on the Internet don't know what they are talking about, even when they sound competent or claim credentials (do I really need to say that?) and someone could get seriously hurt or killed. Unless you are an expert, you can't tell the good advice from the bad; find an authoritative source.

And in fact, if you read further down the linked thread, someone asked an apparent professional about the advice; they did not give a favorable response and called part of it dangerous.

<comment><USER18> In this case the advise is spot on (i.e. don't get within arms reach of someone who is drowning unless you know what you're doing). I think warning people that the situation is more dangerous than it appears is consistent with your advice that you should rely on experts when possible.

At the risk of "claiming credentials", I'm a paramedic with swift-water rescue training.

<comment><USER17> In my experience, responsible professionals do not give free Internet advice in situations with potentially serious consequences. Serious situations require very carefully considered advice; you could leave something out or misstate something; it could be misconstrued - and someone dies. For much less dire situations, I don't give professional advice without giving it far more care than I give an HN comment.

Authoritative sources are great. They probably bring to bear far more expertise than HN commenters, they've already performed all that careful consideration, and in many cases they've also tested how the information will be understood. Again, misunderstandings can be deadly.

The proper response is not 'here's what to do'; it's 'here's a link to an excellent authoritative source'.

<comment><USER18> I agree with your general premise. I disagree with your application of that premise here. In this case the comment is providing a warning that the situation is more dangerous than it appears.

Someone reading that comment would be more likely to act conservatively, resulting in fewer deaths.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> What's even more dangerous is that children can get secondary drowning if they sucked water into their lung [0]. They would often just look like they're tired, like any other child after the beach. But it can be fatal if not treated properly.

[0]: [http://www.osteopathic.org/osteopathic-health/about-your- hea...](http://www.osteopathic.org/osteopathic-health/about-your- health/health-conditions-library/childrens-health/Pages/secondary- drowning.aspx)

</comment><comment><USER20> Also, most people don't know how to swim. When you ask a person if they know how to swim, when you're headed to the beach, you'll get:

1 Sometimes: no way, I stay out of the water

2 Usually: uh, sure, yup, I can swim

3 Rarely: Totally, I used to be on a team.

My favorite follow up to #2 is "could you swim 4 laps in a pool without ever touching the bottom or stopping to take a break? That usually prompts a "what are you crazy, no way that's super hard" response. Then I inform the person that they do not know how to swim, and that they should be extra careful.

<comment><USER21> You are implying that only competitive sport swimmers can actually swim.

<comment><USER4> Relatively few people who've not been on a competitive team have ever taken enough swimming lessons to be good for a few brisk laps of the pool. Where I come from every school child gets probably 20 hours or so of swim lessons in public school, spread out over several years. In my experience this sort of background is typically enough to be able to tread water and move around, but not with correct form. And without correct form they will quickly fatigue.

It's certainly possible for a autodidact swimmer with such a background to go to the Y pool and start doing laps until they figure out out on their own, but that's pretty uncommon. And it's also possible for somebody to pay for enough private lessons to become a competent swimmer, but that's also fairly uncommon. In my experience every licensed lifeguard I've ever met was currently or formerly a competitive swimmer; that's not a requirement but realistically only competitive swimmers could accomplish the 300 yard perquisite swim required to qualify you to receive training. (As for selection bias, in my training course there were several without competitive swimming backgrounds who tried, but failed.)

(In some outlying situations, perhaps such as a coastal community where surfing is common, the above might not necessarily be true. But for your typical community I'd say it's a good bet that anybody who hasn't swam competitively will, if they're able to swim at all, have poor form and fatigue quickly.)

<comment><USER22> This sounds absymal. Is this the US? Definitely different in Australia and UK.

Maybe there are more pools here.

I used to swim 1k couple of times a week (no breaks) just to "keep fit" not even competitive. I considered that normal.

<comment><USER4> Yes this is in the US. The school district owned one pool. A few years of your 12 years in the school district system, students would get a week or two of lessons during gym class (being bused to the pool from the other schools in the district, when necessary.) About an hour of lessons 2-3 times a week for one or two weeks, a handful of times in twelve years. On second thought 20 hours may have been an underestimate, but not by much.

That same pool is also where private swimming lessons for all ages were available for a modest fee (that program was subsidized by the pool's existence but otherwise self-funding. I worked as an instructor in that program for a few years and got a modest paycheck for it.) That pool was also use for practice and meets for the swim club (competitive swimming for young children) and the swim team (competitive swimming for teenagers.) Private lessons were mostly attended by young children, their parents stopped paying for it once they were reasonably confident their child wouldn't drown and it was very rare for anybody as old as a teenager to take those lessons. The pool was also open to the public once or twice a week for a dollar or two and there was a lane set aside for lap swimming, but it was rarely used.

I'm not sure what the bottleneck was that prevented more school-hour swimming lessons during their scheduled gym classes. It may have been the busing requirement, since there were a handful of elementary schools in the district that were not close to the school building that had the pool.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The linked article is from 2010, but I think it's still as good and valid today as it was then.

Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER23> Archive.org mirror [https://web.archive.org/web/20180528043231/http://mariovitto...](https://web.archive.org/web/20180528043231/http://mariovittone.com/2010/05/154/)

</comment><comment><USER24> There's an excellent episode on stuff you should know podcast about drowning. They talked about this and several other interesting facts about drowning.

Link: [https://www.stuffyoushouldknow.com/podcasts/how-drowning- wor...](https://www.stuffyoushouldknow.com/podcasts/how-drowning-works.htm)

</comment><comment><USER25> And don't forget about "Dry Drowning". It can happen days after someone is rescued from actually drowning....

[http://www.livescience.com/59444-dry- drowning.html](http://www.livescience.com/59444-dry-drowning.html)

<comment><USER26> "Dry drowning is a term that has never had an accepted medical definition, and that is currently medically discredited."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drowning#Dry_drowning](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drowning#Dry_drowning)

<comment><USER25> In the context of the article "drowning doesn't look like drowning". Drowning a week after you have been submerged in water doesn't "look like drowning". The _definition_ may not be medically accepted but the _concept_ is well documented.

From the original article.

 _Dry drowning occurs when, after being submerged in water, a person 's vocal cords experience a spasm and close, making it difficult to breathe, said Dr. Mike Patrick, an emergency-medicine physician at Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, who was not involved in the boy's care. When this happens, the body's response is to send fluid to the lungs to try to open up the vocal cords. But this can lead to excess fluid in the lungs — a condition called pulmonary edema. Symptoms of dry drowning usually start within an hour after a person is submerged in water, Patrick said._

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Related: Show HN: Spot the Drowning Child (1215 upvotes, 384 comments) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9962185](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9962185)

</comment><comment><USER28> Was a junior lifeguard a long time ago at university pool, not sure if they still do this but do lifeguards still have flotation device and go into kicking position when approaching drowning people?

</comment><comment><USER29> I don't know how to swim and have almost drowned a few times (~8) from not really respecting that I can't swim effectively (actually from reading the top link from ColinWright I am tempted to do a "AskHN: Best way to learn how to swim as an adult?" there seems to be a lot of knowledge here on this subject)

One of those times was particularly bad and someone had to come in and rescue me. I had gone to a swimming pool the day before and done a couple of strokes and thought to myself "this isn't too bad" but then we went to this cliff next to a flooded canyon where people like to jump into the water (it's very deep but only around 10 meters across and you have to swim across to get to the cliff). I wanted to be safe so I started by going parallel to the bank to be sure I could do it but after doing a stroke and keeping my head out of water I thought "what the hell I'll go for it" and turned while swimming and started going across. With no experience and a very out of my element I was rushing and basically managed to exhaust myself when I was half way (I could have gotten to that same spot in one kick from the bank probably). It was a very strange feeling I couldn't move at all! My body was completely exhausted and I couldn't summon an ounce of energy so I started to drown. The issue was that no one really took it seriously and my friend who was standing on the other side and had said he'd help me if anything went wrong was just looking at me like "come on.." so gradually my panic rose and rose until my face communicated sufficient terror for him to realize that I was going to die.

The problem of course is when you are really panicked this climbing response (that I just learned about today by reading ColinWrights top link in this thread) kicks in and you become dangerous. I did know that panicking people tend to kill their would-be saviors in their panic but I wasn't really thinking..

Anyway he jumps in and I bear hug him instantly and we both start drowning, except I realize we're going to die and go completely limp just keeping my hand on his shoulder and my eyes open. He manages a stroke or two and then I do the climbing response and pull on his shoulder and manage to grab a rock and pull on it and boom I'm up and standing on the other side wheezing and coughing and with a crazy headache.

It's very important to start saving at first signs of trouble and not waiting for signals of distress, by then people have already lost their rationality. I think what saved me is just how mentally prepared I was for this exact scenario and also having experienced it before but with no one to help me (needing to breath out all air and walk on the bottom of the ocean / pool to find something to grab / float with). Being careful about not breathing in water (better to suffocate) and having done a bunch of yoga was also useful.

My biggest lesson was that swimming isn't binary, anyone can swim, it's more about the gradual efficiency improvements you make. Since then I've made some progress in learning to relax again and now I know how to float on my back but I'd like to buy a buoy for open water swimming and start practicing in the ocean. I'd love it if anyone can inform me of the sanity of that plan or give me good resources and advice.

<comment><USER30>
        > [..]bear hug him instantly and we
        > both start drowning[..].

For anyone who knows how to swim who's on the other side of this, what I was taught you should do is:

a) Try to find another way to deal with the situation, e.g. throw something that floats at that person, or swim to them with a tree branch, or anything you have at hand. You'll be risking your life approaching them if they're all you can grab.

b) If you're OK with risking your life, you dive, approach them from underwater from the rear, and push them up by the hips long enough that they can breathe or show that they're not panicking. If they are you let them go, swim away, take a breath, and repeat.

c) If somehow they manage to grab a hold of you you dive. Their panic reflex is to try to approach the surface. If you try to also approach the surface they'll try to climb on top of you and they'll likely kill you. It's really hard to get rid of someone clinging to you in the water in panic. Even an 8 year old could kill an adult male under those circumstances.

People who are drowning are in a complete state of panic. If you're close enough to shore you may both be better off if you let them lose consciousness and haul them in unconscious and try to resuscitate them, otherwise you might both die.</comment></comment>


The Controlled Natural Language of Randall Munroe's Thing Explainer [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://arxiv.org/abs/1605.02457 <comment><USER2> I thought Thing Explainer is a fun experiment and a delightful book, but as an attempt (and it isn't a serious attempt) to use only simple and super- commonly-used language, it doesn't hit the home base. As I speak English as my second language I'm acutely aware of this.

Thing explainer uses the 1000 most commonly used lemmas, but words have multiple senses, and some of them are commonly used and some are not. From a viewpoint of a language learner, an unfamiliar use of a word might be another word for what it's worth. (Of course they might have a clear semantical connection, which helps guessing.)

Another thing is that phrasal verbs and set phrases are essentially vocabulary items too – you can't decode them using only extralinguistic knowledge (that is, knowledge about the world).

Randall Munroe developed a text editor that highlights any words outside his word list to help with writing the book, but I think an editor that could handle word senses and multi-word phrases would be a formidable thing. Of course it needs much more high-level NLP, word sense disambiguation and such. (Possibly impossible to pull that off cleanly with the current level of tech?) I'd love to see one.

<comment><USER3> The text editor is here:

[http://xkcd.com/simplewriter/](http://xkcd.com/simplewriter/)

Try it!

1,000 words is an unrealistic constraint. But I'm amazed how often I use a complex word when the simple alternative is better.

Or...

Sticking to 1,000 words is hard. But doing it often makes my writing better.

<comment><USER4> I wasn't familiar with that tool, so I put a few of my last HipChat messages in there to see how I faired. Once I removed specific words or proper nouns, I still didn't do all that well. Even the preceding sentence had four problem words, and I'm pretty sure "preceding" would join them.

I agree, sticking to 1,000 words is hard. But I don't think I agree that it makes the writing better. I look at language as a form of expression, and some words are just more colorful than others, but it takes all of them to paint a picture. I honestly don't know if I could limit myself to the 1,000 most common words, but I wouldn't want to do that if I could. That said, I'm curious why you think it makes your writing better? Is it that you think more about what you're saying? Or that you think it will be more easily digested by others?

<comment><USER5> To me, language is wielded with dual intention: (1) to convey meaning ("A thorough lecturer") & (2) to convey meaning in a pleasing manner to the listener ("A good lecturer").

Expanding vocabulary to accentuate (2) by necessity compromises (1) _for classes of listeners / readers who are not familiar with that vocabulary superset_. Which decomposes the optimization problem to "Who is my audience and what is their comfort vocabulary set?" I would expect it's >1,000 words even for ESOL listeners. However, it's certainly < "the full set of florid English words".

And furthermore, I think English writers writing for English consumers (I count myself among these, sadly) often undervalue writing in the most effective style for the widest audience when applicable (and nowadays it almost always is: research papers, comments on a public forum, blog posts, how to's, etc etc).

Does anyone have any links to courses to help develop a working minimally spanning English vocabulary for international technical communication?

This is one problem I've had with academic literature in historically liberal arts fields. "Just learn the obscure English vocabulary _(before you can understand, work, or research in a field)_ " is a ridiculous bar to set in front of contributions.

<comment><USER3> Rare words can make writing more efficient and enjoyable. But it doesn't always.

To my ears:

"I use language for two reasons:"

Is better than

"To me, language is wielded with dual intention"

But I always enjoy the word "florid", even though it's not in the top 1000 words.

<comment><USER6> > "To me, language is wielded with dual intention"

I've got to be honest. I actually prefer that one. Not for conveying meaning but it definitely sounds nicer -- as a though it were a part of a Shakespearean soliloquy.

<comment><USER5> I believe that's the nicest thing anyone has ever said about words I put on the internet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Thing explainer is fun -- but I don't think the descriptions in it are particularly clear. It's just fun to see how he solves the problem of describing them given his self-imposed limitation.

Even more fun is Poul Andersons "uncleftish beholding": [http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/complexity/people/st...](http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/complexity/people/students/dtc/students2011/maitland/fun/)

<comment><USER8> Agreed. Often you have to already know what he's talking about to get meaning from his words.

For example, his description of the Saturn V Rocket (he replaced rocket with 'up goer') has this description of hydrogen: "The kind of air that once burned a big sky bag and people died (And someone said "Oh the [humans]!")

I guess that's amusing if you already know about the Hindenburg, or something.

Also, speaking of the propellant used for the Saturn V's F-1 engine he states: "This is full of that stuff they burned in lights before houses had power". The propellant in the F-1 engine was RP-1 (kerosene). I assume he was talking about 'town gas' for lighting.

<comment><USER9> Kerosene lamps were ubiquitous before electric lighting. Look at the pictures in the wikipedia page[0], you'll recognize them for sure.

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

<comment><USER10> It seems that, in trying to make a second point, jgrahamc accidentally proved his first.

<comment><USER8> It wasn't an accident. I was showing that the ambiguity introduced by his language means that it's hard to understand what's really going on.

<comment><USER10> Well that was clever. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Off topic:

I attended a school with little to none "secular" education, but I was by nature really curious about things.

At some point, I got my hands on "How Stuff Works", the book[0], and devoured it. It was a super-enlightening book. I'd even venture to say it set me on my autodidactic path to programming.

If this book serves the same purpose for someone as that book did for me, it's benefits cannot be overstated IMO.

As an extra bonus, I was considered by my peers to be far more knowledgable than I actually was, due to having a layman's understanding (or at least the appearance thereof) of _so many_ esoteric concepts. 10/10 would read again!

[0] [http://amzn.com/0785824324](http://amzn.com/0785824324)

</comment><comment><USER12> While this is tagged as PDF the link is actually to the website where you can read the abstract.

The PDF link is: [http://arxiv.org/pdf/1605.02457v1.pdf](http://arxiv.org/pdf/1605.02457v1.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER13> I have Thing Explainer right here, my main issue is I'd like a separate version with the actual terms so I can have a conversation about the covered topics without sounding like a moron.

<comment><USER14> What I think would be interesting is if he tried another version _without_ the 1000 most common words.

<comment><USER15> I don't think it's possible to form non-trivial sentences without function words. But leaving out common content words could be interesting.

<comment><USER16> Someone wrote a 260 pages long novel without using a single word that contains the letter 'e'. That seems impossible to me.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gadsby_%28novel%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gadsby_%28novel%29)

<comment><USER17> There are multiple examples. It is difficult but apparently not so difficult that nobody attempts it. The accepted term for texts like that is "lipogram"; it's a popular form of the broader category of constrained writing.

Wikipedia has a page for "logology" which is apparently a term for the general activity of playing with language in that kind of way on a per-letter basis (so, including anagrams and palindromes, etc.)

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Looking at the diagram of "Bags of stuff inside you" in "Thing Explainer" I was surprised to find that when annotating blood vessels, intestines etc he uses "hallway" and not "pipe", which I thought would be in the 1000 most often used english words. How curious.

</comment><comment><USER19> Sounds very similar to Simple English Wikipedia: [https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Simple_English_W...](https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Simple_English_Wikipedia#Simple_English)

<comment><USER20> In fact, Randall makes an explicit mention of it in a comic:

[https://xkcd.com/547/](https://xkcd.com/547/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Thing Explainer was a nice experiment, but, really... what's the value in trying to parse CNL explanations that are harder to understand than using the actual word?

</comment><comment><USER22> self-plug: let's you explore which English words are the most common

The Long Tail of the English Language [http://blog.wordsapi.com/2015/01/the- long-tail-of-english-la...](http://blog.wordsapi.com/2015/01/the-long-tail-of- english-language.html)

<comment><USER23> Is that your site? You have a spam problem in your comments.</comment></comment>


The iPad 3 and Moore's Law - <AUTHOR> http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2012/03/the_ipad_3_and.html

<comment><USER2> This is so stupid, I'm a bit surprised it came out of a normally excellent site.

The crux of the article is that retina graphics use more bandwidth, and thus Apple should have "thought about it" first.

By that logic, the first iPhone never would have existed, because it used way more bandwidth than any phones before it.

</comment><comment><USER3> > _"In the end this is not good for the web, because it's just too bloody much > data."_

This reads like an ISP's argument against every form of progress on the web since the mid 90s.

</comment><comment><USER4> I think what most of you are missing is that many cellular providers provide only a fixed number of bits every month.

If you go over you face a large penalty.

So, this isn't such a big deal for those with the wifi version and virtually unlimited bandwidth at home.

It's a problems for those use those fancy new 4G LTE plans (like mine) that will use up your allocated bits much faster.

You'll be able to load those large images faster, however, that counts against your monthly download limit.

Something to think about as unlimited plans are rare.

Verizon just sent me an offer for the new iPad.

The available data plans are:

 _2GB for $30_

 _5GB for $50_

 _10GB for $80_

Those on the 2GB should consider at least consider this point.

<comment><USER5> Why was there no outcry about Apple including a YouTube app on iOS devices? If you think a few retina images will burn through data try watching a few hours of YouTube.

This is a (rare) complete miss for PPK. Very rash.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The author argues that high-density displays are a problem, because you have to download roughly twice as big pixel-images for apps and websites.

Use vector images instead! Pixel logos are necessary for small resolutions, but 300dpi are good enough for vector graphics.

</comment><comment><USER7> Totally disagree. Faster HSPA+ (DC-HSPA+) / LTE are here today. No reason to wait on improving the end user experience. We also have DOCSIS3 and FTTH on the residential broadband side. In any event bursty traffic like web browsing isn't the problem causing congestion. It's the constant bit rate stuff like video & audio streaming that puts a heavy constant load on networks. (I would agree at least that we should have a browser option to prefer SD web sites)

</comment><comment><USER8> If this were such a problem, we'd already have seen it. The iPhone 4 with its retina display came out nearly two years ago, so it's safe to assume that if there already was some kind of retina optimization, it would already have begun.

Most sites I visit don't do anything like that and look perfectly fine: Because the resolution doubled in both sides, upscaling in a good-looking way is trivial to do.

</comment><comment><USER9> If the iPad 3 retina display really does pose a problem to web bandwidth, this piece would have been more interesting if the author had said at what point in the future there _will be_ sufficient bandwidth.

<comment><USER10> And I would argue that the greater pixel density could be a good thing, because it may drive consumers to demand greater bandwidth from their internet service providers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Most of the space on a website today is filled with rendered text and CSS- styled elements. There are just not that many high-resolution images on the average site today, unless it's media-heavy (Flickr, etc.), and then you already know that it's a high-bandwidth site.

But, anyway, I predict that vector UI components will overtake raster images, thanks the increasing fragmentation of display resolutions on Apple's iOS devices.

</comment><comment><USER12> I think you have Moore's Law confused..

</comment><comment><USER13> I can't believe I wasted my time reading this.

</comment><comment><USER14> This guy didn't even have his facts straight when he posted.

Apple already increased its cellular file download limit from 20MB to 50MB, before rolling out the LTE iPad. That's an increase of 2.5x, which is more than enough to cover the expected increase in sizes of apps containing Retina- resolution graphics.

</comment><comment><USER15> Doesn't the 4G LTE connection on the iPad 3 solve this problem, at least partially?

<comment><USER4> Unless you have AT&T or any other provider which limits your total download MBits per month.

You will use up your allowed bits quite a bit faster.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> > In the end this is not good for the web, because it's just too bloody much > data

What does that even mean?

</comment><comment><USER17> One word: vectors

</comment><comment><USER18> What is Cooper's Law, and how is it related to this article?</comment>


The road to Elm - <AUTHOR> http://www.nilunder.com/blog/2013/12/05/the-road-to-elm

<comment><USER2> Elm looks awesome. The problem I have is every demo is some game that looks like it was written in '82 for the VIC-20.

I'd love to see some awesome looking demos that show widgets, charts (maybe SVG and/or Canvas), with some Ajax calls.</comment>


Play-by-play on the phpbb.com hack - <AUTHOR> http://erratasec.blogspot.com/2009/02/importance-of-being-canonical.html

<comment><USER2> I'm surprised that Robert Graham, who is not ignorant of computer security, has mired his password recommendations in the 1980s. These are the same weak recommendations your Unix manuals would have given you 10 years ago.

What you should be doing is using bcrypt, tuned to take several hundred milliseconds per crypt. /usr/share/dict/words --- a pitiful dictionary --- with even the most basic set of permutations will take _weeks_ to test a _single password_ under this regime. Bcrypt is free and available for every major web platform. I didn't write it; the guys who did, David Mazieres and Niels Provos, are much smarter than me.

Computer science has solved the brute force problem on passwords, and we should stop dithering and adopt the solution.

</comment><comment><USER3> _The second thing is to fix the password problem. They should force users to create more complex passwords when they log in._

Seen from a security perspective this adds to the overall security of the site, however most users simply find an easy password that fits the bill. blink182, 123456qwerty, qwerty! - which is almost as easy to bruteforce or keep in a rainbow table as normal dictionaries.

You should be aware, however, that password requirements detract from the user experience. When users pick a password for a new account they are at the most crucial part of a website: The sign-up. This is where you can lose people that were otherwise ready to sign up.

So it's a trade-off. If your site holds credit card numbers, or other vital information a certain minimum requirement for passwords is certainly in place, but if your site is something like HN, where no valuable information is held, you should probably just let users pick whatever password they like. Worst case they will lose a few comments and some karma.

<comment><USER4> _Worst case they will lose a few comments and some karma._

I think the worse case is actually substantially worse -- call it an identity escalation attack. I think a huge number of Internet users are vulnerable to it:

a) Use any means you please to compromise the password on a low-security site, such as HN.

b) Use the same login credentials at other low-security sites, such as Facebook and Twitter. These compromises are valuable in their own right, but what you are really looking for is the email address.

c) After you have their email address, compromise it using variations on the same password you already know.

d) You can now read their email. Search for "statement", and identify which bank they bank with. Go to bank and try logging in with their email and password. That probably just worked. If not, click "lost password", supply email address and their security question (you have their Facebook already or can in seconds, how hard will it be to find their mother's maiden name or middle school?), and enjoy.

e) For added fun, look for other high-value accounts whose security is premised on the email user being authorized, such as brokerages (a tough target due to strong institutional controls, like banks) and GoDaddy (a successful compromise would cost me FAR more than what I have in my bank account).

The worst part? You can automate large portions of this attack (given a list of usernames and password, writing a script to try them at a dozen or a hundred popular services is child's play) and outsource the rest right up until the "compromise bank account" portion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Thanks for posting the link. I found this particular tidbit especially useful:

"The first is to create 'canary' accounts. Create accounts that have e-mail addresses, like "firstname.lastname@example.com". This account is not going to get any spam e-mail. When it does get its first spam, you'll know that it came from your database."

<comment><USER2> The problem with this advice is that it is not particularly useful.

In the event that your canary account receives a spam message, you will have gained one piece of data: that at some point in the months since you installed the account, it is _likely_ that someone exploited a problem that exposed a table column in your database.

Now what?

You don't know what the bug was. You don't know how far-reaching the damage is. You don't know when the event occurred. There is, in fact, almost nothing actionable about this information at all.

You might be telling yourself two things:

* That, upon learning of the possible breach, you will lock down the security of your code and your site. Of course, think for two more seconds and realize this is ass-backwards; if you can reasonably lock down your site, you might as well do it before you burn your whole database.

* That, upon learning of the breach, you can get all your users to change passwords. Which, of course, you will never do, because you will be taking an enormous reputational hit over circumstantial evidence, and for the purposes of seeding your database with a couple thousand new passwords for the same attacker to steal.

People like this "canary" and "honey token" stuff because it's fun. But it's not valuable.

<comment><AUTHOR> If I called you and said, "Hey, would you like me to tell you your site has been cracked?", would you really say "no"? I would argue that the cost of adding a canary is similar to the amount of time that phone call would take.

I'm guessing that after that call, you'd go through your logs and attempt to find out how the site was cracked. Then, if you find some anomalous behavior, you might be able to isolate the component that was being exploited and fix it. Maybe you wouldn't find it, but maybe you would.

<comment><USER2> What's your point? Sure. Set up a canary account. It won't hurt you. But the only way it will help is if your monitoring regime is already so good that it works with or without the canary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The original (first person) story is here, but the erratasec post adds a lot: <http://hackedphpbb.blogspot.com/2009/01/place-holder.html>

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm going to check milw0rm constantly now and try to avoid/update services. The Google Chrome and VNC vulnerabilities look particularly bad.

<comment><AUTHOR> They've got a twitter account: <http://twitter.com/milw0rm>

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> How much more productive would the world be if it didn't have to worry about hackers breaking into our sites?</comment>


Show HN: EverydayCheck – A minimalist app to help you form new habits - <AUTHOR> https://everydaycheck.com <comment><USER2> Like the concept. One small advice I learned from Duolingo (on 290 day streak) is that you have to make sure that it is non-negotiable to break the streak. If you miss it, you end your streak, you cannot reverse it, no exceptions.

This really gets the commitment going. But to make it softer, there should a way to earn points by your existing streaks and buy a weekend pass, or a 1 day streak saver pass which will help you keep your streak if you skip it on the weekend, or 1 day respectively.

You gotta purchase those with the points you earn (can be 1 point for 20 day streak or lingots, etc) so there is a limit to what you can buy and you don't want to waste it also. I also like their weekly wager in which you double the lingots if you maintain the streak for a week. It really hooks you into it. It's not uncommon for people to have a 1000+ streak just because of these things.

<comment><AUTHOR> hey superasn, thanks for the feedback!

This was exactly one of my primary goals, no "skip a day feature". If you skip, you have to start again. There's nothing wrong with streaks being hard to go over 15. I myself have been using it for 6 months and my longest streak ever is 17. This means I did something for 3 weeks weekends included. And because the number is relatively low, it motivated me to try to overcome it (i'm on 8 now... gonna be tough :P).

I see why buying "skips" can be good too, but I think it still kills the basic idea. I kind of like to sell the idea that breaking chains is completely normal, especially depending on the kind of habits. Otherwise, people who break the chain (everyone!) feel demotivated too quickly.

In other words, I think the road to habits should look something like "3-skip-5-skip-10-skip-15-skip-15-skip-15-skip".

Just curious, for that 290 day streak (good job btw!!) how many "skips" did you use?

<comment><USER2> I never use the skips deliberately. For me it's kind of an insurance that in case i forget i have one life (1 day) protection before my streak is broken. But like insurance i have paid for it.

<comment><USER3> Sounds interesting. So the point is you can buy it any time, and it will get used when you miss it. Not just for specific day in advance?

I would love to see this feature in.

Did you try any other apps for learning languages? I am learning with Memrise at the moment but I didn't really try anything else because it seems to work.

For OP: Thanks for adding "Why isn't everydayCheck free?"

<comment><USER2> Yes, that's how it works. Saved me twice from breaking my streak and that's why I'm at it. Also as a side note you can only buy 1 streak saver at a time regardless how many lingots you have.. So if you miss it for 2 days in a row, it's gone. This too i think increases your commitment to keep at it.

Nope never tried any other app.. Only duolingo so far and I'm only 4 modules away from completing the english to French course. Unfortunately I can't say i have learned much, don't think i can even communicate 10% of what I'm writing here in French. So even though i love duolingo and practice daily it's just like a game and nothing you can take seriously imo.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I use Loop[1] for something like this. It's an Open Source Android app that looks and works pretty nicely, it doesn't have a web-view or sync capabilities though.

[1] [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.isoron.uha...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.isoron.uhabits&hl=en)

<comment><USER5> I also use Loop Habits

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've coded or read some Lisp every day for almost seven years. I started tracking it on a year-on-a-page calendar, but after a few years it was so ingrained that I stopped tracking at all. I am now keeping track of it on an index card that I fill out daily with weight, exercise, and meditation.

It's such a habit now that I can't imagine stopping it, even though it might not be as helpful for me now as it once was -- there are things I would like to do more of, but the creation process takes a similar type of effort -- comedy writing, blog post writing, cigar box guitar manufacture.

</comment><comment><USER7> Nice work! I am a believer in the "don't break the chain" notion used to motivate continuation of habits. As an aside, I've read a few accounts of Jerry Seinfeld recommended this technique when asked about productivity tips.

For me, the idea mentioned by others of having a "skip a day" pass or something similar to the Duolingo system that allows one to "get out of jail free" is important. Since the goal of the app (I assume) is to help people form positive habits, users (especially paying customers) must be able to customize their experience.

</comment><comment><USER8> This is cool, reminds me of Github Commits, which I've been using similarly as a "code oss daily" sort of thing. As is usually the case, I wish this was self hosted, but cool nonetheless!

</comment><comment><USER9> Neat! Any chance of an offline version?</comment>


Ethereum Blockchain Project Launches First Production Release - <AUTHOR> http://www.coindesk.com/ethereum-blockchain-homestead/ <comment><USER2> Among the interesting things about Ethereum is that they built a billion- dollar "company" in a totally nontraditional way. Instead of VC, they raised money in a presale, the developers have liquidity from the beginning, and none of it required permission from anyone. Just people buying into the concept. Seems clear that this sort of thing being possible stands to change things for regulators, investors, and other market participants.

<comment><USER3> Is that really a valid valuation? If they tired to liqudate even a small fraction it would surely tank the price to essentailly zero.

<comment><USER4> The same can be said for any public company.

<comment><USER3> Not really. Is there any public company whose entire product is essentially printing stock certificates?

<comment><USER5> The product is actually internet hosting as a service. It is being administered by an autonomous artificial intelligence, who runs the books and decides who owes who how much. That AI is its own corporation, and is a separate entity from the Ethereum Foundation, which created it and organized the initial public offering of web hosting tokens. The tokens can be exchanged for hosting.

They have some value on the open market which is a function of how much people are willing to pay for Ethereum hosting and how much people think people will be willing to pay for it in the future.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Ethereum amd blockchains are incredibly exciting to me.

For an example of Ethereum innovation, musician Imogen Heapis using Ethereum to create music sharing and remixing, with smart connections among artists, producers, and fans.

Article: [http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/sep/06/imogen-heap- sav...](http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/sep/06/imogen-heap-saviour-of- music-industry)

"her current project: to bring to life an entirely new landscape ... spurred on by the technology originally designed by libertarians to create the crypto- currency bitcoin, she's releasing her next song as an event and an experiment. What she hopes to emerge is the core of a revolutionary system she refers to as Mycelia. It could completely transform the music industry."

</comment><comment><USER7> Not really related but maybe interesting anyway... When etherium got started they gave away 100 "ethers" to anyone who wanted them to drum up interest. I just sold mine last week at $12 each. Only time I can recall someone literally giving me $1200 for nothing...

<comment><USER8> "...to drum up interest..." <\--> "...for nothing..."

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Can someone help explain why the "hard fork by consensus" in Ethereum is any better than the "hard fork not by consensus" in Bitcoin?

At some point, a hard fork will be required for Ethereum that the community will not want because they've got vested interests that differ from Ethereum's developers.

<comment><USER10> Ethereum is defined by a spec, rather than a reference client. There are seven independent implementations so far. So it's already a less centralized development model.

Once the transition is made to proof-of-stake, the incentives of its "miners" will be more closely aligned to those of the community.

The existing miners can't prevent that transition. They're also using general- purpose hardware that can be repointed to other chains or sold to gamers, so they don't have a strong incentive to fight it anyway.

<comment><USER9> So it's more like HTTP than an open source Skype. How is that spec managed and controlled?

<comment><USER10> By a nonprofit foundation. The clients are tested against each other, and the spec is modified if there are any discrepancies due to misunderstandings.

If the community ever loses confidence in the foundation's leadership it can transition to another arrangement.

<comment><USER9> But Bitcoin has a foundation as well

<comment><USER11> They aren't too official, and there has been controversy recently over how much power they have.

<comment><USER9> What I'm getting at is how is Ethereum immune to the social factors currently plaguing Bitcoin? I don't see anything except "trust us".

<comment><USER10> I thought my comment amounted to more than "trust us." Development is less centralized, since Ethereum is defined by a spec and there are seven independent implementations, and proof of stake aligns incentives better than mining.

But I'd only claim it's more resistant, not immune.

<comment><USER9> The reason I likened it to HTTP is because of the browser wars and how the big players can influence the spec. Now we're talking about money and the same possibility of big players emerging.

It sounds like what you're saying is "yes, big players will emerge but something will keep them in check." What is that thing?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Anyone know how many transaction per second the Ethereum network can handle?

Also, how fast does the blockchain grow in size in GB/month?

<comment><USER10> They've hit 8 tx/sec in production and 25 tx/sec on the testnet. Proof of stake should increase capacity to over 100 tx/sec, and a simple sharding scheme to at least 10,000 tx/sec. Long-term they hope to do even better.

Blockchain size is increasing rapidly, I think it's up to 40GB already. But they plan to implement pruning before it becomes a serious problem.

<comment><USER4> I think the current size is about 8 GB, not 40 GB, according to some recent posts (not running a node myself though).

<comment><USER10> You may be right, I'm just going by hearsay myself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I have heard a lot talk about these DAPP's. Is any DAPP seeing market adoption? I saw binary option marketplace earlier, don't remember the name, anyone have idea how active is it?

</comment><comment><USER14> Nice to see hacker news slowly catching upto news from two weeks back!

<comment><USER15> Here's some previous discussions: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11197592](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11197592) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11284912](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11284912)</comment></comment>


Django's architecture - the good, the bad, and the ugly - <AUTHOR> http://ontwik.com/python/djangos-architecture-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly/

<comment><USER2> Thanks for posting this, I missed FOSDEM this year.</comment>