Bitcoin promoter Shrem indicted in NY for money laundering - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/04/14/us-usa-crime-bitcoin-idUSBREA3D1RU20140414 <comment><AUTHOR> Fortunately, this case is much more about Charlie Shrem and his penchant for violating laws than Bitcoin itself. I think this guy - who now refers to himself as "Charlie van Bitcoin" \- just doesn't get it. There are laws out there, and he doesn't seem to want to follow them. Here's an example:

He is out on bail on this case right now. As someone out on bail for a federal felony, he is prohibited from using or possessing deadly weapons (knives, guns etc.). There are people in his position that have found themselves in trouble over kitchen knives. Yet Charlie publicly posted yesterday that he is the proud new owner of a World War II Nazi Dagger.

[https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=566300.msg6202174#ms...](https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=566300.msg6202174#msg6202174)

He will eventually learn, but apparently he hasn't yet.

<comment><USER3> This is a common behavior among many libertarians/ancaps (although still a minority). They tend to believe that they can live outside the law. And it's sad, because they usually don't harm anybody with their little misdemeanors. It usually looks more like a child reveling against their parent's arbitrary laws, than a crime for which they should go to jail or even prison.

Adam Kokesh would be a very good example. [1] [2]

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Kokesh](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Kokesh) [2] [http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/activist-adam-kokesh- rep...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/activist-adam-kokesh-reportedly- arrested-in- herndon/2013/07/10/73dbc8c2-e943-11e2-8f22-de4bd2a2bd39_story.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Although I have issues with anyone that would buy Nazi memorabilia (I am not Jewish, but I am human), I agree that his intent probably isn't to take this small sword he bought and go on a stabbing spree. That won't matter though; the moment a pre-trial services officer sees this thing in his house during routine searches that are usually a condition of federal bail, his bail will be revoked at a minimum, and he may face new charges.

He's going out of his way to thumb his nose at the Court; they tend to frown on that.

<comment><USER4> It does kinda depend on the reason for buying Nazi memorabilia. For example, if you are ever in the northwestern part of the mitt of Michigan, I highly suggest visiting the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia: [http://www.ferris.edu/jimcrow/](http://www.ferris.edu/jimcrow/)

But I'm sure the most common reason for someone who would buy a Hitler Youth knife is to be edgy.

<comment><USER5> I have a Nazi proof-marked Mauser K98 rifle. I like it much more because it was later bought by the IDF, rebarreled to 7.62x51mm, and marked with the IDF star. There are a lot of reasons to own such things.

<comment><USER6> Wow. Any photos?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> According to 31 CFR 1022.320 [1], your bank is legally required to report on any transaction that it "knows, suspects, or has reason to suspect ... involves funds derived from illegal activity"

I don't know how the Treasury Department expects my bank to know if transactions involve funds derived from illegal activity, but damn is that creepy.

[1] [http://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/31/1022.320](http://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/31/1022.320)

<comment><USER8> I'm curiously why you think that's creepy. If you suddenly deposit $5 million, but your salary is $100k / year, that's pretty suspicious and report-able.

<comment><USER9> What's _really creepy_ is the fact that the big bankers can get away with laundering billions in drug cartel profits, yet not a single person has yet to answer for these crimes.

[http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/apr/03/us-bank- mexico-...](http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/apr/03/us-bank-mexico-drug- gangs)

[http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-06-29/banks-financing- mex...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-06-29/banks-financing-mexico-s- drug-cartels-admitted-in-wells-fargo-s-u-s-deal.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Setting aside the fact that allegedly he was doing illegal things, it's interesting to note that PGP didn't protect him.

(I'm basing this on two assumptions: SR encourages its users to use PGP, so therefore unless he was blindingly stupid, he, too, was using PGP; and that he never slipped up once. The second assumption is probably invalid.)

Anyone have details as to how these charges came about?

<comment><USER11> I would think that it was traced via bitcoin, not pgp.

<comment><USER12> Its worth noting there was no indication that BTCKing and Mr. Shrem used PGP to encrypt their communication.

<comment><USER13> From the original arrest it said he was using his work email @bitinstant to communicate with BTCKing and I don't remember anything about PGP being used.

Shrem is screwed, because all those emails are highly incriminating with him actively helping BTCKing avoid being flagged in the system for laundering checks. BTCKing was originally caught because he's a drug addict supporting his habit by exchanging coins and was completely sloppy and careless with everything.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here's the indictment:

[http://www.scribd.com/doc/218320971/Charlie-Shrem- Indictment](http://www.scribd.com/doc/218320971/Charlie-Shrem-Indictment)

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm getting tired already of all this noise around Bitcoin. It's a nice technology, okay, terribly wasteful in terms of resources, but regardless - <USER2> won't help us colonize the space, it won't help us reach Singularity sooner, it won't help extend lifespan and do other meaningful things - it could potentially (although very unlikely) make some lazy hoarders rich and that's it. Bitcoin really turned into a scum of the Earth magnet - just reading the comments under any negative article makes you realize the kind of human waste that's behind the bubble!

<comment><USER15> > it won't help us colonize the space, it won't help us reach Singularity > sooner, it won't help extend lifespan and do other meaningful things

Would you have said the same about Paypal? Because if you did, you'd have been wrong. Plus, among the set of technologies/companies that are discussed on HN, not that many are directly related to the goals you mentioned.

Perhaps Bitcoin is wasteful due to its Proof-of-Work system but you have to consider how wasteful the alternative is. How much human capital is wasted in operating the deposit banking and payments industry? How much land and resources are wasted to physically secure cash in bank vaults and move it around? How much efficiency is lost to high transaction fees or lack of access to the banking system? How many services which haven't yet been invented would be enabled by a distributed ledger? I'm not saying Bitcoin would wipe out those industries completely but it could certainly make parts of them obsolete.

I think it's wrong to dismiss the technology just because you dislike its community. The web was once a wild west as well.

<comment><USER14> PayPal never had the speculation appeal! PayPal, Venmo, Dwolla, Stripe, Balanced, Ribbon, Square, and others are all great services. They change the world in different ways - I buy with credit cards at Farmers Markets now, Stripe saved endless developer hours simplifying integration, Dwolla offers even lower than Bitcoin cost for accepting payments, etc. Bitcoin fans should learn from Elon Musk - the guy is a genius and, yet, he is a lot more humble than the average satoshi hoarder with a quarter of a Bitcoin waiting for the price to hit $1M apiece!

The technology never matters as much as the community! The Internet was created by nerds, not speculators!

<comment><USER15> Your comment is obviously emotionally charged. I agree that the satoshi hoarders can be extremely annoying at times but I maintain that you should distance your opinion of the technology from the community. In fact, the Bitcoin community has been dilluting over time as it gains in popularity and it's getting harder and harder to meaningfuly talk of a Bitcoin community.

<comment><USER14> Ripple is a better piece of technology, but because it lacks the "get rich quick" appeal, it's not nearly as popular. Dogecoin has a much more positive community than Bitcoin!

<comment><USER16> The other problem with Ripple is that it _is_ set up as a "get rich quick" scheme, but only for the founders. In order to carry out transactions you need XRP, they're the only ones who can sell you more XRP, and they have the ability to change how much XRP every transaction costs at any time.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Wanted: Buyers for a 1% stake in all my future income - <AUTHOR> I'm a software developer in the UK, got >$1M to my name, and am 29 and unmarried.
I'm looking for a mentor, and would like to reward the right mentor with a 1% stake in all my future income.   If you mentor me well, you will earn lots.  If I fail, you earn nothing.   If you no longer want to be a mentor, you can pass it on to someone else.
In a real company, you get voting rights, and the ability to direct how it's run.   When mentoring me, you get no say whatsoever - but it will be in both of our best interests to work together.
To pick the best mentor, I propose an auction.  How much would you pay for this right?
(There is a reserve price, offers also accepted for a 0.1% stake or a 0.01% stake) <comment><USER2> I highly doubt your proposed contract would be legally binding. I don't think you can sign away 1% of your total (pre-tax?) remaining life-time earnings. But even if you could, your prospective mentor is very likely to be ripped off. Let me explain.

I don't know how much time you want your mentor to spend on your development. But I'm assuming it is at least one month of full-time mentoring, so about 175 hours. From experience, I know that providing one hour of quality mentoring takes at least one hour of preparation. So the mentor would have to spend about 350 hours. The mentor wants to get compensated for this time. Since you want a highly qualified mentor and not just any random programmer, his or her hourly rate would be quite high. I'd say at least €60. So the mentor would be out about 350 * 60 = €21 000 before he or she starts making money of your salary.

The UK median salary is about €50 000 per year, but we'll assume you'll make €60 000 per year thanks to the great mentoring. Assuming you'll work for another 30 years that's a measly 600 * 30 = €18 000 into the mentors pocket (I realize salary increases makes this calculation suspect)

Clearly, the deal is not worthwhile. And that is not even taking into account the uncertainties (what if you die or get sick?) or that the mentor could have put the €21 000 in index funds instead, yielding about 3% per year or €50 000 over 30 years.

I have had a mentor. A guitar teacher. I paid him €40 per 45 minutes of mentoring. If I had told him that he could instead pay me for the privilege of mentoring and get 1% of profits of all my future record sales, he would have rightly laughed in my face. I don't understand why you can't do the same? If you have >$1M then you can surely afford to pay someone an hourly salary to mentor you?

<comment><USER2> I wrote "ripped off" which implies malicious intent on your part. I should have phrased that differently since that is not the case. To late to change my comment now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> You misunderstand why people enjoy mentoring. The absolute best mentors don't want money, they want someone that is receptive to their advice, and who they can watch grow.

Relevant link: > [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20715136](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20715136)

</comment><comment><USER4> This is fairly relevant. [https://kmikeym.com/](https://kmikeym.com/) He started to trade himself as public person. The stockholders don't really get any monetary value from it. Though if the stock rise they can cash out.

<comment><USER5> How is there no About page?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The problem for the mentor is you can succeed and make no "income" but plenty of "capital gains". Or maybe your wife will on paper (nod to sister comment).

A mentor would be incentivised to get you working for a high income, a job at Google for example, and not investing or running your own business.

The problem for you is someone can come along for 1 hour, mentor you but not do much useful stuff. You then go away and are successful anyway by say using a normal hourly paid mentor, and the original useless mentor want's his 1%.

If you are going the business route, pay the mentor per hour, then if appropriate offer them the opportunity to invest in the business once it is ready for it.

</comment><comment><USER7> You are 29 with greater than $1M. Assuming you didn't inherit that then you don't need a mentor. Get back to work! :)

</comment><comment><USER8> My usual rate is around 245 EUR / hour. Assuming we'd do at least one call of an hour every second week you'd have to be earning 637K a year before I got my hours fully paid..

<comment><AUTHOR> Arguing against myself here... But:

I need to earn much _more_ than 637K per year to pay for your hours. Thats because if you were to decide to stop the 1:1 sessions, you'd still get paid the 1% of income. So the real question you should be asking is, 'If I invest 1 hour into mentoring this guy, will he earn EUR 24,500 extra in the rest of his life?'

And that EUR 24,500 should be in todays money, so with a discount rate of ~5% annually for future earnings.

So over a 40 year working life, that works out to EUR 77,689 _extra_. Quite a lot to earn for _every_ 1 hour consultation!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm a fellow developer. I'm younger and have less resources. What would you be willing to work out in exchange for my assistance/collaboration?

</comment><comment><USER10> $20.

While I'm sure you'll make more income than that even this week, theres no way I'll be able to ensure you pay up.

</comment><comment><USER11> what are you looking for in a mentor? a fellow developer, a manager, a promoter?

also how will this work? are you basically thinking of a similar thing to BowieBonds?

<comment><AUTHOR> > what are you looking for in a mentor? a fellow developer, a manager, a > promoter?

I don't know - if I knew what I needed to do, I wouldn't be asking for advice. I'm hoping that's what an auction can decide. Whoever thinks they can benefit me the most would offer the highest price.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The guy got >$1M, but has no idea what to do.

<comment><USER6> $1M earned or inherited? Or won? Or lucky bitcoin investment?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Question: If I find you a spouse, do I get to keep 1% of her income, too?</comment>


Max linkage space-time permutation scan stats for disease outbreak detection - <AUTHOR> http://www.ij-healthgeographics.com/content/13/1/20

<comment><AUTHOR> Excerpt:

 _Conclusion

We have successfully developed two new space-time permutation scan statistics methods with irregular shapes and improved computational performance. The results demonstrate the potential of these methods to quickly detect disease outbreaks with irregular geometries._</comment>


Ask HN: Board Games Online? - <AUTHOR> I want to play online board games with my friends, have you used platforms to do this? What do you like about them - can you create private lobbies? What games can you play on them? <comment><USER2> I've made a list of online boardgame platforms:

[https://wiki.alcidesfonseca.com/blog/online-boardgames- platf...](https://wiki.alcidesfonseca.com/blog/online-boardgames-platforms/)

Boardgamearena and yucata have the largest collection and the best user interface in 2D. Tabletopia and tabletopsimulator are 3D and (mostly) paid.

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22967716](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22967716) has some good resources.

I have played some Steam games which support Remote Play Together (sharing screen and inputs from one device), so only one player needs to buy the game.

</comment><comment><USER4> My friends and I have been playing board games (Coup, 7 Wonders, Stone Age) on boardgamearena.com. It has a nice interface, and looks like there's a lot of other board games too. But to play these games, one person in the group needs to have a premium account.

<comment><USER5> That took a surprising number of clicks to get to how much a premium account costs, which usually indicates a very high price. I was surprised at the end to find it's just €24/year, that's extremely reasonable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Free online Codenames: [https://www.horsepaste.com/](https://www.horsepaste.com/)

</comment><comment><USER7> [https://colonist.io/#](https://colonist.io/#) for settlers of catan</comment>


Seeing Circles, Sines and Signals – A DSP Primer - <AUTHOR> http://jackschaedler.github.io/circles-sines-signals/

<comment><USER2> Previous discussion [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9131706](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9131706)

</comment><comment><USER3> Figure 1 on sound.html seems wrong. Consider the vibration speed slider. The waves have a given wavelength and speed of travel. Slide to get e.g. a faster vibration speed. The speed of travel should not change, but the wavelength should change. The demo has the opposite: the wavelength remains constant but the speed of travel increases.</comment>


Offline Wikipedia browser for iPhone now available in the App Store - <AUTHOR> http://collison.ie/blog/2008/10/wikipedia-iphone-redux

<comment><USER2> another link [http://app- store.appspot.com/?url=viewSoftware%3Fid%3D288141...](http://app- store.appspot.com/?url=viewSoftware%3Fid%3D288141564%26mt%3D8)

</comment><comment><USER3> does the app update the database regularly?

and I also wish there were formatting + images

<comment><AUTHOR> _does the app update the database regularly?_

The Wikipedia guys release new dumps quite infrequently (every few months), so there isn't an incremental dump update mechanism - the changeset would simply be too big to make it worthwhile.

 _and I also wish there were formatting + images_

Most formatting is retained. Images, however, would simply make the dump too big for the phone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I read your post. I couldn't find any information on how much space this would take up on the iPhone. It most definitely is useful for me.

<comment><AUTHOR> There's more info at <http://collison.ie/wikipedia-iphone>, but to answer your question, it takes up 2GB of space.</comment></comment>


American psyche: Michael Lewis on the triumph of irrational thinking - <AUTHOR> https://www.ft.com/content/ec89a34a-bc6f-11e6-8b45-b8b81dd5d080 <comment><USER2> anyone know a paywall workaround for FT?</comment>


Ubuntu displays advertising in /etc/motd - <AUTHOR> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/base-files/+bug/1701068 <comment><USER2> _Instead,[https://motd.ubuntu.com](https://motd.ubuntu.com) should show relevant items to those that use Ubuntu Server (relevant security issues, etc), instead of items for desktop users._

Shouldn't that be more like "Instead, Ubuntu should not fetch the motd from the internet by default, but have this feature as opt-in"?

<comment><USER3> Reading the bug report, this did lead me to wonder what happens when one tries to log in to an Ubuntu server which is behind a firewall and without internet access. Does this nonsense cause a timeout delay in getting into the box ?

<comment><USER4> Howdy! I'm the author of the code in question, a bug in said code, and the fix to the bug in the code :-)

By design:

\- Asynchronously, about 60 seconds after boot, a systemd timer fires which runs "/etc/update-motd.d/50-motd-news --force"

\- It sources 3 admin-editable config variables in /etc/default/motd-news. The defaults are: ENABLED=1, URLS="[https://motd.ubuntu.com"](https://motd.ubuntu.com"), WAIT="5"

\- The admin can disable it entirely (ENABLED=0), change or add other MOTD news sources (your corporate IT team could run its own), and change the wait time in seconds

\- If it's enabled, that systemd timer job will loop over each of the URLS (note, that it's important that these should be https with valid SSL certificates), trim them to 80 characters per line, and a maximum of 10 lines, and concatenate them to a cache file in /var/cache/motd-news

\- Every ~12 hours thereafter (with a little bit of random timer fuzzing), this systemd timer job will re-run and update the /var/cache/motd-news

\- Upon login, the contents of /var/cache/motd-news is just printed to screen. There was a bug (fixed now, working its way through the Ubuntu update process), in that an empty cache file was not getting, if the fetch failed, so the fetch was retried every time (and failed every time, with the $WAIT delay of 5 seconds). Obviously, it was a simple fix.

As I am generally responsible for this feature in Ubuntu (as the Ubuntu Product Manager for the design, and the Ubuntu Core Developer for the implementation) I'll also respond to the discussion about this feature being included in Ubuntu at all...

\- Back in 2009, Ubuntu was the first distribution to add the concept of a "dynamic MOTD", by introducing the /etc/update-motd.d/* structure of scripts. I originally implemented it for Landscape (a commercial package management system by Canonical), but it has since also been adopted by Debian, Amazon Linux, and others.

\- It's a flexible framework that enables distro packages or administrators to add executable scripts in /etc/update-motd.d/* to generate informative, interesting messages displayed at login.

\- This was quite interesting, in that for almost 40 years of Linux/UNIX, the "Message of the Day" was anything but that... It was a message that was created at one point in time, when the distro released, and that's about it. And we managed to change that.

\- If you look in your Ubuntu's /etc/update-motd.d/, you'll see a set of scripts. One prints the generic "welcome" banner. The next one prints 3 links, as to where to find help. You'll also find one that counts and displays the number of package updates available for the local system. Another tells you if a reboot is required.

\- All of these are locally generated, based on local information available on the system.

\- In Ubuntu 17.04, we added /etc/update-motd.d/50-motd-news. This is the script who's design is described above. The motivation is threefold:

* Sometimes, there's critical information that either we, the distro, or perhaps even the local IT administrator of a fleet of systems needs to communicate to users at login. Think, "ShellShock", "Heartbleed", "StackClash". This seems to happen every few months, in the current state of the world.

* Other times, we need to communicate something about the distribution. EoL messages, new feature availability, etc.

* And sometimes, it's just a matter of presenting a fun fact. News from the world of Ubuntu. Or even your own IT department. Such was the case with the Silicon Valley / HBO message. It was just an interesting tidbit of potpourri from the world of Ubuntu. Last week's message actually announced an Ubuntu conference in Latin America. The week before, we linked to an article asking for feedback on Kubuntu. Before that, we announced the availability of Extended Security Maintenance updates for 12.04. And so on.

\- There is a team of engineering managers at Canonical (the ~ubuntu-motd team in Launchpad), all of who have shared write access to the source code repository (lp:ubuntu-motd in Launchpad). Going forward, we're going to review one another's proposed message merges. In fact, that's an open source repository. You're welcome to propose your own messages for merging, if you have a well formatted, informative message for Ubuntu users. We'll be happy to review and include them in the future.

As always, I'm impressed with the critical analysis of the HackerNews community. We, the Ubuntu ecosystem, are held by the HN community to a very high standard, and we're quite humbled by that. Thank you for the continued feedback and response.

Cheers, Dustin

<comment><USER5> A couple thoughts:

\- Why did you copy/paste this on the bug tracker ([https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/base- files/+bug/17...](https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/base- files/+bug/1701068/comments/11)) and find/replace 'Ubuntu Community' with 'HackerNews community'? Doesn't that seem a little bit patronising to both parties

\- Why didn't you actually address the issue? You said a lot of words but at no point did you say whether or not you would be removing this "feature" OR keeping it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Good for them. Ubuntu does lots of good work that benefit the whole community, and if this allows them to stay in business, and pay people well to write open-source software, I'm not complaining.

Considering the example shown (which I also get logging in) is about HBO's use of Tensorflow, this also happens to be the best-targeted ad I've seen in a while. At that level, advertising actually does become something that's valuable/interesting for the recipient.

And if not, it takes about 10 seconds to disable.

<comment><USER7> I don't think that the advertisement itself is the issue, but rather the medium chosen for it.

Speaking for myself, I expect /etc/motd to contain information deemed relevant to me by the responsible sysadmin. I feel like this is the hi-jacking of a well-established communications channel, for ads no less.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is a _serious_ reach.

The item linked in the MOTD isn't an ad, it's a _news story_ about a relatively high-profile project that turns out to have been built with Ubuntu. The story isn't written by Canonical; in fact, in the relatively long list of people thanked for their help at the end, Canonical isn't even included. It doesn't make a sales pitch, and only mentions the word "Ubuntu" _one time._

The only way to interpret it as "advertising" is if you believe literally anything that mentions Ubuntu is an ad, which would be stretching the meaning of the word far beyond the breaking point.

If Canonical wants to use /etc/motd to spotlight interesting projects people are doing with Ubuntu, as a user of Ubuntu desktop & server I personally don't see a problem with that.

</comment><comment><USER9> It still baffles me why people choose Ubuntu for a server.

Canonical has a history of doing weird things: how many times have they diverged from upstream with some in-house solution that never quite works out.

The 6 monthly releases aren't realistic for business, who use LTS, at which point you may as well use Debian and back ports/vendor repos for software you need more updated versions of.

<comment><USER10> There are people who need to operate linux servers without great familiarity with any of them, Ubuntu just seems to have a much greater available knowledge base.

You can just basically search for "how to do x in ubuntu xx.xx" and get very helpful results, including solutions for Ubuntu desktop that are relevant to the server version.

Results may vary immensely with "how to do x in y", y being any other distro.

<comment><USER11> You should not operate a linux server without great familiarity. (well, at least not one commercial success/survival depends on)

<comment><USER12> Everyone has to start somewhere...

<comment><USER13> But preferably not in production.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Off Topic. I find it funny that you would have a hard time watching "HBO's Silicon Valley" on an Ubuntu machine legally. HBO still uses flash based DRM.

<comment><USER15> Can't Chrome's built-in Flash overcome that?

<comment><USER14> No, chrome's flash doesn't do DRM on regular linux distros. It does it only on ChromeOS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> But is it advertizing? I wonder if Canonical recieved money for this. I think it is just an interesting story that they linked to.

<comment><USER14> That's not the only form of advertising. They are advertising themselves. More like marketing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> As long as security info etc. is present and prominent I don't mind if it's accompanied by entertaining tidbits.

<comment><USER18> At the same time, it's considered poor practise to give servers open internet access. The only outgoing connections that should be allowed are to update servers. I'd second disabling this 'feature' on a server - it seems very unnecessary to get a MOTD from the internet in the first place, let alone if there's going to be advertising in it.

<comment><USER19> And updates are ideally pulled from a local cache so that only one server in the DMZ needs to connect to Ubuntu's server.

It's disappointing that in 2017 no Linux vendor ships with a default-denial Internet firewall configuration but I suppose stories like this explain why.

<comment><USER20> > It's disappointing that in 2017 no Linux vendor ships with a default-denial > Internet firewall configuration but I suppose stories like this explain why.

I don't believe that's accurate. On openSUSE and SLE you have SuSEFirewall2 which has such a configuration (from memory) and I would be surprised if RHEL doesn't have such a configuration.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> TL;DR : edit /etc/default/motd-news and change ENABLED to 0

<comment><USER22> That's crazy, how do you find that?

<comment><USER23> find /etc | grep motd

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Canonical, the Microsoft of Linux. ;)

(for anyone wondering, that's a comment on ethics)

</comment><comment><USER25> Ubuntu should advertise in updates. User is waiting for it to finish either way, connected to the internet and won't get annoyed.

</comment><comment><USER26> I've been running Ubuntu on my laptop for a while, working as a software dev. Maybe it's time to switch.

What other distro is a competitor in this space? (I.e., not a minimalist distro, easy to use, with plenty of available software?) Fedora? Mint?

<comment><USER27> Arch

<comment><USER28> I haven't used Arch in years, but I'm pretty sure it qualifies as a minimalist distro.

<comment><USER27> But isn't that what OP was asking for?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Now this is either poor marketing or poor taste. They tried with desktop with Amazon applets now /etc/motd for server guys. This is really bad for ubuntu

</comment><comment><USER30> Really disappointing.

</comment><comment><USER31> I wonder how many use the terminal in the first place for such an ad to be actually profitable anyway.

</comment><comment><USER32> Who leaves the default motd in place after an install?

<comment><USER33> I do?

<comment><USER34> Then you apparently don't work on PCI grade machines. Many particular industry security standards dictate you put a 'if you are not authorised disconnect now' message in the motd.

<comment><USER35> I wish there was a way to know how many evil-doers cancelled their evil plans after reading that kind of MOTD.

<comment><USER36> AFAIK the theory is that it helps with prosecution - if they got this prompt they clearly were told where they are and that they are not welcome and can't try to excuse themselves through some mistake or not knowing that they shouldn't access.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


In need of some ideas? Here are a couple of mine - <AUTHOR> https://joelkuiper.eu/ideas <comment><USER2> Regarding Offline bookmarks:

I'm really surprised that nobody made a product with this idea/concept already. I probably have a few hundred unread items across all ex-popular and now-popular bookmarking services (Pocket, Safari's Reading List, now-dead Google Reader, delicious). For me, the big problem always was that I bookmark interesting reads, but then I don't come back to it. Or I bookmark it, actually read it, but then never come back to it to check out what's new stories of the author.

<comment><USER3> But that's not a bookmarking product. Don't any of the RSS feed readers cover what you want?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There is a distinct difference between ideas for "apps" and ideas for startups. An app is not a startup and a startup isn't just an app. It's project vs product.

Yes, I agree, within the context you think of ideas, then ideas are cheap.</comment>


Ask HN: What is your favorite time to hack? - <AUTHOR>

I find myself super productive starting at midnight, and sometimes on Friday evenings. Sounds weird, given that most people decide to call it a day or a week. Was wondering if any of you have similar experiences?<p>Cheers! <comment><USER2> I used to love midnight hacking. Really did. Was way more productive during the night than during the day.

It changed a couple of years back. Don't really know why.

Maybe it's just that I'm more busy nowadays and have to go to work/class in the morning. Feeling like crap - despite liters of coffee - at work because I just had to finish a pet project the night before doesn't seem worth it anymore.

</comment><comment><USER3> I also find myself most productive from around 10pm till 4am or so.

Anyone venture a guess why many of us are like that?

<comment><USER4> The internet gets boring (relative) and you're almost guaranteed no distractions. The other time I've found for myself is on public transit (busses/trains) where I have imperfect internet (tethered 3/4G) which is enough for hitting third party APIs and some quick documentation/SO/github lookups but not much else.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> My best hacking hours start around 8-9pm and go until about 6am.

</comment><comment><USER6> Early AM. Say, 6 to 1. With coffee.

I tell people that work with me to find their productive time and work then.

</comment><comment><USER7> 3am ftw

</comment><comment><USER8> 6-10 am</comment>


Cockpit – Web-based interface for Linux servers - <AUTHOR> https://cockpit-project.org/ <comment><AUTHOR> I recently came across this project when looking for a simple web interface for a Raspberry Pi (running Ubuntu). I see that it was discussed here before [1], but thought it was worthy of another share.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16445612](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16445612)</comment>


Feynman: There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom (1959) - <AUTHOR> http://www.zyvex.com/nanotech/feynman.html <comment><USER2> A great article. I suspect the shortest route to atomically-precise manufacturing will be by engineering biology since biology already knows how to do it. And there is even already a high-school competition as Feynman suggested at the end of that article: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Genetically_Engin...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Genetically_Engineered_Machine)

<comment><USER3> Biology does not do atomically-precise manufacturing. It does do a lot of sorting and filtering of random interactions, and in a few places (the ribosome), precision alignment of large complex basic units (amino acids). It is very, very unlikely that we will develop Drexlerian nanotech via biological processes.

<comment><USER4> I wouldn't call amino acids "large complex basic units" at all, they may be bigger than an atom but 10-20 heavy atoms is hardly complex. Plus many amino acids themselves are synthesized in vivo.

Moreover, this misses the point somewhat, namely that the resulting peptide chain folds into a protein with essentially atomically precision. Atoms may not be placed one by one, but an atomically precise structure is created.

<comment><USER3> When the machinery you want to lay out is composed of carbon atoms placed at sub-nanometer scale, 10-20 heavy atoms is like boxing gloves.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For those who think that nanotechnology is too mundane, what about machines made from nucleons?

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

Greg Egan speculates on femtotechnology in some of his sci-fi, mostly as insanely fast computers. (I mean, jeez, it takes SO MUCH TIME for an electron to whirl around the nucleus of an atom... it's so much faster when your computer _is_ the nucleus.)

An excerpt from a Egan short story: [http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/SCHILD/00/SchildExc...](http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/SCHILD/00/SchildExcerpt.html)

More on femtocomputing: [http://hplusmagazine.com/2011/11/01/femtocomputing/](http://hplusmagazine.com/2011/11/01/femtocomputing/)

<comment><USER3> As a physicist and mechanical engineer ... I have absolutely no idea how femtotechnology is supposed to work. The entire premise seems to be: "quarks are smaller!" So? You know what you get when you put a bunch of sub-atomic particles together? Atoms.

I would like very much to see an actual femtocomputer design, one which has a chance of working (as a commentator in the h+ article points out: "Unfortunately, this relies on assumptions that contradict known physics and ones that have not yet been proven."), so I could at least understand what it is supposed to be...

<comment><USER6> QCD's strong coupling makes it hard to imagine how one could create programs for quarks with bounded errors. The linked article seems to suggest using gluons/interactions as gates for the colors on the quarks. This is so totally bonkers it is hard to know where to start, but perhaps an easy place is: how would you go about isolating a single quark and a single gluon in the horrible nonperturbative mess that is the QCD vacuum[0].

If you want to program the nucleons in the nucleus, you can switch your description to chiral perturbation theory[1], which is weakly coupled, but you need to be able to shoot individual pions at individual nuclei, which would be extremely difficult, and might require enough energy to liberate the target nucleon from the rest of the nucleus, anyway, destroying your "computer".

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

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> And we are almost there. People currently print circuits with 18nm features, that's about 180 atoms long, or a square with 32 thousand atoms in the surface. We are still limited to planar designs on silicon, but that's just a couple of breakthroughts from 3D printing once we get precision enough.

But that's the talk that launched the idea of molecular nanotech. That side note is far away (or not, who knows?), but the main line is almost here.

<comment><USER8> Chips are built differently from your standard 3D printing process: 3D is additive or subtractive, while chips are mask-deposit-strip (filter, additive, subtractive?). Keep in mind that the reason we can get to those sizes on microchips is through mind-boggling optical engineering on the masking step. I remember a prof explaining in the clean room over one of our Perkin-Elmer lithography stations that it takes years to redesign the systems for new wavelengths; the application's precision demands that each optical system is specifically engineered and tailored to that wavelength.

Get rid of the masking stage and you've got the missing link to 3D printing. But that would require nigh magical levels of control over a particle beam. Which could totally be solvable to a sufficiently clever team of engineers and a sufficiently robust and controllable beam source. But add that basically nothing behaves itself on those scales, especially machines, and there's still tons of work left.

But you're right like Feynman was all those years ago: you can totally imagine it is plausible, so there's no way we won't try! (Great, now I want to go back into microtech...)

<comment><USER7> > Get rid of the masking stage and you've got the missing link to 3D printing. > But that would require nigh magical levels of control over a particle beam.

Quite like in an electron microscope. Ok, most electron microscopes are way less precise than top of line lithography, but there there are some that are more. 3D printing with controlled ion deposition would be expensive as hell, but I see no reason why it could not be done.

Anyway, I was talking about iterating the filter - add - subtract pattern. Our current low precision is the reason we only iterate a few times. With increased precision, we can do it more. Yep, any advance here requires years and a lot of investiment. But they always come through.

<comment><USER8> Now that you mention it, the setup I imagined is dang near identical to an SEM, but with atoms. All we need to do is replace the filament with a mass spectrometer's filter and bam! Instant micro-3D printer (where instant is ten- twenty years of R&D :). I'd be willing to devote a decade of my life working on that.

As for the second half, I apologize. I didn't realize you were thinking in terms of the long now. I think you're completely correct: we will spend the time and effort to make it better and faster. I have no doubt industry will come through for us in this. We got to supercomputers in our pockets in less than one lifetime, after all!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "Of course, a small automobile would only be useful for the mites to drive around in, and I suppose our Christian interests don't go that far."

I so want to make and have this tiny car and give mites driving permits omg.

</comment><comment> T-A ... which led to [http://e-drexler.com/p/06/00/EOC_Cover.html](http://e-drexler.com/p/06/00/EOC_Cover.html)

</comment><comment><USER10> To point out what everyone's overlooking: this was written in 1959, which means the wildest sci-fi nanotechnology he's imagining here... is, basically, achieved by magnetic HDDs since around 2011.

" _Why cannot we write the entire 24 volumes of the Encyclopaedia Brittanica on the head of a pin? "

"Let's see what would be involved. The head of a pin is a sixteenth of an inch across. If you magnify it by 25,000 diameters, the area of the head of the pin is then equal to the area of all the pages of the Encyclopaedia Brittanica. Therefore, all it is necessary to do is to reduce in size all the writing in the Encyclopaedia by 25,000 times. Is that possible? The resolving power of the eye is about 1/120 of an inch – that is roughly the diameter of one of the little dots on the fine half-tone reproductions in the Encyclopaedia. This, when you demagnify it by 25,000 times, is still 80 angstroms in diameter – 32 atoms across, in an ordinary metal. In other words, one of those dots still would contain in its area 1,000 atoms. So, each dot can easily be adjusted in size as required by the photoengraving, and there is no question that there is enough room on the head of a pin to put all of the Encyclopaedia Brittanica."_

By his assumption, a pinhead is about 0.003 inches^2 (2 mm^2). The current _Encylopedia Brittanica_ has about 300 million English characters [0], which is about 300 MB in a reasonable text encoding (although it should compress [1] to around 60 MB). So, what Feynman is speculating about, translates in digital language to a memory density of 300 MB/(0.003 in^2) or 100 GB/in^2 or 800 Gb/in^2. This is roughly an average magnetic HDD from 2011 [2].

To emphasize the point: Feynman is speculating about a dot _" 80 angstroms [8 nanometers] in diameter - 32 atoms across, in an ordinary metal"_. This is actually the size of a magnetic domain on a HDD platter -- wikipedia gives it as 10 nm [3].

Unfortunately, there now exists a far larger English-language encyclopedia which is 9 GB compressed [4] or 75 GB with images [5]. Using Wikipedia as the new benchmark, it is currently _not_ possible to compress it onto the head of a pin.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_comparisons#Com...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_comparisons#Comparison_of_encyclopedias)

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_%28information_theory%...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_%28information_theory%29#Introduction) ("1.5 bits per character")

[2] [http://storageconference.org/2013/Papers/2013.Paper.01.pdf](http://storageconference.org/2013/Papers/2013.Paper.01.pdf)

[3] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_storage#Design](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_storage#Design) ("Magnetic grains are typically 10 nm in size...")

[4] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download#En...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download#English- language_Wikipedia)

[5] [http://xowa.sourceforge.net/image_dbs.html](http://xowa.sourceforge.net/image_dbs.html)

<comment><USER11> I believe it's only 2gb without images, 9gb with, but I may be incorrect.

<comment><USER10> Check again. The text-only snapshot is 44 GB of XML compressed to a 9.5 GB .bz2 -- that's just the current text of the English-language wikipedia. And XOWA's snapshot, with images, is 75 GB compressed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> wow, thanks for sharing this!

</comment><comment><USER13> an application of DNA as a building block: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5KLTonB3Pg](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5KLTonB3Pg)</comment>


You Know Less Than You Think About Guns - <AUTHOR> https://reason.com/archives/2016/01/05/you-know-less-than-you-think-a <comment><USER2> Late last year in response to IMO misleading charts showing a clear correlation between "gun deaths" vs gun freedoms, I charted murder vs gun rights from a city and state perspective, which illustrate some of the points made in the article. Helpful to visualize, e.g. the point made about Louisiana as an outlier:

[https://hackpad.com/Gun-Rights-Statistics- UBI1bkaNgG6#:h=No-...](https://hackpad.com/Gun-Rights-Statistics- UBI1bkaNgG6#:h=No-clear-correlation-between-g)

Raw data and interactive charts here: [https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1N5JsB- _kTxFSW-14f7Bv...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1N5JsB- _kTxFSW-14f7BvRkiq4FHaC6tR5aaUmh1uPTk/edit#gid=0)

<comment><USER3> Very cool, thanks for sharing.

I think it is interesting that, with the exception of Hawaii, all of the lowest murder-rate states are northern, mostly rural, and overwhelmingly white. I don't know what conclusions to draw from that, aside from the general trend that these aren't states where there is a lot of ethnic gang violence.

<comment><USER2> Murder is highly correlated with urban and minority populations - the murder rate for blacks is about 8x that of whites.[1] The root of this is clearly socioeconomic, and I believe rooted in the drug war[2], which drives black market violence both by creating a lucrative ungoverned market and by removing constructive inter-generational alternatives through mass incarceration - i.e. if your father is in prison for a non-violent drug crime, you as a child lose both a role model and a bread-winner, which makes you more likely to fall into gangs for social and economic reasons.

If that's accurate, it's a vicious, massively destructive cycle.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_crime_in_the_United_S...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_crime_in_the_United_States#Homicide)

[2] e.g. outlier city "Baltimore's City Police Commissioner Anthony Batts says that 80 percent are drug-related." [http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/01/01/the-year- in...](http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/01/01/the-year-in- murder-2013-marks-a-historic-low-for-many-cities.html)

"Eighty percent of the homicides were gang-related, [Chicago Police Commissioner Garry McCarthy] said" [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/29/chicago-homicide- ra...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/29/chicago-homicide-rate-new- york_n_2378073.html)

New Orleans Police Department: "29% of all murders in #NOLA this year involved a gang member. That's down from 42% this same time last year." [https://twitter.com/nopdnews/status/618864980364898305](https://twitter.com/nopdnews/status/618864980364898305)

And in some California cities "gang homicides only accounted for 29 percent of the total for the period under consideration (2003-2008)" I question the use of "only" here. :P [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/evan-defilippis/do-we-have- a-g...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/evan-defilippis/do-we-have-a-gang- problem_b_5071639.html)

On the other hand, The National Gang Center says (based on survey data): "These estimates suggest that gang-related homicides typically accounted for around 13 percent of all homicides annually." [https://www.nationalgangcenter.gov/survey- analysis/measuring...](https://www.nationalgangcenter.gov/survey- analysis/measuring-the-extent-of-gang-problems)

<comment><USER4> It's hardly clear that the root is socioeconomic. I don't have data on crime, but in education race remains predictive even after you include socioeconomic status in the estimator.

[https://randomcriticalanalysis.wordpress.com/2015/05/16/on-c...](https://randomcriticalanalysis.wordpress.com/2015/05/16/on- concentrated-poverty-and-its-effects-on-academic-outcomes/)

Do you know of a similar analysis of crime?

<comment><USER2> I haven't looked into this deeply, more of a productive assumption[1], but here are some related studies:

"the majority of the black-white gap (over 60%) [in violence] and the entire Latino-white gap are explained by a small set of factors, especially marital status of parents, immigrant generation, and neighborhood characteristics associated with racial segregation." [https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/www/external/labor/sem...](https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/www/external/labor/seminars/adp/pdfs/adp_ajph.pdf)

"Despite a large difference in mean levels of family disruption between black and white communities, the percentage of white families headed by a female also had a significant effect on white juvenile and white adult violence."

"The combination of urban poverty and family disruption concentrated by race is particularly severe. Whereas the majority of poor blacks live in communities characterized by high rates of family disruption, most poor whites, even those from "broken homes," live in areas of relative family stability" [https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/3226952/Sampson_...](https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/3226952/Sampson_RacialEthnicDisparities.pdf?sequence=2)

"Multivariate regression results for ninety-one cities showed that while total inequality and intraracial inequality had no significant association with offending rates, interracial inequality was a strong predictor of the overall violent crime rate and the Black-on-Black crime rate." [http://egov.ufsc.br/portal/sites/default/files/anexos/33027-...](http://egov.ufsc.br/portal/sites/default/files/anexos/33027-41458-1-PB.pdf)

See also: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_correlations_of_cr...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_correlations_of_criminal_behaviour#Socioeconomic_factors)

[1] I have a hard time imagining a productive line of thought that leads from saying that high black murder rates result from something inherent to blackness

<comment><USER4> When reading studies like this, it's very helpful to look at the tables of regression coefficients rather than just reading text. Unfortunately, it can often be a career limiting move for study text to accurately reflect the contents of the data tables/regression coefficients.

The first source you cited (the rand study) shows that being African American is a strong predictor of engaging in violence, even after accounting for other factors. See table 2.

The second study doesn't address the question.

The third study (see table 2) shows that, among other factors, percentage of a city that is black is a strong predictor of violent crime even after accounting for other factors.

One productive line of thought which leads from "something inherent to blackness causes crime" is "since this problem is intractible with current levels of biotechnology/social engineering/etc, we should stop wasting resources trying to solve it and focus on other things."

<comment><USER2> I don't disagree with your analysis of the studies, but the fact that a difference remains after accounting for known socioeconomic factors does not indicate that other factors do not exist.

Personally, I wouldn't call this[1] a productive thought, rather a fatalistic one.

[1] "since this problem is intractable with current levels of biotechnology/social engineering/etc, we should stop wasting resources trying to solve it and focus on other things"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I support strict gun control, however I feel it's wrong for the politicians to be meddling in gun control how they are. The US constitution is fairly clear (I accept people will always argue specific) that citizens to have access to firearms.

From this I find it dangerous that any politician would seek to override or 'reinterpret' the constitution without the peoples mandate to do so. This seems ot be happening at an increasingly accelerated rate e.g. government eavesdropping and civil forfeiture.

Firearm ownership should be taken to the vote. If the nations decides to leave firearm availability as a citizen right that's democracy and the inevitable shooting are the price. Potentially more dangerous is a government that feels they can bend a nations constitution away from its spirit to their personal agenda.

<comment><USER6> The constitution is a document that was written well over 200 years ago. And while the document has held up extremely well there's part of it that didn't. For we got rid of things like having slaves be counted as 3/5 of a person of representation.

I think the gun provisions have not. For starters it's crazy to think that a militia equipped with a stock pile of firearms can overtake a intrusive government with tanks, choppers etc. It's just not realistic.

Guns were much more important for protection back then. There were parts of the country that were the frontier with no policing ability. Nowadays places around the world when gun ownership is substantially restricted are generally safer places. Just google Australasia before and after.

Gun ownership as touted by constitutional nuts is an idea that had it's time come. Sadly, I think give the political climate a amendment that could fix this (put in wording that lets the government legislate gun ownership) is untenable.

<comment><USER7> That is precisely why the Constitution includes a specific means to change it. If that's what is deemed necessary, then there's a process to accomplish it.

Sidestepping the Constitution, or ignoring its enumerated rights and restrictions, however, is unacceptable, and should not be tolerated by We the People.

<comment><USER8> Thank you. Yes the document is old. If we feel is outdated there is a mechanism * within the law* to change it!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > Yet during that same period, per-capita gun murders have been cut almost in > half.

So has all violent crime [1]. I don't want to see a chart of per-capita gun murders, but per-capita gun violence as a fraction of _all_ violent crime. Even if crime is decreasing, if those who do commit violent crimes increasingly turn to guns in places where there is more access to guns, then this is evidence in favor of gun control. The hypothesis here (which would need further study) is that the decrease in violent crime would be sharper with gun control laws than without them.

[1]: [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mike-weisser/violent-crime- cit...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mike-weisser/violent-crime- cities_b_4760996.html)

</comment><comment><USER10> Despite the politically-charged nature of the central topic, in a way this fits better into the HN gestalt's continued fascination with the inability to replicate science than the specific topic.

</comment><comment><USER11> Anyone with an appropriate machine such as a (very expensive) DMLS or a (much less expensive) CNC can make gun parts. The price will continue to drop and the materials and designs will continue to improve. Are the places where defending yourself and others with effective tools is criminalized going to mandate DRM'ed machines? Will the criminals (conveniently equated with hackers) follow the law?

<comment><USER12> There are many firearms (i.e. receivers) that do not even require CNC machinery. A manually operated milling machine is more than enough. A small charcoal-fired furnace and drill press is enough to make an aluminum cast AR-15 or 1911. No need for the furnace if you're making stamped AK variant receivers. There are many places in the world where you see these sorts of garage workshops. I always wonder whether the anti-gun public is aware of the ease in which people are and will be able to acquire firearms "extra-legally" in the event of outright prohibition or further restrictions. I assume not, but I prefer not to enlighten them lest they attempt to make aluminum cans and hand files illegal as well.

<comment><USER3> They are not particularly sophisticated, or safe to use, but it is possible to build semi-modern firearms with nearly medieval technology[1]

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Main-line lefty here: I'm immensely frustrating to me to read articles that point out that there's no solid research on guns & gun violence when--to the best of my knowledge--congress has been blocking funding for this research for quite some time.

<comment><USER14> Since when does someone need the permission of congress to do this type of research? There are MANY anti-gun lobbies out there with deep pockets who could easily commission such a study.

Most likely they have numerous times and buried the results as it would not aline well with their agenda.

<comment><USER15> "Most likely they have numerous times and buried the results as it would not aline well with their agenda."

That's fatuous and shows your bias.

For one simple reason: if so, the pro-gun lobbies with deep pockets would be screaming the same findings from the rooftops.

<comment><USER14> I am biased and it is based in reality. The pro gun lobby does scream it from the roof tops but most major media outlets are not pro gun so they don't carry them or follow them. They in fact attempt to demonize and demean anyone who doesn't agree with them. The fact that this isn't know to you speaks volumes about how ill informed you on on this topic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm just curious what the murder rates are relative to violent crime, relative to population in countries with stricter gun control.

Also, given the number of guns, how does that relate to say cars, and car deaths. Nobody is suggesting banning cars, or heavily restricting licensing.

What this comes down to is a fundamental, natural right... Yes, it means that people can do bad things, and can be dangerous... people are/were dangerous and did bad things before guns, and still do. In a free society bad things will happen. I find the entire discussion fairly irritating because most people seem to be in favor of some polar extremes... And though, I'd lean towards freedom, I can understand the idea of registration. For that matter, you were once supposed to register for and train with your local militia, and provide your own firearm as a matter of law in this country.

</comment><comment><USER17> Isn't that lack of knowledge caused in part by the CDC funding ban [1]?

Studying gun control in the US also requires some care: because of the population configuration, you need to take into account the fact that people can bring guns from one jurisdiction to the next, especially in some Eastern cities, like Washington, DC (right next to Virginia) or Baltimore (~50 miles from Virginia).

Violent crime and homicides have been going down all over the richer countries, but the US rate is still much higher than that of say, Canada or the UK.

[1]: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/storyline/wp/2015/01/14/...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/storyline/wp/2015/01/14/why- the-cdc-still-isnt-researching-gun-violence-despite-the-ban-being-lifted-two- years-ago/)

</comment><comment><USER18> I feel like I know even less after reading this piece.

It has an obvious bias - it purports to talk about gun violence, but then only talks about murders.

When talking about the dangers of having a gun in the home it does not attempt to tally injuries - which would be a sentinel event indicating imminent risk of death.

> Public health scholars have continued to research from a place of hostility > to firearms.

Public health scholars are also hostile to viruses and bacteria. Public health scholars are also interested in promoting health of prostitutes and prison inmates. Guns don't make people _healthier_

To be clear, I don't think guns can be outlawed in America, so I don't think working towards that is a good use of political capital.

</comment><comment><USER19> "This simple point — that America is awash with more guns than ever before, yet we are killing each other with guns at a far lower rate than when we had far fewer guns — undermines the narrative that there is a straightforward, causal relationship between increased gun prevalence and gun homicide."

According to Table 1, firearm homicides dropped to 10,828 in 1999 and have actually gone up since. Which demonstrates that you can get statistics to say what ever you want. I have another simple point, that it is harder to kill someone with your bare hands that with a gun.

</comment><comment><USER20> Australian here, we had a mass shooting in Australia some years ago. As a result of this Assault rifles were banned (Edit: without a demonstrable need), licenses were required for rifles and hand guns. Any guns could be traded in to the govt for money in the cut over period. We haven't had a mass shooting since as far as I can recall. The occasional knifing or someone with a hand gun argument occurs still. Guns are a lot harder to come by here, so if you're a loony who wants to kill everyone for looking at you funny then you're out of luck.

<comment><USER21> I'm Australian too, and it seems to work pretty well. One thing I hear a lot is that 'then only the bad guys will have guns', but I think our laws and enforcement must drive the black-market prices way up, because they do find illegal guns every now and then when they have a big drug bust and confiscate millions of dollars of drugs and cash, but your regular criminal on the street pretty much never has a gun. The drug gangs mostly only shoot each other, and pretty rarely too, so for the average Australian, the idea of ever witnessing gun violence (or being a victim to it) just feels really far fetched.

I wonder how much of it is cultural though - when the big gun buyback happened after Port Arthur, it was mostly taking guns from farmers - not people who think they could rise up against the Government or that they should be able to personally kill people in self-defense...

<comment><USER12> Since when is it a contentious issue to kill in legitimate self-defense, with a firearm or not?

<comment><USER21> It's just not something you really ever hear about anyone doing here, and even when it is required, it's pretty far down the list of things to do. Pretty much the only time you hear about someone killing someone in self defense is a cop killing a knife-weilding person every now and then...

Whereas in the US every now and then you hear about people firing at what they think is an intruder, but it turns out to be a family member and stuff like that. It's just really strange to me that shooting would be the first thing you would do, but from the news we hear, it seems that's what a non- insignificant number of people in the US do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm curious what could be done to reduce firearms suicides (and even better reduce overall successful suicides, and ideally suicide attempts.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Why the concern only about gun homicide? Does suicide get somehow worse when done with a gun as opposed to stepping in front of an Amtrak train?

<comment><USER22> Mainly it's that firearms suicides tend to be much more effective. It's a generally effective technique and can be done "privately" (unlike, say, jumping off a tall building or waiting for an inevitably-delayed Amtrak train)

I don't think it is always a bad decision, either -- if someone is 55 and finds out there's a solid diagnosis of a painful fatal illness, there might be a point where it's a reasonable choice (I'd personally Alcor, but...). And I'd certainly prefer if spree killers just killed themselves privately.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> To seek out the highest rate of gun violence, look no further than gun-free zones in America.

<comment><USER24> Which is why, if you believe guns reduce violence, we should saturate such areas with guns.

I highly doubt you'd be in favor of such a policy.

<comment><USER25> Why do you doubt that?

As a counter data point, the police chief of Detroit recently advised the city's residents to carry guns for their protection. The reaction on right- wing blogs which covered this was applause.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Absence of gun control has made Somalia the safest country in the world!</comment>


SciPy - the embarrassing way to code - <AUTHOR> http://www.vetta.org/2008/05/scipy-the-embarrassing-way-to-code/?

<comment><USER2> After spending most of the last night trying to model and fit a bunch of data with scipy, my main bottleneck was my understanding; working out what I needed to do. Once that was done, everything could be implemented in a single call. I don't think that's a particularly bad bottleneck at all.

There was some good discussion about this last time this was posted, and also current discussion over on reddit.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=182676> [http://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/a2xzj/the_embarrassi...](http://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/a2xzj/the_embarrassing_way_to_code/)

<comment><USER3> The problem is that programmers like to program. Make the programming part trivial, and we start to fear that we aren't needed, and that perhaps we could be replaced with domain experts :-O

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I had the exact same experience recently while writing a dynamic programming simulation in Python. The naive (and elegant) solution to the problem consists of a 20-line recursive function which took me about an hour to write. Unfortunately function calls are very expensive in Python, and I my sim required a couple billion of them, so I started searching for ways to eliminate the recursion. 3 weeks and a deep foray into Numpy later and I had it.

The second implementation is about the same length and replaces all of the simplicity of the recursive solution with a bunch of five-dimensional arrays. Never before did I have to think as deeply about vectorized functions, array broadcasting, dimension matching, etc. The non-recursive version is about an order of magnitude faster, and what's better, using the numpy operators means nearly all of the processing is offloaded into low-level C routines, so the Python overhead is effectively nil. On the downside the code is extremely difficult to follow now... trying to visualize what's going on in 5 dimensions is a real pain.

<comment><USER5> Might be able to save yourself some trouble if you can generalize it to an n-dimensional set of operations. Then again, that might not work for your situation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I did some SciPy work in computer vision applications, and it was both a blessing and a curse. About 80% of the code could be reduced into matrix operations, which provided the 'embarrassing' moments that the article mentions. However, I'd hit something like Hysteresis Thresholding in the Canny Edge Detector, which traces through the image looking for faint edges, and spend a day figuring out how to write a Python extension against the Numpy API. This was necessary, because any code that iterated over 1000 x 1000 matrices in Python that I wrote took well over 10 seconds, instead of the < 100 milliseconds it should take.

As a nublet, I probably didn't end up saving much time over C++, but I could see that in the right hands, this tool would be a lifesaver

<comment><USER7> scipy.weave solved a lot of these types of problems for me. It allows you to place inline c++ (with access to the blitz library) it does the trick for those cases where expressing something as a matrix operation would be wasteful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> scipy still doesn't have a good submodule for doing manipulations with multivariate gaussians, which is a HUGE part of machine learning applications.

I'm referring to the analog of R's mvtnorm library.

Yes, you can use rpy2. Yes, you can roll your own dmvnorm (but be careful about the degenerate situations with zero eigenvalues that always arise in high dimensional problems with real data). It is significantly more of a pain to roll your own pmvnorm, because you are now talking about efficient computation of high dimensional integrals, which always seems to involve a trip to Numerical Recipes or the like (see the Genz and Miwa references when you do "?pmvnorm" in R).

Basically this is a huge thing to lack.

PS: yes, if you grep the codebase, you can find this: [http://www.scipy.org/doc/api_docs/SciPy.stats.kde.gaussian_k...](http://www.scipy.org/doc/api_docs/SciPy.stats.kde.gaussian_kde.html)

But you need to write wrappers because it doesn't provide a basic interface to the multivariate gaussian density.

I could go on about other parts of scipy -- it has some advanced stuff but lacks a lot of basics...

<comment><USER9> The definition of "basics" depends on your domain. For the fluid dynamics and geological data that Enthought (the sponsor and primary developer of SciPy) works with, SciPy and NumPy provides all the basics.

One could argue that if you're going to call something "SciPy", it ought to cover all sorts of scientific computation...but, it is Open Source under a very open license. Contributing is very easy, and the team are very friendly to outsiders sending patches, and it's not hard to no longer be considered an "outsider". So, if you need it and SciPy doesn't provide it, why not develop it and contribute?

What I'm trying to say is that complaining about missing functions you need from an Open Source project just wastes your time and annoys the pig.

<comment><USER8> Hey, without going into details I have contributed a fair amount of code to R.

Scipy (and the whole Python numerical computation stack) has nontrivial competition out there and here's what it needs to do to compete...if its developers care about adoption, which most do.

Definitely not saying scipy == crap, just that for stats/machine learning (which is a big percentage of a lot of applications today) it is not mature.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "It's just a matrix" and all the comments sound like SciPy is some kind of APL for the rest of us, is that impression correct? There you too can achieve incredible conciseness once you manage to formulate you problem using some matrices and vectors with funny dimension. (And you get the benefit that the resulting code doesn't look too simple, so you get something to show off witth in return for your effort.)

<comment><USER11> Depends on what you think of when you read "APL".

1\. A language with matrices as a central data structure and a rich variety of operations on them. Yup, SciPy is this, kinda, though not to the same extent as APL.

2\. A language with an extremely strange syntax, apparently engineered for terseness on the smallest possible scale. Nope, SciPy is basically just a bunch of Python libraries, and the language syntax is still Python's.

(There's more to SciPy than the matrix operations, but that's what the original poster was mostly talking about and what might prompt comparisons with APL.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is precisely why people are afraid of math - the more work you do, the smaller the end result. E = mc^2 is actually an approximation, but even the full set isn't very complicated, and imagine how difficult it is to get there. The other truth is that less code is generally faster, but not as small or as fast as a better algorithm, which is in turn not as small or as fast as a mathematical equation. The poster talks about moving across this space, which is actually a great accomplishment... but will probably get the best reception among great programmers or mathematicians.

<comment><USER13> E = mc^2 is not an approximation. What are you referring to?

<comment><USER14> They might have been referring to relativistic effects. Wikipedia has E^2 - (pc)^2 = (mc^2)^2

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I once spent around ten weeks writing a C program to numerically integrate the Schrödinger equation for an electron in a particular magnetic field. When I started looking at results, they looked eerily like trig functions. A little digging revealed that the problem was stated and solved (exactly) in one of the exercises to _Quantum Mechanics_ by Landau and Lifshitz.

I sheepishly told my advisor at the time what had happened, worried he would think me an idiot, but he was thrilled: "You solved the problem! That's what's important."

</comment><comment><USER16> I think the author is taking the wrong thing away from this, all those little realisations are things that if he comes across in the future he will have a better understanding of what to do.

In other words rather than become embarrassed after realising a months work boiled down to just a few lines think about how much you learned to get to those few lines.

<comment><USER17> His use of the word "embarrassing" is tongue-in-cheek.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Just curious, can SciPy also automatically take advantage of cell processors or graphics processors? If it is all just matrix operations, it seems doable?

<comment><USER19> It cannot, at least not ATM and not out of the box.

I am by no mean knowledgeable in those areas, but my understanding is that using specialized hardware/aggressively optimized code in numpy (or similar tools) would be very hard, though. One of the problem is that CUDA or multi- core optimized numpy would have a significant overhead (obviously of a totally different nature), and would be justified only for very large problems. Multi- code numpy was tried a few years ago by E. Jones, and the overhead was almost never worths it IIRC.

The current solution is to use those through libraries which implement linear algebra, etc... , which can be implemented on top of those architectures. There is obviously quite a bit of excitement around those technologies, and this was one of the most talked area at las scipy conference. Video are available: <http://blog.enthought.com/?p=184>. Some of them are related to those</comment></comment>


[ASK HN] Splitting equity - <AUTHOR>

Hello HN,
We are a small tech startup in very early stage we have a product partially built and had a beta going to validate our idea. Currently we are expanding our team. Also, we are changing the roles of a few key team members. We are really struggling to decide how to split the equity.
Our leading founder is taking a passive role now due to several unfortunate visa issues, and a new addition to the team is bringing high value proposition to the team. However, it is very hard to quantify value each member is bringing to the team and give it a number. How did you decide to split your company? How do you quantify each team member's contribution even before we launch the product?
Please point me to a good resource where I can learn about how to go about finding answers to these questions. <comment><USER2> Interestingly enough, this article just popped up on the delicious popular list so may be relevant to you.

[http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/fd0n/35%20Founders%27%20Pie%2...](http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/fd0n/35%20Founders%27%20Pie%20Calculator.htm)

<comment><USER3> Great reference. Any thoughts on how to make sure everyone feels like they get a fair shake? Maybe consensus on the values in this spreadsheet is sufficient?

<comment><USER2> That's a good question, I'm currently working through this problem aswell.

Perhaps give each team member their own table where they would fill in what their perceived self-ratings are, but also how they would rate other members and what they would set the weightings at before sitting down to seriously discuss it.

I think this kind of exercise might help people understand where they fit within the new organisation too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Currently on the front page: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=303101>

Also, <http://paulgraham.com/equity.html></comment>


Moz's $18 Million Venture Financing: Our Story, Metrics and Future - <AUTHOR> http://www.seomoz.org/blog/mozs-18-million-venture-financing-our-story-metrics-and-future <comment><USER2> Any chance of using Linkscape to create/power an alternative search engine to Google?</comment>


Ask HN: How have you been impacted by Sandy? - <AUTHOR>

There have been several posts directly related to downtime and issues coming from Sandy.
ie:
Fog Creek is about to go down: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4717279
Internap evacuates LGA datacenter: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4715889
Even a poll form PG, Should we push the YC deadline back by a day because of the storm?: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4715829
How have you, your company, sites, etc been impacted by Sandy? Such as a service outage, loss of functionality, nothing, complete and utter destruction? <comment><AUTHOR> cognet NYC datacenter down: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4717985></comment>


We dedicated a year to self-improvement: here's what it taught us - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jan/02/self-improvement-optimization <comment><USER2> _> >by the end of the month he could also recite the first 1,000 digits of pi._

I can't tell if he's joking here, this sounds incredible, useless but incredible.

<comment><USER3> "Useless but incredible" sounds like a good description for life itself!</comment></comment>


Review my app: Feedbark - ask questions, get anonymous answers - <AUTHOR> http://feedbark.com

<comment><USER2> Your app is very similar to yahoo answers. I don't think this will make a lot of money , but at least you got some real practice programming something.

Could you tell me how it is different than yahoo answers?

<comment><AUTHOR> It is similar, but the goal with this is to have a more social, personal outlet for questions to friends. I think it's more similar to (and was inspired by) sites like failin.gs and formspring in that you can participate anonymously.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> if you need to login/signup to post a comment, how does it remain anonymous?

Whats going to stop the flamers and trolls?

<comment><AUTHOR> You can answer questions without logging in or signing up. The answers need to be approved by the person that originally asked the question before they show up.</comment></comment>


Synopsys Design Compiler-A quick Tutorial - <AUTHOR> http://www.yanzhi.org/blog/2007/10/synopsys-design-compiler-quick-tutorial.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow, this is as fascinating as the erlang stuff!</comment>


Lock-free Data Structures – Memory Model: Part 3 - <AUTHOR> http://kukuruku.co/hub/cpp/lock-free-data-structures-memory-model-part-3

<comment><USER2> This is a good article, but on a site that makes unauthorized translations and publishes them without the original author's consent.

Some earlier discussion of this problem is here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7753792](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7753792)

The original for this article is here: [http://habrahabr.ru/company/ifree/blog/197520/](http://habrahabr.ru/company/ifree/blog/197520/)

<comment><USER3> Seems like they have a link at the bottom of an article.</comment></comment>


Maemo 5 and Nokia n900 press release - <AUTHOR> http://www.nokia.com/press/press-releases/showpressrelease?newsid=1337594

<comment><USER2> From the developer's point of view, it's notable that you can now use the Qt framework to program cross-platform apps for Maemo and Symbian phones as well as for Windows, Mac and Linux desktops. And with the support for web technologies in Qt, this means Web developers can create native apps using mostly HTML, CSS, Javascript, SVG etc. <http://qt.nokia.com/>

( _Edit:_ replying here because of the reply limit: _I_ Right, Qt is supported on Maemo 5, will be default on Maemo 6. _II_ Indeed, and Nokia will support Python for Qt development too.)

<comment><USER3> FTR, most of Maemo 5 is GTK.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes Maemo 5 is mainly gtk based. But nokia announced they will switch to Qt for Maemo Harmattan. It is only logical after they acquired Trolltech in early 2008.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> videos: [http://www.engadget.com/2009/08/27/nokia-n900-running- maemo-...](http://www.engadget.com/2009/08/27/nokia-n900-running- maemo-5-officially-500-in-october/)

<comment><USER5> Wow, is it really a resistive touch screen? That's pretty terrible.

<comment><USER6> Doubt it. The N97's screen "feels" capacitive. No mention to tech here: <http://maemo.nokia.com/n900/specifications/>

<comment><USER2> The N900 includes a stylus and thus, a resistive screen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Biggest additions I see here are the additional memory, cellular connectivity, and rear facing camera. The limited memory made multimedia application development a challenge on the N810, and the front facing camera was rather useless for photo taking. Now this will truly be a use-anywhere, do-anything mobile computing platform. Looking forward to developing on it.

Battery life was always a problem on the N810 with constant connectivity. We'll see how it holds up on the N900.

</comment><comment><USER8> I want this so bad. It's the first device I've seen that's powerful, open, and available.

<comment><USER2> plus it's a phone, you mean ?-)

<comment><USER8> Actually, that's not even important to me. Just the 3G data connectivity. I might just keep my razr for calls :)

<comment><USER2> I see. For 3G data, I've found tethering to be good this far. I'm eager to see how built-in (versus Bluetooth) data affects the battery runtime. ( _Edit:_ replying here because of the reply limit: The previous Nokia internet tablets (770, N800, N810) can tether with any phone that supports the standard Bluetooth DUN profile.)

<comment><USER8> Can you tether with other Nokia devices?

<comment><USER9> I've had a Nokia 9300, E71, and other Nokia phones. I have been able to tether with all of them on AT&T.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Does Maemo have a JRE? I'm currently a Clojure fanboy...

<comment><AUTHOR> I highly doubt that Maemo 5 would have default java support going by the history of Maemo.

But have a look at jalimo, <https://wiki.evolvis.org/jalimo/index.php/Main_Page>. You may be able to get something working. That is the beauty of openness.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> damn, 500 euros...

<comment><AUTHOR> IMHO 500 euros is reasonable considering that this is almost a computer in your pocket with real control for the user. It is my guess that an iphone 3GS would cost more than this without a contract and the device looks good as the iphone.

<comment><USER11> The Samsung i7500 Galaxy Android handset is less than €400 without a contract.

<comment><USER2> One reason might be that the Samsung has 8 GB storage, the Nokia has 32 GB. The Samsung has 320x480 pixels, the Nokia has 800x480. The Nokia also has OpenGL for Exposé-like task switching etc.

<comment><USER12> And a real keyboard.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Algebra and the Lambda Calculus (1993) - <AUTHOR> https://people.csail.mit.edu/jaffer/lambda.txt <comment><USER2> I took the liberty of converting this to LaTeX: [https://www.overleaf.com/read/vbnkshcwhcyk](https://www.overleaf.com/read/vbnkshcwhcyk)

<comment><USER3> Thanks for doing this. There's an error on page 2 though: 0 = 1^2 + g - g@ It should be 0 = 1 + g^2 - g@

<comment><USER2> Good catch. Fixed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I was looking at the references at the bottom and saw `6`, I thought "Hygienic Macro Expansion? M.Fellinson? He probably must be referring to Matthias Felleisen...". Effectively: [1]

Doesn't mean I understood the rest of the paper... sigh :-p

1: [https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=319859](https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=319859)

</comment><comment><USER5> I like the article's discussion of algebraic operations and computer representation as well as how to implement the lambda operation. That's all abstract algebra and its extensions.

What I'm still mystified by when confronted by these discussions is the way the lambda calculus is considered equivalent to a Turing machine. Is it essentially that you have these complex variable substitution schemes which can "encode" a Turing machines' tape and transitions or is there something more straightforward?

<comment><USER6> I guess the tape is just a linked list of bits? What confuses me about lambda calculus, and a lot of math in general, I guess, as opposed to something like the turing machine, is that, how do I put this...

To actually implement Lisp or lambda calculus in real life you need "cons", right(?), and some way to increment your equivalent to an "instruction pointer". Or else you don't have any memory or information to operate on and you don't have any way to move on to the next step. If you are doing it on paper I guess the act of moving your pen to an empty space is your cons and moving your eyes across the page is like incrementing your instruction pointer... In the idea of the turing machine this is all explicitly explained but every time I try and read about lambda calculus it seems like they just expect you to know it right away. This might seem really trivial to other people but its how I tend to think.

<comment><USER7> Lambda calculus is simple, mechanical symbol substitution. There's no information or memory needed outside of the initial 'program' other than the substitution rules.

Read about church encodings to see how numbers, pairs, conditionals, etc are encoded.

<comment><USER8> I doubt it; substitution will blow up on self-referential tricks like the Y combinator, where a function receives itself as an argument: any attempt to substitute the raw lambda text for this argument leads to infinite regress ( _à la_ Droste effect).

<comment><USER7> It's still just an infinite series of substitutions.

<comment><USER8> That's a failure to reduce, showing that the reduction by substitution is an incomplete evaluation strategy at best. The Y combinator works under call-by- value and other strategies; you can stick it in production code, if you're so inclined.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I have found paper by Raúl Rojas, which is also a good start to learn λ-calculus. Here it is [http://www.inf.fu- berlin.de/lehre/WS03/alpi/lambda.pdf](http://www.inf.fu- berlin.de/lehre/WS03/alpi/lambda.pdf)

<comment><AUTHOR> The significance of this paper is not about learning the λ-calculus.

Rather, to me the significance of this paper is that it presents a novel way of "implementing the lambda calculus in an algebraic system" and provides a correspondence between the λ-calculus and the matrix model of computation:

      Vector and matrix valued functions can be represented
      by vectors and matrices some of whose entries are
      lambda expressions.

I have been looking for a lingua franca for programming languages, a way to unify the langs and make use of the decades of wisdom encoded into our langs' Great Libs. Maybe the matrix model and linear algebra is the lingua franca I seek.

<comment><USER10> Paul Halmos' work on Algebraic Logic may be relevant.

(And see also Conal Elliott's "Compiling to Categories" [http://conal.net/papers/compiling-to- categories/](http://conal.net/papers/compiling-to-categories/) )

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I don`t know how to call this effect, but often I look to learn about something specific and later that day the same topic pops up on the front page of HN. Earlier today I googled about "algebra and lambda calculus" and variations of that and lo and behold this peice on the front page few hours later. Is this some kind of advanced geek ad tracking or what? :D

<comment><USER12> It's the frequency illusion (also known as the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon).

[https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion](https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion)

<comment><USER13> also known coloquially as 'blue car syndrome'.

[https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Blue%20Car%2...](https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Blue%20Car%20Syndrome)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wonder if this correspondence could be used for program transformations/optimizations?

code -tx-> polynomial -tx-> simplification -tx-> [possibly more efficient] code

<comment><AUTHOR> My burgeoning conjecture (as hinted at in a previous comment) is that all can be unified, transformed, and optimized for modern hardware under the matrix model of computation -- type theory, the lambda calculus, the actor model, neural nets, graph computing -- I'm starting to see a path to where all models are aligned across vectors of unity.

Here are some the correspondences I've been looking at...

* Graph algos in the lang of linear algebra now realized and encoded into GraphBLAS [1]

* The three normed division algebras are unified under a complex Hilbert space [2]

* Ascent sequences and the bijections discovered between four classes of combinatorial objects [3]

* Dependent Types and Homotopy Type Theory [4]

* Bruhat–Tits buildings, symmetry, and spatial decomposition [5]

* Distributed lattices, topological encodings, and succinct representations [6]

* Zonotopes and Matroids and Minkowski Sums [7]

* Holographic associative memory and entanglement renormalization [8]

[1] Graph Algorithms in the Language of Linear Algebra (Jeremy Kepner) [http://www.mit.edu/~kepner/](http://www.mit.edu/~kepner/) Discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18099520](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18099520)

[2] Division Algebras and Quantum Theory (John Baez) [http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/rch.pdf](http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/rch.pdf)

[3] (2 + 2)-free posets, ascent sequences and pattern avoiding permutations [pdf] [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S009731650...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0097316509001885/pdf)

[4] Cartesian Cubical Computational Type Theory: Constructive Reasoning with Paths and Equalities [pdf] [https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rwh/papers/cartesian/paper.pdf](https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rwh/papers/cartesian/paper.pdf)

[5] Bruhat–Tits buildings and p-adic Lie groups [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Building_(mathematics)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Building_\(mathematics\))

[6] Distributive lattices and Stone-space dualities [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributive_lattice#Represent...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributive_lattice#Representation_theory)

[7] Solving Low-Dimensional Optimization Problems via Zonotope Vertex Enumeration [video] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NH_CpMYe3tw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NH_CpMYe3tw) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zonohedron](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zonohedron)

[8] Entanglement Renormalization (G Vidal) [https://authors.library.caltech.edu/9242/1/VIDprl07.pdf?hovn...](https://authors.library.caltech.edu/9242/1/VIDprl07.pdf?hovno=/) Holography [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_associative_memory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_associative_memory)

Google Scholar: [https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=related:Yi- GtarGxh0J:sc...](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=related:Yi- GtarGxh0J:scholar.google.com/&scioq=entanglement+renormalization+and+holography&hl=en&as_sdt=0,44&as_vis=1)

<comment><USER12> Can you expand on what you mean? What is "the matrix model of computation" and "vectors of unity"?

Which actor model are you talking about? The variants are very different and Hewitt's original paper is mainly referenced for coming up with the name rather and kicking off the field than inventing a usable model.

Type theory is even vaster. Are we talking homotopy type theory? Calculus of constructions? System F?</comment></comment></comment>