Surprisingly Turing-Complete - <AUTHOR> http://www.gwern.net/Turing-complete <comment><USER3> I have taken to calling certain features "Turing Complete" (in a joking-but- not-really way). Most often they are seeking some kind of enterprise customizability: "workflow", survey skip logic, custom reports, white labeling, etc.---basically the same places where you risk falling into the Inner Platform Effect trap. I'm curious how other people tackle requests for these. Usually it starts out with something basic ("email the admin if it's two weeks late", "skip this page if they answer that way", "use the most- recently entered birthday to compute age in years and months", "let people change the logo"), but I can see where it's going.

It seems to me you can either field these requests as they come in and get a hodge-podge of strangely-interacting features, or you can build some kind of general-purpose scriptability from the start. (Or you can follow the iPhone and 37 Signals and do it one way only, but often that is not an option.) So I've started to wonder about simply embedding a Javascript interpreter with access to a well-defined API into your application objects. Then people can do whatever they want! Of course this assumes savvy users, perhaps 90% an internal "services" team. But JS is easy to embed, e.g. therubyracer, was designed to be secure (no network/file/shell access), and is the most widely- known of all programming languages. What do other people think? Crazy?

<comment><USER4> I don't favour anything that puts more Javascript out there, but I agree with the more general point: if you're going to embed a programming language, better to embed a real, well-designed one than an ad-hoc custom one.

This is also why I find the likes of drools and cucumber utterly wrongheaded. (More generally, there's an antipattern of turing-complete configuration files - often when an organization has convinced itself that "code" needs to go through a long testing and deployment cycle but "configuration" doesn't). If you already have a programming language, use it.

<comment><USER5> Drools yes, but Cucumber? Cucumber isn't a programming language, it's just a sequence of steps. There's no logic, iteration, calling, etc. There's substitution of table values into steps, but that's no more programming than a mail merge.

<comment><USER4> Tests end up needing logic, and so Cucumber ends up splitting the flow of a test between two files in different languages.

I should probably have complained about HTML templating that allows a template to call into functions (or have logic in it itself), that's a bigger and clearer example of the problem.

I think the underlying principle here is that the more powerful languages need to be outermost. Having a powerful language call into a weak language to do something that needs to happen safely works well. Having a weak language call into a powerful language just results in a worst of both worlds - all of the danger but less of the power.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm so tired of "CSS is Turing Complete" meme being propagated. TC is a powerful result with important consequences. Namely the impossibility to solve Halting problem. But CSS is deterministic and a CSS "program" always halts.

"But, but, we are making an _assumption_ that a user has to click this particular button until the page doesn't change anymore (assuming infinitely long page [1])"

To which I say, poppycock. The purpose of CSS language is to apply styles to the webpage. Once it is processed, the CSS "program" has done it's purpose and is finished (i.e. halted). Running the same CSS "program" over and over again until it consistently produces identical results is not the point of CSS (unlike, say LaTeX/BibTeX compilation process, where you need to compile one file several times to get citation page numbers right, which _is_ Turing complete). You might want to call it something else, like RCSS (repeated CSS). Then, RCSS is Turing complete, but plain CSS isn't. Much like a calculator that can calculate z^2 + C isn't necessarily Turing complete, while a graphical calculator that can draw a Mandelbrot fractal by iterating that formula is.

[1] which is acceptable, due to infinite memory assumption of a regular Turing machine

<comment><USER7> I don't consider that a remotely relevant argument. CSS is intended to style webpages at all times, webpages which are dynamic; CSS has never had a 'purpose' of rendering once and only once since oh, I don't know, 1997 or so. You might as well object to the _Magic: the Gathering_ example because it assumes a human to play each card mechanically; or you might as well object to the very first Turing machine in Turing's paper because he asks us to assume a setup where it's a human (or 'computer' as they were then known as) following the instructions mechanically.

<comment><USER8> While I question the tone of the original post, it is correct.

The difference between being Turing complete and implementing rule 110 is crucial, and any discussion on the subject needs to make clear that these are not the same.

You are obfuscating the role of the driver. In the Turing machine, the driver is _part of_ the Turing machine. In CSS, it is not, and has to be done by the user (or presumably a JS script).

As another post by Grue3 points out, almost any language can implement rule 110, including languages that are not Turing complete, and are explicitly said not to be Turing complete in the CS literature/community.

For example, Coq, Agda, Idris (with totality checking) and other languages based on Martin Lof type theory, are not Turing complete. That it why they are able to prove totality of their functions. But they can all implement rule 110 with no problem.

<comment><USER8> Just some more on dependently typed languages: The article actually mentions them in footnote 1. So as it stands, the CSS part really doesn't make sense, because everything written about CSS applies to these dependently typed languages.

In particular, you could write some Agda/Coq/Idris program that implements rule 110, and has some trivial user interaction to repeat this until a stable pattern is reached. This simulates a Turing machine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> My favorite example is SQL. The ANSI-92 standard deliberately made SQL _not_ Turing Complete so that it could be optimized. But people kept adding things to it, like CTE and windowing, and now it is.

See [http://assets.en.oreilly.com/1/event/27/High%20Performance%2...](http://assets.en.oreilly.com/1/event/27/High%20Performance%20SQL%20with%20PostgreSQL%20Presentation.pdf) for proof.

<comment><USER10> SQL took off as a way to wrap-up first-order logic over finite models into a form useful for programmers: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relational_model](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relational_model)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Here's a challenge for you guys: Super Mario Maker. It hasn't been proven Turing complete yet, but I'd be surprised if it wasn't.

Here's a pointer for you to get started: [http://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/805618-super-mario- maker/7251...](http://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/805618-super-mario- maker/72515728)

This guy says he has built a single nand gate, but hasn't been able to connect several together.

As a gamer and a computer scientist, I find Turing complete games intriguing. Minecraft's Redstone is probably intentionally Turing complete, but for example the signalling of trains in OpenTTD probably is not.

<comment><USER12> One big limitation in Super Mario Maker is that objects too far horizontally offscreen are not simulated and may "de-spawn". Here's a more detailed description of the rules: [https://www.reddit.com/r/MarioMaker/comments/3lcrqb/super_ma...](https://www.reddit.com/r/MarioMaker/comments/3lcrqb/super_mario_maker_science_spawning_despawning_and/)

This means you have to include Mario's position in your design if the device is larger than the horizontal simulation area. Just chaining together NAND gates isn't necessarily enough.

<comment><USER13> This was (is?) a problem in Minecraft as well, when people were first trying to build CPUs in it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> >Why this effort to make a language in which many programs can't be written? Because TC is intimately tied to Godel's incompleteness theorems & Rice's theorem, allowing TC means that one is forfeiting all sorts of provability properties: in a non-TC language, one may be able to easily prove all sorts of useful things to know; for example, that programs terminate

Non-turing complete languages are also easier to reason about, less susceptible to bugs and less susceptible to technical debt.

For this reason minimizing as much as possible the amount of turing complete code you write will make your code cleaner.

Configuration and tests in particular are usually best described in a non- turing complete language.

<comment><USER15> >Non-turing complete languages are also ... less susceptible to technical debt.

Well, except the technical debt of writing all the code in a language that may not support solving your problem once you know it better.

<comment><USER14> If it doesn't actually solve the problem you have a non-functional program, not technical debt.

<comment><USER16> You have a non-functional total functional program.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> So many things are Turing complete for me anyway there's nothing surprising about finding Turing completeness. What I find fascinating is useful languages designed explicitly not to be Turing complete. It's a much harder task

<comment><USER18> Indeed. Agda and Coq are excellent examples.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Wikipedia's template language was not intended to be Turing-complete.

Then, through some hideous contortions of the syntax, someone managed to construct an "if" statement.

This caused so much CPU load they implemented it as a function.

And then it evolved into a horrifying accidental DSL, ParserFunctions.

They're now trying to rewrite all those clever templates in Lua, having given up avoiding Turing-completeness ...

The curse of Turing-completeness is: if you have it, you will soon _have to_ use it.

</comment><comment><USER20> Interesting sub turing complete language:

[https://github.com/ainfosec/crema](https://github.com/ainfosec/crema)

</comment><comment><USER21> Another list of "accidentally Turing complete" languages is here:

[http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/articles/accidentally_turing_complet...](http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/articles/accidentally_turing_complete.html)

Edit: Oops, I see this is already linked in the main article as "accidentally Turing-complete".

</comment><comment><USER22> My personal contribution is [http://demo.robustperception.io:9090/consoles/life.html](http://demo.robustperception.io:9090/consoles/life.html)

Who doesn't want a Turing Complete monitoring language?

</comment><comment><USER23> Rust's type system was not meant to be turing complete, yet here we are.

Ref: [https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/2o6yp8/brainfck_in_ru...](https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/2o6yp8/brainfck_in_rusts_type_system_aka_type_system_is/cmkrjz2)

<comment><USER24> Alas, the compiler imposes an arbitrary recursion limit that makes the Turing- completeness essentially useless. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Call me naive, but regarding:

> why a perfect antivirus program is impossible

What does TC have to do with a perfect antivirus program? Does it have something to do with the Halting problem?

<comment><USER7> TC implies there's no such thing as a perfect antivirus program (which detects all and only viruses), or a perfect typechecker etc because if you had such a program, you could turn it into a halting-checker easily: for an AV program, if you want to know if program X halts, you simply put the virus at the end and run the whole thing through your perfect antivirus checker - <USER2> assumption, if it detects a virus, then the program X must halt (otherwise the virus would never be able to run and is just dead code) and if it doesn't detect a virus, then program X doesn't halt. Since we know you can't solve the halting problem... In more general terms, this brings us to Rice's theorem.

<comment><USER26> This was discussed in "Godel, Escher, Bach" in the form of trying to make a record player that can play any record.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> TrueType fonts are apparently Turing Complete.

<comment><USER28> In this case it's intentional: they contain embedded bytecode programs for hinting. (That is, adjusting what the font should look like under certain conditions, e.g. low resolution)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I dug into the CSS example before: it's not actually Turing-complete, but it comes really close.

The user still has to manually intervene to advance each iteration of the loop. It _would_ be Turing-complete except for that one little thing, but it's not quite there.

<comment><USER30> See gwern's rebuttal of this argument: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10320076](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10320076)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> It's missing sql !

<comment><USER30> I guess you missed the mention in the footnote.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I've got a bunch of spaghetti that are Turing-complete (they form an analog computing machine). I don't even want to think about the security implications.</comment>


Why so much impatience on the STEM communities? - <AUTHOR>

this is more of a rant than 'news', but anyway...<p>Why are online communities-particularly those centered around STEM matters such as stack exchange, reddit, and wikipedia etc have a tendency to be so impertinent to newbies, or those not up to speed? These intelligent people want to create communities but seem to have little patience those who don't meet their lofty standards or fit in with the clique. For example, the stack exchange series of sub-forums have a habit of  closing questions that are deemed 'off topic' and rule like a dictatorship where appeal isn't an option. In my own experience I've posted technical questions to only have them closed without even an a link to a resource. This was after an exhaustive google search on the subject matter. On reddit I see people post non-trolling, helpful replies to science/econ/math boards and get 5+ more down-votes because the intelligentsia overclass didn't like the answer. Maybe they could take 2 minutes  to elaborate what was wrong with instead of down-voting? I can understand angst ridden teens downvonting a troll on an lolcats board, but not smart, educated people acting like jerks to well intentioned people. <comment><USER2> Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy is sufficient to explain this: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle#Iron_Law_of_Bu...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle#Iron_Law_of_Bureaucracy)

Along this line of thinking, your confusion comes from thinking the Powers That Be in those long existing forums actually share the goals the forums ostensibly exist for. Of your cited examples I can only speak about Wikipedia, and I assure you that's not in the least true anymore. For that matter, in response I changed my approach to it, from improving it to simply firmly defending two articles I find of particular importance, and occasionally related ones. Plus general good stuff so I continue to look like I good-willed Wikipedian (which I am, but besides the problems of Wikilawyers and biased areas (wouldn't dream of touching a page on Islam), [http://xkcd.com/386/](http://xkcd.com/386/) is always relevant, and with the original goal of Wikipedia stone cold dead...).</comment>


Instagram is down - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/apps/2014/08/28/instagram/

<comment><AUTHOR> Too much of #tbt?</comment>


Google is not leveraging its search monopoly by giving away Android - <AUTHOR> http://theorangeview.net/2011/08/google-is-not-leveraging/ <comment><USER2> My comment is "awaiting moderation":

\</comment><comment>--

I have a large farm where I grow carrots, and I have the best and largest land for growing them. As the entire ecosystem I am in is built on horses eating carrots, all growth eventually turns into me making even more money: I am flush with cash and have the worlds largest silos and most interesting farm equipment.

Given that I have so much cash, and pretty much all the worlds strongest farmhands work for me, I decide to "have some fun": I build "ok" stuff an give it away for free.

I mean, sure: there's some guy out there selling buggy whips, and they are awesome, but I can just hand our buggy whips /constantly/: they fall apart, but they work, and many (most?) people don't care.

You could say I'm "losing money" on the buggy whips, but the fact that people were spending that money on buggy whips is just more money they weren't spending on carrots, so I am not losing as much as you'd think.

However, my "competitors" (do I even bother to think of them as such?... they are pretty much ants in comparison) find it harder an harder to operate in this environment: they need to actually make money on those whips.

Even worse, customers don't even seem to realize anymore that buggy whips have any underlying cost: or anything else, really. People who offer buggy whips for money are seen as "greedy", and customers even start to question why they are paying money for saddles... some even call for me to make those for free too (and why not: consider it done).

This turn of events is awkward, and damaging on the entire economy: I am simply going aroun messing with every market I consider smaller than me, messing with the incentives.

Why? Partly fun, but it is certainly difficult to discount "power" as a contributing factor: it is a wonderful feeling to see my bran on every product, and make everyone super reliant on me for /everything/, not kist their carrots. Hell: people even like me more, because I'm obviously so "altruistic".

Now, how can I do this? It is not that I have some awesome "free or freemium business model": it is only because I have a mear monopoly on carrots. If I had any serious competitors on carrots, their prices would be lower, as they wouldn't be wasting cash handing people free buggy whips (and free everything else, even stuff totally unrelated to carrots).

This /is/ leveraging a monopoly. If you can do something that accumulates power and assets that is only possible because you have a monopoly and you choose to actually take advantage of it, that /is/ leveraging.

Of course, it is also important to ask "is it legal?", and the answer might very well be "yes". Bundling, a specific form of leverage that Microsoft was using, was considered illegal, but I am not a lawyer and have no clue how comprehensive the laws were.

But seriously: you cannot imagine that it is an efficient use of our economic resources to have Google buying up anyone who sells something awesome (including Android: that was an acquisition) so they can give it away for free instead.

<comment><USER3> There is a difference between leveraging a monopoly to create a new offering in a different product area (increasing competition) and leveraging it to lock users into another of your products (decreasing competition).

By locking users into IE, Microsoft was decreasing competition. Google, by pumping resources into Android and Chrome, is increasing competition.

<comment><USER2> You are not increasing competition if you are subsidizing that product offering and giving it away for free: you are messing with (and sometimes even destroying) another market.

Example: when Google gives away Google Voice service, that is a horribly bad thing for that market. There are tons of competitors in that space that have fundamentally better service, but competing with /free/ is so serious of a barrier to entry in the mind of a user that you have to be like mind- blowingly-ultra-horribly better, which isn't even really possible. Google Voice is an aberration in the market caused by an unrelated monopoly.</comment></comment></comment>


Google Introduces Hotel Search - <AUTHOR> http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/29/google-introduces-hotel-search/

<comment><USER2> Couple things that impressed me ...

\- Results are returned instantly. \- The heat map idea, coupled with draggable area, is pretty cool.

Nice to see more competition and innovation in hotel search.

</comment><comment><USER3> Gorgeous. If only they could do the same for apartment/house rentals!

Really, that would be perfect.

<comment><USER2> I think this is what you want: <http://www.padmapper.com/>

<comment><USER3> It doesn't have many listings, and their craigslist listings are incomplete and inaccurate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> <http://www.google.com/hotelfinder/>

</comment><comment><USER5> This is the reason why I'm long on GOOG. There's a huge world of revenue out there, and they just have to reach out and grab it.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm just connecting fictitious dots here, but it seems a rather crafty move to launch a hotel search site in the midst of the Airbnb debacle. "Oh, I was going to use Airbnb, then I heard about so-and-so's experience with them and decided to book a hotel instead ... and oh look! A spiffy new hotel search service!"

Which reminds me--I think there was an article linked here on HN not long ago about Google's timing in releasing new products/features--can't find it now, but makes me wonder if Google doesn't keep a few projects in the wings, waiting for the opportune moment (i.e. best PR moment) to launch them.

</comment><comment><USER7> There's good potential here for accurate price discrimination. If Google collects and passes on user data (especially now that there's G+), they'll know a banker can probably pay more for a hotel than a student.

I'm not sure if they'll put this into practice, but this sure gives them the ability to.

<comment><USER5> Thus creating a world where everybody struggles to look as poor as possible to Google's algorithms in the hopes of getting a good price?

I'll just google "how do i gets my babby daddy to give me his welfare check" ten times a day, and use a separate account when it comes time to research private yachts. Cha-ching!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> (Not even a "beta" tagline, an "experiment".)

My go-to place for hotels is TripAdvisor. This doesn't seem to have an real improvements.</comment>


How Many People Can You Remember? - <AUTHOR> http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-many-people-can-you-remember/ <comment><USER2> I hadn't really thought about this until my wife pointed it out to me a year or two ago but I apparently have "weirdly good" face and name recollection. My wife on the other hand isn't all that good at it. Not bad but not great. I would say about average.

I am also a very sociable and chatty person. I can and do chat to everyone. On the tube. On a plain. Waiting in a queue (I am British after all!). You name it I will chat to you. My wife on the other hand is a person who doesn't like to chat with people she doesn't know. She gets nervous striking up a conversation whereas I just start it without giving it a second thought.

I have wondered if these are related? I am naturally very observant. I remember car reg plates, addresses and telephone numbers with ease. I can't remember if I trained myself to do this or it is just a natural ability. I suspect it is a little bit of both. Remembering IP addresses and directory structures in my early years and teens no doubt helped strengthen those skills.

A couple of months back I did this test [0] and apparently got the 'super recogniser' title with ease. If you think you are good at remember small details it is quite a fun test!

[0] [https://jfe.qualtrics.com/form/SV_e3xDuCccGAdgbfT](https://jfe.qualtrics.com/form/SV_e3xDuCccGAdgbfT)

<comment><USER3> Wow! I'm surprised the later ones are even possible to do. The faces are shown at a completely different angle and with aspect ratio distorted, I don't know where to begin.

Scored 7/14\. Enjoyed it a surprising amount anyway.

<comment><USER2> It is hard to explain but I can just understand the structure of the face and my brain can sort of automatically map that to a 3D model of their head. I don't even need to try and look for distinguishing marks. I just look at the face for a couple of seconds and that's it. Just retook the test, my results [http://i.imgur.com/HwQs6XQ.png](http://i.imgur.com/HwQs6XQ.png)

<comment><USER4> That's interesting, I feel the same way about faces. It just feels natural to me.

I got a 13/14 on the first test you posted. Then I decided to take the extended test:

\- 37/40 (top 5%) upright face recognition

\- 27/32 (top 5%) inverted face recognition

\- 38/40 (top 25%) glasgow face matching

\- 32/40 (<top 50%) chair recognition test

The results are very interesting. I don't know what to make of them. But these tests were fun nonetheless! Thanks kozukumi.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I did a lot of research on learning techniques, especially spaced repetition, a few years ago. I also noticed I'm not great with names, so I wrote a piece of software called Nombre that tracked everyone I met and let me play a spaced repetition game so I could learn names. It basically died when LinkedIn shut down their APIs, but thought I'd share anyways - [http://nombreapp.com](http://nombreapp.com).

Does anyone here use a personal CRM or contacts database? Would love to hear your thoughts on that type of software.

<comment><USER6> I'm absolutely horrendous at remembering both names and faces so would be very interested to hear suggestions of techniques or tools one can use to assist remembering people.

"You can repeat the person's name back to her while you're talking to her, Harris says, "although the best strategy is simply to show more interest in the people you meet."

I've tried this with no luck, I will still forget a person's name within 60 seconds.

It almost seems like I have a portion of my brain missing, and I've always been like this for anything involving memorization. Going over a list of names on a regular basis _helps_ , but very little. However, my spatial recall seems to be much better - if I have a seating plan for example, for some reason I can easily associate a person with where they sit, but I simply cannot remember their name even if I deal with them fairly regularly.

<comment><USER5> The human brain is actually wired to remember visuals over abstract concepts. This is why you're so good at remembering faces and the places you meet people, but not names. Names are abstract, so they are hard to remember,

The best way to remember names is to actually turn that person's name into a mental image, then tie it to the location where you met them. This gives your brain a mental image of someone's name, and when you see there face again, you'll recall the component cues of their name.

For example, my name is Andy Cook, so you might imagine me standing next to a life sized Raggedy Andy doll wearing a chef's hat + apron. When you see me again, you're likely to remember the image and put the name together. The other nice thing about this technique is that it forces you to stop and commit someone's name to memory instead of letting it go in one ear and out the other.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I have noticed that people who move around a lot seem to remember and care about more people - they tend to have a group of people in their memory from each location they have lived, job they have worked, etc. Whereas people who have lived in one place their entire life tend to be more focused on those who also stayed in that place.

My evidence is anecdotal, as I grew up in a small town, and all of us who left remember each other well, with many of us in touch with each other at least via social media. But our childhood acquaintances barely remember us. Or good friends do, but not those who were simply classmates, for example. And even those who do remember don't necessarily care.

I'd be interested in seeing any actual research performed on that aspect of remembering people.

</comment><comment><USER8> "The average number of Christmas cards mailed was 68.2". I think it was the most impressing number for me in that article, although only based on data from 43 people. Do they spend their whole Christmas writing cards?

<comment><USER9> Most Christmas cards I get are just photo cards with a collage of family pictures from the year and maybe a handwritten "Merry Christmas" or something on the back.

<comment><USER10> I have found over the years that the fewer Christmas cards I send (zero for quite some years now), the fewer I tend to receive. I'm quite happy with this situation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Has Dunbar looked at how technology changes this? After all we now have a database of friends including their pictures and biographical data. And there's one of business connections as well.

You can also keep relations up in a time-economical way now, both two-way (chat,email) and one-way (status update).

You'd think this would make a big difference both to number and quality of connections.

<comment><USER12> Pretty interesting question - I don't know Dunbar's view, but I can see two ways of looking at it: one: that the functional social group is the primary thing to be measured, and people who you aren't physically around very often, and who you need a database to remind you who they are, wouldn't properly be part of that; two: that the notion of functional social group should now be expanded to include these very people, and that the relation Dunbar was interested in (proportionality between social group size and neocortex size, viz: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number)) needs to be adjusted to regard databases of friends as an extension of the neocortex :)

<comment><USER13> > _needs to be adjusted to regard databases of friends as an extension of the > neocortex :)_

It's sometimes called an _exocortex_ and I find it to be a very useful term. It implies that your tools are a part of you :).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> tl;dr 150</comment>


Christmas Ideas for Young Son with Engineering Interest - <AUTHOR>

My son is 9, and loves building things and is very patient in doing so. but I'm tired of buying legos and other 'toys,' and instead am looking for something like a robotics kit, or something he can build that's real and takes a bit of skill to finish.
I've seen some cheap robot building kits, but they seem pretty lame.
Any URL's or ideas for where you can find gifts for young hackers? <comment><USER2> Its not exactly cheap but have you looked into the Lego Mindstorm NXT 2.0 set?

Link: [http://www.amazon.com/LEGO-4544091-Mindstorms- NXT-2-0/dp/B00...](http://www.amazon.com/LEGO-4544091-Mindstorms- NXT-2-0/dp/B001USHRYI/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1324023851&sr=8-1)

You can build various things with it because its a LEGO product and it allows programming for specific functions. The homepage is here: <http://mindstorms.lego.com/en-us/Default.aspx>

Let me know if this is along the lines of what you're looking for or if I have the wrong idea. I'll try and help adjust suggestions accordingly.

<comment><AUTHOR> Definitely not cheap, but still pretty cool. I like that, thanks.

I had been looking at stuff like this: [http://www.scientificsonline.com/robotics/intermediate- robot...](http://www.scientificsonline.com/robotics/intermediate-robot- kits.html)

but it seems so generic.</comment></comment>


The Browser Shuffle - <AUTHOR> http://blog.thirdyearmba.com/the-browser-shuffle

<comment><USER2> I've seen a "New Tab" button on Firefox since at least version 3.6, IIRC. It's visible in the UI comparison at <http://limi.net/articles/firefox-4>.</comment>


Sweden brings back military conscription - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-39140100 <comment><USER2> How do you motivate a conscript?

When I was in the British Army, which is volunteer only, commanding a basic training troop if someone was wanted to give up we could say to them 'if this isn't for you then you can go home' (of course we did coach and mentor people to help them, I mean in cases where people just give up and stop soldiering when an exercise gets tough). They usually worked extremely hard to get into the Army in the first place because it's competitive so we know they're motivated.

What do you do with a conscript who never wanted to be there and possibly fundamentally isn't suited to military life anyway gives up? Threaten them with legal action?

What do you do if they sort of do what they're told, but not really putting any effort into it?

Conscription seems counter-productive to me. If you can't attract enough motivated and talented people to join your military then maybe your military is not representative of your society anymore and you should fix that.

<comment><USER3> >'if this isn't for you then you can go home'

I did compulsory military service, including in a leadership role. "If you don't do what you're told, you don't get go home next weekend." Worked very well for conscripts, who usually get to go home for many weekends (unless on exercises). There are also many smaller privileges you can take a way for smaller infractions.

Although when you have a defensive military that does not go around the world fighting wars, and whose only objective is to retain the independence of your own country, most conscripts take it as their civic responsibility and don't cause problems.

Those who are fundamentally unsuited for military usually ended up getting discharged quickly. Most before ever stepping into service.

>Conscription seems counter-productive to me.

Britain has 150k active military personnel with 80k reserves. Now imagine you're a country with less than 10% of the population and need to produce a force of 200k soldiers in order to have a credible deterrent against an aggressive neighbor. How do you do that without conscription?

<comment><USER4> A credible deterrent in 2020 is not 200k dudes with guns. It's air and naval power. Expensive and complex hi tech death machines.

Of course, a 10m country will never have a really credible defense against nuclear super power Russia by itself.

<comment><USER3> > 200k dudes with guns

Conscript military doesn't mean that you just teach everyone to dig a hole and sit in it with a rifle. You train conscripts into every role you need in a 200k strong modern military. Including operators and maintainers of the hi- tech death machines, sigint operatives, radar operators, tank crews, missile forces, officers of all kinds, and yes, the guys that dig holes and sit in them with rifles.

One of the strengths of a conscript military is that you get _everyone_ , which includes all kinds of current and future skill sets. Modern conscript armies aim to put that expertise into the best possible use.

<comment><USER5> You literally cannot use conscripts for anything of "operators and maintainers of the hi-tech death machines, sigint operatives, radar operators, tank crews, missile forces, officers." First of all, most of them take at least a year to get up to speed, if not more, and they have to maintain their competence. You cannot just release a conscript after his year long stint, and call him up ten years later - the ten year old tech he was trained on will probably have been replaced, and even if not, he'd have forgotten most of his training. Oh, and officers by their very definition cannot be conscripts.

So you're looking at guys to dig holes and sit in them with rifles and maybe some supporting jobs (administrative, kitchen, IT, construction, etc.)

<comment><USER6> This anecdotal, but it was suggested that after the Dutch government suspended conscription, the military lost easy access to lots of highly educated people. There is quite a large group of people with a university degree who can very quickly pick up the theory behind complex systems. The same group group will not sign up voluntarily.

<comment><USER7> This is actually true. When we took 100% of all able men in Norway, the got the top guys as well as the lump. Now, when it's gotten a lot easier to get out of conscription, a lot of the well people with other ambitions skip this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So to add some needed background information to this:

Every 18 year old has been forced to submit a form stating if they want to be conscripted. That's about 100k people every year.

Out of the 100k, about 20k state that they do want to be conscripted.

Out of the 20k that say yes, 4k are selected during a screening process that evaluates physical and mental fitness.

So there are no less than 2 points where you can opt out of being conscripted if you so like.

<comment><USER9> That doesn't sound like conscription, then. If they didn't have enough people saying yes, do they start drawing from the "no" pile?

<comment><USER10> Yes they do - if not enough people volunteer, they will force the ones seeming most fit for the tasks at hand.

Also, if I know the Swedish military, they'll chose the most fit for the task, but make absolutely sure to fill the gender quotas.

<comment><USER11> What's the required gender ratio, out of curiosity?

<comment><USER8> I have never heard of such a thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I am quite surprised by the number of people here (and even larger numbers elsewhere this is being discussed) who don't seem to have any ethical problem with conscription. Thought the idea of killer slaves was completely off limits in the West. Now all of a sudden we are debating cost effectiveness. Guess I thought wrong.

<comment><USER13> What western military doesn't pay service members? Pretty sure you mean "a job, that rarely, but sometimes involves killing." There are many jobs like that: policing, security, and depending on your moral framework, murdering animals.

<comment><USER14> Well, I guess most of the countries do "pay", but at least in Finland that pay is 5.10 euros per day for first half of year (increases first to 8.50 for days 165-256 and then to 11.90 for remaining). If someone other entity was paying that low wages for even a normal job (let alone 24/7 availability requirement), the employer would be facing criminal charges.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm not sure why Sweden would be concerned.

I read Russian news/propaganda occasionally. Over the last few years, Russian news/propaganda prepared Russian minds for interfering in Ukraine. And the propaganda includes arguments to justify a military buildup. And it seems to be preparing Russian minds for a possible invasion of Baltic states one day.

But I don't think I've even seen Sweden mentioned in Russian news/propaganda. I don't think Sweden is a target.

<comment><USER16> As Russian I don't agree. I don't watch TV and read news (other than HN and a couple of other sites where I try to avoid politics as much as I can), but why the hell do we need these Baltic states? What do they have that Russia needs? Territory, natural resources? Nothing.

I don't know the real motivation for annexing Crimea, but making a conclusion: first they take Crimea, then they're going to take Sweden and Baltic states - is nonsense.

<comment><USER17> Putin wants to revive USSR without any of it's benefits but all of it's power & resources available to him.

He might get his way-we have a "Gorbachev" in the White House or a KGB asset.

<comment><USER18> Full disclosure: I am Russian.

Even Belarus and Kazakhstan don't really want to join, forget about the rest ex-USSR countries.

Taking countries by force makes even less sense - there do not exist resources or territory that make it profitable enough to offset military spending and new rounds of economic sanctions.

<comment><USER17> it gives political momentum-as did Hitler's blitzkrieg in Poland

Military wise you buy large buffer between US ground & air forces based around there.

<comment><USER18> If he wanted a buffer he could have easily taken over Ukraine in the fall of 2014 and spring of 2015. Both times the rebels routed Ukrainian army and the road to Kiev was essentially clear. Reinstalling the puppet president would have been easy.

Not to mention that during the coup itself there were reports of Ukrainian generals sending envoys to Moscow, seeking aid and patronage to throw a counter coup and either reinstate the former president or setup military dictatorship. And they easily had the force too. Kremlin just said no.

<comment><USER17> RussiaToday is a poor source.

<comment><USER18> Yes, go ahead and resort to stereotypes.

RT is external propaganda, TV is the main instrument of internal propaganda.

Very few Russians use that as their information source, even pro-regime ones.

This is tantamount to Americans citing this as their source of domestic news:

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I can give a bit of context. Mandatory military service in Sweden only ended in 2010, so this is not a huge change.

During the cold was period, almost all men did ~1 year of military service. After that it was a regular job, but in case of war everyone could be conscripted.

By the '90s it dropped to maybe 1/3 of young men. Everyone went to a 1-2 day testing session, and then some were selected. In practice, it became increasingly voluntary. Soldiers on peacekeeping missions in foreign countries are all volunteers.

In 2010 mandatory service was dropped completely. I think the Swedish military found it difficult to recruit enough after that, and the politicians now think the military has shrunk a bit too much. I don't think it will be a huge growth (that would cost money), but perhaps a return to early 2000's level. This time it includes women.

I am not a big fan of conscription, but I can somewhat accept it as long as it's strictly defensive. One good argument for it is that a conscript army is unlikely to stage a military coup in a democracy. If the soldiers are more or less random people, they will more or less support the elected government, at least a portion of them. But, as military power becomes more about technology than numbers, I suspect this argument becomes less important.

<comment><USER20> > One good argument for it is that a conscript army is unlikely to stage a > military coup in a democracy.

Turkey has mandatory military service and suffered an attempted coup less than a year ago. Napoleon came to power in France after the levée en masse, really the first major mass conscription act in history. Egypt, last coup being ~4 years ago, again has mass conscription. As does Thailand. And Eritrea, Sudan, Chad, and Equatorial Guinea, although I don't know if mandatory military service dates back before the time of those coups.

Coups are often instigated by the officer class, whereas mass conscription is primarily used to fill out enlisted ranks. There's definitely room for the upper echelons of a military to support a coup while the lower echelons remain largely apathetic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> It is sobering to think that if you have the technology you can conscript a workforce to build war fighting robots more effectively than you can conscript a force to fight for you.

I believe one of the developments in Syria and Iraq that is under appreciated by strategists is the force multiplication efforts of "cheap drones with hand grenades". Assuming that 50% of the videos on these things are fake, that is still a good case that it is getting easier and easier to turn money into usable offensive capability.

In my estimation, THAT pivot is going to have as much impact on conflicts as the machine gun did.

</comment><comment><USER22> When the US had conscription (at least in ww2) it supposedly had the effect of creating a "we're all in this together" mentality. I wonder if, in addition to the threat of a perceived expansionist Russia, the influx of new immigrants has anything to do with this. A year of servitude might may assist in integrating new swedes. Or in part help the indigenous swedes see the new arrivals as somehow more Swedish for having served?

</comment><comment><USER23> 9 to 12 months is short. The first six months are lost to training. The US used to draft people for 2 years (Vietnam) or, in WWII, "for the duration, plus six months".

About 75% of the US military-age population couldn't qualify for the US Army today. Too fat, too criminal, too sick, too crazy, or too dumb. This worries some military manpower planners. What are Sweden's stats like?

<comment><USER24> It _is_ training. Traditionally the 18 year olds were all trained 8-15 months and then return to civil life immediately.

Now they want those who do the training to stay as employed soldiers afterwards - but traditionally Sweden had only a conscript army, no standing army in peacetime apart from those employed in the organization to do the training.

This makes sense as we don't have wars, don't have large foreign bases to staff etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> So who are we at war with today? Oceania?

</comment><comment><USER26> We should have this in the US, starting with the children of Congress and the Senate. I think Mark Twain or Will Rodgers said something like this.

</comment><comment><USER27> What's the point of conscription? Surely there must be a good reason. Boosting the numbers of your military by forcefully bringing in some barely-motivated, hardly-trained conscripts that are discharged just a few months after completing basic training seems ineffective.

Is there some larger "get the public used to military service" social goal?

<comment><USER10> We have a long history of conscription. I think it's a good thing. I think it's the moral choice when it comes to defence (but obviously not enough). That is because a conscript is not a professional soldier - and a conscript will never invade another country without good reason. Conscripts will defend their land, but not unjustly attack others.

<comment><USER28> Then I'd be a bad conscript. I don't even own land.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> If you're having trouble getting volunteers, the solution is simple. Pay them more.

</comment><comment><USER30> The trend seems to be lately to end conscription or national service, as Sweden did itself, but is this the first time in recent history that a country introduced or reintroduced conscription?

<comment><USER31> You'll see that many European nations ended conscription during the last decade(Sweden in 2010)[1]. If anything this seems to signal a new trend: reactivating conscription.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> "In Russia all men aged 18-27 have to spend a year in the armed forces."

I don't think that's correct. College graduates only have to serve a few weeks, IIRC.

<comment><USER33> Not true. Graduates serve for 1 year just as all other men. People who graduated from colleges with military departments get the rank of lieutenant and indeed serve a few weeks, but as of 2017 not too much universities have those departments and even if they do, not every student can enroll there as there are certain requirements for health and physical abilities.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Bork bork!

</comment><comment><USER35> How is this post not flagged and anything negative related to Trump gets flagged and downvoted because it is "too political for HN"?

Has HN started to take political sides now?

<comment><USER36> If you think this submission (or any other) are inappropriate for HN, please do flag. As for political sides, humans are generally biased to see actions against their own beliefs and miss those that are congruent. Political submissions in general regardless of political persuasion tend to attract flags, and this one likely has as well: it has 170 points and is only 8 hours old, yet is no longer on the front page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> 4,000 troops? Ok.</comment>


Ask HN: Is Email translation a viable idea? - <AUTHOR>

Problem: English business-person wants to communicate with Japanese client but neither speak the other's language.
Proposed solution: They use a service which automatically translates (human translation) emails between him and the Japanese client.
Would this type of service be useful to you or your company? I've been thinking of making this a reality for a few weeks, but first I'd like to know if this is a common problem.
Appreciate any tips! <comment><USER2> It's been tried before a few times and hasn't worked for a simple reason: people don't generally deal with other people who don't speak their language. Think about it: how many times has this ever been a problem for you? Or anyone you know?

The hard thing in the translation business is scaling up demand (there are tons of translators in most language pairs so pricing is really competitive and it is hard for a middleman to make money). And if you somehow manage to get a lot of business you then have to manage the HR side of keeping a lot of people working efficiently at scale while making sure you're still getting great quality.

Both of these are difficult problems, especially since there isn't an obvious technical way to lower customer acquisition costs enough to compete with independent translators. That said, if you can find a solution to the first problem (reliably getting business) you can monetize it much more easily than by solving the second, if only because anyone who already has translation business at scale will be reluctant to screw with the organizational processes that are making them money in a cutthroat market.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. Those were really good points to consider.

Would you mind giving out your contact? I would love to pick your mind on something like this :)

<comment><USER2> Sure, see first site in my profile.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Ive certainly heard of people who would use it, but there would be a lot of concerns around privacy and security of information. I personally think gmail has most of the market here by providing automated translations, the big companies who want something better (and are willing to pay for it) probably use their existing translation partners....

Although...honestly...id you can solve the privacy issue and make an experience where someone sends an email and selects the new language, and the person receiving the email doesnt even see it until the translation is complete...it could seem very seemless and accurate, people might love it. I would, if i needed it.</comment>


Walter Benjamin: Fragments, Salvage and Detours - <AUTHOR> https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/walter-benjamin-fragments-salvage-detours/ <comment><USER2> Benjamin is a fascinating figure in the history of philosophy. He had a lot of interesting things to say about fascism and history. Probably the most vivid expression of his understanding of history can be found in his 9th thesis on history [1]

>"A Klee painting named 'Angelus Novus' shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress."

[1] [https://www.sfu.ca/~andrewf/CONCEPT2.html](https://www.sfu.ca/~andrewf/CONCEPT2.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> Benjamin's essay _The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction_ [1][2] is probably of great interest to HN readers: he states that reproduction releases art from the ritual of production. This applies to so many aspects of our modern digital lives. It's touched on in this essay when they note that Benjamin viewed modern writing, such as Kafka, as becoming secular, i.e. free from religious ritual: "where its laws and traditions are still present but have lost their meaning". Interesting stuff for our current times, e.g. as another extraction from the article reads:

"how does human perception evolve over the course of history, as a result of social and technological change?"

[1] [https://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/benjamin.pdf](https://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/benjamin.pdf)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Work_of_Art_in_the_Age_of_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Work_of_Art_in_the_Age_of_Mechanical_Reproduction)</comment>


Google will always do evil - <AUTHOR> https://www.engadget.com/2018/05/24/google-will-always-do-evil/ <comment><USER2> I've always loved David Mitchell's take on Google's motto:

"There's something fishy about Google's motto, "Don't Be Evil." I'm not saying it's controversial but it makes you think, "Why bring that up? Why have you suddenly put the subject of being evil on the agenda?" It's suspicious in the same way as Ukip constantly pointing out how racist they're not"

<comment><USER3> Because Microsoft were (are) evil, and they tried to market themselves as being different.

They are not.

<comment><USER2> But going out of your way to say you are definitely not evil just makes you come across like this:

< [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_YmDcCpD1gc](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_YmDcCpD1gc) >

So in a sense, if you get past an age of naivety and if you don't want a Google job purely for self-interested gain, then Google's approach has always fallen on deaf ears. I guess their recent actions have just made it more obvious in the mainstream.

<comment><USER4> Going out of your way to say it?

People act as if it's always been a tagline below the corporate logo on every Google webpage and communication.

From what I've read, it was a half-joking contribution from Paul Buchheit in the early days, when they were brainstorming about what the company ethos could be. It apparently caught on internally with staff.

I'm personally glad that it's been dropped, because it's overblown and it feels like the whole thing has been tedious forever.

Any large and highly profitable company will be doing something 'evil' in the estimation of someone who's looking for it.

<comment><USER2> You're suggesting that a big multinational corp just leaves phrases in its public-facing motto, or in heavily vetted handbook materials, by accident, or as a joke, or on a whim?

In my experience, absolutely nothing gets into a handbook or a code of conduct unless you go waaay out of your way to put it there, through legal & compliance, HR, senior leadership teams, etc.

There's zero chance Google treats this like a cheeky wink.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> While I'm no fan of Google, the premise of this article annoys me. Good and Evil are such a simple concept and have no place in reality. Good and Evil are always subjective to the viewport. I don't disagree with the facts of the article, just that its cast in the simplistic light of "Evil" for dramatic effect.

Maybe Google removed the Don't Be Evil because of articles like this pushing a Good vs. Evil narrative.

<comment><USER2> I don't agree. While Good and Evil are certainly relative, normative social constructs, in any given place and time there are a lot of behaviors that are widely accepted as "good" or as "evil" — and most of them (e.g. don't commit cold-blooded murder) are not even near any gray area and are fairly universal and serve important, widely valued pragmatic interests.

It seems overly pedantic to me to act like just because deep, technical moral philosophy can be quite tricky, it means we should abandon big, first-order, obviously pragmatic notions of good and evil.

<comment><USER6> > In any given place and time there are a lot of behaviors that are widely > accepted as "good" or as "evil".

Philosophically that's a loaded topic, and gets to the subject of "objective morality". I could bore you with arguments I suppose, but the key is, that's not a given -- even on the "big, first-order" good and evil definitions.

But what's worse is when you're judging and using those judgments for your argument, when you could just be supplying facts and letting us come to our own conclusions.

E.g.:

A: Nuclear weapons are very, very evil.

B: The US used Nuclear weapons to end a long, protracted, brutal, and deadly war.

A is a judgement, which I may or may not agree with. B is a fact, which also seems to diminish the power of A.

<comment><USER2> > Philosophically that's a loaded topic...

I don't agree. I think the existence of widely accepted notions of "good" and "evil" is actually an empirical claim. It says nothing about whether society _is right_ , just whether you could list off some claims and get an unambiguous majority to agree with statements like "Murder is evil".

Also, nuclear weapons seems exactly like choosing a topic already known to be in a gray, contentious zone but then acting like it's a high leverage and useful example for widely held beliefs about morality. We tend to sensationalize and focus so much on these gray zone topics, that we forget just how huge the space of basically agreed moral principles is.

There certainly are great moral philosophy problems. I remember when I first read Derek Parfit's _Reasons and Persons_ and thought about "The Repugnant Conclusion" it was eye opening. It would definitely be useful for people choosing large-scale policies or facing real problems of humanitarian crisis or population ethics.

But on a day to day basis, it's childish and useless to point at that kind of academic moral philosophy and argue that we should just treat "good" and "evil" as relative fictions. No way. There's big, obvious, widely shared views that define what our linguistic constructs of "good" and "evil" generally mean in a day to day context, and serve super useful, pragmatic functions in the operations of society.

<comment><USER6> > I think the existence of widely accepted notions of "good" and "evil" is > actually an empirical claim.

Quit moving the goalposts. Objective morality is not the same as whether lexical definitions of "good" and "evil" exist in all the world's languages.

My real point which you left out is that judgements about such things should really be left to the reader. Saying such things like "x is evil" really doesn't help the conversation.

<comment><USER2> > Quit moving the goalposts. Objective morality is not the same as whether > lexical definitions of "good" and "evil" exist in all the world's languages.

What are you talking about? I was only ever talking about the lexical part, which was what the original parent of these comments was talking about (e.g. removing the lexical part just because the objective part doesn't exist in complex moral philosophy terms). No goalpost moving (I'm really not sure what you're talking about with that.)

> My real point which you left out is that judgements about such things should > really be left to the reader. Saying such things like "x is evil" really > doesn't help the conversation.

What? Again I am not seeing a connection either to your earlier comment or my original point. But regardless, I disagree with the claim that "Saying such things like "x is evil" really doesn't help the conversation".

It absolutely does help when there is a commonly understood lexical (as you call it) notion of evil that's widely accepted.

<comment><USER6> As I quoted:

> In any given place and time there are a lot of behaviors that are widely > accepted as "good" or as "evil".

That's objective morality.

<comment><USER2> No, it's not. It's just a set of widely accepted heuristics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Geniune question is anyone at liberty to comment on Google culture? Google has always been a sort of grass is always greener aspirational employer to me but lately I have to admit externally they don't look as good.

</comment><comment><USER8> No company should have the choice between being evil or not.

<comment><USER9> That would require a law system that perfectly captures all ways of being evil. In reality, the law can only play catch up at best. In campaign donation reality even this will not happen.

<comment><USER10> A minimal of fair labor practices for imported goods, enforcing secure data practices, and things like mandatory arbitration aren't too much to ask though. It's not rocket science.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The motto "don't be evil" forces every brain hearing it to process "be evil". This is made particularly ponient by research showing that people don't process negation well. This is why the transition, ignored by the article, to a positive statement of the desired outcome was adopted. Regardless of whether Google attains the behavior it lasts out for itself, this is probably a good change.

<comment><USER12> Similarly the whole "Love Trumps Hate" thing was probably a poor choice, considering it literally starts with "Love Trump"

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think that over time, big corporations like Google and Facebook tend to attract increasingly evil (greedy, financially motivated) people - It creates an environment where non-evil people feel uncomfortable and it causes them leave the company at a higher rate which makes the problem worse. Even the people at the top slowly become more evil (via osmosis) without realising it.

</comment><comment><USER14> Was this really just last month? I feel like I participated in outrage over the removal of "don't be evil" last year or the year before.

And it's not like it ever meant anything. I agree terrible companies are terrible... but there hasn't been a turning point recently or ever.

<comment><USER15> There are articles on the internet going back many years claiming that they've quietly removed it. Perhaps they remove it occasionally to generate buzz or as part of some kind of A/B testing?

As I write this, it is currently included: [https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of- conduct.html](https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct.html)

<comment><USER16> i like the idea of A/B testing that particular statement

i mean, what were the alternatives? did they test against "Be evil" or "Don't be good?" or "Remove the headphone jack" or something?</comment></comment></comment>


Facebook's Free Basics Shuts Down in Egypt - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/a-week-after-india-banned-it-facebooks-free-basics-s-1750299423 <comment><USER2> I don't understand how Mark could propose this with a straight face when he himself is a proponent against Comcast and others trying to do a similar thing in the US. Does not matter if its free or not (there is no such thing as free btw). As long as he gets his own ad dollars he is fine with carving out a special "internet path" to his users. Bad. Worse still, he is doing this piggy backing on "helping the poor" story.

Now I wonder how free and open his other internet through blimps idea was, that was floated a while ago.

<comment><USER3> Let me ask you a question: the Free Basics is targeted to people that can't afford another way to get internet. What will showing ads to these people accomplish?

<comment><USER2> Ad dollars were the wrong choice of words, its more gaining mind share and users.

So do you really believe FB did it for the good of the people and that this free basics thing is good? What do you think a poor guy without access to proper resources like food, education will gain by sharing likes on FB?

<comment><USER4> Obviously facebook is motivated by ad dollars, but people get some benefit out of it. Maybe that poor guy will see some image that makes him laugh.

<comment><USER5> I don't think access to cat pictures justifies shitting all over a country's chances of building out proper infrastructure just to provide a profitable but censored service we'd never accept ourselves.

Net neutrality was the last bastion of freedom online, but it's somehow too high of a standard for societies with lower rates of internet access?

<comment><USER6> Speaking of shitting over a country's chances of building out proper infrastructure, have you read [http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0452287081](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0452287081) Confessions of an Economic Hitman?

It's all about the USA doing exactly that, by promising massive GDP gains. When they fail to net the profit required to pay the contractors, the contractors take over the infrastructure -- netting the USA dozens of corporate-owned electrical infrastructure all over the world, chiefly South America & the Middle East (!!)

<comment><USER5> I picked that up a few months ago but haven't had the time (management skills) to start it yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> African here: I'm really really glad more and more counties are seeing behind the facade Facebook is putting.

(Earlier post) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10816991](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10816991)

<comment><AUTHOR> Mind if I ask how you usually access HN? Mobile? A mac you own? An internet cafe? Do you know anyone who would consider something like free basic? What's their story? I've heard basically nothing from anyone who might use facebook- basics (unless they are being used as a propaganda tool), and I'd love to.

<comment><USER8> So I just created an HN account to answer this. I'm in Accra, Ghana.

> Mind if I ask how you usually access HN?

My PC, with WiFi at home.

> Do you know anyone who would consider something like free basic?

I would. Already, mobile networks have Facebook and Wikipedia (iirc) zero- rated. Meaning you pay nothing to use those services. My startup is trying to get zero-rating on Vodafone to encourage our customers to use our service.

Having free access to some useful sites is a plus. Having my Internet restricted to those sites is a minus.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

What is the process of getting zero-rating like?

Are you glad that zero rating exists in your market?

<comment><USER8> > What is the process of getting zero-rating like?

I don't know. As far as I can tell (what we're doing) we're speaking to the telcos directly. There's no formal process for getting zero-rating. We have an investor/incubator relationship with Vodafone Ghana. Zero-rating our service is just one of the things we're negotiating.

> Are you glad that zero rating exists in your market?

Uhh...I should put my current feelings in context.

I didn't care much 2-3yrs ago because these were marketed as carrier promos, and telcos in Ghana have a bad reputation already. It was none of my business until word went round that MTN (the largest in Ghana, huge across Africa) will start charging special rates for using certain apps like WhatsApp, Instagram, the usual.

The response in our small tech community was mixed. A lot of people I asked weren't aware, but there few that were, were truly outraged.

I didn't follow the news but it seemed other telcos started moving in that direction, then backed down. All the while, 0.facebook.com was still promoted on billboards in Accra.

So it's two things: you can get useful services for free (so you remain subscribed to the network, I guess) or you can be charged _specially_ for using a service that really matters.

My feelings are mixed at this point but I'd much rather prefer a neutral net than one that can favour or penalize services. That leaves an uncomfortable room for abuse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> If Marks not careful, he's going to talk himself right in to being a utility.

[http://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/toi-edit- page/free-...](http://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/toi-edit-page/free- basics-protects-net-neutrality/)

<comment><USER6> Great link.

Something that really bothers me about "Facebook Basic (Free Basic, Facebook.. what a fucking insidious name!)" is the lack of competition..

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Here's the local perspective on the issue. They argue that Etisalat Egypt didn't apply to renew the license and thus it expired and the regulator body NTRA had to suspend it. Like I suspected, nothing about taking a stand on Net Neutrality or unrestricted internet access, just business as usual in Egypt.

[http://af.reuters.com/article/egyptNews/idAFL3N14J3OQ2015123...](http://af.reuters.com/article/egyptNews/idAFL3N14J3OQ20151230)

</comment><comment><USER10> A lot of people seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of what the Internet is.

It begins with telecommunications, namely wires and radio links that carry data. You cannot have an Internet without these. Normally these things are provided by carriers, also called phone companies. ISPs used to be a separate thing but nowadays, an ISP is just part of a wireline or wireless phone company. Once you have a carrier who supplies you with connectivity using the Internet protocols, you are on the Internet.

Beyond that there are millions of services accessible via the Internet and Facebook is only one of millions. Many people never use Facebook because they don't need it, or because they use an alternative service.

It costs money for carriers to provide Internet service and traditionally this has been paid for by subscribers, not by Internet service companies. People are creative, and in many countries, the billing plans for Internet services are very different from the way it is done in your country. But it works, because local carriers are motivated to understand their customers' needs.

Facebook can add nothing positive to the relationship between carriers and their subscribers. It's that simple.

</comment><comment><USER11> This is very conspiratorial, but it'd be interesting if Facebook intentionally shut this down to show its new user base how vital it is to their lives. By giving new users a service and then taking it away, it could drum up support for reinstatement. Wouldn't put it past Mark to pull something like that.

<comment><USER12> OK, mark is going to something bad, then stop doing it to prove how good it is, to convince people to ask for it back. Because it is bad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Maybe someone figured out how to do TCP-over-newsfeed and broke their whole model?

<comment><USER13> Actually, come to think about it, you could probably make a workable web proxy through a Facebook account, as long as they didn't throttle how many cat pictures you uploaded in a day. Have a server on the outside that will post stenographied pictures of cats to your timeline every time you ask "Hey that was an awesome cat picture, do you have any more LOL? WW8gZGF3ZyB0aGlzIGlzIGEgYmFzZS02NCBlbmNvZGVkIEhUVFAgR0VUIHJlcXVlc3Qh".</comment></comment>


Re-inventing the trails in Eve Online - <AUTHOR> http://www.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&nbid=3217

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I saw this on Reddit, but it tickled my fancy as something that would appeal to hackers and those who like splines.</comment>


Just Do It - <AUTHOR> http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2013/01/just-do-it.html

<comment><USER2> It would be interesting if there were more 1-3 year "rotation" positions.

The Silicon Valley (and more so outside) default seems to be "we're hiring you for life", even though the compensation structure (vesting) is set up to encourage no more than 4 years, and in reality more like 1-2 years.

There are a lot of jobs I'd love to take if there were an explicit "accomplish this in 18 months -- if that is successful, you've been successful" -- but where psychologically the idea of "work here forever" would be horrible (even if I intended to quit). VC (EIR focused on security, or some associate type role, ...), politics or activism, turnaround/tech strategy for an existing business in distress, etc.

<comment><USER3> You pretty much described the way jobs are structured in the U.S. military officer corps. You typically have fewer than 2-3 years in any given assignment. There are some interesting pros and cons.

On the one hand, it really forces people to _learn to learn_ and adapt quickly -- even in very different spheres (especially because people are usually rotated between operational jobs and policy/admin/planning staff jobs). That is paired with the "up or out" selection mechanism to try to weed out people who are bad at that. Through the arc of your career of many different jobs, the organization's goal is to give you a broad understanding of its whole portfolio of missions and business processes while making them an expert in one or two areas. (Similar to the industry term of being a "T-shaped" employee.) It is also an attempt to shake things up periodically so that people and processes don't get too entrenched. Performance reports lean heavily on what you have accomplished in a short period of time.

On the other hand, you lose quite a bit of corporate knowledge when 25%-30% of any given group leaves every year. As soon as you start to feel like an expert, you are reassigned and have to start all over again. As for the attempt not to get too entrenched... this works well for smaller units, but is markedly less effective at large, staff-based ones (i.e. the Pentagon).

<comment><USER2> Yeah -- it's pretty common inside management consultancies, too (which is the model Meg Whitman tried to impose at eBay. I don't think it helped them.)

The military at least has less rotation in the Warrant Officer system (you can be a pilot for ~almost your whole career, or a comms expert, etc.), and has decent programs for technical expertise development for enlisted (until you get past E-8, but E-8 is a great terminal rank). There's a difference being a Blackhawk pilot with a combat units vs. medevac vs. 160th, but it's not _that_ big a difference vs. running an infantry company to a staff officer position in an occupation force to running an acquisitions program in DC.

The officer corps really does seem to sacrifice a lot in order to create O-6 and in particular general officers. If the goal were just to produce the best possible company and field grades, you'd probably do something more similar to how warrants are handled.

One of the biggest problem the military has (in jobs like occupying a country) is gratuitous individual rotation. I spent more time in Iraq than ~any military officer I ever met, because I actually lived there. There were KBR cafeteria workers who spent _the entire conflict_ , and truck drivers who knew more about the situation (by virtue of driving on the roads for 5 years pretty much straight) than the military responsible for them.

The solution to that, IMO, would be to assign higher level units to tasks, and then rotate their subordinate units through on a repeating basis. e.g. 1CAV should "own" Southern Iraq for the duration, and HQ elements should remain in place the whole time. Individual BDE could rotate through. This was essentially the British Empire model. For other capabilities, at least rotate a unit back and forth to the same area -- 6mo rotations would be fine if it were half on, half off, to exactly the same thing; sort of similar to how the navy blue/gold crews worked.

It is way too easy to win on OERs by checking boxes vs. actually doing anything. You end up with people making meaningless changes when something is already fine (sometimes, cycles every other commander!) just to make their mark and get something on the OER.

I personally have respect for JSOC and for combat arms during wartime as a good model for leadership (all the way from E-4 through O-6; never talked to people much beyond that), but I don't think the military model in the US works during peacetime or in roles outside combat arms, medical, aviation, or SOF.

Another interesting model for all of this is how the Soviet officer structure worked -- they'd put their best available candidate into a role, but wouldn't promote him to the official rank right away. You could end up with a Colonel commanding a Corps if he was the best guy available. There were maximum ranks for various positions, but not minimum ranks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Similar to Mark Suster's[1]: _What Makes an Entrepreneur? Four Letters: JFDI_

[http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2009/11/19/what-makes- an-...](http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2009/11/19/what-makes-an- entrepreneur-four-lettersjfdi/)

<comment><USER5> Haha.. Effin' would have been a better 2nd word for the anagram.

<comment><USER6> Or, for a 'U' rating : Enthusiastically, or Efficiently, or EXTREME!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I really like the @pmarca quote: "Marc Andreessen says you either will be the person who tells the computer what to do or the person that the computer tells what to do."</comment>


Are You Born To Be A Billionaire? - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/entrepreneurs/2008/03/05/microsoft-hewlett-chevron-ent-billionaires08-cx_mf_0306bornbillionaire_slide.html?thisSpeed=15000

<comment><USER2> Oh fuck off, ideas101. How many forbes.com "articles" can you submit?</comment>


Using Machine Learning to Understand Page Templates - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomreach.com/en/blog/2018/07/using-machine-learning-to-learn-page-templates.html <comment><USER2> When I saw this title I assumed it was about using ML to build dynamic scrapers that self-configure where the changing data elements. Does that exist anywhere?

<comment><USER3> I think this is what Diffbot does !

<comment><USER4> At a very high level, it's similar. We use computer vision and ML to extract structured data from any web page, even ones we haven't seen before. [https://www.diffbot.com/](https://www.diffbot.com/)

If anyone has any questions or wants to try it out, feel free to email me directly at firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> interesting read. I liked the part about identifying rare templates. plus, if I ever plan to do ML on html the article gave me a good place to start on feature extraction.

might have some uses in identifying phishing urls, etc

</comment><comment><USER6> The title should be "Clustering HTML pages". It's not a terribly interesting application. The only thing new I got from it was a de-noising technique.

<comment><USER7> What I'd really like to see is a presentation of an algorithm that automatically recognizes and hides the first dismissive HN comment that inevitably appears. Any takers?

<comment><USER8> Recognize, hide, and automatically post to /iamverysmart.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> most of the images won't load for me.

<comment><USER10> and the title of the browser tab is flashing at me...</comment></comment>