The Internet Is Saving Culture, Not Killing It - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/15/technology/how-the-internet-is-saving-culture-not-killing-it.html <comment><USER2> Call me a pessimist, but as a content creator this piece came off as extremely out of touch. Yes: NYT is booming in subscriptions, and Patreon has carved out a nice little niche for supporting podcasters and YouTubers. But it's nowhere near the level of support artists have had for the last hundred years.

Before, if you were a writer, you could write for the neighbourhood paper or magazine and carve out a decent living (see: Hemingway, DFW, etc.) Now, unless you're a staff writer for the NYT or maybe 10 other 1%er sites, there's no way to make a living off subscription sites. They have killed local markets that have supported writers. Book sales are down. Newspaper sales are down. Literary magazine sales are non-existent. Anecdatum: I wrote a series of Medium posts this month with a Patreon link at the bottom: 70k hits, $0 donations. It's hard for me to imagine reaching 70k people with my writing in 1910 and still being a pauper.

Two things: this isn't necessarily all doom and gloom. There are probably more artists living than at any point in history. And the internet helps us reach more people than ever before.

However, bragging that the world's most popular newspaper is adding subscriptions and that another couple of creators are making $10,000 on Patreon does not a Renaissance make. Patreon's PR team is trying to spin something that—at least for writers—isn't happening. The needle is not moving.

<comment><USER3> The landscape is shifting yes, and it's harder to make money. But consider that the last 150 years of mass literacy and spare time to consume vast quantities of media is already a historical anomaly. If you look at the sheer quantity of culture produced and consumed, it's hard to see it as anything but a golden age. The fact that it's harder to make money in these conditions makes perfect economic sense.

But on the positive side, I think this gives us a helpful sign post on the way to UBI/post-scarcity society. Consider that one of the biggest political impediments to UBI is not just the puritan work ethic as applied to others, but perhaps even more fundamental is the individual's own need to feel useful. De-coupling creative output from ones livelihood does not necessarily have to be a terrible thing.

<comment><USER4> Whether or not you think that 'the last 150 years [...] is a historical anomaly' is irrelevant. The fact is that it was better, and there's no legitimate reason that it should now be worse except for the anticompetitive actions of a few big corporations that loss lead by providing expensive-to- produce services for free to eliminate competition.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> You only have to spend a little time consuming digital media to understand that products that rely on advertisements for income suck. As soon as subscription services started offering ad-free versions of their product, I started buying them.

I'm not saying it's the best way forward, but would it kill Twitter and Facebook and Snap to experiment with some of these models? It's working for content creators, why should social media platforms be any different?

At the very least, it makes sense to offer paid tiers of access for their APIs, which I get some of their "enterprise" clients are already doing, but certainly a great API is monetizable and worth paying for.

<comment><USER6> Facebook, Twitter, Snap should be co-operatives of some sort, the users are creating the value, at least the popular ones, so they should be rewarded within the system for their continued support and audience development.

<comment><USER7> Why do you think users of these services create value for free? Maybe it's because the value created for free is less than the value they get out of using these services they create free value for. It is true that these services get money thanks to the aggregated value that is created by all their users but let's take facebook for example, they only make $48.76 per user per year as of 2015 [1]. If they were to pay their users, they could not pay them more than that per year. Not such an interesting deal for anyone involved, even if Facebook was turned into a cooperative with 0 profit. Users would only get $48.76 at best per year and as a non profit, Facebook would probably be way less efficient and therefor only offer half or maybe less than that.

Now Facebook could turn into a paid service and pay its users more but then it would have much fewer users and then way less money to offer and now we're back to paying users little.

Seems like the current deal isn't such a bad one, Facebook connects a massive amount of people around the world including poor immigrants with their family (I know a few) and in exchange these users create value for Facebook. It's a voluntary win-win situation for both parties. Adults entering mutually beneficial deals with each others and enjoying it, what's wrong with that?

1: [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/facebook/11891353/How-...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/facebook/11891353/How- much-money-do-you-make-for-Facebook.html)

<comment><USER8> I believe you may have some fatal unstated assumptions in there.

The co-op concept doesn't require equal distribution of proceeds to participants. Nor does it require that the net distribution of proceeds equal the total value per user. Nor is incentivizing value creation on your platform a zero-sum game between facebook and content creators.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Ever-lower barriers for creators?

There have never been any barriers for creators. Folk art has always been a part of human societies.

There were barriers for mass dissemination of artistic works, but not the process of creation.

Mass media put the local artists out of business. Before the advent of radio and recorded music there were many more musicians and bands. Now everyone has to compete on a global level.

I would argue that in this new global digital attention economy that there is even more competition and even less room for local and alternative voices.

Live music profits are at an all time high but it is all concentrated at the top. The long tail is a fallacy.

<comment><USER10> >Before the advent of radio and recorded music there were many more musicians and bands.

That's just incorrect due to the sheer exponential increase of humans alive, not to mention the many cultural factors you are ignoring. Thousands of bands were started because kids heard old blues music over the radio and became inspired.

I'd wager there's more bands and venues than ever now and if anything, I'm seeing more and more people make a living off their music thanks to the network effects of social media combined with touring. I've watched two of my friend's bands - pretty weirdo stoner pop music - go on national tours supporting major acts (Of Montreal was one) and it most likely would've never happened if not for the exposure and channels of the internet.

<comment><USER9> You're wrong.

In the 19th century there was a much higher percentage of people who could play rudimentary musical forms.

The quality of music and choice available to consumers has increased steadily. People would rather hear the best musicians in the world than the best musicians in their household or neighborhood.

There is plenty of historical research on this topic beyond the common sense explanation I'm offering here.

Amendeum:

I assume you live in a media hub like NYC, SF or LA, where there is a concentration of mass media professionals.

If you drive out to a small town you will find a very low number of local musicians. Before mass media there would have been a number of local music groups. Today people living in small towns listen to what the mass media professionals are making for them.

These are the same kind of basic economic principles that lead to any kind of concentrated specialization, and on a global scale, comparative advantage.

<comment><USER11> Before the widespread adoption of radio, pianos were an essential part of any household that could afford one. Pianos were a common sight in pubs, village halls, workplace canteens and practically anywhere that people would gather. Nearly everyone participated in social singing to some extent. The streets were filled with buskers, most pubs had a pianist or accordionist, most families had at least one person who could play an instrument. Music was as omnipresent as it is today, but it was performed live by whoever happened to be around.

The decline in music-making over the past century has been astonishing, in small ways and large. Whistling used to be a common sound on the street, but is now almost extinct. Social singing is now a rarity and would be difficult to revive, because there is no longer a shared repertoire of song to draw from. A vast chasm has opened up between "musicians" and "non-musicians".

<comment><USER9> I'm very fortunate to live in a musical household and have a lot of musicians in my life. My wife and I both write and sing songs together. I've got a crew of people who get together to play covers and jam.

It is incredibly rewarding and gives me a very real sense of participating and contributing to my culture and community.

When I was a social media addict living my life through a screen while theoretically living in San Francisco I was frequently pulled down by bouts of depression.

Ever since I quit social media, got rid of my smartphone, discovered bluegrass and country music and moved to a place where these musical cultures are a fundamental part of society my life has gotten so much more rich and satisfying.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I feel like 200 years from now, our times will be viewed as something akin to the industrial revolution. Recency bias makes us feel as if we're more important in history, but 200 years is a long time. I'm sure there'll be another "revolution" or two in that time. And the people of that time will probably consider it to be the most pivotal revolution yet.

History folks. It repeats itself.

<comment><USER13> So we've got the agricultural revolution about 10,000 years ago, then the industrial revolution about 200 years ago. I can't think of any other separate event of equal impact.

And you are suggesting that no only are we currently within a similar scale event (plausible, but hardly proven), and there will _another_ two such magnitude events in the next 200 years?

Or are you noting that we, and future generations, will always think we are on the cusp of "great things" but for almost all cases will be wrong?

<comment><USER14> I think it is more likely that in 10,000 years we will see the "internet revolution" as part of the industrial revolution. It's only because we're in it that we can see it as separate things.

For example, we now speak of a single "agricultural revolution", where in reality it would have spanned hundreds of years of had several different periods (discovering plants, discovering cattle, etc).

<comment><USER15> The industrial revolution was centered around the production of _things_ , and machines' effect on that.

We're now shifting to a knowledge economy, and the internet has been transforming that. I think of this transformation as distinct from the Industrial Revolution (either the first or the second).

<comment><USER4> Again this is recency bias. You think it's more significant because you're experiencing it.

'Knowledge economy' is a myth anyway. The 'knowledge economy' produces nothing of actual physical value to people and .com bubble 2.0 will burst within 5 years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm not even sure we'll be able to read content created in this epoch at all two hundred years from now. While the NY Times article is mostly HTML (with lots and lots of script injected, but still), sites such as medium.com and many others created in this decade are just a single big JavaScript blob with auto-generated CSS.

<comment><USER17> I'm not sure why we wouldn't be able to? The binaries / source of old browser versions aren't going away. It seems like it's a much easier problem than emulating old closed source console games, or dos programs, both of which have been done very well.

<comment><USER18> CDN-hosted scripts, for starters.

Also, running old games in DOS Box is often a finicky process that requires some tinkering for every game. That's one of the reasons GOG.com took off so rapidly. People are gladly paying several bucks to save themselves the trouble of messing with configs and reading forums about game's quirks.

This isn't a huge deterrent in case of games, but it will be a huge deterrent for retro-browsing, because the whole point to the Web is its interconnectedness. Plus, there are many more websites than there are games.

<comment><USER17> Isn't the internet archive solving this problem? I guess I am taking them for granted and should donate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> At the beginning they talk about places that have lost income, but the internet has also preserved a lot of content that was only accessible if you visited a place that owned a copy (library, museum, etc).

For instance, UCLA has a great old lecture series from the '60s they've been digitizing: [https://www.findlectures.com/?p=1&collection1=UCLA%20Archive...](https://www.findlectures.com/?p=1&collection1=UCLA%20Archives)

There are a ton of other places doing this. Once these types of projects are funded once, they can be available pretty much forever, because they are drop in the bucket for youtube, which seems tremendously cost effective.

</comment><comment><USER20> The way I've come to view culture is that it is a byproduct of communication. Stick three people in a room and have them talk to each other, eventually they come to share a culture (a small one, but nonetheless significant to them)[1]. If it's indeed a byproduct, it follows that the amount of culture generated is directly proportional to the bandwidth/speed of that communication.

In that interpretation, the internet can only be an accelerating force; driving society forward into greater levels of social consciousness.

[1]: A relevant XKCD comes to mind [https://xkcd.com/915/](https://xkcd.com/915/)

<comment><USER21> > In that interpretation, the internet can only be an accelerating force; > driving society forward into greater levels of social consciousness.

Not necessarily. Take evolutionary processes. Diversity arises in part from isolation. This is why the Galapagos are such a crazy local ecosystem. The Internet globalises all communication -- it is easy to see how this can lead to more "bandwidth" as you say, but less actual cultural output.

<comment><USER20> I like the evolutionary analogy. I agree that the global nature of internet communication will most probably lead to a homogenization effect. Truly distinct cultures will soften over time. The lack of diversity would reduce the output, but by how much? I see it as a second term in the equation we're (informally) discussing. A negating factor to be sure, but I think the net result will still be in the positive direction.

<comment><USER21> Thanks :) You might be right, of course. I hope so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I largely agree. The only thing that will remain constant is that the news today is absolutely terrible since it's trying to become entertainment and not what it should be: news.

<comment><USER23> I disagree with the whole notion of news itself. Thinking you can condense geopolitical, environmental, or scientific happenings into short, attention grabbing headlines and relay enough of the issues at play is crazy.

Now journalism, I agree with. But it requires time and investment.

<comment><USER24> Right! We're still mostly locked into the newspaper model of "articles" for factual reporting, despite its complete arbitrariness on the web.

I'd love to see journalists experiment with perhaps a more wiki-like model of reporting, where you have one page for a certain topic which gets updated (new stuff at the top or otherwise readily visible).

<comment><USER25> This is a really interesting idea. Any story that really matters unfolds over a period of months or years, and stumbling upon a couple of articles a month about it doesn't inform the reader very well. And what if the first article you read about it is in the middle of the unfolding?

A wiki-style document, updated as the story unfolds, organized so that anyone can get an overview and then drill down into the details, seems like a really good idea. Some JavaScript and such could allow stories to be viewed chronologically, by topic, keyword, etc. (Something like TiddlyWiki could be a good place to start.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> tldr; We've all become patrons of the arts through micro-transactions.

Ten years ago, I donated regularly to charities that would enable micro- funding for people living in third-world countries. A $10 donation would buy some chickens for a woman in South America, who could turn a profit on the eggs and eventually pay the loan back. I thought it was a fantastic idea.

Today, I find I'm funding everyone's projects. I pay a $2/month for a serialized zombie radio drama I listen to on my morning run. $4/month contributes to one of my favorite weekly science podcasts. $4/month to Amazon gets me unlimited streaming music on my Alexa. I think nothing of paying $3 for a phone app I might play once or twice before getting distracted by the next shining new thing.

Culturally, even without this micro-funding, we are swamped in culture. My DeviantArt feed overwhelms me with more amazing art than I have time to appreciate. The same is true of books, shows and films both professionally- made and independent. As a result we are drowning in culture, but dividing into micro-cultures as individual. Twenty years ago, everyone had the common cultural experiences of watching the same shows and movies. Today, we no longer can take those common-cultural references for granted. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, just an observation.

<comment><USER27> But why pay for a book when you're entertaining yourself with streaming music and zombie shows? It is killing culture; just not the culture you care about.

<comment><USER28> Bet really, _why_ pay for a book when people are choosing streaming music and zombie shows as their preferred medium of culture? If anything, that's an illustration of how culture in total is growing, even if it's killing parts of the culture that you care about.

<comment><USER27> Who cares if culture is growing if you can't connect to your neighbor over it?

Culture is more than just hobbies. It's about identity.

<comment><USER28> This growth allows me to connect to distant people who share my culture and identity, instead to my physical neighbor with conflicting values.

It opens up cultural niches that aren't viable in smaller communities or weren't viable before - something that won't have a critical mass to grow or even exist in a city of 100,000 people can have a thriving culture worldwide nowadays.

Yes, we're losing the notion of a shared monolithic identity kept together by mass media keeping "everyone" (or 3-4 major groups/demographics each) in a nation on the same page culturally. While it does mean that the society is becoming less united, this is increasing diversity and bringing the culture towards the individual differences in taste; I believe that in the end this trend is a good thing, both for the individual people and culture at large.

<comment><USER27> I suppose; I can certainly see the benefits.

I don't think you're acknowledging the other side of the trade off: if you aren't interested in something popular, you're going to be effectively alone in spite of a torrent of options for interacting with others. Reducing popular culture to sub groups makes this much, much easier to encounter.

My friends call this "Facebook fatigue": looking at hundreds of friends and feeling alienated because of few shared interests.

Regardless, claiming that culture is "dead" or "thriving" seems to be missing from evidence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> "Wenn ich Kultur höre ... entsichere ich meine Browning!"

Terrible play, questionable subject matter and worse fans, but still... a good point. There's nothing wrong with culture as a concept to live through, but as a point of discussion it's akin to a discussion of religion or dreams.

<comment><USER30> Except he didn't mean it that way. He wasn't saying "don't bore with me your particular views on culture". He was saying "if you have to analyse culture then you're a pernicious misfit and probably a Jew".

So I think we need a better shorthand for this - just so we all know what we're really saying.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I made music as a hobby for a decade and without the internet no one would have heard any of my music. With the internet, my songs have been played hundreds of thousands of times.

So I'd agree with this. The internet is responsible for my bands success.

</comment><comment><USER32> The Internet reduces the entry barrier for publishing, and that is a twofold sword.

It helps content creators to disseminate their content, but increases the variance of content quality.

</comment><comment><USER33> The Internet is both killing culture and saving it at the same time, not for humans though.</comment>


Data Visualization on Yahoo - <AUTHOR> http://www.visualize.yahoo.com/core/

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome Stuff !!

<comment><USER2> Thanks!

I am part of the company (Periscopic) that built the visualization for Yahoo!. We have been ecstatic about the positive responses to the project.</comment></comment>


Effect of One-Legged Standing on Sleep - <AUTHOR> http://quantifiedself.com/2011/03/effect-of-one-legged-standing-on-sleep/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+QuantifiedSelf+%28The+Quantified+Self%29 <comment><USER2> Methodologically isn't this close to nonsense?

His measure of how well rested he is is completely subjective. There's obviously no blinding (as he's subject and experimenter) which makes it almost certain that as he knows the hypothesis he's looking into and the measure is subjective, he's going to either subconsciously or consciously push the data towards proving or disproving it based on his preconceived ideas.

He talks about randomly choosing (possibly sloppy language but if you choose in any way it's not random, regardless it's not clear) and he's failed to adjust for or control any other variables that might influence sleep like, oooo, alcohol or caffeine or stress or a whole bunch of things that will make more of a difference than standing on one leg which given the relatively small data set is a pretty big deal (again some of this may depend on the method of randomisation).

And then the variation is within fractions of one percent (the scale showing 99 and 99.4) which given that the measure is subjective is essentially insignificant.

Please, please tell me that this is a wind up about how people believe anything scientific looking and trying to get people to stand on one leg for lulz rather than something serious?

Given that what he's doing is basically exercise and that linking sleep and exercise makes some sense, it's not a totally stupid hypothesis, but his experiment proves nothing.

<comment><USER3> Too many people, like you, are hung up on "proof". Yes, we should be aware of the difference between hypothesis exploration and a solid demonstration. But that doesn't mean that hypothesis exploration is pointless!

An experiment like this one is entirely appropriate when trying to decide whether a hypothesis is worth exploring further; setting up a more elaborate study would have been premature.

So when you say "his experiment proves nothing" I think you are judging it by standards it was not, and should not have been, intended to meet. Don't focus only on the results of science; without the process, there would be no interesting results.

<comment><USER4> The experimental procedures he went through gave little additional support for his argument than simply stating: "I noticed I sleep better when I stand on one leg for a while".

The statistical analysis of the study does not provide any additional weight to the statement. In fact, the statistical analysis is more of a distraction because he didn't control for an important influence in self-evaluating health. If a person expects that taking an action will improve their health, it's very likely that the person will think he feels better after taking that action.

<comment><USER5> While it is not rigorously scientific in the sense that physics is, it is compares very favorably to findings in the fields of medicine and nutrition. (Yes, they are much worse than you imagine).

And while this document cannot reflect this, I've been following Seth Roberts for a few years now -- he is the best kind of scientist, with a remarkable talent for objective measurement of oneself. While this cannot be generalized to other people easily, as far as it refers to himself, it's probably way better than most medical results published in the last 20 years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _If I stood on one leg "to exhaustion" — until it hurt too much to continue — a few times, I woke up feeling more rested_

Wouldn't it be easier to just exercise? Regular physical activity leads to better sleep, and doesn't require you to stand on one leg.

<comment><USER7> What he's doing _is_ exercise. He's working a muscle to exhaustion, which is essentially weightlifting without the weights. I guess the value is that he's found a simple workout that gets the results he needs in eight minutes a day with no equipment.

It would be interesting to find out if he would get better or worse results through cardio instead of working a muscle to exhaustion, and whether or not it is important that the legs be that muscle. Some people suffer from restless legs syndrome which keeps them from achieving deep sleep, and maybe exercising the legs is countering this.

(I wish there was some way he could experiment that wasn't subject to the placebo effect, though, which makes the results moot when applied to anyone else.)

<comment><USER6> Well, yeah. It just seems a little strange (and likely less efficient) to do leg raises, when a decent workout of real exercises would be just as easy and more effective.

Even if you stick to the legs, exercises like bootstrappers, squats, and lunges would be significantly better.

<comment><USER8> (see above comment) dynamic exercise is only more effective at increasing muscle twitch force. isometrics will be more effective at increasing strength at joint angle. for example, i could do more squats in a minute (up to 90) after i did isometric holds vs before.

<comment><USER6> Fair enough. I just didn't get the impression that the OP took an exercise approach to his experiment. It seemed less isometrics and more "I'm gonna stand on one leg until I get tired."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Interesting, useless experiment. It was invalid from the start. He went in 'knowing' that standing for long periods 'made' him sleep better. That may or may not be true. It is anecdotal. Not only that, but he may have drawn the same conclusion that standing on one leg also worked and that doing 4 sets was best, etc. I'm not saying that standing's effect on sleep doesn't warrant proper exploration. I am saying that the placebo effect cannot be ruled out with this guy's work.

</comment><comment><USER10> We seem to be approaching self-satire here on HN.

</comment><comment><USER11> My Mom always told me a glass of milk would help me sleep better. It isn't scientific, but if I'm stressed out and have a glass of milk before bed I'll relax more and sleep better.

One legged standing could be just a good! I'll definitely try it out.

<comment><USER12> The calcium in the milk helps: <http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/163169.php>

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Why is this on Hacker News!?

</comment><comment><USER14> Do squats, acquire sleep.</comment>


NextDNS is my new favourite DNS service - <AUTHOR> https://angristan.xyz/2020/04/nextdns/ <comment><USER2> Been using NextDNS for a few months now, I cant even find a single flaw. DNS is fast, Both founder must be expert in networking, I have tried literally all the third party DNS services, Ad blocking or not and NextDNS is actually one of the best / fastest DNS services. And I often think of myself as having latency intolerance so it is very good. Despite what I thought 300,000 DNS queries/month was low it turns out I never exceeded that limit.

And its Dashboard / Control Panel, it is very fast, extremely responsive. Basically I love everything about NextDNS, from DNS Speed, Ease of use and Design. Anyone who want Ad blocking should give it a go.

Edit: Not affiliate with NextDNS, just personal opinion. Not sure why the downvote.

<comment><USER3> I've added my relatives to my NextDNS and have yet to receive a single complaint while blocking a whopping 25% of all requests. (Off course I turned off logging.) I'd be happy to pay them even for my limited number of requests.

<comment><USER4> You could be logging all DNS queries of your relatives by a single click of a button? Did you inform them of this possibility, just curious, not judging.

<comment><USER3> Logging is on by default and per system. So yes, that is definitely possible. The majority of users are my children so I don't feel the need to inform them and the SO was not fully informed other than "tell me if it breaks something".

It's a good question to reflect on though. If I install this at my parents should I tell them. The whole world is monitoring their DNS now and after this only (potentially) me and NextDNS.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for your reply. I usually cant inform my SO more anyway, simply not understanding the technical limitations or reasons for something, but I do always tell.

I'll be checking out nextDNS for sure, even though its just for seeing what its about etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> One thing that gives me some confidence in NextDNS is that they have joined Mozilla's Trusted Recursive Resolver program.

Choosing it within Firefox's setting won't enable any of the filtering the article mentions, though. You need a custom config for that.

[https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2019/12/17/firefox- announces-n...](https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2019/12/17/firefox-announces- new-partner-in-delivering-private-and-secure-dns-services-to-users/)

[https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/DOH-resolver- policy](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/DOH-resolver-policy)

<comment><USER6> Also, one extra nice thing about using NextDNS via DoH (as you would with Firefox) is that now everything except the fact you're talking to NextDNS is concealed from eavesdroppers even if you _do_ have custom config.

If you use other methods, NextDNS needs to figure out which custom config is yours, and there's no way to hide that from an eavesdropper (at least not yet). For example with DoT the customisation is hidden as a server name, and travels plaintext in SNI during TLS connection.

But with DoH that indication is in the URL path component, which is just more encrypted data in DoH and so an eavesdropper can no more discover which (if any) customisation you use than they can discover my Hacker News password when I log in here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've had the complete opposite experience to the author w.r.t. PiHole and WireGuard.

I run a PiHole on my home network and it's also my WireGuard "server". I will concede am lucky enough to have static IPv4/IPv6 addresses on my home connection.

On my iOS devices I have two connections set up: one for "access to home + DNS", and the other for all traffic. When I'm on my home wifi the VPN connection is off, when I'm on cellular data the DNS is set to the PiHole, and when I'm on any other wifi I route all traffic via the VPN (all automatically via the WireGuard app).

For my other mobile devices... well, they're Linux, so I just set the DNS server correctly and leave WireGuard always connected. It's a UDP "connection" for crying out loud.

This all works flawlessly now to the point that my less technically-minded roommate has it set up on their phone, too: they can access the NAS all the time and ads are blocked in the web browser and in apps.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sadly I had battery drain issues with WireGuard on Android. That's why I'm content enough with the native DoT feature.

<comment><USER8> Same with iOS. The battery drain was significant enough to make my phone hot even when the screen was off.

<comment><USER7> The app has a logging facility.

I'm not affiliated with the WireGuard project, but I would appreciate it if you could encounter the issue again, and then submit an account of your experience and the logs from your device.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> _-___________-_ I tried NextDNS out recently, and had a few technical questions about how it was interacting with some specialised DNS software I was testing. I clicked the livechat button on the website and was connected within seconds to someone who understood DNS at the protocol level. It was... unexpected and amazing.

<comment><USER9> Now THAT is the most impressive thing I have heard about them.

<comment><USER10> For now. That level of support is inevitable for a small startup and generally unsustainable beyond that stage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> NextDNS is great for all my devices. let's me access Handshake domains easily from [https://dns.live](https://dns.live)

The default blacklist for NextDNS is really good too; stops a lot of Windows phone home stuff too, and can easily see all that.

Don't add a bunch of blacklists though or websites break

<comment><USER12> What are Handshake domains?

<comment><USER13> Crypto secured domains, I assume. First google result is namebase, which is a familiar name in such a field. [https://www.namebase.io/](https://www.namebase.io/)

<comment><USER14> Here's the 101 I found: [https://www.namebase.io/handshake101](https://www.namebase.io/handshake101)

Edit: more: [https://handshake.org/](https://handshake.org/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > Despite how much I like Cloudflare and this specific service, I want to > block trackers at the DNS level. 184.108.40.206 is probably the most reliable and > fastest resolver there is on earth, but that does not fit my use case > either.

Isn't this a bit poorly timed, considering the recent Cloudflare DNS announcement?

> In the coming months, we will provide the ability to define additional > configuration settings for 22.214.171.124 for Families. This will include options > to create specific whitelists and blacklists of certain sites. You will be > able to set the times of the day when categories, such as social media, are > blocked and get reports on your household's Internet usage.

[https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-1-1-1-1-for- families...](https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-1-1-1-1-for-families/)

<comment><USER16> I doubt they're going to support adblocking as a first class citizen.

<comment><USER17> Why? Their business model doesn't involve advertising at all.

<comment><USER18> Yeah. No. Many advertisers rely on Cloudflare. If Cloudflare would choose to block ads, I'd imagine that lots of folks would ditch them and use some other DNS provider instead.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I've started using NextDns on my phone (Android) for its simplicity and thoroughness.

One of the harder parts about DNS based blocking is that it's significantly more effort to unblock something like clicks from tracked deals sites than ublock browser extension.

For my routers, I'm mostly happy with last week's announced 18.104.22.168 malware blocking from Cloudflare.

</comment><comment><USER20> It's also fairly easy to run your own recursive resolver in case you don't want to use an external DNS service. I use Unbound and ad-blocking lists and it works great.

</comment><comment><USER21> NextDNS is also my new favorite DNS service - especially since they've been supporting Handshake name resolution at the click of a button since March 20th. [1]

[1] [https://twitter.com/nextdnsio/status/1241178358257455104](https://twitter.com/nextdnsio/status/1241178358257455104)

<comment><USER22> Sorry for being naïve: What is handshake-dns useful for-- is it like dnscrypt? Is it mainstream enough to matter yet?

<comment><USER23> Handshake is an attempt to decentralize DNS root domains. It isn't mainstream enough to matter yet. I'm pretty excited about it though :)

You can read more at [https://handshake.org/](https://handshake.org/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'm hosting my own DNS server with DoT/DoH as reverse proxy of PiHole server. The latency might not as impressive as NextDNS' (7~10ms on my phone via TMobile), and I can have full control of the stack.

[https://github.com/yegle/your-dns](https://github.com/yegle/your-dns)

<comment><USER22> > _The latency might not as impressive as NextDNS '..._

For just DoH and low latencies, see Stackpath: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19514791](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19514791)

With fly.io, one could run DoT, too: [https://fly.io/docs/app-guides/run-a- private-dns-over-https-...](https://fly.io/docs/app-guides/run-a-private-dns- over-https-service/) (that's a tutorial on DoH, though).

I use Cloudflare Workers (their generous free-tier covers 3 devices worth DNS queries, with much room to spare), but the 128MiB RAM limit restricts the number of domains in my blocklists: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22208988](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22208988)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Started using NextDNS a week ago and it's quite good so far. One of my concerns was how hard it would be to debug websites/services that stop working but it their logging being instant made it superbly easy. I can turn on logging, go to the website/app that doesn't work correctly, go right back to the NextDNS logs to see the requests instantly. You can then filter for the blocked ones too.

</comment><comment><USER26> I tested the ipv6 latency to nextdns [https://my.nextdns.io](https://my.nextdns.io) and opennic [https://servers.opennic.org](https://servers.opennic.org) –– I'm impressed with the newcomer, with 21㎳ median it's very close to the 17㎳ median I currently enjoy.

</comment><comment><USER27> This looks great, but unfortunately CloudFlare has 1ms ping for me but NextDNS has 50ms. I'm not quite sure how it can reply in 1ms, but that's what I'm getting.

<comment><USER28> 1 ms... Do you live in their datacenter? I sadly don't even get that kinda RTT inside my own house.

<comment><USER27> I don't either, that's why I'm puzzled. Here's my traceroute:

[https://www.pastery.net/zppyhe/](https://www.pastery.net/zppyhe/)

I do have a fiber connection to my ISP, but still, 1 ms is pretty low. I wonder if something else is replying, but I tried 220.127.116.11 as well and the latency is the same.

<comment><USER29> Greece is a hard place for many to serve, not a big internet hub. Evidently CloudFlare has servers there, and transit with Cogent too.

<comment><USER27> Yeah, definitely. I'm surprised CloudFlare has servers near here, if anything.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> NextDNS is excellent, I have my family and non-techie friends using it. Personally I just wireguard to my home network and use pihole.

Hopefully Windows, Linux, iOS, and MacOS natively support DoH soon. It's a pain setting up proxies.

Even worse, iOS forces you to use a fake VPN to change DNS servers at all on cellular!

<comment><USER31> I was pleasntly surprised and happy to see that I could use this service or Cloudflare on the latest version of Android natively by just typing in a URL into the settings rather than having to install a 3rd party app!

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Surrendering our DNS traffic to few massively centralized services is even worse than to local ISPs.

<comment><USER33> Have you checked out Handshake? It's a new experimental protocol that's trying to decentralize DNS [https://handshake.org](https://handshake.org)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I switched from pointing various things to cloudflare to simply using NextDNS a while ago, and it's just excellent. The onboarding flow was way faster and easier than I thought it would be (fantastic setup documentation). Configurations are really great for customization at per-device granularity. Extremely slick and fast web UI. Great DNS latency + performance overall.

I was planning on setting up my own recursive resolver one day (tm) but NextDNS really just makes everything so seamless + easy.

</comment><comment> m-p-3 And I'm impressed at the speed they're implementing new things I didn't even know I wanted (Handshake TLD, more blocklists, etc)

</comment><comment><USER35> I've been using NextDNS on my laptop, two phones, and a tablet for months now, after hearing about it from a poster here on HN.

Love it. I'm just worried that there is something a bit more nefarious going on. If you're not paying, you're the product being sold.

Are we still just in the 'growth and acquire' phase here, where paid subscriptions will eventually be required?

</comment><comment><USER36> NextDNS works great for me, I use it as a second layer to ublock origin and it still catches things.

Only downside I have is when something does break, and it happens occasionally, I have to whitelist the domain on their dashboard. You can only whitelist the domain for all requests, which is not what I would like. Would prefer to whitelist it on a specific page and for a temporary time.

Otherwise when something break I have to go to their dashboard, whitelist the domain, use the website and then go back and blacklist it again.

Would be nice if they had a browser extension that can do that in the browser without having to go to their dashboard

</comment><comment><USER37> I deployed NextDNS for my family months ago. The Handshake resolver locked in NextDNS for my home network. I've been considering setting up PiHole as well — Handshake resolution would lock that in.

</comment><comment><USER38> Interesting - just found weird behaviour in pihole. It's asking upstream to resolve "pi.hole" according to nextdns. That shouldn't be happening

<comment><USER39> Check /etc/pihole/local.list

It should have something like

        x.x.x.x pi.hole

where x.x.x.x is your pihole's local ip.

<comment><USER38> It's in a docker container so any changes will just get wiped on next version upgrade. I just checked and it does have the right IP in it though (IP of device hosting pihole). So doesn't seem to be obviously misconfigured. Weird.

.hole doesn't seem to be a valid TLD so not much of a security risk

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> It really is incredible, first time I couldn't think of any improvements a product could add

</comment><comment><USER41> Support is also great. It accidentally a Dutch government website (probably had reasons) it was fixed < 24 h after my email.

I think its brilliant. Using client side ad-blockers on shitty hardware [to make things less slow] adds a good bit of overhead.

</comment><comment><USER33> We use NextDNS to access Handshake domain names and it's been working great. The privacy features are great too, although email links sometimes don't work because of them (more of a feature than a bug imo).

</comment><comment><USER42> PiHole at it's core is easy access to a bunch of blocklists. Why not just run a local resolver and import the blocklists if your usecase is mobile and you don't want to vpn your traffic?

<comment><USER43> I've moved from a local resolver with regular block list updating to NextDNS - here's why I'd recommend it over a diy solution:

1\. Easy to turn on and off. My block lists were pretty aggressive and worked beautifully 90% of the time. However, occasionally I'd need to hit a site that was registered in a list that wasn't immediately obvious. The O'Reilly site is (was) a good example - they were loading a script on their login page at one point that failed because I'd blocked the source. I've encountered other site that fail in similar ways. Being able to temporarily disable adblocking (OSX via the app) is tremendously convenient.

2\. The blacklists and blocking categories offered by NextDNS are at least as good as what I'd managed to pull together (I was pretty proud of mine), they update frequently, and again it's very easy to opt-in/opt-out

3\. CName cloaking - unless you update your own lists very frequently, there's a good chance you won't be as effective at catching third-party trackers masquerading as first parties.

I had fun running a local resolver and updating it from various block list sources with a cron job. I'd add new entries manually as I encountered them, but after a while it got old. Additionally, I wanted the same protection outside of my network. The same setup on a FreeBSD droplet worked well, but was more maintenance. NextDNS does at least as good a job, and it's way more convenient.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> I am using this on and off. I have some trouble with its adblocknig etc.

Some apps and some sites do not work well.

You could easily say that this is due to the pages or app itself and I agree. Still. I have to use some of them.

<comment><USER22> > Some apps and some sites do not work well.

You might have enabled some pretty aggressive blocklists with nextdns. If you can't be bothered, Adguard DNS is more accommodating but configuration-less, give it a try [0].

As for sites, I use startpage's anonymous-view [1] or brow.sh [2] at times.

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18788410](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18788410)

[1] [https://www.startpage.com/en/anonymous- view/](https://www.startpage.com/en/anonymous-view/)

[2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17487552](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17487552)

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> I've been using DNS Made Easy for some years now, can someone who knows both, fill me in on the main differences? Any need to change?

<comment><USER46> DNS Made Easy (Which, by the way, is great and fast, although I'm using HE for some domains) is for your domains.

NextDNS is for your devices. Is a DNS provider for your network and devices that allows you to block ads, custom configs and the like. Seems an advanced version of what OpenDNS used to offer back in the day (not sure if they still do it after Cisco acquisition).

<comment><USER45> Thanks that helped!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> What a great write up. If they can get over the technical fear for the average user this is a huge idea and the price is fair.

</comment><comment><USER48> I'll give a try :) but it's a little bit suspicious that there is not a single bad comment about NextDNS......

</comment><comment><USER38> Doesn't seem to be catching much that uBlock and pihole aren't. 0.07%. Not super surprising I guess

edit...and noscript

<comment><USER49> There are multiple blocklists you can enable.

<comment><USER38> Yeah I don't think it's a flaw with NextDNS. Just means my existing setup is already doing a decent job. Another layer is always good though

I did have a look at additional blocking lists on there though - some good options there. Added "Block Child Sexual Abuse Material" and gambling.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> also a fan of NextDNS. i have been using the service for a few weeks, since i saw them mentioned on twitter. looks like the aggregate number of queries from the many devices on my home network will exceed 300,000 per month, so i am happy to start paying as soon as they start charging.

</comment><comment><USER51> How do ads get blocked in the DNS level?

<comment><USER25> When the browser tries to load an ad, let's say from "ads.com", the DNS service responds to that domain with 0.0.0.0, which prevents the ad from loading. You enable lists to customize which domains should be considered ad domains and can optionally blacklist other domains.

<comment><USER52> Are any ad networks bypassing this yet by serving ads from a static IP?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> can pdnsd (persistent/cache) work with nextdns ?

</comment><comment><USER54> _wow_ this is great! Now I want Apple to acquire them and provide this natively on the iPhone.

</comment><comment><USER55> I've not used it, but Adguard also has an ad blocking DNS[0].

[0] [https://adguard.com/en/adguard- dns/overview.html](https://adguard.com/en/adguard-dns/overview.html)

<comment><USER56> Used Adguard for about 2.5 years, and literally switched to NextDNS yesterday after reading this article. I've got a blog post about DNS ad-blocking [0], updating stuff now and then. I hope it points out some of the different features and reasons to use one over the other. Let me know what you think!

[0] [https://www.calebyers.com/blog/dns-ad- blocking.html](https://www.calebyers.com/blog/dns-ad-blocking.html)</comment></comment>


Zero to $1B: Lessons Scaling a Startup - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@swaaanson/zero-to-1b-8-lessons-scaling-a-startup-f9a4b631de61 <comment><USER2> I thought Lesson #8 is pretty critical to anyone who either wants to lead or ends up in a lead position. specifically:

> Some founders take pride in working long hours. That's dumb. You should take > pride in having huge leverage (which often requires long hours). When I > would work 100 hour weeks, instead of feeling self-satisfied, I knew I > either 1) wasn't delegating enough or 2) didn't have the right leaders > around me to delegate to. By working longer hours you can get 20% or even > 40% more done, but with effective delegation you can get 10x or 100x more > done.

I remember talking to a coworker years ago, who was also a long time software developer. I asked him something along the lines of what his near term goals were. I was surprised by his answer because I thought his answer would be about learning some new tech, getting a part of his project done etc. His answer was along the lines of "I want learn to lead better and hire good people to work for me so that we can get 10x more done" ..that really changed the way I think about leadership and hiring.

<comment><USER3> This switch from working harder and getting more tasks done versus working harder to figure out how to scale in both your professional and personal life is hard transition. As someone going through the process, I do agree this is the most critical thing. Easier said than done.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > So, yes, I came out of the closet every morning

This is an unfortunate and juvenile joke in an otherwise great post.

<comment><USER5> I took it as a sign of his immaturity _then_. Few authors who write about a decade-long process manage to use the perspective, let alone the voice of the narrator at the time. It's rare in fiction and rarer in non-fiction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I find it surprising that they were looking for $5M raise with MRR of less than $50K.

Other sources suggest VCs are looking for a significantly higher MRR for series A [https://visible.vc/blog/much-revenue-startup-need-raise- seri...](https://visible.vc/blog/much-revenue-startup-need-raise-series- round/)

Anybody have thoughts on that?

</comment><comment><USER7> Some good advice. The letter from Dean of Stanford Business School is classic.

<comment><USER5> I found it surprisingly petty for him to quote it in that way: I won't defend an MBA (never did, never will) but furthering your education can't be compared head-on to a business opportunity. The "now of never" is obviously a flipped argument (for the start-up, not the MBA that will be available every year) but you can't fault the Dean for trying.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is the business profitable yet? I didn't see any mention of it actually making any money, let alone being sustainable. Is this just a 10 year long con?

</comment><comment><USER9> I guess one of the lessons wasn't:

GMV (Gross Marketplace Value) ≠ Revenue</comment>


The Queensway Syndicate: tens of billions in revenue; unknown owners. - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/node/21525847

<comment><USER2> I'm not going to comment on the subject matter of this article, rather I think it's worth pointing out that we need more articles like this, investigating corrupt, shadowy organizations that are ripping off innocent people.

In fact, it would be nice if our journalists looked into some American corporations the way the Economist investigated Queensway.

Kudos to the Economist for doing reporting the way it should be done. Let's hope they continue pursuing this. This is journalism the way it should be done.

<comment><USER3> Why?

<comment><USER4> At some basic level you have to decide whether free flow of information is morally desirable or not. It's somewhat axiomatic, you can argue it's a good thing for efficient markets, but that is actually circular reasoning as someone who prefers inefficient markets would argue against the free flow of information and in favour of information asymmetry.

So I guess I'm saying that some people simply believe the world is a better place if there is more information going around, less secrecy, and fewer private deals between shsadowy figures.

Many of those peole are also in favour of fewer restraints on people's right to make choices. That seems to capture much of the place where the hackeer ethos overlaps with the startup culture: "Let people does at they like without patents and other restrictions, but give everyone the information they need to decide what to do for themselves effectively."

If I could sum it up in a phrase, I would borrow from Doctors: _Informed Consent_. To make an informed decision, you need to know the relevant facts and have a basic understanding of the likely actual outcomes that your chocies will create.

Shadowy syndicates cutting deals with corrupt regimes do not create an environment of informed consent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Sonangol was deemed so corrupt in 2003 that Citibank closed all its accounts."

Wow, when corrupt companies consider a company corrupt, that's not a good sign.

</comment><comment><USER6> In South Africa, the ruling party's Youth League, and it's president, Julius Malema keep promoting the nationalization of the country's mines. They recently started threatening to destabilize Botswana, because they claim it is a "tool of the west"' while supporting the Zimbabwe regime.

Although nationalization is totally illogical, and unlikely to succeed (paying for assets at fair value would bankrupt the country, and doing a grab would collapse the country's reputation), they persist in pushing the issue.

Reading this article, the seemingly irrational behavior of Malema and the Youth League seem to make more sense. There is of course, no evidence that shadowy groupings are attempting to ruin South Africa's economic system so they can swoop in and grab the ruins, but reading the article, it doesn't seem particularly far-fetched.

</comment><comment><USER7> > If that is right, then they would be depriving some of the world's poorest > people of desperately needed wealth.

Really silly to see the Economist, of all places, taking this kind of line.

The inhabitants of these countries lack the technological knowhow to drill for oil and mine for minerals. If you're familiar with the area, it's no joke; we're talking about serious physics, math, and computer science to get oil out of the ground and ship it profitably.

For all kinds of reasons the Chinese have these skills and the Angolans do not. The land will remain absolutely barren if foreigners do not bring their knowhow. Moreover, it is not in China's interest to have an African civil war raging over a possible oil supply as well, so they'll quash stuff like that with authority.

Life around a Chinese-Angolan joint venture will not be paradise relative to a US standard of living. But it will mean jobs, food, and relative political stability, which is a far sight beyond what most other nations in sub-Saharan Africa enjoy.

<comment><USER8> They're not complaining about foreign joint-ventures. The Economist, of all publications, knows that they're essential to do sophisticated drilling in developing countries.

What they're complaining about is that the proceeds are being directed through private hands, as opposed to the actual governments of the developing countries that need to drill their way out of poverty - for example, how the group is dealing with and paying Zimbabwe's secret police directly for access to the country's diamond mines, as opposed to dealing with the actual government (who may be less friendly).

<comment><USER7> The government of Zimbabwe is run by Robert Mugabe. It's pretty hard for even a secret police force to be worse than him.

Moreover, the governments of many of these countries are extremely rickety and unstable. They are in the main kleptocracies and certainly not capable of running any indigenous drilling operations.

So, it's not necessarily obvious that involving local politicians/warlords to a greater degree would produce better outcomes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> ROFL I just thought of a sad little joke:

Q: What would it take for the Economist to notice rich countries fucking over poor countries for mineral rights?

A: When the rich country is China.

But don't worry soon the Chinese too will figure out how to bribe the pathetic asswhores that call themselves business journalists and we will not have to worry about these stories marring our newspapers.</comment>


Waymo valued at $137 Billion by Volkswagen CEO - <AUTHOR> https://www.motorauthority.com/news/1119567_could-volkswagen-be-waymos-partner-in-europe <comment><AUTHOR> Although these numbers are theoretical, it would value Waymo at roughly 10x Cruise, arguably their closest competitor. It would also give Waymo liquid cash (or something equivalent I assume) roughly comparable to Cruise's valuation. I also am guessing this would be more money than Alphabet has spent on Waymo and would immediately recoup their investment, not to mention that 90% upside in long term growth.

I feel like this is the partnership that might actually make self-driving cars a reality.

</comment><comment><USER2> Thank god this guy got laughed out of his boardroom. Not even Sauftbank would pay that much</comment>


A categorical programming language (1987) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://web.archive.org/web/20140317211611/http://www.tom.sfc.keio.ac.jp/~hagino/thesis.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> I hear lots of people talk about category theory having some application to programming languages. Who knows about that as it's outside my expertise. I did stumble on this programming language designed for category theory. Figured you language or category theorists would enjoy it. :)</comment>


Functional Bits: Lambda-calculus based algorithmic information theory [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://tromp.github.io/cl/LC.pdf <comment><USER2> Author here. The paper is currently in a state of flux, as I started adding material about the graphical notation, but didn't get very far before my attention drifted to other topics. So please have a look at the following page as well

[http://tromp.github.io/cl/cl.html](http://tromp.github.io/cl/cl.html)

which links to an explanation of the graphical notation, to my corresponding IOCCC entry from 2012, and to a Wikipedia page on Binary Lambda Calculus that has since been deleted.

<comment><USER3> Serious question.

Is Lambda calculus a good match for algorithmic information theory. The versions of AIT I've read involved either Turing machines, hand-waving of computation or recursive function. Lambda calculus seems more complex and thus harder to integrate with an AIT that mostly needs to know that strings are programs, that not all programs terminate, that some programs can give a substring of their string as outputs and so-forth.

<comment><USER2> In my view lambda calculus is a perfect match for AIT since the language is both so simple and so expressive. This should be readily apparent from the concise self-interpreter. The versions of AIT that you've seen based on TMs probably didn't have any explicit constants because determining them would be much too cumbersome. Chaitin was the first to prove theorems in AIT with actual programs and he resorted to LISP. I'm positioning lambda calculus as an even better choice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you like this see also [1], and Joy as well as Iota and Jot[2] (programming languages). And maybe "Algorithmically probable mutations reproduce aspects of evolution such as convergence rate, genetic memory, and modularity": [https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.00268v8](https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.00268v8)

> In the context of his Metabiology programme, Gregory Chaitin, a founder of > the theory of algorithmic information, introduced a theoretical > computational model that evolves 'organisms' relative to their environment > considerably faster than classical random mutation. While theoretically > sound, the ideas had not been tested and further advancements were needed > for their actual implementation. Here we follow an experimental approach > heavily based on the theory that Chaitin himself helped found. We apply his > ideas on evolution operating in software space on synthetic and biological > examples and even if further investigation is needed this work represents > the first step towards testing and advancing a sound algorithmic framework > for biological evolution.

[1] [https://wiki.haskell.org/Chaitin%27s_construction](https://wiki.haskell.org/Chaitin%27s_construction)

[2] [https://www.nyu.edu/projects/barker/Iota/](https://www.nyu.edu/projects/barker/Iota/)

<comment><USER5> That Arxiv link is fascinating, thanks for that.

<comment><USER4> Cheers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As a layman, it is a personal aspiration to be able to understand this precise paper. It's very appealing to be able to express and reason about the related problems of complexity and edit distances using a generative(?) notation like lambda calculus that you can hack on in accessible languages like Haskell.

I also like that the citations include Emperor's New Mind; Godel, Escher, Bach; the Brainfuck homepage, and Haskell. The effects of these ideas on a couple generations of young minds is bearing fruit.

It feels like we're on the brink of gamifying a lot of important math.

</comment><comment><USER7> Is there a video lecture version of this paper that someone can recommend?

This is a great paper. But I burn so much mental energy trying to focus when I read something vs. when I listen to a video lecture. So I end up retaining more watching stuff and every more taking some notes.

<comment><USER8> Not sure about this specific paper, but I've been following John Tromp's work on this for a while. Its current homepage seems to be on GitHub [https://tromp.github.io/cl/cl.html](https://tromp.github.io/cl/cl.html)

The paper assumes knowledge of combinatory logic and lambda calculus, which you could probably find videos about. This paper uses pretty standard notation, so almost any video/course/book/blog/etc. should be OK. The main thing this paper does is to define a way to encode such programs as a string of bits.

Note that combinatory logic is one of the simplest Turing-complete programming languages, but it's _so_ simple that it's basically unusable for anything more elaborate than toy examples (the paper actually has a quote from Chaitin saying this!). Once you're comfortable playing with little examples containing a handful of symbols, that's basically all you really need.

There's a nice book of mathematical puzzles [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Mock_a_Mockingbird](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Mock_a_Mockingbird) which is actually based on combinatory logic. This is why combinatory logic terms are sometimes referred to as "birds", e.g. in this Haskell library: [https://hackage.haskell.org/package/data- aviary-0.4.0/docs/D...](https://hackage.haskell.org/package/data- aviary-0.4.0/docs/Data-Aviary-Birds.html)

If you're familiar with other programming languages, it's usually pretty easy to implement combinatory logic and play with it. For example, here are 'S' and 'K' in Javascript:

        function k(x, y) { return y; }

        function s(x, y, z) { return x(z)(y(z)); }

This isn't _quite_ right, due to most languages using strict evaluation, but the following Haskell is essentially correct:

        k x y = y
        s x y z = x z (y z)

There's also the esoteric language "unlambda" which implements these directly, including the "monadic IO" that the paper mentions [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unlambda](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unlambda)

Lambda calculus is more tricky than combinatory logic, since it contains variables. It's also more widely used (e.g. as the basis for many functional programming languages, like Haskell and Scheme), so there should be more material available. In essence, when you see something like:

        λa b c.x y z

You can think of it as acting like this Javascript:

        function(a, b, c) {
          return x(y)(z);
        }

When it comes to Kolmogorov complexity, maybe the Wikipedia page and its citations will help ( [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity) )? Notice that all of the definitions, etc. on that page assume that we're talking about some particular programming language or machine, but the examples use pseudocode rather than a "real" programming language. This paper is basically saying that we should use lambda calculus as that language, and we can measure the size/length of a program by encoding it as binary according to the method given.

<comment><USER9> Re birds -sage bird is the y combinator.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> HN feels psychic sometimes!... this paper happens to tie together a lot of the foundations I was lacking (out of ignorance) that I need for a personal research project. So happy to have found it :)</comment>


Web Biz: How to have 4,000 Users Waiting When You Launch - <AUTHOR> http://blog.rescuetime.com/2007/07/05/web-biz-how-to-have-4000-users-waiting-when-you-launch/ <comment><USER2> I wonder if this strategy makes sense for different kinds of plays-- if you think your app will be cloned as soon as word gets around, and you need a good head-start, maybe advertising what you're doing isn't as good an idea?

I have a feeling that's what's motivating many of the stealth-mode startups.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yaw, I dunno. I'm not convinced it's a one-size-fits-all strategy, but I tend to think that being out there is a lot more valuable than being stealthy.

The "first mover advantage" isn't much of one. Looking at the top 10 internet properties (by traffic), you don't see a lot of first movers there (people who were the first in their space). Also consider Walmart, Starbucks, the iPod, MS... Not a first mover among them. Not that they didn't innovate, but they were decidedly NOT first.

I don't think worrying about clones is worthwhile. Once you're out there, you've already got a headstart-- it's unlikely that anyone can beat you to launch. And if the only defensibility you have is a 6 month head start with a team of 3, you've got big problems. You win by being the best (and having the best marketing), not by being first.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Not generally one to pimp my own posts, but I thought the numbers might be interesting to folks.

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting article and interesting website... what tool are you using to generate the graphs?

<comment><AUTHOR> They are flash graphs that are XML-driven. We pondered CSS graphs (there's a great Rails helper for 'em here: <http://nubyonrails.com/pages/css_graphs),> but ultimately went with flash because there was a bit less code and they were a touch prettier. I still waffle on that particular decision.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Interesting. I just put up a splash Web page for my own startup, but after reading your post I think I should've done that a long time ago rather than when I'm close to launching a beta. Thanks for sharing.</comment>


Have we arrived in the post-Windows era? - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=16590 <comment><USER2> Yes, Windows has been commoditized, but Microsoft is not really suffering from it. Even though most users don't care about the OS, they still need one. In most cases, they go with Windows.

You can even say Microsoft won the battle by having everyone else compete on the web and leave Windows alone. Think about it - Microsoft gets $100+ in licensing fees from every PC user every 3-5 years. Add another $100 for that user's PC at work. How many web businesses can make the same statement?

</comment><comment><USER3> The only thing that makes me think we aren't entering the post-Windows era is that Office is still a cash cow for Microsoft. Because the situation Microsoft is in now with Windows greatly resembles the one they were in with Office '97. People kept buying new versions because no one else offered anything all that different and it was preloaded

It comes down to the next great thing. Linux, OpenOffice, Google Apps and Zoho are all trying to be just like Microsoft in their look and feel. But the only thing that will draw people from Microsoft is the next evolution of the desktop. Microsoft clearly can't provide it.

When I see that. Something that makes it worth the effort for people to ditch Windows I'll know we're in the post-Windows era.

</comment><comment><USER4> A foolish article - why the graphic about browser wars, when the real comparison is between Office Enterprise and things like Google Docs (who will surely be competing against Oracle + Sun now)?

Yes, the OS is less relevant now as many users don't _need_ more computing power than a netbook + SAS can provide, but it still matters. High-powered consoles won't kill PC games, I doubt I'll be editing HD video over the net any time soon (although I wouldn't object), and no large corporation or medium is going to outsource its operations to some third-party provider of cloud services.

Just because something is commoditized doesn't make it irrelevant. Cars are functionally identical for 90% of drivers but people still have preferences there.

<comment><USER5> What about editing HD video on a high-powered game console? I should think that there would be a _huge_ market for that!

<comment><USER4> That would be interesting, for sure. I like some of the design tools found in ps3 games - and yet again, I wonder why game consoles aren't made more expandable. I'm sure it would transcode video faster than my PC, though I've been disappointed at the scanty amount of code produced for Linux on PS3. I thought there'd be a much more robust hobby scene around it by now, but Sony's decision to wall off the GPU alienated a lot of people.

<comment><USER5> Sony could sell a ton of video editing software as a download. Maybe this is why they walled it off.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The importance of upgrades has always been overblown by a tech media written by the kind of people who pay attention to new OS releases. For most people, the OS isn't a product separate from the computer.

What's changed is the PC market reached saturation shortly after XP dropped in 2001. Older versions of Windows weren't upgraded voluntarily so much as swept along with the exponential growth of the overall market. If Microsoft didn't drop support and licensing of new copies to force upgrades, plenty of companies would be happy to stick with XP for years to come.

</comment><comment><USER7> Hopefully we are moving back into an era of increased competition in the OS market; that would be a good thing to see. personally I'm rooting for Plan9 :)

Having you product commoditized isn't so bad, provided that you've got high volumes. Getting people to upgrade existing XP and Office installs is going to be Microsofts biggest challenge, in a saturated market where sagging hardware sales are no longer pushing new Windows licenses. Hence ever more aggressive Windows Genuine Advantage stuff, I guess.

I don't know about you, but when people talk to me about upgrading their 'slow' old pc's now, I usually talk them into putting Linux on it. They are generally astounded at the speed improvement over their mushy old, virus addled, Windows install. No complaints from anyone yet.

</comment><comment><USER8> With apologies to William Gibson: The post-Windows era is here, it's just not evenly distributed yet.

</comment><comment><USER9> Yes.</comment>


Ask HN: How to handle a difficult client? - <AUTHOR> I was always lucky in getting very reasonable people as my managers/clients until my company found this new project from a Bay Area startup. The client has following characteristics:
1. We have standup meetings scheduled twice every week. He doesn't show up in 90% of them.
2. He doesn't respond to most of the emails which are to get his feedback on latest development progress.
3. A week before the initial deliverable was due, he demo'ed the project to CTO. He didn't give me any heads up before giving the demo. Incidentally there was a bug in the system at that point and his demo didn't work as he expected. He expressed his anger by a one liner email.
4. On the day of first deliverable, he gathered his entire department to showcase the product. He asked us to run a flow which was neither mentioned in his requirement docs nor it was related to the core features due for the deliverable. Since we weren't prepared for the flow, it didn't work. He shared his anger later with my manager.
5. He'd agree to everything I present in initial requirements, and later get angry for something not even remotely present in the initial requirements.
The project is super complex and he is barely involved in the development process. I know I can technically face any challenge, but I'm struggling with locking down requirements and managing his expectations. I'm whole-heartedly committed to learning and adapt to this challenge, but I'm not been able to develop a mental model so far.
How you'd handle a difficult client like this one? <comment><USER2> I don't see a difficult client, I see a consultant who didn't ask the right questions before taking the job and isn't seeing things from their client's point of view now that they have it.

Why don't they show up to standup? Why aren't your emails a priority to them? Why was a demo to the CTO necessary or desired? Why did they leave you out? Why was that flow important to them? Why did they discuss something out-of- scope?

I only see your perspective. If you don't know the answers to these questions, why not?

Advice isn't going to help; you need a relationship manager. You probably need to bring someone in to get face time with this person, and handle them on an ongoing basis, again probably in person every time. It's going to get expensive. You're probably not going to make as much money on this contract as you expected as a result. This isn't a technical problem to be learned from and fixed; this is an interpersonal problem with someone who works and thinks differently than you, who is also unfortunately holding the purse strings.

The most valuable thing I learned working in consulting wasn't how to be a better designer or developer, it was how to handle relationships. I learned that the next time I went out on my own, I'd hire a business and relationship manager, and I would absolutely pay them 50% or even 60% of my earnings, because that is the "real" work of consulting.

A relationship manager will give you a list of signs that you shouldn't have taken this job in the first place. A relationship manager would have specified that this person's attendance in standup is either mandatory (and therefore in the contract) or not required (which means they wouldn't have even been invited). A relationship manager would probably have established up front how this person likes to work, and that probably means in-person, and would never have sent an email, and instead had lots of meetings. A relationship manager would have made sure you kept control of the demonstrations, so off-message presentations couldn't have happened, and would have made sure that out-of- scope things either didn't come up, or were quickly addressed by understanding _why they came up_.

Your takeaway from this will be how to better vet potential clients, so you can either not take their money, or add in the cost of relationship management to their contract. You'll also learn to write better contracts, that firmly establish the participation required, including penalties up to and including the termination of the contract with full payment and no deliverable, should the client violate their expected level of participation.

<comment><USER3> I could be wrong, but (what with the references to the client complaining to the OP's manager) it sounds to me as if the OP is not the person who negotiated the contract but the engineer implementing the requirements. Perhaps s/he is in a position to affect company policy regarding such client interactions and contractual agreements, but it sounds like that may not be the case.

Do you have any advice for someone in this situation? Mine would be to start with a nice long sit-down with the manager about setting expectations for both the engineer and the client. Of course, if your manager doesn't have your back, you have a whole other constellation of problems, and you may be better off getting the hell out.

<comment><USER2> At that point, it might be too late. It's hard to reset expectations in the middle of a project that's already gone off the rails, short of pulling the team and replacing them with a client relations person, hence my advice.

If OP is "just" an engineer, I feel like they've still neglected their responsibilities as a consultant, and I think all my advice stands, because it means they didn't talk with their manager about this project, they just went in blind, full of assumptions.

At the consulting company I mentioned, everyone had to go through consulting craft 101, everyone had to learn how to be "client-facing," because at any point someone from the client might want you to add something out-of-scope that should be just five minutes and you might want to do it to be nice and make friends.

I have absolutely had loud, difficult arguments with technical leads and project managers who did not do all the due diligence necessary to inform my scope of work. That's my responsibility to make sure I'm able to execute, I'm set up for success, and the project doesn't fail.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Document everything.

Get signatures for documents.

Have a requirements change control process that is punative. Home builder have this part down. Make them agree to this upfront.

Deliver and keep signed documents handy.

</comment><comment><USER5> charge more. the more trouble they give you, the more you have to charge.

</comment><comment><USER6> You FIRE them !

Jerks, like the CTO you described, do not become more cooperative over time. It is possible that he is trying impress the investors and co-founders. Sadly for you, there is no way to win in these situations. So it is best to move on.

</comment><comment><USER7> document everything and get it signed.

reference it when asked.</comment>


Trump administration lifts ban on pesticides linked to declining bee numbers - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/aug/04/trump-administration-lifts-ban-on-pesticides-linked-to-declining-bee-numbers <comment><USER2> So this is lifting a ban on the use on wildlife refuges. The use anywhere else in the US was never banned. So the ban had little effect on preventing bee deaths.

If bees are dying from this it needs to be banned across the United States for all farming.

</comment><comment><USER3> If bees are dying from this it needs to be banned across the United States for all farming.</comment>


Show HN: giver.ly - Discover. Give. Impact - <AUTHOR> http://giver.ly

<comment><USER2> Interesting idea! I would love to see how this works.

</comment><comment><USER3> I love it

</comment><comment><USER4> Amazing!</comment>


Show HN: C library for Linux to easily create modular projects - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/FedeDP/libmodule <comment><USER2> It's no secret that I dislike C. That said, I'm very pleased to see libraries like this, because I think that much of what are extolled as the benefits of OOP can be achieved with effective use of message-passing between modules. This handles both stateless and stateful components well, in many cases better than C++/Java-style class-oriented OOP.

<comment><AUTHOR> There are some developers who think that OOP is a bless; other developers think that OOP is a sh*t and try to stay away from it as much as possible.

I think that just like everything else in the world, it has some benefits and some downsides.

For me, the greatest benefit is that it enforces some sort of code modularity/standardization and helps people keep their code organized. Note that i am not asserting that any OO code is inherently better written.

While designing libmodule, i always focused on that, plus being simple that, imo, should always be the primary goal while writing any library.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Who's your target audience? With a GPL licensed, Linux-only offering, you seem to (only) target open source Linux devs.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, that's it. Indeed i'm really open to support other platforms; i used linux-only epoll because of its beautiful API and only support linux because i can only test on it.

If anybody asks for support for some other OS, i can think about switching to poll(), even if i find epoll-like interfaces to be much more enjoyable to work with. As stated on project's readme, any patch is welcome.

About licensing, GPL is my usual choice there.

If you think any of these points is crucial, and you'd like some changes, please fill a bug report.

<comment><USER4> Interesting, could be "libmodule" be useful for such app development as AzPainter[0,1] (based on mlib[2] toolkit)?

> If anybody asks for support for some other OS, i can think about switching > to poll(),

Think, adding macOS support is enough.

Windows support un-needed[3] as Windows OS will die soon and it's soul go to clouds[4]. I'm serious[5], really[5]! There is HN thread[7] about it.

[0] [https://github.com/Symbian9/AzPainter](https://github.com/Symbian9/AzPainter)

[1] [http://azsky2.html.xdomain.jp/linux/azpainter.html](http://azsky2.html.xdomain.jp/linux/azpainter.html)

[2] [http://azsky2.html.xdomain.jp/linux/mthemeeditor.html](http://azsky2.html.xdomain.jp/linux/mthemeeditor.html)

[3] [http://azsky2.html.xdomain.jp/winsoft.html#en](http://azsky2.html.xdomain.jp/winsoft.html#en)

[4] [https://news.microsoft.com/2018/03/29/satya-nadella-email- to...](https://news.microsoft.com/2018/03/29/satya-nadella-email-to-employees- embracing-our-future-intelligent-cloud-and-intelligent-edge/)

[5] [https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/30/17179328/microsoft- window...](https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/30/17179328/microsoft-windows- reorganization-future-2018)

[6] [http://money.cnn.com/2018/03/29/news/companies/microsoft- res...](http://money.cnn.com/2018/03/29/news/companies/microsoft- restructuring-windows/index.html)

[7] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16716040](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16716040)

<comment><AUTHOR> I cannot say much about AzPainter, sorry. Libmodule is designed to be flexible enough in managing events, so if you are writing any event driven software and that event exposes a file descriptor, you should be able to use libmodule without any issue.

Indeed, i recently added bsd + osx support in libmodule ([https://github.com/FedeDP/libmodule/tree/kqueue_support](https://github.com/FedeDP/libmodule/tree/kqueue_support)) even if it is not yet in master. It builds, but I still need to properly test it; expect it to be merged sometime near this weekend.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is using recv not a problem as there is the recv(2)?

Do I understand correctly that there can be only one instance of a module? Why then use string identifiers instead of an enum?

<comment><AUTHOR> You are probably right about recv; i'll change it to "receive" as soon as i get home (patch welcome though). There can only be one instance, you're right.

String identifiers are human friendly; moreover i can't see how an enum could fit there, care to explain? Thanks! Btw you can have same module name in different contexts.

<comment><USER5> I guess it would change the API. You could have a separate file where you define an enum with all module identifiers plus a max value that all modules should include. Then you could omit whole hashmap dance and just use a static array. Then even an IDE or your text editor could give completions easily.

That would be less dynamic, but it's all a game of tradeoffs.

It could be beneficial to also support poll, as it's more portable and should be faster for low fd number. Probably not worth the hassle for a side project though.

BTW: nice clean and simple library. I'm more inclined towards libdill and coroutines, but they are certainly more complicated under the hood.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh i see, that is what i firstly thought reading your comment.

Yes, that surely would work out pretty well and would be slightly lighter too. But it would lack flexibility and simplicity that are my key points for libmodule.

Thanks for your suggestion and feedback though, they are really appreciated. And thanks for the hint on recv(), how could i miss that!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Enerscore – Find the energy costs of any home before you buy or rent it - <AUTHOR>

http://www.enerscore.com/
Hi HN.
Been a lurker for about a year now. After many fits and starts, I've finally launched an MVP of Enerscore. I made this tool because I couldn't find any information about home energy costs on Zillow, Redfin, etc, and it screwed me over when I moved into my new apartment and found out I had a $370/mo oil bill after I signed the lease.
My story is just as simple. I'm a high school junior, and this time last year, I had the idea for Enerscore but I couldn't code. So I took it upon myself to learn what I could and get as much help as possible. Now I have some interest from a couple large real estate websites.
If anyone is interested in working on this together, feel free to ask me any questions or shoot me an email: email@example.com <comment><USER2> Just tried it again, this time using Firefox on my laptop.

Still doesn't do anything useful.

Does this only work for addresses in the Boston area? If so, then it would be really useful to know that before typing in any address.

<comment><AUTHOR> Strange. It works for me on Chrome. It pulls property information from Zillow's API, so the issue could possibly be that your home doesn't exist in Zillow.

<comment><USER2> No, my home definitely exists in Zillow. That was one of the first things I checked when we started looking at it.

What all resources do you use in the code? I run with NoScript and Ghostery and AdBlockerEdge, among other things so it's possible you're trying to load a library that is being prohibited on my end.

But that doesn't explain the problems in MobileSafari on my iPad. ;(

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> Doesn't load anything useful on my iPad.

</comment><comment><USER3> clickable [http://www.enerscore.com/](http://www.enerscore.com/)

</comment><comment><USER3> What's the tech stack?

</comment><comment><USER3> email me michael at realpython dot com

!!</comment>


How to generate puzzles from chess games - <AUTHOR> http://en.lichess.org/blog/U4sjakQAAEAAhH9d/how-training-puzzles-are-generated

<comment><USER2> I believe chesstempo.com and chess.emrald.net generates their problems this way, or something similar. Decent results.</comment>


Four Seasons Spent $18 million on a Website redesign - <AUTHOR> http://thecubiclepunk.com/2012/01/13/fourseasons-blew-18-million-on-this/

<comment><USER2> I've never overpaid for computer parts, because I'm very familiar with their true price. Conversely, I always feel screwed when I need auto repairs since I know nothing about cars and am at the total mercy of the mechanic who tells me I need a new Widget X. It's no surprise that Four Seasons drastically overpays for web design -- it's not their specialty and the cost of making web design an organizational priority would be far more than $18 million. They've correctly chosen to focus simply on running luxury hotels.

Not to mention, a big portion of the cost of this project is hidden from view -- it's the cost of integrating with legacy systems at each Four Seasons hotel around the world. There might be a reservation system from 1994 at the front desk of the Four Seasons Istanbul which needs extremely delicate internationalization: [http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/03/whats-wrong- with-tu...](http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/03/whats-wrong-with- turkey.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> I think you miss the point a bit. It was a redesign. The had internal and external datasources that were used in the recreation. The thing I can tell you from being in house at a company whose core competency is not web development or design that regular over spend occurs less because of the details and more because of operational ignorance and agency selection. It is rarely because the site is so complex or special.

I would expect some expense for the legacy integration, but I believe that 18 million is way to much and given the fact that the site launched with so many issues it seems even if it were a steal it was too much.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I like to think that payments like this go to relatives or business partners at a different company. I only like to think that because the alternative is actually harder for me to comprehend.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm sure the front-end took only .5% of the cost, others were research/discovery phase, pictures/videos/travel costs and as qq66 said integration with their systems.

Bill Gates owns a percentage of the company, not sure what role he plays but I'd like to think they would ask him for some advice and recommendations.

If anyone finds out who redesigned it, let us all know!

<comment><AUTHOR> I am dying to know. I think the poor execution on launch is what shocks me the most I can think of several scenarios where millions would be spent on a site redesign and launch one would include a larger marketing budget for ad placement, etc.

But I think given the old site was already integrated into their booking systems we are giving them too much benefit of the doubt. This was clearly an over payment in my opinion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> If all you do is get the basics completely correct every time, you are already ahead of 99% of the world.

<comment><AUTHOR> I actually think you are right on my concern is less that they spent the money, but how and how well was it executed. I think it was poorly executed on. I wish I were the agency or development firm because I would have milked this for all it was worth.

<comment><USER5> Oh, I agree with you completely. I think the Four Seasons site described is very much an example of _not_ getting the basics right.</comment></comment></comment>


Some sex differences that look biological are really cultural - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9762790

<comment><USER2> This is basically the "you throw like a girl" phenomenon. With a sister who played NCAA Division I varsity softball, I can assure you that girls can learn to "throw like a boy", and then some. And yet, many more girls than boys "throw like a girl" (hence the stereotype). The reason is simple: throwing well takes practice, and boys throw more than girls.

But _why_ do boys throw more? Boys and girls have different preferences, and many of these preferences have biological as well as cultural roots. (Indeed, are there any cultures where athletic prowess is more valued in women than in men?) And so we're right back on the African savannah, where men who liked to throw learned to throw well, and thus killed more game.

It seems that, even with a "cultural" explanation, you can't escape nature.

<comment><USER3> I saw this topic come up somewhere else, and here are what the most sensible conclusions seemed to be.

The question of male to female biological differences can be answered better when you compare the best male athletes versus those of the female. There are clearly huge differences in physical abilities, and it's not because more men play sports than women.

Girls develop faster than boys in K-12, so a girl who played a sport can definitely get a college scholarship and play better baseball than the average male. However, I don't see how that proves it's in any way cultural. Sounds like genetics to me.

<comment><USER2> You're absolutely right, though I think we're talking about slightly different things. Continuing with my example, men throw _better_ than women mainly because men throw _more_ than women; men throw _faster_ than women because men are _stronger_ than women. You could say that they are "second-order" and "first-order" biological effects, respectively.

<comment><USER4> Men throw _better_ (whatever the definition - I'm assuming you mean accurately) and faster than women because our muscles are stronger. You can take a boy and a girl who have never thrown anything and the boy would throw better than the girl.

<comment><USER2> My contention is that throwing well is a skill, dominated by practice, while throwing fast is an ability, dominated by talent. Girls who practice a lot can throw better than almost any boy, but they can't begin to compete in terms of speed with even moderately well-trained boys.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> "That has several implications.... one is that playing violent computer games can have beneficial effects."

I doubt this study demonstrated that the 3D game has to be violent.

Logically, 3D game which involve aiming and tracking mechanisms help raise situational awareness in ways two-dimensional puzzle games cannot--it's very likely that non-violent 3D aiming and moving games, if they existed, would also work.

</comment><comment><USER5> If males are driven to playing fast twitch games because of their biology, then are the subsequent physiological adaptations considered biological or cultural?

</comment><comment><USER4> The study mentioned by the article failed to take any biological recordings from the participants. My guess would be that playing the violent video games causes a rise in testosterone. Since women have less, a rise in their testosterone levels would impact them more hence the evening out of the test scores. Just my theory.

</comment><comment><USER6> Inflammatory article that makes many misleading statements.

downvoted. twice.

<comment><USER7> Agreed. For me, the worst piece of writing is:

That has several implications. One is that playing violent computer games can have beneficial effects.

Ummm... seems like a really rash conclusion based on scientific article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Should have called it: VIDEO GAMES CHANGES BOTH MALE AND FEMALE PERCEPTIVENESS

<comment><USER9> Or KILLING VIRTUAL PEOPLE IS GOOD FOR YOU ;-)</comment></comment>


Bugs of news.ycombinator.com  - <AUTHOR>

<comment><AUTHOR> If you submit a comment, you are returned to the page you were commenting. But if you refresh that page (x), the comment is re-submitted. I suppose, a no- cache and an expire header of the submit request page would avoid this problem of replicating by mistake the submittions...</comment>