Why Digital Maps Are Inaccurate in China - <AUTHOR> http://www.travelandleisure.com/articles/digital-maps-skewed-china <comment><USER2> I was dealing with multi-source map authoring with coordinate system conversions here in China years ago (~2004)... that's before Google Maps came out.

Later I found that in China a given city's satellite data for a will be off by some standard drift, usually pretty much effectively constant for a whole city area, and by co-relating a few known points throughout your area of interest across multiple sources' coordinate systems you can scale things well, even if you are remaining 100% projection agnostic (black box treatment).

I have never studied computational cartography, GIS and only have a basic self-taught understanding of matrices but didn't find this all that difficult to hack up at the time.

We were using it to generate little point-of-interest area maps to help people find locations throughout the city on a sort of city-focused whats on style magazine operation. Maps were generated in multiple languages.

We were shut down by the publishing bureau but subsequently kept running anyway, apparently with no problems. The business continues today, though I have nothing to do with it.

</comment><comment><USER3> Topic discussed 1 month ago (205 points) here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10964450](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10964450)

</comment><comment><USER4> There is a Chinese idiom describing things like this: Plugging One's Ears While Stealing a Bell.

</comment><comment><USER5> South Korea also has problems with Google Maps. And also for political reasons. Apparently they have some disagreement with Google which prohibits Maps from supporting routing aka navigation. It also prohibits full resolution display, although the map data is basically present.

It seems to be a way to retain control over what is undoubtedly economically valuable information. But at what cost?

<comment><USER6> > _It seems to be a way to retain control over what is undoubtedly > economically valuable information. But at what cost?_

At the cost of not giving up some of your national assets such as geographic info just to get better GPS gadgets from foreign companies? They can still create and enjoy their own maps and tools.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The article implies that the source of trouble is the GCJ-02 datum.

Is this really such a major problem though? In North America, both the NAD27 and NAD83 datums are still common. NAD83 nearly matches WGS84, but NAD27 can be quite off. Datum transformation is a well understood topic, so what's so special about China?

<comment><USER8> Yes, this. I've had to deal with inter-datum conversions in the past, and as far as I can tell, though after a _very_ brief review, GCJ-02 is just another datum, albeit one not well documented. The "random offset" described in various documents may be easily explained by the datum being optimized for accuracy in a relatively small area, and thus errors increase as you expand your mapped area.

(For those who don't speak GIS, datums are essentially a way of mapping an orange peel to a table; because any attempt to dedimensionalize points on a sphere must by necessity introduce errors, datums are designed to either minimize that error in all locations -- which is what WGS84 does -- or to gain greater accuracy by focusing on a smaller part of the globe, such as the "state plane" datums. When you see misaligned points on maps that derive data from various sources, it's usually a good idea to make sure that multiple unconverted datums aren't the source of the problem.)

<comment><USER9> The state plane coordinate systems use NAD27 or NAD83 (plus improvements).

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

The flattening of an orange peel you mention is more about projection, a datum is a mathematical description of the earth that maps out how geographic coordinates will vary. Given geographic coordinates, a projection system is needed to display them on a flat surface (or really any surface that doesn't match the shape of the geographic coordinate system).

Differences between datums do arise from different modeling choices and should be accounted for when translating coordinates, but as the fine article discusses, the offsets in GCJ-02 are algorithmic and are not a refinement of WGS84, they obscure true location.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restrictions_on_geographic_dat...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restrictions_on_geographic_data_in_China#GCJ-02)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> in case anyone missed, the source code of evil transform between WGS-84 and GCJ-02 in C/C#/Go/Javascript/Python/PHP/Swift

[https://github.com/googollee/eviltransform](https://github.com/googollee/eviltransform)

</comment><comment><USER11> Its funny how some of the most paranoid seeming nations on the planet has within the last 100 years or so experienced foreign military meddling in internal affairs.

</comment><comment><USER12> Interesting. Why can't maps be produced using satellite photos?

<comment><USER13> The problem isn't of producing a map, it's of publishing it. If you go ahead and do that be prepared to find yourself locked out of anything to do with China.

<comment><USER12> But if the bottleneck is publication, not data gathering, then why does the Chinese government bother cracking down on map making activities?

> Three British geology students discovered this the hard way while > "collecting data" on a 2009 field trip...

<comment><USER10> > then why does the Chinese government bother cracking down on map making > activities

Most China polices can be explained by the "fuck you" treatment. What is "fuck you" treatment? Well fuck you go figure it out yourself.

<comment><USER14> See also: "no why".

Paranoid psychopaths are so obsessed with keeping a stranglehold on every possible thing that they design algorithms to screw up maps, causing untold problems, inconvenience, extra costs, incompatibility, etc. It's reverse- engineered and compensated for by everyone else, but they just keep doing it. Why? No why. #china. My cynicism is, I think, my way of dealing with heartbrokenness.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> We like to think of North Korea as the crazy country but we forget it has a much older brother who is far more dangerous because it appears to be mature and acceptable yet is almost as nuts.

<comment><USER6> Said the country that evaporated 250.000 Japanese (men, women and children), sprayed Vietnam farmers with chemicals, had segregation until the sixties, has the biggest number of incarcerations in the world, has been tens of times at war with places thousands of miles away from its borders, has supported all kinds of dictatorships abroad as long as they have been favorable for its interests, had 2 open occupations of foreign countries just until a few years ago, is full of religious nuts, has a huge surveillance system that spans the whole world, its police kills more people (mostly blacks) in a year that the rest of the Western world combined does in 10, and has elected Bush for two terms, while now half of it celebrates Trump...

<comment><USER16> Oh no you didn't!</comment></comment></comment>


Paradox CEO defends studio's continuous DLC model as 'fair and balanced' - <AUTHOR> https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/346124/Paradox_CEO_defends_studios_continuous_DLC_model_as_fair_and_balanced.php <comment><USER2> I think one negative consequence of their model is for new release, which will appear to lack features, compared to older games which have received years worth of DLCs; so buyers/players/complainers will complain that the new game lacks features compared to the previous games (adds some whining about dumbing down/decline too for good measure) and the devs are greedy __*s who cut back features to sell as DLCs. Facing such reaction, the devs will double down on DLCs on existing titles, making the issue even worse in the long run...</comment>


"Cameras Were Invented for Inarticulate Photographers Like Me" - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@polarrist/cameras-were-invented-for-inarticulate-photographers-like-me-960e16e9e0cd

<comment><USER2> "The biggest thing that I think people miss is this: because it's so much easier to capture images using digital technology, there's a disconnect in people's minds about how relatively easy or hard it is to protect, conserve, store, those images for the future… [With film], when you're done, you stick it in an envelope, stick it in a drawer and it's safe. Short of fires and floods, it's gonna be there in 600 years and look just fine. Today, I don't know that the imagery I have on a hard drive — I don't know if there's going to be technology that can read those files 5, 10, 15 years from now, so I have to continually keep backing them up and re-backing them up onto newer and newer media just so people can look at them when I'm dead and gone. Digital is far less archival than film."

Interesting argument. I think most readers will have a different perspective, especially with cloud backup. But there is reassurance in the physical.

"P: Who are some of your favorite photographers? T: Irving Penn, Arnold Newman, Philippe Halsman, Jim Marshall, Max Yavno, Arnold Newman, Joel-Peter Witkin, Ruth Bernhard, Herb Ritts, William Garnett, Joseph Koudelka, Sebastiao Salgado, and Horst immediately come to mind. There are more."

Some other work to check out in the future.

</comment><comment><USER3> "Since I'm inarticulate, I express myself with images."

― Helen Levitt

</comment><comment><USER4> Great interview.

</comment><comment><USER5> he seems fairly articulate to me</comment>


DoomRL Open Source Release - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ChaosForge/doomrl <comment><USER2> Some backstory: [http://www.pcgamer.com/fan-made-doom-spin-off- from-2002-chal...](http://www.pcgamer.com/fan-made-doom-spin-off- from-2002-challenged-by-zenimax-legal-team/)

<comment><USER3> It's a shame that it took a threat of a lawsuit for it to be released as open source. This wasn't a game that was ever charged for, so I see no reason it shouldn't have been released like this 15 years ago. There's actually a weird culture in roguelikes (and similar ASCII games) of _not_ releasing the source, and using opaque, non-open development processes. NetHack was open source but only recently switched to an open development process recently, and may other popular entrants in the genre such as ADOM and Dwarf Fortress are closed source entirely.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, I think that might be a matter of wanting to keep things secret from players.

Of course, it doesn't keep things secret from players with a copy of IDA and too much time on their hands, but it probably adds to the mystery for some people.

<comment><USER5> I don't think it's about keeping secrets.

Stuff are often covered in great detail in changelogs, development blogs, forums, etc.

And players figure stuff out.

All the info will be on wikis. It is not effective.

If people want to spoil it, they check out the said wikis. If they don't want to spoil it, they don't check the wiki or the source, if it is available.

<comment><USER6> In Dwarf Fortress's case, the closed sourcedness is because the creator wants to be the sole driver of the project until it's "done."

<comment><USER3> If they don't accept PRs then they will still be the sole driver. But if I were in his situation I'd at least take PRs for simple bug fixes. That gives you more freedom to work on creative stuff.

<comment><USER7> Given the ecosystem around it and the reportedly parlous state of the DF codebase, I would guess, somewhat along the lines of Minecraft, what would happen upon open-sourcing is that people would start big cleanups and APIfying, and he would have little choice but to either accept PRs en masse or quickly be left in the dust with an obsolete codebase while everyone begins using a version forked from whenever he balked at a re-architecting patch.

<comment><USER3> He could add trusted contributors to handle that load for him. No one says he has to handle merging all the PRs himself. Dwarf Fortress has a huge community of very technically-minded people. The end result would be better with more contributors, especially if it freed up the attentions of the main developer to focus solely on the creative stuff while bugfixes and maintenance tasks were handled by the community.

<comment><USER7> I don't mean he's going to go 'woe is me I have too many PRs to look over'. I mean that inevitably, his goals and coding aesthetic preferences are going to conflict with the community: 'I don't want to add that feature' or 'I think this is too complex and just caters to API users' or 'I dislike this architecture'. Right now, his version is king because he is the only one who can make meaningful changes to it and it is very difficult for anyone to patch his binaries, dooming any fork; allow access to the source code, and suddenly he's merely an ordinary coder who happens to be very experienced with the codebase. Think eGCC and GCC.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's an extra click to get to a video/screenshots [1].

I remember playing turn based RPGs and really enjoyed them. It was really hard for me to adjust to the frenetic pace of RTS when they arrived.

This video looks a bit faster paced than the turn-based games that I recall, but it's been a long time.

[1] [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2020043306/jupiter- hell...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2020043306/jupiter-hell-a- modern-turn-based-sci-fi-roguelike)

<comment><USER9> If I've understood correctly, the action in Jupiter Hell happens only after user controls are used, so it's still turn-based in that sense. Looks like a promising game to me, hope they make their Kickstarter target.

<comment><USER10> The animation system uses tweening and will respond to queued actions, so you can give sequential commands faster than it renders and get more interesting animations. It's still a RL and you can take as long as you want per command.

[http://www.roguelikeradio.com/2016/11/episode-130-jupiter- he...](http://www.roguelikeradio.com/2016/11/episode-130-jupiter-hell- successor-to.html) is a really neat interview that explores the genesis and production of the project and goes into the visuals and philosophy. It was also written before the TM concern.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I was sure from the title that this was a reinforcement learning agent set up to train itself to play Doom...

</comment><comment><USER12> DoomRL scratches the space marine variety of my crawl itch(crawl as in Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup: [https://crawl.develz.org](https://crawl.develz.org) )

</comment><comment><USER13> As somebody who had to code in Pascal (in this millennia) I just... I'm not sure I can get passed that to enjoy the game. I think this is the moment where I realize that I'm a coding language bigot.

<comment><USER14> I haven't used Pascal for a very long time now, but AFAIK Free Pascal is going pretty nice and modern.

Apparently, there are some very nice and polished games implemented in Pascal, like Hedgewars or Ultrastar Deluxe.

<comment><USER13> Interesting (looked it up thanks to your post). As a means of recompiling old code for newer systems that is a great solution.

<comment><USER15> The most interesting part is that they've also made a very nice _cross- platform_ clone of 1) Turbo Vision (yes, text mode and all), and 2) VCL.

Then, using that TV clone, they wrote a cross-platform clone of the original DOS Borland Pascal IDE - that even comes in the base FPC distribution. Works great in Linux console:

[https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:FPIDE_1.0.10_de.png](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:FPIDE_1.0.10_de.png)

And using VCL, they wrote a cross-platform clone of Delphi (circa version 3) IDE!

[http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Screenshots](http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Screenshots)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


One More Time, with Big Data: Measles Vaccine Doesn't Cause Autism - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/05/health/measles-vaccine-autism.html <comment><USER2> Of course Big Media is backing up Big Pharma!

/s

I really want to understand the logic that goes on the head of an anti-vax parent. I can't wrap my head around "This injection will make sure, with a very high degree of certainty, that my child does not die from a disease thought eradicated."

<comment><USER3> I don't consider myself anti-vax (my children and I are fully vaccinated) but I do question things and I prefer to make my own decisions regarding what is best for my family.

What are the risks of a particular vaccine? What are the risks to my child if they get the disease?

The answers to those vary per vaccine and could result in some parents deciding to not vaccinate their children for one or more vaccines.

<comment><USER4> > I do question things and I prefer to make my own decisions regarding what is > best for my family.

Medical researchers know more than you about which vaccines are safe and should be administered.

> What are the risks of a particular vaccine? What are the risks to my child > if they get the disease?

For all of the regularly scheduled vaccines the answer is the risks of not vaccinating greatly outweigh those of receiving it, unless you have an allergy to something in that particular vaccine.

<comment><USER5> "For all of the regularly scheduled vaccines the answer is the risks of not vaccinating greatly outweigh those of receiving it, unless you have an allergy to something in that particular vaccine."

This is only true for healthy people who have had no reactions to vaccines, nor have their family members.

There are people who have life-long debilitating reactions. What is being proposed is to make it impossible to opt-out if you have a personal or family history with negative reactions to vaccines. Medical exemptions are impossible to get except for the very wealthy who can afford the appropriate testing to prove it's an issue.

<comment><USER4> > This is only true for healthy people who have had no reactions to vaccines, > nor have their family members.

That's what I said. Allergy, reaction, same thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I find the pro-plague movement very similar to the flat earth movement. Nothing will change their minds because they want to believe their story so badly that nothing will make them budge.

<comment><USER7> > Nothing will change their minds because they want to believe their story so > badly that nothing will make them budge.

While there are fanatics, there seems to be a lot of the the movement which is people who are ignorant and misled and can be effectively engaged from a position of respect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wonder how much more budget and time we are going to waste re-proving this.

It's a matter of faith, further studies will never make people change their minds.

<comment><USER5> Double-blind placebo controlled studies evaluating the safety of mercury based preservatives and aluminum adjuvants in vaccines still have not been done. This study evaluates the contemporary MMR vaccine that does not have mercury or aluminum in it, so it's know surprise to people who understand the science behind vaccine-hesitancy that the results of this study showed no problems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm not sure any anti-vaccers are saying, "if only there were more data."

</comment><comment><USER10> You can't feel superior or pretend to have secret knowledge if you believe the facts and scientific method. So feel free to ignore the article.

<comment><USER2> Facts are just what THEY want you to believe!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Even if it did, I'd rather be autistic than dead

</comment><comment><USER12> People are irrational. We downplay statistics when it's convenient (like buying a lotto ticket) and overplay them when fearful (like with vaccines). Or we ignore statistics completely, like how dangerous it is simply to drive to the doctor's office in an automobile. Unfortunately, more data is unlikely to sway folks who are already held by this dangerous meme that vaccines are bad. The answer is scientific literacy, and for such an advanced society we have a shocking lack of it.

</comment><comment><USER13> We're going to hell in a handbasket quickly now, folks, hang on

</comment><comment><USER14> I don't want to discuss on the level of "pro" or "anti" but I would like to analyze some numbers from this paper.

Take a look at this picture: [https://www.nejm.org/na101/home/literatum/publisher/mms/jour...](https://www.nejm.org/na101/home/literatum/publisher/mms/journals/content/nejm/2002/nejm_2002.347.issue-19/nejmoa021134/production/images/img_medium/nejmoa021134_t1.jpeg)

There were 440,655 vaccinated children and 96,648 unvaccinated. Among the vaccinated 621 were autistic (of any kind), 117 among unvaccinated. Which gives us 0.14% and 0.12% respectively.

Why doesn't this prove that vaccination has some impact on autism?

Please refrain from attacking me, I just want to know the science explanation.

<comment><USER15> I haven't read the paper, but it could be that the 0.02% difference is not statistically significant.[1][2]

Say you pick two groups of people from a population, two groups of 10 000 people at random.

Imagine then that you count the proportion of autistic people in each group. You might get say, 0.15% in group A and 0.14% in group B.

If by chance the people in groups A and B had been partitioned differently between the two groups, i.e.: if enough autistic people in group A had instead ended up in group B, you can easily imagine that the numbers would change. Or even that they could flip.

Some differences between the two were simply due to random chance. Statistical significance is a concept used to try to tease apart how much of an effect is due to a suspected cause (vaccination in this case) vs chance.

Now in the case of this study, you might say, well there was no other way to partition the data, since all the vaccinated kids had to go in group A. While this is true, if autism has a different cause or causes than the partitions you chose effectively, your partitioning into groups would still be random with respect to the true cause of autism.

So to 'prove'[3] whether a vaccines cause autism, we would prefer to see large effect sizes, which would strongly suggest that the effect is due to the cause we suspected.

If instead, we had seen numbers like this: group A 15% and group B 7% then you could argue that the effect size is large enough to go beyond the effect caused by the sampling.

Mathematical techniques in statistics and probability theory exist which allow you to choose a threshold (p value) in order to consider an effect to be statistically significant.

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

[2] [https://towardsdatascience.com/statistical-significance- hypo...](https://towardsdatascience.com/statistical-significance-hypothesis- testing-the-normal-curve-and-p-values-93274fa32687)

[3] 'Prove' in quotes, because you can't really prove cause and effect using a study like this. To get closer to proof, you'd need an experiment where the conditions are specifically assigned to each group.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Finally a Danish study without Poul Thorsen! As he is no longer among the authors of the study it is probably the first Danish vaccine study that can be taken seriously, thanks to Mr Thorsen's non-participation (who bought a house in Atlanta,a Harley-Davidson and few other things with grant money from CDC and there is a suspicion that he has manipulated the results of studies).

However, like the Jain study ([https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2275444](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2275444)), this new study focuses primarily on MMR vaccination, which is a shame. Focusing on once vaccine in a heavily vaccinated population kinda proves nothing. They also captured data on vaccination with pentavalent vaccine, which is great, but unfortunately it seems that it is completely useless ...

As usual a control group of completely unvaccinated probably is not included because the study states that "We evaluated the association between MMR and autism in children with no DTaP -IPV / Hib vaccinations in the first year of life; we found no support for an association in this vaccine-naive subpopulation "\- so the "no DTaP-IPV / HiB" field in the tables probably means "no DTaP-IPV / HiB in first year of life"(haha, sneaky!). I view positively that they included other covariants (eg parents' age, etc.), but again, unfortunately, the covariant combination is missing and there are no groups with more variables (shame).

As with the Jain study, there is a "healthy user bias": the authors did not take into account the possibility that parents of children showing signs of ASD do not start / stop vaccinating the MMR and fall automatically into the "unvaxx" group. At least the authors mention this in the discussion.

And as usual: epidemiological studies are NOT a good tool for verifying the safety of a product (or to disprove possible causality), this is the job of clinical trials (unfortunately, vaccines' safety clinical trials are very very bad pseudoscince with no placebos).

</comment><comment><USER17> My wife and I are expecting our first child. We are both pro-vaccine [trust the professionals!] but she recently met a woman whose kid "instantly changed" after one particular combo-dosage of several different vaccines. She has since gotten spooked by the NUMBER of vaccinations administered at once. "I'll take our son to the doctor every day to get them one at a time if I have to." I doubt doctors would even entertain this strategy... Does anyone have resources I can read to understand this angle of anti-vaxxers and the pro-science rebuttal?

<comment><USER18> In my opinion - If your doctor won't indulge the a harmless idea of spreading out your child's immune response to individual vaccines, then it's time to find a new doctor.

<comment><USER17> Fair enough. We haven't spoken to docs about it yet so I was speculating. Any idea if spreading it out is a common request?

<comment><USER19> This is a pretty common question/request in the US. I'm sure that almost every doctor been asked before and is familiar with the idea and would rather work around a special request than not have the child vaccinated at all. They understand that parents are scared of the unknown.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> There are still groups out there who believe the earth is flat, more extreme than anti-vax but a similar, irrational belief.

</comment><comment><USER5> This study does not evaluate the leading hypothesis of how vaccines could cause autism / other issues.

That hypothesis is the mercury and aluminum exposure. The current MMR vaccine does not contain mercury or aluminum.

<comment><USER7> > This study does not evaluate the leading hypothesis of how vaccines could > cause autism

A hypothesis of _how_ vaccines could cause autism would only be worth evaluating if there were evidence presented of an effect that that hypothesis was necessary to explain.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> the new review of "Aluminium adjuvants" is on the way.

protocol: "Aluminium adjuvants used in vaccines versus placebo or no intervention"

[https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD...](https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD012805/full)

Cochrane Systematic Review - Intervention - Protocol Version published: 24 September 2017

 _" More than 10 years has passed since the systematic review by Jefferson and colleagues, new adjuvants are being introduced continuously, and FDA and WHO do not require genotoxicity or cardiotoxicity studies of new aluminium adjuvants (WHO 2014b; FDA 2015). Lately, symptoms following HPV vaccination have been suspected of being caused by the addition of aluminium adjuvant (Tomljenovic 2011; Lee 2012; Poddighe 2014; Brinth 2015b; Gruber 2015; Martinez‐Lavin 2015). A recent animal study by Inbar and colleagues managed to spark further controversy by demonstrating behavioral abnormalities in mice administered the aluminium‐containing HPV vaccine Gardasil (Inbar 2016a). Compared to previous animal studies on HPV vaccines, the authors included two control groups: one where mice were administered aluminium adjuvant alone and another with placebo without adjuvant (Inbar 2016a). Inbar and colleagues concluded that Gardasil via both its aluminium adjuvant and HPV antigens can trigger neuro‐inflammation and autoimmune reactions, leading to behavioural changes in mice (Inbar 2016a). Upon submission to a peer‐reviewed journal, the paper was accepted with revisions, and published. However, it was soon withdrawn by the editor (Inbar 2016), only to be published in a competing journal shortly thereafter (Inbar 2016a). The initial withdrawal was allegedly due to "unsound scientific results"; an assertion which was not supported by the final publisher._

 _The theory that aluminium adjuvant is responsible for symptoms following HPV vaccination is impossible to refute or prove based on the current data. Aluminium adjuvant has been administered to both experimental and control group in the vast majority of randomised clinical trials on HPV vaccines, thus masking its potentially harmful effects (Exley 2011). Clinical trials designed to administer vaccine adjuvants to the experimental group as well as the placebo group do, de facto, not compare an intervention against a true placebo, and therefore, do not adequately assess safety (Exley 2011). Indeed, aluminium adjuvants, new or old, should be evaluated for benefits and harms on their own merits._

 _Aluminium is the most frequently used adjuvant, introduced in vaccination programmes worldwide (Tritto 2009). While the consequences of adding aluminium to vaccines have been discussed broadly, no systematic review has been conducted to assess the effects of aluminium adjuvants across vaccines. The effects of aluminium adjuvants remain to be properly assessed using Cochrane methodology to determine whether they are beneficial, or causally linked to the numerous adverse events reported following immunisation. "_

<comment><USER16> Finally someone is looking into this, it has been long overdue!</comment></comment>


Dear California: I'm leaving you. Here's why... - <AUTHOR> http://www.erica.biz/2011/california-im-leaving-you/

<comment><AUTHOR> I wish my company and I were more portable. I'd leave CA too! I totally agree with this particulsr blog post.</comment>


What Android gets right that the iPhone gets so wrong - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/09/tech/android-11-iphone-notifications/index.html <comment><USER2> Incorrect.</comment>


Ask HN: Is the full stack developer more myth than reality? - <AUTHOR> One of the original selling points of NodeJS was that one developer could apply the same language in front and back, making the Javascript skillset more valuable to an organization as resource demands shift among projects.  Yet, considering the demands of both frontend and backend development, it seems unlikely that one person would change that often, if at all, because of comparative advantages due to domain expertise.
What can people from HN report on this experience in the wild-- is the full-stack developer more myth than reality? <comment><USER2> I'm a full stack developer and I regularly work across half a dozen languages. NodeJS and standardizing on one language is overrated. And there's no obstacle to mastering both front-end and backend development, apart from the time investment required.</comment>


An update about the Software Transactional Memory subproject of PyPy - <AUTHOR> http://morepypy.blogspot.com/2013/06/stm-on-drawing-board.html

<comment><USER2> If I'm reading the post correctly, the HN title is inaccurate. The in-progress STM was already written in C. It was the garbage collector that was written in RPython, and _that_ has been rewritten in C as part of a combined STM/GC library.

edit: fixed now.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the correction. Must be more careful next time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The original blog post they did on STM is well worth reading, especially if you're not familiar with the python GIL and STM.

[http://morepypy.blogspot.com.au/2011/08/we-need-software- tra...](http://morepypy.blogspot.com.au/2011/08/we-need-software- transactional-memory.html)

<comment><USER4> This is also informative: <http://pypy.org/tmdonate.html>

There haven't been any recent blog posts on that topic (and they aren't tagged consistently), this is the latest, which may explain the choice to go with C: [http://morepypy.blogspot.com/2012/08/multicore- programming-i...](http://morepypy.blogspot.com/2012/08/multicore-programming- in-pypy-and.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Any potential to leverage the Haswell hardware TM intrinsics?

<comment><USER6> As mentioned in their 2013 PyCon talk, the problem with HTM (at least with current designs) is the hard limits to transaction sizes. They are attempting run run entire interpreted code loops in transactions, while HTM is designed more around smaller transactions.

Specifically I think Haswell requires that all mutated references must fit in the L1 cache. That doesn't really leave much wiggle room</comment></comment>


Nick Bostrom: 'I don't think the artificial-intelligence train will slow down' - <AUTHOR> http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/munk-debates/nick-bostrom-i-dont-think-the-artificial-intelligence-train-will-slow-down/article24222185/ <comment><USER2> I've been interested in AI for a long time. But the last year AI discussions seem to have really hit mainstream, which we can also see here on Hacker News with a lot of posts about deep learning etc.

Lately I read this two piece story on Wait But Why which I really would recommend to anyone wanting to get a better overview of the topic:

\- Part 1: [http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence- revolu...](http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence- revolution-1.html)

\- Part 2: [http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence- revolu...](http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence- revolution-2.html)

<comment><USER3> The author goes to great lengths to provide examples of what he calls a "Die Progress Unit (DPU)," then vaguely but not explicitly implies it is the measure for what he calls "human progress;" leaving the reader to assume that the Y axis labeled human progress is plotted in DPUs on his two graphs.

He then outlines the mechanism for all of these progress-(non?-)deaths[1] to occur, which he calls superintelligence. I find that explanation as either the cause or solution to all these DPUs very unsatisfying compared to the historically supported causes of death on that scale: disease, natural disaster, famine, war. I may be the "stubborn old man" called out in the article, but I don't on the face of it believe superintelligence will eliminate most deaths in all four of those categories at the same time. It's positing a mechanism seemingly immune to the selection pressure that got us here.

But even if I put aside my doubts about superintelligence, I would find it significantly more helpful to see a hypothesis as to why increasing computational power is a general mechanism whereby there will be fewer deaths from disease, natural disasters, famine, and war. I suspect it is more fruitful to focus on how computational power will help solve problems with critical infrastructure (shelter, supply, safety, communication, transport, resource control, &c) rather that puzzling over how it may create a new cause of death exceeding the magnitude of disease.

1: The author seems to switch signs here and imply these will be non-deaths, which is supported by actual population growth, so let's proceed with that assumption.

<comment><USER4> Hi, I might have you or the article wrong, but I think you have misinterpreted the whole "Die Progress Unit" thing, in a way that alters the fundamental premise of the article to the flawed one which you have called out.

The interpretation I believe you've developed is connected to the number of people who die prematurely at a given point in history, and that the author's point then is something about how superintelligence will impact the number of people dying of disease, famine, etc, either raising or lowering that number. I can't find any spot in the article where the author raises the concept of the rate of people dying prematurely at a given point in history, and definitely not any place where he connects that concept to DPUs.

My understanding of the DPU is as the amount of change required in daily life for a single time travelling individual to "die of shock" upon experiencing another moment of time. In the examples provided, 100,000 BC to 12,000 BC was enough change in day-to-day life experience to cause a person from 100,000 BC to "die of shock" if they were transported to 12,000 BC instantaneously. The same assertion was made for 12,000 BC to 1750 AD, and 1750 AD to 2015 AD, with the author's conclusion being that there has been an exponential shortening in the timescale required for enough change to occur in the daily experience of human life to cause a time traveler to "die of shock", and that such shortening will continue into our future -- possibly to the point of allowing such a level of change to occur multiple times within our own lifespans.

I took the entire discussion of DPUs solely as an exercise in generating an evocative image for illustrating the increasing rapidity of change in our qualitative experience of life. I don't think the "die of shock" idea is meant to be taken literally; it's just a convenient stand-in for "extremely shocking, to the point that the experiencer may be incapable of processing the instantaneous change rationally", not a measure of people actually dying.

(Sorry for going to such length, I just wanted to be precise. This is a perfect illustration of [https://xkcd.com/386/](https://xkcd.com/386/))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't think the artificial-intelligence train ever picked stream.

What we have with Watson (the Jeopardy model, because the name is used by IBM as an umbrella for staff) etc is the same kind of number-crunching, dumb-smart AI we always hand.

Without any qualitative steps that wont fly.

<comment><USER2> Watson is what I think is called ANI (Artificial Narrow Intelligence). There is a lot of things we need to figure out to move from a narrow intelligence to a general intelligence (AGI) and then (quickly) to a super intelligence (ASI). The big question of cause is how far we are from AGI - i.e. an intelligence on par with a human. No one knows of cause but a lot of smart people say there is a good chance it's happening in around 30 years. It's a development I for one will be following closely - with both fear and excitement ;)

<comment><USER6> > No one knows of cause but a lot of smart people say there is a good chance > it's happening in around 30 years.

I've been hearing that since I started using computers, 36 years ago.

<comment><USER7> To be fair, today we have what we believe to be (much) more accurate models of how much computation a human mind is capable of and how long it will take to build computing machines operating at that scale.

36 years ago the argument that AGI was coming soon could be made in tandem with the argument that we'd make some fundamental advance that allowed computers to express intelligence with less computational capacity than humans (by orders of magnitude). Today we can make an argument that we'll achieve it (at least initially) by leveraging computational capacity on par with or orders of magnitude greater than a human mind.

<comment><USER6> > To be fair, today we have what we believe to be (much) more accurate models > of how much computation a human mind is capable of

How much, yes, how, not so much and definitely not at the powerbudget the brain has.

> and how long it will take to build computing machines operating at that > scale.

We don't actually know that. There have been some WAGs but so far those appeared to be totally off based on the developments since.

> 36 years ago the argument that AGI was coming soon could be made in tandem > with the argument that we'd make some fundamental advance that allowed > computers to express intelligence with less computational capacity than > humans (by orders of magnitude).

Yes, that was a crucial mistake and it led directly to the AI winter.

> Today we can make an argument that we'll achieve it (at least initially) by > leveraging computational capacity on par with or orders of magnitude greater > than a human mind.

Chances are that we're missing a very important piece of the puzzle for which there is no known solution even in theory. The problem is that there are many candidates for that important piece _none_ of which have currently proposed workable solutions no matter what the computational budget or the accepted slowdown (they are equivalent).

So I think some caution when throwing around projections numbering 'just a couple of years' is warranted, after all it's 'merely a matter of programming' but in this case we don't have a working model that we understand.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > If we were to think through what it would actually mean to configure the > universe in a way that maximizes the number of paper clips that exist, you > realize that such an AI would have incentives, instrumental reasons, to harm > humans. Maybe it would want to get rid of humans, so we don't switch it off, > because then there would be fewer paper clips. Human bodies consist of a lot > of atoms and they can be used to build more paper clips.

That's a funny example but seriously, a machine smart enough to build paper clip factories would certainly be also smart enough to be able to avoid doing things that harm humans. The argument sounds a bit silly to me.

<comment><USER6> > That's a funny example but seriously, a machine smart enough to build paper > clip factories would certainly be also smart enough to be able to avoid > doing things that harm humans.

Why do you think this? Building paperclip factories is straightforward execution of a recipe, defining 'harm to humans' is a problem smart people alive today can't even figure out for themselves, I can easily see how that might be a problem for computers.

<comment><USER8> Yes, theoretically any action, no matter how small and remote, can eventually lead to harm of a human, i.e. the butterfly effect, but that's not what I meant.

What I meant was that a machine capable of building a paper clip factory on its own would certainly as well be capable of avoiding doing obviously bad stuff like killing people to turn them into paper clips or melt down buildings and bridges for the iron.

Such a machine would probably also be smart enough to read the law, to have a framework of what it can do and what it can't do.

<comment><USER9> Is this your first exposure to the paperclip thought experiment? You can find lots of things to read about it here: [http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer](http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer)

The general reply for you is that the generally intelligent paperclip machine can understand law, can weigh consequences of potential actions, and can, _if it wanted to_ , make paperclips without harming others. The key phrase is "if it wanted to". Its only goal is to make more paperclips, it simply doesn't care about anything else. When it recursively improves itself (makes itself smarter), the only thing it cares about for its successor version to do is to also care about making paperclips, and to make them more efficiently.

The problem of programming general intelligence seems to be orthogonal to the problem of programming goal selection, goal preservation, and beneficial goal changes, and making sure goals lead to actions which benefit humanity. That's the main point of the thought experiment.

<comment><USER8> Yes it is my first exposure to this thought experiment and I do not have trouble understanding the thought experiment. I am just going ahead and applying some common sense and logic, to conclude that the argument is pretty much entirely theoretical.

Yes, optimizing only for maximum number of paper clips could potentially have some bad side effects, I get that. If that's the point of the thought experiment, fine. However that's not how the author of the blog post put it: He expressed concern that this could happen in real life, in the future. And I don't think it could.

Why? Because in real life we'd not invent a super intelligent machine and then feed it with some objective function to maximize and then let it do its thing, watch it go out of control and destroy earth. In real life we'd make sure we're in control over that machine. In real life we'd make sure we put very clear and enforceable mechanisms into that machine to stop it from doing anything harmful in the first place while it is carrying out steps to reach its objective. In real life should we still see it doing something funny we pull the plug. End of story.

In addition: Implementing above mentioned mechanisms is probably the easier part of the whole exercise. The hard bit is inventing a machine that can build a paper clip factory. If we can invent such a machine by then we certainly have also invented mechanisms to control that machine and only have it do "good" stuff.

<comment><USER9> The point of the thought experiment is that there's a difference between intelligence and goals. There are other thought experiments (and just general study of human cognition) whose point is that accurately capturing human goals and values is _hard_ , possibly harder than making a general intelligence with X goals in the first place. (See [http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Complexity_of_value](http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Complexity_of_value)) So organizations like MIRI exist ([http://intelligence.org](http://intelligence.org)) to try and solve this problem sooner rather than later, because once a more-than-human-intelligent agent is running, despite the controls, if its values aren't precise enough and if they aren't stable enough on improvement, there is immense possibility for failure. It's also sort of questionable to talk about effective controls of something that's smarter and faster than you are. (See the AI Box Experiments, it's suggestive that you don't even need anything beyond human intelligence to subvert controls you don't like. [http://www.yudkowsky.net/singularity/aibox](http://www.yudkowsky.net/singularity/aibox))

These solar system tiling examples are just a dramatic case for something terrible that could happen given a generally intelligent machine with non- human-friendly goals, or even friendly-seeming goals (like "make nanomachines that remove cancerous cells") that are improperly specified to cover corner cases, but if you spend time analyzing more mundane ways things could go slightly wrong to terribly wrong given an honest but flawed attempt at making sure they go right, carry your analyses years into the future after the intelligent software is started where things continue going right but then go wrong, you might come to agree that the most likely outcome given present knowledge and research direction will be bad for humanity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I brought Bostrom's book _Superintelligence_ and got about halfway through it before I moved into something else - it was a little disappointing. Throughout it seems that he just doesn't get what makes something 'intelligent' \- while a machine that optimises paper clip production might be an application of artificial intelligence, it's not artificial general intelligent, and it's hardly any more advanced than some particularly well automated factories that already exist today. Artificial general intelligence at s human level implied to me that such a machine can think and consider things at least as much as a person - and therefore probably understands that making lots of paper clips isn't the be all and end all of existing.

<comment><USER9> That's some useful feedback to know as I've considered recommending that book but haven't read it myself as it's redundant to what I've already read, but if Bostrom doesn't seem to explain very well that there's a distinction between intelligence and goals/values, I'll just keep linking to some basic online texts. (Try [http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Complexity_of_value](http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Complexity_of_value)) The paperclip superintelligence will indeed be able to reason more effectively than humans about what's the be all and end all of existing -- the problem is that its conclusion will always be "to make more paperclips", because that's the overarching value it uses to frame all its thoughts on future actions, and its reasoning will be air tight. It will also be capable of explaining to any human wondering why its being torn apart for paperclip conversion that human values are different (they are such and such) and because it does not share those values, it comes to a different conclusion for the meaning of life, and it will also be able to generate great arguments for why its value system is superior. But it probably won't bother to do so...

<comment><USER10> It's probably still worth reading the book if you're interested in a philosophical view of super intelligence, but if you're looking for a detailed look at the philosophical issues concerning artificial general intelligence (which I thought it would be), it's probably not the book for you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's a shame the headline stopped where it did. The article continues, "... or stop at the human-ability station." This makes for a much more interesting discussion (only because we're human).

We all measure AI progress and its rate of progress differently. That's the common debate, isn't it? But however we arrive at that axis, human ability is a point on it. It _will_ be a point in time. And there's no reason to believe it's a special point that machine intelligence would notice or throttle itself at. So as progress goes rushing, indifferently, past... don't things get interesting?

</comment><comment><USER12> Related to AI but not this post. I just got back from the new film Ex Machina and it was very good. As one IMDB user states, "it's beautifully shot, fantastically lit, intelligently written, brilliantly cast." In the film, they blend Mary's Room w/ a bit of Plato's Cave.

[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0470752/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0470752/)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PI8XBKb6DQk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PI8XBKb6DQk)

</comment><comment><USER13> I recommend anyone who is making outrageous AI claims (we will have an AGI in X years, AI is getting dangerous, etc.) to take an introductory course in AI/Learning/Intelligent Systems. Trust me, a single course on this subject will be an instant cure for all doomsday imaginations. It'll take the magic out of those "intelligent" programs. People who make these claims about AI show a remarkable amount of ignorance about the subject.

And, quite franky, I'm tired of this subject. It's dumb and boring, everyone is warning and fearmongering, and nobody is presenting any facts at all.

<comment><USER14> Apparently not:

>We thus designed a brief questionnaire and distributed it to four groups of experts in 2012/2013\. The median estimate of respondents was for a one in two chance that high-level machine intelligence will be developed around 2040-2050, rising to a nine in ten chance by 2075. Experts expect that systems will move on to superintelligence in less than 30 years thereafter. They estimate the chance is about one in three that this development turns out to be 'bad' or 'extremely bad' for humanity.

[http://www.nickbostrom.com/papers/survey.pdf](http://www.nickbostrom.com/papers/survey.pdf)

The people warning about the future of are pretty familiar with AI. Your accusations that they are all idiots who have no understanding of AI is way off the mark.

A number of notable people also signed the future of life institute open letter warning about AI: [http://futureoflife.org/misc/open_letter](http://futureoflife.org/misc/open_letter)

<comment><USER6> They're not idiots but their funding depends on them being able to move the needle within their career window.

As for the warning letter: Asimov and other SF authors have been writing such letters for the longest time, there is nothing new there that hasn't been covered many times over.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The narrative of the dangerous AI exciting for the layman, but it's ultimately just a good story, more of a danger to our current economic model than it is to our species.</comment>


The Diplomatic Couriers Who Deliver America's Secret Mail - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/diplomatic-courier-service/ <comment><USER2> For those that are interested my Dad was a Diplomatic Courier and published 10 years worth of personal letters traveling the world in the Navy and then as a Courier from 1956-1966.

[https://www.amazon.com/Dear-Mom-Odyssey-World-Travel- ebook/d...](https://www.amazon.com/Dear-Mom-Odyssey-World-Travel- ebook/dp/B01MR2ZQ5W)

"DEAR MOM" is a book told through 591 letters to my parents while living throughout the world. The letters seen here are transcriptions of all letters I wrote to my parents for ten years following college graduation. They record my daily life in surprising detail from Navy Officer Candidate School until resigning from the U.S. Foreign Service in Viet Nam. This was a decade of practically non-stop travel throughout most of the world – some 4 million miles.

<comment><USER3> My aunt was a courier in Brussels in the 90s/2000s! I visited her when I was backpacking and she gave me the low down. It was pretty funny, really boring job but she had to get security clearance, get hand to hand and firearm training. It came up because she was giving me a ride somewhere and when I first got in her car she was like "now be careful, there's a gun here, here, here, there, there, under the seat between the seats behind the seats, in the glove box" just all over the place!!!

<comment><USER4> Did she ever get pulled over by the cops? Asked if there were any weapons in the car lol. Or do they get diplomatic plates?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My aunt opened an unlicensed orphanage in northern Ivory Coast after WWII, and she had the Queen of the Netherland as a donor. Every year around Christmas the Dutch diplomatic mail service would come, heavily armed and very serious, to deliver boxes of sweet treats for the children.

<comment><USER6> Amazing story, if I was a fiction writer then not in a million Sundays would I imagine such a thing.

I don't think I have seen the word 'unlicensed' followed by the word 'orphanage' before, I might just add '2' on the end and use that for my password.

<comment><USER5> The whole story is crazy, they were 2 women, and they couldn't get the papers to open the orphanage, so they legally adopted the kids, one woman adopting the girls and the other one the boys (the idea is to let them inter-marry if they wanted to).

I don't know how safe it is to give the google keywords to find the place.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The pay starts pretty low, but they apparently have many job openings: [https://careers.state.gov/work/foreign- service/specialist/ca...](https://careers.state.gov/work/foreign- service/specialist/career-tracks/diplomatic-courier/)

<comment><USER8> Honestly even with "75% travel" I'm surprised they're struggling so much to find people. Seems like a lot of people want to travel, and would love to spend part of their 20s doing so.

Would be interesting to know just how dangerous it is though, particularly for relatively low pay. The article covers some plane crashes, but doesn't really explore the question in detail.

<comment><USER9> I would imagine the requirement for a TS/SCI clearance cuts down on the number of candidates that make it through the hiring process substantially.

<comment><USER8> That's a good point. I doubt I could get that clearance for example.

<comment><USER10> Depending on how strenuous the clearing agency is, a lot of people are knocked out for seemingly banal reasons. I work with people who have to have clearances for various projects and people have been knocked off of those teams for:

\- Being a dual citizen (and, far worse, holding a passport from the other country) even if they were born citizens of the US and the other country

\- Having traveled to several countries, like China or Russia, for reasons other than a short tourism stay

\- Being married to a non-US-citizen, even a permanent resident

\- Owing a lot of money on student loans

\- Parents being born in or citizens of the "wrong" country

\- Psychiatric or psychology counseling for certain conditions

\- A history of regular gambling

From what I can tell, the investigators want someone who was born in the US to parents whose ancestry can both be traced to the Mayflower and who does nothing except stay at home and read National Geographic while sitting by the fire next to an equally-suitable spouse.

<comment><USER11> It's all about how easy you'd be to bribe. If you owe a lot of money or gamble a lot then that's viewed as you being susceptible to selling secrets.

They don't care if you like to go out drinking

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > Employing 103 couriers at 12 hubs around the world, the DCS boasts a > delivery success rate that would be the envy of FedEx and UPS.

Do they? The article never backs that up:

> Nobody at the service could remember a single lost pouch or unsuccessful > delivery in the service's modern history, though missions can be aborted for > political, weather, or mechanical reasons if necessary. The service did once > manage to lose a baby grand piano along the Orient Express in 1919. > Evidently, the courier—David K E Bruce, later a renowned diplomat—slept > beneath it on a railway platform in Bulgaria and woke to find the piano was > gone.

I'd count cancelled missions as unsuccessful, just as I'd count a cancelled delivery by UPS.

Given that the Diplomatic Couriers Service _must_ have orders of magnitude fewer packages than e.g. UPS or FedEx, it's entirely possible that those few failures are a higher failure rate than the commercial carriers.

None of that's to detract from the DCS's really cool achievements — I just dislike journalistic hyperbole.

</comment><comment><USER13> They even carry furniture. Not unexpected given the lengths that spies go to. It reminds me of the IBM Selectric bug (apparently planted during a customs inspection).

[http://www.cryptomuseum.com/covert/bugs/selectric/](http://www.cryptomuseum.com/covert/bugs/selectric/)

</comment><comment><USER14> All government communications are subject to inspection and should be disclosed as soon as possible.

Why does the State Department need to take such extreme measures and have special exemption from processes meant to detect and stop all manner of nefarious activity?

<comment><USER15> Quite a lot of this stuff is private (e.g. employment-related), other people's stuff (passports, visas, etc), or actually classified secret.

<comment><USER16> The SECRET stuff can actually be sent by the USPS. It just has to be packaged correctly, properly labeled, and you have to select the appropriate options for sending it.

I did the courier job briefly when I was working for what was then the Defense Communications Agency, and we were transmitting SECRET documents. I had the hand-carried copy, and they sent a second copy via USPS.

I even had a nifty courier badge, which was created by using a typewriter to fill out a small government form that was printed on orange card stock, and then the whole thing was laminated together. No pictures, no fingerprints, no signatures. The security agents at Washington Regional Airport sure took notice....

<comment><USER17> Presumably using Registered Mail, which is kept under lock and key.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Report: Senior Uber exec threatened to dig up dirt on journalists - <AUTHOR> https://gigaom.com/2014/11/17/report-senior-uber-exec-threatened-to-dig-up-dirt-on-journalists/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

<comment><USER2> The link in the headline should be changed to the original reporting from Ben Smith at Buzzfeed instead of Gigaom's commentary about the story.

[1] [http://www.buzzfeed.com/bensmith/uber-executive-suggests- dig...](http://www.buzzfeed.com/bensmith/uber-executive-suggests-digging-up- dirt-on-journalists)

</comment><comment><USER3> Interestingly, journalists dig dirt on everyone, so why wouldn't they have the same treatment? There is this guy who cleaned up the ebola apartment in NY, everybody is trying to take him down because of his past. I have a friend who fell into depression, failed a project and got harassed online for years after that, it could happen to me too. And the clickbait competition is not helping.

disclosure: I have never used Uber (or anything resembling) in my life, it's not present in my city and the closest I have been to Uber is witnessing a demonstration of drivers in Seattle (I didn't know there were demonstrations in the US). I just feel that one day _I_ could be in the crosshair, and get my name trashed in the news for weeks.

</comment><comment><USER4> This makes me distrust the journalist, not Uber. A VP getting drunk and describing petty revenge fantasies against journalists who publish hit pieces isn't news. The whole thing sounds like some dude circling wagons.

Read the original article: [http://pando.com/2014/10/22/the-horrific-trickle- down-of-ass...](http://pando.com/2014/10/22/the-horrific-trickle-down-of- asshole-culture-at-a-company-like-uber/) Seriously; Have you been to France? It may have been ill-advised for an American company to do business with some foreign companies what with the global connectivity allowing everything to be judged by American standards, but that promo wouldn't be considered sexist there. Right or wrong, France is a very different place.</comment>


Ask HN: How many of C. E. Shannon's papers are still classified? - <AUTHOR> How many of C. E. Shannon's papers are still classified? <comment><USER2> Though I'm not familiar with the workings of classification, that question sounds paradoxical to me. Isn't that equivalent to something like, "How many secrets are there in the world?"?

<comment><USER3> Maybe the existence of a paper isn't classified, but the contents are, or heavily redacted.</comment></comment>


Thomas Edison Did Not Invent the Light Bulb - <AUTHOR> https://www.ripleys.com/weird-news/or-not-thomas-edison-light-bulb/ <comment><USER2> Would you say that a filament that burned for a few minutes is a light bulb? Perhaps it would be better to term it light-from-electricity. (But then after you invent that word, wouldn't you say light-from-electricity was invented by nature through lighting?)

The point being that everyone sits on the shoulder of giants, and the above article half a play on semantics, and half an interesting history of items that preceded Edison's practical light bulb.

<comment><USER3> A little-known chapter of lighting is the Phoebus cartel, created in Geneva in 1925. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel)

It was created to reduce competition and _to standardize the life expectancy of light bulbs at 1,000 hours (down from 2,500 hours)._

Preventing technical advances to maximize profit is a fascinating art. That art may explain many things that we see going on today. I bet there are a couple great books on the topic I haven't seen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Yes, but he was better at self-promotion than the others who did, so he is credited with it by history.

Similarly, in 20 years time Steve Jobs will be remembered as the inventor of the smartphone.

<comment><AUTHOR> People should know about the truth.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Freelancers: have you had success with client referral schemes? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> The first thing I suggest doing is not call it a "scheme." Focus on building relationships, not running a scheme. When you build a relationship (trust and respect) then the referrals will come.

You may need to push a few people to make a referral ("Hey I have some availability next month, know someone like you who can use my help?"), and they'll do it without any scheme or reward.</comment>


How TCP backlog works in Linux - <AUTHOR> http://veithen.github.io/2014/01/01/how-tcp-backlog-works-in-linux.html

<comment><USER2> The article kind of misses the point. The reason for having a separate queue for connections in a SYN-RECEIVED state is to provide a defense against SYN flooding attacks.[1] An incoming SYN has a source IP address, but that may be faked. In a SYN flooding attack, large numbers of SYN packets with fake source addresses are sent. The connection will never reach ESTABLISHED, because the reply ACK goes to the fake source address, which didn't send the SYN and won't complete the handshake.

Early TCP implementations allocated all the resources for a connection, including the big buffers, when a SYN came in. SYN flooding attacks could tie up all of a server's connection resources until the connection attempt timed out after a minute or two. So now, TCP implementations have to have a separate pool of connection data for connections in SYN-RECEIVED state. There's no data at that stage, so buffers are not yet needed, and a minimum amount of state has to be kept until the 3-way handshake completes. Once the handshake completes, full connection resources are allocated and the connection goes to ESTABLISHED state.

This has nothing to do with behavior of established connections, or connection dropping.

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

<comment><USER3> > There's no data at that stage

There can be. The initial SYN can contain a payload.

<comment><USER2> True, although few implementations send data with SYN, because the BSD socket interface, which everybody uses, forces a full handshake before sending data. Some firewalls treat data with SYN as an attack.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> "The solution suggested by Stevens... The problem with this is..."

I see no problem with it. But perhaps I am missing something.

"... an application is expected to tune the backlog..."

Two simple applications I use everday called tcpserver/sslserver and tcpclient meet this expectation.

See "-b" and "-c" switches.

Has the author looked at Stevens' own example?

[http://www.icir.org/christian/sock.html](http://www.icir.org/christian/sock.html)

</comment><comment><USER5> There was a recent video or article posted here discussing the poor interaction between Nagle's Algorithm/Delayed ACK/TCP slow-start and how it results in increased latency, especially for the first few packets.

From a first read it sounds like the decisions made in both BSD and Linux could also be adding to the latency problem for the first initial packets.

Have OSes checked how their TCP backlog implementation affects the various congestion control algorithms being used?

<comment><USER2> Different problem.

The bad interaction between the Nagle Algorithm and Delayed ACK still irks me. I designed one, somebody at Berkeley designed the other, and by the time I found out about it, I was out of network architecture and doing something else for a different company.

That 200ms fixed timer in delayed ACK was a bad idea. The whole delayed ACK thing was a hack to reduce overhead for character-by-character Telnet, which mattered to Berkeley back then because Berkeley used a lot of dumb terminal servers. The fixed time delay is based on human response time and the time UNIX needed to process a character echo. If a typed character has to be echoed, the ACK can be piggybacked on the reply packet with the echo. This is one of the few cases in which delayed ACK is a win. It might also be a win with some quick request-reply APIs.

Really, delayed ACKs should be off by default, and should only turn on when the connection has been showing a consistent pattern of "packet received, ACK sent, application quickly transmitted reply so ACK could have been combined with reply."

John Nagle

<comment><USER6> I recall emailing you about this in 1996 when I worked on LDAP at Netscape and being rather surprised to receive a reply! Good times...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I ran into the overflow behaviour with our source repository provider, as they'd get hammered on the top of every minute by all the continuous integration servers and silently drop connections. The specific version of SSH we were running didn't send the client banner until it received the server banner, so the connection just hung for 2 hours on the client.

After much debugging and reading of kernel source this was all figured out, and the provider adjusted things on their end so this wouldn't happen.

Moral of the story: You probably should set tcp_abort_on_overflow to 1.</comment>


New York State to ban plastic bags–here's why - <AUTHOR> https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/03/new-york-state-plastic-bag-ban-explained/ <comment><AUTHOR> Related discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19536973](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19536973)</comment>


Mir for Ubuntu 13.10 progress report - <AUTHOR> http://www.jonobacon.org/2013/08/15/mir-update-and-testing-mir-in-ubuntu-13-10/

<comment><AUTHOR> I think this is Canonical's most aggressive and unstable plan yet. Mir is baby new, like version 0.0.9. They need to be doing a freeze soon for 13.10 and Mir is still dropping major major features like multimonitor support (soon) and has big performance regressions (some fixed soon). For something being launched to the public in two months, this seems insanely aggressive and unlikely to do well. I'm really disappointed</comment>


Safe.page - <AUTHOR> https://safe.page <comment><USER2> Horrendous UX with those animated section transitions.</comment>


Indian engineers are so bad that a tech giant wants to hire high school grads - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/941399/indian-engineers-are-so-bad-that-hcl-technologies-wants-to-hire-high-school-graduates/ <comment><USER2> More like HCL is so cheap they don't even want to spend the pittance they give their fresh engineering hires anyway. And besides it's not like they are selling software in the first place. What they are selling is labor, and more precisely warm bodies on their "bench". A live 12th pass kid is just the same as a fresh engineering graduate in that respect. The real tragedy here is how the "journalist" has just parroted HCL's bullshit in their headline.

<comment><USER3> This. Indian engineers are not bad. There are very impressive Indian, Chinese, Bangladeshi, Indonesian etc engineers.

However

$5 per hour engineers are bad. Especially in organisations that seem designed to keep them bad. Indian, Chinese, happen to be overrepresented in that cohort because of living expenses and their numbers.

Managers that hire these folks and expect quality, secure and well-represented software should be held to account, that's all. Not that most companies can produce decent requirements in the first place, and these guys also tend to have a "don't bother me" approach to communications as well.

<comment><USER2> That 5 usd metric is just random and I just can't agree with you. Everybody has to start somewhere and considering the cost of living in South Asia, $5 per hour isn't all that bad. $5 an hour may be some kind of janitorial level income in the US, but it's not so in India, because of the foreign exchange rate difference. Of course a talented and ambitious programmer can earn much more than that amount if they seek out the opportunities. And you need more than just cs talent to discover and exploit said opportunities.

The point I was making was that companies like HCL don't care about cs talent for most of their hires anyway. They are competing for contracts which require them to show bench strength. Since it's literally impossible show 1000s of top notch engineers just sitting on their rolls jobless, they just hire whoever comes along and after a few months of "training" say shit like, "We have a million engineers just waiting hand in hand to personally work on your project". Of course they also hire some who know what they are doing, but most hires are only for appearance sake. Since if they manage to win a big contract that will easily cover for all the hires and more.

As for the workers themselves, most won't show any interest because they have no idea what impact their work is having. For example they rarely interact with clients. Their metrics for success has nothing to do with quality of work. I can't imagine workers from any culture, including Americans and Europeans, evolving into expert professionals under these conditions.

<comment><USER3> The $5 metric is just my random number meant to indicate "below this, everything is crap". I agree that $5 is perhaps not the real border price that should be used for this, but hopefully we both agree that there is such a level, and HCL is purposefully going below it to save a buck.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Someone needs to realise that employing 100 cheap junior people to deliver a software project is not going to work. You end up with <20 developers + 80 people overhead (PM/QA/etc) and communication overhead will kill any productivity. Better to hire 10 people that know something and just pay each of them 10x.

<comment><AUTHOR> If you read the article you would have learned that they are choosing to train these people in a boot camp style environment. It seems the education system is failing in producing solid software developers.

I am struggling with a similar scenario right now. My oldest is struggling/coming to grips with attending a University where he wants to study Cyber Security but will spend at least two years learning about Geography, History, art appreciation, peoples of culture and two years of other courses that are loosely relevant to the Cyber Security Industry and dreadfully behind the times.

He took History and Geography and other courses through out HS. How much more do he need to be exposed to it?

This is why our System is failing us and a lot of kids are unprepared. They only way to learn what you want to learn is to do it outside of Academia. Sad but true.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Come on! India produces one of the best engineers in the world. If you look at the numbers, they need people doing run-of-the-mill 'coding' jobs who need not be 'trained' in complex algorithms and software engineering. They can hire school grads, train them to the basic skill set they need and hire them at 30% less salary. No good engineer would like to be hired for 2.5L in these companies.

</comment><comment><USER6> The most common problem working with indian developers in my experience was that they cannot say 'NO'. the culture maybe?

</comment><comment><USER7> this article title is the worst.</comment>


The Repo Market Explained - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-09-19/the-repo-market-s-a-mess-what-s-the-repo-market-quicktake <comment><USER2> Wait, the fed wants an overnight rate in a specific range. To do this they just set the deposit rate under the "floor" to encourage banks to lend above that, but they didn't set a ceiling, assuming it would magically stay in target range??

Now they are "thinking" of making a standing offer to lend at the top of their target range. Makes sense to me.

<comment><USER3> > To do this they just set the deposit rate under the "floor" to encourage > banks to lend above that, but they didn't set a ceiling, assuming it would > magically stay in target range?

Yes. The Fed had hoped that IOER would serve as a floor for controlling interest rates, when it ended up acting as a ceiling. They used repo transactions to try and counter this. Prior to ~2007, the Fed used open market operations to maintain a corridor system.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I honestly believe that this is how QE will be reintroduced. The article even mentions that a "solution" to the repo squeeze will be for the Fed to begin expanding its balance sheet in order to create more bank reserves.

My question is this: will interest rates ever be allowed to go back up to historical norms? This episode clearly shows that the Fed won't allow rates to go up even if it's a temporary spike, so why should we believe that Treasury yields will be allowed to go back up?

<comment><USER5> I'm no economist, but my intuition is that under normal circumstances, it makes sense for a country's interest rate to be close to the growth rate of that country's economy. Given that, it doesn't seem likely that the US will ever go back to 7% interest rates.

<comment><USER6> I know you said intuition but can you elaborate why you think that?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> My understanding is that the problem is not that banks don't have money, but that they don't have the right kind of money.

They need fed reserves, which is the only kind of money that works intra-day for bank needs, but they have treasuries and other stuff, which only clears the next day.

Why don't they sell treasuries today so that they have the money tomorrow and thus no problem tomorrow I don't understand.

<comment><USER8> This article talks about a few factors that have created this crisis: [https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2019/09/the-fed-has-not- cove...](https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2019/09/the-fed-has-not-covered- itself-in-glory-fed-funds-edition.html)

"What were they thinking?" indeed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The current situation means that one or more entities are in desperate need for funding and will pay any price for it. A similar situation happened in 2013 when China's Banking system was on the verge of collapse. The repo rate reached 20% before the Central Bank of China intervened to calm down the market.</comment>


Vauxhall manufactured a "Stolen" car. Thoughts? - <AUTHOR> My friend took her Vauxhall Corsa for an MOT at the weekend.
Upon inspection, two of the VIN numbers on the vehicle match the log book, the third does not. This is an instant MOT failure.
The garage are confident it has not been tampered with or been in an accident. The garage believe that while they've never seen this before, the incorrect VIN number was installed at the Factory.
Because of this, the garage say the vehicle's tax and insurance are also likely to be invalid and the car should not be driven. She was also told to inform the police. The police say if she drives the car and gets pulled over there will be questions as to why the cars VIN numbers don't match as that is illegal.
After numerous phone calls where Vaxhaull wouldn't even entertain that this could happen, they eventually agreed to acknowledge the problem and say it will take 6 weeks to correct.
My friend is a community nurse and uses the car every day to visit sick people. She now can't use the car for six weeks until it is fixed.
On asking Vauxhall to arrange a courtesy car, as her livelihood is being affected by their mistake, they were very dismissive saying that the car is out of warranty (it is). My argument is that it's not a warranty problem. It's not like a part has failed and she doesn't want to pay for it. She can't pay to have anyone fix this problem any faster.
I have a friend at BMW who said if this happened with one of their customers, they wouldn't be able to do enough to help them, it's embarrassing and completely their mess.
Vauxhall don't seem to care that this has happened, and my friend is left with the only option of hiring a car for six weeks at her expense.
What does anyone think about the situation?
TL;DR Vauxhall made a car with 2 VIN numbers and refuse to sort out a courtesy car while they sort out the illegal, undrivable car. Am I wrong to think they should be more bothered about this? <comment><USER2> Legally, I would be very surprised if your friend has a leg to stand on. It sounds exactly like a warranty issue. IANAL however.

It's also hard to argue anything other than inconvenience, it's not like the factory fault means the car is unsafe.

TBH if she really wants to try to get some compensation, probably her best bet would be to bring it up on Twitter/Facebook and try to get some publicity. You may be able to embarrass Vauxhall into responding that way, especially if you highlight the community nurse bit. I'd be a little surprised if it worked but you never know.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your input. Good to get different perspectives when I've just been getting wound up by the whole thing on her behalf.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Sounds like something local press might be interested in, if press in the UK still has sections for that kind of thing.

<comment> J-dawg Even national newspapers sometimes have sections on consumer rights. I'm pretty sure The Times still has this as part of the money section (maybe the Saturday edition? It's been a while since I read a newspaper). This also sounds like it would be of interest to the specialist motoring press.

I feel like this is one of those cases where generating some negative PR and embarrassing Vauxhall could actually get results.

Good luck!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why hasn't this been discovered during earlier MOTs? You say the car is out of warranty, so I'm assuming the car is older than 3 years, so it must have been through MOT test before, right?

<comment><AUTHOR> Apparently this is the first year where MOT testers have to check all of the VIN numbers on the car. It's new legislation, according to the garage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> My recommendation is that your friend contact their insurance company rather than relying on insurance advice, regardless of how well intentioned, from the mechanic's shop.

</comment><comment><USER6> Is the car new? Why isn't the dealer offering to loan a car during the repair time? Or is that not something that is done there? It is what I would expect in the USA.</comment>