Information Is Physics - <AUTHOR> https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2019/11/240356-information-is-physics/ <comment><USER2> Landauer's principle intuitively: the laws of physics are reversible, and therefore two distinct states (1 or 0) always map to two distinct states (1 or 0, evolved). So how can you erase a bit - take a 1 or 0 and map them to a 0? The answer is that you have to send the 0 or 1 to the environment i.e. map 1 or 0 to (system,environment) = (0,1) or (0,0) , which manifests as the dissipation of heat.

<comment><USER3> So where does the information go upon the final heath death of the universe? Does it become encoded by, say, the final diameter of the post-expansion universe (i.e. by some "environmental" property at the sub-quantum field level)?

<comment><USER4> There is no environment when you are considering the entire universe. This means it evolves unitarily and no information is ever erased.

<comment><USER5> > evolves unitarily and no information is ever erased.

Nor created.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Fascinating! Thank you for sharing, OP! Having recently gone down a similar rabbit hole [1], having references and starting points is incredibly useful for further exploration, as this stuff is very hard to search for. There does seem to be a direct computational link between information and the universe - and the way we're using this link now , with classical computers, is highly abstracted and inefficient (the article also compares current energy cost of computing vs the much much lower theoretical limit). Quantum computers come closer to the nature of that link, but still require many abstractions.

I wonder if it will be possible to eventually compute without abstractions, directly on the substrate of the universe. Though that might be equivalent to real magic ;)

1\. [https://juretriglav.si/computing-with- nature/](https://juretriglav.si/computing-with-nature/)

<comment><USER7> I don't think you need to bring quantum computing into the picture. For example "naturally" 3D printing a Mango takes a few years. Just drop a seed in the right place on earth and wait. Isn't that computing on the substrate of the universe?

Are you asking if nature can be coaxed into doing it in a few seconds or a day? Or maybe you are not bothered about time and want to drop in that seed and grow a chair? The answer is probably yes to both. It will just take some time to get there. I don't think quantum computing will be required but who knows...

<comment><USER6> Yeah, dropping a seed in and growing a chair very quickly sounds like it is in the same ballpark, or at least further along the spectrum of efficient computation. That seed (program) would very tricky to produce, though. Contrary to the current practice of writing programs relatively easily, but the machines to run them are incredibly complex, both to run and to manufacture. With the seed, though, the machine would be nature, 1=1.

I agree that there is no need to bring quantum computing into the discussions, but it is higher on the efficient computing scale. It also requires a lot of effort to come up with programs that make sense, and they use more of natural phenomena (superposition, entanglement, etc) compared to classical computers. It's something to look at for inspiration, at least?

<comment><USER7> Definitely. You might like - [https://www.edge.org/conversation/seth_lloyd- seth-lloyd%E2%8...](https://www.edge.org/conversation/seth_lloyd-seth- lloyd%E2%80%94life-what-a-concept)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> For anyone interested in this, the Landauer limit now has experimental evidence.

Also, it is now believed that the Margolus-Levitin theorem puts a lower bound on energy even on reversible computations.

<comment><USER9> Weird. It's new to me that we _didn 't_ have experimental evidence before, but I guess it would have to be pretty subtle equipment.

I wish I knew how to catalog/index my assumption/belief set, so I could scrub it down for unverified sub-assumptions from time-to-time. I'm happy to update them, when they are proven wrong, but I don't know how to do this methodically and as a result, my brain fills up with crap. And then I can't trust my own glib reasoning, and then I have to be methodical for anything I need to think through, and that slows me down. And I hate that.

<comment><USER10> There are quite a few things in physics which didn't have direct experimental evidence, while most are convinced because the theoretical results and incomplete evidence are persuasive enough. If this Science article is accurate, there was no direct experimental evidence that proved the majority energy of the Sun comes from the fusion of protons into helium, until the neutrino experiment in 2014.

[https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/08/underground- experime...](https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/08/underground-experiment- confirms-what-powers-sun)

<comment><USER11> "They did a stellar job..."

Well ... yes, yes they did.

Pretty fascinating, if light, overview of what's involved in neutron detection. A case of understanding theoretical models (causal knowledge), materials, purity and processing, conversion processes (neutrino interaction -> light -> photodetector), statistics, and ultimately, a view of what was happenning inside the solar core _eight minutes ago_ , events which won't manifest on the solar _surface_ for another 100,000 years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think the next step for physics could be potentially in establishing the link between abstract information and what is perceived as "real matter".

<comment><USER13> Self squared dragons and monstrous moonshine.

<comment><USER13> I find it amusing that I didn't say anything for _OR_ against, just mentioned them and that apparently someone 'disagrees.' With what, an inaccuracy? Then post a reply. Just voting says: I don't get it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This reminds me a bit of David Deutsch's Constructor Theory. What's the mainstream acceptance of that like at the moment?

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

<comment><USER15> I'm always ticked off when I hear the hype around constructor theory. While information theory has had profound impacts in physics, constructor theory has always seemed to me to accomplish nothing but add fancy words. Yet it has done very well trading on the past prestige of its proponents, and promoting itself through popular talks where no real scientists are present to question them.

For example, constructor theory "explains" why life exists. Their argument is as follows (condensing 20 pages of vague equation-free words into a few sentences): first assume that there exists a constructor for life. Such a constructor is defined to be an object that can create new life. This leads to the creation of more life. Therefore life exists.

I was so shocked by this that I reread their paper three times before concluding their argument really was that vacuous. Their physics-related stuff is similar: assume the desired conclusion, then pretend you've derived it by adding the vague term "constructor" everywhere. (To derive F = ma... assume F is a constructor for ma!) It's so content-free I literally can't find anything specific to criticize. But they keep getting press by making more and more outrageous claims.

The fact that tens of thousands of curious people around the world have been duped into thinking that it is on par with ideas that actually have content proves the absolute bankruptcy of science communication. It is also a warning to avoid blind trust in past credentials.

<comment><USER16> The first sentence of the Wikipedia article is "Constructor theory is a proposal for a new mode of explanation in fundamental physics".

Well, if it's a "new mode of explanation", then the baseline expectation is that it doesn't add anything to all existing explanations of physics. The point of it would be to somehow allow explanations of things that were unexplainable before...

I mean, if you have a new way of explaining things, you _have_ to derive all of the things we already know are true.

Edit:

The "Outline" at the bottom of the page doesn't _sound_ like a profound new way of understanding the universe; it makes my bs meter twitch, but I don't see anything that provides a definitive reason to consider it all null.

<comment><USER15> You're completely correct: new modes of explanation can be extremely useful, and you can't judge from the Wikipedia article alone because it can't get to the meat! That's why I had to read the papers. Turns out, the meat just isn't there, it doesn't exist. There aren't any ideas beyond the vague popsci outline, which by itself does no good.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> java-man "settled into something that many people agree is a problem."

love this phrase.

</comment><comment><USER17> Can someone ELI5 the general concept?

<comment><USER18> A contest near the end of this chart: [https://xkcd.com/435/](https://xkcd.com/435/)

<comment><USER19> where are the philosophers with applied consciousness to imagination?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Does this relate to entropy (information theory) by any chance ?

Information Theory part 12: Information Entropy (Claude Shannon's formula) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4OlXb9aTvQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4OlXb9aTvQ)

</comment><comment><USER21> [https://web.stanford.edu/~montanar/RESEARCH/book.html](https://web.stanford.edu/~montanar/RESEARCH/book.html)

</comment><comment><USER5> ENERGY AND INFORMATION: [https://www.jstor.org/stable/24923125](https://www.jstor.org/stable/24923125)

</comment><comment><USER22> Feed sad. It is really one of the few area has long term impact. Sadly my young fellow hkust student cannot have a chance to explore and see it. Even get a funeral house to refuse to burial him. Rip. Just not sure what to say.

</comment><comment><USER23> It was only a matter of time

</comment><comment><USER24> What else could it be? Everything is physics.

<comment><USER25> This is the same sort of claim as everything is water, the four elements, matter, mind, math, or according to this article, information. The difficulty as always is showing how everything is actually X. It started with Thales or Parmenides, and the allure of reducing everything to one substance remains with us to this day.

<comment><USER24> Except physics is precisely _not_ a substance. So let me ask that again, what _else_ could information be? _Even_ dualistic philosophies are conceptually reducible to "physics" because physics is _all there is_ , _by definition_. To paraphrase George Carlin about the Earth and plastic, even if you think "minds" or "information" are not "physical" (by which people usually mean material, which is yet again something else), then redefine physics to be "old physics"+"that new arbitrary thing you named" and you'd still have physics.

Those discussions might involve interesting physics, but it's certainly clouded in very poorly chosen and confusion-inducing terminology.

<comment><USER25> Physicists certainly don't concern themselves with the study of everything. Take sociology or art, for example. At best you can you say everything is made up of physical stuff.

But even then, there are questions. Are math and logic made of physical stuff? What about causality or laws of nature? And what of universals or possible worlds or counterfactuals? If those exist, are they physical?

And then there's consciousness, and the ideas we have about the world, of which the study of physics is but one domain (containing concepts of energy, mass, fields, laws, information). Are these ideas physical?

What about the debate over the proper interpretation of quantum mechanics? Is that physical or philosophical? Is philosophy physics?

You quickly run into problems when you say that everything is domain X, because then you have to justify lumping everything into that category.

And the idea that everything is physics is open for debate, so clearly not everyone agrees that it is true by definition. Most things in philosophy don't get a free pass by virtue of definition, because people aren't going to usually agree to go along with said definition. Instead, they will want to ask what it means for everything to be physical.

<comment><USER24> That the _discipline_ of physics doesn't _study_ everything doesn't entail that _everything_ isn't _physics_. The title of the OP doesn't refer to the discipline.

As for your other points, I'm familiar with the debates on physicalism in their various forms. I just believe most of them are elaborate semantic games with very little actual content.

That people will ask what it means for everything (or anything) to be physical is precisely my point — stating that "information is physics" is a vague and (in my view) probably empty/tautological statement if you don't explain what you mean by that more precisely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Theories are now emerging that Universe is running one large bayesian learning algorithm (bayesian inference itself is proven to be an optimal knowledge creation method)

See e.g. Bayesian Brain and Universal Darwinism

<comment><USER27> See also: brain as hydraulics, brain as a system of cogs, brain as a computer.[1]

[1] [https://aeon.co/essays/your-brain-does-not-process- informati...](https://aeon.co/essays/your-brain-does-not-process-information- and-it-is-not-a-computer)

<comment><USER28> Argh, that article! Those are metaphors at some level of representation!!! You could argue in the same specious way that a computer is not a computer because it is really a bunch of atoms interacting via non deterministic quantum mechanical rules so it can't really implement deterministic algorithms and error free information storage. The three conditions stated in the article basically are the set up for reinforcement learning, (which can be implemented at some level of abstraction on a computer) and the question about if a representation is required or not is a mathematical one. For linear systems with gaussian noise the optimal control this is an answered question, yes you optimally estimate the state, then you base your controller off the optimal estimate. For more complicated systems it is unclear if the representation is required or not, but it sure seems reasonable that some level of representation is required. In the baseball example they are still talking about keeping a constant optical line, not what happens to raw optic nerve inputs. It has a reduced dimensionality representation!

<comment><USER25> > You could argue in the same specious way that a computer is not a computer > because it is really a bunch of atoms interacting via non deterministic > quantum mechanical rules so it can't really implement deterministic > algorithms and error free information storage.

Jaron Lanier argues that computers and computation are cultural. Why give them a special ontological status? Yeah, we can think of the universe as computational or informational. We can also think of it as mathematical, mental or just whatever physics posits (fields, strings, higher dimensions, etc). Whatever the case, when someone like the article in the OP states that reality is X, then an ontological claim is being made. Its metaphysics.

One could instead argue that the world just is itself, and anything we say about it is our human model or best approximation. Which would be a combination of realism (the world itself) and idealism (how we make sense of it). Then it's just a matter of not mistaking the map for the territory. Instead of saying that the brain or the universe is X, we say that X is our best current map for Y. We don't say that London is a map. That would be making a category error.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


CEO Crime and Punishment - <AUTHOR> http://bhorowitz.com/2007/06/27/ceo-crime-and-punishment/

<comment><USER2> The road to hell is paved with good intentions. It's often really hard to see that in the grander scheme of things, you're doing something bad.</comment>


Bitcoin Cryptoeconomics Still Within Grasp of the Future - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/utopiapress/bitcoin-cryptoeconmics-still-within-grasp-of-the-future-255049f8231f <comment><USER2> Well that was a pile of hot garbage.

"Blockchain groups now exist at every major university in the world and the number of people who own some kind of crypto digital asset continues to rise."

The same could be said about alt-right cliques or communist groups, both of which are growing too. Not such a great metric for progress.

"The idea of cryptoeconomics becoming embedded in the 5G video and voice-AI internet is sort of inevitable."

Really? I've got friends doing research and development related to those fields and they seem to have a very different view.

"Cryptoeconomics must be tethered..."

lol.

"...to and converge with the key exponential technologies of the future: quantum computing, machine learning, the Voice-AI interface, 3D printing, Biotechnology and whatever other important changes to human life occur from the intersection of technologies."

The rest of your article seems to be spewing incessant buzzwords without actually outlining any coherent argument or model for how this would actually work.

Finally, as much as I don't want to use ad hominem, it seems fairly unlikely that a content writer has any kind of professional knowledge of economics or technology to actually make any accurate predictions about the future of either field. Predicting the future of either field is extremely difficult, even for experts. Hand waving and claiming things as "inevitable" does not put you on the same level as a thought leader, it puts you on the same level as a cult preacher.</comment>


Apple using patents to undermine open standards again - <AUTHOR> http://my.opera.com/haavard/blog/2011/12/09/apple-w3c <comment><USER2> Alternate title:"Apple disclosing patents ahead of deadline in accordance with W3C patent policy, again."

The sense of malice seems to be inferred from Apple not disclosing these sooner, but I question what the point is of having a deadline if disclosures a month prior to it are going to be considered disruptive. If this was going undermine the process, shouldn't the deadline have been sooner?

<comment><USER3> The case where a W3C member has essential claims that aren't available under W3C royalty-free licensing requirements is treated as an _"exception"_ to W3C policy [1], not an expected part of the normal process. It requires formation of a special committee and is truly disruptive. Apple seems to be one of the only members willing to do it regularly.

[1]: [http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Patent-Policy-20040205/#sec- Exc...](http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Patent-Policy-20040205/#sec-Exception)

What would have been less disruptive is if Apple had _any_ other communication at all with the W3C Web Events working since it was formed more than a year ago.

Actually participating in a working group that is working an APIs they are shipping is the normal way for a W3C member to help shape a standard. If they had participated in the group, then the patents would have come up during the disclosure period for the First Public Working Draft back in May 2011. Instead, they recently even asked for _other_ , unrelated standards (like the Game Pad API) to be moved to a different working group so they can continue to avoid participation in the Web Events WG [2].

[2]: [http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public- webevents/2011Oct...](http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public- webevents/2011OctDec/0131.html)

Or, better, Apple could have brought touch events to the W3C themselves after they first shipped them in Safari back in 2007. (Even better is to propose new standards _before_ shipping them in a production browser, so that other parties can provide feedback before the standard is locked in by content compatibility - but I understand that proprietary browser vendors won't always do this because of secrecy around product launches.)

And of course, _not_ patenting their extensions to the web platform would also be great. :(

<comment><USER4> I'd be down for considering corporations that retain software patents [1] to be malicious. But I'm not sure I can get behind intimating that groups are being maliciously or aloofly disruptive simply because they aren't participating in Open Source working groups _to the degree that we might like_.

Again, if the timing is disruptive, the group should have set an earlier deadline for disclosure. If Apple's honoring the rules, then their timing is only as disruptive as the rules allowed in the first place. So it seems more reasonable to critique and revise the rules than to cast aspersions about dedication and motives.

[1] i.e. do not simply file for and retain ownership for defensive purposes, but freely license them to prevent any offensive use on their part.

<comment><USER3> As I said, there were earlier deadlines, but they didn't apply to members who weren't in the working group -- just as the whole process doesn't apply to companies that aren't W3C members at all.

Perhaps it was a strategic error by the W3C to standardize touch events in a new working group (allowing Apple to delay longer just by refusing to participate), rather than an existing working group that Apple already participated in. But in the end, no matter what process changes a standardization body makes, Apple will always have the option to just take their things and go home. And they'll continue to do so whenever engaging the standards community is less beneficial than their other priorities (like having a stronger patent arsenal to use against mobile OS competitors).

And sure, I don't expect Apple to act any differently. They are a for-profit corporation, and they have not just an expectation but a duty to use the tools the system gives them -- including patents, secrecy, and lock-in -- to create and capture value. And they are very good at it. And they've created some tremendous value not just for their shareholders but also for users and developers.

But, thinking in the long term, remember that the open web is part of what kept alternative platforms like the Mac useful and viable through decades of Windows monopoly, and what made devices like the iPhone useful from day one, before the SDK and the app store. Open platforms like the web are great for disrupters, but for the same reason they are scary to incumbents.

If the dominant computing platforms of the 1990s were as locked-down as iOS and Windows Phone are today (with one company controlling software distribution, and forbidding any alternate ways to download and run code), then _the web would never have been allowed to take off._ I want to build and sustain platforms where the _next_ web-like innovation will be allowed to happen. But today's incumbents understand what this means, so I expect a real fight to keep that possibility alive.

<comment><USER4> > _"Apple will always have the option to just take their things and go home. > "_

Sure. And at that point it will be reasonable to cast aspersions all we want. I just don't think it's reasonable to do so while they're still following the rules.

> _"the web would never have been allowed to take off."_

The systems being locked down isn't a big deal, I don't think. The far larger risk was the monoculture that Windows presented and thus the control Microsoft could (and tried) to exert. As long as we have healthy competition between viable alternatives, I think the mobile space will be healthier than PCs in the 90s. Carriers, manufacturers and platform vendors today may try to squeeze out third party solutions, as Verizon is trying to control the NFC wallet space. But they extent to which they might succeed is the extent to which there aren't competitors for what they offer. The operating systems they (ab)use to push this plan are largely irrelevant of their ability to get away with it. Indeed they stand at their highest chance for success, right now, with the most open mobile operating system on the market.

That said, a locked-down monoculture would be a far bigger threat than a monoculture with more freedom.

<comment><USER3> >> "Apple will always have the option to just take their things and go home. "

> _Sure. And at that point it will be reasonable to cast aspersions all we > want._

Well, that's what they did in this case. They opted out of the standards process, first by not bringing their proprietary extensions to any standards group, and later by not joining the standards group that other parties formed. No rule change will prevent outcomes like this.

I do agree that it's slightly better that they are at least W3C members (so they had to disclose their patent claims at the last minute rather than not at all), but that's the most marginal possible level of participation, and it doesn't really leave the open web or the standards community in much better shape.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't understand why the W3C even allows this.

When companies submit _any documentation whatsoever_ as part of, say, an the ITU H.264 standardization process, they are required to sign off on a form that states whether they have patent claims on that documentation. If they do, they declare that they are willing to license it under the terms required for that specification -- no surprises.

This doesn't eliminate the possibility of later surprise patents, but it does mean that it's unlikely any can come from anyone involved, because to even be involved in the process, you have to declare legally that this won't happen.

Why does the W3C not do this? If a W3C standard requires that all patents involved be licensed in a particular royalty-free manner, shouldn't even _proposing_ an idea to the W3C require a declaration that one has no patents on said idea, or that will license ones' patent in such a manner?

<comment><USER3> The W3C has similar requirements. Apple worked around them by never proposing touch events as a standard in the W3C [1]. The standardization effort was led by other W3C members without Apple's participation.

[1]: Also, although Safari lead David Hyatt hinted way back in January 2007 that he would eventually bring touch events to the WHAT-WG , it never actually happened: [http://lists.whatwg.org/htdig.cgi/whatwg- whatwg.org/2007-Jan...](http://lists.whatwg.org/htdig.cgi/whatwg- whatwg.org/2007-January/009213.html)

 _P.S. Greetings from a fellow Mudder! Thanks for ffmpeg! :)_

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The author's framing of Apple's patent applications isn't congruent with the way Apple views touch. The W3C, and standards advocates, view touch events in the same way they do mouse clicks. They're interactions that should be standardized and incorporated in to an event model for use in web applications. Apple views toch events as a proprietary interaction that they pioneered. Their already granted pinch to zoom patents reflect this view.

So, to a standards body, Apple's actions are perceived as undermining standards. To Apple, they're perceived as an act to protect a R&D investment.

<comment><USER7> " _Apple views toch events as a proprietary interaction that they pioneered._ "

Surely you recognize that to a lot of people this is exactly the problem, right? Using questionable patents to prevent straightforward interoperability requirements (i.e. make a web app to act like a native app) is, to me and I suspect lots of others, a fundamentally evil act.

It's all well and good to Love you some Apple. But when they start acting directly counter to the interests of the public, don't expect people to stand behind them just because they make pretty phones.

<comment><USER8> """Surely you recognize that to a lot of people this is exactly the problem, right? """

Yeah, but tough luck.

Why didn't those complaining Opera/Mozilla devs come up with the same interaction methods before Apple/fingerworks to give them to the public domain?

"""when they start acting directly counter to the interests of the public"""

Well, selling computers instead of giving them with zero profit margin is against the interest of the public too. Where do you draw the line? Why should the public benefit from something Apple invented by bypassing Apple and getting it from other vendors?

If you invoke the defense of the questionable patent, since "pinch-to-zoom" is "too obvious", then why didn't anyone else come up with it before and patented it?

It can't be both obvious AND non patented before. What it can be, though, and I think it is, is "obvious in retrospect". Which is not the same as obvious at all.

That said, I'm all for a short period (5-10 years?) where a patent can be valid.

But I don't buy the "questionable" or "obvious" argument. If it's obvious, patent it and grant it to the world, or at least establish some major prior- art.

<comment><USER7> " _It can't be both obvious AND non patented before._ "

This is so wrong it makes my brain hurt to read it. Even beyond plainly bad logic (you patent every "obvious" idea you have?!) it's contradicted by a continuous stream of "bad patent with prior art" stories on this site and a hundred others. Hell, I see some links to that sort of thing in this very thread.

" _Why should the public benefit from something Apple invented by bypassing Apple and getting it from other vendors?_ "

Because that's is the whole point of patent law, according to the US constitution at least. And in any case that's not what's happening here. Apple isn't trying to make sure we get pinch-zoom from them, they're trying to make sure that web applications _cannot get pinch-zoom at all_.

<comment><USER8> """Even beyond plainly bad logic (you patent every "obvious" idea you have?!)"""

If it's a multi-million making idea, why wouldn't I? (In my case, though, a little Googling reveals that someone else has thought of it first.)

You know of many people coming up with ideas like pinch-to-zoom and just throwing them away?

""it's contradicted by a continuous stream of "bad patent with prior art" stories on this site and a hundred others."""

How does this contradicts it? It cuts both ways, you know. If anything, it makes it even easier for someone else, like Opera, to patent something, if they can still patent it while prior art exists.

"""Because that's is the whole point of patent law, according to the US constitution at least."""

The whole point of the patent law is that ...the public should benefit by something X invented by bypassing X and getting it from their competitors?!!!!

You're reading it totally backwards. The whole point of the patent system is to PROTECT X invention.

"""Apple isn't trying to make sure we get pinch-zoom from them, they're trying to make sure that web applications cannot get pinch-zoom at all."""

Wrong again. Web applications get it in mobile Safari and Safari OS X. So, yes, they're trying to make sure we get it "from them".

<comment><USER9> _You know of many people coming up with ideas like pinch-to-zoom and just throwing them away?_

As a matter of fact, I do. Let me present to you a very popular example, pinch to zoom:

<http://www.billbuxton.com/multitouchOverview.html>

I'm sure you are confused, because Apple has a patent on this because they invented it, right? Not quite. Apple has a very narrow patent on it for using it in conjunction with a particular technology. To most people, applying pinch to zoom on a capacitive screen verses some other type of screen is pretty obvious, it works in any situation where you have multiple touch points.

None of this stopped Apple from patenting it. It didn't stop the patent system from granting the patent. And perhaps worst of all, it doesn't stop Apple from using this patent to claim that they did all sorts of work and _pioneered_ multitouch with gestures like pinch to zoom.

The problem many of have with Apple stems from exactly this type of situation. While this is one of the most talked about, I have no doubt that you can find many other examples of Apple enforcing trivial patents granted in a narrow band, or in some caes like the Apple vs Samsung, not so narrow.

You don't typically see people complaining about patents on Latent Semantic Indexing, Page Rank, or other complex algorithms that are truly non-obvious. If our society truly believes that minor tweaks on existing ideas are grand innovations worthy of patent protection, that's a very sad statement on the human condition.

<comment><USER10> I don't know if it counts as invention, but surely we've seen such technologies in science fiction movies like the Minority Report. The idea must have existed before.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> [http://www.ted.com/talks/jeff_han_demos_his_breakthrough_tou...](http://www.ted.com/talks/jeff_han_demos_his_breakthrough_touchscreen.html)

When did Apple file for its pinch-zoom patent? Jeff Han figured out a good way to commoditize multi-touch hardware, but the pinch-zoom multi-touch interface existed well before Apple made it mainstream.

<comment><USER12> It's possible that some of the patents came from Fingerworks which Apple bought in 2005. Fingerworks had been doing touch based work since about 1998.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm wondering what would be an effect of moving a standardisation organisation to a software-patent-free country. In such case software patent issues wouldn't be any obstacle for the organisation in their standardisation processes. On the other hand, created standards would be useless in countries where technologies covered in the standard had already been patented.

As a result, isn't it so that software patents in some countries inhibit the development of standards on a global scale? That's troubling.

<comment><USER14> I think just creating the standard is not the problem. If W3C had a policy "We don't care about patents", nobody could sue THEM.

However, if anybody wanted to actually use those standards, he/she would get sued.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I was under the impression that FSF had a collection of patents that have been donated to them. If so, can it really be true that Apple's not violating any of them? Proprietary companies use their patents to blackmail one another into cross-licensing all the time. Although it's offensive, it's how business operates. Why can't FSF do the same for the greater good of fostering the establishment of standards that will benefit the Free Software community and the public at large?

<comment><USER3> Apple is the largest company in the world, or close to it. Even huge companies with big legal teams and patent holdings like Samsung that get into patent battles with Apple risk ending up with court injunctions against selling their products. If the FSF decided to fight a (horribly lopsided) patent war against Apple, the losing scenario could include injunctions and damages against open source developers and users.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> While I don't condone it, it's easy to understand Apple's reasoning.

The longer they can delay the standardization of touch events, the easier it is for them to maintain dominance in the tablet and phone markets with their UX design & proprietary apps marketplace ("those web apps are harder to use because they don't behave with touch right!").

Of course they don't want a standard yet. They're the ones doing it best and reaping the rewards.

</comment><comment><USER17> This is interesting.

To me, it seem, that Apple knows its a lost battle before it even begins. So the only purpose here is to delay the open standard for as long as possible.

Why do I think this? Because they filed it at the last minute...not once, not twice, but three time!

</comment><comment><USER18> Watch out, Haavard is at it again!</comment>


JSVM - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jawb/JSVM Javascript virtual machine is one instruction set machine to parse and execute an assembly like code. <comment><USER2> Shameless plug: a while back I wrote an assembler-and-VM for a similarly hypothetical assembly language that I was studying in class. Just for kicks, I wondered if I could fit the entire thing into 1KB of JavaScript, whilst including features as step by step execution, a "debugging GUI" (as much as you could expect from 1KB!) featuring the stack, register contents and program counter, plus the assembler on top which performs full syntax/opcode argument checking.

The result (which I'm pretty pleased with) is here: [http://chengsun.github.io/ocremutiny.html](http://chengsun.github.io/ocremutiny.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> I love low-level learning projects like this, but I wish more of them would centralize around something like Nand2Tetris[1] to create an expanded, and interconnected, learning ecosystem.

[1] [http://www.nand2tetris.org/](http://www.nand2tetris.org/)

</comment><comment><USER4> Your VM will work much faster if you take the time to do a second pass over the generated "code" and resolve the jumps to LABELs all at once instead of linearly scanning the code for the appropriate target on each jump.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree with you, I'll fix these ASAP.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I had to write one of these (in C) for a class a couple years ago.

[https://github.com/tylerkahn/MIPS-Virtual- Machine](https://github.com/tylerkahn/MIPS-Virtual-Machine)

<comment><USER6> Whoa dude, this is awesome!

I once wrote a MIPS assembler+VM in Racket. It went OK but I never used it for anything: [https://github.com/gcr/mips-simulator](https://github.com/gcr/mips- simulator) Was a great learning experience though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> If I make make a few suggestions (mostly from a desire to see a more familiar sort of spec):

> Add arithmetic shift left/right

> Add logical shift left/right

> Add exclusive OR (XOR)

> Pick a word size so your integer and bit ops have meaning

Questions:

> How do I set the program counter from my assembly?

> Do I have registers (seems like a stack-based VM, so no)? If not, can I have > more stacks?

> Can you setup a dedicated block of memory to use as a framebuffer and render > it to a <canvas> tag?

~

Good work so far!

<comment><AUTHOR> > Add arithmetic shift left/right .. I'll add > Add logical shift left/right > .. I'll add > Add exclusive OR (XOR) .. I'll add > Pick a word size so your > integer and bit ops have meaning .. I think I'll just rely on js types to > keep things simple, If you see any reason not to please explain further

> How do I set the program counter from my assembly? The only way to set PC is > through branching

> Do I have registers (seems like a stack-based VM, so no)? If not, can I have > more stacks? Like you said it's a stack-based VM, so no registers. Currently > it's a single stack since it's enough. I never encountered a machine with > multiple stacks, can you enlighten me about this ?

> Can you setup a dedicated block of memory to use as a framebuffer and render > it to a <canvas> tag I made this machine to be used by students to test > compilers, But I think I'll add this feature in case there is any ambitious > student who wants to embed a graphics library in his language :)

Thanks,

<comment><AUTHOR> I think I understand the thing about word size, thank you I'll fix it

<comment><USER7> No worries--nothing broken, just undefined. :)

Having a fixed word size in a machine is important for being able to say, for example, what the largest and smallest integers are (assuming twos-complement arithmetic).

<comment><AUTHOR> It's 32bit now

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Better name it VM.js !!

<comment><USER9> I real disappointed when I discovered this was not an amateur JS vm that I could read in a weekend or two, that would be awesome to have :(

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry for disappointing you, the name is correct, what you're looking for is called a javascript engine like V8, SpiderMonkey ...</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: CoinJump, crowdsourced explanations for cryptocurrency price jumps - <AUTHOR> http://coinjump.community/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi all! It's a very early release, hacked together in a couple of evenings, but it's open source and anyone with an interest in cryptocurrencies can join in & hack on the code.

I think there's a place for discussion price jumps _after_ they happen, for analysis. Not trying to game the system, just learning about what causes price increase/decreases in +10% increments.</comment>


Burdened with Debt, Law School Graduates Struggle in Job Market - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/27/business/dealbook/burdened-with-debt-law-school-graduates-struggle-in-job-market.html <comment><USER2> I know someone in this situation. It is sad having $100k+ debt.

That being said seems good thing the country to need fewer lawyers.

With the excess where is the $49hr lawyer available for people? I have seen some on freelancer/uwork sites for $88 but would think could lower than that.

<comment><USER3> I've been wondering about that to. I think the lawyers from top schools can lateral into other fields easily. The lawyers I know all do something else besides law. One teaches. One rents out bedrooms in his home. One barely scrapes by waiting for the phone to ring, and hoping the person will accept $400/hr.? One got a real estate brokers license.(you don't need any prior experience if you passed the bar.)

I think it will just take time for the profession to realize they will probally not make what other generations made.

I do think there's a huge need for reasonably priced lawyers. Something between Nolo Press and $400 hr.? Some areas of law are pretty straight foreword. If a person without many assets(expensive home--mainly), and just has unsecured debt; a straight chapter 7 is something a lawyer could guarantee.(As long as the client is completely honest?) I'm surprised more don't advertise in that light--instead of hiding their work in mystery.

To any lawyer who tries to scare a client into paying whatever--the climate has changed. We know a little more than we did before the Internet, and Nolo. At least in civil matters.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> We've had this problem in Brazil for quite a while. It persists, I think, because of the large salaries that some public careers offer. People would be better off working as plumbers or electricians (huge demand for those jobs at the moment), but there's also the need for social recognition which, it seems, is more important than money for some people (who have not realised they wil get neither).

</comment><comment><USER5> The world is changing...even here in Israel, without any debt, salaries for law school graduates are extremely low and it is very hard to land a job even at that, a real struggle. On another note, the hi-tech and startup jobs are extremely good, huge demand, good salaries.

</comment><comment><USER6> Irony not called out in the article: Despite poor job prospects for law school graduates, LSAT tutoring still pays well.

<comment><USER7> I'm in this industry. Two comments.

First, if you are going to law school, the ROI of a better LSAT score is astounding. Likely $200000 in scholarships and then who knows how much in future earnings. That is what justifies the high fees.

But second, the market for LSAT tutors has actually shrunk dramatically. It's been cannibalized by an explosion in free/affordable online resources that are as good or better than a tutor.

I know johnathan, the tutor in the article. He has his own platform that generates clients. It's very, very hard to be an LSAT tutor now if you don't have that. Only the visible minority can consistently charge $100+ an hour ar enough volume to do it full time.

For anyone curious about these online resources, the main company in the field is 7sage. They've done the most to destroy demand for tutoring (this is a good thing!). They have free explanations for the logic games section. This used to be what everyone asked tutors about. Now almost no one wants logic games help.

While I do tutoring, I mostly focus on products and on creating free/inexpensive resources. This is my own contribution to eliminating the need for people like me: [http://lsathacks.com/explanations/](http://lsathacks.com/explanations/)

(They're free explanations for a bunch of LSAT practice tests.)

<comment><USER8> Very brave of you to voluntarily contribute to your own profession's demise by helping to provide auto-didactic services.

<comment><USER7> I used slightly equivocal language. The tutoring part of me has less demand. But I sell products too, and those do alright.

I think society is better off for having free/inexpensive products addressing this need, rather than many expensive tutors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The starting salaries of Law School Graduates in the US has become distinctly bimodal:

[http://www.nalp.org/salarydistrib](http://www.nalp.org/salarydistrib)

</comment><comment><USER10> Many have predicted for a while now that the next big crisis will be the default of student loans (approximated at over $1 Trillion). Perhaps the Law profession will lead the way, but there must be many other professions where people are getting degrees but not jobs. After-all, it takes a lot of people to accumulate $1 Trillion in debt.

<comment><USER11> But, in the US you can't "default" on student loans, they just keep accruing until the government starts to take it out of your social security payments.

My step father is close to being in this situation, he went to medical school in his late 30's, didn't pay his loans for a couple years, and now nearing his 60's faces the probability that he won't actually manage to pay them off before he retires.

The one loan you never want to take out is student loans, its total debt slavery.

<comment><USER12> You can definitely default on student loans; plenty of people are. You just can't get them discharged in bankruptcy.

<comment><USER11> I was trying to differentiate default on a student loan from defaults on pretty much everything else. I'm not sure your credit card company can block a professional license or garnish your wages. Plus, as I understand it, its pretty common for bankruptcy judges to adjust the principal, or remove fees/unpaid interest from other forms of defaulted debt, when the debt isn't directly discharged. This is apparently really rare for student loans.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> ProTip: Don't go to law school. Society is already awash with lawyers, who, beyond their functional purpose, quickly represent a corrosive and corrupting impact on society. Lawyers are like algae, if you don't make sure the conditions keep it in line, it will bloom and suffocate all life in its self destructive zeal.

</comment><comment><USER2> What is needed is law school graduate employment numbers broken down by undergrad degree.

I would think those who have undergrad in some STEM would be doing better than those with no technical background.

<comment><USER14> Why would you think that those with a STEM undergraduate degree would do better than those with an arts background?

I think you can extract potential benefits from any degree which could serve you well in practising the law. Take History for example, where you're taking different interpretations of the past, and concocting arguments in support of a particular interpretation, which is similar to what you will be doing as a general litigator.

<comment><USER15> One high profile barrister in the UK commented that a good lawyer has some elements of being a good actor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> How come the overabundance of people practicing law has not driven the cost of lawyer related services down? (Supply and demand makes me assume this would be happening by now..)

<comment><USER17> The market for legal services is an extreme power law. I used to run an online arbitration service where I paid arbitrators a fixed $150 for handling a case and was amazed at the caliber of people that applied.

Former law firm partners, Harvard Law grads who worked on Capitol Hill before, legal scholars with published books, all of it.

Turns out a tiny number of arbitrators can charge hundreds of dollars per hour for high value arbitration cases, while the rest just begs for scraps.

<comment><USER18> What happened to the service?

<comment><USER17> Arbitration requires either an arbitration clause upfront or a mutual post- dispute agreement to arbitrate. The latter rarely never happens as cases are often quite clear or parties don't talk anymore, the former is rare for small claims where my $300 arbitration made sense.

So it turned out I was begging for scraps too. The only way similar services survive is by partnering with marketplaces and handling all their disputes. This leads to kangaroo courts cause the arbitration firm ends up having just a few large clients (the marketplaces) despite having hundreds or thousands of cases (the marketplace users).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Before 2008 universities treated law schools as cash cows. It was not uncommon for a tier-2 or tier-3 school to open up a law school to make some money for the rest of the place. (Incidentally, the role has now been taken by schools of pharmacy.)

Where is the interview with a law school dean of a non-top-10-school, i.e. with a person who continues to perpetuate the misery?

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm slowly working my way through school again in my mid-30s to go to law school, although so many lawyer friends have advised against it due to an overcrowded marketplace. I really haven't yet decided if I'll actually do it due to such horrid numbers...

<comment><USER20> Consider reading this:

[http://www.amazon.com/Worthless-Young-Persons- Indispensable-...](http://www.amazon.com/Worthless-Young-Persons- Indispensable-Choosing/dp/1467978302)

Or at least watch some of his videos about degrees, e.g.:

"Before You Get Your MBA or Law Degree"

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNQqXyfsye0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNQqXyfsye0)

<comment><USER21> Wow, that books looks just priceless, almost a parody of the position it advocates, to judge by the Amazon reviews. English degrees are worthless, except perhaps if you want to avoid getting dinged by every other reviewer for your poor writing and grammar.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Who questions the use of central banks? Their purpose, their market intervention in setting the price of new money and creating debt?

<comment><USER23> FX traders, economists, ratings agencies

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> At last, an explanation for the proverbially low price of legal services!

</comment><comment><USER25> Since when was the economy "flourishing" in 2010?

<comment><USER26> It was flourishing in 2007 when he started. 2010 graduation minus 3 years.</comment></comment>


One long, intimate month with the Facebook API - <AUTHOR> http://anilchawla.org/2011/02/23/one-intimate-month-facebook-api/ <comment><USER2> I tried to integrate my site, Scribophile, with FB a few years ago when the API was still relatively new. The idea was to give the user the option of adding a wall post to their profile when they posted writing to the site.

The API had the exact same problems then... unanswered questions, confusing documentation, complex code examples. Something that seemed so simple--post a link to someone's wall, with their permission--turned into a multi-day codefest. But I finally got it working!

Until one day a few months later, when the API changed without warning. And that's what I think the biggest problem with the FB API is... they (at least back in the day) change it constantly, without much warning, and don't update documentation in a sane way. It's impossible to build once and forget.

I finally got a complaint from a user one day that the FB integration wasn't working. When I went in to check the code, I found that FB had almost completely changed their JS libraries and made significant API changes. Instead of going through that hell again, I just removed the feature.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I should say that I've been lurking on HN for quite some time and that this is my first post :-) One motivation for writing this post was that I was surprised to see how often the Facebook API will drop/omit data that exists and that you should be able to access. I specifically call out the Breakup Notifier app (which recently got a ton of buzz) because I don't see how apps like that can report accurate information when the underlying data is unreliable. Any thoughts or similar experiences with the Facebook API?

<comment><USER3> So this is how Breakup Notifier does it. It checks to see that the data is there. If at any point in time, the data I'm looking for is unavailable, I mark that field as "stale", don't vouch for the validity of its contents, and remove the ability for the user of the app to view that data.

When it comes back online, I mark it as not stale, and if it differs from the previous (non-stale) version, I send out an email.

<comment><AUTHOR> Gotcha. I thought you might report updates only. The problem is that people can also remove their status instead of setting it back to "Single". Focusing on value updates only is probably fine and I'm sure nobody is going to freak out if the app misses a breakup :-P In my case, I was trying to create a more comprehensive notification that covered events such as new relationships (i.e. the user does not have a relationship status and one day finally sets it) and I couldn't afford the false positives.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm the developer of Clarity (clarity-app.com), a Facebook Client for the Mac and I've had a similar experience. Here's another couple of things that are weird.

\- you can't like pictures or even see likes for pictures

\- you can't post on your wall if the attached image is located in your fcebook album: so if you want to post an image you have to upload it somewhere else.

\- you can't rename friend lists

\- lots of things are inaccessible if your friends have strict security settings (like their birthday, or their name)

\- as outlined in the article: the notification data structure is a train wreck

\- you can't approve friend requests

\- some parts of the API are not documented at all, like the 'attachment' field on the posts table: it contains a dictionary, but in order to understand the keys and values you have to read the raw data from lots of posts, and even then you never know if one future entry breaks your app.

\- and much more

One problem I had was that users expected much of this to work because it works on the Facebook iPhone app too. But that one is official and does not need to use the limited app API.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great list of additional restrictions/shortcomings. I forgot to mention that you can't post a photo that is hosted on the Facebook CDN - that is really annoying.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Great stuff, I'll keep this in mind as I build out the Appleseed Graph API. Especially good that you opened up with what you like about the Graph API, often-times articles like this skip right to the criticisms.

</comment><comment><USER6> I recently spent some time integrating with the Facebook Credits API, and even though it's smaller, it's a similarly frustrating experience.

The documentation is sort of there, sometimes contradictory, and I _always_ have to resort to reading their code examples in PHP to really figure out what data is expected, how to format it, and what I get back. None of their APIs are really well thought-out, they're all slapped together to sort of have all the relevant data. I understand that it's better to ship than not, but a little thought. Please?

The greatest irony though is that if you want to make a post asking for help in the official developer forum, you're met by this page:

[http://forum.developers.facebook.net/register.php?agree=Agre...](http://forum.developers.facebook.net/register.php?agree=Agree)

</comment><comment><USER7> I won't go into the specifics of the article, because there are people far more qualified than I - I did enjoy it.

There's a lesson here in marketing: can you predict which name will get more buzz, 'Breakup Notifier' or 'Friend Mail'?

There's another lesson in marketing - you sell the sizzle, not the steak, but if the steak is awful you won't sell very many for very long regardless of how sizz-tastic your marketing is.

I can't compare both these products - and I hope they're both solid.

</comment><comment><USER8> Good read. And a good reminder that you shouldn't (or can't) rely on documentation or a single request here and there when you decide to work with an API.

And that the amount of support and 'release cycles' (frequency of updates and fixes) is something that you should _always_ consider when integrating another piece of software into your own system.

</comment><comment><USER9> Anil, why didn't you just ignore fields and attributes that were missing? So if education:concentration returns "CompSci" on the first call, but then is missing on the second call, don't treat that as a change. Don't consider the attribute changed until the it is present _and_ different.

<comment><AUTHOR> Right, I also thought I could work around the issues by ignoring fluctuations in the data. The problem is knowing what is the correct baseline data. In your example, the education:concentration might be missing when you first start checking and only start appearing a long time later. Do you ignore the data when it first appears or report that the person just added another major at college (which may be true!)? This is a bigger problem with fields that people might completely add/remove instead of simply updating (e.g. relationship status). I tried baking in a time period (e.g. 24 hours) in which I ignored all changes and waited for the baseline data to become obvious, but even that didn't work because some data took even longer to re-appear. At some point I had to admit to myself that - with all these work-arounds - my simple feature had turned into a hack.

<comment><USER9> I understand that having to work around fluctuating data might produce less than desirable results. But your users might find the feature useful anyway.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I'm definitely keeping the code around since it's fully implemented. I might either reduce the scope of the alerts (for example, ignore add/remove and focus on changes only) or just bring it back when I have more confidence in the API.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I can understand all the complains about the facebook api, and they're all very valid, but my use of the facebook javascript API's have been relatively easy, to be honest. The documentation is far from ideal, and you have to figure stuff out by reading the actual response codes instead of trusting the documentation, but in general it all seems to work.

I am just wall posting and uploading photos though, and not doing any real data retrieval. Maybe facebook is more focussed on API's that put stuff in instead of taking things out? ;)

</comment><comment><USER11> Having built a Facebook application that uses FB video I can understand where he's coming from. The Graph API is a great concept but like so many things Facebook, only halfway executed. It always amazed me that there are so many differences between a video in FQL and a video in the Graph API. In the end I figured out that "begin ... rescue ... end" was my friend when dealing with the Facebook apis. And about any call I make to the OpenGraph API is now wrapped in them.

</comment><comment><USER12> Nice post.

Remember ChromeSpeed? Fancy seeing you here!

<http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~neeraj/projects/chromespeed/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Ha - ChromeSpeed! Glad to see you have the project page hosted and the video on YouTube. Maybe we should port to iPhone? Definitely an Angry Birds killer... OK, sorry to go off topic, we should catch up offline (or online elsewhere)!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> How do you deal with spoofed emails?</comment>


Show HN: Yet another React global state container - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/djyde/rehux <comment><USER2> What advantages or disadvantages does this have over redux? Thanks</comment>


Gowalla Is Reborn As A Beautiful App For Travel And Storytelling - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/12/gowalla-reborn/ <comment><USER3> Seeing that they probably would have never beat Foursquare, I'm glad that they are continuing to iterate. I have to say that I'm a bit skeptical about this new product. It seems a bit murky conceptually, and I'm not sure if travel is the right industry for them to be putting their bets on.

I met a lot of diehard Gowalla fans during SXSW at their party, and they seemed much more keyed into the gaming / object collection aspects of the service. Bottom line - I think a lot of these superfans (many of whom traveled on their own dime to the party) will probably feel alienated by this new app. Gowalla will probably have to find a whole new market, which may not be the worst thing but won't be the easiest either.

No matter what, I think Gowalla has a huge uphill battle to climb. They haven't even really been able to build much excitement here in Austin (even among people I know who are addicted to social media). I think their design and UI is top notch, but they seem to be missing whatever makes consumers super excited.

<comment><USER4> I worked at Gowalla last summer and I can tell you that there are superusers who travel around only for the beautiful stamps and to collect items, but that number is very small. Gowalla has always been about travel and exploring. This move is not a surprise in any way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Sorry, has check-in been "won" by Foursquare now that Gowalla and Facebook have bowed out, or is it actually the case that check-in is just _dead_?

<comment><USER6> Check-in has gone dormant for now because for most of the world's mobile users, there is no real benefit to checking-in to a place. The action of checking-in can be quite powerful if different systems can react to it. I'd love to check in to a fast-food drive-thru on my phone, get a meal menu customized to the particular location, place my order, pay for it, and just drive up to the window. Or check-in to a stadium/theater/museum and get a customized program guide. I don't want to download a new app for each company, location, or event. I don't want to go to their website. I should check-in to a place using a single app, and the relevant services should perform the most appropriate actions. It's not going to happen right away but eventually it will.

<comment><USER7> If you want to "check in" to a drive-thru, how is this different than say, going to chipotle.com and ordering online? Your description sounds like "an app that conglomerates all things I would do on a company website into one." Obviously what those "things" are are different from person to person - <USER2> would need to be more focus. Plus you'd have to integrate into every system you partnered with - which is significant development overhead for each new feature.

It kind of sounds like you are suggesting that each company/store/whatever conform to some generalized platform, whose APIs can be auto-discovered or auto-pruned with GPS coordinate input. This is almost along the lines of "everything should have an API - even my toaster." Theres someone out there trying that very thing but I forgot the name of it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> We've put a lot of hard work into this, I think you'll be happy with the final result :)

<comment><USER9> Nice work!

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think MG is right that "The travel aspect is potentially even bigger. While there are a lot of people going after this problem, no one has nailed the mobile travel guide so far. When someone does, it's going to be massive."

Partnering with Disney, National Geographic, and various universities to get their guide-content is a smart move.

Who is providing _good_ travel guides for mobile? Fodor's? Frommer's? Lonely Planet?

<comment><USER11> Lonely Planet is still my go-to for travel guides. Their content, however, is not yet crowd sourced...

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> surprised to not see more positive comments here. this sounds like color done right (or better, at least).

</comment><comment><USER13> It takes time to get it right, and I think Gowalla and Foursquare are both on track to do just that. I also think Josh is a great product guy and will eventually find a working solution. I think this is great proof that they aren't just waiting for it to come to them by chance.

</comment><comment><USER14> They were pretty much forced to pivot because they could not compete with Foursquare.

</comment><comment><USER15> Why are they given a chance to speak at Techcrunch Disrupt? Come'n they had their moment in the sun, give some new startups a chance

<comment><USER16> _Why are they given a chance to speak at Techcrunch Disrupt? Come'n they had their moment in the sun, give some new startups a chance_

What, because startups should be given one chance and one chance only?</comment></comment>


Delicious Junkies Unite. - <AUTHOR>

I was wondering if we can exchange delicious ids here.(mine is bstk2000) It will help in finding out what other stuff we are all interested in besides startups. It was discussed here recently that this community could not be launched in that direction even after startup news became hacker news. Perhaps delicious can give the final push.
<comment><USER2> Hmm... Interesting... Well to start, here is mine raju.gandhi

Though between delicious, tumblr and firefox bookmark syncing, my bookmarks are flung far and between.

I think one interesting experiment out of this would be to see the tag cloud that gets generated out of all the bookmarks that ycombinator hackers bookmark... assuming we get a good sample space</comment>


Maps with 3 words - <AUTHOR> http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013/07/02/what3words_n_3532122.html 3 words to pinpoint a place within 3x3m - www.what3words.com - pretty good in the middle of Hyde Park, London never mind somewhere really remote. <comment><AUTHOR> London tech startup www.what3words.com being pretty innovative in mapping - more accurate and memorable than postcodes?</comment>


Introducing s2n, a New Open-Source TLS Implementation - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.aws.amazon.com/security/post/TxCKZM94ST1S6Y/Introducing-s2n-a-New-Open-Source-TLS-Implementation <comment><USER2> If I counted right:

      OCaml TLS: ~4400 LoC
      OCaml X509: ~1550 LoC
      OCaml ASN1: ~1400 LoC
      OCaml nocrypto: ~5250 LoC

Total ~12600 LoC but you get a fully self-contained implementation, having only some crypto code in C and the rest as pure OCaml:

[https://mirage.io/blog/why-ocaml-tls](https://mirage.io/blog/why-ocaml-tls) [https://mirage.io/blog/announcing- mirage-25-release](https://mirage.io/blog/announcing-mirage-25-release)

<comment><USER3> Also note that s2n links with OpenSSL (or LibreSSL, BoringSSL) for the ciphers and ASN.1 functionality.

At first I was really surprised/impressed/worried that they managed to pull off an ASN.1 parser in C along with TLS is just 6,000 lines of code. Alas, they did not.

So, when they mention the 500,000 lines of OpenSSL, they are probably actually using a good 20,000+ of it for ASN.1 and all of the ciphers.

Yay marketing!

<comment><USER4> Still using it for ASN.1 is quite sad, given ASN.1 is where a fair few security bugs have been. If I'm not mistaken, this includes CVE-2015-0286, CVE-2015-0287, CVE-2012-2110, CVE-2009-0590, CVE-2009-0789, and CVE-2006-2937 from the last decade (and more if you go further back). The ciphers are pretty damned solid — the ASN.1 code… not so much. I'd argue that the ASN.1 parsing and the like is one of the areas that sorely needs replacing in OpenSSL, precisely because it has had so many vulnerabilities found in it over the years.

<comment><USER5> Incidentally, Fabrice Bellard has written a small ASN.1 compiler:

[http://bellard.org/ffasn1/](http://bellard.org/ffasn1/)

However, he does not want to give it away.

ASN.1 is a rather hairy standard overall, but AFAIK only a part of it is needed for TLS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Note that this library is currently only providing server functionality, and doesn't do certificate validation (in fact it appears to not do any of the X.509 parts of SSL/TLS). It's certainly interesting, but one of the reasons it's so small is that it's missing critical functionality for many use cases.

<comment><USER7> I think that's kind of the point. If your web server's TLS stack is trying to validate client certificates, you're doing it wrong.

<comment><USER6> There's nothing wrong with client certs (other than insane complexity). However ultimately s2n is likely to need to support operation as a client too at which point things like certificate validation etc. will be needed and the amount of code will increase.

<comment><USER7> Insane complexity is exactly why supporting client certs is a bad idea.

<comment><USER8> No, sorry. The insane complexity is on the requirements. If you need client certs, anything you do to satisfy the need will be at least as complex.

<comment><USER7> Yes, but 99.999% of web servers don't need client certs.

<comment><USER9> Source?

<comment><USER10> I think cperciva's opinion is a sufficiently valid source on this sort of issue, which is probably why you're being down voted.

<comment><USER7> Thank you for the vote of confidence, but you're wrong. The question of "real world usage of TLS" is one where I would immediately defer to tptacek without question... and you've been around long enough to know that's something I don't do very often.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wonder if this could motivate others to try making even simpler implementations of TLS - essentially, an effort toward the bare minimum necessary to be secure.

The fact that they are focusing on the TLS protocol itself and not the actual encryption implementation is a good way to start; the "extraneous complexity" is not really in algorithms like RSA/ECDSA/AES since those are specified mathematically, but in the handling of the protocol messages and states. That is also where most of the bugs tend to be.

It reminds me of this Hoare quote: "There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies."

</comment><comment><USER11> Can you use this library without having to use its IO capabilities?

My biggest issue with OpenSSL is that it also tries to do IO, but does it in a not too well-performing and non cross-platform way.

<comment><USER12> At least with OpenSSL you can implement your own BIO objects and do the I/O yourself if you want/need to. It's not the cleanest or best-documented interface in the world, but it's certainly usable.

<comment><USER13> it is usable. But I think you would be hard pressed to find a more widely used piece of software that has absolute terrible documentation. The only real way to figure it out is to read the code or read the examples.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Unfortunately this still uses libcrypto from OpenSSL. This isn't a fully self- contained implementation of TLS.

<comment><USER15> Nobody is particularly worried about libcrypto. There would be little point in reimplementing it's functionality.

<comment><USER16> libcrypto includes the OpenSSL ASN.1 code, which is worrying as all hell, e.g.: [https://git.openssl.org/?p=openssl.git;a=blob;f=crypto/asn1/...](https://git.openssl.org/?p=openssl.git;a=blob;f=crypto/asn1/tasn_dec.c;h=7a6414ad04761b5b355869c4fd8d095ce5ddbe6c;hb=HEAD)

Or any file in that directory.

<comment><USER17> Oh man, that code is just horrible. No comments on some of the functions, no comments on the input parameters and return values pretty much throughout.

I really thought OpenSSL was in a much better shape.

<comment><USER18> Code that implements standards should be read with the standard open next to it. This code: [https://git.openssl.org/?p=openssl.git;a=blob;f=crypto/md5/m...](https://git.openssl.org/?p=openssl.git;a=blob;f=crypto/md5/md5_dgst.c;h=335126c76d8fdc7f59dd68b2bbe134216c68ae26;hb=HEAD) looks like awful garbage, until you compare it to [https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1321.txt](https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1321.txt) , and then you realize you don't really _want_ comments or anything else cluttering up the implementation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Glad to see that some of the big players are starting to get into the habit of giving back to the communities building the bricks their success was built upon. Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon, Twitter, all of them have contributed major pieces of the web fabric in the past few years. The power and money they can divert to such operations is a key factor in producing mature tools which will help foster the web ecosystem in the end.

</comment><comment><USER20> I wonder why do implement SSLv3 in the new product, while others already deprecating and removing it?

<comment><USER21> Amazon uses this library on all their AWS api's. They probably still need to support SSLv3.

<comment><USER22> Amazon disabled SSLv3 on S3 very recently (May 20th), prob as part of moving to S2N.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > As a result of this, we've found that it is easier to review s2n; we have > already completed three external security evaluations and penetration tests > on s2n, a practice we will be continuing.

"Our pill has been clinically tested."

What were the _results_?

</comment><comment><USER24> Very impressive, thanks Amazon!

</comment><comment><USER25> > s2n is short for "signal to noise"

Anyone else think this was a contraction of the a11y, i18n, a16z or f6s variety?

<comment><USER26> Here are your options:

sawn scan seen sewn shin shun sign skin soon sown span spin spun stun swan

"Yeh, we're not vulnerable, because we've been using the swan library"

<comment><USER27> > "Yeh, we're not vulnerable, because we've been using the swan library"

Yeah, who would name a crypto implementation something stupid like "swan". Oh wait... [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openswan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openswan)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I think another implementation is not necessarily a bad thing, but it's a shame that this effort couldn't be combined with LibreSSL and BoringSSL or even OpenSSL under a single project. Having more eyes on one thing would be better it would seem.

<comment><USER29> No! Let's have many implementations all with completely separate code bases. Then when the next security bug is found it won't affect the whole internet.

<comment><USER28> I can see that side of it, but when N >> M I don't really see how that helps things significantly.

N = number of https sites M = number of tls implementations

<comment><USER29> You don't think N(M-1)/M sites not being affected by the next heartbleed wouldn't be significant?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Is it me, or is Amazon s2n (signal to noise) logo very similar to our company (signal2meaning) logo?

[https://signal2meaning.com/](https://signal2meaning.com/)

</comment><comment><USER31> Sounds great. I hope that Windows support without an additional crypto library dependency is added soon, e.g. using Windows CryptoAPI or Windows Cryptography API: Next Generation (CNG).

</comment><comment><USER32> I wonder if they will include it in Amazon Linux at some point.

</comment><comment><USER33> How does this compare to miTLS[1]?

[1] - [http://www.mitls.org/wsgi/home](http://www.mitls.org/wsgi/home)

</comment><comment><USER34> So I bet there will be a rust implementation before long :)

<comment><USER35> There are some Mozilla security folks feeling out the waters as we speak.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I hope libcurl supports this soon.

<comment><USER37> s2n is server-only

<comment><USER31> I don't think that this is true. See [https://github.com/awslabs/s2n/blob/master/bin/s2nc.c](https://github.com/awslabs/s2n/blob/master/bin/s2nc.c)</comment></comment></comment>


Can a Night Owl Become a Morning Person? - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/id/2193208/

<comment><USER3> I love the night. I also love the winter and cloudy days. Has anyone ever thought about running their company at night? Has anyone thought about making the normal hours for your programmers start sometime after 8 pm? It might produce interesting results. The only thing you would need is your public facing group awake during the "normal" hours, or as I like to call them: the "sleeping" hours.

<comment><USER4> You should try working from China. I'm currently based out of Beijing working US hours (8pm-5am). All you need is broadband and a bed.

<comment><USER3> Are you working for a corporation, or are you working for yourself? Also, for the position you are in, do you need to speak Mandarin or Cantonese?

<comment><USER4> Check your email

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've read a lot of articles and even a book on healthy sleep. I generally understand how sleep works and I have desperately tried to make myself a morning person. I have to wake up in 6:30 am for school and i usually feel good for an hour or two and then i get sleepy. I take a monster coffee dose and try to go through school without sleeping trough it(im not the only one, at least 6 people from my class are night people) I handle it somehow until 1:30 pm and go home and im sleepy. But i just start wasting time until 5:00 pm and go jogging and an between 6:00pm and 8:00 pm i usually fall asleep and wake up between 9:00 pm and 11:00 pm. Weird. i fall asleep between 1:00 am and 3:30 am. Sometimes when i go to sleep i stay awake for a really long time, i don't know how long. Anyway i managed that by forcing myself to NOT think in bed. The bed is my favorite thinking place and i don't think here any more. And i manage pretty well i guess, im a pretty energetic person. The only problem is that i know someday i will burn out and this schedule will fall on top of me and crush me. So the summer is going to be hard, because i won't have to wake up for school. I usually wake up at noon and no alarm works on me, i just go back to bed because i don't care. But at least i don't drink coffee so it balances it's self. Anyway don't try to drink yourself to bed like i tried with alcohol. It comes back to haunt you in the morning. Pill's i don't like taking any at all. So im just cursed.

<comment><USER6> How did you force yourself not to think in bed? My brother who can fall asleep in a few minutes says he can do this but I've never been able to do it once. My mind just wanders the second I lie down.

<comment><USER5> A few months ago i started meditating. Im not that much in to it, but i learned how to concentrate for a while on something(eg. my breathing) And in bed i just concentrate on something like that, don't brutforce yourself not to think, just take your mind away from it. It doesn't always work, but im getting better and better.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> __What I am learning about sleep __

I wanted to be a morning person, because I wasnt, because I am a hacker and our pledge requires constant self-improvement, because others could do it and finally because i wanted to feel good about myself. Alas, all this failed, till I chanced onto something interesting. Here is how I manage getting up early-ish.

After numerous unsuccessful attempts my body just gave up...but I wasn't quite done yet. So, the alarm was set for 7 AM and every morning I would get up to switch it off and promptly go back to sleep. My body and I had reached a compromise. I was allowed to set any big hairy audacious goal and my body was free to disregard it just as long as it went through the motions to humour me. Soon enough the body started getting up a few minutes early just to switch off the alarm and then took its own time going back to sleep. Now, it gets up at 6.30AM to switch off the 7 AM alarm (lol) then it sleeps till 8 AM and is fresh as a daisy for the rest of the day. I sneakily fooled my body! You can too...

Next goal 6.00 AM!

<comment><USER8> I also read that our bright monitors are fooling us for daylight but the key thing is eating. Usually I would eat late in the day and just get going on coffee. But I read and tried it (it works somewhat) that if you dont' eat at night, then wake up early just one day and eat a nice meal. Your body instantly adjusts. You repeat this for a while and soon enough you are an 7-8am'er.

<comment><USER9> Making any lasting change requires three things: Motivation, Mechanism, and Monitoring.

I've implemented these three things to fix my sleep schedule: Motivation comes from my own desire and encouragement from those around me. The Mechanism is to shift my eating schedule earlier by eating a snack in my bed right when the alarm goes off and eating dinner earlier. Monitoring is the log book of times that I eat, wake up, and go to sleep.

Applying this technique for 2 weeks has yielded a 2-hour forward shift in my sleep schedule! :)

The article mentions another mechanism: going outside right after waking up. I'm going to think about adding this mechanism to my sleep-schedule-shift personal development project.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I have two things to add:

1: The consequences of lifestyle won't hit until you cross thirty. Unhealthy diet, lack of exercise, poor posture, poor sleep habits, extreme stress - <USER2> of these matter when you're young, so you think you're invincible. We even celebrate this kind of lifestyle as some kind of macho thing. But bad lifestyle karma WILL eventually get you and weird shit will start happening with your health.

2: Want to wake up early? Just drink a huge glass of water before bed. I'm serious.

</comment><comment><USER11> I love how she makes 1:30 in the morning out to be "sleeping late."

<comment><USER12> Sure, but that's kinda bad. During 4th year of university, my bedtime crept up to a regular schedule of 5am - 3pm with some nights even later. It made it hard to do a lot of things, including going to pretty much all classes.

<comment><USER11> I agree with what you're saying.. but most hackers I know can force themselves to get up sevenish if they're going to sleep that early. IMHO, late is 3am+

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> _Being a morning person has its drawbacks. Morning people get sleepy just when all the fun begins. What I really wanted when I started this experiment, I now realize, was to be one of those crazies who functions well on just five hours of sleep. That's never going to happen._

Remarkable. I've thought a lot about this issue, and this is _exactly_ the conclusion I've reached as well.

      O, to rise when bright,
      And bed past dark.
      To be both an owl
      And a lark!

</comment><comment><USER14> Have children; worked for me.

<comment><USER15> Or get a day job/contract.

I did _just_ so I would be _forced_ to sleep and get up at 'normal' times.

...so far so good. A hidden benefit that never occured to me is all the prety girls I now meet with no extra effort. (day<girls<night). :)

<comment><USER16> I did get a day job, and I force myself to sleep on a normal schedule. I still hate it. It's completely unnatural to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> About the half-hour morning walk, you can skip it if you can put an 100 watt light bulb (or equivalent) somewhere in your field of vision. It should be visible without turning the head, but not directly in your retina. Mine is (accidentally) half a meter above and behind the monitor and works just fine. Used it to get over a bad case of winter blues (more like winter depression, if you ask me) and worked wonders.

I'm still waiting for someone to try and confirm the latest Harvard study, the one about not eating 16 hours before the desired wake-up time. Looks very good on paper.

</comment><comment><USER18> Throughout university you could not of convinced me that I would be a morning person. But once I got into the real world (aka corp gig) I realized that I was most productive in the early hours of the morning, my job required me to get up early. Now I have totally embraced the morning as my "getting stuff done" time. I have more energy and time, I won't be going back to the night owl lifestyle anytime soon.

</comment><comment><USER19> Last September, I flew to Australia to visit my family. My normal routine (roughly) is sleeping from 2am to 9am.

Somehow the jetlag worked its wonders on me. For a couple of months after the trip, I was dog-tired by 9pm and asleep by 10, up at 6. Somewhat sadly, it wore off, but at least I started getting stuff done in the evening again. I found I just wasn't productive in the mornings.

<comment><USER17> That's the final argument for us, night owls. Even if we could "fix" our schedule, it's not worth it because it's the best for us. Plus nothing compares with work done after 7 pm - no phones, no emergencies and even less noise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Daylight can be replaced with "full spectrum" lights, esp if you live in places where sun is infrequent (e.g. Seattle).

Also recommended is physical activity. A small, foldable exercise bike is ideal for apartment and can be used at the same time as lights.

<comment><USER21> > A small, foldable excersize [sic] bike is ideal for apparment [sic] and can > be used at the same time as lights.

Real bike riding is more fun, though. Riding at night is especially nice because nobody else is awake, there's no traffic, and the wind is lighter.

<comment><USER20> And how would riding at night help in becoming a morning person?

<comment><USER22> Because you are up before the sun (at least in the winter).

<comment><USER20> To suppress melatonin production you need to be exposed to the sunlight, not the darkness before the sunlight.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Popular post on sleep from a former programmer;

[http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/05/how-to-become-an- ea...](http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/05/how-to-become-an-early-riser/)

Read his polyphasic sleep posts too.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the link. I've struggled since childhood with both falling asleep and waking up, especially the latter. (Some of my earliest memories involve been ripped out of bed and thrown into a cold car to be taken to school.) I've read quite a few articles like this over the years, but this is the first time I've encountered the notion of practicing a routine during waking hours to program yourself to get up. Interesting idea -- I may even give it a shot.

<comment><USER23> Where is the bug?

In your beliefs about the universe? > Your purpose in life? > Your career choice?> Your motivation? > Your diet > Your genes...

Seriously, at what level of abstraction is the problem? Is it a problem at all?

<comment><AUTHOR> There's most likely a large genetic component. I doubt I had formed many beliefs about the universe when I was only 5 or 6, but my tendency to stay up late and sleep in appeared as early as then, if not sooner. If I'm free to set my schedule, which has been possible at times, it's not a problem. But inevitably outside factors -- job, school, relationships, etc. -- interfere.

That said, I find that the night does have a certain aesthetic appeal -- a sense of freedom, of wonder even -- that I find absent in the cold, hard light of day, which likely contributes to my return to a "night owl" pattern when possible.

<comment><USER24> Almost word-for-word, I'm in the same situation and have a very similar outlook, for whatever that's worth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Yeh I totally was warped for ages going to bed at 4am and waking at 12pm. I got so much done but my health, availability and communication hours were difficult. I am still fighting it but when you can work it in the day sometimes you spend less time messing around, for better or worse. Some of my best stuff came from just messing around.

There is something to be said of the late night session, It almost feels like you can draw more inspiration without constant interruption and nothing going on, extreme focus.

In fact with the green onslaught, globalization and population growth maybe night living will be acceptable at some point.

</comment><comment><USER3> Does anyone know of any other websites for Night Owls besides www.nightowlnet.com and www.nightowlcafe.com? I want to believe that there is a whole group of people who are dedicated towards making my condition more known so that I one day will not have to CONFORM to a way of life that I view as backwards. I use to envy Dave Attell.

Of course there is some sarcasm in the above comment, but really does anyone know of a place or company more centered around the "night owls" life?

</comment><comment><USER25> I like my life much better when I go up at 07-08:00 and not 12-14:00 but I have this really bad tendency to push later and later everyday until I stay up 24hours , go to bed at 18:00 sleep to 04:00 then start it all over again.

But it has to do with being free, I will soon have more habits, training etc which will force me to keep a more normal schedule.

</comment><comment><USER26> I used to have trouble getting up by 9am back when I lived in my parent's basement. When I moved out on my own, I started waking up at 7am. It was the sunlight which did it. It was bright shining through the shades and when I lived in the basement, I had no windows.

</comment><comment><USER27> How about trying the recently-discovered "fasting" method?

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=199394>

</comment><comment><USER28> I think melatonin works really well for some people. If I take one mg melatonin, I sleep great, natural, and wake up 8 hours later, refreshed, ready to go, feeling like it's morning no matter what time it is.</comment>


Tesla turns a profit - huy-nguyen https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2018/10/24/tesla-turns-a-profit-fulfilling-a-pledge-by-ceo-elon-musk-as-the-electric-car-maker-seeks-to-leave-chaos-behind/ <comment><AUTHOR> Comments moved to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18295942](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18295942).</comment>


React Router is dead. Long live rrtr - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@taion/react-router-is-dead-long-live-rrtr-d229ca30e318#.djr4dzu0z <comment><USER2> Seems like the project just needs more high-touch maintainers. Why not apply for that instead of forking?</comment>


Gum disease linked to Alzheimer's, study claims - open-source-ux https://www.nhs.uk/news/neurology/gum-disease-linked-alzheimers-study-claims/ <comment><AUTHOR> See also: [http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2018/06/22/alz...](http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2018/06/22/alzheimers- and-infectious-disease-for-real)

>A new paper in Neuron, though, looks to be the most unignorable one yet with evidence that there's some sort of viral/bacteial/fungal component to the disease. A team led out of a Mt. Sinai research group has gone over a pretty large sample of Alzheimer's brain tissue (622 patients who died with the disease, and over three hundred control brains as well), sequencing infectious organism DNA, looking for changes in the proteome, etc. They find that aging brains in normal patients display plenty of viral signatures (as indeed is probably the case in many other tissues). But the AD samples were particularly enriched in herpesviruses 6A and 7, a result that repeated across three independent cohorts from different geographical locations (the brain tissue collections were from more than one previous effort). According to Stat, there's a paper coming out next month from another group entirely that also implicates HHV6.

</comment><comment><USER2> Why does the root (no pun intended) of all evil always circle back to me not flossing enough?</comment>


Ask HN: Why do threads show up minimised? - <AUTHOR> Is it auto in some way like flagging or moderator censorship? I've noticed many more lately, not just today, and most of the time the comment starting the hidden sub-thread seems perfectly factual and innocuous. There are exceptions of course. :) <comment><USER2> Here are some comments by 'dang on the topic of collapsed threads: [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=dang%20collapse&sort=byDate&pr...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=dang%20collapse&sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=comment)

<comment><AUTHOR> None of which answer the question. I had searched before I asked to see if there was any indication as to what might have changed - either algorithm or actions of site users :)</comment></comment>


Seven Reasons Why a Scientist Believes in God - <AUTHOR> http://www.sivanandadlshq.org/messages/sciblgod.htm

<comment><USER2> The list, so the moderately curious need not visit the actual link:

First: By unwavering mathematical law we can prove that our universe was designed and executed by a great engineering intelligence.

Second: The resourcefulness of life to accomplish its purpose is a manifestation of an all-pervading Intelligence.

Third: Animal wisdom speaks irresistibly of a good Creator who infused instinct into otherwise helpless little creatures.

Fourth: Man has something more than animal instinct - the power of reason.

Fifth: Provision for all living is revealed in such phenomena as the wonders of genes.

Sixth: By the economy of nature, we are forced to realize that only infinite wisdom could have foreseen and prepared with such astute husbandry.

Seventh: The fact that man can conceive the idea of God is in itself a unique proof.

</comment><comment><USER3> Seven reasons why I don't believe "scientists" who believe in god... And the maths was faulty, too...

</comment><comment><USER4> move along, nothing to see here</comment>


Mind uploading via Gmail - <AUTHOR> http://multiverseaccordingtoben.blogspot.com/2010/09/mind-uploading-via-gmail.html

<comment><USER2> I like the idea. Can my alter ego please have 8 spider legs, then? Some years ago I told a good friend who works in cybernetics to get the job done. Unfortunately there has not been real progress to far. Anyway, I assume, in 2060 the job will be done.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I don't think that gmail alone can capture all nescessary and substantial details of ones mind.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, better add facebook and twitter.</comment></comment>


Spend Your Money Like You Have to Pay It Back - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/life-learning/spend-your-money-like-you-have-to-pay-it-back-24096a626333#.eb7hnz6c5 <comment><AUTHOR> "Do you want some free money? That would be great. All you need is a venture capitalist or an angel investor to swoop the fuck down and make you rich with a $3,000,000 cash injection. You can blow the money on X-box consoles, office perks and supporting a burn-rate that would make Emperor Nero's pyromania look harmless."

<comment><USER2> The opening strawman weakens the essay because it is unthoughtful compared to what follows. It's just a rant and the rest isn't.</comment></comment>


How long did it take you to figure out that the top/bottom arrows are for voting? (honest!) - <AUTHOR>

<comment><AUTHOR> I didnt realize it until 10 days ago (though I meant to ask long ago how points were awarded). It skirted my consciousness and I think I saw it as in the IE newsreader and in XML and Swing trees, a way to collapse and expand the conversation tree.

If YC had picked the "standard" icon - thumbs up/down, they would have had to compromise their minimalist Gmail look. But would this have made for a better UI?

(I wonder if there is an "Aha" lesson trying to get out...)

</comment><comment><USER2> I realized it immediately because I came from Reddit...

</comment><comment><USER3> I didn't look, I didn't notice, and frankly, I didn't care. If I had ever wanted to upvote a comment, I'm sure I would have found quickly.

</comment><comment><USER4> I overheard STEW allowed users to vote others down before I ever registered for this site. :)

(STEW = YCombinator startup news.)

<comment><USER5> I see what you did there :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> What down arrow? (came from reddit)

<comment><USER7> Comments have down arrows. They're only visible if you're logged in.

<comment><USER8> Perhaps you also need a certain amount of karma. I'm logged in (with 2 karma) and don't see any down arrows.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Honestly, I knew right away. I'm not sure why, because I've never used Reddit or Digg.

</comment><comment><USER9> Just now...

<comment><AUTHOR> that's one point for you, for your honesty :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Down is new</comment>


Ask: DropBox or Google Drive for startups? - <AUTHOR>

Now that Gdrive and DB have both been around for a while, I'm wondering:<p>(1) any consensus which is better for a small startup office environment with less than 10 team members, and why?<p>(2) which do you prefer, and why?<p>Thanks! <comment><USER2> This is somewhat off-topic, but...

Why do people keep camel-casing Dropbox?

<comment><AUTHOR> huh?

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Upvote for Google Drive

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Upvote for DropBox</comment>


Jeffrey Epstein, My Sick Pal - <AUTHOR> https://www.motherjones.com/crime-justice/2019/08/jeffrey-epstein-my-very-very-sick-pal/ <comment><USER2> Quite an entertaining read, despite the dark subject matter. Especially at the end, when Stuart starts to regret picking up the phone. Possibly intoxicated, or maybe he's just like that all the time at age 89.

</comment><comment><USER3> Oh, that Stuart Pivar..

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuart_Pivar](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuart_Pivar)</comment>