Taleb: The future will not be cool - mck- http://www.salon.com/2012/12/01/nassim_nicholas_taleb_the_future_will_not_be_cool/ <comment><USER4> I was going to say something to the effect of "Who is this guy and why do we care what he thinks? He seems like an idiot." But it turns out that he's actually a respected thinker and has published some respected books so maybe I'm not allowed to say that.

However, I still think this particular essay is insulting drivel. Taleb uses a lot of 10 dollar words to mast his 10 cent thoughts. He wears his vocabulary and enculturation on his sleeve like a badge so that he can pour scorn on _neophiles_ and other people he doesn't like. Now, this may merely be the predjudice of an "autistic" technophile, but I prefer reasoned arguments to intellectual muscle flexing.

He makes a few good points. As the old saying goes: "The more things change the more they stay the same." Some things about society will possibly never change. But his actual argument is so vapid: We still use glasses to hold liquids that we intend to drink? Just like the Mesopotamians? No kidding. But chances are that glass he was drinking out of was manufactured in China hundreds of miles away with techniques wholly unavailable to Mesopotamia and shipped across a distance, inconcievable to a Mesopotamian, and at a price, proportionally less that the price of the rudimentary earthenware mug that a Mesopotamian would use.

Taleb accuses technophiles of not studying history, but I _have_ studied history, and the world _has_ changed, quite a bit.

<comment><USER5> You spend a lot of time insulting Taleb, and relatively little time actually addressing the problems with his arguments.

<comment><USER6> It's a 50/50 split. In an article, 5/95 would suffice? Must a retort require so much more?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I always find these sorts of essays curious, here is a guy who is eating lamb and noting that the fork is an old invention. Except that the lamb he is eating is probably from New Zealand, a country that is mesopotamian ancestors couldn't even imagine existed, much less imagine trading with. He might as well remark that his sperm is using the same sort of gamete structure that was fashionable in the neolithic period. _That isn't the point._

The future is going to be new, and different, and it is hard to predict. Your phone (for some definition of phone) can give you answer to nearly any fact based question you can imagine. Right now, in under 500 mSec. The future doesn't look different when its entered into gradually, it looks hugely different when it is punctuated.

So if Taleb really wanted to 'check' on his futurist mantra, he should pick a number, 10 years, 25 years, 50 years. And then 'spend a day' in that time by removing everything in his possessions, environment, and activities that were not created or possible at that previous time.

I would predict that its a matter of opinion as to whether the future is or is not 'cool', most people would agree that the past _sucks_. :-)

<comment><USER5> I think you're missing the point, but also I admit I'm not entirely sure what you're trying to say. So please forgive me if I get it wrong.

The point is not that the future will be like the past, or that things which exist now simply should not. It's that in Taleb's future, technologists will have recognized that technology should eliminate bullshit (think about the toilet and sewers, some of the best technology that could ever exist!) and make it easier to live a life full of the basic good parts of being human: companionship/sex, food, discovery and knowledge. So the smartphone is not incongruous with his vision of the future at all. It enables you to seek all of those things, and adds relatively little in terms of shitty things (I mean, you have to pay for it and keep it charged, but beyond that it doesn't add a lot hardship.)

When he talks about the lack of literacy in technology circles, I believe he's thinking of literature as a tool for looking at human motivations. So, his theory is that if technologists were to read literature (or were of a mindset to be already interested in literature), they would recognize these motivations, and it would provide a path for changing their focus from stupid social widgets to something that will actually create the future.

<comment><USER8> But his claim, as stated by his title, was that the "The future will not be cool." If the author is allowed to reach this conclusion by saying "all present and future gadgets are just boring solutions to ancient problems" then his claim is true but basically tautological.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Taleb of Black Swans fame says that predictions of future technology dont pan out, flying cars for example. He says that the predictable new technology is a replacement of older less capable or less adapted technology. I suppose your could have predicted cell phones, having see analog wireless phones.

What he doesnt say in this book excerpt is that truly disruptive technology is usually around in the labs or experimental form 15 or so years before its disruptive phase. Could you have predicted today's internet from the early ARPANET? I was there and I didnt. Or the iPad from the integrated circuit? Good grief, Ted Nelson demoed Xanadu of a group of us in the 1980's and I didnt see the social implications of the Web.

<comment><USER10> Has technology really made your life significantly better?

How many of us still get in cars and commute to work, sit in an office, as we are monitored by our boss, drive home through some awful commute. Then eat some processed food because we didn't have time to go to the grocery store and get some fresh food. I'm sure there are plenty on this site who telecommute and bike, but that's not the norm.

A lot of what is If talked about on this site is really not a big deal: some new library to make some flashy display; or some new iphone/app thingy; or some new way to get eyeballs to look at a web page.

<comment><USER11> I'd say vaccines and antibiotics have made my life vastly better.

Let's compare: WW2 was the worst war we've ever had; it killed about 60 million people, or about 2% of the world population.

The Spanish Flu in 1918 killed 3%. Smallpox killed 3-500 million people in the 20th century, or about 5-8x as many as WW2.

Or how about the Black Death a few centuries before? _Half_ the European population gone. It wiped out entire Asian cities too.

Vaccines and antibiotics are miracles we take for granted; our ancestors would think us mad.

<comment><USER12> > Vaccines and antibiotics are miracles we take for granted; our ancestors > would think us mad.

And we _damn need to_ speed up the development, as antibiotics are starting to fail due to their overuse. We take the life without major pandemics for granted, but we will get a cold wake-up soon if we don't fight to maintain this.

<comment><USER13> Wait; have you been reading the news? Several epidemics have swept the globe in recent years already. Did somebody wake up, and I missed it?

<comment><USER12> I meant serious pandemics like the ones dmpk2k mentioned. Most of the first worlders didn't fear any serious contagion for decades.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is, surprisingly, a warning for entrepreneurs worldwide. You should read it.

"After I left finance, I started attending some of the fashionable conferences attended by he new class of technology intellectuals. I was initially exhilarated to see them wearing no ties, as I used to live among tie-wearing abhorred bankers."

"But these conferences felt depressing. It took a while for me to realize the reason: a profound lack of elegance."

Take its message as a humbling lesson: "Technology is at its best when it is invisible."

<comment><USER15> I moved back into a conservative industry and have started wearing a jacket and tie. Honestly, I quite like it. It's a couple hundred bucks worth of clothing to have the image of being "serious" about my job, and to get the benefit of the doubt in all sorts of social interactions. With the rewards considered, it's extremely cheap.

I don't know that I'll continue to wear a tie for the rest of my life, and I certainly won't expect other people to do so when I become a "higher-up", but I'm not going to dress like a college student for work anymore, no matter what I do. When you go to work the unfortunate reality is that you need to subtly tell other people what they think of you, and dressing well is one of the most time- and energy-efficient ways to do it.

<comment><USER14> I guess we, in our youthful arrogance, dismiss our seniors as enterprise relics of a lost age, without considering what led them to that place before. Things don't seem to change that much, after all. Sadly. Which is coincidentally the theme of this article.

<comment><USER16> What's sad is the conformist turn this thread has taken. What happened to the rebelious spirit of the internet generation? People shouldn't make judgments based on somebody's clothing. We are supposed to be beyond the point where one needs to be "pleasurable to everyone" in order to be respected. Also, if anything, shirt-and-tie clothing is quite impractical, how about putting some brains to work to come up with self-cleaning/self-healing clothes?

Another thing: by creating a strong impression of seriousness, jacket-and-tie creates a false , narcissistic sense of self-worth that can limit the true drive to succeed and that's a sad, sad thing when it happens. It's just an appearance after all.

Taleb may have been referring to certain "conference-whores" [1] who dress up like geeks to fit into the crowd. Hopefully, in science and technology, actions matter more than words and dress up, and that's one of the reasons we like it.

[1][http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2010/10/13/be-careful- not...](http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2010/10/13/be-careful-not-to- become-a-conference-ho/)

<comment><USER15> So, I like wearing the suit and tie and you probably think I'm "conformist". I also tend not to judge people based on how they dress or look. I make active efforts to be as non-biased by peoples' physical appearances as possible. Yet I know (from experience) that it's an unreasonable expectation of other people to hold them to this same status and that, in the real world, appearance matters.

What I've learned, the hard way, is that you have to spend a considerable amount of your work time deciding for other people how they perceive you, and this is a subtle art. If you don't manage your image actively, others will manage it for you. This is as true, if not moreso, in a startup than in a big company. At least the social status rules of large companies (as broken and antiquated as they may be) are _documented_. In a startup, you often have situations where there are 20 employees who all think they're the alpha dog.

Wearing a suit and tie is a very cheap, efficient way to manage other peoples' impressions of you. Sure, it's silly, but the reward-to-cost ratio is very high. It's a lot cheaper and better than, say, sticking around the office till 9:30 when you finished productive work 5 hours ago.

<comment><USER16> I didn't make a personal remark, but yes, what you describe perpetuates a certain conformity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Taleb is a Soup Nazi. He (volubly) suffers for his soup. He treats customers with disdain. And yet people line up for the soup, because it's pretty good, actually.

I find Taleb's opinionated eccentricity very useful, especially when it consists of a mixture of ideas, some of which you totally agree with and some which you totally disagree. Keeps you alert and thinking, instead of blindly swallowing or blindly rejecting everything depending on religious preferences (e.g. iOS vs Android)

Antifragility is perhaps the most important perception-refactoring concept since the selfish gene, and the book deserves to be read purely for that reason.

The book is pretty laudatory of engineers and the tinkering mentality, crediting them for most of the inventions of the past age, rather than top- down science.

Erudition is great. But it is far easier for the engineer to become erudite than for a liberal arts major to become an engineer.

Where Taleb is wrong is that (good) science fiction is not about predicting the future. It is really speculative economics fiction - how would a mix of this kind of intelligent agents and this kind of resource environment work out? The science, futurism and the aliens are merely literary tools to help you get out of a human/today-centric point of view. They are thought experiments which can be sold to the public (at least, the engineering public).

And God, I hate longhand as the primary mode of input. Connecting the iPad to ancient tablets is the kind of wankery one gets from the erudite, I guess :)

(I'm picking very small nits here; "Antifragile" is overall very thought provoking. Highly recommended.)

</comment><comment><USER18> I used to be impressed by Taleb (when I was younger and more clueless) but having read two of his books and many articles I find the negativity tiresome and petulant, and his finance theories questionable.

Eric Falkenstein:

"Another key to understanding Taleb is that he has a French post-modern tendency to write to impress rather than explain. He provides hundreds of loosely related anecdotes, reminding me of the Talmud quote that 'when a debater's point is not impressive, he brings forth many arguments.' I actually agree with a lot of Taleb, such as the intractability of risk because it is endogenous, and I think he's vaguely libertarian, but he says so many inconsistent things that doesn't mean much (when he's right it's probably a good example of the Gettier problem)."

Gettier problem = whether being right by accident still counts as being right.

[http://falkenblog.blogspot.com/2012/11/taleb-mishandles- frag...](http://falkenblog.blogspot.com/2012/11/taleb-mishandles- fragility.html)

<comment><USER19> I continue to be impressed by Taleb, but I will read the linked blog article. I don't read him for the financial advice per se so much as for enjoyably- written reminders to avoid the fundamental attribution error and pay attention to the expected value as well as the extremes when weighing probabilistic outcomes. I wouldn't characterize him as negative—he strikes me as about as positive as you can get with an acute awareness of human ignorance as an incurable situation that leads to a great deal of needless suffering. A lot of the anti-Taleb angst seems to derive from him not delivering facts in a sufficiently rigorous and drab manner, but I don't think there's anything wrong with entertaining non-fiction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I enjoyed this excerpt, but I was surprised that he used Orwell as one of his examples of someone whose imagination failed to predict the future.

As much as Taleb swoons over literary culture in this excerpt, and as much of cultural force as Orwell was as a writer; I'm surprised that that Taleb doesn't view Orwell's imagination as a remarkably accurate, in a literary, if not literal, sense, prognosticator.

After all, Orwell's imagination predicted the surveillance society, death of individual privacy, the use of propaganda for social engineering among other things. I may be misinterpreting Taleb's words, "The problem is that almost everything that was imagined never took place, except for a few over-exploited anecdotes...", because it strikes me that he would miss the obvious current reality of Orwell's 'literary predictions' which mostly are very much based on technological achievements such as ubiquitous networks, cheap cameras, cheap and ubiquitous data storage, and so on.

</comment><comment><USER21> I would like to point out that the Space Age futurism the author rants so much about wasn't made by the, and I quote, "techno-autistic" guys.

Most of the futuristic crap from 50 and 60 years ago was the product of some uninformed scifi authors who mixed fantasy with technology, marketers creating products of the future to create more brand-awareness (with the ironic consequence that some of those companies disappeared decades ago) and many charlatans who simply had no idea what they were talking about.

For example, food pills wasn't about a rosy cool future, the whole idea started as a theoretical last-ditch effort to curve a future global famine of catastrophic proportions caused by the at the time unprecedented increase in population. Fortunately other "techno-autistics" were able to find a way to increase crop yields (Green Revolution) which is why we still have real food instead of something closer to dry dogfood pellets.

</comment><comment><USER22> I'd like to see a news aggregator where all of the submissions were as well- written and thoughtful as this one. It doesn't matter whether his perspective is wrong or right, the fact is that the writing here simply makes reading it a pleasure. I'd say that 1% or less of articles have this quality.

<comment><USER20> This was actually little more than an advertisement for his book. I agree it is well written, which is not entirely surprising as the author has been on the NYT best selling list before. With that being said, the NYT might be the aggregator you're looking for - that is, if you're looking for high quality literature.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Venkat Rao at Ribbon Farm has a great post on this topic: "Welcome to the Future Nauseous" ([http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2012/05/09/welcome-to-the- future-n...](http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2012/05/09/welcome-to-the-future- nauseous/)).

<comment><USER24> now that was an excellent article. thanks for the pointer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> A fun article whose real value will likely be missed by many here who will be rushing, misguided, to defend their ideas of 'technology' or 'progress' from attack.

The points that Taleb is making here are best discussed, not by considering technology as artifact alone, but technology for what it really is - a set of artifacts, systems, processes, and artifices that take place in a social milieu and as a two-way relationship with society and civilization. To think otherwise is naive folly, from my perspective. (Please see: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_construction_of_technolo...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_construction_of_technology) for a primer on this, it's fun reading if you're unfamiliar).

Technophiles (myself included!) will often project things out because they fail to understand that technology does NOT just show up and leave an imprint on the world, deus ex machina style. Instead the world shapes technology back. You can see this for any kind of technology, from the bicycle (Bijker's famous example, shown in the wikipedia article) to the Internet, which has its present design because of the real fears / threats / motivations that abounded during its establishment.

It's the (mostly) impossible nature of this dis-entanglement that throws people off track. In some world of scientist-kings of technocratic technophile dictatorships, yes, we'd have moon bases by now. But that's not how it works, and as a result people - messy, annoying humanity - get in the way. For better or, for often, worse.

The future WILL be cool - I'm still an optimist. But it will be cool in different ways, and maybe for different reasons, than many here on HN might imagine.

Since this thread is already a bit long let me instead just close with a great quote that I reference often. Relevant here.

 _The plain message physical science has for the world at large is this, that were our political and social and moral devices only as well contrived to their ends as a linotype machine, an antiseptic operating plant, or an electric tram-car, there need now at the present moment be no appreciate toil in the world, and only the smallest fraction of the pain, the fear, and the anxiety that now makes human life so doubtful in its value. There is more than enough for everyone alive. Science stands, a too competent servant, behind her wrangling underbred masters, holding out resources, devices, and remedies they are too stupid to use._ – H.G. Wells, A Modern Utopia (1904)

<comment><USER12> To quote from the Wikipedia article:

"Advocates of SCOT—that is, social constructivists -- argue that technology does not determine human action, but that rather, human action shapes technology."

Sounds like another case of people not understanding feedback loops - that A can both determine, and be determined by B.

<comment><USER25> Obviously you're going to see a gradient, but I don't think most would contend human action isn't shaped at all by technologies in ways that are often unexpected. Plus, you get a sort of chicken-and-egg problem at some levels...

But people very, very commonly fail to see the embedded social factors in technologies, and are very quick to ascribe autonomy to technology, which is in my mind fallacious. You see this when the news has stories like, "Technology just keeps advancing. How will it change our lives next?" instead of understanding it as part of a relationship between people, their environment, and their artifacts, technology gets put on some magical self- propelling trajectory that just isn't true. Yes, Moore's Law is great - <AUTHOR> it's a social/human driver, as is Intel's Tick-Tock, not something innate in technology!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Taleb is wrong. There's a much better analysis on why futurists predict the future wrong by an author who I forget. This authors central thesis is that technology moves in spurts along any given dimension. For example building were getting taller and taller. Every year a new "talltest building" was built. People began imagining buildings to the moon or at least out of the atmosphere. This eventually stopped. Similarly, planes got faster and faster. In the midst of the increase in plane speeds not many would have thought that we'd have the amount of commercial flights at the current "slow" speeds we have.

But people tend to miss a lot of other things. Most futurists wouldn't have predicted that computers 1000x more powerful than ENIAC would fit in our pocket. I recall one prediction about a computer the size of ENIAC might fit in a small room. Notice the low resolution displays in most old sci-fi movies. Or how ubiquitous wireless communication would be. Many sci-fi movies with tethered phones, or data transfer with USB-key like gadgets.

It's not that things are subtractive (that's just wishful luddite-like thinking). It's just that things aren't necessarily additive where we think they may be. It may be that in 50 years the web is a lot like how it is today, but nutrition technology has drastically changed so that nutrituous food is tasty and cheap. Or we discover technology to communicate with animals much more effectively.

Technology keeps moving forward. And I think his comment about literary culture reveals his bias.

</comment><comment><USER27> I believe that the future will look more like the past. One thing I'm almost certain we'll see less and less of is _gadgets_. Smartphones, computers, things like that will all go inside your head (if you're willing, and most everyone will be). Soon we will become tired of living in houses with blank walls upon which are projected whatever we want and, because we can do so, will revert back to more ancient styles of architecture and furnishings (with a couple of blank walls or two).

Your stove may look like a wood burning stove, and your fridge may look like a 50's model. Why? Because when almost EVERYTHING is 3D printed to your specifications, people are free to make things that function in a modern way but look like what _they_ want them to look, rather than how the manufacturer's marketing department deems they should look.

I think transport will be dominated by self-driving vehicles, but again: think of individual styles. I predict quite a few autonomous "horseless coaches" driving around our cities.

Speaking of cities...

My hope is that high speed network access will be everywhere, and population densities will equalize as more and more people prefer to live a rural life even while they do cutting edge professional or academic work. There will still be slums and there will still be poor people, but I think that the majority of people who live in cities will do so because they really _want_ to.

Further out, I can see even things like traditional healthcare completely disappear. Sure, we may always have emergency trauma centers and doctors, but it's not to hard to fathom a time where a colony of self-replicating bio- robots and ongoing genetic engineering work 24 hours a day inside your body to keep it healthy and let you know of any real trouble before it becomes serious.

This is not to say that all these predictions will come true, only that the disappearance of electronic gadgets into the mind and into fabrics, paint, and the air seems inevitable, as does the radical differentiation of physical _things_ like furniture, houses, and vehicles that will certainly come from the 3D printing/replication revolution (if that occurs).

</comment><comment><USER28> I want to be contrarian here and say I actually liked this article, whose main thrust I might summarise thusly:

 _The future will not be as cool as technologists imagine because in the contest of being what it could be, and being what its current inhabits want it to be (especially those in power), the latter wins_

It's nothing profound, but it's worth hearing again, and the arguments here underline that. Technology exists to serve humans, and humans haven't changed for a very long time, for better or worse. Any prediction that fails to take this into account will fail. It's an old lesson, but it seems we need to hear these old lessons again, and again, and again.

</comment><comment><USER29> "It is remarkable that the tools that seem to currently dominate the world, such as the Internet, or more mundane matters such as the wheel on the suitcase of Book IV, were completely missing from these forecasts."

This is completely wrong. I can think of at least 2 victorian examples imagining the internet: 1, a series of drawings where video telecommunications is imagined, and the other a story I cannot find, written over 100 years ago I believe, about a son and mother communicating from their pods where all the worlds knowledge is accessible, and the son chooses to go "offline".

<comment><USER30> The story is called _"The Machine Stops"_ by E. M. Forster.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops>

<comment><USER29> Thanks! It's also far out of copyright, here's the story itself.

<http://archive.ncsa.illinois.edu/prajlich/forster.html>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> He doesn't mention the smartphone, a pocket computer connected to the Internet that may settle an argument at his dinner without recourse to the library the next day. It may also enable finding out where the friends who are running late are and guide him to the address if it isn't familiar.

The smartphone was probably predictable from the early 2000's at the very least.

Having said that I'm not that I currently see any similar major leaps coming in the next decade. More accurate and indoor location data could bring useful (and in some ways almost invisible) functionality to the smartphone.

<comment><USER32> _The smartphone was probably predictable from the early 2000's at the very least._

Thinking about smartphone predictability reveals a pattern that might apply to other technologies: an actual _dip_ in predictability caused by technological progress. If you leave out the always-internet-connected aspects of the smartphone, you still have a very small and portable device with books, amusements, up-to-date reference materials such as maps and encyclopedias, current periodicals, and real time voice and video communication. If the Internet did not exist, the iPhone would still have been a breakthrough product. A web-ignorant but otherwise capable iPhone was theoretically predictable half a century ago, but the technological reality of the intervening decades (ugly low-res screens, huge devices with pathetic capabilities, painfully clumsy input methods) depressed our expectations to the point that when it finally happened, it was something of a surprise.

AI may be another area where decades of technological disappointment have narrowed our expectations and reduced our ability to imagine what the future will bring. Someone transported from the 1960s might be better at predicting the future of AI than anyone who lived through the intervening decades.

<comment><USER33> _"A web-ignorant but otherwise capable iPhone was theoretically predictable half a century ago […] when it finally happened, it was something of a surprise."_

That made me think of Bruce Tognazzini (TOG) in "TOG on Interface" ([http://www.amazon.com/Tog-Interface-Bruce- Tognazzini/dp/0201...](http://www.amazon.com/Tog-Interface-Bruce- Tognazzini/dp/0201608421). From 1991, but seems unaware of the existence of the world-wide web):

 _"I want the United States Library of Congress on my desktop. I want the collections of every major museum in the world available to project against my wall. I want every issue of every newspaper published in the English-speaking world sitting in my laptop.

Is this really too much to ask?"_

I remembered that first paragraph as ending in "in my pocket", but, apart from minor technical details (for example, wireless communication allows us to shrink the device even further then laptop size, and he isn't asking for all of Hollywood or even for all radio recordings ever made) I think that is a decent prediction of where we are heading.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Interesting but very over the top. An iPad might be called a tablet but it's very different than what Babylonians used (except in shape and sometimes purpose), contrary to Taleb's assertion.

</comment><comment><USER35> I can agree with a lot of the criticisms in these comments, because the future will definitely be cool, and Taleb has selectively forgotten about a lot of the great technological advancements and focussed on things that haven't advanced.

That said, Taleb makes a good point when he is talking about the tendency for 'futurists' to get it all wrong. He is touching on one of the major problems of design which is that bad design is always additive, and constantly bolts on extra useless features in order to strive for something 'newer', whereas good design demands subtraction.

The iPhone was released in an era where most nerds still got excited about what Intel was planning to release next year, and yet the most influential computer of the decade didn't even have an Intel processor. By subtracting away the unnecessary, Jobs delivered something that was far greater than the sum of its parts. Most notably, the iOS touch interface was a huge innovation from a human-computer interaction perspective, yet viewed from another perspective all it did was bring us back to an interface that had been used for centuries (I think Taleb can realise the difference between a Phoenician tablet and an iPad, he is referring to the interface).

I think ultimately Taleb is touching on something that Steve Jobs would often repeat, which is that the best objects exist at an intersection of the arts and the sciences. Human nature does not fundamentally change as the years pass, and this is ultimately the limiting factor on successful technologies, and the driving force behind the process of disruptive innovation which continues to favour the less technologically advanced yet more customer- centric (or human-centric) technologies. This is something that is often forgotten in the technology world where it took a completely non-technical liberal arts drop-out in the form of Jobs to help technologists realise that computers ultimately have to be made for real people.

That said, Taleb is writing outside his domain and therefore this piece could have been much better written.

</comment><comment><USER36> I'd really like to know if people on HN "share an absence of literary culture" as Taleb suggests. Can you please respond if you read literature other than science fiction?

<comment><USER37> I'm rather 'well read.' I don't say this boastfully as I feel a lot of it was a waste of time (although I also found a lot of philosphy/literature etc. very insightful).

<comment><USER38> _I don't say this boastfully as I feel a lot of it was a waste of time_

I try to read a few "classics" now and then, and I definitely read more than just sci-fi. I like history, philosophy, biographies, etc., as well. But you touch on something we all have to struggle with: Time. There are only so many hours in the day to read, and every time I sit down to read, I have to make a decision on whether or not what I'm thinking about reading is a good use of my time.

So... I'm going to get a certain amount of raw "escapism", pop-fiction stuff, that I need just to stay sane. That's a given. Now, how much time do I have left to read Homer, or obscure French and Russian "literature"? And to what end? Just to impress hipster douche-bags and self-appointed "intellectuals"? Or because reading that stuff is actually going to add value to my life? Is reading _Madame Bovary_ or _Anna Karenina_ going to do more for me than reading _Teach Yourself Haskell in 21 Days_ or Asimov's "Foundation Trilogy" books, or whatever?

The last few books I've read (other than technical books) include _Run_ by Dean Karnazes, _Born to Run_ by McDougal, _The Belgian Hammer_ by Lee, _Eat & Run_ by Scott Jurek, _Racing Through the Dark_ by David Millar, _Slaying the Badger_ by Moore, _Running on Empty_ by Marshall Ulrich and _The Secret Race_ by Tyler Hamilton. Would I be better off if I'd spent that time reading "literature" instead? I don't know, but I'm sceptical.

OTOH, I have a whole pile of stuff lying here by Nietzsche, Kieerkegard, Hume, Foucalt, etc., that I'm planning to work through. But I'm reading it just because I find it interesting, not because I see it as having any more inherent value than "low brow" literature.

<comment><USER39> Anna Karenina is a really beautiful story. I read it a long time ago and it is, at the very least, a great achievement, so sweeping, so intricately detailed, so many rich characters, so much insight into human hopes and struggles. I don't know much about its context but I imagine if you read up on Tolstoy's life and Russian social conditions at the time it would make reading the book enormously stimulating - a panoramic story covering the intersection of a flowering cosmopolitan aristocratic society and a more ancient world of feudal landlords, at a turning point in history shortly before that world vanished forever.

Mostly I would read Tolstoy for the same reason I would read Nietzsche - <USER3> break through our regrettable tendency to take the past and its people for granted. It's one thing to read about the ideas Nietzsche developed on a Wikipedia article, it's wholly another to read him in his own words and suddenly find yourself thrust into contact with a whole mind, a living, breathing bundle of thoughts and anxieties and dream, a human being palpably aching to find meaning, caught in the middle of one of the greatest social upheavals of human history. To get a sense, just for a moment, of the sheer enormity of the fact that whole generations of people lived and died without knowing anything of the world we lived in.

19th century literature is special. There is so much heat, passion, confusion, pain and soul-searching in it - it feels so close, yet so far, from the world we live in. For me at least it is humbling and amazing that people like Tolstoy laboured on and left behind such vivid traces of their souls for us to discover and enrich ourselves with.

Edit: I suppose this is a long-winded way of saying that the value of literature is that it helps you develop reverence and respect for the enormous reality and weight of history. Arrogance and shocking stupidity are the natural consequences of not realising your tiny place in history. The best literature breeds deep humility.

<comment><USER38> Sure, I don't dispute any of that. And, in fact, I mentioned _Anna Karenina_ partly because I bought a copy a few months ago because it _is_ on my list of books to read. But I do question whether or not it has any _particular_ value which exceeds any of the innumerable other works I could read with that time instead.

Of course that might lead you ask "then why are you planning to read it"? To which I can only say "because it sounds interesting and exactly because I haven't read much Russian literature and I want to broaden my horizons a bit". But I'm not reading it because I want to be able to impress some hipster pseudo-intellectuals, or because it's something you're "supposed" to read. I just want to see what it's all about. Same with _Crime and Punishment_ , which I started recently (but got distracted from and set aside temporarily).

 _Mostly I would read Tolstoy for the same reason I would read Nietzsche - <USER3> break through our regrettable tendency to take the past and its people for granted._

I agree with that, but I find that fiction from (and set in) Victorian era England has been my primary outlet for thinking about and appreciating the past in that regard. That's certainly not to discredit the Russian stuff you speak of, just saying that reading Tolstoy or Dostoevsky or whatever, isn't the only way to tap into that historical perspective.

 _It's one thing to read about the ideas Nietzsche developed on a Wikipedia article, it's wholly another to read him in his own words and suddenly find yourself thrust into contact with a whole mind, a living, breathing bundle of thoughts and anxieties and dream, a human being palpably aching to find meaning, caught in the middle of one of the greatest social upheavals of human history._

Indeed. I greatly enjoyed reading Nietzsche's _Thus Spake Zarathustra_ and have quite a few of his other works on my list.

<comment><USER39> I think we're pretty much on the same page here. There is an ocean of great stuff to explore, and 19th century Russia is just one lovely part of that ocean. For example I haven't read Dickens or Eliot - I still consider myself pretty well-read, but there's always more out there. And of course with foreign-language writers there's always the additional dream of learning the language and reading in the original. One reason to hope for radically- extended lifespans eh?

I wasn't trying to claim that Tolstoy et al are better and more important than anyone else, just trying to counter the suggestion that the only reason to read them is to try and impress people. Faux-reading to try and cultivate a sophisticated appearance is, I think we can agree, just stupid.

Personally if I had a choice between Tolstoy and Saramago or Le Guin, I think I would pick one of the latter. And yes, Nietzsche is the 19th century bomb.com

NB: I read a lot of non-fiction too. An educated person has to have his or her fingers in a lot of intellectual pies I think.

<comment><USER38> _And of course with foreign-language writers there's always the additional dream of learning the language and reading in the original. One reason to hope for radically-extended lifespans eh?_

Indeed. I have this dream of learning Latin and most of the associated Romance languages one day, but I haven't gotten very far yet. I was making some headway with Spanish, and then my one Spanish speaking friend kinda disappeared due to marriage, so I haven't been as motivated without anyone to practice with.

And my Portugese speaking friend got deported back to Brazil. :-(

Still, one day...

<comment><USER39> <http://www.language-exchanges.org/>

Might be helpful?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I think he's missing an important thing about SF and futurism. The point of them is not to predict. The point is to say "What if...?" and proceed from there.

Every now and then someone nails something. And every now and then someone building a device is inspired by something they read or saw; the form of the once-ubiquitous flip cellphone came from Star Trek's tricorders.

Taleb's theoretical dinner might be woven through with the Internet: did he and his friends decide to have this dinner by making appointments on the phone? Or did they use email? Or Facebook, or even just kinda hooked up via Twitter when one of them tweeted "hey who wants to go to The Grinning Wok with me tonight #omnomnomsogood".

And maybe that choice of restaurant came in part from reviews online? The Internet is no longer cool, this is true. This is because we're used to it. Hell, the tablet I'm typing this on was cool for like a month after I got it; now it's normal. Maybe a little annoying because the onscreen keyboard sucks and the autocorrect is aggressive and occasionally wrong.

The real parts of the future go from "cool" to "normal" very quickly. Impractical stuff stays "cool" in imagination forever.

</comment><comment><USER16> It's true that our basic needs haven't changed much. We 've become a little more brainy but our basic needs are served by relatively little technology. That's because humans haven't evolved visibly since ancient times. Our way of life will truly change once we start altering ourselves in substantial ways. The future will be very cool in a world where people can grow wings at will.

<comment><USER41> Unfortunately, this future is still very, very far away. We're not even close to understanding how a single eukaryotic cell works, much less an entire organism as complex as a human being or a bird.

<comment><USER16> We don't necessarily need to know all the inner workings, just the important things to do our job. Cavemen didn't know about torques, loads and angular velocities when they invented the wheel. Thus i am hopeful that i will live to see the major breakthroughs in genetics and neuroscience.

<comment><USER41> I suppose that's true; its also a good summary of how molecular biology has been done thus far and we've managed to learn quite a bit. Translating it into practical applications has been more of a challenge. I'm skeptical that we'll see any breakthroughs in transhumanism in our lifetime, although naysayers are always being proven wrong— I sure hope I am as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I have long thought that the highest purpose of engineering is to reduce entropy. Although he doesn't express it in those terms, I think Taleb is advocating something similar here. It's not anti-technology in the way that a lot of comments here seem to be interpreting it, but it probably is incompatible with the sort of techno-utopianism that is in vogue at the moment.

<comment><USER13> Paradoxically, Engineering practice is almost entirely entropy-positive. Turning electricity into heat and light (and minute electro-magnetic patterns, but that's insignificant).

<comment><USER43> Everything is entropy-positive. Some things, though, are less entropy-positive than others.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> _Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder [Hardcover] Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Author)_

\-- You Save: $13.01 (43%)

I thought the Amazon-affiliate link was a bit Ironic.

<comment><USER5> Why is it ironic?

<comment><USER44> _Taleb: The future will not be cool_

\-- but it will be 43% off ! [1]

_________

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony#Situational_irony>

<comment><USER5> Uh... did you read the article?

<comment><USER44> edit: footnoted for future reference.

<comment><USER5> If I understood it in this circumstance, I wouldn't have asked you to explain it.

\--

Edit: link added for future reference: <http://xkcd.com/1053/>

<comment><USER44> You seem to be reading condescension into where it is/was non-existent or trying to throw it around where it is not warranted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> A simple way to predict the future is to step back into the past. 5 years ago? Aside from the whole tablet/smartphone revolution, not much. 10 years? Much faster computers, web 2.0, Facebook, Gmail, the whole social media thing. 20 years? The entirety of the modern web. MMO games. Global warming. Cloning. Cell phones.

Basically technical progress moves quite fast in the medium term but slower than you'd expect in the short term, except with surprises. (Nobody saw tablets coming. A move _away_ from the web, to native apps? In this day and age?)

</comment><comment><USER46> Arthur Clarke is one of the futurists that has imagined things right: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxYgdX2PxyQ>

<comment><USER47> I think he's also a good example of what Taleb is pointing out - the problems with taking a snapshot of the present and projecting. 2001 was published in 1968, with a moon landing imminent. Projecting ahead, it seemed reasonable that by 2001 we would have had moon bases, commercial flights to large space stations, and ships ready to explore Jupiter and Saturn. I wish he had been right!

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Y'know, this is a cute article, but as facilely as he refuses to accept that the present is not as weird as people thought - I'm wearing a flannel button- down right now as I type this in 2012 - the fact remains that I had a nice face-to-face chat with my dad yesterday, even though he's still on the farm in Indiana and I live in Budapest this year.

</comment><comment><USER6> 'I will be using silverware, a Mesopotamian technology, which qualifies as a "killer application" given what it allows me to do to the leg of lamb, such as tear it apart while sparing my fingers from burns.'

Lost me there. Doesn't even make sense. At a time when people were still hungrily eating meat fresh from the coals, silverware was the least of their worries.

</comment><comment><USER49> Sadly, Taleb failed to address the predictions of one of the biggest "neophiles" of them all-- Kurzweil

[http://www.techi.com/2011/01/ray-kurzweils-tech- predictions-...](http://www.techi.com/2011/01/ray-kurzweils-tech-predictions- have-been-eerily-accurate/)

<comment><USER50> Luckily we have Mr Carrico to address those (warning: he is very rude) [http://amormundi.blogspot.nl/2009/01/condensed-critique- of-t...](http://amormundi.blogspot.nl/2009/01/condensed-critique-of- transhumanism.html) Techno-utopianism and futurism does have quite a few critics.

Anyway, I've read two of Taleb's books (Fooled by Randomness and Black Swan). Taleb seems to be filled with nostalgia at times. He dreams of a simple, slow life. He regards the news and up-to-dateness of modern mediums mostly as 'noise', and even takes a stab at people that read the newspaper in transit every day.

What is also interesting is that he rails against people that try to predict the future because of black swans, the unknown unknowns. Still, this is the second article by him about the future that I read. And it's just as boring as the last one.

Technophiles have the tendency to exaggerate what change the future will bring, but conservatives like him fill the predictions with good-old- timesness. It's wishful thinking just as much.

<comment><USER49> Be that as it may, Kurzweil has a decades long history of making predictions, often considered absolutely nuts by the press and in some very high profile cases, technology even beat his predictions. I don't think there's anyone else with as good of a track record when it comes to predicting far off technical advances.

(e.g. saying in the 80s that a chess AI beating the top ranked human by 1998 or that the human genome would be sequenced by the year 2000).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> The future will be plenty cool. What it won't be is what the cool people (or, indeed, anyone at all) thinks it will be. It will be, as it has always been, the cool future that nobody thought of.

</comment><comment><USER52> I can't believe I just read that entire thing... I feel as though the trajectory of technological advancement and "Taleb's" personal vision of the future are two seperate things and he is unable to acknowledge that fact. He is let down because reality isn't living up to his idea of what he thinks reality should be... There are far too many points to refute..

Shoes look no different than they did 3500 years ago because they serve a purpose.

Once a technology serves a purpose, there is no need to improve that purpose, unless said technology is to be used in another setting which requires change or improvement... Hence sandals, flip-flops, sneakers, skateboarding shoes, high heels, rollerblades, iceskates, snowshoes. I think author touched on this, kind of... You get my point...

Chairs are the same as they were because panda's aren't sitting in chairs. People are sitting in chairs, and people haven't physically changed since the inception of chairs. So a device that humans use for sitting is not likely to change... But wait, what about lounging chairs, or baby chairs, or high chairs, or stools? I'm sure if a fish needed a chair, it would look like a bed...

Technology is the instantiation of idea's into physicality. This is done for any number of reasons, most of which to solve some type of rudimentary problem. Some become extrusions of ourselves. Human beings are limited in MANY ways, but we are able to identify the limitations and problem solve through technological means.

For example, an iPhone is an extreme technological extrusion, not just a device. Think about a text message. Bear with me here...

A thought you have makes it's way from being a mere THOUGHT, to then being processed by LANGUAGE, which is processed to WRITTEN LANGUAGE, which is expressed through typing on a KEYBOARD, on a TOUCH SCREEN DISPLAY, on a WIRELESS MOBILE DEVICE, and then SENT THROUGH THE AIR to someone else's WIRELESS MOBILE DEVICE, to be READ, PROCESSED, and your thought implanted in that persons mind.

No words were used here. Just transference of thoughts through technological means.

Look at a car... Metal exoskeleton with wheels that can change it's rate of speed at will. Another technological extrusion of yourself. Without you driving, the car doesn't do shit.

Try explaining that to the shoe person 3500 years ago, or your fork friend, or someone even a mere 150 years ago... "Yeah man, instead of walking in 3500 years you'll get into a 2500lb metal box with rubber wrapped wheels filled with air that burns a a flammable liquid in another metal box of moving parts and listens to commands your right foot gives it!"

The internet has allowed people to have access to a network of information no other period in known history has ever had. The library of Alexandria MAY have contained similar amounts of knowledge, but it was in a centralized location that required your physical presence. The internet itself isn't changing the technological landscape, but the access to information the internet provides is. The rate at which thoughts/ideas are physically instantiated is increasing rapidly, as more tools are created by more people having more access to other tools, etc...

In short, what I gathered from this piece is that people should give up looking forward, and be happy right where they are, because our prediction skills suck and change is scary and doesn't always have the best outcome...

I'm sure glad pre-bigbang conditions didn't feel the same way. Or the primordial soup. Or Einstein. Or Edwin Hubble. Or Carl Sagan. Or Nikola Tesla. Or anyone who's ever had an idea and executed it for that matter.

</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>=

TL;DR Technologies are idea's that solve problems. The future is unpredictable. Problems of an unpredictable future are also unpredictable. Hence, why people are shit predictors of the future technological climate. Doesn't mean we shouldn't try.

</comment><comment><USER53> Reminds me a lot of a 120 year ago prediction that all the good stuff had been invented/discovered. So wrong...

</comment><comment><USER12> Obligatory xkcd: <http://xkcd.com/728/>

</comment><comment><USER39> This post is so poorly argued and sloppy it is unbelievable. Intellectual trash.

</comment><comment><USER54> He picked the perfect example of his point.

</comment><comment><USER15> First of all, I disagree. The future _will_ be cool, at least in the long term. What it won't be is _weird_ , in the sense of people wearing spacesuits in their living rooms. The bizarre visions people have traditionally had of the future (and which, demonstrably, haven't come true) seemed to focus largely on superficial stuff (clothing fashions, which are highly unpredictable but have a long-term mean-reversion) and to exaggerate. That doesn't mean that the world hasn't changed, and won't change, in profound ways.

Yes, the pleasures of life (wine, music, books, sex, spiritual experience) don't change all that much and therefore we use a lot of old technologies in daily life, so it can appear like there's nothing new... but there will be more people able to afford them, and they will be much less impeded by the stupid shit that clogged up peoples' lives in pre-technological times. Just to continue Taleb's example: in the 21st century, a lot of people get to drink wine of (by historical standards) exceedingly high quality. Three millennia ago, wine existed but the vast majority of people never got to drink any.

 _Many of the modern applications that have managed to survive today came to disrupt the deleterious effect of the philistinism of modernity, particularly the 20th century: the large multinational bureaucratic corporation with "empty suits" at the top; the isolated family (nuclear) in a one-way relationship with the television set, even more isolated thanks to car-designed suburban society [...]_

I'm going to stop there with the quote. His point is valid, but I think there's something missed when people rip on suburbia. Yes, it's outmoded and wasteful and somewhat ugly, but the Levittowns were a lot better than the "company towns" of early-industrial hell, and those were a lot better than being a serf on a medieval enclosure, in a time when it wasn't uncommon for a peasant to have his head cut off by a knight (knights were more like warlords than the noble paladins of romance). People tend to compare the experiences of average people now against those of an elite in the past and conclude that things were better, but that's not fair. The 1800-era analogue of a bored suburbanite of 50th-percentile social status (only one car!) was not an English baron, but someone who started work at seven in the coal mines.

People rip on suburbia now because it's outmoded, but it wasn't always this way. Urban freeways are called "parkways" because the vision of Robert Moses (in hindsight we say, "That fucker!", but he was very respected in his time) was for them to be park-like roads for an automotive elite. In the 1920s, suburbia was very much _in_. The suburban lifestyle, with lots of driving, was designed for the rich and handed down, over a couple of decades, to the working classes in a watered-down form. The result now, almost a century later, is that "suburbia" is no longer cool because the low-quality suburbs of the poor have killed the image of the concept.

Oddly enough, has anyone ever noticed how rich people suburbs aren't called that? The Hamptons isn't "suburbia". The Woodbury towns out there are "charming little towns" rather than suburbs, because the rich people who live there have enough time to make zoning rules that keep a quaint little street or two alive. These people aren't morally superior for having houses in high- price towns that still have walkable main streets as opposed to "suburbs". They're just richer.

One thing I find interesting is that Ted Kaczynski (Unabomber) wrote an essay about technology and alienation, while most of his complaints were of the industrial-era society, not the _technological_ society we evolved into. He was miserable because, in spite of his extreme intelligence and adept writing, he had no real influence in a world run by corrupt corporate institutions. So he went out and killed people in order to effectively force the New York Times to publish his rant. If he had waited 15 years and not killed people, he would have had the public access and attention he craved. He might have trolled a bit, but no one would have died. Technology was just about to solve many of the problems that had him so upset-- that he blamed on industrial society.

My view of technology and progress is that it's nearly monotonic in "goodness", but that the old humanity we're now trying to distance ourselves from is quite tenacious and willing to use technology toward pre-technological purposes, and so the long-term convergence toward democracy that we'd like to see doesn't come nearly as fast as we'd like. For example, one might like to believe that, in an electronic world, old-style industrial pressures like taking orders from managers, showing up in an uninspiring white-box office during certain hours, and writing TPS reports would vanish... but human nature is a certain way and power likes to maintain position, so the transition is actually taking decades rather than the hours that it "should". The result of this is that the technological push toward a better world appears to collapse into an unsatisfying half measure and people end up having to use technology in uninspiring ways (e.g. getting to write code, but still having to take orders from non-technical executives or "product managers"). That's not technology's fault. That's an artifact of humans being slow to improve themselves.

<comment><USER55> _Yes, the pleasures of life (wine, music, books, sex, spiritual experience) don't change all that much_

I'm not so sure. Those pleasures all continue to _exist_ but except for wine, the way we enjoy or practice most of these would be alien to people of 100 years ago. It's not the concepts that change but their expression.

Throw two 20-somethings from 1912 into a common modern scenario of doing shots before you go out, hitting a nightclub full of techno music, laser lights and people 'grinding', then coming home and indulging in some pre-maritial anal sex (just to be safe) and you might as well have thrown them on a different planet.

Life in 100 years will seem similarly bizarre and intense to us now. I think the author of the article has a certain notion of what 'cool' is but I think radical changes in expression and society are also 'cool' - they're just not jetpacks or spacesuits.

<comment><USER5> And yet, starting just 8 years later: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flapper>

I think it's easy to overestimate the difference between people in the past and ourselves. The lack of shame with which people pursue their pleasures now may be different, but it's silly to think people 100 years ago didn't enjoy getting smashed and having sex.

<comment><USER56> After the double take/uneasy giggle at the choice of word to describe women (in the 1920s), I looked at the article.

One main difference that stands out for me is that the type of behaviour patterns described by the OP above (booze, grind, etc.) would be classed as "typical" from today's point of view, the "flapper" behaviour pattern above wouldn't have been "typical" in that usual sense of the word in those times (would it probably be tame from today's stand point?). Anecdotally, it would have been, at best fringe, and dare I say, restricted to (perhaps) the wealthy.

Someone also mentioned roman orgies. That would have been restricted to the wealthy, upper class too and would not have been classed as "typical"?

Therefore, the OP's point, namely, " the way we enjoy or practice most of these would be alien to people of 100 years ago. It's not the concepts that change but their expression." is relevant IMO.

And usually that is where clash of the generations originate from?

<comment><USER39> Roman orgies is a bullshit myth. Christian smear propaganda to discredit Roman culture.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Axios Joe Uchill thinks using macOS is dangerous - <AUTHOR> Axios Joe Uchill notes: "Any change that reduces Apple's control over app curation could also make using the iPhone a little more dangerous." So using macOS is more dangerous? Please give me a break.<p>https://www.axios.com/critics-smell-blood-around-the-iphone-app-store-7b4e0591-8a0f-44a2-9ebd-b746478d24d8.html <comment><USER2> who?</comment>


Surprises from numerical linear algebra - <AUTHOR> http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2010/01/20/ten-surprises-from-numerical-linear-algebra/

<comment><USER2> Mathematicians call Complex Analysis "The Disneyland of Mathematics". Everything you might want to be true is, and stuff you want seems to fall out of the air by magic.

Numerical Linear Algebra is math's Exurban Sprawl. Everybody's problem falls into one of a few cookie-cutter categories, and nobody minds the sameness because the solutions we have are good enough and cheap enough.

NLA is an amazing field if you think about it -- but you have to think about it.

</comment><comment><USER3> > Many practical problems - optimization, differential equations, signal > processing, etc. - boil down to solving linear systems, even when the > original problems are non-linear. Finite element software, for example, > spends nearly all its time solving linear equations.

If I remember correctly, it's not that all these problems are actually sets of linear sub-problems. We just are a lot more apt to think in terms of linear equations, making it so that we tend to break down any problem we have to a linear problem. If done incorrectly of course this has dire consequences to your results.

This is similar to how in physics we try to reduce or approximate every problem to a harmonic oscillator, because everything else is just too damn complicated to actually solve.

<comment><USER4> More probably things like the Newton-Raphson method to solve simultaneous non- linear equations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I find the below extremely fascinating in terms of both mathematical beauty and applicable practicality:

"There are many theorems bounding the error in solutions produced on real computers. That is, the theorems don't just bound the error from hypothetical calculations carried out in exact arithmetic but bound the error from arithmetic as carried out in floating point arithmetic on computer hardware."

</comment><comment><USER6> My favorite piece of numerical linear algebra is the pseudospectrum. In some sense, this is a set that gives you an indication of whether your eigenvalue computations will be accurate or not. Understanding non-normal operators really requires an understanding of this object.

It also has a surprising connection to the local solvability of pdes and pseudodifferential operators by helping to construct quasimodes ("almost solutions").

</comment><comment><USER7> I my girlfriend's numerical linear algebra textbook once, fully expecting it to be a very annoying subject dealing with implementation of floating-point numbers. It turns out, the discipline is mathematically rigorous and looks a lot like standard analysis. It was eye-opening both to me, as a mathematician, and to her, as a computer scientist, how directly the fully-abstract theorems applied to real-world floating point operations.</comment>


Microsoft debuts Xbox music service to take on Apple - <AUTHOR> http://finance.yahoo.com/news/microsoft-debuts-xbox-music-apple-040222565.html

<comment><USER2> I really, really hope that when they make windows software for it, they do the sensible thing and just re-brand the zune player instead of unnecessarily writing something new, because zune is hands down the nicest music software out.

</comment><comment><USER3> Now they just need 98% of the MP3 player market and they're sorted</comment>


Ask HN: How would you build the Paycheck Protection Program website? - <AUTHOR> The PPP website went down again yesterday due to load.  Let's say you worked at the Small Business Administration, and you were tasked with building the website.
The hard part: You've only got a week to build it, you know demand will be crazy.
The good news: Normal "process" is thrown out and you can do whatever you want. It just has to work.
What would you do, software and architecture wise?
PS - No, I do not work at the SBA and this isn't a hidden plea for help. <comment><USER2> Doing as much as static as possible - maybe Hugo or Jekyll, coupled with CDN to increase workload.

For the data entry part, a form with JavaScript (Vanilla or jQuery, no fancy frameworks like React/Vue) and a backend taking care of the data handling. Backend should be as lean as possible and supported by a load balancer for more replicas.</comment>


Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman - <AUTHOR> http://www.gorgorat.com/

<comment><USER2> This appears to be a blatant copyright infringement - what am I missing?</comment>


What I learned from an unfortunate incident with the NYPD - <AUTHOR> http://www.nickfarr.org/2014/02/what-i-learned-from-an-unfortunate-incident-with-the-nypd/ <comment><USER2> > "Is that a Muslim or Hipster beard?" by a crew of three NYPD officers in > Times Square.

I'm very curious to hear the full story behind this one.

On a separate note - I used to work in Chelsea[0]. Two or three days of the week, as I was leaving the subway, I would see NYPD questioning and/or frisking a young, black man or women. I saw this happen for months, and never _once_ was the person being questioned/frisked white, east Asian, or any other race.

Oh, and by the way:

> The main I didn't file any kind of report or move forward at all was that I > don't have badge numbers.

NEVER ask a police officer for his/her badge number. Look for it and try to memorize if you want, but don't let them know you're trying to learn it. I know someone who ended up doing ~18 months in prison for doing exactly this. (The official charge was "obstruction of justice" and/or "resisting arrest", but that's basically all he actually did. Once it's clear to the cops that you're looking to report them, they'll do everything in their power[2] to punish and discredit you).

[0] Affluent, primarily white, gentrified (former) gayborhood, for those unfamiliar with NYC.

[1] This is _not_ the same as the NYPD standing by the tables asking people to let them look through their bags (which you _can_ refuse, by the way!)

[2] And possibly even things _not_ in their power

<comment><USER3> We really need to redesign officer uniforms so that the badge number is inconspicuous the same way numbers of football and soccer jerseys are inconspicuous. It should be possible to identify a police office by their badge number from any angle once you're within 10-20 feet (i.e. it should be on the front, back and both sleeves of their uniform). Cameras should be able to track officers the same way that officers can track the license plate numbers of cars.

<comment><USER4> you mean conspicuous - inconspicuous means "not clearly visible or attracting attention".

<comment><AUTHOR> I thought he was being ironic.

"I want x to be subtle in the way that a shotgun to the face is subtle" i.e. not subtle at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This has been the third article on HN recently about the police. Historically it has been minority groups that only see this side of police activity. Now that upper middle class white individuals have experienced it though Its interesting to read the comments people are leaving.

For the record: I believe his advice is terrible for any person of lower socio economic background and especially for a person of colour. The number 1 rule when interacting with police should be you have no rights. Only when you're safely away from that policemen are your rights returned. Countless victims of police brutality can attest to that.

<comment><USER6> > _The number 1 rule when interacting with police should be you have no > rights._

As a former Los Angeles sheriff's deputy who agrees with the majority of sentiments in this thread, I can confidently say that your broad statement is nonsense. Everyone, not just upper middle class whites, should know and assert their rights in police encounters.

<comment><USER7> This only works if you assume that every officer is nice, reasonable and believes strongly in upholding their duty to the public.

The sad fact of the matter is that a very large number of police officers are simply bullies in uniform. Asserting your rights to them, or acting "uppity," will only get you in trouble.

<comment><USER6> A sizeable minority of officers are indeed bullies. But while I can't speak for other police agencies, even the bullies are pretty well reined in by the policies in Los Angeles. I can elaborate if you like.

<comment><USER7> If by "pretty well reined in" you mean "given 30-day paid vacations when they misbehave" then I suppose you are right.

What you won't see (or will see very, very rarely) is a cop losing his job and standing trial for assault if they wrongfully use physical force on a civilian. They can always get away with "well, I thought he was carrying a weapon" or other such flimsy excuses. Combined with the fact that cops always look after their own, it becomes very difficult to successfully and meaningfully persecute a cop for abusing their authority.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Part of the irony here is that Nick is one of the most respectable, least threatening, most "establishment" people I know -- he's worked in banking/gov security, and his goal in life is to be a CPA for startups.

If someone like that is getting fucked with by the biggest gang in NYC, you know there's a problem.

<comment> o0-0o There are already too many cops, and they have to keep going back to the same trough to feed themselves. Solving murders, rapes, and robberies doesn't pay. Ticketing people for jaywalking, curfew, and traffic violations does. Also, to further the problem, the police have cash bonuses paid to them for exceeding their quotas with these tickets.

The police are there to preserve disorder, but they have lost sight of this. Now, there are two types of cops; the protect and serve kind, and the us against them kind. Sadly, the latter seems to be taking over. I'm afraid this doesn't end well. The nightmare scenario is some kid walking up to a cop on the 4th of July and asking for baseball cards with a toy in his hand that is mistaken for a gun.

The real question here is what are we going to do about it?

<comment><USER8> Empirical research disputes your assertion that there are too many cops:

[http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/12/pol...](http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/12/police- crime-and-the-usefulness-of-economics.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> NYPD is 10x too big. NYC is really a special case of infinite budget, powerful union, and external events (1970s/1980s crime wave, followed by 9/11) to justify it.

Other places have too few (Oakland PD should be at least 2x and really 5x what it has). The fundamental problem is poor places have less budget and also higher need for policing.

Various transit agencies, universities, etc. should probably not operate their own substandard police forces, but use non-sworn security and have a decent working relationship with the local PD.

<comment><USER8> It looks like NYC has ~40 police officers per 10k people(1). If you cut that by 90% to ~4 per 10k then NYC would have, by far, the smallest per capita police force for any American city. So really you're asserting that police forces are too large almost everywhere in the US?

EDIT: ~4 officers per 10k would also be lower than essentially any other country in the world(2).

1\. [http://www.governing.com/gov-data/safety-justice/law- enforce...](http://www.governing.com/gov-data/safety-justice/law-enforcement- police-department-employee-totals-for-cities.html)

2\. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_police_officers)

<comment><USER9> But how many do they have per square mile?

<comment><USER8> 35k officers / 468 square miles ~= 75 officers per square mile.

<comment><USER9> Just as a comparison, Albuquerque has ~8 police per sq. mile, and Tucson has ~4.5 police per sq. mile. However, New York has ~27000 people/sq. mile, while Tucson has ~2800 and Albuquerque about ~3000. So NY has about ~9x the population density, but ~12x the police.

Now what I'm also curious about - would you expect high population density to increase or decrease the number of police needed per capita? Off hand, I would be inclined to think lower population density would need higher police per capita, but here it seems to be the reverse (possibly reflecting the coffers rather than the needs, though).

<comment><USER10> I also have your intuition but after thinking about a couple of the police's jobs I do understand how it could easily go the other way.

You have the somewhat obvious want of a _visible_ police officer ranging an area to deter criminal activity such as shoplifting/vandalism/mugging.

But you also want the police in an area to deal with domestic dispute type crimes which you'd expect to increase at least linearly with density, possibly more so as the closer you are to your neighbors the more you may see them and the more their behavior may impact you. Which may mean that you need several more cops to respond to concurrent incidents even if the average rate of incidents is lower than what a single cop could deal with.

That's without getting in to any other issues such as bureaucracy needs/wants of larger departments. Or the odds of more dense areas being more culturally diverse/allowing higher differentials in income against distance.

So after that I think it would be quite hard to judge what would be required.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Very interesting video - a law professor and a police officer explain how to deal with law enforcement in the US, mostly by not saying very much. I learned a lot watching it.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuc](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuc)

</comment><comment><USER12> Cops should be treated like muggers.

Move slowly, make your body language indicate that you are not wanting a fight, speak clearly and ask the other person to also speak clearly, and be ready to bolt if the opportunity arises.

American cops must be dealt with using de-escalation techniques.

<comment><USER13> Yeah, no kidding. Also, keep your hands out of your pockets and make sure you are not holding anything lest they "mistake" it for a weapon, which would justify your death to both them Anything else and they go into a rage and you'll end up in jail.

It's especially tough because their only training is to escalate further at any provocation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'd like to create a mobile app where users can input a badge number.

If the number already exists, you get the existing profile, if it doesn't, a new profile is created, from which you can upvote or downvote the officer, add a name or picture, and write a review. Other users can upvote or downvote reviews as well.

The other part of the app would be a top 10 list of the best officers in NYC, and a top 10 worst officers.

I'm pretty alright at Android, but know nothing about iOS. We'd need a really great and simple design. The whole backend could be done with Parse.

Anyone interested?

<comment><USER15> Like this? [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RateMyCop.com](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RateMyCop.com)

<comment><USER14> Yeah, but a mobile app with better design.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Welcome to the Police State.

Avoid contact with the Police at all costs, otherwise you are going to have a bad time.

Justice means nothing, quotas mean everything.

</comment><comment><USER17> i'm inclined to agree with the first comment on the article. if the author was not a privileged, professional-looking white guy, his outcome could have quite likely been much worse. i disagree with his naive conclusion (based on a sample size of one instance of getting arrested for an extremely minor infraction) that the NYPD are largely "good people charged with bad policing tactics". the treatment of minority groups such as chicanos, african- americans, and muslims by the NYPD is well documented and does not reflect a police force full of good people. :-/

<comment><USER18> I'm actually going to take you to task on this once, precisely because the NYPD is set to become a "minority majority" force if current hiring trends continue. I've had many, many more interactions with the police than these two incidents in a variety of different contexts and I believe they're decent human beings who want to do the right thing. The systematic mistreatment of all underprivileged groups (including poor whites and the mentally ill, btw.) is, when you look at it, the bad cops getting the outsized share of attention. There are lots of cops who do the right thing when they can, I see it happening all the time even beyond the patina of the blue line of intimidation.

<comment><USER17> i don't live in NY, so i'll concede to your actual experience with NY cops. BUT, i think your assumption that a lack of mistreatment of minorities results from a more diverse police force is naive. in my experience, i have seen abuse against ethnic minorities at the hands of police who are themselves ethnic minorities - sometimes even the same ethnicity as the victim. perhaps in many cases police brutality falls along racial lines, but only by correlation. i think it is probably more of an issue of class, and groupings like "people who look like thugs to me". either way, as a professional-looking white or asian dude, you can usually escape being classed as a "thug" sight-unseen just for your appearance.

i would also offer that due to the fact you're a successful guy, you have probably not had police interactions in, say, east new york. police attitudes and behavior are highly variable based on where they work. if you're in a shitty neighborhood, you will have much worse interactions with cops no matter your race. in nice neighborhoods, cops are nice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I have lived in nyc for 23 years. The police used to be much cooler. The would chat with parade goers, joke around and compared to the harness bulls in Chicago they were great. After 9/11 the department changed. Meaner more suspicious and unfriendly. 10 citations a month is pretty low. One every three days. You could write that in ten minutes in the intersection outside my window. My dad was a cop. It's a hard fucking job. Keep that in mind.

<comment><USER18> I know it's a hard job...that was part of the point that I think got lost in the whole article. That being said, this intimidation strategy (along with the rampant drug war incarceration of anyone who isn't 100% clean) has "cleaned up the city". Once the crime rates start going up again, it's going to get a lot worse.

Beat cops aren't just supposed to write traffic citations. They're supposed to get a litany of these "pink ticket"s, which account for all the quality of life violations that the Broken Window theory goes after.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> De Blasio unfortuantely hired back Bill Bratton, who defends stop and frisk:

[http://hereandnow.wbur.org/2014/02/25/bill-bratton- nypd](http://hereandnow.wbur.org/2014/02/25/bill-bratton-nypd)

</comment><comment><USER21> "The NYPD aren't tasked with policing, the act of maintaining law and order."

Exactly. That goes for all police. Their _only_ job duty is to make arrests. _Only._ It is a fallacy to think that the police are there to help. They're not even required to help by law and have no duty to do so. Once this fact is realized by someone, not interacting with police and other smart actions start to make complete sense. It's just too bad that children are wrongfully taught otherwise. It's one thing that parents can be squarely blamed for, as they usually believe the lies themselves.

</comment><comment><USER22> Regarding the beard incident... ah yes, never go outside when there is any major event in NYC. The cops are unusually crazy. They bring in a bunch of auxiliaries who have no business doing crowd control or even wearing a badge, really.

[http://www.nyc.gov/html/nypd/html/careers/auxiliary_police.s...](http://www.nyc.gov/html/nypd/html/careers/auxiliary_police.shtml)

(Regarding the park incident.. to be fair, most parks in the city close at 1AM. I've seen people asked to leave, but I've never seen anyone get a summons. I usually try to get an extra lap around Prospect Park in as it's closing, and haven't had any problems, but I do keep an eye on the time.)

</comment><comment><USER23> They stopped him before checking for a suit??? Bastards.

</comment><comment><USER24> Love the idea of a stop and frisk app: [http://www.nyclu.org/app](http://www.nyclu.org/app) A more general "I'm being forced to do something against my will" app would be real handy, I think, especially on the 2nd or 3rd generation of google glass.

<comment><USER25> I love the idea of the app too.

I found this odd though:

 _Shaking the phone stops the filming._

That seems like a bad idea given that police brutality might cause the film to stop when you most need it to be filming.

The one really positive thing I could see coming out of google glass is a shift of power from the police force to the citizens.

<comment><USER26> Why stop filming at all? I'd want something that kept on recording until the battery was dead, regardless of any action that an app can resist by any means publishable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> fuck the police. they are just another gang and do little to stop real crime in most urban areas. i would venture to say that police actually facilitate more crime than they prevent on the average.

in chicago, i have never received anything from a police officer besides disrespect and questionable tickets.

i am very excited for the next 20 years since i predict we will see the end of human policing and instead have robotic law enforcement.

<comment><USER28> > _i am very excited for the next 20 years since i predict we will see the end > of human policing and instead have robotic law enforcement._

[http://jeremiahlambert.deviantart.com/art/ED-209-June-12-Dai...](http://jeremiahlambert.deviantart.com/art/ED-209-June-12-Daily- Art-Jam-Day-18-309511163)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I read it, but I still don't understand why you plead not guilty.

<comment><USER18> Bear in mind, I didn't get a ticket from the Stop-And-Frisk incident, I got one for trespassing in Central Park a few months prior.

I plead not guilty because I was TOLD by the Police Officer that the ticket would get thrown out. I assumed this meant that the officer would not appear were I to appeal it, and when the officer appeals it gets thrown out.

What I didn't know is that the "ACD" option--Adjournment in Contemplation of Dismissal--was not offered to be at my arraignment. The first magistrate I saw wanted my $25, and didn't say a thing about throwing the ticket out. Not knowing my rights at the time (i.e. the ACD option), I plead Not Guilty.

Turns out the officer did appear and I was offered ACD. Had I continued with the trial, I would have made a point of the officer's statement saying that "this ticket would get thrown out as long as you appeared".

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> The correct answer was "Hipster beard", then.

> In the nearly six hours I spent in court on two separate dates, I saw around > a hundred people plead guilty and pay fines for a variety of different petty > offenses

This is plea-bargaining in action, and related to:

        Q: "How many citations have you written since you saw my client?"
        A: "Maybe 40 or 50. We're required to write 10 citations a month."

They're "manufacturing prisoners". One reason for that is the prison- industrial complex with the for-profit prisoners demanding "customers" and bought politicians delivering them. Another might have something to do with the burgeoning police state in the US.

</comment><comment><USER31> Great tips in here! Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER32> Why is this on HN? What does this have to do with technology/startups?

<comment><USER33> "On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity." — [http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

Then again; "Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, […]"

<comment><AUTHOR> I posted it because it's Sunday and there wasn't much going on. I wouldn't put it up as one of the finest HN submissions ever, but I think there's some value in "this could happen to you" and "this is what you should do if".

The piece itself was well written and relatively apolitical and non- threatening.

The "tech" aspect is the "fsck the police" part -- I think Nick is going to go into some ways to use technology to 1) help the police do what they should be doing, better 2) help the police not do what they shouldn't be doing 3) help users/clients/customers/victims of the police. And so should other HN people. Video recording seems like the lowest hanging fruit -- figuring out how to do that both safely and reliably is a good problem to solve. If I were GoPro, I'd donate $25mm or so to developing best practices for this, and then make another $5b selling GoPro-Police cameras over the next decade.

<comment><USER18> I didn't put it in the article precisely because I didn't want the shift in focus--but this incident made me think a lot harder about wearing my Google Glass again.

That being said, there's absolutely no reason that cops should not have a camera on them at all times. It's more for their benefit than ours.

As far as technologies that reliably work, the stop-and-frisk app is actually quite good, but requires practice like anything else.

I'd also be all for photographing cops out of habit. I stopped short of recommending that...but, hell, there's plenty of fodder here for a good month's worth of posts.

<comment><USER34> > That being said, there's absolutely no reason that cops should not have a > camera on them at all times.

True. This would be a major positive change to our system.

> It's more for their benefit than ours.

False. Everything is already all the cops' way. They have nowhere to go but down. Their court testimony is legally privileged over yours (this really galls me in the face of the idea that "all are equal before the law"). They don't like being filmed _because it hurts them_. In this case, what we have is a case of "good for us _because_ it's bad for the cops".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Another whiny "rules don't apply to me" hipster story. Becoming a tired meme, pls. stop upvoting.

<comment><USER36> The original poster seems to have acknowledged that he broke the curfew law, and also acknowledged that he was treated differently by the police in the other case because of his appearance, and that the police and judges treat poor people and minorities more harshly than they treat him. Is there some other kind of acknowledgement you'd like to see from him? Would you like him not to have been surprised when he saw the criminal justice system treating people badly? Or is there something else you found offensive or annoying about his approach to the situation?</comment></comment>


Doitlive – live shell presentations - <AUTHOR> http://doitlive.readthedocs.org/en/latest/ <comment><AUTHOR> This is an example of what this looks like:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OlDm3akbqg#t=547](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OlDm3akbqg#t=547)

I had a nice discussion with the author of doitlive who was inspired by my own ad-hoc and personal hacky version of this code to rewrite it in a better way for the masses.

</comment><comment><USER2> PlayerPiano is a similar existing program:

[http://i.wearpants.org/blog/playerpiano-amaze-your- friends/](http://i.wearpants.org/blog/playerpiano-amaze-your-friends/)

It's in PyPi and was demo'd at PyCon 2011 in the lightning talk sessions.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, but it only works for Python sessions, right? doitlive does shell and Python sessions. Perhaps other kinds some day?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Soo, the point is to boost your entire audience's impostor syndromes by showing off what terminal-fu you have, when in reality you don't?

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually, my hope is that people use this technique more often until it stops looking magical, which is why I submitted the link in the first place. I wanted to give it more exposure.

I've used this technique a couple a few times to deliver presentations, and it seems that all that people notice is the hacker typing, or at least that's what they most comment on, instead of the content of the talk. I don't know if they really are being distracted away from the content, but in case they are, I want the technique to be pedestrian.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This has been possible for a while with Shellcast: [http://tty.tv/](http://tty.tv/)

<comment><AUTHOR> This seems neat, but not the same thing? The idea with doitlive is that you pre-record a session and then you "hacker-type" it back. [http://hackertyper.com/](http://hackertyper.com/)

Seems like shellcast is for connecting your current shell session with a webpage, not for replaying pre-recorded sessions?

<comment><USER5> Hahaha, [http://hackertyper.com/](http://hackertyper.com/) is brilliant.

Full points for proactively lowering the production budget of C-grade hacker films.

<comment><USER4> I think I will have to make a hacker film just for this....</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Toast sandwich - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toast_sandwich <comment><USER2> Trying to get the most out of stale bread was a probably big deal until the early 20th century. I mean: toast, french toast, soup (really a dipping sauce for stale bread), bread puddings, crumbled and fried (as in _migas_ ), crumbled and mixed into eggs and then fried (as in some spanish tortilla recipes), crumbled into a variety of recipes. And all of these are quite edible, or at least they used to be back when people didn't have Wonder Bread.

</comment><comment><USER3> Y'know, just because it has a Wikipedia article doesn't mean it's not still a stupid idea...

</comment><comment><USER4> See also Chip Butty and [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crisp_sandwich](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crisp_sandwich)

</comment><comment><USER5> I can't believe it's actually a thing. I've been doing it since I was a child and was certain that it was my brainchild.

It's even better if you put peanut butter on the white bread and jelly on both side of the toast. Peanut butter and jelly time with an added crunch!

<comment><USER6> when I was a child I came up with a mustard and sugar sandwich. it was pretty nice, the hotness of the mustard kinda boosted the sugariness

<comment><USER7> In high school, a friend of mine had a 'mustard club'. In order to join it, you had to eat a jar of Hot English Mustard by itself. I like mustard, but not quite that much...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> When I was child, my grandmother used to cook this recipe for me:

        *. put oil to heat

        1. lightly beat a couple of eggs
        2. add provenzal, as you like it
        3. wet a piece of bread in there
        4. and quickly throw it on the oil
        5. fry for a bit and turn the bread around
        5. enjoy :)

It was one of these mini family rituals that later on I came to understand how much happiness it brought to my life.

<comment><USER9> That's French toast...

...with French herbs.

French toast to me is normally eaten sweet - say with maple syrup, but that works too.

<comment><USER10> I spent some time in the US when I was in my late teens and it was the first time I saw French toast or, as we call it in the UK, Eggy Bread served with syrup on it. I didn't know where to put myself. It sounded horrific. I actually tried some and it wasn't as bad as I was expecting but got to say, I prefer it with my salt, pepper, tomato ketchup and sausages.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Sooooo. Basically eating 3 pieces of bread at once?

If I have a Crescent roll. That has hundred layers. Is that like a toast sandwich inception?

<comment><USER12> It's called a deep sandwich. You should add some convolutional layers inside.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I was hungry and lazy once and grabbed three slices of bread at once to eat as a snack. I looked at them together in my hand and said, "Bread sandwich."

I think this wikipedia entry might be something like a stale April Fool's Day joke.

</comment><comment><USER14> Mucky fat on a slab of bread is (or was) a staple in Yorkshire.

You get beef dripping from the butcher - beef juice with a top layer of fat - you then mash it together, and spread it on bread with a little bit of salt.

It's magical.

</comment><comment><USER15> I've been doing this for years. It always blows people's minds. Generous salt and pepper is key. Using a different type of bread for the toast bit is also a fun improvisation.

</comment><comment><USER16> We call this "a student's sandwich", because when you are a poor student, those are all the ingredients of a proper sandwich you can afford. Though a proper student sandwich doesn't toast the middle slice (on account of not having a toaster due to being poor) and skips the butter (on account of not having money for butter).

<comment><USER17> Throw some potato chips on there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This food is an indication of economic depression</comment>


Ask HN: What will the implications of IR35 changes be in the UK IT industry? - <AUTHOR> The UK government has released a draft of what they are planning to do in regards to IR35 which impacts IT contractors heavily.
How do you guys foresee this playing out? Will companies start allowing contractors to work remotely with their own equipment? Pay higher rates to counteract the loss of having to pay extra taxes? Pay a higher permanent rate? Or will it just be a hit that contractors will have to take?
Draft: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/rules-for-off-payroll-working-from-april-2020 <comment><USER2> IR35 has been around for twenty years. All this change does is make the employer liable if they hire a contractor and treat them like an employee.

That was the original design but it was changed by lobbying from the professions to avoid IR35 hitting them.

Ultimately it is a matter of power in negotiation. If the hirer needs the skills they'll either alter the way the task is done or just pay the tax.

The impact will be in aggregate. Any tax reduces the overall number of transactions. That's sort of the point of it.</comment>


Exploring the Bitcoin Bubble: from February to Now - <AUTHOR> http://bitcoinweekly.com/articles/exploring-the-bitcoin-bubble-from-february-to-now

<comment><USER2> I think the argument that Bitcoins will ultimately have some nonzero value is fairly sound under certain assumptions, namely (a) the crypto doesn't get broken; (b) governments don't outlaw it. If Bitcoin turns out to be useful, people will want to keep a certain amount of it on hand so they don't have to continually trade in and out of it, with the attendant fees.

That doesn't mean, however, that a bubble hasn't formed or will not form. Speculative bubbles take on lives of their own, and can drive the market price well above the true value, as we've all seen.

</comment><comment><USER3> Well reasoned article.

</comment><comment><USER4> wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole</comment>


Facebook Extending Markdown Support for Status Updates - <AUTHOR> https://blog.praveen.science/facebook-extending-markdown-support-for-status-updates/ <comment><USER2> Surprised this is on the front page, when it's clearly not true. Markdown support for statuses is only available for Workplace accounts.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not exactly, it's been enabled for few folks in India. The screenshot I have posted is on Groups page on an Incognito Chrome window, where there are no extensions or plugins installed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I don't understand why they would chose markdown instead of a true WYSIWYG input. The website post input already uses Draft.js, which is the editor that also powers the Notes product. All the pieces are there.

<comment><AUTHOR> WYSIWYG is kinda difficult for developers to control the allowed HTML part as it can generate a lot of gibberish and null characters. The same goes with contenteditable too. The good thing is, if you have Markdown, you can export it to HTML, text, doc, PDF, or any other format.

<comment><USER3> Draft.js doesn't use the native browser content editable behaviour. It ensures that only valid markup can be generated: all text exists in a single block level element (p, h1, h2, li, blockquote) and then inline text can have an number of a developer-defined formatting options applied (emphasis, bold, links).

It doesn't have the compatibility problems and ambiguity that markdown suffers from.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Interesting update. Though, it begs the question whether Facebook's current UI can handle such styling to its full extent.

That said, is posting on Facebook still a thing? I haven't used the platform in the last 3 years and get the idea that traditional status updates have evaporated.

<comment><USER5> Given that Workplace (the enterprise version of Facebook) has supported Markdown for a while now, I think it's a safe assumption that they've built the UI to handle it.

<comment><USER4> Never heard of Workplace before. Does it have ads like normal Facebook UI?

<comment><USER6> Based on their FAQ (I don't use Workplace myself) "There are no ads in Workplace." [https://www.workplace.com/workplace/faq](https://www.workplace.com/workplace/faq)</comment></comment></comment></comment>