Can you supercharge your brain? - <AUTHOR> http://mosaicscience.com/story/can-you-supercharge-your-brain <comment><USER2> I'm an individual who has designed [1] and built his own tDCS device, downloaded all the PDFs, read them and then designed his own experiment: anode over LDLPFC and cathode above right eye, 20 minutes at 2 mA, while doing Dual- N-Back Workshop [2].

I've done between 30 and 40 sessions over a period of three years, still ongoing. The intention was to increase my working memory, but it has also helped with several other minor issues. By my own estimations, my fluid intelligence has gone up significantly, it's really noticeable and I now also score significantly higher on IQ tests.

I've combined that with my own nootropics stack and mental exercise regime, which further enhanced my intelligence, now pushing me into genius territory. It's a blessing, that's for sure, I can now much better strategize my life, but there are also some downsides, like an uptick in neurotic behavior.

I'm currently working on changing my website, winfred.com [3] to a site that lists all the details of the work I've done on myself. Does anyone think there is value in publishing something like that?

[1] [http://www.reddit.com/r/tDCS/comments/qn6s5/diy_tdcs_howto/](http://www.reddit.com/r/tDCS/comments/qn6s5/diy_tdcs_howto/)

[2] [http://brainworkshop.sourceforge.net/](http://brainworkshop.sourceforge.net/) [3] [http://winfred.com/](http://winfred.com/)

<comment><USER3> Sorry to be a pessimist here, but is there any evidence that you've increased your intelligence in anything that can't be trained? Dual-N-Back benefits from training, IQ tests benefit from training, and fluid intelligence is really such a subjective term its hard to tell anything based on that. Can you elaborate on the "minor issues" that it has helped with, how your "fluid intelligence" has gone up, and what your mental exercise routine is? I don't mean to be nasty, but I do have a healthy dose of skepticism about many of these topics.

<comment><USER2> Why would I consider your response pessimistic? It seems to be a totally valid remark to me.

No, there is no evidence at all. However, the medication I have been taking, is known to improve the ability to focus in people with a certain DNA marker. And I have that DNA marker and I take this medication. The same goes with tDCS, over and over it is proven to improve certain brain functions, I have been using this device for the last 3 years now, the device has built in checks that show me that the current is actually going through my skull, I've seen the studies that show the flow of the electrons and I know where the electrodes are placed. I think we can make some assertions on the effects this has had on my brain?

Regarding the minor issues, I sometimes have small bouts of depression, nothing too bad really, I never contemplate suicide for example, but still, it is nice that after a tDCS session these depressions tend to disappear. It could be coincidence, but there are research papers [http://www.tmslab.org/publications/165.pdf](http://www.tmslab.org/publications/165.pdf) that also seem to imply that tDCS helps with depressions.

The mental exercise consisted mainly of no longer using my episodic memory (I have very limited time related memory storage, it's really pathetic in some sense) and reading hundreds of audiobooks on the following topics:

Psychology, Early Roman Civilization, Early Christian Religion, General History, Battle Tactics, Modern Warfare, Late Christian Religions, Philosophy, Story Telling, Programming (well, I just learned that on the computer, not with an audio book).

As a result of doing that for a long time (over 10 years), 5 hours per day, I am now a theoretical subject matter expert on a wide range of topics.

<comment><USER4> Over 10 years! I am extremely impressed with your dedication. You must've spent maybe 20,000 hours listening to audiobooks, which is kind of astonishing. I would almost be more impressed if you emerged from such a regimen _without_ being a subject matter expert.

In my experience, trying to assess the effects of a medication or technique on yourself is an exercise in frustration. Although you can do legitimate double- blind experiments on yourself, it's usually impossible to properly control the variables which can affect the outcome (diet, exercise, sleep, work, stress, relationships, etc. all have an impact).

So, I'm a big fan of the "assume it works because the studies say it should" approach that you describe. It's not clean or certain but it's eminently practical, and it has the fringe benefit of giving you a lot of opportunities to benefit from placebo :)

<comment><USER2> Thanks, you're one of the few that gets the implications of what I am doing and why I am doing it in this way.

One of the problems I ran into while studying is the decay of the information. It takes quite some time to store all this information (and even more if you try to do some hypothesizing or brain storming with multiple aspects of the information), that by the time I had a decent amount of knowledge, I started noticing that parts of it had already gone bad (proven partly or completely false after I read it) and needed maintenance.

From my perspective it didn't require much dedication. I like reading, all I had to do is make sure I read almost only non-fiction and that the knowledge maps of the subject fields overlap enough so I can get maximal understanding on the first reading. It's just an entertaining puzzle that doesn't have a predetermined outcome.

<comment><USER5> Regarding information decay, have you looked into spaced repetition? If not, I strongly suggest it, it's an effective approach to this very problem. Also, the memory palace can be very useful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It is clear you can damage your brain by having electrical current pass through it, and it has been demonstrated in a bunch of different species (including humans) that electrical charges in the brain are observable when the brain is active. And it has been demonstrated that directly stimulating motor neurons with electricity causes them to 'activate'. So the non-question is whether or not this sort of activity can effect your brain.

The question then is can the changes induced by this external stimulus have more positive than negative impact on your brain? That would be easier to answer with a better understanding of _how_ the brain worked (as opposed to what parts of it were active when it was working) but it can certainly be an interesting source of experimentation.

What surprises me most about this research is that we have not yet invented 'wire heads' or folks who are addicted to the artificial stimulation of the pleasure cortex of their brain. There is a clear market for such a device, it would not require smuggling any narcotics, and it would seem to be nominally cheap to manufacture. Further, it would seem that finding a way to reliably stimulate the pleasure centers is a much more tractable problem than trying to stimulate memory or intelligence.

I keep an eye on this research, I've known too many people with clinical depression for whom existing therapies were unsuccessful in treating that depression, but I expect to see the illicit use appear on the market first, then I'll know we're close to answering the question posed by the article.

<comment><USER7> Can we currently activate the pleasure center non-invasively? The only experiments I've heard of this have been invasively on rats and a few humans.

<comment><USER6> Some of the deep brain stimulation research is focused on using a carefully constructed magnetic fields such that they can create a 'node' at any point inside the skull. Then by modulating that node create an electrical current using the available ions.

I have no idea if that will be a fruitful path for them but it has the 'feature' that it can act in any part of the brain.

<comment><USER8> Interesting - this? [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_transcranial_magnetic_stim...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_transcranial_magnetic_stimulation)

I hadn't seen this before. Very cool!

<comment><USER6> Yup. Still challenging to get it to narrow areas.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Fascinating topic - glad to see it mentioned here. tDCS may be effective in improving working memory [4], treatment of depression [1], pain management [2], improved motor control [3]. You can find out how they work, how to build one, or where to get a commercial product via the r/tdcs FAQ [5].

To be fair, it does remind me of Ringworld, where 'wirehead' addicts would starve themselves to remain plugged in. Wild!

[1] [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3372849/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3372849/)

[2] [http://www.tmslab.org/publications/164.pdf](http://www.tmslab.org/publications/164.pdf)

[3] [http://www.researchgate.net/publication/10710628_Facilitatio...](http://www.researchgate.net/publication/10710628_Facilitation_of_implicit_motor_learning_by_weak_transcranial_direct_current_stimulation_of_the_primary_motor_cortex_in_the_human)

[4] [http://www.researchgate.net/publication/51068527_Improving_w...](http://www.researchgate.net/publication/51068527_Improving_working_memory_the_effect_of_combining_cognitive_activity_and_anodal_transcranial_direct_current_stimulation_to_the_left_dorsolateral_prefrontal_cortex)

[5] [http://www.reddit.com/r/tdcs/wiki/faq](http://www.reddit.com/r/tdcs/wiki/faq)

</comment><comment><USER10> Here are some highlights that caught my attention from the article (tl;dr):

Imaging the brain first, to target the stimulation to the active region:

"The MRN team used this software in part of their DARPA-funded research. First, they imaged volunteers' brains to see which regions were active as they learned to spot threats. Then they applied 2 milliamps of direct current for 30 minutes to that crucial region – the inferior frontal cortex. They found that stimulation halved the time it took volunteers to learn. This was a huge surprise, says Clark. "Most tDCS studies don't achieve a huge effect. A lot are borderline."

This is one of the criticisms that has been levelled at tDCS: the results aren't always that good. Clark is convinced this is because a lot of the studies haven't involved imaging the brain first, to pinpoint the regions that really need stimulation. "A lot rely on common knowledge about how the brain is meant to be organised. I've learned in 33 years of looking at the brain that we still have a lot to learn," he says. Michael Weisend, who collaborated on the study, agrees – he calls the imaging work "the secret sauce"."

Using both excitatory and inhibitory stimulation to increase the effectiveness of training:

"Brain imaging suggested that the best way to do this would be to stimulate the motor cortex while the volunteer was doing the task. But McKinley and his team added a twist: after the stimulation, they use tDCS in reverse to inhibit the volunteers' prefrontal cortex, which is involved in conscious thinking. The day after the stimulation, the volunteers are brought back for re-testing. "The results we're getting are fantastic," McKinley says. People getting a hit of both mid-test and inhibitory stimulation did 250 per cent better in their retests, far outperforming those who had received neither. Used in this way, it seems that tDCS can turbo-boost the time it takes for someone to go from being a novice at a task to being an expert."

Side-effects seem to be absent from evidence up to this point:

"So far, there seem to be no harmful effects of tDCS, at least, not at the levels or durations of stimulation that are routinely used. Weisend believes there's no such thing as a free lunch, and admits there could be side-effects to tDCS that no one knows about yet."

<comment><USER3> A wired article [0] mentions a study that found trade-offs in studying using tDCS, albeit minor ones. It sounds like tDCS increased learning rate, but also increased recall time for the knowledge learned compared to non-tDCS learning. I can't find a link to the study they summarize, but here's a quote from the article:

> Those who had the parietal area involved in numerical cognition stimulated > learned the new number system more quickly than those who got sham > stimulation, the researchers report today in the Journal of Neuroscience. > But at the end of the weeklong study their reaction times were slower when > they had to put their newfound knowledge to use to solve a new task that > they hadn't seen during the training sessions. "They had trouble accessing > what they'd learned," Cohen Kadosh said.

> The volunteers who had the prefrontal area involved in learning and memory > stimulated showed the opposite pattern. They were slower than the control > group to learn the new numerical system, but they performed faster on the > new test at the end of the experiment. The bottom line, says Cohen Kadosh, > is that stimulating either brain region had both benefits and drawbacks. > "Just like with drugs, there seem to be side effects," he said.

[0] [http://www.wired.com/2013/03/cognitive- enhancement/](http://www.wired.com/2013/03/cognitive-enhancement/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'd like to see more concrete detail on the experimental design, to convince myself that this wasn't much more than placebo effect. Additionally, assuming the effect is real, it would be nice to have a concrete and detailed theory for the mechanism through which the effect works.

I find myself extremely skeptical of these results.

<comment><USER12> I am incredibly skeptical. There are a lot of red flags here:

* Huge incentive to keep getting positive results because money was/is needed * Higher ups insisting this is great and works before the science is finished - this can cause a lot of pressure to focus on positive results and gloss over negative * Scatter gun approach - they're doing a lot of different experiments, and are allowed to fail on lots of them: "they want to promote research that is very cutting-edge and very risky; a 90 per cent failure rate in their portfolio is okay, because the 10 per cent that works will change the world" \- it's pretty likely somewhere in that region of experiments will show results just through sheer chance. Are they controlling for this? * A wide number of not particularly related benefits from a single, simple cause whose mechanism is not understood (I understand that breakthroughs occasionally look like this, but it's also a hallmark of snake oil) * Possible cherry picking: "This is one of the criticisms that has been levelled at tDCS: the results aren't always that good" and "people do not respond equally to stimulation, and no one yet knows exactly why". Could the reason be that they are sometimes seeing positive results due to chance or placebo?

Overall, their claims are extraordinary and their evidence is anything but. I'm not saying there's nothing here, but so far I am not convinced that these researchers aren't fooling themselves.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This article is very shallow. I would rather redirect you to this -> [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_1P6v24riU](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_1P6v24riU) <\- Practical brain boosting in London today. I visited Andrew's lab in Wembley. Very impressive. He is also very fond of old school nootropics. Also see Hacking the Wetware meet-up - [http://www.meetup.com/London- Futurists/events/79975272/](http://www.meetup.com/London- Futurists/events/79975272/) UPD: Yes, you can supercharge your brain. It is reprogrammable. But there are costs to cover and risks to take.

</comment><comment><USER14> (Subscription needed sadly) [http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22129570.500-healing-s...](http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22129570.500-healing- spark-hack-body-electricity-to-replace-drugs.html) Read the dead tree version and it recounts a company who are building implantable devices which can be used to stimulate the vagus nerve to reduce chronic pain.

Update - Said corporation : [http://www.electrocoremedical.com/](http://www.electrocoremedical.com/)

The article from another source :

[http://www.bodyshox.com/blog/science/body-hack-healing- spark](http://www.bodyshox.com/blog/science/body-hack-healing-spark)

</comment><comment><USER15> Yes with adequate sleep, meditation and thinking positive

<comment><USER9> Spot on. A quick perusal of many cognitive enhancement-centered communities (/r/Nootropics, Longecity, Bluelight, etc) will reveal that sleep and mindfulness are the first things that need to be improved, not last.

<comment><USER16> I was always confused about what 'mindfulness' means. Does it mean concentrating on one current thing? Then why not call it concentration. Alternatively, does it mean that my brain has a 'controller' which goads the 'controlled' to be more mindful? To me this duality of our perception feels absurd. It creates internal conflict and somehow this is supposed to be good for you?

Do other animals feel this duality? Or this phenomenon unique to human beings?

<comment><USER17> Not that I'm any sort of expert in mindfulness, but I like to relate the concept via a few analogies. The first is that for dieting, one strategy is to be _mindful_ of your satiety. Pause between bites and feel if you are full. Another is for training. Exercise is good, but to train effectively, you have to pay attention to how your body feels, not just to prevent injuries and know when to rest, but also while training, so that you make sure every movement is actually influencing your body the way you want.

With mindfulness, you place the focus of introspection on your mind: what emotions are you feeling? Why do you feel that way? Have you lost focus? When attempting to learn are you keeping your mind active? It's sort of like "situational awareness" turned inward, or honing your mind to make deliberate practice even more effective. "An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself."

<comment><USER16> Right. I think I get the basic idea of it. What bothers is me is who is this 'other me' telling me what to do. Is the 'other me' the real me, if not why can't I figure out myself when to stop eating why do I need another overbearing character watching my every move and telling me what to do.

It is quite disconcerting that we have taken this kind of dualistic thinking to be the norm and assumed that thats how things are and that we are doomed to live in a perpetual conflict within ourselves. We have made great scientific discoveries and have spent enormous amounts of energy in learning how the world works. But we have spent so little time on studying ourselves as to why we behave in certain way. All we have come up with so far are conflict inducing strategies like mindfulness.

<comment><USER18> We have habits, unconscious things we do, learned on our own or from others. We eat when we get stressed, but it's not deliberate. (Or whatever it is for you.) We have to change the way we've wired our minds to break these behaviors. So if you find yourself constantly knocking yourself down (in self- effacing jokes, internal monologue, whatever), you need to become aware of your action, and deliberately alter your behavior until it sticks. If you eat too much, you have to be aware of yourself at the dinner table, and learn to push things away or ask for a to-go box. Eventually these deliberate changes will (hopefully) stick and become the new, desired, habits and behaviors.

So it's not two yous. It's one you, but one part is conscious and one part is unconscious (or non-deliberate, habit-based, instinct-based, etc.). The objective is to bring yourself to awareness of your actions, recognize that you are doing something, perhaps actually understand why, and then change it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> George Nash (Beautiful Mind) stopped doing anything significant after they zapped his brain. I wouldnt gamble on this.

<comment><USER20> 1\. John Nash, not George.

2\. So far as I can tell, Nash was never treated with electroconvulsive therapy.

3\. ECT has scarcely anything in common with tDCS.

4\. Nash did all his best work before he became schizophrenic. I would be more inclined to blame the _major mental illness_ for any falloff in the quantity or quality of his output, rather than the treatment he received for it.</comment></comment>


Optimizing Websites for Opera Mini - <AUTHOR> https://www.africanexponent.com/blogs/afrotech/4559-a-comprehensive-guide-on-why-and-how-to-optimize-websites-for-opera-mini <comment><USER2> so much yes! People in USA and Europa do not understand this. Not everybody in the world has many X Mbit/s on mobile (many have less than 1Mbit/s) and Gigabyte download limits. Companies like Facebook, Instagram and even WhatsApp understand this problems. Some companies like Snapchat do not even know what I'm talking about. The downsite of websites going SSL is that normal Google Chrome compression does not work. While Opera Mini is maybe not as secure (because it does server side rendering even on SSL) it helps a lot on that problem in countries with low bandwidth.

<comment><AUTHOR> I second this. In 3rd world countries, data usage is a very sensitive issue. It hurts that a person has to go through hoops of ad overlays and high res images (on a really small screen) just to get to the text that they are looking for. A person who is limited to 20MB of data has to consume their 1 MB of data in order to read 10KB of text. Facebook has realized this and is already providing free facebook access through local phone service providers.</comment></comment>


MVVM and Databinding for Unity3d - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/vovgou/loxodon-framework <comment><AUTHOR> LoxodonFramework is a lightweight MVVM(Model-View-ViewModel) framework built specifically to target Unity3D. Databinding and localization are supported.It has a very flexible extensibility.It makes your game development faster and easier.

For tutorials,examples and support,please see the project.You can also discuss the project in the Unity Forums.

The plugin is compatible with MacOSX,Windows,Linux,UWP,WebGL,IOS and Android,and provides all the source code of the project.

Tested in Unity 3D on the following platforms: PC/Mac/Linux IOS Android UWP(window10) WebGL

Key Features: MVVM Framework; Multiple platforms; Higher Extensibility; async&await (C#&Lua) try&catch&finally for lua XLua support(You can make your game in lua.); Asynchronous result and asynchronous task are supported; Scheduled Executor and Multi-threading; Messaging system support; Preferences can be encrypted; Localization support; Databinding support: Field binding; Property binding; Dictionary,list and array binding; Event binding; Unity3d's EventBase binding; Static property and field binding; Method binding; Command binding; ObservableProperty,ObservableDictionary and ObservableList binding; Expression binding;</comment>


Giving Everyone in the World an Address - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/business-32444811 <comment><USER3> I may be missing something here, but it seems like this solves only half of the problem. Sure it's helpful to cover the earth in 3m squares with unique names, but in order to actually deliver something you need to be able to navigate to it.

The advantage of a (building number, street name, locality) address is that it identifies some point on the edge of a graph, and that the edges and vertices are well-known.

I'll grant that within any locality, people generally know how to get from point A to point B (and frequently don't know the names of the streets), but it seems like what you really need is a way to map the unique 3m squares onto that knowledge.

Even with that problem solved, another problem comes up with planning deliveries efficiently. There's no information embedded in the what3words address that encodes any notion of adjacency or relative distance. I realize that this is probably intentional to reduce the likelihood of errors in addresses going unnoticed, but it means determining nearness requires access to the whole mapping data set (or at least enough to determine that a what3words address isn't in the set of ones you care about).

<comment><USER4> Those squares can be mapped back to regular lat/long and navigated by regular GPS/SatNav.

I guess the main thing here is that we can now express "GPS coordinates" in easy to remember and human-friendly phrases.

<comment><USER5> That is partially done with Geohash ([http://geohash.org/](http://geohash.org/)) and other variants. The actual step here is usage of dictionary words as digits for encoding instead of a bunch of random characters.

Alternatively, such a system can be done by interleaving bitstrings for coordinates then converting the result to base 10000 or something and encoding each digit with a word. By using that you will get a little bit of hierarchy (the coordinates starting with same digits will correspond to sequences starting with same word). In this way we will know which zone starts with e.g. chocolate.kit.photo then it will be easier to navigate. Of course it won't beat a graph-based solution like street and building numbers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> Flip-per First sentences of the article:

"Where the streets have no name," sang rock frontman Bono on one of U2's biggest hits. "It must be hell being a postman, then," came the sarcastic rejoinder from the music press.

But the system they come up with is still hell for a postman. He either remembers the 111111 three-word combinations for his square kilometer of delivery, or he can't work without an electronic device.

I see the problem, but hope that there are better solutions. Especially ones that are free: A non-free address system is absurd in my opinion, to put it mildly.

<comment><USER6> quite this is first worlders trying to nickle and dime poor third world country's

Access to clean water and basic medical services will do far more.

<comment><USER7> Well, if you ever try providing clean water and medical services to one of these places, you will quickly find that your first challenge is distributing resources in an efficient, non-wasteful way.

And to do that, you need to take a census and find out how many people live in each area, how many are lacking service, and to what extent.

And to do that, you need to have some way of counting people that both humans and computers can understand. Which brings us back to this very elegant address system.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I recently learned that Northern Canada has this problem.

Most of the communities in the Arctic do not have street names. Canada Post has been forcing them in the last few years to start, so, for example, a community called Aklavik officially has one street, Aklv St. Even though there are physically more streets than that, and streets at right angles, they're all called Aklv St.

I work for the telco that services these communities, and it's hilarious to look at the street addresses in our plant and provisioning systems - <USER2> are literally "brown bld across from red bld", "House near lake" etc.

Not surprisingly, I'm having trouble writing code to parse street addresses :)

<comment><USER9> Oh, classic address trap. I feel for you, my friend. It makes you wonder about introducing a new address system that takes into account your actual location in the globe (with GPS). Not a trivial undertaking itself. I assume it has been thought off before. Anyone have more info on this type of setup?

<comment><USER10> Mapcode was a submission a while back: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8052908](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8052908)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Usual disclaimer for what3words: neat idea, shame the data/algorithm is closed.

In the Rio example, a postal service or courier would have to pay w3w to license the words->lat/lon lookup before they could deliver anything.

<comment><USER12> I imagine, from their point of view, that's the point.

<comment><USER13> Which is a big problem. They want to own the address of most of the people in the world. They might get away with it, too; their word list can be copyrighted.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I have to think "ugh" when I read about this idea. Random three words to every square seems like chaos to me.

These also take a lot of bytes to store. In the US, every address or "delivery point" can be represented by 11 numerals: zip+4+2. If you read the barcodes on your received US mail, you will see the normally invisible +2. (zip+4 is usually granular to one side of a block or MDU mailbox cluster, and the extra two numerals represent a unique mailbox within the zip+4.)

Amateur radio people have organized the world into grid squares, which are a bit larger as they are minutes of latitude/longitude in either dimension. However they are like postcodes, in that once you are familiar with the system you can glance at one and have a rough idea of whether it is near you or not, and where on the map it is. For instance, the White House in Washington is within grid square FM18lv.

Introduction to the grid square system at [1] and a rudimentary mapping tool at [2].

I'm not sure if there is any reason why the grid squares couldn't be further subdivided. Even then, this wouldn't solve the problem in some places I've been: The barrios around Caracas are not only tightly packed in two dimensions, but they have been building their homes on top of each other, so a 3m x 3m square could very well contain five homes or more.

[1]: [http://www.arrl.org/grid-squares](http://www.arrl.org/grid-squares) [2]: [http://www.qrz.com/gridmapper](http://www.qrz.com/gridmapper)

</comment><comment><USER15> I still prefer Geohash [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geohash](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geohash)

It's already implemented in mongo, elastic, solr, etc, supports arbitrary length/precision codes, adjacent cells have similar hashes. [http://www.movable-type.co.uk/scripts/geohash.html](http://www.movable- type.co.uk/scripts/geohash.html) [http://mapzen.github.io/leaflet-spatial- prefix-tree/](http://mapzen.github.io/leaflet-spatial-prefix-tree/)

<comment><USER16> Geohash is great, but doesn't include any error detection or correction. This means that one (undetectable) symbol changes, and you could be half-way around the world from the original Geohash location.

The EZCOD encoding provides accuracy within 3 meters AND error detection/correction with 10 symbols. For example, where my daughter was born: R3U 1JU QUY.0 (try it at [http://ezcod.com](http://ezcod.com))

If you want 20mm accuracy AND 5-nines certainty of correctness, you can have that in 15 symbols: R3U 1JU QUY L02.XJ8

Available in C++, Javascript (via Emscripten, production-ready and CDN hosted), Python (via Swig) and REST APIs:

[http://hardconsulting.com/products/13-reed- solomon#EZCOD](http://hardconsulting.com/products/13-reed-solomon#EZCOD)

[https://github.com/pjkundert/ezpwd-reed- solomon](https://github.com/pjkundert/ezpwd-reed-solomon)

[http://ezcod.com](http://ezcod.com)

Use EZCOD for free. Forever. For whatever application you want. Available under either GPLv3 or completely free Commercial licensing, at your preference.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Nice idea but there is also sacrifice of the relativity of the places. Based on the calculations, looks like the order of the words are important too.

"With 40,000 dictionary words, you have 64 trillion combinations, and there are 57 trillion squares."

If the dictionary words can be doubled, the order of the words can be made unimportant too. That way it would have ~80 Trillion combinations (64 Trillion/3!) * 2^3.

</comment><comment><USER18> Discussion of the company's own website from three months ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8614198](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8614198)

</comment><comment><USER19> One critical issue in this (apart from the proprietary approach) might be the mapping of adresses between languages, since a random Indian or Chinese person will probably not benefit from English words.

Can you identify subsets consisting of 10,000s of words in different languages that have one-to-one maps to any other global language subset for w3w? (i.e. without multiple words being suitable for a translation of the word)

</comment><comment><USER20> > Sure it's helpful to cover the earth in 3m squares with unique names ...

I'm actually not convinced. Squares don't tessellate a sphere; you have singularities at the poles. Sure, there aren't many people living there, but it's important to think about the limitations of this approach.

If you think this is really just an edge case, remember that projecting a square onto a sphere necessitates some distortion. You can choose to distort angles or distances, but you have to choose one. For distances, well, a "3m x 3m" square becomes essentially meaningless. The problem gets worse when you increase latitude. Canada, northern Europe and Russia are especially prone to this problem. The same argument applies to locations in the Southern hemisphere as well.

<comment><USER21> That's true for large chunks, but I'd imagine 3 meters is small enough to remain useful well past the 85 degrees latitude mark. Straight Dope informs me that the circumference up there is approximately 24k miles, which becomes 38,624,256 meters which means approximately 1 million divisions.

As long as the system works, what's the big deal?

<comment><USER22> 24k miles is Earth's circumference at the equator, not 85 degrees latitude.

<comment><USER21> Dammit. I thought I had been careful enough to get the correct number.

Alright. Picking the simplest formula off Wikipedia, cosine of 85 degrees is ~0.0871557 times _a_ (6378137m) times pi is ~1746383.9m for the circumference. That's still approximately 500k squares at the exact latitude. My point is one of the sheer magnitude still available.

What I should do is calculate how many decimal points down from 90 degrees 3 meters is and get _that_ circumference, since that's the low bound, but I'm not really feeling up to the number-plugging.

I could be incorrect about what _a_ is; I presumed it is the semi-major axis on WGS84, but I might have picked the wrong thing.

...

Ooh. I forgot there's a Wolfram|Alpha. ... And 10 minutes later I haven't convinced the input parsing to give me what I want. Oh well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> discussed at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8614198](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8614198) earlier

</comment><comment><USER24> How about retrofitting DNS to do this? Encode a persons GPS coordinates in a TXT record. Now instead of writing my address on an envelope, I write me.example.com. The mailman/post office can then look up someone's coordinates via a DNS query. The benefit of this is that when I move, I can simply update my DNS entry. I could either host my own address or 3rd party could. Local government could grid up their own regions and assign address to fixed locations. You could choose to CNAME your address to the government allocated address or use the government issued one for the plot.

<comment><USER25> There is already a LOC Resource Record type defined by RFC 1876[1] that can be used to represent location data.

[1] [https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1876](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1876)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> This article is clearly placed by the guy featured in it whose company is promoting an alternative to street addresses.

The article incorrectly states that people without street addresses have no postman and can not get mail.

This is not the case at all. I've lived in many places throughout the world without street addresses. Mail is delivered to addresses consisting of the person's name and things such as their village, precinct or neighborhood.

The articles assumption and promotion of non-factual claims as true suggests the author and the company simply do not know what they are talking about.

</comment><comment><USER27> I lived in Saipan for a few months, part of the CNMI. A couple decades ago they attempted assigning road names and addresses, but what you find is that almost no one uses them. They don't have a postal delivery infrastructure, so those who can afford it get private company PO Boxes (the official PO boxes are extremely limited).

To me it seems like the real challenge is funding and setting up a postal infrastructure. Creating 'addresses' of any scheme would emerge organically out of necessity from that.

</comment><comment><USER28> This seems as behind-the-curve as printing out email and delivering it to physical mailboxes. As long as you can accept delivery of electronic documents, nobody should care where you "reside." If you need to take delivery of goods, you can specify a designee for that purpose, as and where needed.

</comment><comment><USER29> An imprecise, centralized, English-centric system for labeling the planet. Why not just use GPS coordinates? It's much more universal, distributed and precise.

</comment><comment><USER30> "Interestingly, he says what3words has not had to market itself intensively"

Really? Don't they have connections with Ogilvy and Mather?

</comment><comment><USER31> Coming from a country with a working, comprehensive, addressing system, I never understood how special this was until I started extensively traveling. It's kind of mind-boggling how unique of an invention addresses are and yet how simple they are.

It requires only two things

\- give an identifier to each road, numbers are perfectly fine (the scheme isn't even all that important)

\- each property plot along a given road gets an incrementing number, plots with multiple housing units are given some kind of subdivider (Apartment, Unit, etc.). This works best with oddly numbered properties on one side and evenly numbered properties on the other.

So long as you use unique identifiers, you don't even need states, counties, zip codes or other administrative districts -- though this makes things easier -- all you need to know if the block of property numbers the address lives in.

An alternate approach is to simply subdivide a territory into smaller and smaller zones until you get to a small enough spot on the planet that you've uniquely identified a plot of land or a building or whatever. I believe Korean addresses used to use something like this but are slowly moving on to a mixed mode system like the U.S. uses (subdivide areas, then use street names and numbers).

It's also seems absolutely insane that the concept of an address, or parts of an address can be some kind of Intellectual Property that a company holds some kind of right to. My understanding is that this used to be a significant problem with addressing in the U.K. and remains one in Ireland. The last time I visited Ireland, outside of the cities, addresses were give to us as Lat,Long coordinates! Absolute insanity.

I remember trying to send a package to a friend in rural England once, the address was something like "The Yellow Home behind the Red Barn, Essex, U.K.". It took 8 weeks to arrive, I have no idea how much of that was spent by the Royal Mail matching color swatches and building combinations.

It's an interesting notion that we couple postal service to addresses. In some places, like Dubai, they are decoupled and the post only makes its way to a P.O. Box, not to a residence -- which of course have no address, and end up with descriptions like "Building ABC Behind the Market, off of the Second Exit, 2 Lefts and a Right after entry" which is necessary for non-government postal services like Fedex. Oddly, this system makes a kind of sense in the Internet age, unless you actually have to get somewhere.

In some countries, local landmarks and these sorts of quasi-turn-by-turn directions-as-addresses are the norm. Oddly, they often persist long after what they describe is gone. "The Red House behind the Temple" might be somebody's address, but the Temple fell during an Earthquake 20 years before and the house is no longer Red. The claim is that the local postman has enough local knowledge to make this work, but there's so many obvious failure modes to make this sort of "system" seem absurd.

If you look back long enough, the U.S. didn't _always_ have a useful system. Old Revolutionary War era advertisements look like the kinds of semi-useless addresses you see elsewhere. Addresses definitely appears to be product of cities, but it's useful when it's used on a national scheme. It's so simple and so absurdly effective, it's always seemed bizarre to me that it's just not universal.

This proposal is interesting, but ultimately a bad idea. Correct addressing encodes both a unique location _and_ navigation way points.

Take a U.S. address:

1234 Main St. Beverly Hills, CA 90210

Beverly Hills, CA is honestly not necessary, but does make it human readable, 90210 tells you this location is out west and the post office has a map that subdivides it even more to a specific delivery zone.

There's hopefully only one Main St. in that zip code, and the building is on the 1200 block of that street on the even side. When you arrive there, it should have "1234" on the building and the street signs should tell you that you are on the correct street.

A better proposal is perhaps to use a subdividing system. The world is split into N "squares" and each of those is split into N "squares" and each of those into N and so on until you're at a fine resolution. A simple map lookup for "Fred-Berry-Fred-Cow" would get you to within a few meters of wherever. The military uses versions of such a system (MGRS, UTM, etc.) and without electronic aids you can pretty quickly find pretty much any place on the planet within a few moments.

[http://www.earlyamerica.com/pages-past/ben-franklins- pennsyl...](http://www.earlyamerica.com/pages-past/ben-franklins-pennsylvania- gazette/)

<comment><USER32> I'd agree with you to some extent but postcodes (the UK equivalent of ZIP codes) were actually introduced before ZIP was in the US. If you were given an address in 'rural England' like that at any point in the past >40 years then it was most likely the addressees choice rather than the actual postal system. The postcode also makes everything apart from the number irrelevant in the eyes of the post office - you can address items to 10, GL10 2AB and it will end up where it needs to go.

<comment><USER31> > it was most likely the addressees choice

That's good to know. I believe there was a post code (this exchange happened about 10 years ago). I recall there's been several interesting exchanges over rights access to the postal code locations in the U.K. as internet mapping started to become more prevalent. I think this finally changes ~2009/2010? At least it finally happened, but I cannot fathom the thought process that would have made a campaign necessary to force the release of basic location data.</comment></comment></comment>


A conversation with Popehat about a billboard, free speech, and the Constitution - <AUTHOR> https://abovethelaw.com/2019/08/should-the-north-carolina-gun-store-billboard-targeting-the-squad-be-unconstitutional/ <comment><USER2> What fails to amaze me every time is that burning a flag is the correct way to dispose of one.

</comment><comment><USER3> TL;DR: Restrictions on free speech are primarily used against the powerless, not the powerful. So don't create free speech restrictions that you think are going to be used to protect blacks, say, against white racism. Those restrictions will be used _primarily against blacks_ , not against whites.

</comment><comment><USER4> What a terrible interview.

They had someone knowledgeable and interesting to talk to, and the interviewer sounds like he's failing 10th grade, and asks questions to match.

<comment><USER5> To the contrary, I thought the interviewer did a fine job of highlighting the issues and letting White make his points. And on paper at least, he seems eminently qualified for the interview. He's a former litigator with an undergrad and JD from Harvard: [https://abovethelaw.com/author/elie- mystal/](https://abovethelaw.com/author/elie-mystal/).

<comment><USER4> he sounds like an ignoramus and his credentials dont make him sound any more intelligent. You can be a harvard trained lawyer and still not be a good interviewer, as this person proves.</comment></comment></comment>


Six Months After Legalizing Marijuana, Two Big Things Have Happened in Colorado - <AUTHOR> http://mic.com/articles/92449/six-months-after-legalizing-marijuana-two-big-things-have-happened-in-colorado <comment><USER3> The linked data shows 19 murders in the first five months of 2013, 11 murders in the same period in 2014.

First, this is very noisy data to make any predictions from. (I guess it's a good thing to have so few murders that it's hard to make generalizations.) March 2014 alone had 5 murders compared to three last year.

Second, this isn't a 52.9% drop, even if you exclude May, which makes the drop from 17 to 9. It's a 47.1% drop.

This is a very low quality article.

<comment><USER4> They just worded it wrong, really... It should say it's 52.9% of what it was in 2013, meaning it is a 47.1% drop.

But linking to data for 5 months and then only using the 4 you want to use to skew numbers seems pretty ridiculous to me.

And then in the same page there's data for drug/narcotics violations which isn't even mentioned because it is going up (21% more) even though there are supposedly plummeting marijuana convictions. Also they stated that the crime rate in Denver is going down, yet the data shows the exact opposite.

Whole article seems like cherrypicking at its finest.

<comment><USER3> It's just the first thing I honed in on when I was checking the article. I could start talking about significant digits but I don't think it's necessary to really put more work into this.

<comment><USER4> Yea, I just read the article again and it seems more ridiculous than I thought at first glance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I live in Denver and work in Boulder, and honestly, I haven't noticed any change in people. The murder rate going down is awesome and having the state earn revenue is awesome, but the biggest misconception people have about Colorado right now (thanks to the media) is that it's a wild west of pot smoking lazy people stumbling around and acting up.

But really, there's been no change in how people act. The people that have always smoked it (hippies in the park and normal people at home) are still smoking it, and the people that don't smoke (myself included) still don't smoke.

So no lifestyle changes for the majority of the people in the state (except the people that get jobs now thanks to the legit industry and hopefully some lives saved by quality controlling the stuff) AND we get all the benefits.

Let's go national with this thing.

<comment><USER6> Long time Boulder resident here. In regards to change, the homeless/transient situation in downtown Boulder and beyond has gotten completely out of control [1]. I now see transients/homeless where I did not in the past. I am not certain the marijuana laws are the reason for so many transients coming to Boulder, but it could be a contributing factor.

[1] [http://www.dailycamera.com/News/ci_26064136/Boulder- councilm...](http://www.dailycamera.com/News/ci_26064136/Boulder-councilman- merchants-warn-of-downtown)

<comment><USER7> Of course you're seeing transients/homeless where you didn't in the past. The City Council is playing Whac-A-Mole: the police blocked off significant portions of the downtown library green areas and patrol the river. Where do you expect them to go?

Besides, Boulder has been hostile to recreational marijuana. Denver had retail shops open on the 1st of January...it took until March or April for multiple shops to open. I doubt a couple months of legal weed has spiked the population.

Boulder, like San Francisco and Seattle, has always had a significant homeless population. The big change I've seen in Boulder is Conservatism and intolerance. Take Patti Adler, for example.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Since the statistics in that article are terribly misleading, I took the effort to make a chart with some more data:

[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1waFpYd7jK9nUcb1VbPOL...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1waFpYd7jK9nUcb1VbPOLjZx81LJ_SmKa-8bJEXz4GyA/edit?usp=sharing)

It's based on the raw data here:

[http://www.denvergov.org/Portals/720/documents/statistics/20...](http://www.denvergov.org/Portals/720/documents/statistics/2012/XCitywide_Reported_Offenses_2012.pdf) [http://www.denvergov.org/Portals/720/documents/statistics/20...](http://www.denvergov.org/Portals/720/documents/statistics/2013/XCitywide_Reported_Offenses_2013.pdf) [http://www.denvergov.org/Portals/720/documents/statistics/20...](http://www.denvergov.org/Portals/720/documents/statistics/2014/XCitywide_Reported_Offenses_2014.pdf)

Personally, I can't see any noticeable effect on crime except that drug violations and crimes against persons seem to be up this year. Or maybe I just didn't do a great job on the chart?

<comment><USER9> The point in the article was unclear; I think they meant to say something more along the lines of "crime didn't go up by eleventy-thousand percent" rather than "crime went down".

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> > According to government data, the Denver city- and county-wide murder rate > has dropped 52.9% since recreational marijuana use was legalized in January.

I think it's probably a stretch to link these two things together...

Also, it sounds like the government is already writing checks based on "predicted" income levels 4x what they are today.

I think legalization is a good idea but I wish people would give things a couple years before drawing meaningful conclusions from the data.

</comment><comment><USER11> This sounds like a great outcome, and I support legalization for basically these reasons. More revenue for state governments, less violence, less law- enforcement time wasted on drug offences, and less crowding of prisons with non-violent drug offenders are all good things.

But surely there have been downsides, too, even if they're not the ones that fear-mongerers predicted. Can anyone in Colorado speak to what those are?

<comment><USER12> I'm not in Colorado but I saw one of the downsides the other day which is the manufacture of items like candy bars with multiple serving sizes of THC in the one bar. People aren't paying much attention to the serving sizes and there appears to be no restrictions in place yet on how much can be in a given food item. I'm in favor of legalization but there may need to be some more restrictions in place on how much THC could be included in any one item.

<comment><USER13> But on the plus side, you can't overdose on THC (like alcohol, cocaine, heroin, etc). I will note that you can still do stupid things that endanger your life.

<comment><USER10> > But on the plus side, you can't overdose on THC

Sure, but you can still have a pretty bad time if you take too much and/or are very sensitive. It's known to cause tachycardia in some people, which is not something to be taken lightly.

<comment><USER14> Yes! The government should regulate to prevent you from a "pretty bad time" good use of everyone's time!

<comment><USER10> "Pretty bad time" is a euphemism for "could have serious negative health consequences." Yes, people can and do have very negative reactions to marijuana. Been there, done that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The second point seems like it is a stretch. Of course, crime rate of illegal marijuana dropped when it was legalized.

What I'd really like to see if related crime has dropped or increased - <USER2> as DUI, Theft, Assault, etc.

\--Edit-- Thanks all for pointing out the piece I skimmed over :) ...However I am still very curious to smaller offenses and misdemeanors. It will be years before we see good statistics, but those elements will be politically crucial in pushing for wider adoption.

<comment><USER16> > According to government data, the Denver city- and county-wide murder rate > has dropped 52.9% since recreational marijuana use was legalized in January. > This is compared to the same period last year, a time frame encompassing > Jan. 1 through April 30.

This was the second paragraph of the crime section.

<comment><USER17> That statistic is cherry picked from a list of 36 at [http://www.denvergov.org/Portals/720/documents/statistics/20...](http://www.denvergov.org/Portals/720/documents/statistics/2014/XCitywide_Reported_Offenses_2014.pdf) and has a relatively low sample size.

If you can't find a statistic to cherry pick for your argument in a list of 36 you have a very bad argument.

• Arson has doubled since legalization! Bunch of flaming stoners.

• Embezzlement is down 88%! Who knew this was all society needed to fortify people's fiduciary responsibilities.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I hear this kind of stuff every day on the radio and other news sources living in Colorado.

Here are some things to consider:

1) Only the revenue is really important to the politicians - there has been virtually no talk about using the money for rehabilitation programs, and only a little talk about using the money for drug education. So far the only tangible outcome I've heard was a proposed $3 million to be used to hire ~100 government personnel to handle administrative tasks related to marijuana sales and regulation. Given the fights that we see among politicians when it comes to spending other sources of revenue, I don't see it being any easier to get this new revenue spent appropriately either.

2) Correlation vs Causation re: lower crime. Who's to say it's not due to the beautiful sunny spring and summer that we have here in CO or the fact that it kept snowing in the mountains longer this year so people skied more? The one thing I have observed is that legalizing marijuana didn't convert a lot of non-users into users so at first blush it does not appear that legalizing marijuana has turned the state into a bunch of potheads (although I tire of hearing things like "Denver is the Silicon Valley of weed").

3) Because there's still no good research out on the effects (long, short, casual use) of marijuana (THC specifically) there is a lot of concern over the substantial increase in the amount of edibles, elixirs, and other marijuana infused products which can be purchased that are not well regulated or identified. The same argument can be made for the vapor/e-cig industry. Clearly identifying how much THC a product contains and what affect that will have on a person is much needed and should hopefully come about from the bills that Hickenlooper signed into law in May.

As others have said the reason you aren't hearing any news from Seattle/DC is because they do not have everything in place to allow stores to open up. Colorado moved quickly to both decriminalize as well as create regulations, tax structure, etc., which the other states have not done yet. Many states are watching CO to see how this plays out and based upon the revenue figures that are being released as long as there isn't a significant increase in directly correlated crime, I don't think the politicians will be able to turn down the money in the long run.

</comment><comment><USER19> > This November, it's all but certain that D.C. will vote on a marijuana > ballot measure and even pass it, setting up a battle with Congress to > legalize.

It will be interesting to see what happens with this vote. The marijuana debate is in a completely different place than it was 16 years ago when Congress blocked the counting of the votes for medical marijuana in D.C., but I could still see them interfering with the vote again.

<comment><USER20> Why would DC legalizing pot set up a battle with Congress - does Congress need to sign off on DC legislation?

<comment><USER21> Yep.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_of_Columbia_home_rule](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_of_Columbia_home_rule)

<comment><USER22> Relatedly, the motto on D.C. license plates is "Taxation without representation":

[http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ef/Washingto...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ef/Washington,_D.C._license_plate.JPG)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Once more data comes in, I would like to see crime and revenue compared with crime and revenue in areas that instead legalized casino gambling.

</comment><comment><USER24> It will be interesting to see how the economic benefits hold up- Colorado has a history of boom and bust, whether from mining, ranching, military, tech, or tourism. It also has a history of making decisions during the boom that are unsustainable throughout the bust. As prices drop and more states legalize my guess is that the economic benefits will prove relatively modest.

</comment><comment><USER25> Pre-legalization: "Crime will go up." Post-legalization: "Crime went down, but not because of the weed thing."

Well, okay then.

</comment><comment><USER26> There was a pretty informative round table on cannabis business hosted on Jason Calacanis' This Week in Startups [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zZ8RgfTFzA&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zZ8RgfTFzA&feature=youtu.be&a&utm_content=bufferc7b72&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer)

One useful quote from there is not to get euphoric over revenue figures - first few months "people are not buying marijuana, people are buying freedom". A variety of things, such as novelty effect, natural curiosity and even social currency accumulation (people who live in Colorado/Washington brag to their friends outside of those states) motivate the first purchases, you have to look at longer timeline to properly extrapolate the expected sales.

<comment><USER7> People aren't purchasing freedom, they're purchasing convenience. And this isn't a new product. Also, as prices fall in the legal retail trade, shouldn't we expect more competition with the black market?

<comment><USER27> Both groups exist.

Think of the "buying freedom" bump as the bump that happens when a new restaurant opens. A lot of people buying pot for the first time (or the first time in a long time) probably don't really care about pot that much. Not enough to break the law to buy it. It's just fun to try something new.

Replacing "Pot" with "Norwegian Cuisine" is maybe a useful exercise. I'm in the group that doesn't care much about either (from the consumer standpoint). I wouldn't break the law to smoke pot, nor would I break the law to eat Norwegian food. But if either was suddenly legalized, of course I'd go try them out a few times, why not?

<comment><USER7> But that's my point...you're talking about a "few times" and not volume. Sure, some (at least 1) may purchase freedom, but compared to the convenience crowd (think Starbucks), freedom is a rounding error.

BTW, prior to legalization, there were more Medical Marijuana dispensaries in Boulder than coffee shops.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> > According to government data, the Denver city- and county-wide murder rate > has dropped 52.9% since recreational marijuana use was legalized in January. > This is compared to the same period last year, a time frame encompassing > Jan. 1 through April 30.

They need to also compare with demographically similar cities and counties that did not legalize marijuana. Crime is often heavily influenced by national or broad regional factors. You have to identify and account for this when trying to figure out how much of an affect a local factor (such as marijuana legalization in your state) had.

</comment><comment><USER29> Curious, have we seen similar data in Washington/Seattle -- another place where it was legalized?

<comment><USER30> Here in Seattle, things are moving slowly. The first stores haven't even opened up yet.

<comment><USER31> Yep. The first store is scheduled to open next Tuesday [http://seattletimes.com/html/localnews/2023970923_potlicense...](http://seattletimes.com/html/localnews/2023970923_potlicense2xml.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> A few months ago, one of these discussions came up and someone presented some interesting data on negative effects this had on students and the drop out rate. Sorry I do not have a link to the discussion but I would love to see if someone had that data.

</comment><comment><USER33> I worry about what will happen when the next GOP President takes office. Will there be a sudden federal crackdown? If that happens then I think it is inevitable that the US will devolve into a tyranny --just as Plato said, all democracies ultimately do.

<comment><USER13> Could a new GOP president retroactively charge dispensary customers with illegal possession?

<comment><USER34> It wouldn't be "retroactively" any more than all criminal prosecutions (which, in the absence of precrime legislation, necessarily address events in the past) are.

Subject to the applicable statutes of limitations, as long as the federal laws are on the books, yes, people who committed offenses at a time when the those offenses were not prosecutorial priorities of the executive branch could be charged when the prosecutorial priorities of the executive branch change. That's sort of the key distinction between "prosecutorial priorities" and "laws".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> the graff with the addiction rate vs. drug control spending is misleading. while the addiction rate is constant, the population is growing, meaning the total number of addicted people would be rising.

graff graff.

<comment><USER36> I thought the problem with drugs isn't the addiction but the black market.

The people get addicted anyway, but now the money needed to cure them goes where it can help and not to the mob.

<comment><USER37> I suspect it will be like the lottery money that was supposedly destined for the public schools, and it will just turn into a slush fund the legislature and governor can spend as they please.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> It's a long stretch to argue a decline in crime is attributed to drug use. Spin the numbers however you wish, it doesn't take a mathematician to figure out the truth... If I were in law enforcement, I'd feel pretty slighted that drug users figured out how to take credit for some of my work.

<comment><USER39> Perhaps it's more related than you think: If pot is legal, police can spend their valuable time policing other things, and making a difference in those areas.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Why isn't this happening here in Vancouver? What more proof do we need?</comment>


Forget your wallet? Here's one way to fly without ID - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/i/moments/680057794607853568 <comment><USER2> I never understood the emphasis on ID when flying. I mean the point is to make sure you aren't carrying a bomb or a weapon. What difference does it make what your name is? Ideally it shouldn't, so why are we moving further and further away from the ideal?

In fact, doesn't it seem rather ominous to think that governments are starting to track everything about us, including everywhere we go at all times? They tell us it is for our security, but aren't the reported circumstances that have led us to require such levels of security due to government failures to begin with?

<comment><USER3> > I never understood the emphasis on ID when flying.

This was pushed by the airlines so that they could maximize revenue. If the ID is not verified, then you can (and do) have a buy-sell ticket market -- which makes it harder for them to extract every tiny cent from their customers.

<comment><USER4> Then why was the OP able to get a boarding pass without ID in her story?

TSA was giving her all of the trouble, not the airlines.

<comment><USER3> > TSA was giving her all of the trouble, not the airlines.

Yes, since Sept-11-2001, all harassment of passengers was outsourced to the TSA, making airlines look like the good guys. But the ID requirement was enacted and enforced before that - I am not sure when, but at least in July 2000, I was told that I won't be able to fly without an ID.

> Then why was the OP able to get a boarding pass without ID in her story?

Assuming the story is true and exactly as told (which I have no reason to doubt on one hand, but no reason to take as gospel on the other) -- because either the TSA were violating their own rules, or because they were able to satisfy the ID requirement through some procedure which is not general knowledge among the population.

The TSA procedures are, in fact, secret: See, e.g. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilmore_v._Gonzales](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilmore_v._Gonzales)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Did something change recently? I forgot my ID a few years ago and was allowed to board. I just had to go through extra security checks.

</comment><comment><USER6> "I'm still not entirely sure what happened tbqh. But I know for a fact that you can board a plane at LAX with only a People Magazine for ID."

There is an implied asterisk there

</comment><comment><USER7> Off topic. What's this Twitter feature calle? It looks neat.

<comment><USER8> Moments: [https://about.twitter.com/moments](https://about.twitter.com/moments)</comment></comment>


The Biggest Mistakes You Can Make When Choosing a LinkedIn Photo - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/the-worst-linkedin-photos-you-can-have-2012-7 <comment><USER2> If someone's going to think worse of me for having my dog in my linkedin picture, I don't want anything to do with them.</comment>


Microsoft Introduces Slack Competitor, Microsoft Teams - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.office.com/2016/11/02/introducing-microsoft-teams-the-chat-based-workspace-in-office-365/ <comment><USER2> Slightly earlier announcement : [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12855684](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12855684)

<comment><USER3> That other thread's link was changed from:

[https://slackhq.com/dear-microsoft-8d20965d2849](https://slackhq.com/dear- microsoft-8d20965d2849)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Too late.</comment>


Eric Kidd: Why Ruby is an Acceptable Lisp - <AUTHOR> http://www.randomhacks.net/articles/2005/12/03/why-ruby-is-an-acceptable-lisp#repost

<comment><USER2> Having hacked a (poorly implemented, bug riddled) macro system into Ruby because I needed it, I can say with certainty that Ruby is _not_ an acceptable Lisp. It just turns out that some of the (easiest) things you can use macros for can be faked with a combination of closures and fully executable class code (both good ideas, both present in Ruby and in Python). Try to do any of the most interesting/great things with macros and you'll run into a brick wall.

Of course this can be overcome - he mentions two projects which could turn Ruby from most of a Lisp into 100% of a Lisp with direct access to the parse tree. But those are not used right now in every day Ruby programming.

<comment><AUTHOR> What are "the most interesting/great things with macros" that you would like to do?

<comment><USER2> I want to be able to write:

      cache(key_name, :ttl => 30.seconds, :dependent => ModelClass) do
         model.expensive_operation
      end

and have that cache expire whenever any instance of ModelClass is updated.

With macros, every call to cache() can be expanded into:

      ModelClass.register_expiration_callback(keyname)
      do_cache(...)

Without macros, there's no way to catch deeply nested cache calls. I fake this by scanning the source for calls to cache() on startup right now.

<comment><USER3> I'm not following. Why does "ModelClass.register_expiration_callback(keyname)" have to be in a macro expansion, rather than just the first statement of the cache() method? It doesn't appear to use local scope at all. Can you flesh out the example a bit more?

FWIW, I believe that Ruby or (especially) Smalltalk-style syntax for method calls and closures covers such a large set of the things macros are used for that their complexity cost (esp when building tools) outweighs their benefit.

<comment><USER2> Sorry, re-reading that it wasn't totally clear. The ModelClass.register_expiration_callback(keyname) has to be run at _parse time_ , because there's no guarantee that the cache statement will ever be executed before a ModelClass instance is updated. You can't run things at parse time in Ruby (without exotic extensions); that's the whole point of macros.

I completely agree that there are a large number of uses for macros that "SmallTalk style" syntax completely replace. It turns out that a lot of things don't really require you to run code at parse time. Take anaphoric-if for example, which is classically implemented as a macro; all you really need is the ability to manipulate the local variables of a closure from the outside. Parse-time execution is not required.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> 'Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine', McCarthy, 1960

<http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/recursive/recursive.html>

Does that sound like 'Ruby'?

I don't think so.

</comment><comment><USER5> What confuses me in Ruby is that functions and executable blocks (or what they are called) seem to be different things.

So def my_fun(a,b,c) is different from {|a,b,c|...}

I find it very confusing and as a matter of fact, I can not remember what I have to instantiate when to pass around (there is a Proc object, but does it refer to a fn or a block? And what would be the name for the other thing?).

Just a reminder that shortness is not the only criterion - it also has to be intuitive/logical.

<comment><USER6> This is a method:

      def nuts(a, b, c)
      end

A method can take a block (a block is not an object, it's syntax):

      nuts { |a, b, c| ... }

You can capture a block as a Proc:

      foo = proc { |a, b, c| ... }
      foo.call(1, 2, 3)

      def nuts(&proc)
        proc.call(1, 2, 3)
      end

      nuts { |a, b, c| ... }

There is also a Method object:

      method(:nuts).call(1, 2, 3)

And you can turn a method into a Proc:

      method(:nuts).to_proc.call(1, 2, 3)

Why does it makes sense to have these as different things? Because we want to use return in the blocks:

      def nuts
        @vars.each do |var|
          case var
          when String
            # Returns the method, not the block
            return "Test"
          end
        end
      end

<comment><USER6> Also, they behave slightly different when it comes to arity:

      def nuts(a, b)
      end

      foo = Proc.new { |a, b| }

      nuts(1, 2, 3)     # => ArgumentError: wrong number of arguments (3 for 2)
      foo.call(1, 2, 3) # works fine

We also have lambda, which is a Proc that works (almost) as a method: <http://samdanielson.com/2007/3/19/proc-new-vs-lambda-in-ruby></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Webpage to PDF Microservice - <AUTHOR> https://imti.co/webpage-to-pdf-microservice/ <comment><USER2> A basic command line alternative using Headless Chrome[1]:

      chrome --headless --disable-gpu --print-to-pdf https://www.chromestatus.com/

[1] [https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/04/headless-c...](https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/04/headless- chrome#create_a_pdf_dom)

<comment><USER3> Similar functionality is packaged in wkhtmltopdf, which essentially runs Webkit headless to print to PDF.

[https://wkhtmltopdf.org/](https://wkhtmltopdf.org/)

<comment><AUTHOR> txPDF is a simple containerized web services wrapper around wkhtmltopdf, intended to be used as a Microservice component in a larger system.

<comment><USER4> wkhtmltopdf maintainer here. That's really cool!

Did you manage to find a workaround for [https://github.com/wkhtmltopdf/packaging/issues/2](https://github.com/wkhtmltopdf/packaging/issues/2)? If so, would appreciate a PR :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I'll check out that issue and see if there is anything I can contribute. wkhtmltopdf is a great utility and we rely on it heavily.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've reported many bugs in projects that turn "URL" to "PDF".

You need to be sure you're limiting the kind of URLs that people can submit. For example ensure that nobody makes a PDF of :

* file:////etc/passwd

* [http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/local-hostname](http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/local-hostname)

* [http://localhost:8080/](http://localhost:8080/)

I'd say over half of the "PDF-creation" projects posted here have been vulnerable to some/all of those attacks. (I continue to be surprised at how many web-to-pdf services exist. I guess there must be a lot of people paying for them?)

<comment><AUTHOR> These are great security suggestions and I should make some clarifications on the intended use. We use txPDF as a backend Microservice and not open to direct public use. It is good for automating report generation from other portions of a larger system.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Awesome timing. Just started work on a LinkedIn alternative called [https://jaresume.com](https://jaresume.com)

We need a reliable way of turning peoples resumes into PDF's

Going to give this a go today or tomorrow.

Doing it with [https://github.com/GoogleChrome/puppeteer](https://github.com/GoogleChrome/puppeteer) also works quite well

<comment><USER7> Why not simply press Ctrl+p and print to PDF?

<comment><USER6> We have tried it in the past, just doesn't work reliably with different html configurations.

Does ctrl+p on this page -> [https://jaresume.com/thomas](https://jaresume.com/thomas) look good for you?

<comment><USER8> Have you tried using a print media stylesheet? You could hide the navigation, reduce the whitespace, maybe shrink the font size a little bit, and remove link text decoration.

<comment><USER6> Great idea. I have used print media sheets in the past, but found them easy to have regressions e.g. elements that are introduced but not hidden. A webpage to pdf process is also vunerable to that though.

I think ideally, because the resume renderer is a react component, I'd rather just boot up chromium with the react component and resume data and do a fully clean render of the page into pdf.

We shall see.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> You can achieve this using just the browser.

In Chrome Dev Tools, click on the devices button (the icon with the phone and tablet). Using the top-right menu, select "Capture full size screenshot".

Walla, you now have a full size screenshot that you can convert into PDF.

Incidentally, I am author of [https://www.pagedash.com](https://www.pagedash.com), which is a personal web scrapbook which allows you to capture the current page as HTML and generate links to share with others.

<comment><USER10> I tried it with this page only but it didn't work for me. Got a 110Kb png file but it's empty. It is a valid PNG but it's completely blank. Maybe it's buggy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I find wkhtmltopdf very difficult to work with, for instance the official documentation is just a man [1].

I discovered the project Weasyprint[2] a few months ago. I find it easier to use, and very powerful when using Python. You can define a custom loader to inject images or styles generated on the fly for instance.

There are still some missing features compared to wkhtmltopdf, such as defining a custom footer and header, but it's a very promising project.

[1] [https://wkhtmltopdf.org/usage/wkhtmltopdf.txt](https://wkhtmltopdf.org/usage/wkhtmltopdf.txt)

[2] [https://github.com/Kozea/WeasyPrint/](https://github.com/Kozea/WeasyPrint/)

<comment><USER12> Since you mention Python, I have found pdfkit[1] to be a pretty good wrapper for wkhtmltopdf. I have a document generation engine that uses it dozens of times a day. Worst part is that wkhtmltopdf in the Ubuntu repos is still compiled (when last checked) without some patch that allows it to run headlessly. I built from source, which was not too difficult.

[1][https://pypi.org/project/pdfkit/](https://pypi.org/project/pdfkit/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> One of my application running at work has a task of creating a user ordersheet made through the main app workflow and transposing it to an HTML document which is then converted to a PDF document by wkhtmltopdf and dispatched via email, etc.

I found this setup to be really stable and easy to maintain, so far it has produced around 70k orders per year and has been running for over 4 years now without any hiccups.

Before that I was using phantomjs but it wasn't as fast and reliable for some reasons that I can't quite remember now, since I havent touch that part of the app in a long time.

All I remember is that wkhtmltopdf was easier to tweak and compose with.

</comment><comment><USER14> [https://prerender.com/](https://prerender.com/) is a great service (fully MIT-licensed at [https://github.com/prerender/prerender](https://github.com/prerender/prerender) ) for this type of thing, both for rendering internal pages and for scraping/rendering external sites that rely heavily on client-side code.

</comment><comment><USER15> You can also use pdf printers available in linux distros and even windows now.

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm still looking for a service like this, but that creates a nicely tagged PDF and conveys the HTML structure in the PDF tags.

Tagged PDFs are a requirement in many processes for accessibility or archival reasons.

<comment><USER17> Why not using HTML instead of PDF? I'm the author of an extension that allows to save faithfully a web page into an HTML file [1]. From my point of view, that should be the best solution for archiving web pages in a file. Votes on HN disagree with me though [2], I wished I could understand why.

[1] [https://github.com/gildas-lormeau/SingleFile](https://github.com/gildas- lormeau/SingleFile)

[2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18243721](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18243721)

<comment><USER18> read recently PDF is defacto standard by government

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> alternatively if you want a SaaS REST API:

       curl https://service.prerender.cloud/screenshot/https://google.com/ > out.jpg

       curl https://service.prerender.cloud/pdf/https://google.com/ > out.pdf

       curl https://service.prerender.cloud/https://google.com/ > out.html

[https://www.prerender.cloud/](https://www.prerender.cloud/)

</comment><comment><USER20> Why not just

> Print

> Open as PDF

?

<comment><USER21> To save your microservice having to run a graphical environment and simulate mouse interaction?</comment></comment>


Ask YC: Credit card processing in Python? - <AUTHOR>

I need to do credit card processing, (I use Python and Django), and I don't know where to start from.<p>So what are the libraries/tutorials I should read on to do this? <comment><USER2> <http://searchyc.com/credit+card>

Although it would be nice to see what some thoughts and ideas people on HN have utilized themselves when implementing a Django web app.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for that link.

So a few questions after reading some of the articles for those in the know,

1\. How can a Non US citizen get a Merchant Account? 2\. I just want to confirm that the Credit card is valid, (or maybe get a token payment.) (I want to confirm that you CAN pay for the service, the first month is free.) Is Authorise.net good for something like this. What is a good price to charge as a token payment?

<comment><USER3> I would assume you would set up a subscription based service where the first month is free and every month after that is a certain fee. This would all be setup with the payment gateway of choice, such as Authorize.net. You would set it up in a manner that would allow the customer to have the first month free, and then Authorize.net would charge their credit card every month for whatever fee you set up. Authorize.net would be responsible for making sure the credit card is valid and processing the payment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I haven't used it, but there's Django Cart: <http://code.google.com/p/django- cart/></comment>


BMW has a hydrogen-powered 5 Series - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2015/07/04/bmw-hydrogen-fcv/ <comment><USER2> Thanks for sharing. It's gorgeous for a green car. Tesla still has the upper hand. Teslas are fabulous!

</comment><comment><USER3> RIP Stan Meyer</comment>