The relentless honesty of Ludwig Wittgenstein (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/ludwig-wittgenstein-honesty-ground/ <comment><USER2> I've been a big fan of Wittgenstein since college, and have at this point read just about all of his work. I might suggest that people new to Wittgenstein start neither with the _Tractatus_ nor with _Philosophical Investigations_ , but with the _Blue and Brown Books_ (you want the Blue part).

These are lecture notes toward what would later become the _PI_. They're way less systematic than the big two, but they'll give you a great feel for Wittgenstein's thought.

I'll also second Monk's biography, which is just superb.

One of my favorite things about Wittgenstein, is that there's a powerful strain in his thought that regards philosophical speculation as essentially a form of "madness." That is to say, if you're sitting around wondering what "justice" is or trying to figure out the mind/body distinction, you're engaging in a kind of nonsensical behavior. It is the purpose of philosophy to resolve these problems -- which, in Wittgenstein's case, often meant showing why they're nonsensical questions in the first place -- _so you can go back to living your life._ In Monk's biography, you often see him revolutionizing modern philosophy and then afterward going to work as a gardener.

I think this explains, in part, why he is more admired than influential in modern analytical philosophy. He is one of the many twentieth-century philosophers to suggest that the proper outcome for philosophy is to stop doing it.

[edits for typos]

<comment><USER3> Yes, absolutely! He even explicitly stated that in a letter to Norman Malcolm, dated November 1944 [0]:

"What is the use of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is to enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic, etc., & if it does not improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday life"

[0][https://books.google.de/books?hl=en&lr=&id=JfnyUT7Oo_wC&oi=f...](https://books.google.de/books?hl=en&lr=&id=JfnyUT7Oo_wC&oi=fnd&pg=PP9&dq=wittgenstein+letters+to+malcolm&ots=g-RabyHrG9&sig=1uGiP9_mkFpO6JE92UnBIyLeIkE#v=onepage&q=use%20of%20philosophy&f=false)

<comment><USER4> I enjoy Richard Rorty's writings along similar lines, like in his essay "Trotsky and the Wild Orchids":

"I decided to major in philosophy. I figured that if I became a philosopher I might get to the top of Plato's 'divided line' \- the place 'beyond hypotheses' where the full sunshine of Truth irradiates the purified soul of the wise and good: an Elysian field dotted with immaterial orchids. It seemed obvious to me that getting to such a place was what everybody with any brains really wanted."

"The more philosophers I read, the clearer it seemed that each of them could carry their views back to first principles which were incompatible with the first principles of their opponents, and that none of them ever got to that fabled place 'beyond hypotheses'."

"When I am asked (as, alas, I often am) what I take contemporary philosophy's 'mission' or 'task' to be, I get tonguetied. The best I can do is to stammer that we philosophy professors are people who have a certain familiarity with a certain intellectual tradition, as chemists have a certain familiarity with what happens when you mix various substances together."

"Despite my relatively early disillusionment with Platonism, I am very glad that I spent all those years reading philosophy books. For I learned something that still seems very important: to distrust the intellectual snobbery which originally led me to read them. If I had not read all those books, I might never have been able to stop looking for what Derrida calls 'a full presence beyond the reach of play', for a luminous, self-justifying, self-sufficient synoptic vision."

<comment><USER5> I guess in math they found it just gets more complex, as you go deeper? eventually you need new tools, upon new tools? Is this like philosophy? you just find you need more tools? I'm no expert. And that's why I'm putting question marks around.

<comment><USER6> Often in maths you build higher and higher abstractions until you've finally succeeded in an abstraction high enough to encode the very axioms you started with, at which point you're back where you started, if a little wiser for the journey.

At this point I'm fairly sure going deeper (or higher) in mathematics is a dead end, you should instead try to go sideways, to the 'ground level' questions that aren't answered yet, or to the questions that aren't yet mathematical.

<comment><USER5> Great insight. and thanks for taking the time to clear things

I was likely butchering the Godel incompleteness theorem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Wonderful article for a short introduction into his work. He was a fascinating personality and his writings are extraordinary. He "only" published two books in his lifetime, one being tractatus logico-philosophicus, the other being a dictionary for school children. Philosophical Investigations was published post-humously, but it is an excellent view into his mind.

As mentioned in the article, there are no subsections, no table of contents. It consists of almost 700 paragraphs. You have to read it from beginning to end. Why I find that great in its own way? Maybe the analogy with the movie >Being John Malkovitch< may help: you are like a visitor in his head. Our thoughts are not tidy and ordered into sections. When you think about a problem (like he does with language and what it is and what it can do and what not), your mind wanders; you come across different issues, tackle them, then come back. It's like a written thought process.

I can really recommend this book. Its language is easy. As soon as you get used to its style, you can follow.

<comment><USER7> I completely agree with your sentiment on our thoughts. They aren't neat and tidy. People like to pretend they are, but this simply isn't true.

It's also interesting to think about exactly where these thoughts come from. Where did the thought come from for example that invoked you opening up hacker news at the time you wrote this?

Where does great intuition come from? It's all fascinating whether you prescribe to a theory that likens consciousness to that of thinking rocks or if you're incredibly spiritual and think of consciousness more as a radio signal that were tuned into at some arbitrary frequency when we're alive in Earth.

If you're interested in being a visitor in ones mind, could I humbly request you check out my comment? [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18814685](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18814685)

<comment><USER4> "I should have liked to produce a good book. This has not come about, but the time is past in which I could improve it." (Preface to Philosophical Investigations)

<comment><USER3> The preface is actually very fun to read. Very honest, quite cynical, too.

>"[...] mainly because I was obliged to learn that my results (which I had communicated in lectures, typescripts and discussions), variously misunderstood, more or less mangled or watered down, were in circulation. This stung my vanity and I had difficulty in quieting it."

Such bare honesty! I love it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've noticed Wittgenstein is mentioned quite a lot on HN threads about philosophy. I suspect he's a favorite of engineer types because his conceptions nullify large swaths of philosophical activity and thinking. This conclusion allows the untrained student to feel as if they've entered a cheat code to reach the end of the discourse -- it's all a language game, so I need not waste my time with further inquiry.

<comment><USER9> Strongly disagree. Wittgenstein clears the way for traditional philosophy topics (ethics, aesthetics, etc.) to be taken seriously.

'Engineer types' may react to ethical discussions by pointing out that you can't define right and wrong, and may then wrongly conclude that they don't exist. But Wittgenstein shows that this is an isolated demand for rigor.

<comment><USER10> You can't define right or wrong? Tell that to an Aristotelian. You can most certainly define it and ground a natural law theory in it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Wittgenstein is one of those rare, inimitable thinkers. I get a sensation reading his work that I rarely get reading the work of others: that he truly was someone who thought about the world with great incisiveness and depth, beyond the confines of any particular discipline or outlook—a logician with a mystic's underbelly. Each one of his pithy notes exudes the degree of exhaustiveness with which he's contemplated the topic—it's a great experience. I highly recommend checking out some of his writing. Aside from the _Tractatus_ it's not systematic, and as such I do not think there's any particular reason to study it systematically.

Philosophy as analysis, philosophy as therapy—Wittgenstein's writings present the collision of both of these perspectives.

</comment><comment><USER12> My favourite Wittgenstein quote:

"A philosopher who is not taking part in discussions is like a boxer who never goes into the ring."

<comment><USER13> He's right. Modern intellectual and political aversion to open competition and experimentation is, at best, unethical.

<comment><USER14> Could you elaborate?

<comment><USER15> As the other comment points out, people aren't willing to challenge themselves but also feign a confidence about themselves due to various factors such as economic and societal pressures. Admitting you have no idea most of the time is probably more accurate (estimate is obviously a reasonably afauirable skill) but that's not what boss man is looking for.

I think this also evidences itself in the prevalence of imposter theory, especially in younger generations. The reason the saying goes, "that feeling never goes away" is because we all operate outwardly as if we are more expert than we are and begin to believe that lie.

Does that clarify?

<comment><USER14> No, not really. It's still rather vague to me. Could you give me a concrete example?

<comment><USER15> Sure!

If you look at the levels of reported 'imposter syndrome', there is a noted rise over the last few years.

I'm assuming here that you are aware of imposter syndrome and perhaps have felt it at times yourself. I certainly have.

To our peers, we pretend we know more than we do to feign this confidence that has almost emerged as necessary since there are so many that can do our jobs as programmers.

This feigned confidence manifests as imposter syndrome. Since we can't be honest (and risk management firing us because we're incompetent), we never quite feel like we're 'good enough' for our jobs.

Does that help?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It's interesting and informative that a lot of the commenters here have positive reviews or experiences with Wittgenstein.

I have not read any of his work but remember Paul Graham had a mixed take on Wittgenstein in his essay "How to Do Philosophy". Wittgenstein helped shake up philosophical thought, but his later focus on philosophy of language led his followers to turn philosophy into a field of jargon.

[http://www.paulgraham.com/philosophy.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/philosophy.html)

<comment><USER4> Whether philosophy has been a useless waste of time is a commonly recurring question. I think it's asked from a kind of historically privileged position, since we have already mostly gotten it over with, so to speak.

Another perspective is that these naive thoughts have a curious tendency to pop up, and philosophy as the work of critiquing and developing such thoughts is a crucial part of intellectual culture. There's a fascinating case in the history of AI research, as described by Hubert Dreyfus:

> When I was teaching at MIT in the 1960s, students from the Artificial > Intelligence Laboratory would come to my Heidegger course and say in effect: > ''You philosophers have been reflecting in your armchairs for over 2000 > years and you still don't understand intelligence. We in the AI Lab have > taken over and are succeeding where you philosophers have failed.'' But in > 1963, when I was invited to evaluate the work of Alan Newell and Herbert > Simon on physical symbol systems, I found to my surprise that, far from > replacing philosophy, these pioneering researchers had learned a lot, > directly and indirectly, from us philosophers: e.g., Hobbes' claim that > reasoning was calculating, Descartes' mental representations, Leibniz's idea > of a 'universal characteristic' (a set of primitives in which all knowledge > could be expressed), Kant's claim that concepts were rules, Frege's > formalization of such rules, and Wittgenstein's postulation of logical atoms > in his _Tractatus_. In short, without realizing it, AI researchers were hard > at work turning rationalist philosophy into a research program.

> But I began to suspect that the insights formulated in existentialist > armchairs, especially Heidegger's and Merleau-Ponty's, were bad news for > those working in AI laboratories—that, by combining representationalism, > conceptualism, formalism, and logical atomism into a research program, AI > researchers had condemned their enterprise to reenact a failure. Using > Heidegger as a guide, I began looking for signs that the whole AI research > program was degenerating. I was particularly struck by the fact that, among > other troubles, researchers were running up against the problem of > representing significance and relevance—a problem that Heidegger saw was > implicit in Descartes' understanding of the world as a set of meaningless > facts to which the mind assigned values, which John Searle now calls > function predicates.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I recommend Monk's biography [1] and a short lecture by Wittgenstein [2]

[1] [https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-02-921670-5](https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-02-921670-5)

[2] [https://www.jstor.org/stable/2183526](https://www.jstor.org/stable/2183526)

<comment><USER4> There's a nice book by Edward Kanterian called "Ludwig Wittgenstein" from Reaktion Books Critical Lives series which is quite good, and shorter than Monk's biography.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> [https://youtu.be/ermZKgG4htU](https://youtu.be/ermZKgG4htU)

>But what is most strikingly original about Wittgenstein's account in the Tractatus is his drawing out of the implications – which are to a degree disturbing – of this conception. One implication is for values. If I think or claim that the car is in the garage, then, built into that claim is the idea that this may be true or false. But when I think that, say, slavery is morally wrong, I think something that could not be otherwise than true (even if others should disagree

I believe the solution to this lies in collective subjectivism with a fancy twist. Underlying every disagreement about such a claim, we have an implicit agreement. If I say slavery is wrong and you say you disagree, then we actually agree about something; the fact that we disagree.

That agreement underlying the disagreement gives rise to new conversational opportunity to approach a new, more fundamental point of agreement.

In this example, we could ask something like the following to our debate partner: "would you like to be owned by me?" Employing Kant's categorical imperative (or the golden rule or bowever else this idea has been named) to demonstrate to your opponent indeed no, they would not like to be enslaved.

Following that train of logic, we can begin to piece together agreements from the disagreements that we unavoidably come across when using a tool as blunt as language to describe anything close to resembling reality.

At some point, given the good faith participation of both partners in conversation, we will be able to form more agreements, phoenixes rising from the ashes of our disagreements, that will lead to something more closely resembling a "universal truth", truism, true objective fact, etc.

After all, true is just the word we have for something that cannot be proven false. In the same way that we just pretend money has value and so it does, true doesn't mean anything beyond the word itself. That doesn't necessarily make it less useful, it's just something we need to keep in mind.

On that note, this author does a fascinating job introducing a hypothesis that an alphabet causes a society to lean to value masculine thought processes more highly. Not sure what I think about the hypothesis yet but it's been a fascinating listen thus far.

[http://a.co/49lwAZNb](http://a.co/49lwAZNb)

<comment><USER18> Collective subjectivism does not lead to universal truth even closely. There is no universal truth, but only your personal experience and perception. This is true both for things which you see, and also for morality. In Wittgenstein's world, your subjective morality is neither true nor false.

<comment><USER15> What would you say of a hypothetical claim that was ideally translated to all languages that everyone, when asked, unforced, agreed that it was an accurate description of their subjective experience?

I'm digging underneath Wittgenstein's ideas of subjective morality a little bit. Humor me here and let me know what you think. I'm truly curious.

<comment><USER19> > What would you say of a hypothetical claim that was ideally translated to > all languages that everyone, when asked, unforced, agreed that it was an > accurate description of their subjective experience?

We don't actually learn anything fundamental here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "The early Wittgenstein on scientism"[0] and "Goodill on Scholastic Metaphysics and Wittgenstein"[1] for more on Wittgenstein.

[0] [https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2010/06/early- wittgenstein-...](https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2010/06/early-wittgenstein- on-scientism.html)

[1] [https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2015/12/goodill-on- scholast...](https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2015/12/goodill-on-scholastic- metaphysics-and.html)

</comment><comment><USER20> I have a mixed feeling about this article. On the positive side, it does a good job of explaining the ideas in Wittgenstein's two books. On the negative side, the author fails to explain that there are similar ideas in Pragmatism and Existential-Phenomenology.

Also, the author fails to explain, as Roy Monk's book makes clear, that Wittgenstein had a highly dogmatic and rather irrational set of religious and cultural views.

</comment><comment><USER21> There was a documentary on his life in the 80s, mentioning his life as teacher in a rural primary school (they even interviewed some of his pupils) and his acting in a silent movie [1]. It is these anecdotes which make history and biographies so vivid.

81] [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0013619/](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0013619/)

</comment><comment><USER22> a passing remark -- by all means read Wittgenstein's 'Philosophical Investigations' because it is readable as the article says. In the metaphysical world it can be hard cut through the work of its great thinkers. A sensible way to approach Wittgenstein is to start with a college level introductory book on Metaphysics to get the foundational ideas, Categories and Forms of Aristotle and Plato. Some modern philosopher writers can walk us through this nicely (Michale Loux from U of Chicago, his introductory writings or some other perhaps). What might be modern now (Trope Theory, World of States of Affairs, Stage Theory etc), their instigators first came to reject the basics of the ancients but in the end they actually dissect the work of the ancients for us. Travel to Wittgenstein along this path, read him only towards the end. One needs numbers and algebra before calculus.

<comment><USER2> I agree with that completely. Wittgenstein's "simplicity" is only apparent, because he tends to write as if he's the first person to ever do philosophy. But he knows he's not, and his grasp of classical metaphysics (like most philosophers of his era) was basically flawless. He is way more interesting to read with that background in place.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Thanks to that post I discovered after a short research that I share a lot with Wittgenstein personality-wise. I'm not sure if it's a good or a bad sign. Never heard about him before.

</comment><comment><USER24> Is it bad to have expected to the article to be all about how his alleged virtue help become the famed figure he is today? This was just another portrait of his work.

</comment><comment> noir-york Excellent article. Thanks for posting!

</comment><comment><USER7> I've been told on exactly one count that my thought process echoes Wittgenstein.

Here's a recording of the comment as kind of a proof of why I think this is interesting to do. Very Meta. Watch Community of you enjoy this kind of thing:

Part 1: [https://youtu.be/sx7K8O7IGxo](https://youtu.be/sx7K8O7IGxo)

Part 2: [https://youtu.be/wZGvJBXOkGs](https://youtu.be/wZGvJBXOkGs)

I also do live thought explorations, record them, and put them on YouTube. Please come tell me why you disagree with some of my most honest thoughts.

[https://youtu.be/buJSby8Eoco](https://youtu.be/buJSby8Eoco)

[https://youtu.be/z-_6A0nXkX8](https://youtu.be/z-_6A0nXkX8)

are a couple of videos I could find off the bat. For anyone interested in just reading rather than watching the entire thought process, I've posted links in the descriptions to the final text produced. I'll also link my Medium page below.

I record the entire thought process because I think we are in dire need of honesty today. It's too easy to pretend we know more than we do. I have lots of theories I'd like to share and talk with people about and have an incredibly hard time finding any kind of audience, yet constantly find people taking about our suffering from problems I believe I can solve.

I know this comment is all over the place, but just like the current top comment describes, I find it fascinating looking inside people's thought process as it is the most raw thing we can do with language. I also believe as I hammer away on these keys that I could just keep typing and eventually bring it all back together, which I will now.

I believe developing trust amongst individuals is vital in a digital age if we are to maintain any degree of community as society. Wittgenstein style thought explorations (and now with new technology recording the process therein) are the most raw, unidealogically possessed form of thought we can share. Any level of rehearsal or editing, while they certainly improve the finished product, both waste time and present an opportunity for those idealogical possessions to creep back into play.

In previous human times, we had much less diverse information flux. This enabled us to more easily understand our environment and those around us. We saw the same people every day, knew our place, and knew what to expect more or less.

Today, we don't know anyone we talk to online. Pair that with the difficulty of forming a strong community and that leads to some pretty serious problems.

I mean ABSOLUTELY no disrespect to anyone with what I'm about to say: suicide rates in youths, as well as what appears to be an identity crisis where people are latching on to whatever made up concepts please them are caused by a theory I call "Information Radiation."

"Information Radiation" effects a culture of people much like nuclear radiation effects a single individual. It makes them sick and die. Our culture is dying. There's so much new information coming in (most of it being of little importance) that it is crowding out the old information we have stores about the value of our cultures precious stories. The ones that got us here.

Those stories aren't true, but hey, we're here! And very few intellectuals respect that. We are arrogant to think now that these stories of religious proportioms are just simply not a representation of physical events that happened in our space time that they aren't important or helpful.

If this was true, television and movies such as Game of Thromes, Harry Potter, and the Avengers simply would not be popular.

This is not a religious claim at all by the way. There's no man in the sky dictating things. There are in my opinion human spiritual happenings, but those are unimportant to include here to pursuade you of my opinions.

Lastly, I want to plug my website knophy.com that I'm working on.

TLDR on it is that it's a website that values competency and the comprehension of content. My utlimate goal is to pay both creators for creating content and consumers for forming comprehension about content. I believe I have invented a sound business model for doing that.

Details are below

[https://link.medium.com/Hnu2JLZ0aT](https://link.medium.com/Hnu2JLZ0aT) [https://link.medium.com/nCVtpC00aT](https://link.medium.com/nCVtpC00aT)

Thanks for reading.

Honest yours, Michael Lustig.

<comment><USER7> Rather than downvote, can someone point out why they dislike this comment?

On an article on Wittgenstein's honest and fluid thinking style, I posted something similar to what the current top comment has described as the most interesting part of W's process.

Thanks in advance.

<comment><USER25> You didn't contribute to the talk about Wittgenstein, but exclusively talked about yourself and things you do.

In addition, instead of explaining the relationship of your activities with Wittgenstein (that could have been an on-topic contribution), you ask the reader to watch recordings.

<comment><USER15> How would recommend explaining the relationship of my activities W?

Honest question, I'd love to not come across as such a moron.

Thanks for the feedback.

<comment><USER25> Let me start by saying that it is great to see how you deal with the feedback you get, this is not an easy feat.

Some more preliminaries: When I write a comment on HN, I first ask myself: what is the message I want to send to potential readers? And then I put some effort into expressing it as good as I can. After reading your comment, I had a hard time identifying any message, and I think the reason is that you employed the method of giving us your raw thoughts without considering which message you would like to send. When I first read your comment, I didn't even bother to dig deep enough to decipher the content; if you don't spend effort in writing, why should I spend so much effort in reading? Now, after having watched the first video and read your comment five times, I understand the structure, but still only fragments of the content.

Let me give one example what I think you could explain, based on the partial understanding I gained: it seems that you consider it very important for people to capture and communicate their thoughts 'unfiltered', as they happen. If you could relate that to Wittgenstein's philosophy, that would be an on- topic comment. (I am not very familiar with Wittgensteins philosophy and don't see how that would obviously follow from his philosophy, maybe Wittgenstein experts immediately see it).

I see the dilemma you are in: you want to exemplify the style, and I ask you for something which is impossible to do in this style: polishing and refining a message until it is easy to read and understand. However, I also would say that your experiment - convincing the reader by exemplifying the approach - has failed, so it seems you anyway need to reconsider your approach.

Finally - and I hope it doesn't come over as patronizing - I think only few exceptional people have such clear thoughts that conveying them without any editing is a win for a large readership. I know for sure that my thoughts are initially much too chaotic. Maybe Wittgenstein was able to do it. You and me are far away from that level.

<comment><USER15> Absolutely! I truly don't want to come across as that downvote seeking troll. I really want to share and engage in rich conversations with interesting people online.

I really appreciate your feedback. I think you touched on a key point of contention for me that I need to work very hard on:

> if you don't spend effort in writing, why should I spend so much effort in > reading?

I come at this from precisely the opposite angle: "I could pour my heart into something and have it ignored because it's too long, so I'm just going to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks."

Obviously, I know this is a poor solution. I'm actually building a website instead that I believe solves my problem and many more. That will give me the motivation required to put in the effort up front to polish things up a bit more.

The problem, for me, boils down to one thing: we have a content discovery problem. Low energy bullshit rises easily, while content that takes a while to parse rises quite quickly.

The saying "a picture is worth a thousand words" is perfect here. It's also roughly 1,000 times more difficult to read, parse, understand, and provide feedback for content such as mine than to like a gif on Reddit, for example.

Again, thank you for the feedback. I've copied it into my notes (highly recommend Bear app for mac / iOS if you're in the market) and will meditate on it and hopefully improve through it.

If you're interested in the project I'm working on that I believe solves this problem, here's some stuff I wrote about it:

[https://medium.com/@michaellustig/knophy-or-how-were- going-t...](https://medium.com/@michaellustig/knophy-or-how-were-going-to- change-the-world-3a52f866120)

[https://medium.com/@michaellustig/step-by-step- explanation-o...](https://medium.com/@michaellustig/step-by-step-explanation- of-how-to-start-your-page-on-knophy-72c53c8a0e9b)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Wire Image of a Network Protocol - <AUTHOR> https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc8546 <comment><USER2> > QUIC is ... the first ... protocol to ... prevent ossification

I'd never heard of the term 'ossification' regarding a protocol before. But "QUIC as a solution to protocol ossification" from LWN [1] clears it up:

> TCP suffers other problems as well. ... Middleboxes (routers between the > endpoints of a connection) interfere with traffic and make it difficult to > improve the protocol. They aren't supposed to be looking at TCP headers, but > they do so anyway and make decisions based on what they see, often blocking > traffic that looks in any way out of the norm. This "ossification" of the > protocol makes it nearly impossible to make changes to TCP itself.

[1] [https://lwn.net/Articles/745590/](https://lwn.net/Articles/745590/)

<comment><USER3> This brings up some interesting considerations

I personally believe in absolute freedom of speech so from a network engineering perspective this manifests as a personal responsibility to make the networks I control pass packets without discrimination. The public internet is just a conglomeration of seperate private networks that operate under their own sets of rules.

To have absolute freedom when passing traffic the underlying protocol should be fully encrypted and probably even hide the source and destination IP address and port. This is a very tough problem to solve technically because you have to know the destination IP to efficiently route a packet.

<comment><USER4> The destination IP could be hidden opportunistically?

Send the destination IP for high-priority requests and retry without the destination. Low-priority/long-latency requests would always hide the destination.

... I can't articulate why, but I feel even this introduces a very large amount of hidden complexity. It solves efficient routing and freedom in part, but does not consider privacy.

<comment><USER3> I don't see how you can hide destination IP. Each router has to know the destination IP to determine where to send the packet, yes there are some cases such as MPLS/VXLAN/v4VPN where the packet is encapsulated inside more routing info but for it to get to its destination the routers have to have an IP.

<comment><USER4> If the routers have public keys it's possible, then the client has to determine (some or all points on) the route. I think future protocols will track use and payment via client-provided keys which are somehow linked to their ISP.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What is this specifically aimed at? The entire point of the End to End Principle is that mid-nodes should be passing packets, not mucking about with them. Everything that has been developed contrary to that (eg DPI boxen) are basically exploits of security vulnerabilities attempting to force the old top-down telco services model.

So yes, putting a name on what m[ie]ddle nodes can observe is useful. But I have to ask for what end, given that any modern protocol should be aimed at reducing this "wire image" to the absolute minimum possible. The only reason necessitating still using plaintext-header TCP/UDP is because we're stuck with NAT, and the only reason to use ip.saddr is because we're stuck with egress filtering.

<comment><USER6> The problem is, even in a situation with only good faith actors, not every codepath is equally developed/tested/working, and bugs creep in. Especially if some parts of a protocol are there for future use. Then if a buggy implementation gets widespread, that effectively nixes that part of the future potential of the protocol.

That's why, if you think about a clever solution for something, and your solution depends on the letter of the standard instead on actual large scale experiments, then the risk of stumbling into big problems is large. Sure, it might be only 1-5% of the Internet that cannot use your clever solution. But historically developers opted to chose solutions that work for 99.9%, even at the cost of even more layers/encapsulation/complexity.

<comment><USER5> Doesn't this line up with my point? What you're saying seems to be most relevant in the context of unaccountable meddle boxes - eg I fully agree if you want your protocol to work widely, you have to accept the current Internet as it is and set ip.proto = {1,6,17}.

But to avoid creating even more of these constraints you want to keep as much as possible out of sight of the meddle boxes, lest they get ideas to start doing even more filtering. Given that crypto is now computationally inexpensive, this seems straightforward with anything that is not already in IP/TCP/UDP headers.

<comment><USER6> It lines up, I just wanted to point out that there needs to be no malicious exploitative intent, this kind of network state degradation naturally follows from the always ongoing optimization of resource allocation by actors involved in the process. And thus there is a natural priority of features when it comes to network equipment design, development, production, testing, marketing, support and eventual replacement.

And yes, crypto helps with enforcing the layers, it forces engineers to move to a different part of the solution space when it comes to doing things that used to be done with DPI/snooping/etc. (A lot of the meddleboxes were sort of rational responses, like a MITM caching proxy, DNS hijacking, captive portals, blablabla. And they were quick and dirty.)

<comment><USER5> I stand by the characterization of "exploitative". The point of protocols is to mediate between parties with _diverging_ interests. The parties deploying meddle boxes are rationally trying to further their own interests, but they are doing so by stepping over the delineating line. In 2019, the idea that neighborly courtesy would preserve the line was obviously naive. Now we need to build concrete walls.

And lest you think that my viewpoint is completely at odds with network administrators - elsewhere I've argued that raw unrestricted IP access will eventually come to be seen as a bug. Surveillance companies backhaul much of their collect unhindered precisely because "Internet access" is given as an all-or-nothing condition. IP is actually _horrible_ for addressing such concerns, which is why attempts at egress firewalls devolve into idiotic "block everything but 80/443" (and then new devices respond by working over HTTPS).

I think in the future, if we're lucky, the equivalent of firewalls will be based around type systems over PDUs, and embedded devices will be forced to specify exactly what they communicate. But those capabilities need to be kept at personal network edges (or even per-user) by devices' owners making them transparent (akin to installing a personal CA), with traffic over the centrally-controlled transit network remaining completely opaque.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


People who run BSD - <AUTHOR> https://runbsd.info/ <comment><USER2> I run OpenBSD on a PC Engines apu2 as my main router. I have a 1 Gbit fiber going into a TP-Link converter and then directly into the OpenBSD router which completely bypasses the POS router provided by my ISP.

When I first started poking around with BSD I searched for tutorials online for the things I wanted to do. As I often do when I want to learn something. Early on in this process I came across a suggestion to just read the man pages (RTFM!). So I stopped searching and just read the official documentation. I was surprised how it was all just there! For almost everything I needed to do the man pages were enough.

<comment><USER3> When coming from Linux one is not used to this but the OpenBSD and FreeBSD man pages and documentation are actually useful!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Just installed openBSD on my 2007 MBPro (OS X does not update etc.). What a charm.

I bought another MBPro in 2017 because I needed the power and the old one had become unreliable (shutdowns due to heat etc.) I use now the old one for home work and as a remote terminal. Could not be happier.

<comment><USER5> In case you ever run it from the battery, how is the power consumption?

<comment><USER4> Never run it from battery: it has become just a backup for fast moves from room to room.

However, I have managed to get the processor get at 1Ghz when not under too much stress automatically (there is a switch which I do not recall, sorry).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The only reason I don't run a BSD derivative is laziness. It requires more maintenance effort than xubuntu. Back in the distant past I ran NetBSD on SPARC at home.

I'd quite happily be paid to work with it all day but no one wants to hire me to do that. So centos it is.

</comment><comment><USER7> I tried to use OpenBSD for software development and deployments. It didn't work well because it seemed that packages didn't get as much use judging by inconsistent documentation and sometimes faulty defaults. I didn't care enough to contribute to fix the issues I ran into. Instead I went back to the Ubuntu LTS as before.

I briefly also looked at kFreeBSD with a Debian userland to address the issue but it seemed to be even less well traveled.

<comment><USER8> I wonder what kind of development and deployments you do and whether FreeBSD might work better. For instance, FreeBSD packages (ports/pkgng) has two branches: latest and quarterly. I've found latest often closely tracking upstream releases.

My work consist of Elixir/Erlang development and a bit of deployments with Kubernetes/Helm/Kapitan/Jsonnet. I primarily work on iPad and login to the FreeBSD workspace via Blink.sh/Mosh and it all worked really well.

That said, if your work involve Haskell and Stack, you might want to stick with FreeBSD 11.2 since Stack still hasn't release a version that supported FreeBSD 12 (which broke due to FreeBSD 12.0 change to inode64)

<comment><USER7> My motivation for trying *BSD over Linux is for security/stability which is OpenBSD's goal more than FreeBSD.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I always thought BSD is surviving due to its liberal license allowing many companies to use it as a base OS for their prodcits without any liability to open their code leading to financial supports.

From a consumer perspective where a license choice doesn't really matter, I don't find much reason to use BSD over Linux, though I keep a FreeBSD just to keep up with the difference.

<comment><USER10> I saw someone post that "FreeBSD is a professional operating system for professionals" so consumer perspectives don't really matter. That Netflix, Whatsapp, Sony and most of the world's major internet traffic routers run FreeBSD, via Juniper Networks, is more significant to me.

<comment><USER8> Sony also deploys FreeBSD in one of their major consumer product: a PlayStation 4, which runs Orbis OS, a fork of FreeBSD 9[1]

[1]: [https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTM5NDI](https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTM5NDI)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I would like to use FreeBSD myself on my laptop, but I really need those intel WiFi drivers to support 802.11ac

<comment><USER4> Have you tried OpenBSD?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I really like BSD myself, I used it as my primary OS for both desktop and server back in the early 00s.

Nowadays, with a container-centric cloud architecture, it seems like BSD doesn't really have a good answer to Kubernetes, Nomad, etc. If anything, the projects are experimental and/or hobby projects.

<comment><USER13> Which is a bit bizarre because FeeeBSD jails were world's first containers on a vaguely desktop-ish unix-ish systems.

The crowd just never had the hype power of Linux and no big player took to developing cool things on top.

It just shows you that having a technically good solution is irrelevant if there's no marketing behind it.

<comment><USER14> It maybe also shows how brainwashed or resume-oriented the tech crowd is.

<comment><USER15> Network effects are real though.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ex-Myspace execs launch Gravity - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/12/16/exclusive-ex-myspace-execs-launch-gravity-into-private-beta/

<comment><USER2> i don't think this will displace forums. The key for forums, is users, everything else is fluff.

And existing forums won't be switching to this, because they just can't. Technology won't work together, and few admins would switch if they could.

So their main "target" are the people who want to start new communities, and that's a very fickle audience(I got in on the early beta of Stack Exchange, which had a similar hook, new forums! and ~2 months later, 90% of sites have been abandoned, because it's very hard to get early users.

Starting a community is much harder than people think. Forums take years to build up...and most people just don't want to deal with that, since there is no light at the end of the tunnel(most forums are barely breaking even)

The widget part, does have some merit, but at that point, it's pretty much sounds like a disqus/intense debate copy.

Analytics part doesn't really matter since you can get that already with other software+google analytics.

Insights, even though interesting, doesn't really do any value add to the user or the admin, so once again fluff.

Frankly I don't see why they are going for the forums market, vBulletin barely makes any money. They are like THE forum software, and I don't think they make more than 10 mil in revenue.

<comment><USER3> I've personally worked with the three founders during a stint as a consultant for MySpace. They've all incredibly smart technologists and strategists with proven experience on creating community - MySpace is after all probably the first mega community that formed on the Internet (OK, you might not be a fan of MySpace and the type of community it created - but you can't argue they were successful in their hay-day)

The details are sketchy on how this is really going to be implemented - and as a start up founder myself working on a stealth product I understand that there is little reason to give before launch all the implementation details us techies want to know.

I agree this might be difficult to bite into the core vBulletin/PHPBB communities but I also feel a lot of people are migrating away from them as the conversations spread out over blogs comments, google/yahoo groups, etc.

I don't actively use any vBulletin/PHPBB communities anymore - do you?

The API aspect of this has the ability to get traction within the more distributed conversations going on, and they'll be able to provide sophisticated search on top of that -- which is what excites me the most.

We'll see but I'm keeping an eye on this.

<comment><USER2> but they didn't create the myspace community, they jumped in the phase when they were already hiring senior level execs(the only early guy, is on the tech side, and joined it at 300,000 users), and it's quiet different growing a community from a few million users compared to growing a community from 0. The hardest phase of any company, are those first 10, 100, 1000, 10000, 100000 users. After that 100,000 user mark, as long as your site is viral enough(like myspace), you'll continue growing at XX,XXX users per week.

and it's not really them, that I'm talking about, I'm talking about their future users, the admins, who'll be implementing this to start their own forums. Those are the guys that will have a huge churn rate, that will use the system for 1-2 weeks, before shutting the site down, due to lack of users.

And yes I use plenty of forums, message boards are the only avenue that you can use just for discussion. Sure there are other things that focus on something else and allow discussion(i.e. HN, where the key goal is submitting articles), but if you want to discuss something you gotta hit up those outdated forums. The comments in blogs etc, are really not the same as an actual discussion on forums. I've read a 10,000 posts forum thread. I've never read a blog post that had more than 50 comments, since there is no way to hold a discussion, just a bunch of +1 comments.

The api thing excites you as a techy, but almost all of the forums are run by fans. Camaro fans, harry porter fans, excersize fans, the words API are like magic to them, they mean nothing.

Yeah it's still up in the air, and can go either way, but I just don't see any mass adoption or mass revenue in their future. Any business that relies on their users starting communities, has a very long road ahead of them. Granted their goal is probably just scale(like ning), where they have a few million communities, but each with 5-10 people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> If they really manage to optimize it for conversations, then it could have a future. I'm one of those crazy people who think that NNTP was the greatest thing to ever hit the net, and still hold that nothing has yet to come close to match in the ability to let people actually converse over longer periods of time. Most web forums seem, by design, to actively discourage long running conversations. Some even go so far as to forbid posting to a thread that is more than X days old. Everything seems to be geared towards hit and run postings and a quick question-and-answers format.

I've often pondered why NNTP and newsreaders was so much better at this than HTTP and web browsers, and haven't really found an answer. The pessimistic part of me sometimes thinks that it's simply because people on the internet where better and smarter in 1999 than in 2009, but I doubt that's completely true. If someone else can solve this problem and make it work, I'll be the first to shake their hand and use their product.

That being said, based on the article, Gravity doesn't seem to be it.

</comment><comment><USER5> God this idea is familiar... I remember someone trying to launch something like this a few years back. You looked for interests that you had within the system and you got back conversation threads...</comment>


Free ebooks correlated with increased print-book sales - <AUTHOR> http://www.boingboing.net/2010/03/04/free-ebooks-correlat.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+boingboing/iBag+%28Boing+Boing%29

<comment><USER2> better source: [http://bloggasm.com/new-study-shows-some-correlation- between...](http://bloggasm.com/new-study-shows-some-correlation-between-free- ebooks-and-higher-print-sales)

actual paper: [http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text- idx?c=jep;view=tex...](http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text- idx?c=jep;view=text;rgn=main;idno=3336451.0013.101)

nice result, I've been praying that for music for ages.

<comment><USER3> Don't you mean preaching?

<comment><USER2> yes,oops.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This makes a lot of sense. People who like ebooks, whether they own some sort of reader or just dont mind reading a book on their screens, are still a minority.

However, if they read something and tell others about it, they're opinions and hype are just as valid as the next man's. It follows that peers who don't read ebooks may be intrigued enough to actually buy a physical copy</comment>


Blueprint - Technology for preventing XSS attacks - <AUTHOR> http://sisl.rites.uic.edu/blueprint/wiki/Main_Page

<comment><AUTHOR> There is also a paper published on this technique here: [http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.153....](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.153.4483)</comment>


Minecraft shows how bedroom programmers can create global hits (2013) - <AUTHOR> https://www.technologyreview.com/s/516051/the-secret-to-a-video-game-phenomenon/? <comment><USER2> > Coded in Java, a general-purpose programming language that emphasizes speed > and lightness over the grand capabilities of more powerful tools

I stumbled a bit while reading that. There is a comment to be made about notch's use of java, both good and bad, but I don't think speed and lightness when I think java, especially in the realm of 3D games.

I do think it was a good choice for cross platform play and modding though.

<comment><USER3> I wonder what are the grand capabilities it lacks? Is C++ a more powerful tool filled with grand capabilities? It does not feel right, although it sure is a Swiss army knife full of sharp and pointy tools in a "Don't look into laser with remaining eye" sort of way.

Is C a more powerful tool? Absolutely not. It's powerful but not that expressive.

Both languages are relatively low level and uses application memory management. I think it's only the latter that really matters when writing 3d games and other low-latency programs to be honest.

But I think the slow part of minecraft is the terrain generation, and I think it's mainly because the world is rather large and the algorithm is complex, not because java is slow or that the gc is a bad idea.

I don't think that the Windows 10 version run noticably faster, but I'm not completely sure that it's C++ and not C# and gc:d.

<comment><USER4> The biggest thing compared to C and C++ (or even C# and Go) is probably the lack of user-defined value types. So if you want to create an array of Point2D objects, in Java it will be an array of pointers to heap-allocated objects (each with additional per-object overhead), which is really bad for cache misses, memory consumption, GC pressure etc. C# is a pretty similar language that is popular for game development (with Unity) but unlike Java it supports value types.

<comment><USER3> I agree. It would be good with some kind of fly-weight allocation for a whole array of objects in java.

How is garbage collection for arrays of value objects solved? Is the whole array gc:d, or what? If an individual element is referenced somewhere the array stays in memory?

<comment><USER4> C# works a little differently from C/C++ in that stack vs heap allocation is decided at the type level (using a 'struct' or 'class' keyword when defining the type). So you can't easily have one object have a reference to an interior Point in a Point[] array, since any Point instance variable will just be copied by-value and not be a reference. A Point in an array can be passed by reference into a function using the 'ref' keyword though, in which case I'd expect the GC to keep the whole array around until the function returns? (It seems hypothetically possible to optimize but kind of a niche case). If you need to, you can also actually use raw C pointers with an 'unsafe' keyword, that's outside of the GC though (useful for working with C libraries).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> IMHO Markus Persson wasn't a "bedroom programmer" in the pejorative sense, he programmed as a professional for King.Com for four years before venturing into the land of indy dev.

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

<comment><USER3> Yes.

I think he was a rather creative developer that managed to create the game that he wanted himself as a kid.

Maybe we can just sort this article under "slighly uninformed opinons" and carry on with our lives...

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> s/Minecraft/Stardew\ Valley/ and you get the 2016 version.

<comment><USER7> Wow. I wasn't aware of this Harvest Moon clone. Brings back memories.</comment></comment>


Monitoring and Architecting for Failure - <AUTHOR> https://mux.com/blog/monitoring-and-architecting-for-failure-at-mux/ <comment><USER2> I'm the author of this post.

Here are a few things I highlight in this post as things to consider when architecting for failure: Retry, Backoff and Rate Limit. Use a Cache. Add Redundancy. Build a Buffer. Reconsider Dependencies. Introduce Isolation. Improve Test and Release Practices.

Click the post for more about how I think about each of these. I think that considering cost tradeoffs when doing evaluating each of these approaches is what makes architecting systems so challenging (and interesting).

What else do you do in your systems to handle failures gracefully? Any questions about what we are doing or how we are doing it?</comment>


Ask HN: Help to get us first feedback - <AUTHOR>

Hello HN,
we are working on a project management webapp and it finally became minimally usable. We would love to get your feedback early on!
Features:
 -- realtime updates;
 -- task counters as a means to instantly get what is going on in a workspace/project;
 -- scrum-inspired layout: each project may have a backlog and sprints;
 -- per-project permissions: a user may see and participate in a project only if she is a member of it.
http://routehq.com
Thanks! <comment><USER2> I would like to try before registering, or at least see some screenshots of how it looks like.

</comment><comment><USER3> Try to setup a demo, just as stripe.com - <https://manage.stripe.com/register> , <https://manage.stripe.com/test/dashboard>

</comment><comment><USER4> With respect, why does the world need another project management app?

</comment><comment><USER5> clickable: <http://routehq.com></comment>


Ask HN: Can you be a code C as a Freelancer? - <AUTHOR>

Hello. I am a Freelance Programmer and I spend most of my time coding for websites using PHP, HTML, CSS etc. I am 18 and haven't been Freelancing for very long but recently decided that programming for websites isn't really what I want to be doing.
I am wondering if it is possible to get Freelancing work doing projects in C or another lower level program-oriented language. In the past I worked on quite a long project in C++ with SDL and OpenGL and enjoyed the lower level parts and optimization involved far more than the higher level PHP scripts and layout adjustments that I have been doing recently.
My question is, is it possible to be a Freelancer while doing lower level programming or should I be looking for a permanent job in the field? I would be interested to know what people think that my next step should be? I would think either going to a University (which I have not done yet) or at least getting a good example program in C or C++ to put on my CV (I've been considering porting a particular 2d platforming game that I like to C++ for a while). What do you think?
Thank you for reading, I'd be interested to know what you think I should do next. :) <comment><USER2> What do you want to do?

Do you want to freelance, get a full time job, and/or go to school? Think about why you would be doing each one. Do you just like to code? Are you interested in making a lot of money? Do you just want to learn more?

I think your next step should be identifying a passion that you have. Do you want to develop/design mobile applications? Do you want to get your hands dirty with backend development? Etc.

Once you have an idea, start building a portfolio of projects using the technologies you are passionate about. That is the easiest way to start finding work (freelance or full-time).

Think about what you want for your future. Do you want to work 9am-5pm every day? Do you want total control over your hours? Do you want to be in class every day? What appeals to you the most? Figure out what lifestyle you want to live right now and think about how a full-time job, freelancing, and/or school might affect your ability to get to that point.

Also, here's a tip for freelancing. Stop thinking about yourself as a C developer or a [Insert Language Here] programmer. Instead, focus on specific problems that combinations of your skills can solve. You are probably doing this now as you describe "coding for websites". If you're making websites now, that might be a good place to draw an example from. Businesses need nice websites. I would find plenty of businesses that either don't have or have bad websites. Contact them. Instead of offering yourself as a PHP programmer, offer to build and design them a nice website. Show them examples of your work.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your reply. It's very helpful. I'll have to think about it all. :)</comment></comment>


'NIPS' AI conference renamed after 30 years over complaints of sexism - sahin-boydas https://thenextweb.com/artificial-intelligence/2018/11/22/nips-ai-conference-renamed-after-30-years-over-complaints-of-sexism/ <comment><AUTHOR> I remember discussions about why the name Python Object Oriented Programming Conference wouldn't be popular.</comment>


Ask HN: Feedback on my Saas relationship management tool - <AUTHOR> I'm building a relationship management tool to help professionals (i.e. startup executives, consultants, sales VPs) build and strengthen their network. It still has rough edges and there's more development work on the way but I would love to get some feedback from the HN community: http://orchestrahq.com <comment><USER2> Here is my 2 cents:

I think that this product could be useful. I know people who have a similar system going with spreadsheets. Having this in a web app could be handy and make the data cleaner and more accessible than it would be in spreadsheet. Because there are already a number of CRMs you may want to pick a vertical and specialize.

In terms of usability there are a bunch of places where you could use better form validation. For example on registration if you don't enter a company you can't submit, but there is no alert. Also it looks like there is no validation on the add contact form. Also, it looks like the contact detail form isn't finished. The Tasks, Reminder, Relationships and Other sections all don't seem to do anything.

All in all this looks pretty sweet! Nice Job!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your feedback. I'll have to get them setup and fixed.

I've been thinking about these verticals but not sure which one to go for yet: \- financial advisors \- insurance advisors \- consultants \- freelancers and/or contractors

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It sounds like something very few people would actually use. Why? Because everyone is busy and preoccupied with their own jobs. Sales VPs are busy trying to chase leads. Executives are busy managing their own product/employees, etc. Networking is one of those things people say they want to do more of, but in reality nobody finds the time to do so.

<comment><USER4> What I hear you saying is that people see the value in maintaining business/professional relationships but don't have the time to so do. Maybe people would use this tool if it could help decrease time spent maintaining a network?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I clicked on the Get-Started link. It kept loading for a few seconds (half a minute?) and now all I see is a blank page with a colored background.

[EDIT]: I refreshed it did turn up with the Registration screen this time.

<comment><AUTHOR> Probably the fact that Angular is taking too long to load. I'll try to see how I can make it more responsive to the user.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The homepage looks great! Nice start. One note - the 'Get Started' button in the nav takes me to the bottom of the page, but the only signup button on the page is at the top of the page.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah yes, thanks. I'll fix it tonight.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> clickable link: [http://orchestrahq.com](http://orchestrahq.com)

"Orchestra shares personalized recommendations" Where would these recommendations come from? Will you use data your customers enter for recommendations to other companies as well?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not too sure I understand your 2nd question but we'll only be using the data customers enter for the customers' benefit themselves. Potentially, it could be recommending when is the best time to reach out to a particular contact, etc.

<comment><USER6> Thanks! I understand now. I thought recommendation would point to new contacts, similar to Facebooks "do you know this person?" and worried contacts I enter will be recommended to other companies.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah yes, personal privacy is something we take extremely seriously and we will never sell you out to other companies. In my own personal life, I've also tried as best as I can to stay away from companies that do these sort of things. I feel extremely important that there is a trust between us and our customers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> kinda has a similar look/feel to this product:

[https://www.yardbook.com/customers?guest_user=Yes](https://www.yardbook.com/customers?guest_user=Yes)</comment>


How Genetics Is Changing Our Understanding of 'Race' - <AUTHOR> https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/03/23/opinion/sunday/genetics-race.html <comment><USER2> This is an interesting argument but I think it fails to coherently restate what it means for race to be socially constructed. Nobody is denying that genetic differences between people exist and are important for health. They're saying that reusing racial categorization schemes in genetics is scientifically ungrounded because these racial categories have no inherent biological content— they're more like receptacles for political and social debate.

It's not clear what value it adds to use (e.g.) US Census racial categories in genetics research. The salience of racial identification changes over time and is deeply politicized (as the author notes). More sophisticated and granular categories that are actually based on genetics would be much more appropriate than trying to recuperate categories that weren't developed for science.

<comment><USER3> This is because phenotype is a good predictor of genotype and people are good at assessing someone's phenotype very quickly.

I can usually tell roughly which European country someone is from by looking at their face.

It doesn't work as well with different parts of Eastern Europe but you get the idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The problem with this kind of "gene-centered" social thinking is that the implication, almost always, is some sort of regressive or conservative politics about social problems and inequalities being a result of natural forces. A horrifying example of this is, for example, the book "A Natural History of Rape" which makes a biological deterministic argument that explains rape as a natural and evolutionarily selected-for behavior in men.

Show me a controlled longitudinal study where (eg) men and women are raised in an identical environment, treated identically, and not even informed of the concept of gender. That doesn't exist, and never will exist. There are massive emergent cultural forces that make biology a pretty useless tool for doing sociology, much like chemistry studies the emergent properties of physics principles, but trying to account for emergent properties of atoms and molecules in terms of quantum mechanics is totally useless. Human societies should be studied on sociological terms, not biological ones. With even the smallest amount of effort, you can see that there are HUGE confounding factors that make any attempt to explain social outcomes biologically totally useless.

</comment><comment><USER5> It's interesting to think that an article so reasonable, and so grounded in knowledge, would also get you called names if you posted it on Twitter. Empirically, this field would appear to be the one most likely to yield Galileos in our time. (As in Galileo's case, without any deliberate attempt on their part to be heretics, just by following the truth where their era's zealots don't want it to lead.)

<comment><USER6> It's reasonable but also kind of.. straw-manny. Outside of a few crazy fringes, nobody is suggesting that its not "Politically Correct" to point out that certain races are carriers for various genetic disorders or disease risk factors.

I've never heard of anybody calling someone racist if they said "People with African heritage can be carriers for sickle cell anemia." Likewise, I've never seen anyone called an anti-semite for pointing out that Jewish people can suffer from or be carriers for "founder effect" genetic disorders.

If anything, there's a distinct social justice angle to recognizing minority population health concerns in medicine, so I'm actually kind of surprised things aren't tilting the other way: where the "anti-PC" crowd is angry that researchers aren't focused more on traits that apply to the broader human population, as opposed to the genetics of distinct minorities.

<comment><USER5> I think the strangeness may come from the fact that the author is thinking of things that genetic research either has discovered or will discover that would be more controversial, but he's being careful not to actually mention any of them.

<comment><USER6> Perhaps, but so far modern scientific discoveries have been fairly devastating towards the various hypotheses of "scientific racism." Just recently it's gotten to the point where some white supremacists are convinced the field if genetics is a Jewish conspiracy because they got their genes tested and... _surprise_... they're 5% non-white.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> No matter how much the society at large wants to tiptoe the subject, the concept of race has never fell into disuse wherever facts really matters, such as in healthcare or the legal system.

<comment><USER8> I don't understand your examples. How does race affect medical treatment of an individual? Should people be treated differently in the eyes of the law depending on skin color?

<comment><USER9> There are some situations where both illnesses and treatments behave differently depending on race-linked genetics; sickle-cell aenemia vs malaria is the famous one, but there's a long tail of medicines that are slightly less effective in nonwhite people because of who happened to be in the clinical trials.

<comment><USER8> How strong is the link to race? There is a great number of diseases and conditions affected by genes that have no correlation with skin pigment.

Swedes and Finns have quite different profiles of hereditary diseases. Are Finns a different race based on that?

In the 1930s, Finnish scientists spent a lot of time "proving" to their German counterparts that Finns are an Aryan group rather than part of the Mongolic race. That seems completely absurd today. Hopefully in 80 years we'll be able to say the same about present-day race obsessions.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Fastest way to make 10K 100K 1M? - <AUTHOR> If we think of "fastest way" as a relative term, what would be the fastest way to make (legally) 10K 100K and a cool 1M?<p>Anyone? <comment><USER2> Aside from winning the lottery (either literally or figuratively), the fastest ways are going to include consistently investing in the stock market, or investing in your own business. If you can become an entrepreneur and grow your business, you can make enormous amounts of money relatively quickly. I recommend a cleaning business, a coin car wash, or real estate (including flipping houses); the first two are relatively easy and straightforward, and the third is a well known business model.

</comment><comment><USER3> Dollars or users? And for yourself or your project/company?

<comment><AUTHOR> Dollars and "Net Profit" for the individual.</comment></comment>


Wolfram blocked publication of a mathematical proof with a court order - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_110#The_proof_of_universality <comment><USER2> Please help me understand this.

If I understand this correctly, the Wikipedia snippet is saying that Mr. Cook developed this theory while under a related NDA with Wolfram Research; and that by publishing a paper, Mr. Cook violated that NDA. The paper in question, the conference, and the injunction blocking publication all happened in 2015.

If I understand that correctly, then should this post be marked "(2015)"?

Also, this seems to me to be a rather run-of-the-mill NDA violation case. The only things making it more more noteable is it being an NDA related to math, and how one of the parties involved is Wolfram Research. Otherwise, this seems to me to be like any NDA involving a technology company, and HN has seen discussions on over-broad NDAs recently.

Finally, I'm not liking the quality of the Wikipedia article: I'd appreciate more information, and maybe links to court documents!

<comment><USER3> This all went down in the late 90s. Basically, Wolfram had been employing a lot of people to continue the basic research he did in the early 1980s on cellular automata. Wolfram's claim-to-fame is that he discovered 4 classes of cellular automata (random, stable, periodic, complex). I claim he took these straight off nobel-prize winner Ilya Prigogine who identified these 4 classes for far-from-equilibrium thermodynamic systems - see Nicolis paper (figure 1): [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC388547/pdf/pnas...](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC388547/pdf/pnas00060-0162.pdf). (Nicolis was Prigogine's student).

Anyway, Wolfram thought he was on to something really big (meaning-of-life type big). But he also founded Mathematica, thought - "hey, i'll just get rich first". And like Jeff Hawkins who put his Palm Pilot money into his first love of brain research, Wolfram funded basic research on cellular automata. And Wolfram wanted the scientific credit for that basic research - hence the NDAs. Now artists (like Andy Warhol and Damien Hirst) have been doing this successfully for years - taking credit for their employees art. Wolfram reckoned he could do the same. But Mr Cook thought otherwise. Fair play to Cook, I say. It's a very interesting exercise, because there's nothing Wolfram can do now. Cook was the one who made the discovery and he told us so. Wolfram wants to undo that, but with the Internet, he can't.

Regarding the actual discovery. It's significance is that it shows us how very simple rules and interactions can produce something complex and regular (a universal Turing machine) upon which intelligent systems can be built. Given that the brain is almost certainly not a universal Turing machine, I believe that Wolfram over-estimated the long-term historical significance of the discovery.

<comment><USER4> How is the brain not a universal turing machine? Is there a task that turing machines can do that brains can't? It has been shown that rnns are turing complete [1] so it is certainly believable that brains are

[1] [http://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/220907/meaning- of-a...](http://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/220907/meaning-of-and-proof- of-rnn-can-approximate-any-algorithm)

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h I think the key detail is that the brain is actually more powerful than a turing machine, as demonstrated by our ability to solve halting problems

<comment><USER5> I'm not sure this is correct at all. Turing machines can solve certain subsets of the halting problem (i.e does a given program without recursion and with only certain types of loops halt?), but it's impossible to create an algorithm which will say whether _any_ program halts. I see no reason why the Human brain would be able to solve the halting problem, or even any problem a Turing machine can't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Newton wasn't above abusing his position as head of the Royal Society to discredit Leibniz. Wolfram reminds me of Newton—a self-conscious genius, exceedingly jealous of his intellectual primacy. I think Wolfram even compares NKS to Newton's Principia on the book's dust jacket if I recall.

<comment> awinter-py newton stuck a knitting needle in his eye to find out where colors come from

<comment><USER7> He didn't do a bad job at that.

He also wrote over 100 books on alchemy (that he didn't publish because it would have been illegal to practice), tried to predict the apocalypse from the Bible, predicted a Jewish repopulation is Jerusalem from similar crazy bible numerologies, and, because he saw himself as a priest of the natural world, never married.

<comment><USER8> I could not help but note your last name...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> For any of you who haven't read it, Cosma Shalizi's review of ANKoS seems relevant: [http://bactra.org/reviews/wolfram/](http://bactra.org/reviews/wolfram/)

</comment><comment><USER10> When scientists chase dollars it's double-ugly.</comment>


Python Machine Learning Tutorial for Scikit-Learn: Wine Snob Edition - <AUTHOR> https://elitedatascience.com/python-machine-learning-tutorial-scikit-learn <comment><USER2> How does sciki-learn compare to caret from R?</comment>