Who does that server really serve? (2010) - <AUTHOR> https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-serve.en.html <comment><USER2> My problem with this article is that it is far too one sided to be a tenable argument.

It is the software equivalent of arguing that taxation is theft, without acknowledging the things government works toward (infrastructure, business development, education, healthcare, national security). Note: Before the replies flood in, I understand everyone has problems with their government. The point is that you are still receiving benefits from government investment, regardless of how good those benefits are.

I don't think anyone uses a SaaS platform without realizing that they are taking the role of customer. I am paying someone else to give me a platform that translates text so I don't have to put in the effort to set up one myself. What seems to be perpetually missing from the FOSS philosophy, especially among people who love tinkering with Linux (note: I am one of them), is a valuation of time.

I don't care about free software if it takes me hours or weeks to set up. I will gladly pay someone else who has put in the time to develop a first-class platform so that I can go home earlier or spend my time working on something else. I have the power to make more money to cover my SaaS expenses later on; nobody has the power to generate more time that they can spend doing things that make them happy.

<comment><USER3> > I don't care about free software if it takes me hours or weeks to set up.

That's because you've made a personal choice that free software is not important to you.

Many people take public transport even though it takes them longer because they believe that, say, driving a car is bad.

Not everyone feels that way. It's not an important issue to them.

In that sense the argument revolves primarily about how much priority you assign to a particular belief (e.g. belief in free software, belief in environmentalism, etc).

Before you think I'm going on some sort of holier-than-thou rant - there's no directionality to this.

It's a fairly general thing. If you believe heavily in X then you'll make sacrifices in order to achieve X, even if that results in costs in other areas.

Presumably you have some goal that you think is more important than these other issues. That's the thing that has your priority - you want to spend time doing that, because you care about it more.

<comment><USER2> My point isn't that the people who care about free software are misdirected. My point is that they don't focus enough on making the free software experience painless.

Take, for example, F-Droid, the free software package manager for Android. In my opinion it is free software done right. Easy to install, easy to manage, easy to publish. At no point do you have to pop a shell and interact with a dozen low level bash executables or edit deeply nested configuration files (each written in their own markup language of choice) to Get Things Done.

> If you believe heavily in X then you'll make sacrifices in order to achieve > X, even if that results in costs in other areas.

My response is that believers in X who want to make a difference will put in the effort to reduce the sacrifices others have to make to join X. As another example, consider the roles the Toyota Prius and then later the Tesla Model S/3/X played in mainstreaming the idea of owning an electric car. It wasn't that long ago that hybrid-electric cars were relegated to small columns in PopSci rather than the front page of MotorTrend. In the next few years we will see a similar transformation with vegetarianism/veganism with Beyond Meat and Impossible Burger - as soon as it costs less to make meat in a lab than it does to grow and care for livestock, you bet everyone is going to leave the cows alone. Not just for morality (although the moral argument is a powerful one), but because the alternative is simply better in every way.

If you want to be the truly superior solution, and you want people to believe in your cause, you can't expect them to make sacrifices.

<comment><USER3> There's a lot to unpick here. I'll write a brief response for now.

Ultimately I think there are two parts. You have to realise that free software advocates aren't unlimited in their power. The commercial world is far larger (likely due to feedback effects from, well, money). So there's effectively a race there that free software advocates will find it difficult to win.

Having said that, the world is literally built on this stuff. User facing software is the final, difficult, frontier, because marketing costs money, user studies cost money, AB testing costs money, and telemetry and stuff like that allow commercial entities to gain market share using practices that are incompatible with the free software ethos.

> you can't expect them to make sacrifices.

I very much do expect people to make sacrifices and I think that people who aren't willing to sacrifice for the greater good (unrelated to free software; I'm talking in the general sense here) are either misguided or outright malicious.

As a strawman example: "we" shouldn't need to create an electric pickup truck in order for people to stop driving 10mpg guzzlers around cities for ego reasons. We should probably just tax the hell out of it instead and require them to "sacrifice".

Because ultimately there won't always be a magical solution. I own a Tesla and I think they're great. But if society decided - actually we should probably not like, build roads all over the countryside and disrupt habitats - I'd be fairly happy to give it up. And that would be a sacrifice, but it would make sense to do so, because it's a personal sacrifice for a greater good.

<comment><USER2> I understand that good software costs money. All of the "evil" things listed in this article such as DRM or the SaaS business model all originated from unique attempts to make money and pay developers for their work (among other things, obviously all of this stuff also enriches shareholders and other people who don't directly contribute to the product). You can't have your free cake and afford to eat it too, per say.

There is not really a solution to this dilemma other than overthrowing capitalism entirely (which I believe will happen eventually with the rise of automation), but that might be too drastic of a change at this point in time.

>I very much do expect people to make sacrifices and I think that people who aren't willing to sacrifice for the greater good...are either misguided or outright malicious

Hey, I can agree with you here!

>"we" shouldn't need to create an electric pickup truck in order for people to stop driving 10mpg guzzlers around cities for ego reasons. We should probably just tax the hell out of it instead and require them to "sacrifice".

Agreed that we should tax them, however...this example ignores that quite a lot of people who drive pickups actually _use_ them for their job. For example, small business owners such as plumbers or electricians benefit greatly from driving pickups that can carry their tools rather than tiny sedans or awkward SUVs.

This type of insight is also missing from other morally guided arguments such as removing all cars from cities to promote walking and biking. What do you do about snow plowing, service vehicles, delivery vehicles, etc. that modern consumers expect to cater to them directly to their households?

Making an electric pick up truck is a far better solution than taxing ICE pickups (although, again, I think that would help) because it benefits everyone without also penalizing the people who truly do need a pickup or something that can perform the role of a pickup.

In a similar way, making better free software to take market share from paid SaaS software is better than deriding SaaS companies as immoral for stepping in to make life easier for their customers. They exist for a reason and they could not survive if enough people didn't find them valuable.

> if society decided - actually we should probably not like, build roads all > over the countryside and disrupt habitats - I'd be fairly happy to give it > up

Well, this depends on quite a lot of factors you're leaving out. How do you leave your house without a car? How do you visit friends or family, how do you go to restaurants or grocery stores? How do you get to work if you don't work from home?

If your answer is better public transport, then that's not really a sacrifice you are making because there is an equivalent alternative that still does what you want but without the parts you perceive as bad or wrong. Sure you gave up your Tesla, but you'd only do that if you knew there was some other way to get around. I think if your alternative was literally walking or biking everywhere, I"m not sure if you'd be so excited.

<comment><USER3> > In a similar way, making better free software to take market share from paid > SaaS software is better than deriding SaaS companies as immoral for stepping > in to make life easier for their customers.

We can do both.

> Well, this depends on quite a lot of factors you're leaving out. How do you > leave your house without a car?

The point is that if everyone does something in lockstep, e.g. via taxation or simply an agreement, then these solutions gain pressure to arise.

So again, we can do both. If ICE cars were taxed more heavily then a ton of investment naturally flows into alternative fuels, bus services, etc because suddenly there's an enormous competitive advantage.

<comment><USER2> FOSS already has the largest competitive advantage - it is literally free and accessible to anyone who has access to a computer.

That paid solutions still manage to trump many FOSS programs tells me that people value their time more than their money, and FOSS developers ought to work to develop software that takes a lot less time to do things with.

<comment><USER3> By free software, we mean libre software, not free as in beer. None of my comments have in any way related to the cost of using said software.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think this is from his essay collection "Free Software, Free Society." Its a great read, I wish he'd written a sequel to go into more depth on some of the topics... maybe now he'll have time to do some more writing?

</comment><comment><USER5> > The basic point is, you can have control over a program someone else wrote > (if it's free), but you can never have control over a service someone else > runs, so never use a service where in principle a program would do.

If I'm reading this correctly, Richard is simply saying that SaaS(S) takes away your freedom to compute and manipulate software/data if there's a (free) program that can be run on your local computing environment.

I've never really thought of using SaaS as someone else taking away my freedom.

I understand the concept of lock-in and the possibilities that should I no longer pay the vendor then the software stops being available to me (but my data is still mine), but I don't feel my freedom is being taken away.

And isn't Richard's argument the equivalent of saying that the banking system is taking away your freedom to spend your money because you COULD setup a safe at home and store all your money in it? Some problems are hard to solve and paying someone else a nominal fee to use their platform, which solves that hard problem, isn't taking away your freedom.

> A user of the server would send her data to the server, which does her own > computing on the data thus provided, then sends the results back to her or > acts directly on her behalf.

Case and point: what happens when the user in this scenario is using a MacBook Air but wants to compute a large sum of data using a complex, time consuming algorithm? Go out and buy a cluster of systems to maintain software freedom, or pay AWS for some services (they likely offer), SaaSS if you like, to do it for you in 10 minutes for $0.45?

If anything such services are giving you more time and money, and therefore freedom.

EDIT: added in example of a hard problem

<comment><USER6> I think you missed the point.

For example, any SaaS can have a feature and decide to remove it, for whatever reason, and that results in a loss of freedom to you. For a concrete example, let's say that Github suddenly wants to add ads to their platform and because some people read and write issue posts with email, they decide to remove that feature so they'll be pushed to use the web interface and see the ads. That wouldn't be possible if the platform wasn't a SaaS.

Just being forced to see ads is a loss of freedom. Software should only serve the user, not do stuff like impose ads on them. Nobody is arguing against paying the software developers, just against not being in control of the software.

> Case and point: what happens when the user in this scenario is using a > MacBook Air but wants to compute a large sum of data using a complex, time > consuming algorithm? Go out and buy a cluster of systems to maintain > software freedom, or pay AWS for some services (they likely offer), SaaSS if > you like, to do it for you in 10 minutes for $0.45?

I don't think the argument is against the use of VPSes, but rather against the running of code you can't inspect/modify/control, in the case of SaaS because the code is not running on a machine you control. I imagine that RMS isn't against the use of VPSes where you have control of the code running. So, yeah, rent that AWS VPS, nobody is arguing against it. And if you can self-host a SaaS program (well it might not count as SaaS anymore) on a VPS you're renting, then there's no problem with that either, as long as you have control of the code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> "If you rent a server (real or virtual), whose software load you have control over, that's not SaaSS. In SaaSS, someone else decides what software runs on the server and therefore controls the computing it does for you. In the case where you install the software on the server, you control what computing it does for you. Thus, the rented server is virtually your computer. For this issue, it counts as yours."

I'm most curious about applying this distinction to the computing environment today. According to the author it seems Amazon EC2 wouldn't be considered a SaaSS, but Amazon Serverless would? After all you don't control the software loaded in a "serverless" environment, only the business logic. Yet both are hosted in and maintained by Amazon. Amazon, for all intents and purposes, has access to the data coming in and out of there in both cases. So does the distinction hold true, and if it does does it not damage the value of making such a distinction?

</comment><comment><USER8> Interesting take on the entire thing (though from 2010). I think things have changed a bit regarding the possibilities of hosting on not-your-computer.

I still agree with the premise that if you want control over something you use you should have it on your own computer, if you care less about that then a service is fine. I won't cross into dictating what others can do with my software or in the case of this article how they should buy their software.

</comment><comment><USER9> Something weird about Stallman is that he has a special FOSS exemption for his microwave software, because it's an "appliance", not a "general purpose computer", but he doesn't grant the same exemption to cloud computing and web apps for some reason.

</comment><comment><USER10> I suppose these articles aren't timestamped on purpose, but that is really annoying.

<comment><USER11> From the bottom of the page:

 _Copyright © 2010, 2013, 2015, 2016, 2018 Richard Stallman_

 _Updated: $Date: 2018 /12/15 14:02:39 $_

<comment><USER10> Interesting... one does not expect the timestamp to be there!

<comment><USER12> I think that's an old CVS/SVN trick that didn't come forward into git.

There's a token pattern you can put into files that gets updated at commit time.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Hit-and-run during an Uber ride - <AUTHOR> Hey HN,
I was involved in a hit-and-run while in Uber on May 19th. My driver ignored my request to take the highway and went onto a local street, where it wasn't the best part of town. He was driving pretty slow, at around 30mph, when another car drove out of a ground level public parking lot at a very high speed and hit my ride on the front right corner. The car that hit us backed out and drove away before I even realized what happened. My ride's bumper fell out and it was smoking a lot, and I had hit the right side of my body pretty hard on the door and the left side of my face on the back of the front seat (I was sitting in the back on the right side). It was raining and I was shaking a lot and really didn't want to stand on the street where there were a lot of drunk people yelling at us, so I grabbed another Uber and left the scene.
I did report the accident to Uber right away on the app, took photos and videos of it, and thought they were going to contact me. They have only responded on the app saying their insurance would contact me in 2-3 business days but it's been a week and I haven't heard from them. I got bruises, external and internal, as well as a minor concussion. It's been hurting more but I currently don't have an insurance (life of an early stage startup founder...) and haven't gotten it checked yet.
What are the best next steps?
Thanks! <comment><USER2> If you've been injured, call an accident (tort) lawyer. Uber will respond to a legal inquiry much more quickly and seriously than to a customer service inquiry.

Most tort lawyers work on contingency, so you usually won't have to pay anything up front, though they will demand 30-50% of any payout you receive.

</comment><comment><USER3> Get an attorney. There are plenty who specialize in auto injuries. As _otterley_ said, many injury lawyers work on contingency. Furthermore, many will help you get medical attention while you're waiting for Uber to cough up money to pay your bills.

One of my taxi passengers was going to a Chiropractor. She'd lost her car in a car wreck caused by the other driver. The chiropractor paid her taxi fare, and billed the passenger's attorney for this and their fee. The passenger was previously not a Chiropractic fan, but the urgent care she'd gone to first basically ripped her off by charging lots of money for anti-inflammatory medication (which didn't help at all). She was feeling much better with regular treatments from her new Chiropractor.

(I personally have been to lots of Chiropractors. Some were pretty good, some were mediocre. Eventually I found some manual therapy systems that are more gentle and reliable. As one of the doctors I'd visited said, "all some people need is any kind of touch, which is why they love their massage therapist...")

(I bet Uber's founders were so annoyed when they realized they had to _hire people_ to provide customer service. The transportation company I used to drive for has always had people to take complaints, and to deal with problems.)

<comment><USER4> Contact Morgan & Morgan. This is their specialty. Let me know if you want more info.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> If your body is still hurting after one week, well, go see a doctor. I can imagine everybody you told the story so far said the same.

Also get health insurance. Not the answer you're looking for but in the US medical costs can ruin your life.

<comment><USER6> how would he know if he had a concussion and internal bruising if he hadn't been to a doctor?

<comment><USER7> If your car gets hit in the side and you knock yourself out on the back of a seat, figuring out you've got a concussion doesn't require expert problem solving skills.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > It's been hurting more but I currently don't have an insurance (life of an > early stage startup founder...)

European here. I thought "Obamacare" was supposed to prevent this?

Otherwise, it seems crazy for anyone to take the risk of founding a startup, and not being able to afford insurance.

(I know people that avoid going to the doctor when they should, me included sometimes, but it's nothing to do with money.)

<comment><USER9> It's not socialized medicine. Technically it made it possible to get insurance subsidized (or fully funded) if you cannot afford it, prevented insurers from pricing with anything but age/gender/tobacco/location, and dings you with small tax penalties if you don't buy it (on the assumption that everyone will eventually then buy insurance and the net cost to society will go down).

Honestly, probably a better long term solution than socialized medicine, but it still allows individuals the freedom to screw up and not buy insurance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Go see a doctor, you not having insurance won't affect them seeing you or billing the auto insurance for your care. Also, depending on what state you are in, remember some states limit the amount of time you have to make a claim. In my state it is 14 days, after which you forfeit your right to make a medical or injury claim. There are probably some ways around it, but why mess with it. Even if nothing comes of this all and you just need some time to heal, at least you have protected your rights in case there is something more serious that is found later.

Other option, go to a personal injury attorney (I know but they do exist for a reason). A reputable PI Attorney will help you protect yourself, get seen by a physician faster if you need help there, and will file all the paperwork etc for you. They get paid by going after the insurance, so just expect that, and they will get a response, not the brush off.

</comment><comment><USER11> I got into a minor car accident (as a passenger) on an Uber ride in Seattle a few months ago. No injuries, just a bit jarring for me and an utterly destroyed bumper for the driver.

Someone from Uber called by phone the next day and were very willing to discuss coverage for any injuries. They asked me to confirm multiple times that I wasn't injured before ending the call.

Not trying to be a shill: I assumed I'd never hear from Uber unless I went after them with a celebrity twitter account or an army of lawyers.

Hopefully it's just an oversight that your incident has fallen through the cracks and you can get ahold of someone soon. I just wanted to point out that there _should_ be human beings reviewing any reports, at least as of a couple months ago.

</comment><comment><USER12> I'd try the uber facebook page. They usually respond within the hour. [https://www.facebook.com/uber/?fref=ts](https://www.facebook.com/uber/?fref=ts)

</comment><comment><USER13> Report the accident directly to the James River Insurance Company rather than going through Uber. You'll have better response going directly to the insurer.

</comment><comment><USER14> When riding a taxi, is it normal to expect that the taxi operator covers health costs for any accidents not caused by their driver?

<comment><USER7> One of the reasons for insurance is that most people do not have the funds to immediately take care of the costs that accidents cause.

If someone crashes into your car, you usually call your own insurance and they pay for your expenses so you can carry on with life. Then they get the money from whoever was responsible. Usually some combination of the other party and their insurance.

With taxis, it works similarly. The operator is supposed to be insured and their insurance will float the cash.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> When I see stories like this trending on Reddit, Twitter, or Hacker news, am I too paranoid in thinking that just maybe some of them are marketing plays meant to manipulate the reader into siding with one company or the other? It would be so easy for them to do this.

<comment><USER16> While that is a possibility, I do appreciate the discussion and advice goven, should I ever find myself in a similar situation.</comment></comment>


Show HN: A simple url shortener written in Node - <AUTHOR> http://www.github.com/danieltreacy/naurls Was bored at work so I threw this together. First bash at a Node app. Built a simple Chrome extension for it too. <comment><USER2> I realize criticism is cheap, and I like seeing small projects like this to explore other people's mind, but:

What's the reason for the valid_url_pattern in shortener.js?

/https?:\/\/([-\w\\.]+)+(:\d+)?(\/([\w/_\\.]*(\?\S+)?)?)?/

Why? This seems to be broken by design (I can construct invalid urls that match and find valid urls that don't. What's the idea behind this expression, why is it necessary?

And looking at the code it just seems to prepend '<http://> to the url if it doesn't match this expression?

<comment><AUTHOR> If you're able to input invalid URL's I guess I didn't test the regex thoroughly enough ;) I'll look into it. The prepending "http" is just a lazy hack to handle the case where they enter "google.com" instead of "<http://www.google.com>, which would fail the regex, but is a valid URL. This would be deprecated by improving the regex validation. Keep in mind I threw this together in an afternoon.... But thanks for the critique ;)

<comment><USER3> Maybe adding a simple "^" at the begining of the regex should be enough :)

         /^https?:\/\/([-\w\.]+)+(:\d+)?(\/([\w/_\.]*(\?\S+)?)?)?/

Otherwise, could be used for XSS. Like this url (<http://naurls.me/39696e>):

         javascript:<script>alert('HELLO world');</script>http://naurl.me/

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Having a quick read through the code (so I might have missed something) but the URL is generated from a substring of an SHA hash, does this not mean, at least in theory, URLs could be duplicated?

With a hex hash at 6 chars, there are a possible 16,777,216 unique URLs (Probably not an issue, unless you're bit.ly). But when there have been 1,677,721 URLs generated, there is a 10% chance a URL will be duplicated, at 8,388,608 there is a 50% chance, and so on. While those numbers are very high and probably not an issue, it's worth considering this probably wouldn't work on a large scale (Though I'm sure it wasn't designed too)

Not really a criticism, I still think this is a great example of how simple Node is, just an observation

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point. Yes, in theory they could be duplicated. I chose 6 characters firstly to keep the url as _short_ as possible (I thought 5 chars was too short, 7 too long).

I am planning on introducing a background process to clean up shortened URL's that haven't been accessed in a given time frame (still deciding but I think around 7 days). While it still wouldn't solve the problem you mentioned at a certain scale, it would help. But true, I very much doubt it will ever reach that scale.

Thanks for the critique

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm new with Node.js, but the "shorten" process shouldn't be an asynchronous process? Maybe something like this?:

       app.get('/shorten', function(req, res) {
          console.log('Shortening url...');
          shortener.shorten(req.param('u'), function(result){
            res.send(result);
          });
        });

It's well known that Redis is pretty fast, but, citing "Node Web Development" ([http://www.amazon.com/Node-Web-Development-David- Herron/dp/1...](http://www.amazon.com/Node-Web-Development-David- Herron/dp/184951514X)) on it "Architecture: Threads versus asynchronous event- driven" chapter, _"(...)Depending on the query that pause can be quite long. This is bad because while the entire thread is idling another request might come in, and if all the threads are busy it will be dropped. Looks like quite a waste. Context switching is not free either, the more threads we use the more time the CPU spends in storing and restoring the state. Furthermore, the execution stack for each thread takes up memory. Simply by using asynchronous, event-driven I/O, Node removes most of this overhead while introducing very little on its own."_

It is not a criticism but a question.</comment>


Serrapilheira – first private funded scientific support institute of Brazil - <AUTHOR> https://serrapilheira.org/en/ <comment><AUTHOR> I guess for foreigners, first world countries, this is quite normal. However, here, at Brazil, this is the very first initiative where a private company decides to invest in research, aiming to keep innovative researchers working at Brazil. This should be more praised than usual.</comment>


Beating Atari with Natural Language Guided Reinforcement Learning [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1704.05539 <comment><USER2> In other words, the RL system needs to acquire high order concepts (such as "climb the ladder" or "run from the bad guy"), and equipped with those it fares much better. The problem with learning abstract concepts is that they are combinations of combinations of low level features and it is exponentially hard to search for them in raw data. Humans inputting such concepts as "command phrase + reward in case the agent correctly executes the command" cut through the search space and help it learn to operate over the new concepts it learned.

Imagine how would you classify even a simple concept, such as "riding" \- a human could be riding a horse, or a monkey could be riding an elephant, or there could be tons of other cases. Riding would be much simpler to detect if there is a classifier that selects "objects used for rides" and "agents that can ride" and the spatial relation between them - that would be a high order concept that we can't simply learn from images, we have to have preliminary abstractions that help in classifying it.

I think this is the future in AI - higher order concepts, based on compositions of previously known concepts. Both language and the physical world are made of objects and relations between objects, so it would be necessary to learn to combine concepts into new concepts, even when training data is very small. It would solve the problem of sharing knowledge between tasks. Another benefit would be the ease of inspecting the internal state of the system - which would be a graph of language based concepts, unlike the internal states of neural nets which are inscrutable. An agent that has higher order abstractions and an object-relations graph would also be programmable in plain language and capable of reasoning over facts - that would make AI accessible to the public at large.

Another way of putting it is that up until now, we used plain vectors, as if it was untyped data, but now we need to operate over strongly typed vectors with higher order operators. We need type theory into neural nets, to apply type constraints and to convert from one type to another, by applying operations. Such operations are hard to learn directly from labeled sets of images.

<comment><USER3> You make a great point. Rather than neural nets operating on vectors they need to operate on typed graph structure and compute recursive functions with memory stacks.

Kind of like how computers work but learn the code and reason about data structures automatically

<comment><USER4> You can't differentiate through discrete data structures though. The main reason NNs work at all is because vectors are continuous. Small changes in the input lead to small changes in the output. Then you can work backwards and find out exactly what parameters to tweak.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The book "Grokking Deep Learning"[0] which is currently under construction promises you that you'll learn how to build an A.I. that can (and even better than you) play Atari. Though there has been a slow progress but I'm keeping up my faith on it.

[0][https://www.manning.com/books/grokking-deep- learning](https://www.manning.com/books/grokking-deep-learning)

<comment><USER6> I imagine the focus on the Atari is because of the much simpler mechanics and input data, compared to more modern games, correct ?

How hard it would be to make the transition to more complex games, like Zelda or Mario for the NES ?

<comment><USER5> Not sure how hard it is since I haven't tried to implement it myself. But I've seen from youtube that somebody had already implemented an AI to play Mario and floppy bird. You might want to search the web about that since it's quite popular and amazing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Interesting idea and good results, but I don't think there's any natural language work being done here. The descriptive sentences are only there as human readable labels for features extracted from templates, and the actual performance increase is coming from these custom features and giving the agent intermediate rewards.

But I still like idea, on x86 'INC' is just a human readable label for 0xCD, and we instruct our processor to do a series of tasks. The difference is on an x86, we specify the instructions and we get the reward (yay). Here you specify the meta-instructions and the agent is rewarded for completing those. The Atari game's end goal reward is sort of irrelevant to the agent, its real goal is completing each meta-instruction we have given it. Only the instruction giver knows the end-goal and the sequence of instructions to give.

Perhaps you could teach a second agent to be the instruction giver, the first agent the instruction performer (gets rewarded for completing subtasks only), and together they solve the problem. The job of the first agent still seems intractable for a game like Montezuma's revenge.

The real natural language work will be if you can actually use human descriptive sentences to create the subtasks without making hand-made templates.

</comment><comment><USER8> Seems like if you replaced MONTEZUMA'S REVENGE with quicken or excel and you could replace 1/2 the office workers in the world.

<comment><USER4> I don't know if you're joking but this is why everyone is so concerned about automation causing unemployment. There isn't a huge leap between controlling a video game character and controlling a robot. Quite possibly the majority of current jobs could be automated in the near future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language- game_(philosophy)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language- game_\(philosophy\))</comment>


Norway plans to cull more than two-thirds of its wolf population - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/sep/16/norway-wolf-cull-government-wwf-friends-earth-environment-protest <comment><USER2> It's amazing how low the wolf population is in Norway, 68 wolfs in the entire country! While here in Minnesota we have nearly 2,300 wolfs across 439 wolf packs mid winter 2016[1]. But that puts them only at 3.2 wolves per 100 km2 of occupied range[2]. That must make the wolf density and total range in Norway absurdly low, why would they "cull" the wolfs when there are so few.

Plus the wolfs are not really a problem here in Minnesota, a few people's pets have been killed, which sucks but thats all you really here about.

[1]: [http://news.dnr.state.mn.us/2016/08/22/minnesotas-wolf- popul...](http://news.dnr.state.mn.us/2016/08/22/minnesotas-wolf-population- remains-stable-2/)

[2]: [http://files.dnr.state.mn.us/wildlife/wolves/2015/survey_wol...](http://files.dnr.state.mn.us/wildlife/wolves/2015/survey_wolf.pdf)

<comment><USER3> dude norway has no forests, land is all steap mountains fragmented by fjords, only in southeast there is little suitable wolf land, nothing compared to minnesota.

<comment><USER4> 38% of Norway (146,364 km2, or 56,509 square miles) is covered by forest and woodland.

<comment><USER3> typical nerd, taking statistics and not real life. "forest/woodland" is not same thing everywhere - [http://www.borealforest.org/world/images/norway_wilderness_l...](http://www.borealforest.org/world/images/norway_wilderness_loss.jpg)

wolf relevant forest is tiny tiny tiny

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For thousands of years humans have farmed with wolves near by. The Japanese used to use Akita to fend off wolves who are looking for the easiest, lowest risk source of calories. Seems to me that the Norwegians should ask the Sami people of the region how they lived with wolves for so long while herding reindeer and maybe look at using the Lapphund to guard their herds.

Of course that may mean they would have to go out and shoot the wolves after the dogs warn them but that would have a positive effect on the wolves teaching them that they get shot if they go near the sheep. Culls don't teach the wolf packs anything.

That may also mean the farmers have to live with their herds which doesn't blend well with modern life so maybe we should scrap the sheep farming and not the wolves?

<comment> Tuna-Fish The traditional way the Sami people manage wolves is by systematically killing all of them. The method they do this is that whenever anyone finds any prints on the snow, they encircle the area, laying a kind of "streamer" that smells like people (so wolves don't want to approach it), constantly reducing the area until the wolfpack is trapped in a small enough area that they cannot hide or escape and can be slaughtered.

The reindeer herding areas of Lapland have no wolves, and have not had any for any long period during recorded history. The Sami claim the right to kill all wolves on their territory despite environmental legislation and their endangered status as part of their unalienable rights as indigenous people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is sad.

Although the gray wolf as a species is classifed as "Least Concern" by the IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature), the Scandinavian wolf population is classified as 'Engdangered'.

Instead of killing wolves, we should be trapping them and redistributing them to help ensure genetic diversity in isolated populations like Scandinavia's.

<comment><USER7> > we should be trapping them and redistributing them

European wolves routinely travel 60-80km a day for food, and since they are very social (pack oriented) hunters, a lone wolf (forced away from the pack, for what ever reason) can travel many hundreds of kilometers per week in search of other packs, new hunting grounds etc.

Meanwhile, Norway is full of hill farming in areas suitable for wolves.

I can talk about the livelihoods of people and families that have been decimated by the increase in the wolf population in Sweden, but instead I will say that many of these people would rather risk a jail sentence and hunt them themselves than try to convince the government to do anything about it.

> This is sad.

Agreed.

<comment><USER8> 78 wolves in Norway and 340 in Sweden? If you as a farmer can't handle one wolf per 28 thousand humans, I feel bad for you, but the lives of those wolves are more important than a slight increase in farming profits. This is not wolf life vs. human life.

<comment><USER9> Farming in Norway is largely unprofitable anyway. All West Norwegian farmers I have talked to consider it an expensive hobby. Most Norwegian farming is only economically viable due to government subsidies, which have a long tradition due to famine in old history and living memory.

<comment><USER10> Also a cold war policy of being self-sufficient if shit hit the fan.

And i think farming did better until we started pumping oil, and the export of that drove the exchange rate out of whack.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> There are ~200k sheep in Norway, about 1mil livestock total [1] and less than 100 wolves. Unless these wolves have devoted themselves totally to taking down sheep, the idea that they're a real issue is preposterous.

[1] [http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics- explained/index.php/...](http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics- explained/index.php/File:Figure_5_Livestock_by_main_types_NO_2000_and_2010.PNG)

</comment><comment><USER12> Sounds like a really bad idea

"A recent study in the journal Science, "Trophic Downgrading of Planet Earth," examines how the near disappearance of upper levels of the food chain—big cats, wolves, bison and great whales—has altered ecosystems around the world."

[https://www.fastcoexist.com/1678282/humanitys-biggest- impact...](https://www.fastcoexist.com/1678282/humanitys-biggest-impact-may- be-the-extinction-of-predators)

And more recently "... pups of predators in socially disrupted packs are more likely to prey on livestock."

[http://www.publicnewsservice.org/2016-09-15/endangered- speci...](http://www.publicnewsservice.org/2016-09-15/endangered-species-and- wildlife/study-killing-wolves-may-not-protect-livestock/a54029-1)

</comment><comment><USER13> Highly deplorable :( Norway is a wealthy country; [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_wealth_fund#Largest_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_wealth_fund#Largest_sovereign_wealth_funds)

<comment><USER10> On paper yes, in reality no. There is a high chance of basically trashing the national economy of that is spent, depending on what effect it would have on the exchange rate etc.

<comment><USER14> Which is why the government of Norway is careful about how much they spend.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> >That population would be below the level necessary to maintain genetic diversity. At least in NZ, the Kiwis have the decency to say that they want a species eliminated outright. The Norwegian wolf population is a common population with the Swedish population. The total is something like 400 wolfs. (For the record I support a robust wolf population.)

</comment><comment> guard-of-terra It's weird that they have just 70 wolves in such a huge country. Heck, how could they even count them when I would expect them to roam freely from Finland and Murmansk and back. Wasn't Norway mostly huge wilderness actually?

<comment><USER16> The count is indeed a very disputed number precisely because wolves roam across the borders between Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia. Those who suffer damages from wolves often claim that the number of wolves is actually much larger. Conservationists offer smallest numbers.

I don't know if Norway is so huge. Land area is about 300 000 km, for Americans: about three-quarters of Montana.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Not our proudest moment..

Regarding lost life stocks, this can be solved by having a herdsman watching over the life stock. But no one wants to work as such, and therefore they kill the wolfs instead.

(My grandfather was a herdsman.)

</comment><comment><USER18> This decision is probably for political reasons in favour of two groups within Norway: hunters who probably want to shoot more deer and elk or perhaps moose and the Saami who get paid by the state based on the number of reindeer they have roaming the tundra in the mountains and the north of the country.

Not sure if the latter is still the case. When I last visited the far north the effects of overgrazing by reindeer were starting to be severe in places. The densities of reindeer are pretty high so wolves would have a spectacularly easy time and would do very well as a result.

<comment><USER10> I don't think the wolf has ever been a problem up north.

Nah, this is a local issue in the counties near Oslo.

The decision is not even made centrally, but left to the counties.

You can bet your behind that they were leaned on heavily by local farmers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Damn, I imagined hordes of wolves roaming about, but then I open an article and learn that there's only 68.

</comment><comment><USER20> [https://g.co/kgs/6tfjQu](https://g.co/kgs/6tfjQu) A Little wolf-pro activism from Follow Him to the End of the Desert. Not Norwegian, but Swedes.

</comment><comment><USER21> I'm disappointed of Norway, they could do so much better than that.

It's strange as they usually do - remember how humanely and thoughtful they handled the terror incidents of 2011.

</comment><comment><USER22> Why not allow people to buy these wolves to be kept in private forests ?

<comment><USER23> I'm not familiar with the details of Norway, but the Nordic countries have so called "everyman's rights" which among other things say that owners of forests can't restrict people from roaming in their (uncultivated) land. Building a fence around your forest would most likely not be allowed.

<comment><USER22> Bad for the wolves. But I think the wolves can at least be sold to the keepers of exotic animals or even sent to other countries which might be interested.

We need an international market (legal) for exotic animals.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> How many sheep do these few dozen wolves kill?

How much do sheep cost?

How much does Norway spend on promoting tourism?

This isn't about the business of raising livestock. This is an ideological hunt. This is killing wolves to make wolves dead. When in a few years they come knocking on Canada's door for new wolves, as America once did for Yellowstone, I hope we charge them millions.</comment>


Ask HN: Feedback on our "consumer analytics" startup - <AUTHOR>

Hi HN, we've been working on this for the past few months and are finally talking to a few major franchise brands.<p>Would love to get feedback: http://www.loyaltiapp.com/platform/ <comment><USER2> "Loyalti is a consumer analytics platform, implemented as a high-penetration and card-less loyalty program. "

Why don't you include a demo that doesn't require a sign-on so I can actually see what your product does. See mixpanel for an example.

<comment><AUTHOR> working on it right now, thanks for the feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Clickable: <http://www.loyaltiapp.com/platform/>

</comment><comment><USER3> orange county, represent!</comment>


Ask HN: Is the swiftype article on the homepage an ad? - awinter-py I've never seen an HN post that didn't have a discussion / vote button. Is this new? <comment><AUTHOR> Yes, that's a job ad. No, that's not new (at least a few years). From the FAQ:

> _The other kind of job ad is reserved for YC-funded startups. These appear > on the front page, but are not stories: they have no vote arrows, points, or > comments. They begin part-way down, then fall steadily, and only one should > be on the front page at a time._</comment>


Ask HN: How to ship laptop to Europe? - <AUTHOR> They say at the post office that they can send it only without batteries. Is there a way to send it with batteries? <comment><USER2> Ferry plane or UPS</comment>


The New York Times used to be afraid of BuzzFeed. Now it hired its biggest star - <AUTHOR> https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/1/28/21112608/ben-smith-new-york-times-buzzfeed-media-revenue-jonah-peretti <comment><USER2> Oddly, buzzfeed went from clickbait to real journalism, but NYT, went the other direction. Weird days.</comment>


MySQL-PostgreSQL comparison - <AUTHOR> http://www.teknico.net/devel/myvspg/index.en.html

<comment><USER2> > PostgreSQL has implemented for years transactions, foreign keys, subselects, > unions, views, stored procedures, triggers, Unicode support, full joins and > constraints on data.

> MySQL does not yet implement full joins and constraints on data.

It's all you need to know,</comment>


Do School Libraries Need Books? - <AUTHOR> http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/10/do-school-libraries-need-books/ <comment><USER2> The internet is a great way to find small bits of information, but most of the time the information is really questionable. Search for a topic and wikipedia is usually among the first entry, which is great for a start but no way reliable enough to put in an academic paper. Of course there are information sources that are just as great on the internet, but getting there is a long process (there's just too much irrelevant information out there); it might be more efficient if you just go get the book instead.

Turning books to ebooks might make it much more convenient to be accessed, but wading through ebooks for information is horrible. I regularly have to print about 20 pages that was originally in pdf form because I cannot stand reading so much on the computer on a regular basis. Not when you already do a ton of referencing and programming using the computer. I'm sure there are many people who feel the same.

<comment><USER3> "Search for a topic and wikipedia is usually among the first entry, which is great for a start but no way reliable enough to put in an academic paper."

Ah, you're looking at the wrong part. Go down to the "citations" part. Any decent article that might actually be the topic of an assignment will have five to ten times more "real" citations from primary sources than any teacher ever assigned me to have in school.

Wikipedia is still a "cheat code" for school assignments, you just have to use it right. Copying and pasting Wikipedia text is wrong. Following it to primary sources is hard to call "wrong", harder to detect, and, honestly, at the point where you're yelling at the student for getting your primary sources from one place and not another you're crossing dangerously close to "You did the assignment too efficiently, do more busy work" rather than "I want you to learn something from real sources". Students are very sensitive to that sort of message (even if only subconsciously) and we send the "do more busywork" message pretty loudly as it is; we don't need to amplify it any further. (I'd say, if the assignment has become too easy, make the assignment harder by making it _actually_ harder, rather than forcing inefficient techniques.)

(BTW, my "write a paper that could be copied from Wikipedia" period ended well before Wikipedia existed, but unless they've radically changed the types of papers that are assigned, this is still essentially the optimal approach in terms of time.)

<comment><USER2> Oh yes, I agree completely that wikipedia is not a horrible place to start. I do use the Notes / References whenever I go on wikipedia to double check the reliability of the information. But I do also notice that many times the references will point you to books. They don't always point you to this great primary source entirely online; at least my experience is that this is hardly ever the case, others' might differ of course.

So yeah, I do use the internet a lot to search for information. But in the end, the internet still take me back to the library.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Research libraries need books for a very obvious reason: Authors before the 90s did not write their content to be easily indexed by a search engine. That's what the keyword card index was for! I agree that the internet is the best first step for researching, but as articles age, they will become harder and harder to find.

When I wrote research papers in college, I always located the hard copy of articles I found online. I would yank the whole year of publication off of the shelf and spend some time digging for buried treasure. Sometimes it was a waste, but other times it paid off!

<comment><USER5> Research libraries are the only ones that DON'T need books.

Research libraries are about timely access to journal articles. Journals are available, indexed, abstracted etc online. By the time a paper makes it from Arvix to dead tree and then to the annual review abstract it's probably irrelevent to your research.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Yes. Working solely from online sources might seem complete, but the result is impoverished research. It's like a fish in a fishbowl assuming it's got the full depths of the ocean at its fin-tips.

<comment><USER7> I've gotta fall on this side of the argument, despite being an avid internetter myself. There just isn't enough content on the internet in many situations.

Maybe when Google Books finishes scanning everything.

edit: that said, "Bits are brittle." is the lamest pro-book argument I've ever heard. Bring on the e-ink!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The argument for books as a medium is a fair one to make, but overshadowing this is just what students end up using. When I was in high school a couple of years ago books were almost never used for research purposes (despite a well stocked library) - we grew up using the internet for research, and as far as I can tell didn't suffer too much for it.

Books being used less means that an enormous school library just doesn't make sense for schools with limited resources.

<comment><USER9> I agree that the Internet is great for starting research, but are you _sure_ you didn't suffer for it?

Were all the Internet sources you used reliable and documented? And how could these sources possibly duplicate the knowledge found in printed books, considering most books still aren't digitized or freely available to browse online?

<comment><USER7> Depends on the field of study. There are, for instance, _many_ sites with many _thousands_ of whitepapers each for computer algorithms, genetics, and many other subjects (I've looked into those two, otherwise I'd list more). A single site can eclipse several large libraries for that kind of information.

Or, in a more specific case, try looking for 3D rendering techniques. Info on the internet _easily_ encompasses and eclipses _all_ printed info on the subject, and it's significantly more up-to-date in many cases.

In a more general case though, yes, I agree that many studies would fall short if done exclusively online.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> At my High School, I used to rent out loads of Raymond Chandler novels, and some science fiction. So yes, if people enjoy reading, schools should provide books.</comment>


Yeast Probably Originated in China - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/yeast-sequencing-china/557930/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> This is referring to one species of yeast, whereas yeast in general is many millions of years old. This only applies to what is called the Brewer's Yeast. Yeast as a kind of organism is at least hundreds of millions of years old. As such the title should include the species name, or common name to make clear the truth of this, and prevent confusion.

<comment><USER3> This is very explicitly contradicted in the article, so your claim is not simply about the inaccuracy of the title. Do you have a cite for your claim?

<comment><USER2> _The first yeast originated hundreds of millions of years ago, and 1,500 species are currently identified.[1][2][3]_

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

<comment><USER4> Yes it originated hundreds of millions of years ago. And this new research indicates it was probably in China. (The land not the civilisation.)

<comment><USER5> No, the research says that Saccharomyces cerevisiae probably emerged in China, not all yeast.

I think the point is that the article hopelessly uses the term 'yeast'.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Single celled fungi are likely to be older than our current continental arrangement, the title could clarify that yeast had most likely become domesticated in China, maybe around 4,000 ago, from which all modern domesticated yeast may have descended.

<comment><USER7> > the title could clarify that yeast had most likely become domesticated in > China, maybe around 4,000 ago, from which all modern domesticated yeast may > have descended

That's not what the paper says. The out-of-China event is estimated to be ~15,000 years ago while the various domestication events were only 4,000 years ago. [1]

[1]: [https://static- content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs415...](https://static- content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41586-018-0030-5/MediaObjects/41586_2018_30_MOESM1_ESM.pdf) see note 4.

<comment><USER8> This is the most surprising take-away from this article and paper for me. I would have thought a simple pervasive organism like yeast would be millions of years old. But then again I guess there's just as brutal a competition between single celled organisms as it is for complex ones.

edit: As a homebrewer this would also mean that the best place to look for interesting wild strains of yeast for brewing might be in China.

<comment><USER9> Yeast probably _is_ millions of years old; but a species being millions of years old doesn't naturally cause it to spread across the face of the Earth. Sometimes a thing evolves in a niche and can't get out of that niche (despite there being other places it could thrive) because it's surrounded on all sides by inhospitable local habitats.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's hard to separate what actually came from China, and what didn't come from China. Not that it isn't obvious (I mean really, you invented the spoon -- also claimed by Korea but whatever -- information overload so they have done themselves a disservice.

<comment><USER11> We'll this is prior to the existence of China, they mean the area now known as China.

Not sure what was going on there 4k-15k years ago?

<comment><USER12> _Not sure what was going on there 4k-15k years ago?_

Scholarship in ancient Chinese history here. While 'China' as a concept didn't exist, certain forerunners to key cultural traits defining Chinese civilization were in place by 3000BC. This includes agriculture with pigs, chickens and common intensive staple crops, village structures, pottery, warmaking, Sino-Tibetan language,[0] and critically the indisputable development of written Chinese characters.

However, in addition to these there were also distinct, large, parallel, significant cultures with impressive technical achievements, those such as the Shu[1] Kingdom (finally invaded and destroyed by the Qin in 316BC, and only rediscovered in the 1980s) which was known for its masterful large-scale bronze casting, said to be unequaled in human history.

Prior to 2k years ago, it gets messy fast, and notions of "China" are vague, relative and almost untenable. Chiefly because, lacking any large unifying kingdom to provide political, economic, military and cultural unity, it's very difficult to make blanket statements about an area the size of the modern region of China. There were certainly separate cultural spheres from the northeast (circa Korea), the north, the northwest (Xinjiang), Tibet[2], Sichuan, Yunnan/Guizhou/Guangxi, Hainan, the southeast and Taiwan, from which humans launched themselves in to the Pacific to conquer the final part of the planet.[3] We can make sparse suggestions based on suppositions about overall migrations of people and technology, but not much more.

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

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shu_(state)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shu_\(state\))

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

[3] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austronesian_peoples#Prehistor...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austronesian_peoples#Prehistory_and_history)

<comment><USER11> 2 questions:

When the dominant state broke down and new states emerged - as in 3 kingdoms, or 16 kingdoms periods - would you always consider a later state to be a successor in title of the state that existed prior to the break up? Is it the language?

>"critically the indisputable development of written Chinese characters." //

What makes the characters Chinese. Italian, for example, uses the Latin character set (though that comes from Greek, which comes from, ...; which may make it a poor analogue). Why aren't they Qin, or Han, or whatever? Is it just imprecise naming.

<comment><USER12> Agreed. Succession is relative and a grey area, and nomenclature is arbitrary.

<comment><USER11> I was hoping for inciteful answers .. but accord will do ;o)

Funnily enough [https://qz.com/522079/the-long-incredibly-tortuous-and- fasci...](https://qz.com/522079/the-long-incredibly-tortuous-and-fascinating- process-of-creating-a-chinese-font/) popped up in my reading today and dovetailed serendipitously with this discussion, the images of symbol development were particularly interesting to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Actual title: "All of the World's Yeast Probably Originated in China"

<comment><USER14> "Yeast came from China" is the HTML doc title. That's also a legit choice.

<comment><USER13> I should have noticed that. Thanks for pointing it out. I do think the title on the page is a bit more nuanced.

<comment><USER14> Ok, we'll use that then. Thanks!

<comment><USER15> Except the title is absurd, because "all yeast" predates any conceivable ability to trace its precise origin, and has existed at _least_ as long ago as a time when Asia the continent didn't exist, but was part of Pangaea. Either it's talking about Saccharomyces cerevisiae or it's a joke.

<comment><USER14> If you or anyone can suggest an accurate, neutral title that is 80 chars or less and preferably uses representative language from the article, we'll happily change it again.

<comment><USER15> "Saccharomyces cerevisiae originated in China circa 12,000BCE"</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Arrhythmia.js, a new take on rhythm validation - <AUTHOR> http://eng.wealthfront.com/2010/11/arrhythmiajs-new-take-on-rhythm.html

<comment><USER2> While I agree with the all the principles of having good vertical rhythm on page typography it has often been impractical to chase down and fix the offending markup and CSS. This appears to take a lot of the grunt-work out of finding and fixing the vertical rhythm issues on a page. Thanks, and keep it coming.

</comment><comment><USER3> Dude, this is sweet. Nicely done.</comment>


Y Combinator co-founder Jessica Livingston shares advice on how to get accepted (audio interview) - <AUTHOR> http://www.grid7.com/archives/189_podcast-28-jessica-livingston-of-y-combinator.html

<comment><USER2> Thanks adding this interview as emphasis can sometimes get lost in essays. Don't forget another G7 podcast, #24 on Zenter ~ [http://www.grid7.com/archives/178_podcast-24-founders-of- zen...](http://www.grid7.com/archives/178_podcast-24-founders-of-zenter.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> basic points:

1) be determined.

2) know your co-founders well.

3) they like it if you've built stuff before.

<comment><USER4> >1) be determined.

I had told myself before the interview that I would open with "OK, we've got 15 minutes to convince you that our product is going to be huge and that we're capable of building it." Instead, I got nervous and let them dictate the course of the interview and we didn't talk about the design and big picture of our product. It also really didn't help that we argued against Paul Graham's simplified, buildable in 3 months version of our product. I wonder if we would have got in if we would have said "yes, that's a great idea." Now I know that one of the things they test for is flexibility, so if they suggest changes to your product during the interview, don't argue with them.

<comment><USER5> Is letting them dictate the course of the interview really a bad thing? It's an admissions interview, not a negotiation. I've pretty much already stated my case by way of the application. Any remaining reservations they may have seem better addressed by letting them ask the questions than by letting my preconceived notions of what they want to hear dominate the conversation. Plus, that way, even if we get rejected, we've still gotten a 15 minute consulting session out of it.

<comment><USER6> They're going to dictate the course of an interview to a much larger extent than you are. That's pretty much the nature of the interview.

You should be flexible, I agree, but not wishy-washy. I don't think they'd respect anyone who was willing to totally revamp their idea instantly just because of their suggestion anymore than they would someone who was totally inflexible. There's a middle ground that you should walk, not just in trying to be accepted into YC, but in life in general.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Man...they say submitting early gives you a slight advantage and then they give us little gems like this! I guess that's why they let you submit more than once.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> sure thing. And actually one more: #21 Inkling Markets-> [http://www.grid7.com/archives/171_podcast-21-adam-siegel- of-...](http://www.grid7.com/archives/171_podcast-21-adam-siegel-of-inkling- markets.html)

sean

</comment><comment><USER8> I think one has to be flexible enough to understand the pros and cons of the modified idea/design suggested by YC ... Paul and his team are experienced enough to have clear big picture about how market (including angels and VCs) will respond to the your idea and whether little bit of tweaking can help !! Flexibility is also directly linked to the listening skills !!! Also i understand that chances of getting selected are high if you have a great team and they may invite you for completely new idea that they have in their mind and they think that you can deliver it, to this I think its a testing time whether you want to give-up on your idea and join the YC team to develop new idea or do you still want to stay with your original idea because you are passionate about it (catch-22 may be) ...</comment>


PSU punishes prof who duped academic journal with hoax 'dog rape' article (2019) - <AUTHOR> https://www.campusreform.org/?ID=13489 <comment><USER2> Looks like it boiled down to the IRB's take on the matter.

        The school asserted that Boghossian had unethically
        conducted research on human subjects with his
        experiment. According to the school's Institutional
        Review Board, Boghossian would have needed to obtain
        "informed consent" from the individuals reviewing his
        hoax articles in order for his actions to have been
        considered ethical.

Does this catch-22 mean no more investigative meta-research would be tolerated by universities? Even if those human subjects are kept anonymous, they're still afforded IRB protections? Is there anything we can know apriori that those subjects aren't actually subjected to anything high risk to them? Maybe that's a bad direction to take to even allow that?

<comment><USER3> I wonder how this could be done ethically but in a way that doesn't allow peer reviewers to cheat. One thing that comes to mind is ABX testing. Show peer reviewers both a paper which they should accept, and a paper which they should reject, and then give them questionable papers to classify.

At what point does it become unethical simply to be a peer-reviewer for a broken journal? That's the implicit question that should be asked in this sort of ethics review. It does no good to punish just a submitter of papers, if the entire journal is unhealthy.

<comment><USER4> Low-impact-factor journals that accept papers with 1000 of ethnographic field studies aren't "broken" just because the data was fake, because it isn't the premise of peer review to reliably spot fake data.

You can make the argument that there are too many low-impact journals and schools shouldn't be allocating resources towards keeping them going; I don't think it's a super strong argument but it's at least coherent. But more importantly: it won't have anything to do with this hoax; if you're willing to fake data, you can get accepted in higher-impact journals outside the social sciences as well.

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure how fake data is substantially different from any other part of a fake paper. Just like how randomly-generated sentences might sound reasonable, faked data might look like real data. In both cases, we expect peer review to engage and to consider how data was sourced. This happened in the "Who's Afraid of Peer Review?" incident [0], where the offending papers were intentionally designed to have many red flags that would have helped reviewers understand that the data was bogus.

More worryingly, data cannot model itself, so the quality of data should be largely irrelevant to any models which purport to explain it; as a result, a paper's contribution to science needs to be structured to work with other results, and cannot simply proclaim that its modelling is correct because some given equation fits the observed data. To pick a situation where your expertise shines, imagine that somebody submits a paper about a 3-SAT solver, and they include data that shows their solver doing not just extremely well on standard problem sets, but asymptotically scaling better than exponentially. The reason that you might doubt the honest presentation of the data is because you know, from having studied the field, that such behavior is unlikely.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who%27s_Afraid_of_Peer_Review%...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who%27s_Afraid_of_Peer_Review%3F)

<comment><USER4> No, we don't expect peer reviewers to investigate the sourcing of data. A journal reviewer might be assigned a workload of dozens of papers to be completed, in snippets of spare time, over the course of a month or two. Peer reviewers aren't equipped to do that kind of vetting; that's what replication is for, and replications are their own research projects. It's really surprising what kinds of expectations people seem to have about peer review and what it can reasonably accomplish.

"Who's Afraid Of Peer Review" targeted fee-charging open-access journals, which are financially incentivized to accept random papers. Journal reviewers are generally unpaid postgraduate academics.

<comment><USER3> I don't want to quibble with your experiences of peer review; your experiences are valid. But what does a journal provide, then, exactly? Are they relics of the era before cheap self-publication?

<comment><USER4> "A panel of experts from this field read this paper and felt it likely to make significant contributions". For high-impact journals, you can add "so much so that it was selected to be among the 25% of submissions this cycle to be published".

What peer review does _not_ say is "a panel of experts carefully vetted this paper to ensure that its conclusions are accurate". In fact, part of the premise of replication projects is that peer review _doesn 't_ say that.

I've only been a reviewer a couple times, and only in computer science. Other people on HN have experience reviewing for other hard science venues. Maybe their experiences are different. But I think it's notable that you don't hear that in comments about what this hoax exposed; has there been any HN comment from a reviewer saying that they were expected to rigorously vet submissions, the way a PhD board does with a thesis?

Daniel Engber makes many of these points better than I do, here: [https://slate.com/technology/2018/10/grievance-studies- hoax-...](https://slate.com/technology/2018/10/grievance-studies-hoax-not- academic-scandal.html)

<comment><USER5> The problem is not so much the system as how it's presented: the media presents "peer-reviewed study" as a gold standard, practically synonymous with correct. And unfortunately academia absolutely encourages this practice.

The message that peer review is largely meaningless hasn't really been made by academia, for obvious reasons, and thus stupid papers getting accepted by journals will continue to be interesting and news-worthy until people get the message that peer review doesn't mean much.

The world will then move on to "replicated" as a gold standard. This will be better but not by much. Just a few weeks ago Imperial College London published a press release claiming their Report 9 results from their COVID-19 simulator program had been replicated. Worth a press release because after it was open sourced it was discovered to be filled with non-deterministic behaviour, even with fixed RNG seeds.

Unfortunately the press release was fraudulent. The report they cited as evidence of replication was by a friendly academic. He said he was able to replicate the results, then admitted every number he got out was different, some by 10%-25% different. This is the output of a computer simulation so the allowable difference is 0%. Despite this, Nature and other outlets proceeded to report that ICL's COVID model was "replicated".

In the end, academia is strongly incentivised to _appear_ credible, not actually be so. _Being_ credible requires you can reliably turn your findings into something useful, as when in the realm of pure theory you can never be sure your findings actually hold up in reality. Corporate research has this attribute (eventually), academic research doesn't, as academics are rewarded for writing clever sounding papers not being correct.

<comment><USER4> This seems totally fair!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The PSU Grievance Studies Affair [1] had the same objective as the 1996 Sokal Affair: to test peer review by submitting obviously bad papers that should be rejected, and seeing how many of them are accepted.

The motivation behind this is entirely reasonable. Bad "true negative" as well as known-good "true positive" articles ought to be regularly submitted to every peer review process as a test of accuracy. A great example of a similar idea was the 2014 NIPS consistency experiment [2].

However, there is a problem with the "dog rape" hoax article [3] as a test of the peer review system. Specifically, the author in that paper claims to have spent over 1000 hours carefully cataloguing the behavior of ten thousand people and dogs over the course of one year. The paper then proceeds to produce silly but surprising statistics: female dogs are 70% more likely to be leashed than male dogs, 100% of dogs with shock collars are male, 847 instances of dogs fighting were observed, and so on.

The problem here is that the data was falsified: the observations and experiments claimed never happened, the numbers were all made up. The article was likely accepted because of its data, but the data was a lie. If this data had been real, it might have been a minor but useful study relevant to economists, sociologists, or urban planners, regardless of how silly or made- up the conclusions at the end were.

Peer review works based on the assumption that the author is telling the truth about what experiments they conducted and what numbers they measured. The grievance studies authors could have submitted fake and silly hoax papers without falsifying data: that's what Sokal did, and that would have been a valid experiment testing the peer review system. But that is not what the authors chose to do.

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

[2] [http://blog.mrtz.org/2014/12/15/the-nips- experiment.html](http://blog.mrtz.org/2014/12/15/the-nips-experiment.html)

[3] [http://norskk.is/bytta/menn/dog_park.pdf](http://norskk.is/bytta/menn/dog_park.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER7> This looks like a valid test case. How else could you verify the legitimacy of previously submitted articles. The emperor has no clothes.

</comment><comment><USER8> An ongoing misconception here is that academic journals only publish 'facts'

Not really.

They publish research articles. Depending on the field, and the field's philosophical perspective on the construction of knowledge, that can take differing forms. Those differing forms are not just valid but important. And understanding the differences is also, important. An article about medical treatment necessarily does different things and looks different than a journal in the humanities (for example). They make meaning from information in different ways - and that is what all forms of research do, make meaning. Research at its core is not about the discovery of facts...this is basic philosophy of science, basic Thomas Kuhn. Standards like replicability may be of use for making meaning in some fields, but they are not _necessarily_ equally useful in others, often because the level of contextual situating that needs to occur reaches towards the impossible.

Serious members of the field would not have taken the Grievance Studies articles as 'capital-F-FACT' they instead would have interpreted it as a perspective, an argument, an interpretation. Specifically, the entire field of critical studies exists to, in varying forms, critique the ways in which 'discovery of facts' is a reductivist way of looking at meaning making that privileges certain perspectives over others - by treating some perspectives as reality.

So the critique here, and looking back at Sokal, isn't that 'hahaha I pulled one over on you' its that 'we assumed that you were giving us a new perspective in good faith that we could collectively learn from' and ...'now you are standing here laughing at us because you acted like a jerk.' It's two different world views with one willing to be open (by choice) to outside critique and perspectives, and the other supremely self-confident that critique and perspective is unnecessary.

In effect, it's like a legal opinion that separates matters of interpreting law and matters of finding fact.

</comment><comment><USER8> Just a note that Campusreform.org is...a mess of a site that publishes opinions as factual articles and is primarily writen by undergraduates.

Here is a more fair handed presentation of this case:

[https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/01/08/author- recent...](https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/01/08/author-recent- academic-hoax-faces-disciplinary-action-portland-state)

</comment><comment><USER3> As a Portland State donor, I'm disappointed at PSU's refusal to back legitimate scientific inquiry. Sending bogus garbage to journals occasionally is a reasonable way to test that peer-review systems are working.

The events I normally donate to support are canceled due to the pandemic, though, so I probably wouldn't donate anyway. Guess I can't really take a moral stance here.

<comment><USER9> As a PSU alum, I never donate to this halfassed institution, a glorified community college.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> So, when Sokal did something similar in the 90s, we all had a laugh and life went on.

Now that it's today, we're more vicious and this kind of punking will not go unpunished. Good checkpoint on where we're at.

</comment><comment><USER11> If Mark McLellan remains VP for Research and Graduate Studies, it casts a cloud over academic excellence at PSU. What is his background? How long has he been in this position? What would cause him to make such a politically driven bad decision?

It is inconceivable that someone with so little understanding of the toxic academic publishing environment could be influencing the education of 26,000 students.

</comment><comment><USER12> As an aside for everyone coming to the comments first before reading the article, PSU in the title is Portland State University not Penn State University which I immediately thought of when I saw PSU.

Basically, Portland State University is retaliating against a professor who showed that the peer review and acceptance process for various journals was woefully broken.

<comment><USER8> another perspective is that they are _disciplining_ a professor who _practiced research misconduct_

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I don't know how you can get clearer cut research misconduct than faking an experiment.

<comment><USER14> That wasn't the actual experiment, though. The actual experiment was to test whether or not these publications were capable of detecting fake papers.

<comment><USER13> Understood, but in the process he claimed to do a large experiment that he didn't do. He faked data, he broke the trust that the entire research enterprise is built on.

<comment><USER4> I think you're going to find that most people commenting on this have never reviewed a journal article and don't understand the process. You see it in replication crisis threads as well: the belief that academic research is premised on reviewers _replicating results_ before things get published.

The idea that academic journals are based on a presumption of good faith is totally alien to a lot of HN commenters.

<comment><USER15> Reasonable critics aren't expecting reviewers to replicate the results, but the dog park paper illustrates that reviewers can't even recognized _clearly bogus_ data. I mean, have you even read the methods the paper said they employed?

<comment><USER4> I read several of the hoax papers, and skimmed one that included dog park data. Which paper are you referring to, where was it submitted, and where was it accepted? The hoax authors were exceptionally dishonest in their presentation of the results: virtually all of their papers were rejected, the accepts were generally in very low-impact venues, and the papers that got accepted were generally not the lurid ones they highlighted in their summary. I ask for specifics because it is not an interesting research result if they created a paper with clearly bogus data _that was then rejected_.

The problem with the experiment, of course, is that reviewing takes a fuckload of time and effort, and most fields barely keep up with the legitimate workload they have. They are literally taking time and resources from program committees, and they do have IRB obligations in order to do that.

<comment><USER15> > The hoax authors were exceptionally dishonest in their presentation of the > results: virtually all of their papers were rejected, the accepts were > generally in very low-impact venues, and the papers that got accepted were > generally not the lurid ones they highlighted in their summary.

I think the other poster summarizes why quite well why this charge of dishonesty is ironic. I'll just add a link to the paper itself if you'd like to read it [1], and review one part:

> From 10 June 2016, to 10 June 2017, I stationed myself on benches that were > in central observational locations at three dog parks in Southeast Portland, > Oregon. Observation sessions varied widely according to the day of the week > and time of day. These, however, lasted a minimum of two and no more than 7 > h and concluded by 7:30 pm (due to visibility). I did not conduct any > observations in heavy rain. [...] The usual caveats of observational > research also apply here. While I closely and respectfully examined the > genitals of slightly fewer than ten thousand dogs [...]

So in the span of one year, this lone "researcher" claims to have "closely" inspected the genitals of ~10,000 dogs. That's 1,000 hours to inspect 10,000 dogs, which amounts to 10 dogs per hour, during which they took detailed notes on the dogs and owner's names, gender, and other associated information, while documenting the dogs' behaviour (6 minutes per dog+owner!). That stretches credulity to say the least.

Also, for the data to be meaningful, there must be at least 10,000 unique dogs visiting these three dog parks during the given time span. This also beggars belief even for Portland which features a high percentage of dog ownership. Portland has ~264,000 households, ~70% of households own a dog, that's ~185,000 dogs across ~32 dog parks, which is only 5,000 unique dogs per park on average.

The basic math just doesn't add up, and then the researcher disclaims their abilities to determine canine breeds, but makes claims like, "NB: the phrase 'dog rape/humping incident' documents only those incidents in which the activity appeared unwanted from my perspective – the humped dog having given no encouragement and apparently not enjoying the activity."

So apparently they have quite a bit of insight into canine behavioural psychology. There is a lot about the methods and the data that make no sense, and this paper received accolades.

> They are literally taking time and resources from program committees, and > they do have IRB obligations in order to do that.

That's a legitimate concern. Unfortunately, the hoax itself reveals that these program committees may not be doing much meaningful work with those resources anyway, which seems like a far more important matter.

Edit: I would add that some way to verify that peer review is doing its job should be part of the publishing process. Periodic random hoaxes seem like a good way of doing it. It will make everyone, particularly reviewers, more skeptical and cautious.

> (Revise-and-resubmit, by the way, is a nice way of saying "reject").

No, it's a nice way of saying, "this is good work, you just need to massage your presentation".

[1] [http://norskk.is/bytta/menn/dog_park.pdf](http://norskk.is/bytta/menn/dog_park.pdf)

<comment><USER4> 1000 hours over the course of a year is the equivalent of a half-time job, which makes sense if you're a researcher publishing in journals, in that it is your _actual_ job. There are way more than 10,000 dogs in Portland. You're shooting the data down because you're motivated to find its flaws, which I agree are apparent on close inspection, but that's _not_ what motivates a paper reviewer. Why would a reviewer for a gender studies journal have any intuition for the usage of a dog park? It's not an epidemiology or even an animal studies venue.

(Here's a sharper way of asking the same question: tell me, as quickly as you can, how many dogs visit the largest Portland dog park; bear in mind that this is a waste of your time while you're tracking that stat down, because that's what the reviewer is thinking, too).

R&R means reject (it's a rejection _cause_ ). At Usenix, if I wanted you to "massage your presentation", I would accept conditional on those changes (actually: at Usenix WOOT, we would have assigned a reviewer to shepherd the paper --- we would have _helped you_ massage your presentation).

Ultimately, to make a case that journals are accepting bad papers, you have to look at their accepts, not their rejects, no matter how those rejects are worded.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This happened a bit ago, you can read more about it here:

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

</comment><comment><USER17> [2019]

<comment><USER18> Good catch. Added.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Would it be equally unethical to submit a paper that 'simply wasn't any good?'

i.e. any academic who doesn't think a paper should be published, but submits it on the off-chance they think it might be?

<comment><USER4> No. Submitting a flawed paper in good faith to a journal isn't unethical; journals exist to evaluate papers. Deliberately submitting bad papers --- in fact, going out of your way to shade what's bad about your papers to try to get them further into the process --- is a waste of volunteer time. Reviewers have offered to evaluate good faith papers; they have not offered to have their time spent as guinea pigs. Hence IRBs, to tell you not to do stuff like this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This website seems to be an extremely partisan culture war site basically focused on issues academics discuss that conservatives don't like? And then "cancelling" them?</comment>


WordPress is at a Crossroads - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@plagiarismtoday/wordpress-is-at-a-crossroads-133638714a52?mc_cid=d41bb5b19f <comment><USER3> On the topic of the prevalence of freemium plugins in WordPress ecosystem: I really detest this. Given the huge effort that has gone in to WordPress itself - freely provided to the community - it's ridiculous for small plugins - <USER2> in many cases just filter some function already provided as a hook in WordPress by the core developers - would ask for money. A few years ago I set up an online labbook for my research group using a bunch of plugins to make WordPress behave the way I wanted. I had to search really hard for plugins that didn't spam end users to "upgrade" to unlock arbitrarily disallowed features, and furthermore plugins which were well written and didn't contain silly hacks or security vulnerabilities (in the process I ended up submitting patches to a few of them to fix obvious flaws). It was even difficult to find plugins that use the proper settings page infrastructure, instead of adding their own top level menu item in the admin panel and not conforming to the WordPress core look and feel. What a mess.

Somehow discouraging freemium junk from the plugin library wouldn't be a bad thing from my perspective. It would surely decrease the sheer volume of plugins available, but would undoubtedly increase the quality. Perhaps this could be achieved with some sort of rating system for the code quality, judging based on how much the code relies on WordPress APIs, properly handling unexpected input and errors, properly sanitizing user input, etc.

Incidentally, I am now developing a plugin to combine the behaviour of all the plugins I previously used for the academic labbook [1] (if anyone is interested in using it, I would like to know!). In the process I've learned a lot about the WordPress code base, and have come to appreciate that it is on the whole well written - it's mainly just plugin authors that produce junk, and hope to make a quick buck off the back of the hard work of volunteers in the process.

[1] [https://github.com/SeanDS/alp](https://github.com/SeanDS/alp)

<comment><USER4> When your plugin will reach - let's say 1 million users - I hope that you'll stick to your ideas and don't spam end users to upgrade, just work for free. Good luck :)

<comment><USER3> I don't have a problem with large plugin projects charging money, but I have a problem with (1) very basic plugins asking for money and (2) spammy, clickbait tactics to upgrade; for example, asking the user to upgrade to premium after every update, or adding extra pages to the admin sidebar with "Upgrade to Premium", etc. etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Good article. This problem is, of course, much larger than just WordPress; the open libre Internet where you can just run your own instance of whatever you need is increasingly being threatened by walled gardens of every kind because it's more fiddly work to do it yourself.

Is it possible for a libre tool to be easier to use than one from a walled garden? Can we make running your own Medium easier than signing up for Medium and starting a new post?

This is the challenge.

<comment><USER6> With tools like Github Pages, netlify, etc, and static site generators like Jekyll, Hugo and nanoc, I'd argue - yes it's possible.

Wordpress itself attracts criticism but for a large class of users it does work.

Ironically imo Medium, with its "dickbar" and pop ups, is a fairly crappy reading experience.

<comment><USER7> I don't think setting up and configuring Jamstack is within the realm of understanding of the majority of Medium users. Most indie publishers are "non- technical".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> What a long winded article. It gets to the point in the last few paragraphs: WordPress needs to add more options for free customisation, and is doing so with Gutenberg, but some people don't like it.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm working with WordPress since 2005 both as a theme designer and plugin developer. The experience is the same today as it was at the beginning.

And that experience is famously broken. Code mess, theme mess, customisation mess, etc.

If WordPress powers one third of the internet, and, Automattic is such a success story how they couldn't create a framework in which designing and developing can give you a little satisfaction?

Many times I left WordPress for others like Ruby on Rails, Yii, static site generators, Contentful, etc. but I'm always returning to it. My clients need it. They think it is a standard in CMS and the hosting is stable and affordable.

But non-businesses, individuals are abandoning it. The promise is huge: pay a few dollars for hosting, get a pre-installed WordPress, choose a theme from that 5,000 free themes and you are done.

The reality is that WordPress theming is broken. None of those 5,000 free themes can satisfy a single need in 100% percent. People realise they need an expert to customize and make it work, and from that moment their project either is migrated somewhere else or just bitterly abandoned.

I wonder how many of that '30% of total websites are powered by WordPress' is an abandoned site?

TLDR: WordPress lost it's individual user base; still good for small businesses who can afford customization; awful as experience for designers and developers;

WordPress is not at crossroads but in chaos. Gutenberg, the only big change since it's inception is not well received by designers and developers. If they flock they'll take away with them the small businesses.

<comment><USER4> Your message is full of sentences which are contradiction to each other. You are saying that WP not changed for a long time and yet at the same time you are afraid of upcoming change, and you are power user! - this is the reason why changes are so slow.

> The reality is that WordPress theming is broken. None of those 5,000 free > themes can satisfy a single need in 100% percent.

It's not broken, it's just how everything works in life - unless you are skilled or determined enough yourself you need expert for customizations, it isn't possible to make creator which will satisfy everyone (and yet there are abominations like Visual Composer which try to do it). Can you customize parts of your car engine yourself?

>TLDR: WordPress lost it's individual user base

What is used as replacement nowadays? I hope not walled gardens or solutions like medium where your content is held in grip and they just wait to squeeze.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> You could say a lot of the same things about SharePoint. (I was never a fan, personally.) This seems like the natural progression of any CMS that tries to be infinitely extensible and flexible. It becomes very difficult to evolve or simplify your product without breaking its add-on ecosystem and your most entrenched customers.

</comment><comment><USER10> Interesting article! Gutenberg itself is also on a different road than before as you can't run it self hosted. To use it on a self hosted blog you would need to install jetpack and use WordPress.com as the main UI, which isn't self hosted. His point regarding commercial plugins are also to the point. There are great plugins out there, but setting up a site with these can easily cost over $1000 in yearly subscription fees and the free versions are often too basic or require tweaking to add required features. Still think WordPress make sense for organizations that can easily pay for premium plugins and support, or hackers that know how to code and find the great free plugins.

<comment><USER11> What do you mean you can't run it self-hosted? I have it already locally and work as expected.

I don't use jetpack nor I have a WordPress.com account.</comment></comment>


Libtins – A multiplatform C++ network packet sniffing and crafting library - <AUTHOR> http://libtins.github.io/

<comment><USER2> Anyone knows what are the differences or advantages compared to pcap?

<comment> pea-tear This library uses libpcap to capture packets/read them from a pcap file. When you sniff using libpcap you just get a pointer to the packet and the packet size, you then have to parse the packet appropriately to do something useful with it.

What libtins adds is the ability to parse and assemble packets easily. Parsing is automatic, so you won't need to be checking protocol fields to determine how to parse it: it will all be handled by the library.

<comment><USER3> libpcap does not support WiFi AFAIK (or maybe Winpcap doesn't)....does libtins depend on an underlying driver on Windows for WiFi support? How good is the 802.11 support on Windows?

<comment> pea-tear libpcap does support it. As for Winpcap, I don't know.

Yes, libtins uses libpcap to capture packets (and also to send, if you're using Windows), so basically if winpcap supports it, then it should work on libtins.

<comment><USER3> Winpcap it seems like does not support capturing raw 802.11 packets and instead presents a pseudo-ethernet interface to the packets captured on WiFi adapters and it only presents the actual ethernet packet to the application using it (not the raw 802.11 packets). To actually capture 802.11, it seems like you need to use 3rd party drivers like Airpcap (which are commercial and it seems like this is a driver/wifi adapter combo). See [https://www.winpcap.org/devel.htm...](https://www.winpcap.org/devel.htm...).</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Day One sync will be offline indefinitely - <AUTHOR> http://help.dayoneapp.com/day-one-sync/sync-status/ <comment><AUTHOR> Who would think about putting the word "indefinitely" into downtime timing..... Geez</comment>