The "Acquired" Savant- "Accidental" Genius - <AUTHOR> http://www.wisconsinmedicalsociety.org/savant_syndrome/savant_articles/acquired_savant

<comment><USER2> There has been some interesting research done using transcranial magnetic stimulation:

<http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/22/magazine/22SAVANT.html>

</comment><comment><USER3> Moral of the story: Anything that could simulate FTD would be temporarily would be one hell of a drug.

</comment><comment><USER4> It's going to take more than a handful of cherry-picked anecdotes to convince me that this condition really exists.

<comment><USER5> There are a several similar examples in Oliver Sacks' Musicophilia. It provides some explanations, too.

<comment><USER4> Wake me up when somebody has a means of inducing the condition that they can show is more reliable than a placebo.

<comment><USER5> These conditions appear after seriously traumatic incident, generally. The fact that we cannot double-blind test them doesn't mean it doesn't exist. There /is/ a correlation with some physical brain alterations.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


In the Face of Constant Censorship, Bulgakov Kept Writing - <AUTHOR> http://lithub.com/in-the-face-of-constant-censorship-bulgakov-kept-writing/ <comment><USER3> I read the The Master and Margarita for a literature class at University. It was a fascinating but confusing book, but lots of references which made it ideal to get some help by someone who scope and historical context (USSR being at its end when I read it).

Of course now with the internet there is help from wikipedia:

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

<comment><USER4> Did u enjoy it? I started reading it, but stopped early on.

<comment><USER5> I tried reading the Ginsburg translation and didn't get very far. Found it to be wooden and stilted. Recently I started reading the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation and I'm having a much better time of it. It has footnotes that explain some of the references, and I'm just finding it much easier to read from a prose-style standpoint.

<comment><USER6> According to my russian wife who studied both russian and english literature, the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation is by far the best. Not only does it provide a great introduction and footnotes, it also manages to capture the spirit of the original.

I found it a highly enjoyable book and, while I'm sure I missed many references, it gave me better understanding of what it must have been like living in the USSR in those times.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> For those looking for more Bulgakov, or who found M+M too opaque but are still curious, The White Guard is a hell of a book. Sharp, beautifully told story about a monarchist family in Kiev in the early days of the revolution.

<comment><USER8> Heart of a Dog is also very accessible relative to M+M, and considerably more fun. It also features Bulgakov in at what seems to be peak "Honey Badger" mode - you read it, then check the date in disbelief... how he figured he'd get away with writing a book like that in 1925 beggars belief.

<comment><USER9> Also, The Fatal Eggs, and Journal of a Young Country Doctor are fascinating reads for different reasons - the former is a scathing allegorical attack on the Soviet Union (the eggs being the ideals of communism, the things which hatch from them being the praxis), and the latter is a riveting insight into the pillories of daily life in rural soviet Russia.

Along with Bulgakov, Solzhenitsyn also offers deep insight into the soviet mindset, between his better known works (Gulag Archipelago, Cancer Ward, Ivan Denisovich) and his lesser known works (Incident at Krechetovka Station, Matryona's House).

One thing that both excelled at was getting their work published, not purely through samizdat, by making their allegorical allusions clear to those who knew what they were looking for but utterly opaque to the poorly educated soviet censors.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is a contender for the greatest work of Russian literature in the 20th century. The Bergin/O'Connor translation is a good one. Even if you don't get the references or historical context, you'll still enjoy reading it. Giant talking cat!

As pvg points out, Kevin Moss's notes ([http://cr.middlebury.edu/bulgakov/public_html/](http://cr.middlebury.edu/bulgakov/public_html/)) will reveal whole new layers of the onion when you re-read the book.

<comment><USER11> I'm an hour away from finishing the book, and goddamn I cannot get into it _at all_. It's just a bunch of random stuff happening without much connection. What is the appeal?

<comment><USER12> Which edition/translation are you reading?

EDIT:

For me, the appeal is in the interplay of the ultra paranoid and cynical life in the Stalinist USSR and the supernatural and goofy exploits of the Devil and his entourage who happen to visit Moscow.

The love story between the two main human characters is just the icing on the cake, but in my opinion not that important.

Not to mention that the "book within the book" about Pontius Pilate provided an entertaining intro to one of the fundamental Biblical stories for the atheist me, although now I tend to skip it when I re-read the book every once in a while.

EDIT2: Forgot to mention that the style it is written in (in Russian) is unique; it's very tongue-in-cheek: respectful to the established order and authorities on the surface but derisively satirical underneath. Nobody else wrote like that.

<comment><USER11> (After your edits:)

Hmm, yes, I do agree that it is interesting to see how everyone reacts to accusations of "holding foreign currency", but I think I'm missing most of the humour because I just don't know what it was like to live in a Stalinist sociopolitical climate.

I did enjoy the sub-book about Pontius Pilate indeed, and I also agree that the style feels very unique. I think the story with the Devil is just an excuse to orchestrate these unique situations and write the satirical/subversive reactions. I think that's what I don't like, the disjointed narrative without much of an arc, because I'm missing most of the subtext that is the payoff for the scenes.

<comment><USER13> The closest modern day equivalent to living in Stalinist Russia in the 30s is North Korea. At the slightest suspicion that one was somehow demonstrating disloyalty to the Soviet state one could be hauled away to be tortured and executed or sent to the Siberian Gulag to be slowly worked to death.

Bulgakov's writings, if discovered, would have lead to him being executed. To people who lived in the system, their was an unacknowledged understanding that something bad was happening as people would mysteriously disappear on a regular basis. The movie "The Inner Circle" ( [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103838/plotsummary?ref_=tt_ov_p...](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103838/plotsummary?ref_=tt_ov_pl) ) and "Burnt By The Sun" ( [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0111579/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0111579/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1) ) are good depictions of what life was like during those times. It makes the high anxiety and paranoia of most characters in M & M much more understandable.

<comment><USER14> There are deeper things in play there. Bulgakov had very peculiar relationship with Stalin. He hoped, against all odds and reason, that Stalin would read the book and like it and would protect him. That is what the scene when Woland talks to the Master about his novel is about. Stalin actually kind of did help Bulgakov somewhat, and enabled his works to be produced in theaters (without which Bulgakov would not have any means to support himself). It was kind of cat and mouse game which Stalin, having a sadistic streak, loved to play - <USER2> day he helped Bulgakov, another day reverted everything back. But Bulgakov sincerely hoped that Stalin would personally read the book and like it. That, of course, never happened and probably couldn't happen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Didn't expect to find discussion of my favorite writer here at HN. I wonder how does it translate to English... Now I want to get all those translations and compare them. Thanks HN!

</comment><comment><USER15> Is the translation that important? I'm writing a piece of fiction that occasionally quotes M&M, and consider using a yet another translation if it's so controversial...

<comment><USER16> For one, many of the translations are just terribly wooden.

But Russian is also very hard to translate to English, for several reasons; it's a heavily idiom-based language, full of common phrases (that every Russian knows) that an author can turn into puns or allusions. If the translator chooses to rewrite using the equivalent English idiom, the original meaning may be lost; whereas if it's translated literally, the reader won't know that it's a common saying that the author has subverted. The same thing goes with words that have multiple meanings, where the ambiguity itself resonates within the phrasing, or where the word has historical subtext or whatever.

But translators also often get stuff wrong. Plenty of people have pointed out very clear errors in the Pevear-Volokhonsky translations that are based on misunderstandings of the original text. Bulgakov also frequently writes on several levels (there's a lot of subtext and humour), and it's often hard to replicate the intended meaning, so translators end up with something that isn't quite right. Here [1] is some discussion with concrete examples.

[1] [http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/article/translation_wars_on...](http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/article/translation_wars_once_more_into_the_breach_edition/#20224)</comment></comment>


Here's the enormous hangar Google bought to fill with robots - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/176551/heres-the-enormous-hangar-google-bought-to-fill-with-robots/

<comment><USER2> > Bottom line: who can stop Google getting what it wants?

Why would they want to? They want to lease airport space, not poison babies.

People overreact to Google all the time. They've in a really weird PR place. People kinda love them, but are also terrified of them, and they cant really put a finger on why.</comment>


What if the aliens we are seeking are AI? - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20160922-what-if-the-aliens-we-are-looking-for-are-ai <comment><USER2> It seems strange to make a distinction between organic and created by organic. At an advanced enough stage, couldn't any AI look organic to us?

My take...

1) Over the span of our development, our technology development would look like uncomprehensable magic to someone 1000 years ago. Our ancestors from 100,000 years ago would find us uncomprehensible. Galactic time horizons are billions of years. The odds of our finding life who could comprehend us (and us them) is miniscule.

2) It's hard to fathom the listening not being automated, and using AI. There's just too much space to listen to.

<comment><USER3> My thoughts exactly. How do we even define "Artificial"? Heck, we can't even define "consciousness" properly.

Is a turtle artificially intelligent? What if a Chimp had titanium atoms instead of carbon? Would that make it AI?

Overall I think it's an absurd question because right now the definition of "AI" is something that we/humans have created. Everything else is natural intelligence.

A question of vernacular.

<comment><USER4> It matters, and here's why: natural intelligences, reasonably defined as intelligence evolved through natural selection, can be expected to have some convergent properties. The convergent instrumental goals of resource acquisition and self-preservation naturally arise, of course, but the same is probably said of artificial entities too. Naturally evolved intelligences on the other hand are very likely to have moralities of a recognizable (even if foreign) sort -- the Pareto optimal solutions to resource sharing problems encountered in their ancestral evolutionary environment which likely resembles ours in important respects. These are, in the words of Daniel Dennett, "forced moves" which any evolutionary process is likely to stumble upon regardless of lineage. Artifacts, on the other hand, have no reason to be so constrained.

<comment><USER5> For an artifact to survive a long time, won't it also undergo a sort of natural selection? Perhaps the only long surviving ai's are those with the exact qualities you ascribe to "naturally" occurring entities. I don't think there is a reason to differentiate intelligences into any natural artificial dichotomy.

<comment><USER4> Not under similar selection pressures as we underwent during our evolution, and unlike natural selection it would not be limited to neighboring improvements in design space. The range of possible intelligences, and their drives, would be vastly expanded.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Interesting - quite likely any anlien civilization would not send living creatures to explore space. It's more efficient to send von Neumann probes that can "create factories which will reproduce copies (of) themselves by the thousands", as argued here: [http://mkaku.org/home/articles/the-physics-of- extraterrestri...](http://mkaku.org/home/articles/the-physics-of- extraterrestrial-civilizations/)

<comment><USER7> > It's more efficient to send von Neumann probes

A fun mental activity: you could posit that life as we know is a von Neumann probe, with simple life supporting each more complex level (from the microbes that made a young Earth's toxic atmosphere oxygen-rich, multicellular machines etc) until you reach the human who, by being able to engineer their local environment, shifts intelligence from biology to machines that are able to coordinate solar-scale engineering, i.e. Dyson swarms, which can power mass- drivers that send out more von Neumann probes lined with organic terraforming seeds thus creating a forever repeating process until the universe sinks into darkness.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think it's likely intelligent life outside our planet just doesn't, or won't, have any interest in us outside the infinitesimal possibility of a threat.

Consider everything less intelligent than us on our planet... If anything tried to communicate with us, would we even bother trying to figure out what it was trying to say? Would we try to communicate back?

Suppose an octopus stacked rocks in piles of prime numbers (not including unity). Would we care beyond possibly putting it on display in an aquarium?

<comment><USER9> Traditionally, no human considers an octopus intelligent unless it can predict soccer results.

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

Paul aside, we've been ignoring evidence that animals are sentient for centuries now.

So yes - as a general principle, there's a term missing from the Drake equation to cover recognisable similarity, technological equivalence, and mutual interest.

Two civs probably need to be within half a millennium or so of technological development (human time) to have any possibility of communicating.

Considering how old the universe is, it's quite likely civs pass each other by all the time, because larger development differentials aren't visible - literally in one direction, and because of perceived triviality in the other.

Imagine an ant colony in a city, looking for other ant nests, while the city, all the other cities, and the rest of the civ that built the cities can't be imagined by the ants. So even though they're in the middle of a busy civilisation, it's invisible to them.

<comment><USER10> Ant 1: "Man, how do we get all these strange food deposits without plants?"

Ant 2: "Who knows? That's just the way the universe is."

Man 1: "Man, how do we have all these strange gravity deposits without matter?"

<comment><USER11> Creepy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I would think there is a high chance that if aliens are capable of listening to us, they would be using AI to do so. After all, within decades of starting to listen for Aliens, we've already made significant progress in AI development.

However, once their AI deciphers what we're saying to them, they'll probably just get annoyed like the FCC and HAM radio operators get annoyed with people mucking around with radio transmissions before knowing the rules.

</comment><comment><USER13> One wonders if we ourselves are not a step along the way of a genetic algorithm that began with a meteor-riding virus crashing on our fertile primordial world. Sent from?

<comment><USER14> I've considered that possibility as well.

We are the only known species to propagate out of balance within our local environment. Our brain has this concept of "infinity", which shows up everywhere in our society. Unconstrained growth is in our DNA.

<comment><USER15> This is not correct. Picture a caterpiller eating all the leaves on a branch -- the only home it has ever known.

That animal is eating it's environment and we might consider that irrational and unsustainable -- right up until the moment where it emerges from a cocoon and flies away to a new world.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I don't think life can survive itself in order to become super-intelligent. It's easy to see why we have the Fermi Paradox. Homo Sapiens have been around for say 100,000 years yet the last 200 years, as we have become technological, we have basically destroyed our environment. I think any intelligent lifeform would have a similar path; where the social intelligence lags behind the technological intelligence. We are not mature enough to handle the global problems that we are facing today. Solutions to these problems require the political will on a global, not nationalistic scale and we just are not ready. Hence we are destroying the environment.

So any intelligent life-form would have to survive this period where they have the technical intelligence to create damaging things such as cars, coal-fired power plants, nuclear bombs, etc but lack the maturity and will to manage the bad issues resulting from that technology.

And I can't see how we will create the solutions on a global scale within such a divisive world society. It just won't happen. And any life-form would go thru the same phase. So life will flourish until technology enters the picture, and then the issues of technology (pollution, over-population, resource depletion, etc.) will happen very quickly and destructively since any life-form would be emotionally ill-equipped to handle them. I mean, how can we construct global solutions when the majority of people still believe in a 'god'. We are still immature apes yet with nuclear bombs.

It would be a rare civilisation that would be able to survive this period. And hence that's why intelligent life-forms would continually rise and fall, but never progressing past a certain level of intelligence.

<comment><USER17> So whenever I open the newspaper every headline I see in the newspaper points to the birth pangs of a type one civilization information. However, every time I open the newspaper I also see the opposite trend as well. What is terrorism? Terrorism in some sense is a reaction against the creation of a type one civilization. Now most terrorists cannot articulate this. They don't even know what the hell I'm talking about, but what they're reacting to is not modernism. What they're reacting to is the fact that we're headed toward a multicultural tolerant scientific society and that is what they don't want. They don't want science. They want a theocracy. They don't want multiculturalism. They want monoculturalism. So instinctively they don't like the march toward a type one civilization. Now which tendency will win? I don't know, but I hope that we emerge as a type one civilization.

—Michio Kaku. "Will Mankind Destroy Itself?", 2010

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

<comment><USER18> > What they're reacting to is the fact that we're headed toward a > multicultural tolerant scientific society and that is what they don't want. > They don't want science. They want a theocracy. They don't want > multiculturalism. They want monoculturalism.

Sadly, you've also described an increasing number of western political conservatives.

[https://m.mic.com/articles/95234/psychologists-discover- the-...](https://m.mic.com/articles/95234/psychologists-discover-the-striking- difference-between-conservative-and-liberal-brains#.K34utmriA)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I think emergence of life is a start of a ticking time bomb. If someone would look at earth from afar and observe the changes on a compressed time scale, one would see the earth 'lighting' up a bit as soon as intelligent life emerges.

Life emerging on a planet is like a bomb's fuse getting lit. The bomb in this case being earth itself with its unique chemical composition. It is only a question of time when this bomb goes off and destroys all life in the process. Maybe the purpose of life is to accelerate and magnify that explosion to achieve the highest possible cosmic reduction of entropy.

Some people argue against this by citing how earth has become relatively peaceful over the last century. I think this is a false belief - earth is in a local minima of violence bought about by the emergence of nation states and nuclear weapons.

The next level of evolution of intelligent life, which will most likely be AI, will bring with it a new wave of violence. First, when AI takes over and fights the humans for dominance, and next if there are multiple AI which emerge and fight over the resources of this solar system.

<comment><USER20> > Maybe the purpose of life is to accelerate and magnify that explosion to > achieve the highest possible cosmic reduction of entropy.

What mechanism would define that purpose? Earth harboring life for a few billion years, and then snuffing itself out, seems completely irrelevant on the scale of cosmic entropy.

Your argument might have merit if intelligent life tends to perform crazy Physics experiments that spawn new universes. Then you'd have an evolutionary feedback loop where universes become tuned for intelligent life.

<comment><USER19> It is just the direction the universe flows. Life is just a more complex incendiary reaction born out of a certain chemical chemical composition and planetary alignment.

In that sense it is perhaps similar to a volcano that erupt. Both are emergent from the same forces of entropy, but life just takes a non obvious path. Life seeks to burn itself out, the same way a volcano seeks to cool itself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I thought it was going to be a much more deep article on how we are going to 'create life' and how we might discover it is amazing and will blow our minds.

(Rather than AI just being our servant)

</comment><comment><USER22> After aliens or AI see how we treat each other they will probably just sterilize the entire planet with a gamma ray to not expose themselves to such apeness.

</comment><comment><USER23> Of course they are. If they exist. There is always the possibility we are the first intelligent life in this galaxy. Someone has to be first.

</comment><comment><USER24> Nice that the picture has minified frontend code using jQuery, basic string manipulation and regexes in it.

</comment><comment><USER25> If these alien beings are built using javascript (as pictured above in the matrix-esque image) then we definitely have nothing to fear.

This phrase should defeat them: "Hi, welcome to undefined"

<comment><USER22> If they used JavaScript, the language's excellent floating point arithmetic would likely make them crash all the time and we will be safe.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Really doubt any extraterrestrial beings would be willing to make contact with us in our current state of development. Maybe if we could go a century without wars or genocide or other atrocities. Honestly unless they want to guide us (ala Childhood's End) I doubt we have anything to offer.

<comment><USER26> Unless maybe we taste good?

<comment><USER17> They'd probably look at us (for food) the way most people look at food currently coming out of China. Polluted garbage.

<comment><USER27> or perhaps they'd look at us like wild beasts, ripe for cultivation in their factory farms.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Here is the 'plan' as outlined to me by an old dust hippie outside of Gerlach (Warning: totally crap, light speed remains the limiter, but entertaining still the same):

>Humans figure out this brain and AI thing sometime in the next 200 years. So, now 'you' don't need a body or any of that jazz anymore. Brain uploads, that whole shebang, fun times ensue, maybe

>Great, now we start ctrl+C and ctrl+V'ing ourselves a lot, we start getting into the real nitty gritty of physics, chem, bio, math, etc. We get limited by the amount of computers, matter, and energy we can muster. The Earth turns to computronium and heat.

>You know how this ends: We deconstruct the Earth and solar system, send the sun into brown dwarf state and 'colonize' other systems to do the same. The issue is still light speed. More computation is great, but it is the flops that matter. This means that other systems are effectively useless and on their own as it still takes centuries to distribute the computations. You need more plain-jane matter and energy. Bigger systems are primo then. If we go to interstellar war, it will be over very large systems. Still, it's unlikely because...

>Black holes. You fall into one, and time slows down. Boom! You have more flops for no effort. All you have to do is fall into one and have your 'puters on the outside do all the work faster. We super-engineer some craziness and make tiny ones to orbit about. (Note: Now things REALLY fall off into dust hippie-land).

>Cosmic eggs. The black hole is the egg and we are the sperm (yes, this is nutto but fun). We all merge our individual black holes and then we make the 'great journey' to the center of galaxy to all merge with all the other AIs out there. He said it was the only real option. The horizon of the super massive one in the center is the 'flattest' and therefore easiest to orbit and 'choose your time dilation' (I think he meant that it had the smoothest gradient as it was the biggest).

>We are then the first to be intelligent. Dust Hippie then said something that, by this super crazy funland logic, was pretty good. Assuming these time dilation and systems turned into computronium ideas kinda hold water, then we know there are no other super-AIs in the galactic core. This is because we can see many massive suns in very odd orbits about the galactic super black hole. If they were there, went his thinking, then they would set them in better orbits with a constant 'power feed' into the AIs orbiting closely to the black-hole, also they would not be visible to us as they would be enshrouded themselves by computronium, with no radiation wasted on the way out. Not a bad extension of crazy logic, I'd say.

Now, these are all predicated on our current physics know-how and that light speed is as slow as it is. We have great suspicions that this is not true, as our form of matter is ~5% of the total mass-energy budget of the universe and it seems most of the universe is not 'positive' energy (the universe is accelerating in its expansion). Still, its a fun, if likely LSD fueled, theory.

<comment><USER29> Why should an AI care to spend time near a black hole, in order to 'have more flops for no effort'? That's the same as slowing down the AI's substrate, or putting it into suspend mode. If the non-AIs can survive for centuries, why can't the AIs? In other words, why does the AI care about the "still" in "still take centuries"?

If the AIs have interstellar war, they won't be bogged down in slowtime around a black hole. The ones in fasttime have more chances to control the computronium, and a faster response time to take advantage of whatever those compute cycles are being use for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Paging cstross.</comment>


Tesla Model S fire after crash in Mexico  - <AUTHOR> http://green.autoblog.com/2013/10/28/second-tesla-model-s-fire-caught-on-video-after-mexico-crash/

<comment><AUTHOR> The picture from this other article seems to indicate the same cause of fire as its precedent.

[http://www.digitaltrends.com/cars/second-tesla-model-s- catch...](http://www.digitaltrends.com/cars/second-tesla-model-s-catches-fire- critical-crash-mexico/)

TSLA holders don't seem all that concerned though.

[http://www.google.com/finance?q=tsla&ei=rshvUsjNCMfFwAOXLg](http://www.google.com/finance?q=tsla&ei=rshvUsjNCMfFwAOXLg)

What does HN think? Is this just the statistical reality and not particularly worrisome or is there an design flaw that should be addressed?

Personally I understand the rational behind the comparison of the Tesla Model S with typical gas powered cars. Nevertheless, I don't see why Tesla shouldn't address the issue and make the cars safer and more reliable.

</comment><comment><USER2> Tesla's official statement: "We were able to contact the driver quickly and are pleased that he is safe. This was a significant accident where the car was traveling at such a high speed that it smashed through a concrete wall and then hit a large tree, yet the driver walked away from the car with no permanent injury. He is appreciative of the safety and performance of the car and has asked if we can expedite delivery of his next Model S."

[http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-10-28/tesla-says- model-s-...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-10-28/tesla-says-model-s- driver-unhurt-in-mexico-crash.html)</comment>


Programming Languages to Learn in 2019 - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/3-programming-languages-to-learn-in-2019-2eb035936f65 <comment><USER2> I'd recommend mend throwing Elixir on this list. It's similar to go and it has the Erlang ecosystem to build off of. The language is very mature and nearing a level of feature completion. It's got HA, concurrency, and robotics support with nerves.

I've spent so much time focusing on it after coming from Ruby and I must say, I'm thoroughly impressed with my experiences.

</comment><comment><USER3> +=Rust</comment>


Highlights from the Meteor Stack Overflow-athon - <AUTHOR> http://meteor.com/blog/2012/12/21/highlights-from-the-meteor-stack-overflow-athon

<comment><USER2> I'm just taking a look at [1], and they're typing mongo inserts into the javascript console on the browser. I assume this is only enabled when in some kind of development mode?

[1] <http://meteor.com/screencast>

<comment><USER3> Actually, it was impossible to restrict updates when the screencast was made -- the Meteor "auth" system just landed a few months ago, and now it's possible. (You can provide your own update methods that do authentication before proceeding, and then disable the direct Mongo updates.)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Burned Out. Is a sabbatical a good idea and will I ever work again? - <AUTHOR>

Hi, I'm in my early 20s and based in the US. I started working at a big company in IT last year, and lately, I've become disillusioned with the work I'm doing and the people I'm working with. Since starting, I've slowly stopped working on personal projects, and can't seem do any real work on any of my ideas.
Getting up to go to work is starting to be a pain and I feel like I'm spending a quarter of my time worrying about office politics rather than getting any real work done. My productivity is approaching zero, and I can't even get myself to apply for other jobs when I get back home. I read the description of burnout from jacquesm and it hit me hard - almost all of it seemed true for me. A combination of burnout and depression and not enjoying what I'm working on is killing my passion and motivation. I don't even know if I'm mentally ready for another job.
I have around $10k saved up and instead of getting another job, I'm thinking of taking a 3 or 6 month sabbatical to reboot my career, explore East Asia and develop my skills. I imagine with expenses, I can get by with spending about $5000 if I live cheaply which I plan to do. I've had this idea brewing in my head for a while, but everyone I talk to thinks its crazy so I wanted to get some advice from HN.Note: I have no dependents or girlfriend and besides student loans, no real commitments.
What I fear is that once I return, I will not be able to get another job because employers will care about the resume gap. Who here has done something similar? If so: What were things you took into account before making the decision? What would you do to make the most of a sabbatical? What can I do to prepare the best for when I get back in terms of looking for a job / starting my own thing?
Thanks, really appreciate your recommendations and insights! <comment><USER2> Yes! If you need to refresh your mind, get a new perspective on what you are doing and what's important to you, and seek internal satisfaction, I think it's a great idea to take a sabbatical, or a long vacation of some sort.

Ignore the people who think it's crazy - they aren't walking in your shoes and feeling your malaise. Don't fear your return back to the workplace - in fact, I think spending time figuring out what's important to you and broadening your experiences and perspective should make you more interesting to prospective employers than if you trudged forward in a job that you have little zest for.

Keep a blog. Track your experiences. (In the old days, this would be a diary). Figure out what's meaningful to you. Expand your experiences - push your boundaries. This is your chance to rediscover what makes you tick and perhaps why you're doing what you're doing now. Or maybe that you actually want to do something else.

</comment><comment><USER3> Do it. I took 7 months off after working for 5 years at megacorp and getting burned out. Take the time off to revitalize yourself. Don't do any coding or programming for a month at least. I went to China and studied martial arts for a month, then came back and spent time in the SF night life and Burning Man crowd.

Then I started working at a startup, which was much much better then working at megacorp. Much less politics, much more freedom to do what you want, and you have much more impact. Less soul sucking :)</comment>


The Kinetic Wood Sculptor - <AUTHOR> http://priceonomics.com/the-kinetic-wood-sculptor/ <comment><USER2> "In 1992, David purchased 5MB of data space from his local Internet service provider, taught himself how to code a website, and put his designs on the web." I like his style! Smart guy and a true artist!

</comment><comment><USER3> This guy is like the flip side of Matthias Wandel[1]

Very cool.

[1] [http://woodgears.ca](http://woodgears.ca)

</comment><comment><USER4> After CS studies and looking at low level computing devices (physical as in stack machines or ideal like lambda calculus), I'm about to fall in love with clocks, gears and engines (like wankel's [http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c3/Wankel_en...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c3/Wankel_engine_diagram.png)). As embodiment of loops, reminding me of quines and paradoxical combinators.

</comment><comment><USER5> Lovely. Reminds me of these all-wooden clocks - [http://bruceaitken- clockmaker.co.uk/](http://bruceaitken-clockmaker.co.uk/)</comment>


Font Combiner – improvements to free web fonts - <AUTHOR> http://fontcombiner.com/docs/whyfontcombiner

<comment><USER2> From the explanation beneath "How is this possible":

> The Font Combiner application uses a couple of different techniques to > overhaul fonts. All glyph forms are extracted from vectors present in the > original fonts and scaled to size where appropriate, the vertical metrics > are recalculated from scratch, and spacing and fresh automated hinting are > applied to the result.

Now, I don't know a lot about the gory details of typography, but I do know that type designers spend a lot of time thinking about things like "appropriate size and scale" and other metrics. Can these really be automatically recalculated from scratch and how can this possibly lead to a better result?

<comment><USER3> I can't imagine that it would do better than carefully designed and hinted font. But I doubt such care is given to all fonts.

<comment><USER4> This is really the problem. Many fonts are poorly hinted and not designed with small sizes on a screen in mind.

<comment><USER3> That I will agree with. I highly doubt that Font Combiner could beat a font manually hinted by a trained fontographer though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Some rendering screenshots would help. I'm viewing this on my iPad and the only difference I see is bad kerning in the examples on the right.

<comment><USER2> Same here (OS X, Safari). It doesn't look much better in the demos either. Their demos include some truly horrific examples, like Linux, Firefox 24, Ubuntu: [http://fontcombiner.com/docs/media/demo/linux_firefox_ubuntu...](http://fontcombiner.com/docs/media/demo/linux_firefox_ubuntu.png)

<comment><USER6> I, like many here, prefer the original on the left both in my browser (Firefox 27 on Windows 8) and in the example you linked.

Most notably, to my eye, the text on the right has unappealing kerning changes.

A concrete example, visible in the screen-shot you linked: look at the words "little three" at the top right of the second paragraph. In the original rendering, the space between the pair of 't's and the 't' and 'h' pair is correct. In the modified rendering on the right, there is an excess pixel between the pair of 't's and the 't' and 'h' pair.

Uneven spacing of letters is one of the reasons I am unhappy when I use Chrome, since it still doesn't support DirectWrite on Windows [1].

[1] [http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=25541](http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=25541)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I was under the impression that Google Fonts stripped hinting to speed download since its entirely ignored by many platform/browser combinations.

And for platforms that do use it I thought it ran ttfautohint to generate it, which sounds incredibly similar to what these guys do.

Relatedly, Google fonts also has sophisticated subsetting options which this page claims as an improvement over Google's offering.

edit: relevant links

[http://www.freetype.org/ttfautohint/index.html](http://www.freetype.org/ttfautohint/index.html)

[http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QTX1lU97z08](http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QTX1lU97z08) (27 minutes in for stripping hints on non-windows requests)

[http://googlewebfonts.blogspot.com/2011/04/streamline- your-w...](http://googlewebfonts.blogspot.com/2011/04/streamline-your-web- font-requests.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't know if Google strip hinting, but that sounds broadly accurate. Font Combiner makes use of ttfautohint as part of hinting types B and C, with slight modifications where a subset omits character 'o'. Hinting and truetype instructions make little difference to OSX and others.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> On my MacBook Air, the original version looks much better than the "improved".

</comment><comment><USER9> I see clear difference on both Windows and Linux, your product makes the fonts more clear and sharp thus making it more readable and less fuzzy than taking fonts straight out of Google Fonts. Looks to me like a solid thing, definitely bookmarked.

</comment><comment><USER10> They look mostly the same to me on a 30" screen (chrome on linux). Slightly different kerning is all I can really tell. Certainly no significant difference.

</comment><comment><USER11> So essentially you want to deliver the font combiner version to Windows/Chrome and the normal version to everyone else.

</comment><comment><USER12> Can't see a difference, other than a slight change in spacing between letters. Maybe the site should explain what I'm supposed to be looking for since it's not obvious? As it stands, there's no explanation about what changes, and there's no real visible difference. Why would I use this?

</comment><comment><USER13> Big improvements on Windows 7 / Chrome.

<comment><USER14> Same here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This affects mainly Windows users (why I do not know.. but the default Google fonts have always look like shit on my Windows machine).

If you don't see any difference think about how many people are viewing your app/site on windows machines and having to look at the horrible default rendering.

You can always tell when a site is build with Apple and not throughout tested on Windows, the fonts are always horrible, and there are very few tested services that render fonts across OS/browsers the right way, so this is a great idea.

<comment><USER9> Actually this affects Linux users too. I tested on Elementary OS, which is a distro based on Ubuntu and uses sub-pixel font rendering. Fonts made with font combiner are more crisp and clear (but not pixelated) than the default google fonts, which are fuzzy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Definitely worse for me under FF25/linux with the autohinter. Kerning also seems to be worse in certain common cases ("ow").

Fortunately, I enforce my own fonts on web pages, as I cannot stand the incredibly poor quality of most "web fonts". Proper hinting makes a world of difference for reading on a screen. If you really care for typography on your website, you should pay for a decent font, or use a common system font.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Forgive the slow response to some of the comments. Font Combiner's utility is intended to be as much in the facility to combine glyphs from more than one font and to adjust spacing characteristics and hinting to taste, along with scaling fonts to size for greater consistency.

Hinting and vertical metrics are quite the rabbit hole across platforms. This is a good article [http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2012/04/24/a-closer-look- at-...](http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2012/04/24/a-closer-look-at-font- rendering/)

Font kerning is very new to web browsers. So far as I'm aware neither of the fonts demonstrated at the top of the post contain kerning information. The heavy fonts lower down do.

Font Combiner itself is still very new. Tracking or character spacing (as opposed to kerning) may benefit from some additional tweaks for OSX. This is outside of the scope of the current UI.

</comment><comment><USER17> On linux with slight hinting enabled, and I see no discernable difference between the examples.

</comment><comment><USER18> Great project! Web designers need absolute control over charset and font size (load), kerning, word and letter spacing, etc. Support for OpenType features [1] would be a dearly needed addition. Editing/tweaking of glyph shapes [2] would make this tool really into an in-browser font editor.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_typographic_features](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_typographic_features) [2] Check nodebox.github.io/opentype.js/ ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6459778](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6459778))

</comment><comment><USER19> I notice improvements on windows8/chrome on the 2nd one. First one is about the same. I've always hated how bad web fonts can look on chrome on windows and why they have yet to resolve the issue.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> View statistics for Font Combiner following some exposure on HN show upwards of 70% Linux and Mac. This probably isn't representative of the audience most fonts in use would be presented to. If you're interested in the differences, do try a test in Windows on a browser without DirectWrite.

This is a screenshot showing Windows 7 and Chrome 30: [http://i.imgur.com/WBbUIFi.png](http://i.imgur.com/WBbUIFi.png)

</comment><comment><USER20> Windows 7, Firefox 25 with no hardware acceleration.

[http://imgur.com/a/V8zTc](http://imgur.com/a/V8zTc)

</comment><comment><USER21> On Chrome, on a retina Mac Book Pro here. Kind of liked the right side they produced at first glance, but actually reading the text, the left side is clearer, sharper, and lighter and easier on the eyes. Reading the right is like reading an entire book set in bold. Maybe their stuff is just good for heavy title fonts or something?

</comment><comment><USER22> I first viewed the examples on my Macbook Air, and didn't see much difference (except what looked to me as marginally better kerning for the Font Combiner version).

Viewing them again on Chrome/Win7, the ones served by Font Combiner seem to have much better hinting.

</comment><comment><USER23> No 1's to compare against upper case "I" and lower case "l." No 0's to compare against upper case "O."

I don't see any differences.

</comment><comment><USER24> On my Mac+Google Chrome the difference is barely noticeable.

<comment><USER25> Not on my rMBP. The "enhanced" versions are noticeably better spaced and easier on the eyes.

<comment><USER26> wow. on my macbook air, it's the opposite - the "enhanced" versions have letter smushed together and is overall a little harder to read.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Demo didn't show diff for me. (OSX Chrome) But the actual font-combiner tool seems to be great, I can create my own font combining few fonts. Which is nice.

</comment><comment><USER28> The fontcombiner versions appear more appealing to me, more crisp and bold and weightier, than the G webfonts. iphone 4s, ios7.

</comment><comment><USER29> Looks great, this is something I'll use for sure.

</comment><comment><USER30> what does it do?</comment>


Any startups gamifying learning? - <AUTHOR> What are the benefits of gamifying education? Why is it better than traditional education (lectures, videos, textbooks) <comment><USER2> Gamifying adds an artificial layer of motivation unto the educational experience. Some people accept this artificiality; others don't. You need to know if your target audience will.

</comment><comment><USER3> Classcraft and Gameffective are both in that area.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> We're trying to gamify higher education</comment>


Things from leaked audio of Mark Zuckerberg and his employees - tech-historian https://www.theverge.com/interface/2020/6/3/21278233/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-walkout-employee-meeting-leaked-audio <comment><USER2> So long as their speech remains legal, social media sites should not be the business of censoring elected officials. That is the job of voters and Congress.

It's too easy to walk down a slippery slope where suddenly these sites have to regulate in accordance with whatever is the popular opinion of the day.

<comment><USER3> >social media sites should not be the business of censoring elected officials. That is the job of voters and Congress.

What about Paul Nehlen, a political candidate who (before he was permabanned) frequently railed on Twitter against the "Jewish media" and mused about the "JQ", which stands for Jewish Question? Who called Jewish critics "shekels- for-hire" and used the phrase "The goyim know!" as an imitation of their involvement in a supposed conspiracy? Who said he wouldn't mind "leading a million Robert Bowers [the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter] to the promised land"?

Is that something Twitter is within their rights to ban for, in your view? If so, would that change if he were elected?

Social media is a not a public square where people can plant their soapbox, it is a set of privately owned servers where people can persist small amounts of data that comply with a set of rules. You break the rules, you get kicked off the private property.

<comment><USER4> > Social media is a not a public square where people can plant their soapbox

Except there isn't really an alternative to Twitter - they have monopolised that "short catchy text stream" market. Other services, like Gab, exist - <AUTHOR> when services like Cloudflare readily pull support for less mainstream alternatives, its hard to say that if you don't like Twitter you can go somewhere else.

For better or worse, Facebook and Twitter consumed blogs, and there are no real alternatives.

<comment><USER5> That's like saying television networks are required to give you a show for your free speech. Social networks are private companies built for profit. For better or worse they should be able to censor anything that's not good for their business. Hell, you can't even post a nipple on Facebook.

<comment><USER6> Facebook and Twitter are _ostensibly_ platforms. The analogy would be if a TV network rented out studios and cameras but prevented you from hiring them even though you had the money because they didn't like you or what you were going to film or had filmed or might film.

If they were a TV channel or programme then they'd have no bother refusing you. And that's the nub, are they a platform or are they a publisher? If they're the former _and_ you allow them to discriminate then what's your argument against other businesses discriminating? Can't see that ending well.

If, however, we accept that they're publishers - which in my view they are, as they edit what can be seen in several ways - then by all means let them discriminate but they must follow the rules of other publishing media companies.

<comment><USER7> TV channels refuse advertising based on politics or community standards. That's pretty similar - provide your own content, and rent airtime, but get rejected because of what you say.

<comment><USER6> That's true but let's take it a step forward - if the TV station published a list of rules and your content did not cross the line but you were denied, would that be okay?

Would retroactive application of rules be fine, or new rules created and then retroactively applied?

Would it be okay if they refused simply because of who you were? Or what you did elsewhere? These kind of questions seem to be more applicable if we're comparing to Twitter et al.

<comment><USER7> I wasn't ready to give an opinion! I was just stating the circumstances :)

But, if I'm going to answer I think legal issues are grey and it can be tough to accept as a programmer dealing in binary. There aren't many absolute rules and sometimes a rule works well at one scale but not another.

Part of the reason we should avoid monopolies is so people and governments can leave companies alone and those who disagree with their rules can go elsewhere because they have options. But this is in complete opposition to products and platforms that flourish because of network effects. By its very nature, Twitter wants to be the only game in town. I think that changes things and opens them up to scrutiny because we have fewer realistic options.

So as a non-answer, if we had many viable social networks or TV channels to choose from I'd be happy with them arbitrarily deciding who gets to play in their playground for any or no reason (as long as it's only in that one place, and there's no secret cabal or cartel). Protected reasons and classes aside. Keeping in mind, many times rules aren't rules, they're flagged as guidelines and subject to change for subjective reasons.

But I don't think that really reflects what is going on in modern social media networks. They are similar but distinct, each is used for different types of speech, and the key players dominate their niche. Users can choose to some degree what they prefer to receive. Networks also choose for the users via their feed algorithms.

So they are already taking on the role of arbiter and have been for some time. That sounds more like a publisher to me, as you say. They don't change the content of each post - but they do change the collection of content you get presented, just like a magazine editor rejecting articles and putting together this month's issue. Except every single article is tagged _opinion_.

On top of that I think we are just running up against another "too big to fail" situation. They're our only platform to communicate this way, so we don't like the idea of them suppressing speech, and speech can be inflammatory, inciteful, or libelous. That's not really incompatible with free speech in other areas, and I think once a platform reaches a certain size we should treat it as a public arena. This would be consistent with not allowing them to remove posts for arbitrary reasons, but allow them to do it if they think it falls under one of those categories.

<comment><USER6> > I wasn't ready to give an opinion! I was just stating the circumstances :)

Any insightful comment, even "just" descriptive, deserves a response, _nay_ , a challenge to force the speaker to tease out more! :)

And I'm glad I did because your opinion is spot on, in my opinion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > Zuckerberg's decision was supported by the majority of the company, but that > people who agreed with it were afraid to speak out for fear of appearing > insensitive

I find that interesting and dangerous.

<comment> tech-historian It's not entirely clear how they came to that conclusion without any data to back it up. How could they know? Was there an internal survey or something?

Or perhaps Facebook employees generally lean right maybe? Any FB employees here care to comment?

<comment><USER9> I'm at FB (throwaway account for good measure).

It's impossible to tell, especially working remotely. It's not like you can ask these kinds of questions over Workplace chat unless you're close with other team members.

But the perspective that there are people who agree with Zuck's decision and aren't speaking up is valid. I'm one of them despite generally agreeing with BLM _and_ being a person of color.

You have people changing their profile pics to BLM icons which makes it ever so apparent that a non-negligible percent (20%-30% maybe) of co-workers in each group chat support the cause.

During Q&As, 95% of the comments are from BLM supporters making quite blunt remarks about Zuck's decision making.

Director+ levels are also vocally against Zuck's decision (although they accept that they can't change his mind). I'm not willing to torpedo my career progression here, and imagine others feel the same.

So yeah, I'll be keeping my mouth shut and silently nodding along with the rest while Zuck gets rocks thrown at him.

<comment><USER10> Just out of curiosity, what keeps you from speaking out (besides a strong feeling of group think).

Have you actually experienced firings / ostracism from people at the company? While I do feel like your points would be contrarian (and may get shouted at), I'm wondering what the actual repercussions would be.

Most of what I've seen (in regards to dissenters) have been relatively spirited debates and strong digital dissension but no strong tangible effects.

I'm asking this in good faith as someone who sits on the other side of the fence on this issue (though like with most things am not 100% assured of my decision).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Zuckerburg has a history of this type of behavior in the past where he sucked up to Xi Jinping asking him to name his child (wtf...). He obviously doesn't care about politics nearly as much as he does courting influence and money from politicians in power. The embarrassing part is his attempts to justify it without outright saying "Look, we have to keep Republicans happy because they have the power to hurt Facebook or stop giving us money and I'm not OK with that."

Dorsey and even Bezos are more principled than he is.

<comment><USER12> About baby names: This was in 2015, when the Democratic presidential front runners for the most part were pro-China and in favor of the TPP.

Edit: TPPP -> TPP

<comment><USER13> You mean the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP)? That partnership was not to the benefit of China. It did not include China.

<comment><USER12> Ah, that is correct. It's possible that, since China and Vietnam have a free trade agreement, that there would be some misuse ([https://theintercept.com/2015/11/11/trump-was-right-about- tp...](https://theintercept.com/2015/11/11/trump-was-right-about-tpp- benefitting-china/)), but you're right.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> If Facebook and Zuckerberg personally did not profit from such acidic and destructive kind of free speech they would fix that pronto, it's as simple as that and it appears fruitless to me to spend a lot of words to counterargue them without considering this. Karl Popper would be going nuts by now were he alive today, I'm afraid.

<comment><USER15> They know it's destructive and harms people and they do it anyway: [https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/26/21270659/facebook- divisio...](https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/26/21270659/facebook-division- news-feed-algorithms)

Barry Schnitt, former spokesperson for facebook:

 _Unfortunately, I do not think it is a coincidence that the choices Facebook makes are the ones that allow the most content — the fuel for the Facebook engine — to remain in the system. I do not think it is a coincidence that Facebook's choices align with the ones that require the least amount of resources, and the choices that outsource important aspects to third parties. I do not think it is a coincidence that Facebook's choices appease those in power who have made misinformation, blatant racism, and inciting violence part of their platform. Facebook says, and may even believe, that it is on the side of free speech. In fact, it has put itself on the side of profit and cowardice._

[https://onezero.medium.com/dear-facebook- employees-7d01761e5...](https://onezero.medium.com/dear-facebook- employees-7d01761e591f)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> >Here are my top takeaways from the roughly 85-minute recording

Is that recording publicly available?

<comment><USER17> i've been looking for it as well and haven't been able to find it. i wouldn't be surprised if journalists are keeping it close because fb puts a watermark in streams to catch leakers. so it's not available to keep the leaker anonymous.

<comment><USER18> or to make sure the journos still have a purpose

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I like very much the approach the author took to writing this piece. He does a great job of putting the situation in context (ie: his "the optimists and the pessimists" positioning).

</comment><comment><USER20> I don't think the policy will ever be black and white like that in terms of free speech. If that is the case no social media company will have any terms and conditions on their site, other than don't spam us. All of them will have the same free speech limitations that the country has.

For example will facebook be ok if the next democratic president says "we will stone carl if this post gets 10k upvotes" will it be ok? Lines are always drawn and they are always in he sand. Its just that FB decided that is where they want to draw that line. Everyone will have their own opinion on whether its good or not.

</comment><comment><USER21> so wait - what would Facebook do during the Arab spring?

>"If we were entering a period where there may be a prolonged period of civil unrest,...

Should they be censoring rioters? What if foreign governments compel them to censor material? What if you censor the "good" guys?

</comment><comment><USER22> Megacorp gonna megacorp. There are 655 billion reasons why Facebook will continue to act in the interests of its sole reason for existence as a money- making enterprise, as it has for a decade. All the hemming and hawing and hand-wringing and agonizing they portray...ignore it. Just watch the actions. Actions speak louder than words, Mark.

</comment><comment><USER23> I like how o.p. edited the title of the original article from 'Nine things we learned from leaked audio of Mark Zuckerberg facing his employees'. Good move. The 'x thing you never knew' format has become the hollow candy of internet- acquired knowledge.

</comment><comment> tech-historian Also, while we're on the topic, I'd like to understand why this post was flagged here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23393676](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23393676)

</comment><comment><USER24> "Free speech" is a very nuanced term. You can't shout "fire" in a crowd unless there's a fire; and you can't force me to distribute anything.

Traditional media (TV, Newspapers, Radio, Publishers) always use discretion about what they print and broadcast. A TV station deciding not to broadcast something, or a publisher declining to publish something, is not censorship.

IMO, Social Media is not like a generic web hosting company. They can use a lot more discretion in what they publish, how they publish it, who they show it to, and what context they put it in. To be quite honest, I honestly believe Facebook needs to be more proactive in curtailing misinformation. Calling lack of discretion over what they promote in feeds "Free speech" is ruse to try and distract people from their poor credibility.

Nothing's blocking Trump from creating his own website where he can say whatever he wants.

<comment><USER25> I remember seeing that "yelling fire in a crowded theater" was technically untrue as it is usually presented. Anyone with more knowledge can elaborate?

<comment><USER26> Here's a good summary: [1]

Basically, the analogy of shouting "fire" in a theater was meant to illustrate the "clear and present danger" doctrine - if an act of speech could lead to clear and present danger which there were laws against, then the speech was not protected. What's false about this analogy is that the "clear and present danger" standard isn't the standard that speech is measured against today. Instead, speech is restricted according to the "imminent lawless action" doctrine, by which speech that could lead directly to people breaking the law is not protected. This was decided in Brandenburg v. Ohio[2], and the central tenet of the ruling is:

"Advocacy of force or criminal activity does not receive First Amendment protections if (1) the advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action, and (2) is likely to incite or produce such action."

Thus, standing on a street corner and praising the merits of rioting and damaging property might be protected speech if it was very unlikely for anyone to take those actions, but if you did it during a restless protest march the protections of free speech may not apply.

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_the...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_theater) [2]: [https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/395/444/](https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/395/444/)

<comment><USER27> It's worth noting that the phrase "shouting fire in a crowded theater" comes from a Supreme Court case in which the government imprisoned socialists for handing out flyers urging people not to submit to the draft during WWI.[1]

It's one of the most infamous decisions in the history of the Supreme Court, at one of the darkest hours in the history of the First Amendment. I think most people would be surprised to learn how far the Wilson administration went to suppress free speech during WWI. I had no idea until I read "The Great Influenza" (about the 1918 pandemic) recently.

As an aside: the Espionage Act comes from that time, and is the law that was used to jail opponents of the draft back then. It's also the law being used to charge Assange today.

1\. Schenck v. United States: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenck_v._United_States](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenck_v._United_States)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Free For All of Social Media censors won't last very long. It became mainstream to hate the internet and push for the end of platforms, effectively turning Twitter/Facebook/Google into publishers. By doing that they automatically loose the ability to claim to be platforms and become publishers.

As a publisher it is much harder to guaranteed that things said in the platform won't end up in the arrest of your employees. Zuckerberg is trying to find a middle ground where he does not push an agenda but at the same time can keep its advertisers by removing things based on a clear policy ( showing violence / pornography / etc ).

Don't forget the media as a whole does NOT have that benefit, if a company publishes or defames people they will be severely punished. We should think really hard before asking for Social media companies to breach that vote of confidence, there is real chances Twitter will be the first giant to fall regardless if Biden wins the election.

<comment><USER29> It is becoming easier and easier to argue that these platforms _are_ actually publishers. They are all making more editorial decisions on what posts to show and hide, where to show what, and they all have rules about what content is allowed and what's not. Those sound like the activities of a publisher to me.

<comment><USER30> You are explicitly permitted to do this by the law without being classified as a publisher.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Does President Trump's threat to treat them as publishers rather than platforms have teeth?

<comment><USER32> It doesn't because the publisher v/s platform thing isn't a real thing.

Helpful link: [https://www.popehat.com/2019/08/29/make-no-law- deplatformed/](https://www.popehat.com/2019/08/29/make-no-law-deplatformed/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Zuck will follow the ad dollars. If revenue drops due to the Trump hate speech then it'll be gone already.

<comment><USER34> Unless he's playing the long game where he is betting the farm on a Trump victory, and is trying his best to not antagonize him.

Which seems more likely than him being ruled by a small impact on a few months of ad revenue.

<comment><USER35> This is a good take and one I also think is likely. Maybe Zuckerberg saw what happened to Google.

Google essentially bet the farm on a Clinton win (Schmidt was directly helping the campaign). Fast forward to today, Google is under dozens of anti-trust investigations and has been iced out of all Washington influence.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Facebook thinks of itself as a state and fundamentally misunderstands it's relationship to the traditional "big L" liberal democracies.

The first amendment[0] specifically defines congress, the law making body, as the arbiter of free speech. This is because without the force of government behind it, the concept of censorship is effectively meaningless.

In a constitutional sense, it is impossible for any actor other than the government to violate a persons first amendment rights.

Facebook, as a corporation, is not capable of violating first amendment rights. Even FCC section 230 [1] explicitly enables facebook to moderate as it sees fit. Facebook could decide that any post that contains the word "avocado" would be deleted on the spot. Or they could decide that only political posts that support Vermin Supreme [2] are allowed.

This would be completely legal.

The same way you are allowed to delete spam and comments by Nazis on your personal blog. You are also not liable if someone posts a libelous comment on your blog, just like facebook isn't liable.

Similarly, if you decide that you are a-ok with rabid neo-nazis commenting on your personal blog, well, then, sure, that's legal, but it also says a hell of a lot about you and your personal beliefs. There's a word for people that sympathize with nazis...

You could run the smallest blog or the largest, world spanning social network and delete Nazi content legally in the US.

So, when Mark Zuckerberg says he is defending free speech, he is using misdirection. He is fully aware that the legal, constitutional term "free speech" doesn't apply to Facebook.

He wants you to avoid thinking that the people that run Facebook are morally responsible for the legal, fcc section 230 moderation that they choose to engage in, the same way you would be morally responsible for actively allowing Nazis to comment on your blog.

It's so simple, a six panel stick figure comic can explain it. [3]

Zuck just doesn't want to show Trump the door. Why? Because he makes a lot of money from sowing division and hate. [4]

As Barry Schnitt, former spokes person for facebook put it [5]:

 _" Unfortunately, I do not think it is a coincidence that the choices Facebook makes are the ones that allow the most content — the fuel for the Facebook engine — to remain in the system. I do not think it is a coincidence that Facebook's choices align with the ones that require the least amount of resources, and the choices that outsource important aspects to third parties. I do not think it is a coincidence that Facebook's choices appease those in power who have made misinformation, blatant racism, and inciting violence part of their platform. Facebook says, and may even believe, that it is on the side of free speech. In fact, it has put itself on the side of profit and cowardice."_

[0] [https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/first_amendment](https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/first_amendment)

[1] [https://www.theverge.com/21273768/section-230-explained- inte...](https://www.theverge.com/21273768/section-230-explained-internet- speech-law-definition-guide-free-moderation)

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

[3] [https://xkcd.com/1357/](https://xkcd.com/1357/)

[4] [https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/26/21270659/facebook- divisio...](https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/26/21270659/facebook-division- news-feed-algorithms)

[5] [https://onezero.medium.com/dear-facebook- employees-7d01761e5...](https://onezero.medium.com/dear-facebook- employees-7d01761e591f)

</comment><comment> tuna-piano The problem is really pretty simple:

-Facebook has a culture that is extremely biased toward the political left. The left has a (recent?) trend of wanting to censor speech they don't agree with.

-America (and the world) has a lot more viewpoint diversity.

Zuckerberg is stuck with trying to keep his workers happy but also not wanting to alienate large portions of users, customers, politicans, etc.

In my opinion, he has chosen the path correctly and only those deep in an ideological bubble would think otherwise.

If you disagree with this, think to yourself - would you want Trump supporters deciding what you're able to post on Facebook?

<comment><USER36> I want to respectfully disagree with you. The kernel of your argument here is that the speech in question is a matter of disagreement. It's important to define what kind of speech we're talking about here, because everyone might mean something different.

To be clear, we are talking about verifiably false speech. Verifiably false speech that is sufficiently amplified can have serious consequences. This is unequivocally NOT a matter of differing opinions. And, yes, I understand that there is a huge gray area as to what is "verifiably false", but it's still a standard that we should strive for. Misinformation is a serious problem that is arguably responsible for tens of thousands dying in the US from COVID just in the past few months. This is not a game.

I can't say for sure if you're framing the question as partisan bickering in good faith, but if you are I want you to consider how flat out lies and half truths can have extremely dangerous effects. All sources of misinformation are dangerous, but it is undeniable that one "side" traffics in misinformation in much, much higher volume (at least an order of magnitude). Anyways, the point is the problem is not simple and anyone claiming such is oversimplifying at best and being disingenuous at worst.

<comment><USER37> I'm with you on this. In the past 150 years, pseudoscientific disciplines like eugenics and phrenology have directly led to the deaths of millions of people. Geographic determinism and 19th-century racial "science" directly led to the subjugation, abuse, and exploitation of tens of millions of people. Just two years ago, misinformation and falsified news fueled a genocide through Facebook.

You're 100% correct: this is not a game. We have frameworks for verifying truth, in science and journalism - that truth can safe lives.

<comment><USER38> >pseudoscientific disciplines like eugenics and phrenology have directly led to the deaths of millions of people

>Just two years ago, misinformation and falsified news fueled a genocide through Facebook.

All this was done by governments (Hitler, Myanmar government), and you want to give governments more power to control what people can do/say online?

<comment><USER37> This is a misreading of what I've said that is so egregious that I cannot reply assuming you're writing in good faith.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> This is Zuckerberg posturing to run for president in some medium term future. Probably expected it to be leaked and is setting up the decision reasoning to make it seem like he deals with "presidential" topics, has to assess national civil unrest.

It's such a complete joke. Probably will work though.

</comment><comment><USER40> I sense that Mark may be using his employees to play good cop bad cop in front of the media. But in reality, they all unanimously want censorship. Censorship would give Facebook a huge amount of power. Why would Mark not want that?

<comment><USER41> Maybe Mark understands his users (as in, the whole ugly world) more than his employees?

<comment><USER40> If he was really cared about his users, he wouldn't be a billionaire.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I've seen videos of looting (as opposed to protesting) which say out loud that they are being coordinated on social media. In particular, one looter's sister was murdered by another looter. She was crying on camera, "This ain't some Facebook shit" indicating she had been coordinated to show up on FB.

Once the general population of old people figures out that roving groups of young people are using "The Facebook" to coordinate their plans to set the cities on fire, social media is dead via regulation. So far that knowledge has escaped mainstream understanding. But it's only a matter of time.

<comment><USER43> You're underestimating the intelligence and experience of "old people." They've been through eras like this before, they know what protest looks like. And they already know that the looting (and much of the protest too) is pre- coordinated and planned by outsiders, primarily via social media.

<comment><USER42> There's a difference between being technically aware of something, and having the mental framework to take that awareness and turn it into a call to action. It's the news that tells people how to think about things and how to act about them. Corporate news is being slaughtered by social media. You've seen them attack social media already with stories of how pedophiles use it to get your kids and stuff. I don't think it will take long for the corporate news to figure out they can weaponize this to encourage regulating their enemy industry.</comment></comment></comment>


Tagging the Code - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@panuviljamaa/tagging-the-code-c5e59f28ef04 <comment><AUTHOR> Tags inserted into code are a bit like hyperlinks in the web. They can connect together related but otherwise far-away sections of code in different files. If hyperlinks are good on the web, why wouldn't they be good in the code as well?</comment>


Korma - a git based blogging engine - <AUTHOR> http://github.com/sandal/korma/tree/master <comment><USER2> This looks like a less powerful engine than jekyll (<http://github.com/mojombo/jekyll/tree/master>), the git based blogging engine available to github users.

Cool that it is only 230 lines, though.

<comment><AUTHOR> Unless things changed in the latest version, Jekyll's not git-powered _per se_ , it's just a website generator that Github has hooked up to a post-commit hook on users' pages repositories.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Korma - A delicious sauce I pour over my rice and lentils...

;)</comment>


Is It Good For Entrepreneurs to Laugh? I Think So. - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cj9KUwSGKOs&feature=related

<comment><USER2> I was half expecting to get rick-rolled with that title.</comment>


Google and other tech vendors moving manufacturing back to US - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/28/technology/google-and-others-give-manufacturing-in-the-us-a-try.html?_r=1&hp

<comment><USER2> Sigh. Somebody at NYTimes has a bone to pick with Apple. How else can you explain this softball article. How many times did they say "Google isn't revealing" or "We weren't told", etc, etc.

Not a single mention of the obvious difference between manufacturing an ultra- compact battery driven device like a cellular phone in the TENS of MILLIONS and a big, single board, no display, AC powered device in the HUNDREDS of THOUSANDS.

I'm now at the point where technical article from NYTimes = garbage.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you, personally, keep a work journal? - <AUTHOR> Assuming you keep one. For a long time, I've kept a paper journal for work - usually just 2 lines each day - the day and date, and a line or two of what I did. Helps with standup meetings the next day and has also been helpful to look back and find out when I worked on something.
I'm quite partial to paper but I occasionally would like to search, so I'm thinking of an electronic format - text file, google doc, or something else.
What are your suggestions for keeping an electronic journal? <comment><USER2> I keep multiple journals, one per project. I use Notepad and a program I wrote years ago to total the hours up for billing purposes.

It's great for long term remembering, like what settings were used for a serial port, links to downloads, etc. I also like to put a "Next:..." line at the end of the day so when I open the log in the next morning I immediately know what I need to work on.

</comment><comment><USER3> I recently started using [http://notion.so](http://notion.so) (not just for a journal but for other note-taking as well). I quite like it.

Before that I used my own [http://quicknotes.io](http://quicknotes.io) and before that [http://workflowy.com](http://workflowy.com)

</comment><comment><USER4> Isn't that what commit logs are for?

<comment><AUTHOR> Perhaps I should say 'work journal'. It's not necessarily code related. I've updated the title to clarify. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Maybe [http://jrnl.sh/](http://jrnl.sh/) ?

</comment><comment><USER6> I use the "Work" journal from Stealth Journals.

</comment><comment><USER7> Emacs org-mode?

</comment><comment><USER8> Geekbot.</comment>


Don't bootstrap yourself to death - <AUTHOR> http://saastr.wordpress.com/2012/12/10/dont-accidentally-bootstrap-yourself-to-death/

<comment><USER2> _Now if you can get [to $1 to $2 million inn run rate] in 12-18 months, that's great. 24 months is probably OK, but at the edge for most people. Or if it's a semi-mythical lifestyle business, maybe it's OK._

You know what you call semi-mythical things with existence proofs? Empirically observable facts. As contrary to, say, unnamed $1 MM run rate SaaS businesses killed by competition. I'm having great difficulty thinking of one. Granted, I don't know the histories of all the _hundreds_ of companies that fit the terrible nightmare of selling millions of dollars of software at 90% gross margins, so it's possible you could come up with an anecdote or three...

Also, if you sell a million a year in software, and you need help, _you buy help_. People who are additive to revenue aren't cheap but they are, well, additive to revenue. Support folks? Very inexpensive - a plumbing firm with 30% gross margins at the same scale can trivially hire them.

<comment><USER3> Keep in mind Jason is very much talking about a VC-funded SaaS company rather than a bootstrapped SaaS company. A boostrapped company may take quite a lot longer than 24 months to hit $1M and no harm no foul. Many of the famous bootstraps took 24 mos to be big enough for 3 founders to quit their day jobs.

The difference is the $1M VC funded SaaS company will have been wildly unprofitable while the bootstrap will have been profitable every step. The VC world rightly regards SaaS as a landgrab and some of Jason's other posts approach it that way. Hence the companies are run unprofitably so they can be grown faster.

My impression from his posts is he doesn't have a lot of experience with the bootstrap world or doesn't think much of it. I frequently write counterpoints to his posts on my Smoothspan blog.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you have a high margin, recurring revenue SaaS business doing $1-2MM and are looking for growth capital, you do not need to dilute your equity with VCs expecting an exit on their terms (not always yours)- you need bank debt. One of the perks of bootstrapping is once you get to profitability and have a business built on good fundamentals (versus vanity metrics/eyeballs/"scale") you can walk into a bank and obtain lines of credit or debt finance to help you add those customer service folks or incremental sales help in other territories or whatever overhead you need to take on for the next stage of growth. The reason for all the VC hoopla in the first place is the overwhelming risk associated with your pre-revenue, pre-profitability business- traditional commercial bank financing is vastly superior if you can get it on decent terms, which you should be able to if you've bootstrapped your way to $2MM

</comment><comment><USER5> I can identify with this. Bootstrapped and profitable enough to hire other people to grow faster. But as I'm doing almost everything solo and the business needs to keep running on a day to day basis, the time to formalize processes, hire, on-board and/or train people, let alone look for funding, barely exists. My current idea is to gradually bring on freelancers so I don't overstretch my time or resources. Long term, I'd like to acquihire people already familiar with the business or have saved up enough profits that money can be more easily thrown at the problem.

I imagine this is one of the reasons folks like pg are keen on multiple founders since one founder could more easily be 'spared' to handle things like recruitment, process, and other things important to growth that are separate from sales or product development. I can do all the sales and production and do it well, but then that leaves little time for anything else.

</comment><comment><USER6> I thought this was going to be about over-reliance on Twitter Bootstrap.

<comment><USER7> Same here

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> At the same time, if this $1-2m/y company has the typical 80% profit margin, I think it makes a great basis for starting the next company. Just hire a couple of people to keep the lights on, and get working on the next idea, now safe in the knowledge that you have the cash to pay for most things you want already, and you're doing the new idea for the fun and extra profit of it, not to put bread in your mouth.

</comment><comment><USER9> The problem with this is some companies want to remain small. They don't want to be the next instagram or pinterest. They are perfectly happy pulling in $1-2MM and supporting a healthy lifestyle for the few employees it employs.

I'm not necessarily saying I disagree with the premise of this article, but the owners need to make a choice about what kind of company they are running and take the necessary steps to achieve that.

</comment><comment><USER10> A fine balance between PG's "Just try not to die and eventually smart people figure out a way" and "don't be a zombie company forever or it will become your grave". Sounds reasonable.

<comment><USER11> ... but will it work?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> But do bootstrap yourself to _the_ death.

If you're bootstrapping, like we did, you absolutely have to take each step up _as soon as you can_ , and push as hard as you can, as otherwise you'll find yourself in the time-trap described, where you bootstrap growth while neglecting organisational development.

We haven't cashed out for £800,000,000,000,000, but we've taken (small) investment after 6 years of growth and operation in order to open up opportunities (investor's customer base nom nom nom).

Ultimately, I think the main issue in startups is expectations. You probably won't make a billion dollars. You probably won't make a million. You probably won't even make $100k. But you might.

<comment><USER13> and who are you? I mean what is the company that you bootstrapped?

<comment><USER12> SaaS eCommerce provider. Platform turns over ~£3bn/yr. Small fry. You almost certainly haven't heard of us.</comment></comment></comment>


Write Better JavaScript with Promises - <AUTHOR> http://davidwalsh.name/write-javascript-promises

<comment><USER2> This was a helpful and informative writeup, but it hasn't really convinced me that I should use promises.

I currently use use callbacks and caolan/async on node.js, using in-place callbacks where simple and async methods where things get complex. It's been working very well so far, and it avoids my biggest issue with promises, which is that it seems I'd need _all_ the modules I want to use to support promises, which they surely don't, and mixing two styles seems worse than picking a poison.

Maybe someone can show me why my reasoning is flawed, though.

<comment><USER3> There are several promise libraries (the most promising among them seems to be Bluebird, though Q has some popularity as well), which can easily convert callback-style functions into promises. For example:

        var b = require('bluebird'), request = b.promisify(require('request'));
        request(...).then(...)

These libraries also have utilities for controlling callback flow -- e.g calling several promises in parallel, which is done in the article with jQuery's $.when, waiting until a certain number finish, etc

<comment><USER4> I hadn't heard of bluebird at all. Does it work for any library you require?

When I used promises for real in a section of my code processing data:

1) I found it hard to use mostly because of all the work I had to do to "lift" non promise code up into promises, before I could use them.

2) When chaining them, it wasn't clear how you would handle a "fan-out", where a piece of data generated an array, which you then had to process with callbacks.

3) Unless I inserted a fail() after every then(), it was hard to tell where exactly in the chain something failed, and the stack trace wasn't very helpful.

I suspect maybe I'm doing something wrong--that even though you can chain promises sequentially, you generally want to make functions using promises, that you can then chain? I still haven't seen well written promise code. Anyone got examples other than toy examples?

<comment><USER5> It does work for any library that uses callbacks - a node library that uses callbacks but not the node js callback convention has a bug.

1) There is not much work in promisifying libraries, for example the entire redis library can be promisified using 2 lines:

        var Promise = require("bluebird");
        var redis = require("redis");
        Promise.promisifyAll(redis.RedisClient.prototype);
        Promise.promisifyAll(redis.Multi.prototype);

After those lines all redis client objects have promise-returning versions of the methods. E.g. `redisClient.getAsync()` is the promise-returning version of `redisClient.get()`

2) Mixing callbacks and promises will result in very ugly code, see 1) to avoid it.

3) Forget about .fail(), this is not how promise error handling works. Use `.catch()` like you would use try catch. In your case that means not using it at all - then a full stack trace is automatically logged. Try catch is meant to be used with expected errors like file not existing, not bugs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> >You've probably heard the talk around the water cooler about how promises are the future.

Just wait until the JavaScript developers learn about continuations!

<comment><USER7> BiwaScheme has call/cc</comment></comment>


Instagram's Fake Changes To Your Image Rights - <AUTHOR> http://www.photobizcoach.com/2013/01/23/instagrams-fake-changes-to-your-image-rights/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=linkedin

<comment><USER2> As one of the comments says:

      if one investigates further they will find that most content posting sites
      contain the exact same language (though stated in a variety of legalese). Among
      the most popular are Facebook, Flickr, Youtube, Pinterest and Reddit. Apart
      from the "sale of content" these terms are also found in each and every
      internet service provider's terms of service and policies.

For example, I posted Twitters version of this 'outrage' <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4939705>

I'm no lawyer, but I figure they all need this type of language in their Terms to be able to show your images to anyone other than you, advertise against them, include them in promotional screenshots, etc.</comment>


The complete works of Leonhard Euler available online - <AUTHOR> http://www.math.dartmouth.edu/~euler/

<comment><USER2> This is _amazing_. It is quite a thrill to be able to read such things in a browser, instead of having to slog to the library or do an inter-library loan. And the indexing is very well done, even with English translations of titles.

<comment><USER3> I wish the works themselves were available in English too. I believe they are all in Latin.

<comment><USER4> 44 articles due to Euler, in English, are on the arXiv: <http://arxiv.org/find/math/1/au:+Euler_L/0/1/0/all/0/1> It's kind of surprising to be looking through what showed up on the arXiv today and see Euler there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The link appears broken to me. Is there a mirror?

</comment><comment><USER6> TIL it's pronounced 'oiler'</comment>


CircleCI 2.0 - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/circleci/status/884808754885050372 <comment><USER2> > Too bad no good examples for C / C++ projects in Circle CI 2.0. Barrier to > entry too high compared to Travis CI.

Hahaha, just stop using C/C++. It's 2017 for god sake why do you want to write inefficient, memory-unsafe, non-scaling softwares when you can avoid all these?</comment>


Exponent - <AUTHOR> http://mamota.net/exponent/ <comment><USER2> Creator here. Surprised to see this on HN. This was about a morning's work, intended as a joke incremental game. Please don't judge it too seriously.

<comment><USER3> You are a horrible person, but I finally achieved my goal.

[http://imgur.com/7tcfZXZ](http://imgur.com/7tcfZXZ)

<comment><USER4> My most interesting finding was that we started losing precision before switching to exponentional notation. The former happened around the 10^17 mark, the latter around the 10^19 mark.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Nice work. I really like the simplicity of it.

The best strategy I've been able to come up with grows the exponent roughly every 50s: 47s to get to 100, 51s to 1415, and so on. I wonder if there's a way to do it faster.

<comment><USER4> AFAICT, the best strategy is to get each factor to 2 as quickly as possible.

At least in the area of 10^15, it takes about N to click on 2x10^i and 4N to click on 1x10^(i+1). Since clicking on 2x10^i approximately halves the time to get to 1x10^(i+1), then it takes N + 4N/2 to get to 1x10^(i+1) if you click on 2x10^i first. 3x10^i is an additional 3N. N + 3N/2 + 4N/3 = 3.8N.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you'd like to be mean, make it so there's one way to win, by hitting a certain large score _exactly_ (if you jump over it, you lose), and then have it report the time to get there.

</comment><comment><USER7> It's like the raw mechanic of Cookie Clicker, sans cookies. And every other game like it. Nice distillation.

</comment><comment><USER8> Kind of reminds me of Clicking Bad: [http://clickingbad.nullism.com/](http://clickingbad.nullism.com/)

</comment><comment><USER9> What's up with the nowrap CSS? On my iPad, it shows only x10^4 in portrait mode and 10^6 in landscape.

<comment><USER10> You should be able to scroll the div horizontally

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> there is an obvious conspiracy against developers to just prevent them from working in peace.

any way to guess how the cost are calculated ?

</comment><comment><USER12> Is it actually possible to lose the game?

<comment><USER2> It's not even possible to win.

<comment><USER12> Well, surviving is winning, right?</comment></comment></comment>


LinkedIn handing out critical identify theft data on your profile. - <AUTHOR>

Date of birth/birthday is often used by banks and other institutions to verify your identity.<p>LinkedIn publishes this information on your profile, ready for any identity thief to pick up and use.  Thanks LinkedIn! <comment><USER2> No it doesn't.

The only way they display this information is if you (a) add it to your profile, and (b) make that information public.

If you use LinkedIn to tell people when your birthday is - and I have no idea why you would, given its intended use case - then that's your doing, not theirs.

Use this link to edit your profile:

<https://www.linkedin.com/profile/edit?trk=tab_pro>

In the "Additional Info" section, either set Birthday back to "Month..." and "Day..." or click on the icon next to it to reduce its visibility to only your network or connections. Then click the "Save" button.

P.S.: You can always lie about your birthdate.

</comment><comment><USER3> They only know that data because you put it there in the first place. If you don't want it available - dont put it on the Internet.... is this really such a hard concept to grasp?</comment>


Indian scientists develops Maglev Train with 800 kmph speed - <AUTHOR> https://urbantransportnews.com/indian-scientists-developed-maglev-train-with-800-kmph-speed/ <comment><USER2> Not with overcrowding and people hanging off the sides and riding the roof.</comment>