Prime number patterns - <AUTHOR> http://www.jasondavies.com/primos/ <comment><USER6> Very, very lovely. You might (or might not) also be familiar with the Ulam Spiral[1] or the arguably more beautiful Sacks Spiral[2], which do reveal certain patterns in the distribution of the primes.

I used the software from this site[3] to generate a large Sacks spiral graphic, which I had custom-printed on my shower curtain. To most folks who see it, it's just some pattern of dots, but knowing the order within gives me great joy.

[1] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulam_spiral>

[2] <http://www.numberspiral.com>

[3] <http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~jhw/spirals/index.html>

<comment><USER7>
      which do reveal certain patterns

Perceived patterns. If an actual pattern was known, you could generate prime numbers from the pattern. No such pattern is known to exist.

<comment><USER8> There are TONS of patterns in the primes.

<comment><USER7> Name me a pattern that, from the primes below 100, can be used to extrapolate, with certainty, the first prime above 100.

<comment><USER8> That's an awfully restrictive definition of "pattern." For what it's worth, I'd say that more mathematics has been devoted to the study of patterns in the primes than to any other single topic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'd like to add tone generation so you could hear the various harmonics being added and removed as you worked up through the numbers, occasionally hitting a pure sine wave as you hit a prime number.

</comment><comment><USER10> Two things that were non-obvious to me but made me extremely happy when they worked: panning and zooming.

<comment><USER11> That is a very nice touch. Good catch.

It does seem to break a bit if you resize the browser after the initial render. A refresh will fix it though.

<comment><USER12> Thanks, it should handle resizing better now.

<comment><USER13> Slightly off-topic but how did you find out your site was submitted on HN?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Its beautiful. It has an interesting formation of an infinite coaxial cones. with semi vertical angles arctan(1/3), arctan(1/5), ... arctan(1/(2n-1))... (The even numbers slopes form the progression of circles on the top). Although that doesn't give the pattern of the primes, it is formed because every number has a multiple for each natural number.

</comment><comment><USER15> Interesting - exact same submission - exact same URL - submitted 12 days ago:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4202198>

1 upvote, no discussion.

<comment><USER16> But the title was much less descriptive.

<comment><USER15> Agreed, but if you use a descriptive title it's likely to get changed by the mods to something less useful, simply because that's what's on the article.

Indeed, this title shouldn't be allowed to stand, it should be changed to the title on the page itself, based on moderators' recent behavior.

 _Added in edit: Oh look - downvotes for pointing out that the current HN system of finding interesting items occasionally fails._

<comment><USER17> Indeed the title did not stand. The title was recently changed, just as you asserted it "should" be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I find this app to be quite interesting, actually. Even though it's really more a visualization of compositeness rather than of primality per se.

<comment><USER18> Yeah, it took me a while to sadly realize this visualization tells us nothing useful about primes. otoh, it does tell us a lot about composites. Hover on 29. The pattern is completely useless - you get one wave of period 29, and the other wave of period unity. However, hover on 28. Now you get 6 waves - <USER2> periods 1,2,4,7,14,28 - these being the divisors of 28. The intersection of these 6 waves produces those interesting floral patterns. But obviously, this whole experiment tells us much more about 28, a composite, than 29 the prime.

<comment><USER16> That's just the thing. Does _anyone_ understand the primes, really?

We know a lot about number fields, multiplication and sieving... but the primes themselves (the "holes" left in the wake of the sieving process) are something of an epiphenomenon to all of this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I hadn't realised this before making it, but one interesting pattern is that the number in between twin primes is always abundant, if greater than 6.

It's reasonably simple to prove using the fact that every twin prime pair except (3, 5) is of the form (6n − 1, 6n + 1).

<comment><USER19> Adding the fact that: perfect(x) -> abundant(nx) | n>=2

gives a proof why.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I didn't know that the Sieve of eratosthenes could look this good!

</comment><comment><USER21> It's interesting that the curve on the left passes through zero rather than one.

I've always been inclined to think 1 _x = x, and think of one as fundamental. But the pattern shows that rather than 1_ x being fundamental, rather there is the issue of x exists or x doesn't exist. x doesn't exist => 0\. I wonder if 1*x = x is really a distraction away from a better type of thinking around existence.

Also, I've always been wary of the part of the rule that says that 1 is not a prime number. Why is that?.

<comment><USER22> 1\. By definition

2\. Because the math works out better

If it turns out that things that depend on prime numbers work in all cases except for 1, you might as well define 1 not to be a prime number.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_number#Primality_of_one>

<comment><USER21> "By definition" is a poor justification. I almost referenced the exact link you've given here. It gives poor justification for primality of one - <USER3> on authority and lacking justification. The closest it comes (not very) is, "If 1 were admitted as a prime, these two presentations would be considered different factorizations of 15 into prime numbers, so the statement of that theorem would have to be modified." So what?

<comment><USER23> "The closest it comes (not very) is, "If 1 were admitted as a prime, these two presentations would be considered different factorizations of 15 into prime numbers, so the statement of that theorem would have to be modified." So what?"

Many proofs depend on the unique factorization of primes, many directly and many many more indirectly. It is a trivial mechanical modification to them to deal with the non-uniqueness of a prime factorization if you admit 1 as a prime number by explicitly taking that case and saying it doesn't affect this case. So in that sense, no, it's not important.

Except... you've now taken numerous proofs and made them longer... and for what? There's no didactic advantage. There's no proof that is made easier by letting 1 be prime. What's the advantage of adding all these special cases? None.

And that's the real reason. In the end, "by definition" is the _only_ justification, and the reason we choose the definition is that it works the best. Unlike 0 to the power of 0 where there's at least a bit of argument to be had (though the overwhelming preponderance is for it to be 1), there's no reason to put 1 in the set of prime numbers. Even if you don't personally consider it a "lot" of evidence, it's still entirely one sided.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I think he meant "El Padrón de los Números Primos". Patrón means "boss", not "pattern".

<comment><USER25> It also means pattern. The source page also uses patrón. <http://www.polprimos.com/>

<comment><USER12> Ah, good. The title is meant to be an homage to the original source of the idea.

My Spanish is somewhat rusty so I didn't know it also meant boss. :)

<comment><USER26> What you created is pretty boss.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> This is extremely neat! The visual semi-patterns here are very interesting.

</comment><comment><USER28> 3^n sequence looks like fractal penguins

</comment><comment> guard-of-terra It would look 2x nicer if they removed 0 ~ prime number branches and waves beginning from primes. Much easier to spot, less clutter.

<comment><USER29> If they removed the branches between 0 and primes, and then removed branches beginning from primes, I don't think there would be anything left.

<comment> guard-of-terra They should have removed 0 ~ number sections.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> wow, that is very nice. Does anyone else think they notice that primes are near to highly divisible numbers?

<comment><USER31> I recall a successful 'highest prime' search using a system that checked numbers of the form 2^n - 1 (or something like that)

<comment><USER32> Those are called Mersenne Primes, and are in the form 2^p - 1, where p is a prime number.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I had always liked the number 42. However, I must say n=48 looks a lot nicer.

<comment><USER16> Try touching down some place strongly composite, like 720.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Lets see how the explanation help me to solve ProjectEuler's problems.

</comment><comment><USER35> Simply stunning, many thanks for the link !

</comment><comment><USER36> Cute, though does appear to be limited by browser initialwindow size.

Thing about prime numbers - ask yourself this question: Does the universe operate on base 10!

Endless fun aint they.

<comment><USER29> You can drag the number line to the left. I'm past 1000 and haven't found the highest prime yet.

<comment><USER36> Thank you, yip click - hold down mouse and move it left. Thats my afternoon bumped now lol

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> This doesn't work in IE 8

</comment><comment><USER38> Stop it, stop it, stop it, just stop. Once an article reaches the front page, it's title is no longer editable. It causes confusion and frustration, and is obviously an issue that a lot of people dislike. I don't care about prime numbers, this article was all about the visualization to me. Every time a title gets changed like this, you are telling your user base that you don't care about what they think. I feel like I'm back in Digg, waiting for something like Reddit to pop up so I don't have to deal with the 'power' users.

/rant

<comment><USER39> What are you talking about?

<comment><USER40> He's talking about the inability of Hacker News submissions to retain their title when it differs from the title of the article. This is particularly bothersome when the title of the article is something vague like "Prime number patterns" or "On concepts and realities."

It is against the rules to talk about this problem, though. From the guidelines: "Please don't post on HN to ask or tell us something (e.g. to ask us questions about Y Combinator, or to ask or complain about moderation). If you want to say something to us, please send it to email@example.com."

<comment><USER16> So not that we'll "discuss" it, but is there an article link or a blog post available that explains the perceived rationale behind this most vexatious and utterly inane misfeature?

<comment><USER40> Not really. There is a lot of discussion in the first few results here: [https://www.google.com/search?q=site:news.ycombinator.com+st...](https://www.google.com/search?q=site:news.ycombinator.com+stop+changing+post+titles)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> it can be eye catchy but says really nothing interesting about prime numbers nor their patterns

<comment><USER17> I don't know much about number theory, but I think this visualization probably provides significant intuition as to why number theory, which contains only theorems about integers, uses tons of math that is about a lot more than integers.

 _Edit_ : Why would anyone down-vote this comment. Barbarians at the gates, I tell you!

The only possible explanation is that the down-voters thinks that the relationship between number theory and other kinds of math is so obvious that it needs no further explication to those who are less informed. In which case, this is the pinnacle of arrogance. Or the down-voter believes that there is no such relationship between number theory and other kinds of math, in which case this is the pinnacle of ignorance.

In any case, I personally found the visualization inspiring. I.e., it makes me want to learn some more.

<comment><USER41> this chart basically includes a set of periodic curves, even though it looks nice but what does it tell you about prime numbers ? Intersected by only two curves 1 and itself ??? well, everyone knows this, no need to make a chart.

<comment><USER17> It tells you that prime numbers and periodic curves might be related more than you might have thought at first blush. I.e., if you can mathematically describe and analyze this set of periodic curves, then you have also described and can analyze the prime numbers.

As I mentioned, I don't know much about number theory, but I do know that it uses a lot of math that is counterintuitive at first blush. Perhaps this visualization gives us a clue as to why that is the case.

<comment><USER18> >if you can mathematically describe and analyze this set of periodic curves, then you have also described and can analyze the prime numbers.

Dude, no offense, you are really making stuff up. The periodicity has to to with the divisors of the composites. Every prime p has exactly 2 curves - <USER4> wave of period 1, and the wave of period p. There's nothing interesting or useful to take way from that observation. otoh, you look at a composite c - <USER5> has several divisors & each divisor d generates a curve of period d, and those curves intersect in interesting ways...though I don't see how you could mathematically analyze them to tell you anything about the primes nearby. They are mostly pretty patterns, not mathematically useful...here are 2 quite famous & useful diagrams on periodicity in primes if you are interested in that sort of thing -

1\. the prime number cross - <http://img841.imageshack.us/img841/1329/primenumbercross.gif>

2\. hippocampal neurons & primes - <http://www.hindawi.com/journals/amp/2011/519178/fig8/>

<comment><USER42> > Dude, no offense, you are really making stuff up.

No. Parent has it essentially correct. Many new results in number theory are obtained by studying automorphic forms, which are the stable waveforms, on various spaces.

Things like the Riemann zeta function arise out of spectral transforms of automorphic forms.

<comment><USER17> Thank you. I don't know what's up with the increasing trend around here for people to imply you are an idiot over some nitpick that seems to reveal only that the nitpicker spent no effort to try understanding what you had to say, and would rather berate you for a detail rather than engaging in the gist.

One of the things that can seem almost mystical at times about math to someone who has not studied math heavily, is even just simple things, like how pi and e seem to get into everything, even where you might not naively expect it.

The visualization in the OP shows how to use sine waves to build a sieve of Sieve of Eratosthenes. Now that I've seen the visualization, this revelation seems so utterly obvious that it goes without saying. But somehow, I never drew this connection until seeing the visualization.

And once I see how "obvious" this is, it's suddenly obvious how e and pi might get into _everything_ , because everything that repeats with a specific frequency can be modeled as a wheel rolling along and leaving a mark on every revolution. And what is multiplication, but repeated addition? I.e., a wheel of a certain size rolling down the number line, leaving its mark once per turn. Above a certain age, we tend to stop thinking about multiplication as repeated addition, and so we don't think about how all multiplication is implicitly bringing pi into everything we are doing.

Maybe everything I said above is wrong in some way, since, as I have mentioned, I haven't studied any math past calculus and college algebra, and even that was so long ago, most of it I don't remember. Or maybe what I've said is so obvious to someone who has studied math seriously that they just want to shout, "Duh!" But there must be some way to interpret what I just wrote that doesn't deserve being summarily shot down.

<comment><USER42> You're welcome!

> One of the things that can seem almost mystical at times about math to > someone who has not studied math heavily, is even just simple things, like > how pi and e seem to get into everything, even where you might not naively > expect it.

Yep. Sure blew my mind when I saw a proof of quadratic reciprocity (a very neat result about square numbers in modular arithmetic) which used complex analysis (how on earth can complex numbers prove stuff about modular arithmetic!?)

> Maybe everything I said above is wrong in some way...

Not really. Your intuition upon seeing this visualization was pretty much right on: studying periodic functions is a way of understanding numbers.

> Or maybe what I've said is so obvious to someone who has studied math > seriously that they just want to shout, "Duh!"

Not so much. It took some mighty smart folks to develop some ideas which are perhaps suggested, in hindsight, by this picture. The big one is Fourier series and transforms, which allow you to decompose periodic functions into their constituent sine waves. You can use Fourier analysis to get information about number theory, which was essentially your suggestion. However, that's not at all obvious without seeing this picture. Certainly, my first exposures to Fourier analysis were in the context of signal processing and solving PDEs. I had absolutely no inkling that it may be useful for number theory until actually seeing it. Even if I had seen this picture 7 years ago (when I knew signal processing and PDEs, but not number-theoretic applications), I probably would not have made the connection that you made.

So, I think your intuition was a rather non-obvious idea, and so your comment did not deserve the quick shoot-down. (And even if it were obvious to folks who have studied math, it would still be non-obvious to someone, probably).

<comment><USER17> Thanks again! You restore my faith that it is possible to have a reasonable conversation around here.

This leads me to a question: Do mathematicians actually try to analyze primes by looking at a function that is created by combining a set of sine waves where there is one sine wave for each integer, on order to form a sieve out of the sine waves? E.g., creating a function that crosses zero only at each composite, or some such? Or is this visualization only suggestive of a broad approach?

The paper cited by the visualization is clearly attempting to do what I just described, but it appears to be the work of an amateur, and I don't read Spanish, so I can't really tell if this approach is on sound footing. I tried to Google around looking for this approach referenced in something more authoritative, but couldn't find any. I did find plenty of references to trying to analyze the function that you get from subtracting x/ln(x) from the prime staircase, using Fourier transforms and the like. But I can't see a direct connection between these approaches, other than the general inspiration of trying to break the problem down into a combination of sine waves. On the other hand, I'm well aware that a lot of identities in math are not readily obvious!

<comment><USER42> Oooh... you're getting into some serious math now.

The stable waves on a circle are precisely those waves which oscillate an integer number of times as they traverse. In other words, one for each integer. Further, every function on the circle can be expressed as a sum of the sine waves. That sum is called the spectral decomposition. (This is Fourier series.)

With clever choices of functions, you can get some profound results. For example, picking a saw-tooth wave and doing the spectral decomposition gives the identity

1 + 1/4 + 1/9 + 1/16 + ... = pi^2/6

And, by the way, the left hand side is the zeta function evaluated at 2.

And about functions that are zero at each composite... You may want to check out Dirichlet characters. They are periodic functions which behave nicely under multiplication. Whenever an integer and the period have a common factor, the character will be zero at that integer.

It's not going to be zero at all composites, but it's on the right track.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Police in Germany rescue man being chased by baby squirrel - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/10/driving-me-nuts-german-police-rescue-man-baby-squirrel <comment><USER2> Police should always endeavour to make their phone number feel safe to call for anything. Even if the result is that they refer you elsewhere, without ridicule. Doesn't matter why. If you feel unsafe, that's a _valid_ feeling.

<comment><USER3> _If you feel unsafe, that 's a valid feeling._

I'm not sure I follow the logic here. I can think of a bunch of scenarios when someone might feel unsafe, but that feeling is invalid. Some prescription drugs have random senses of fear as a side-effect, for example.

I don't think that someone's irrational fear should necessarily be a police matter. But then, I'm also glad he decided to call the police rather than act violently against the little critter. If park squirrels had fewer teeth and less rabies, they could be community kittens.

(Do I sound high? Re-reading that last part really sounds high.)

<comment><USER2> I hear you! Its really hard for me to articulate this. I'm not saying the feeling is rational or sensible or productive. But it's a valid state of being. Part of being human is feeling adrenaline and fear when you shut off the lights and race up from your basement. Its not rational but it's valid.

What I'm trying to articulate is that the police should never say, "don't call us for this.". Err on the side of caution. Support everyone.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: SiteProfiler – Get all critical SEO metrics and insights under one roof - <AUTHOR> https://siteprofiler.com/?hn <comment><USER2> Looks good, like the design. I'm going to compare the results with my website's google analytics.</comment>


Show HN: Epic levels of tracking from a website - <AUTHOR> I was looking into alternative mail clients for Windows and came across a site called AddictiveTips [0] and was immediately shown their cookie and spying declaration.
I use UBlock Origin and block all third party cookies and empty my browser when it's closed and I thought I had seen it all with newspapers taking the piss with their trackers but these people are showing an extreme level of contempt for visitors.
If I am to interpret them correctly, they want to save hundreds of cookies on my computer and pass my data to potentially dozens and dozens of third parties, some of which (in fact a fair few) duplicate the efforts of others.
WTH?
[0] - https://www.addictivetips.com/ <comment><USER2> Wow, that is truly ridiculous. I've been a long-time browser of that AddictiveTips, but with uBO and other tools removing the nasties, I'd never noticed just how much _garbage_ that site is serving.

</comment><comment><USER3> How to Set Up Gmail in Outlook [https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/gmail-outlook- settings/](https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/gmail-outlook-settings/)

Import Gmail to Outlook [https://support.office.com/en-us/article/import- gmail-to-out...](https://support.office.com/en-us/article/import-gmail-to- outlook-20fdb8f2-fed8-4b14-baf0-bf04b9c44bf7)

Google Chrome Browser Security by usb [http://www.gbotstudent.com/chrome.html](http://www.gbotstudent.com/chrome.html)

Gmail Use a Security Key for 2-Step Verification [https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/6103523?hl=en](https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/6103523?hl=en)

How To Make your Gmail Account More Secure [http://www.tomsguide.com/faq/id-3704782/make-gmail- account-s...](http://www.tomsguide.com/faq/id-3704782/make-gmail-account- secure.html)

Windows 10 Configuration Tutorial by usb [http://www.gbotstudent.com/win10.html](http://www.gbotstudent.com/win10.html)</comment>


How misbehaving at school made one man a multimillionaire - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/business-32702501 <comment><USER2> HMA was a triumph of marketing and usability over security concerns. They are one of the most law-friendly VPN providers out there (and it couldn't be otherwise, considering they hail from a certain GCHQ-ruled island), but they were great at selling a simple way to avoid boring office-network blocks. I remember using their web proxy to bypass some stupid block on the FreakAngels webcomic (to this day, I still can't understand why anyone would block such innocuous material).

<comment><USER3> Many filters aren't that sophisticated, it might just have been a single word that tripped it up. I remember "hackaday" being blocked at my High School because it was tagged as a "hacking website" by the filter.

<comment><USER4> I remember not being able to look at cryptography websites because they contained the word "hash".

<comment><USER5> I remember the classic example back in the day of Super Bowl XXX content being blocked because it contained XXX. Heard this on the news.

<comment><USER6> I had exactly the same problem with a site I made for a friend's wedding. It included a short message from the bride and groom ending with 'xxx' — i.e. kiss kiss kiss. Vodafone UK (at least) blocked it as porn.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Seems to be a well-deserved example of doing something unoriginal, boring and well-trodden in a no-bullshit, user- friendly way and being rewarded for it.

I think Whatsapp is another great example - afaict the key innovations there were using cell phone numbers as user IDs and running on every platform known to man. Just works. Dropbox and Imgur are two others.

<comment><USER8> Dropbox was unoriginal, boring and well-trodden?

<comment><USER9> I don't know what's the fuss about Dropbox being called boring. It's a backup service, so it's not really an insult, it's just not supposed to be exciting, or fun. It's supposed to work. It wasn't original either, but it worked seamlessly and reliably to the point where you confidently forgot about it. Would you trade that for some backup that didn't work so well, but was, yeay, more exciting? (I don't even know how you add excitement to backups... do you make it a video game? Add videos?)

<comment><USER10> gamification?

Dropbox was gamified, a bit, in my view, in that I had loads of people who'd invite me to dropbox, because they'd get extra storage for getting me to sign up. Maybe it's not real gasification because they didn't get badges?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I had one of those in school, as I'm sure many here did. I just gave my friends access to it for free. What an idiot.

(I remember someone I knew in another school tried to sell logins for his proxy to people for £5 each or something. They hated him for this perceived pettiness and he became even more of a social outcast than before. Pricing psychology is a funny thing.)

So many life lessons learned in the school IT suite!

<comment><USER12> This guy gave it away for free too. He just added affiliate links.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The article mentions that HMA makes/made money via affiliate programs, but also that there were no intrusive ads or popups. Does that mean it would hijack users' normal shopping activity when signed on to HMA by injecting their own affiliate codes to make commissions? I think that kind of behavior would violate most of those commission programs' terms of use.

<comment><USER14> I read it to mean they ran their own affiliate program where affiliates could run links to sign up for HMA services, with commission payouts when traffic converts through those links (signs up for a paid HMA account). Nothing affecting the VPN traffic itself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> _" Within a month HMA had hundreds of thousands of users around the world, and revenues of £15,000 per annum._"

Which means that he would have been losing money like crazy on bandwidth, and yet the article says he had no investors. Obviously the business survived and was successful, but I have an extreme dislike for articles that leave out or misrepresent crucial details either for the sake of simplicity or out of sheer ignorance.

<comment><USER16> I used HMA ~2 years ago. The speeds were throttled, it's entirely possible they saved a lot of money that way. Also, xxx,xxx of users and 15,000/annum? The service was $10/month back then, I'd imagine the number should be way higher for hundreds of thousands of users...

<comment><USER15> The service was free back then.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The name is quite genius, common people don't know or care what a "VPN" is, but if it "hide my ass" on the internet - it sell itself.

<comment><USER18> Wouldn't it get blocked for having "ass" in the name? Slightly ironic choise of name IMO.

<comment><USER16> For what reason? They connect the client's PC to an exit node... they probably also use a different domain name for authentication :-)

<comment><USER18> A URL in with "ass" in the domain will almost certainly be blacklisted on a school network.

When I was at school there was an online amazon like site for electronics called "egghead.co.uk" which was blocked for having "head" in the url!!

<comment><USER17> That's kind of an extreme case right?

Must be hard to study medicine in that school....

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> What happened to "you'd better get a co-founder"?

<comment><USER20> Yeah, it's like he's set up for failure!!! Oh wait

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> It amused me to be reading this article at my school, using my own proxy server because the bbc.co.uk website is blocked!

</comment><comment><USER22> Very surprised by this, I had no idea VPN companies were so widely used.

<comment><USER23> Completely depends on your location/school/work place etc. In Canada, many people use VPNs to access American Netflix, so here, the companies that specialize in that are doing very well. I think the average cost is likely about $5 per month, almost the same cost as Netflix itself.

<comment><USER24> I've found a lot of content on Canadian Netflix that wasn't available from the USA so I do the same thing, but in the opposite direction.

<comment><USER23> [http://netflixcanadavsusa.blogspot.com/](http://netflixcanadavsusa.blogspot.com/)

The best source I have seen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Its all in the name.

</comment><comment><USER26> Do these school admins not have the basic filtering abilities to stop proxies? Its trivial to do on several firewalls.

Education IT sounds like a nightmare in general. If students are outsmarting the firewall trivially, then it says a lot about how IT is run there.

<comment><USER27> You have to remember, this guy's story started 10 years ago. Many schools just contract this sort of thing to a 3rd party. My school used Websense, you could easily bypass their solution by using https or simply having google translate the site from english to english.

Additionally, you also assume that there is a formal IT staff. An old roommate I had used to be in charge of selecting the hardware for the computerlab in his small town school. He was a student, his school was too small to have a real IT staff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> How did a 16 year old know how to write something like this? Very, very unusual. It certainly takes some know-how to put together an effective and highly usable VPN service.

<comment><USER29> You might enjoy this video of people that age working on one of the most famous demos of all time: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIIBRr31DIU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIIBRr31DIU)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Hasn't HMA discontinued the free web proxy?

<comment><USER31> nope, it's still there; it's just a couple more clicks so they can upsell to support their living

[https://www.hidemyass.com/proxy](https://www.hidemyass.com/proxy)</comment></comment>


Ray Kurzweil on "I've Got a Secret" in 1965 [Video] - <AUTHOR> http://youtube.com/watch?v=X4Neivqp2K4

<comment><USER2> Ray Kurzweil has an insatiable curiosity. I talked with him recently, and even at his age, he was trying to learn all he can about cancer biology (which is not even his field) from the top people. If he was even half as intellectually curious as a teen, it doesn't surprise me he found a way to build a computer.

</comment><comment><USER3> Where does a 17-year-old get the bankroll to build a computer in 1965?

<comment><USER4> With enough memory to write a composition, no less?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Ohh, AI. Every decade we say human-level AI is merely a decade away. And every decade we are again disappointed.

Poor Kurzweil. He's spent a lifetime on this obsession, and computers are no closer to being true composers than they were in 1965.</comment>


Encrypt the Web with the HTTPS Everywhere Firefox Extension - <AUTHOR> http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/06/encrypt-web-https-everywhere-firefox-extension

<comment><USER2> Hoping for a chrome one, soon. :)</comment>


DNS server in Go - Big NTP Pool upgrade - <AUTHOR> http://news.ntppool.org/2012/10/new-dns-server.html

<comment><USER2> This seems like a great time to prod more folks into joining the pool. If you have a static IP and a stable machine please consider becoming part of the pool:

<http://www.pool.ntp.org/en/join.html>

My firewall at home is part of the pool. You can configure how much traffic you can handle in the manage servers interface. With any decent cable connection you can set the speed to 768Kbit and never notice the traffic (ntp is just tiny udp datagrams).

While we are at it lets go through /etc/ntp.conf and remove any references to stratum one servers. With a recent version of ntp you can replace all of your server lines with:

      pool 0.CC.pool.ntp.org iburst
      pool 1.CC.pool.ntp.org iburst
      pool 2.CC.pool.ntp.org iburst
      pool 3.CC.pool.ntp.org iburst

Where CC is your country code {us,ca,de,mx,fr,etc}. I decided to err on the side of caution and give an example that will work with any reasonably recent version of ntp. With the most recent stable release the following one line will suffice:

      pool CC.pool.ntp.org iburst

That one line will work for Mountain Lion, debian/unstable and the most recent ubuntu release and ntp will automatically poll more servers as needed.

More info on using the pool can be found here:

<http://www.pool.ntp.org/en/use.html>

<comment><USER3> Thanks dfc. I made a note for myself to update the site to mention/recommend the pool statement as well:

<https://github.com/abh/ntppool/issues/69>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Miek Gieben's [1] DNS library [2] is truly excellent. I use it at Port 6379 for an authoritative DNS server, looking up Redis instances [3]. I too have found Go surprisingly productive and enjoyable to code, and our servers seem very stable so far.

[1] <http://www.miek.nl/>

[2] <https://github.com/miekg/dns>

[3] [https://port6379.com/blog/2012/09/03/using-dns-to-find- insta...](https://port6379.com/blog/2012/09/03/using-dns-to-find-instances)

</comment><comment><USER5> > Since mid-September, twenty of the name servers have been running the new > software and except for a bit of trouble on i386 (32-bit) and low-memory > systems, it's been running very smoothly.

So is <http://code.google.com/p/go/issues/detail?id=909> a real-world problem?

<comment><USER6> If 32-bit, low-memory machines are part of your world, I would say obviously yes.

<comment><USER7> 4GB of addressable memory per process is hardly low memory, x32 was recently merged into Linux so I doubt it's going away anytime.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> How can this even exist without generics, template meta-programming or a turing complete type system? I doubt that they know what they're doing.

<comment><USER9> The first time I read one of these comments by you on reddit[1] I thought it was sincere - replies to it suggested I was not alone, although I was surprised that one was on your side.

So, I guess your sarcasm was a bit too subtle. This one is better :)

[1] [http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/10zsz4/i_wrote_...](http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/10zsz4/i_wrote_my_first_nes_emulator_written_in_go/c6ih7io)

<comment><USER10> FYI I'm the guy that replied to that, I was really interested to see how the OP of that post got around it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> For people searching for performance benchmarks like me, here are the numbers I dug around from the post ( <http://geo.bitnames.com>)

 _If you need less than 200 DNS lookups per second per DNS server the Perl version is fine and might be a little easier to setup. The Go version is much faster (in prodution we've seen it do 5-6000 requests a second on commodity hardware and even virtual servers)._

Is 6000 rps a high number for a DNS server? Let me do a back of the envelope calculation: one simple dns request (assuming udp here) response msg size is 100bytes, 6000rps x 100bytes /1024/1024 x 8 = 4.69mbps. Even we consider the request msg size is equal to that of response msg, the throughput is still 9.38mbps, far from saturating the network pipe. It sounds to me there is still space for improvement.

<comment><USER12> Was it implied that the 6000 requests was peak performance of the software, or was it just the current max usage they've seen?

<comment><USER11> I suppose it's the latter. That number is pretty much hardware-specific, though it would give us a bit more details if they mentioned the hardware profile.

<comment><USER3> The DNS servers are (mostly) virtual machines on all sorts of hardware. In many cases I don't actually know the exact hardware specs or how much other load the boxes have.

<http://www.pool.ntp.org/dns-server.html>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm in love with Go. The more I use it the more i fall in love with it.

<comment><USER14> I've seen a number of near-identical comments, but they're not interesting unless you expand on why.

<comment><USER15> In no particular order:

       - new, shiny, toy (boys will be boys)
       - sufficiently different (allows for think different moments)
       - sufficiently subtle (does promote deep think moments)
       - bipolars are sexy (Go is seriously bipolar.)
       - pedigree (Go is something of a pedagogue)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Source code linked by the OP: <https://github.com/abh/geodns/>

</comment><comment><USER17> pretty neat. hopefully this will get some tractions.

thanks for sharing.</comment>


New Wave of Adept Robots Is Changing Global Industry - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/19/business/new-wave-of-adept-robots-is-changing-global-industry.html?hpw&pagewanted=all

<comment><USER2> In addition to reading the article (which is good), I recommend that everyone watch this to get the perspective of various thinkers on the topic:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOoHRircmhM&feature=playe...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOoHRircmhM&feature=player_embedded)

It starts getting especially interesting around 1:00:00 when Cowen and Ford start talking. A few things:

\- The idea of "personal shoppers" being a growth area seems dubious. With recommendation and predictive desire systems getting better all the time, I think this is probably a no-go.

\- Nannies might be a growth area for a few decades, but decent AI will likely obviate the need for these as well. I'd give this one 50-50 odds over the next 4-6 decades.

\- Basically everyone on that panel endorsed the guaranteed income. The fact that people from so many different perspectives had their policy prescription converge to that is really striking.

\- This also brings us back to the "how do we occupy the unemployed masses?" question yet again. Arts and leisure activities will likely not need much support from society, as they will just happen. Sports might (stadiums, etc.) Other things we'll probably be looking at will be extremely powerful, long- lasting, side-effect-free (or tolerable side effect having) drugs. That road of course leads to wireheading, but I think that denying that as a possibility now is extremely naive.

A cultural shift will be required, as several people in the video make clear. Having one's self worth (and respect of one's peers/society) be defined by a traditional support-one's-livelihood "job" is going to have to disappear. Demonization of those "lazy parasites and slackers" is just not going to work in a future where much human labor is not needed.

Another thing this brings to mind is the effect on the labor market for those still in it (programmers, robot designers that cannot themselves be replaced with robots, etc.): a great deal less unemployment, at least for a long while. For those skills that are essentially not able to be automated any time soon (let's stay over, the next 50-100 years) those that stay in the labor market will not be doing much competing for open positions. It may in fact be an employee's market in those cases where someone is not simply their own business.

Other good articles on the topic:

<http://buzzmachine.com/2011/08/05/the-jobless-future/>

[http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/10/why- work...](http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/10/why-workers-are- losing-the-war-against-machines/247278/)

(referenced in the NYT article)

Edit:

If you haven't read Autor's work ("The Growth of Low Skill Service Jobs and the Polarization of the U.S. Labor Market "), I highly recommend it:

<http://economics.mit.edu/files/1474>

<comment><USER3> One of the difficulties for a society with large numbers of unemployed is that the consumer and media culture creates aspirational needs: people want stuff, and since its not being given to them and they can't earn the money to buy it, they become frustrated. Drugs are one escape from this problem, as is attainment of a higher consciousness (that you don't really need stuff to be happy). But it seems that many people avoid the first (to addictive levels) without having the second, and so end up frustrated and angry.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "the advent of low-cost automation foretells changes on the scale of the revolution in agricultural technology over the last century, when farming employment in the United States fell from 40 percent of the work force to about 2 percent today".

This may have interesting ramifications, specifically around economic theories, labor, migration of some jobs back to the US etc. How will the world look like in 10 years from now with robots, artificial intelligence etc.?</comment>


Show HN: reEmbed.com, customized YouTube embeds and analytics - <AUTHOR> https://www.reembed.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi this is Alex, I'm the founder of reEmbed. I'd be grateful for any feedback you may have.

<comment><USER2> Hey Alex, just got myself on-boarded in under 5 minutes, this is good stuff - loved the depth of analytics.

Two feature suggestions

\- ability to flush all stats \- ability to block/filter a particular domain (e.g. localhost)

Thanks!</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Can a 15-inch Retina MBP substitute an external monitor? - <AUTHOR>

I'm aware that the rMBP has a usable resolution of 1900x1200 at most, and that 2880x1800 is unfortunately unusable due to readability issues, so my question could be reformulated as "Can a developer comfortably code on a 1900*1200 resolution without external monitor"? <comment><USER2> In my experience, that can be comfortable on a part-time basis, but less so -- perhaps significantly less so -- on a full-time basis. I find myself overwhelmingly more productive with an external display. When I'm onsite, I typically use my rmbp lid-down with a 27" Apple Thunderbolt Display (2560x1440).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you, that's what I was afraid of. It seems the upgrade to 15" retina is not worth it and I should stick with a 13" Air then.

<comment><USER2> No worries! In my mind, there are only a few situations where I feel the 15" rmbp is particularly worth it (for developers):

1\. If you're offsite far more than you're onsite.

2\. If you need >8 GiB of RAM.

Of course, if you expect to do much gaming on your laptop, you may want a laptop with a dGPU. *8-)

<comment><AUTHOR> I actually am offsite a lot more than I am onsite at the moment, and maybe for the next couple months. I bought the low-end 15" rMBP to test it. 1920*1200 actually provides a lot of real estate while being quite usable. I'll see within the next two weeks how much it can increase my productivity. But it is really heavy.

Agreed on the gaming part. But one wouldn't buy a Mac to play games lol.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> So, the 15 inch retina can drive a _large_ external monitor at high resolution (full resolution). This is worth a lot to me. I connect it to a dell ultrasharp via a thunderbolt cable.

</comment><comment><USER4> I have a 15" MBP and I run it at 2880x1800 (not in HiDPI mode) by using RetinaDisplayMenu. I've been working without an external monitor like this for ~6 months now.

<comment><AUTHOR> Really? It's kind of usable but it requires being really close to the monitor. I find 1920*1200 more comfortable.</comment></comment>


Jitsi Meet about to solve Firefox/Safari issues - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/issues/4758#issuecomment-604463127 <comment><USER2> I just tried jitsi today to have a meeting with two students. We could not manage to get it to work, the three of us at the same time. We could hear each other perfectly (better than zoom, actually) but never three videos at the same time. Every time we restarted the browsers a different person appeared as a static image (no video).

I am rooting for the jitsi developers to fix the browser issues. I'm still recommending it to everybody, but I cannot do it with a straight face when it still has these simple issues and the damn "FIREFOX BAD" at the beginning.</comment>


So You Want to Make a Whole Bunch of T-Shirts - <AUTHOR> http://blog.unitedpixelworkers.com/2013/02/20/so-you-want-to-make-a-whole-bunch-of-t-shirts

<comment><USER2> Insightful post, but, there are services (disclosure: I work for one) that help do all of this for you. The time required to do the steps in this article is insane. Much less your actual product and shipping costs. Seriously, there are better ways to do this — see printfection.com</comment>


A woman rants about man bashy stuff written by "women in tech" - <AUTHOR> http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2015/11/a-woman-rants-about-man-bashy-stuff.html <comment><USER5> Great post, all this exaggerate promotion of feminism only alienates men and makes them actively avoid women as colleagues. You may never know now, if she's one of those overzealous "women's right defenders" that will sue you for accidentally touching her, glancing at inappropriate body parts for a split of a second or overheard "sexist" joke. Actually, not even suit is required -- blog post is enough to ruin your career[0]. Such aggressive promotion of feminism (in today's terms) only makes the gap between genders even deeper -- the exact opposite of this movement's stated goal. No wonder that really clever women start to understand such aggressive confrontation only worsens the situation and form a counter-movement[1].

0\. [http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/21/a-dongle-joke-that- spiraled...](http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/21/a-dongle-joke-that-spiraled-way- out-of-control/) 1\. [http://womenformen.org/mission/](http://womenformen.org/mission/)

<comment><USER6> As a women in tech, I very much agree with you.

However, i've never had sexual harassment in work, but I do have it in public a few times a year so I do know how it feels.

I'm not sure if it makes a difference but i've been coding every week from the age of 13 (i'm 23 now). I've genuinely have next to always never felt anything but respect from my Male/Female colleagues. I'm a bit of a tom-boy though :).

On the rare occasion I ever felt I was not being taken seriously, I worked twice as hard to show and prove to them why I should be. Okay, fair enough, I shouldn't have to do that but I don't really care, it is what it is, I like the challenge and i'd rather provide evidence through my produced work than argue for ages about crap that won't get me anywhere.

Or complain and blame others. My life is in my control.

And it's not just being female that means I have to do that - people from different ethnic origins will do, people who have disabilities will do to prove their worth. It's just life.

<comment><USER5> I'm only talking from my personal experience, but IT is one of the most welcoming field for women as it's mostly skill and abilities that matters. Those few women I've encountered at the university or professional career were really respected by their male peers, and I've never heard any single sexist negative remark (not to mention harassment attempts) during these years. Of course, there are a$$holes and jerks everywhere - IT is not an exception - <USER2> blaming a whole group (namely white males) based on few anecdotal evidences is just another stereotyping. I live/work in Europe, so maybe situation is different on the other side of a pond, I don't know. IMHO, the reason there are few women in tech is fairly simple -- most girls don't like hard science and I don't believe it has something to do with stereotypes or cultural influences, but that's another topic.

 _And it 's not just being female that means I have to do that - people from different ethnic origins will do, people who have disabilities will do to prove their worth._

As a white male, I'd argue that _everyone_ (at least those, who are on their own) has to prove their worth, especially in a junior position. Taking into account your young age, I guess you fit in this category as well.

P.S. it's always nice to see a girl interested in coding, good luck and may your skills guide your career, not complaints and threats!

<comment><USER6> Aye :).

I'm not a Junior btw (at 15 I was developing websites, optimising java bytecode using Bcel and writing AI - I don't mean this as bragging, I was working with way more intelligent people than I). I didn't learn much in university in respect to programming because of that...

However, that may explain something there - people will probably look at my age and assume i'm a Junior =). A natural assumption really.

The difference in social conditioning for girls is quite an interesting topic =) (in random comment to the lack in hard-science).

<comment><USER7> > The difference in social conditioning for girls is quite an interesting > topic =)

It would be interesting to hear self-aware women speak about on this topic. From what I understand, generally speaking girls for whatever reason prefer (be they via social conditioning or instinctual preference or a combination of both) to play with dolls, as opposed to boys who play with trucks ... as the former, playing with dolls, is indicative of early development of social relationships (people manipulation, to put crudely) while the later, playing with trucks, is indicative of early development of object manipulation ... and this stems from the fact that men and women evolved to fulfill different instinctual roles (sperm is cheap, eggs are expensive).

<comment><USER6> I'm a female who hated playing with dolls - they were boring. I didn't play with trucks or other toys either. I preferred hands on or sports stuff - <USER3> riding, tree climbing, football, computer gaming(but not television which I could never stand). I required activities which were more mentally stimulating, otherwise my behaviour became destructive.

I'm quite lucky though as I was encouraged to do the things I was enjoyed - <USER4> female cousins were not. When their brothers went bike riding, she was told she had to stay home and make cakes. When she asked for gifts for Christmas she didn't get them because they were not socially acceptable for females, so she got dolls.

So, how many choose them because they genuinely like them? And how many choose them because it's enforced and they think it's the social thing to do? How many disney films are all about finding one true love to take care of you?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Great post. I would just like to say that as an immigrant to the US, i see this tendency to turn every debate into "with us or against us" is much more prominent in the media here. I believe that most people across the world are reasonable enough to see the vast "grey areas" you mentioned between any two poles, but when we just read about an issue in passing, we tend to accept what we read so a media pushing dumb controversial articles can create this tendency.

The renewed push for accepting women in the workplace is simply one instance where a (reasonable) position has been chosen (women should have all the same opportunities as men in the workplace), but anyone who speaks against this position (even if just to improve it, or learn more) is labeled a old- fashioned,bigoted, and much worse.

The answer is to take a position without instantly shaming anyone who disagrees. So we can have an open discussion. The way controversial issues are treated here reminds me of medieval times - if you don't believe, you will be "excommunicated" from society. Debates aren't football games where you watch and cheer for your team to win. Right now, everyone is cheering for the womens side. Dont get me wrong, I am too, but that doesn't mean the other side is wrong/evil.

</comment><comment><USER9> > I wish women would make more of an effort to understand why men do what they > do. Here is my general take on it...

From the author's referenced post[1]:

> My experience is that men are either not very willing to talk to me one-on- > one or, if they are, talking shop is the last thing they had in mind. They > are looking for romance, not looking to help me professionally. When I say > this to other women, they generally express immediate agreement. Men often > deny it, criticize it or just stop talking when I say such things.

Most people are _not_ attracted to most people. What this means is that most of the people you are attracted to won't find you attractive, and most of the people who are attracted to you are not going to be attractive to you.

Given this simple fact, believing that most of your interactions with members of the opposite sex are motivated by romantic interest is simply not realistic, no matter how handsome/beautiful or charming you are.

Maybe the tech industry (or a particular subset of the tech industry) is completely dysfunctional, but in my experience, _most_ adult women and men are capable of interacting professionally without believing that all these interactions are somehow romantic in nature or fearing that they will be interpreted as such.

[1] [http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2014/03/the-gray- zon...](http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2014/03/the-gray-zone.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> A man does not need to be attracted to me to be worried that close collaboration -- working late together, having dinner together, etc -- will lead to other people wondering if there is an affair. Bonus points: My experience has been that men who aren't attracted react really negatively to me giving off signals that I am interested. So men who are not hoping to sleep with me can have powerful reasons to just not want to work closely with me in the kind of manner that could dramatically further my professional goals.

(I am the author, in case that is not obvious.)

<comment><USER10> So I'm a man, and I'm married, and I'm committed to my marriage. I'm not just worried about my reputation; my marriage is a more important issue. Unfortunately, that doesn't mean I'm immune to temptation. So if I'm having to work closely with you, and you're interested in me, _and I also find you attractive,_ I'm going to take steps to distance myself from you. That may take the form of not working late with you. It may even take the form of asking to be assigned to a different team than you. (Note well: It's not OK for me to try to get you fired, or damage your career. It's not even OK for me to ask that _you_ get reassigned.)

If you want to blame me for that, saying that it's my weakness that is the problem, I can agree with you. But I'm not trying to discriminate against you, or put a glass ceiling on your career, or anything like that. I just know that I can be tempted, and if I give in, it will really mess up my life.

Unfortunately, that can still leave you blocked from your professional goals. I don't know how to fix this.

<comment><USER9> 1\. How many years have you been working?

2\. How many times in your career have you found yourself working closely with a woman who you found attractive and who made it clear she was interested in you?

3\. In these situations, how many times were you the woman's superior, equal or direct report?

I think answers to the above would be more beneficial to this discussion than the admission that you could theoretically be tempted by a co-worker to cheat on your wife.

<comment><USER10> 1\. 30

2\. Once. I found her attractive, and I think she was at least willing to become interested in me. (Of course, I'm a clueless male geek, so I easily could have been mistaken.)

3\. Her equal.

So, yeah, it hasn't happened to me very much. But the time it did, I did what I felt I had to to make sure that nothing happened. ( _What_ did I do? I sent one message that I wasn't going to play, and I asked a male co-worker that I trusted to hold me accountable for what I did _and thought_ about her. It was enough.)

<comment><USER9> Your response sort of demonstrates the point I made above about most people not being attracted to most people.

In a career of 30 years, you found yourself working closely with a total of _one_ woman who you were attracted to and who you thought _might_ be "willing to become interested" in you. This co-worker was your equal, and you dealt with your feelings in what seems like a mature manner that caused no professional harm to you or her.

Where's the problem that needs solving?

<comment><USER10> > ... and you dealt with your feelings in what seems like a mature manner that > caused no professional harm to you or her.

Thank you.

> Where's the problem that needs solving?

I was responding to Mz's post about how men _who were not attracted to her_ reacted negatively to her. My point was that men _who are attracted_ can be just as difficult.

It's fine if you don't see the problem based on my personal situation. In fact, I prefer it that way...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I can see a response article "Women rants about women ranting about women in tech. Look at that women who has nothing better to do. I have to spend 16 hours a day just to survive and shes just complaining about complaining".

Where does it end?

"From what I have experienced, it looks to me like an awful lot of men do not want to engage women professionally for fear that it will lead to scandal of some sort" \- any comments from guys on this? Are you ever hesitant to engage out of fear of a scandal?

<comment><USER11> Generally, I like to give all people benefit of the doubt irrespective of gender identity. That said, it doesn't take many interactions with individuals to get an idea of why kind of things they care about and are vocal about. People who are actively like the person referenced in the blog post become their own self-fulfilling prophecy and fail to see how their whining/complaining contributes to them not progressing in their career by isolating them from their colleagues. I work with amazing people that span the gender spectrum. Most are heterosexual males. Regardless of where a colleague lies on the identity spectrum, I respect and work with them all. I did however have a coworker on a previous team that frequently interpreted many interactions and events through victim-colored glasses. On occasion we would get in debates, especially if bad statistics were presented (I'm easily nerd- sniped by bad stats, [https://xkcd.com/356/](https://xkcd.com/356/)), especially the base rate fallacy. It got a tad uncivil at times because my retorts and corrections to the bad state were unwelcome. Another behavior of their's that caused discomfort for me and others, were frequent unambiguously negative comments stereotyping a gender identity, gender orientation and race that is generally perceived as have greater privileges. Despite the occasional unpleasant interaction, I made sure to provide mentorship to this colleague when appropriate.

I eventually switched teams for a far more interesting opportunity. Avoiding this colleague with a victim mentality was not at all a motivating factor for my move, but I can't say that it wasn't a huge relief to no longer work with this person directly. The entire time we worked together, I assumed that it was possible that I may eventually end up at the wrong end of one of those unpleasant interaction that would end up biting me in the ass because I have the privilege of being assumed to be the transgressor in such situations due to my perceived gender identity and perceived race (fwiw, I'm a mixed race pomosexual, but people don't know that unless I tell them).

I actively/consciously make sure not to single out people based on their identity, but observed behavior is another manner entirely. Once someone outs themselves as a wearer of victim-colored glasses, I get especially leery. I recognize however that most people aren't going to give the benefit of the doubt and identify this nuance, so I can see how many colleagues would avoid working with those whose identity correlates statistically with wearing victim-colored glasses. The threat of scandal with those wearing victim colored glasses begets avoidant behavior in those who perceived identity puts them in the group most likely to be the loser in the event of any ambiguous scandal.

Overall I consider victimhood culture to be a super toxic approach that fosters isolation.

[http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/09/the- rise...](http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/09/the-rise-of- victimhood-culture/404794/)

<comment><USER6> Yeah the Victim mentality is something that seems really strong with the blogs kind of posters. Thanks for your comments, enjoyed reading them!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Yup. As a white heterosexual male with a lot to lose, I avoid any kind of controversy involving women at all costs. Does this harm collaboration? You bet! But I don't feel safe otherwise.

<comment><USER13> I've noticed Asian and Indian men following this as well. I've overheard them talking about the backlash Nadella got as part of their reasoning.

<comment><USER12> Seems like a good idea for all men, regardless of race, ethnicity, or minority status. When your reputation can be irretrievably destroyed based on nothing but hearsay and someone's perceptions and preconceived notions, this course of action is the only one that's rational.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Interesting that this post received no comments. Self-fulfilling prophecy. Sad really.

<comment><USER15> 1 - 25 minutes isn't very long to wait for comments but now that I look again I guess you mean on the post there. Though by my reckoning it hasn't been up 12 hours.

2 - Some people are psychotic so I'm not surprised people stay silent.

<comment><USER16> Who is psychotic here?

<comment><USER15> Just about everyone who voluntarily enters the discussion, myself included.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I don't really see it. Yes, affluent people are the one that can afford to "whine". That's because you need a certain level of independence and education to be able to represent a position. Women have been "nice" throughout history. No one cared. Now they are outperforming men and the only reason we are talking about "sexism in tech" is because women are doing so well in many other fields.

The whole premise of the post seem to be that women should know their place. A woman overreacting over being felt up is "whining", while men have been punching people in face over petty things for decade. Some men hesitate to work with women. So? Women didn't have it easy in the past. Now men share the world with women and those that can't work with them won't have many opportunities.

<comment><USER18> > Now they are outperforming men and the only reason we are talking about > "sexism in tech" is because women are doing so well in many other fields.

Name one where women are outperforming men at the top. I'm genuinely curious.

<comment><USER17> What makes you think that metric is even relevant? Since women haven't been competing with men on equal terms for long you have to look at fields and metrics were being young isn't a disadvantage. Taylor Swift had the most selling albums of 2014, Jennifer Lawrence was the top paid actor/actress under 30 the same year. Also many metrics relating to education, which if you really are curious can find yourself. Of course there will probably never be an outright dominance of women at the top of any field simply because of competition. But things are definitely going to change.</comment></comment></comment>


Ranking of Colleges by ROI - <AUTHOR> https://cew.georgetown.edu/cew-reports/CollegeROI/ <comment><USER2> I haven't read this in detail, but according to commentary here [1] it sounds like they don't actually have 40-year returns, they have 10-year data and extrapolate.

Which is a massively different thing, and as you would expect would favor things closer to trade school (immediately useful) rather than the sort of careers people going to top schools are likely to aim for (many of which have high pay much later).

[1] [https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/11/th...](https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/11/the- future-of-higher-education.html#comments)

</comment><comment><USER3> Pretty impressive that eight of the ten the top 10-year NPV schools are two year degrees.

<comment><USER4> That's because they are single-major schools (nursing).

The lowest NPV schools are art/music schools.

4 year schools have many majors, so nursing and art departments cancel out and you get the average returns.

These ranking are silly, they don't attempt to separate confounding factors. They also make the unhelpful observation that a $92 school has the best ROI, ignoring that ROI is a useless measure more investments you only make once in your life and do not have constant R or I.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> > bachelor's degrees from private colleges, on average, have higher ROI than > degrees from public colleges 40 years after enrollment

That's a f... up conclusion if there's one. Let's look at it another way: in those private colleges, you'll likely find more students whose parents are rich than in public colleges. Guess what? After 40 years, there's a higher chance they will find themselves higher in the food chain than students from poorer families.

The only conclusion is the renewal of the capital gap generation after generation.

<comment><USER6> Chetty et al [0] came to the opposite conclusion: "...children from low and high income families have similar earnings outcomes conditional on the college they attend."

[0] [http://www.equality-of- opportunity.org/papers/coll_mrc_paper...](http://www.equality-of- opportunity.org/papers/coll_mrc_paper.pdf)

<comment><USER7> Read your own link: "We document four results. First, access to colleges varies greatly by parent income. For example, children whose parents are in the top 1% of the income distribution are 77 times more likely to attend an Ivy League college than those whose parents are in the bottom income quintile. Second, children from low- and high-income families have similar earnings outcomes conditional on the college they attend, indicating that low-income students are not mismatched at selective colleges. Third, rates of upward mobility – the fraction of students who come from families in the bottom income quintile and reach the top quintile – differ substantially across colleges because low-income access varies significantly across colleges with similar earnings outcomes."

They attend very different schools and have very different results.

<comment><USER8> Isn't that what parent said?

Once you control for college attended, outcomes do not depend sugnificantly on parent incomes; therefore parental income is not a confounding factor in looking at the ROI of collages.

Children of wealthy parents still tend to do better, but that is because they get to purchase a superior product.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm pretty sure that 95% of my college ROI can't be measured. The people, ideas, techniques, perceptions, and multiple forms of expertise and culture shared with me - the opening of horizons - have been invaluable to me as an individual ... and hopefully to some people I shared with.

College can be much more than quantifiable job training. All of us know this, and we owe this kind of reckoning no more respect than it deserves. This experience needs to be open to all who wish it, regardless.

</comment><comment><USER10> Would be interesting to see these charts based upon the actual degree. A CS degree will likely have a better ROI than basket weaving. Society shouldn't be creating more basket weavers, and the first step is to have solid data.</comment>


Unrigging the Poverty Trap - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/unrigging-the-poverty-trap-11591226815 <comment><AUTHOR> [https://archive.vn/wip/cs6Oh](https://archive.vn/wip/cs6Oh)</comment>


Momentum Grows for Jack Dorsey of Square to Also Run Twitter - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/29/technology/momentum-grows-for-jack-dorsey-of-square-to-also-run-twitter.html <comment><USER2> It blows my mind that all of the following people, per the article, think 50% of Dorsey is better than 100% of someone else: Suhail Rizvi, Keith Rabois, and Chris Sacca.

<comment><USER3> A smaller amount of the right direction is ALWAYS more valuable than a large amount of the wrong direction</comment></comment>


StackOverflow is down - <AUTHOR> https://stackoverflow.com <comment><AUTHOR> I'm currently getting an IIS banner page.

<comment><AUTHOR> And it's back up.</comment></comment>


Review my startup: Ledgerble Small Business Accounting - <AUTHOR>

http://www.ledgerble.com
A simple, easy to use accounting web app for small (1-5 person) companies. We've been testing it for a little while now but I'm looking for feedback on how we can do better.
We are already putting together a screencast for the homepage, and revamping the support section. Just rolled out a full API this week. Thanks! <comment><USER2> You seem to be doing only general ledger accounting with the first iteration.

Accounting is a domain with tough competition from open source solutions (SQL- Ledger, LedgerSMB, WebERP among many others) as well as new SaaS services like freshbooks, lessaccounting etc. Just suggesting to have a look at those solutions too.

I would suggest to showcase a demo/trial without asking for credit card detail. Or at least make such a demo available for HN evaluation.

<comment><AUTHOR> Plenty of competition for sure, but we're going after the extreme low end of the market, companies who only have really basic accounting needs.

The cc / no cc thing was actually a test we're running, I turned it off for now so you can signup for a trial account without having to enter your card.

Thanks for the feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Not to discourage you, but I just switched to QuickBooks Online from a custom accounting system some folks had built for me (for themselves, really, as they were doing all our accounting/sales), and I have to say QBO is outstanding.

In particular, their human support has exceeded all my expectations by an order of magnitude.

So you might keep that in mind as a competitive issue.

Godspeed in your venture, in any case.</comment>


A Verizon reality check - <AUTHOR> http://www.marco.org/628763225

<comment><USER2> A Marco.org Reality Check

"There would almost definitely be a Verizon Wireless logo somewhere on the iPhone's case, probably on both the front and back. There may be separate Verizon music, video, and app store icons that you can't delete. At least one major feature may be disabled at Verizon's request — say, turn-by-turn navigation — because they want to sell you their own version for an additional monthly fee. Verizon may want a cut of any iTunes or App Store revenue from on-device purchases, the cost of which Apple would probably happily pass along to either users or developers. (My guess: Developers.)"

Apple wouldn't ever let Verizon pull that crap, which is exactly why the iPhone is on AT&T now. They went to Verizon and Verizon didn't want to play ball, there is no way in hell Steve would compromise on the user experience now just to be on Verizon.

<comment><USER3> 1\. My HTC Incredible has 1 Verizon logo on the front, under the earpiece and it's tiny. 2\. There are no Verizon icons I can't delete. There is a separate Verizon app store in the Android market, though. 3\. Google Maps offers great turn-by-turn on my phone. Free. 4\. MP3 stores are available on Android.

 _yawn_

<comment><USER4>
      2. There are no Verizon icons I can't delete.

AFAIK, Verizon _does_ have a boot logo on the HTC Incredible. Not the most intrusive thing, but I'm not aware of a way to delete that icon.

<comment><USER5> Reflash.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Our company's office in SOMA, San Francisco has zero AT&T reception. If you are in our conference room and someone calls, your iPhone will not ring.

The "reality check" should be going to people who think free visual voicemail and small icons on the hardware are in any way significant issues compared to the magnitude of how much worse AT&T's network is.

<comment><USER7> Hear, hear.

Last time I've had Verizon was 3 years ago, and I got service EVERYWHERE, and I live in the same area as the author - NYC/Manhattan. Of course, everyone's experience is their own, but I think their network couldn't have become that much worse all of a sudden.

And as everybody with an iPhone knows, AT&T is hell. Just today, I got a whole bunch of calls that never made it to my phone. Discovered that there were new voicemails hours ago. And I'm sitting in my office, right next to a window, in an area where I usually get 4 bars.

The biggest problem with Verizon and the original reason that I switched is they (used to) not have any good phones. Now they do, and hopefully once they get iPhone there won't be any reason to stay on God-awful AT&T network.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> * They'll probably even charge separately for Visual Voicemail. *

Let me be one to mention that this very likely wont be the only thing Verizon locks you out of for no particular reason. I'm unable to find the link currently, but a prime example of why I'll never sign up to Verizon again is just this. A user who owned a Motorola Droid downloaded Skype, and planned to use it over WiFi in areas where he'd incur roaming fees, or had bad reception.

Verizon actually managed to find a way to disable the voice feature of Skype, restricting it only to use in areas with network coverage.

That's not an isolated example.

<comment><USER9> > _Verizon actually managed to find a way to disable the voice feature of > Skype, restricting it only to use in areas with network coverage._

That doesn't make any sense. Why would they want to force a user to use Skype in network coverage areas? What does Verizon gain when you can't use Skype outside of the network?

If anything I would think that Verizon would disable Skype when you _are_ in their network area, and only let you use it outside of that area.

<comment><USER8> A couple of links

[http://connectedplanetonline.com/mobile-apps/news/verizon- sk...](http://connectedplanetonline.com/mobile-apps/news/verizon-skype- android-shutdown-0414/)

[http://www.skypejournal.com/2010/04/skype-on-verizon- android...](http://www.skypejournal.com/2010/04/skype-on-verizon-android- requires-you.html)

Now, it's worth noting that while this problem has been somewhat 'fixed' meaning you can run Skype over wifi for applications like Instant Messaging/Chat, you still have to use the Verizon Network in order to actually make calls.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Why is Verizon the only other carrier in the race here? Is there a reason Sprint and T-Mobile can't carry the iPhone, or that nobody seems to care if they do? Sprint has smartphone plans with unlimited nights/weekends, unlimited text and picture messaging, and unlimited data services for $69.99/month. T-Mobile has similar for $59.99/month without a contract or $69.99/month with one. They'd both be far cheaper than anything Verizon would offer.

<comment><USER5> People like Verizon because they plaster ads _everywhere_. T-Mobile and Sprint are quieter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> "Give a man a reputation as an early riser, and that man can sleep till noon."

Not that I necessarily agree. I haven't used Verizon in years. But back then I switched to AT&T (Cingular) because they had better service in my area.

</comment><comment><USER12> The last two points are fair, the first two (re: data) simply are not. If you have significant problems with dropped calls in Manhattan you should have your specific device checked out.

<comment><USER13> Yeah, I'm not sure how you could see a strong signal outside, go inside and get no reception, and conclude that's due to the carrier. Like Verizon uses some sort of cheap radio waves that don't go through walls while AT&T uses the premium ones.

<comment><USER14> Carries can save money by having less towers but by using higher transmit power. I have heard that this can show up as the phone reporting full bars, but not being able to initiate/receive calls due to insufficient transmit power in the phone.

<comment><USER9> While possible, that doesn't seem likely. Doesn't the phone have to do some sort of handshake with the tower to even show the bars? Or are you saying that the phone only has enough power to do the handshake?

<comment><USER14> My understanding is that when the phone is idle, bars are commonly measured based only on the quality and strength of the incoming signal. The outgoing signal might be stable enough for a handshake but not for a call.

Of course the other possible explanation for full bars but no calls is that the network is busy.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why Do So Many Programmers Lose Hope? - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdA6aQR-s4U <comment><AUTHOR> He touches on many things that I experienced in my career as well. Here is a short summary of talking points:

1\. Forced to cut corners (we're asked to do low quality work and rush best practices just to make sure we hit original deadlines)

2\. Cognitive Overload (the information requested of us to know and deal with stretches the boundaries of human thinking)

3\. Low perception of value (people who don't understand our work, trivialize the effort and don't respect how difficult it really is)

4\. High income forces us to seek deeper goals (with our financial needs met early in life, we start having "first world problems" of finding our greater purpose)

5\. Learned helplessness (we act out of lost hope simply because that's what other people around us have experienced)</comment>


The new struggles facing open source - <AUTHOR> http://www.infoworld.com/article/2905331/open-source-software/the-new-struggles-facing-open-source.html#tk.rss_all <comment><USER2> The "struggles" mentioned in the article aren't issues with open-source projects at all in my opinion.

> "Newbies Not Welcome!" signs like Chu's aren't a great way to accommodate > the influx of those who want to participate but don't yet know how.

Yes, if you don't know how to contribute good code to the Linux kernel or other open-source projects, you're going to need to learn to do that on your own time. Nobody has time to walk someone every step of the way in fixing an issue or adding a feature -- otherwise we would just do it ourselves.

> Ultimately, open source isn't about code. It's about community, and as Bert > Hubert suggests, "community is the best predictor of the future of a > project." That community isn't fostered by jerk project leads or corporate > overlords pretending to be friendly foundations. It's the heart of today's > biggest challenges in open source -- as it was in the last decade.

Open-source, as the name implies, _is_ about source code and not about a community. It's about you, your friends, and anyone else you know being able to get a copy of the source code and being able to modify it however you want to.</comment>


A Top Climate Scientist Blows the Whistle on Flawed Climate Science - <AUTHOR> http://www.nationalreview.com/article/444668/whistle-blower-scientist-exposes-shoddy-climate-science-noaa <comment><USER3> A counterpoint to this claim at the hoity-toity mashable.com: [http://mashable.com/2017/02/05/noaa-global-warming-hiatus- st...](http://mashable.com/2017/02/05/noaa-global-warming-hiatus-story/)

It misses a most important point: when people talk about a "global warming hiatus" from 1998 to 20XX, _they are always full of shit_.

1998 was an abnormally warm year. When people say things like "The last N years were N of the N+1 warmest on record", 1998 is always that +1. The trend- line for global warming only just now started to creep above 1998; it was like 2 or 3 standard deviations above the average.

If you start your trend lines at 1998, they always look flat, because you are starting at an outlier. If you take a trend line over a different period - <USER2> instance, 1990 to 2010 - the "global warming hiatus" goes away and the data looks like a normal noisy data series conforming reasonably to a linear trend.

If you see someone talking about climate data over a period of time starting at 1998, _they are full of shit_. They are using one of the most obvious and well-known lies-told-with-statistics you'll ever come across.

<comment><USER4> If you see someone talking about __climate __data over a period of time less than a million years, they are full of shit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Ars Technica explains this quite well in a piece [1] published yesterday. The paper's original dataset was replaced with an updated one that was run through the same algorithms that NOAA had previously used. The updated dataset better reflects findings that other scientific bodies had released that counter the claim of a warming 'slowdown', partly because they used a richer array of sources. At the end of the day, the trend is not that different, and the trend is still one of warming. Ho-hum.

[1] - [https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/02/article-names- whistl...](https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/02/article-names- whistleblower-who-told-congress-that-noaa-manipulated-data/)

<comment><USER6> What is with the weird title there? It is written as if we should already know about the existence of such a whistleblower, or maybe it was written up before the name was known.

One possibility is he tried to whistleblow to the Washington post, but they sent it to the whistleblow targets, allowing them to develop talking points:

"He submitted an earlier, shorter version of this essay to the Washington Post, in response to the 13 December article (climate scientists frantically copying data). The WaPo rejected his op-ed, so he decided to publish at Climate Etc." [https://judithcurry.com/2017/02/04/climate-scientists- versus...](https://judithcurry.com/2017/02/04/climate-scientists-versus- climate-data/)

<comment><USER5> It was published a day after the Mail article was, and that so it's not unreasonable to assume that readers are aware of its content - ie, that such a whistleblower exists.

<comment><USER6> Here is the title: "Article names "whistleblower" who told Congress that NOAA manipulated data"

In the original source there is a giant picture of him at the top: [http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-4192182/World...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-4192182/World- leaders-duped-manipulated-global-warming-data.html)

Why is his name so important to someone who would have either not heard of this, or just read an article prominently featuring the guy? It is definitely odd.

<comment><USER5> From the Ars piece:

>[This] latest article is noteworthy in that it appears to reveal the supposed "whistleblower" who has been cited by the US House Science Committee in its ongoing clash with climate scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

The Mail made Bates a subject of import, and another outlet is responding. What is odd about this, exactly?

<comment><USER6> Well, I found this. Now it looks like that part of the Ars article is "fake news":

"Yesterday, Bates said he was contacted by the Science Committee for the first time only after the story broke. He said he has not communicated with anyone there before and was not a whistleblower for the committee previously but that he expected to be invited to Washington to testify at a future hearing."

[http://www.eenews.net/stories/1060049630](http://www.eenews.net/stories/1060049630)

<comment><USER5> That part of the Ars article is restating a claim made in the Daily Mail article. Also, Lamar has been making the claim for awhile [1] that he has whistleblowers in the NOAA, which is where the link comes from.

[1] - [http://www.npr.org/2015/12/07/458476435/is-this- congressmans...](http://www.npr.org/2015/12/07/458476435/is-this-congressmans- oversight-an-effort-to-hobble-climate-science)

<comment><USER6> >"That part of the Ars article is restating a claim made in the Daily Mail article."

Wow, this is why I ignore the news. What a clusterfuck. However, I cannot find the part you are talking about in the Daily Mail article after a search. Can you quote it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I really don't understand the complaint in the article.

> He claimed to have developed a way to raise sea-temperature readings that > had been collected by buoys: He would adjust them by using higher > temperature readings of sea water collected by ships.

So actually it's due to ships being used before, that the data needs to be corrected. And they're using comparison between the buoys and the ships running at the same time. This is the same story as the sensors which were running in the cities and needed to be moved into the remote countryside in the US to account for city heat. I get that he doesn't like that the bouys readings were raised rather than ships, but relatively, why would it matter?

The linked article says:

> Now, some of those same authors have produced the pending, revised new > version of the sea dataset – ERSSTv5. A draft of a document that explains > the methods used to generate version 5, and which has been seen by this > newspaper, indicates the new version will reverse the flaws in version 4, > changing the buoy adjustments and including some satellite data and > measurements from a special high-tech floating buoy network known as Argo.

Soooo.... basically exactly what he wanted?

<comment><USER6> After looking it up quickly, it seems that one step really was raising the buoy values by a single constant, but this was only a tiny part of a much more involved process.

"The SSTs from ships or buoys were accepted (rejected) under a QC criterion that observed SSTs differ from the first-guess SST from ERSST.v3b by less (more) than 4 times standard deviation (STD) of SST (Smith and Reynolds 2003). The ship and buoy SSTs that have passed QC were then converted into SSTAs by subtracting the SST climatology (1971–2000) at their in situ locations in monthly resolution. The ship SSTA was adjusted based on theNMATcomparators; _buoy SSTA was adjusted by a mean difference of 0.12 C between ship and buoy observations (section 5)_. The ship and buoy SSTAs were merged and bin- averaged into monthly ''superobservations'' on a 28 3 28 grid. The number of superobservations was defined here as the count of 28 3 28 grid boxes with valid data. The averaging of ship and buoy SSTAs within each 28 3 28 grid box was based on their proportions to the total number of observations. The number of buoy observations was multiplied by a factor of 6.8, which was determined by the ratio of randomerror variances of ship and buoy observations (Reynolds and Smith 1994), suggesting that buoy observations exhibit much lower random variance than ship observations. The SSTAs of superobservations were further decomposed into low- and high-frequency components. The low-frequency component was constructed by applying a 268 3 268 spatial running mean using monthly superobservations where the sampling ratio is larger than 3% (five superobservations). An annual mean SSTA was then defined with a minimum requirement of two months of valid data. The annual mean SSTA fields were screened and the missing SSTAs were filled by searching the neighboring SSTAs within 108 in longitude, 68 in latitude, and 3-yr in time. The search areas were tested using ranges of 158–208 in longitude, 58–108 in latitude, and 2–5 yr..."

[http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/10.1175/JCLI-D-14-00006.1](http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/10.1175/JCLI-D-14-00006.1)

It would be much easier to understand if they just showed us the code...

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think, as usual, the media has obscured rather than clarified what is going on here. If you read his own words, you will see John Bates is accusing NOAA (in particular, Tom Karl) of _p-hacking_. He claims they are changing the significance cutoff, choosing which data/processing to include based on statistical significance of a trend, and that this process is not reproducible.

"I questioned another co-author about why they choose to use a 90% confidence threshold for evaluating the statistical significance of surface temperature trends, instead of the standard for significance of 95% — he also expressed reluctance and did not defend the decision.

[...]

Tom Karl constantly had his 'thumb on the scale'—in the documentation, scientific choices, and release of datasets

[...]

Tom Karl liked the maturity matrix so much, he modified the matrix categories so that he could claim a number of NCEI products were "Examples of "Gold" standard NCEI Products (Data Set Maturity Matrix Model Level 6)."

[...]

Since the version GHCNM3.X never went through any ORR, the resulting dataset was also never archived, and it is virtually impossible to replicate the result in K15.

[...]

The withholding of the operational version of this important update came in the middle of a major ENSO event, thereby depriving the public of an important source of updated information, apparently for the sole purpose of Mr. Karl using the data in his paper before making the data available to the public."

[https://judithcurry.com/2017/02/04/climate-scientists- versus...](https://judithcurry.com/2017/02/04/climate-scientists-versus- climate-data/)

So statements like this are rendered meaningless:

>"Also, the new global trends are statistically significant and positive at the 0.10 significance level for 1998–2012" [http://science.sciencemag.org/content/348/6242/1469.full](http://science.sciencemag.org/content/348/6242/1469.full)

Personally, I know such statements about statistically significant deviations from a strawman nil-null hypothesis are always meaningless. However, perhaps this will open up a few more people's eyes to the awful state of affairs NHST has brought us.

</comment><comment><USER8> lol. Difficult to take the original Mail article seriously. A look at the temperature rise graph [1] tells you a lot. Bizarrely they've started the y-axis at a value lower than the '97 baseline meaning the slope of a line through the data _looks_ shallower than it is.

Secondly their interpretation of the graph is messed up. The Met Office data tracks the NOAA data, but looks to be lower by a constant. This means you'd expect that the _slope_ of a regression line through each of the two data sets would be very similar.

Why did they choose 1997 as a baseline (why does anyone choose the baselines they do)? '1997' doesn't appear in the article. '2000' appears in the article. Oh look, the temperature was lower in 2000 meaning the slope would appear greater if the graph matched the discussion. [I don't know who is pulling a fast one here]

[1] [http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2017/02/04/23/3CD7C57C0000057...](http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2017/02/04/23/3CD7C57C00000578-4192182-image-a-90_1486249374130.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER9> The National Review isn't a science magazine. When it says things like "And in the most Obama-esque move" and references The Cato Institute, you have to take what they are saying with a grain of salt.

<comment><USER10> The main thing that caught my eye in this article was that it using dailymail.co.uk as it's source. It's rather common to see an article originate on dailymail, then get repeated by a hundred other news-like sites. They all use that first article as their only source, and no follow up.

<comment><USER11> its source

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Is this a regurgitation of David Rose's critique?

[edit: this "debate" confuses me, is there a summary/reference somewhere?]

<comment><USER13> It's a regurgitation of the Mail on Sunday's latest nonsense.

The MoS article did at least provide some humour by 'proving' misconduct by using a doctored graph: [https://twitter.com/ClimateOfGavin/status/828082851585388544](https://twitter.com/ClimateOfGavin/status/828082851585388544)

It's funny how David Rose continues to get baselines wrong despite it being explained to him hundreds of times. Even more strange is how his 'inadvertent' baseline errors always end up supporting his latest wacky conspiracy theory…

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> It's sad some scientists go to far in manipulating data to fit their model, but that doesn't mean every scientist is crooked.

Anecdotal fallacy – using a personal experience or examples to extrapolate without a statistically significant number of cases that could form scientifically compelling evidence.

<comment><USER14> It's sadder that someone is posting National Review articles on HN.

<comment><USER15> There's a wide variety of views among HN members. Reading a variety of sources, including those you may not agree with, is a good way to understand issues from different perspectives.

If you believe a submission is inappropriate for HN, flag it and move on.

<comment><USER14> That sort of depends on believing that all publications are of equal quality, or that there is no universal measure of quality in journalism and science.

While there are a range of perfectly good publications from across the political spectrum (well, probably not right across it but the fringes rarely produce well researched pieces), it is not true to say that any publication / PoV is of equal validity / newsworthiness as any other. The Daily Mail (in the UK) is a good example of a publication with |editorial value| < ε.

<comment><USER15> Sure, there's crap journalism all over the spectrum, some of it barely worthy of the name. The National Review is hardly the Daily Mail. While you may not agree with the opinions of its commentators, it's far from a tabloid. Over the years it's consistently valued and published high quality commentary and political opinion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This article address many of the incorrect claims being made about the dataset and processes: [http://icarus-maynooth.blogspot.com.au/2017/02/on-mail-on- su...](http://icarus-maynooth.blogspot.com.au/2017/02/on-mail-on-sunday- article-on-karl-et-al.html?spref=tw)

</comment><comment><USER17> Why is nationalreview being posted here? This partisan toadying dross isn't fit to be HN's toilet paper.</comment>


Future of the Computer User Interface - <AUTHOR> http://www.trueventures.com/blog/2010/07/27/interface-illiteracy-learning-how-to-read-write-in-the-21st-century/

<comment><USER2> How about a user interface that learns as the person interacts with it? Not just context based menus, but a paradigm where stuff changes as the user plays with it and the machine becomes uniquely suited for you.

The advantage of something like this is that we can accommodate every type of user from the technophobe to the power users.

Has anyone over here ever tried to make something like this?

<comment><USER3> I don't know, but Vernor Vinge talks about such an interface in his book Rainbows End.

<comment><USER4> Also reminds me of the fantasy game in Ender's game. Of course that thing eventually turned into a universe-spanning uber-being, so maybe it's not such a good idea...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> great story!</comment>