Peter Norvig: The machine age - <AUTHOR> http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/the_machine_age_tM7xPAv4pI4JslK0M1JtxI

<comment><USER5> In this AI/machine learning is compared to the space race and the fight against cancer - I like the comparison considering I work in the field ;) Unfortunately though I think AI and machine learning has the fundamental problem of rolling improvement...

Think back a hundred years to a time before the internet, long distance telephones, common air travel and so on. To people from a hundred years ago we'd be the most outlandish science fiction story ever told.

I consider the same thing whilst watching science fiction films - in reality they wouldn't be amazed that they can reach Mars in a half hour. They'd instead be complaining about the in-flight entertainment or the turbulence caused by navigating asteroid fields.

AI has the same problem. People can now (naively) communicate with each other even though they share no common language. Texts and documents can be re- written in real time to be legible in another language. Credit card fraud and spam emails are handled transparently by systems trained on hundreds or thousands of hours of cumulative knowledge. No-one sees these things. No-one respects these things.

Human kind judges itself from the position it currently stands, not from where it began. For this reason alone incremental improvements will never really be considered milestones of achievement.

<comment><USER6> "To people from a hundred years ago we'd be the most outlandish science fiction story ever told."

You'd be surprised:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_in_the_Twentieth_Century#...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_in_the_Twentieth_Century#Predictions)

<comment><USER7> Technology is one thing; society is another: I doubt anyone from the 19th Century could possibly imagine a debate over gay marriage. A crazy promoting it getting beaten down by a righteous world, possibly, but not a debate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> A link to the 'print version' of the page: the whole article on one page without the incredible clutter and cruft that the New York Post splashes all over its site:

[http://www.nypost.com/f/print/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/th...](http://www.nypost.com/f/print/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/the_machine_age_tM7xPAv4pI4JslK0M1JtxI)

</comment><comment><USER9> Perhaps offtopic, but I find it odd that there is an opinion piece by Peter Norvig in the NY Post.

<comment><USER10> true, but i'm sure that NY Post has more subscribers than NY Times, so if his goal was to reach the largest possible audience, perhaps NY Post was an appropriate venue

<comment><USER11> This isn't true. According to Wikipedia, the NY Times has 876,638 daily/1,352,358 Sunday subscribers [0] while the NY Post has 525,000/343,361 [1]

[0] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NY_Times> [1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NY_Post>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The episode "The Thinking Machine" of the Nova miniseries "The Machine That Changed the World" is my favorite introduction to the history of AI up until around AI winter.

The episode, along with four others, are available here: [http://waxy.org/2008/06/the_machine_that_changed_the_world_t...](http://waxy.org/2008/06/the_machine_that_changed_the_world_the_thinking_machine/)

</comment><comment><USER13> This is an excellent article for raising awareness of AI. However, I disagree with its conclusion that we will always relate to AI as tools, pets, advisers, etc.

When we ask whether machines can think, I believe it is a question of volition and self-direction. Does the machine have an open-ended goal and is self aware? Can it alter its own programming to change its own methods, its own knowledge, and its own goals? If the answer to these two is "yes," then I believe we will consider the machine to be thinking.

What are the implications? If machines gain those capacities, as well as the ability to compute emotions, then what separates them from us? If you agree that humanity is fundamentally a function of our minds, then, if machines can compute in fundamentally equivalent ways, they become "human." What evidence is there that this is forever impossible?

<comment><USER14> _If you agree that humanity is fundamentally a function of our minds_

What about the ability to feel pleasure and pain ?

I don't believe a deterministic machine will ever experience such subjective feelings (though it may behave as if it does). Computers may well become sapient but they (at least with current technology) will never be sentient.

<comment><USER15> Thought experiment: If there was a human that suffered an injury that left them unable to feel pleasure, or pain - some form of nerve damage, perhaps - <USER2> wouldn't think any less of that human's mental function. I wouldn't think they had lost any humanity, or argue they should be accorded any less human rights. I think that they'd still have hopes, and fears, would be much more important than their ability to feel pain or pleasure.

Given this, how important is the ability to feel pleasure, or pain, really?

I think you are focusing on the wrong thing, and disagree with this way of assessing humanity.

<comment><USER14> I used pleasure and pain as examples of subjective experiences. Hopes and fears are other examples.

If you believe that humanity amounts to more than merely electrical signals and other physical phenomena (ie you're not a reductionist) then I'm surprised it's my side of the argument you're disagreeing with.

<comment><USER15> It is hard to have this conversation on hacker news.

The format works well for general discussion, but this is a particularly subtle topic - its hard to make conversational progress before several essays back and forth to pin down a set of agreed terminology.

This is something I'm struggling with here. I don't want to get bogged down in a debate on good semantics, but without clarification its hard to have any meaningful discussion. Sometimes you need to spend some time discussing semantics, in order to move past them.

I need a word to describe the sort of higher level awareness that we humans have in and of ourselves, that makes it not ok to 'switch off' another human. Normally, I'd say sapience, after 'wisdom' - but you are clearly using that in a different meaning, so I'll go with 'personhood', without limiting that necessarily to homo _sapiens_.

While we still know relatively little about personhood, I would be happier to use hopes and fears as a defining criteria, over pleasure and pain.

Pleasure and pain are very low-level sensory phenomena. Very simple life can feel pleasure and pain - pain particularly; to my mind, they are neither necessary, nor sufficient, criteria for personhood.

Hopes are fears are, I think, the product of a much higher level reasoning process. For a start, they are not merely short term and reactive; they pre- suppose some model of the future. Further, I think they generally necessitate a model of self, and an awareness of self in that future.

That makes them very different criteria, in general.

If you were arguing that 'subjective experiences' were necessary for personhood, it'd have been better to state that explicitly.

The post you were responding, when you mentioned pleasure and pain, said that 'humanity was fundamentally a function of our minds'. I agree with that post.

If you require pleasure and pain - which clearly require some level of situatedness in a sensory apparatus which can communicate these sensations - for your definition of personhood, then I can see how you would argue against a machine 'simulating' personhood.

However, with hopes and fears, no such situatedness is required. I see no reason why a machine couldn't potentially simulate/execute a program/consciousness that had hopes and fears, even without a body, or conventional sensory input.

I see no reason why a simulated/executed (it is _very_ important to realise that these two verbs have the same effective result in this context) program couldn't have subjective experience.

>If you believe that humanity amounts to more than merely electrical signals and other physical phenomena (ie you're not a reductionist) then I'm surprised it's my side of the argument you're disagreeing with.

So many difficult (loaded?) words there: 'amounts', 'merely', 'reductionist', 'side'.

I believe humanity amounts to more than merely electrical signals, in the same way I believe the mona lisa 'amounts' to more than 'merely' a collection of oils on a poplar.

Join the technological revolution: its not the atoms that are important - <USER3> the bits. The pattern things are in is much more important than the things themselves. A quicksort algorithm running on vaccum tubes, or transistors, or water pipes, or CPU simulated in minecraft, or rocks in an XKCD desert, is still a quicksort algorithm.

Its not 'merely' a collection of electrical signals. Its become more than that, because the electrical signals are arranged in a certain pattern. But its still fully explainable in terms of electrical signals.

>(ie you're not a reductionist) I do believe our minds are defined and explained (in theory) by physical phenomena, like everything else in the universe.

I'm not a supernaturalist. How about you?

<comment><USER14> I'll try to explain my point of view on this to the extent that I myself understand it.

First to me what you call "personhood", which you define as that which makes it wrong to kill (or I would assume as well cause suffering to) another human being, is based on the capacity of the being in question to experience suffering. I think that humans have a much higher capacity for suffering than most (if not all) other terrestrial animals due to their more complex nervous systems. Part of this increased capacity may be due to increased cognitive capacity per se (for example I will suffer if I think my life is in danger whereas an animal may not be able to conceptualize that danger and hence will not experience suffering in the same situation). Humans clearly have greater sapience than animals and this can lead to greater suffering. It is also possible that humans have a greater intrinsic capacity for subjective experience independently of any cognitive process. If this is true I would say that humans have greater sentience than animals. I don't know if it's true because I lack a conceptual model for understanding the nature of sentience and what physical processes may give rise to it.

In the absence of such a model, I can only guess and my guess is that sentience somehow arises from the interaction between information and matter.

I think it's likely that deterministic computers will achieve human level cognitive abilities in the relatively near future. I know of no cognitive function that humans perform which I can't imagine being executed on a sufficiently powerful computer. I would consider such machines to be sapient but as far as I can see they would have no sentience whatsoever (not even as much as lower animals).

As for your last question:

It seems to me that human beings are constantly falling into the same intellectual trap. That trap consists of believing that their scientific theories are not only accurate but also complete. At the end of the 19th century physicists believed they knew essentially everything there was to know about physics (except for a couple of pesky anomalies that could easily be swept under the rug). Ten years ago it was common wisdom that the majority of human DNA was junk which served no purpose. Only now are we beginning to understand the role that "junk" plays in regulating gene expression.

I think that current scientific theories are not capable of explaining the nature of sentience or of predicting which physical systems will be sentient and which not. I'm not sure if that makes me a supernaturalist or not.

<comment><USER15> Thanks for the detailed response.

>It is also possible that humans have a greater intrinsic capacity for subjective experience independently of any cognitive process.

I must disagree with you here - I would say that subjective experience _is_ a cognitive process.

Of course, this is a speculative opinion; but it seems likely to me:

We know that we can have simple algorithmic and statistical processes on neural nets; we know we can build very complex processes from simple building blocks; we know the brain is full of neural nets; we know that the high level cognitive processes are build on the neural nets; and that if we interfere with the brain, we disturb the personhood.

To me, this seems like a pretty good case for applying occams razor and deciding that the personhood comes from the (big, incredibly complex) neural nets.

Loosely, I believe that if we could write a sufficiently powerful piece of software, and if we constructed it so that that was capable of complex introspection, then it would say it had a subjective experience. And I would tend to believe it. Such a feat is clearly some distance from the current state of the art and we have no idea how to do this - but still.

>I think that current scientific theories are not capable of explaining the nature of sentience or of predicting which physical systems will be sentient and which not. I'm not sure if that makes me a supernaturalist or not.

This is tricky territory.

Its reasonable to believe our scientific theories are incomplete. Certainly, we have a long way to go, scientifically, before we understand how minds operate.

But, lets look at our physics knowledge. Our physics models seem to be pretty good. Unless we are at very high energies, they seem to do a very accurate job of describing the world. We've built components with that knowledge, that have been reliable; our abstractions do not seem very leaky.

It is important to realise, that while relativity did come along and wipe away aspects of the newtonian worldview, newtonian physics is still accurate for deciding where to throw the ball to get it into the net. The more detailed physics was only relevant when working with certain situations that demanded the lower level of abstraction.

I don't believe nature evolved brains that require subtle properties of high energy physics to work. I'd say the systems underlying them aren't even quantum in nature. Some scientists would dispute this - notably Roger Penrose.

But is evolution really going to build brains, and processing software - <USER4> are present, in some form, in a vast range of species - out of some mysterious quantum - or lower level - physics?

Evolution tends to be about bootstrapping. Higher level systems are always assembled out of lower level building blocks. Thats why I have cells, tissues, organs - motifs and structure that repeat themselves.

If you evolve a system that is sensitive to the smallest changes in the properties of its smallest units (quantum interactions, say) its much hard, in terms of the search required. It also is going to be much more fragile.

Even neurons are a pretty high level construct, from a physics point of view; high enough so that our current physics probably models their functional characteristics completely. (Although we have yet to fully apply our current physics to analyse them completely; ANNs as we see them in AI are but the crudest approximations, and shouldnt be considered descriptive.).

So I would tend to believe that we don't need any new _physics_ to understand how minds work.

If you are saying that there is some strange new physics needed to describe how the information relates to matter, then I think you are, functionally, a supernaturalist. I also put Penrose in that box, though, so its a personal opinion, and the jury is still out.

If you think that there is a lot of science yet to be discovered, to come up with theories of how computational building blocks are made from neural architecture, and what the 'algorithms' that run on that architecture are, then I agree with you.

<comment><USER13> I am glad that we can have this discussion, despite its difficulty. It is an intensely interesting subject, and I can't resist.

For the poster below, thank you for bringing up the p-zombie argument. Indeed, with links to deconstructionism and physicalism, how can you even tell that another human is "human"? Can you prove that that individual is conscious, has subjective experience, and has a soul? Or is it, in fact, an assumption that all humans possess these things? This fundamental assumption is put to the test if a computer can perfectly simulate a human mind. Perhaps we will see that such notions are purely subjective constructs, like "cold". Though we may feel "cold", it is a sensation and an experience. That experience is not provable, even if we might get everyone to agree that -50C is "cold." All we can prove is the behavior of the brain, and assume that that behavior is linked to experience in general.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> "Learning turned out to be more important than knowing." This seemingly simple sentence, to me, sums up the article, i.e. the data driven approach as opposed to model-driven ones.

</comment><comment><USER17> ``One of the biggest issues in AI is determining what the question is really asking i.e. translating a "natural language" query into something machine can understand and find the appropriate answer.'' - so True.

<comment><USER18> That's also one of the biggest issues in software development.

<comment><USER19> Surely it's _the_ issue in software development. Everything else is a case or subproblem of "how do I use a computer to solve this imperfectly defined problem?"

I mean, it's borderline tautological, isn't it? Software development is the practice of translating natural-language requests into executables. That's not just a recurring question – it's definitional.

This is why I'm nervous when strongly antisocial people say they want to go into software. The point of this field is to figure out what people need (or want, or mean, or like). Of course you can do this creatively rather than responsively, and with more rather than less respect for your customers. But you don't _escape_ human tastes and concerns when your job is to explain them to a microprocessor.

<comment><USER18> Well, there's the second issue of doing it such that the machine can produce results efficiently. Which tends rather towards the mathy computer-science side of things - which is where I think the less social "I just want to write code" people would be much happier.

<comment><USER19> Efficiency is implicit in most natual-language queries. Managing efficiency tradeoffs is a good example of something fuzzy yet important that you have to be able to figure out from natural-language queries and human interaction.

But yeah, if you really just want to work with numbers, you'll probably be happier in CS academia.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> "Spam filtering programs using A.I. learning and classification techniques correctly identify over 99.9% of the 200 billion spam e-mails sent each day."

200 _billion_ spam e-mails _each day_. Something should be done with spammers just on the basis of how much electricity it wasted on sending, processing and discarding all those e-mails...

</comment><comment><USER21> Single page (print) version: [http://www.nypost.com/f/print/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/th...](http://www.nypost.com/f/print/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/the_machine_age_tM7xPAv4pI4JslK0M1JtxI)</comment>


Ask HN:What is a personal or biz web utility that is needed/not yet dominated? - <AUTHOR>

I have spent the last year learning how to create a web application and now that I am capable, I am having difficulty finding a utility that would be worth the time investment to create it. All the obvious ones exist and are controlled by a major player and I have no means to compete with my part time involvement. I'm not looking for 'the next big thing' as much as a usefull utility that could development into a livable income's worth of paying customers. Note: I am talking about a web only application. I am unfamiliar with android/iphone. <comment><USER2> For UK market: Budgeting for people on benefits. It needs to be really simple to use, and cover benefits in (with dates) and money out. Have space for telephone numbers of various benefit offices and utility suppliers. Have reminders for when to pay. Have links to useful information - job centres and cv writing and CAB and etc.

Because of the limited funds of these users you'd monetise with ads.

\---

"Mood Tracker" \- there are lots of these. But yours would be better. In the UK we have something called IAPT - Improved Access to Psychological Therapies. These are first line therapies for people with mild to moderate depression, anxiety, etc. Your app would describe what CBT (cognitive behaviour therapy) is, and would help the user with some of the processes.

</comment><comment><USER3> Million dollar question dude. Best way to find a good idea is to quietly examine problems you or people around you face, and come up with better solutions.

</comment><comment><USER4> Here's another one: Build the Pinterest of 3D Printing where everyone posts their favorite designs.

</comment><comment><USER4> Study aids. Flash cards I could make on my desktop & use from my mobile browser at the bus stop or whatever. Teachers might pay to create decks. Sharing decks might be popular. Featured curriculum specific decks might make money.

<comment><USER5> Disclosure: I work for the company that makes this web application.

[https://www.examtime.com/p/422-Spanish-Vocabulary-- Intermedi...](https://www.examtime.com/p/422-Spanish-Vocabulary--Intermediate- flash_card_decks)

You can register and make your own for free or search for ones already there. Feedback is more than welcome.</comment></comment>


How AllFacebook sold for millions (& didn't get a trademark suit from Facebook) - <AUTHOR> http://mixergy.com/nick-oneill-allfacebook-interview/ <comment><USER2> Nick seriously is the man.</comment>


Ask HN: Can Global Warming Be Reversed with Technology? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> We are told to delay acting on climate change because it costs money. Then we are told by the same people that carbon capture will save the day. Now, most definitely by the laws of thermodynamics you will spend more energy in this roundabout way of doing things. Not releasing a gas in the first place, is cheaper (in energy units) than releasing it and then trying to capture it back.

Assuming that energy units roughly equate to dollars, it would be immensely cheaper to cut our emissions today, as much as possible, than to keep emitting CO2 at our current rates and then hope to capture it back in the future. The reasons we behave in this illogical fashion:

1\. The costs of acting now and the costs of acting in the future are going to be bared by different entities. Thus some entities can profit out of this, to the detriment of the rest of us.

2\. The nominal economic cost will be higher, but it might become economically more viable, still, just plainly out of desperation when things get really bad.

So to answer you question, maybe yes. Not entirely though. CO2 can be captured back, maybe, but the damage to human societies and the environment cannot be fixed. But nonetheless, this should not be an excuse to delay action on climate change!

</comment><comment><USER3> Reversed as in slowed down, absolutely.

Reversed as in CO2 levels brought back to preindustrial levels within a few lifetimes, not known.

The "warming" is a small part of the overall problem; CO2 increases are impacting a far wider range of conditions, including those in your own body, and that of your food. The temperature changes just capture the imagination better.

Other than stopping burning so darn much, our two go-to strategies are "artificial weathering" where we unearth carbonaceous rock and convert CO2 into bicarbonate, pulling it out of the cycle, and "ocean fertilization", where we unleash the power of aquaculture by dumping mineral nutrients into large swaths of ocean, whereby a new crop of plant critters will absorb the CO2 and add it to the food chain.

Most other ideas either make the problem worse (blocking out part of the sun, for instance), or fail to move the needle.

My upcoming book Fat Gas (first few chapters at fatgas.com) is a useful resource on the subject.

<comment><AUTHOR> I like the idea of massive production of carbon absorbing plants. Do they come with any ecological consequences?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Reversed" as in returning to 1950s CO2 levels would cost a few trillion, and many decades.

Unmelting all the ice that melted in that time would cost a lot more.

<comment><AUTHOR> How about tech that absorbs CO2 and produces some useful output.

<comment><USER4> There is a reason industrial civilization has put quadrillions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, but taken very little out: It's profitable to emit carbon, and expensive to take it out of the air.

You can absolutely take CO2 out of the air and produce useful output. It's physically possible, no problem. It's not at all profitable, though. Not much reason to produce synthetic gasoline at $20 a gallon when you can make it from fossil petroleum for $3 a gallon.

This is why global warming mitigation efforts have focused on reducing emissions instead of carbon capture.</comment></comment></comment>


We see so well because of snakes? - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/04/cover-to-cover/7977

<comment><USER2> I think this short review does a disservice to Isbell's work. It seems to use a very minor point about pointing and peripheral vision, when it looks like she did much more research to support her views. From this review: [http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertai...](http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article6864376.ece)

"The crux of Isbell's Snake Detection Theory focuses on vision and is straightforward: 'Visual systems are more developed in those primates that have shared the longest evolutionary time with venomous snakes and least developed in those primates that have had no exposure at all to venomous snakes'."

There's also a very interesting and much longer review I just submitted: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1195869>

Edited: I see a lot of comments about snakes not preying on humans. But humans evolved over millions of years from much smaller primates. That's where Isbell thinks the evolutionary arms race took place. You could argue the reason snakes don't prey on humans is because our ancestors _won_ that arms race.

<comment><USER3> Thanks very much for the additional background material. I agree wholeheartedly that The Atlantic article fails utterly to capture the essence of her thesis, but I also think she's seeing a co-evolutionary causation where it's merely a strong correlation.

Those same environments with higher density of vipers also play host to the widest variety of plant life. In many fruits and leaves, the differences between positive identification and edible vs. inedible have more to do with color and texture than scent.

Additionally, in a canopy environment fraught with the hazards and complexity of 3 dimensional navigation, and lack of a constant "ground scent-base", food source identification via sight would seem to be a more caloric-efficient approach. That's the strategy employed by most tropical birds and they have an even greater freedom of movement amongst the branches. It's also worth pointing out that exclusively ground-dwelling tropical birds such as Kiwi, Kakapo, Cassowary, and the Ocellated turkey all forage by scent and all have undergone reverse evolutionary trade-offs in visual acuity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I haven't seen the data, but at first blush, I really question the strength of this hypothesis.

Most (all?) animal senses have evolved firstly for finding and obtaining food.

From antelopes to bees, the spectral and polarization sensitivity (if any) of the eyes is perfectly matched to discriminate their primary food source against the background of their visual environment.

Predators evolved binocular vision (for distance estimation), and vergence tracking to estimate future prey pathing movement. In fact, amongst humans, the extremely wide margin in vergence tracking performance between the sexes is indicative of a very early specialization for hunting by men and gathering by women.

Evolving defensively against such an extremely rare event (no known extinct or extant species of snake even actively preyed against humans) would seem counter to the daily duty cycle demands of the human sensorium.

<comment><USER4> In what way is vergence different in men and women? Do you have a source? I'd love to read up on that.

<comment><USER3> I recall a few studies from colleage and an old friend is currently studying non-human vergence tracking sexual dimorphism. I'll take a look, but here's a quick Google search on the relevant terms:

<http://tinyurl.com/yhbwjde>

One of the interesting results is that women are better at short-range vergence skills (e.g. obscured fast facial recognition & foreground-background discrimination) while men are better overall and absolutely excel at long range pathing prediction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wait a minute. Snakes don't eat humans and are not predators for humans. Snakes have no interest in attacking humans, they just don't want to be attacked by humans. Snakes also avoid going where there are many humans as they are likely to get killed quickly.

So when there are two predatory species that try to avoid each other as much as possibly, how can there be such a strong effect by one to the other?

<comment><USER6> As someone with 20/20 vision whose main interest growing up was snake- catching, I have trouble with this hypothesis. Unless a snake is basking or is already moving, you generally won't see it until it is underfoot. In other words, the proposed adaptations don't actually help you see a snake before it is underfoot. And as you mention, snakes are mainly interested in avoiding people.

Wouldn't the dangers of uneven terrain, tripping, and falling be a better explanation of why we are good at looking down? Peripheral vision makes sense if you're also watching out for the family as you walk.

<comment><USER5> Yes, I've seen the situation where you have a group of people looking at a close-by tree, and one person is shouting: look there is a snake. And everyone is saying "where, where"? I've seen this go on for 10 minutes, and people just don't see the snake. It's like some type of puzzle.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Tangent: one of my favorite programming patterns is to roughly mimic the human visual processing. This is super simplified, but humans make snap judgements based on small amounts of data, then progressively make better judgements as better data comes in. (ie, you'll jump away from that brown stick instantly before you even think about if it's really a snake).

In programming terms, it's a narrowing funnel of accuracy. You start off vague but very very quick to catch the important stuff early, then you filter it better and better as you have time.

</comment><comment><USER8> _Furthermore, as Isbell points out, of all the species, only humans point declaratively, and we are much better at following the pointing of others to our visual periphery than to our visual center, and while looking down rather than up. "What was it outside central vision and in the lower visual field that was so urgent for our ancestors to see that it caused neurological changes to enable us to turn automatically in the direction of a gaze and a pointing finger?" Isbell asks.

Her answer: snakes. "I cannot think of any other object in the lower visual field that would have been more difficult to see and more unforgiving if missed. The relationship between declarative pointing and the evolution of language is so strong, neurological and cognitive studies find, that the two are, to a degree, interchangeable. And so, Isbell avers, Genesis has it right: the snake made us human."_

I disagree with the assertion that only humans point declaratively. Other methods of "pointing" could include a variety of behaviors apparent in the animal kingdom: perked ears (cats), nose / "catching the scent" (dogs / esp. bloodhounds), flickering tongue (snake).

[edit] message for the downmodder: wtf?

<comment><USER9> A cat pricks it's ears to increase fidelity of it's hearing, dogs point with their nose as a learned trait they don't do it in the wild and a snakes 'sees' with it's tongue as it picks up scent trails.

None of these behaviours are naturally evolved communication methods, two are evolved traits that better adapt the animal to it's environment and the other is a learned behaviour.

If creationism ever compliments evolution it is purely by accident.

<comment><USER8> _A cat pricks it's ears to increase fidelity of it's hearing, dogs point with their nose as a learned trait they don't do it in the wild. None of these behaviours are naturally evolved communication methods_

This is pure speculation. Who is to say that learned traits _can_ or _cannot_ evolve naturally, over time?

Besides, your use of "it's" is wrong.

An underlying assumption of the statement "pointing declaratively" is that there's some one or some thing to be declarative to (as in an audience, or partner, or fellow pack member). I liked the article, but it did go about assuming that humans are the only creatures who know how to be declarative.

We're probably more _verbally_ declarative than any other species, but I highly doubt we're the only "declarative" species out there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Not immediately related to the topic at hand, but this is why reading things aloud is so different than silently to yourself.

Right from the second sentence: "Coolly testing hypotheses and assessing evidence across an impressive range of disciplines[…]." Read aloud, that's a lot of 's's in an article about snakes. Fun!

</comment><comment><USER11> _Furthermore, as Isbell points out, of all the species, only humans point declaratively,_

Out of all species there are a lot of things humans do which are unique to humans. That doesn't mean such things evolved from snakes.</comment>


SteamOS - <AUTHOR> http://store.steampowered.com/livingroom/SteamOS/ <comment><USER2> This is effectively the software-only equivalent of a console launch.

Is anyone else skeptical that they can motivate publishers to spend time/money porting their games to the Linux platform?

Valve certainly has a better chance than most at pulling this off (and likely enough user/market data to make this seem like a valid investment) I am still super skeptical that these publishers are going to spend the time porting their AAA releases to this platform.

A good chunk of the console games barely make it to PC/Windows as it is, let alone a PC/Linux platform... seems like a tough sell.

If the goal is an entertainment OS with streaming and DVR capabilities in addition to the few Linux compatible games on Steam, that's a bit different of a story but not a huge commercial win I don't think (unless they having some amazing partnerships planned with Netflix/Amazon/Vudu/Hulu for streaming that I am not thinking of).

If the goal is to make Steam into an entertainment platform (not just games) it is interesting to watch all these platforms converge on this "entertainment delivery pipeline" solution.

<comment> matthew-wegner Valve has three announcements this week: [http://kotaku.com/looks-like-well- hear-about-valves-new-hard...](http://kotaku.com/looks-like-well-hear-about- valves-new-hardware-on-mon-1356094018)

One of the announcements is widely believe to be the long-rumored Steam Box hardware...

<comment><USER3> Why would they announce the software separately from its #1 use case?

<comment><USER4> Valve likes to escalate announcements. It would be very "Valve" to announce the OS, which can run anywhere, and then next announce the box they want you to run it on.

<comment><USER5> ...and then announce the game that you'll be playing on the box?!?

<comment><USER4> No, it's not half life 3. The logo for the 3rd announcement wouldn't make any sense then.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "In SteamOS, we have achieved significant performance increases in graphics processing, and we're now targeting audio performance and reductions in input latency at the operating system level."

I'm really interested to see the trickle down effect that this will have on other Linux flavors. Having a push for standardization from a big name company like Valve should provide a better Linux experience for everyone.

<comment><USER7> What performance increases in graphics processing are they talking about?

I'm with you thought, I do hope all of their work will be landed in mainline kernel so everyone could enjoy the benefits, and we could play games (through Steam or other methods) on most Linux distros, without much hassle.

<comment><USER8> Phoronix has several articles about the work that Valve has done with Linux GPU drivers (open source and proprietary)

[http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=17823](http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=17823)

That one is about how valve themselves got value out of debugging on open source GPU drivers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is basically a similar approach Android took for phones. It leverages off Linux while replacing user facing pieces to give the user a simplified and consistent environment that they expect.

However as with Android, that isn't enough to get it to take off. Android had huge traction problems to start with until they managed to get the big device makers to train users and market the devices. SteamOS is going to have the same rough and long launch period, but the ultimate payoff is very big as the tech is all there and it's just a matter of getting the big game publishers to join up.

As with mobiles and Google, if anybody can succeed in the gaming industry, it's Steam. So I definitely wouldn't write this one off, I think it will take off in a few years time if they can get the big players - both software and hardware - to join up.

<comment><USER10> I suspect that like Android, they're going to leverage Linux-the-kernel, but have a user space that is alien to the one common in current Linux servers and desktops.

I can understand: I'd say good riddance to some parts of the userspace myself _cough_ X windows system _cough_ , but having a few different userspaces is like having the UNIX wars all over again.

PS "The UNIX wars" has a modern space opera ring to it, like something out of an Orson Scott Card book (or JMS script. Or maybe your-favourite author. I don't read enough Sci-Fi to know). And now I have an urge to write a comics^W graphic novel adaptation of the UNIX wars. It'll be glorious!

<comment><USER11> That seems really unlikely. Steam for Linux runs on Ubuntu as it's platform of choice, and installs via apt-get. They're already running all their games under X and the standard Ubuntu userspace tools, with BigPicture, it would be very surprising for them to fork the platform at this point.

Android made sense because standard linux/X windows applications didn't work on a multi-touch mobile device for a whole host of reasons. PC games work fine on Linux and X.

<comment><USER10> X has a lot of baggage. And by lot, I mean a few metric tons. The protocol can do things you wouldn't believe, and do that in the most cumbersome way (it was all the range in the Eighties, or so I'm told).

Most of Steam and Steam games don't really use X as anything but a bootstrap for GL, and run full screen, so they could be easily ported to FB+GL (consider that there's already a GTK backend that renders to FB, no X involved).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Building their own linux is the right move to create the kind of end user experience it will take for the living room PC to work.

Think about the XBox 360 and the XBox One. They are both basically a windows kernel with a totally custom UI designed for the living room. It's about creating the best possible experience for the end user.

You can already get steam client with big picture mode on Linux, what this does is creates something analogous to ChromeOS, but purpose built for gaming instead of web browsing.

If linux gaming is going to have a mass market chance, SteamOS or OUYA a similar approach is going to be how it gets there.

</comment><comment><USER13> Oh my god. This provides a genuine chance for year of the linux desktop in 2014, for gamers at least.

<comment><USER14> Gaming is one of the last legitimate refuges of Windows dominance. There are a _lot_ of us who wouldn't care about (read: would be willing to switch) their OS if not for PC gaming.

<comment><USER7> Also MS Office, Adobe Photoshop and a bunch of other Windows-only or Mac-only tools.

<comment><USER15> Libreoffice replaces MS office easily for me

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The rumors of a Steam Box based on Linux have been circulating for a while now, but earlier Valve came out to say they had no plans to enter the hardware business.

I love this solution. Those of us comfortable with building our own Steam Box can do so easily, and manufacturers can also build their own models. In every case, the Steam store will certainly be sewn into the very fabric of the box, and Valve emerges a big winner.

This is what I've been waiting for to build an HTPC/PC gaming battlestation... I've (personally) always preferred gaming with a controller while sitting on a couch.

<comment><USER17> Valve, at one point, came out to say they had no plans to support linux.

Now they don't just support linux, they're using it to stage a mini coup against microsoft.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Since I spend most of my time in front of a computer screen and not a tv, I hope they also roll out some improvements to the steam client as well.

Things like the ability to tag my games with multiple categories; To see trailers and descriptions of the games I "bought and forgot"; Pause the game and read the user manual; and the ability to actually PLAY a game _right now_ instead of being forced to wait for hours while it downloads and applies updates to itself and the game I _already have downloaded, installed, and partly played_.

<comment><USER19> I'd settle for < 4 second load times on the pages within their shitty web based interface.

The old steam was snappy and fast, new steam is a bloated pile of garbage by comparison.

<comment><USER4> That's very possibly the _least_ important thing about Steam to me. When I want to browse the store, I just launch Firefox...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Add in Netflix (or a competitor) integration and you've got the potential to put all 3 major consoles on the ropes in a few years. Given Halflife 2 launched steam my bet is HL3 will be used to launch this.

<comment><USER21> Please... No more HL3 fake launch announcements. Please.

If HL3 comes out as a SteamOS exclusive; well that would be quite the coup.

<comment><USER22> Kind of crazy to think that Valve has the power to make 2014 the fabled "Year of the Linux Desktop" simply by making HL3 a Linux exclusive.

<comment><USER23> In Gaben we trust.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'm somewhat disappointed. While perfectly logical for Valve, it might end up being not very beneficial for other distributions. In worst case scenario, hardware manufacturers cherry pick specific devices ("steambox") and software ecosystem to support (SteamOS) while totally neglecting all other linux distributions.

<comment><USER25> Doubt it - most of the benefits - like sane drivers, optimizations and so on will trickle down.

And I think steam box will be set of requirements.

<comment><USER24> I hope you're right and we won't end up with even more incoherent binary blob dumps than we have now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The biggest benefit as I see it, is that the users won't have the hassle of setting something up: just install the OS and login. No drivers ppa, no recovery console, no xorg.conf patches. If this is true, Valve will do something very big for the gaming community.

<comment><USER27> I don't believe that they'll even focus on users installing the OS, just like 99% of Windows users don't install their own OS. Valve will provide the reference SteamBox and encourage other manufacturers to release their own SteamOS-preinstalled boxes, giving users hardware options.

<comment><USER28> This is the end goal - but for the time being, it does seem aimed at tinkerers - the kind of people who already have a PC hooked up as an HTPC...

<comment><USER29> Keep in mind that this is the first of three announcements that they've, err, announced: [http://store.steampowered.com/livingroom/](http://store.steampowered.com/livingroom/)

The second is in 48hrs, and almost definitely something related to the SteamBox. So it's too soon to speak of their intentions "for the time being".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> As someone who's had a lot of fun writing game hacks for ET:QW and QuakeLive back in the days and while I greatly enjoy seeing this move to Linux, I'm quite worried about game hacks on SteamOS. There are so many attack vectors on Linux and, currently, VALVE's Anti Cheat (VAC v3) does not, as far as I know, cover any of those. You can still inject your hack via LD_PRELOAD + detouring dlsym/dlopen. Even were that not possible, you could have fun with, e.g., ptrace.

I'm looking forward to seeing what VALVE's done to fight this, especially as I expect SteamOS to eventually be repackaged to run on any distribution...

<comment><USER31> Is there even an expectation that anti-cheat utilities can work? They're worse than DRM - unless the anti-cheat software is certified and your system can do hardware trusted execution, it's going to be worked around. (it's most likely also possible in case of trusted execution...)

<comment><USER30> They do have some limited success at deterring "script kiddies" and similar, however I think that this is far more difficult to do on Linux than Windows. Back when there were a few games around on Linux that used PunkBuster (America's Army, Enemy Territory), PB offered almost no real protection and, e.g., ET's mod developers decided to build in some anti cheat protection of their own into the mods which was superior to PB's. (Which, of course, also got bypassed eventually)

<comment><USER32> >however I think that this is far more difficult to do on Linux than Windows

You are mistaken.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I don't like that Valve says that SteamOS is "freely licensable". They must know by now that the word "free" often means "libre" in the GNU/Linux community, but they've made no indication of what the license terms will actually be.

<comment><USER34> Presumably the GNU/Linux core is libre and Steam is freeware. Why would it be anything else?

<comment><USER33> The point is that Valve is using confusing language to claim that they are "open", instead of saying what they are really doing: writing proprietary software that sits on top of a free software operating system.

<comment><USER34> The word "open" (well, the derivative "openness") is only used once on the page, and the context is clear: It's not locked to any hardware (like Windows) but is freeware (like Android).

<comment><USER35> Free as in beer; not speech.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> The streaming of other OS games from your other OS systems seems like a pretty compelling and surprising feature. I wonder if it will work with all games.

<comment><USER37> I can't see how they'd manage to get twitch games like online FPSes to be playable with the addition of another layer of latency between the player and the game. A 100ms delay between input and response is death for games like that.

<comment><USER38> If you have 100ms latency on your LAN you have some serious problems.

<comment><USER39> There's latency for pings and latency for sending moves to a multiplayer server, those are going to be low on the LAN. Then there's user experienced latency for sending high frame rate HD graphics to another machine every frame and the input back from that other machine. That is not going to be without hiccups, even on a LAN.

In reality, most consoles are hooked up by WiFi nowadays which will make things even worse. Android manufacturers have struggled with smooth display mirroring over WiFi for a long time and the only time I've seen it work good enough for gaming is WiFi Direct connections via Miracast or wired connections via MHL.

<comment><USER32> Latency is a measure of the time it takes for a packet to travel to its destination. No part of ethernet networks cares what the payload in those packets are. You don't magically get more latency because the data in them can be interpreted as frames of video.

<comment><USER40> You can look up latency and it has a more general meaning. We're talking about a time delay. In this context we're not concerned about the time it takes to tranfer a single TCP packet, we're concerned about the time it takes to transfer a complete frame of video (under the assumption that a complete frame is required before the receiving end can display it). So bandwidth plays a role, and if you're sending larger frames then the delay from source output to destination display will be larger. This is latency.

<comment><USER32> >So bandwidth plays a role

Of course it does, but we're not talking 10Mb/s networks here. People stream 1080p content all the time, gigE can handle that no problem. The only latency concern would be the encoding step, not transferring the data.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> The success and effectiveness of the console, I believe, is dictated by the following statement:

"Watch for announcements in the coming weeks about all the AAA titles coming natively to SteamOS in 2014. Access the full Steam catalog of over nearly 3000 games and desktop software titles via in-home streaming."

To me this suggests that they are actively trying to get developers to port and they have had some success. Also I believe that a lot of developers will not port and to handle those cases they've introduced the home streaming functionality so that you could stream your windows game to the steam box via a windows steam client running somewhere.

</comment><comment><USER42> How long till we see the "SteamOS on Raspberry Pi" threads?

<comment><USER43> Or SteamOS inside a Docker container!

;-)

<comment><USER44> This actually isn't a terrible idea. It's been a _long_ time since I've gamed on Linux, but I remember playing Tribes 2 in aeons past, and had to patch a decent chunk of the libraries in my distro to get it working. Using something like Docker/LXC to define the runtime environment of a game would probably help to make life a lot easier.

<comment><USER43> As long as the use of containers didn't impact on performance too much, which ideally they don't compared to virtualisation. (I say having not personally had any significant experience of the different performance characteristics).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I wonder if they will white-list any games are not natively ported to linux that have good wine compatibility. SteamOS could manage the wine configurations for those games. With enough platform adoption, this should help game companies to start targeting linux natively.

</comment><comment><USER13> So what is the chance that Gaben will make everything proprietary? Releasing games for the SteamOS with license restrictions to make them unplayable on other Linux distros? What if he makes a deal with AMD/NVidia to make drivers only for SteamOS which won't be available to normal Linux users? I don't want linux to go towards that direction.

<comment><USER46> That would turn their most vocal supporters into enemies, destroy their plans to make Linux a viable gamming plataform (and Valve needs Linux to be viable, for keeping MS from destrying them), assure that nobody ever uses their new SteamOS (people that don't care are already doing similar stuff with Windows), and alienate everybody that is selling specialized Steam hardware.

Unless they get a MS-like world domination, the chances of that happening are near enough 0 that you'd better care about other problems.

<comment><USER47> Don't be ridiculous -- Canonical has taken control of Ubuntu development and now they have a reputation for being authoritarian and secretive. There are fewer ways to alienate the open-source community than that and yet Ubuntu's popularity soars.

The more critical people are of Canonical, the more fervent Ubuntu supporters become. "How will they make money" will be parroted just as loudly, if not more-so.

<comment><USER48> Ubuntus popularity is anything but soaring these days, mint has more or less taken over its former crown.

<comment><USER28> Hah. I'd wager that in real world installs Ubuntu has at least 20x-50x the installs (Wikimedia statistics support this assertion), never mind Ubuntu server installs.

How many people ever visit Distrowatch (the only statistic on the web that supports the idea that Mint > Ubuntu) once they settle on a distro?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> I wonder if history will repeat itself, will Valve be the next Apple?

Apple took FreeBSD and makes it into OSX. > Valve takes Linux and makes it into SteamOS.

Apple makes iTunes for music, unifying digital music download > Valve makes Steam for games, unifying digital game download

Apple make IPOD for digital music playing > Valve make (SteamBox?) for game playing

Damn I wish I could own some Valve stock...

<comment><USER50> The differences in licensing between the BSD license and GPL are designed to prevent them from doing all of what Apple did with FreeBSD.

<comment><USER51> > what Apple did with FreeBSD

Please tell us what Apple did with FreeBSD.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> I think this is Valve's answer to the chicken/egg problem of new platform/app availability.

Build it and they will come.

<comment><USER25> I would say that a lot of people are there already. A lot of developers are switching to linux as desktop os. Except the games everything in the toolchain works better there and windows tools work fine.

And the IT guys have long been the core of the PC gaming scene.

So ... it was not a chicken and egg problem but a demand that needed answering.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> Even if this never gets majority traction compared to consoles, I suspect it will be worth it for Valve. Ever since Microsoft tried to cut them off with the Windows Store, Valve has been working to have an independent platform. Having alternative platforms gives Valve room to maneuver.

</comment><comment><USER54> Some responses say SteamOS is not open source, in the press release, it says "Users can alter or replace any part of the software or hardware they want." So I'm guessing if not open-source, the user would download a disk image, then go in and change the configuration, install media-center front-end software, etc, after the fact?

Regardless, I'm very interested, but just curious how easy and flexible it will be.

</comment><comment><USER55> So the Streaming functionality will be in both SteamOS _and_ the normal Steam client? For both PC and Mac?

There might be a few interesting ways to utilize that. :)

<comment><USER56> Yeah, I see the streaming functionality as almost bigger announcement than the OS.

It's quite possible that one could stream into any other machine including tablets, laptops and even phones. This would enable playing your full Steam library from anywhere with decent enough connection (on both sides), especially games where input lag is not that big issue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Open ecosystem (Linux, hardware) + gaming = well done Valve, sounds good, I like it!

<comment><USER58> Not open source, however. Not a dealbreaker, but an important distinction to keep in mind.

<comment><USER59> Personally, I'm fine with Steam remaining closed-source, as this is both inevitable because of it being both a store and a DRM provider.

The key question here is whether Valve's future extensions to the graphics subsystems (which seem to be advertised, to some extent) will be released as open-source and be admitted to the (free software) kernel and libraries that exist today.

<comment><USER60> It'd be cool if Valve incentivized contributions to open source parts of their OS through Steam. E.g. if you fix a bug you get some sort of achievement, and if you fix several bugs you get something valuable like game coupons.

<comment><USER61> At the very least they should have some TF2 hats for code contributors!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> This is easily the most groundbreaking news I've heard as a gamer (and from the point of view of an engineer/business geek) in the past four years or so. This will be a really tough blow for the windows platform since the gamer demographic drives a lot of spending. Also it points to a very deep strategic move by valve, vertically integrating the distribution channel and controlling a la Apple which and how games are experienced. I wouldn't be surprised if valve built strong partnerships with hardware providers to provide a fully vertically integrated, key-in-hand gaming platform experience. It is worth mentioning that valve also sells other types of programs through steam... and that it seems this will eventually mutate into it's application store, centralizing the money management for steamOS in general and fully capturing the platform value.

A new apple but instead of "think different", the idea will be "play different"

</comment><comment><USER63> I'm not a software dev, so this might be a really dumb question, but how hard is it to port/co-develop Windows/Mac games to Linux?

From what I can find out, PS3 is based on FreeBSD and WiiU is a heavily modified version of Linux, possibly Android. XBOX obviously Windows. Would it be that much harder to also have a SteamOS version in the mix too.

<comment><USER25> According to John Carmack its a few weeks worth to port, and maybe even less to extend wine.

But that is like saying that according to Superman going to the moon is a few minutes of flight.

<comment><USER64> And while Superman might be a hell of a Super Hero, what he said doesn't mean much. Its heavily dependent on libraries/frameworks/engines and technologies used to make the game.

If you use something like C++ and SDL it shouldn't be too hard (if not automatic), but if you use something like C#/XNA it could be harder (if not impossible?), but anyway I think (hope) most C# game developers and ex-XNA users use MonoGame these days.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> How is "Windows 8" NOT found on this discussion???

It is very unlikely, had Microsoft not decided to go nuts and release a dead- end train wreck of an OS that thew it's passengers/users into the ravine in the name of chasing MacOS and touchscreens that everyone wanted with the same enthusiasm as to 3DTV, that Valve would be so scared of the future on Windows that they would need their own Linux-based platform. Not to mention Mac support.

I am a huge Linux advocate, but this is much more about Valve being scared and running away from Microsoft Windows than it was the greatness of GNU/Linux.

I wonder how Steve Ballmer being fired will change the direction of Microsoft and it's products. What will be the future of Windows?

If they keep trying to actively throw their users off the train with wildly backwards-incompatible user experiences, you can expect even Microsoft Office to start supporting GNU/Linux for fear of the future of Windows.

<comment><USER66> So long as this box will play hl2 engine games, most notably DOTA2 it's going to be fine. DOTA2 in 2014 is going to skyrocket it's going to be the next WOW and it will secure valves revenue. This box is really just gabe saying fuck you to Microsoft and Sony - let me keep my TV open!

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> I have to say - after trying to simply play a 2-player game of Portal 2 with a friend over the Internet and having so much go wrong, I don't have a lot of faith that they'll be able to maintain an operating system.

We see constant problems just trying to download the same map. Sometimes the game just shoves us over to a screen with no options and the game has to be force-quit to exit it. Other times it crashes during loading. It won't download to both of our computers at the same time, so it downloads to one first, then, only after the first one has finished, to the other. On those rare occasions that we actually get into the game, there are lots of glitches. I mean, when it works it's really fun, but the number of problems that occur along the way is just phenomenal. It's like using software from the 80s again. It's terrible.

</comment><comment><USER41> The idea itself is not novel as such. Just like every other company the difficulty is having to disassociate yourself from Windows. As it stands the store relies heavily on Windows titles. The real feat would be if they managed to get the whole catalog across to SteamOS by under the hood cross compatibility layer.

<comment><USER68> It would be an amazing boon to Linux and gaming on Linux if Valve bought (or heavily funded + added resources to) Crossover/WINE.

<comment><USER41> Exactly what is going through my mind :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> The way for Valve (if you're reading this) to make SteamOS/Linux the top gaming platform overnight?

Make HL3 Linux-only.

Don't do a Windows/Mac port for 2 years. Watch all of us gamers scramble to dual boot at minimum, if not see the writing on the wall and do a wholesale swapout on our Windows gaming boxes.

<comment><USER70> As evil as this sounds, exclusivity works for the other consoles.

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> Speculation from over a year ago: [http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/08/16/heres-a- thought-w...](http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/08/16/heres-a-thought-what- if-valve-were-making-steamos/)

</comment><comment><USER72> As someone mentioned this is just the first announcement of three: [http://store.steampowered.com/livingroom/](http://store.steampowered.com/livingroom/)

Announcement 1, SteamOS: is just a fancy way to say you can create custom Steam consoles by just installing some software. Make the box as good or a cheap as you want and everything will just workPretty awesome, but definitely this will be dwarfed by...

Announcement 2, people are guessing is a Valve distributed "SteamBox": a console that is presumably very cheap and linux based. This would give Xbox One and PS4 a run for their money and with the social aspects of Steam built- in, this could be a break out hit with a price of 50% all the other consoles.

Announcement 3, is the large unknown here. We don't know what it is, but if it is bigger (or equal to) SteamBox this could be a huge deal. Nothing really makes sense here. We know:

* SteamBox will support streaming from your windows/mac machine so it will be able to run every game at launch.

* SteamBox will likely have lots of publishers signed on. Probably as many or more then on xbox one / ps4. If they are already using an engine that targets multiple platforms (Unreal or Unity) they are definitely going to try to support it.

* SteamBox will likely support all the features of steam with friend lists, chat, voice, purchasing over the cloud, etc. So the + might mean sharing, but a new kind?

* SteamBox supports game sharing at a friends or family level. I see this as a kind of Netflix-like persona idea: an account gains separate personas that each have different friends lists and achievements. Very powerful and necessary once Steam hits the living room and multiple people are using the same box / account.

What it could be:

* LAN play for SteamBoxs on the same network (announced in Dota, this could explain the circle + circle graphic). Maybe you share the game between friends, and stream to the other boxes? That would be pretty awesome.

* Game streaming from other people's SteamBoxs? This would be an awesome way to share a game. It is like onlive but for distributed for everyone (seems unlikely. That kind of streaming would stop your friends from being able to play).

* A launch title like Half-life 3 (seems unlikely with the circle + circle logo implying you need multiple SteamOS instances).

* A new kind of social experience, maybe a built in way to be a part of the game creation process or improved social network experiences on Steam (seems unlikely to be big enough to be the final announcement)

* A new kind of hardware like a VR headset(seems unlikely, as cheap will be a big feature of this box)

This is marketing at its best. They hooked us good.

<comment><USER73> O+O

OS + Oculus?

<comment><USER74> That is a nice idea, however Oculus is not consumer ready yet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> The first circle is SteamOS, the second will likely to be the Steambox: [http://store.steampowered.com/livingroom/](http://store.steampowered.com/livingroom/)

There's also a third circle there...

<comment><USER76> I'm surprised yours is the only comment I saw pointing out the incremental approach to this "living room" goal Valve has been using.

The steam box will obviously require some OS to run, and it seems perfectly reasonable to ship the OS, get feedback for it and it's features (i.e. streaming), and have it production-tested once the inevitable steam box is ready. Why take the risk of shipping all-new-everything when you can do it in smaller steps?

</comment></comment><comment><USER77> I've been asking for years why someone just doesn't make a XBMC-like os for gaming on commodity PC hardware. Glad to see it finally happening. I'm very excited for this. My son who is 11 will be too

</comment><comment><USER28> This is the best thing to happen to Linux since Steam came (which itself was the best thing ever).

This gives developers even more incentive to use cross platform tools, to develop on OpenGL, and to make things work with Linux.

</comment><comment><USER78> GTA:V Bundled Editions sold quite nicely over the past week. Seems like bundling your own console with your own game just became a reality.

Valve just got every major publisher to take a serious look at what they are doing.

</comment><comment><USER79> Here's hoping that this effort is where they've been concentrating some of their non-game devs. There have been longstanding issues with Valve-produced UX once you look beyond the in-game aspects. TF2 server list couldn't sort properly on the first update for years, the Steam browser is often dog slow, etc. -- things that are front-and-center pain points for me. A perfect initial release isn't a reasonable goal, but I do hope that they'll be able to polish the out-of-game experience better than they have in the past.

</comment><comment><USER80> What I'm curious of is most of Steam's users are probably avid PC gaming fans that _prefer PC gaming over console gaming_

At least that's true for me and various of my 'internet friends'

<comment><USER81> I am with you, but I am a PC gaming fan, not necessarily a Windows gaming fan. WHat I like about this is not the ability to put a Steambox into my living room, but to replace windows with SteamOS on my PC.

</comment></comment><comment><USER82> Let's hope they don't got the route of Android, which is perhaps the most successful consumerization of Linux to date, wherein they allow hardware vendors bog it down with crapware...

</comment><comment><USER7> Given the current high-end game engines that seem to support all the popular platforms out of the box (Windows, Mac, consoles), how difficult is it really to ship a game with Linux support?

</comment><comment><USER83> "In SteamOS, we have achieved significant performance increases in graphics processing".

I assume they mean in comparison to other Linux OSs. Beating windows drivers seems a bit far fetched?

<comment><USER84> Valve has reported better performance in Linux than in Windows 7 for at least one of their titles [1].

[1] [http://www.zdnet.com/valve-linux-runs-our-games-faster- than-...](http://www.zdnet.com/valve-linux-runs-our-games-faster-than- windows-7-7000002060/)

<comment><USER85> Depending greatly on your hardware. And there's the rub. And there's the reason it could be really nice to have Steam boxes and certification of hardware for SteamOS

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER86> Lovely - this is what I had discussed more than a year back [1] This same OS can be repackaged for the desktop. I would think superb hardware compatibility, driver support and fundamental media library innovations would make it a compelling base on which to layer on a desktop UI.

I wonder what packaging format will they use for their games ?

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3888472](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3888472)

</comment><comment><USER87> So, this means I could build a PC with SteamOS, hook it to my TV, XBox controllers and play all the same games in our living room. Am I thinking about this right?

<comment><USER88> If you want to play any non-linux games, you have to have a capable-enough PC to stream the games from, it sounds like. But other than that, yeah.

</comment></comment><comment><USER89> If valve couples this to a reasonably priced htpc and sell it they could get nearly every game available on steam ruining on it using wine.

That's easy because like with consoles you have only one hardware configuration so getting a game to run properly on wine or even better than on windows would be a walk in the park compared to porting it.

Of course this trick won't work with the millions of hardware combinations in today's PCs.

</comment><comment><USER90> This needs to be marketed to consumers the same way Windows was in the 90s and iOS/Android is today or else it has no chance of gaining any real... Steam.

The Linux or tech community alone will not make this happen. They need to do a Windows/iOS/Android and push this out on marketable hardware for the masses or else it will just be another niche tech product.

No cool commercials, no chance.

<comment><USER91> Exclusive period for HL3 on SteamOS. Done.

</comment></comment><comment><USER92> Valve doesn't need all the AAA titles initially. What if SteamOS were released to a group of perspective and current gaming hardware manufacturers à la Android? Despite the DirectX platform being incumbent on the mid to high-end x86 PCs, if Valve were to target the Wii/smartphone gaming demographic they'd stand a decent chance at commoditizing consoles.

<comment><USER93> I would disagree here. Nobody likes fragmentation. If Valve can't deliver AAA on linux right away, then this will likely go the way of Ouya. The most interesting thing here is the streaming which could act as a bridge until we see native Linux AAA games.

Lastly, DirectX is so widely used in game engines. I haven't seen any hard evidence (not coming from Valve) that OpenGL can meet or exceed DirectX capabilities. I'd love to see real data on this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER94> How open will this be? Will game developers have to licence the right to develop for SteamOS? If not, it'll potentially be huge!

</comment><comment><USER95> They never seem to define what a Living room machine is ? I wouldn't consider a desktop be a living room machine.

<comment><USER96> If only Valve would provide us with an exemplary device!

</comment></comment><comment><USER92> What if SteamOS were released to a group of perspective and current gaming hardware manufacturers à la Android? The DirectX platform may be incumbent on the mid to high-end x86 PCs, but if Valve were to target the Wii/smartphone gaming demographic they'd stand a decent chance at commoditizing consoles.

</comment><comment><USER97> Having a machine boot into Steam will have an interesting effect on other similar services like Origin and Desura. It will no longer be sufficient to request customers install yet another download manager/DRM platform; instead customers would have to boot in to a different OS to play their Origin games.

<comment><USER85> So much the worse for Origin, which was a stupid idea anyway.

Desura runs on Linux.

<comment><USER97> Desura runs on Linux, but assuming SteamOS is akin to "boot to Stream Big Screen," users won't have a Gnome or KDE desktop to install it to. In such a case, Desura's existence on SteamOS depends on either inclusion in Valve's marketplace or users' willingness to venture off the map.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER98> If you want to see that third announcement icon a little more clearly, the lit version is already up.

[http://cdn3.store.steampowered.com/public/images/promo/livin...](http://cdn3.store.steampowered.com/public/images/promo/livingroom/glyph_03_b.png)

</comment><comment><USER28> By the way, anyone who's sceptical of Linux gaming needs to get on Steam, and see what's available for Linux - right now. There are plenty of AAA quality titles already, with many more to come.

Or, for anyone with an Nvidia card and the Nvidia drivers, just download a Unigine demo...

</comment><comment><USER99> This effectively gives traditional desktop OEMs a relatively cheap and easy entry into the living room, and a new category of product to sell effectively and compete against Xbox, PS4, and the mobile OSs who will be trying to gain entry into the living room soon.

</comment><comment><USER100> Is it based on an existing distro?

<comment><USER101> It's either OpenSUSE or Ubuntu based.

<comment><USER102> Most likely ubuntu as that seems to be their defacto test platform. If you download steam from their site it comes packaged in a .deb format. They have pretty significant investments in that stack, and even list it as their favorite flavor:

"Not running Linux yet? Ubuntu is our favorite version of Linux."

(at the bottom of this page: [http://store.steampowered.com/about/](http://store.steampowered.com/about/))

<comment><USER103> I hope not. Going Ubuntu will mean (long term) Mir instead of Wayland, which will suck for other distributions and projects.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER104> wOOOOOOOOOO!!!

If that works on normal machines (like, my laptop), I will kick Windows for good finally!

<comment><USER49> Yeah I hear you, I thought that this announcement would hurt M$oft stock, but I guess Valve isn't on the radar at all in the mind of investors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER105> I really, sincerely hope they will get rid of the block that allows only one computer to be signed in at a time. I don't like the idea of having to relogin every time I switch computers (as is the case now).

<comment><USER106> Given the streaming feature they've mentioned I think it would be safe to assume that you'll at the very least be able to have two machines signed in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER107> Looks great! I'm really looking forward to see the fist SteamOS device.

<comment><USER108> "SteamOS will be available soon as a free download for users" \- you can build your own device!

<comment><USER85> You can run Steam on Ubuntu today, if that's what it comes down to. This is for manufacturers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER109> I find it ironically funny that, after all of these years of having a near monopoly Microsoft is losing out to the open source it tried so hard to sabotage in the late '90s and early 2000s.

Then, while the MS boat is leaking and sailing haphazardly across the computing landscape, along comes Valve to put a stake in the heart of the MS gaming division...

Could this truly be the beginning of the end of this giant leech on the computer industry?

The combination of this "story" and this one from slate ([http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/09/23/microsoft...](http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/09/23/microsoft_surface_2_surface_pro_2_tablets_for_people_who_hate_fun.html)) makes me wonder...

<comment><USER109> I see the drive by spineless downvoters are showing up here too...

</comment></comment><comment><USER110> That's one hell of a smart idea if they can pull it off. As an OS, it can run on a VM or dedicated hardware, which gives us users the greatest flexibility. Well played!

</comment><comment><USER111> To me the big thing is "Music, TV and Movies". If they are able to get rid of the "This Show is not Available in Your Country" thing, that would be huge.

</comment><comment><USER58> If only it were open source... This is great nonetheless, though. It'll be interesting to see what directions this takes off in, both in terms of hardware and software.

</comment><comment><USER112> Will this be a game only platform or can I do work on it too?

<comment><USER88> According to The Verge, SteamOS will boot straight into Steam with Big Picture mode, and you wont see linux at all "unless you want to" [1]. So... for whatever that's worth.

[1] [http://www.theverge.com/2013/2/6/3958162/valve-steam-box- cak...](http://www.theverge.com/2013/2/6/3958162/valve-steam-box- cake/in/3514777)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The other thing SteamOS will end up doing that is super interesting is get good controller support on Linux/PC games, which can many times be real lacking.

</comment><comment><USER113> So they are using an open OS foundation to build an OS that will allow them to effectively lock users into their store/environment? And geeks are happy?

<comment><USER114> Still an improvement over the other consoles which are completely proprietary and locked down. I think it's great that Linux is gaining a wider audience regardless of whether it's due to commercial, technical or ideological reasons. Some people will never be happy...

</comment></comment><comment><USER115> I sincerely hope the release the streaming client for use on other Linux dists as well. This would mean a welcome end to my current dual-boot setup.

</comment><comment><USER116> Is it just me or does Valve still rock? These guys really keep powering along, steady pace, good going guys, best wishes with your new platform!

</comment><comment><USER117> I'm guessing that o+o means split-screen gaming on the t.v., streaming from two separate Windows machines.

</comment><comment><USER118> Now, if Halflife 3 becomes a SteamOS exclusive, then we might have a shot of a linux gaming environment.

</comment><comment><USER119> Most Steam games require keyboard and mouse. I don't see how that can work in the living room

<comment><USER120> > Most Steam games require keyboard and mouse. I don't see how that can work > in the living room

If the issue is "how do you get control devices that work for that use case", wireless keyboards and mice with suitable range for living room use exist (I've seen them mostly used in large conference rooms, but the requirements aren't very different.)

If the issue is "how do you use control devices in that environment since they call for surfaces", lapdesks, coffee tables, etc., are frequently found in living rooms. If people want to play their existing keyboard-and-mouse focussed Steam games in their living rooms, its not hard to see how they can.

But I think that -- as with other consoles -- the games that are playable with more traditional "gaming controllers" will be more popular for the livingroom role than keyboard-and-mouse driven games. But plenty of PC games have, for years, been very similar to console games and support game controllers (even though they usually had KB/mouse support since that's what you could count on users having on the PC platform), so I don't think this is going to be much of an issue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER121> Are they looking to sell their own hardware? How good are graphics card driver support in linux?

</comment><comment><USER122> Does mac bootcamp only work with windows, or is it any OS?

Id love to have a macmini as a 'steambox'

</comment><comment><USER123> It would be good for valve to project Rustlang as their programming language of choice :)

</comment><comment><USER124> Will we see a USB device for Smart TV's later this week?

</comment><comment><USER125> The end is near! windows should shake in its tiny boots

<comment><USER126> I'm not sure if you're serious or not, but I am. Steam has already started to offer non-game applications. If SteamOS gets a large enough installed base and provides a good-enough platform for desktop/couch-side apps other than games then things could get interesting.

EDIT: Of course, it would help if Valve had someone in charge with a record of success in desktop app platforms. Well [http://www.computerandvideogames.com/172835/interviews/creat...](http://www.computerandvideogames.com/172835/interviews/creative- minds-gabe-newell/) fancy that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER127> Can you sideload games that aren't on Steam?

<comment><USER68> Current Steam lets you add non-Steam games. No word yet (AFAIK) on whether or not that will continue when it becomes its own OS.

<comment><USER127> I sort of worry about that. As a userspace client Steam could never have hoped to lock out non-approved games, but as an OS it probably could. The HN commentariat probably skew pro-curation, but I for one think it would be bad for the future of Indie games if Steambox did not support side loading.

<comment><USER128> OTOH, I can totally see Steam allowing me to stream Minecraft (not available on Steam) to my TV simply to encourage me to use Steam for gaming.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER129> Yay, the 80s UNIX wars all over again:

[http://www.bell-labs.com/history/unix/wars.html](http://www.bell- labs.com/history/unix/wars.html)

</comment><comment><USER130> I told you so [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5186806](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5186806)

</comment><comment><USER131> Can I still browse the internet?

<comment><USER34> Yes. Steam's Big Picture mode has its own web browser, as does Steam itself.

<comment><USER131> Sweet. I wonder how it will compare to XBMC. I'm looking to buy/build a media center PC within the month and been checking out operating systems for it. This is now a contender.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER132> At last, all the unresponsiveness, bugginess, and ugliness of Steam in OS form!

</comment><comment><USER133> the 3rd circle will be HL3

</comment><comment><USER134> What qualifies as a "New" operating system? This is slightly modified Linux, with a slightly modified UI. Is that really considered new? How about calling it a new Linux variant rather than a new Operating System.

<comment><USER135> Because most of their target audience isn't pedantic existing users of Desktop Linux, it's people that are using Steam on Windows.

Furthermore, for most people an "OS" is not a collection of general purpose kernel and userspsace as components, it's a vertically integrated and holistic product + experience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER136> Since when did we start to call Ubuntu skins operating systems?</comment>


Who Buys Virtual Goods?  It's Not Who You Think - <AUTHOR> http://blog.viximo.com/corporate/2009/07/22/who-buys-virtual-goods-its-not-who-you-think/

<comment><USER2> The reason that people buy virtual goods is the same reason people buy most things. Cynics often comment that you are "buying air", as though the only thing people spend money on is rent, food, and the other basics.

Whenever you get a community of people together, economics is something that naturally arises.

I have run a successful virtual goods business in Second Life for over 2 years. The main products I have been selling center around video/machinima production, audience and performance interactions, and avatar animation improvements.

Just because the platform that my products are built on is a 3D MMO-ish environment doesn't mean they have no value. I often make the analogy that my creations are simply software programs that I sell, because that's what they are. Hundreds of millions of people worldwide have purchased software for decades. Our entire modern economy and culture is in large part based on software and the industries that operate in around around it.

When you look at communities in "virtual" spaces, whether they be full 3D environments or sites like Facebook, people find value in software that runs in those platforms. The value that they find varies greatly from person to person. Some find an application that helps them manage their friends list useful, while others have no problems spending a few cents or a dollar to send an image of a funny puppy to someone they care about.

Another kind of virtual good is music. I used to occasionally torrent music if it was something I wanted. I was also broke then. However, it gradually happened that I have transitioned to buying almost everything I want online. For me, and I think for others, it is so much easier to find and buy a song on iTunes than it is to stab wildly in the dark on torrent sites to find exactly what I want. The same has held true for tv shows and movies. When I was broke, I torrented. The quality was hit or miss. But since I bought an AppleTV in 2008, I just buy the stuff I want to see. Its always high quality, and its instantly there.

Virtual goods are really no different than anything else people spend money on. For women, maybe its fashion. For guys, gadgets or cars. None of it is stuff we need to keep our carbon-selves running, but they're stuff we want. And if we have money, we will pay for it if its easy.

There's a very good economic lesson that is often missed by people. If you make it extremely easy for people to spend money, they will spend money. No complicated signup forms, no thinking required, and make it as inexpensive as possible. The more barriers you put between the customer's money and your pocket, that's all the less money you will be getting from them.

Making money is easy. Making something people want can be a bit harder. So concentrate on building something useful and easy to use, and make it easy to buy.

</comment><comment><USER3> Seems like virtual goods are a new type of revenue model. The numbers are really high for buying thin air. Most of the startups should consider adding virtual goods bazaar into their products. With the rising of micro payment options virtual goods possibly will gain more speed. By the way how do virtual goods have effect on macro economics? Isn't it bad for the economy spending money on unproduced and no-value generating goods? Or am i judging virtual goods wrong?

<comment><USER4> I think it's funny that people ask about virtual goods "why do they sell so much?" and about music "why doesn't it sell enough?", when it's fundamentally the same thing: no tangible good is exchanged, the only benefit is the enjoyment and satisfaction of the buyer.

What effect does music have on macro economics?

<comment><USER5> It's quite funny because before I clicked the link, I actually wondered if they were going to include the iTunes Store or the App Store as part of their "Virtual Goods". For after all, digital music and softwares are just that : virtual goods.

I actually spent some real USD in Second Life to buy decent clothes. That was for corporate use, with the company credit card. I discovered at that time that Second Life was a cheap and efficient way to organise online meetings (very decent VOIP, and the 3d-sound is a killer for large groups), but definitely not easy-to-use / intuitive.

For my not yet public startup we are actually thinking of going the Virtual Goods way... though I personally would prefer just charging users to use the product. Maybe I'm a bit old-school... well, anyway, the priority is to release the product.</comment></comment></comment>


Billie Holiday and the Federal Bureau of Narcotics' Early Fight for Survival - <AUTHOR> http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/01/drug-war-the-hunting-of-billie-holiday-114298_full.html#.VL7NFS7F_jZ <comment><USER2> I have never read a more shocking indictment of "The war on drugs" and I can only hope that this book gets its message across to everyone willing to listen.

I can't believe I live in a country with the gall to do this. My biggest question is, how can I help change this? Can I change it?

It's just sad. I can only hope that someday, some country will create opportunities and futures like those of the United States. I hope there will be someplace for people to move where they don't have to worry about something as atrocious as this. Because this sickens me.

<comment><USER3> There is such a place already, Europe. With Portugal paving the way: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_policy_of_Portugal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_policy_of_Portugal)

<comment><USER2> I'm not even specifically talking about drugs: these so-called "wars" (drugs, terrorism, etc.) are just wars on citizens. I have a Polish passport, so if I ever need to go somewhere safe, I can. But Poland lacks the same opportunity that exists here. Y Combinator, Silicon Valley... everything's right here.

Portugal seems very interesting and I'd really like to hear what happens with their drug policy.

But in the end, it's all for naught if I can't get any opportunities there. Which is why I live in the US.

<comment><USER4> Well, I don't like this viewing of societies/countries as just venues for "individual opportunity".

I mean, it's not just about getting were you can get the most benefits, money, tax breaks and whatever.

It's also about working with your fellow citizens to improve the conditions where you live, and also fighting when the bad times come there, not just saying "so long suckers" and leaving for the next opportunity abroad.

The latter just makes everybody a selfish bastard, and ends up in a (non)-community of cowards stepping on each other to get to the top.

<comment><USER5> Or expressing voice through exit is much stronger than expressing voice through vote.

If I express dissatisfaction with my mobile carrier, should I work with my fellow customers to improve the conditions of the service we get, or should I just switch to a competitor? If I switched I would just be a customer of a company with lots of satisfied cowards stepping on each other for the best deal they can find.

<comment><USER4> > _Or expressing voice through exit is much stronger than expressing voice > through vote._

Expressing voice to what? To some greater power (ie. the government) to come and fix the issues?

What I said was about people HELPING solve the issues themselves.

> _If I express dissatisfaction with my mobile carrier, should I work with my > fellow customers to improve the conditions of the service we get, or should > I just switch to a competitor?_

See, that's my point. A society is not some company that owes you service, it's something you build.

For a better example, if you express dissatisfaction with an OSS software, you should very much work with your fellow users to improve its conditions.

<comment><USER5> By "expressing voice" I mean showing your preferences and acting in some way to make your reality closer to those.

I am not a fan of many window managers available on Linux. The most reasonable solution is not for me to attempt to change the first one I happen to use (Unity in Ubuntu for me) into one I prefer, but to find a community which better suits my use case (i3 now, in Arch - I've clearly made a big jump in communities here).

What you are arguing is that the happenstance of where one starts should absolutely dominate opinions and preferences developed through experience. Or do you think I should have fought Canonical and the entire Ubuntu community to turn it into a much more minimalist distro with i3 as the default WM? There are thousands of orphaned projects out in the wild. If I find one that I like, is it the best use of my time, or is it best for the community for me to take it over, or is it best for me to focus on one of the communities where I find up to date and functioning software?

Similarly, I was born to a pair of Christian parents (one Catholic, one Episcopalian) and experienced two (admittedly very similar) religious traditions growing up. I am now firmly agnostic. Should I follow your line of reasoning and work night and day to turn one of these religions into a bastion of agnosticism, or should I act as a reasonable adult and abandon the community I have no communion (pun intended) with in favor of a community of my choosing? Which community should I choose to fight against in order to make it more pleasing to myself?

Why should the circumstances of my birth bind me inextricably to an arbitrarily delineated geographic region and whatever society predominates there? Why do you expect me to care more about those who live within 500 miles of my birth place than those who live further? Are these people more worthy, more human?

If you admit that the happenstance of birth is exactly that, and that those who share a birthplace with me are not more deserving in any way than those who don't, then how can you demand that I pay more attention to them and make more effort to make them better off?

A strict utilitarian would argue I should go to the worst-off country I can find and help them. I do not believe either of us is a strict utilitarian.

If I find a society that I fit into better than the one I am born into, is it not a cruelty to forbid me to join it? Is it not a qualitatively identical (though quantitatively lesser) cruelty to discourage me from doing so by attempting to make me feel immoral for desiring to join another?

If you value individual choice, why not allow me the pleasure of choosing my own company and my own society? I would argue that the best way to improve societies is to allow anyone to make that same choice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Compelling story. Would be a lot easier to follow if author were clearer on relative dates. (How long after the 1939 threat was the first bust? The later SF bust? The final hospitalization?)

Note the author, Johann Hari, has had some issues with accuracy and attribution in the past, and some argue that even his recent work is sloppy with quotes for dramatic purposes ([http://www.jeremy- duns.com/blog/2014/9/7/kdgwxcbsned1rknh0h3...](http://www.jeremy- duns.com/blog/2014/9/7/kdgwxcbsned1rknh0h3zdvqrebxa3x)).

<comment><USER7> Thanks for posting that. The story is compelling, but without sources for quotes and more details, I'm left wondering how much of it was "artist embellishment".

There are enough factual stories about the war on drugs that will make your stomach turn. There is no need to "spice up" the story.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The "war on drugs" is steeped in racism and plays a large part in the state repression of people to this day. I have hoped for years that people would start realizing this connection. Sadly, the racial witch hunters of the day prefer to focus their energy on symptomatic outliers (e.g. Ferguson) instead of the root source of legal injustice. The powers granted to the state through the drug war and all the side effects thereof are crippling generations.

<comment><USER9> Keep speaking and people will eventually hear what you have to say.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> If there is anyone with anything good to say about Anslinger, I've never heard of them. Police in the US need to stop lionizing people like Anslinger and J. Edgar Hoover.

Erowid has a list of links of Anslinger's congressional testimony and a couple other references. [https://www.erowid.org/culture/characters/anslinger_harry/an...](https://www.erowid.org/culture/characters/anslinger_harry/anslinger_harry.shtml)

<comment><USER11> How can you simultaneously claim that nobody speaks well of Anslinger, and that he is lionized? That seems flatly contradictory.

<comment><USER10> You're right. s/anyone/anyone with half a brain/

<comment><USER12> s/Scotsman/True Scotsman

<comment><USER10> +1 It was pretty lazy of me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I wonder how many people would cite the War on Drugs as the primary reason they identify as Libertarian.</comment>


A crash course in blockchain and crypto - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/a-crash-course-in-blockchain-and-crypto-6b6794f41814 <comment><AUTHOR> Update: The story can now be viewed at [https://medium.com/@jproco/a-crash- course-in-blockchain-and-...](https://medium.com/@jproco/a-crash-course-in- blockchain-and-crypto-6b6794f41814) \-- hoping to have it back up on hackernoon shortly

</comment><comment><USER2> Redirects to [https://hackernoon.com/suspended](https://hackernoon.com/suspended) and returns 404.

<comment><AUTHOR> Working on it

<comment><USER2> FWIW, I'm seriously disappointed that common usage has now adopted "crypto" to mean (almost exclusively) "crypto-currency". It's such an impoverishment of the language.

<fx: shrug />

Can't win, can't break even, have to play the game.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh, I totally agree. Like when people say "Google" something they just mean "search" not "track every movement you make on the Internet and serve ads based on what some algorithm determines your interests might be"

<comment><USER2> Call me weird, but I don't "Google" for things. I use the Google search tool as a tool, but I use other search engines as well, and I _don 't_ use the term "to Google for something".

Yes, I know, I'm weird, out-of-date, and due to be put out to pasture. I still claim not all changes are indicative of positive progress.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>