The Dark Web's Top Drug Market, Evolution, Just Vanished - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2015/03/evolution-disappeared-bitcoin-scam-dark-web/ <comment><USER2> "You knew what I was when you picked me up," said the snake as it slithered away.

<comment><USER3> For those not getting the reference [http://www.gballard.net/lifes_lessons/girl_rattlesnake/](http://www.gballard.net/lifes_lessons/girl_rattlesnake/)

<comment><USER4> Or the Scorpion and the Frog [1]

[1] [http://www.aesopfables.com/cgi/aesop1.cgi?4&TheScorpionandth...](http://www.aesopfables.com/cgi/aesop1.cgi?4&TheScorpionandtheFrog)

<comment><USER5> I had only ever heard the scorpion version, never the snake. I MUCH prefer the scorpion version because it focuses on the scorpion and not the frog.

The scorpion dooms himself by his own nature, where as the girl is merely trusting and punished for it.

<comment><USER6> According to [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Frog_and_the_Mouse](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Frog_and_the_Mouse) , you can find each moral in Aesop, with the frog and the mouse teaching that evil destroys itself and the farmer and the viper teaching that you're a fool to hope for anything but evil treatment from evil. Presumably, you'd target the first lesson at people you wanted to shape up, and the second one at the excessively giving.

On a different note, [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scorpion_and_the_Frog](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scorpion_and_the_Frog) is only listed in WP's "apocryphal" subcategory of Aesop's fables, dated to 1954. What's it doing on "www.aesopfables.com"?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Not to add insult to injury, but these people posting on Reddit complaining about the money they have lost are opening themselves up to massive prison sentences. Reddit is a US site; all it takes to arrest everyone posting is to subpoena Reddit, get their IP's/emails/whatever, then raid their houses looking for drugs and whatever other contraband the police can find. Complaining publicly that you lost money on a site whose sole purpose was to sell illegal items is plenty of probable cause - especially with several implied death threats and people saying they may be killed over missing funds right in the thread. The feds will be all over this.

Not that they shouldn't complain somewhere, but maybe keep it on the darknet sites.

<comment><USER8> I'd presume they are posting to Reddit cia TOR, so I doubt subpoenaing Reddit would give much new information.

<comment><USER7> I thought about that, but you never know. There are other bits and pieces available...email, which might lead to a real IP via another subpoena if the person isn't careful, ad/tracking cookies, etc. I would guarantee you that some of these people aren't being that careful with their clearnet activities.

<comment><USER9> Would it be worth investing those kind of resources into tracking lower-tier sellers or buyers though?

<comment><USER7> Well....reading the thread, there are people claiming that drug gangs are going to kill people (both the owners of the site and people who are going to come up short paying their suppliers), at least one person seriously talking about suicide, and another saying that he has contact info for the owners. I can't say what resources they will put into it, but there are a ton of law enforcement red alerts and more than enough probable cause in that one thread to subpoena Reddit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't understand why vendors would keep a lot of bitcoins on the site, instead of withdrawing them as quickly as possible.

This guy apparently had 300BTC/$85k on there! [http://np.reddit.com/r/DarkNetMarkets/comments/2zeuxo/compla...](http://np.reddit.com/r/DarkNetMarkets/comments/2zeuxo/complaintwarning_evolution_admins_exit_scamming/cpijggd?context=4)

<comment><USER11> Escrow, funds are only released once the buyer confirms that he received the shipment. If you have a ton of outstanding orders, you are going to have a lot of funds frozen in escrow.

<comment><USER12> I thought the whole point of bitcoin was that it was peer-to-peer with no chargebacks or centralized middlemen?

<comment><USER13> A side benefit, but I wouldn't say the whole point. There are some cases where middlemen are necessary - the difference being that they're a lot more avoidable with BTC than they are in meatspace. (Credit cards, authorities who rob people carrying large amounts of cash, and so on.)

<comment> lhc- I'm not positive that bitcoins offer much more protection from robbery than cash, given the situation here.

<comment><USER14> They offered protection, though didn't they? Evolution had multiescrow, they wouldn't have gotten those funds would they have?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> at-fates-hands _" NSWGreat described confronting Evolution's two pseudonymous owners, Verto and Kimble, who he or she says then admitted they were closing the market and stealing its funds. "I am so sorry, but Verto and Kimble have f–ked us all._"

With no chat logs, all we go by is this guy's word? What are the odds he was in on the heist?

Also, this reminds me of when Max Butler did a brute force take over of all the carders markets and then created his own "super carders forum" by hacking in and then wiping their databases and then repointing their domains to his. While this is probably not in the realm of possibilities, if this site does come back, people had better be very, very weary of who's actually running it.

Lessons learned and all that jazz I suppose.

<comment><USER15> > With no chat logs, all we go by is this guy's word?

You mean, besides the market & forum being down since 8PM yesterday, withdrawals failing since at least Saturday, no communication from the operators, at least one other employee saying it's an exit scam, and blockchain movements of large amounts of funds?

> What are the odds he was in on the heist?

We can't rule out a scenario like NSWGreat expected to receive a cut, but it's clear that when he went public, he helped some people save money by not continuing to deposit funds.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> There are people on reddit raising funds to doxx the people who ran Evolution.

Jesus... a whole lot of shadowbans are going to happen once the admins wake up. Maybe even some subreddit bans.

<comment><USER15> Nothing's going to happen. This happens every time a big market like Sheep goes down - a lot of people who knew better start talking big online and huffing and puffing and bluffing, along with the occasional scam 'send me BTC and I'll track down the admins!'

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> One Evolution (ex-)staff member claims that 130,000 BTC (~$35 million) were stolen:

[http://www.deepdotweb.com/2015/03/18/interview-with- nswgreat...](http://www.deepdotweb.com/2015/03/18/interview-with-nswgreat- evolution-staff-member/)

</comment><comment><USER18> Aaaand its gone... and I bet with gazillions of the user's bitcoins (this is becoming a classic)

<comment><USER19> Although it takes a certain amount of guts to steal from drug dealers. They don't generally bother with suing you in court to recover their funds :-)

<comment><USER20> If "drug dealers" can find you, then so can LE. If LE can find you, you're cooked already and shouldn't be playing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> So why haven't markets that utilize Bitcoin escrow transactions taken off yet?

<comment><USER22> "The site gained users' trust by offering a feature known as "multi-signature transactions," designed to prevent exactly the sort of bitcoin theft its administrators are now accused of."

Seems like the site's differentiating feature was multiparty escrow transactions but weren't used often due to hassle?

<comment><USER23> Pretty much, yeah. It was available but not very many people used it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> >While other sites followed the original Silk Road's ethos of selling only victimless contraband

While human sacrifices may not be a literal ingredient of drugs, calling it victimless ignores a whole lot of problems caused by drugs. Buying pot from your friend who grows it is victimless. But fueling any black market, even one that avoids identity theft, means you are supporting the marketplace that provides service to drug traffickers of the sort that kill people or that delivers highly addictive drugs that ruin far more than just their user's own life. Yes, bad government laws have made these problems much worse and are preventing truly safe victimless market places that uses locally grown and produced drugs sold in moderation, but the black market is not victimless.

<comment><USER25> The drug cartels brutally murder thousands and commit many other crimes -- they are as brutal as ISIS in many ways -- they undermine and oppress entire countries and ruin large parts of American cities. Many organizations such as the Taliban and Hezbollah fund themselves via the drug trade.

Some people boycott companies over political issues; how many of them still buy drugs? Every user I know, to whom I've mentioned this issue, insists their drugs come from a friend who produces it at home. But somehow the drug cartels earn billions and have worldwide distribution networks.

<comment><USER26> Prohibition laws created the drug cartels. You don't see distillers killing each others in turf wars, quite simply because it would be highly destructive to their possibility of operating on the right side of the law.

To end the "wars" regarding drugs, you must end the war on drugs. Legalize everything. It won't eliminate drug abuse, just like legalizing alcohol didn't eradicate alcohol abuse, but it removes all the compounding effects caused by the substances being illegal by themselves.

Besides, legalizing is, from a moral perspective, the only right way to act.

<comment><USER27> Agreed. And then deal with it the same way you do with tobacco and alcohol, with social campaigns to raise awareness of the issues of addiction. We have a working model here for legal drugs that are just as bad or worse.

<comment><USER28> Working model? LOL.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Recent HN posts of related Reddit comments:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224517](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224517)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9225154](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9225154)

</comment><comment><USER29> Brokering narcotics and everything else to the entire world is an unsustainable business you have no safe country to flee to if caught or outed. Surprised these black markets don't just focus on one foreign market from their stronghold in Abkhazia or something.

<comment><USER30> setting up with iranian hosting might be a plausible way to go about it

<comment><USER31> And a great way to get yourself some terrorism related charges when you inevitably fuck up and leak identifying information.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Perhaps I don't understand Bitcoin well enough, but wouldn't these guys out themselves the instant they try and spend them because of the public transaction history?

<comment><USER33> There are tumbler services, no idea how well they work or how many are compromised but in theory it seems like it could work.

<comment><USER34> I'm surprised we haven't seen more theft and fraud with the tumblers. I used one out of curiosity about two years ago and the experience was basically to fill out a super shady looking webform, send the coins to the address it gives you, and then pray like hell that they come back out the other end.

<comment><USER35> The CoinJoin proposal[0] by Greg Maxwell provides transaction-history-tracing erasure capabilities. JoinMarket[1] is a market driven approach to incent CoinJoin mixing

[0][https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=279249.0](https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=279249.0) [1][https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=919116.0](https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=919116.0)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> The original article on wired magazine now returns 404, but we're starting a discussion about this on [http://www.peerlyst.com/discussions/the-dark-webs- top-drug-m...](http://www.peerlyst.com/discussions/the-dark-webs-top-drug- market-evolution-just-vanished-wired-com)

Peerlyst is a community of 17K+ security professionals, discussing 25 areas of security (content security, cryptography, identity management, privacy etc). Once joining, you get a feed relevant to your areas of interest.

</comment><comment><USER12> [http://www.reddit.com/r/sorryforyourloss](http://www.reddit.com/r/sorryforyourloss)

</comment><comment><USER37> well looks like these thiefs selling their bitcoins will push down the prices....almost 40 million dollars they've stolen, how the fuck do they expect to cash out without getting caught?

<comment><USER18> Probably they're already doing it. I was wondering why the plunge in price during the last 24h, and then I found this thread. We were in our slow-but- steady way to recovery and bam! now back to downtrend. Always the same history. Shit happens...</comment></comment>


So, What Makes a Good User Story? - <AUTHOR> https://www.promptworks.com/blog/what-makes-a-good-user-story-part-1?utm_source=hn&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=usp1 <comment><AUTHOR> Here's the link to part 2 that we recently released! [https://www.promptworks.com/blog/what-makes-a-good-user- stor...](https://www.promptworks.com/blog/what-makes-a-good-user-story-part-2)</comment>


Ask HN: Please review and give thoughts on my app - <AUTHOR> http://bln.kr

<comment><USER2> Not technical but this question made me too curious: who do you expect to upload music? Artists with reputation or anyone? Or, the point is to offer an url shortener service for MP3 songs?

<comment><AUTHOR> We expect anyone who makes music to upload. We have a few famous artists like The Streets (<http://bln.kr/-skinnermike>), some internet famous folks like Levar Thomas (<http://bln.kr/-LeVarThomas>), and plenty of people just trying to make it. We also have hobbyists who just want to share music with friends.</comment></comment>


Fuzzmail - <AUTHOR> http://www.fuzzmail.org/about.html <comment><USER2> Seems like an odd idea to me, but what do I know?

They need to have the option to speed up the rate at which the text is displayed. It was going way too slow for me and I was getting bored waiting for the next line to show up.</comment>


What Is the Right Age to Found a Company? - <AUTHOR> http://lsvp.wordpress.com/2012/02/29/what-is-the-right-age-to-found-a-company-7-2/

<comment><USER2> Your current age.

</comment><comment><USER3> age does not matter.</comment>


Burn Baby Burn - <AUTHOR> http://www.cringely.com/2009/09/burn-baby-burn/

<comment><USER3> It seems so tantalizingly close, doesn't it? To replace the revered institutions of higher learning in this country with laptops and Starbucks cards, throwing the gates of prosperity and knowledge wide open for anyone who cares to partake.

But I'm afraid it won't happen for awhile, for several reasons:

1\. The technology just isn't there yet. MIT's entire lecture series is not online, far from it. Many of the OCW courses have only notes, no video, and the ones that have video often lack resolution to be able to read the notes on the board. Also, has anyone ever used Blackboard? It's horrible.

2\. Not everyone has the tenacity to sit through four years of college classes and really learn something. Even fewer have the dedication to do it on their own, remotely, with no human interaction other than a webcam to guide them.

3\. Schools such as MIT serve as a filter and a credibility indicator. They have great professors, of course, but anyone can obtain the raw knowledge they teach. What's harder to obtain on your own is the stamp of approval that you've . PG commented on Dropbox's YC application that was posted on here with his thought process. One of the first items was: "MIT...must be pretty smart." That's the power of a credibility indicator at work.

4\. The people that are needed to make this happen are 1) parents, 2) government (for incentives), 3) existing institutions of higher learning, 4) employers (to hire these graduates). All of these groups are likely to have degrees that are granted using the current model, and thus none are likely to want to undermine their own education choices. What's the incentive for them to break with status quo?

5\. School isn't just about what you learn...the best schools serve as a kind of bridging ground between childhood and adulthood. Perhaps there are better ways to accomplish this, but some kind of "GED for higher education" hardly seems to be a good solution. I'd rather hire employees who are smart and dedicated than knowledgeable. Most of what they need to know can be taught, but character and raw intelligence can't be, or at least not easily. Getting good enough grades in high school to get into a great school and then doing well in that school indicate both mental aptitude and the perseverance that I want in people who work for me.

These are off the top of my head...I'm sure there are more.

<comment><USER4> I agree with many of your points, but...

 _1\. The technology just isn't there yet. MIT's entire lecture series is not online, far from it. Many of the OCW courses have only notes, no video, and the ones that have video often lack resolution to be able to read the notes on the board. Also, has anyone ever used Blackboard? It's horrible._

That has absolutely _nothing_ to do with the technology, which is just fine thank you. What's missing is a few man-years of recording and post-production work - which colleges probably don't want to spend money on in order to give away free. A 2-hour lecture isn't too complex to film, but to get good results you need to spend maybe $2000+.

Multiply that out by the number of courses and you're looking at quite a chunk of money...although it would seem a highly appropriate task for a government grant (if you wanted to put the material into the public domain) or could be self-financing with a little planning.

Th BBC's open university offers a model for this, though a rather pricey one - <http://www.open2.net/> ...inexplicably, though, it's still built around TV broadcasts which is kinda stupid nowadays.

<comment><USER5> A startup opportunity? Video cameras are incredibly cheap, a PC with eight webcams, software to do initial editing of a lecture with final edit done by a human?

I can imagine a lectures could be put on video for much less than $2000 each with the right technology.

<comment><USER4> Webcams are really horrible though. If you're working with an eye to posterity you'd be better off using a few regular cameras, and people to operate them. Editing is a mixed bag. You could show the blackboard, but depending on what's up there you might be better off doing titling in software and having it float beside the lecturer.

Certainly you can do it for much less...$2000 was a ballpark price for doing something of pretty decent quality that's going to be visually engaging - <USER2> best lecturer in the world is a lot less compelling when s/he's been reduced to the size of a postcard or less. I think auto-editing would be next to useless except for the most basic things like:

      while(wide_cam.frame.rightside.movement = true)
        wait 10 seconds
        edit_cut_to (medium_closeup.cam[1])
      end while

It'd be a lot simpler to just hire a bunch of people and pay them to do the work - trying to automate what is essentially an aesthetic process is a recipe for wasting money. Bear in mind that you do get some economies of scale as you do more 'episodes'.

On the other hand, I do think there's a great startup opportunity here, mixing some basic production techniques with some visual FX techniques (let's animate that polynomial as the lecturer explains it to us) and some decent interactive controls (pause and rewind are sloppy relics of linear information access - what we want are the kind of contextual controls at which game UIs excel).

<comment><USER6> Mturk might be cool. "Here are 3 30 second video clips. At any given time, hover over the one with the clearest view of the subject matter. Here's 5 cents.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Why wasn't he asking this question when textbooks started to be published? Just give all the physics students Feynmann's Lectures on Physics and a few other textbooks and they can educate themselves. Hire a professor to handle the occasional question.

Does the existence of online video make this so much more compelling?

<comment><USER8> Very good point! What has really changed with videos, ebooks and the web? Maybe the web has made interacting with other students cheaper and more richer than before. I don't know.

I do know that I enjoyed hanging around in the CmptSci common room and I learned a lot just shooting the breeze with students, TAs and the occasional prof. I would never have learned as much in a chatroom nor would I want to hang around in a chatroom. There are so many modes of communication that are not possible with the chatroom and you don't have the opportunity to bump into random, interesting people.

<comment><USER9> > Very good point! What has really changed with videos, ebooks and the web? > Maybe the web has made interacting with other students cheaper and more > richer than before. I don't know.

Computers allow much better tests and quizzes, for one thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Do we really want to eliminate the physical university?

One thing that a campus does, that would not exist with an online education, is create a community. Good universities get smart people together, which is invaluable in creating wealth.

For a better explanation of what I mean, see the "Universities" section of <http://www.paulgraham.com/siliconvalley.html>

[edited for grammar]

<comment><USER4> I don't, but I would like to eliminate the enrollment. I personally feel that universities should offer more ad-hoc participation and function like giant libraries rather than toytowns for those who can afford to make a 4 year commitment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Academia is more about shaping your mind than learning material. Going to a lecture is also not a very effective way to learn material. What is important about lectures, assignments and tests is the social aspect. Everyone will attend the same topic at the same time at the sample place, setting you up for a (direct or indirect) discussion with your peers or your professor. This will not only force you to really think about the topic, but also introduce you to viewpoints your mind was not yet capable of producing. What makes a university good is what your, your peers and your professors have to offer.

If you have a degree of MIT, that should tell people not that you were able to watch MIT lectures and do MIT tests, but that you spent at least 4 years developing your mind in one of the top academic and intellectual environments in the world. "I watched MIT lectures on the Internet" is not quite the same.

</comment><comment><USER12> > What drives the education industry is producing degrees

A 4-year college degree is almost a standard requirement for a white-collar- type job.

As for computer-based training, Neal Stephenson offered a tantalizing look at where the potential lies with his the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer in "The Diamond Age"

<comment><USER13> _Neal Stephenson offered a tantalizing look at where the potential lies with his the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer_

Exactly. Although the nanotech stuff remains distant, a present day Kindle or tablet system could easily incorporate synchronized interaction between children like Nell and actors like Miranda.

<comment><USER14> Of course, Stephenson also slyly suggested that the ideal remote-teacher-to- remote-student ratio remains one to one: Miranda sacrificed her career to raise Nell, remotely.

If you still need a human teacher, and that teacher has to be paid, what exactly have you gained by interposing the Kindle between the teacher and the student?

Greenspun once theorized that you could pay teachers in low-wage countries to do the tutoring, but I have trouble believing this will work. Communicating over a teleconference link is hard to do, even when there are adult-aged engineering graduates on both ends of the link. Show me the person from a low- wage country whose flawless command of English and uncanny ability to communicate over the phone allows them to effectively teach eight-year-olds from half a world away... and I'll show you someone who won't keep a low-wage job for long, because someone is going to offer them a high-wage job.

<comment><USER13> _suggested that the ideal remote-teacher-to-remote-student ratio remains one to one_

I don't think that follows. Nell's Primer was only a prototype. As a practical matter the kind of infrastructure that went into developing it would over time be replaced by something more economically and socially efficient. The story itself suggests that neither Miranda or the Primer's designers anticipated Nell's needs.

 _If you still need a human teacher, and that teacher has to be paid, what exactly have you gained by interposing the Kindle between the teacher and the student?_

It's likely that little is gained in that limited student/teacher/employment context but in my experience[1] I think there are considerable educational opportunities once people step outside that traditional box.

1- <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=226987>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The author kinda forgets that there's also branches of study that can't really be pursued from wherever you are but actually need facilities. Think of chemistry for example.

</comment><comment><USER16> This reminds me of the piece on _StraighterLine_ , which allows students to take as many online courses they like and complete them at whatever rate they like for $99/month. It's accredited, too.

[http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/college_guide/feature/colle...](http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/college_guide/feature/college_for_99_a_month.php?page=1)

</comment><comment><USER17> Well, it is already happening.

I am studying Law as an external student. All lectures are delivered using Powerpoint + MP3s. Tutorials via Wimba (both chat and audio). Study groups are actively encouraged (for some subjects they are required) and also use Wimba. Legal databases supplement traditional textbooks. Exams are done either on- line or invigilated at a University in my home town.

My campus is 1900 miles away and I need not visit it during my entire degree.

You might not be able to do it that way in Chemistry or Physics but in Law it works very well. I can't see why it wouldn't work in Mathematics or many other subjects.

</comment><comment><USER18> Internships can also cover a lot of what the universities are trying to cover. A group of interns can also cover a lot of the social aspects a lot of people here claim would be missing from our society if it weren't for uni's.</comment>


What kind of text encoding is this? - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/sharonhe/2360692ec8d9d0404ee89565d2bb28fa <comment><USER2> They appear to be a 4 byte wide utf-8 characters According to my hex editor the G character is F0 9D 99 B6 while the C is F0 9D 99 B2. Here are the characters: [http://graphemica.com/%F0%9D%99%B6](http://graphemica.com/%F0%9D%99%B6) [http://graphemica.com/%F0%9D%99%B2](http://graphemica.com/%F0%9D%99%B2)</comment>


JavaScript Grew Up and Became a Real Language - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/young-coder/how-javascript-grew-up-and-became-a-real-language-17a0b948b77f <comment><USER2> Meh. TypeScript is the real successor here and JavaScript will seem like programming in C with all its weak typing and its lack of advanced language features.

I do see TypeScript slowing becoming C# like, which I can only say it is a good thing.

<comment><USER3> True, but JavaScript had to survive 20 years to get the chance to evolve into something like TypeScript, and that was no mean feat.</comment></comment>


26 senators say US relying on 'secret law' to collect data on citizens - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2013/jun/28/senators-letter-james-clapper

<comment><USER2> I would be nice to have one of those whitehouse signature collections for these very same questions.</comment>


Show HN: an API to extract text from a PDF - <AUTHOR> http://stamplin.com/api/docs/extracttextpdf/ <comment><USER2> Why not just system(pdf2html) - I don't see the point since this level of functionality is trivially achieved. If it did something over and above that it might be useful, like OCR, but even that's not hard to add.

<comment><AUTHOR> indeed, at the moment, that's quite simple. The only benefit is the fact is quite easy to integrate and fast. More advance feature should be coming soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> If you're doing this local/cli

`pdftext`, from [http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/](http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/)

For OCR, `pdfimages` (also from xpdf), combined with ImageMagick's `convert`, and `tesseract` ([http://code.google.com/p/tesseract- ocr/](http://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/)) works passably well.

</comment><comment><USER4> I have some questions:

1\. Why return an array of texts? Where do the texts get split up? At page boundaries? Column boundaries? At the end of each line? If a line is interrupted by a corner of an image and continues a couple of inches afterward, does it get treated as a separate text? (I once used a PDF->text extractor program that spit out every word sepearately, often in an incorrect order. That probably had to do with how the PDF was organized internally.)

2\. "The PDF file should be smaller than 1 Mbit" -> You mean 1 megabyte, right? Because 1 megabit is only 125-128 kilobytes.

<comment><AUTHOR> 1\. That's indeed dependant on the way the PDF has been created. Sometimes, you can even have letter splitted on different text token.

2\. You're right, I mean Megabyte

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the clarifications.

Since a lot of PDFs are badly organized (and I wonder if some programs deliberately do that to make text extraction difficult), perhaps you could try to analyze the location of each token on the page and merge the ones that seem to belong together. That would be already 100x better than most of the free PDF->text converters out there.

<comment><AUTHOR> we are already close to do that but with a really slow parser (this one can even replace some text on the pdf). Our problem now is to understand if developers would rather have better text extraction or some other features like image extractions, etc.. Let us know what you would prefer.

<comment><USER4> Image extraction would be cool, but to me getting a readable block of text is more important.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Going from PDF to nicely formatted word doc would be huge for lawyers and people who do a lot of contract negotiations. It's hard to do well though.

<comment><USER6> Isn't a better solution to get software that supports PDF natively like Acrobat, then edit the documents there instead of doing a (poor) translation to Word.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've recently been working on extracting text from PDFs myself. I've found that `pdftohtml -xml` from the Poppler utils does a decent job of it, and includes a bounding box for each piece of text. I've submitted a few patches to their Bugzilla to also include the transformation matrix as well as some extra styling information.

</comment><comment><USER8> I googled "converting PDF to text" and "converting PDF to html". A tons of services already exist out there. Apparently, it's not something new. How do you plan to compete? Are you planning to focus on data extraction rather than conversion?

<comment><AUTHOR> the initial plan wasn't about text extraction but text modification. We noticed we already have something to "give" and created this service. Following the lean methodology, we hope we are going to get some insights about the next step.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Neat, but practically who would want to do this with an API rather than installable software?

<comment><AUTHOR> Some languages do have indeed good enough librairies to do that, some don't. Moreover, they are quite slow and not always really easy to integrate.

<comment><USER10> And sending the whole file over the wire is preferable?

What if the document contains sensitive or privileged data?

<comment><USER11> Then use a library or local call. For web based projects with low security concerns or something reminiscent of Yahoo! Pipes this is pretty cool.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Hey I've documented this in Mashape - [https://www.mashape.com/ismaelc/extract-text-from- pdfs#!docu...](https://www.mashape.com/ismaelc/extract-text-from- pdfs#!documentation)

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is similar to what we do at [http://searchtower.com](http://searchtower.com) , where you can store, view, index and search the data.

</comment><comment><USER14> Do you do OCR for text extraction?

<comment><AUTHOR> not right now but we are working on it. Would you be interested by this feature?

<comment><USER15> Good OCR with a nice API would be very useful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Nice. Why no paid options? I'm guessing because this was a weekend project.

If so, nice work!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. The paying option would be coming if there is some interests in it. If there is people interested in it, please let us know in this thread or at email@example.com.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> do you use pdftotext internally or something else?

<comment><AUTHOR> we have our own parser for more complicated task and use xpdf when speed is key because it's much faster.

<comment><USER18> I am writing something similar for a client. He needs data in tables extracted from the PDF. Which language are you using? I wrote two scripts, one using python and pdftotext and another using ruby pdf-reader, the ruby one gives each line of the PDF one by one which is good for extraction.</comment></comment></comment>


Fishing for Disaster (80s short about video game programmers) - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjkEz_9zMvU&feature=youtu.be <comment><AUTHOR> Pretty funny short film from a couple of years ago - didn't get too many views so I thought it was worth sharing.</comment>


Fork of Gitlab that allows public access to repositories - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ArthurHoaro/Public-GitLab

<comment><USER2> Gitlab already has this?

<http://demo.gitlab.com/public>

<comment><AUTHOR> That's just allowing anonymous access to the clone url: you can't actually browse the source code, read/file issues, etc.

See the full discussion here: <https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlabhq/issues/12></comment></comment>


Recombinant Human GDF-11 Protein, 5ug - <AUTHOR> http://www.amazon.com/RayBiotech-Recombinant-GDF-11-Protein-213-10127-1/dp/B00P8EBKIE/ref=sr_1_1/178-8739235-5298523?s=industrial&ie=UTF8&qid=1425194234&sr=1-1&keywords=gdf11

<comment><USER2> Interesting that every advertisement on the page has a button to click to report issues with the ad, but Amazon does not have a button to report the product. Sure, you can report a lower price elsewhere, but if you want to report that the product is unethical, dangerous, and illegal, you're out of luck.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This recently became available on Amazon for much cheaper than anywhere else. Anyone care to be a guinea pig?

Disclaimer: I am not in any way affiliated with the company. I am also not responsible for your actions, that's on you.

<comment><USER2> Guinea pigging a hormone only expressed during development runs a very serious risk of giving yourself cancer. Fortunately, these scammers are probably shipping something harmless instead of the actual product, so no one is likely to die.</comment></comment>


Apple 'Pinch to Zoom' Patent Rejected by U.S. in Initial Ruling - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323277504578189891418492784.html

<comment><USER2> You might be wondering why your submission hasn't sparked any discussion. There was a discussion over here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4945181>

The discussion is still there, but the submission is dead. No idea why. The initial comment is excellent:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4945449>

The story has also been broken from other sources:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4946026> (groklaw.net)

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4945174> (slate.com)

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4949109> (readwrite.com)</comment>


Deadbolt - autoreleasing locks for node.js - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/indutny/deadbolt

<comment><USER2> Could someone please explain to me what this does. I've looked at the repo and the readme, and I dabble in nodejs. But to be honest I have no idea what this does or helps one do.

<comment><AUTHOR> It does locks management and some autoreleasing black magic.

Lets image you have a `callback` variable that you want to pass to some 3rd party code and you ain't sure whether it'll call it or not (or you're aware that unhandled exception may be thrown inside it). If you'll wrap `callback` with `deadbolt.wrap(callback)` and pass it to that function, `callback` will be called with a error if it will become not referenced (see [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_collection_(computer_sc...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_collection_\(computer_science\)) ) in that 3rd party code.

<comment><USER2> ah thanks very much, so its a way of being alerted as to whether my callback has been ignored/lost.

<comment><AUTHOR> yes. I did that because in one of my projects 3rd party code was rarely throwing exceptions that I could not caught and incoming request was hanging for a minutes (and after that overall app's state was inconsistent)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ketamine 'exciting' depression therapy - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-26647738 <comment><USER2> While I was in university, I suffered (not knowingly at the time) from pretty bad depression. I basically was extremely self-destructive, and at 19 was experimenting with various drugs. My roommate's girlfriend stole a half used bottle of ketamine from a veterinary clinic she worked at. They dried the liquid into powder form in the microwave, and we all used it by snorting it. (as I said, I was hell bent on self destruction)

Obviously, whatever dose we obtained would be far, far beyond a clinical amount. I immediately sank into what is called a "k-hole" and had what is often described as an "out of body" sensation. I was 5 years old again, walking along the beach in winter, looking through my father's binoculars at the humpback whales. A feeling of peace and calm came to me, and some amount of time later (perhaps an hour) I awoke from the "k-hole."

The sense of peace I felt remained. I wasn't intoxicated, nor did I feel any other effects. I just felt like I had before my girlfriend had died two years before.

That was the last time I touched a drug other than alcohol or marijuana.

<comment><USER3> To my knowledge I never suffered from depression. When I was a teenager I also experimented with various drugs. At age around 17 me and some friends took a lot of ketamine at a friend's house one night. We went out for a walk at at some point I started k-holing. We were walking along a train line at the time. I collapsed on the line and watched myself lying there. My friends hadn't noticed me fall, they'd carried on. Then I calmly watched myself get hit by a train. I watched my bloody corpse lying there for quite a while.

I came back to my senses lying by the rails in a puddle of my own vomit. I hadn't really been hit by the train, although I had watched it, seen my body crumble and split.

I spent the next several hours vomiting and feeling atrocious. Ever since then, I occasionally see the image of my own dead body again. That was the last time I touched ketamine, though I carried on experimenting with everything else until my early 20s.

Not to detract from your experience, but ketamine _can_ be a disgusting, dangerous drug, and taking it at home is not a sensible approach to depression, drug addiction, or anything.

<comment><USER4> _Not to detract from your experience, but ketamine can be a disgusting, dangerous drug, and taking it at home is not a sensible approach to depression, drug addiction, or anything._

This is a very black and white statement. Most people probably shouldn't treat serious illnesses by self-medicating with powerful drugs, especially those obtained illegally where the purity of the drug might be questionable.

On the other hand, someone with crippling depression who has sought treatment from medical professionals to no avail and is on the verge of suicide has few options and not much to lose. Trying ketamine might well be a reasonable option for such a person - more reasonable than suicide, anyway.

<comment><USER5> I don't dispute that ketamine may perhaps have some clinical relevance for humans, but unfortunately it wreaks too much havoc on the kidneys for me to consider it as a viable option for treatment of depression.

<comment><USER6> Those points seemed already covered in the article, but somehow it must have been unclear.

First of all, it's unlikely to ever have ketamine as a first-line treatment for a depression. Probably more somewhere near electroconvulsive therapy. ECT also has adverse effects which can't be considered as minor (e.g. severe memory loss). However, at the same time it's recognized as a life-saver for certain population of patients.

As I have understood from this research and previous ones, it's hoped that the effect of ketamine would be long-lasting: at least up to months. Not so-called daily anti-depressant pill. The adverse effects of ECT would also be more severe if it would be administered on a daily basis. As it was mentioned, some patients relapsed within days, some were free from depression for up to three months.

According to animal research[1], it's prolonged not acute ketamine use that has shown signs of renal and bladder damage. In a review of ketamine-induced vesicopathy[2] it's also noted that 'Very little is known regarding the pathogenesis of its effects on the urinary tract.' I'm not claiming that it doesn't cause any damage, but that it needs more research and currently there's no indication of "renal havoc" after few doses.

In light of this, I can't even imagine how someone could call possibility of using ketamine for treatment of depression not viable. However, it may be because I know how disabling severe or even moderate depression is and how much damage it causes to person's life.

Each person reacts very differently to anti-depressants and there's large amount of people with treatment resistant depression. It's not like there's silver bullet and because of that we need as many as possible different treatment methods. Depression is life-threatening condition and thus all of those methods can't (and don't need to) be 100% safe. A lot of approved drugs have serious side-effects. Basically it's all about assessing the benefit:risk ratio of a drug. It's not rational to cross any treatment out, just because it may have side-effects. Especially if there's not reasonable amount research done - like with ketamine.

When we have more data, then it may show that certain population would need additional doses of ketamine after 1-3 months and the damage to organs is minor or non-existent in such case. Or it may show something else. It's just unthinkable to call it as "not viable" option, yet.

[1] Yeung, LY, Rudd JA, Lam WP, Mak YT, Yew DT. (2009) Mice are prone to kidney pathology after prolonged ketamine addiction. Toxicol Lett. 2009 Dec 15;191(2-3):275-8. doi: 10.1016/j.toxlet.2009.09.006. Epub 2009 Sep 17.

[2] Middela, S., Pearce, I. (2010) Ketamine-induced vesicopathy: a literature review. Int J Clin Pract. 2011 Jan;65(1):27-30. doi: 10.1111/j.1742-1241.2010.02502.x.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I was a ketamine user for over a decade. It really did work wonders for clinical depression, even brought me right out of suicidal hysteria and despair within moments, but it comes with severe drawbacks. It can ruin your bladder. It will sap the b vitamins out of your system, and could cause nerve damage. More importantly, it is VERY addictive psychologically. I'm not saying to stay away, but to be careful and disciplined.

Thoughts on the research: to the extent that the mind is already chemical in nature, yes depression can be a chemical issue. However, I think they are looking at it all wrong. I believe the reason ketamine (and nitrous oxide, they may soon find out) are so effective at attacking depression is because they are disassociative in nature. Looking at it as simply a chemical problem erroneously reduces what is likely a complex issue in a complex organ. What ketamine and other disassociatives do is they "loosen" one's attachment and identification with various parts of their cognitive minds, allowing thoughts and feelings to exist in their own space without having such a strong hold on a person's conscious self, or seat of awareness, or whatever. Its basically like induced meditation, and from my experience with both disassociatives and years of meditation, I will tell you that they are VERY similar and the ancient traditions of buddhism and yoga got the nature of the mind and depression more right than any of the shit I learned in university or this kind of research. Meditation WORKS, it just takes practice and discipline. Like brushing teeth, but for the mind. If you dont do it, you will get plaque and your mind will rot. A drug may help pull a person out of the depression temporarily, which is definitely useful in times when a person can't break out of the loop and is immobilized with despair, but to reduce the whole thing down to this chemical or that chemical will only continue to find chemical solutions, which are never ideal.

<comment><USER8> very insightful post, thanks for sharing your thoughts. I think I'll give meditation a go

<comment><USER7> The best piece of advice I can give you is to do whatever you can to make, and keep, it as a daily habit. It is far better to do 5-10 minutes every morning than half an hour once a week. If you want any good resources, I've got a great list of books to choose from, but whatever method you just make sure you stick to it regularly. Think of it like brushing your teeth, brushing 3 times as long every 3 days doesn't work as well as brushing a shorter amount of time every day.

<comment><USER8> thanks for the advice. I'd appreciate a couple links to recommended books, as would other people here reading this. My techniques are very basic and uninspired currently, so I'd like to change that. Take care!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Two quotes from the article:

1\. "Eight showed improvements in reported levels of depression, with four of them improving so much they were no longer classed as depressed. Some responded within six hours of the first infusion of ketamine."

2\. "Lead researcher Dr Rupert McShane said: 'It really is dramatic for some people, it's the sort of thing really that _makes it worth doing psychiatry_ , it's a really wonderful thing to see.'" [emphasis added]

Wait ... what? Saying, "Take this pill and you'll feel better" isn't how psychiatry is (or was) defined. That isn't psychiatry, it's pharmacology.

Also, none of the treatments, the old ones like talk therapy, or the new ones including drugs and/or deep-brain stimulation, suggest or identify a cause for depression. So far we've only been treating the symptoms of a disease whose cause we don't know.

I long for the good old days, the days of science, when we identified the cause of a disease, then designed a cure based on our understanding of its cause.

This isn't a cure, it's a symptomatic treatment, and to remain effective it would have to continue forever, reliant on a drug whose mechanism is as unknown as the thing being treated, just as with ADHD and PTSD. I'm sure Big Pharma is very upset that another perpetual market for drugs is opening up.

<comment><USER10> The "good old days" of psychiatry were a far cry from "the days of science."

<comment><USER9> Yes -- as true now as it was then. But moving away from talk therapy toward symptomatic drug treatment moves neither toward nor away from science.

Also, by "the good old days" I was referring to the medical practice of first identifying a disease's cause, then designing a cure. Most mental illnesses don't have this property, which open them up to exploitation by Big Pharma.

<comment><USER11> Of course scientists are trying to identify the underlying causes of mental illnesses. They're even making a lot of progress, but the brain is just unbelievably complex.

In the meantime, treatments are found by trial and error. Testing whether a drug treats a disease's symptoms can be scientific even if you don't know how the drug actually works.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Many people at bluelight.ru have blogged extensively about their experiences using ketamine to treat bipolar depression and major depression. The general consensus seems to be that using doses low enough to not feel any effect with very frequent dosing (every hour or so over the course of a few days) seems to have the strongest effects. I have tried both this route and the more traditional k-hole route to self-treat treatment resistant depression but haven't noticed much of an effect with either route in the long term. In the short term, I rather enjoy the psychedelic experience of ketamine trips. It is a rather "more-ish" drug though, because it is both short-lasting and hits dopamine so I urge people to experiment responsibility (ie; lay out the ketamine you are going to do, put the rest away, and don't touch it no matter how much you think one more line will be useful/fun)

</comment><comment><USER13> The test was only done on 28 people and only 8 showed some improvements. The Improvements where self reported. What I wonder is the statistical error on such a small study. From this small study they are generalising to say that it is "exciting" and "dramatic"!

<comment><USER14> Usually a small study like this is done as a test of safety and potential benefit as a precursor to a larger more comprehensive study. I think its exciting and dramatic that there were enough initial positive results to move on to a better study.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> "It shows that depression is something chemical, that it can be reversed with chemicals, it dispenses for once and for all that you can just pull your socks up."

This is entirely an assumption, and shows nothing conclusively. Just as an experience can trigger a depression (see @JPKab) an experience can cause it to end. There's no reason to look at a human being as a walking slab of meat for the sake of analysis.

This says nothing about "chemicals", and I'll bet you can find many of the same benefits are attained by people who are able to achieve similar experiences using meditation or other techniques.

<comment><USER16> Per the linked article, the particular test subjects had longterm depression and had undergone numerous, unsuccessful, treatments in the past. And, while that quote seems a bit too absolute in stating that "depression is something chemical". They probably should have said something like: depression can be caused by something chemical. And you are correct that for many, maybe even most, people it's probably not chemical in origin, that doesn't mean that it's _never_ chemical.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Mhmm.. funny the article mentions it's an illegal party drug but not that is widely used in veterinary anesthesia.

<comment><USER18> You mean, apart from the bit at the end which says:

      The Home Office is reclassifying ketamine in the UK to be a class B drug, although it is already used in medicine for the treatment of back pain and as an anaesthetic.

<comment><USER19> I think it's also used on infants as well as it is does not effect the respiratory system.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I've had friends experiment with this, and they've reported good effects from taking small doses to help with depression. In small amounts, it isn't as scary of a drug as most people make it sound like. In small doses, its kinda like being tipsy (acts on similar receptors to alcohol), and if you know what you're doing there isn't much of a chance of 'accidentally' going into a K-hole, as its roughly a magnitude of difference between what you need to take for basic effects and a K-hole.

</comment><comment><USER21> Several years ago and for a period of around 5 months I took Ketamine recreationally.

I was taking it nearly everyday and besides the effect of the drug itself, the resulting lifting of depression was very strong. It got to a point where I had feelings of intense love for people and my interactions became very emotionally charged in a positive way.

I also noticed that I had higher levels of clarity and my writing and thinking became clearer. The only explanation I've found is that ketamine reduces the level of kynurenic acid in the brain, something that I've found to have higher levels of.

As I started taking it less depression would start to kick back in 5-7 days. A relatively small dosage (not enough to get back in to a k-hole) would get rid of the depression almost instantly.

But there was a critical downside. After a while I noticed that my ability to do technical work diminished greatly. It made me stupider in many ways. I felt like I did not have access to the portion of my brain in which I could code. On the flipside it seemed to make me smarter socially, or at least give the impression as the increased verbal clarity and feelings of connection to people.

From looking around at other users at the time, I would say the effects of increased clarity were not commonly reported, and the anti-depression effect wasn't really talked about much, yet people got quite addicted to it.

At the end of around 5 months, I stopped taking it completely. I couldn't do it and hold down a technical job.

<comment><USER22> I'm curious: what kind of test did you undergo that let you see how much kynurenic acid you have in your brain?

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> A few points:

This is not just getting high. The antidepressant effects far outlast the brief trippy effects, which is an important reason why science is interested.

Although this is a small sample, this is not the first study of this antidepressant effect, which had been studied since at least 2000 (citation at end). I'd guess this study is probably getting extra attention from the BBC because of it's from a British group of researchers.

This area of research is important both because it's a new mechanism of antidepressant (opening doors to other drugs and a better understanding of depression) and it is faster acting than other antidepressants, which improve mood slowly over weeks. For the suicidal, this wait can be a lifetime.

There's currently a super interesting (to some of us) question about how important the acute trippy effects are to the sustained antidepressant effects. Is this something where we can engineer out the psychedelic components or are these somehow part of the antidepressant mechanism? See for example this paywalled paper from Zatare's group, which correlates what they call 'dissociative' effects with the antidepressant effect [http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165032714...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016503271400055X)

(An early paper on the phenomenon is Berman RM, et al. Antidepressant effects of ketamine in depressed patients. Biol Psychiatry. 2000;47(4):351–354. Paywalled [http://www.biologicalpsychiatryjournal.com/article/S0006-322...](http://www.biologicalpsychiatryjournal.com/article/S0006-3223\(99\)00230-9/abstract) )

</comment><comment><USER24> Lately, I seem to be hearing a lot about drugs of the "psychedelic" variety being used to treat thugs like depression. psilocybin, DMT, MDMA, Ketamine. The thing that jumps out at me is that they sound like / claim to be treatments in the way that antibiotics are rather than in the way painkillers are. IE, you go through treatment and get "cured."

Please correct me if I am wrong but as I understand it most medical treatments for mental illness is of the painkiller variety. It relieves symptoms while taken consistently and patients either stay medicated indefinitely or the illness runs its course while the effects are mitigated by the drug.

Are there any established treatments that we understand well of the antibiotics variety? Mental illnesses that are cured by a course of treatment rather than and indefinitely ongoing one.

<comment><USER25> Psychedelics are certainly not drugs in the antibiotic sense; they don't seek out depression-causing neurons and cure them or anything remotely like that.

Rather, psychedelic drugs offer a means for the user to "get out of their head" for a bit. In the right set and setting, the experience offers an opportunity for intense introspection. "Psychedelics probably work in addiction by making the brain function more chaotically for a period — a bit like shaking up a snow globe — weakening reinforced brain connections and dynamics." It is the experience, not the drug, which causes a fundamental shift in attitude/mindset/worldview, and that is what "cures" the illness.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Very interesting. There have also been recent studies on the effects of anesthesia (Isoflurane in particular) on depression. See:

[http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna...](http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0069809)

I thought the ketamine therapy was especially interesting in that it had good effect with relatively low doses. In the Isoflurane study they would put patients completely under (asleep? What is the technical term for being unconscious under anesthesia?) for about 15 minutes. Makes me wonder about the relation between sleep problems and depression.

<comment><USER27> > Makes me wonder about the relation between sleep problems and depression.

There is fairly strong evidence that sleep deprivation can trigger or exasperate depression [1].

As someone who has had chronic cyclical insomnia since my teens (17 years) in my case it has a massive effect.

When I'm coming out of an insomnia phase the first couple of days where I get a proper nights sleep I feel like I'm on drugs, it's a feeling of well-being and euphoria that is hard to describe, I have limitless energy and I'm enthusiastic about all the things I love to do.

When I'm in the middle of the no-sleep cycle, I struggle to do even basic tasks and anything requiring complete focus is basically ruled out, the world is a grey dreary place, summoning the energy to do anything is a major challenge.

I manage my insomnia without drugs (the problem with sleeping pills in my experience is that while they do make you sleep it's not a high quality sleep and that combined with the lag from the pills means I don't feel any better with them than without) by impeccable sleep hygiene, diet and exercise and the knowledge that eventually the cycle will end.

[1] [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK19961/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK19961/)

<comment><USER9> > There is fairly strong evidence that sleep deprivation can trigger or > exasperate [sic] depression ...

This is one I'm seeing more and more often. The word you were after is "exacerbate". It's my hope that _exasperate_ and _exacerbate_ won't suffer the same fate as _literally_ and _figuratively_ , which now mean the same thing:

[http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/literally](http://www.merriam- webster.com/dictionary/literally)

<comment><USER27> Your pointing out a trivial error that didn't significantly impact the intelligibility of my comment adds absolutely nothing to the conversation except demonstrating that you have superior English skills to mine (which I suspect was entirely the point).

In addition if we are going to be rigourously accurate I will point out that merriam-webster also has exasperate down as "to make more grievous" as an obsolete meaning and since you seem to be concerned about changing the meaning of words over time we should perhaps allow the obsolete usage here.

<comment><USER28> Aw. And to think, you could have just thanked him!

<comment><USER27> As a rule I don't thank pedants I just avoid them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I wonder what the effects of other arylcyclohexylamine compounds have on depression. There is plenty of anecdotal evidence on Bluelight.ru and Erowid.org suggesting that other chemicals of this class can have a positive impact on depression. Of course, there are plenty reports of addiction and negative behavior (mostly with PCP). I know that many people report the legal analogue Methoxetamine (legal in the US; Ketamine is schedule III and the federal analogue act only applies to schedules I and II) has potent antidepressant effects.

</comment><comment><USER30> This is very interesting for the use of ketamine. My wife is currently undergoing a ketamine infusion for RSD/CRPS. RSD/CRPS is a crippling pain disorder, and ketamine infusions are so far the only thing that has given her any relief. Hopefully things like this will help to get ketamine treatments covered by insurance, because it is insane that they are not covered for those suffering RSD/CRPS.

</comment><comment><USER31> Treatment of depression has improved enormously over the last four decades. It's a tough treatment and research problem because depression isn't just one disease at the biological level.

Quoting the full study abstract will probably be helpful to the discussion here.

"Background: Ketamine has a rapid antidepressant effect in treatment-resistant depression (TRD). The effects on cognitive function of multiple ketamine infusions and of concurrent antidepressant medication on response rate and duration are not known. Method: Twenty-eight patients with uni- or bipolar TRD were treated over three weeks with either three or six ketamine infusions (0.5 mg/kg over 40 minutes) in the recovery room of a routine ECT clinic. Post- treatment memory assessments were conducted on day 21 (4–7 days after the final infusion). Patients were followed up for six months where possible, with severity of depression and side effects monitored throughout. Results: Eight (29%) patients responded of whom four remitted. Only three (11%) patients had responded within six hours after a single infusion, but in all responders, the response had developed before the third infusion. The duration of response from the final infusion was variable (median 70, range 25–168 days). Discontinuations included two (7%) because of acute adverse reactions during the infusion and five (18%) because of failure to benefit and increasing anxiety. Ketamine was not associated with memory impairment. The ECT clinic was rated suitable by patients and offered appropriate levels of monitoring. Conclusion: This small, open label naturalistic study shows that up to six low dose ketamine infusions can safely be given within an existing NHS clinical structure to patients who continue their antidepressants. The response rate was comparable to that found in RCTs of single doses of ketamine in antidepressant-free patients but took slightly longer to develop."

The free full text of the article reporting this preliminary finding can be found online.[1] (Hat tip to the participant here who first found the abstract link, which leads to the full-text link.)

Depression is maddeningly difficult to treat because it is quite clear on multiple grounds that not everyone with signs of depression (extremely persistent low mood contrary to the patient's life circumstances) has the same underlying physical or psychological cause of depression. The human mood regulatory system is a SYSTEM, and as such it can be perturbed by a number of biochemical stressors internal to the patient, and also by a number of outside-the-patient environmental stressors (including sleep disturbance, already mentioned in this thread, and the use or abuse of various druggs). Not all patients have the same biological substrate to their depression, so not all patients will respond to the same treatment. To date, the most effective treatment for depression is a both-and of prescribed medication and professionally supervised talk therapy, and there is an active research program on identifying which patients respond to which medicines and to which kinds of talk therapy.[2]

In any research program on treatment of human subjects, the studies have to start with small numbers of subjects to verify safety of the treatment, and then gradually increase the number of subjects and add in double-blind protocols to verify both safety and effectiveness. (The study reported here is "open label," not double-blind.) New treatments are usually tested first on patients who don't respond to current treatments, as in the research reported here. It will be a long time before we know how helpful ketamine is compared to other treatments for depression, but that will be an ongoing program of research, and so far it looks somewhat promising.

[1] [http://jop.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/03/17/026988111452...](http://jop.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/03/17/0269881114527361.full.pdf+html)

[2] [http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.psych.1...](http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.psych.121208.131653?prevSearch=depression&searchHistoryKey=)

</comment><comment><USER32> I am not sure why they linked to sagepub but not the actual article. The full text journal article is available: [http://jop.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/03/17/026988111452...](http://jop.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/03/17/0269881114527361.abstract)

<comment><USER33> It was a lot of work to get BBC to link even that much. I would suggest a polite note thanking them for the link, and suggesting how to make it even more helpful :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> THE WHITE ROOM, Trancentral, Thursday (NTNME) — The illegal party drug ketamine is an "exciting" and "dramatic" new treatment for depression, say doctors who waited about two decades too long before conducting the first trials in the UK.

The single small study has attracted due caution from evidence-based medicine experts, since 80% of single studies turn out to be in error. However, middle- aged doctors and researchers who feel they didn't get out enough in their youth are clamouring to do multiple large-scale replications of the study, probably this weekend.

The findings open up whole new avenues of research. "It's the sort of thing really that makes it worth doing psychiatry," said lead researcher Dr Rupert McShane, or, as he now calls himself, DJ Rupe McK-Hole. "Can we get back into trials on LSD yet? I understand there's also considerable clinical possibilities for the therapeutic qualities of sequences of repetitive beats, MDMA and the possibility of shagging cute raver chicks like the ones I remember."

The duration of the effect is still a problem. "We'll have to make sure we repeat the trials next weekend and the weekend after as well. For science and verifiability."

</comment><comment><USER34> I remember reading about this in a New scientist issue over 8 years ago. It's a shame that it's taken this long for newsworthy studies to be done on it.

</comment><comment><USER35> ketamine

</comment><comment><USER36> > Some patients who have faced incurable depression for decades have had > symptoms disappear within hours of taking low doses of the drug.

So in other words they are getting high.

<comment><USER37> Yes, they are getting "high". I'm not sure what your point is however.

I've never understood the stigma associated with all mind-altering drugs, regardless the relative 'safety' of certain drugs in comparison to legal, and far more dangerous alternatives (nicotine and alcohol).

<comment><USER9> > I've never understood the stigma associated with all mind-altering drugs ...

One objection that comes immediately to mind is that it may divert from a search for the actual cause of depression. Remember that this treatment, like all depression treatments, is symptomatic. It doesn't either identify or treat the underlying condition, only its symptoms.

<comment><USER38> > One objection that comes immediately to mind is that it may divert from a > search for the actual cause of depression.

That's an insane objection, because understanding of how different depressions (depression isn't one thing, its just a set of symptoms) respond to different treatments is one method of determining the causes.

Linking observed symptoms to environmental factors (both those that precede the symptoms, those that occur with the symptoms, and those that cause changes to the symptoms) is a fairly essential part of the normal scientific method of determining the mechanism behind the symptoms.

That it also helps people in the here and now is a not insignificant side benefit, of course.

<comment><USER9> >> One objection that comes immediately to mind is that it may divert from a search for the actual cause of depression.

> That's an insane objection ...

Actually, it's called "science". Science isn't about descriptions, it's about explanations. If we knew why ketamine worked, we would have finally crossed the threshold of science.

Without science, we will continue to see one "breakthrough" after another, each lasting a few months, to eventually be discarded as its questionable statistical basis comes to light.

> Linking observed symptoms to environmental factors (both those that precede > the symptoms, those that occur with the symptoms, and those that cause > changes to the symptoms) is a fairly essential part of the normal scientific > method of determining the mechanism behind the symptoms.

That can only be a preliminary to science. Science is not about "links", it is about testable, falsifiable _explanations_ for those links. Without an effort to explain "links", any correlation becomes science. But that's not how science works.

> That it also helps people in the here and now is a not insignificant side > benefit, of course.

But that has no value at all, in fact it's an obstacle to understanding. And it explains the many drugs presently available that are either known to be ineffective or that have adverse effects -- all of them gained a foothold by a study like this one, a questionable study, over-reliant on self-reporting.

<comment><USER39> > Actually, it's called "science". Science isn't about descriptions, it's > about explanations. If we knew why ketamine worked, we would have finally > crossed the threshold of science.

Actually, science is mostly observation and description. Sometimes the descriptions can lead to theories, but only after peer-majority agrees the theory adequately describes enough observed cases to be trusted for prediction. Most of the seemingly immutable parts of science are in fact maths.

And maths is mostly description of observation...

<comment><USER9> > Actually, science is mostly observation and description.

That's not science, that is a preliminary to science. If this were not so, astrologers -- who do lots of observing and describing -- would be scientists.

<comment><USER40> If you think observation is "preliminary" to science, then you fundamentally misunderstand the scientific method.

The reason Astrologers are not scientists is not that they don't try to work out why the positions of planets might affect the future.

The reason they are not scientists is that they don't _observe_ the world to see if they actually do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Well, on a drug where you've forgotten the difference between up and down and are now convinced you're able to walk through solid objects, I'm pretty sure you'd forget about being depressed...

<comment><USER42> I don't know why you are being downvoted. My understanding is that yes, that's more or less how it works. Speaking from experience, whatever it is you are obsessing about, a ketamine trip makes you forget about it for about an hour. I think the main feeling you get when coming down from the trip is that you were just shown a world where your obsession doesn't make any sense, and it's a very good time to question your obsessions.

<comment><USER43> > I don't know why you are being downvoted.

He's being downvoted for making a moronic criticism: what the person feels under the influence of ketamine is obviously irrelevant, of no value for treating depression, this would be just as obvious to the researchers as to him, and so they couldn't possibly have meant that, and indeed, the _second sentence_ of the article says benefits last well beyond the immediate influence.

<comment><USER41> You're an idiot, I wasn't making a moronic criticism, I happen to be 100% anti-drug prohibition, but yet again on Hacker News, I've been massively down- voted and insulted for making a joke.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How to grow my social app at the beginning? - <AUTHOR>

I have an app that lets you share rate and comment anonymous photos: [redacted]. What would be the best strategy to increase my user database without paying for that ? I know, it s a pretty large question but anyway, is there some "keys" or "basics" to accomplish this ? <comment><USER2> Fake it! Fake it so when real users come on, they see lots of content and have a good exp

<comment><AUTHOR> Ok but i was wondering how to get 3 users from 1 user for exemple.</comment></comment>


What is Modern Perl - <AUTHOR> http://www.josetteorama.com/perl/what-is-modern-perl/http://www.josetteorama.com/perl/what-is-modern-perl/ <comment><USER2> I'm torn between thinking there is value in learning some Perl and not really knowing that value might be.

I've found a lot of embedded wisdom in the "old school" stack. If you edit in vi, add some sed / awk / grep, and learn some bash, you'll find these tools start to come together and leverage one another up substantially. Perl might be more post-Bell Labs but it still was written and used by smart people to Get Stuff Done. It stands to reason that there are large returns on learning it.

But it isn't as approachable as Python. When I needed a glue language, I first looked at "Learning Perl" -- after a few days I concluded that, if this was The Path, then I would never get There. Python was much more approachable, and my code already gathers so many hacks that I'm glad my language forces me to make these at least somewhat intelligible.

I would learn Perl faster now. But for what? I've learned some PHP to meet client demand, and for web development the next language would be RoR. I bet Perl is better than bash for various sysadmin and utility tasks, but bash feels good enough for the simple stuff I do. If I needed to do something really beyond bash I'd turn to Python, and I'm not sure why Perl would be better. I suspect there's a lot of general knowledge embedded in Perl but I'm not sure how that gets extracted and made current among today's toolset for the tasks I have.

So to my mind, Perl is something of a sysadmin tool, better than bash and very useful for a workload focussed on system and file processing, on *nix, without much service to HTTP. I'd love to hear how it pays returns for people more focussed on back-end support of web development.

<comment><USER3> >>But it isn't as approachable as Python.

Minimalism, is both an advantage and a curse. You may be able to learn python quickly, and that is because the syntax and semantics are designed with a goal to do that. But unfortunately that is not the only problem programmers have, Learning how to program is problem only for first few weeks of your programming career, there after its hardly a problem. Beyond that verbosity becomes a curse, once you begin to understand what 10's of lines of code do, you wonder why you even need 10's of lines of code when something can be expressed more elegantly.

In my experience people complain about learning Perl for the same reasons why they don't get awk/sed/tr and other text processing utilities. Tools like that are a little difficult to start with, but offer tremendous advantages. Skip learning them, and suddenly you put yourself in a situation where you start your eclipse and write Java programs for every small bit of text processing task. That sucks up your time, effort and code forever. So its better to learn tools that are better designed to solve such problems.

>>and I'm not sure why Perl would be better.

Perl and Python are both excellent languages, so you find a range of problems that can be solved in both languages well. But try solving problems that Perl was specifically designed to solve, Pick up the book Higher Order Perl by Mark Jason Dominus(Its Free) and see for yourself how Perl helps you solve a certain kind of problems. I'm sure its the same case with Python too! Its good for academia, as its easy psuedocode.

Problems that can be solved in both Python and Perl can obviously be solved in any of them.

>>So to my mind, Perl is something of a sysadmin tool, better than bash and very useful for a workload focussed on system and file processing, on *nix, without much service to HTTP. I'd love to hear how it pays returns for people more focussed on back-end support of web development.

You have just described a very small subset of problems Perl can solve. Perl is used for developing very large application in nearly almost every industry.

Web programming != Entire Programming world.

Much of the software world never writes a web page. And they do programming too. But like us they don't tweet/Facebook/blog every time they finish writing a class.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What is modern Perl? Python. (I'll elaborate more here from my earlier one- word answer).

Long-time perl programmer here, until I found Python. Perl is powerful, but Perl is for the programmer, not the programmer's coworkers. It's not even for the programmer 6 months down the line. This is nothing new, and it has become a stereotype in the community.

Yes, this argument has been made and refuted many times, but I argue the reason isn't the language, but the dominant language paradigms.

Perl's "monk" ideal is not sustainable in the long term, and encourages "clever hackers" who can do things with the fewest lines of fundamentally unreadable code. Yes, the language has evolved. Yes, it is slightly easier to read now. But the goals of the community still tend toward the ideals of becoming a master of arcana who can pass his wisdom down to the less experienced.

Give me a language that the commoners can read, that a beginning programmer can feel empowered to learn because he can take one look at the source code of someone truly experienced and know at least a part of what is going on.

You can change Perl all you want, but you cannot get away from the fundamental guiding principles of the language, which encourage antisocial, clever, and magic code.

<comment><USER5>
        > What is modern Perl? Python.

Ah, 'fraid not.

I am also a Perl to Python refugee. For most applications I get far more enjoyment out of Python. But try implementing Higher Order Perl in Python and you won't get past Chapter 1 without some weirdness. Using decorators, lambda, map, reduce, itertools, even generators all feel like bending over backwards to achieve what comes naturally in Perl.

This isn't an attack on Python. I'm just saying, Python is not meant for functional programming any more than Perl excels at OO, and that's why I disagree with your thesis.

<comment><USER6> >>any more than Perl excels at OO

Check Moose and related on CPAN, modern Perl has probably the best OO among the usual scripting languages (Python, PHP, Ruby, etc).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I actually own the domain modernperl,net, for trollish reasons actually (www.modernperl.net redirects to Ruby) but if anyone wants it / wants to do something useful with it. I'd be happy to transfer it to you for free.

<comment><USER8> I think you might want to contact chromatic so this domain could be setup to redirect to his <http://modernperlbooks.com/mt/index.html>

He gives away his ebook for free, so I guess giving him free domain might be very good for your karma :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I started using Perl around 2006'ish, that was pretty late in the day compared to most Perl hackers. I was primarily a C/C++ Dev, going the OO way. And I was doing Java here and there.

Until one morning a colleague of mine, saw me doing some stuff I was taking really long to finish. He just walked up to my cubicle and just said 'Why dont you use Perl to do this' and then started my crazy journey with Perl. What I really like about languages like Perl/Python and Ruby is how quickly you can go from learning to building something really useful.

Perl has seen atleast 3 major rise in its popularity since its inception. First one among sysadmins, its from these days that you will powerful terse, small but elegant solutions to a range of problems. If you ever get a chance, do browse and read essays from Tom christiansen written during those times. They are just pure gem. The second was during Perl/CGI days. And third was the most recent with the Modern Perl movement. Much of the thanks for this goes to People like Chromatic, Audrey, People of p5p, Moose devs and etc. From each of those times, you will see varying variety of code written. Starting from really amazing one liners to at times some frustrating code during the dot com bubble, to now where Perl code really looks very nice.

Modern Perl really is set of many successful sub projects. And its not just code, it covers everything. Code is just the beginning. To give you an example, these days you have very nice cpan package managers. You can search packages using Metacpan in a very user friendly GUI with nice syntax highlighting. You have awesome documentation, Modern Perl book really is the Perl's equivalent of the K&R book. There is Moose, And there are things like Class::MOP. There are things like DBIx::Class.

In terms of other new breath taking stuff you will see things like Devel::Declare. This allows new syntax extensions to be written using Perl itself. Then as a result you have a range of modules like Moosex::<extensions>,Try::Catch, Gather::Take etc.

In terms of web frameworks your have Catalyst.

So its really these many many successful subprojects together which form 'Modern Perl', if you wish to describe it that way. Its no one thing. Code, documentation, culture, events, infrastructure etc etc all together form the 'Modern Perl' thing.

If you come to the Perl core development, then they have real good time based releases. They are fixing bugs, adding new features, and doing a lot of amazing stuff. There have been pretty neat syntax features added in the past few releases and I guess much of Perl 6 based features will continually seep into Perl 5 as needed over time.

Modern Perl, or other wise. Perl continues to retain its niche. Which is text heavy lifting, automation, rapid prototyping, development, a deep learing curve and larger gains in productivity with time. Its still the go-to tool for most back end tasks. If you wish to get something done faster, with little effort, sanely with little bugs in say over a weekend, You have little alternatives apart from Perl. If you are in dev ops and you have P1 tickets standing on your head pretty often, a tool like Perl is indispensible.

And most importantly its areas of strengths are only growing- Unicode, regular expressions, CPAN, powerful syntax etc. If you ever get a chance Higher Order Perl is one book you must read. It really opens your mind to elegant solution to a range of problems.

But like every other language, you need to invest time and effort incrementally to keep yourself updated.

<comment><USER9> I started in 2003 or so, and got into it more seriously because I ended up with customers to support using Perl software. Perl is an amazing language, and with many modern perl approaches, it's wonderful.

This being said like most frameworks it is extremely important to know when to leave the framework or leave things out. While I LOVE working with Moose, my own projects are very heavily stored procedure centric and therefore an ORM like DBIx::Class really does me very little good. DBIx::Class by all reports is an excellent ORM but it's still an ORM. ;-)

There is no better glue language I have ever encountered than Perl We use it in LedgerSMB to glue together stored procedures, web templates (in Template Toolkit), and the web server interfaces. It's a wonderful language and I can't recommend it highly enough.

As for Perl 6, it has joined HURD 1.0 as one of those projects that will be released when pigs fly. I suspect that Perl 5.x will be as far as Perl gets.

<comment><USER10> David Wheeler (theory) started working on a stored procedure centric project a while back and as a result extracted the DBIx::Class connection logic into DBIx::Connector - which I have a feeling you're already using.

I spent a fair amount of time hanging out in #ledgersmb a while back and in spite of being the project founder of DBIx::Class, I don't think I ever felt I had a convincing argument for using it, so honestly I'm glad you're not doing so (if I ever come up with an O<sproc>M or something I'm sure you'll find out :)

<comment><USER9> Glad to see you again.

Actually some of your recommendations are pending getting rid of old code (we simply can't move everything to PSGI when we have the mixture of old and new code we have, so it's CGI only for now still). However we are giving hard thought as to the best way to do so and I expect that as we continue that process things will become more PSGI friendly until it is just a matter of changing one sub somewhere.

I should note you have convinced Josh Drake on the merits of DBIx::Class for other projects though.

Finally I think it is worth noting that I think that in the 1.4 tree we've come out (I hope) of the contageous effect of the bad SL code, and so the coding styles which evolved so much during LSMB 1.3 are being formalized and moved to Moose in 1.4.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I started picking up Perl (as my first programming language) in 2003 while working in a genetics lab. I used it for years on a number of bioinformatics projects due to its strengths in tackling disparate sources of often irregular information. Recently I've been using it for the Kaggle Facebook competition simply because I can iterate my designs faster than in any other language. I'm looking forward to learning a few of these more newfangled modern appurtenances of Perl.

</comment><comment><USER12> I really wanted to see what Modern Perl looks like.

<comment><USER13> Have a look at <http://onyxneon.com/books/modern_perl/> This is from the author of the book, there's a nice pdf preview there to show the book off and a way to buy it.

<comment><USER14> Preview is a slight understatement, it's the full book as both pdf and epub.

It is a bit of a marketing term, though. Not many of the "modern" features are really new to Perl, but basically rather common modules. In the case of Moose, they do change the language use significantly, but mostly it's about showing that Perl can be used beyond small, one-file Unix scripts. And it's been able to do that for quite a while, the Perl 4 days are long gone.

Still, getting some new-found traction is important, and popularizing some great CPAN modules definitely won't hurt.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> In perl culture, "Modern Perl" refers to bad programming by a core group of egocentric, sanctimonious developers who are to Perl what Lennart Poettering is to Linux.

There are now dozens of CPAN modules with names like "common::sense" and "Modern::Perl" that provide no useful code, but introduce packaging dependencies and administrative overhead in the name of not having to type "use strict;" out by hand.

Modern Perl is using Moose::Any instead of just using a language that does what you want. Modern Perl involves an average of 130 CPAN dependencies for any give application.

Modern Perl is when perl stopped being perl and started being awful.

<comment><USER16> I actually despise Moose as much as I despise blindly over-doing OO. To me Modern Perl meant tackling problems in a much more Lisp-inspired way (via lexical scoping, anonymous functions, closures, lists, etc) ... but in Perl. Kind of like "Higher Order Perl."

I had the impression it was more a cultural shift, a renewed interest in Perl and people wielding it much differently. There's a different CPAN web interface[1], a lighter cli client[2], and everyone is on GitHub and writing hundreds of tests. I guess Moose is part of that shift but I'm torn a lot of the time - I support modern Perl but I hesitate to support blindly copying the warts from other languages just to appear modern.

This[3] is a result of searching for common::sense ... yikes.

[1]: <http://metacpan.org> [2]: <https://metacpan.org/module/App::cpanminus> [3]: <https://metacpan.org/module/Real::Handy>

<comment><USER17> Personally, I think Moose' value to the community is much larger than that it just provides good OO.

It pushed a much more declarative approach than usual, that swaps over to other projects (Moo, Mo, even Class::Accessor supports has declarations now). It has a community that is focused on best practices with regards to OO. It put introspection more in the spotlight (like the idea of getting Getopt definitions by introspecting classes).

It is also flexible, which allows for lots of extensions to its functionality. That means a lot of concepts are tried out on CPAN already. Even if someone doesn't use Moose, there is lots of OO knowledge to be found in the ecosystem. Same goes for runtime type constraints/coercions.

Then there's the p5-mop project, that would provide a common core, so many of the things above could find themselves in a much more light-weight and broadly usable variety, with side-effects like less heavy anonymous packages.

Personally, while I'm very excited about where Perl 5 has come so far, I'm even more excited by the things we haven't thought of yet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Writing a book on Modern Perl is nuts.

As the author of this post points out, there have been about twenty releases since Perl 5.6, when the book was published. Features like the "switch" and "state" keywords have been introduced. If you look away too quickly, another database interface crops up, or people are doing objects differently. Perl changes so often that writing about it is like trapping a unicorn.

It's impressive that users of a 25-year-old language are not afraid to improve upon it (with the caveat that it stays backwards compatible). But since I started using $OTHER_LANGUAGE I don't have to worry about keeping up to date because language features change twice a decade.

<comment><USER19> That's a terrible straw man. Everything changes. Javascript is morphing into this weird "Coffee" thing before our eyes. Python pushed a completely new language and is currently supporting two of them. Even python 2.6 looks absolutely nothing like 2.0. People fled whole-hog from perl and python to ruby (another hardly static language) a few years ago, and most of those same people are now retraining their brains on that JavaCoffee thing I mentioned.

C++? Yeah, brand new version out with whole new metaphors (An... rvalue reference?! And what is that -> operator doing there?).

If you want compatibility, you have it. 15 year old perl scripts run fine on 5.14. If you want the community to not invent new stuff... dig yourself a hole I guess.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Python!

Sorry couldn't resist.</comment>


Ask HN: Should I minor in computer science, or work more on side projects? - <AUTHOR>

It's time to pick classes for next semester, and I'm still not exactly sure what to do. I am going for a double major in Physics and Economics, the Elon Musk route (still not sure if I plan on going the full 4 years), and I have thought about also going for a minor in computer science or maybe something else. If I minored in CS or something, I would want to start down that road now, rather than later. I'm already pretty experienced with programming and computers. I know PHP, Javascript, HTML, and learning Python at the moment. I don't know these extremely well, but I can do anything fairly easily with them if I use Google (by the way, does this count as knowing the language well?)
I always have some sort of side project going, and have tons of ideas floating around in my head that I want to build (not necessarily involving computers). If I minored in CS or something, I would have less time to work on side projects because of increased workload.
Is minoring in CS (or something else you suggest) worth it in this situation? Will I learn anything, and does it mean anything when applying for a job at a startup/other company, especially if I tell them I learned how to program decently on my own?
Thanks! <comment><USER2> Yes. Get the CS minor. It means something to a lot of employers, so is worth it for that alone, and you'll probably pick up algorithmic techniques that you might not have thought about.

There will be plenty of time for side projects afterwards. (And I'll bet you'll still find some time to build stuff.)

<comment><AUTHOR> What if I don't want to be an engineer? Does that change anything? But thanks for the advice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'd agree w/ @benwerd, I think that an understanding of CS is a helpful background in understanding computing. Think of it as an equivalent of taking US History before practicing law.

Although I barely use much of the low level coding that I learned, I find that a deeper understanding is invaluable.

<comment><AUTHOR> What if I'm probably not going to be an engineer? Like I'm more interested in the logistics and theory of things.

<comment><USER3> Engineers respect people who _get_ engineering. Also, whatever role you are, if you have to decide on planning/prioritization it's helpful to have an understanding if people are bs'ing on time estimates.

You can't really understand the complexity of a feature or shift in direction without the computing background.</comment></comment></comment>


Think Before You Voicemail - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/05/think-before-you-voicemail/ <comment><USER2> Agreed, entirely. The big problem with voicemail as a medium is that it takes so long to read. Not to mention lack of indexability, near-impossibility of seeking accurately...

...So remind me, again, why we're getting so excited about video comments on blogs, or sending audio clips instead of emails? It's like, after a few years with a high-productivity medium (rapidly-delivered text), some people have just completely un-learned so much of what it taught us.

</comment><comment><USER3> So true, I worked in telecom industry on the voice mail servers and the irony was that I never used the services that developed. From my point of view the biggest problem with voice interface - it's too heavy, it takes too much time to navigate all these voice menu's listen to the message from start and the inability to filter and manipulate the information. Voicemail is dead. At least in the form that we have now.

</comment><comment><USER4> E-mail is not reliable enough to be a one-stop medium (as an alternative to voicemail - as highlighted in the post). I love e-mail as a medium, but I never know for certain (or even with just an 80% probability) whether a message I send will get through. Thanks to spam, many bounce / "message undelivered" type messages are never sent back, and mails disappear into the ether.

At least the phone / voicemail are reasonably guaranteed. Voicemails stay where they should and phone calls are instantly verifiable. E-mails are not, and you cannot /entirely/ rely on them at any point.

E-mail as a conceptual medium is great, but its delivery mechanism sucks for anyone who needs reliable communications with the rest of the world.

</comment><comment><USER5> Exactly! When I moved to US in 98 I was shocked at how popular voice mail was and it was annoying even then. Yep, voicemail and faxes - two things from common everyday US technologies I could never grasp.

<comment><USER6> The world is just waiting for Fax-to-Voicemail.

Just play the faxmail recording into your fax machine to get a convenient printout of the message!

Like an email you can skim read the text, like a phonecall you can be sure it arrived. The best of both worlds!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The iphone has solved this problem for me - at least for incoming messages. I would like a transcription too.

As these tools become more common, it will become easier to receive the information. That means Arrington is essentially wrong: you can continue to use voicemail and people will be more likely to get the message as time goes on. That isn't 'dead'. 'Comatose' might have been a better choice of words.

<comment><AUTHOR> An interesting startup in the market of voice message transcription to text is PhoneTag (<http://www.phonetag.com/>) which was formerly Simulscribe.</comment></comment>