Mac apps are harder than iOS apps - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/tech-blogging/614338e2e470 <comment><USER2> So I have this question that's been eating at me for a few days, and I can't find anybody who knows the answer and is willing to talk about it.

When I find myself wanting to write Mac (as opposed to say iPad) software, it is not always but usually because having a hardware keyboard is important to whatever software I want to write, and of course all Macs have hardware keyboards. There are other reasons, like better interoperability with other desktop software, but these seem to shrink each year.

But it occurs to me that with iPads outselling Macs at a ratio higher than 4-to-1, it seems at least plausible to me that either there are, or could be in the forseeable future, more iPad users with hardware keyboards than Mac users. So if you are trying to target people who use a keyboard, the iPad could be a better bet.

I can't find any numbers so I don't know if we are there already or if we are a long ways off. But this line of inquiry has really caused me to question whether the iPad makes more sense than the Mac for a lot of projects that I have formerly just assumed would be a better fit for a desktop form factor.

<comment><USER3> Not everybody who owns an iPad has or uses a hardware keyboard. I think most people don't have one, and of those who do, many may hardly use it. I have a bluetooth keyboard for my iPad, but I really hardly use it. I bought it once for a longer vacation where I just wanted to bring the iPad but needed to be able to quickly respond to mails. In the end, I didn't even use it much during the vacation.

What kind of apps, except for text processing like word, number processing like excel, programming editors, or scientific like mathmatica are you thinking about? I think these are the categories where keyboards are really necessary for iPad, but for all others, I think touch input may be the better option (I'll probably have forgotten a couple of niche categories, like music trackers).

<comment><USER2> Yes, not everybody has a hardware keyboard, but at some point

         (large install base) * ( lower probability of having a hardware keyboard) > (small install base) * (certainty of having a hardware keyboard)

I'm interested in getting some kind of OOM answer to that equation.

> what kind of apps... are you talking about?

Well for example, here I am, at this moment, typing a comment to you on an iPad with a hardware keyboard.

But to answer your question: heavy email, threaded discussion, bug reporting, data entry (e.g. invoices, grades, tracking numbers, door-to-door, consumer surveys, medical coding, pilot logbook, etc), inventory management, insurance adjusters, real estate listings, pro-grade eBay/Craigslist tools, non-casual games (e.g. Starcraft, Half-Life, etc.), Quicken, MSProject, TurboTax ...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have been working on a Mac app off and on for a few months. I don't have any background in native programming though, as my experience has been pretty much completely from web engineering and javascript/Python.

My biggest issues have been 1) Lack of a development community and 2) Both too much documentation and not enough.

1) The Mac dev forums from Apple are almost dead. Asking a question on StackOverflow is a literal crapshoot as to whether you'll get an answer or not. I don't know where to begin looking for an active, vibrant Mac developer community.

2) Apple's documentation is simultaneously rich and deep while being incredibly sparse, inconsistent, and maze-like. Very frequently you can find a description on SO or a blog post referencing something you need, yet the link is broken because Apple is very bad about maintaining and forwarding links when they change their URL structure.

There are entire classes of questions that I don't even know how to research or ask about yet I know should have answers when I encounter them.

Not too long ago I was doing something with AVFoundation. There was a particular setting that I needed to change, and by looking at the signature of a similar feature that plugged in the same way I knew it should be there. But I couldn't find it. The docs in this feature said nothing about it. I searched high and low for 2 days for sample code or anything that implemented this thing. I was getting nowhere.

I finally went back and watched the original 2 WWDC videos where AVFoundation was being introduced in 2011. After 2 hours and literally in the last 2-3 minutes of the 2nd video, the speaker casually mentioned the feature I was working with. I about flipped my lid at that point.

The property was exactly where I expected it. Xcode wasn't autocompleting it for some reason and I think there was a camel-case issue that was making it fail. All in all it was extremely frustrating.

I'm being vague about the details because this all happened about a year ago and I haven't thought much about it.

If anyone knows if/how you can display a window in the app while recording the screen with AVFoundation and not record that window, you'd save me a ton of time and frustration. Otherwise I fear I have to stop using AVFoundation and do my own implementation which I think is a very bad idea.

<comment><USER5> I've learned to directly look at header files with apple code now-a-days. And AVFoundation on iOS has a similar sparseness of documentation and community. Also when you actually work with the code, you find out it's extremely fragile.

This is why you want to be able to see source code in your libraries, you can solve these kinds of problems a lot better.

<comment><USER4> This is a good tip that I do more and more.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Most of these "problems" actually sound like good things to me. It's more difficult to override stuff like the title bar for a reason.

Mac apps aren't iOS apps, and if you're developing them as if they are, you're app is going to look goofy and ugly running on OSX. Your app isn't as special as you think; it should use the standard conventions like everybody else.

That said, there are a _very_ few apps where going away from the conventions can work. Lightroom comes to mind, but there might be others. In any case, it only works if it's done all the way and not half assed, which I'm not sure 99% of software companies are capable of doing. If Adobe wasn't a mega-corporation with tons of money to throw at it, they'd probably screw it up.

</comment><comment><USER7> > On the Mac if you want to customize the window title bar, you are going to > be in for a world of pain. Apple provides no API for customizing things like > the title bar on OS X.

That is not really a downside. Why should the title bar be customized by an application? The title bar is used for the window management by providing controls to close, minimize, resize, and move the application window. This behavior should not be customizable by the application at all.

<comment><USER8> Consider Google Chrome as an example. The title bar is customized to allow for their tabs at the same height as the close, minimize etc. buttons.

<comment><USER9> And that's precisely why I don't use Google Chrome - nonstandard Mac GUI (like Google really has great UI? Please)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Cocoa has actually evolved significantly. There was a long period on the Mac where the (now legacy) Carbon and Cocoa APIs didn't overlap too well. In fact, _both_ APIs had things that the other API couldn't even do, and _both_ APIs had strengths in completely different areas. I think by about the time 10.3 Panther was released Cocoa had filled in a lot of the gaps, and Apple eventually decided to not port Carbon to 64-bit at all. Carbon remains functional but it's almost completely deprecated.

As great as versions like Mac OS X 10.3 were, later versions of the Cocoa API are noticeably better. In fact, it's now hard to support anything earlier than 10.6 because of improvements to libraries (e.g. more native UI views available, more features per class), improvements to the compiler and other developer tools (e.g. ARC), and changes to the language (e.g. blocks).

As of Mac OS X 10.8, the Cocoa frameworks are decently in line with iOS, far beyond the simple stuff like NSArray; for example, AVFoundation.framework and GLKTextureLoader now exist on both platforms which is useful for consistent game development.

Cocoa is also more customizable than you might think. While technically Cocoa won't allow certain view or window properties to change, an _illusion_ of a change can be just as effective and is straightforward (not to mention being more stable for the OS in the long run). For instance: maybe you create a mostly-transparent borderless window at a specific location with a certain Z-order, in which you draw what _looks like_ a window frame modification; this is often exactly what is required even though the window underneath didn't actually change at all.

I have my own share of frustrations with Cocoa in spite of what I've said. Cocoa is _not_ perfect and I do think they still have some work to do in terms of improving sync with iOS and making it a lot more powerful. A pet peeve of mine is that APIs often lag far behind new OS features (e.g. new UI paradigms...it seemed to take forever for Spaces to be properly handled in the API).

</comment><comment><USER11> Isn't this part of the reason why there's some effort to port some of the iOS UIKit to OSX? [https://github.com/BigZaphod/Chameleon](https://github.com/BigZaphod/Chameleon)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, but most of these projects have been abandoned. GitHub for Mac used a similar project but they've also changed direction. There is just too much "stuff" to reimplement. It is really a job only Apple can do

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm willing to bet that the next major version of OS X will do away with AppKit and bring UIKit to the desktop. UIKit is already API-compatible in many ways and most of the pieces are already in place.

<comment><USER3> I'd be willing to bet against it. There's so much cruft that has to be kept in for compatibility reasons that I really doubt it. Also, the Mac offers much more functionality than an iPad, you'd need to expand UIKit a lot to run on Mac hardware. Maybe they deprecate AppKit and introduce UIKit alongside, like with Carbon, but I doubt they have the manpower for that right now. I guess they'd rather concentrate on making UIKit better on ARM than porting it somewhere else

<comment><USER13> Isn't it already working on the x86? Isn't the iOS Simulator evidence of that?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Good article.

Now, try the Win32 API, then go back to Cocoa. That will put the "pain" into perspective.

OSX developers are writing at the same level as C developers using Win32 directly, but with a much nicer, object-oriented API.

<comment><USER15> But WinAPI has excellent documentation on MSDN.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> One thing that I found confusing about writing mac apps was the vestiges of the old memory models. When I started a new project I just clicked the checkbox for Automatic Reference Counting and assumed I was coding in something like Java. I didn't think about memory management anymore.

I remember having to add annotations to the auto generated getter/setters to inform old memory management systems how to treat things returned from the methods (I'm sure I stated that incorrectly but it has been a while). Bottom line is that it was hard to know what was no longer required when coding with the latest release. If I read tutorials that were a few years old they would confuse me with aspects of memory management.

</comment><comment><USER17> "Why I'm not writing OS X apps", by Hipster Programmer: [https://plus.google.com/u/0/107370779337689020644/posts/8SWf...](https://plus.google.com/u/0/107370779337689020644/posts/8SWfTAtS8LX)

<comment><USER18> Hah! This is awesome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Making custom OSX controls is easy with PaintCode ([http://www.paintcodeapp.com](http://www.paintcodeapp.com)). It is a vector drawing app that generates Objective-C drawing code.

<comment><USER20> His point is that you _have_ to create complex custom controls on OSX, whereas in iOS it'll generally be sufficient to mix and match a few views and CoreAnimation, and use customization options not present in OSX.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> The Layout is also a very tricky part. On iOS the app is always in full screen. On OS X, there are infinite number of display sizes and the user can dynamically change the size and ratio of the window of your app.

<comment><USER22> Apple are pushing both iOS and Mac developers to use autolayout (especially on the iOS side), which is meant to solve some of these problems.

I say 'meant to' because autolayout is far from perfect, but there's a pretty clear shift on the iOS side from a "code to a fixed 320x480 window" to a "write a UI that can adapt to different sizes gracefully". For example, apps should in iOS 7 really now be able to handle varying text sizes (and thus layout) according to user preference.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> So true. I've been working on my iOS app for about 4 years now, and recently started work on porting it to the Mac. But it's so much more tedious than I expected, for exactly the reasons you mention: lack of documentation and support, lots of subsystems to work on, legacy controls that aren't customizable. Attending WWDC and talking to people on both AppKit and UIKit teams, it's striking how little they seem to collaborate; it's like they live in their own organizational bubbles, and there is very little push from on top to make them more streamlined. They have made some progress on some frameworks to consolidate them across Mac OS and iOS (MapKit comes to mind), but it feels like they still operate as two independent entities within Apple; one being the young hot-shot with all the resources, and the other being the envious legacy-system that knows it's past it's best.

</comment><comment><USER24> Desktop window manager integration seems to always be tricky. I've personally sunk months of my life in getting a variety of custom window frames to work "well enough" on various Windows flavors (for Chrome on XP, Vista, 7 and newer). I think part of the benefit of these new mobile platforms is their simplicity - there is less going on outside the app's control at any given point in time, so there's less to worry about.

(On Windows, there are several ways to achieve a "custom-ish" frame, but only if you really study the window manager-app interaction and think about the problem as if you were the window manager can you come close to doing a proper job of it... handling the right messages (some of which are undocumented and only discovered via using spy tools), responding in the correct way etc.)

</comment><comment><USER25> Good read. I like the examples. I have been thinking about writing some Mac Apps. This made me rethink it. :)

<comment><USER26> Yeah I remember trying to emulate ios style scrollbars before they were added to OSX. Yeah not so fun. Now if I had to make a Mac App I'd look into using [https://github.com/rogerwang/node-webkit](https://github.com/rogerwang/node- webkit)

<comment><USER27> Do you really care about customized UI so much that you'd rather ship a WebKit view than not have any?

<comment><USER26> That's not the concern any more, it's just a fun and different way to make an app. Im a web guy so its familiar territory and will be portable to other platforms.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> This guy has been writing Obj-C for 10+ years! woot!</comment>


Nvidia Shield - <AUTHOR> http://store.nvidia.com/buyshield?cid=sp-gfnewsletter <comment><USER2> 1\. This cost Nvidia $10 million to develop and essentially promote the Tegra 4. If it convinces other companies to back Tegra 4, it was probably worth the investment. If it completely flops, it's not exactly something that will sink the company.

2\. From following the thread on NeoGAF about the Shield, it seems like this is targeted more towards hardcore gamers who want to stream PC games so they don't have to be at a desktop all the time and to also have a relatively powerful emulation machine.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is an a very strange launch and I'm not entirely sure who the target market is.

Serious gamers -- I doubt they'd be happy with Android games. Kids -- no killer marketing/mascots. Casual gamers -- likely wouldn't care enough, their phone is good enough.

However, if this gained an install base, I'd assume it would drive the nearly non-existance premium purchase market on android games up.

<comment><USER4> The real killer (or at least differentiating) feature is that you can stream PC games from your desktop to the shield. Apparently it works pretty well[1].

[1] - [http://www.theverge.com/2013/7/31/4573596/nvidia-shield- revi...](http://www.theverge.com/2013/7/31/4573596/nvidia-shield-review)

<comment><USER5> Is that Tegra 4 only that requires some kind of special hardware? Or any android device with some kind of software could do this?

<comment><USER6> Onlive does this on pretty much any device, here is their Android app [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.onlive.cli...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.onlive.client&hl=en)

<comment><USER7> Well, except that it only plays games on the OnLive service, not any PC game with controller support.

<comment><USER6> The point is nothing magical is happening in the Tegra 4 to enable this use case, this feature can be replicated with pretty much any device.

<comment><USER8> Neither of you understands what's going on here. It has nothing to do with Tegra 4 in regards to streaming. It has to do with Nvidia's PC GPU's and their streaming software. That's why it wouldn't work with AMD's chips - because you need Nvidia's software that's only available for Nvidia's GPU's.

<comment><USER6> I don't buy it, just look into Nvidia and Physx, AMD chips are just as capable is not more so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm I the only one who read the headline and thought it was some awesome addon for Arduinos?

<comment><USER10> No, I was so disappointed. I had images of some sort of fantastic mini-GPU shield.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm going to buy one as a portable emulation machine...when it doesn't sell well and drops in price a hundred dollars.

</comment><comment><USER12> I got one, and so far love it. The pc streaming feature is fantastic not to mention the ability to have all my favorite old console games emulated on the go.

</comment><comment><USER13> (disclosure: I work at NVIDIA, but not directly on Shield.)

One of the things that I find most exciting about Shield is that it's a platform designed for innovation. Build blobs, a manifest.xml, and recovery images were released on day 3 (they would have been released on day 1, but for an Akamaization mistake). [1]

I'm not sure whether it will take off in the hands of developers, but the step of reaching out as soon as we could makes me proud. I certainly hope that people will come and develop on our platform, but more than anything else, I hope that this will make it closer to "the norm" for SoC vendors to provide support packages for _their_ platforms.

[1] [https://developer.nvidia.com/develop4shield#OSR](https://developer.nvidia.com/develop4shield#OSR) ... or if you prefer the PR-speak, [http://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2013/08/07/hack-your- shield/](http://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2013/08/07/hack-your-shield/)

</comment><comment><USER14> The reveal of the shield was months ago, and since then it's still unknown by many within the industry (including pro gamers) how this will end up.

While it definitely targets the more serious gamers with capabilities like PC streaming, etc., this is really Nvidia dipping its toes in the retail arena, starting with mobile.

A leader in portable _real_ gaming has yet to emerge, and until recently it's been a showdown between PS Vita & the 3DS line. Mobile game development has really started to mature and and so has mobile hardware (tablets/phones/etc.) and seriously cut into the value proposition for portable game systems.

Unfortunately, the control experience hasn't kept up and this is a serious gap that _may_ present opportunity.

Nvidia already has a platform (Tegra) that performs extremely well with respect to gaming, and by selecting Android has access to a potential existing library of games that could be easily ported over to seed their ecosystem.

As someone else mentioned, the dynamics of gamers are extremely diverse. Serious FPS players may only play PC, but also 'moonlight' as casual sports gamers on console. And all gamers have the same basic needs when it comes to portable gaming that at present is only available from Nintendo & Sony.

Bottom line, many gamers suspect that Nvidia may attempt to produce their own hardware console in the future, and this could be the precursor. It is a bit 'something for everybody' so it's hard to say whether that will be compelling enough for anybody. Most of the gamers I interact with say that they'll wait for v2.

<comment><USER15> > A leader in portable real gaming has yet to emerge

Real gaming? The games on Android and iOS are real video games. As far as I'm concerned those two platforms are the leaders in mobile gaming.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Nvidia demoed this at their keynote in CES this year, it looks very promising.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOHNmzz1gYo](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOHNmzz1gYo)

Edit: This video is a much better closeup: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bf_3huHlfZM](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bf_3huHlfZM)

</comment><comment><USER17> It would be cool if it was a portable Steam console.

<comment><USER18> You can stream Steam games from the PC on the Shield (AFAIK).

<comment><USER19> What, through VNC? That doesn't seem like it would be a very enjoyable experience.

<comment><USER20> Shield's PC game streaming works by using the hardware H.264 encoder in Nvidia GTX 650 (or higher) graphics cards. They recommend a reasonably fast PC and a fast wireless network.

<comment><USER21> Does it support an ATI card in the PC?

<comment><USER2> No, you need an Nvidia card above a GTX 650 because those cards have the built in H.264 encoder necessary to stream the games.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The marketing here is awfully deceptive unless you know what you're reading (you know, parents and stuff):

"Custom 72-core NVIDIA GeForce® GPU Quad-core ARM® A15 CPU."

Rarely do you hear cores related to the GPU and not the CPU. "72 core? This thing must be amazing! [click]" Furthermore, how often do you see the GPU mentioned prior to the CPU? Not very, but I guess that's what happens when you're NVIDIA.

Edit: "5-inch 720p retinal quality multi-touch display for high-fidelity visuals."

Retinal display. Made me giggle. Just because they're pitching it with the latest buzzword. Yeah, it's 294ppi at 12", blah blah blah, but still. Retinal display?

<comment><USER23> Retina Display is actually a trademark. Never seen anyone hint at it so explicitly - not that that's necessarily a bad thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Maybe next year they can increase the screen to 6" or even 7" by cutting down on those big bezels, and maybe making the top cover a bit bigger.

The resolution can stay the same, since for that kind of screen it should be enough for now, and as a gamer you'd rather take advantage of the extra graphics. I'm also more interested in the mobile Kepler GPU that they should have next year. If they could drop the price down to at least $250 that would be better ($200 would be the sweet spot in a world where people are barely interested in consoles anymore, but I know that won't be possible even next year).

</comment><comment><USER24> My initial thoughts were "meh" but after getting into some details and reading some reviews this device seems to be really well made and has alot going for it. The PC Streaming feature looks awesome and if there is one thing that frustrates me about serious mobile gaming, its controls which is a non issue here. Instead of a PS Vita or some other gaming handheld, i would definately get this!

</comment><comment><USER2> [http://store.nvidia.com/buyshield?cid=sp- gfnewsletter](http://store.nvidia.com/buyshield?cid=sp-gfnewsletter)

Is that an affiliate link?

<comment><AUTHOR> No. The link is from the official newsletter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> The future of mobile gaming is IOS. Ports of KOTOR and XCOM have shown its potential.</comment>


Ask HN: Potential Interest for New Hacker House in Redwood City - <AUTHOR>

We find ourselves in a situation where we either need to move in August, or we need to find new room mates for our house.
There are six or seven rooms, depending on how we set things up, and three of us (a YC company) who are hoping to stick around. We thought we'd reach out to the Hacker News community to see if anyone was interested in moving in and forming a "hacker house" of sorts.
Price depends on how many people, and also we're hoping to renegotiate our lease after it expires, but it would probably be in the $800-$1000 range. The home is very large, with two rooms dedicated to office space, one of which is completely open right now. The bedrooms are available immediately.
The house is located in Redwood City, off Woodside Road. It's walking distance to plenty of food, but not quite walking distance to Caltrain (biking distance to Caltrain and Palo Alto). There's a big kitchen, huge living room (part of which could also fit desks), two fire places, back yard, dedicated parking, in a very quiet neighborhood, good for hacking. Comes with a hammock too.
If you're interested, post below or send an email to: firstname.lastname@example.com. We're happy to send photos along, and will probably post some later. <comment><USER2> The current Palo Alto Hacker House — 3 YC, 2 Google, 1 Facebook, etc.. — will be looking for a couple of new housemates starting the first week in August.

</comment><comment><USER3> I might be interested as well, especially if it's only going to be a 6 month lease.

I'll send an email with my contact info so you guys can keep me in the loop.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> There wasn't much interest so we're not keeping the house. Sorry.

</comment><comment><USER4> Does anyone know if there's a hacker house in San Francisco?

</comment><comment><USER5> how long are you guys looking to sign a lease for?

<comment><AUTHOR> Ideally 6 months, but we need to talk to our landlord.</comment></comment>


Whistleblower in New Orleans hotel collapse is deported to Honduras - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/nov/30/whistleblower-in-new-orleans-hotel-collapse-is-deported-to-honduras <comment><USER2> This seems like a pretty obvious case of retaliation. Especially when he had valuable information to an ongoing investigation.

All this does is encourage undocumented immigrants to never report dangerous or illegal behavior under the risk of deportation.

<comment><USER3> He didn't offer any information to authorities until a month _after the disaster and his rearrest_ and had been ordered deported during the Obama administration. He was only caught because he was poaching!

People _died_ that could have been saved had he been an actual whistleblower. A whistleblower is someone who calls attention _before_ the crash. Waiting until afterward makes you merely a witness (if not a participant).

<comment><USER4> From the article: "Delmer Joel Ramirez Palma had reported potentially dangerous lapses in construction safety to his supervisors before the collapse, according to lawyers"

From previous article: [https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/nov/22/new- orleans-...](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/nov/22/new-orleans- hotel-collapse-deported-honduras) "Construction managers allegedly told him to ignore the issues"

Whistleblowing doesn't just mean going above the head of your supervisor. It can mean reporting issue directly to them. Wouldn't you agree?

Yes, he probably should have taken it further but maybe his immigration status made him reluctant to do so. And I think that's what clouding this case. But the timeline is pretty clear.

<comment><USER3> He claimed to have reported _to his boss(es)_ , but _not_ to the building inspector. Or OSHA. Or any other authority. Or any media.

 _That 's_ what whistleblowing is.

<comment><USER5> From Wiki: "Those who become whistleblowers can choose to bring information or allegations to surface either internally or externally. Internally, a whistleblower can bring his/her accusations to the attention of other people within the accused organization such as an immediate supervisor."

<comment><USER6> From Merriam-Webster:

[https://www.merriam-webster.com/legal/whistleblower](https://www.merriam- webster.com/legal/whistleblower)

Legal Definition of whistleblower

: an employee who brings wrongdoing by an employer or other employees to the attention of a government or law enforcement agency and who is commonly vested by statute with rights and remedies for retaliation

That is the "legal" definition, but I understood also the "common" definition is such, otherwise any employee that reports to his/her superior/management _anything_ that is not "right" or "legal" or "correct" would instantly become a whistleblower by the sheer fact of reporting that.

So according to Wikipedia all internal inspectors, auditors, etc. in a company would be automatically "internal" whistleblowers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> d-d I hate seeing a person's past catch up with them. Especially if it has the sting of irony, is decades after the fact and FUBARs life as they know it. My heart goes out to the guy.</comment>


We are in the bubble, I am now 100% sure - <AUTHOR>

Hi folks,
this is just a small post about my yesterday experience. On a flight between Boston and Denver (United airlines) there was a video running on the screens. Video was: "How to make a million dollars" And they showed a footage about footycs.com, a youtube-like service for skaters, snowboarders etc.
I mean, is this is not a real prove of being in the bubble: Ordinary people in the plane get entertained by two (very young) "web-entrepreneurs". Unfortunately I wasn't able to locate this video in the web. However, it is worth to look this video first, before deciding for going by your own business. You could learn a lesson from that: do not be so darn naive and work hard when starting your own company.
P.S. Just realized that this video is already pretty old (3 years or so), however still very interesting.
EDIT: Here a blog, I found about this video: http://www.ianfernando.com/2007/tlc-how-to-make-millions-internet-entrepreneurs/ <comment><USER2> Where is the video link?

<comment><AUTHOR> Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find the video on the web. If somebody could find this, please post it here and I will edit the post to include it.</comment></comment>


On social networks and anonimity - <AUTHOR> http://codepengu.in/ramblings/2017/09/29/social-networks.html <comment><USER2> The first step to _anonymity_ is learning how to spell it. Typos are inherently conspicuous.</comment>


Death by gentrification: the killing that shamed San Francisco - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/mar/21/death-by-gentrification-the-killing-that-shamed-san-francisco <comment><USER2> There's a lot left out in Solnit's article, see: [http://www.modernluxury.com/san-francisco/story/alex- nieto-w...](http://www.modernluxury.com/san-francisco/story/alex-nieto-was- not-killed-gentrification-its-worse)

<comment><USER3> > Nieto was clearly a man having a crisis, and his purported reaction when > approached by police was not that of a rational person. Told to show his > hands, Nieto allegedly demanded that the cops show theirs. He then > reportedly drew his taser and fired three times. And so he was shot—and shot > and shot—by officers who claim they did not realize Nieto was carrying a > less-than-lethal device.

This is the stuff she should have included into her article?

This platitude about mental health,

> Our jails are full of men and women whose crime is being mentally ill.

Is not a more compelling analysis of the event than Solnit's take.

<comment><USER4> Here, let me help you out...

> ...there is no mention whatsoever of Nieto's long and well-documented battle > with mental illness. No mention of Nieto's "history of aggressive and > bizarre behavior and auditory hallucinations," as described in a letter > written by District Attorney George Gascón following his office's > investigation of the shooting. Likewise, no mention of "a clinical history > of psychosis exacerbated by his failure to take ... medications." No mention > of a police report filed less than three weeks before Nieto's death by a man > alleging that Nieto tased him (Nieto, in turn, filed a police report > claiming this was an act of self-defense). No mention of prior incidents in > which police intervened when Nieto's internal battles spilled out into the > public sphere. - See more at: [http://www.modernluxury.com/san- > francisco/story/alex-nieto-w...](http://www.modernluxury.com/san- > francisco/story/alex-nieto-was-not-killed-gentrification-its- > worse#sthash.Y6wXsh3O.dpuf)

<comment><USER3> The severity of his "long and well-documented battle with mental illness" is:

a) Disputed

b) Weaponized against him, taking advantage of the fear and misunderstanding people have of mental illness ("he burnt a book! that sounds like he'd pull guns on people!")

c) Used to avoid engaging with the racial issue that brought it to the fore

<comment><USER5> Disputed? He was confined on a 72 hour mental health hold _twice_. You need to be examined by health professionals for that to happen. I would argue his mental health problems are not disputed at all.

I also love how you said "he burned a book". No, he set a book on fire in his parents home, which they luckily extinguished, then took the ashes and ate them. Even his parents said they were in fear of their own safety.

Jesus, twisting facts knows no ends when it comes to supporting a certain narrative doesn't it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This police-assisted murder is a shame but I don't understand why we expect neighborhoods to remain frozen in time forever, never changing their racial or socioeconomic makeup for as long as the area exists.

It's a given that neighborhoods, especially in the city, will change over time. The real issue isn't whether people who don't look like the lifelong residents will move in, it's if those new neighbors will treat the area and neighbors with the same reverence and respect that those before them did. I don't think people resent a changing neighborhood so much as they resent people with different values settling down and expecting the neighborhood to bend to their preference.

This is clearly what's at stake in the death of Alex Nieto.

<comment><USER7> When middle class families move out it's called *-flight. When poor families move out, it's called gentrification. Both are due to economics, some precipitated, not so much by individual bigotry but rather by self interest (the former wanting to preserve value individually in anticipation of devaluation of property, the latter get pushed out due to economics whereby its not viable to remain in a valuating neighborhood while earnings remain flat for the individual.

<comment><USER8> I think the difference is choice.

White flight is white folks _choosing_ to move out of an area.

Gentrification is white folks _choosing_ to move in to an area.

No-one else gets a choice. Only the white folks.

<comment><USER9> > No-one else gets a choice. Only the white folks.

That's not really fair. White flight was a result of mandatory school integration policies, which forced middle-class (i.e., by-and-large white) and lower-class (i.e., by-and-large black) children into the same schools; white folks didn't have a choice about that, nor did those who stayed a bit longer have a choice about the continued decline of their cities.

Poor city folks have the same choice now that white city folks had in the 70s: stay & deal, or flee elsewhere. The sticky point is that it's a _lot_ easier for someone middle-class to afford to move to the suburbs & commute to work than it is for a poor person.

<comment><USER8> Really? White folks were _forced_ to move away because their kids might go to school with black kids?

Only in America...

<comment><USER9> > White folks were _forced_ to move away because their kids might go to school > with black kids?

It's really, _really_ unfortunate that race is a proxy for class in America. It's a natural and IMHO good human tendency for folks to want to be around others of their own class; the problem is that in America race and class are so conflated that one gets this horrible self-reinforcing racist spiral, which is unfair to blacks and poisonous to whites. And race isn't even all that _good_ of a proxy for class, but due to the aforementioned self-reinforcing racist hate spiral it has been extraordinarily difficult to eliminate.

<comment><USER10> > It's a natural and IMHO good human tendency for folks to want to be around > others of their own class;

Natural, but not good. Good is when we eliminate class, not enjoy its stratification.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > Evan Snow, a thirtysomething "user experience design professional"..., who > had moved to the neighbourhood about six months earlier (and who has since > departed for a more suburban environment)

> Snow never seemed to recognise that his out-of-control dog was the > aggressor: "So Luna was, I think, looking to move around the benches or > behind me to run up happily to get a chip from Mr Nieto. Mr Nieto became > further – what's the right word? – distressed, moving very quickly and > rapidly left to right, trying to keep his chips away from Luna. He ran down > to these benches and jumped up on the benches, my dog following. She was at > that point vocalising, barking, or kind of howling."

>– in his deposition for the case, under oath, his exact words were that he was distracted by a female "jogger's butt". "I can imagine that somebody would – could assume the dog was being aggressive at that point," Snow said. The dog did not come when he called, but kept barking. Nieto, Snow says, then pulled back his jacket and took his Taser out, briefly pointing at the distant dog- owner before he pointed it at the dog baying at his feet. The two men yelled at each other, and Snow apparently used a racial slur, but would not later give the precise word. As he left the park, he texted a friend about the incident. His text, according to his testimony, said, "in another state like Florida, I would have been justified in shooting Mr Nieto that night"

Is this guy real? This is the sort of person I'd expect to see on _Silicon Valley_ not in the real world, he fits the techbro stereotype exactly. After each sentence I read, I thought this guy couldn't get even more stereotypical, but he managed to lower the bar further.

<comment><USER12> This is a person Rebecca Solnit chose to single out, carefully juxtaposing reports of his (incredibly obnoxious) behavior against Nieto's shooting, to which, even by Solnit's account (read carefully), _he was not a party_.

I don't want to get drinks with this character in Solnit's story, either. But I'm not sure we should applaud the tactic of summoning up and focusing outrage on people like this.

<comment><USER13> Nope. Sorry, Evan Snow's recklessness in not getting his dog under control resulted in a innocent person getting shot, and cops whose careers are probably ruined.

Snow deserves a big chunk of blame here.

It's simple folks: if you're not highly confident that your dog will behave itself

For those of you who still harbor sympathy for Snow, do a Google search for people who have been mauled by out of control dogs.

Now Snow's dog didn't end up biting, but that's beside the point. His dog clearly caused a major disturbance because he didn't control it. Snow's recklness is the root cause of this profound tragedy.

<comment><USER14> I'm pretty sure that pointing a device that appeared to be a gun at a group of cops after ignoring their requests for him to put his hands up had a bit more of an impact than the dog in this case.

<comment><USER15> One of the key assertions of the story is that he had no reason to believe that the people requesting he show is hands were police officers. It was dark and they hadn't properly identified themselves or used sirens when arriving at the scene.

We can't know the state of mind of the victim, but there's every possibility that he believed he was pointing his tazer at a group of assailants. It's incumbent on police to properly identify themselves before making demands of someone they expect to comply.

<comment><USER12> There was one eyewitness to the shooting. Their testimony contradicted physical evidence in multiple ways (from the location of the shooting, to the number of police cars that were present.) That same witness was forced to admit on the stand that their recall was compromised by alcoholism.

The same eyewitness is the basis for claims Nieto's hands were in his pocket when he was shot. But Nieto's hands were wounded by the shooting, and his pockets were not damaged.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Why would a person ever point a taser with a laser sight at uniformed police in this country?

Yes this is a tragedy, but how are police supposed to react to a gun-like object pointed at them, in the heat of the moment?

Cops get shot also. They are nervous on the job. As we would be, in their position. Are they supposed to react to a pointed gun with understanding and open arms? I just don't think that's practical.

<comment><USER17> Cops always say that they feared for their life when they end up shooting an innocent person. If we just take their word for it, we're effectively saying that there are no circumstances under which we can legitimately criticize the police for killing someone (because the officers involved will _always_ say that they perceived their lives to be in danger).

<comment><USER18> Yes, but then the situation is evaluated

One of the reasons for body cameras

<comment><USER17> There isn't any camera footage in this case, is there? There is, on the other hand, witness testimony to the effect that the police are lying.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> So. Four policemen put 40 bullets in somebody, and that's supposed to be "normal". What the hell?

<comment><USER12> That the police shot this person at all is a tragedy, but the number of bullets --- a detail reported brethlessly in all police shooting stories --- isn't particularly important.

Police training demands they shoot to kill. The notion of using a firearm merely to wound is mostly a TV fiction. Especially with a subject they believe to be armed (as with this case, where someone called 911 reporting a gun), if the police start shooting, they're going to make sure the target can't react. Their concern will be that even a fatal shot might leave the target with 10-15 seconds with which to get off a shot in reply.

That this is probably a reasonable thing for the police to do is, for me, a strong argument that most police should not be armed with guns. But that gets us into an unproductive discussion about American gun culture and gun control.

<comment><USER20> > Police training demands they shoot to kill.

Something that is incredibly fucking stupid, and there are plenty of countries who do very well without this misguided use of of lethal weapons.

<comment><USER12> If you are saying that it's incredibly stupid to routinely put police into situations where they have less than 5 seconds to decide whether or not they are required to kill someone to protect themselves or their partners, I agree. I think we should disarm most police.

<comment><USER20> Well, obviously the less police and the general public are put in this position the better, and when there is a gunman running around the neighborhood, there better be police to subdue, and yes, if it's required to save other lives, kill him.

The point here, though is not to deny police their right to self defense, the point is to train them in a way that their first action to exercise that right is not with as much force as possible, but with as much force as is necessary.

Clearly emptying multiple magazines into someone speaks of fear, rather than necessity, and I do not wish to be policed and protected by the fearful.

But to your larger point, I agree: building a society in which there is little to none violence is a desirable goal.

<comment><USER12> That's actually not my point. My preferred solution to this problem isn't utopian. We could do it tomorrow:

Step 1: Ensure every police patrol vehicle has a shotgun locked in the trunk.

Step 2: Take away handguns from all patrol officers.

<comment><USER10> That's an excellent idea, especially considering that in my very limited time in California, their cops were the most heavily-armed human beings I'd ever seen in-person. And these were policemen and sheriffs in Redwood City. And I've seen on-duty soldiers.

California cops honestly had me wondering why anyone would ever really need to walk around looking like they'd stepped out of a Hollywood shoot-em-up movie, with two handguns, a rifle, and another larger weapon strapped to their back.

Maybe they were there for a cartel bust or some shit I didn't know about, but that simply was not appropriate for ordinary beat policing. Luckily, I was white enough that they didn't give me crap for staring at them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> the-dude From a European perspective this is more 'Death by police state' than anything else.

<comment><USER21> What happens in Europe when someone is seen in a public park waving around something that looks like this?

[http://i2.wp.com/missionlocal.org/wp- content/uploads/2016/03...](http://i2.wp.com/missionlocal.org/wp- content/uploads/2016/03/taser.jpg)

<comment><USER22> There are far fewer guns floating around in most of Western Europe, so it's less likely in the first place.

<comment><USER21> I think this is the key point. In a society with as lax gun control as we have here, police are placed in much greater danger than they are in Europe, and their training is adjusted accordingly, with lethal repercussions.

It also doesn't help that we leave our mentally-ill citizens to fend for themselves on the street, instead of giving them the care they need like most other first-world countries do.

Put the two together, and American police are faced with the very real possibility of facing an armed crazy person any day they report for work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This article seems to miss some crucial details. How does a jury go from the given description of a man armed with only a Taser being not only shot to disable but absolutely destroyed and vote unanimously in the police's favor? Was the question asked to the jury more specific, did the Guardian leave something out or was the jury really racist as the Guardian implies (by listing their races)?

<comment><USER24> > being not only shot to disable but absolutely destroyed

There is no such thing as "shoot to disable" with firearms. Firearms are lethal weapons. They should only be used when deadly force is justified, and cannot reliably be used to "disable" someone apart from killing them.

<comment><USER25> You can "shoot to disable" though it can often result in death. Which can be useful if your trying to keep someone alive to interrogate. However, US police are flat out trained to kill.

Note: Disable does not mean they are unarmed / unconscious, it generally means they can't move quickly and even if they could still be quite dangerous.

<comment><USER26> Case in point, Salah Abdelslam, the Paris terror 'suspect' who was arrested last week in Brussels, was shot in the leg as he was charging the police, then arrested.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> It is true that this case has the signs of unnecessary, racially-biased police brutality written all over it. It is also true that gentrification in SF is causing serious problems and culture clashes.

But I think it's unfair and quite a stretch to take this example and say that 'gentrification' is directly responsible for this killing. The underlying problems here are racism and police brutality, which in this case are correlated to, but an entirely separate issue from, the sudden influx of wealth.

<comment><USER28> The death wasn't caused by racism and police brutality in the abstract. It was caused by the confluence of the two that manifests in the context of gentrification. Cities have a huge incentive to police these neighborhoods in a way that makes the gentrifiers "feel safe." That causes an atypically unstable situation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is the taser Alex Nieto pointed at the police and refused to drop (if the police are telling the truth):

[http://i2.wp.com/missionlocal.org/wp- content/uploads/2016/03...](http://i2.wp.com/missionlocal.org/wp- content/uploads/2016/03/taser.jpg)

<comment><USER29> Whether he did or not is almost irrelevant.

The police wouldn't have even been there if some dude hadn't decided to call 911 on the guy for "walking while hispanic":

> Fritz said he only saw Nieto pacing near a bench and eating from a bag but > did not himself see any weapon.

[http://missionlocal.org/2016/03/witness-testified-alex- nieto...](http://missionlocal.org/2016/03/witness-testified-alex-nieto-never- drew-weapon/)

<comment><USER30> >"walking while hispanic"

I'm hispanic, Puertorican to be exact. Guy seemed to be dressed like a hoodlum in all images I can see in the article. I get nervous when I see people dressed like that here in San Juan, and he definitely would have seemed shady wandering around in a park, alone, dressed like that.

Sure, maybe it's not tolerant to judge someone like that based on what they wear, but at the same time, I can't fathom why an innocent would insist on literally dressing like a gangbanger.

<comment><USER31> Are you serious? It's a fucking 49er's jacket and some black pants. That's nowhere near close enough to be considered "dressed as a cholo".

It's the fact that some white transplant saw a Hispanic guy wearing a bomber jacket and Snapback hat, and decided that was a suspicious look. That's frankly " walking while Hispanic"

<comment><USER21> Why do you omit the part about him carrying and allegedly pointing around an object that looked just like a handgun?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> The word 'xenophobia' literally means fear of strangers. But apparently it applies only if those strangers are Syrian illegals and not when they're white techies. It's unfortunate that the media is stoking this phenomenon. Strangely enough, here a British newspaper is concerned about the supposed invasion of a city half a world across from Britain.

</comment><comment><USER33> This is a very sad occurence but I'd wish an article to read more as facts than as a sob story

<comment><USER17> Aaron Swartz commits suicide after being prosecuted for a crime that he did commit, and he's a martyr.

A working class latino guy in San Francisco gets shot by the police because some white dudes didn't like the look of him, and it's basically his fault.

Hacker news values.

<comment><USER34> yes. he obviously got killed because some white dude didnt like the look of him. the gun he was pointing at the cops is not related to his death.

<comment><USER35> 1\. Please prove he pointed a gun at them. 2\. People literally called the cops TO his location in the first place because he was sitting on a park bench eating. What is wrong with this picture? 3\. He was shot 40 times. What is wrong with this picture? 4\. The cop immediately called his union rep before an ambulance. What is wrong with this picture?

<comment><USER34> You are right they must be lying, it seems more likely that some random cops heard on radio that a guy was sitting on a bench eating and they just thought "let's go kill some guy eating in a park today".

<comment><USER35> LMAO what a fucking strawman. At least try to not be disingenuous from the get go

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Why is gentrification bad?

<comment><USER37> Decreased quality of life for those who rent and can no longer afford to live in the gentrified neighborhood.

Increased property taxes for those who already own can force even long-time residents to move, regardless of whether they actually want to, simply because their home has suddenly and unexpectedly increased in value. You could argue that this is a windfall - but being forcibly displaced by increased cost of living isn't fun, even if you do get a bunch of money for your house (that you didn't want to sell in the first place).

Also, change is scary.

<comment><USER38> In California, real property is only reassessed at market value when it is sold or transferred. So property taxes won't increase on long-time residents who don't move. Rent control is, I believe, intended to provide the same effect for long-time residents who rent instead of own. I agree that increases in other components of the cost of living of an area can have the same effect though.

<comment><USER39> It's also reassessed if you improve it in any substantial way. My property taxes doubled after a remodel. Some of that was the remodel, but roughly half was due to prices in the neighborhood going up since my wife and I originally bought the house.

In my case we can afford these extra taxes, but I can easily imagine that in other circumstances this would be difficult. The alternative is doing work without permits, which comes with other risks.

<comment><USER40> You got permits for your remodel? Everyone else I know in California does it on the dl and doesn't tell the city for this reason(and many others).

<comment><USER39> We built up, no way to avoid it. People get caught in our neighborhood unless they're keeping it way under the radar.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> What about the "UnProvoker": free floating handcuffs that at the press of an easily accessible button will clamp on your hands and fingers, so if the incoming cop team shoots you, they won't be able to claim you acted menacing? Also the cops then have to come untie you, maybe time enough to start a conversation about racial profiling?

</comment><comment><USER40> Some other articles have mentioned that he was previously on some pretty powerful psych meds and there weren't any found in his system by the coroner. Quitting those medications cold turkey can make someone with previously minor mental health problems go full "point a taser at the cops" crazy.

</comment><comment><USER18> This is exactly like (minus the human tragedy) the bars that start getting noise complaints after more residential building move into their area

And somehow people moving into a certain area think that what was there before should cater to all of their demands

Really

<comment><USER9> I know of a place where there's been a gun club since the 40s. There's a road called Gun Club Road. There's a housing development called Gun Club Estates or somesuch. And people who move there complain about the noise of the … gun club.

People are stupid.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Is there no rent control in SF or other US cities? How do people get priced out?

<comment><USER43> There is rent control in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Washington D.C., and Oakland, CA. People get priced out of the market through an increase in demand and a lack of corresponding supply opportunities.

1\. The lessee stays in a rent controlled location during a period of price increases, absolving themselves of the real-world price increase that is occurring to the landlord. So, to move from the house would mean the costs the landlord absorbed will be now absorbed by the lessee, meaning there is a large expense in moving. So, you either make the lodging you are in work, or else you move out. If you move out, lacking a corresponding wage increase, you will be priced out.

2\. For San Francisco, there are height and zoning restrictions galore in the city. Supply to meet the demand is just not going to be allowed by the locals who push for "Keeping San Francisco like San Francisco." Since, demand increases, supply is static and those who would like to come in at $X wage are simply priced out of the market.

<comment><USER44> DC technically has rent control, but there are a variety of loopholes and it does not apply in most cases.

<comment><USER43> What are the loopholes? Is it like Section 8?

They fell in the statement because it was listed on the Wikipedia article. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_control_in_the_United_Sta...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_control_in_the_United_States)

Thank you for the heads up.

<comment><USER44> \----

[http://dhcd.dc.gov/service/rent-control](http://dhcd.dc.gov/service/rent- control)

The most common exemptions from rent control are for rental units that are:

\- Federally or District-subsidized

\- Built after 1975

\- Owned by a natural person (i.e., not a corporation) who owns no more than four rental units in the District

\- Vacant when the Act took effect

\-----

To be clear, DC has an _extremely_ tenant friendly set of laws. But the rent control is basically just a legacy of an earlier era.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> One more vote for [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Amendment_to_the_United...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution#Meaning_of_.22well_regulated_militia.22)</comment>


Groklaw on the Bilksi decision - <AUTHOR> http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20100628100422167

<comment><USER2> When we stand back and assess what happened here, a few things become evident:

1\. The Court did not have to hear this appeal. It did so under a discretionary grant of certiorari. So the question is, what did it intend to accomplish? Well, since it did not arrive at any new test for assessing whether business methods are patentable, and since it simply affirmed the decision of the Federal Circuit on the merits of Bilski's particular claim, the logical answer is that the Court was very uncomfortable with the Federal Circuit's adoption of the so-called machine-or-transformation test as sole test for whether processes are patentable and it ruled in a way to make it clear that this is not to be an exclusive test.

2\. Thus, in spite of the hopes of many that the Court was using this as an opportunity to rein in a wildly out-of-control system of business-method and software patents, the Court was in fact aiming to prevent any form of _categorical limitation_ from being put on what or what does constitute patentable subject matter when it comes to processes. In this sense, the Court's ruling was definitive in rejecting any categorical attempt to limit the scope of such patentable subject matter ("Congress plainly contemplated that the patent laws would be given wide scope").

3\. What this means, for good or for bad, is that the Court is _not_ about to hold any form of broad category (e.g., software patents) as being inherently unpatentable.

4\. Ergo, there is no radical answer here for those who hoped the Court would strike down software patents. As noted in this piece, however, the Court definitely rejected the other extreme as well by saying that it was _not_ endorsing the Federal Circuit's 1998 _State Street_ decision that had served to open the floodgates to software patents (by ruling that any process can be patented as long as it leads to a "useful, concrete and tangible result").

5\. The Court also explicitly acknowledged the issues that are troubling so many: "It is important to emphasize that the Court today is not commenting on the patentability of any particular invention, let alone holding that any of the above-mentioned technologies from the Information Age should or should not receive patent protection. This Age puts the possibility of innovation in the hands of more people and raises new difficulties for the patent law. With ever more people trying to innovate and thus seeking patent protections for their inventions, the patent law faces a great challenge in striking a balance between protecting invention and not granting monopolies over procedures that others would discover by independent, creative application of general principles. Nothing in this opinion should be read to take a position on where that balance ought to be struck."

6\. I read all this as the Court's way of saying, in effect, "we are not about to wade into this mess and solve a problem that fundamentally belongs to Congress and, thus, under the current statutory scheme, we will guide the lower courts only to the extent of telling them to approach the issues case- by-case while not going to the extreme of trying to limit patentable processes through arbitrary tests that Congress did not authorize and while being sensitive that their rulings in the information age might have the unintended consequence of stifling innovation through the grant of improper monopolies - thus, to be vigilant to use all the tools available under the statutory scheme (e.g., other requirements that patents be novel, nonobvious, and fully and particularly described; that they not constitute abstract ideas, etc.) to prevent the system from getting wildly out of control."

7\. Thus, one can say that the Court basically upheld the status quo but with a few twists. I know this is profoundly anticlimactic and disappointing for those who were looking for a comprehensive answer to the problems raised by process patents, but I personally don't think the Court had a lot of choice in being bound ultimately to rule on what Congress meant when it enacted a broadly-worded statute (for a technical analysis of the statute, see my prior comment: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1350273>).

8\. Any more fundamental answer will lie with Congress. In that forum, the practical impediments will be large and that is perhaps why so many had hoped the Court could cut through all these without needing to deal with the vested interests who will seek to block reform at every turn.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've been working on product development and "customer development" recently, and this has emphasized for me the differences they have in perspective. The first (engineering) is about _features_ : how to implement something, what it needs, what would be the cleanest conceptual approach; the second (marketing) is about _benefits_ : what those features mean to someone, is it useful, what can it do, what extra features are needed just to make it work (eg. an editor isn't just about editing: you also need to be able to save your work, even though saving isn't editing).

There's a distinction in this case that strikes me as similar: software for its own sake is _abstract_ ; software that has a useful _application_ is not abstract. The question then becomes whether the patent as a whole is new and inventive. Just applying an abstract idea to a concrete problem isn't enough; the way it is applied has to be inventive.

In legal terms, I think this throws the burden of _patentability_ from "subject matter" to "novel and nonobvious" (Bilsky majority on Flook, emphasis added):

> unpatentable under §101, not because it contain[ed] a mathematical algorithm > as one component, but because once that algorithm [wa]s _assumed to be > within the prior art_ , the application, considered as a whole, contain[ed] > no patentable invention.

tl;dr _you can't patent software, only its doing of something useful_

 _EDIT_ btw, typo in title: s/Bilksi/Bilski/

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm now waiting for the HN grok of the Groklaw discussion of the Supreme Court opinion :P /me goes back to reading.

</comment><comment><USER5> Well I am disappointed but not surprised that SCOTUS didn't throw out software patents.

The patent system has been the foundation of the business processes in many industries. It's natural that a lot of powerful stakeholders expect this to continue into the information age. Despite this, when production in general is going towards information, patents are doomed to become more pathological and more a rent-seeking activity as information processing expands.

There is simply no _even slightly_ objective measure for determining whether X algorithm and Y distinct algorithm are "the same". The existence of such a measure is essentially a mathematical impossibility. _Among other challenge_ , a sameness measure would probably have to solve the halting problem (otherwise you substitute an algorithm with the same results for any given patented algorithm). More generally, any "sameness" criteria must really be based on a "close enough" measure and _closeness itself_ is a characteristic of the three dimensional metric space we humans live in. Closeness doesn't exist and can't meaningfully exist in an infinite dimensional space of abstract algorithms.

So "sameness" is going based entirely on subjective and arbitrary judgments of juries and judges, who naturally know little of the situation (indeed, ignorance is something of a necessary condition for having an honest opinion on the similarity of algorithms). Thus, software patents give any given patent holder of any algorithm an unlimited terrain to sue people on.</comment>


Facebook buys Instagram for $1B - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2012/04/09/facebook-buys-instagram/

<comment><USER2> Zuckerberg says they are keeping Instagram independent. Anyone buy that? And if so, for how long?

<comment><USER3> I imagine that the app will stay separate in the app store and be its own network, but that photos will also be pushed much harder to FB network and they will attempt to connect data about IG and FB users so they can sell ads against both.</comment></comment>


The National Parks: America s Best Idea - <AUTHOR> http://www.pbs.org/nationalparks/

<comment><USER2> This has been all over NPR, The Colbert Show, and The Daily Show, and other outlets I follow (it's amazing how precise these advertisers are).

I look forward to watching it, probably via Bit Torrent.

<comment><USER3> You can just watch it online via the website. Sometimes, there's just a simpler solution ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wonder what year the picture of the beach is from. I was at that beach in 2005 and It had a lot of sticks on it. There was also a warning sign.

      Beach: http://www.underdamped.net/Pictures/SecondBeach/SecondBeach.jpg
      (SecondBeach_Big.jpg for full size)
      Sign: http://www.underdamped.net/Pictures/SecondBeach/LogsKill.jpg

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> KQED (9) 10:00pm - 12:00am Pacific

The National Parks: America's Best Idea: Great Nature (1933-1945). The years 1933-45 are recalled. Included: the Civilian Conservation Corps are created during the Depression to undertake renovation projects...

</comment><comment><USER5> That looks amazing. I love the sale in the intro. "You own the most beautiful oceans, the most beautiful mountains" etc. A really interesting way to look at the national park system!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Pacific time today 12pm now, 4pm, 8pm, 10pm.

The sumptuously filmed history of America national parks begins in 1851...</comment>


You can increase your intelligence - <AUTHOR> http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=you-can-increase-your-intelligence-2011-03-07 <comment><USER3> I don't think people on HN need more intelligence. After 120 IQ points, it doesn't make much of a difference to winning a Nobel Prize. I think what people need here is an increase in their willpower to see boring stuff through to the end.

<comment> barry-cotter [http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2008/07/annals-of- psychometry-i...](http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2008/07/annals-of-psychometry- iqs-of-eminent.html)

[Review] Anne Roe: The Making of a Scientist

 _After 120 IQ points, it doesn't make much of a difference to winning a Nobel Prize._ Not true

Test (Low / Median / High) Verbal 121 / 166 / 177

Spatial 123 / 137 / 164

Mathematical 128 / 154 / 194

<comment><USER4> If you follow that link, you'll find that in the study referenced the researchers made up their own more or less ad hoc tests of "ability" precisely because "most IQ tests are not good indicators of true high level ability (e.g., beyond +3 SD or so)." It seems to me this study supports the idea that IQ is irrelevant to winning a Nobel Prized past a threshold instead of refuting it.

<comment> barry-cotter In the blogpost

"Roe devised her own high-end intelligence tests as follows: she obtained difficult problems in verbal, spatial and mathematical reasoning from the Educational Testing Service, which administers the SAT, but also performs bespoke testing research for, e.g., the US military. Using these problems, she created three tests (V, S and M), which were administered to the 64 scientists, and also to a cohort of PhD students at Columbia Teacher's College. The PhD students also took standard IQ tests and the results were used to norm the high-end VSM tests using an SD = 15. Most IQ tests are not good indicators of true high level ability (e.g., beyond +3 SD or so)."

Seems a decent try at it to me. But a better indicator that IQ is predictive of success is

[http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2009/01/horsepower-matters- psyc...](http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2009/01/horsepower-matters- psychometrics-works.html)

 _Can psychometrics separate the top .1 percent from the top 1 percent in ability? Yes: SAT-M quartile within top 1 percent predicts future scientific success, even when the testing is done at age 13._ The top quartile clearly outperforms the lower quartiles. These results strongly refute the "IQ above 120 doesn't matter" claim, at least in fields like science and engineering; everyone in this sample is above 120 and the top quartile are at the 1 in 10,000 level. The data comes from the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY), a planned 50-year longitudinal study of intellectual talent.

Ability Differences Among People Who Have Commensurate Degrees Matter for Scientific Creativity

[http://www.vanderbilt.edu/Peabody/SMPY/ParkPsychScience2008....](http://www.vanderbilt.edu/Peabody/SMPY/ParkPsychScience2008.pdf)

<comment><USER5> OK, so "Most IQ tests are not good at sorting out people above 120".

So yes, intelligence is important. But many tests are useless at quantifying it above a certain threshold.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The author juxtaposes his recommendations against his unnamed professor's claim that intelligence is genetic and fixed at birth, pointing out that there are broad classes of behaviors that can improve our intelligence -- but he neglects half of the response to his professor's genetic predestination view, namely the whole host of physical/chemical/biological factors impacting both brain development and cognition later in life.

As just an example, I was recently impressed by a study ([http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/270/1529/2147...](http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/270/1529/2147.full.pdf)) demonstrating improvements on both a memory task and an intelligence task through creatine supplements. The explanation suggested by the authors (and it looks like some other literature as well, though I haven't really dug into it yet) is basically that creatine is part of a mechanism for rapid ATP synthesis, that the ion pumps in your neurons run on ATP, and that if you're sometimes "fuel-limited" (their word) creatine levels matter, in the same way that oxygen and glucose do. This make sense, but I was quite surprised to read this, I think in part because I'm used to seeing my brain as being a relatively static thing. Stepping down a level of abstraction, and thinking about the instant to instant chemical resource needs of individual cells and gates is kind of eye-opening. And for all I know there's hundreds or thousands of other documented effects, where increasing or decreasing the presence of some reagent associated with running ion pumps, or growing axons or synthesizing neurotransmitters has some measurable effect on intelligence.

<comment><USER7> > As just an example, I was recently impressed by a study > (<http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/270/1529/2147...>) > demonstrating improvements on both a memory task and an intelligence task > through creatine supplements.

I would point out that Rae 2003 was conducted using _vegetarian_ subjects. When you run tests on normal subjects, no benefit is found. To quote what I've said the last few times creatine came up <http://www.gwern.net/Nootropics#creatine> :

> I'm not a bodybuilder, but my interest was sparked by several studies > showing IQ boosts (such as Rae 2003; however, Rae 2003 was only in > vegetarians, who are known to be creatine deficient (much like B vitamins, > creatine is usually gotten in one's diet from meat), and the other studies > are likewise of subpopulations. Rawson 2008 studied young omnivores who are > not stupid or sleep-deprived, and found no mental benefit. The summary of > the DNB ML discussion was that Rawson 2008 is a broad null result for > healthy young omnivores who aren't idiots. Vegetarians, idiots, the sleep- > deprived, and old people may benefit from creatine supplementation.

<comment><USER6> Thanks for pointing that out, and linking to those notes. As it happens, I'm vegetarian and often sleep deprived, so I still might try the creatine thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> <http://sourceforge.net/projects/brainworkshop/> is an open-source implementation of the dual n-back test for Windows, Linux, and OS-X.

"Following training of working memory using the dual n-back test, the subjects were indeed able to transfer those gains to a significant improvement in their score on a completely unrelated cognitive task. This was a super-big deal."

<comment><USER9> FYI, this game crashed on me at launch (W2K8 R2). Setting the exe to run under WinXP compat mode made it work.

It's also devilishly hard. Dual 1-back is easy, but Dual 2-back is surprisingly difficult. I think it'd be fun to get good at this :).

<comment><USER10> I usually play it at d9b with 2,5 sec intervals. I intend to advance higher though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> '#4 Do Things The Hard Way'

I think this is so important for our young generation b/c everybody is trying to "hack" or "game" the system. The problem is that you don't actually internalize things by hacking your way through

So it depends on your goals. Let's take a computer science degree for example: if your goal is to do investment banking and having a CS/engineering degree from a top university really puts you apart from all those econ/business majors in the finance interviews (which it does), sure hack your way through CS/EE: you're not planning to go into that field anyways so copy-change homework and study past tests to hack the system and get a good GPA. But if you're doing CS to be a software engineer, you DON'T want to hack your way through, you'd want to "do things the hard way" and really learn the material.

<comment><USER12> I think your definition of "hack" is confusing with respect to this forum. Hackers are people who understand the system so well that they can manipulate it to their advantage. Good hackers have done things the hard way and use those experiences to make things easy in the future.

<comment><USER13> I'm no authority but I'm gonna have to disagree. Hackers as understood on this forum are people who find the shortest path to an intended outcome. This usually takes a novel way of looking at the system. But it by no means requires a complete understanding of it. Hacking requires a clever insight that allows you to quickly accomplish your goal. Total understanding is usually too time consuming for the hacker.

<comment><USER12> To clarify, my definition of hacking is inspired by this <http://stallman.org/articles/on-hacking.html>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The bullet point version extracted from the 4,474 words:

1\. Seek Novelty

2\. Challenge Yourself

3\. Think Creatively

4\. Do Things The Hard Way

5\. Network

<comment><USER15> Perhaps in meeting point 4, we should skip your summary?

<comment><USER16> Yeah, the TL;DR thing really grates on my nerves. Are we so miswired now that we can't take the time out to read 4,500 well-written words on a subject, and instead need it condensed to a list appropriate for Twitter? Is there really no other value in the entire essay other than the list items themselves?

<comment><USER17> Go read _How to Read a Book_. The second level of reading is about skimming, picking up the general point of something, then deciding if it's _worth_ a careful, analytical (and perhaps synoptic) reading. I don't think this article deserves it, so I didn't give it the full time to read everything, and since I've read other stuff in this area before, I think the bullet points really do sum it up.

<comment><USER18> The article focuses on the motivations behind these advices and how to apply them in practice. A big part of thevalue of the article comes from this and your bullet list fails to account for that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I take exception to the 'Think Creatively' item. It's kind of like making a to-do list with 'lose 20 lbs' as a line item. Much easier said than done.

That being said, I think one of the best ways to improve your creative thinking is to work directly with other people that YOU consider to be creative thinkers. At my previous job I always enjoyed working with the CEO, sales, and marketing folks because they almost always approached problems from a completely different angle than I would. Experiencing how others ideate is very mind opening and often times humbling.

</comment><comment><USER20> #4) Do things the hard way. It's hard for me to agree with this. In principle, I want to bemoan the decline of my ability to spell as a result of auto- correct. But I think that casts an unfair negative light on the idea of doing things "the easy way".

Think about math. There is no question that the Arabic numbering system makes doing math easier. Why should I to go back to scratching out base-60 cuneiform? I can challenge myself just as easily by pushing on to more powerful and abstract mathematical concepts made possible by timesavers like the Arabic numbering system.

I'm sure that having access to high-level languages limits my understanding of the bits and bytes. But I can use these new tools of abstraction to do things that I would have found impossible if I were writing machine code. I'm not sure I see the value in doing things the hard way, when my brain will be challenged enough probing the depths of what these new innovations have made possible. I think the author misses one crucial part of intelligence - intelligence, insofar as it is about abstract thought, is positively correlated with the sorts of things I can do without thinking about them.

<comment><USER21> "Any fool can make things bigger and more complex. But it takes a genius to move in the opposite direction." - <USER2>

Solving things in the easiest way, is often the hardest challenge there is.

<comment><USER22> Simple and easy are not the same thing. Please stop being lazy and bother to learn the words you are using. It is simple to do, just read the dictionary. This really isn't easy tho, you have to cross reference other words, take time to do so, bother to remember, and so on - lots of effort.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> You can increase your measurable intelligence. This is only true to the degree that intelligence tests measure what they're supposed to.

<comment><USER24> I've suspected this for a long long time - when I was a young kid (around 5 years old) my oldest sister was at university studying psychology with an emphasis on child development - so for years I got bombarded with "intelligence" tests to the point where I could do them very easily and I used to get extremely high results in IQ tests in my teens. However, I've _never_ thought I was particularly brighter than anyone else, just that I had done a lot of these silly tests and had acquired the skill of doing them.

<comment><USER25> But by doing that you also acquired a skill to spot patterns and connections: I'd argue, that this ability is important part of intelligence.

<comment><USER24> I've thought about this quite a bit (I was motivated by those experiences to go into AI research - which I did for six years) and I'm not convinced that the kinds of problems used in the tests I did map too well to "real world" problems - in essence all of the difficulties have already been abstracted away. Of course, I have no evidence for this but the fact that the logical/symbolic approaches to AI failed to live up to their early promise more or less supports my views.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The author raises a number of interesting questions after citing several path- breaking research studies. Why, indeed, aren't school systems adopting some of these techniques known to improve children's learning and problem-solving ability? Quite a few mathematicians have written critiques of United States practice in teaching primary and secondary school mathematics, informed by practice in other countries, for example Hung-hsi Wu,

<http://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/Lisbon2010_2.pdf>

<http://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/Lisbon2010_3.pdf>

<http://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/Lisbon2010_4.pdf>

<http://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/NoticesAMS2011.pdf>

Richard Askey,

<http://www.aft.org/pdfs/americaneducator/fall1999/amed1.pdf>

<http://www.math.wisc.edu/~askey/ask-gian.pdf>

Roger E. Howe,

<http://www.ams.org/notices/199908/rev-howe.pdf>

Patricia Kenschaft,

<http://www.ams.org/notices/200502/fea-kenschaft.pdf>

and

James Milgram.

ftp://math.stanford.edu/pub/papers/milgram/milgram-msri.pdf

ftp://math.stanford.edu/pub/papers/milgram/report-on-cmp.html

All those mathematicians think that the United States could do much better than it does in teaching elementary mathematics in the public school system. I think so too after living in Taiwan twice in my adult life (January 1982 through February 1985, and December 1998 through July 2001). Taiwan is not the only place where elementary mathematics instruction is better than it is in the United States. Chapter 1: "International Student Achievement in Mathematics" from the TIMSS 2007 study of mathematics achievement in many different countries includes, in Exhibit 1.1 (pages 34 and 35)

<http://pirls.bc.edu/timss2007/PDF/T07_M_IR_Chapter1.pdf>

a chart of mathematics achievement levels in various countries. Although the United States is above the international average score among the countries surveyed, as we would expect from the level of economic development in the United States, the United States is well below the top country listed, which is Singapore. An average United States student is at the bottom quartile level for Singapore, or from another point of view, a top quartile student in the United States is only at the level of an average student in Singapore. I've been curious about mathematics education in Singapore ever since I heard of these results from an earlier TIMSS sample in the 1990s.

The article "The Singaporean Mathematics Curriculum: Connections to TIMSS"

<http://www.merga.net.au/documents/RP182006.pdf>

by a Singaporean author explains some of the background to the Singapore math materials and how they approach topics that are foundational for later mathematics study. I am amazed that persons from Singapore in my generation (born in the late 1950s) grew up in a country that was extremely poor (it's hard to remember that about Singapore, but until the 1970s Singapore was definitely part of the Third World) and were educated in a foreign language (the language of schooling in Singapore has long been English, but the home languages of most Singaporeans are south Chinese languages like my wife's native Hokkien or Malay or Indian languages like Tamil) and yet received very thorough instruction in mathematics. I hope that all of us here in the United States can do at least that well in the current generation.

P.S. Another reply mentions the Flynn effect (secular increase in raw scores on IQ tests from generation to generation in most countries worldwide), and links to the Wikipedia article. Thanks for bringing that up. Being aware that the Wikipedia article on that subject has been subject to edit wars that have gone to the Wikipedia Arbitration Committee,

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Race_and_intelligence)

I think it may be helpful to link to another source about the Flynn effect

<http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/flynn-beyond/>

that has had the influence of better informed and more impartial editors. There are several good discussions of the Flynn effect in recent books on IQ testing, and citations to those can be found in Wikipedia user space.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/Intellige...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/IntelligenceCitations)

<comment><USER27> Personally, I don't think the situation is nearly as gloomy in the US as a lot of my fellows seem to. It's a characteristic of nation citizens to be over hard on certain aspects of their community.

As a matter of fact, if the US school system is partly or significantly responsible for the productivity and creativity of adult residents, I'm pretty satisfied with it on the whole. I'm not sure studying to tests produces the best outcomes. I'm more interested in novel problem solving, invention, and innovation, and typical international standardized tests don't suss that out especially well, do they?

Moreover, it's hard to know what to infer when comparing a giant, multicultural country with a small, much more homogeneous one such as Singapore. It makes sense that some small countries might outperform the US at testing in the same way that you expect some small countries to have a higher per capita gdp. Unless I miss my guess, we could cherry pick some communities in the US that do better on either than Singapore.

This article about US test scores, after adjusting for demographics, was discussed on HN before, although I can't find the link just now:

[http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth- abou...](http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-about-pisa- scores-usa.html)

It's extremely interesting, and I haven't seen anything that impeaches it.

That's not to say that I think the US school system does not have huge room for improvement. That's clear, and I'm hopeful that continued technological development and research will provide amazing breakthroughs. Moreover, we're not even using some of the best methods that are already available; research suggests the Montessorri method is advantageous, and indeed my own son was trained at one, and we were much happier with the result in comparison to his time at a public elementary school.

But it's not necessary to down talk where we're at to motivate improvement. What I _don't_ want to see is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. US schools get some things right. Students come out believing they can do anything. They're not afraid to try new approaches. I'd rather not end up with test taking automatons who are mainly expert at memorization and thoughtless skills drills.

<comment><USER16> Just a couple of quibbles:

> _But it's not necessary to down talk where we're at to motivate > improvement._

It is necessary if the general perception of where we're at is much better than where we're actually at. I think the U.S. still has a very strong cultural air of superiority which perhaps is no longer justified (if it ever was). The first step to solving a problem is to realize that it exists, and the U.S. educational system is only recently coming under scrutiny because of repeated criticisms of it.

> _Students come out believing they can do anything._

I'm uncertain about this -- both whether it's true, and whether it's beneficial if true.

> _They're not afraid to try new approaches._

Actually, there's a growing murmur of dissent that, at least in the special case of "gifted" children, the constant praise of their intelligence leads to a fear of failure which, in turn, leads to a fear of trying things which others might try without hesitation.

<comment><USER28> >Actually, there's a growing murmur of dissent that, at least in the special case of "gifted" children, the constant praise of their intelligence leads to a fear of failure which, in turn, leads to a fear of trying things which others might try without hesitation.

Citation needed. Speaking as a giftie myself, and someone who has many friends who went through various gifted programs, this is not my impression.

<comment><USER16> <http://nymag.com/news/features/27840/>

Googling for "praise effort not intelligence" will turn up a bunch more references, but most of them (at a glance) are referencing the same work by the same individual(s) (Dweck, et al). I didn't have this saved in my pinboard, so I had to go find it again.

I have to snark a little about a giftie not investigating this for themselves. (snark snark snark) :-)

<comment><USER28> > I have to snark a little about a giftie not investigating this for > themselves. (snark snark snark) :-)

Hah. well, you are the one talking about effort being more important than intelligence. I, on the other hand, have always been lazy. I was in the program through ability alone.[1]

I mean, clearly effort matters. But ability matters, too. Otherwise I'd be working at the 7-11 like my parents said I would if I didn't go to college.[2] Of course, if you can't do anything about innate ability and you can do something about effort, "praise effort not ability" makes sense, as you should try to improve the thing that can be improved, right?

On the other hand, I think effort has limitations, too. As a kid, I was pulled out of the "gifted" class one hour a day to work in the "special ed" room. Handwriting. My stepmother made me spend probably five hours a week practicing my handwriting at home on top of that. To this day I can't write a legible sentence.

I think key is to put effort in to areas where that effort makes a difference. Consume all the low hanging fruit before you start scaling a sequoia looking for pine nuts.

[1] the ability to do well on standardized tests, that is. I've never had to learn to work a cash register, so it's gotta correlate to something useful, but I'm first to say that I'm really not all that bright.

[2] Actually, considering my schedule variance, I wonder if I could hold down a job where the primary performance metric was "did the guy show up on time?"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> You can play dual n-back here: <http://cognitivefun.net/test/5>

<comment><USER30> There is also a very good app for android, called n-back if I recall correctly. Very handy to kill time during the daily commute!

<comment><USER31> Hey Joel, try out mine too ;) [https://market.android.com/details?id=phuc.entertainment.dua...](https://market.android.com/details?id=phuc.entertainment.dualnback)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Anyone interested in this might also be interested in the broader Flynn effect: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect>

I've always believed that additional/new stimulations is largely responsible for our increased intelligence.

<comment><USER33> Flynn recently found the opposite effect among British teens:

[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/4548943/B...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/4548943/British- teenagers-have-lower-IQs-than-their-counterparts-did-30-years-ago.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Excellent post. It's made me realise how much I have been taking the easy road lately.

I used to always be looking into new areas to learn about new things and really pushing myself, but I realise now that lately to solve a problem I reach for a familiar way to solve it, because it's easier and faster. This could be the reason why I am getting less satisfaction with solving problems lately.

Time to get back on that horse...

</comment><comment><USER35> Excellent article and here is a link to an open source Dual N-Back game, have fun. <http://brainworkshop.sourceforge.net/>

<comment><USER36> "Join the Dual N-Back, Brain Training & Intelligence forum & mailing list at Google Groups for some interesting discussions on dual n-back, memory, intelligence and the brain"

<http://groups.google.com/group/brain-training>

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> 'I know what the statistics say - but gosh darn, I have an anecdote to the contrary!'

OP spends a lot of time & space on Jaeggi 2008... and she quietly omits all of the _other_ results and considerations: <http://www.gwern.net/N-back%20FAQ#criticism>

</comment><comment><USER37> From what I saw, society reserves creativity to artists, writers, composers, and other "creative types". For some reason creativity has become associated with creating useless inventions that no one will ever buy; sometimes people see creative person as a loner who spends days and nights on drugs throwing paint around or mumbling crazily.

In reality, creativity is, perhaps, our only advantage when trying to not get killed by other animals. Picking up a stick and fighting off a larger animal -- great example of creative solution. It's novel.

Before, no one ever thought to pick up a stick. Perhaps sticks were viewed as merely lying there, to be carefully avoided in case somebody steps on one. Maybe those who tried to pick up sticks were viewed as crazy, sinful by some sort of primitive Republicans (not that Republicans now are more evolved :)... I mean, who cares about sticks, animals were usually fighting with their own teeth, hands, or horns (I wish I had a horn).

It's not until an animal with a stick has beaten the shit out of another animal without a stick for calling him crazy, that the sticks became a useful tool.

I mean, face it -- we're just animals, and without creative approaches to our problems we wouldn't be talking about this on a giant electronic mind-network- thing.

</comment><comment><USER38> I really enjoyed this article. I wish she had given specific tips on how to think more creatively. She mentioned what happens "when" you think creatively, but did not really go into the "how."

<comment><USER39> Try to fit math ideas.

What does zero mean? what does one mean? does addition make sense? can you take the limit of something? What if something blows up to infinity?

So... try cars. zero being no car. one being a "standard" car. say a honda civic. how much honda can you take a way and still be a car? like taking the limit at zero. There are crazy efficient cars with tiny little internal combustion engines and bicycle wheels that get 100+ mpg but piss poor acceleration. hmm. what would a car be at the other end? a ferrari? Do cars associate? do cars commute? :)

Creativity isn't painting. It's looking at the same crap you look at all the time and playing with it. Math has a lot of tricks for labeling things, then seeing what shows up when you try do stuff with the labels. New dimensions will pop out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> The key study cited by the article is available in full as a PDF.

Jaeggi, Buschkuehl, Jonides, and Perrig (2008), Improving Fluid Intelligence with Training on Working Memory: [http://lowellinstitute.com/downloads/BrainLearning/Fluid%20I...](http://lowellinstitute.com/downloads/BrainLearning/Fluid%20Intelligence.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER41> "So to make the most of your intelligence, improving your working memory will help this significantly"

This reminds me of how RAM is underestimated in improving computer performance.

<comment><USER42> Excellent analogy

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> The subtitle for this piece is '5 ways to maximize your cognitive potential'.

Shouldn't that be -realize- your cognitive potential, or maximize the utilization of your cognitive potential or some such? What good does it do to maximize my potential?

</comment><comment><USER44> PDD-NOS – Pervasive Development Disorder Not Otherwise Specified, is not necessarily a mild form of autism. The meaning is in the name. It means that the diagnosed doesn't fit more specific diagnoses such as Kanner's autism or Asperger syndrome.

Even though someone who's autistic fail to show intelligence through a test, I believe they still may be very intelligent and can show this better through training.

I personally still believe reasoning skills can be trained by learning new heuristics at least.

</comment><comment><USER45> My addition (6): observe others, be inquisitive about other people. This will not only help you appear smarter to others (believe it or not, there is such thing as behaving/appearing smart), but will also help you with networking because (a) people respond positively when someone displays genuine interest in them (well as long as you are being nonthreatening) and (b) smart people tend to seek out others like them.

</comment><comment><USER46> Dual N-Back test: <http://www.soakyourhead.com/>

</comment><comment><USER36> "Brain fog - poor memory, difficulty thinking clearly etc"

[http://www.drmyhill.co.uk/wiki/Brain_fog_- _poor_memory,_diff...](http://www.drmyhill.co.uk/wiki/Brain_fog_- _poor_memory,_difficulty_thinking_clearly_etc)

</comment><comment><USER47> Haven't read the entire article yet, but(this is off topic), highlighting any word on the website shows a "Learn More" tooltip which automatically loads more info for the highlighted text. Awesome.

<comment><USER48> Wow. I'd never have discovered that if I hadn't read your comment, so thanks. I'm not sure how useful it would be in general but for an article like this quickly looking up terms seemed pretty neat (e.g fluid intelligence).

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> I always slack when it comes to number 5 (networking). I'm always busy with something "more important" and kinda have to force myself to get out and meet people.</comment>