Box Launches Box Notes To Take On Google Docs - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomiogeron/2013/09/16/box-launches-box-notes-to-take-on-google-docs/

<comment><USER2> Note to Box, please make your file formats plain html or something exportable.

I think it will take a leap of faith for a company to start creating all their docs on Box, vs Google Docs which has been around longer. I would feel better if I saw them stored in such a way that I wasn't afraid I was stuck with you forever.

Maybe you can create the first modern, open docs file format for the web. Maybe that's just html.

IE not .gdoc (.bdoc)

That is all to say, I'm not sure you can win this war on features or usability (vs Apple and Google) but you might be able to win with security + openness.

</comment><comment><USER3> If it has real, proper, version control with named checkpoints then I'll check it out. I still struggle to believe that Google Docs doesn't have the ability to create a named version alongside its version-for-every-change tracking.

<comment><USER4> So lets bolt a fancy document editor on top of Github and call it a day.

<comment><USER5> Honestly... This could be a very useful product. We just rarely need "branching"

<comment><USER6> We're Kivo (YC S13) building Git for documents. www.kivo.com - would love to chat more.

<comment><USER3> This is extremely interesting and directly solves a major pain point for me. I've registered and I am going to give this a try once your Mac beta is out.

Curious why PPT first? I'd have thought a bigger issue was with Word docs. I guess that has its own track changes thing, but it's still not got anything approaching version control.

<comment><USER7> I imagine that one of their main target use cases is collaboratively editing slide decks, or something similar. I recall when our company had some major event last year, our exec team had over a hundred iterations of their slide deck.

edit: Their blog [1] notes that the reason is to let them focus on executing one well-defined thing WELL. Seems like a good idea.

      If we're going to achieve these goals, we need to be
      super focused. Which is why our first version is
      specific in its scope: Kivo 1.0 is an Office plugin
      which works with PowerPoint on Windows.

Kivo guys: what a great presentation, and clear explanation of what you feel is lacking in the space.

1: [http://kivo.com/blog/](http://kivo.com/blog/)

<comment><USER3> I figured there was a narrow focus at this point: it makes perfect sense. I was just wondering why that particular focus. Having thought on it some more, it looks like a clever strategy: the Word case has a half-solution already, with Track Changes and numbered file versions. In Powerpoint, there's simply no such thing.

I wish the Kivo team every success.

<comment><USER6> Thanks guys for your very kind words. Feel free to reach out to me on zefi[at]kivo.com with any questions or comments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> They should just make a really good Google Spreadsheets.

<comment><USER9> What do you think is needed in order to make a good web-based spreadsheet? Where do you think Google falls down at it?

(I work on spreadsheets and find this very interesting.)

<comment><USER10> They fail in their importXML limit to 50 queries They fail in their limited feature sets that make it not a true Excel replacement They fail in their inability to perfectly past data from Excel

I still use the Google spreadsheets all the time, but as a quick and dirty version of excel with importXML ability

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This has been a long time coming after Box poached one of the top guys on the Google Docs team.

</comment><comment><USER12> Almost signed up until they required a phone number, with no explanation why.

<comment><USER2> Business focused service. This reduces spam + increases quality of new sign ups.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Why not Box Docs? I like the rhyme.

<comment><USER14> I would imagine it's too similar to Google Docs and they don't want that for a couple reasons:

Potential (though unlikely) legal trouble and brand confusion.</comment></comment>


Old coal mines can be 'perfect' underground food farms - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-46221656 <comment><USER2> We shouldn't restrict them to just farms. We should strive for fully independent biomes with space for human inhabitants. With the ability to be sealed off from all external influence. We could even plan for many of them to perform useful psychological studies on their populations. "Vaults" is one name that comes to mind for them, but we should probably number each one to keep track.</comment>


Ask HN: Apps to keep personal things securely in the cloud? - <AUTHOR> Hi HN! I figured people here probably have the best recommendations on this.
I am looking for a way to securely use Dropbox & friends without having to fear for my data, while still have it usable on phones if needed.
I am currently using DEVONthink as my document dump which looks horrible but has the amazing feature of encrypting things before pushing it into Dropbox, Google Drive, WebDAV and friends. The app that goes with it, DEVONthink 2 Go, can decrypt things and makes them usable on the phone again.
The multi-destination feature with different encryption keys per cloud storage is absolutely fantastic for backup and safety and something that I couldn't find in any other app out there.
The problem, the app is only available on iOS and DEVONthink itself still looks and feels absolutely horrible and crazy outdated (even though it isn't).
Evernote, Bear and friends are nice as document dump but don't store things at rest.
Boxcryptor looks like it could be a great alternative. Is there anything else that I could look at? What are you using for managing your documents/pictures/files and securing them? <comment><USER2> syncthing -- I run it on a vps, couple boxes at home, and there is an iOS app to access that stuff although it's not that great really.

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool! Will look into that, thanks!</comment></comment>


Monopolies cost Americans $300 a month - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/nov/13/america-was-once-the-land-of-free-markets-now-theyre-becoming-a-myth <comment><USER2> That actually seems low. Given the enormous growth in worker productivity vs how little real wages have grown in the last 30 years, I'm guessing monopolies cost Americans much more.

</comment><comment><USER3> Nice to read a well-written article with interesting viewpoints, and then find it's actually written by an expert who has published their research in this area.</comment>


Ask HN: Recommended Laptops for Linux? - <AUTHOR> I have a 2017 15 inch MacBook pro, and in general I'm a bit underwhelmed with it.
The main reason I use MacOS is because it's Unix-like, all of the tools I require for work are available on Linux.
I have a Lenovo Yoga at home - but running Linux on it never seems to be very smooth - the main issue I have with it (and this is a bit of a deal breaker) is that it doesn't ever seem to work properly with my Thunderbolt docks. I have two thunderbolt docks, one is an OWC, which is plugged in to two LG 4K UltraFines and I have a Belkin which is plugged in to an LG 5K Ultrafine. For various reasons, I don't want to change these docking setups.
Things that are important to me the most are RAM and screen quality. Portability, disk space, high end graphics cards, touch screens, quality of keyboard/trackpad (almost always use the keyboard and mouse attached to the docks) are all lower down the list.
Can anyone recommend a good linux laptop that would fit the bill here?
Thanks! <comment><USER2> Lenovo with Intel hardware peripherals is probably the most suitable for installing Linux on.

At a pinch, Nvidia displays can be used, though you are constricted to using Nvidia's proprietary Linux drivers which they tend to provide whenever they finally bother to get around to doing.

I have just replaced my 10-year-old Thinkpad T410 with a Thinkpad P53. I hope it will be as versatile as my older machine.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I've always heard that Lenovo is generally the way to go, but my Yoga C940 really struggles with the USB-C/Thunderbolt Docks.

I've kind of got it working now, but the screen will occasionally cut out and I often have to reboot it so it will wake up the monitor etc - and only one of my two USB-C ports on the laptop are working (I suspect one of them got fried somehow - it doesn't seem to work in Windows either)

I know the Yoga range and the ThinkPad range aren't really comparable, but it's made me quite nervous about spending a larger sum of cash for a more 'workstation' appropriate laptop.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I've had a Thinkpad X220 as my Linux machine for years, and I love it. The computers are cheaper than a Mac and are built to last.

</comment><comment><USER4> I imagine itd retty much going to be a mix of responses for Dell XPS, Lenovo, and system76.

I use a Dell XPS and it's great.

</comment><comment><USER5> Well I have not personally used this laptop but I have heard good things about system76 laptop line.</comment>


Damn Cool Algorithms: Log structured storage (2009) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.notdot.net/2009/12/Damn-Cool-Algorithms-Log-structured-storage <comment><USER2> In the 8 years since this was written, Log-Structured Merge Trees (the concrete realization of this idea) have basically "won". BigTable, AppEngine, LevelDB, Cassandra, HBase, MongoDB, and several others are all built around them.

There's a powerful hardware trend driving this, namely that disk capacities and write bandwidth are still increasing rapidly, but seek times have basically plateaued. That means that data structures that rely on append-only operations can continue to scale to take advantage of bigger disks, but data structures that rely on disk seeks (eg. B-trees) have hit a bottleneck. Also, as number of cores continues to increase, playback & processing from a sequential log can often be parallelized, but updating your on-disk indexes blocks on I/O.

<comment><USER3> I suppose the follow up question is, what will replace this once enterprise SSDs start replacing spinning disks?

<comment><USER2> SSDs have even more unique access patterns - they give you (relatively) fast seek times, there's no particular penalty for random-access vs. sequential usage, but you really want to avoid writes, both to preserve the lifetime of the drive and because mixing reads & writes with a SSD lowers performance.

In practice (and I haven't worked in a big corp for a couple years now), I don't see SSDs replacing mechanical disks. Rather, they're being used for different functions. Disks are becoming a data warehouse; they're the new tape, but one that systems can write directly to, without needing scheduled backups. Operational serving is moving toward SSDs and RAM, with a periodic processing step that pulls data off disks and builds a pre-made shard that gets written all at once to the SSD. LSM trees are well-adapted to the data- warehousing part of this, which is why you continue to see big uptake of BigTable/Cassandra/Mongo. On the SSD end...most people are using custom algorithms & data structures, AFAIK, but you're seeing a resurgence of data structures like perfect hashes, bloom filters, and plain old sorted arrays, all of which have great read performance but can't be incrementally updated without rebuilding the whole data structure.

<comment><USER4> Do you think you could point me towards a source for "mixing reads & writes with a SSD lowers performance"? This seems reasonable, but I've never actually heard it before, and a cursory googling didn't turn much up. I have heard before that small, random writes on SSDs are much more expensive than sequential writes because random writes can produce write amplification and increase fragmentation. It was my impression that SSDs stand to benefit significantly from log structured filesystems despite the mixed read/write load, but I don't follow it that closely and could be wrong.

<comment><USER5> [https://www.usenix.org/conference/atc14/technical- sessions/p...](https://www.usenix.org/conference/atc14/technical- sessions/presentation/skourtis)

<comment><USER4> Thanks! This talk is pretty cool.

In case anyone else is interested, in addition to the above video, this [1] paper goes into some of the details, including this explanation:

"Reads and writes on SSDs can interfere with each other for many reasons. (1) Both operations share many critical resources, such as the ECC engines and the lock-protected mapping table, etc. Parallel jobs accessing such resources need to be serialized. (2) Both writes and reads can generate background operations internally, such as readahead and asynchronous write-back [6]. (3) Mingled reads and writes can foil certain internal optimizations. For example, flash memory chips often provide a cache mode [2] to pipeline a sequence of reads or writes. A flash memory plane has two registers, data register and cache register. When handling a sequence of reads or writes, data can be transferred between the cache register and the controller, while concurrently moving another page between the flash medium and the data register. However, such pipelined operations must be performed in one direction, so mingling reads and writes would interrupt the pipelining."

Also relevant to the "seek" conversation below: it turns out many SSDs have read-ahead caches built in, so sequential reads are much faster than random reads after an initial warm-up, just like hard disks (the difference, however is closer to ~5x than to 100x difference you see in HDDs).

[1] [http://bit.csc.lsu.edu/~fchen/publications/papers/hpca11.pdf](http://bit.csc.lsu.edu/~fchen/publications/papers/hpca11.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I am impressed by the writing style. Very clear and delivers a solid explanation.

What relation, if any, would this type of system have with "persistent data structures", a term I have seen used in some browsing of functional programming topics. Is this somewhat like a persistent data structure until old parts are overwritten ("garbage collected"?)? Is there a flavor of persistent data structure similar to this?

<comment><USER5> There is also a really cool paper on concurrency control for databases implemented as log-structured storage: [http://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol4/p944-bernstein.pdf](http://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol4/p944-bernstein.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Slightly related perhaps and something I have been curious about for a while... event sourcing seems like a very powerful pattern that I haven't seen wide adoption. The best documentation seems to be some MS dev library notes and a discussion from M Fowler.

Are there any open source implementations of a database that uses event sourcing?

<comment><USER8> Check out the videos and articles by Greg Young on the topic. This one's a good start [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JKjvY4etTY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JKjvY4etTY)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> For further/similar content by Ben Stopford that I personally found a very high quality:

[http://www.benstopford.com/2015/02/14/log-structured- merge-t...](http://www.benstopford.com/2015/02/14/log-structured-merge-trees/)

</comment><comment><USER10> Another notable product based on log-structured storage is ObjectiveFS ([https://objectivefs.com/](https://objectivefs.com/)), which implements a POSIX filesystem on top of Amazon S3 and other object stores. It's proprietary, so I don't know much about how it works. But it claims to be a log-structured filesystem.</comment>


Why Do Jellyfish Glow? - <AUTHOR> http://alliance.nautil.us/feature/156/why-do-jellyfish-glow <comment><USER2> GFP and other fluorescent proteins now provide the basis of most debugging done in genetic development. The fluorescent proteins are so robust, straight- forward, and easily analyzable that they're used as console flags for 'is it on', 'does it compile' and 'where is it' when teasing out complexity in other parts of biological code.

[1] GFP: [https://serotiny.bio/notes/proteins/gfp/](https://serotiny.bio/notes/proteins/gfp/)

[2] The sequence if you want to build genetic tools with it yourself: [https://serotiny.bio/pinecone/part/3945](https://serotiny.bio/pinecone/part/3945)

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting, but does not answer the question in the title, or even address it.

<comment><USER4> It think the article plays fair. The inclusion of some of Shimomura's early work on bioluminescence provides ample insight to be considered an answer to the question. But this article seems to me to be about the long-term value of asking such questions at all. The conclusion makes that clear:

> _But the original question that got us to GFP wasn't, "What can it do for > us?" Instead, our human curiosity led us to ask, simply, "Why does it > glow?"_

It's about the question, not the answer.

<comment><USER3> That does cover a little of _how_ jellyfish glow. But _why_ is never broached.

_

The title of the article is misleading.

<comment><USER5> We'll leave the "why" to the jellyfish philosophers.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Escapology: The art of addiction - <AUTHOR> https://vimeo.com/250087447 <comment><USER2> Is it wrong that I first thought it would be about using smartphones for social stimulation, that has slowly become an addiction?</comment>


Canal ice helps Dutch rediscover national identity - <AUTHOR> http://www.iht.com/articles/2009/01/16/europe/skaters.php <comment><USER2> I grew up in Maine and have fond memories of skating on the ponds and lakes. We used to build bonfires in the evenings out of old tires and skate around in the warmth and light. I suppose if we tried it these days we would have the EPA, FBI, and DHS after us.

In high school we graduated to cars. It was great fun to go as fast as we could, cut the steering wheel, hit the brakes, and go spinning down the lake. (Don't try this at home. We were trained professionals. Not to mention the effect of global warming on the thickness of the ice.)

</comment><comment><USER3> This story's hilarious:

"Hundreds of thousands of skaters, their cheeks as red as apples in the freezing temperatures, took to the ice, and hospital wards were filled with dozens of people with fractured arms, sprained ankles and broken legs."

</comment><comment><USER4> _Will there be another cold snap to freeze the canals of the Eleven Cities Tour? "Not in the coming weeks," Geurts said. "At the earliest, in February."_

I'm crossing my fingers. During this last freeze I was at home with my sick girlfriend, watching all the news reports of people skating on the big canals. Here in Amsterdam there wasn't enough ice to skate on the canals, so I'd have to head north which wouldn't have been very nice :(

Would have been nice to see all the Dutchies out in skates, everyone seemed so happy about it. Plus, this poor Californian has never skated on natural ice!

Any other hackers in Holland?

<comment><USER5> sure! where you at? I'm in Arnhem working in Amsterdam.

<comment><USER4> Ahh, I was actually just in Arnhem a few weeks ago, cute little town.

I'm living in A'dam finishing up a Masters (why did I go back to school?!), then I have to decide if I'm going to get involved in another IT project or try and save the world.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I used to spend my winter holidays in northern germany near bremen as a kid and I loved skating on the river... It's a completely different feeling from skating in a ice skating rink...

</comment><comment><USER7> Getting subtler, are we, gibsonf1?

<comment><AUTHOR> :)

I actually found this very interesting as a peek into Dutch culture as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> _... water pollution and ... have made [canal freezing] so rare..._

What mechanism does water pollution have in freezing point depression? Surely they don't have enough dissolved solids to make a significant difference. A quick googling didn't reveal an easy answer. Perhaps this is "hacker knowledge".

</comment><comment><USER9> I've enjoyed the "cold" (by which I mean normal) winter weather. These past few days have reminded me of Minnesota and brought back fond memories.

</comment><comment><USER10> _With an influx of immigrants, the country has been struggling to maintain what it considers its Dutch soul, and Gustafsson was one of many here who thought the skating experience enabled the Dutch to reconnect with their identity. "There were only Dutch people on the ice," he said. "I saw no people of Arab descent."_

OMG you nazi! How dare you question the goodness of flooding your country with people who have nothing in common with you.

<comment><USER11> That makes two outrageous comments.</comment></comment>


Rails on intelliJ, OS X (review) - <AUTHOR> http://wrongnotes.blogspot.com/2008/08/rails-on-intellij.html intelliJ vs. aptana: he likes intellij <comment><USER2> There are quite a few refactorings that are for practical purposes "fire and forget" even with dynamic languages. Moving methods up and down inheritance hierarchies, for example. Though the approach Ruby/Python/Lua have for instance variables might be problematic. Maybe dynamic languages need to seek some kind of middle ground where they are just "agile enough." Declarations make things stiffer, but they also enable more refactoring.

Ever notice that users of Dynamic languages keep wanting to it more like Static Typed compiled languages in some ways, and users of Static Typed languages keep wanting to make it more like Dynamic ones? Examples: advocacy of Unit Testing to enable fearless refactoring in Dynamic languages or putting in hard work to enable runtime code evaluation, state changes, and editing in the debugger in Static Typed languages.

The ideal must be somewhere in the middle.</comment>


Drawing figures in WebGL - <AUTHOR> http://taskinoor.wordpress.com/2012/04/28/webgl-getting-started-drawing-figures

<comment><USER2> As an example to this tutorial, 'Sketch' is a great example of an application that utilizes WebGL for drawing. <http://www.webgl.com/2012/03/webgl- application-html5-sketch/></comment>


Creating Shazam in Java - <AUTHOR> http://www.redcode.nl/blog/2010/06/creating-shazam-in-java/? <comment><USER3> Update: I posted a link to some source code that implements the Shazam algorithm:

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5724442>

About the patent lawsuit thing:

As I understand it, Shazam sold their patent to Landmark Digital Services, which are a part of BMI the record label. They kept an exclusive license to make Shazam-like software for phones.

You can imagine BMI wanting it to make money from how a service such as Youtube fingerprints and detects copyright infringement...

And it was this BMI company that were trying to get this blog post explaining the patented algorithm removed from the internet.

One post from the BMI lawyers to Roy in the Netherlands was particularly broad bullying:

> Mr. Van Rijn,

> The two example patent numbers that I sent you are U.S. patents, but each of > these patents has also been filed as patent applications in the Netherlands. > Also, as I'm sure you are aware, your blogpost may be viewed > internationally. As a result, you may contribute to someone infringing our > patents in any part of the world.

> While we trust your good intentions, yes, we would like you to refrain from > releasing the code at all and to remove the blogpost explaining the > algorithm.

> Thank you for your understanding.

> Best regards,

> Darren

> P. Briggs

> Vice President &

> Chief Technical Officer

> Landmark Digital Services, LLC

Roy gave a great talk at Devox about this: [http://www.redcode.nl/blog/2012/03/devoxx-2011-talk- freely-a...](http://www.redcode.nl/blog/2012/03/devoxx-2011-talk-freely- available/)

I think I heard that Shazam recently got the patent back. I speculate BMI found no-one to license their fingerprinting tech for copyright infringement.

<comment><USER4> " you may contribute to someone infringing our patents in any part of the world."

Oh really? What a dolt.

Patents are, by _definition_ , public. (not before they are accepted, though)

<comment><USER5>
        Patents are, by definition, public.

That's actually the telling sign of the dysfunctional patent system. Companies want to use patents to prevent everybody else from doing something similar, and in this case, even from just talking about it (which is obviously ridiculous).

Patents used to be a framework for sharing technological progress without giving up ownership, i.e. make it easier for everybody else to build on other's progress - that's long gone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is very cool. Minimum clear implementation of the algorithm that replicates the effect of Shazam. It's refreshing to see a blog with actual code sample got voted up instead of all the press releases.

<comment><USER7> +1

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I mirrored this implementation a while ago since the full source isn't available. It was not nearly as successful as the blogger portrays. For example, if I used a high quality wav mono file to create a fingerprint it would have a hard time identifying a track that is an mp3. It seems the maximums actually get shifted and merged from compression. In other words there's a reason shazam uses entropy based anchor points to help it pick hashing values.

<comment><USER9> I'm wondering if they bound the fingerprint search to human audible frequencies. MP3 compression, as a lossy codec, works by discarding information in the input signal that corresponds to inaudible frequencies. I believe this could be mirrored in the implementation by running the frequency domain peak-pick algorithm only over specific bin ranges.

<comment><USER8> I don't recall if the paper specifies the frequency ranges used but my implementation was bound to audible frequencies. I was going to use hill climbing search to find optimal frequency ranges but came to the conclusion my implementation was too flawed regardless. If I looked at the two graphs side by side(compressed vs uncompressed) they looked nothing alike. For example, the peak might be in the same region but it would be shifted.

<comment><USER3> [http://www.redcode.nl/blog/2012/03/devoxx-2011-talk- freely-a...](http://www.redcode.nl/blog/2012/03/devoxx-2011-talk-freely- available/) has a demo in the video

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> For those interested in more about the algorithm, one of the guys who created Shazam released a whitepaper on it. <http://www.ee.columbia.edu/~dpwe/papers/Wang03-shazam.pdf>

</comment><comment><USER9> After using Shazam, I was kind of hoping there was more to it than just a time windowed frequency domain peak-pick algorithm. The algorithm itself is pretty basic from a signal processing perspective, but I think the key insight here was that the results are unique enough to store off and compare other samples against at some later point in time.

<comment><USER11> Are there other uses for this algorithm/technique, when applied to signals other than audio? I mean apart from identifying a source from a small clip.

<comment><USER9> This type of analysis is commonly used in tons of things, like communications systems, image processing, radar, etc. I used a similar technique when trying to identify an underutilized wifi channel in the vicinity of my apartment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> johnx123-up Can someone please compare it to other fingerprinting approaches <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_fingerprint> ?

</comment><comment><USER12> So, the patent infringement story ended up with "Good luck."?

<comment><USER13> It happened 3 years ago and there was nothing posted after 2010 on that issue anymore, so I believe they didn't file a suit in the end.

Here's the links to the infringement story for those that missed it: <http://www.redcode.nl/blog/2010/07/patent-infringement/> [http://www.redcode.nl/blog/2010/11/patent-infrigement- part-2...](http://www.redcode.nl/blog/2010/11/patent-infrigement-part-2/)

<comment><USER14> Thanks for the link.

The result shows he did the right thing not complying, they had no legal grounds for their demands.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is interesting

I wonder how the work is split between client/server in (actual) Shazam. (I suppose only the key points are sent to the server, but I may be wrong - <USER2> for example sends the server a compressed audio file of the recorded sound)

<comment><USER15> You can phone Shazam up and have it make the identification using what it hears live. There's no client processing at all for that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Google Cache: [https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http:/...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.redcode.nl/blog/2010/06/creating- shazam-in-java/)

</comment><comment><USER17> First time I used Shazam, was so amazed. Had to download the original paper, still couldn't understand well enough how it worked, in order to code it. now lets get to work on it.

Great article, thank you

</comment><comment><USER18> Good article, title should have [2010] in it.

</comment><comment><USER19> One possible way to solve the legal troubles is to just remove any references to the product name 'Shazam'. You could title the blog post "Algorithm in Java that identifies music similar to other commercial products" (too long.. but use your imagination)

<comment><USER20> That wouldn't do a thing. Patents cover the code, not the names. (Well, the "embodiment", but since all there is here is code, it is clearly covering the code.) That would only help a trademark infringement, and there isn't one here.

<comment><USER19> Ah.. good point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> From where Shazam gets its content - fingerprint database?

I mean, did they bought/rent mp3's?

<comment><USER22> I haven't had a chance to google for a source so take this as anecdotal but I vaguely remember reading an interview with the people behind it (when Shazam first launched in the UK) and in it they said they were ripping thousands of CDs a day/week (can't remember which) and running each track through their algo. Can't remember if they bought the CDs or had some deal in place with the record labels.

<comment><USER21> Interesting. So as with many other "innovative" startups - the content is the crucial thing.

As already pointed here, audio fingerprinting is not a new thing. Although, they might have added some twists in order to were able to patent it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> We had a 'build your own Shazam' as a lab for Berkeley's Intro. Signals & Systems class this semester. Super cool to see it working and quite an interesting application of Signals & Systems

</comment><comment><USER24> <http://boingboing.net/2010/07/08/patent-holders-legal.html>

</comment><comment><USER25> What ever happened to the "patent infringement" issue?

</comment><comment><USER26> Is there any code changes that you can make to not conflict with the patent?

</comment><comment><USER27> For the first time I'm surprised that one of the first comments isn't "why was it written in Java, bla, bla bla". Those were getting really annoying.

</comment><comment><USER28> I wonder if they would have bothered you if you had named the post: "Creating Google Ears in Java"

</comment><comment><USER29> Who made that article could have said what external libraries did (s)he use.</comment>


Graphic novel piracy on 4chan leads to massive spike in sales - <AUTHOR> http://www.geek.com/articles/news/graphic-novel-piracy-on-4chan-leads-to-massive-spike-in-sales-20101021/

<comment><USER2> If you read the article to the end, it says that it wasn't the piracy that led to increased sales. The decisive part was the author engaging with the 4chan community and earning their respect.

<comment><USER3> The author's engagement is key, absolutely. But the fact remains that the good was freely available, regardless.

However, the spike in sales would never have happened if the book hadn't been freely available to start with.

This is a measurable demonstration of a working business model, and it is, clearly, not the model the publishing business is using. Indeed, it is precisely this model that they are lobbying, and succeeding, to make a criminal offence.

It's absolute madness.

<comment><USER4> _However, the spike in sales would never have happened if the book hadn't been freely available to start with._

For all the works that have their sales increased by the extra exposure that piracy can sometimes give, how many do you think have their sales reduced by piracy due to, y'know, piracy?

<comment><USER5> I don't know. _We_ don't know. That's kind of become the lynchpin of the entire debate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I know this is supposed to seem like a huge outlier and ridiculously far- fetched, but historically, its just not.

Its called:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patronage>

Yep. People give money to artists because they like what they're doing and they have a _relationship_ with the artist. Not because some middle-man arbitrates the price of the art of some unreachable "star" or because some lawyer mugged them with paper weapons.

Edit: I know that this probably won't work at "Madonna" scale. The artist can't possibly make a meaningful connection with a fanbase that large. That might be the point.

<comment><USER6> In the internet world this relies on every artist being an extrovert and a marketing expert as well as an artist.

Also, we don't live in a feudal system or aristocracy where a significant proportion of the wealth is controlled by a small elite who have little more to do than live idly.

So the conditions are different, an artist has to gain a lot more followers than in previous times through a method which is actually pretty specialised and tough.

But if you're that passionate about your art, maybe you're just going to have to learn how to gain a base of fans willing to patronise you.

<comment><USER7> > Also, we don't live in a feudal system or aristocracy where a significant > proportion of the wealth is controlled by a small elite who have little more > to do than live idly.

This is definitely wrong. Most of the wealth is actually controlled by a small elite, as a matter of fact.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So, free access to a digital version of the comic led more people to buy the physical vesion. What about when the physical version doesn't exist anymore or is more completely substitutable with a digital version?

Digital distribution is fantastic and is still in the process of changing many industries, but I think that this case likely would not have had the large beneficial effect for the author had it happened in a day when the distributed digital good was just as good/easy as the physical, purchasable one.

<comment><USER9> But doesn't this example show that people _want_ physical copies. As long as people want an item, there will be a market for it.

Traditional print runs may no longer exist, however, print on demand may continue to grow.

For example, Hacker News magazine uses Magcloud for printing and distribution.

<http://www.magcloud.com/>

HN folks are among the most tech savvy people, yet there is still a demand for print copies.

<comment><USER10> People like physical books. They're less enthusiastic about physical music or movies, which are the subjects in most discussions about piracy.

<comment><USER11> Exactly. As soon as E-Readers become the norm, I'll bet physical books will be a collector's item just like Vinyl (mostly) or CDs (almost) are.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> One recalls

<http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/09/17/3014462.htm>

which may be pertinent. The fundamental truth is still the Tim O'Reily aphorism that the main enemy of most authors isn't piracy but obscurity. There's some sense in which this is a form of freemium pricing -- use a lower- quality (in this case, crappy scanned) version to drive engagement, then use engagement to drive sales of the good, pay version.

There's a decent chance that the actual publishers get this -- near as I can tell, the real problems with understanding this idea come from the top of the multinational media companies that own the publishers.

<comment><USER13> That may be true for fringe authors/artists/musicians, but those are not the people being pirated the most. People mostly pirate blockbuster movies, big- name artists, and bestselling books.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Comic industry seems to get it better than other industries.

I can download digital comics through Comixology apps at a fair price and awesome quality which makes it easier and more convenient than downloading poorly scanned and heavy .cbr files from shady websites.

They just need it to release it the day it comes out in print.

</comment><comment><USER15> Oh this is so damn clever. Genius!

Think about it - copyright and brand owners must hate 4chan. But 4chan hates marketers and insincere people who don't "get" it. So why not post a story about how some writer "engaged" with his audience there leading to a massive sales spike and all-of-a-sudden it'll be crushed under the weight of semi- earnest marketing types attempting to convince "anonymous" to buy their wares.

Genius, I say! Before you know it there will be "4chan social marketing" consultants popping up all over the place, touting their snake oil at advertising events!

;)

<comment><USER16> <http://xkcd.com/591/>

Randall always seems to have a comic to fit the occasion.

<comment><USER15> Haha! Yes, I think that's what I had in my subconscious.

Presumably on other sites I'd award you "+100 internetz" for that? :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is plausible only if it's extremely rare, so the novelty of someone interacting with 4chan is shocking and cool enough to drive sales.

Let's not confuse 'chatting with pirates' with a sustainable business model for everybody.

</comment><comment><USER18> Someday publishers will learn that free products creates exposure that creates fans who buy products.

I can't even name how many bands I listen to because of Napster and Limewire in the early 00s, which led to me buying several albums from each band and attending many of their concerts - actually, I got into entire genres this way and now that I'm not a broke student, have spent a lot of money. If I hadn't been able to download full versions of songs and listen to them as much as I wanted, I never would have found out how much I like these bands.

</comment><comment><USER19> I am no longer surprised by anything relating to 4chan. I decided a while ago that they basically break all the rules (in a good way) that we have come to understand, though only within their walls.

</comment><comment><USER20> Hmm. So if you aren't an ass to prospective customers, you can still get their sales? Who would have thunk that?

Its not a proof positive way to get sales via advocating copyright infringement. However if you're less known, it works wonders.

And yes, I saw his works linked from /b/</comment>


Our closest worm kin regrow body parts, raising hopes of regeneration in humans - <AUTHOR> http://www.washington.edu/news/2016/11/28/our-closest-worm-kin-regrow-body-parts-raising-hopes-of-regeneration-in-humans/ <comment><USER2> A lot of people are focusing on the mechanics, but it seems like humans don't generate body parts just like cells don't generate organelles. The entity is not _meant_ to exist by itself, but form a cohesive living group.

A cell doesn't need to repair itself, it can simply clone itself and then die. A human being doesn't need to regenerate itself because it can reproduce and be cleared away. Evolution evolved to ensure the survival of the species, not the individual.

The human being is constantly generating itself by multiplying cells. Similarly, the species is constantly generating itself by multiplying individuals.

<comment><USER3> > Evolution evolved to ensure the survival of the species, not the individual.

At some point in our evolutionary history the cells in our body made this choice. Evolution favors survival and potentially reproduction, because otherwise you are no longer in the game. So there was some evolutionary constraint that caused those genes not to regenerate parts.

It's possible we can change things so that those genes are active again. But we don't really understand these systems well enough to do that and won't anytime soon. But science carries on and I am sure you can make lab mice to test hypotheses of how this might work in mammals. And we probably will very soon, if not here then in China.

Evolution is perfectly fine even if you don't reproduce much, as long as you continue to survive in your environment. There are creatures out there that have changed very little and we know this because we have fossil records, and this is because they have been adapted to their environment and stayed adapted despite the environmental changes. And there are even immortal creature that die not because their bodies age and kill them but because they are eaten by other things, but still they don't change much over time. I guess you could say they are better evolved than other creatures that have to constantly change. They made better evolutionary decisions than other creatures very early on.

<comment><USER4> You don't have to regenerate parts to live long enough to have offspring. You can do it at like 15 years old. So evolution isn't going to help in that regard much.

<comment><USER5> Living for a long time after you have children is incredibly useful from the standpoint of genetic fitness. After all, grandparents play an important role in pretty much every human culture. And a grandparent with all their body parts is a whole lot more useful than one without.

<comment><USER6> > _Living for a long time after you have children is incredibly useful from > the standpoint of genetic fitness. After all, grandparents play an important > role in pretty much every human culture._

In the time scale that matters to evolution, grandparents played absolutely no role for the Homo Sapiens, and neither did culture.

<comment><USER5> Do you have children? Raising children is hard. And it's a lot less hard when you have other adults to help. Historically, those would be grandparents and aunts/uncles. But aunts/uncles would probably have children of their own.

<comment><USER6> "Historically" is the keyword here. Evolutionary timespans are much much larger than recorded history and human culture as we know it.

<comment><USER5> Nobody's saying that grandparents being alive are a prerequisite for grandchildren. But anybody with kids will tell you that grandparents are tremendously helpful in raising children.

Evolution is statistical in nature, not binary. Grandparents just have to be useful in raising grandchildren for them to be favored by natural selection. They don't need to be strictly necessary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Well, a plausible answer is that if we (or random mutations) re-enable those genes then the end result is simply a lot of cancer.

A reasonable default assumption is that each switch in our "genetic configuration" is set to a quite good value.

The only exception is if we see a feature that is beneficial at a high calorie cost - those features have been (reasonably) optimized away during our evolution, but would be useful in modern circumstances where food is not scarce anymore; this is a tradeoff where it would make sense to just turn the dial way to the right from where it had been throughout the last million years.

<comment><USER8> >Well, a plausible answer is that if we (or random mutations) re-enable those genes then the end result is simply a lot of cancer.

Interesting idea, but does the risk of cancer have that much selective pressure? It tends to be the "last thing that kills you", after you live long enough to survive everything else. So it seems like any increased risk of cancer would have to be pretty high before it traded off against injury recovery. Then again, "injury recovery" might not have been as beneficial either -- the time to regenerate would still leave you vulnerable, so adaptations favoring _avoidance_ of that injury would have a leg up in selective pressure.

<comment><USER7> For large animals, I'd believe that it's very rare to have non-fatal injuries that are large enough where regeneration would make a big difference to future life.

According to evolution (which hasn't yet noticed medicine), if something rips off your foot, that's not an injury, you simply bleed to death or die of infection even if you win the fight - unlike, say, various small regenerating lizards. What selective pressure could there be to regenerate feet if there were almost no (alive) people with missing feet until the last few hundred years?

However, risk of cancer _is_ serious selective pressure even with short lives - e.g. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil_facial_tumour_disease](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil_facial_tumour_disease). Cancer tends to be the "last thing that kills you" exactly because so much of our biology is tuned to resist cancer. Also, all kinds of mechanisms causing our aging problems seem to be simply evolutionary adaptations to resist cancer by limiting cell division.

<comment><USER9> > if something rips off your foot, that's not an injury, you simply bleed to > death or die of infection

That's a false premise.

Plenty of (four-legged) animals can survive just fine without a leg - in fact, it's often said that animals have a spare leg. Some animals might even gnaw their own leg off it's stuck in something and they can't get it out.

<comment><USER7> It's kind of correlated with size - the smaller the animal is, the easier it is to survive after losing a limb. For a horse, even a broken leg is likely to be fatal.

A missing foot is survivable for a lynx much more so than for a human in the absence of modern medical care.

The same applies for evolutionary pressure in the case of hypothetical regeneration. A lizard can take ~2 months to regenerate a limb, for a human it would take longer simply since the limb is larger and needs to grow more. Prehistoric humans and hominids were calorie limited - if an injured individual is capable and likely to (a) survive for e.g. half a year with the injury and (b) to obtain much more calories than normal to rebuild many pounds of tissue, then apparently there is no strong evolutionary pressure to favor regeneration it as he/she is capable of procreating almost as well even without this feature.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> From what I've understood from things I've read on the past, we _do_ have pretty much full regenerative ability already. It is blocked by various things, such as the epidermis. If you chop off a finger, a blastula of stem cells will develop on the tip, at least until the skin grows over and stops it. If you could hold back the skin, then... well, you'd die of an infection in very short order. Waiting for regeneration is just not feasible in the natural world.

There's also the potential for cancer, of course, but personally I don't buy that objection. You can take cancerous cells and revert them to stem cells and they'll stop misbehaving (unless their genetic damage is very specifically triggering them to grow without bound, but I think this is rare. Usually it's a gene activation problem.)

And complexity of the regenerated part isn't much of a problem. You can reroute the nerves on a salamander to get a fully functioning arm poking out of its back. Some things can regenerate half their hearts fast enough to survive. I don't know exactly how the information is transmitted and expressed, but it's there.

No, I can't prove my assertions. They are based on half-remembered readings of the book The Body Electric from long ago, written by a guy who did experiments to back this craziness up. He was enough of a nutcase that not many people followed after, though his key findings were replicated. And he lost the thread at some point, going on a crusade against emf fields that didn't seem to be based on real science. So it goes.

<comment><USER11> As I understand it, scarring and regeneration are mutually exclusive. The advantage of regeneration is that you get the body part back. The advantage of scarring is that you don't bleed to death or get a fatal infection while waiting for the wound to close.

In larger animals, formation of scar tissue had a greater survival advantage. So humans scar instead of regenerating.

The regeneration capacity is probably all still there in humans, but it is never been observed in modern times, except after losing less than about 1 cm of fingertip. It may not be a matter of how to turn regeneration on, but how to turn scarring off.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Few years back I remember reading a story about the guy who lost his finger in an accident and then regrew it by dipping it into some kind of a powder.

Edit: found it!

> _The magical formula to regrow a finger apparently includes a doctor, a pig, > and some "pixie dust." This is no fairytale, though; this is a medical > breakthrough being explored at the University of Pittsburgh, Pa. In Science > Channel's video, "How to Grow a New Fingertip," Dr. Stephen Badylak from the > university explains regenerative medicine has the potential to grow a whole > human body._

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtBUM51t4iw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtBUM51t4iw)

[http://www.medicaldaily.com/pulse/magical-pixie-dust-pigs- bl...](http://www.medicaldaily.com/pulse/magical-pixie-dust-pigs-bladder- helps-man-regrow-human-tissue-severed-finger-346154)

<comment><USER13> > In Science Channel's video, "How to Grow a New Fingertip"

Just wow! This story is about _actually_ regrowing a finger on the man's hand.

It's so incredible, I'd skeptical. Is this really correct? Why didn't they make a time lapse video of the man's finger regrowing -- even taking just one photo per day. That would have been the obvious thing to do, but they didn't do it (or didn't show it).

UPDATE: On further research, I guess it was just too good to be true. Here's one rebuttal to the claims from the exuberant video:

[https://www.theguardian.com/science/2008/may/01/finger.claim](https://www.theguardian.com/science/2008/may/01/finger.claim)

tl;dr: The finger was not so badly injured. It healed rather than regrew.

<comment><USER12> Here's some pictures of finger regeneration. DO NOT open these images if medical imagery bothers you. They're gruesome :)

[http://www.mebo- international.com/sites/default/files/field/...](http://www.mebo- international.com/sites/default/files/field/image/Fig%202.GIF)

Page with a lot more pictures:

[http://www.mebo.com/a/books/HUMAN/2011/0221/2934.html](http://www.mebo.com/a/books/HUMAN/2011/0221/2934.html)

These examples are from stem-cell activation therapy:

[http://www.space-age.com/fingertipregeneration.html](http://www.space- age.com/fingertipregeneration.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The interesting studies are all in zebrafish and salamanders, not worms.

One of the more intriguing of the recent ones is this from last year, strongly reinforcing the theory that most species lost proficient regeneration due to evolutionary battles between cancer and aging. The greater question is perhaps why there are any proficient regenerators among the vertebrates rather than why we can't do it.

[https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2015/11/251746/human-gene- prevents...](https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2015/11/251746/human-gene-prevents- regeneration-zebrafish)

"Whether the regenerative powers of zebrafish and salamanders represent ancient abilities that mammals have lost, perhaps in exchange for advanced tumor-suppression systems remains an open question for biologists. Most tumor suppressor genes, being extremely useful for preventing cancer and for forming tissues during development, are broadly distributed and conserved across many different species. Recent studies, however, suggest that one, the ARF gene, arose more recently in the avian and mammalian lineage, and has no equivalent in the genomes of highly regenerative animals. To explore whether this gene might play a role in preventing tissue regeneration in humans, the researchers added human ARF to the zebrafish genome and assessed how it affected the fishes' normal ability to regrow damaged fins after injury. They found that human ARF had no effect on the fishes' normal development or response to superficial injury, but when the researchers trimmed off the tip of a fish's tail fin, the gene became strongly activated and almost completely prevented fin regrowth by activating a conserved tumor-blocking pathway."

<comment><USER15> That is sufficiently interesting to make me wish I could upvote it twice. But. What I really want to hear about is the opposite experiment. Take something that has ARF, and see what happens if you take it out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm a huge believer that humans can cherry-pick the best traits of many different species and apply them to ourselves. It might sound like science fiction right now, bit give it time and we humans will have unlocked some crazy things that we claimed to be "impossible." It's always impossible until it's done. And to be honest, I think the second something is thought of, it becomes possible. I live for this shit.

<comment><USER17> Well, it depends what you consider to be "the best". If you have watched the olympics, you can see that different body types are better suited for different sports.

A basketball player playing ping pong or viceversa? probably not very successful.

<comment><USER18> But if that basketball player had super speed and agility, then he would be good at both sports. You're only thinking about what humans are like now. If we could freely add and take away genetic mutations, who knows what kind of freaky immortal animals we'll look like in the future. We may also not care about sports at that point.

<comment><USER19> Mechanically there's an advantage to shorter limbs for particular sports, that's just how physics works.

If a basketball player could be made super-human they might trounce ordinary ping-pong players, but a super-human ping-pong player would destroy them.

Plus there's more to these sports than any one aspect. It's never just strength or height or stamina, it's a complex of factors. Finding that optimal even given all the options might be difficult. There's intrinsic trade-offs.

For example, there's two kinds of muscle tissue, that better suited to fine motor skills and that suited to brute strength. Most animals are heavily stacked in the latter category, that's why a chimpanzee can tear you in half, but they lack the sorts of fine control that permits us to do things like type with agility and write precisely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> It would be good to regenerate at least teeth.

<comment><USER21> Teeth might also be a good area to look at in terms of figuring out how it works. Since most people already grow two full sets of teeth, and I believe there are numerous cases on record of people who have grown more than that, perhaps the regeneration genes are already partially activated in that region of the body.

<comment><USER22> I'm not a dentist, but I get the impression that milk teeth and adult teeth are different things, not a regeneration cycle?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The "we have the same genes" argument is completely absurd. So alright, some set of DNA sequences in the context of a worm enable the regeneration of worm parts; does it follow that the same set of DNA sequences in the context of a human enable the regeneration of human parts? Of course not! In the same way that the knowledge of how fix a bike has little bearing on being able to fix a cellphone, or that the touchscreen drivers on said phone wouldn't provide a usable interface if loaded onto your gameboy. DNA is just data; its functional value is almost entirely dependent on its surroundings. For that matter, we're a bit physically _different_ than worms; trying to port their mechanisms to human physiology is likely comparable to trying to graft wings onto your arms in order to fly.

Not to say that regeneration is implausible (after all, _generation_ is possible), or that there's nothing to be learned from worm regeneration, but this article is fluff.

<comment><USER24> > does it follow that the same set of DNA sequences in the context of a human > enable the regeneration of human parts? Of course not!

But that isn't really the argument. We know we can grow limbs because we've all done it once before.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> There was an interesting Science Friday segment on this topic back in August 2016:

[http://www.sciencefriday.com/segments/a-hand-a-fin-a- gene/](http://www.sciencefriday.com/segments/a-hand-a-fin-a-gene/)

A couple of comments made by the guests during the discussion (from memory):

* there is a theory that humans/vertebrates actively repress regenerative abilities,

* children under the age of about five have the ability to regrow cut-off fingertips,

* the genetic instructions for growing a hand (or fin) consist of the thumb and little finger, and the rest get interpolated.

</comment><comment><USER26> This is the type of research where I like to fantasize about the outcome. As a human race we've managed to basically cheat evolution with our advances in medicine and technology. If somehow we can stay alive as a species long enough we very well might be able to discover the secret to regeneration and immortality in some way.

<comment><USER27> > If somehow we can stay alive as a species long enough we very well might be > able to discover the secret to regeneration and immortality in some way.

Hopefully we won't figure that out before we figure out how to not overcrowd Earth.

<comment><USER20> Forbid procreation for those who chosen immortality. If you decided to spawn children, then free space for them - die. (Or go cryopreservation and be kept in a small box occupying little space. In this case you and your decedents can live in turns: they live for one century while you sleep frozen; next century other way around).

<comment><USER27> You can't let people choose because even a small percentage of people choosing immortality a generation will end up overcrowding the planet given enough time.

<comment><USER20> This depends on the reproduction rate. If it's > 1 then you're right. BTW, controlling reproduction rate is a way to not overcrowd Earth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> The processes that built us originally worked with much smaller versions of us. The techniques for constructing an arm that is a few cells wide may not work when the arm is millions of cells wide.

</comment><comment><USER29> From another research done on mice, the answer is mainly scar tissue. [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12557217](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12557217)

About the evolution part: we have a higher change to live with scar tissue, then we have without (shorter chance for infections).

</comment><comment><USER30> If this were possible, I wonder how our new limb would grow. Would it be a reconstruction of the structure of the old limb or would it grow like a child limb and take the same amount of years (18-20) to reach the adult stage of the limb?

Edit: replaced limb instead of member.

<comment><USER31> FYI, referring to a body-part like "his member" is often a euphemism for penis, so your post is (unintentionally?) amusing to read.

<comment><USER30> Unintentionally. In my defence I have to say that the term is correct but I get your point. I've replaced it for limb hoping the question will be taken more seriously.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> We regenerate plenty. Our bodies are constantly regenerating. We keep growing new skin to replace old (dandruff is a simple example), damaged organs can recover (eg liver problems), and even exercising to increase strength involves regeneration (broken muscle fibres grow back stronger). We don't regenerate large external body parts in general, but we do regenerate some bits quite well - like the palms of our hands.

If you cut us, do we not bleed? Then clot? Then grow new tissue to heal the wound? Sometimes so that there is no evidence of a cut afterwards?

</comment><comment><USER24> Sure, we have the genes to grow limbs while hibernating suspended in amniotic fluid and being fed intravenously. Maybe recreate those exact circumstances and we can regrow limbs.

</comment><comment><USER33> "Why can't we break off half a microchip, and then rebuild the missing part so it works again? We have all the mask artwork and silicon wafers ..."

<comment><USER34> This doesn't strike me as a reasonable analogy.

1) Microchips don't grow autonomously in the first place, unlike organisms.

2) The article's point is that not only do humans have the "mask artwork and silicon wafers", but also the genes that other organisms use to regenerate portions of their body. A closer equivalence would be "the instructions on how to rebuild the missing half of the microchip from what remains".

<comment><USER33> Microchips grow autonomously if you regard the entire fab and its staff as a big organism.

And note that the blueprints for the chip do actually encode more or less what it looks like: as a genotype they resemble the phenotype. Yet such a repair is not feasible.

DNA genes do not encode an arm or a leg directly, but a convoluted process by which the structure develops.

<comment><USER35> > Yet such a repair is not feasible.

Well, we don't really know, because we've never bothered to build a chip/fab process with that capability. It's cheaper to just throw broken ones away (edit: plus, it isn't morally reprehensible to throw them away because they don't have consciousness... yet). I guess the other thing is that a CPU is pretty simplistic compared to a big organism.

We do bin products and then e.g. underclock or disable parts of them accordingly. So there's the start of an "injury"-sensing mechanism. But microchips still have a few thousand years to go in their "evolution" at least :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> It seems like the cells in a worm are relatively position-independent, so they can regrow using only local information.

If you lopped off your leg, a cell would need to know how much of the leg to regrow to get to the kneecaps, how much to grow to get to the foot, or more. If you chopped off a foot, it seems hard to know which parts need to be regrown and which don't. There's a lot of complexity in a foot.

<comment><USER37> This has to be a solved problem unless the womb offers some sort of telemetry.

<comment><USER36> In that case, the entire organism is forming. It can use techniques like forming the general structure before filling in the details. It could be that forming the general structure is carefully scripted by chemistry, while the details are mostly position-independent.

Bones can have their lengths determined by biological clocks that operate over years. Examples of clocks are hormone release cycles, which the rest of the body uses for signaling. But, a new leg wouldn't have access to the global clock, since it would've shut off if the affected parts are fully-developed.

Bones and muscles might have their final shapes partially determined by outside forces. The biggest one is gravity. It may be that people develop longer legs in space, or their spines don't develop correctly. A leg intended to be regrown on an adult might not have time to be shaped in this manner.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> One answer I've read in The Spark In The Machine[1], is that our cells' organizational energies (or Qi in Chinese Medicine) is not strong enough as we grow older.

Only when someone is super young (when their qi is super strong) can they regrow body parts and very small ones (the tips of the fingers!)[2]

""" Doctors have seen the effect in humans without quite understanding how it happens. "Kids will actually regrow a pretty good fingertip, after amputation, if you just leave it alone," says Dr. Christopher Allan, from the University of Washington Medicine Hand Center, who wasn't involved in the research. """

EDIT: yeah i know its HN so i'll probably get downvotes, but as far as modern science is concerned we still know very little about embryology and what actually controls the beautiful orchestration of a single cell developing into a full human in 9 months. The idea of an organization energy that directs embryological cellular function is now starting to be investigated in western science [3]

[1][https://www.amazon.com/Spark-Machine-Acupuncture-Explains- My...](https://www.amazon.com/Spark-Machine-Acupuncture-Explains- Mysteries/dp/1848191960)

[2] [http://www.npr.org/sections/health- shots/2013/06/10/19038548...](http://www.npr.org/sections/health- shots/2013/06/10/190385484/chopped-how-amputated-fingertips-sometimes-grow- back)

[3] [https://vimeo.com/26761300](https://vimeo.com/26761300)

<comment><USER15> I am kind of doubtful about this Qi business. I followed the amazon link you gave and it made it even more doubtful.

Nevertheless, I gave you an upvote, because I had no idea fingertips could ever regrow; that's really cool!

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make with the third link. Are you saying Qi is electric?

<comment><USER38> Yes! the term "Qi" is just another way to denote the organizational electric energies our bodies use to orchestrate cellular function. This video does a way better job at describing it: [https://vimeo.com/154294365](https://vimeo.com/154294365) (2 minutes)

<comment><USER15> Okay, fine. Then what makes you say that children have more than adults?

<comment><USER38> Its more about the strength and quality rather than the quantity. As we get older the quality reduces with the rate depending on our genes, lifestyle, habits etc... Children in general, have better qi because they are 'new'.

I'm not going to go into the scientific details here and start listing off pubmed studies, but its all in that book if your interested (many references at the end of each chapter). I'm sorry the amazon link seemed to further dishearten you, I would love to know why!

<comment><USER15> > I would love to know why

Sorry for late response. The entire blurb on Amazon gives off a mildly pseudo- science vibe, but it is mild enough that I was willing to forgive it. But this I could not overlook:

"[...] how the hearts of two people in love (or in scientific terms `quantum entanglement') truly beat as one"

Just no. I don't know quantum mechanics, but I know enough to say that can't possibly be anywhere near right, or even vaguely plausible.

<comment><USER38> Ah yes, so, similar to how womens' periods synchronize up when they live together...Studies of couples show that when in a state of rapport, of emotional empathy, heart rates become matched and that they become mismatched when out of rapport: [http://www.futurity.org/heart-beats-sync-up-in-romantic- coup...](http://www.futurity.org/heart-beats-sync-up-in-romantic-couples/)

Yeah I would probably not take that quote 'Truly beat as one' literally, I mean, I'm betting the heart rates in the study aren't as precise as to say... a distributed real-time system written in go /joke :)

<comment><USER15> It's not the "beat as one" I object to, it's the "quantum entanglement".

<comment><USER38> Oh, Rats! Well when speaking about quantum entanglement, we (as Naive realists on HN (see my profile)) should just ignore it for the next 2000 years, hopefully by then physicists will have a definitive yes or no answer for that domain. Like an unfortunate cardamon seed in our tasty sweet rice kheer, I guess just navigate around it and enjoy everything else presented in the book with a back-up-with-references-from-pub-meds-from-the-last-40-years format.

<comment><USER15> All right, all right :) I'm adding it to my list.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> But when then if you cut of an arm - do the body then regenerate a new arm and the cut off arm a new body ?

<comment><USER9> Unless the arm managed to quickly generate enough organs to crawl around an feed itself, it would suffocate/starve before it could generate a body.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> What about unwanted parts which are removed intentionally? Wisdom teeth and appendicitis come to mind. Or body parts intentionally modified by surgery. Basically, unless there is some control regarding which part to regrow, this might not always be desirable.

</comment><comment><USER41> Watching axolotl regrow a full limb is quite exciting mentally. The thing reboots topologically and not 'linearly' like most wounds. The bioengineering if I may say so seems passionating.

If I could I'd go Inti embryology.

</comment><comment><USER42> seems to me that when the original generation of organs, bones, and other structure is occurring, there is a chemical soup of proteins/hormones/etc that provides the right environment for a whole host of gene expressions not seen after the generation is done and the organism is more or less fully formed. recreating that environment seems challenging. it's like getting back to bios after you already booted the OS.

</comment><comment><USER43> Lizards can regrow their tails.

[https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.geneticliteracyproject.org/...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.geneticliteracyproject.org/2016/11/11/regrowing- limbs-gene-map-of-how-lizards-regrow-tails-offers-insight-to-regenerative- medicine/amp/?client=safari)

</comment><comment><USER44> Imagine you chop off your head, give both your head and body necessary environment to regenerate. It'd be like cloning.

Although the head gets a brand new body that works just as good if not better, while the body gets a head that is completely blank. Sounds pretty unfair to the latter...

</comment><comment><USER45> _and supply the necessary materials to let it work._

That is the key.

</comment><comment><USER46> We changed the URL from [http://newatlas.com/human-body-regeneration-worm- genes/46670...](http://newatlas.com/human-body-regeneration-worm- genes/46670/), which points to this.

</comment><comment><USER47> Do you know cancer? The cancer is the ability of regenerate from the very begin in human's history. But we lost the ability of control cancel cells and it became an illness.

<comment><USER48> What is this claim based on? This sounds like speculation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Probably because limb regeneration wasn't a favored trait during our evolution. e.g: we managed to survive and be fertile without it.

Rather than limb regeneration we evolved pain and fear to prevent losing a limb in the first place.

A similar question would be why aren't fruit toxic so animals stop eating them? Because they pass their genes anyways. Rather than that, animals that were too good at eating fruit, destroyed their own food source and died.

Another interesting phenomenon are lemmings. Why lemmings kill themselves en- masse? Because they're too fertile. And as a population their own way to control their size is to mass suicide.

The hawk and dove model game in game theory attempts to explain a bit of this.

<comment><USER48> > _Another interesting phenomenon are lemmings. Why lemmings kill themselves > en-masse? Because they 're too fertile. And as a population their own way to > control their size is to mass suicide._

Lemmings don't commit mass suicide.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemming#Misconceptions](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemming#Misconceptions)

<comment><USER17> OK, fine. Disregard the lemmings.

They do die massively, but it's not intentional, I get it.</comment></comment></comment>


SDF Public Access Unix System - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SDF_Public_Access_Unix_System <comment><USER2> This page is anonymous | [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5638988](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5638988) (4 years ago)

[http://voidnull.sdf.org/](http://voidnull.sdf.org/)

"there is one place where you can still host your content anonymously. That place is the Super Dimension Fortress or SDF. SDF lets you register an anonymous user over ssh (which is accessible via the Tor network) and takes cash over mail in order to validate the user."

"I challenge you to send me a postcard to my mailing address with the content that says "I see you voidnull" and a self-addressed postage-paid envelope. I will then send you a $10 bill back as a prize."

\--

SDF – Public Access Unix System | [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14134798](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14134798) (4 months ago)

<comment><USER3> Doesn't it simply put the maintainers of SDF in line of fire (legal and otherwise) for any anonymous content hosted there that annoys someone?

<comment><USER4> I think most people who use SDF are aware that it is a public good whose existence depends on its users not drawing too much fire to it. If you want to do evil and/or illegal things, there are better places to host content.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> SDF has a free streaming music service called aNONradio with live (including daily openmic) and archived content. A handful of its members produce original content shows available at [http://anonradio.net](http://anonradio.net)

</comment><comment><USER5> Celebrating 30 years right now at the Vintage Computer Festival being held at Computer History Museum in Mountain View California. Can't be there? join virtually: ssh email@example.com and choose option 1.

<comment><USER6> I wish I knew this was going on this weekend!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> SDF has an active group of "phloggers" which are proxied to the web here: [https://sdf.org/?gopher](https://sdf.org/?gopher)

</comment><comment><USER7> I used to have an account on Nyx. [https://www.nyx.net/](https://www.nyx.net/)

"Nyx, the world's oldest Internet Service Provider, is a free public-access ISP that free e-mail, (including webmail), web space, web/domain hosting, a full, uncensored Usenet newsfeed, Linux shell accounts and the usual Unix/linux programming and development tools."

It started out on a PDP system at University of Denver in the eighties. [https://www.nyx.net/history.html](https://www.nyx.net/history.html)

I used it in the early nineties as a teenager.

</comment><comment><USER8> I've always been interested in this and other online communities. I guess there's some piece I am missing, though, because while interesting, I am also underwhelmed by it.

Is there anyone who is a member that could tell me what it's like or why you joined?

Note: this is not an aggressive post. I want to know more and would love to be induced to joining this community. I just don't get it.

<comment><USER9> "Back in the day" these were popular because you might have a modem, but not IP internet access. So places that provided a dial up Unix shell had value. That is, a plain terminal dial up. Dial up to their shell, ftp a copy of some software, then download via zmodem or Kermit.

[http://nyx.net](http://nyx.net) was similar.

After slip and ppp became popular some still used these as a home base of sorts. Like you might keep files there so you could get to them from different client machines when traveling. There was also typically a community there that would help with questions, share news, etc, not too unlike HN.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm wondering how these shell providers deal with malicious users. In security the standard response to an untrusted person getting shell access/code execution is to reinstall the entire server due to the risks of kernel privilege-escalation exploits. How do those people manage this risk given they're allowing shell access on purpose? Or are they already pwned and just not know it?

<comment><USER11> BSD derivative systems have a lot better isolation than mondern Linux systems. In fact, one Docker "port" for FreeBSD is an interface over their jails functionality and it can be difficult to tell uourr even in a jail at first. They all have a much richer history of supporting multi-user machines.

Linux's route to multi-user is a very different history with very different use cases. It's also got a much richer history around single user machines (and the performance, efficiency and support gains you get from focusing there).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> One of the big features of SDF is the MetaArray. it gives members around 800GB per account of storage both NextCloud and direct shell access [https://sdf.org/?tutorials/metaarray](https://sdf.org/?tutorials/metaarray)

</comment><comment><USER12> SDF Home page, [http://sdf.org/](http://sdf.org/)

<comment><USER13> Seems like the lion's share of the updates were last made about 10 years go.

<comment><USER11> Just when EC2 was leading the charge of on-demand cloud services, coincidentally.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Cool exhibit - they had an old ATT blit terminal connected via old Telebit Trailblazers.

<comment><USER15> [http://imgur.com/a/b46vt](http://imgur.com/a/b46vt)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Favorite part of SDF was/is TWENEX/Tops-20.

More on TENEX/Tops-20 from author of TECO: [http://tenex.opost.com/hbook.html](http://tenex.opost.com/hbook.html)

Decades later, TECO still available for a variety of OS. Compiles cleanly, at least on BSD.

[http://github.com/blakemcbride/TECOC](http://github.com/blakemcbride/TECOC)

[http://web.archive.org/web/20160321191408/http://tilt.twenex...](http://web.archive.org/web/20160321191408/http://tilt.twenex.org/) [http://wiki.twenex.org/](http://wiki.twenex.org/) [http://web.archive.org/web/20161031045254/http://www.twenex....](http://web.archive.org/web/20161031045254/http://www.twenex.org:80/?locke)

<comment><USER17> I played with TECO on Unix for a while many years ago as well as a similar character editor (I think it was called SPEED) on the Data General MV8000 Eagle at Texas A&M. Editing with those editors is like solving a puzzle. It was fun, but I always moved back to a screen editor to be more productive. However, I imagine on a slow Teletype, TECO was a good way to go because it is so terse.</comment></comment>


The Science of Winning Poker - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323610704578625812355516182.html <comment><USER2> >A few years ago, a young pro named Phil Galfond published a crucial refinement to Mr. Sklansky's point. He showed that the right way to analyze a poker decision is to consider your opponent's "range"—that is, the full set of different hands that he could plausibly have, given all the actions that he has thus far taken.

I find it impossible to believe that concept of a "range" was (a) invented a few years ago and (b) invented by Phil Galfond. This article is disappointing.

Edit: In fairness, the article's sentence is literally correct. But I cringe at its implication.

<comment><USER3> I have a theorem which I refer to as the Fuzzwah theory, it goes like this:

"The more you know about a topic, the more it will annoy you when it is covered by the main stream media."

Once you realize this with regards to topics you're knowledgeable about you start taking coverage of ALL topics with a grain of salt, knowing that someone who knows all about it is probably cringing and / or yelling at how poorly it is being reported.

PS: I was obsessed with online poker a few years back and was an avid 2plus2 forum reader. The 1st person which I recall giving excellent advice about putting people on a range was Cole "CTS" South. He even sold an ebook called Let There Be Range for (initially, from memory) something like $5,000 a pop (it still sells for $1400 on amazon [http://www.amazon.com/dp/0982402252](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0982402252) )

<comment><USER4> Mainstream media? I occasionally cringe at some of the discussion here on subjects I know something about, seeing how badly wrong smart people can get it. (Thankfully most of the discussion on HN is on subjects I know little about, or are that are way over my head! :-) )

<comment><USER5> What is your point? No one can be smart at everything. Just because one occasionally writes words that helps computers do things doesn't mean one's world view is not silly when it comes to other things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There's another element in there. The one about relative skill. Let's say that you're a much better player than the other person, and that you would win 90% of the time heads up (one on one, which we are going to assume at this point for simplicity). If this were the case, you would need to have a greater than 90% chance to win the hand all in for it to be a correct move.

This is also easy to understand if you, a novice, are heads up against one of the pros. It's a much better move for you to go all in on any decent hand and just try to get lucky to win, since if you try to play their game, you're going to lose.

<comment><USER7> Many poker players who study theory see this as incorrect. Ill try explain the other side.

I will avoid the fact that a 90% winrate in a format like you describe (heads up sit and go) is not even remotely possible vs anyone who knows the basic rules. In heads up sit and goes 2-5% roi is generally considered great at any non micro level. Poker (especially online) is more of a volume game. However, roi is very flawed which I will get to. Generally the most profitable players are ones who crank out a small winrate over large amounts of volume.

Here is the problem though, we really are not concerned with winning a single game in a format like this. Our top concern is making money. In a winner take all heads up tournament chipEV == $EV so we can just call it EV in this format and not worry about ICM. If we are playing for a living we want to make the most amount of money, so each session we want to maximize our EV (win the most amount of chips). Most internet players worry about their winrate in BB/100 or EV adjusted $/hr.

When we get into a situation which we are a 1% favorite for full stacks vs a player we have a large edge on, we should still take it, its money in our pocket long term. If we lose we pray the opponent accepts a rematch. This is especially true for heads up games which usually only last a few minutes and its possible to play 100-200 games per day. A 3% winrate at $100 stakes with this volume becomes a significant amount of money even before factoring in site bonuses (likely a bit over $1/game) etc.

Not related to your comment, but doesn't deserve another post is that poker really is a great game and its unfortunate how its perceived by so many. Ive been playing for 3 years professionally and coached on a popular training site, yet after transitioning to programming (With a cs degree) I get laughed at by recruiters and seen as a degenerate.

<comment><USER8> why tell them you play in the interview?

<comment><USER9> why not? It demonstrates the ability to hold a huge amount of information in your head at once, make rapid decisions in a high pressure environment, and do what are essentially Bayesian probability calculations in your head. I may be biased as someone that played poker to put myself through grad school and had a nice hourly rate by the end of it, but I think that it requires a high intelligence, the ability to emotionally disconnect from decisions, and the ability to retain and act on such large amounts of information that it's a definite positive. (It's also really boring and psychologically brutal at times and I wouldn't recommend it to many folks.)

<comment><USER8> Are you still a winning player? Were you playing before Black Friday? I heard it was easier. I studied the game a lot these past few months and I barely break even. I'm only winning in live poker.

<comment><USER9> Not sure...there is a dearth of games now for US players and I was so disgusted with my money getting wrapped up in the Full Tilt BS that I went away from poker for about a year. I am certainly still a winning player at live poker, but the hourly rate can be a bit dismal and I don't enjoy it enough to do it everyday, or even once a week.

I would say that by 2008 the average live game was strong enough that I definitely had to practice disciplined game/seat selection, couldn't just sit down anywhere and expect my edge was higher than the rake.

I agree HU strategies advanced exponentially once stoxpoker and some other video sites came on and people started being heads-up specialists.

<comment><USER8> I'm hoping the US players can come back online soon. I'm not saying US players are bad but it can't be harder than playing Russians hyper-LAGs all day.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> >Bluffing still matters, but the best players now depend on math theory

This is a silly byline. If anything, the best and most mathematical players bluff more than the older generation of typically more conservative players. Bluffing and math are NOT opposed principles.

<comment><USER10> That's not what byline means. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byline](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byline)

<comment><USER11> That just makes it an even sillier byline.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> For those interested in more poker discussions [http://www.reddit.com/r/poker](http://www.reddit.com/r/poker)

<comment><USER13> Also [http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/](http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/)

<comment><USER14> Been reading 2p2 for 10 years and was a mod at one point. I would say its about 500000x more valuable than reddit poker.

<comment><USER13> That would've been my initial assessment too, but I've never read reddit poker, so I didn't feel qualified to compare the two...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> There are some references that could be interesting:

[http://statspotting.com/is-poker-a-game-of-skill-or- chance/](http://statspotting.com/is-poker-a-game-of-skill-or-chance/)</comment>