No, the OK Hand  is not a symbol of white power - <AUTHOR> https://blog.emojipedia.org/no-the-ok-hand-is-not-a-symbol-of-white-power/ <comment><USER2> Symbols only have the meaning that they are given through use. A symbol that originally has one meaning can take on another meaning if it is used to convey that second meaning. Just look at what happened to the word "Isis" over the last few years--it conveys something pretty different today than it used to, doesn't it?

Nowadays, many white supremacists use the "ok" hand symbol to communicate that they are white supremacists. In this way, they have added a meaning to an existing symbol.

I feel like this is obvious, and that one needs to really be leveraging their disingenuousness to pretend to not understand it.

<comment><USER3> The obscure mountain people of Maguti use it to mean "prepare me immediately for ritual suicide."

Clearly everyone who uses the AOK symbol should be cognizant that meanings change, lest they be prematurely terminated.

\--

White supremacists are so isolated from Republican society that only someone who grew up with no exposure to Republicans could believe this.

We're actually quite normal.

<comment><USER2> White supremacists aren't normal

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> whats with the recent trend of articles that have condescending headlines in this "No, X is not Y" format?

</comment><comment><USER5> Maybe I'm just a simpleton, but this, traditionally, just seems like 4chan- level trolling to me.

<comment><USER6> The article actually mentions 4chan, so you're not wrong. That's _exactly_ where it comes from. As a troll, to screw with people who still haven't grasped "how the internet works". Lest people have forgotten about waterproof iPhones, microwaving your iPhone to charge it quickly, making "color crystals" (read: mustard gas), etc. It's a case of people having a laugh at people who really believe it's an alt-right thing. Although it may eventually become an "alt-right" thing. Poe's law and all that. But the thing about the "alt-right" is that they don't exactly try to hide it, most wear it as a badge of honor, and so don't need silly secret hand symbols to signal to one another... Don't forget that the Gay Pride flag is also a symbol of the "alt-right", so claims /pol/, the "gathering place" of the "alt-right".

Try to explain Bowsette to people who just "don't get internet culture". Internet culture has become a giant, collective in-joke that makes fun of people who aren't in on the joke. Think of it like someone who always pulls the chain of their gullible friend. Things like "Taurine is bull sperm, by the way." to mess with their naive friend drinking an energy drink. It's that kind of humor but on the scale of millions instead of single-digits/dozens. Ever get a group of friends in on a joke? Now imagine if millions of people you've never met or spoken to were in on the same joke.

I'm personally fascinated by internet culture - I "keep up" with it in the same way other people would keep up with celebrities. The ability for ideas to propagate across the network in the matter of days, sometimes hours, is nothing short of amazing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> "some members of the alt-right adopted the OK gesture to signal their identity. Many employed it, though, simply to troll liberals who had come to believe the OK hand was a genuine hate symbol"

So it's a symbol of being a troll, got it.

<comment><USER8> Some members of the National Socialist Party adopted the swastika to signal their identity. Many employed it, though, simply to unsettle Jews who had come to believe the swastika was a genuine hate symbol. Which it _was_.

<comment><USER9> And many more -- billions in Asia still today -- view it as an ancient prosperity symbol and are totally OK with it.

[https://www.tripsavvy.com/why-are-there-swastikas-all- over-a...](https://www.tripsavvy.com/why-are-there-swastikas-all-over- asia-3498922)

Coming back to the "OK hand". Not all insignificant cultural battles in the US (and not even in the whole of the US, just some fringe groups) apply to the world at large. In this here parts we use the OK hand just fine, non ironically and non racially, and have never heard or cared for the people mentioned in the article (either racists or trolls).</comment></comment></comment>


The shrinking RSS pie - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/on-the-news-media/82cd84a8ed16

<comment><USER2> I wonder if it may be simpler to write a site that outputs nothing but RSS/Atom. If user participation is allowed, they can contribute by using PUSH with JSON or something similar. I'm sure the vast majority of mobile apps already function in this fashion (maybe they just use some proprietary format to get the content).

</comment><comment><USER3> The problem with RSS these days is that many, many websites use RSS as a way to get people clicking on their site and don't provide full-text feeds.

Hell, you can put in ads as well as metrics code into RSS feeds, that's just not a valid excuse to not provide full-text feeds.</comment>


Load in all of Google's Web Fonts with one terminal command - <AUTHOR> http://webfontload.com/

<comment><USER2> There are lots of reasons you should not do this, and many blogs with different explanations.

[https://jordaneldredge.com/blog/one-way-curl-pipe-sh- install...](https://jordaneldredge.com/blog/one-way-curl-pipe-sh-install- scripts-can-be-dangerous/)

[http://output.chrissnell.com/post/69023793377/stop-piping- cu...](http://output.chrissnell.com/post/69023793377/stop-piping-curl-1-to- sh-1)</comment>


Man in Hole – Turning novels' plots into data points - <AUTHOR> http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/02/04/man-in-hole/

<comment><USER2> This was a really great read:

(1) I think the data-driven humanities are very interesting. The professor certainly gets at some rather deep questions regarding plot, and it's nice to see the structure of the bait-and-tease page-turner quantified.

(2) There's a passage about artificial intelligence and using computers to construct stories. I thought the following quotation on that was pure gold, hitting a truth that may be uncomfortable to those of us who consider themselves artists and creators, but which we will certainly have to engage in the future:

 _It should be obvious to all writers that parts of "the craft" are deeply schematic; if you feel threatened by a machine, there's probably something suspect about your humanism. We should resist the precious notion that there's something inimitable about the whole enterprise of storytelling._</comment>


Review My App: Hearts Net (multiplayer iPhone card game) - <AUTHOR> http://www.platinumball.net/hearts/

<comment><USER2> Up until I bought Hearts Net, Hearts Solo was the best hearts game for the iphone out there (UI aside).

If you want to try and get some more exposure, maybe try getting some blogs to play your game.

Gizmodo, for one, has weekly "best of" posts for apps, so you could give that a try.

[http://gizmodo.com/5459997/this-weeks-best-iphone- apps/galle...](http://gizmodo.com/5459997/this-weeks-best-iphone- apps/gallery/?skyline=true&s=i)

<comment><AUTHOR> hey, thanks! i agree, the user interface for hearts solo leaves something to be desired. me and my friend steph spiffed it up a little for hearts net. i think she's going to do another new "theme" for hearts solo as well, so i can release a new version of that.

are you one of those people who likes to shoot the moon a lot? i tried to make the robots a lot more resistant to that this time around. the number one complaint i heard from my really good players was that it was too easy to shoot the moon.

i think my best marketing leverage at the moment is that hearts solo has been downloaded 30,000 times. about 5k of those were upgrades when i released version 1.1.0, so that's 25k unique users. when i release a new version, all 25k of them will get notified by the app store downloader. i'm going to try charging 99 cents, and see how many of them go for it.

<comment><USER2> I rarely intentionally try to shoot the moon, rather it happens when the robots give me something like a Q, K, and A of spades and I roll with it.

I do have one suggestion for the UI; in landscape mode the buttons at the bottom seem too large. Can you shave the text and have just the icons or have an option to hide them completely in any mode other than portrait or something?

<comment><AUTHOR> 'the buttons' at the bottom are part of a UITabBar, which is provided by the UITouch framework. i can't change their size, it's fixed to be the same for all apps. the tab bar is pretty deeply embedded into the fabric of the app, so i cannot yank it out when the phone rotates to landscape mode.

there is a smaller type of toolbar i could put down there, but if i have it do the job of a UITabBar, that's a violation of apple's human interface guidelines, and i wouldn't be surprised if they rejected my app for it.

i agree that landscape mode doesn't work all that hot, but there's not a lot i can do about it. there's just not enough pixels to go around. that problem goes away when i port the game to iPad (heh).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Dude, you really lost your goodwill with your upgrade. You gave people a free app and now you sneakingly have stolen it back. I know you want to make money for your hard work but this way trashes your rep completely. You had really good reviews and could have start charging. A grocery store that increases traffic and word of mouth doesn't try to take back the free stuff after it gets the traffic and goodwill. You could have updated to advertise your new games but you used it steal back what you gave away for free. It's looks like a bait and switch and your rep may never recover.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hey guys,

I am one of those programmers who is clueless about marketing that we get so often here. Suggestions for improving my website, iPhone marketing in general, iPhone game marketing in particular, or other comments are welcome.

I worked really hard to make WiFi multiplayer games work well. This is best tested if you and a friend try it. If it doesn't work for you, I'd like to know why not.

Some anecdata: this app was approved for sale in less than 24 hours!

Here's some promo codes for your trouble.

RXXKXJXMJ6PR 749TRELXYAMH YPMA7J9MRK9K WTXPP76R6YRJ</comment>


Stop Using the Cup of Coffee vs. $0.99 App Analogy - <AUTHOR> http://www.joshlehman.com/thoughts/stop-using-the-cup-of-coffee-vs-0-99-cent-app-analogy/ <comment><USER2> If I see something that is both "free" and "in-app purchases", it already _greatly_ reduces the chance I'll even bother to download because _so damned many_ of these are just _terrible_ experiences. On the off chance I bother to look one step further and preview the "top in-app purchases", I usually see something totally unsurprising like the absurd "$9.99 gem bags" or whatever.

Please, please just start charging for apps again. I _specifically_ search for "pay once and never again" apps now.

<comment><USER3> > If I see something that is both "free" and "in-app purchases", it already > greatly reduces the chance I'll even bother to download

If a free app starts out with limited functionality for trialing, with a (one- time) in-app-purchase to unlock the full features, is that a good thing or a bad thing?

Follow-up: if it's a good thing, how should the app developer make it clear that it's not crapware? (asking for a friend)

<comment><USER4> That's my personal favourite for apps, but it's impossible to tell from a glance whether the "in-app purchases" label means you just buy it once (like Super Mario Run) or it'll be a constant push to spend more and more (nearly every other app).

That's a tough one, especially for small developers.

<comment><USER5> Look whether "top in app purchase" is "unlock full game" or "buy gameXYZ coins" etc

<comment> squeaky-clean Is this iOS only, or maybe I'm very bad at searching? I don't see anywhere in the Play Store to view the top in-app purchases for an app.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I prefer to apply this analogy to the situation with how users expect updates into perpetuity in exchange for their 99 cents. Developers that try to fund continuous updates through a small annual subscription fee (like Dark Sky on Android, for example) get pilloried for it.

You wouldn't pay $4 for a coffee at Starbucks, then come back to the store six months later and say "I paid $4 for this, refill it." But you expect that app you paid a buck for in 2008 to still work in 2017 across 10+ new OS revisions (and one or two major UI paradigm shifts), and the justification for that is "I paid for it once."

When you went out and bought boxed software it was kind of an expectation that it was going to work for a reasonable time period afterward. But if you want an update or support for a later OS version that didn't exist at the time of purchase, you're going to pay for it.

<comment><USER7> We're really torturing the metaphor with app updates as coffee refills, buuuuuut....

Many of us are in the software business. So we know how hard the stuff can be. But the customer doesn't, and shouldn't care. I think it's reasonable for the customer to expect updates forever. Particularly because so often, we put out a product that has bugs and problems in it. The customer is sometimes already being fairly accepting being willing to pay for a product that has problems that are yet to be fixed.

The app author also has the ability to release a new app if the features warrant. So no one is forcing the publisher to give new features for free.

<comment><USER6> >The app author also has the ability to release a new app if the features warrant.

That's easier said than done. You can't really do this without losing your customer base, links to your app in the store, sign-in tokens, etc, and you have to have some mechanism for migrating data out of one app sandbox to the other.

Additionally, if you want to be fair and offer an upgrade price, the app stores don't allow this directly.

Tweetbot did something clever; they wanted to charge $10 for new users but $5 for upgrades. They put the "old" version and the "new" version in a package deal bundle on the iOS App Store, and priced the bundle at $10. If you had the "old" version already, you got get a discounted upgrade by buying the bundle -- since you already owned one app in the bundle, you got a credit for that towards the full price.

The app stores could fix this problem and allow publishers to set upgrade pricing, but they don't.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The article makes some pretty compelling points, but I think it's underestimating the irrationality in human behavior. It's well known that people's purchasing habits are deeply irrational on many levels - one of which is the idea of anchoring. We've had the idea of $4 coffee prices anchored in our heads, and so, don't think twice about it. Conversely, we've also had the idea of free-apps anchored in our heads, and so, feel deeply averse to spending $1 on it, even when a rational person would conclude that the app's lifetime value (over free alternatives) exceeds 25% of the value provided by a single cup of coffee.

There are certainly many rational reasons for why someone wouldn't want to pay a buck for an app, but it's worth pointing out that a significant number of people are irrationally averse as well.

[http://www.investopedia.com/university/behavioral_finance/be...](http://www.investopedia.com/university/behavioral_finance/behavioral4.asp)

<comment><USER9> Yeah, I can't tell you how many irrational hours I've gone out of my way to avoid toll roads or paid parking, things that "should be" free, even now when I certainly _charge_ many times the rate that any parking garage does.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The app world has really been grinding my gears lately. The move to subscription services is really getting to me. Especially on iOS. I've dropped a lot of money on writing apps - I'm looking at you, Ulysses - to move to a subscription - and eventually lock me in, or lock me out. "At a cost of a coffee a month," you say.

</comment><comment><USER11> I think the article misses the point.

If we transfer the app store experience over to the real world who would pay $4 for a cup of coffee at your shop if there were coffee stands on the sidewalk literally every 100 meters offering excellent free coffee for you to grab with some ads printed on the cup.

That's about the sort of competition that mobile app developers have to put up with. Starbucks however didn't have that competition when they started out, that's why they could become so big in the first place.

<comment><USER12> Free coffee with ads on cups? Could it work as a model?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I was expecting this to go in a different direction when I read the headline, which is this: a decision to buy and experience an app does not have a guaranteed ending. The app could easily command more of my attention than I want it to, which--not to get all self-important here--is valued at way more than $0.99. I personally don't buy apps because I feel attention-saturated by the ones I already have. I do buy cups of coffee regularly, though, because I know where they start and end.

<comment><USER14> I was expecting it to go in a different direction also. But mostly based on the price of coffee. I don't know anyone in my professional/social circle that drinks coffee that costs less than a dollar. I think its time to start equivocating $5.00 purchases with a cup of coffee.

<comment><USER15> And even then, saying "this is the cost of a cup of coffee" is basically asking me to give up a cup of coffee to pay for their app. If you break out the whole logic argument, it's saying "I don't want to pay for this app", at which point the value proposition is "you know that money you were about to spend on coffee? Spend it here instead". I know they want to say "look how cheap it is", but what I hear as a budget-oriented person is "if you don't want to spend the money for it, just stop buying something else". My aversion to buying an app isn't how expensive it is, but rather how much I'm going to use it. Stop insinuating that I'm too poor to buy your product.

And like you mentioned, coffee is actually pretty expensive. Even at $1, if you drink a cup a day that's $30/mo which is more than the cost of GitHub Enterprise. If it's $5 for a cup and you drink one per day, that's $150/mo which could get me an absolutely massive Digital Ocean droplet. We pay an assload for coffee. Bad comparison.

And not to mention coffee is addictive; many people drink it because they feel like they have to, not because they necessarily want to.

Comparing your app to coffee is just an awful comparison all around.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I think this essay touches on something that is obvious yet feels frequently overlooked: time is valuable/money. And apps, unlike coffee, suck up your time.

It's not that 99 cents is expensive. It's that if 1 hour of my time is worth $50, and a 99 cent app wastes 1 hour of time, I'm out $50.99. The low price tag is itself a disincentive because experience has taught me that it's very rare to find something indisputably worth $9.99 that has been valued (by its own creator!) for 99 cents.

And as a technical issue, if you were to pick up apps because they were free or cheap, you'd subject yourself to cognitive overload, even if you never even opened those apps and wasted time on them. Nothing is ever free, and even if Starbucks/Peet's is a bit overpriced, at least I know what I'm committed to (barring an unexpected discovery that coffee is much more harmful than previously thought).

</comment><comment><USER17> I have fond memories of freeware and postcardware from a few decades back. In contrast, I'm rarely impressed with either free or paid apps.

The most solid apps I use just promote or expand another primary product. They're made as an adjunct by a company with a different revenue stream.

I don't know if it's walled gardens or the ease of payment that drives the shift. I'm glad people can get paid for good work, but I worry we lost something.

On the other hand, maybe it's just nostalgia taking. I wish I could find all the old astronomy simulators and games I found on BBSs, see if any of them actually hold up. Maybe software overall has gotten so much better I just raised my standards.

</comment><comment><USER18> My coffee spending is naturally capped at a level that is imperceptible to my budget. That's why I feel comfortable blowing the $4 on a cup - without any conscious decision making.

That's not the case with apps. I could easily spend a thousand bucks on them in a single day, so I am very careful with every single $.99.

<comment><USER19> I feel the opposite is true for me. For meals and soft drinks, my appetite seems to be infinite so I could really bankrupt myself if I just let it run free. However, there aren't many apps that seem useful to me and just let me _buy them_. It's subscriptions all the way down.

I've bought Wolfram Alpha for about a buck, I've blown 30 bucks on a bachata moves app, but god forbid if anyone offered a run tracking app without a subscription.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is a survivorship bias article.

\- "People are building fantastic free apps. They are finding new and creative ways to make money off these apps" People drop $4 on coffee at new coffee places/restaurants all the time, so that whole I trust this experience thing is really not valid when you think about it a little further than your morning Starbucks.

\- "Fact: Starbucks Has No Free Alternative" \- This can be interpreted to say that maybe more apps should be $0.99, so that users get used to paying for the apps. I dont think anyone would question the $0.99 price for apps if thats how it was from the beginning. \- "People are building fantastic free apps. They are finding new and creative ways to make money off these apps". This is because the prevalence of free apps has trained developers that people wont pay for apps. So new/creative ways of making money is most likely a result of there not being a way to make money by selling the app itself. Another way to look at it is, because you cant make money just selling the app, the only people who survive are people who can find other ways of making money. If the expectations was for apps to be paid, maybe more people would make apps and we would see a whole different world of apps.

I realize that its hard to change consumer habits, so free is likely to be the dominant distribution model. But its important to distinguish that the current reality might not be the best alternative.

<comment><USER21> They're not really correct that Starbucks has no free alternative. However, this depends on several understandings. The first for me is a sort of A=A mindset, that coffee=coffee regardless of all else. Assuming for the moment ground coffee rather than whole-bean or instant, I can get over a month's supply for about 5 bucks. It's not "free", but it's $60 a year for a pot of coffee per day. On top of that, if I don't want to make my own coffee, a $1 coffee mug allows me to get refills at 7-11. And I can get coffee at the food bank reliably.

While you might argue that I'm discounting the cost of the water and electricity, I'd argue that instead we're talking about the same issue as the cost of the phone. I have a $20 phone which works well for me. But any purchase in the Play Store is getting judged against that $20 value; if the phone were worth more there'd be no hope of an app significantly increasing the value of the phone.

There's no app I really need that's not free (or OEM like phone, text, memo, camera, ebook reader). The few that I do want or which I might need? I can get that function working in a browser.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is why free to play, apps that offer premium modes, or apps that have social conversions are good models for a digital store. When there is almost no barrier to entry users have good reason to doubt the value of what they are downloading. Hence they want to try it first or hear strongly from a trusted source that it is valuable.

</comment><comment><USER23> Well, considering "Save The <$INSERT-CAUSE-OF-THE-DAY>" charities have been peddling "For the cost of a cup of coffee a day" scams for years rather successfully I would be shocked if it did not work. Of course it may require TV ads.

</comment><comment><USER24> The cost of goods on a cup of Starbucks coffee is substantial (servers, beans, equipment, rent, utilities, cup, creamer)

The cost of goods on your $1 app is close to, and perceived to be, zero.

<comment><USER25> Why is customer acquisition cost (which can be many $s) not considered part of the cost of the app if it's considered part of the cost of Starbucks (through rent)? Why is Starbucks server a cost, but your app's developer isn't? Why is Starbucks equipment a cost, but app's infrastructure isn't?

<comment><USER24> You are comparing R&D with Cost of Goods - they are different things.

Cost of goods refers to the production cost of an individual item. COG for app store is zero. You don't even pay for hosting your app on the app store.

Software developers are R&D, not cost of goods.

There is R&D associated with Starbucks coffee as well (researching beans, refining the blends, etc), but nobody really factors that into its perceived value.

<comment><USER25> \- I don't see why customers would be so specific that they only want to look at cost of goods and not other costs. Most products and services people buy are based on their value for them, not based on their cost of goods.

\- If you include equipment, rent, and utilities in your cost calculations, then you have to include software developers and servers that are powering the app. I am not talking about apps that you build, publish and forget. Most apps have backend and engineers maintaining and supporting them.

\- You ignored my point about the customer acquisition cost which is likely to be the biggest cost for most apps.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The best model would be to have an app that slowly unlocks more functionality based off off TOTAL revenue, so the whales effectively unlock content for the non-spenders.

</comment><comment><USER27> > _Is There Hope for the Paid App?

Sure there is. Just do what Starbucks does:

• Build an app experience that's unique and doesn't feel "easily replicated"

• Provide something the user sees as valuable to their daily life

• Package it such that it shows off its craftsmanship Find creative ways to profit off of a "free" version (Starbucks doesn't do this…. yet)

• Quit complaining about money wasted on cups of coffee_

Don't forget the part about spending millions on advertising, so that people know what your product is.

</comment><comment><USER28> People who make this comparison wildly underestimate how much I like coffee. It's a lot more than your dumb app, I assure you. In fact, I'll go further. There isn't an app in _existence_ that I'd trade for coffee. Not Facebook or Instagram or anything else on my home screen. Coffee is better than _all of them_. This comparison could only be made by somebody who doesn't drink coffee.

<comment><USER29> Sure, but it's not coffee, it's _one cup_ of coffee - and you can immediately get another cup for yourself.

That said, they still often lose out in that comparison.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I agree with the author. Although the author didn't mention apps being "digital" as a reason for no sales, others have done so and I commented on that not being a convincing roadblock: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13634892](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13634892)

</comment><comment><USER31> I don't think it's supposed to be an analogy, the point is just to illustrate that 1 dollar is a very small amount of money and you shouldn't hesitate to spend it on an app.

</comment><comment><USER32> Let's also not forget that an app is a digital experience and coffee is a physical one.

Plus even if the facts the author wrote were not true, it's just overused at this point anyway.

</comment><comment><USER33> > Last week I bought a game for 99 cents and it was terrible. I played it > once, for 15 seconds. I could be shoving $1 straight down the toilet again > for all I know. Your app, good sir, is a total gamble. Sure, it's only a $1 > gamble… but it's a gamble and that fact matters more than any price you > might place on it.

Haven't the ability to return apps been around for like, 6-7 years?

EDIT: I see downthread that this has apparently changed

</comment><comment><USER34> We need to introduce a system called "macropayments" where you pay once for a complete product and they leave you alone afterward.

</comment><comment><USER35> I think there is another piece to this. Buying a cup of coffee means I get a cup of coffee. Buying your $0.99 app means I have the right to trade my time for whatever your app provides. The reason I don't buy apps is because I don't have the time to spend on your app, not because I think the $1 is strictly more valuable elsewhere.

</comment><comment><USER36> I don't mind buying something for a dollar and with the knowledge that it might not be that good. Gambling with a dollar is not exactly going to ruin me.

</comment><comment><USER37> These arguments work against paying for music too!

</comment><comment><USER38> Okay but now how will I confirm my bias?!

</comment><comment><USER39> > Starbucks coffee is a trustable experience

I stopped reading after that...

</comment><comment><USER40> I prefer Costa or Nero.

</comment><comment><USER41> bad luck for such developers, i don't drink coffee, neither drink beer

actually i can't think of thing i would buy daily which would be waste of money and not essential

if the app is useful like launcher or calendar reminders i am willing to pay, but i have trouble to imagine more paid apps i would be willing to pay with great free alternatives

</comment><comment><USER42> I wish the emphasis in TFA was not on "craftmanship",

1) it's a tired metaphor with weird resonances to a male dominated guild structure.

2) even the positive aspects don't really apply to Starbucks which is more fits the "well oiled machine" analogy. If i think of craft coffee, I think of a small (possibly independent) coffee shop where the baristas really know what they are doing

3) I think that customers do care about Quality, but they dont' (en masse) care about craft, your journey is not of typically of interest to them, just your results.

The article relies too much on a notion of _craft_ which describes how a product is made, I believe that the consumer cares about the _quality_ which is the result of that journey, only a fraction of customers care about the process.</comment>


Ancestor of animals identified in Australian fossils - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2020-03-ancestor-animals-australian-fossils.html <comment><USER2> I find it amazing that we all start from a ring that turns into a tube and then it bends and twists into a complex being.

Interesting part is that ring is the anus. The first organ that gets formed is the anus.

<comment><USER3> It also seems that during development, we pass through various stages, as if the organs of higher order life forms are a series of hacks added on top of the prior ones.

<comment><USER4> This is the well-known fallacy known as "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny".

[https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ontogeny_recapitu...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ontogeny_recapitulates_phylogeny)

<comment><USER5> This idea is explored heavily by Steven J. Gould in his book Ontogeny and Phylogeny. I highly recommend anyone interested in this idea to check it out. As far as I remember the "fallacy" is not that these stages exist, but that evolution works by adding new stages on top and pushing the previous stages down into development.

<comment><USER6> Surely that is _one_ of the ways evolution works?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I had to check because I was skeptical, but Bilateria actually does include the radially symmetrical echinoderms, i.e. sea stars, urchins, and other weirder creatures. They go through a bilaterally symmetric larval stage.

<comment><USER8> It's pretty interesting that a starfish is more closely related to us than it is to, say, an octopus or a crab.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Link to journal article this article is based on[1].

[1][https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2020/03/17/2001045117](https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2020/03/17/2001045117)

</comment><comment><USER10> My sci-fi fantasy consists of building such an ancestral organism by modern genetic technologies and phylogenetic simulations to come up with a likely ancestral genome that would actually work. Some kind of Jurassic Park for the evolutionary biologists.

</comment><comment><USER11> I was installing Ubuntu 19 today and thinking not bad Ubuntu has lasted 19 releases.

Meanwhile this thing has been producing new releases and updates for 550 million years.

<comment><USER12> Ubuntu's version numbers are year.month. So "Ubuntu 19" means it's of the 2019 vintage.

<comment><USER13> To add to the correction, there is no "Ubuntu 19" really, as all the versions have year.month as you mentioned. So "Ubuntu 19.04" and "Ubuntu 19.10" are the only versions that exists.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Opening paragraph: "A team led by UC Riverside geologists has discovered the first ancestor on the family tree that contains _most_ familiar animals today, including humans."

most <> all

<comment><USER15> Ok, we've taken 'all' out of the title above.

<comment><USER16> Now it's lost all meaning. :(

Why not say "ancestor of [most] animals" or similar?

<comment><USER15> I would say that's implied.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Wow, it is amazing to know that as years passby people tend to discover interesting stuff from the past.</comment>


Ask HN: Is Chime's (online US bank) 2FA system flawed? - <AUTHOR> I signed up for a Chime (https://chime.com) account last weekend. The first thing I did was try to find out how to turn on 2FA for my account. Not finding the setting I reached out to the company on Twitter. They replied and said that 2FA is turned on for all accounts by default. (It's SMS based and cannot be configured to be One-Time Password based which is less than ideal but that's not my point here.) I was confused when they told me that it was on for everyone because I was not asked for a 2F code when I logged into my account on my Mac. I reached out again and here's first response I got back:
https://pastebin.com/JbGGXYzN
This was immediately concerning to me and rather confusing. What is the criteria for when it asks and when it doesn't? Will I be lucky enough that when a bad actor obtains my credentials from a security breach that they will be asked to supply a 2F code to access my account? I tried logging in on a few more devices. I cleared cookies and caches on them and even switched to a cellular network on my phone. I was NOT asked for a 2F code on two devices (one being the cell network-connected phone) and WAS asked for a 2F code on two other devices. I replied to the support response and got this as a reply:
https://pastebin.com/BXEGeNbK
Am I crazy or does this completely defeat the purpose of 2FA? In my above scenario where this bad actor already has my credentials it sounds like they have free reign to my account. I practice good password habits (different passwords on every account and changing passwords immediately upon hearing about a breach) but this system still leaves me vulnerable if I don't hear about a breach for a few days.
Please put my mind at ease and tell me that their 2FA system is not as bad as I think it is. If they gave me control to configure it so the system asks _every_ time I log in I wouldn't have as much of a problem. But I don't like this mysterious algorithm that decides when it's going to ask for a 2F code. <comment><USER2> Their second description is not 2FA, but password recovery.

At best, the support rep is confused between the two, very different, flows.

Your understanding of 2FA is correct. If what the support rep said is accurate, I wouldn't trust them with my money.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed. I planned on moving my money over the next few weeks but now I'm just going to close my account.

About the support, (of course) it was two different people who responded. Even though I kept the same email chain.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Sorry about the pastebin links. I ran over the character limit.</comment>


Google and SpringSource joins hands in the heavens - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/05/19/google_teams_with_springsource/ <comment><USER2> tl;dr - MySQL coming to Google App Engine

<comment><USER3> I'm getting so sick of seeing "tl;dr". Especially when you gloss over important facts in the article. Stop being lazy and stop enabling laziness.

Edit: Plus, the article in question here has 5 little baby paragraphs. Is that _really_ too long to read? Do you click-in expecting to read a tweet?</comment></comment>


Raspberry Pi 4 WiFi stops working at 2560 x 1440 screen resolution - <AUTHOR> http://www.enricozini.org/blog/2019/himblick/raspberry-pi-4-loses-wifi-at-2560x1440-screen-resolution <comment><USER2> Answer from forum

        Had the same problem with Raspi 4B.
        Problem was dependent on screen resolution (!!).
        With 1920x1080, wlan0 became disconnected after it was
        ok at lower screen resolutions. Was in 2.4GHz band.
        After turning on 5GHz in the router and going into
        the network preferences (right click the network icon top
        right on screen) and SSID ... and checking "automatically
        configure options" the connection remains stable (so far :D ).

So radio interference it is?

<comment><USER3> Reminds me of the MacBook Air that I have (2018 model).

When I connect my USB 3 hub to it, I lose my WiFi :(

I Googled it when it happened a while back, and apparently other people have this problem with the MacBook Air too.

Some choose to shield the USB 3 cable with tinfoil. Personally I opted to connect a USB 3 Ethernet interface to the hub and use wired Ethernet when I use the hub.

<comment><USER4> In the very distant past (late 1980s, early 90s), Olivetti changed their PC keyboard design; it went from having the keyboard PCB assembly inside a metal clamshell to a bare board with a metallised plastic sheet on the back of the PCB (they 'cheaped out').

We got to know about the design change when a rather large and sprawling local leisure centre reported that often when someone used their walkie talkie near a PC, the screen filled with random characters and sometimes the dot matrix printers would 'go haywire' (CTRL-P = Print what's displayed on the screen).

In effect, the rf signal from the walkie talkies was 'mashing the keys'.

The immediate fix was to swap in some older keyboards, the longer fix was down to Olivetti using better shielding and some appropriately-placed capacitor decoupling on the power and signal lines.

<comment><USER5> First time I saw a room full of non-crt computer monitors, found out Merrill Lynch moved to a new building to save money. What they discovered is the CRTs would weird out every time the subway train went by. All the cash saved by moving was lost buying the stupid expensive monitors.

<comment><USER6> I wouldn't have considered trains to be a source of EM interference but in retrospect it makes sense. one that's amazed me is that military jets and warships cause some of the nearby consumer electronics go wonky, but as they _literally_ run systems that are trying to jam radio waves, it makes a ton of sense that eg garage doors have trouble keeping up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I will really like to hear what the root cause of this is.

This makes me think of the bug that the QCA AR9331 SoC has. The AR9331 is extremely common in small travel routers, but it has a fun bug where one of it's clock sources is shared between the 802.11 wifi and the USB port. IF the USB port is negotiated at USB 1.x speeds AND the 802.11 radio is scanning, the USB will freak out and die. This generally requires the 802.11 radio to be in client mode rather than AP mode. You can read some details about this on the old OpenWRT forum, if it survived the great forum purge of 2018.

<comment><USER8> The cause seems to be a low-quality HDMI cable that doesn't provide enough shielding.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Also Macbook Air (especially 11 inch model) 2013-2015 versions have similar problem with (cheap) USB 3.x external drives

Wifi shows as 'connected' but reality is only fraction of packets go through because of interference problems

some online reference from intel on usb.org: [https://usb.org/sites/default/files/327216.pdf](https://usb.org/sites/default/files/327216.pdf)

<comment><USER10> Unfortunately not only with cheap external USB 3.x drives and not only with old MacBook Airs. Connecting an Anker USB-C dock/hub to my MacBook Pro 2016 and later 2018 would consistently cause interference with the Microsoft Sculpt Ergonomic and Apple Magic Trackpad (both on 2.4GHz). Then I got an Aukey hub (since my wife was happy with one) and the problems have vanished.

<comment><USER11> This is an issue with poorly made USB 3 cables, connectors, and devices. Intel has a white paper about it: [https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/docs/io/uni...](https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/docs/io/universal- serial-bus/usb3-frequency-interference-paper.html)

> the noise from USB 3.0 data spectrum can be high (in the 2.4–2.5 GHz range). > This noise can radiate from the USB 3.0 connector on a PC platform, the USB > 3.0 connector on the peripheral device or the USB 3.0 cable. If the antenna > of a wireless device operating in this band is placed close to any of the > above USB 3.0 radiation channels, it can pick up the broadband noise. The > broadband noise emitted from a USB 3.0 device can affect the SNR and limit > the sensitivity of any wireless receiver whose antenna is physically located > close to the USB 3.0 device. This may result in a drop in throughput on the > wireless link.

The money quote:

> With the HDD connected, the noise floor in the 2.4 GHz band is raised by > nearly 20 dB. This could impact wireless device sensitivity significantly.

Besides having properly shielded devices and cables (which manufacturers often don't bother doing), they also recommend that the plug in the laptop be fully shielded or enclosed in a metal chassis (which is fulfilled by having an entirely metal case).

I don't know of a cheap RF analyzer but I'd like to get one at some point. I'm curious how many common devices actually adhere to the FCC regulations and/or standards like USB 3, compared to how many are just cheaply made.

<comment><USER12> > I don't know of a cheap RF analyzer but I'd like to get one at some point.

A SDR might work, and they're quite versatile. Unfortunately, the cheap RTL- SDR ones don't get to 2.4 GHz without a downconverter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Former communications semiconductor FAE here. We would troubleshoot issued like this all-day every-day for years, usually under NDA before the product is ever released to production. The solutions are routinely as weird as some of the "voodoo" hypothesis tossed around here - wait for it and you'll see. After a while it seems normal that all unverified combinations are broken and the moments of delight are when an unverified configuration completely works.

<comment><USER14> TIL one more TLA.

FAE = Functional Accessibility Evaluator

<comment><USER15> Typically in the semiconductor business FAE = Field Application Engineer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Aw, I was hoping the explanation would be in the thread. Is it high-frequency noise from an unshielded clock? Surpassing a current or temperature limit due to the stress of the high resolution and resulting high memory bandwidth? Time will tell!

<comment><USER17> > Is it high-frequency noise from an unshielded clock?

I bet that's it.

2560x1440 @ 60 Hz with CVT-RB timings has a pixel clock of 241.5 MHz. The TMDS bit rate is 10x the pixel clock, and 2415 MHz is right in the lower end of the 802.11 band.

If the Pi can be convinced to use CVT blanking, that'll raise the pixel clock to 312 MHz, which should be fine.

<comment><USER18> This is the answer. That mode puts the second harmonic going out of the HDMI cable smack in the 2.4GHz WiFi band (the fundamental would be at 1/2 the bit rate).

Now the question is who screwed up. Is it a leaky cable? Is it bad PCB design? Is it a problem internal to the SoC? Is it a power delivery issue? Knowing the RPi foundation and Broadcom, I bet one of them screwed this up for all RPis and it isn't just a bad cable.

<comment><USER19> I'm trying to understand this so I don't know a lot of what's going on here, but why is the fundamental half the bit rate instead of the bit rate?

<comment><USER17> Imagine a signal that alternates every second (e.g. 10101010). This has a frequency of 1/2 Hz, not 1 Hz, because it repeats every 2 seconds.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Why do all the proposed avenues of future investigation, and all of the current comments on this thread, focus on voodoo instead of the far more likely explanation that the display driver is just stomping on the memory of the network interface? If there's software anywhere in a system, 99% of the time that's the problem.

<comment><USER21> What does "stomping on the memory of the network interface" mean?

<comment><USER22> Really, terrible, security vulnerability issues? DRI and networking kennel modules should absolutely not be able to interact with each other at all.

<comment><USER23> "kernel module" together with "should absolutely not be able to interact with each other" are an impossible requirement with Linux.

I think the other operating systems available for the Pi are roughly in the same boat (Windows & RiscOS). There was a nascent Minix port at some point, I wonder if it was abandoned.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Is it using main memory as the video controller's memory? It may be out of memory bandwidth.

<comment><USER25> That was my first thought as well, but scanning out that resolution should use less than 1 GB/s of memory bandwidth which is nowhere close to the DRAM speed. And usually in that situation you get horizontal speckles in the video output.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Some MacBooks have the same issue (interference). Making sure WiFi is working in the 5Ghz band is one of the workarounds.

</comment><comment><USER27> I'd want to know if the Bluetooth stops as well since it's in the same frequency range.

</comment><comment><USER28> Maybe it doesn't have enough power and prioritizes the GPU over the WiFi antenna?

<comment><USER29> First thought as well. Didn't see a way it could determine that tho.

<comment><USER28> I know PIs soft-require more power than the supplies most people give them, and they do things like CPU throttling when undersupplied. I think I've also read that WiFi and/or Bluetooth may stop working when underpowered. So it may not be a balancing thing so much as graceful degradation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Ah WiFi radio interference, everyone's favorite! It kills Thunderbolt sometimes:

[https://www.akitio.com/faq/301-why-does-my- thunderbolt-3-dev...](https://www.akitio.com/faq/301-why-does-my- thunderbolt-3-device-not-work-witih-dell-s-xps-laptops)

> Why does my Thunderbolt 3 device not work with Dell's XPS laptops?

> Some users on the Dell forum have found that reducing the power output of > the WiFi network adapter to 75% fixes the problem.

</comment><comment><USER31> I have been using this resolution (with the console runlevel 3 only) and no prob with wifi.

</comment><comment><USER32> A Xenon flash used to freeze the Pi 2.

<comment><USER33> I don't know why it became such a piece of breaking news.

When a current flows through a p&n junction, photons are emitted (and an LED is just a diode that happens to emit photons at the wavelengths of visible light). And it works in both ways, if you hit a p&n junction with photons, you produce a current, not only LEDs - any diode will do that, they're all potential photodiodes, it's just that some are more sensitive than others.

You can cause a lot of chips to reset if you shine a bright beam of light to its exposed die, a common way to test chips.

It's also one reason (in addition to cost) that most diodes are sealed in plastic package, not glass package. Fun experiment: buy some 1N4148 small- signal diodes in glass package, connect it to a Darlington-pair transistor amplifier, and shoot the flashlight, you'll see some funny thing on the oscilloscope.

<comment><USER34> I think the newsworthy part of all that wasn't the physics involved, but more the design-choices on the Rpi 2.

Putting a light-sensitive chip (I think it was a wafer-scale package with no casing) on a board that's intended for use outside of an enclosure was a really big oversight.

<comment><USER33> > _a really big oversight._

I agree.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Sounds like a turkey day mystery!

You were missing a router swap on your list.

While it might seem a bit overkill try restarting your router's WiFi to see if it magically works. I had a war with a pi zero W not that long ago...turns out the 2 band wireless would just die sometimes. Turned out to be an issue with the router

<comment><USER36> Was it a bug in the router or was it a bug in the Pi that happened not to get triggered by a different router?

<comment><USER35> It was ultimately with the router. Specifically With NAT and 2.4 band. 5g kept going just fine. After looking at the manufacturers website the solution was to either buy a new router or disable port mapping.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Monitors creating harmonic interference with wifi is a very common problem, and most computers don't give any warning of this. I don't see why it wouldn't be possible to say "the wifi won't connect, it may be because of your refresh rate".

</comment><comment><USER38> Reminds me of an old adage about software:

The plane can't take off because the carpet is the wrong kind of orange.

ObligAnecdote: I once had a keyboard that wouldn't work when the monitor was outputting at 75hz. Had to be 60hz or else nothing. The joys of wireless keyboards.

</comment><comment><USER39> Has anybody else got 4k video working in the pi? Doesn't work for me on raspbian at all.

<comment><USER40> I have over VNC

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I have this issue with a Zero W. Wlan0 would just disappear. I tried jessie, stretch, and now buster. It had been connected to a ultra-wide monitor (but not at 2560 width, obviously).

I can't get it to fail now, but it is not connected to a monitor anymore.

</comment><comment><USER42> Any other SBCs that can drive a high res display @60hz just for normal computing purposes? No gaming/video encoding use cases.

<comment><USER43> I have successfully used the Pi4 at 4K. It is a very slow computer for "normal computing purposes" though.

<comment><USER44> > It is a very slow computer for "normal computing purposes" though.

Can you elaborate what you're doing that is slow? In my experience, CPU wise it's plenty fast, matching typical desktop from 2008. Although memory bandwidth could be better...

<comment><USER45> It's slow at 4k. I've got the 4GB variant and in 1080p it's good, I'd even say surprisingly so.

<comment><USER44> Ah, so you mean graphics performance. Yeah, just not enough memory bandwidth. 32-bit DDR4 memory interface is a bit narrow for 4k use!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> mic-kul It works fine with Ar1 Pi case - that extends usb-c ports and puts them 2-3cm away

</comment><comment><USER46> It reminds me of this old demo of electromagnetic interference: [http://www.erikyyy.de/tempest/](http://www.erikyyy.de/tempest/)

</comment><comment><USER47> Sounds like an EMC or Clock error to me.

</comment><comment><USER48> Please don't use code blocks to quote text, they are impossible to read on mobile.

> _Had the same problem with Raspi 4B. Problem was dependent on screen > resolution (!!). With 1920x1080, wlan0 became disconnected after it was ok > at lower screen resolutions. Was in 2.4GHz band. After turning on 5GHz in > the router and going into the network preferences (right click the network > icon top right on screen) and SSID ... and checking "automatically configure > options" the connection remains stable (so far :D )._

</comment><comment><USER49> Ubuntu Bug 255161: Openoffice can't print on Tuesdays

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8171956](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8171956)

</comment><comment><USER50> Please don't post quotes as code - it makes it almost impossible to read on mobile.

<comment><USER2> Honestly, I have no idea what is the right way to format quotes. And sorry for inconvenience.

<comment><USER51> You could use "quotes" to format quotes. Just a suggestion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> The RPi doesn't feel very minimalist.

I wish the RPi was this standalone microserver that had its own flash memory (SD cards are known to fail) that you could plug into your home network and act as a personal server.

Maybe one day it will be possible to do some basic GSM data with a RPi.

<comment><USER53> If they didn't use SD cards, the storage would be more reliable, but users would spend a lot more time fixing bricked boards. By allowing for removeable storage (in a format that can be plugged into any other computer natively) they solved that problem because I can just re image the card and get going again.

The philosophy of the RPi is that they won't really add features to it unless a bulk of the user base would use the feature. For example they were hesitant to even build the WiFi into it because users who wanted that could always get a USB chipset, and building it in adds BOM cost.

Because with GSM you'd also need a plan for it, I don't really predict they'd add that. Especially since you can get it in hat format already.

<comment><USER54> M.2 to USB converters work just fine and a M.2 drive would be far more reliable than μSD cards, even the high-endurance ones.

<comment><USER53> You're talking about a $40 tool just to flash the storage vs a part (micro SD adapter) that they give you with the SD card for free because it's so cheap.

Also doing a quick survey for the rated cycle counts on M.2 vs SD card slots:

M.2: I found this one [1] which is $0.768 for only 60 cycles

SD: This one [2] is $0.6256 for 5,000 cycles

I'm not sure why you'd say M.2 is more reliable, considering users often cycle storage dozens if not hundreds of times.

[1] [https://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/jae- electronics/SM...](https://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/jae- electronics/SM3ZS067U310AMR1200/670-2690-2-ND/4162221)

[2] [https://www.digikey.com/product- detail/en/gct/MEM2051-00-195...](https://www.digikey.com/product- detail/en/gct/MEM2051-00-195-00-A/2073-MEM2051-00-195-00-ATR-ND/10460360)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How We Got from Doc Brown to Walter White - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/43/heroes/how-we-got-from-doc-brown-to-walter-white <comment><USER2> Walter White is not really about him being a scientist, but about him being a grown-up, trained professional.

Or maybe that's just supporting the point of the article, that scientists in fiction are not lab-coated magicians anymore, but just one of many breeds of white collar workers. But strictly speaking, I still would think of Walter White as a former scientist at best, because as a school teacher who clearly does not do research. Just like being trained in computer science does not make you a scientist, working in computer science research does.

</comment><comment> aaron-lebo The show's been around for awhile now, but there's a spoiler which takes suspense out of a major scene in the first paragraph....

To me what most of these portrayals lack is how mundane real scientists are. Completely brilliant in one area and boring, ignorant, and ill-informed in others - just like anyone else. Neil Degrasse Tyson (just one popular science figure today) is as likely to have a valid opinion on politics or history as Joe Montana - but you wouldn't think it.

There's a very real appeal to authority inherent in it, but as long as you can appeal to a scientist - you're alright. What's slightly terrifying to me is the worship of "science" and it being used to justify every Reddit thread, when in reality we're training the public to worship scientism.

Doesn't _Big Bang Theory_ run on the same network as _Two Broke Girls_ after football games? It's popularity might not have much to do with science...

<comment><USER3> The thing is, scientists really _do_ have a greater chance of having an informed opinion of politics, or history, or any other subject than do actors or football players because to be a scientist you have to know how to evaluate claims based on evidence. That doesn't mean that their opinions are 100% correct of course, but yes, being trained in the skill of thinking makes their opinions more valuable than those whose skills are in looking good or running fast. "Scientism" is a meaningless word because every question that can be answered is part of science in the broad sense (which includes history and social science in addition to laboratory science).

<comment><USER4> > "Scientism" is a meaningless word

What do you mean by this? People prematurely assuming that science has a good explanation for something it doesn't has a long and storied history.

Scientists saying women couldn't vote because blood flowing to their ovaries fled the brain causing poor decisions, saying that black people had lower IQs because they had smaller craniums, that the Irish were a totally different inferior race than whites, etc. And people latching onto their authority as justification.

Most recently, many outlets have discussed the Clinton campaign's over- reliance on "data" and "science-like" methods, via their ADA "algorithm" and a refusal to go for grassroots tactics and instead trusting analysis of millenials or w/e.

"Scientism" is alive and well. People who think more numbers == more truth, even without putting those numbers and their underlying generating assumptions to any scrutiny, are very very plentiful.

<comment><USER3> But science is literally the only way we have of explaining anything. Yes, many 19th century opinions are now known as incorrect. But how do we _know_ that? Because later science showed that ovaries don't work that way and so on. And while Clinton's campaign was unsuccessful, arguing the merits of various strategies that could have been taken is clearly a form of social science, not an alternative to science. If "scientism" is a real thing there have to be answerable questions that not addressable by science.

<comment><USER5> You seem to be using a very broad definition of 'science'. What do you mean by the term? Do we know mathematical truths via science, or is that a different realm of knowledge? Are philosophical arguments categorizable as science? What about questions that are in theory testable, but the test involves huge numbers of complex interfering factors and decades of time (like many questions of political and social policy) - are they usefully labeled as scientific questions, or do we gain something by recognizing them as requiring some other mode of knowledge than just empirical observations?

> answerable questions not addressable by science

So what does 'answerable' mean? There's no such thing as proof, rigorously speaking, outside of math and other formal systems, and not always within them. The answers that the best hard science provides are strong, but not provably certain, and the spectrum of certainty extends a long way down from there - at what level of certainty does an answer stop being an answer? I think there are many important questions that don't admit hard scientific answers, and for which 'science' as I understand the term isn't the most useful mode of knowledge for finding the 'answers' that are most likely to be fruitful.

<comment><USER3> Science is a process in which conclusions are made from evidence. It does not deal in proof and scientific conclusions change when new evidence is available. Obviously a historian uses this process as much as physicist. Mathematics in itself is not science, but it can be used as a tool for science if the assumptions in the mathematical models are based on evidence. An answerable question is one in which evidence can actually be used to test whether one answer is better than another.

<comment><USER4> Historians do not do science. Your definition of science seems is so broad it's meaningless.

<comment><USER3> Do paleontologists do science in your opinion? Or archeologists? They also are using evidence to answer questions of the past. What makes historians different? What is meaningful about the broad definition of science is it separates the people using evidence from those just using "gut feeling" (or mystic intuition or whatever they want to call it).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> We got to Walter White because that was the design goal of "Breaking Bad" \- to turn Mr Chips into Scarface. The mechanism in use was, IMO, a partial ( and perhaps oscillating/varying) reductio ad absurbum on the very idea of heroes and villains in narrative.

Eastwood's played the antihero for decades now. It's not new.

But it's Science! ( ala Thomas Dolby's "She Blinded Me With Science"). Sort-of _yawn_. That way lies ex deux machina and Merlin figures...</comment>


Any lawyers in here, can you help explain the tech gap in law? - <AUTHOR>

I'm a lawyer currently working (as a non-lawyer) for a tech startup.  I look to my colleagues in the legal field and notice that there is a pretty obvious tech gap in the legal field (shitty websites, shitty CRM's, shitty law firm management tools).  Is it because they are unaware that such tools exist, or because they don't care? <comment><USER2> There is a tech gap in most fields. The ones I have seen personally: Financial Services, Legal, Non-Profit/community organizations, Building and Architecture firms, Retail, Food Service, Fire Departments and Local Government, EDU and wait for it... IT consulting companies. This stuff is expensive and hard to get right or the incumbents have the market locked up and people perceive they can't break in and innovate.

Also, many of these service oriented firms have traditionally started as partnerships and there is often squabbling over who pays for what systems and how resources are spent. Tech is still seen as a cost center and way under utilized in most businesses even today. (You would think in all this I could have come up with a software business to build by now...)</comment>


IEX Gains SEC Approval to Launch New Stock Exchange - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/iex-gains-sec-approval-to-launch-new-stock-exchange-1466206325 <comment><USER2> [http://on.wsj.com/1W4tA5K](http://on.wsj.com/1W4tA5K)</comment>


Show HN: Elect.io, my side-project that provides objective candidate information - <AUTHOR> http://www.elect.io

<comment><AUTHOR> Elect.io is a side-project I've been working on for the past few months, and is my attempt at providing a tool for voters in the U.S. to learn more about the candidates that are running for office in their area.

In addition to providing basic candidate bio information, when possible I also provide details on what issues a candidate supports or opposes. I calculate each position programatically using the following data:

\- Special Interest Group ratings for this particular candidate. i.e. the NRA may give a candidate a score of 90 out of 100 in the year 2007 for the candidate's position on gun rights issues.

\- The bias of the Special Interest Group i.e. the NRA strongly supports issues related to the preserving of Second Amendment privledges.

These ratings are then weighted by year (more recent ratings have greater weight) and run through an algorithm to determine a candidate's calculated "position" for each issue.

<comment><USER2> > Second Amendment privledges

The Bill of Rights are privileges? I thought they were, um, rights. As far as I'm concerned, you could throw all the guns in the world in the ocean, but if your site is to be unbiased your terminology should be too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I've wanted something like this for a while. It takes a lot of effort to find info about candidates that are less well known.

A couple of comments:

\- I find the use of checkmarks and "X" to be a little too simple, since you're calculating this stuff based on an algorithm. It might be better to devise some sort of little visualization (a small pie chart, thermometer, etc...) to show me the actual score in addition to the "X" or "check". This is useful to identify situations where a politician is deliberately waffling on an issue. For example, my own congressman has a twisted history with respect to "Card Check". The algorithm shows this, but I have to click into the checkmark to see his score is 75/100.

-It's hard not to introduce bias in the phrasing of issues (I don't have a good solution for this). For example, I'm sure some would take issue if you had labeled the abortion issue "pro-life" vs. the current "pro-choice" (conversely, I'm sure some take issue with the current use of "pro-choice" as a category). About the only (not great) solution I can offer for this is to show both labels and give a score (as mentioned above). Civil liberties is another. Just because the ACLU doesn't like a candidate, doesn't mean they're a knuckle-dragging, sexist, racist, homophobe.

-There's the potential for subtle incumbent bias by letting the candidates with the most information drive the display. If one candidate is better known, the vast majority of the categories are driven by that candidate and it has the effect of making the other candidates look like they don't have positions on those issues (when in fact, the info is probably just not as readily available). Again, I don't have a really good solution for this issue either, but detecting extreme cases and really calling it out to the user is probably the best way to mitigate this.

</comment><comment><USER4> Unreasonably hard to pull up "Chicago"; your search didn't accept a Chicago zip code, the name "Chicago", or "Chicago, IL". Instead, I had to select "Chicago" from a list of every city in the entire state of Illinois.

Any UI decision that involves selecting from a list of every city in a state is a bad UI decision.

<comment><USER5> I think the zip lookup is broken in general. I tried zips for places with a population of 90K and 1M and neither of those worked either.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep you're right. I'm using Geonames' free postal code search, and unfortunately I went over the quota around midday today, so searches stopped working after that point.

I'm going to look into purchasing their paid service, but in the meantime I modified the code to only accept zipcodes and bypass the geonames web service call.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> That's quite clever. I'm impressed at how you can composite fairly objective views from special interest groups.

As mentioned by others, you seem to have a (lack of) data issue. Perhaps you could also work with public voting records (<http://www.votesmart.org/>) to help mitigate that.

</comment><comment><USER7> Curious about what you're using for your data sources; Wikipedia? OpenCongress? Check out Sunlight Labs API for Congress if you haven't already: <[http://services.sunlightlabs.com/docs/Sunlight_Congress_API/...](http://services.sunlightlabs.com/docs/Sunlight_Congress_API/>).

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm using data from Project Votesmart (<http://www.votesmart.org/services_api.php>). At one point I planned on also using data from OpenCongress and OpenSecrets.org, but that functionality didn't make the cut for the initial launch.

Thanks for the link to Sunlight Labs, I'll check it out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's dead, Jim?

Hitting enter after entering my ZIP code gives me:

Traceback (most recent call last): File "/base/python_runtime/python_lib/versions/1/google/appengine/ext/webapp/__init__.py", line 513, in __call__ handler.post(*groups) File "/base/data/home/apps/codeablepolitics/1.344842764317514643/controllers.py", line 66, in post geonames_results = geonames.zipcode_search(query, 1) File "/base/data/home/apps/codeablepolitics/1.344842764317514643/utils/geonames.py", line 26, in zipcode_search if len(web_service_response['postalCodes']) == 0: KeyError: 'postalCodes'

Also: add this on the ZIP code input box: onfocus="this.value=''"

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the feedback.

The search functionality makes a call out to Geonames.org to get location data, and unfortunately I hit the quota for more free account. I'm going to purchase premium service with a higher quota, but in the meantime I modified the search to only accept zipcodes, which will not require a call to geonames.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Have you also considered a mode in which the website first asks the user about his agreement with a series of political statements, and then offers the best- matching candidates?

(In Germany, there's Wahl-o-Mat which operates like that)

</comment><comment><USER10> [http://www.elect.io/elections/Orlando+FL-32899/chief- financi...](http://www.elect.io/elections/Orlando+FL-32899/chief-financial- officer) \- Error.

Most of the pages in my area only have positional data on 1 candidate. Some have no info at all, or only 'gun rights'.

Until it's got more info, I can't see it being very useful.

Also, without references as to why the system thinks they have that position, I can't easily double-check. That means I end up doing most of the same work I'd have done anyhow before voting.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback.

You can view details on how I calculate each position by clicking on the position's 'check' or 'x' image. Doing so will open a modal dialog provide that displays detailed information in both a graph and table view.

Getting additional position data is one of my top priorities in the next week or so. The first additional subset of data I plan on using is the Political Courage Tests from Project Votesmart (<http://www.votesmart.org/npat_about.php>). With this data, I should be able to provide positional information on 40-50% of all Congressional candidates, including Independents.

Finding this same data for regional candidates will be tougher. I am thinking of providing some alternate information for these candidates, such as a Twitter feed or RSS feed.

Also thanks for reporting the error. I will look into it today.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> First line says "Abortion issues: Pro-choice"

Now, putting it like that already causes a bias in the reader, the opposite bias that "Pro-life: YES,NO" would cause, of course.

My point being: is very prepotent to say your site provides objective information. And you're probably pro-choice, right?

<comment><USER12> I see "Abortion issues: Pro-life", so that has been accounted for somehow. I would be interested in knowing how it decides which version to show. There does seem to be a bias towards evaluating as true as much as possible in that bullet point.

Not ideal, of course. But if you're bound to simple booleans, there's not much more you can do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I like the sound of this app, but it doesn't seem to work with IE7 at all. I tried searching for my state and it gave an error and if I try to pick the state I see the select a city briefly appear and then it disappears.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for reporting this. I tested in IE8, Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Opera, but it looks like I should have also tested in IE6 and IE7.

I will address this issue tonight.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> How does one guarantee that a site provides objective candidate information?

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm not sure about your color choices. It is just hard for my eyes to focus. I mean I can read it, but I can feel an extra one or two mississippi before my eyes really lock in.

</comment><comment><USER14> Not looking so good on a netbook when you have 5 candidates: <http://imgur.com/iep9S.png>

<comment><AUTHOR> Ooh, yuck. I'll look into that issue. Thanks for reporting it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The select a location does not render properly on iPhone. The cities list cuts off.</comment>


Twitter account security emails & phone numbers used for advertising purposes - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/twittersupport/status/1181661080033955840 <comment><USER2> unintentional? That is the worst excuse ever! How many people signed off on this and how long did it happen? How much unintentional money did they make?

>We cannot say with certainty how many people were impacted by this, but in an effort to be transparent, we wanted to make everyone aware. No personal data was ever shared externally with our partners or any other third parties...

>We're very sorry this happened and are taking steps to make sure we don't make a mistake like this again.

Yeah, you're liars @ Twitter. This does not make me trust you.</comment>


Good News! CD Music Sales Down 20% from 2006 - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/03/21/good-news-cd-music-sales-down-20-from-2006/ <comment><USER2> I disagree with his outlook on the music biz. I think that recorded music does have a value. Although there is a small cost to produce it these days every musician dreams of making money off of it. No musician enjoys giving their music up for free. They assume that it'll pay off in the long run(whether that be buying tracks on itunes, getting a cd or a tshirt at their show). Just because the current model for selling music isn't working and piracy is a popular alternative doesn't make music worth nothing.

Also, any band already relies on live concerts for their means of money. This is nothing new. What is happening is that major labels are getting a bigger piece of the pie when it comes to merchandise(which used to go straight to the band). I just think a new means of selling music must be created that benefits all parties.

<comment><USER3> Digital content "wants" to be free. That's the problem for industries that have historically generated revenue by artificially restricting access to content: when content distribution (and even production) are without cost or restriction, revenue must come from other sources. This is glaringly obvious for music, and we're headed that way for film.

The film industry will do it's best to stay ahead of the bandwidth: 3D projection, better surround sound, etc, but will also need to adapt to make formerly secondary revenue streams (product placement, franchise merchandise, etc) more primary. That and they're going to have to find ways to get their costs down, significantly, to compete with a fast approaching internet and independent film community.

<comment><USER2> I completely realize that. 1000 bucks for an album is not reasonable though. At this point it's around 10 grand for a solid album with an okay producer. That's still a big investment for a small band.

Production costs will never reach zero. It makes no sense. You're always going to have good producers out there, better engineers, a genius mastering person and great studios that people will pay for. Anyone right now could make their own movie with a home camcorder but I'm sure they'd rather go with some professionals.

<comment><USER3> my point is that the quality level of the two ends (what you get from the world's best producer and what you get from a mediocre or inexperienced one) are quickly approaching each other, at least in technical quality.

The point is that what you could do at home for free (or with some help from smart people for cheap) now is orders of magnitude better than 3 years ago, and is still improving.

Some people will always be willing to pay. But everyone else won't HAVE to.

<comment><USER2> Yeah I agree. The amount of money is no doubt going down. I mean my brother's studio can make a recording that sounds close to the 50 grand ones by just putting triggers on the drums and doing all these other tricks. Would a big musician pay to record with a 20 yr old? No chance in hell.

I wish I was going to the startup school. It'd be nice though if I was cause I'm sure this conversation would have been much better. I didn't realize it was a free event until it was too late.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Draft of a story about wildlife crime was frozen for violating Google Docs' TOS - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/Rachael_Bale/status/925352538110595072 <comment><USER2> Better the document than the account!

Anyone know of a Google Drive equivalent for [https://github.com/jay0lee/got- your-back/wiki](https://github.com/jay0lee/got-your-back/wiki), which implements backup and restore for GMail? Closest I could find was [https://github.com/odeke-em/drive](https://github.com/odeke-em/drive), a popular command line client.

\--

It appears my Google account is slated for deletion | [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15234207](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15234207) (Sep2017:266 comments)

> _My YouTube account was suspended for uploaded /embedded portions of AQ vids > used for analysis for U.S. v Pfc. Manning. It appears my Google account is > also slated for deletion_

Ask HN: Did anyone use ruinmysearchhistory and get Google account suspended today? | [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11880008](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11880008) (Jun2016:116 comments)

> _I think it might have something to do with the "ruin my search history" > viral thing yesterday_

Dumped by Google | [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5591133](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5591133) (Apr2013:193 comments)

> _My data was intact save for the last thing I'd worked on–a spreadsheet > containing a client's account numbers and passwords_

Google account disabled for 6+ days. Some thoughts | [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=354593](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=354593) (Nov2008:53 comments)

> _I haven't been told yet why it was disabled for a week yet, oh well…_

</comment><comment><USER3> Apparently it's not an isolated case: [https://mobile.twitter.com/ismh/status/925367292346683392](https://mobile.twitter.com/ismh/status/925367292346683392)

The Google Docs team claims they're on it: [https://mobile.twitter.com/googledocs/status/925377864677158...](https://mobile.twitter.com/googledocs/status/925377864677158912)

Even so, Zeynep Tufekci sees a larger unaddressed issue: Is Docs a publishing platform? [https://mobile.twitter.com/zeynep/status/925368098303160320](https://mobile.twitter.com/zeynep/status/925368098303160320)

<comment><USER4> Is that really "unaddressed"? People share documents publicly directly from Docs (including Google employees), it has tools to support that (e.g. you get a "light mode" warning if you access a doc with many active viewers), ...

<comment><USER3> Yes, of course, on the technical level it works. The legal and editorial side of it has not really been addressed. When somebody can publish arbitrary content on a Google domain, then Google pretty much has to start taking on an editorial role.

<comment><USER4> I would assume that this freezing of documents means this is already happening from Googles side, with them applying variations of the filtering they use on their other publishing platforms to answer these issues.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Well, what did you expect?

To add something constructive: There are several solutions for collaborative editing that you can host yourself, like Etherpad or gobby.

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

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

</comment><comment><USER6> Just the realization that Google is scanning and evaluating everything I put in a document I make on their platform is more than reason enough to never use that service.

Everyone here knows it's just snippet of code to set a flag and trigger a reaction.

We should also be able to conceive what might be reacted to and how, and know that we could still be surprised with the truth being worse than we imagined.

</comment><comment><USER2> This post came first, but much more discussion (45+ comments already) is currently on the front page as well:

Google Docs Is Randomly Flagging Files for Violating Its Terms of Service | [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15594163](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15594163)

</comment><comment><USER7> It seems to be a server-side bug, affecting a random (or at least apolitical) population of users:

[https://it.slashdot.org/story/17/10/31/1734232/google- docs-i...](https://it.slashdot.org/story/17/10/31/1734232/google-docs-is- randomly-flagging-files-for-violating-its-terms-of-service)

</comment><comment><USER8> Is he a paying customer of Google Docs? Or using the free version.

Dont know why the downvotes, legitimate question since he turned to twitter to seek tech support, and he is storing important documents in someone elses cloud instead of just using a normal word processor on his computer. Im curious if he is paying for that privilege or going with freemium.

</comment><comment><USER9> Well, I guess I need to move all my documents out of Google Docs. Suggestions for alternatives?

<comment><USER10> The Drive API allows you to export to docx, which can be converted to markdown (or whatever) via Pandoc. This works surprisingly well for me.

For web-based collaboration, you could self host something like Etherpad (there are a few alternatives).

<comment><AUTHOR> Actual desktop Office and an encrypted blob on OneDrive or Dropbox.</comment></comment></comment>


Succinctness is Power (2002) - <AUTHOR> http://www.paulgraham.com/power.html <comment><USER2> He also talks about programming from the bottom up, that leads to succinctness as well.

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

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

</comment><comment><USER3> A recent related topic on LtU: [http://lambda-the- ultimate.org/node/5402](http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/5402)

Stroustrup's Rule:

\- For new features, people insist on LOUD explicit syntax.

\- For established features, people want terse notation.

<comment><USER4> Up to a point. There is a degree of terseness that does not help anymore, just increases number of mistakes.

See Perl for example and sigil type marking that is a historical artefact of ancient 8-bit computer parsers.

Conciseness is not the same as terseness. Fewer syntax elements used to express as opposed to shorter syntax.

Succintness is another thing, also meaning lack of ambiguity. For example many dynamically typed languages are concise but not succinct. (You have to rely on names of things to know what they are and mean and assume no mistakes.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> >My hypothesis is that succinctness is power, or is close enough that except in pathological examples you can treat them as identical.

This word has two meaning, which in some circumstances can have opposite effects.

>succinct - briefly and clearly expressed.

While succinctness is powerful. From a coding standpoint it can be a bear to maintain. I would much rather have clear verbose code than succinct code. I have had this problem especially with brilliant developers. They have a tendency to not stick around to maintain their code, and if it takes 10 times to expand it. Give me clear but verbose any day.

I strive to make the intentions behind what I code clear to others.

<comment><USER4> This has two sides. Either the programmer is writing verbose code because they're doing unnecessary work (in algorithm and in coding) or they really know what they're doing.

Simular with succinct code, either you're bashing code using libraries and syntax you don't understand, or you're writing genius code but forgot to document it.

Always remember you're the last person to judge clarity of your own code.

<comment><USER5> I think doing the work to make your code self documenting is required. Some might consider that unneeded, but after after looking back at my own code years later, what was blatantly clear at the time, it no longer obvious years later.

And I would say you are the FIRST person to judge the clarity of your code. Who knows who the last person will be...</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Should you pay your formal advisors? - <AUTHOR>

As an early startup with little revenue, should you pay your formal advisors?  If so, how much? <comment><USER2> You should pay them in the form of referrals and connections through your network. Also a small amount of options/warrants are always nice, but you need to make sure that they are adding value in exchange for them. As far as formal payment goes, I would run from any advisors that require it. Once the business is starting to gain some cash flows I would suggest holding a quarterly dinner at a decent restaurant with the entire board present. As busy as advisors are, placing them in a formal atmosphere with the rest of the board usually requires them to slow down for a second and actually focus on you and your business.

My 2 Cents.</comment>


Seizures from Solving Sudoku Puzzles - <AUTHOR> http://archneur.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=2456131 <comment><USER3> That's a bit of a link-bait title, the first line of the abstract reads:

"This case report describes a patient who had hypoxia and posthypoxic intention myoclonus and subsequently developed clonic seizures while solving sudoku puzzles."

So the patient already had some brain damage and the puzzles were a trigger (there are many known potential triggers for seizures including stress).

<comment><USER4> I'm finding declaring titles to be link-bait the new 'Betteridge's law' spam on HN. In context, this title is entirely not link-bait.

Anyway, regarding seizures, absolutely anything can be a trigger, but is highly dependent on the individual. Stress and sleep deprivation are two common triggers for epileptics. There is an abstract concept called a 'seizure threshold', and when you reach it, you have a seizure. Things like stress reduce this supposed 'seizure threshold'. Multiple stressors reduce the threshold more.

But in my time in neuro, there were a few once-offs like in this article - <USER2> notable one was the patient who had seizures when he saw orange circles. Other orange shapes were fine, and other coloured circles were fine - it was just orange circles. Another was a patient who responded to ice on the lips, though we couldn't replicate that in the lab. These kind of triggers are unique, but they show that anything can trigger, if you have the concomitant wiring problem in your brain...

<comment><USER3> The whole point of a link-bait title is that 'in context' it is still accurate. If sudoku puzzles caused seizures _by themselves_ then the title would be accurate. As it is the fact that that particular patient already had a problem seems to me to be quite important and by leaving that fact out the publication likely gets more exposure.

> anything can trigger, if you have the concomitant wiring problem in your > brain...

Exactly. So ordinary sudoku solving people should be perfectly ok.

<comment><USER5> > _The whole point of a link-bait title is that 'in context' it is still > accurate._

That's the basic technique if you want to mislead without saying outright, blatant lies - you say something that's true only in a specific context, hoping your audience will miss the context. In case of headlines, the audience doesn't even get the context before reading the article.

Yes, I tend to bitch about that practice in journalism a lot. I find it a very serious antisocial pattern of behaviour in media. Why is that? Because most people _skim a lot of headlines and read only few articles of interest_. So if your pattern of writing is: linkbait bullshit in headline, clarification/refutation in the article, most of the audience will only read the bullshit and read it as a fact.

And I'm talking here about things like half of my country's population talking how our country sucks so much, because compare with Germany or France or something, and you can sometimes trace those opinions back to actual articles with headlines: "Poland worst in Europe in X", where the article itself explains that it's actually 6th (!) on the list of worst European countries in X, _behind_ Germany and France.

Sentiments of entire nations are shaped by those linkbait headlines. And then tell me to trust the democratic process, and that headlines are absolutely not a problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Here's a short story in which certain patterns have been discovered which break the human mind: [http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/blit.htm](http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/blit.htm)

Putting aside fiction, these cases are always so interesting. How much has neuroscience been advanced by studying the very particular ways in which brains _don 't_ work?

<comment><USER7> Plenty. I'd hazard that's how _most_ medical science has come to be.

If you're on this site and haven't already been strongly reccommended to read Oliver Sacks, do so. Broader than neuroscience, look for memoirs of British surgeons during WWII.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> $30 for a 24-hour "subscription" (presumably cheaper if you're a med student or doc, but I didn't bother to check).

Am I the only one who wonders whether this access model is sustainable? How many people would actually pay such a fee, and just to read about a single patient, not a major study.

</comment><comment><USER9> COuld anyone here please explain whether it is a good thing or a bad thing happened to that guy?</comment>


1927 color video of London - <AUTHOR> https://vimeo.com/7638752#

<comment><USER2> Absolutely fascinating.

And the color process is really fairly good, considering the age of the film. Interestingly, William Friese-Greene, the man who invented the color process used here, was unable to show movies using his process because a pair of inventors had developed and patented another color process, and claimed tha any color film infringed on their patent (according to Wikipedia). Ça plus la change, as they say.</comment>


City living 'makes it harder to concentrate' - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-21506132

<comment><USER2> " _Concentration is improved when people's senses are aroused, says Dr Linnell, but if this becomes excessive it seems to have the opposite effect and reduces the ability to focus on a single task._ "

Something to be said for the suburbs!</comment>


Snibgo's ImageMagick Pages (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://im.snibgo.com/index.htm <comment><USER2> I wonder how difficult it would be to make a programmatic BAT to BASH converter that only had to handle these scripts. It would probably get more traction that way.

<comment><USER3> Bluntly، if I was the author, I'd scream "hell, no!".

Transcribing the scripts is straight forward, if you cannot do that, chances are high I'd like to be payed to debug your problem.

ImageMagick is a beast. Mighty but definitely not user friendly.

edit: trying to say that it can do everything - if you already know image manipulation.

<comment><USER2> The bottom of the page suggests the author wouldn't object to a third party doing it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> There's a link in the introduction to Fred's ImageMagick scripts, which are also worth a look:

[http://www.fmwconcepts.com/imagemagick/index.php](http://www.fmwconcepts.com/imagemagick/index.php)

</comment><comment><USER5> This is coming right on time (I'm looking at various screenshot differs for a 3D tool application (shaders, etc.)) - [http://im.snibgo.com/phashthresh.htm](http://im.snibgo.com/phashthresh.htm)

</comment><comment><USER6> Can a mod change the link to the HTTPS version?

<comment><USER7> Sure, done.</comment></comment>