Intel microcode license updated to permit redistribution - <AUTHOR> https://01.org/mcu-path-license-2018 <comment><USER2> Can anyone with background in law in some of EU member states share their take on enforceability of the DeWitt clause[0]?

I know it popped up quite a few times here, but very few commented on it in the context of EU.

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

<comment><USER3> AFAIK EULA's are unenforcable in the EU.

Disclosure: IANAL

<comment><USER4> IANAL. This is not legal advice.

AFAIK, in Germany a EULA is enforceable. But if you are only presented with the EULA after having bought the product (e.g. if the software came on DVD in a shrink-wrapped box, so you couldn't look at the EULA at the store), you're entitled to a refund if you don't agree to the EULA.

<comment><USER5> EULAs are enforceable, but surprising or unreasonably discriminatory clauses are not. When it comes to contracts with private customers, judges tend to interpret that highly restrictively.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A lawyer friend of mine one told me that his job was basically to try to see what he could sneak past the opposition's (his sentiment, not mine) lawyers in their contracts. He explained contracts are like a running game of tag for lawyers. "If they don't read it, fuck 'em".

He also said that all contracts are mutable. Just strike in red whatever you want, sign it, and send it back. If they don't object (for whatever reason, including not expecting a non-lawyer to do such a thing and never reading your reply), you've won this round of tag.

Then mentioning that 9/10 contract disputes get settled out of court meant the law didn't really matter, it's just what you can convince others about.

<comment> another-cuppa This is essentially how all business works. When I got my first job before I went to university I was very surprised to learn that accountants always pay invoices on the very last day of the terms rather than as soon as they can. Since everyone else is going to pay you as late as they poassibly can, if you pay your invoices as soon as you can you'll lose out in the long run.

The way everyone tries to get slightly more from other people than they give back is one of the things I dislike most about humans. I wish we had a system that punished such behaviour rather than rewarding it.

<comment><USER7> It's often not that they're really trying to screw the vendor, but that their cash flow doesn't allow immediate payment.

A lot of commercial invoices have payment terms like "2/10, net 30" meaning you can take a 2% discount if you pay within 10 days. The cost of not taking this deal is an effective 35% annualized interest rate, so it's a big incentive to pay early, assuming your cash flow allows it.

<comment><USER8> I used to do this as a freelancer..

Some clients would insist on 45 or 60-day terms for my invoices, and as a self-employed individual (who at the time couldn't afford to be picky about my contracts), this really sucked.

Then someone suggested to me I put a clause offering a 2% discount if they paid within 15 days.

I definitely remember some of my clients taking me up on that and paying quickly, and it was a big help..

<comment><USER9> I remember the first time I discovered what "30day net" meant. "What? You're going to borrow my money for 30days???"

I'm a consultant and I charge $N for 30 net and 25% off if payed in 10. (25% is not a typo.) Very few of my clients do the math and decide they want to borrow my money for the full month.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The bigger news is that they've applied the license to FSP too. Great news for coreboot.

[https://mail.coreboot.org/pipermail/coreboot/2018-August/087...](https://mail.coreboot.org/pipermail/coreboot/2018-August/087220.html)

</comment><comment><USER11> I had a quick Google and couldn't find any published benchmarks yet. Does anyone know of one so far?

<comment><USER12> According to a German news article [0], Intel published benchmarks themselves [1].

[0]: [https://heise.de/-4144515](https://heise.de/-4144515)

[1]: [https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/architecture-and- tec...](https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/architecture-and- technology/l1tf.html)

<comment><USER13> Intel's attempt to suppress independent benchmarking suggests that this is not the whole story. This suspicion lingers even though it has removed the clause.

<comment><USER14> There exists other reasons to not allow third-party benchmarking, other than trying to hide something. A common reason is as a way to make sure the benchmark is done in a proper way.

I've had the experience myself, and I can imagine that when a system is complex and hard to measure that you don't want an internet journalist running Cinebench to become the reference benchmark for your customers.

<comment><USER15> Yeah, but what if the microcode killed cinebench performance? Wouldn't that be interesting?

<comment><USER16> The problem is still the context in which cinebench would be ran. There are so many variable on a complex system that "the microcode killed cinebench perf" could very well be an over simplification of "the microcode in conjunction with this particular motherboard and this version of the kernel plus this particular Nvidia driver lead to a bad interaction that affects cinebench performance negatively".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Marvel Cinematic Universe?

<comment><USER4> I would watch the hell out of the Intel MCU. The story line about the Avengers getting in trouble for "speculative destruction" practically writes itself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Just to save others the two minutes of googling I just went through, apparently the MCU in the title stands for "Microcontroller Unit" (and not "Marvel Cinematic Universe" as per my original thought).

<comment><USER19> I think 'microcode update' is what is meant here.</comment></comment>


Fast (Nanotech) Takeoff: RepRap Rocks - <AUTHOR> http://crnano.typepad.com/crnblog/2009/04/fast-takeoff-reprap-rocks.html <comment><USER2> _[RepRap] has been called the invention that will bring down global capitalism, start a second industrial revolution and save the environment..._ \- The front page of The Guardian, November 25, 2006.

Good lord, there's hype and then there's Guardian hype.

<comment><USER3> Also, can we PLEASE stop posting all these articles about RepRap.

As cheap-ass CNC systems go, it's OK, but (a) no, it CAN'T reproduce itself (it has tons of precision components that you have to buy separately, and (b) it has nothing to do with nanotech.

<comment><USER3> Down-vote it if you want, but we've gotten over 100 different posts on RepRap, even though there has been no new news or development in quite a while.

[http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+r...](http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+reprap&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=com.ubuntu:en- US:unofficial&client=firefox-a)

I'm all for posts if there's something to say, but the ceaseless boosterism for RepRap, and the unwillingness to either be realistic about RepRap or address criticism is quite annoying.

<comment><USER4> There's new news and development every week. Check out the RepRap blog (and, if that's not high-volume enough for you, the RepRap builders blog). I guess you didn't even bother to read the original article; the development of successfully constructing printed circuits from solder is news in the last couple of weeks.

 _Nothing_ can reproduce itself, strictly speaking; there are dozens of basic chemicals that even your own body needs and can't manufacture from raw atoms: vitamins, essential amino acids, Ω3 and Ω6 fatty acids, several heavy metals, and so on.

The RepRap Darwin has _already_ successfully manufactured all of its custom parts except for the extruder nozzle and circuit boards, leaving only a few hundred dollars' worth of common off-the-shelf "vitamin" parts to buy to build the thing. At this point, it's a matter of optimization: improving the machine's reliability, further reducing the number of custom parts (and making them easier to make), simplifying and automating assembly, and so on.

In short, your criticism is false from beginning to end. Do you feel that that sufficiently "addresses" it? (Myself, I prefer to address human beings.)

I'm not affiliated with the project, I've never seen a RepRap in person, and I'm not engaged in trying to build one.

<comment><USER3> > The RepRap Darwin has already successfully manufactured all of its custom > parts except for the extruder nozzle and circuit boards, leaving only a few > hundred dollars' worth of common off-the-shelf "vitamin" parts

So it can extrude plastic, but can't extrude

* nozzles

* circuit boards

* guide rails

* screws

* motors

* steel rods

* thermocouple sensor

* rotary encoder

* etc., etc., etc.

That's quite a lot of "vitamins" (to use the propoganda term).

Take a look at the Darwin.

<http://www.reprap.org/pub/Main/WebHome/darwin-small.jpg>

I believe that of everything you see there, the only things that the RepRap creates itself are the small white plastic bits...maybe 10% of the machine by volume, 5% by weight, and 1% by complexity.

> Check out the RepRap blog

I have. The signal to noise ratio is pretty low, and there's a lot of relentless boosterism (did I mention the OVER 100 TIMES that RepRap has been posted to news.yc?

> In short, your criticism is false from beginning to end. Do you feel that > that sufficiently "addresses" it? (Myself, I prefer to address human > beings.)

If you're going to do a dictionary flame, do it right. "Address a criticism" is a phrase that has been used in English for hundreds of years, even if you're not familiar with it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Phorque, this is just commentary on the same story (RR prints first circuit) you posted the other day. That was worthy of note, but commentary on same doesn't really add anything and this particular article is really lightweight.

<comment><AUTHOR> So... don't upvote it? Or, if you don't feel it's hacker-newsworthy enough, go ahead and flag it?

For what it's worth, I really liked the links and 3D additive printing industry analysis, so I posted it here.</comment></comment>


Rob Pike's 5 Rules of Programming - <AUTHOR> http://users.ece.utexas.edu/~adnan/pike.html <comment><USER2> > Pike's rules 1 and 2 restate Tony Hoare's famous maxim "Premature > optimization is the root of all evil."

That quote is from Knuth, not Hoare.

[https://shreevatsa.wordpress.com/2008/05/16/premature- optimi...](https://shreevatsa.wordpress.com/2008/05/16/premature-optimization- is-the-root-of-all-evil/)

<comment><USER3> The Hoare attribution is also (at least in part) due to Knuth so it all comes out about even in the end.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Link change?

[http://users.ece.utexas.edu/~adnan/pike.html](http://users.ece.utexas.edu/~adnan/pike.html)

<comment><USER5> Yes. Changed from [http://blog.codonomics.com/2017/09/rob-pikes-5-rules-of- prog...](http://blog.codonomics.com/2017/09/rob-pikes-5-rules-of- programming.html).

It's also a dupe: [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=pike%20rules&sort=byDate&dateR...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=pike%20rules&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I really like rule 5. It's can be extremely hard to get data structures right, but you really notice when you do. I had the chance to redo a project, and the biggest chances was to how data was structured and it made a world of difference.

<comment><USER7> I have found this to be true as well. The first thing I do whenever reviewing an open source project is to examine the database schema. I can usually figure out what the code does and how it works by looking at the tables and the relationships between them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> These are all well and good, as long as you remember not to blindly live by them (which you'll often see people do with advice from authority).

> If you've chosen the right data structures and organized things well, the > algorithms will almost always be self-evident. Data structures, not > algorithms, are central to programming.

I'm not sure what the author wants me to take away from this? Data structures and algorithms should very much both be taken into consideration, although I'd agree that "it all starts with the choice data structure".

<comment><USER9> All too often we focus on performance as the main problem we're trying to solve, when, in reality, our chief problem is managing complexity.

A clever algorithm can often dramatically improve performance, but usually clever algorithms are difficult to understand and their unmaintainability leads them to be abandoned as a project evolves, or, worse, subtly break when assumptions no longer hold. (Its especially hard when working with other developers)

The only example that was coming immediately to mind was a distributed lock. Once you have that primitive available your distributed systems problem can be substantially simpler to implement. Without it writing race-free code is going to be really tricky.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I've witnessed the unfortunate consequences when each of these rules were violated.

I've seen kludgy code when Rules 1 and 2 are violated for instance.

Employing Fancy algorithms to look good among peers, leaving behind buggy and maintainable code.

Rule 5 violation is deceptive. Often one can get it right with right understanding of business use-case.

The worst part is not the violation of these rules but the developer's chest- thumping with pride for writing seemingly intelligent code :-/

</comment><comment><USER10> On one hand I love these and consider them good advice. On the ther they're often used as a weak crutch for poor programming practices, usually by developers who believe any amount of money spent on infrastructure is worth it to avoid the catastrophic consequences of maybe thinking about performance in their code. They're certain they never want to optimize too early, and they're certain that every day is too early.

</comment><comment><USER11> Understanding and living by Rule 5 is, in my book, what separates good and great programmers.

<comment><USER12> I can't even remember all the times this has hit me. Often times, I'll be working on a module, and the code will just be ugly, hard to understand, hard to write. Then, I'll make a small change to the organization of the data structures I'm working on (normally, literally a change in the set of data that is a field of one struct or another, or a parameter to one function or another) and suddenly everything will become clear. These days, if code is getting ugly, the first thing I try to do is look at whether the relevant data is logically grouped, because nine times out of ten, this ends up being the problem. I only wish I was better at getting it right the first time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Rod Burstall of Edinburgh University said pithily: "Efficiency is the enemy of clarity"

</comment><comment><USER14> "Premature optimization is the root of all evil."

Except in an interview ;)

</comment><comment><USER15> Sound principles, as usual.

</comment><comment><USER16> That is pretty nice topic.</comment>


Creating Personalized Jigsaw Puzzles (2014) - the-enemy http://ivrl.epfl.ch/research/jigsaw_puzzles <comment><USER2> First: That is a really neat algo for solving how to make fiendishly difficult very custom puzzles. I might pay for that as a service.

Second: I feel that the pieces are too unique; and that might distract from some of the enjoyment of the puzzle. Perhaps if the variance was lowered so the pieces seemed more uniform....

<comment><USER3> Not strictly related, but on your second point - [http://www.libertypuzzles.com/](http://www.libertypuzzles.com/) makes some really great puzzles that have very unique ("whimsy", iirc) pieces. I've gotten a few for my children and found that I enjoy putting together the easier puzzles as a speed challenge. The unique pieces make "timed-runs" quite interesting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> And how long until this particular method is turned into a turnkey service where I can upload a picture, configure a few slider variables and have it shipped to my door?!

</comment><comment><USER5> AKA "Creating insanely difficult puzzles that will drive you potty"

<comment><USER6> One of the authors here. Since it is a optimization, the difficulty can be controlled as a parameter ( the lambda parameter in Eq.1 in the paper ).

But you are right, some of the puzzles can be super-hard ( for example, the Seurat puzzle ) that we used to joke between ourself to name our paper "taking the fun out of puzzles".

Personally, what was fascinating for me is the shape of the puzzle curve it produced. Most of the common puzzles are grid based (i.e. four neighbours - <AUTHOR> , down, left, down ). But in this scheme, there can be strange neighborhood pieces, with even stranger shapes.

<comment><USER7> Exactly what you said, this solution doesn't make super-hard puzzles, it makes not-fun puzzles. The obvious next step that I would challenge you to do would be to optimizes for puzzle cuts so that they _do not_ follow the main color lines of the image as much as possible. This would result in pieces that are just as interesting, but produce puzzles that are radically more fun to actually put together.

A good puzzle will not bore the player. Boring is that there are many blue pieces that all look exactly alike. Trying each one over and over is not fun. But with a tweak to your technique you could make sure that every blue piece that can contain another color would, thus increasing the variance of unique pieces which is not boring for players. Finding a blue piece with this little bit of brown and a spec of purple means the player can get to remember that and hunt for where it could go which is the fun part of puzzles. Do that and you can approach puzzle companies to license them a tool to make more fun puzzles and they will buy it.

Now of course your tool can't solve everything you can still end up with rubbish like: [http://www.amazon.com/USAopoly-M-Ms-Puzzlemania- Puzzle/dp/B0...](http://www.amazon.com/USAopoly-M-Ms-Puzzlemania- Puzzle/dp/B000OM99KG)

And in contrast a really good puzzle that at first glance looks like it is all one color, but filled with so much detail it is a blast to put together. [http://www.amazon.com/Ravensburger-78000-Fire- Dragon/dp/B000...](http://www.amazon.com/Ravensburger-78000-Fire- Dragon/dp/B00005S0JJ)

<comment><USER6> Pushing away from color lines is very easy. For negative values of lambda in Eq.1 of the paper, (i.e. reverse the cost for color lines ), the optimization tries to push the puzzle shapes away from the color lines. We had tried a few in this configuration, but personally my co-authors and I liked the puzzles generated by the scheme of adhering to the color lines.

Hardness/fun factor in puzzles is a matter of personal taste. Hence the ability to personalize is very interesting. Not everyone like to solve 10000+ piece puzzles , nor color line adherence, but people invest time and effort in solving them.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


World Bank Data API example - <AUTHOR> http://r-chart.blogspot.com/2010/06/plotting-world-bank-data-with-r.html

<comment><USER2> @EzGraphs Thanks! Never know World Bank open up so much APIs (<http://data.worldbank.org/data-catalog>) and with a bit of visualization and charts, it could give a good macro view of economy of the world.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Anyone working on applications using this data?</comment>


What is Pharma's Sales Savior? - <AUTHOR> http://www.medcrunch.net/pharmas-sales-savior/

<comment><USER3> Wait, I know this one ... because I was there, 'kicking' sales reps out of hospitals, helping senior physicians mandate formulary prescribing, helping juniors stick to the local, national formularies.

I was also there with pharma companies, helping them to implement systems to record networks of influence, identify key opinion leaders to target. Helping them to use IT to near-shore sales teams.

Long time ago, but it seems to have moved like custard since then - <USER2> sales is pointless because clinicians are overwhelmed with government prescribing guidelines and internet based forms of communication from colleagues and KOLs.

Nowadays only drug advancement, hands-on experience from colleagues and clinical evidence should count.

At the most I guess there should be a social n.... - wait - I think I'll build that myself ...</comment>


The Floppy Disk of Floating Point - <AUTHOR> https://www.evanmiller.org/the-floppy-disk-of-floating-point.html <comment><USER3> > You'll find F2XM1, which computes in a swoop (2𝑥−1) – a kind of pauper's > fused multiply-add, some twenty-five years ahead of its time.

No. It computes pow(2, x) - 1.

Suppose x is close to 0, so that pow(2, x) is close to 1, like 1.00000000000000002345678. Because of that leading 1 (to the left of the radix point), all those zeros also have to be stored, meaning some of the low-end digits will have to be dropped, so you end up rounding to 1.00000000000000002. But if you can subtract 1 from the exact result before rounding, then you can store more of the low-end digits: 2.345678e-18. Hence the F2XM1 instruction.

<comment><USER4> expm1 is the modern equivalent. That (plus the related log1p) are probably some of the most underutilized standard library math functions. They can substantially improve the accuracy of tons of calculations.

<comment><USER5> Can you give an example of a common situation where a programmer should have used expm1 or log1p but didn't? (the way it's common for people to test if something is inside/outside a circle or sphere by comparing the square root of the sum of squares to the radius as opposed to compare the sum of squares to the square of the radius, or use trig functions when linear algebra will do)

I do a reasonable amount of computational programming but to my recollection I've never used either of those functions.

<comment><USER6> One example I can think of is doing an interest calculation with small interest rates/short periods, where you'd want to know that someone owes you 0.000000001234 dollars in interest today rather than owing you 1.000000001 - <USER2> dollars.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm sad to see the x87 go. I've never been able to convince anyone of the value of 80 bits of precision. Never mind that I've seen engineers convinced their sums were correct (because the computer can't be wrong) because they used insufficient precision for adding too many numbers.

But you can thank (or blame!) me for extending its life - back when Microsoft was developing their 64 bit Windows, they were all set to not save the x87 state during a context switch, effectively killing the x87. I talked them out of it.

Microsoft's VC still doesn't support the x87, their "long double" is 64 bits. I suppose that's for compatibility with other processors it supports.

I'm proud of the Digital Mars C/C++ compiler which still sports full 80 bit long doubles, as well as the D programming language which still (despite opposition) delivers 80 bit precision for type real, even for 64 bit Windows.

<comment><USER8> I had to debug a nasty x87-related issue with a piece of scientific computing software. The output of each version of the software was deterministic, but different versions usually (not always) gave very, very slightly different output, even if the numerical code was unchanged. This bothered the original author, but he was a hardware engineer, and his attitude towards it was basically "software sucks, you can only depend on computers if you lay out the circuits yourself." So the mystery remained until I was brought on and was able to figure out that the default settings of gcc at the time did not use any of the SSE2 instructions supported on the workstations we were targeting, instead using x87 floating point instructions. The state of the x87 stack was affected by code interleaved with the numerical code (there was a bit more going on than just number-crunching) causing the 80-bit representations to be copied to and from 64-bit registers (and hence rounded) at slightly different points in the computation. This resulted in tiny changes in the output. I added a flag to enable SSE2 instructions, and thereafter the output only changed when the numerical code was changed.

<comment><USER9> Had the experience on several occasions in C# on 32 bit. The whole idea of the 80bit operations is flawed in an environment where you can't control the native code generated with register allocation and so on (so in most high level languages). We became so used to these bugs that we immediately recognized them when some calculation differed on just some machines.

As C# is jit-compiled, you could never be sure what code would actually run at the end user machine, and where the truncation from 80 to 64 bits would occur.

In the end the best cure is to ensure you never ever use x87, which happened automatically when dropping 32 bit support.

Determinism is too important to give up for 16 extra bits.

<comment><USER10> I feel like I read something once that said when writing numerical/scientific code, traditionally there were so many weird high performance computers that were used, e.g. Crays or whatever, you'd have to be robust to all sorts of different types of FP anyway.

Nowadays maybe that sort of diversity is less of an issue? Expecting determinism in the sense you mean it just seems weird to me.

<comment><USER9> Having absolute determinism is probably still difficult but using SSE on x64 on Windows, where all users have compatible compilers (I.e determinism _without_ diversity) is at least "good enough" nowadays. I haven't seen any issues with that scenario so far, even though it's certainly possible problems can arise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> One of the interesting things about the 80-bit format was that allowed the use of 64-bit integers on a 16 or 32-bit machine. This was what Thomas Nicely was using them for when he found the Pentium FDIV bug: [https://faculty.lynchburg.edu/~nicely/pentbug/pentbug.html](https://faculty.lynchburg.edu/~nicely/pentbug/pentbug.html)

</comment><comment><USER12> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadruple- precision_floating-p...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadruple- precision_floating-point_format#Hardware_support) shows (non IEEE) 128-bit floats existed in the 1970s, and that IEEE ones were added to Power in 2015, and the clang, gcc and Intel C compilers support them in software. There clearly is a market for them.

Truth is that successive rounding errors accumulate complex calculations can lose a lot of bits of precision. That's why you sometimes need to do calculations in a lot more bits than needed in the answer.

Also, the x87 had 80 bits floats, but not all instructions computed all of them correctly ([https://www.infania.net/misc/coproc.html](https://www.infania.net/misc/coproc.html))

I don't know how current FPUs fare there, but would hope they have become optimal.

<comment><USER13> > but not all instructions computed all of them correctly > ([https://www.infania.net/misc/coproc.html](https://www.infania.net/misc/coproc.html))

I failed to find which instructions weren't computed correctly in the text linked, and I'd like to know about that, that is, if it's something I wasn't aware of. Can you specify a bit more?

<comment><USER12> Search for "Accuracy of calculations performed by a coprocessor" in the article I linked to.

it says "Intel claims that maximum error in the 8087, 80287, and 80387 for all transcendental functions does not exceed two bits in the mantissa of the double extended format". Typically, those reposts get rounded to double format, but that doesn't guarantee that such errors get dropped.

Edit: [http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/software/ieee/](http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/software/ieee/) has lots of links and code for testing floats.

[http://li.mit.edu/Archive/Activities/Archive/CourseWork/Ju_L...](http://li.mit.edu/Archive/Activities/Archive/CourseWork/Ju_Li/MITCourses/18.335/Doc/IEEE754/ieee754.pdf) gives quite a few corner cases, so it would be helpful when writing a test suite.

[https://slixe.de/stash/projects/MAS/repos/libfirm/browse/ir/...](https://slixe.de/stash/projects/MAS/repos/libfirm/browse/ir/tv/IeeeCC754?at=8045fb7fc4f9dc8c0ae329e17b78d5fc2d679517) has source code for a/the compliance checker

[https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/151193633.pdf](https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/151193633.pdf) describes what seems to be a Better version of that test framework (it adds "++" to the name). Unfortunately I couldn't find its source code.

<comment><USER13> That statement that you refer to regarding the instructions for transcendental functions in 80 bits doubles is the result of the way the hardware and the microcode for these functions are implemented. Internally, out of 80 bits, 64 bits are available for mantissa and the steps for calculating the result accumulate the error, and then the last two bits in these transcendental functions are "noisy" which was still very good for its time. And it was documented.

But that's still only for the "convenient" input range for the implemented algorithm.

In practice, the programmers sometimes want to pass the values from the less convenient input range, and then it got much worse when the library functions in high level languages have expected too much from the implementation in the processor:

[https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2014/10/09/intel- underesti...](https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2014/10/09/intel- underestimates-error-bounds-by-1-3-quintillion/)

The resulting problem in the high level implementation described described was blind belief in the wrong (in not correctly stating the input range) documentation by some that then implemented the C library functions for some environments, only a few years ago:

The Intel's documentation was "buggy. By claiming near-perfect accuracy across a huge domain and then only providing it in a tiny domain Intel has misled developers and caused them to make poor decisions."

And it was fixed in 2014:

[https://software.intel.com/blogs/2014/10/09/fsin- documentati...](https://software.intel.com/blogs/2014/10/09/fsin- documentation-improvements-in-the-intel-64-and-ia-32-architectures-software)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The x87 FPU finds an interesting niche application in size-optimised demoscene productions, where the stack-based architecture and scientific-calculator operations allows for some impressively compact 3D demo effects. For example, this one is 256 _bytes_ :

[http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=53816](http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=53816)

</comment><comment><USER15> A good article. However the real floppy disk is the floating point standard . These days other number representation are exceeding floating point in terms of dynamic range, flexibility, fewer exception cases, better rounding, and cheaper/faster hardware implementations.

Read about Unum computing, pioneered by John Gustafson, and implemented on many modern software and hardware platforms.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unum_(number_format)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unum_\(number_format\))

</comment><comment><USER16> One problem with x87 is that it performed all operations in 80 bits, converting to float and double on load/store.

This sounds nice, but in practice was quite problematic, as results depended on whether or not intermediate results spilled into memory.

</comment><comment><USER17> > ...a kind of pauper's fused multiply-add, some twenty-five years ahead of > its time.

Maybe 12 years. The PowerPC had fused multiply-add in 1992. For whatever reason, it didn't really appear in x86 until 2012.

<comment><USER18> And many DSPs had it long before then.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I have a feeling that Kahan lived in a time where matrix inversion and eigenvalue computation was considered the new hotness, just like neural networks today.

It is very easy to build small _invertible_ matrices that cannot be inverted with 32-bit floats, or even 64-bit floats, thus Kahan's insistence on very high precision floating points.

Edit: small _invertible_ matrices

<comment><USER20> >lived

The man lives still, not to be numbered among the dead:

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

<comment><USER19> Then he must be apoplectic about the new bfloat16 format - only 7 bit mantissa - what the heck

It's totally possible that scientists in the future will laugh at our extremely wide 16-bit neural networks. Computation at the biological synapse level is considered to have an accuracy of 1 to 3 bits only - opinions differ.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Solar system scale 128-bit floats can be useful for storing coordinates. Any other reasons to go beyond 64 (or 80) bits?

<comment><USER17> Why do you need 128-bit floats for storing solar system coordinates? 64-bit floats will give you millimeter precision on Pluto, if your coordinate system has an origin in the sun.

<comment><USER22> Similarly, this NASA blog post has some fun facts about the precision of pi that JPL uses in its calculations:

[https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/news/2016/3/16/how-many- decimal...](https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/news/2016/3/16/how-many-decimals-of- pi-do-we-really-need/)

* JPL's highest accuracy calculations, which are for interplanetary navigation, we use 3.141592653589793.

* How many digits of pi would we need to calculate the circumference of a circle with a radius of 46 billion light years to an accuracy equal to the diameter of a hydrogen atom (the simplest atom)? The answer is that you would need 39 or 40 decimal places.

<comment><USER23> So if he'd only had interplanetary probes, غیاث الدین جمشید کاشانی Ghiyās-ud- dīn Jamshīd Kāshānī could in principle have navigated them to the proper accuracy in 1424.

By 1596 Ludolph van Ceulen had 20 digits, and even more by the time he designed his tombstone: [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e8/Monument...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e8/Monument_voor_PI.jpg)

39 or 40 decimal places would have to wait until 1699.

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> > Professor Kahan was last seen ranting about benchmarks.

Incorrect. Scroll to the bottom of this page to find works dated 2016:

[https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~wkahan/](https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~wkahan/)

</comment><comment><USER24> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unum_(number_format)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unum_\(number_format\))

<comment><USER25> I hope my new Mill CPU will natively support Unums. And the whole thing should be memristor-based of course, running on carbon nanotube batteries.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> "There's even FYL2XP1, for all those occasions when you need to compute ylog2(x+1) on the double" When would I want to do that?

<comment><USER27> " The (ε+1) expression is commonly found in compound interest and annuity calculations. The result can be simply converted into a value in another logarithm base by including a scale factor in the ST(1) source operand." [https://www.felixcloutier.com/x86/fyl2xp1](https://www.felixcloutier.com/x86/fyl2xp1)</comment></comment>


Energy Ball - A Cheap And Efficient Wind Turbine - <AUTHOR> http://devicedaily.com/environment/energy-ball-a-cheap-and-efficient-wind-turbine.html <comment><USER2> Very similar article to what was posted yesterday: [http://www.inhabitat.com/2008/09/03/energy-ball-by-home- ener...](http://www.inhabitat.com/2008/09/03/energy-ball-by-home-energy/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Dup.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=296336></comment>


C# += operator guaranteed not to be atomic - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2014/08/14/10549885.aspx

<comment><USER2> It's easy to hand-wave this as being obviously true in a multi-threaded environment, but the strict left-to-right evaluation in C# means you might hit this even in single-threaded code. Interesting.</comment>


Wounds taking weeks to heal on skin disappear in a week inside the mouth (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/26/health/the-mouths-guard.html?ref=health <comment><USER2> From the article: _" "It is a known observation among the vulgar that the saliva is efficacious in cleansing foul wounds, and cicatrizing recent ones," wrote the 18th-century physician Herman Boerhaave. He was correct. Wounds that would take several weeks to heal on one's skin disappear in a week inside the mouth."_

But the author of the article (not Boerhaave) seems to be missing several points:

1) a wound inside the mouth is protected by tissue all about, and body temperature is maintained as well. An external wound is ~half open to the world and has no temperature maintenance on the open surface. Temperature is important for the immune system to perform.

b) concerning the phrase "saliva is efficacious in cleansing foul wounds": what Boerhaave is saying is that _licking_ one's wounds is efficacious. He's not merely speaking of saliva floating about a wound inside a closed mouth. The common phrase "to lick one's wounds" is not a false euphemism and is not limited to animals other than humans. Licking a wound can help heal it, sucking a wound can remove material that has been inserted into a wound and can quickly route fresh blood to a wound site, aiding healing and flushing out foreign material.

[https://www.quora.com/Does-licking-your-own-wound-help- heal-...](https://www.quora.com/Does-licking-your-own-wound-help-heal-it)

[https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/07/080723094841.h...](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/07/080723094841.htm)

[http://www.science20.com/news_releases/histatin_why_licking_...](http://www.science20.com/news_releases/histatin_why_licking_your_wounds_actually_works)

<comment><USER3> Placing an Activ Flex by Band-Aid on a skin cut seems to act as a true temporary replacement "second skin", and the cut heals far more rapidly then a regular band-aid. It heals in a similar time-scale as this article says is regular for the mouth.

I'm sure there are other brands or technologies that act similarly, but once I found this particular type of bandage I never had the thought of using anything else.

<comment><USER4> While true, the reason covered skin wounds heal faster is often due to the cover stops the drying out of the wound which slows healing.

<comment><USER3> Thank you. Though, I wasn't implying these bandages have spit in them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As someone who occasionally suffers from canker sores, I wish it were true that they'd heal faster than say a paper cut.

<comment><USER6> Consider food allergies -- I used to suffer from canker sores and then accidentally stopped drinking milk for 6 months (moved to a place where it wasn't available) and voila they disappeared!

(I didn't actually notice that they had disappeared until I returned to milk- land, and they came back. Took another month or so to establish the link clearly, since there was 3-4 day delay between drinking milk and appearance of canker sores. Then it took another couple of years to alter my habits ...)

<comment><USER7> It's not so much that you were drinking milk, as that you were drinking milk _to answer thirst_ —i.e., you were drinking milk when dehydrated. When you're dehydrated, the mucous membranes of your mouth and throat and sinuses become highly absorbent to any fluid that passes by. If there are things dissolved in solution in that fluid, they'll get absorbed into your mucous membranes too, and stick around for quite a while (either until you drink something else; until you exercise or take in a sauna, and sort of "sweat internally", purging said membranes; or until your lymphatic system slowly flushes the contents of your interstitial fluid out to your liver.)

To talk about canker sores, I first have to talk about dental plaque. Plaque appears when both of these conditions are true:

1\. your mucous membranes are saturated with nutrients (such as those in milk, or juice, or soda, or "saucy" foods) amenable to the growth of bacterial biofilms; and

2\. you are dehydrated enough—or under the chronic effects of diuretics such as caffeine—such that you don't consistently produce enough saliva to reach the mucous membrane and battle the nascent bacterial colony.

(That's right: plaque may live on your teeth, but the food those bacteria consume mostly isn't food stuck to/between your teeth; it's food "in" the mucous membranes of your lips. This is why the regrowth speed of plaque seems to have no correlation to how well you've brushed your teeth—the factor is how much food they have access to, and brushing your teeth has no effect on the nutritive content of your mucous membranes.)

Canker sores, then, happen when an established plaque (bacterial biofilm) colony is pressed into a dehydrated mucous membrane, further isolating it from the reach of saliva, for an extended period. Picture, say, a dirty tooth pressed against your lower/upper lip as you sleep, with your face laying to squeeze that part of your lip around the tooth, such that saliva can't get in.

So, ways to avoid the problem:

1\. brush your teeth at night (i.e. after you stop eating food.) It's more important than brushing in the morning, if you want to prevent canker sores.

2\. If you're dehydrated, _drink water_ or another substance that contains few bacteria-promoting nutrients (like unsweetened flavoured carbonated water, or even hard liquor.) If you can't—if only milk/juice/soda/beer/coolers are being served—then try to "chase" your drink with water as soon as possible. When you do, swish some of the water in your mouth as if it was a mouthwash. Ensure your mucous membranes themselves are getting hydrated.

3\. Get enough vitamin C. Subclinical hypovitaminosis C ("pre-scurvy") causes the linings of your mucous membranes to weaken, making it easier for rough spots on your teeth to cause micro-abrasions in them, which is where bacterial biofilms get in. But make sure you're not "getting enough vitamin C" by drinking orange juice when you're dehydrated!

<comment><USER8> This was incredible! Thanks for sharing. I wish they taught more of this kind of thing in grade school. Do you work in the dental field?

I've been reading about xylitol lately, a sweetener found in sugar free gum. From what I can tell, it could potentially help with cavities because it can help regenerate dentin. Not to mention gum seems to be generally helpful for removing waste from teeth. Is this something you've heard about?

<comment><USER7> Xylitol is great! I can't stop eating these -- [https://www.amazon.ca/Xyla- Brand-Xylitol-Raspberry-Candies/d...](https://www.amazon.ca/Xyla-Brand- Xylitol-Raspberry-Candies/dp/B007PT82KO). And, indeed, they help, rather than harm, your teeth, and discourage bacterial sinus infections.

Which reminds me of a rant:

You know what _doesn 't_ do either of those things? Any mouthwash you can buy in the mouthwash aisle.

Ask a dentist about mouthwash. They'll recommend it—but only because the alcohol temporarily shrinks your gums, which allows a toothbrush and/or floss to scrape plaque out that was embedded deeper between the gum and the tooth. Mouthwash _doesn 't_ kill bacteria. (Or, it does, but only for the 30 seconds it's in your mouth—meaning that you'll have just created a power-vacuum that other, worse bacteria from e.g. the back of your throat can intrude into. And now the alcohol has also _dried out_ your mucous membranes!)

If a dentist needs to _prescribe_ you a mouthwash, on the other hand—for example, to keep a wound inside your mouth clean post-surgery—they'll prescribe something with ingredients completely unlike that in "regular" mouthwash. Here's ([https://www.amazon.ca/Chlorhexidine-Gluconate-Antiseptic- Pep...](https://www.amazon.ca/Chlorhexidine-Gluconate-Antiseptic-Peppermint- Ecolab/dp/B01HNCQIYE/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1519799776&sr=8-1&keywords=chlorhexidine+gluconate)) an example of one.

The primary ingredient of "mouthwash that actually works" is _chlorhexidine_ —that's a chemical more commonly used as a surgical antiseptic (i.e. a "scrub" doctors will sanitize their hands with before putting them inside your body.) Conveniently, the fact that it's safe to touch your internal organs with, also means that it's safe to touch your mucous membranes with. (Though it's not entirely safe; it says stringently on such mouthwashes not to swallow any—but not because it'd harm _you_ per se, just that it'd likely kill your intestinal flora in much the same way an antibiotic would.)

Interestingly, chlorhexidine and xylitol work in similar ways—they're both things bacteria intentionally take up into themselves, that then destroy the bacteria from the inside. Xylitol just stalls the bacteria's metabolism, starving it to death; while, IIRC, chlorhexidine throws off the bacteria's osmotic regulation until it pops, much like highly-saline environments do—but without doing the same to animal cells. Unlike xylitol, though, chlorhexidine will stick around in the mucous membranes (until you do any of the stuff I mentioned in the previous post) for _eight hours_ , protecting you all the while. It's great. Everyone should use it, at least at night.

It's kind of weird, given all this, that it's not well-known, and not used in regular mouthwashes, no? Well, much like you just can't convince some people that a HWRNG-seeded CSPRNG is a valid source of OS entropy, you just can't convince some people that long-term chlorhexidine use wouldn't result in bacterial resistance—even though, in both cases, if there was any potential for it to fail in "normal" use (OS entropy; mouth-washing), it would have failed a long time ago in the "heavy-duty" use-case where it's already being used (cryptography; surgery.)

Or, to put that another way: if doctors will put chlorhexidine on their hands every day without worrying about growing MRSA under their fingernails, you can put it in your mouth every day without worrying about growing MRSA in your throat.

(Bonus pleasant fact: most prepared chlorhexidine mouthwash solutions are sweetened _with xylitol_. So you're getting a double-effect from that.)

On the other hand, prepared chlorhexidine mouthwash isn't very cheap (the one I linked above was $15 for a bottle that'll last less than a month), and preparing such a mouthwash yourself from concentrate is really a hassle (pure 2-4% chlorhexidine gluconate is much cheaper, but just diluting it with water/alcohol would create a solution that only retains potency for ~1 day; you'd need to add other chemicals to make it shelf-stable.)

But, if you can't (or just don't want to) get chlorhexidine mouthwash, I still wouldn't recommend using alcohol-based mouthwash. For battling gingivitis or a canker sore or whatever else, Xylitol actually works pretty well as a "quick- fix" alternative. That is, it works well _if_ you exploit the very property I mentioned before—increased mucous-membrane absorption and retention under dehydration. So, here's a "life hack":

• Go buy a box of xylitol sweetener packets (the kind you'd pour into coffee. You can probably find them sorted into the "nutrition products for diabetics" area of a drug store.)

• Before you sleep, brush your teeth, floss, swish with water, spit. And then...

• Dump one of those xylitol sweetener packets _directly into your mouth_ , not dissolved in liquid or anything. Spread it around; get it onto the insides of your lips, onto your teeth, etc.

• Let it absorb. Don't swallow it; just let it sit.

• Go to sleep, just like that.

 _That_ will protect your mouth, at least a little. Far more than Listerine ever would.

\---

Oh, and as a separate thought: if you have recurring canker sores, oral thrush, throat/sinus infections, ear infections, etc., despite good oral hygiene—there's likely a "hidden fortress" of bacterial biofilm somewhere out of reach, probably your maxillary sinuses or adenoids or Eustachian tubes. These areas are "safe" for bacteria because they're damp from breathing, but few actual fluids reach them.

Want a permanent solution? Flush them out. For the nose, I see people trying nasal lavage ("neti pots" et al), and for the ears, I see people going to an ENT to get microsuction. Neither of these are really needed. The biofilms aren't invincible; they're just _dry_ —too dry for your body's natural defences to loosen them. Drip a few drops of mineral oil down your nose/into your ears, once per day. After two days, you should start to feel the need to clear your sinus passages by snorting, inwards. Just keep doing that. And voila, the hidden fortress has been destroyed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wonder if the instinct to lick wounds is related to this.

<comment><USER10> It is. As is mothers kissing their children's boo-boos.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> And yet we still can't heal damaged gums easily. When somebody figures that out, they'll be rich.

<comment><USER12> You mean periodontics? I think the main problem there is horizontal bone loss. Periodontists can laser off unhealthy gum tissue, but once the jawbone has retreated, there's less scaffolding for healthy gum to regrow on, so it won't grow back to the same level you originally had.

Figure out how to reverse horizontal bone loss though, and you'll be rich!

<comment><USER13> I recently had a post for a dental implant installed and the doctor used ground cadaver (or maybe bovine) bone to help grow new bone around the post area. Is that related to what you are talking about?

<comment><USER12> According to the periodontist I spoke to, bone tissue grafts work for vertical bone loss (a dent in your bone in a small area) not horizontal bone loss (bone has been lost uniformly over a wide area).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> That had disappointingly little content. Mouth wounds heal faster because of background saliva, but why?

<comment><AUTHOR> Histatins: antimicrobial peptides with therapeutic potential

ABSTRACT

Histatins are a group of antimicrobial peptides, found in the saliva of man and some higher primates, which possess antifungal properties. Histatins bind to a receptor on the fungal cell membrane and enter the cytoplasm where they target the mitochondrion. They induce the non-lytic loss of ATP from actively respiring cells, which can induce cell death. In addition, they have been shown to disrupt the cell cycle and lead to the generation of reactive oxygen species. Their mode of action is distinct from those exhibited by the conventional azole and polyene drugs, hence histatins may have applications in controlling drug-resistant fungal infections. The possibility of utilising histatins for the control of fungal infections of the oral cavity is being actively pursued with the antifungal properties of topical histatin preparations and histatin-impregnated denture acrylic being evaluated. Initial clinical studies are encouraging, having demonstrated the safety and efficacy of histatin preparations in blocking the adherence of the yeast Candida albicans to denture acrylic, retarding plaque formation and reducing the severity of gingivitis. Histatins may represent a new generation of antimicrobial compounds for the treatment of oral fungal infections and have the advantage, compared with conventional antifungal agents, of being a normal component of human saliva with no apparent adverse effects on host tissues and having a mode of action distinct to azole and polyene antifungals.

Kavanagh, Kevin and Dowd, Susan (2004) Histatins: antimicrobial peptides with therapeutic potential. Journal of Pharmacy and Pharmacology, 56.

[http://eprints.maynoothuniversity.ie/354/1/R03014.pdf](http://eprints.maynoothuniversity.ie/354/1/R03014.pdf)

<comment><AUTHOR> Histatins are the major wound-closure stimulating factors in human saliva as identified in a cell culture assay

ABSTRACT

Wounds in the oral cavity heal much faster than skin lesions. Among other factors, saliva is generally assumed to be of relevance to this feature. Rodent saliva contains large amounts of growth factors such as epidermal growth factor (EGF) and nerve growth factor (NGF). In humans, however, the identity of the involved compounds has remained elusive, especially since EGF and NGF concentrations are ∼100,000 times lower than those in rodent saliva. Using an in vitro model for wound closure, we examined the properties of human saliva and the fractions that were obtained from saliva by high-performance liquid chromotography (HPLC) separation. We identified histatin 1 (Hst1) and histatin 2 (Hst2) as major wound-closing factors in human saliva. In contrast, the d-enantiomer of Hst2 did not induce wound closure, indicating stereospecific activation. Furthermore, histatins were actively internalized by epithelial cells and specifically used the extracellular signal-regulated kinases 1/2 (ERK1/2) pathway, thereby enhancing epithelial migration. This study demonstrates that members of the histatin family, which up to now were implicated in the antifungal weaponry of saliva, exert a novel function that likely is relevant for oral wound healing.

Oudhoff, M. J., Bolscher, J. G. M., Nazmi, K., Kalay, H., van 't Hof, W., Nieuw Amerongen, A. V., Veerman, E. C. I.

[http://www.fasebj.org/doi/pdf/10.1096/fj.08-112003](http://www.fasebj.org/doi/pdf/10.1096/fj.08-112003)

<comment><USER14> Thanks for the information! After reading the abstracts, I still have two question.

1\. It sounds like the mechanism for killing cells is very general. Why do histatins not attack somatic cells?

2\. Do mouth wounds simply heal faster because the mouth is cleaner?

<comment><USER15> The cells lining the entire upper GI are exposed to digestive enzymes, and are perforce replaced rapidly and constantly. Until bicarbonate rich bile is added to the mixture in the duodenum, those enzymes (and acids) eat your own cells too. Chemotherapy plays havoc with your GI tract because it selectively kills cells which rapidly divide.

As for histamines, mast cells are designed to respond to them and rupture as part of your inflammatory cycle. They release more cytokines, recruiting neutrophils and in general telling your immune system to attack.

<comment><USER16> Histatins, not histamines.

<comment><USER15> Oops, thanks for the correction!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratified_squamous_epithelium](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratified_squamous_epithelium)

Mouths heal faster because of the type of cells in there. Licking your wounds is a good way to get them infected. Use antibiotic creme and a bandage.

<comment><AUTHOR> As a physician, I demur: avoid anything but copious irrigation with water ± bandage.

<comment><USER18> If I'm reading that correctly, you're arguing against antibiotic or sterilizing agents in favor of extensive rinsing without only water.

It certainly wouldn't surprise me to hear that Neosporin et al are usually unnecessary, but are they actually bad? And if they're bad because antibiotic resistance, are things like hydrogen peroxide and rubbing alcohol also bad?

<comment><USER19> I think doc is saying, "Please don't make your wound worse with dubious remedies before you come in to show it to me."

Your mouth is full of bacteria, some of which could be harmful when introduced into an open wound. Your home first-aid kit is unlikely to be perfectly sterile, or as versatile as an entire medical clinic. If you are in the wilderness, and licking is the only means you have at your disposal to clean a wound, go for it. Your mouth is less dirty than actual dirt. Otherwise, use filtered, boiled water to wash, and a clean, sterile bandage to dress. [A single application of] antibiotic ointment is unlikely to hurt, but painting the surrounding skin with iodine would be better, and that kind of antimicrobial power isn't typically found at home, unless you have livestock and didn't care for the magnitude of your vet bills.

<comment><AUTHOR> Published August 2017

Povidone iodine in wound healing: A review of current concepts and practices

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Of the many antimicrobial agents available, iodophore-based formulations such as povidone iodine have remained popular after decades of use for antisepsis and wound healing applications due to their favorable efficacy and tolerability. Povidone iodine's broad spectrum of activity, ability to penetrate biofilms, lack of associated resistance, anti- inflammatory properties, low cytotoxicity and good tolerability have been cited as important factors, and no negative effect on wound healing has been observed in clinical practice. Over the past few decades, numerous reports on the use of povidone iodine have been published, however, many of these studies are of differing design, endpoints, and quality. More recent data clearly supports its use in wound healing.

METHODS: Based on data collected through PubMed using specified search criteria based on above topics and clinical experience of the authors, this article will review preclinical and clinical safety and efficacy data on the use of povidone iodine in wound healing and its implications for the control of infection and inflammation, together with the authors' advice for the successful treatment of acute and chronic wounds.

RESULTS AND CONCLUSION: Povidone iodine has many characteristics that position it extraordinarily well for wound healing, including its broad antimicrobial spectrum, lack of resistance, efficacy against biofilms, good tolerability and its effect on excessive inflammation. Due to its rapid, potent, broad-spectrum antimicrobial properties, and favorable risk/benefit profile, povidone iodine is expected to remain a highly effective treatment for acute and chronic wounds in the foreseeable future.

Bigliardi PL, Alsagoff SAL, El-Kafrawi HY, Pyon JK, Wa CTC, Villa MA.

Int J Surg. 2017 Aug;44:260-268. doi: 10.1016/j.ijsu.2017.06.073. Epub June 23 2017.

[http://www.journal- surgery.net/article/S1743-9191(17)30536-8...](http://www.journal- surgery.net/article/S1743-9191\(17\)30536-8/fulltext)

<comment><USER19> [citation appreciated]

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> [https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7yux9i/e...](https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7yux9i/eli5_how_do_cuts_on_the_inside_of_your_mouth_on/)

</comment><comment><USER21> Thats an example of good writing imo. Short and concise.

</comment><comment><USER22> Weird to know that this is not common knowledge. I have known since I was a kid that applying saliva on a fresh wound helps recover it faster

</comment><comment><USER23> I always assumed it was because the environment is kept moist. Which is why you bandage wounds, and not let them scab over.

<comment><USER24> You bandage wounds to keep out bacteria, and it is your skin having to fight off less infections that make it heal faster. Consider that Neosporin,aka generic triple antibiotic ointment, does increase the speed of external wound healing. It does this because of its antibiotic properties. Nothing to do with moisture far as I know, where did you get that notion?

<comment><USER23> The proof that moist wounds heal faster than dry wounds came back in 1962, thanks to Dr. George D. Winter and his landmark paper, "Formation Of The Scab And The Rate Of Epithelialization Of Superficial Wounds In The Skin Of The Young Domestic Pig"1\. His research showed that, contrary to the conventional wisdom at the time that wounds should be allowed to dry out and form scabs to promote healing, wounds instead heal faster if kept moist. Winter's work began the evolution of modern wound dressings that promote moist wound healing.Specifically, cell growth needs moisture and the main goal of moist wound therapy is to create and maintain these optimal moist conditions. Cells can grow, divide and migrate at an increased rate to enhance the formation of new tissue. During this phase of wound healing, an aqueous medium with several nutrients and vitamins is essential for cell metabolism and growth.

A study published in the Annals of Plastic Surgery aimed to determine the effects of moist wound care. Researchers used a porcine wound model, to compare wet conditions using saline, moist conditions using hydrocolloid dressings and dry conditions using sterile gauze. The scientists found an increase in the presence of liquids led to faster healing (wet wounds healed after six days, while moist ones took seven days and dry wounds took eight). Additionally, moist and wet wound care led to less necrosis and inflammation as well as higher quality in the newly regenerated epidermis.

[http://www.woundsource.com/blog/clearing-air-about-moist- vs-...](http://www.woundsource.com/blog/clearing-air-about-moist-vs-dry-wound- healing)

[https://www.sunoven.com/how-to-heal-open-wounds- faster/](https://www.sunoven.com/how-to-heal-open-wounds-faster/)

[https://int.hansaplast.com/advisor/health-and- protection/moi...](https://int.hansaplast.com/advisor/health-and- protection/moist-wound-healing)

[https://www.advancedtissue.com/debunking-wound-cares- biggest...](https://www.advancedtissue.com/debunking-wound-cares-biggest- myth/)

<comment><USER25> Are dry wounds are less likely to be infected than wet wounds? A wet wound that gets infected can take more time to heal than dry wounds that doesn't?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> try a dip of "Policresulen"

your body will 'straighten out' due to pain, but wounds usually takes 2~3 days to heal

</comment><comment><USER27> Mary Roach. Her books are quite fun to read.

The titles are good too.

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers

Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex

</comment><comment><USER28> (2013)

<comment><USER29> Thanks! Updated.</comment></comment>


'Monolith' Object on Mars? You Could Call It That  - <AUTHOR> http://www.space.com/15244-monolith-mars-2001-space-odyssey.html <comment><USER2> From the article: "When your resolution is too low to fully resolve an object, it tends to look rectangular because the pixels in the image are squares. Any curve will look like a series of straight lines if you reduce your resolution enough."

Like the "face," this is most likely the combination of the right angle and shadowing, low resolution, and our hopes of finding something earth-shattering on an alien planet.

</comment><comment><USER3> Tl;dr: it's a smallish squarish rock.

There _is_ , however, a genuinely impressive monolith on Mars' moon Phobos. It's about the size of a 30-story building.

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

</comment><comment><USER4> TLDR it's a rock.

<comment> excuse-me Really? What a surprise

</comment></comment><comment> excuse-me A Monolith on Mars?

Damn Fedex - it was supposed to be delivered to Jupiter.</comment>


High-Speed Traders Profit at Expense of Ordinary Investors, a Study Says - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/04/business/high-speed-trades-hurt-investors-a-study-says.html?hp&pagewanted=all&_r=0

<comment><AUTHOR> Several interesting points here:

\+ there are different types of high-frequency traders, some of which are more aggressive in initiating trades and some of which are passive, simply taking the other side of existing offers in the market.

\+ that more aggressive traders accounted for the largest share of trading volume and made the biggest profits. The most aggressive scored an average profit of $1.92 for every futures contract they traded with big institutional investors, and made an average $3.49 with a smaller, retail investor.

\+ Passive traders, on the other hand, saw a small loss on each contract traded with institutional investors, but they made a bigger profit against retail investors, of $5.05 a contract.

\+ The average aggressive high-speed trader made a daily profit of $45,267 in a month in 2010 analyzed by the study.

\+ "We're not estimating," he [the study author] said. "Our data is excellent."</comment>


Diversity and Inclusion at Patreon - <AUTHOR> https://patreonhq.com/diversity-and-inclusion-at-patreon-9d835c774db5 <comment><USER2> It'd be interesting to see Google do this as well (50% women, 50% minorities by 2020).</comment>


Sweden just claimed the world's second-largest Wikipedia - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2014/08/01/sweden-of-all-places-just-claimed-the-worlds-second-largest-wikipedia/ <comment><USER2> I'm not sure I'd say it's the 2nd-largest. Second-most articles, yes, which is a different metric. Total _size_ of an encyclopedia has to include not only the number of headings, but how much text is under them! For traditional paper encyclopedias, something like word-count is typically used, though that is tricky to use across languages, since languages have different notions of what constitutes a word (and different information rates, if you want to get into that). Something like "compressed size of the database" might be an approximation for encyclopedia size that normalizes for different languages' use of words & UTF-8 bytes.

<comment><USER3> I agree, I'm a swede myself but almost always use the English version because the Swedish articles usually contains very little information.

<comment><USER4> It's exactly the same thing for me in Dutch. There are a lot of articles, sure, but the content is woeful. And there aren't even bots that artificially inflate the numbers there.

<comment><USER5> I agree for general articles, but for an article that has regional specificity, I'll look up the article in the local language and use an online translator.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, I do that with French and German especially. For very well-known people and places, the English article is usually good, but if you want something only moderately known, like a French writer who is historically important, but not Voltaire-level famous, there's a good chance the other (in this case French) article will be more complete. Also true for Japanese Wikipedia articles on Japanese people and places. But Google-translated Japanese->English is hard to read, so I unfortunately rarely consult those.

On the other hand, some of the smaller-language Wikipedias can be quite one- sided and nationalist when it comes to local topics, especially disputed history.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The number of articles is a terrible metric of the quantity of content of a Wikipedia. A far better way to measure this is to look at the size of the data dumps of [http://download.wikimedia.org](http://download.wikimedia.org) (compressed so as to normalize differences in information density between languages).

(Shameless plug: I tried to do that three years ago [http://a3nm.net/blog/wikimedia_projects_by_size.html](http://a3nm.net/blog/wikimedia_projects_by_size.html) \-- it could probably be done again today, though the code would probably need to be refreshed a bit.)

</comment><comment><USER7> Before Wikipedia there was a Swedish collaborative encyclopedia called susning.nu [1]. It eventually shut down due to problems with vandalism and in the meantime sv.wikipedia had grown larger. I suspect a lot of articles were migrated to wiki from susning, or at the very least the community did. Interestingly, susning roughly translates to grasp, as in a short format understanding.

"Because of this, Susning grew and became Sweden's biggest and the world's next biggest wiki." [1]

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susning.nu](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susning.nu)

<comment><USER8> I remember we relied a lot on it in the early 2000's, as Wikipedia at that time contained more general information, and susning.nu was useful for more local (to Sweden at least) information.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> > And it certainly doesn't know that there are only 9 million people around to > read its output, versus the 75 million who speak French, or the 78 million > who speak German.

Minor nitpick: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_native_speakers)

FR: 74m

DE: 89m

That's assuming Wiki P is correct-ish and that page is not some Teuto[+]-bot generated nonsense

[+] [https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:English_nationality_...](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:English_nationality_prefixes)

<comment><USER10> There are over 80m people living in Germany which is already more than 78m, and this is totally ignoring German speakers in Austria, Switzerland, Belgium, Denmark, Italy and Poland. I don't know how they came to those numbers.

<comment> barry-cotter You forgot France, Lichtenstein and Namibia.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Why actually spend all this effort on localized Wikipedia articles? Like someone commented, many people read the English Wikipedia because it contains more info. At least I do, I know most peers do, and a Swedish commenter (fiskpinne) just mentioned it. Sure, local articles are good to have for many basic subjects, but when you really want to get into something you probably know English.

People shouldn't want to read articles like the one about cryptography (just picking something technical at random) in a non-English language beyond what the word means and a general overview. There are so many English resources and so many people able to read English if you'd contribute resources, learning it should be encouraged rather than translating everything just because we can.

<comment><USER12> >Why actually spend all this effort on localized Wikipedia articles?

Because most people can't read English.

If the world's best encyclopaedia was only available in Swahili, would you still be asking "Why actually spend all this effort on localised articles?", assuming of course that you're not a Swahili speaker.

<comment><USER11> If almost everyone in the developed world spoke Swahili, it seems pretty reasonable to say that.

<comment><USER13> What? Wikipedia is for everyone. Most of the worlds population does not speak english.

As a swede I use both swedish and english Wikipedia. It depends on what I'm looking at. Swedish Wikipedia contains more in depth content on a lot of topics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Why is this attributed to "Sweden" rather than to "Swedes" or "Swedish speakers"?

* Swedish is the first language of about 5% of the population of Finland

* Swedish is supposedly mutually comprehensible with Norwegian

* Many minority languages are governmentally recognized and spoken by significant minorities in Sweden, including Saami and Finnish

There should be name for this fallacy of equating language and nationality.

(edit: newlines)

</comment><comment><USER15> This article poses a real question whether computer generated articles are suitable for encyclopedia consumed by humans.

Speaking of this, I would love to see Wikipedia in machine-readable language. Something like CYC project.

Edit: I know of WikiData, but there should be an unstructured analog to that.

<comment><USER16> As long as the content of those articles is relevant and accurate, I don't see how that would impact on the suitability of the articles in question.

Does it really matter if a bot or a human has created an article as long as it contains facts and not thorough analysis?

Disclaimer: I haven't read any of the bot generated articles (at least, I don't think so).

<comment><USER15> I agree with your point. It's generally better to have some article that no article. But Wikipedia is also supposed to be readable by humans, to provide insight and understanding. I am not sure that mere formatted collection of data, as opposed to a real article, does that. And I believe there are many Wikipedia editors who feel the same.

Though, wouldn't it be more efficient to put the data into some machine readable form, if they were already processed by the machines anyway? This would then allow anybody to create algorithm to extract information (meaning) from the data.

So I think there are also good reasons to keep the human and machine created articles separate.

<comment><USER17> It's not so much a formatted collection of data as it is like an excerpt from an encyclopedia. It's sparse and the articles are pretty similar to each other but it has proper sources, and someone might actually find the information useful. And it could serve as a starting point to improve by some enterprising Swedish biologist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Of course it is, because it is full of GARBAGE made by this guy

[http://online.wsj.com/articles/for-this- author-10-000-wikipe...](http://online.wsj.com/articles/for-this- author-10-000-wikipedia-articles-is-a-good-days-work-1405305001)

His stupid bot pollutes wiki with useless crap like this:

[https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lepechiniella_persica](https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lepechiniella_persica)

<comment><USER19> Hehe, that guy was my physics professor. He is a genious. Had a majestic beard as well. His stories and teaching methods reminded me of Carl Sagans style.

But his bot is quite annoying yes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> The first my reaction is to say it's pretty cool or something, but actually it isn't if I look at it more closely. You see, I don't really care about lots of information gathered on the website with one domain. In fact, ideally I would wish for exactly the opposite: if some information can be easily classified, then it should. What I mean is that adding every new article to wikipedia has its own drawbacks as well as value. Recently I was thinking about how cool it would be to have wikipedia accessible offline on some portable device — and it's nothing new, I remember edited versions of wikipedia for mobile devices before smartphones become popular, but this sort of things isn't very useful in many ways. On the other hand, realistically I would assume that all content I will need to look up in my portable wiki easily fits on modern storage cards even with some media-data. Even more than that: many articles become useless to me if images are removed. The only real problem is that I don't know what I _will_ look up and it's very hard to define what's useful.

Anyway, perfect layout for animal articles is significantly different from perfect layout for math articles, so instead of populating wikipedia with rather obscure non-verified by humans information the _really_ useful work would be making easy-to-use thematic resources as the existing ones made by academic people usually are totally unusable. That's where structured information should go in the first place.

However bots on wikipedia often do some useful work, what really makes wikipedia useful is mindful human work. Media-wiki engine isn't perfect for structuring information and is useful specifically for free-form, unstructured data populated by humans. I don't really see what is the use of populating wikipedia with thousands of auto-generated texts.

</comment><comment><USER21> What a dreadful chart

<comment><USER22> When a chart is harder to interpret than a simple table with the same information, you know something went wrong. Or at least you should.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> So they're fine with a bot filling in obscure information that no person decided was worthwhile to add manually, but if you add something manually it can easily be deemed too obscure to be useful? In a strange way, this policy is a logical extension of the actual (not the claimed) nature of deletionism.

</comment><comment><USER24> Likely exclusively due to this guy:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8033600](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8033600)

Who runs a bot that makes millions of shitty stub articles.

<comment><USER25> Which is most of what this article is about...

<comment><USER24> I thought it was fitting to link to the HN discussion, but actually linked it before reading TFA. Shame on me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Isn't it about quality, not quantity?)

</comment><comment><USER27> I wonder if there is an alternative to Wikipedia that doesn't suffer from the same insular type of "Self-Appointed Guardians of the Galaxy"?

I mean one with a more sophisticated system for decision making rather than just bureaucracy, fiefdom, politics, and bribery?

<comment><USER28> If you are looking for a crowdsourced news archive and biography information (which accounts for around half of Wikipedia's pages) you can check out my site, Newslines [1], which fixes many of Wikipedia's software, data presentation, and policy issues. We do this by 1) having a simplified data structure based on news events 2) having a non-combative editorial approval system and 3) paying our writers to post.

[1] [http://newslines.org/](http://newslines.org/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> If they want to get past the English side they can get a good start by translating all the anime and music related pages, what good are three million or more articles in english when a good number are about individual songs or anime characters?

</comment><comment><USER30> "Wikipedia is written by affluent white nerds, in languages only affluent white nerds know"

so his solution to this problem was to expand the volume of content for a language spoken almost exclusively by white nerdy people

</comment><comment><USER31> And the main page of Wikipedia is not updated, but: [https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias](https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias)

<comment><USER32> It is now, that's what makes it so awesome!</comment></comment>


Analyse Asia 36: Venture Capital Asia with Michael Dempsey of CB Insights - <AUTHOR> http://analyse.asia/2015/06/08/episode-36-venture-capital-asia-with-michael-dempsey-of-cb-insights/ <comment><AUTHOR> Synopsis: With Michael Dempsey from CB Insights, we decipher the trends that are shaping venture capital investments across Asia for 2014 and look at the current movement this year. We also discussed the verticals: ecommerce and on demand mobile apps; the major players: Tiger Global, Sequoia and Softbank and the impact of Rocket Internet in the Asia market. Last but not least, Michael provided the perspective of how the investors in US are viewing Asia as an opportunity.</comment>


Show HN: I made a tool to turn pull requests into real time presentation - <AUTHOR> https://vym.io <comment><USER2> I think this is _could_ be a great idea, but the landing page is doing too much "telling" and not enough "showing". I'd really need to see an example of a PR & it's presentation before I'd be sufficiently motivated to try it.

In addition to the end result, showing the process of getting there helps to not only show off the product, but gives a concrete answer to the question of "how will I use this thing?". Having a page that shows the steps of going from a "plain" PR to a finished presentation with GIF screen captures and text would be my personal ideal format.

Anyways, very cool idea, hope to see more of it!

<comment><AUTHOR> GIF sounds like an economical way to show how product works. It's fast and to the point. Thanks for the idea.

<comment><AUTHOR> just added some demo on the landing page

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I made this tool based on my experience as a web developer intern.

Occasionally someone would try to explain the PR by presenting it, but it's awkward to look at television or shared screen; I'd look at my own screen when reading code. Plus files in PR are confusing because they can't be rearranged.

This is my solution: create a slide deck based on PR that you can present in real time by sharing a URL.

</comment><comment><USER3> Add an example of the product on the page</comment>


GHC 7.8 branch is created - <AUTHOR> http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2014-January/003896.html Release notes for version 7.8.1:<p>http://jsfiddle.net/zmV9D/embedded/result/ <comment><AUTHOR> Release notes for version 7.8.1

[http://jsfiddle.net/zmV9D/embedded/result/](http://jsfiddle.net/zmV9D/embedded/result/)

(ghc 7.8 is not yet released, just the branch to mop up any fixes is created)</comment>


I wrote Bitbucket.org, a Mercurial hosting site. Doesn't seem to get much fuzz - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/codeprojects/comments/78ref/ask_reddit_show_off_your_work_what_is_your/c05zmw7/ <comment><USER2> Maybe add [2009] to the title.

</comment><comment><USER3> how long did it take to become popular?</comment>


China to Set Up 'Security Offices' Inside Internet Companies - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-08-05/china-to-set-up-security-offices-inside-internet-companies <comment><USER2> I guess they are finally catching up to the U.S.

Edit: pre-preemptively editing because the original, though I believe correct, was too glib and snarky.

Three Letter Agencies in the U.S. have long had commercial "partnerships"[0] with private companies including internet and telecom companies. As has come to light in the past couple years, these partnerships were not "just" about securing national interests and infrastructure.

[0][https://www.nsa.gov/business/programs/ncsc.shtml](https://www.nsa.gov/business/programs/ncsc.shtml)

<comment><USER3> Did you really equate communist forced police presence with voluntary and beneficial government partnerships with the private sector in the US? The Internet exists _because_ of the US Government (DARPA) and US taxpayer; not under its direct police control.

<comment><USER4> How about the requirement that foreign carriers have US citizens in US offices at the point of interconnect with the US.

I also believe there are reporting oddities in the role too, but I can't find the reference to it anymore.

The result is that same as China, the difference is who's paying the person's salary.

Edit [information below]:

[1] (13) Carriers shall comply with the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), see 47 C.F.R. §§ 1.20000 et seq. Page 5 of 6 1.20000 et seq.

[2] (14) Every carrier must designate an agent for service in the District of Columbia. See 47 U.S.C. § 413, 47 C.F.R. §§ 1.47(h), 64.1195.

[3] [https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DA-15-348A1.pd...](https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DA-15-348A1.pdf)

Not that ominous, just normal legal intercept. The US has had this requirement for a long time.

<comment><USER5> It's not the same as China. China is putting _police_ in _local_ (Chinese) companies with Chinese citizens in Chinese companies. That's kind of different than requiring a _citizen_ in the office of a _foreign_ company doing business locally.

I expect that the intent is different, although I don't know US law. The Chinese intent is to (forcibly?) prevent unwanted communication. I doubt that is the intent of the US law.

<comment><USER4> Actually, CALEA [2] is a requirement for all US carriers (ISPs/telcos), it's just an extra requirement on anyone peering with a US firm. It's also been around since 1994.

CALEA intercepts are implemented through automated systems, the judge signs a warrant, it's entered into a computer and the wiretaps are done automatically, with the traffic routed to the requesting agency's systems.

In China, they probably noticed that they don't have a legal intercept facility built in, and don't want to spend the time to negotiate with all of the interested parties. So, they put a person on site.

The threat and the outcome is the same. If you don't provide legal intercept, you're going to get locked up.

For an example of what level of access these systems provide, a Greek carrier was hacked through theirs - the hacker(s) turned it on and used it to listen in on the Prime Minister's phone calls[1].

I'm not saying that the Chinese are doing the right thing, just that it's largely equivalent to what happens here.

[1] [http://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/security/the-athens- affair](http://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/security/the-athens-affair)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Assistance_for_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Assistance_for_Law_Enforcement_Act)

<comment><USER6> Intercepts with warrants is really, really different than giving unaccountable thought police a desk in the news room. Equating these things is silly and borderline offensive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> At least they're open and honest about it.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A)

<comment><USER8> Interesting map seems to indicate NSA is spying domestically as much as they spy on China

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> China seems to be the crucible of some remarkable scary political and social innovation. I don't know what is more likely to happen: police stationed within a office will be ridiculously corrupt or it will totally kill any innovation or risk taking within the company.

<comment><USER9> It will certainly have a 'chilling effect' if there ever was. China is between a rock and a hard place. Either they're going to have to open up completely (which will result in a democracy and obliteration the group that has been running the country for decades) or they're going to have to try to contain the genie. They're obviously trying to do the latter but it will hurt them economically in the longer run. As long as there is visible progress my guess is the current batch of leaders will do just fine, as soon as progress stagnates there may be a more dramatic change.

<comment><USER10> I disagree, though I'm not particularly pleased about it.

I think 25 years ago, it seemed that choice existed. You could do liberal, capitalist democracy following the examples of Western Europe, Japan & the US. The other hand was a hodgepodge of failure, either state failure or economic failure. Most notably was the failed soviet bloc but also China, India & South America (right and left). All or nothing. Revolution or stagnation. Free your people or live in culturaly stagnant, poverty stricken destitute with .

The idea that political freedoms necessary for democracy are intertwined with the economic freedoms necessary for capitalism had a lot of traction. But, with the examples of the last generation (positive and negative) I think that is no longer conventional wisdom. China's been very successful at growing economically by hand selecting policies and freedoms they want and keeping other out. You could call it non-fundamentalist or you could call it unprincipled depending on your biases and judgements, but it's hard to ignore it.

China has been selectively liberalizing economically, socially and (to a lesser extent) politically. It doesn't see how you could argue that a sudden democratization in 1980 or 1990 would have gotten them further along.

The reality is that the choices are nowhere near black and white. There is such a thing as a soft authoritarian, single party, free market state. They are doing it.

Its nice to think that liberal democracy and prosperity are intertwined because I like democracy. But, I think democracy must be justified on its own merits. The conic advantages…. They're debatable.

<comment><USER9> China is being run by a cabal of scared, mostly old (average age is 64, _one_ woman in the politbureau) men. They're using every trick in the book to hold on to their power while trying to appease the crowds with shiny new trinkets. The question is if they can manage to consolidate before the crowds realize they don't actually need the old men and that the old men are _still_ the biggest brake on their development.

That's why you get things like what the article discusses and why you get the great firewall. It's all about crowd control on a very large scale and it is driven by fear of what that crowd could do once it realizes there are no chains.

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

<comment><USER11> > ____ is being run by a cabal of scared, mostly 60-year old men. They're > using every trick in the book to hold on to their power while trying to > appease the crowds with shiny new trinkets.

You could literally be describing any country on earth with that.

<comment><USER9> No, you definitely couldn't.

For instance, NL has a 10/5 split m/f and the average age of the ministers is 52.

[https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kabinet- Rutte_II#Ministers](https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kabinet-Rutte_II#Ministers)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> A very sad thing. I don't think the early hackers writing GPL code envisioned this turn of events.

Most of those Internet companies would not exist if it weren't for the free and open source software that they run on. Instead of 'liberating' people and bringing them 'freedom', the free sofware has the undesired effect of creating the Supreme Big Brother.

We are "Hacker news" here, we should be very worried about this - the early hacker's visions are being killed by the hour.

How can we win back the dream ?

<comment><USER13> The only thing free software is intended to liberate people from is closed- source binaries and proprietary code.

If governments choose to use GPL code to spy on and oppress their people, that's perfectly within the spirit of free software, as long as they respect the users' freedoms regarding the source code while doing so.

<comment><USER12> Stallman's book on my book shelf is called "Free Software, Free Society" and I believe the spirit of GPL goes beyond just software.

It's the idea that sharing and collaboration will bring us more freedom - freedom from opressors or owners of any kind, who can control our lives for their benefit.

I believe this to be the deeper philosophical implication of free and open source software. It's the dream of a better, freer, smarter society.

So I don't think government spying is perfectly in the spirit of free software, it's exactly opposite to it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is all a bid to control information.

We should airdrop millions of copies of a Chinese translation of "Fahrenheit 451" all over China...

[http://ebookbees.com/fahrenheit-451-free- ebook/](http://ebookbees.com/fahrenheit-451-free-ebook/)

</comment><comment><USER15> "demonstrate positive energy in purifying cyberspace"

I think I'm going to have that put on t-shirt.

</comment><comment><USER16> Partnerships with major Chinese companies now introduces new counterparty risk if that relationship can be leveraged as a back door. Interesting to see how that effects large U.S. Companies working in China. Long term, this can't be good for the country.

</comment><comment><USER17> Ministry Of Truth, Hard at it again

</comment><comment><USER18> What will the cops do? Shoot at cybercriminals?

<comment><USER19> The "cops" will make sure that all the appropriate filters and processes are in place for the government to monitor its own citizens.

They are there to enforce regulation on the companies, not on "cybercriminals." Or to put it another way, operating an Internet company that fails to acts as a de-facto arm of the state's surveillance and culture- control policy is itself a cyber-crime.

<comment><USER20> Also, people who are that close to the pipe are probably the ones most likely to know how to circumvent their rules, so a bit of extra monitoring on their day-to-day surely won't hurt.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> When the US gets close to election time and there is at least the chance of a conservative win in the White House; the Chinese government gets worried and defensive. They will probably remove the police after a couple of years and the new president (conservative or liberal) has settled in.

<comment><USER21> The same way the Great Firewall went down during Clinton or Obama? Come on, don't be naive. This is the status quo in China and has NOTHING to do with the USA. Stop blaming the failings of other nations on the US.</comment></comment>