OS X Yosemite: I went back to Mavericks - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@tschundeee/osx-yosemite-i-went-back-to-mavericks-3f1b35ccb5e

<comment><USER2> It sounds like the author simply doesn't like change and is looking for things to pick apart. Yosemite is faster on every machine I've installed it on and I think the new interface is a new, modern, fresh take on OS X. If it's slow or dropping frames, perhaps it would be best to investigate and diagnose if your machine is OK or not before complaining. Of course, interface preference is subjective but I suspect most people simply _don 't care_ that much.

Change is hard, but if you go into it with this attitude you won't ever want to upgrade or try anything new.

<comment><USER3> Seems really hard to just reject all the new features because you don't like the window chrome.

Unlike the author, I have no issues running Yosemite on an i7 macbook pro retina with a 27' inch thunderbolt external display.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Some interesting points but I personally don't agree with most of them.

Time machine, I personally hated the previous interface. Always felt it was clunky and slow.

Icons are pretty poor but they are so small on my screen it's something I can live with.

The font! Oh where to begin, after using this font for hours on end now I thought I would have got use to it, but something just isn't quite right with it!

* beginning of wine-fueled rant *

Overall I personally am still in a mixed opinion on Yosemite, it took almost 2 days to get my work machines (iMac 2011 and rMBP 2014) back into a usable state. Almost everything was broken, network drivers (I use 10GbE), my IDE, VM environments, file sync, backups.

But worse of all they seem to have changed the mouse acceleration settings! As a long time suffer of RSI/Carpal Tunnel Syndrome I have learnt to manage it so well that most of the time I forget I even suffer with this. One of the best ways for me to manage it was to purchase a Razer Mamba mouse, which worked flawlessly in Mavericks. Installed Yosemite and the mouse was unusable even on the mouses slowest setting, tried another mouse, same issue. Completely unusable! After spending hours upon hours searching for a solution and setting my RSI off to levels which I couldn't sleep for 2 days! I finally found the USBOverdrive app which lets me control the accelerations to something which matches Mavericks. One week later I am still suffering with pretty bad pain in my wrist!

* wine-fueled rant over :) _

</comment><comment><USER5> DWD's Design inspired by Yosemite? Please. They're trying to add a way to implement similar features that Gnome 3's header bars offer in their paradigm for rendering window decorations. ([https://help.gnome.org/misc/release- notes/3.10/#header-bars](https://help.gnome.org/misc/release- notes/3.10/#header-bars)). The flat design sense also seems to be partially inspired by android holo, the current KDE "oxygen" design, some of gnome 3's design, and in general, flat design is more popular these days.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm not sure how "Popularity" counts as a reason unless you are a high school student. Also, on my i7 MBP Retina with only 8GB RAM / 256GB SSD I notice no lag whatsoever, even while running a VM and two browsers. This strikes me as an extremely long-winded whine, similar to what you hear when Facebook makes any UI changes. Revert then, and be done with it.

</comment><comment><USER7> Agreed with some respects (lack of contrast, saturation choices, and so on). I have trouble telling the difference between something I'm just not used to, and something that will be changed in either 10.11.0 or 10.10.2.

That said I already prefer Yosemite overall to Mavericks and wouldn't go back.

Other criticisms I can't agree with. The removal of the starry background in Time Machine? Calendar icon being too thin? (agreed on Mail's icon though).

With those cosmetics out of the way, we come to the performance section. I'm just not seeing it, on a 2012 Macbook Air (I think this should count as a middle-of-the-road performer in the Mac lineup). I suspect there's something wrong with the graphics driver with respect to the writer's hardware.

</comment><comment><USER8> Wow this is crazy, I have had the exact opposite experience with Yosemite. It's faster, _much_ better looking, and finally removes some of the horrible skeuomorphic warts that had been on the OS for a long time.

</comment><comment><USER9> tl;dr It's not pretty enough.

</comment><comment><USER10> I've noticed no lag either. However I see the same black box around the Volume animation popup. I just felt Apple sucked there - a company that I loved for design and for details making such a mistake?

Adding to that, I've owned two Mac's over a period of 3+ years and never once have they crashed. But today Yosemite just shut down all of a sudden. I've lost my confidence on Yosemite.

</comment><comment><USER11> Looks like Siracusa was right about Mavericks becoming the new Snow Leopard as the "last good OSX".

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Interesting to hear your opinions about Yosemite. Yesterday I had a conversation with an apple employee and he also confirmed that they are aware of the UI performance problems. I expect apple to fix this soon.

</comment><comment><USER12> It just doesn't look complete. Could be cool (and useful for Apple) if they released a "Material Design"-like resource.

<comment><USER13> That's what the Human Interface Guidelines is for: [https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/UserEx...](https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/OSXHIGuidelines/index.html)

Or is there something you mean that the HIG doesn't include?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I just checked "reduce transparency" option and that's enough for now.</comment>


Technical Question... - <AUTHOR>

<comment><AUTHOR> So a couple of days ago, TechCrunch profiled VideoCounter: [http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/07/01/videocountercom- count-v...](http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/07/01/videocountercom-count-views- on-multiple-video-sites/)

While the company's stats tracking was simplistic (only hits are counted as far as I know), I was curious as to how they accomplished it. They're not inserting any snippets of code (a la Google Analytics) and I'm going to assume that they don't have access to the server logs, so how are they tracking page hits?

Anyone know how they are tracking the stats without embedding code or looking at logs? I'm probably missing something very simple and not knowing is... annoying :)

<comment><USER2> Revver uses embedded ads to track hits on their videos, similar (sort of) to using an invisible image and counting the number of times it has been loaded.

I don't specifically know about VideoCounter, for everything the uninformative article says they could be screenscraping/using public APIs to just grab the image views and using a highly complex summation funtion (typically represented using a plus sign).

<comment><AUTHOR> Lol okay. I was wondering if there was a magic trick behind it all. If its just screen scraping/api usage with a plus sign... it doesn't seem all that impressive.</comment></comment></comment>


When physics meets biology: a less known Feynman - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.03854 <comment><USER3> There was a really good chapter on his time in a biology lab in his book, "Surely you're joking Mr. Feynman". I have always remembered this quote:

 _When it came time for me to give my talk on the subject, I started off by drawing an outline of the cat and began to name the various muscles.

The other students in the class interrupt me: "We know all that!"

"Oh," I say, "you do? Then no wonder I can catch up with you so fast after you've had four years of biology." They had wasted all their time memorizing stuff like that, when it could be looked up in fifteen minutes._

<comment><USER4> I've been taking medical and biology related courses for the last five years or so, well over 1000 hours in lecture hours thus far - thanks to the Internet _(a counterpoint to the "I Don't Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore" thread popular on HN right now)_. I concluded that while I find it all extremely interesting and exciting as far as anatomy, physiology, neuroscience, organic and biochemistry, genetics, statistics (which I had learned - and forgotten - before but now I actually found useful and therefore interesting for the first time), etc., I could never study medicine to become a doctor. All that rote learning!

For a CS graduate, it's like learning everything there is about Oracle 9i. For years. By heart. Not even about databases in general, you learn the basics of course, but then you spend most of your time learning by heart every command and every setting of Oracle 9i.

I'm sure it makes you an efficient doctor within the given system, and when trying to solve some example cases there sure is value in knowing pathways (real ones, e.g. neurological ones - where is the damage if the patient feels this and does not feel any of that?, as well as biochemical ones, but also organizational stuff like various ways invented to categorize broken bones, e.g. [http://www.thieme.com/media/samples/pubid1252333231.pdf](http://www.thieme.com/media/samples/pubid1252333231.pdf)). Quite frankly, I find most of it a waste of time.

Right now I'm re-taking edX "Principles of Biochemistry" ([https://www.edx.org/course/principles-biochemistry- harvardx-...](https://www.edx.org/course/principles-biochemistry-harvardx- mcb63x-1)), and while it's a lot of fun I also feel it's quite a bit of a waste: From part III on it feels more and more useless. The course is done very well, and every bit is interesting, but how - WHY - am I supposed to learn soooo many paths in such great detail? What's the point? If I need it I can always look it up! No wonder that while there are several "Hello I'm new here, excited to start this course" messages in the forum every day there are only a handful of forum messages for the later sections of the course - <USER2> many months of running. I suspect >90% of people never get past part 3 (of 5). Because the brain just does not see the point of all this rote learning. If there was a larger project as context, a problem to solve! But just "here learn this" for no other reason than "it's interesting" (so are a trillion other pieces of information!!)... it does not work very well.

Learning needs both a PUSH and a PULL. The teaching is mostly about push(ing knowledge into brains), but where is the pull (reasons other than abstract "you need to know")? Brain have their own ways of detecting actual need, and that comes from having to solve actual problems, not from being told "this is important". And learning millions of facts when you don't need them but know you can always learn them/look them up quickly at any time when you do actually need them is soooo demotivating.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, totally with you on that. I knew lots of pre-Med majors in college and I could never wrap my head around how someone could enjoy such a masochistic form of learning. But the common thread of successful pre-Med majors is that they get straight A's and are very successful memorizing everything.

Medicine is basically all rote memorization, from pre-Med to the MCAT. It makes sense to select for doctors who are good at it, because they need to have a quickly queryable, but wide breadth of knowledge in their head at all times.

Personally I'm happy to know that my doctor is able to memorize and collate so much information. But I do worry that the way he learns may also restrict his creativity and problem solving.

Perhaps as AI moves into medicine, doctors won't need to rely so much on their own memorization, and can focus their efforts on problem solving.

<comment><USER6> I think you underestimate the role of problem solving skill in medicine. It's not all rote memorization. A good doctor is good at problem solving and has to have lots of information ready for instant recall.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Not a very good abstract. It doesn't tell me anything about Feynman's contribution to molecular biology.

<comment><USER8> Very little. He did some work on what would now be called mutational "recovery" of frame shift insertion/deletion variants in phages, for about a year on sabbatical. Which at the time would have been enough for him to have predicted several aspects about the genetic code, such as DNA triplets forming codons. Which was funnily enough anticipated by George Gamow around the same time looking at the number of naturally occurring amino acids and the number of nucleobases.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> OT, but if you like quantitative biology, there's [http://bionumbers.hms.harvard.edu/](http://bionumbers.hms.harvard.edu/) . The book draft "Cell Biology by the Numbers" there is also fun.

</comment><comment><USER10> Even Alan Turing have done some biology-related work: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chemical_Basis_of_Morphoge...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chemical_Basis_of_Morphogenesis)

<comment><USER8> Yeah which is waaaay more significant both in the field of chemistry and biology. The work Turing was doing at that time was seriously advanced thinking, and really on the right track for how things like transcriptional regulation works in embryogenesis. If he had lived longer its really depressing to imagine what he might have contributed in biology, and how much faster we would have got to where we are in molecular biology. Unlike this write up on Feynman, Turing genuinely provided a hypothesis with some insight and rigour that turned out to be important. It was first found to be a real thing in the world in chemistry with the discovery of the Belousov–Zhabotinsky reaction, which then directly tied the maths to an actual reactive process. The way biology works is a bit more digital and discrete, but the general idea and concept is similar. Turing couldn't have anticipated that his ideas on computation were probably even closer to biology than his differential rate equation models. If he had lived to see the evidence of the tie ins between his works, I think he would have dropped some seriously epic stuff we cant even imagine right now for dealing mathematically with molecular biology at various scales.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Having recently learnt that Feynman seems to have treated women quite badly [1]. I feel slightly uncomfortable about this article, it feels more like hero worship than anything else.

Feynman no doubt did some interesting work in Physics. But the work discussed here doesn't appear to be particularly distinguished. It does not follow that someone did interesting work on X therefore everything they did must be valuable and interesting.

I suppose what I'm trying to say is that individuals are a complex mixture of good and bad. And that there's a danger that an individual who has done interesting work in one area is seen as a universal genius, and an ideal to be emulated. This unfortunately is not the case.

[1] [https://restructure.wordpress.com/2009/08/07/sexist- feynman-...](https://restructure.wordpress.com/2009/08/07/sexist-feynman- called-a-woman-worse-than-a-whore/) for example...

<comment><USER5> To play devils advocate and give him the benefit of the doubt... wasn't the 1950's a much different time in terms of respect for women?

Reading that excerpt, I got the sense he was writing from the perspective of his past-self, in an almost self-deprecating way. He's citing that incident of an extreme example of how literally he would follow instructions. By choosing it as an extreme example, he's effectively acknowledging that the attitude was disrespectful / wrong.

Granted I haven't read the whole book, but I wouldn't be surprised if there is some crucial context missing from those excerpts.

Feynman did, after all, write the words himself.

<comment><USER12> Having read the book, I didn't get the impression he was criticizing himself. It read as just another story of an experiment, which how it seems he approached most of life (and which is what makes the book interesting, in my opinion).</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Bdash – A simple business intelligence application - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/bdash-app/bdash <comment><USER2> I have been looking for this for the past few days, something to graph directly from my mysql.

Unfortunately the experience in this app is not too good

\- The app is just white and it takes a long time to startup, why isn't is just a website?

\- Would be nice to just do it on data.

\- Clicking CMD+R to run my query for some reason reloads my "native app", this just sucks in all web apps. At the time of writing this post I have done it 6 times in a row.

\- My query for 500k rows took 90 seconds, compare this with sequel pro that takes (well it states 373ms) but its spinner were there for like 10s, it shows results instantly though.

\- Pressing enter on a 'setup connection' made it save, but not connect. Better to just test the connection at that stage.

\- Trying to make a chart and there is no feedback, not sure if it is working and loading, or if I chose wrong values or something like that. But at this stage I'm more likely to close the app than to fix it.

\- I like to see my table structure while writing the queries

\- Auto complete?

Actually I thought I'd try with LIMIT 100; to see if it were snappier, so I wrote it and pressed CMD+R...

Sorry for the negativity, I reallly want a tool like this, so if this can make it better.

This being said, once I got one chart up and running it is kinda nice and makes me want to continue playing with it a bit.

<comment><USER3> Try Metabase[0]! It's one of the most professionally maintained OSS projects I've ever seen. For instance, I don't recall seeing design mockups for new features before implementation elsewhere. And it absolutely shows in the app's design.

[0]: [http://www.metabase.com/](http://www.metabase.com/)

<comment> sports-buddies Thank you for this. This looks really good. Has anyone had experience visualising millions of records in metabase with different users having access to different sections? Basically, I am asking, can this replace SAP Crystal reports?

<comment><USER3> I've never tried anything SAP, but we do have 10^7 order of magnitude tables in Metabase, and we do use permission groups.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nice! I've been looking for a replacement for wagon since they got acquired.

Looking forward to using this.

</comment><comment><USER5> How is this compared to an ELK stack? With elasticsearch & (kibana | grafana) you get tonz of functionality with 0 effort...all you have to do is push data to el.

<comment><USER4> And have an el instance and everything that goes with it...

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Nowadays BI has (at least) two sides: visual analytics, and data wrangling. There are many tools aimed at visualization. But there is a lack of tools for easy data wrangling. I have been working on such a data wrangling tool, called Data Commandr, and an early version can be tested here: [http://dc.conceptoriented.com](http://dc.conceptoriented.com)

</comment><comment><USER7> Disappointing click bait.

This is not BI, this is just charting SQL results.

<comment><USER8> I'd agree it's not a full BI package, but software like "Crystal Reports" is typically part of a BI suite. And while it has more features than this tool, it is also essentially charting SQL results.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Would really love MongoDB support!

</comment><comment><USER10> A Pandas clone in javascript?

</comment><comment><USER11> so it doesn't support MsSQL nor Windows ? I think you should work on these two if you want better reach.

<comment><USER12> >Look, I made A!

Ok, but why isn't it B?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Love this!

</comment><comment><USER14> Maybe bdash is more advanced with drawing graphs. In our small start-up, we love using blazer: [https://github.com/ankane/blazer](https://github.com/ankane/blazer). Everyone can write queries, we can share it with each other, it has cashing layer for fast results, it provides basic charts, it even has maps representation. Thumbs for the team at Instacart for this OSS product.

</comment><comment><USER15> For anyone interested in something a little more fleshed out than this, Metabase is open source, works with most ANSI SQL DBs, and provides SQL and non SQL interfaces for data exploration.

Plus it just looks darn nice [https://github.com/metabase/metabase](https://github.com/metabase/metabase). Not affiliated, but we've been testing it at work and it's great for encouraging non analysts to get their hands dirty in data.

</comment><comment><USER16> This reminds me of a similar project, Redash ([https://github.com/getredash/redash](https://github.com/getredash/redash)), at least in functionality.

This seems like it would be useful for data exploration, and I think the gists are a great way of sharing queries.

</comment><comment><USER17> Reminds me of [https://www.wagonhq.com](https://www.wagonhq.com)

<comment><USER18> Wagon was such a great tool. Shame their acquisition took it away.

Colleagues who used wagon have said good thing about [http://datamillapp.com/](http://datamillapp.com/) \- which I guess is trying to be the spiritual successor to Wagon

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is a tasteless chicken. No one would take the effort to use it in real- life business, since there are always better BI software available (Tableau, PowerBI, etc.), with much better user experience (no need to write SQL) and richer and finer plotting features.

I don't see any point in "reinventing" this.

<comment><USER20> Please don't do this here. It breaks HN's rules to snarkily dismiss new work, especially in Show HN threads: [https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html)

All new work is vulnerable this way. Sure, most of it won't amount to much, but some will, and we want a culture in which people refrain from trampling on it. Even if you were 100% right in this case, your comment violates the categorical imperative.</comment></comment>


CS61A Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs - <AUTHOR> http://wla.berkeley.edu/~cs61a/fa11/61a-python/content/www/index.html <comment><USER2> In case anyone's curious, this is a rather old iteration of the course (2011, right after it switched from scheme to Python).

The current iteration is at [http://cs61a.org](http://cs61a.org) \- taught by two undergrads for the summer.

The most recent two iterations taught by professors are [http://fa16.cs61a.org](http://fa16.cs61a.org) and [http://sp17.cs61a.org](http://sp17.cs61a.org)

<comment><USER3> I can't even conceive of CS61a not being scheme/lisp.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, I liked Scheme but that was the last I ever saw of it. They didn't even use it in CS 188. Now they beat Python into your head like a catechism. And while I really liked Scheme, I didn't like SICP which like the bible we actually never read and only worshipped.

<comment><USER5> > And while I really liked Scheme, I didn't like SICP which like the bible we > actually never read and only worshipped.

Uh when did you take it? When I took the self-paced version with Harvey we read SICP. I mean, I'm sure some students skipped readings but they were still assigned nevertheless.

<comment><USER4> Harvey worshipped SICP so that makes sense.

I took 61A with Hilfinger (who usually taught 61B) and I didn't crack the book. His lectures and notes were very thorough. I can't remember if there were readings on the syllabus that I skipped but I didn't crack the book. Moreover, I was always big on doing the reading before class. Class was a review.

Later when I did read SICP, I didn't like it. Maybe that was like reading the book after seeing the movie. Dunno, but I didn't like it.

As an aside, there was a whole subculture of students who read nothing but just did the HW and worked past tests and sets. They did amazingly well. I had a study buddy who did that in EE20. I prepped him for the final and he _told_ me he'd beat me; he narrowly did. He graduated with a 3.9+ GPA in EECS which is insane. He hated ideas then and now. But he tested insanely well. It was just pattern matching.

<comment><USER5> > Later when I did read SICP, I didn't like it. Maybe that was like reading > the book after seeing the movie. Dunno, but I didn't like it.

Which introductory CS books did you enjoy? I still love my copy of _Patterson and Hennessy_ but it is dry compared to SICP. To someone who had only ever programmed in C++ before 61A, SICP felt like an adventure.

> As an aside, there was a whole subculture of students who read nothing but > just did the HW and worked past tests and sets. They did amazingly well.

Yep. Sadly this has only become more common with the rapid growth of the major. Most of my friends were brilliant but they didn't love EECS. If they had been 10 years older they probably would have majored in math or physics but they felt pressured to study something that would get them a job. They were able to do well just by studying old tests.

We would only get old tests from HKN but many students were somehow able to illegally obtain them. Cheating has only become more rampant and more sophisticated -- the department is going to have to address it at some point instead of sticking their head in the sand.

<comment><USER4> I strongly prefer Patterson and Hennessy _Computer Organization and Design_ to their _Computer Architecture_ which I really don't like; if I do look something up in CA, it's in an old edition. The _Dragon Book_ 2nd ed is awesome. We didn't have a book for 61B. I didn't like the OS book whatever it was. Norvig + Russell is pretty darned good. The notes for CS 70 are awesome as are the CS 161 notes.

If Kubi is teaching just take the course.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I did this course a while back just when I was getting started on my self- taught journey. I'd highly recommend this over Harvard's CS50 or MIT's intro course. This has great coverage of how a computer program works, without being too pedantic.

<comment><USER7> I feel that the biggest strength of CS50 is its wide scope of technologies used. Provides a real great introduction to the field of computer science

<comment><USER8> This Course does not come close to cs50 in anyway. cs50 makes computer programming look intresting to a lawyer

<comment><USER9> Yes, CS50 is quite lively but in terms of quality, 61A beats CS50 hands down.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I fear the current 'iterations' might not last long because of the video aspect. I have been following two other courses from Berkeley: data8.org and datastructur.es. However, because of a certain directive (and I don't fault university for it) the video lectures are no longer public. Sad.

<comment><USER11> Seems that CS61A video lectures have subtitles so it shouldn't be a problem: [http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs61a/fa16/](http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs61a/fa16/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Really nice course. Labs come with solutions and would make an excellent "challenge pack" for anyone learning Python and CS right now.</comment>


Critic Markup: Plain-Text Editing Markup for Humans - <AUTHOR> http://criticmarkup.com/ <comment><USER2> Reminds me very strongly of a simpler (and in my opinion more elegant) notation that I have been using for a long time:

[http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/collaboration_made_simple_wi...](http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/collaboration_made_simple_with_bracket_notation/)

<comment><USER3> I picked up a similar system a few years ago, I don't remember the source, but it depends on always using 2 sets of brackets (thus, fewer rules to remember):

blah blah [][add something] blah blah

blah blah [delete this][] blah blah

blah blah [error][correction] blah blah

Read it as: "replace the first brackets' contents with contents of the second bracket".

An optional third set of brackets would be a comment or explanation.

In my opinion, this simplified ruleset can be used even to correct texts for people who do not dig being asked to memorize 'a lot of rules' and they often end up really liking its clarity.

edit: formatting

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Unfortunately this will make it very annoying to read. The examples look pleasant because it is a small amount of text with color coding. When you have a lot of text with a lot of corrections displayed in a regular text editor this will get very very crowded.

Why not use existing tools like diff?

<comment><USER5> You're right, it can definitely get crowded.

Diff is a great tool, and it's where we started on this whole thing. Unfortunately it's a little too complicated for most users, and there's no way to comment on individual edits unless you use source control and commit on every spelling change.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> So here's a first stab at a Vim plugin for Critic Markup, forked out of tpope's markdown as to be a superset. For now it's just the basic add/delete/substitute. I'll add comments, highlighting and jumping to each change to accept/reject up next.

<https://github.com/goldfeld/criticmarkup-vim>

<comment><USER7> Thanks for this. I won't get the chance to try it out for a couple of days, but it's much appreciated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Great idea. I had been thinking about something like this for a few weeks, very timely! Would you guys welcome a third-party Vim plugin to your toolkit?

<comment><USER7> I would definitely welcome a Vim plugin with syntax highlighting.

Just to totally overcomplicate it, some method of going through the changes one-by-one and accepting or rejecting them, à la Word's `Track Changes' feature, would be the icing on the plugin's cake.

<comment><USER6> Also as a feedback, I wouldn't offer the toolkit zip download as the only option to get the plugins--have separate links for them. Both on the announcement page and on Gabe's post I tried to click the Sublime Text plugin to get to a github page or something and see how you went about it.

<comment><USER5> That's a great point. I'll figure out a better way to handle downloads on the site.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Isn't version control better?

<comment><USER9> The use case is totally different. Say I'm a professor and I'm writing a grant proposal. I send a draft to a PhD student to proofread. Today the only practical way to do this is to use Word's "track changes" tool.

Basically, a proofreader

(i) gives you a _lot_ of minuscule changes. A comma here, moving adverbs around there, etc. In a 10-page draft, there could be hundreds of suggestions.

(ii) only makes suggestions. I'm the one applying for the grant, so I need to explicitly approve (or reject) every single change individually. This probably won't work elegantly with `patch`.

(iii) changes individual words. Word actually records your changes as you make them. This is not the same as simply diff'ing version1 and version2. This helps me see the proofreader's point.

(iv) makes textual comments to explain changes. Or you simply need to annotate a paragraph as "I don't understand this." Maybe you need to offer different suggestions, depending on the author's meaning ("Perhaps your mean to say ...")

(v) makes different kinds of changes. "Diff" tracks changes on a line-line- basis. If you edit prose, you move around words, or lines, or even paragraphs. Basically, dealing with written language is more complicated and has more structure than source code.

(vi) does not typically have a need for a revision history. It is very rarely useful to look up when a certain sentence was introduced in a grant proposal. While it's useful to keep earlier versions as a backup (and Dropbox is enough for that), version control really is a solution looking for a problem when it comes to writing prose.

<comment><USER10> Version control is useful, though, if you want to have an proofreader work on an incomplete draft while the author is adding content.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "Humans", as in "regular people" use Word for this, if they're at all familiar with the more advanced features. Which a lot of people aren't. Something like this might be useful for LiberWriter, but I'm 100% certain that our users would find it more confusing than helpful.

</comment><comment><USER12> It's interesting although I do wonder how we can get the masses to learn and start using something like this. I know it looks trivial to you and I but don't under estimate how not tech-savvy most people are.

</comment><comment><USER13> This would be very useful for marking up LaTeX sources - could have done with this for my thesis

<comment><USER14> Agreed, but it's likely more useful for Markdown sources - when I was writing my thesis my supervisor and I kept the LaTeX source in a shared git repository, and added a couple macros for comments - it wasn't quite this slick, but combined with the git log it worked pretty well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> seem like a good idea, do the markup allow nesting, eg commenting on a previous addition?

<comment><USER5> Not at this time. The syntax can get unreadable fairly quickly.

It works well with version control, and with our Sublime Text plugin you can Accept or Reject edits via keyboard shortcuts before moving to the next round of edititng.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I would love to see syntax high lighting and eventually support for this in org-mode....

</comment><comment><USER17> Seems like a nice way to collaboratively contribute to a chunk of text via email!

</comment><comment><USER18> Nice idea. It seems pretty easy to understand. Where is the emacs mode?

<comment><USER18> Well if anyone wants an emacs mode for this: (require 'generic-x) ;; we need this

(define-generic-mode 'critic-mode nil nil '(("{--. _\--}" . 'font-lock- warning-face) ("{~~._ ~~}" . 'font-lock-constant-face) ("{{. _}}" . 'font- lock-keyword-face) ("{ >>._<<}" . 'font-lock-function-name-face) ("{\\+\\+.*\\+\\+}" . 'font-lock-type-face) ) nil nil "A mode for foo files" )

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I have to add this to my text editor project!</comment>


How to Market Effectively - <AUTHOR> https://ideas.adlove.com/how-to-market-effectively.html <comment><USER2> I don't know if their product is for me (probably not), but this infographic has given me deep insight into my marketing problem. I am greatful.</comment>


Interview with Luis von Ahn explaining his idea of using CAPTCHA to digitize books - <AUTHOR> http://sciencehack.com/videos/view/3PuZ55kyf7E

<comment><USER2> This guy is a genius; if you haven't seen his talk on human computation (which explains some of this stuff in more depth) I highly recommend it:

<http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8246463980976635143></comment>


Ask YC: Why does Paul Graham use the Yahoo favicon? - <AUTHOR>

Whenever i go to www.paulgraham.com, I notice that the site uses a favicon that is extremely similar to the Yahoo logo, (i.e. Y!). It even uses the same color and font. Can this be linked to PG once working in Yahoo or does it just stand for YCombinator? I am really curious, any hints? <comment><USER2> Paulgraham IP Search ARIN WHOIS for: 22.214.171.124

OrgName: Inktomi Corporation OrgID: INKT Address: 701 First Ave City: Sunnyvale StateProv: CA PostalCode: 94089 Country: US

NetRange: 188.8.131.52 - 220.127.116.11 CIDR: 22.214.171.124/18 NetName: INKTOMI-BLK-4 NetHandle: NET-68-142-192-0-1 Parent: NET-68-0-0-0-0 NetType: Direct Allocation NameServer: NS1.YAHOO.COM NameServer: NS2.YAHOO.COM NameServer: NS3.YAHOO.COM NameServer: NS4.YAHOO.COM NameServer: NS5.YAHOO.COM Comment: RegDate: 2004-03-24 Updated: 2005-08-26

RAbuseHandle: NETWO857-ARIN RAbuseName: Network Abuse RAbusePhone: +1-408-349-3300 RAbuseEmail: email@example.com

OrgAbuseHandle: NETWO857-ARIN OrgAbuseName: Network Abuse OrgAbusePhone: +1-408-349-3300 OrgAbuseEmail: firstname.lastname@example.com

OrgTechHandle: NA258-ARIN OrgTechName: Netblock Admin OrgTechPhone: +1-408-349-3300 OrgTechEmail: firstname.lastname@example.com

# ARIN WHOIS database, last updated 2008-06-15 19:10 # Enter ? for additional hints on searching ARIN's WHOIS database.

</comment><comment><USER3> It _is_ the Yahoo! logo. paulgraham.com still runs on Viaweb, which is now Yahoo Store, which is probably where the favicon comes from.

<comment><AUTHOR> What source are you quoting? are you really sure?

<comment><USER4> I remember pg saying in a comment or article somewhere that his site was one of the few remaining sites still running on the old viaweb system (presumably the one written in lisp).

<comment><USER5> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=55451>

<comment><USER6> According to a more recent post, Yahoo! forced Paul to move to the C++ version in the Fall; he experienced some side effects, from what I remember reading.

<comment><USER5> Yes, here:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=180391>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I was surprised to read PG's mention that he was affected by Yahoo's C++/Perl rewrite of Yahoo Store (someone else has supplied the link).

The dog food to eat now is Arc, not Yahoo Store, isn't it? Wouldn't it have been more fun to just rewrite the original Common Lisp portion in Arc and host it himself, similar to how he's operating Hacker News? Or is Yahoo's promise of stability/uptime more valuable than having another anvil for hammering out Arc on?

</comment><comment><USER8> He doesn't anymore.. :)

</comment><comment><USER9> Because YCombinator was acquired by Yahoo!

Or, probably because Yahoo Store maps /favicon.ico to its hosted sites. Examples:

<http://store.triodestore.com/>

<http://infowars-shop.stores.yahoo.net/>

<http://www.pennwellbooks.com/>

<http://greenearthofficesupply.stores.yahoo.net/></comment>


Secret Cameras Record Baltimore's Every Move from Above - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-baltimore-secret-surveillance/ <comment><USER3> Still waiting for the blockbuster case where the all-seeing-eye saved the day? At some level this is being sold to the public. Are we getting what we paid for?

This technology should be nothing if not incredibly useful. The potential of abuse is so bad _because_ it's so damn useful. So, if it's inevitable that it's going to be created, and inevitable that it's going to be abuse, can we at least try to ensure we use it for good as much as possible?

<comment><USER4> An all-seeing eye is perhaps too apropos....

'You are wise and powerful. Will you not take the Ring?'

'No!' cried Gandalf, springing to his feet. 'With that power I should have power too great and terrible. And over me the Ring would gain a power still greater and more deadly.' His eyes flashed and his face was lit as by a fire within. 'Do not tempt me! For I do not wish to become like the Dark Lord himself. Yet the way of the Ring to my heart is by pity, pity for weakness and the desire of strength to do good. Do not tempt me! I dare not take it, not even to keep it safe, unused. The wish to wield it would be too great for my strength. I shall have such need of it. Great perils lie before me.'

<comment><USER5> Here is another opinion on the matter, probably closer to how politicians would feel about it

'And what business is it of yours, anyway, to know what I do with my own things? It is my own. I found it. It came to me. It is mine, I tell you. My own. My Precious. Yes, my Precious.'

\--Bilbo Baggins

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This appears to be the FBI surveillance plane John Wiseman tracked using a BeagleBone black, an RTL-SDR dongle, dump1090 and PlanePlotter

[https://twitter.com/lemonodor/status/605825895295651840](https://twitter.com/lemonodor/status/605825895295651840)

[http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/06/how-i-tracked- fbi...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/06/how-i-tracked-fbi-aerial- surveillance/)

Correction: The FBI plane is not the primary focus of this article, but it is mentioned:

"Occasionally, [Persistent Surveillance's] Cessna has had to share airspace with an FBI airplane. Last year, two days after the Freddie Gray riots began, the FBI flew over Baltimore for five days—actions that were discovered when local aviation enthusiasts noticed a plane's strange flight orbits on a public website that tracks radar data. According to information and footage released this summer by the FBI, its plane wasn't doing the sort of wide-area motion imaging that Persistent Surveillance does but instead was zooming in on specific targets. McNutt says the FBI doesn't coordinate its flights with him, and he doesn't know what the agency is investigating; however, when his plane is in the air at the same time as the FBI's, air traffic controllers insist that McNutt's plane remain at a lower altitude than the federal craft."

<comment><USER7> It's interesting to note that FBI has released all of that footage to the public.

[https://vault.fbi.gov/protests-in-baltimore- maryland-2015/un...](https://vault.fbi.gov/protests-in-baltimore- maryland-2015/unedited-versions-of-video-surveillance-footage)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is there any remote hope for a way to have this happen while preventing abuse? I am not in a very creative mood right now so I can't imagine a scenario where it's not quickly being used incredibly selectively (to "just contradict anything that might be used against the City of Baltimore"), or used to catalog protesters, bulk shipped to the nsa, or many other obvious forms of abuse.

Edit: and of course, where is the countersurveillance guide that examines easy techniques to evade a persistent and widespread aerial threat?

<comment><USER9> I'd go the other way -- is there any remote hope of stopping this from spreading, regardless of abuses? History has shown that on a long enough time line this _will_ be abused. Under what authority do they operate these systems? Since when has persistent surveillance become permissible?

I feel like I'm going to end up a minority here, but _this is not a good thing_.

<comment><USER10> The potential of abusive use of technology is there for every single new technology, every single one. The question is how to best control it with somebody we can trust, and the use case is morally OK.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> >"Let's go get some dirt bikes, Sarge!"

To better understand this reaction and why the police want to use this technology to their advantage in winning the cat-and-mouse game with Baltimore's urban dirt bikers, see the documentary film "12 O'clock Boys".

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOMQY6k16TU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOMQY6k16TU)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/12_O'Clock_Boys](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/12_O'Clock_Boys)

</comment><comment><USER12> There's an easy way to prevent abuse: require the data to be made available to the public in real time. It's not surveillance I object to, it's the coupling of information asymmetry with unaccountability.

Maybe when people start flying their own drones and the data gets aggregated into OpenStreetMap (or some similar project), there will be a decent motivation for transparency.

After all, if the police forces are doing nothing wrong, what do they have to fear from continual public surveillance? ;)

</comment><comment><USER13> Seems there are many variants of this type of tech. PBS [1 - video] had once called AGRUS [2 - wiki] (looks older 2013 and more advanced). They also deployed something like this in Rio for the Olympics [3 - blog/video].

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13BahrdkMU8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13BahrdkMU8)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARGUS- IS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARGUS-IS)

[3] [http://www.sporttechie.com/2016/08/01/surveillance-blimps- to...](http://www.sporttechie.com/2016/08/01/surveillance-blimps-to-provide- an-eye-in-the-sky-for-rio-olympics/)

</comment><comment><USER14> "[..] and the funding came from a private donor."

That it's interesting.

Is just somebody with interest in the company that provide the service, in the line of "the first one is for free"?

Because, otherwise, I can't think who could be funding this or their reasons.

<comment><USER15> If you would have read the article:

> John is a former Enron trader whose hedge fund, Centaurus Advisors, made > billions before he retired in 2012. Since then, the Arnolds have funded a > variety of hot-button causes, including advocating for public pension > rollbacks and charter schools.

Doesn't sound like a pro-privacy activist...

<comment><USER16> >Doesn't sound like a pro-privacy activist...

Well, funding putting cameras in the sky supports that certainly, but what do pensions and charter schools have to do with privacy?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm fine with this because all the data is encrypted until representatives from all three branches of government agree to unlock it (and even then it only decrypts the last 7 days).

Oh, wait.

</comment><comment><USER8> Explanation given for why this is not a threat to civil liberties is:

resolution is limited to " _one pixel per person_ "!

<comment><USER18> It's a foot in the door.

<comment><USER19> 1px is all you need: the article cites instances where they track a pixel to a ground-based camera to get a higher res image.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Its been a long time, but in 1988 Sierra Online had a game that featured just this.

Tracking "criminals" from above, following the signal from their implants and their every move until they disappeared underground.

[https://www.mobygames.com/game/manhunter-new- york](https://www.mobygames.com/game/manhunter-new-york)

</comment><comment><USER21> I am as concerned about privacy as next person, but I would have thought that this is similar to what the satellites are already collecting for NSA, CIA and similar (and their counterparts in other countries).

Is flying Cessna planes really the optimal way of obtaining images? Why not drones (if you can't get satellites)? Or is this just MVP with room for optimization?

<comment><USER22> NSA, CIA and all their friends exist for the sole reason that they can't spy on Americans. That's why they exist, because the constitution doesn't apply to foreigners. They would be a walking terrorist organisation otherwise.

So your question becomes "why can't the police do what the intelligence services already do?" and the obvious answer is that "because then they stop being police and are instead secret police or Gestapo".

<comment><USER23> >NSA, CIA and all their friends exist for the sole reason that they can't spy on Americans.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King_Jr.#NSA_mon...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King_Jr.#NSA_monitoring_of_King.27s_communications)

<comment><USER22> Theres the legal theory and then there is the 100 years worth of experience with intelligence agencies, which is that they are mostly useless and will over time expand their influence and power and dig under the pillars of democracy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This ain't your Daddy's 'The Wire' IRL.

</comment><comment><USER7> Is this really a surprise? PSS activity has been documented for years.[0]

Good rule of thumb: If it's not illegal, people will do it if it is profitable.

[0][http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/07/a-tivo-for- crime-...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/07/a-tivo-for-crime-how- always-recording-airborne-cameras-watch-entire-cities/)

<comment><USER8> I don't see anyone claiming to be surprised the technology exists, the notable thing is the update on the deployment progression of WAPS systems on civilian populations in the US.

I believe the newsworthy thing here is that the system has been in active use in Baltimore for the entire year 2016 so far, which is a surprise, in contrast to the 2014 article you linked that reported the company had "no active contracts inside the United States".

<comment><USER7> It also says:

"[McNutt] is lobbying 10 US cities—he won't name them, apart from Chicago—for longer contracts. He's also dangling a sizable carrot in front of them: a new analysis center that would have "hundreds" of jobs and would act as a command center for all of the company's operations nationwide."

Obviously one of those was Baltimore. Is it a leap to think that there may be others? Not to be crass, but this isn't gumshoe detective work here. He told us what his company was doing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> In light of Snowden leaks, this is just another piece in what appears to be a global panopticon construction project.

<comment><USER25> There's worse things than Snowden's revelations though, like cheerfully donating your organs to a government that executes you over some religious aerobics classes. [1]

I hope this whole panopticon thing doesn't get finished until after we can grow organs in vitro, rendering my donations moot.

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

<comment><USER18> I don't understand what you're saying here. I don't see the connection between organ harvesting and the construction of a global panopticon.

You also seem to be supporter of such a panopticon. Could you explain why? Or are you just trolling?

<comment><USER26> He's saying, I think, that it's worth keeping a sense of perspective - <USER2> there are much worse things than being watched. He's not wrong there.

<comment><USER23> Comparing to the lowest common denominator to feel better about something is often akin to denial.

<comment><USER26> No doubt. But I've had a while to consider this possibility, having noticed general aviation aircraft loitering over Baltimore for some time now and half surmised something like this may be going on, and you know what? I'm fine with it. Being watched from the sky is hardly ideal, I concede. But also worth considering, I think, is that the next time I get mugged, if there has to be a next time, maybe being watched from the sky will make it possible for the police to catch the son of a bitch who does it.

That's one of the things that can happen in Baltimore. It is far from the worst. Indeed, it, and things much worse, happen in Baltimore every day. Don't misunderstand me here - media depictions aside, this is a wonderful city with which I fell in love very quickly, and where I expect and intend to continue living for the remainder of my life. But this is also a city, wonderful though it be in many ways, in which many bad things happen to many innocent people. Being observed from on high by our government bears a certain degree of potential danger, of course. There's an argument to be made, and I think a very cogent one, that that potential danger is outweighed by the very real danger evident in this city's crime statistics. I'm okay with being watched from the sky if it is likely to reduce that danger, and I think that it is.

I realize that people who have never been the victim of a violent crime may feel differently about this. I understand that their perspective on a matter such as this may well be different from mine. I also don't think it is unreasonable of me to regard their perspective as incompletely informed. Basing an argument around my personal experience is not something with which I'm wholly comfortable for a variety of reasons, not least of which is that it's often deployed as a tactic against dissent. But there's also something to be said for the idea that there's only so much a virgin can be expected to know about sex. I don't really know if it's reasonable to expect there be a single right answer on a question like this one. But I certainly know where I come down on it.

<comment><USER18> I'm sorry to hear about your experiences and thank-you for being straight up.

First of all, I don't know your experiences and am in no way trying to cheapen them, but I too have been the victim of crime (a break in while I was sleeping and I woke up and screamed and woke up the house and assailants thankfully fled) and lots of treasured possessions were taken. If I'd been asked in the first year of that, I'd have let the government put cameras in my bathroom and the death penalty would not be enough for them. But of course as things have cooled off; I've moved on and found peace. And now the idea of giving away completely the right to private movement in the name of safety seems plain wrong.

<comment><USER26> Certainly that's fair enough. As I said before, I don't know that it makes sense to expect there be a single right answer to a question like this.

Your response neatly demonstrates the other primary reason I do not like to construct an argument around personal experience. Everyone's experience is unique, and such arguments are thus both unlikely to be convincing and weak in the extreme. To use such an argument was an error on my part which I even expected at the time I would probably regret, but I foolishly went ahead and did so anyway. Perhaps I will use better sense next time.

It is curious to me that you speak of a "right to private movement". This is an idea I find it difficult to comprehend, because the movements of which you speak are not private. They are public. They may largely have taken place unobserved heretofore, but I find it difficult to construct an argument for the idea that, simply because some, perhaps many, of your actions in public have not been seen up to now, this implies the existence of a positive right that such actions in public not be seen into the indefinite future. There is case law to the effect that you do not have a general right to privacy within the confines of a motor vehicle. What about a sidewalk is different?

<comment><USER18> Not sure about the legalities of a right to privacy in public spaces, although perhaps I could have used the word unobserved instead of the word private. For me the idea of observation goes hand in hand with the idea of self censure.

<comment><USER26> I would be interested to know why this is the case, or why it's a serious concern, because I really don't find myself able to comprehend it. The closest I can come is something like not wanting to adjust my trousers or scratch myself in a vulgar fashion if someone might see me doing it, but I doubt that's what you mean.

<comment><USER18> You don't ever self censor posts thinking a potential future employer might see it?

Now imagine having all your movements recorded(and possibly actions too). Who will have access to that info now and in future? Target? Facebook? Your parents? Your boss? Your wife/partner?

<comment><USER23> Most self-censoring and social conformity is done subconsciously as an important evolutionary survival mechanism, thus most people are completely unaware of it.

<comment><USER26> You want to cite a source for that at all?

<comment><USER23> Google "subconscious social conformity" and take your pick

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Good old "anonymous donor" providing third party technology to collect surveillance.

</comment><comment><USER28> It still needs analysts to work; could they be replaced with machine learning?

<comment><USER23> Yes, 99.99% of the data analysis could be done with machine learning which could then send alerts to human operators once a certain pattern of interest is discovered.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Assuming a non-oppressive government I'm all for using this type of technology to stop crime. It is a very powerful tool that will really level the playing field. Many crimes are from repeat offenders and this will just help catch them quicker and more accurately. I suspect crime rates will drop dramatically as a result of these types of technologies.

As for privacy we already give more away just to have free online services. Think how much is tracked by Google through their searches, gmail, etc. by Facebook to use their free service. Apple, Microsoft, etc are all known to track all kinds of data on you. It's not like this isn't already happening.

They key is to make sure it's not abused, and I think for the most part in first world countries this won't be a big issue. That and the benefits will far outweigh the costs.

We just have to prevent it from escalating like in the South Park drone episode ;)

<comment><USER30> But I can choose not to participate with apple, MS, google, etc. And I do.

When did I opt-into surveillance?

<comment><USER31> The flip-side of that question is "When can I opt-in to surveillance if I really want that? Can my neighborhood watch be a _real_ neighborhood watch, with collated telemetry and machine learning, but owned by private citizens?"

And then we're on the slippery slope to the burbclaves of Snow Crash. ;)</comment></comment></comment>


Mmmenu - flexible Rails menu plugin - <AUTHOR> http://github.com/snitko/mmmenu

<comment><USER2> Not sure why anyone would use this -- it looks about one step away from using HAML directly ...</comment>


When It Comes to Parabolic Mics, Larger Is Not Always Better - <AUTHOR> https://www.thebroadcastbridge.com/content/entry/2399/when-it-comes-to-parabolic-mics-larger-is-not-always-better <comment><AUTHOR> "HBO approached Klover about using its parabolic microphone on boxing telecasts. A unique problem in boxing is that fans along the front rows of matches often use profanity and the mic must not pick up those words — only the action of the matches. That can be a problem for a mic that has a long reach for sounds in front of it."</comment>


Heat Wave Nudged the Planet to Its Hottest June, European Forecasters Say - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/03/climate/hottest-june-on-record.html <comment><USER2> Heatwave is an old news in Europe. Its cold July now, after hot June.

> Rotenburg (Wümme) in Lower Saxony recorded a record low July temperature of > 2.9C on early Thursday morning, according to Wetter.com, breaking a station > record which had stood since 1946.

The record low came only four days after Germany logged a record high June temperature of of 39.6C in Bernburg an der Saale in Saxony-Anhalt on Sunday.

[https://www.thelocal.de/20190705/germany-sets-record-low- jul...](https://www.thelocal.de/20190705/germany-sets-record-low-july- temperature)</comment>


CyanogenMod 9 (ICS) for Nexus S - <AUTHOR> http://www.extremetech.com/computing/106809-cyanogenmod-9-ice-cream-sandwich-for-nexus-s

<comment><USER2> I'm running the non-CM AOSP build of ICS on my Nexus S and frankly it's amazing. The phone got FASTER with it.

The biggest difference seems to be that scrolling is now GPU accelerated everywhere, which is particularly noticeable in the browser. The browser itself also seems much faster. It's no problem to load 5/6 tabs in the background quickly and let them render while continuing to browse in the current tab stutter-free. It makes browsing on the phone much more like a laptop/desktop.

This is all on 18-month-old hardware.

They've also made sure that the rest of the OS is much more polished. I still think the widget desktop/app panel division makes the whole OS seem more complicated than necessary, but Android has come a long way. It's finally an iOS competitor on user experience.

<comment><USER3> 18 month old? I picked mine up the day it came out, in early December 2011. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nexus_S>

<comment><USER4> The specs of the Nexus S don't differ significantly from the Galaxy S, which came out half a year earlier.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm running the modified version of this on my Nexus S 4G, the modification is based off of Koush's CM9 build which is shown in the video. Overall, it's pretty amazing. I had to update my kernel manually to bring back BLN support (keeping the soft-buttons turned on when I get a notification with the screen off) but other than that everything worked right out of the box.

I am seeing large numbers of small bugs everywhere though but I'm not quite sure if they're due to the build I'm running or they exist in AOSP's code.

For example: When playing music on Google Music, if the screen is turned off the volume buttons control the systems ringer volume not the media volume.

Another on in the same vein: If you are playing music on Google Music and are in the Google Music application, the volume buttons work as expected, if you are on the home screen or any other application, the volume buttons control the ringer volume.

</comment><comment> steve-howard I broke my Nexus S 4G a few weeks ago (or, rather, it broke itself, and in the fixing I repaired the power problem and destroyed the speaker). I'm not sure if it's just the phone, or if Cyanogen contributed (I installed it almost immediately upon getting the phone), but that thing had awful reception on pretty much every kind of network, and the battery lasted less than half the day. Kind of a let-down for a flagship Android phone. Now I just wish that half the stuff you can do with a Nexus was available for something like the Photon, which has fantastic reception and battery life, but no CM.

<comment><USER6> i've had all kinds of stability problems with cyanogenmod on various phones, which is why i created <http://blandroid.org/>.

though if you are getting poor reception all day, it may be making the radio work harder to find a signal, which reduces the battery. i never used my nexus s 4g for anything other than testing blandroid builds for it, but on my gsm nexus s, the battery would last nearly 2 days with light usage.

<comment> steve-howard I would use mine for maybe two phone calls and 15 minutes playing a game and I'd need to charge. My Photon is a workhorse, I just wish I could customize it more without destabilizing it.

I like your project, though! The feature I miss the most from CM the notification pane power widget, though in general it's more fun to be able to tweak all kinds of things. I've been thinking about getting into some android dev work (especially aiding the efforts to port CM to whatever device I'm using at the time!), but I have no experience in reverse engineering/low-level mobile work.

<comment><USER6> _The feature I miss the most from CM the notification pane power widget_

yeah, that seems to be the most commonly asked-for feature from users of my rom. from what i've seen in other projects, integrating it can lead to bugs, so i've avoided merging it. also, from what i've seen in screenshots, android 4 seems to have some of that functionality integrated into the pull-down notification window.

<comment><USER7> It's not in the CM9 alpha builds at least.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Does anyone know if I can expect a CM port for my ZTE Blade? It's a supported platform for CM7 (Android 2.3.5). I read that all phones that support 2.3.5 ought to be able to support 3.0, but a) I'm not sure that's actually true and b) I'm not sure if they're going to bother. Though a) is more important than b) -- if it can work on the phone, hardware-wise, someone is bound to do the port, even if it's not an official one.

<comment><USER9> My uneducated guess after playing with this model - not a chance! It's super laggy with CM7 as it is, can't imagine anyone putting the effort to port ICS.

<comment><USER8> I've never tried anything except CM7 on this device, but supposedly it's faster with 2.3 than it was with 2.2, which was itself faster than 2.1, the version it originally shipped with. _If_ the hardware (GPU, primarily) support is there, I would assume ICS would be an improvement.

But yeah, I guess it's a bit much to hope for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I cant wait to try out ICS, but seeing as an official update from google has been said to be released (by around about now) I have been holding off, also waiting for baited breath for cyanogenmod 9 for the galaxy tab 10.1 since thats just gonna take ages to get an official update.

</comment><comment><USER11> Will this build run on the Nexus S 4G as well?

</comment><comment><USER12> I wish CyanogenMod supported the Droid X2 :(

<comment><USER5> All (maybe most?) Motorola devices have locked bootloaders, meaning that even though you are rootable you can not install a custom ROM on them since the hardware does signature verifications. There's currently a close to $1000 bounty for whoever unlocks the Droid X2 bootloader but the only way to do that is to find a hash intersection with the key Motorola uses to sign their own builds.

<comment><USER6> just a minor nit: all phones have locked bootloaders. it's a critical feature for securing the contents of the phone and it increases the security for the end-user by not allowing anyone that steals the phone to read its contents or flash a fake rom.

what you're talking about is the ability to unlock and relock the bootloader at will. my nexus s came with a locked bootloader, but i was able to easily unlock it, flash my own rom, and then relock it. if the phone is stolen, someone can easily unlock the bootloader but the phone's data will be erased in the process.</comment></comment></comment>


Advertising Cannot Maintain the Internet. Here's the "Secret Sauce" Solution - <AUTHOR> http://evonomics.com/advertising-cannot-maintain-internet-heres-solution/ <comment><AUTHOR> With the state of the advertising-supported Web looking increasingly untenable by the day, and mindful of the sources of revenue of our fine hosts here at Reddit, micropayments are a frequently proposed alternative.

Dave's been passing drafts of this article around for review, and there's a second part, both of which I've seen and commented on -- he makes quite a strong argument here, and a better one than his initial version following constructive criticisms by numerous parties. Though I've got questions about the viability of micropayments myself, this is among the better cases I've seen made.

And I largely agree with his indictment of the present ads-supported model.</comment>


Ask HN: What's your AI failure story? - <AUTHOR> Hi HN. I am curious to hear your war stories about AI, ML, NLP projects that you have witnessed fail in your organization and why.<p>I think it's time to unearth the failures as much as the successes, and am curious to others experiences. <comment><USER2> I asked Siri to wake me up inside and she thought I wanted to set the alarm clock

</comment><comment><USER3> the chatbot fad comes to mind</comment>


"WiFi on steroids" gets final rules, drops spectrum sensing - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/09/wifi-on-steroids-gets-final-rules-drops-spectrum-sensing.ars <comment><USER2> Great at last some progress. Anybody know who will be responsible for the database?</comment>


Deep learning and free software - <AUTHOR> https://lwn.net/Articles/760142/ <comment><USER2> Discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17607970](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17607970)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the link, I should've searched first. Surprised I missed it a few days ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Oh look, another Debian discussion that will end up nowhere.

> Things in Debian main [should] be buildable _from source_ using Debian main. > In the case of a pretrained neural network, the source code is the training > data.

Technically correct, completely missing the point

Neural Network weights are not source code. Models are, but they are only useful after training and plugging weights into new models go from impossible to very hard.

No, nobody is going to ship the training data again so some open source bureaucracy is happy. Not to mention it goes completely against the objective of sharing model weights.

If an open source software includes a picture of a landscape should it include a free ticket and a camera to whoever downloads the software so they can recreate the picture? No</comment>


Ask HNs: Who would you hire? - <AUTHOR> We interviewed a couple of guys: One guy who seems average to slightly above average guy.
Another guy appears to be rockstar, but seems like he is going to be hard to work with it. He "seems" to know it all, but seems like a dick.
I am leaning toward to candidate 2, but I don't know. <comment><USER2> Candidate 1.

Having a person who is hard to work with can be demoralizing to the team he is working with which will lead others to loose productivity. Nobody is good enough to justify making the work environment toxic.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd hire the average to slightly above average guy. Let the other guy go be someone else's problem.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'd hire the average guy. Average is good. Assholes are bad.

</comment><comment><USER5> Candidate 1.</comment>


Should stores be allowed to digitally scan shoppers' faces? - <AUTHOR> http://www.cbsnews.com/news/should-stores-be-allowed-to-digitally-scan-shoppers-faces/

<comment><USER2> Stores that scan shoppers faces should be legally required to have a REALLY BIG sign at the entrance to their stores advising shoppers about the scanning; then let's all see what happens to their revenues.

<comment><USER3> >...then let's all see what happens to their revenues.

The people who care, will run out of places to shop, while the stores make more than enough to offset the loss in customers. Same thing that happened with security cameras.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I hate the idea of being "tracked."

</comment><comment><USER5> Should shoppers be allowed to digitally compare prices with what they can find on the web?

Turnabout is fair play, as they say.

<comment><USER6> That's not turnabout. Turnabout would be consumers getting access to all the data on the people behind the tracking, so that we can stalk them the way they're stalking us. I want the full data of every store location Carl Szabo has visited and every product he's picked up and looked at for the last ten years, timestamped and digitized in an easy-to-mine format.

EDIT: Oh yeah, and I want to get an SMS alert when he enters a store. Can't forget this part. :D</comment></comment>


Stress eats holes in your brain - <AUTHOR> http://www.startribune.com/stress-eats-holes-in-your-brain/142338285/ <comment><USER2> I read the article but don't see a comment on whether the holes will self- repair with stress reduction.

<comment><USER3> At the end of the article there is a discussion of the impact on patients after getting treatment and learning how to deal with stress, then having brain function return to normal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This site looks identical to New York Times in styling and layout. I wonder if they're owned by the same parent company.

</comment><comment><USER5> Warning: This site gave me a malware warning in Chrome.

</comment><comment><USER6> this article is making me stressed.</comment>


CSRF vulnerability found in Gmail; Google not willing to fix it - <AUTHOR> http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2009/Mar/0029.html

<comment><USER2> Not much of a vulnerability -- the attacker still has to guess the victim's password.

<comment><USER3> Only because gmail enforces somewhat safe passwords. Does it look them up in a dictionary though? You could probably harvest even long-ish dictionary-based passwords this way if an attacker manages to embed this in a sufficiently high traffic page.

<comment><USER4> I don't think you get it. If you could guess a user's password, why would you bother with this elaborate CSRF attack?

<comment><USER3> Fair point. I guess if you had access to a botnet, you could attempt a similarly broad attack; with this you'd only need access to a popular, less scrupulous site. (porn, torrent/warez, etc. sites spring to mind)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> not mentioned in the original post is that the change password field also gives you the option of entering the answer to your 'secret question' rather than your password as the second token.

you replace the password query params with:

&group1=IdentityAnswer&IdentityAnswer=ANSWER_GUESS

not as improbable to guess since Google do not enforce a standard on the secret question answer (ie. with 'place you were born' you could just list major cities and probably get a hit every so often)

if you had access to a high traffic site (thank-you wordpress hax) you would probably harvest a number of accounts using this in an IFRAME pretty quickly. you just need to add some javascript to somehow inform you which ones were a success.

</comment><comment><USER6> I believe the (poorly explained) rationale behind the alert is that the CSRF allows the attacker to brute force the password without triggering a captcha, as happens on the main login page after a couple of bad logins.

If you sent out spam containing a CSRF link that tried a dozen or so of the most common passwords, you might get a few hits, though I don't know why anyone would bother. Still, if I were Google, I would just fix it.

I'm a bit surprised that Google doesn't have a generic authenticity system for all of their forms, or if they do, why it would be omitted from this one form.

<comment><USER4> This all became a moot point when Google supported POP and IMAP, didn't it?

<comment><USER7> I'm pretty sure they cut off POP/IMAP access on too many failed attempts and you have to go to the website.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I understand that this threat isn't particularly worrisome, but articles like this one remind me just how dependent I've become on gmail and how vulnerable as a result. I've now got years of info including everything from purchase receipts to personal conversations of high sentimental value. If someone were to either hack my password or simply cause my account to be disabled I'd be seriously screwed.

I'm now feeling like I need some sort of backup or other protective measure.

</comment><comment><USER9> Gmail asks old password before allowing to set new one, so the attack script is brute-forcing the password by submitting requests from a hostile page visited by the victim. It will take 150 million HTTP requests to brute-force a 6-letter password from 26 possible letters.

I suspect red flags will come up at google after first couple million requests. Or the victim will leave the hostile page he was lured to.

<comment><USER10> If the cracker gets to send a couple million requests per victim, I won't be surprised if she manages to crack passwords of many users. Blind brute force is definitely not the sharpest knife in the drawer; Dictionary based attacks might prove much more powerful when it comes to cracking average Joe's password.

<comment><USER11> According to this article, Gmail disallows weak passwords. So brute-forcing is going to be relatively ineffective.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If google allows strong passwords such as "Password1" then I'm sure quite a few users would pick such a simple password, and I'm sure attackers realise this.

It would be wise if google forced the user to enter the capcha on password change.

Disallowing GET would be good as well. Otherwise attackers would would have to use POST, which would mean tricking the user to submit a html form, and I'm unsure if you can send multiple POST requests per submit.

<comment><USER4> There are plenty of direct ways to grind GMail passwords. I don't see what difference this silly attack makes.

<comment><USER7> The direct ways of guessing the password run into rate limiting -- it starts prompting for a CAPTCHA after X failed guesses. That's all this attack avoids.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> YHBT</comment>


Ask HN: How much traffic from a techcrunch story? - <AUTHOR>

Does anyone know the amount of traffic a techcrunch story will generate for a site. Basically, what do I need to handle to not crash :) <comment><USER2> <http://redeye.firstround.com/2008/01/after-the-techc.html> Not exact numbers, but a start.

<comment><AUTHOR> "get tens of thousands of users from the "Techcrunch Bump""

I'm trying to figure out the time span for this. Is it tends of thousands in a day? In an hour? What's the peak?

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> No, but I can tell you how much traffic a Hacker News post will get you.

<comment><AUTHOR> a lot less ;)

<comment><USER2> ha, exactly :) But I was serious, for whoever down-modded me. I kept track of the hits I got after I made a post here, just to see for the future. How many total/first hour/first day.

<comment><AUTHOR> so what were the numbers?

<comment><USER2> Launched via Hacker News only:

It was submitted at 12:54 pm on a Wednesday, received 54 hits in first hour. First comment on HN appeared at 1:20 pm, after 27 hits. It got 68 page views during the first 24 hours, and 0 after that. As you can see, almost all the hits came during the first hour after submission, and drastically tapered off after that. Also, none of the visitors subscribed to the RSS feed.

I theorize that there would have been more hits if:

1\. There were more comments. I think there were 3, and two were mine. Often, a conversation in the comments can drive traffic

2\. There was more content. It was a blog, and I only had two or three posts. I was looking for feedback on my idea, which was all in the first post, but more content might have gotten people talking.

3\. There was accomplishment. Kind of a tricky one, when you're looking for feedback on an idea. A chicken or the egg problem. If I had put my idea into practice and accomplished something and then posted, people would be talking. But it can be helpful to get comments on an idea before you put it into practice, so it was helpful that way to.

Basically, I'm not in a hurry to get things done, so this was a great experiment for when I will be looking for press, hype or feedback. I'm taking my time with my project, so I was very happy with my numbers overall. I will actually be blogging about these numbers one of these days, because thats basically what my idea is all about. Experimenting.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Epidemiologist behind Imperial College coronavirus model revises model - <AUTHOR> https://www.dailywire.com/news/epidemiologist-behind-highly-cited-coronavirus-model-admits-he-was-wrong-drastically-revises-model <comment><USER2> This is misinformation. This is not a major revision in any sense. Read the Imperial College paper. The estimates were different between the 'mitigation' and 'supression' strategy. The UK have now changed strategy to 'supression'. Hence the different prediction.

<comment><USER3> I've read the Imperial College Paper. Transmissibility is a major change [0]. The original paper says we are only just at the beginning of the time we will have to spend quarantined over the next 12-18 months, off and on. With the new transmissibility estimate, it would mean that we are a few weeks away from the peak and then done with this.

If you can show me I'm wrong, please do.

[https://www.newscientist.com/article/2238578-uk-has- enough-i...](https://www.newscientist.com/article/2238578-uk-has-enough- intensive-care-units-for-coronavirus-expert-predicts/)

<comment><USER4> > Transmissibility is a major change [0]

I'm not sure you read your own link correctly.

"New data from the rest of Europe suggests that the outbreak is running faster than expected, said Ferguson. As a result, epidemiologists have revised their estimate of the reproduction number (R0) of the virus. This measure of how many other people a carrier usually infects is now believed to be just over three, he said, up from 2.5. "That adds more evidence to support the more intensive social distancing measures," he said."

<comment><USER3> I'm sorry. You are correct. Although Ferguson attributes most of the benefit to the lockdown, he _does_ acknowledge a change of R0 further revising the numbers down.

Where I got confused was attributing some of the things said by Gupta (behind the Oxford model) to Ferguson (behind the Imperial College model).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> They claim half the population is already infected. So conduct a random sample, test 50 people and you would expect 25ish MTO be positive, with most showing no symptoms. If so, then herd immunity is indeed a thing.

I have my doubts that the numbers would support this claim. And if so, then virtually everyone in Spain or Italy would already be a carrier.

The fact that cases were linked to known arrivals also is evidence against this hypothesis : if a high proportion of carriers were unwitting and asymptomatic you would expect many of those diagnosed to not have a link to someone previously diagnosed.

<comment><USER3> I agree with your doubts, and I can't make sense of 72% of tests in NY being negative.

However, the test you need to run is an antibody test, since negative tests don't tell you whether you've already had it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'd really like to see this discussed here. I've not seen anybody talking about this in the US. This is the guy behind the "highly-cited Imperial College London coronavirus model."

And this is a _major_ revision. It drops estimated deaths in the UK from 500,000 to "20,000 or far fewer." It also estimates that the UK will not run out of ICU beds in the process.

The reason is that the transmissibility estimate has gone up, which implies that many more people have already had the virus than we realized. This, in turn, means that a much lower percentage are serious cases. It also means that we are much nearer to the peak than we thought.

Edited to add: He also credits the lockdown in the UK, but if you look at the previous model of how this plays out even with a complete lockdown, you see that the vast majority of the change must come from the change in estimate of transmissibility.

<comment><USER6> > It also estimates that the UK will not run out of ICU beds in the process.

That'd be wonderful. But, doesn't that conflict with what we saw actually happen in Italy?

<comment><USER3> Not necessarily. If transmissibility is high, you could be seeing close to the peak.

The data out of NY that makes me most suspicious of this new model is actually the 72% negative rate on tests. I would expect that to be a lot lower. But that's just a gut feeling.

<comment><USER7> Half of those 72% may have had it three weeks ago and are a-ok now. Without testing for antibodies, all we can say is they do not _currently actively have an infection._

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The theory that the virus has been spreading for months just makes no sense at all. By all accounts, COVID has a pretty quick progression and serious cases need to be hospitalized after about one week of symptoms or about two weeks after contraction. How come that the virus has infected millions and millions of people in the last months but none of them got seriously sick. And now all of a sudden, 1000s are dying. Unfortunatly, it seems that even researchers from reputable institutions are now just pulling numbers from their asses to grab some headlines.

<comment><USER9> Maybe they were dying before, but were categorized differently?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "He said that expected increases in National Health Service capacity and ongoing restrictions to people's movements make him "reasonably confident" the health service can cope when the predicted peak of the epidemic arrives in two or three weeks. UK deaths from the disease are now unlikely to exceed 20,000, he said, and could be much lower."[1]

So basically "Scientist revises model based on new conditions". Isn't that supposed to happen?

A successful prevention is going to feel like failure. It's going to prompt questions like "was this worth all the panic, and tanking the economy?" Bodies are easy to count, deaths prevented are invisible.

1\. [https://www.newscientist.com/article/2238578-uk-has- enough-i...](https://www.newscientist.com/article/2238578-uk-has-enough- intensive-care-units-for-coronavirus-expert-predicts/#ixzz6HpPqbiEF)

<comment><USER3> Not quite. You're claiming that this is all because of the lockdown, when it is quite clear that the biggest reason for the change is the changed estimate of R0.

In other words, _if this new R0 estimate is correct_ we were completely mislead about how big a deal this virus is, and comparisons to it "just" being like a bad flu year are more or less correct.

<comment><USER4> But it seems like he's revising the R0 estimate upwards, rather than downwards. From the same article:

"New data from the rest of Europe suggests that the outbreak is running faster than expected, said Ferguson. As a result, epidemiologists have revised their estimate of the reproduction number (R0) of the virus. This measure of how many other people a carrier usually infects is now believed to be just over three, he said, up from 2.5. "That adds more evidence to support the more intensive social distancing measures," he said."

[https://www.newscientist.com/article/2238578-uk-has- enough-i...](https://www.newscientist.com/article/2238578-uk-has-enough- intensive-care-units-for-coronavirus-expert-predicts/#ixzz6HpPqbiEF)

<comment><USER7> Yeah, revising the R0 upwards is exactly what you would expect to result in a faster infection rate. This means that more people have already been infected and were fine, and that we are at the peak before herd immunity starts to drastically impact the R0 downwards.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I also believe the referenced article does not correctly convey what the original New Scientist article does: the original epidemiologist does not buy in completely to the new inferences, by my reading.

</comment><comment><USER10> He tweeted some clarification.

[https://twitter.com/neil_ferguson/status/1243294815200124928](https://twitter.com/neil_ferguson/status/1243294815200124928)

</comment><comment><USER11> Another model that fits the UK data, even when assuming that half of the population has already been infected, which would mean that the disease is not nearly as dangerous as commonly thought: [https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/03/oxford-study- coronav...](https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/03/oxford-study-coronavirus- may-have-infected-half-of-u-k.html)

By adjusting those two parameters (R0 and IFR) in opposite directions, you can come up with a whole gamut of scenarios that match the evidence pretty well.

<comment><USER12> Sure, that model shows that there are multiple ways to fit the model parameters to account for the first 14 days of fatalities. But we have a lot more real-world data available that directly contradicts any scenario where half the population is already infected.

I'm just disgusted that the authors are now saying it was just an abstract demonstration of different scenarios, and pretending they didn't actually make the claims about the real world that they did.

<comment><USER11> ...is all of that real-world data from Lombardy? If not, does it rely on circular logic? I've seen evidence in both categories, but not much else.

<comment><USER12> Sure, here's some to start with.

1\. Any situation where the testing isn't limited to just the most critically ill showing much lower infection percentages than this model would predict. A lot of these are tests of every person in a risky situation, whether they had symptoms or not:

E.g. the evacuation flights from Iran to China tested every passenger and showed a 3% infection rate. T The village of Vo testing their entire population twice soon after starting a Covid quarantine, with a 3% infection rate.

Others were testing large amounts of people with no particular reason they had Covid, but still with a skewed sample:

The Swedish sentinel testing of random people with any kind of flu symptoms (1.5% of people with flu symptoms testing as positive for Covid, vs. 30% testing positive for Influenza A/B). Iceland testing IIRC a volunteer 1.5% of their population whether they had symptoms or not, and having something like a 1% infection rate.

The thing all of these have in common is that they happened at a time in their relative epidemics where this model should have predicted the majority of the population was currently infected.

In fact, it's basically impossible to explain any testing results, since even when they're biased to cases where Covid is strongly suspected, the ratio of positives is so low. If we test the 1000 of people most suspected of having Covid right now, and get 10% positives, how can it possibly be the case that half the non-suspicious population are carriers at the time of that test?

2\. If herd immunity kicks in 14 days after the first death as implied by this model, why haven't any of the epidemics died down by now? Italy is on what, day 30?

3\. How does a super infectious but low mortality model explain the geographic clustering of deaths? Sure, the geographic clustering of known cases could be explained by testing bias. But deaths don't have that bias.

4\. Observed high CFRs in limited populations where we know the infection rate was high. E.g. Diamond Princess at what 1.4%, and still another 2% in critical condition. How many top ranking Iranian leaders died in short order of Covid, and how does that fit in with a mortality rate of 0.01%? Or the cases where most of the patients of a health care facility or nursing home got infected?

<comment><USER11> 1\. Unless I'm mistaken, this (extreme scenario in the) Oxford model does not say that 50% of the population is infected all at the same time. Until there are serological surveys that indicate who was infected in the past, the current tests can't prove what you think. And any false negatives from the PCR test would add to this problem.

2\. The progress of the disease takes time too, from infection to symptoms to detection/hospitalization/secondary infection. And efforts to "flatten the curve" will "slow the spread" too.

3\. I'm not sure about this one, but shouldn't the infectiousness also vary quite a lot with different contributing factors (population density, air quality, etc)? The number used in the model is always just an "average" in a sense.

4\. The cruise ship evidence is pretty significant, but it still has problems. Any passengers who had already recovered or did not show symptoms could have been missed. Plus I can name several factors in that situation that might increase mortality off the top of my head. It's not the best sample for drawing conclusions about people who are on average less old, not traveling, and so forth.

Admittedly, the extreme "50% infected" scenario has a risk factor (same as IFR?) of 0.001%, which my gut feeling says is too optimistic. But as far as I know none of the scenarios can be conclusively disproven (until they can do proper serological surveys).

<comment><USER12> 1\. They have the virus go from like 5% infected to 70% in two weeks in that scenario. Given what we know about the incubation period and they assume about the infectious period, more than half the population has to be infected (and probably even infectious) somewhere along that curve.

2\. Their model predicts that the peak of the epidemic in Italy should have been before March 5th (first death on February 22nd + 14 days, at which point easily more than half the population is infected). There should have been a sharp drop in new cases about a week later, as the virus burnt itself down. But here we are three weeks later, and it's still not entirely clear that the peak has been found.

Italy did not institute significant nation-wide measures until March 9th, so the "slowdown from measures" explanation makes no sense.

3\. Agreed. But their entire model is predicated on treating the entire country as a single unit. That's probably a part of the reason why the results are so absurd. I don't think it's fair to excuse the model for regional differences, but require any criticism of the model to take them into account.

4\. The difference between the model's prediction and apparent reality is likely to be about a factor of 200. Even assuming everybody on the ship was actually infected, that only cuts it to a factor of 40 difference.

And it's really not just that single case. Consider that infamous Washington state nursing home. 120 residents, 35 dead from Covid to date. Even if we assume that every single one of the 120 was infected despite not testing positive, that still an IFR of 30%. Sure, it's a high-risk segment. But it's also a large enough segment a 30% IFT for them makes it quite impossible for the population-wide IFR to be 0.01%.

(Re: your last point, they had two parameters. One for being at risk of becoming a serious case, and another of dying if serious. The two need to be multiplied to get their predicted IFR. They assumed that 0.1% of population were at risk to become severe cases, and 15% of the severe cases died. So about 0.01%).

<comment><USER11> So on the one hand, I think you're bringing up enough problems for me to agree that the extreme scenario is not likely to hold up.

On the other, I don't understand how after making so many (often reasonable) assumptions in your arguments, you can say that it's "quite impossible" for the total infected to be so high, or the population-wide IFR to be three orders of magnitude lower than a nursing home or any other special case that you do not fully understand.

Here are some of those assumptions, which again do not all seem unreasonable to me:

\- A mild case would likely be detectable by a PCR test for 8+ days

\- The PCR test does not have a high false-negative rate in mild cases (see [https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-17319/v1](https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-17319/v1))

\- Italy has not already had a sharp drop in new infections/most new infections are being identified as cases within two weeks

\- Italy did nothing to slow the rate of infection until the full lockdown was in effect (but slower spread would mean higher mortality, no matter the reason)

\- COVID-19 was the only/main thing that contributed to mortality in the special cases

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Bill Gates on the Imperial College model: 'Fortunately it appears the parameters used in that model were too negative. ... Models are only as good as the assumptions put into them' [https://www.reddit.com/r/Coronavirus/comments/fksnbf/im_bill...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Coronavirus/comments/fksnbf/im_bill_gates_cochair_of_the_bill_melinda_gates/fkuojny/)

<comment><USER11> That's just fine and dandy then, _I_ didn't lose my job, and Bill Gates doesn't need to earn money.

Un-fucking-believable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is flat out wrong. There is no revision at all. To quote [Neil Ferguson himself]([https://twitter.com/neil_ferguson/status/1243294815200124928](https://twitter.com/neil_ferguson/status/1243294815200124928)):

I think it would be helpful if I cleared up some confusion that has emerged in recent days. Some have interpreted my evidence to a UK parliamentary committee as indicating we have substantially revised our assessments of the potential mortality impact of COVID-19

This is not the case. Indeed, if anything, our latest estimates suggest that the virus is slightly more transmissible than we previously thought. Our lethality estimates remain unchanged.

My evidence to Parliament referred to the deaths we assess might occur in the UK in the presence of the very intensive social distancing and other public health interventions now in place.

Without those controls, our assessment remains that the UK would see the scale of deaths reported in our study (namely, up to approximately 500 thousand).

</comment><comment><USER15> Made me thinking - Is this the reason behind today's market's rally close to the end of the day?

</comment><comment><USER16> I hope he's right.

</comment><comment><USER17> So we are normalizing rightwing propaganda sites on HN now? Seeing an article from a Ben Shapiro fronted site on the HN front page is frightening. I need a new place to get my information.

<comment><USER3> If you would prefer to ignore the fact that the hugely influential epidemiologists responsible for the recommendations we are currently following have changed their recommendations, go for it.

<comment><USER17> We can all get our information directly from the source: [https://www.newscientist.com/article/2238578-uk-has- enough-i...](https://www.newscientist.com/article/2238578-uk-has-enough- intensive-care-units-for-coronavirus-expert-predicts/)</comment></comment></comment>