Invented Human Languages (2010) - s-phi-nl http://schott.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/10/questions-answered-invented-languages/

<comment><AUTHOR> I can't say how deeply sad it makes me that we have this perception about creating languages -- that it's something you do if you want to have silly wacky fun in your fantasy book or movie.

It's like it was before the creation of the electronic communication standards we now take for granted, but much, much worse. It's not that we're unable to exchange documents, it's that we cannot exchange even basic ideas with our fellow humans if they happened to be born somewhere else.

I'm a native speaker of English. So far I've spent two years in China studying Mandarin, and I'm still like a small child. Most people would never be willing to do what I've done. Or, if willing, they wouldn't have the opportunity. The situation for Chinese people learning English is just as daunting, if not moreso.

Our natural languages grew like crazed mushrooms. They don't obey sensical rules. They're full of exceptions. That's why they're so hard. But it doesn't have to be that way. We can and should create a language whose rules fit on a postcard. If I know how to say its words, I should know how to spell them, and if I see them written, I should know how to say them. The new language's sounds could be carefully chosen to be comfortable for a very large number of humans. Learning such a language would actually be doable in a reasonable amount of time. The benefits of being able to communicate with all our fellow humans go on and on.

Of course, people should go on speaking their native languages -- they're fun! Even if a miracle took place and a brilliant standard language were standardized tomorrow, I'd continue my language studies, because it's wonderful to be able to tell people that I consider them my family in their own language. But when necessary or helpful, we should be able to switch to the standard language.

It's an ongoing travesty. It really makes me sad that humans cannot get their act together enough to build such a desperately needed bridge.

<comment><USER2> _it doesn 't have to be that way. We can and should create a language whose rules fit on a postcard. If I know how to say its words, I should know how to spell them, and if I see them written, I should know how to say them. The new language's sounds could be carefully chosen to be comfortable for a very large number of humans._

There's already an existing project that fulfills so many of those criteria that it's going to be very hard to organize a new one from scratch. And the existing project already has a deep legacy of literature and culture. That project is the world's second most widespread language: Spanish.

Spanish has been destroying the dreams of Esperantists and others over the years who hope to build a more regular, orderly, and easy to learn common language based on common Indo-European roots.

Turns out that it's dang hard to design anything easier or more accessible to speakers of any European language than Spanish already is. The spelling and pronunciation are already completely regular and predictable. The grammar is straightforward and common to almost all European tongues. The vocabulary is mostly based on Latin with some Arabic variety thrown in, but it's been standardized over the centuries so that a lot of it has a simpler and more natural morphology. The sounds are a simple subset of what most languages already use.

It's a great second language: it's fairly easy, the world's second most widespread tongue, and spoken in warm countries with very friendly natives. It's not likely to provide you with many lucrative business opportunities, though. None of the world's financial capitals use it.

<comment><USER3> > There's already an existing project that fulfills so many of those criteria > that it's going to be very hard to organize a new one from scratch.

It's not hard as in "it can't be done" because it was done several times.

> And the existing project already has a deep legacy of literature and > culture.

For an interlingua candidate I see this more as a drawback.

> That project is the world's second most widespread language: Spanish.

Yes, but the second most widespread language is still only about 6% of the population.

> Spanish has been destroying the dreams of Esperantists and others over the > years who hope to build a more regular, orderly, and easy to learn common > language based on common Indo-European roots.

I don't want to start a flame, but by many standards Esperanto is much more simpler and logical e.g. if we take conjugation system, irregular verbs, etc. Esperanto is not unpopular because it's not simple enough. It is; Likewise Spanish is not widespread because it's easier (in quite a few aspects) than English. The widespread of Spanish and English is due to historical and political reasons, that's it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you're interested in this sort of thing, there's lots of community resources to help you get into the hobby. As mentioned in the interview, the Language Creation Society (conlang.org) is a good place to start, but there's also:

The Conlangery Podcast ([http://conlangery.com/](http://conlangery.com/)), which covers a mix of serious linguistics and artistic conlanging, with case studies of both natural and artificial languages.

The Language Construction Kit ([http://www.zompist.com/kit.html](http://www.zompist.com/kit.html)), which was on HN a few days ago, and the associated Zompist Bulletin Board ([http://www.incatena.org/](http://www.incatena.org/)).

Fiat Lingua ([http://fiatlingua.org/](http://fiatlingua.org/)), a monthly publication by the LCS on conlanging topics, and Speculative Grammarian ([http://specgram.com/](http://specgram.com/)) a humourous journal of satirical linguistics.

And finally The Conlang Mailing List (archives as [https://listserv.brown.edu/conlang.html](https://listserv.brown.edu/conlang.html)). The members are generally friendly, international, possessed of a wealth of accumulated wisdom, and usually pretty good about explaining things and helping out newbies.</comment>


The man who bottled evolution - <AUTHOR> https://msutoday.msu.edu/feature/2018/the-man-who-bottled-evolution/ <comment><USER2> Whenever I read about this experiment, I think about Theodore Sturgeon's "Microcosmic God", and experience a moment of profound disappointment:

[https://tinyurl.com/microcosmicgod](https://tinyurl.com/microcosmicgod)

I won't spoil it for you. It's still a great bedtime read.

<comment><USER3> Link leads nowhere for me.

<comment><USER4> [http://1pezeshk.com/wp- content/pics/2013/01/microcosmicgodth...](http://1pezeshk.com/wp- content/pics/2013/01/microcosmicgodtheodoresturgeon-111104040008-phpapp02_2.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > The LTEE is special because it allows the team to "replay" evolution and > thereby probe the effects of prior history on later events. After every 75 > days (500 generations), the bacteria are frozen. This serves as an organic > data backup of sorts, allowing scientists to thaw and revive living > "fossils."

This is just amazing. Kudos to this team of scientists.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is an amazing experiment which took an amusing detour through scientific denialism via Phyllis Schlafly's son.

Here's a summary I found surrounding the issue. [https://arstechnica.com/features/2008/06/conservapedias- evol...](https://arstechnica.com/features/2008/06/conservapedias-evolutionary- foibles/)

</comment><comment><USER7> I have a friend who is somewhat of a "evolution denier" (he's not religious and actually very intelligent). I was thinking about this from his perspective and would like someone else perspective.

"On human terms, the LTEE generations span the equivalent of well more than a million years of human evolution."

Haven't we evolved a lot more in 68,000 generations than the bacteria have? Or put another way, all the bacteria has done in this time period is go from consuming glucose to citrate, nothing else in its shape, structure, etc. So how did humans and other creatures evolve so much over 68,000 generations?

I am 100% on board with evolution, I'm just curious about this. This is only 6-7 times more generations than when humans split from chimps (quick google search said 6-7 million years ago).

Is it because we have way more interaction with our environment and these bacteria are just in a little petri dish? Sounds likely.

Has anyone ever heard of people questioning evolution? I think he was saying something about how impossible it would be to have every single thing we see in nature be pre-written in DNA - it has just been all expressed in genes over the millennia through natural selection.

<comment><USER8> Sexual reproduction allows beneficial mutations to spread and recombine in a population much faster than asexual reproduction (yes, e.coli has conjugation, but it's nowhere near as powerful). A complex trait might require multiple mutations to support it-- a gene pool that's constantly mixed by sexual reproduction will have much higher chances of the combination arising than with asexual reproduction.

You can observe the same thing in genetic algorithms, where crossover ("sexual" reproduction / mixing of two candidates) is often performed because it creates more viable offspring than simple cloning with mutations.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Harvard medical school did a similar experiment on fast evolution of bacterial resistance to antibiotics on a petri-dish. It also clearly shows the lineage of evolution. Very interesting.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plVk4NVIUh8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plVk4NVIUh8)

</comment><comment><USER9> FYI, the ecoli used in the LTEE experiment reproduce asexually, so defining 'evolution' in this sense is entirely at the discretion of the scientists. For sexually reproducing organisms, speciation occurs when an organism can no longer reproduce with its predecessor, a feat which science still can't prove.

<comment><USER10> umm, what? Darwin's finches comes to mind [1]. Also, since then, a host of other examples. All you need to do is look at the Wikipedia page [2], which has citations to the primary research.

Unless you mean, no one has seen it happen inside a lab? But that's not true either.., accelerated evolution experiments with uni-cellular species with different "sexes", leading to reproductive isolation (ergo, speciation) has been shown [3].

How about multi-cellular species where this has been demonstrated at the broad genetic & physiological / behavioral level? That's been done too. See these two for a review of some of the work [4,5].

[1] [https://academic.oup.com/zoolinnean/article/3/9/45/2701607](https://academic.oup.com/zoolinnean/article/3/9/45/2701607)

"On the Tendency of Species to form Varieties; and on the Perpetuation of Varieties and Species by Natural Means of Selection", Darwin & Wallace

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speciation#The_effect_of_sexua...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speciation#The_effect_of_sexual_reproduction_on_species_formation)

[3] [http://www.pnas.org/content/112/14/4405](http://www.pnas.org/content/112/14/4405)

"Molecular coevolution of a sex pheromone and its receptor triggers reproductive isolation in Schizosaccharomyces pombe"

[4] [http://www.pnas.org/content/97/23/12398](http://www.pnas.org/content/97/23/12398)

"Natural selection and speciation"

[5] [http://www.pnas.org/content/102/suppl_1/6522](http://www.pnas.org/content/102/suppl_1/6522)

"The genetic basis of reproductive isolation: Insights from Drosophila"

And all this from a cursory 5 minute search (including time to type this up)..

<comment><USER9> None of your citations, including Darwin's finches, prove evolution.

Your citation #3 states "In conclusion, we have succeeded in creating an artificial reproductive group that is isolated from the WT group." They artificially castrated a species; that is not evolution.

Citation #4: "The authors suggest that reproductive isolation has evolved in situ as a result of...". Again, not proof.

Citation #5 adds no value at all: "Although the sample of genes characterized thus far by various laboratories remains small, and concentrated in the genus Drosophila, I suspect that these patterns may prove general, although likely not universal. Our recent work, along with that of several other groups, also suggests that the selection underlying the evolution of speciation genes may sometimes assume a surprising form, response to intragenomic conflicts, perhaps involving meiotic drive." Keywords: suspect, suggests, may, perhaps

You may want to believe evolution so badly, but science doesn't have the proof yet, and that is a fact.

<comment><USER11> (Deleted)

<comment><USER12> Please don't take HN threads further into religious flamewar. Of all directions not to go, that may be the nottest.

<comment><USER11> I'll just not comment on this anymore, but I'm afraid I was responding to an existing religious flame war, not creating it. I'll be careful not to fuel such fires again though, sorry.

Edit: sorry, my comment seems a bit dismissive, but I really do recognize that no good comes from feeding the fire, and I wasn't trying to weasel out of personal responsibility in that.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The $1.3 Trillion Price Of Not Tweeting At Work - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcompany.com/3000908/13-trillion-price-not-tweeting-work <comment><USER2> The headline implies Twitter, but the McKinsey report appears to specify social tools like " _internal networks, wikis, and real-time chat_ ". Better internal collaboration tools may save that kind of money, but I can't see Twitter being used in this way.</comment>


Scaling Instagram (AirBnB tech talks) - <AUTHOR> http://www.slideshare.net/iammutex/scaling-instagram?from_search=1

<comment><USER2> My love for redis has been validated.</comment>


Understanding Virtual Memory (2004) - <AUTHOR> http://www.redhat.com/magazine/001nov04/features/vm/

<comment><USER2> I would also recommend this excellent lecture: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3akTtCu_F_k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3akTtCu_F_k)

</comment><comment><USER3> It is really a shame Redhat Magazine Magazine is discontinued

<comment><USER4> God yes. The `kill rpciod` trick I learnt in Red Hat magazine saved a thousand IBM servers from so many hard mounted NFS servers going down.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> this was fascinating. Any other recent articles on operating systems and linux at this level?

<comment><USER6> If you want to know more about using virtual memory in an aplication I can recomend [https://www.varnish- cache.org/trac/wiki/ArchitectNotes](https://www.varnish- cache.org/trac/wiki/ArchitectNotes) .

It was certainly an eye opener for me.</comment></comment>


Hadoop sorts a petabyte in 16.25 hours and a terabyte in 62 seconds - <AUTHOR> http://developer.yahoo.net/blogs/hadoop/2009/05/hadoop_sorts_a_petabyte_in_162.html

<comment><USER2> Google did the terabyte slightly slower (68 seconds) on 4x fewer machines, but did the petabyte in 6 hours and 2 minutes (around 1/3 of the time of Hadoop) on nearly the same number of machines (4000).

<comment><USER3> Yes, but the key difference here is that you can download the Hadoop sources and try it out Yahoo's way yourself.

<comment><USER4> Sure, you also just need 3600 machines.

<comment><USER5> You don't have to sort a terabyte in 62 seconds, you could do it on 10 machines and it would probably take you less than a day.

If you are a company that needs to sort a petabyte once in a while and your data resides on the Amazon cloud, you could get 3600 high-cpu EC2 instances and do it for about $12k.

A petabyte is on the order of 100k bytes for every person on the planet. If you have that much data that you need to sort in less than a day, you can afford it.

<comment><USER6> Just a small correction. Using their mapreduce large instances it would cost you less that $3500.

<comment><USER7> IIRC, the mapreduce fees are _on top of_ the normal EC2 instance fees?

<comment><USER6> Ah my mistake I missed that line above the pricing. Please disregard my previous comment.

Changes my figure quite a bit too. Up to $25K.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think you mean "3800 machines running Hadoop"

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Their report (linked to from the post) goes into greater detail: <http://developer.yahoo.com/blogs/hadoop/Yahoo2009.pdf>

I'd love to know why the 500 GB and 100 TB sorts ran at about half the speed of the other two (~0.5 TB/min as opposed to ~1 TB/min).

<comment><USER7> They doubled the ram before the petabyte sort. Is that what you're talking about?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> A _minute_ to sort 1TB on a system with 11TB of ram?

<comment><USER10> IIRC the rules require the data to be read from disk, sorted, and written back to disk, so that's at least 32GB/s of disk I/O by my calculations. Also, the cluster has fairly weak bisection bandwidth.

<comment><USER9> 1000+ machines to sort 1TB should work out to each machine reading, sorting and writing rows around 32MB/s on machines with _4 SATA disks per node_.

While it is kind of neat that Hadoop makes it easy to run big jobs on clusters almost nobody can afford, it doesn't look like it's very efficient.

For comparison, check out <http://www.ordinal.com>

<comment><USER11> Is their minute to sort 34 GB on 1 machine? I couldn't tell.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN:Review our startup - <AUTHOR> https://www.mycardstoindia.com/App/main.html

<comment><USER2> Get a graphic designer for the cards. That's your biggest weakness: The product doesn't look good enough in many cases.

It's a good enough idea, not too original, but I like that you've focused on a niche.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is a service for non resident Indians to send real paper greeting cards to India. We just got it out of the gate

</comment><comment><USER3> Your help link comes up empty for me on Linux/Chrome

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes . It is empty!. We are still working on it . Planing to post a short video there to begin with.</comment></comment>


Why iPhone Will Win - <AUTHOR> http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2007/04/24/five_reasons_wh_1.html <comment><USER2> Ok, this is topic I know a little bit about. Here goes...

1\. Samsung & BlackBerry browsers? That's not a fair comparison at all! Opera Mobile and Nokia's S60 browser are the clear market leaders (and, yes, both of them render full web pages with JavaScript/AJAX as a thumbnail that you can then zoom in on) See: <http://www.opera.com/products/mobile/> and <http://www.s60.com/browser/> (btw, the S60 browser is open-source and based on webkit). The iPhone browser is _supposed_ to be very good, but no one's really seen it yet. And it took many years of work for Nokia and Opera to get where they are today (Microsoft still isn't there, and they've really been trying).

2\. Touchscreens. If all you want is a touchscreen, you can pick up, say, the LG Prada phone or the Samsung Ultra Smart F700. They both sport full-screen touchscreens like the iPhone. There are others.

3\. Mobile fonts: please. Virtually all modern smartphones have nice, antialiased fonts. Take any cheap Windows Mobile phone for example.

4\. Big Screens: You _can_ get phones with bigger screens than the iPhone. (But until they invent fold-away screens, they're gonna be bulky)

5\. Mobile interfaces suck. Ok, I'll give you this one. But I've got a bonus anti-feature of the iPhone for the YComb audience: The iPhone is bad news for developers! <http://www.fiercedeveloper.com/story/editor-s-corner/2007-01-16>

</comment><comment><USER3> I love it when people talk about how you 'won't be able to dial a number without looking at the phone' Who dials numbers on a cell phone? I don't know anyone's number I just pick them out of my stored numbers list. I'm surprised they aren't asking why it doesn't have a rotary interface.

<comment><USER4> Good point. Knowing Apple, I also have a feeling they'll come up with some innovative solutions to the no-number-pad problem.

Some ideas:

\- Automatically complete phone numbers, as you dial them

\- Spotlight-type search for contacts. I.e, I dial "442" and the phone displays all contacts with 442 in the number, address, etc. I could then press the contact I want to call.

\- Better voice recognition technology. For example, if I say "Call Mike," the phone displays the top 3 contacts it thinks match my request, I then confirm the default choice or select one out of the list. Maybe the phone even learns?

Obviously, this is all speculation. But the point is, it should be easy to come up with solutions to this problem that actually make the phone easier to use.

<comment><USER5> Current voice recognition technology is actually fine. My wife's phone has a dial-by-voice feature that she uses all the time to select from her contacts, and it's a prepaid phone she bought outright for 19 bucks. This suggests to me that voice recognition for things like "Call Mike" is a solved problem.

<comment><USER6> My phone has a simple script:

"Please say a command."

-call someone

"please say a name"

-joe

"did you say... joe?"

-yes

"call mobile?"

-yes

"calling..." and it starts ringing. The prompts are optional too, you can just push the button and say 'Call someone, joe, yes, yes' and it'll go for it.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why punk keeps connecting people across space and time - <AUTHOR> https://www.huckmag.com/art-and-culture/punk-then-and-now-cbgb-godlis-east-la-teens/ <comment><USER2> Almost thirty years ago now, driving around on a hot summer day with a couple of friends. One guy puts a punk mix tape in the player, and the guy with a college music scholarship was aesthetically offended. "Anyone could make this music," he complained.

The other guy nodded in agreement and replied, "that's the point."

<comment><USER3> The other thing about punk is that it's really more an attitude. Some punks are really skilled musicians and lyricists that bring a lot of outside influence into their music.

<comment><USER4> NOFX's El Hefe and Bad Religion's Greg Graffin come to mind, respectively in your sentence.

<comment><USER3> Good choices. I was thinking of Bad Brains, who started out as a fusion band, and Craig Finn's early stuff, but that probably gets into more post-punk.

<comment><USER5> If we're going out in the world of genre-spanning punk, Husker Dü, Hot Snakes/Drive Like Jehu, Wire, and (possibly if you count them) Shellac deserve a strong recommendation. The creativity and diversity in the world of post- punk is remarkable.

<comment><USER3> You can't just mention Husker Du and not bring up The Replacements!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Ok, I'm old and got into punk in the late 70s. Never lived in a place with a really big active scene until Seattle in the late 80s / early 90s, but honestly that wasn't punk _per se,_ it was something different. More rock than punk, I would say. Feel free to disagree. The Bellingham Bash in 1990 or 91 had a good vibe, though, and I saw Nirvana at Squid Row for a dollar before they got famous.

I think the point is that punk is accessible and relateable for a lot of people. The punk people I've known were the most open-minded of any crowd, whether that was built around music or something else. I think it's true that it still unites people who otherwise would probably not mix. They are also the most open to different styles of music.

And as for connecting people across space and time, I can't help but think of The Fall's "Telephone Thing" every time I remember the douchebags at Google have all my data as I type HN comments. How dare you assume I want to parlez- vous with you.

<comment><USER7> I saw Nirvana kind of before they were famous too (first British tour). Am I right in thinking they were kind of unmemorable, or was it just that I had other things on my mind at that gig?

<comment><USER8> Bleach wasn't a very strong album, imo.

<comment><USER9> IDK, I kind of felt that way too when I heard it after it came out and I started off as a Nirvana skeptic.. but nowadays when I listen to it again there was really some interesting and unique stuff on it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> One of the interesting thing about these underground music movements from hip hop to punk is the DIY ethos for the creation of music, publications, performance spaces, and more. Adults and respectable companies aren't helping (for the most part) so the kids have to direct and make things on their own.

I think it's not a coincidence that many people who get involved in underground music movements later start successful careers in creative endeavors - fashion, cuisine, publishing, design, programming, etc. There was a documentary a few years ago tracing the lives of people who had been active in the 1980s music scenes and so many of them ended up in these professions.

And you don't have to look far to find more famous examples - Kira Roessler (Black Flag bassist) won an Oscar for sound editing for _Mad Max: Fury Road_ , Damond John's fashion label coming out of the late 80s/early 90s NYC hip hop scene, and Anthony Bourdain's coming of age as a young chef and NYC punk fan in the late 70s.

<comment><USER11> There's a difference between consumption and creation that is easily seen and displayed in aesthetic and cultural choices. It also seems to affect attitude towards employment and economics.

McKenna summed up the evolution from passive, introspective subcultures when he observed that "we're not dropping out here, we're infiltrating and taking over".

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I don't think I've yet to experience anything as incredible as the DIY punk scene in my teenage years. People from multiple communities around Chicago would show up at an abandoned transmission gallery and renovate enough of it to make it inhabitable for a show that night. The dedication was purely out of love for the scene itself and it's a shame I haven't found a parallel in modern adulthood.

<comment><USER13> Not modern adulthood, but electronic dance culture in the 1990s probably (from my point of view) was possibly close. Of course, I really don't know the early punk scene firsthand, which I heard was way more DIY in say the early 1980s, kind of like what you are talking about, vs when I played in a punk band in the 2000s (this is the impression I get when I talked to some guys who were in relatively known local bands in the 1980s).

I also don't know mmuch about the 1960s hippie culture firsthand, of course.

But my "impression" of the 1990s rave scene was that indeed it was in between the punk ethos (DIY, warehouse takeovers, some aggressive music styles like gabber/hardcore) and the hippie ethos (bohemian, some psychedelic influence, etc.) At any rate you did get that sense of "for the scene" with the rave community, something that is indeed special when you can find it.

For all I know there are some scenes similar to that still, but it's hard to keep up with this sort of thing -- it's hard to reconcile a late-hours youth culture with responsible 9-5 job culture. :( It would be interesting to know for sure what has taken its place.

<comment><USER14> >t's hard to reconcile a late-hours youth culture with responsible 9-5 job culture

I'm a founder at a startup trying to address this problem.

<comment><USER15> I'm a father of two and a startup founder. I like Detroit techno, and all relevant events _begin_ at 1 AM. The solution isn't a startup, the solution is techno parties that start at 9 PM.

<comment><USER16> maybe my lameness is showing, but why do people do this? even as a teenager I was usually running out of steam and thinking about bed at that time. is it for people who work late shifts or are there superhumans out there pregaming all night for a 1 AM show? or do they not even start partying until 10/11 PM?

<comment><USER13> From an attendee perspective I do remember those all night events to be quite fun, so I suppose that's why people do this. :) Honestly when I was younger, I was able to handle odd hours easier (that, or my tolerance for being sleep- deprived and off-kilter has gone way down). It helped that I was naturally a bit of a night owl, and it also helped that much of when I did this was when I was in college (much more flexible scheduling during those times). Back then the fun was worth any sleep-dep.

For others, some of it might indeed be helped by later work schedules as well -- a lot of service industry jobs for instance are not 9-5 and are more later shifts. On the other hand I do remember some talking about how little sleep they'd be getting before going into work, so...

On the organization side, I guess some of the reasons for many raves starting so late is that historically they often were after hours style events, sometimes semi-improvised and unlicensed. There was no liquor license getting in the way of closing earlier, and there's enough people that do want to party all night that it makes sense to do so. (It's not just restricted to electronic dance, where it is allowed, there are standard bars that are open 24/7).

I just chalk it up to a side effect of getting older. Even doing the standard dance club scene hours (which here often _is_ a 10PM-2AMish scene, last call is 3AM here) would throw me off these days. (And I'm not even a parent, which I imagine cements your schedule even more!)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Similarly, check out "Barred for Life" [https://www.amazon.com/Barred-Life- Iconic-Became-Handshake/d...](https://www.amazon.com/Barred-Life-Iconic- Became-Handshake/dp/1604863943)

about the widely disparate groups of people who sport "The Bars" of Black Flag. (I've got mine next to The Zen Of Python on my arm)

<comment><USER18> The whole Zen of python? I'd like to see that!

<comment><USER17> Just the repl import: [https://www.instagram.com/p/BCoV6RyPnAd/?utm_source=ig_web_c...](https://www.instagram.com/p/BCoV6RyPnAd/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link)

<comment><USER18> Ah, that makes more sense. Thanks for sharing!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> "Punk's not dead, it just deserves to die when it becomes another stale cartoon."

Dead Kennedys was on constant repeat on my walkman or home stereo as a 14-year-old in the late 80's. Every Friday was spent at the tiny all-ages punk club in our east-coast college town. Government Issue, Fugazi, Das Damen, Black Flag, Jello Biafra, even They Might Be Giants came through.

Even now, 30 years later, I load up Frankenchrist or any other DK album on YouTube at work and that's my intense-focus music. The music is still strong as hell, Jello's words and delivery are ruthless and scathing and hilarious, and the whole thing just works.

I wish there was a DK today. Rage had it. Some Run The Jewels tracks have it, but not quite.

<comment><USER20> How do you feel about Death Grips?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Any recommendations of cross-cultural punk/metal bands?

Taiwanese: 滅火器 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOgNLY8nDxQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOgNLY8nDxQ)

[http://www.chthonic.tw](http://www.chthonic.tw)

Mongolian: 九大圣器 Nine Treasures [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qa7PfYfmoEo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qa7PfYfmoEo)

杭盖乐队 Hanggai [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nf1HKQNuQQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nf1HKQNuQQ)

Norwegian: [http://www.folk-metal.nl](http://www.folk-metal.nl)

Celtic: [https://celticfolkpunk.blogspot.tw](https://celticfolkpunk.blogspot.tw)

<comment><USER22> Brasilian : Ratos de Porao [http://www.ratosdeporao.org](http://www.ratosdeporao.org)

Spanish : Soziedad Alkoholika [http://www.soziedadalkoholika.com](http://www.soziedadalkoholika.com)

French : La Dent Noire [https://ladentnoire.org/](https://ladentnoire.org/) (<\- my band !)

<comment><USER21> Brazilian Portuguese: Under Control

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

Japanese: Monoeyes/The Hiatus/Ellegarden (3 bands with the same lead singer, Takeshi Hosomi)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pppstt1_YZw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pppstt1_YZw)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbUXDcU32tA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbUXDcU32tA)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I feel like live music in general is at a low point right now that I've never seen it at since I started paying attention in the '80s.

I'm in England at the moment, and for the last several years all the band listings I see at bars are for one of the ten thousand "Tribute to the Mildly Popular Band from the 70s/80s". So if I want the Thin Lizzy experience or the Foreigner/Journey experience or the genuine-in-case-you-missed-it-the-first- time Ratt experience, you can get it six nights out of the week because that's all that's playing at every bar in town.

But there are no bands with stupid names playing their own crappy stuff. Even on a Tuesday night. And that's what I miss.

<comment><USER24> Older people are still going to gigs, they have plenty of disposable income and they want to see the stuff they grew up with. Younger people have many more options for making and sharing music.

If you were born in 2000, starting a rock band seems a bit retro - you might do it if you're into that sort of thing, but you might prefer to play solo gigs with a looper or do weird ambient stuff with modular synths on YouTube. There's no shortage of talented young musicians, they're just doing things differently.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Good piece... I feel the underground dance music world has a greater arc of history and continuity to it as it evolves, where punk was more a moment in time that lots of people cherish, and a very specific genre and subculture.

Great book from 99 somewhat in the style of this punk article [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18756.Last_Night_a_DJ_Sa...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18756.Last_Night_a_DJ_Saved_My_Life)

</comment><comment><USER26> related -- this is an interesting read on sub-cultures and how (in the author's opinion) they are co-opted over time: [https://meaningness.com/geeks- mops-sociopaths](https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths)

excerpt:

Subcultures were the main creative cultural force from roughly 1975 to 2000, when they stopped working. Why?

One reason—among several—is that as soon as subcultures start getting really interesting, they get invaded by muggles, who ruin them. Subcultures have a predictable lifecycle, in which popularity causes death.

<comment> a-dub It's an interesting piece, but it seems like sorts of things people would say when we actually had subcultures.

I often wrack my brain trying to think, what changed...

Was it the Internet sucking a lot of the money out of the music industry?

Was it the aging out of GenX?

Was it the long term structural effects of the GFC, with the shrinking of the middle class and the subsequent capital booms that QE created?

Was it a change in perspective in a generation coming up with a lot of economic and global turmoil happening? (no time for culture, time to get to work, economic security is fragile)

Was it the growth of online dating platforms and social media? (Was all of this just an incredibly complex system of mating calls?)

Was it the death of place? Did these cultures lose their luster when anyone could just read all about them online, consume them, and move on? Or perhaps a sort of centralization and homogenization of culture as a result of trends happening in the digital world (where everybody is reading the same things, thinking the same things, doing the same things, in any city)?

Was it the growth of burning man? A sort of Wal-Mart of subculture.

Was it rising real estate prices and the gentrification of cities globally? (Was this new global interest in urban living driven by the Internet in some way?)

Was it the fetishizing of Internet business? (Why do pop stars have Internet startups now, anyhow?)

...but yes, it is super interesting. American cities these days seem to be full steam ahead away from the weird and into the terrifyingly boring, and they have long been fertile grounds for the germination and growth of subcultures.

Does it really just all come down to $?

<comment><USER24> _> I often wrack my brain trying to think, what changed..._

A subculture can only exist if there's a barrier to entry. Commodification, globalisation and social liberalism eroded those barriers.

In their day, hippies and punks paid a real social price for their subcultural identity - they outraged society and were marginalised for it. If you wanted to be a mod in the 60s, you needed money and cultural capital to get the right clothes, the right records, the right scooter.

The Wigan Casino and the Twisted Wheel formed a nucleus for the Northern Soul subculture, because they were the only place you could hear rare soul records. Carnaby Street and the King's Road formed the nucleus for the mod scene, because they were the only place you could buy tonic suits and winkle picker shoes.

Streaming has democratised access to new and obscure music. Retailers like H&M have democratised access to the latest fashions. Social media has democratised access to cultural capital. A new trend can spread globally within a matter of weeks, diluting any possibility of it spawning a subculture. There's very little that a teenager could wear or listen to that is genuinely shocking. Without a barrier to entry, there is no subculture, just culture.

There are two thriving youth subcultures, they just don't fit our idea of what a youth subculture is supposed to look like - the social justice movement and the alt-right. There's a social cost to holding extreme political views, which prevents these subcultures from being absorbed into the cultural mainstream. Your parents probably won't disown you if you dye your hair purple, get a neck tattoo or listen to Merzbow. They might well disown you if you start saying that all white men are complicit in rape culture or that Hitler had a point.

<comment> a-dub subcultures or supercultures as everything is subsumed into some kind of subphysical hellscape of abject banality where group think and mob mentality rule the day centering on the most immaterial of arguments and supercharged by misapplied statistics for engineering consumptive behavior.

cool.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> When you have that spirit, you enjoy connecting with other punks. I was a guitar player in a punk band in my twenties and we self-published our music. When I had the idea to create a company at the end of the nineties, I had that punk attitude to move forward and create a company even if the business around it was new and full of question marks. All my friends recommended not to create that startup, and in a true punk spirit I didn't care and moved forward, I can now say 25 years later that it was a great decision. Even today I keep that punk spirit when I make my decisions, if you feel you're doing something right you should just trust yourself even if you are alone on the market, avoid beeing a follower.

</comment><comment><USER28> Pink/hardcore has an appeal to a certain type of person. I went to my first hardcore show when I was 15. I still go to shows once in a while (I'm 47 now). Kinda funny, when I was in a band, we played shows in Boyle heights, at a House called the dust bowl, where dust got kicked up when people were slam dancing.

</comment><comment><USER29> Wherever there's disaffected youth and guitars, there's punk.

(Honestly, you don't even need the guitars.)

</comment><comment><USER30> Cool story and interesting read, makes me want to go fucking rock out instead of being a code bro shelled up inside all day. been about 3 months since last big rock show, much too long.

<comment><USER31> I'm getting close. After 38 years on this earth, money isn't everything, and more of it isn't making me any happier.

<comment><USER30> Ah , you have many a year on me good sir. Wise words though. i'm just starting on my journey, coming up to 5 years of professional dev work at 1 company. My wife and I definitely connected over our love of punk/alternative musics. There is definitely an 'energy' at these shows that is hard to describe. It is raw and hard to capture on CDs and tapes. backyard/house/underground shows are amazing. The passion, sweat, energy, insanely loud music are all very organic. At most concerts here in the US the crowd is too busy taking a video of the show instead of getting into the music and moving

<comment><USER32> > At most concerts here in the US the crowd is too busy taking a video of the > show instead of getting into the music and moving

Where are you going to shows? This seems pretty regional, and also tied to the size of the venue. The more DIY the space, the crazier the shows in my experience. NYC used to have some utterly insane shows at places like DBA (which unfortunately is no longer with us), and Oakland had some pretty rad DIY venues pre-Ghost-Ship fire (which also unfortunately are slowly getting shut down :().

<comment><USER33> Spent my college years and early 20's in Seattle helping throw parties at a variety of underground/DIY-ish venues (including ETG, two other loft spaces down Pike/Pine from ETG, and The Monkey Loft back when it was literally Brian's loft with his bedroom in it before he remodeled it and turned it into a licensed space). There's definitely a stark difference in vibe compared to larger and/or legal venues, and even a noticeable contrast between The Monkey Loft's early years vs. it's legal years.

Something about those spaces feel more organic, more raw, more unfiltered. Everyone is more connected, the artists seem to have a much better time, the crowds are often more diverse and you'll hardly ever see someone staring into their phones taking videos. That doesn't mean that good shows don't exist in larger or legitimate venues, just that I'm often very discerning with which large venues I'm willing to go to.

/shrug

<comment><USER34> I'm going to somewhat tangent this to pick your brain:

Transplant to seattle from Baltimore, back east I knew all the good venues, DIY and otherwise, and had enough connections to friends working radio stations/djing gigs to stay in the loop. Out here I'm utterly clueless, even to something as simple as the basement EDM scene. Any tips, if that doesn't violate some unspoken dogma? :P (hip hop, electro, doom/grunge, punk, whatever.)

<comment><USER33> Sorry for the late response, but I'm happy to!

I did move away eight years ago, and while I keep strong ties to the people in that scene and still have a good sense of what's going on, I either don't know of the truly DIY spots right now, or there just haven't been many for the past few years. There _are_ some quality legal underground spots, but my knowledge of that is limited to dance music.

Kremwerk is probably most like what you're looking for, in that it's a small, late-night basement that throws great parties with fantastic music. The Monkey Loft would be your next bet, though per my original post, some if its luster has faded since it remodeled itself and became legit (but they still bring great acts). Rebar also gets an honorable mention, and while I wouldn't say it's too "underground" of a venue anymore, it's got a lot of history as such (read into it!) and hosts the longest-running house music night on the west coast, Flammable (seriously, check it out, especially if my man Eugene Fauntleroy is playing). Last recommendation for a venue would be to check out the next Train Car House Party[0].

Your best bet would be to follow area promoters. Sweatbox and Shameless are long-standing groups from Seattle with a history of throwing great parties. Sweatbox doesn't throw as many parties as they used to, but just last month they threw one in some kind of garage space in SoDo with Derek Plaslaiko playing. I worked with both crews when I lived there and they're wonderful people.

Other honorable promoter mentions are Innerflight, Hunt & Gather, Grounded, Drop, Viva and Depth. While you're at it, look into anybody involved with the Cascadia Festival[1] coming up, as many of the acts/groups involved throw small underground parties in the city. Decibel Festival obviously gets a nod, but they've been kind of quiet in Seattle since Sean moved to LA a couple of years ago. All of these promoters have Facebook pages that should be easy to find.

Hope that helps!

[0][http://www.roadarch.com/15/7/orient.jpg](http://www.roadarch.com/15/7/orient.jpg)

[1][https://www.cascadianw.com/](https://www.cascadianw.com/)

<comment><USER34> Wanted to write a very specific thanks, you went so out of your way with this and it's got me excited again, I've been far too down on the scene out here for the last few years! This absolutely helps.

<comment><USER33> Happy to help! :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Reading this with no clue what punk is. The article doesn't do a good job of explaining it or answering the question the title poses to someone not already part of it.

<comment><USER36> Old joke.

First kid asks, "What's punk?" Second kid kicks over a trash can, points at it, and says, "That's punk." First kid kicks over another trash can and asks, "Is that punk?" Second kid says, "No, that's trendy."

<comment><USER37> Another old joke: "What's punk? Punk's dead, man."

<comment><USER38> I grew up with a bunch of crusty punks in the late 90s in the texas panhandle. Punk's not dead, it just smells that way.

<comment><USER39> I think you are looking for

"Jazz is not dead, it just smells funny." \- Frank Zappa, Bebop Tango

;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I've been listening a lot to Tim Armstrong's solo work over the last few years. It's great! A lot of it is acoustic guitar and many folk/country covers. They way he plays them though is still punk to me. I'm impressed.

For those that don't know, Tim was part of Operation Ivy and later Rancid.

</comment><comment><USER41> Vans Warped tour is in its final year after 23 years. Crowds aren't what they used to be.

<comment><USER42> Vans warped tour hasn't had much to do with punk culture for like 15 years, unless you consider using it as a marketing tool as what punk really is. I saw anti-flag and face to face at a free show in Montreal this summer and punk rock certainly felt alive. The US has punk in drublic fest going on which is probably quite authentic considering it's thrown by fat wreck chords.

<comment><USER43> > punk in drublic fest

> which is probably quite authentic considering it's thrown by fat wreck > chords

I believe it's actually throw some random investor types, who kicked NOFX and Me First and the Gimme Gimmes off of all Punk In Drublic events after Fat Mike, the owner and founder of Fat Wreck Chords, made a crass joke at Punk Rock Bowling in Las Vegas this year. I will concede the Punk in Drublic fest has a lot of big-name punk acts, but I would suggest The Fest in Gainsville or Punk Rock Bowling which, alongside the big name / main stage acts, have a lot of small, intimate club shows with big and small acts alike.

[0] - [https://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/rock/8459092/nofx...](https://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/rock/8459092/nofx- apologizes-las-vegas-comments)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Punk connecting people across space and time is pretty much the theme of the movie "How to Talk to Girls at Parties" (adapted from a novel by Neil Gaiman, I would recommend it).

</comment><comment><USER45> To an outsider like me Punk's attractiveness is that it can be serious, but also not. Beyond that it is kinda anything you want it to be and that's ok.</comment>


Ask HN: What Open Source Projects Are You Working On? - <AUTHOR> Just curious what sort of open source projects everyone here is working on, particularly if you started one.<p>What are they? Please share :) <comment><USER2> A static micro blog / site generator [0]. There is a Python and a Perl version. Both generate the same site given the same input. Example site: [http://plurrrr.com/](http://plurrrr.com/)

[0] [https://github.com/john-bokma/tumblelog](https://github.com/john- bokma/tumblelog)</comment>


Virus Survival Strategy for Startups - <AUTHOR> https://steveblank.com/2020/03/17/the-virus-survival-strategy-for-your-startup/ <comment><USER2> _> Social isolation and a declared national emergency have had an immediate impact on industries that cluster people; conferences, trade shows, airlines/cruise ships and all types of travel, the hospitability industry, sporting events, theater and movies, restaurants and schools. Large companies are sending employees to work at home. Large retail chains are shutting down their stores. While the impact on small businesses and workers in the "gig- economy" hasn't made the news, it will be worse for them. They have fewer cash reserves and less margin of error for managing sudden downturns. The ripple and feedback effect of all of these closures will have a major impact on our economy, as each industry that gets impacted puts people out of work, and those laid off workers don't buy products and services.

> It's no longer business as usual for the rest of the economy. In fact, > shutting down the economy for a pandemic has never happened. Millions of > jobs may be lost in the next few months, as entire industries get > devastated, something not seen since the Great Depression of 1929-39. I hope > that I'm very wrong, but the impact of this virus social and economic > effects are likely to be profound, and will change how we shop, travel and > work for years._

I too hope Blank is wrong, but it's hard to disagree with his logic.

Unless governments worldwide act aggressively now to keep businesses -- and families -- afloat, a scarily large number of them look likely to face ruin in the near future. Consider the vast mass of families who have no savings and would suddenly lose their income.

If you're running or working for a startup, please read the entire post.

<comment><USER3> The fed has been acting extraordinarily aggressively - which on one hand good news they're acting aggressively, but on the other hand a lot of people are taken aback by just how aggressive the response is since the fed is kind of signalling that they think this is as bad as 2008 or 1929 and are taking action, which is worse than many were originally thinking it was.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The big issue right now is that the data suggests that 15% of people over 80 and 7% of people over 70 could die from this. If it turns out that those numbers are incorrect or that a medical treatment or preventative measure is discovered which drastically changes those numbers we could see a huge reversal of behavior. If the numbers get close to flu numbers people will want to know why we don't shut the economy down every year for the flu.

<comment><USER5> > _If the numbers get close to flu numbers people will want to know why we don > 't shut the economy down every year for the flu._

My initial guess would be the existence of a flu vaccine.

<comment><USER6> The flu vaccine is not a true vaccine. It's a best guess vaccine at how the virus has mutated, and is often ineffective.

<comment><USER5> My comment had nothing to do with efficacy. It's a guess at why public panic over standard flu cycles does not occur.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't agree with this logic. Startups need to pivot. This creates opportunity. If we all go into recession groupthink, that's what will happen.

Big companies aren't serving the current needs and market well. Startups can go in, and serve new markets better. There are a million open beachhead markets right now.

We need to re-ramp our economy as in WWII, not shut it down.

<comment><USER8> I strongly agree. I can't stop thinking about the potential to completely revamp our society.

The business opportunities and needs are there. Whether it's automating the service worker industries, fully shifting to work from home, new ways of virtual communication, etc. Much of the infrastructure (primarily internet) is there to support it.

This would require an elimination of low paid jobs, which are the typical jobs preventing social distancing. Assuming we can follow a "nobody left behind" mentality (UBI?), imagine the progress we'd make if we raised the bar of entry-level jobs. Investments in creative and new education programs would follow.

Of course, I'm overly optimistic about this, but the potential is there because the whole country (USA) is on the same page right now. Congress is drafting up a stimulus package, which is essentially UBI. It's a very interesting experiment and I really hope we make the most of it and evolve our society and culture.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> My established B2C SaaS app business is already seeing a steep drop in signups, activity, and sales this week. Feels like it's going to be a tough fight for survival, and already taking a lot of steps to begin turtle-mode.

</comment><comment><USER10> Please Americans, take preemptive measures. Ramp up masks, respirators, gloves, alcohol, bleach production. Work from home if you can, protect workers from logistic chains. Don't wait until you have the numbers on top of you.

It's not only the virus, is the deep economical effects it is having. Massive layoffs now in Spain, the economy is basically at full stop.

If you don't do it, it's not only you who will suffer. Everyone will.

Please, please, be responsible. Not only for your elders but for everything else. Don't wait until it becomes personal, you get relatives infected or you lose your job or your business. Every time you don't act is way more people infected, way more people dead, way more people with problems.

Make homemade masks if you need to. Wear them no matter what other think.

Learn from others mistakes. Don't undervaluate the situation. You should understand this situation as a war-like one, but in your own soil.

I saw it coming, didn't have to go through the denial phase, but it makes me nervous nonetheless. It's different to know about something than going through it. If you are calmed now, take advantage of that emotional state to plan ahead, you will perform better.

<comment><USER11> I've been preparing for weeks. Meanwhile, I explain to others what is coming (I live in a rural area in Canada). People laugh at me or simply don't care.

This requires such a strong shift in paradigm that they will need to see things falling apart or people dying close to them until they act.

<comment><USER10> Dude make everything you can. If they don't trust your word, try to show them news pieces that explain the nature of the exponential function. NYT on others are doing some work on it.

Believe me, I went through 2008 and it was hard here in Spain, but this is something different. You're nervous not only for your economical future but for your health and the health of your loved ones, and it's an invisible enemy.

The government is saying that this is a huge crisis, but a temporal one. Society is closing down and pretty much everyone agrees that this is bad and is going to be for long.

Those of you who know what's coming, you should make your best effort. I regret I didn't go way more vocal of fears of being dismissed as an alarmist.</comment></comment></comment>


Internet Is Filling Up Because Indians Are Sending Millions of 'Good Morning' - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-internet-is-filling-up-because-indians-are-sending-millions-of-good-morning-texts-1516640068?mod=e2tw&page=1&pos=1 <comment><AUTHOR> _Google's solution: a new app called Files Go that highlights files for possible deletion—with a special feature to search out and delete all good- morning messages at once. The company used its giant image database and artificial-intelligence tools to train the app to weed out good-morning messages._

</comment><comment><USER2> The Eternal September strikes back.

</comment><comment><USER3> >One in three smartphone users in India run out of space on their phones daily

Damn that's a lot of good mornings. Are they saying it to everybody else in the country??</comment>


Gravatars: why publishing your email's hash is not a good idea - <AUTHOR> http://www.developer.it/post/gravatars-why-publishing-your-email-s-hash-is-not-a-good-idea <comment><USER2> Spam hasn't been a problem for me for quite some time. I stopped obfuscating my email address years ago.

<comment><USER3> What works for you? How often and how closely do your check your spam folder(s) for false-positives?

<comment><USER4> I read over every single spam (or at least the subject and first few lines of the body, via gmail) before deleting.

Yes, it's a lot. And yes, as Batsu said, I'm numb to the pain.

<comment><USER5> When I check my GMail spam folder, I get spams at about the rate of one per minute these days.

Filtering those manually became unworkable for me years ago.

I maybe see a spam in my inbox once a day. It goes up and down, as spammers find workarounds and then Google fix them.

The email address I use is 10+ years old though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> So? Sending email is free; you can just send the email without knowing if the address is correct or not. Change the "| md5sum" to "| xargs mail" and you don't need the Gravatar hash anymore.

<comment><USER7> It's not for spam, it's for privacy. Entering your email in a field that says "will not be published", and they generates an avatar, actually party publishes your email address, which is bad for privacy.

Say, you suspect that Alice on stack overflow bad-mouthing software vendor "HAL", claiming impartiality, is really Eve, working for competing software vendor "Moon", you might be able to confirm that by using your knowledge of moon.com e-mail addresses, and checking the hash of email@example.com, causing SO to breach the privacy Alice/Eve expected when signing up.

<comment><USER8> Either Alice on stack overflow is tying her profile there to her real-world identity, or she shouldn't be signed up for Gravatar. The whole point of Gravatar is to persist a single identity across multiple sites, so I cannot imagine why you would tie a secret or fake identity to a real identity (your email) that you did not want associated with it.

Technically, yes, this article is correct. The Gravatar FAQ even discusses this issue, IIRC. But in practical usage, I can't imagine how this would prove important.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> An idea for a quick fix: use

      email@example.com

as your Gravatar e-mail. Will work if famousprovider==gmail at least.

<comment><USER10> The big problem with that is that you'd have to use the same

      really_long_random_string

to register for every gravatar-enabled site you want to register for.

The only benefit I can see of this is that you could easily blacklist emails destined for that address.

<comment><USER11> Doesn't have to be a really long and random string. Just has to be something that can't be easily deduced from your name and/or username. This might not defeat rainbow tables, but I think there are probably easier ways to harvest email addresses than to generate rainbow tables and troll for gravatar URLs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I don't get it. Why doesn't Gravatar use a salt to generate the checksum? The salt would only be known to Gravatar and is not bruteforcable by anyone who doesn't know the salt.

\- Unomi -

<comment><USER13> Because then the sites would not be able to generate the hash themselves.

<comment><USER14> A simple solution would be to assign each website its own unique ID, the based on that UID assign a private/secure salt only known to the website + gravatar. Then when the websites generate hashes, they can then append the salt and generate the hash. Simple solution and seemingly easy to implement..though, it`s probably not. (I suggest this in the event that it really is a big issue. However, I am of the opinion that it`s not)

<comment><USER15> That would require a bit more infrastructure on Gravatar's part (a UI for registering a site), and would significantly slow its adoption because site owners would have to go register their site before they could generate gravatar URLs. I used Gravatar for my site because it was so easy to implement, and I probably wouldn't have bothered if it was an annoying process like this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is basically a dictionary attack on your e-mail address. There's an easy solution: don't use an easily guessable e-mail address.

If you _do_ use an easily guessable e-mail address, Google has been pretty darn good at finding e-mail addresses for years. I could Google various permutations of a username and famous e-mail providers in far less time than it takes to write a Haskell program. (It'd be even easier if Google indexed the @ token...hmm, I wonder if I should be codesearching for e-mail addresses instead.)

And if all you want is a list of e-mail addresses, you could just run a crawler and a few regexps, and you'll find way more than 8500 in a few hours.

<comment><USER17> Nothing will stop people from simply emailing that address _without_ checking/guessing if it exists first. The whole subject of this post is an exercise in futility.

<comment><USER18> The goal here is not to find out if an e-mail address is valid. It's to find out if the guy that leaked inside information on an Apple fansite is an Apple employee. It's an issue of privacy, not spam.

<comment><USER19> Maybe if the apple employee doesn't want to get caught he shouldn't use his apple.com email address that has his real photo as his gravatar.

"Who leaked this info?" "I don't know but it's someone who looks just like Bill! They even use the same gravatar image he uses everywhere else! Devious bastards! Let's see if we can reverse engineer this email hash to find out who this rogue might be!"

<comment><USER18> Well of course, my example is an exaggeration, but the idea is that this exposes the poster without them knowing that they are exposed. At the same time, so do a million other things like your IP address in Google's logs on the way to the comment you made on that blog. Let's face it: there's no privacy on the Internet. There's just varying degrees of completely exposed to sort of in the shadows.

<comment><USER19> Well my point was that this isn't really a problem caused by hashed email addresses as much as it is a problem with using email addresses in general. Even if Gravatar used something to completely hide your email address - if you use the same email address in different places your gravatar will be the same and you've compromised yourself, regardless of how they stored them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> No matter how inept your accidental data leakage, you can usually rely on Dave Winer to have done a worse job earlier: <http://www.metafilter.com/8140/>

</comment><comment><USER21> I also did some experiments and wrote about this back in april, for anyone interested:

<http://320x200.org/post.py/2009/gravatar.txt>

</comment><comment><USER22> So, the argument is because the hash is displayed it can be reversed by subsequently hashing every known combination of characters with every known mail provider?

I'll give a shiny nickel to the first person that can reverse this hash: 9b60573dba6b13029b245bbdf7d01323

Moral: Not everyone uses some variation on their name nor do they use the most common email providers.

</comment><comment><USER23> Is this guy overly paranoid, or am I overly lax, that I don't care?

My email address is all over the internet. So what.

</comment><comment><USER24> I don't see what the problem is. My E-mail address is a public piece of information.

<comment><USER21> It also allows you to match an e-mail address to a particular account. So, let's say a dating site uses gravatars, now anyone who can see those can match my dating profile to my stackoverflow account (and any other site using gravatars).

 _I_ know this ofcourse, and will use a different e-mail address if I need to keep these identities seperate, but many people do not realize any gravatar enabled user profile can be linked to any other gravatar enabled user profile with only a tiny bit of effort in harvesting.

<comment><USER19> Uh, can't they also link those accounts by noticing that they are the exact same picture? I mean, I thought that was partially the point.

<comment><USER21> The problem is they can match these profiles even if you haven't signed up for gravatar at all. Your email hash is _always_ sent to gravatar.com.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Just host your own avatar and OpenID service. That's what I do. Of course a bunch of my info is listed in the whois for the domain so this is moot anyways.

<comment><USER25> Off-topic, but what solution do you use for your OpenID service ?

<comment><USER18> <http://siege.org/projects/phpMyID>. Simple setup, works nicely and like I said, it supports pavatars.

<comment><USER25> Thanks

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> it's like reading a post from a mirror world. in my world i make it easy to find my email address by googling my name - it's a link on the top result. why? because then people can send email. as a result they do things like offer me jobs and pay me. why would i want to stop people knowing who i am or what my email address is?

(fwiw i currently use gmail for spam filtering, but have also had success with spamassassin)</comment>


Third Apple Co-Founder, Ronald Wayne, Releases Autobiography - <AUTHOR> http://www.mediabistro.com/unbeige/third-apple-co-founder-ronald-wayne-releases-autobiography_b16483

<comment><USER2> With all due respect, I can't help but think that the next up will be

      An adventures of a guy who moved a lawn across the street
      from where Steve Jobs was thinking of starting Apple.

To those downvoting - do you not find it odd that a person who says on his website that founding Apple "was an adventure that occupied only a small part of his life" [0] still decides to title his autobiography "Adventures of an Apple Founder"? This is riding coattails in its pure form, so pardon me for not being terribly excited about the book.

[0] <http://ronaldgwayne.com/bio>

</comment><comment><USER3> You can gather all you need to know about Wayne from this article: <http://www.mercurynews.com/top-stories/ci_15214122>

It always amazes me how life changing one decision can be. Imagine if he simply just "stuck around."

<comment><USER4> Imagine if he simply just "stuck around."

=> Maybe Apple would not be what it is now?</comment></comment>


Markov Chain Monte Carlo Without the Bullshit (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://jeremykun.com/2015/04/06/markov-chain-monte-carlo-without-all-the-bullshit/ <comment><USER2> I think it's a bit rich of the author to advertise a bullshit- or jargon-free explanation of MCMC and then launch into a litany of definitions and theorems about directed graphs.

In fact, when I am looking for "bullshit-free" explanations of statistics concepts, I am emphatically _not_ looking for a resource that reads like lecture notes from a graph theory class.

<comment><USER3> Skimming the article, I see barely any mathematical notation, relative to what you would actually see in a lecture on this topic. This seems pretty math sparse as theoretical topics go.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> How would you explain Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) to a layperson (2010)?

[http://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/165/how-would- you-e...](http://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/165/how-would-you-explain- markov-chain-monte-carlo-mcmc-to-a-layperson)

</comment><comment><USER5> > There we called the matrix A "a web matrix," noted it was column stochastic > (as it is here), and appealed to a special case of the Perron-Frobenius > theorem to show that there is a unique maximal eigenvalue equal to one (with > a dimension one eigenspace) whose eigenvector we used as a sort of > "stationary distribution" and the final ranking of web pages.

Thank god this explantion doesn't have any of that bullshit in it.

<comment><USER6> Those words, except for the references to the Perron Frobenius theorem are fairly basic mathematical literacy, and should already be well known to anyone who is doing math or CS or programming or engineering or reading the blog in question.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9331808](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9331808)

<comment><USER7> And, for the record, I still don't like superfluous statistics jargon :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Hallelujah that people are trying to call stuff like this out, I've really been trying to encourage people in this direction. We need clear explanations of things, not jargon (I don't care how it can be precise, it can also be vague). Randall of XKCD has also done some interesting work in this area. Props.

</comment><comment><USER9> Yeah, that wasn't exactly what was promised in the preface. In fact, unlike many other his posts, this one is worse than a commonplace math-heavy explanation. That way I wouldn't even understand what is the problem we are solving, as drawing x with probability p(x) given p(x) for every x in finite set X sounds pretty trivial thing to program w/o knowing anything about Markov chains and stuff: I know for sure I can generate random uniform number y somehow, so this one is a solved problem, and mapping y to the distribution over a finite set D is simple: if y <= p(x1) return x1, if y <= p(x1) + p(x2) return x2, ..., return xn.

The link to stackexchange in the comments is way more enlightening.

<comment><USER7> > drawing x with probability p(x) given p(x) for every x in finite set X > sounds pretty trivial thing to program w/o knowing anything about Markov > chains and stuff

Then you misunderstood the complexity of the problem. It's okay, I did too when I first learned about MCMC, and I proposed the same algorithm as you did (in fact, your proposed algorithm is right there in the fifth paragraph of the post. Did you read it before commenting here?). The problem is that if X is exponentially large, and many of the probabilities are exponentially small, your algorithm takes exponential time to draw even a single example.

<comment><USER9> That's correct, that would be misunderstanding. No offense, I'm actually quite a fan of your blog, but this one explanation was easy to misunderstand, in my opinion. I didn't even quite understand, what we are trying to achieve here, and suddenly found myself reading about Perron-Frobenius theorem. Compare it to the explanations at stackexchange, especially this:

> The way MCMC achieves this is to "wander around" on that distribution in > such a way that the amount of time spent in each location is proportional to > the height of the distribution.

In fact, yes, I read the fifth paragraph, but didn't quite recognize what I proposed as a "solution" earlier before you pointed this out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Many thanks to the author! I have the exact same feeling described in the introduction when reading anything about statistics, but this article made perfect sense to me.

</comment><comment><USER11> I think all the explanations of MCMC are really bad. There is a fantastic visual explanation that I came up with that's really intuitive. It involves the graph of the probability distribution, and walking around the area of it. Unfortunately explaining it in text is hard, I need a whiteboard.

<comment><USER12> Youtube is your friend.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Any writing on this topic without a huge section on convergence is a BS. In practice, what you need to know is that algorithm almost never converges just like any complex randomized algorithm. If you want to train a reasonable model, you need to look for something convex instead.

</comment><comment><USER14> Thank You, I agree that explanations for people that already know are close to worthless.

<comment><USER15> Well... how much should the author assume you already know? I think you'd agree that this would be tedious if he started with a few hundred pages describing calculus - preceded by another few hundred describing algebra. At some point, it's reasonable to assume that the reader has a specific background and that readers without that background aren't your target audience.</comment></comment>


Canadian researcher traces AIDS to single bush hunter from 1921 - <AUTHOR> http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/health/new-health/health-news/canadian-researcher-traces-aids-to-single-bush-hunter-from-1921/article2210046/ <comment><USER3> >When you manipulate nature in a way you don't completely understand, the consequences can be unpredictable and absolutely disastrous

How were those doctors in the 1920s "manipulating nature"? They were just trying to treat sick people in an undeveloped region.

There are a lot of hospital-originating diseases even today (e.g. drug- resistant TB in Russia).

<comment><USER4> The natural way to deal with sickness is to survive it or die.

Creating a vaccine and injecting it into people's bloodstreams to try to gain an advantage over a virus' spread can be seen as manipulating nature. There is plenty of nature manipulation that goes on in the development and reproduction of a vaccine.

<comment><USER5> Humans are products of nature, therefore whatever we do is 'natural'. There aren't natural chemicals and artificial chemicals, there are just chemicals. The whole distinction is silly. Nightshade will kill you just as a dead as synthetic atropine.

Doing _anything_ will likely have unintended consequences, I would hazard a guess that vaccinating people has saved more lives than AIDS has claimed. Now that we have an AIDS vaccine, should we not vaccinate people for fear of causing an epidemic 80 years from now?

<comment><USER4> I don't think that anything we do is natural just because we are a product of nature. It's getting into definition and semantics here but something like cross breeding a chicken and a pig can't be called natural as far as I'd say.

I suppose that is not possibe but can you imagine chicken bacon?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> NYT on the same:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/18/health/18aids.html?_r=2...](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/18/health/18aids.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all)

</comment><comment><USER7> "manipulating chimpanzee meat"? Is that a euphemism? What is meant by that?

<comment><USER8> I'm pretty sure they just meant "handling".

<comment><USER9> Writing fancily for the sake of it.

<comment><USER10> The word probably comes from the French-speaking professor, for whom "manipulate" would be a far more natural choice of words than "handle".

<comment><USER11> Indeed, the "man" in "manipulate" just means "hand" in Latin.

<comment><USER10> It's interesting how in English, there are usually at least two different words for any given thing, one Germanic one French, with the French one being seen as fancy. (Maybe due to how the Norman conquest worked out.) This has the unfortunate side effect of making French speakers who learn English as a second language sound pretentious to a lot of people.

<comment><USER11> No maybe about it. The classic examples are beef vs. cow, pork vs. pig, poultry vs. chicken. The conquerers manipulating their food at the table while the vanquished were handling the animals.

<comment><USER12> _"the vanquished were handling the animals"_

Whilst swearing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I thought HIV was the virus and AIDS was the condition, the article repeatedly says "AIDS virus"– am I mistaken?

<comment><USER14> Saying "AIDS virus" could be an example of metonymy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> See also The River:

[http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0316372617/ref=aw_d_detail?pd=...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0316372617/ref=aw_d_detail?pd=1)

It seems like their theories are slightly different, but both involve vaccination programs as the cause of the epidemic.

<comment><USER16> It sounds as if this one is nothing to do with vaccination, but with _treatment_ of diseases such as leprosy, tuberculosis and sleeping sickness.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> "Doctors and scientists can draw a lesson in prudence and humility from this," he said. "When you manipulate nature in a way you don't completely understand, the consequences can be unpredictable and absolutely disastrous."

-the law of unintended consequences

<comment><USER18> Problems are inevitable, problems are soluble.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQliI_WGaGk>

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> A bush hunter... is that a euphemism for something?

<comment><USER20> No, it describes someone who hunts wild animals in the bush. The bush is not a full jungle/rain forest, but more of light wooded bushy areas. Australia has "bush", just think of Crocodile Dundee. Africa also has bush, and some people hunt animals for food in there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Quick! Where's my time machine?

<comment><USER22> If it happened once, odds are it could & would happen again.

<comment><USER23> HIV got pretty lucky a few times; it's relatively difficult to contract, so if any of those steps had been disrupted long enough for people to learn about it, we might not have tens/hundreds of millions killed by it.

Keeping it contained in Africa for a bit longer, getting rid of the infected plasma selling organization in Haiti, and a different initial population, might have made all the difference -- imagine if a monogamous/non-needle- sharing person got infected, disease ran its course with first-world medical facilities, and became a research curiosity.

<comment><USER24> Isn't it inherently unlikely for a disease contracted from wild chimpanzees to be contracted by someone with access to first-world medical facilities?

<comment><USER23> Definitely.

I meant if there were a limited population of humans exposed to chimpanzees (in Africa), and maybe it crossed over and stayed in a pretty localized group.

Then, in the lucky alternate universe, the first patient from outside being infected being a ~60 year old western/rich visiting professor who doesn't do drugs, and maybe doesn't even have sex with his wife, and is basically a closed system. Returns home HIV+ but doesn't spread it to any other humans before AIDS develops, he goes to a hospital (where there's already reasonable biosafety against blood-borne pathogens), and someone figures out there's a new virus in Africa which can only be contracted through relatively direct contact.

Then, a few tens of millions of dollars of treatment (practicing better biosafety in Africa, letting US medical device manufacturers send needles/etc. paid for by the government, etc., would probably be enough to keep the whole thing contained, and maybe eventually eradicate it.

Unfortunately that's not what happened.

<comment><USER25> You jumped a step. They would have never figured out he even had a new disease, they would have just treated him symptomatically and assumed he had some sort of immune issue. Detecting a virus without knowing what you are looking for is really hard.

The only reason AIDS was even detected was because of a pattern with many people who were in similar groups got infected. The similar groups part is critical - that's what tells people it's infectious.

A disease that hardly infects anyone is unlikely to even be detected.

And even if we assume your scenario of detection, your second scenario would not play out. With _billions_ of dollar of prevention we can't stop it - <USER2> really think millions would do it? All it takes is a little sex tourism - which despite the risks and the knowledge still happens today.

And finally, none of that would erase the stigma because the reality is that AIDS is mainly transmitted by low status individuals, and changing the origin would do little to change that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Great but is this hacker news or just mini-reddit?

</comment><comment><USER27> So we finally found the guy that fucked the monkey that gave us aids.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rG_DvlFJ-YQ>

<comment><USER28> Downvote? This is the best comment here.

<comment><USER18> Find the corresponding thread in Reddit and post there.

<comment><USER28> Do you know who I am?!?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


No federal challenge to marijuana legalization in Colorado and Washington - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnn.com/2013/08/29/politics/holder-marijuana-laws/index.html?hpt=hp_c2

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm surprised more people apparently don't find this to be important. It reminds me of the day the EU formed, warranting all of a two paragraph blurb somewhere in the back of the NYT. Or when the first successful manned commercial launch happened as part of the X-Prize, and all of zero people in a certain ivy league engineering school program had heard about it the next day. As general life advice, I think there's a certain value in cultivating the ability to recognize big events when they happen.

<comment><USER2> Unfortunately, this administration has a history of broken promises when it comes to respecting state medical marijuana laws. They have always given themselves ample loopholes in any guidance so that they can justify desired prosecutions.

<comment><USER3> They even said as much in the announcement:

> The size and profitability of marijuana businesses will still be a factor > prosecutors can consider, but there also must be additional illegal > activities for prosecutors to take action.

With enough scrutiny (which we know the Feds have the capacity for), it's trivial to find some regulation that a particular business is violating. And as soon as they have their justification, they'll come down on suppliers and vendors like a ton of bricks, using both the official violation _and_ the federal Controlled Substances Act in the prosecution.

Overall, this announcement is a good sign that they're losing the war on public opinion, and I don't suspect they'll crack down unilaterally. I think they're going after a strategy of containment; disincentivizing the experiment from spreading, as well as preventing bales of cannabis from flowing across state lines (which, in fairness, will certainly happen).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Realize Eric Holder said the same thing about respecting state laws over federal, and then proceeded to attack dispensaries, so it's hard to believe him this time.

<comment><USER5> If you're talking about the ones in Washington, weren't those operating illegally under Washington law and federal law? They didn't attack dispensaries because they were dispensaries -- in Washington some will be legal soon -- but because they weren't following the guidelines Washington sent.

<comment><USER6> All are illegal under federal law.

What's it called when laws are enforced for some people and not others?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The federal government hasn't challenged partial legalization elsewhere, either; what it has done (even _after_ announcing that it would not make it a prosecution priority) is continue to _prosecute_ people who were complying with the state law for violating federal drug laws.

So, its really _not_ big news that they aren't challenging the legalization. What will be big news is if there really is a durable consistent accommodation in the way they choose to prosecute (not just a statement or guidelines that seems to indicate a deprioritization, but something that is tangible in terms of differences in action.)

</comment><comment><USER8> I think the problem is selectively enforcing federal laws isn't a good option. Even thought he supreme court struck down DOMA, they stated that until that happened the administration should have still defended it.

While I think they should change the federal marijuana laws, I do not relish the future prospect of an administration deciding not to enforce federal laws they don't like because of this precedent. Voter ID, Abortion, racial profiling, etc.

Admittedly, though, I'm not sure how the laws will get changed. The Right to Vote took a very long time, so the Right to Toke might take a bit longer than the next couple of years.

</comment><comment><USER9> No challenge? They are sending teams of soldiers in to attack marijuana dispensaries in these states. I think the confusion here was the assumption that the "challenge" would be civilized and conducted in the courts.

<comment><USER10> Slow down, slow down. Is there a URL on this? When you mean soldiers, do you mean the US Army?

<comment><USER9> "Is there a URL on this?"

[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/25/dea-raid- marijuana-...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/25/dea-raid-marijuana- dispensaries-washington-state_n_3653071.html)

"When you mean soldiers, do you mean the US Army?"

No, I mean these soldiers:

[http://a.abcnews.com/images/Politics/ap_Dea_drug_trafficking...](http://a.abcnews.com/images/Politics/ap_Dea_drug_trafficking_thg_120622_wg.jpg)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Seems like the feds are reserving the right to swoop in and put a lot of people in prison for a decade+, perhaps after enough lobbying $$$$ from the privately-run prison companies. Sickening.

<comment><USER12> Unlikely, given that the DoJ unveiled a plan to hugely reduce the number of drug prosecutions, avoid mandatory minimum sentences through procedural means etc. What's 'sickening' is you mental picture of what _could_ happen, but there's no great reason to believe it actually will; don't mistake your bias for reality.

<comment><USER11> The same person who ruined the lives of many people who previously believed him when he told them he wouldn't ruin their lives, is now telling us he won't ruin more lives. So I don't think I'm overstating the odds of further ruination here.

<comment><USER12> You're not stating the odds at all, but treating your own opinion as fact. However, I don't think nuance is your thing and I'm a well-known pedant, so we're unlikely to reach agreement on this.

<comment><USER13> no, this actually happened. feel free to respond with some evidence to the contrary though.

[http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/obamas-war-on- pot-...](http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/obamas-war-on- pot-20120216?print=true)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm not American, so I'm not well informed on this, but is the basis for federal prohibition of narcotics not the Commerce Clause? Doesn't that mean that, constitutionally (as far as the USSC is concerned), the states have no right to overrule the federal gov't?

What does this mean for other state nullifications of federal law, like attempts to ignore Obamacare or gun control? Can the states use the USG's acquiescence to state nullification of federal powers ensured by the Commerce Clause in this instance to establish precedence for nullifying federal law in other areas?

<comment><USER15> > is the basis for federal prohibition of narcotics not the Commerce Clause?

Most likely, along with most federal restrictions. However, if you're making a constitutional argument, the Commerce Clause only regulates _interstate_ commerce, not _intrastate_ commerce. The federal government has no constitutional grounds to regulate anything created, sold, and consumed within the bounds of a state. Hence why Prohibition required a constitutional amendment. If you're looking for precedent, there it is.

<comment><USER16> In Wickard v. Filburn ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn)), the Supreme Court pretty much ruled that everything is interstate commerce. That case involved a farmer growing wheat for consumption on the farm. The court ruled that because the grain he grew was grain he wouldn't have to buy, he was having an indirect effect on the interstate market for wheat.

<comment><USER15> I'm familiar with the precedent, and I'm aware that the federal government has interpreted the commerce clause as carte blanche for arbitrary regulation; I'm arguing that such interpretation seems blatantly wrong to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Like gay marriage, history is on the side of legalization and normalization. Once the issue has a non-threatening human face, opinions change. Medical marijuana is a great vehicle for this, because only a real jerk is going to deny someone undergoing chemotherapy or suffering from glaucoma something that alleviates their pain.

As someone who lives in Seattle, it's fairly common at this point to walk past people downtown openly smoking pot on the street, without fear of arrest. I mean, the city even has a festival called _Hempfest_. Tourists may notice this and be shocked at the openness, but Seattle is not overrun by rampaging marijuana addicts, so what conclusion must they draw from it?

I noticed that alcohol is not listed in the controlled substance schedules. That seems like it would be a schedule I or II based on the definition and other drugs that are also on the list. Worse, you can die from an alcohol overdose, unlike cannabis. Why is this dangerous drug legal? Because people are conditioned to believe it is socially acceptable, and know that prohibition doesn't work. The same is now happening for cannabis.

</comment><comment><USER18> As a Washington resident I'm glad that the DoJ has decided not to drag us into a legal battle over this that could have delayed the opening of recreational marijuana storefronts, which should happen around the end of the year.

This bit is just as interesting to me:

> Under the new guidelines, federal prosecutors are required to focus on eight > enforcement priorities, including preventing marijuana distribution to > minors, preventing drugged driving, stopping drug trafficking by gangs and > cartels and forbidding the cultivation of marijuana on public lands.

The federal government's interference with state marijuana laws in recent years has not come via grand legal challenges to the laws themselves, but rather through continued and sometimes arbitrary harassment and arrest of medical marijuana providers across the country.

Hopefully this signals that the DEA will no longer go after producers and distributors who are complying with state laws, but instead leave it to the states to enforce their own laws.

<comment><USER19> > _opening of recreational marijuana storefronts, which should happen around > the end of the year._

My understanding is that legal growing for recreational use cannot begin until around the end of the year, so it will probably be a few months after that when the stores actually have goods to sell and can open.

<comment><USER18> That may very well be. I wonder if there will be any way for existing medical growers to "convert" plants to recreational production, which would speed things up at the outset given that I'm sure a lot of current medical growers are applying for these licenses.

<comment><USER19> I would hope so, but I haven't heard anything about that. It would make sense if they were able to "convert" plants by just paying the recreational tax for an existing plant.

They may not have bothered to cover that edge-case though, since it is probably only really going to be an issue once (I assume it would be perfectly on the level to sell "recreational pot" to people with prescriptions for "medical pot"... Growing plants specifically for medical use may stop being a thing.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Meanwhile, Roger Christie, a "cannabis sacrament minister," remains in pre- trial detention, without bail, for over three years. The Federal Magistrate in the case said that Christie is "a danger to the community."

[http://www.hawaiireporter.com/three-years-after-his- arrest-h...](http://www.hawaiireporter.com/three-years-after-his-arrest- hawaii-island-rev-roger-christie-still-fighting-for-his-release/123)

Then there's the current administration's attacks upon medical cannabis dispensaries in states where medical cannabis is legal. [http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2012/02/barack- obamas-...](http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2012/02/barack-obamas- hardline-turn-medical-marijuana-mystery)

Is this another example of "flip flopping?"

<comment><USER8> Roger Christie dispensed pot for a donation of 'The Approximate Street Value'. I'm not sure that a non-profit religious organization that is in effect 'selling' un-taxed goods is going to get out of jail soon. If he'd been handing out alcohol or Pez Dispensers it'd still be pretty shady.

The second article is a little more interesting, but I'll repeat from my comment above, it is very difficult for the administration not to enforce federal laws, even when they may want to. I would be very worried about operating a dispensary until federal laws change, unless you are ok with going to jail as an act of civil disobedience because you believe the law is unjust.

<comment><USER20> We have numerous examples of criminals accused of exponentially more serious crimes being granted bail, the latest of which is a woman who stabbed her boyfriend to death. [http://www.hawaiipolice.com/puna-murder- update-08-23-13](http://www.hawaiipolice.com/puna-murder-update-08-23-13)

Are you seriously trying to imply that an alleged pot dealer is more dangerous than an alleged murderess?

<comment><USER21> _Are you seriously trying to imply that an alleged pot dealer is more dangerous than an alleged murderess?_

Who alleged she's a murderess? She may have allegedly killed her boyfriend, but murder implies malice aforethought, while the victim's "lengthy criminal record and history of domestic violence" paints a different picture.

Let's not use terms that aren't justified by the facts, please.

<comment><USER20> Way to parse words!

Semantics aside, killing is definitely more dangerous than selling pot

Please, let's just stick to the heart of the matter here.

We see numerous instances where killers, rapists, child molesters, etc, are granted bail, so why not a mid level pot dealer?

The big banks get caught laundering billions of dollars in cartel drug money yet not one bank employee ever saw the inside of a federal detention center, much less held without bail for over 3 years!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is selective enforcement.

All the more insulting when sending kids and innocent people to jail for simple cannabis use in other areas.</comment>