DATAcide: The Total Annihilation of Life as We Know It - <AUTHOR> https://www.adbusters.org/magazine/115/datacide-total-annihilation-life-we-know-it.html <comment><USER2> The internet is other people, and what we get is what people, on the whole, want. It's like the olympic gold medal in _Cool Runnings_ : if your life is meaningless without it, it's still going to be meaningless with it.

> These are the most boring people on the planet.

Yes, we are. That's the real revolution here: that you don't have to be "wacky" to participate, to set the agenda even. Facebook forces us to accept that most people are boring. Forces us to at least consider the possibility that terrifies the politico-artistic-humanities complex - that maybe it's ok to be boring.

> if our data is the oil of the 21st century, then why aren't we all sheikhs?

Or maybe our data isn't actually that valuable. Maybe it's worth approximately what we sell it for.

> There's no sneering, no sarcasm, and no self-deprecation. Everyone is just > sort of floating along in an earnest tranquility. As if each anecdote about > "that cool loft I found on Airbnb" contained some deep spiritual > significance beyond my grasp.

Isn't this a good thing? What do we think the author would have written if everyone were being cynical and snarky?

> magical cloud of squandered human potential

No such thing. Data isn't destroying these things - it's just forcing us to realize that they were myths all along. I think the author kind of acknowledges this with the statement about how "those invisible power structures continue to thrive."

The Internet only amplifies what's already there. It can, and does, help you do what you want with your life. But you have to decide what that is for yourself.

<comment><USER3> I could reply point-by-point, but it's pointless (pun intended).

Here is one thing I learned over the years.

There are people of type A who believe there actually are meaningful things in life. This belief requires to acknowledge that there are also meaningless things. And yes, sometimes identifying those things can get a bit depressing.

There are other people, type B, who believe there are no meaningful things in life. This same statement can be given a positive spin by negation, but the essence remains the same. This is the type that lectures everyone on how subjective and relative everything is, like it's some kind of revolutionary idea we have not heard before.

But that's not it. What I really learned is that having a conversation relating to meaning or value of _anything_ is entirely pointless if you're speaking with people of type B. Eventually, they will fall back on stating the same core belief (the one I just described above) in a myriad different ways.

And here is a question worth asking. If people of type A can have a productive conversation about things that type B considers non-existent, which belief system makes more sense?

<comment><USER4> I always find it very weird when people have debates about whether life is "meaningful" or not. "Meaningfulness" is just a feeling inside a human psyche. If it feels meaningful, then it is meaningful to you. Other people may have different feelings about what is meaningful.

How can a person of type A claim any kind of universal or objective meaningfulness of anything? How would you build a meaningfulness detector or write a meaningfulness algorithm to discern what is meaningful and what is not? What evidence is there to suggest that meaningfulness is a concept that exists outside of our own minds and experience?

<comment><USER5> > What evidence is there to suggest that meaningfulness is a concept that > exists outside of our own minds and experience?

Why would you need or want to?

I exist. My mind exists. My consciousness exists. My experience exists.

I mean that in the perfectly ordinary, uncontroversial sense that we use every day. There is no particular mystery or problem when I say, "My cat exists" or "My socks exist". I can provide evidence for them, in the same way I can provide evidence for my own existence and the existence of my experiences. If you can read and understand this post you have evidence for my existence and the existence of my experience.

Furthermore, because we are beings of a particular kind, the things we find meaningful--like the things we find nutritious--fall into a relatively small number of categories. Particulars won't be the same for everyone, but so what? It would be very strange to say that because I like meat and you like fruit there's no objective or universal standard of nutrition, and anyone can eat anything--rocks, trees, nothing--and get along equally well.

Simply because our nature does not determine what we find meaningful or nutritious does not mean it does not constrain it. This is again a perfectly ordinary phenomenon that for some reason people get all confused about when it applies to the contents of our minds rather than the contents of our stomachs.

<comment><USER6> The question is not whether you experience you exist but what it is that exist.

So it doesn't help your argument that you can point to a sock and say it exist. What you have to show is that there is only one way to interpret what you see before you can prove that what you see is in fact what you see. Only then is it truly "a thing" regardless of perspective.

In other words. The rock exist in your head as a concept, it's not a concept in nature. A pattern perhaps but not an universal object and the pattern that it is is only one perspective.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I quite liked this piece to read as art. But there are some pretty simple solutions to the general malaise he is expressing:

1) get out of the myopic SV culture. There are lots of actually interesting problems to solve (even in the very small world of software) and if you are tired of talking about the same old thing, go somewhere that isn't doing that.

2) if you aren't interested by the data you are consuming, don't interact with it. Don't consume facebook, twitter, HN, et. al. Or more realistically only consume the ones that add value to your life. It's harder to opt out of being collected in the massive hoovering of this data, but in nearly all instances out of sight, really is out of mind.

<comment><USER8> "if you are tired of talking about the same old thing, go somewhere that isn't doing that."

I was getting bored with music a while back, so I did an experiment: I limited the music on my phone to nothing older than five years. To do this I had to remove hundreds of albums.

At first there wasn't much left, so I went looking... for nothing released more than five years ago.

I found quite a bit of new stuff.

Eventually I re-added old stuff I loved, but my musical repertoire had broadened quite a bit.

Part of the problem today is that the amount of signal around us has increased so much that it's overwhelming, and people haven't yet learned that it's _okay_ to tune out a significantly larger amount of chatter than what they had to tune out in previous eras. It feels like ignorance, or being "out of the loop," but it's essential.

I plan on repeating the music experiment regularly. I should probably purge some of my "feeds" too.

<comment><USER9> TLDR; I've done what you've done on a massive scale.

Most things end up depressing me if I follow them, knowing people are willingly participating in such an absence of brain activity. I had to stop myself from constantly scrolling down on facebook when I was bored (I realized I don't even actually read what people post most of the time because I'm looking for something interesting, but I still subconsciously notice what people are doing somehow.) I'm not against this by any means, so don't take this as me complaining. I don't know what's popular right now, I don't know what is trending on twitter. What's left is my little bubble where I have what I need to explore what I'm interested in. I can find interesting articles, I can find new music, and I can talk to people who actually are interesting to talk to. I've completely cut off any noise and am completely left with pure signal.

I'm completely out of touch with most everybody, and I've never felt better. I guess this goes hand in hand with being super introverted, I couldn't imagine actually holding a conversation with anybody around me with the information I know that wasn't super technical or completely shallow. I've lived with this obvious gap between me and other people my entire life though so it doesn't even feel lonely anymore when I can just find whatever I need to keep myself occupied when I'm bored.

The beauty of the internet.

<comment><USER10> TL;DR "I've built my own echo chamber!"

<comment><USER11> To the contrary, seems he built an anechoic chamber. The only signals he perceives is what he wants, cleanly. He has decided what he _doesn 't_ want, knows that most signals out there are just variants on the same such content, and blocks it all.

I'm approaching half a century old. Comes a point where you realize you _have_ heard it all, and are not interested in anything "new" because it isn't. I'm this -><\- close to shutting it all off and going seriously minimalistic. The tipping point would be a news service which presents only actual need-to-know news, and a stream of new music.

Address, enumerate, and centralize your core axioms. Build from there. _Stop letting others dump $#!^ in your head._

<comment><USER12> The purpose of the anechoic chamber is not to keep out sounds from the outside, but to allow you to differentiate the direct sound you're making from the environmental reflections.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This reminded me of moxie's recent post about whether we've put the glasses from _They Live_ on or taken them off[0].

In terms of the internet as a failed utopia, it seems to comes down to the choices we all make in deciding this for ourselves: what we participate in, what we work on, how we choose to spend our time, and especially whether or not we work to build positive alternatives.

It can be a useful exercise to ask oneself whether the work they're doing helps to control others or whether it positively enables people to live in the world they want to live in, and one way to respond to these types of concerns is for people to focus on building that world.

Sometimes that's the harder path, but sometimes the harder path is worth choosing.

[0] [https://whispersystems.org/blog/they- live/](https://whispersystems.org/blog/they-live/)

</comment><comment><USER14> > There's no sneering, no sarcasm, and no self-deprecation. Everyone is just > sort of floating along in an earnest tranquility. As if each anecdote about > "that cool loft I found on Airbnb" contained some deep spiritual > significance beyond my grasp.

This is what I hate the most! Everyone here is so positive. It's like a cult. Any post containing an ounce of negativity is downvoted. Anything that strays from the party line of "technology will solve everything, and we are changing the world" is shunned. And whether this attitude comes from techno-utopians or from eager beaver entrepreneurs, it's toxic to our industry. It makes us ignore the social impact of our inventions. It keeps us narrowly focused on technological solutions when the problem isn't technological. And worst of all, it gives everyone a huge ego. Learn to laugh at yourself, accept that your crappy web app isn't changing the world, and remember that the homeless guy you passed on your way to work is a person like you (who just lacked the opportunities you did).

<comment><USER15> Remember that this is in an interview context-- everyone is on their best behavior and it's a little fake.

<comment><USER14> You're right--interviewers act fake. And besides, this article generalizes, hyperbolizes. But I'm not using this lone anecdote as evidence. My experience on HN is the evidence. My experience working for tech companies is the evidence. And the smug attitude in the article, even if fictional, captures reality perfectly in the same way that a comedian's impression reveals more about the subject than a faithful depiction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I thought it was a great piece. Most of the "innovation" we see is total bullshit. Instagram, WhatsApp, Snapchat, all of these things are NOT new ideas, and NOT lifechanging services, but they're valued in the millions and billions of dollars. It feels like we're in the middle of another dot-com bubble, and sooner or later it's going to pop, and we're going to realize how little we've actually contributed to society.

<comment><USER17> And these apps are a small percentage of the entire tech industry but get 100% of the press on sites like Techcrunch.

Most products and technology are boring. It doesn't mean the 1% fringes aren't doing exciting things.

Such as robotics, automated cars, automated surgery, machine learning/NLP services, VR (ala oculus/Magic Leap), smart AI assistants are improving rapidly (Siri/Cortana). Business intelligence and data mining are new massive industries.

Nor does the fact one niche (social networks/mobile apps) becoming saturated with products means that tech innovation is dead.

IF most of the applications of software are boring and software is to 'eat the world' then there is at least another decade or two of purely boring stuff needing to be transferred to software. For ex: no-one is tweeting about advances in business automation.

<comment><USER14> It is a small percentage of the tech industry. But it's a good percentage of startups. A good percentage of yCombinator companies. A good percentage of what we discuss on Hacker News.

<comment><USER17> > it's a good percentage of startups

Have you looked at any portfolios on VCs websites of startups they invested in? The majority of them are all boring companies, and you'd never hear about them even when they sell for a $1 billion.

Many people on HN work at startups building boring software. They just dont site here discussing it because it is boring. And lots of the articles here are a reflection of the tech journalism, not industry.

That being said there are tons of articles on HN discussing robotics, automated cars, magicleap, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Not bad! I liked it. Kind of weaseled out at the end, though. I get the feeling the author got as close as he could to the truth and then just couldn't cross the chasm.

I was struck by the conscious selling out that the author points out. The folks building the next generation of internet content _know_ what they're doing. It's not like it was back in '95 when we thought that we'd all just turn on machines and share. Back then it was utopia. Now, as he points out, you don't surf the internet. The internet surfs you.

But we know that. Yet to point it out is a terrible faux pas. The "correct" answer is just to sell out, grab the data, flip it, and move on. I guess the conclusion is that it's better to be rich with a slightly guilty conscience than it is to be moral and honest. It's rude to be perspicacious.

If true that people are starting to wake up, interesting. It's showing a shift a shift in the conversation. Far too many techies will rant at length about some kind of social injustice in the world -- while helping to create an authoritarian state the world has never seen before. It's about time some of them looked in the mirror a bit.

<comment><USER19> Maybe techies are slowly realizing that this whole trendy web industry is 50% schlep, 49% bullshit and 1% of something actually valuable to the world. The schlep jobs are obviously boring, but the trendy 49% of bullshit seems to be actually harmful to humanity.

I realized this long time ago. And yet here I am, working on a schlep. I guess that's a step up from the bullshit work I was doing before. Maybe one day I'll be brave enough and take another step, ditch this whole thing and code something actually beneficial to fellow humans.

People will say (I wonder what's edw519's stance on this) - go with what your clients/employers want, and let the magic of capitalism sort it all out, turn it into real value. But we see that more and more things we do don't actually bring any (nonmonetary) value to the world.

So you say, there's a shift in conversation. I'm afraid, that the shift will is towards apathy. "Sell out, grab the data, flip it, and move on". Because they don't give a shit about the world anymore, it's going down the drain, nothing we can do, so let at least have some expensive parties before the whole thing explodes.

<comment><USER20> > Maybe techies are slowly realizing that this whole trendy web industry is > 50% schlep, 49% bullshit and 1% of something actually valuable to the world.

Couldn't put it better myself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Love this: a euphemism for a human centipede of marketers selling marketing to marketers for marketing.

<comment><USER22> Also this: But what many [communes] had common was a cascading systems failure of their foundational hypothesis — that social change could be achieved through self-transformation and the problems of power could be solved simply by ignoring them. There was always a Machiavellian in the transformational mist, though, and a refusal to acknowledge outright how power creates invisible structures that undermine the potential for cooperative action ultimately led to their implosion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> This reads like Wired back when that was a good thing.

<comment><USER24> More like Mondo 2000.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is an incredibly pertinent point. Why is the collective data, profitable for such a small percentage. Why are those that are contributing the data not being rewarded for their contributions. If we live in the information econonomy then those that are contributing that information should be accounted. How is this not digital feudalism??

<comment><USER26> Well, there's choice. I use more obscure tools, for example Unison instead of Dropbox or Tox instead of Skype. It would probably be feudalism if there were dependency, but nobody forces you to post on Facebook. I don't use it. I have friends that I see often, I enjoy life just fine without it. heh.

TBH, I'm more worried about cameras that scan faces and license plates.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> For what it's worth, Ryder Ripps' poem Howl 2.0 explores similar themes:

[http://genius.com/Ryder-ripps-howl-20-for-fixoid- annotated](http://genius.com/Ryder-ripps-howl-20-for-fixoid-annotated)

Since the author of this Adbusters piece was also clearly inspired by Ginsberg, it's pretty cool to see two different authors exploring the same ideas when they are both using the same work for inspiration.

<comment><USER19> I see your Howl 2.0 and raise you Meditations on Moloch!

[http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on- moloch/](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> One word summarizes the article: "emo".

It's a long angst-dripping screed lamenting the extreme data connectivity of today, failing to note three critical points: (A) the connectivity is as vital to "life as we know it" as your nervous system is to your body, (B) he lives it by choice, and (C) he can unplug if he wants to.

He fails to notice that "we" is not universal. For high-tech types living in crowded cities, yes, but there are a whole lotta people much less, and even un-, connected to the Web.

He fails to notice that the connectivity he laments is _critical_ to maintaining life as he knows it. What he takes for granted, the symbiotic consequence of extreme data proliferation. Take away the interconnectedness that scares him, and he has few options beyond tilling the ground and harvesting his own food.

He fails to notice the choices he has. Going only so far as locking the door & smashing the phone, he laments the data-driven world still exists just feet away. Newsflash: there is life outside the blue/red[1] border.

He fails to notice that disconnection _is_ an option, to whatever degree he is comfortable with. Log out of Facebook. Avoid HN. Stop viewing social media. Most news is irrelevant. Pay in cash. Accept that disconnection means longer waits and fewer options. Realize that most of humanity throughout history, some 40 billion people, got along to what they considered "fine" without the Web.

While briefly still connected, take a look at these: [http://www.zillow.com](http://www.zillow.com) [http://www.tumbleweedhouses.com](http://www.tumbleweedhouses.com) [https://www.google.com/#q=library+near+me](https://www.google.com/#q=library+near+me) [http://www.mypatriotsupply.com/Articles.asp?ID=245](http://www.mypatriotsupply.com/Articles.asp?ID=245)

Quit whining. If you want to get out, you can. There is an off switch, and the disconnected life is wonderful.

[1] - if you look closely at voter precinct maps and their blue/red Democrat/Republican Left/Right Progressive/Conservative boundaries, you'll see stark & consistent delineation right at the urban/rural boundary. Cities are political archipelagos, and he's lamenting the foliage & ground, longing for the oceans he doesn't realize surround him.

<comment><USER28> > [http://www.tumbleweedhouses.com](http://www.tumbleweedhouses.com)

Ouch, portability comes at a very high (~5-6x/sqft) premium.

<comment><USER11> Well, in fairness Tumbleweed Homes _are_ premium. I'm just giving a starting link as a hint. If you're looking for serious cheap & portable along those lines, I got a used pop-up camper for $2000 (new $10,000) that I'd be OK living in (and do for a few weeks a year, family of 4 + 2 dogs). During a sale, I also got the detailed plans for a Tumbleweed Home for $20, simple enough one could scrounge most of the materials. You can spend as little as you like, so long as you're willing to DIY and have flexible standards.

Speaking of which... Go to the Zillow link and search (largest range allowed is a whole state) for properties at/under $1000. Dig thru the auctions/scams/typos, and you'll find viable - even nice - lots dirt cheap.

Put those together, deal with misc paperwork & other costs, be ready to work, and you can have a home free-and-clear for under $5000. (Yes, it's not a 2400 sq ft ranch in the suburbs; deal with it.)

<comment><USER28> I've found the tiny-house movement fascinating to watch from the outside. It's got a real appeal to me that's only increased as I've gradually transitioned from my youthful can't-wait-to-be-uploaded outlook to a much more reluctant relationship with tech and the always-on life.

My concerns about trying it myself:

1) The country-living variety defeats any small-ecological-footprint appeal, unless you live like depression-era or earlier farmers ( _i.e._ don't underestimate the ecological sensibility of a studio apartment in the city)

2) The urban/suburban variety is much harder to make work if you don't want to live illegally in someone's backyard, thanks to zoning, HOAs, _et c._ , plus the cost of land very nearly ruins the money-saving angle.

3) Health care is really, _really_ expensive. I doubt I could make enough money to cover that for my family, on top of other unavoidable expenses, while living a disconnected life in the sticks, as much as it might appeal to me otherwise, even with the savings from not having rent or a mortgage. That goes beyond "roughing it" to "irresponsible".

4) I've got a tickle in the back of my mind that a large part of this is a marketing ploy to sell mobile homes at a premium by appealing to "economy" and "eco-consciousness" when both of those would be better (or at least similarly- well) served by buying single-wide in an ordinary mobile home park, which for some reason[1] rarely comes up as an alternative. Incidentally, if you've ever been to poor rural areas along sleepy back-woods highways, you've undoubtably noticed that you can do the trailer thing and the dirt-cheap-land middle-of- nowhere thing, too. Of course, they're ugly and couldn't possibly be mistaken for Thoreau's cabin.

Your pop-up camper approach seems sensible (though I, also with a family of four, can't imagine living quite _that_ small full-time without going insane—a few weeks a year, sure) but it's not the kind of thing you see blog posts gushing about, covered by documentaries, or featured on magazine covers.

[1] Class, almost certainly; trailer park = white trash redneck, "tiny house" = creative class, educated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> The mention of buildings based on _Walden 2_ reminded me of one of my favorite buildings, Ricardo Bofill's _Walden 7_ :

[http://www.walden7.com/](http://www.walden7.com/)

[http://www.ricardobofill.com/EN/666/PROJECTS/Walden-7-html](http://www.ricardobofill.com/EN/666/PROJECTS/Walden-7-html) [might be broken]

[http://www.mascontext.com/issues/4-living-winter-09/case- stu...](http://www.mascontext.com/issues/4-living-winter-09/case- study-2-walden-7/)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walden_7](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walden_7)

The links don't really do full justice to the three-dimensional interlocking of the dwelling units. It's Corbu's _Marseilles Block_ plus peyote.

</comment><comment><USER30> There is one thing which is completely unrelated to contents of the article that puzzles me. The article is quite long and if it wasn't for being at the top of HN, I would never dare to read it and I believe, people are as lazy as me when it comes to long posts.

But, the article did came from 1 to 200+ points and the thing which I wish to know is who were the early readers when the article was at 0 - 20 points. I mean even though writing style is pretty interesting but seeing the length of the article, I would be pretty much discouraged to go through the whole of it, if it had less points.

So the interesting thing to know is what makes the early readers to upvote something. Would they indeed go through whole of the text before upvoting or would they impressed just by few ideas in beginning, and may be just bookmark / pocket it.

<comment><USER19> I saw it early, when it had low two digits score. I almost ignored it (I wasn't in the mood for too much narration), but when skimming something in the middle drew my attention, so I scrolled back and started reading. Upvoted after that, of course.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> "We were told to surf the web, but in the end, the web serf'd us". Funny and sad at the same time.

<comment><USER32> If you always do what you're told, don't complain when you're labeled a serf. ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This essay raises a lot of good points-- mass conformity, data ownership, overstimulated brains. If you work in this field, you're rich, richer than many, many generations before. If we don't ever pause and consider these things, we'll take them for granted.

</comment><comment><USER33> "He's dressed like a Stasi agent trying to blend in at a disco."

Best sentence I've read in a while.

<comment><USER34> "Textbook Zuckercore". I love the wit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Reading this makes my skin crawl. I'll admit -- I only got about half way through before I had to stop. The disposition of the author is entirely too sardonic for my tastes. He's locked himself into an endless spiral of hatred and self-victimization, of course none of which is his own fault.

How can this be seen as normal or healthy?

Maybe I'm just one of the "boring" people. I don't have a twitter or an Instagram, and barely maintain my Facebook that follows only people I have known personally.

Take a walk. Go outside. Get some fresh air. Realize that you don't need to allow things to consume your free time if you don't enjoy them.

<comment><USER36> I believe the piece is not entirely serious.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Like everything else in the world, the truth is somewhere in the middle. Yes, in a certain lens, we are digital serfs bound by companies' TOSs forced by none other than our own listless volition; people don't care where the data is going, they just want the service. Yet in exchange these services allow us to _do more_ , _live more_. Using Kayak instead of a travel agent saves me precious hours for going on a trip. Next time I want to take a trip, I use the knowledge already gained through Kayak to book it even faster instead of futzing around with another person's schedule. Do you want convenience, or do you want your digital "rights" to be respected?

</comment><comment><USER38> AdBusters. Enough said.

</comment><comment><USER39> This is a very well written essay, but I find it rather Valley-centric. There are other worlds out there, non-internet worlds. There are people in west Texas and North Dakota working on oil and gas drilling rigs. There are painters and carpenters, dentists and nurses and oncologists. There are Marines and Navy pilots and infantrymen and -women. Many of these professions are largely the same as they were prior to the advent of the 1970s microcomputer revolution.

Of course, there are plenty of professions that are in trouble if not ceased to exist. Shoe stores, book stores, and clothing stores are all in big trouble these days, as are small hardware stores and small grocery stores and non- chain coffee shops.

Someone who's feeling the level of angst and confusion and directionless of this author should probably consider changing fields, or maybe disconnect more often and wander barefoot in a garden (watch out for deer ticks and yellow jacket wasps, though; nature is not necessarily all fun and games).

The internet is a tool, a means to an end. It's been a way for many of us to reconnect with long lost classmates, stay in touch with distant loved ones like never before. It's enabled severely handicapped people to have jobs and lead more productive lives. It's a miracle, really.

When I was a college student spending a couple of years abroad in Asia in 1980, there was no email, no Skype, and no cell phones. I'd write long letters to the family on international airmail paper, fold it and put an airmail stamp on it, and drop it in the mailbox. A couple of weeks later, it would get to my family in the U.S. If I wanted to make an international call, it was a big and expensive project. I took hundreds of photographs and they had to be developed, and copies made, and physically mailed out to people.

Now, kids doing a junior year abroad are light seconds away from their loved ones. They can text their significant other 50 times a day, send them selfies, post a running travelogue on Facebook or Pinterest, and virtually speaking they are right next door. It's an incredible shift. Take a video of where they are and post it to Youtube the same day. Unbelievable, to those of us who grew up before this was all taken for granted.

And, probably there will be equally vast technological shifts in the future that will have the current 20-something generation, who are so tech-savvy, saying in 25 years -- Wow, we used to have this thing called "email" and we had to use Google to discover interesting facts! We had to carry around these devices called tablets in order to access the world's knowledge -- and even then, we couldn't access all of it all the time! We needed these little devices called cell phones in order to communicate. Etc. Huge paradigm shifts await us.

Perhaps they will not be so benign, e.g. vast AI entities that wrest control of our world away from us. Perhaps we'll be slaves of a future superior race of cyborgs, or wiped out as an inferior competitor.

The future is exciting, and challenging, and even though one can point to the dark corners and seediness of things at any given point, in the long run it's an amazing ride, an endless roller coaster. We have amazing power today to shape our future, if only we can understand and direct this power without destroying ourselves.

Just my 2 cents' ;-)

</comment><comment><USER40> I saw TA in the title and got my hopes up for a modern Linux port or the game.

I don't think I have work on the brain right now.

</comment><comment><USER41> What is this? I read the first few paragraphs and couldn't keep track of where it was going and lost interest. Can someone explain to me why this is at the top of HN and why I should read it?

<comment><USER42> Because it's in interesting article about the human condition in the social technological culture we currently exist in. Though if you're genuinely curious, you could just slog through the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> The judgmental tone turned me off long before I read enough to even understand the point of the piece. I'll assume it's a load of hyperbole that boils down to "I don't like things that are different"

</comment><comment><USER44> Oh, the banality of life! Whining about that goes back to at least Socrates.

The new thing is that everyone in even the semi-developed world now has access to more banal entertainment than they can possibly consume. Prior to TV, most people were limited in entertainment consumption by money and location. With broadcast TV, something was on all the time, but choice was limited. Now, there's a wide range of banal content, more than any person can consume, available at all times at low, low cost.

Smartphones and legal pot now keep the serfs quiet and passive.</comment>


Neuroscientists create computer program that can decode your thoughts - <AUTHOR> http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/116447-neuroscientists-create-computer-program-that-can-decode-your-thoughts <comment><USER2> Talk about a misleading headline: _Second, the scientists kind of cheated: They were listening to the auditory center, which interprets signals from the ear — they weren't actually listening to thoughts._

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure there's much of a difference. If the people thought these words without saying them and the scientist could know what the words were, that is mind reading. It doesn't matter much, IMO, where in the brain they are reading them from.

<comment><USER4> This is mind reading only to some extent. They weren't capturing arbitrary thoughts, only the brain's interpretation of spoken words. That _is_ a difference, although still quite a leap.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Scary. If research progresses to a stage where its actually able to pick up thoughts rather than sound processing, this sort of technology might be used for interrogation. Imagine drilling holes into the prisoners skull to try and pick up this thoughts.

<comment><USER6> So many sci-fi ideas to explore..

While scientist can't read "real thoughts" instead of audio signal, spies would be taught to think in a secret language, preferably each spy in a different one, and only translate it, when they need to speak with someone.

Maybe that's how Babel Tower happened :)

I also wonder, if "real thoughts" are universally identifiable between people. I guess not, so reading them will require calibration of thought-reader. So it (the reader) could be tricked by interrogated person, by thinking about different things/ideas in calibration phase, than interrogators want you to think about.

This allows for full blown fantasy style mind wars. Scary, but also cool.</comment></comment>


Robbie Cooper's amazing photos of gamers and their avatars  - <AUTHOR> http://flavorwire.com/238994/fascinating-photos-of-gamers-vs-their-avatars

<comment><USER2> Oh good, a postbot adding to the HN slowdown.

<comment><AUTHOR> not a bot. hola.

<comment><USER2> Effectively so.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: YC S10 applications almost due. How excited are you? - <AUTHOR>

I'm applying for the first time. I learned about YC in the summer of 07, the summer after my first year in university. At the time, I didn't really understand what YC did, but I sent the application link to my partner Andy to check out for fun. He remarked, in an email I still have: "they only fund <20k not really worth it." LOL.
At that time, we were two 19 year olds who had sunk $22k of our own money into a project which we thought was the next big thing. Of course, it wasn't. But we learned some harsh, important lessons and moved on to build other projects as if nothing ever happened.
A couple years later, we're 21 and stumble across Paul Graham's essays. They all made sense, and the lessons he preached were exactly the types of lessons we learned in failure. But particularly one essay presented an important new idea we hadn't thought about. It was the one about startup hubs and how important it is to be in the valley. I remember shooting up a message over MSN with Andy about moving to the valley. I think he was hesitant, but quickly realized we had nothing to lose; if we failed and went back home, we were the same as the rest of our graduated friends, broke and living with our parents.
So it was settled. We'd try to get into YC when we were done with school. If we couldn't, we'd build our own startup anyway. I always knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur.
I graduated last summer, and Andy is finishing his term in May. We're now 22 years old and applying to Y Combinator S10. <comment><USER2> I'm tempted to write "Best of luck to all of you who are applying" but I've never really believed in luck so, while it sounds more awkward, "May your applications speak accurately and positively about the extent of your ability to create a successful business."

One wee little suggestion: mentioning your age is a lot like an exclamation point. If you're writing a novel, you get one exclamation point. Maybe two. You don't have to use them if you don't want to, but under absolutely no circumstances do you put three exclamation points in five paragraphs. That just makes the publisher's assistant write you off as unserious.

If you feel the need to bring your age up, have a quick mental conference along the lines of "I wonder if it would be more impressive to delete mention of my age and instead mention something which would suggest that I am likely to create a successful business." My guess is 99 times out of 100 the answer is "Hmm, yep."

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool, thanks.

I was kinda just casually writing, I didn't intend on telling a story when I made the post, it kind of just happened lol. I was actually recreating/remembering what happened as I was writing, so I guess I was using age to show how much time passed by.

<comment><USER3> Let's see if you still mention your age in your writing when you are 28 or 29 and still stuck in the grind ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> Man, I wouldn't even make it to 28 grinding. I'd probably die of a heart attack from all those sleepless nights and high caffeine energy drinks.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Are You Good Enough Being Great? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.sokanu.com/are-you-good-enough-being-great

<comment><USER2> It can be difficult to draw a line between what constitutes "good" and "great" but I think Sokanu does a good job in this article. And Spencer takes it a step further with the introduction concept of adding a third level: Exceptional. Very thoughtful piece.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks Kent!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Wave_off_Kanagawa> \- Katsushika Hokusai.

Now that is two greats (Artist and painting) in a single line. Beautiful painting.

</comment><comment><USER4> I think this is good advice that is appropriate for the times. It's actually good timing because I've been toying with this idea myself. It's a tough/fine line. Good work</comment>


We Are Pioneers: the Journey to Ember.js - <AUTHOR> http://hawkins.io/2013/07/we-are-pioneers/?tweet_clock_time=1372853454 <comment><USER2> I'm sorry but this is one of the most ridiculously vacuous, self-aggrandising pieces of nonsense I have ever seen submitted to HN. Even more so when it's just another framework, and not really even a particularly popular or revolutionary one. Pushing boundaries like travelling across the sea to an almost entirely unknown continent with little to no chance of return regardless of what you find there? Please. I think we need to stand back and take a deep breath.

<comment><USER3> Any positive post about Ember seems to be float higher on the front page than it deserves...

<comment><USER4> Eh, so does any angular post on the omg power of directives.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Grandiosity aside, what's pioneering about Ember.js? AngularJS, Backbone, Meteor and even Dojo and YUI I think all have better claims to being pioneers. As much as people hate Rails and the Rails community for having this attitude, at least Rails had that wow factor when it came out and there wasn't really anything like it out there. Ember.js? What does Ember.js have right now that AngularJS or Knockout or Backbone or whatever didn't have a year ago? AngularJS is both easier to get started with, offers much more flexibility and is much more interesting from a technical standpoint, not to mention that its feature set is much deeper.

This is like Apple's marketing, except without the product and aimed at developers.

</comment><comment><USER6> I started to notice a similar mindset between the groups of people who advocate for Rails and Ember.js. They tend to be more opinionated and very proud of the technology choice they made. I have nothing against it, it's just intriguing.

<comment><USER7> I've been building apps for a few years now. I started by taking established projects and making them fit a specific role. Later I started building them from scratch. Now I'm starting to delve into the higher level "theory" behind making stuff like this. I put theory in quotes because it's not really theory, it's just observations made over years of experience, approaching theory from the bottom rather than the top.

What I learned from doing it that way is that there's a level of process abstraction which is higher than "best practices" but lower than pure CS theory. It's the level at which documents like 12factor.net are. The best word I've found that describes it is "opinionated". You want software that's opinionated enough to drive design decisions but not so much that it dictates them.

People are very proud of this sort of understanding because it is hard-won. When you look at 12factor.net, if you haven't been developing for awhile, you might not understand just how useful a document it is. You might be thinking top-down rather than bottom-up. But if you're like me, you've seen lots of anti-patterns in the things you've built and long for a way to get them out of your apps.

That's where frameworks come in. They make decisions for you that cut back on those anti-patterns. Very useful if that's what you're looking for. When I first started building, I found Rails to be too much bloat, too complex, so I used Sinatra. Now I have a large project that I'm finishing up, and I wish now I'd used Rails. You can build an opinionated Sinatra app, but why when you could just use Rails?

You don't think you need someone else to make decisions for you, until you do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Isn't the text's introduction slightly glorifiyng? It tells the story of the noble settlers who had to fight troubles and sometimes even lost their lives - it leaves out that they actually have slayn all the indigenous people whose country they invaded. Colonialization of North America isn't just some exiting bunch of tales about adventurous pioneers, but actually a quite cruel story of suppression and murder. So maybe you should consider some other entry point for your text.

</comment><comment><USER9> I think it's important to rethink this progression a bit. In the early years of Rails, what else was around? What other Ruby-oriented frameworks did we find that did what Rails did? How many people were developing web-based MVC apps on a day-to-day basis in comparison to how many are developing them now? GitHub wasn't even around until three years after Rails v1 - seems like maybe GitHub on its own will have untold effects on speeding up development time on a project like Ember.

Let's consider also the simple fact that ALL client-side MVC frameworks are JavaScript (unless they are precompiler-based, which none of the big ones really are, currently). The fact that all of them are based on the same language, the massive cracks in server-side systems that are further exacerbated by language idiosyncrasies are reduced significantly.

</comment><comment><USER10>
      > I've seen [the problems that occur when you're working
      > with an immature ecosystem] before. I started with Rails
      > in 2006. It was difficult in the earlier years. It has
      > only really matured in the past 3 years. I think Rails
      > 3.1 really embodies everything you need to make a
      > certain class of web applications. Ember and its
      > ecosystem are so far off.

Using rails as our yardstick:

        Rails Releases           Ember.js
        </comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>---    </comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>--
        3.1.0 August 31, 2011    Now + 6.5 Years (End 2020)
        3.0.0 August 29, 2010    Now + 5.5 Years (End 2019)
        2.0.0 December 6, 2007   Now + 2 Years (Mid 2015)
        1.0.0 December 13, 2005  Now (Mid 2013)

So starting an Ember.js project today is like starting a Rails app in 2005. Probably too much headache to take on for six month to a year long projects, but if you're looking at a 2-3 year timeframe and Ember.js gives you a technology advantage over other frameworks, then it might a good time to try it.

<comment><USER11> I dated Ember for a while but I ended up married with Angular.

Ember is really cute and charming. When it works it is all magic - but when it doesn't it is way harder to figure out what is wrong.

So far, Angular seems to have a stronger foundation and will eventually catch up in beauty.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> It probably felt right when he wrote it? Assuming some substances were abused. Terrible post... MVC is decades old, single page apps are getting old too; Doesn't matter whether your view is called an Ember.View or not.

</comment><comment><USER13> _yawn_ good luck with that. I'm sure the settlers in their day would have moved onto something better if they had had the sense to recognize it at the time.

</comment><comment><USER14> What sets Ember apart from Angular?

</comment><comment><USER15> Nice , good luck for you , now only developers eventualy decide what's best for them. If your framework is the best , people will adopt it.</comment>


Show HN: Isebolanear.me find out just how close you are to ebola - <AUTHOR> http://isebolanear.me/

<comment><AUTHOR> Just a silly app me and a couple of my friends threw together. Let me know what you think, and please send any PR's to [https://github.com/elbuo8/ebola- hack](https://github.com/elbuo8/ebola-hack)</comment>


[Ask HN] What is so special about buzzfeed? - <AUTHOR>

Just saw a news that they have joined the billion dollar club but trying to understand why. Anybody use them? <comment><USER2> The ability to influence millions of internet users to share your content has great value. Reaching 130MM unique visitors gives Buzzfeed the power to run target advertising campaigns that companies will reward them handsomely for. They are the largest content provider on Facebook with 39MM interactions (shares, likes, comments) which is 11MM more than the second largest content provider, Huffington Post.

Check out more statistics on Internet Trends of 2014, Buzzfeed slides start on slide 44: [http://s3.amazonaws.com/kpcbweb/files/85/Internet_Trends_201...](http://s3.amazonaws.com/kpcbweb/files/85/Internet_Trends_2014_vFINAL_-_05_28_14-_PDF.pdf?1401286773)

</comment><comment><USER3> Think of the sort of things people share on Facebook, reddit and the lower end of Twitter, now put them all in one place with link-baity titles that appeal to predominantly teenaged girls, stay at home moms and bored internet users. And then plaster it with ads</comment>


Medium updates Terms of Service to enable advertising - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@yungrama/advertising-coming-soon-to-your-content-on-medium-319d24d63e1#.pm6szdpva <comment><USER2> Sorry, my ad blocker will remain on. If that prevents me from using Meduim, then I'll go elsewhere.

</comment><comment><USER3> As a Medium user, I understand that they have to make money. Medium can set a great example here and share revenue with the creators that have made them into an influential tech company.

Please do the right thing Medium, share the wealth with the influencers that have helped create your your brand. You would be out of business without the hundreds of authors that believed in your platform.</comment>


Rob Pike - Unix trivia - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/101960720994009339267/posts/SnEe2UykcH1

<comment><USER2> Answers: <http://chneukirchen.org/trivium/2009-01-18>

<comment><USER3> Oh wow, that linked story about the origins of the 'dsw' command is really something. Simpler times indeed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> >>>59\. What was "ubl"?

ubl ("under bell labs") was a AT&T UNIX port of BSD rogue with some minor changes, most significantly the name of the executable.

At the Labs, a short cut (bypassing going up to a floor with a walkway) allowed one to travel from one building to another utilizing the subfloor (hence "under bell labs") containing the pipe network for power, water, oxygen (and other gasses piped to to labs), occasionally ducking around a corner here and there. It was hot, noisy, dark and cavernous. And quite busy (esp. at lunchtime!)

Running ubl and discovering rogue was an amusing little hack. Wish I knew who was responsible!

</comment><comment><USER5> But what is Blit, you ask? Here's a vintage demo video put together 30 years ago, complete with warbly synth score:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwIAjB99ucw>

Enjoy with sound on.

<comment><USER6> What's more interesting is that the Blit and it's software suite, which was well ahead of its time (literally five years before X windows came up on the VT1000, which is a rather similar terminal hardware-wise) went absolutely nowhere in the market. No one had heard of it. No one sold it. No one produced a competitor.

And it's all because by that point AT&T had walled the Unix team off from the market. None of this stuff got out, where the equivalent (and, arguably, inferior) work that would be done at MIT years later was free.

The Blit isn't just an amusing historical note, or (yet another) testament to the brilliance of its creators. It's also a really sad existence proof of the power of open source software.

<comment><USER6> Rereading this I realize I got my hardware mixed up: X was written on the VS100 terminal. The VT1000 was, in fact, an X terminal from many years later. And early versions of X were done closer to the Blit's era, in 1984-85. It wasn't until 1986 that the widely shared X10 release showed up, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _Into how many pieces did Ken Thompson's deer disintegrate?_

That's a bit esoteric; if it's related to Unix at all, it's trivial indeed.

edit: Downvoters, enlighten me?

<comment><USER8> It's trivia, not to be confused with actual knowledge. They're essentially four decades old in-side jokes - the equivalent of asking "I can haz {what}" in 2050 and calling it "Internet trivia".

<comment><USER7> The name of Mark Pincus's dog could be considered Zynga trivia, but this sounds like personal trivia about a Unix developer. I do hope Pike expounds on some of the stories behind these.

<comment><USER9> Until Mark Pincus wins a Turing Award for Farmville, it's probably not fair to compare the two.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Tillbrook - might of known his team would win. Anyone else remember tips and arlo?</comment>


Ask HN: What Algorithms or patterns do you use? - <AUTHOR>

As I begin to code more and more, I am reminded of my ignorance of algorithmic conventions.  What are your top most helpful patterns? <comment><USER2> It is super helpful to have a working knowledge of common data structures- most algorithms are optimized for data in a particular format.

</comment><comment><USER3> So, probably the single most important one for me has been the concept of immutable data structures: whether in C, C++, Java, or Javascript, treating my data immutable has made debugging things a lot easier, _especially_ in environments with parallel execution and shared memory.

The next one would be abstraction of storage. Whether using an array, linked- list, or something more exotic, I usually want to hide that from the rest of my program if possible. In general, abstraction is a very handy tool--though you are going to screw up and overdo it until you've got some experience (mainly gained by screwing up).

Next top one would be recursive functions to operate on tree-based structures --though I hesitate to use them automatically in languages that don't have mandatory TCO unless I know I won't blow the stack. So many things are plain elegant when you write the problem recursively.

Those are three general principles of engineering and design that have served me well. Some specific things that are useful are: the general idea behind finite-state machines and when to recognize if they apply to your problem, regular expressions and their use, pitfalls of the floating-point representation of numbers, basic linear algebra for graphics and simulation.</comment>


TSMC: 3nm EUV Development Progress Going Well - <AUTHOR> https://www.anandtech.com/show/14666/tsmc-3nm-euv-development-progress-going-well-early-customers-engaged <comment><USER2> EUV is definitely solidly in the realm of magic for me. A spray of tin blasted with 2MW of lasers into a plasma to generate the "light" which is then bounced off of mirrors which barely qualify as mirrors to produce a focused beam to burn in features only a handful of atoms wide... 100,000kg of equipment. $100M per unit.

It's mind boggling.

<comment><USER3> This is the first I've heard of EUV, so I don't have an informed opinion of it at all, but some quick googling shows that Intel will be using it for their 7nm process.

Does this mean that Intel's "7nm" should be considered roughly equivalent with TSMC's "3nm"? And who's typically considered to have the lead on fab tech nowadays?

<comment><USER4> I would rank it probably as: 1) TSMC 2) Samsung 3) Intel

AMD now divested into Global Foundries used to be on there as well, but they're pretty much dead in the water at this point. Both AMD and Nvidia use TSMC now actually. It's kind of funny that Intel is the only remaining foundry within the United States at this point except for maybe Texas Instruments, which lets be honest, doesn't really count.

<comment><USER5> Global foundries still does plenty of production, most chip production doesn't occur at cutting edge nodes.

<comment><USER6> You're exactly right. There's a lot of money to be made outside of 3/7/10nm. I'm not sure why geeks get hooked on having the smallest/biggest or nothing and assuming anything else is failure

<comment><USER7> It's because it's immensely cool what humanity can continue to achieve.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I guess 3nm is just marketing, but I'd be interested in better understanding the feature sizes here and in current processes.

From what I can tell, in their current 5nm process the smallest features are on the order of 30nm? Is that correct? [1] I guess what I'd really like to see is some structures and annotation showing feature sizes. These rarely seem to be shown.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_nanometer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_nanometer)

<comment><USER9> Transistor (FINFET) width should be around 7nm for the 7nm process ([https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/7_nm_lithography_process](https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/7_nm_lithography_process)) but you are right that transistor pitch isn't scaling nearly as fast so transistor density is not going up as fast. Cost per transistor was actually flat (maybe even going up) at the 7nm node.

<comment><USER10> What's perhaps even worse is that _metal pitch_ doesn't scale as fast. As a consequence, the ratio of wiring space per transistor has been decreasing for a couple of nodes now, which makes wiring much more difficult and makes it more difficult to use all the transistor area effectively. Basically, designs more frequently have to reduce their density of useful transistors in order to be able to lay down the wiring connections.

The number of metal layers can be increased to fight back against this effect somewhat, but you still need space for vias to go through the lowest metal layers, and with design rules getting more complex placing those vias is itself getting tougher (though obviously EUV for metal layers helps there because it allows the design rules to become a bit more relaxed).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> So it turns out there aren't any 7nm EUV in high volume ( comparatively speaking ) shipment from TSMC as originally expected. While this isn't confirmed, I would assume Apple to have make a bigger announcement in Keynote if they were using 7nm EUV, since they only mentioned 2nd-Generation 7nm, this is likely an improved version of 7nm DUV, aka N7P ( 2nd Generation 7nm is also an Semi Official Term TSMC uses to describe N7P, while specially mentioning EUV when it is involved ).

The question we have now, would Apple A14 be 7nm EUV, or would it be 5nm? If it is 5nm as the original cadence suggest, then we could expect 3nm EUV A16 in 2022.

And Intel doesn't plan to ship their 7nm EUV till late 2021, in a volume likely much smaller than anything currently Apple ships.

</comment><comment><USER12> What will we do below 3 nm?

<comment><USER13> Carbon nanotubes, graphene, photonic chips, more involved silicon designs.

There's no shortage of ideas, just uncertain ROIs.

<comment><USER14> The 7-5nm was said to be so much a barrier before. I'm sure this will unleash a ton of capital and brains to keep digging.

ps: I heard spintronics and neutronics caught some wind on paper

<comment><USER15> There is a new exciting paper about DNA computers as well.

[https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/leap-forward-for- molecul...](https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/leap-forward-for-molecular- computing-as-dna-executes-six-bit-algorithms/3010270.article)

<comment><USER14> Hah, Woods of course. Two years ago a previous colleague of him hosted a talk in Paris. I got a peek of the work it was truly staggering. But the guy told me they were too instable at scale so far. Sounds like a solid hint at the future though.

ps: do you work in this field ?

<comment><USER15> Not at all, just an interested layperson (I'm in 'normal' IT). My partner studies evolutionary genetics (or something like that), so we talk frequently about biology. There is another DNA computing paper that was very interesting published earlier this year by another group, but I can't find it now. I think it was in Nature.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Not a good week for intel

</comment><comment><USER16> One day, maybe, but not soon.

It's great that we can have dream machines at ridiculously low prices, but these machines are valuable enough that we'd buy them at 2x or 3x the price, easily. There'll be a whole lot of grumbling and complaining, as always. But people have grumbled and complain since the iPhone 1 and every year there after --- and they've been MASSIVELY wrong about the value of these devices compared to their costs, and so, just how desirable they are.

At the end of the day, are you not willing to pay $5K extra from a car that's REALLY self-driving and ultra-safe? Would you not pay $3K for something like your phone, only with enough performance to translate any text or words you hear, and to behave as intelligently as a human secretary?

<comment><USER17> Think of the billions in electricity saved each new size reduction, for data centers and even the general pop doing the same thing as ever with less current, or more for the same cost.

I watch 4k videos a lot, imagine the cost of rendering that 20 years ago.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is it worth reading through a book even if you don't understand it? - <AUTHOR> There's that Asimov trope that he would read his college textbooks during the beginning of the course, i guess as a primer, for the material as it arose. I was wondering if it was worth doing that for subjects I am not familiar with. For example, I am reading Dynamic Hedging by Nassim Taleb, and it looks thick with financial stuff I don't know about. Should I just go through it, or should I have google handy by me and really digest it? <comment><USER2> Absolutely! If the author has written it for a general audience there should always be something to glean from it. If it's for a technical audience, and it's too dense, one may want to find something a little more general interest in that subject before returning to said book.

It's also worth it to give up reading a book one started. Unless it's for school, then one should talk to an instructor or fellow students.

</comment><comment><USER3> If you understand almost nothing in a book, then you probably won't get much out of it. If you can understand >=30%, maybe it's worth it.

\- Before reading a book about calculus, know basic arithmetic operations and some algebra

\- Before reading 'Dynamic Hedging', learn the basics of option pricing, e.g. by studying Hull (Options, Futures, and Other Derivatives)

</comment><comment><USER4> I think you can learn something from it.

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

The techniques in this book provide some insight on how you can approach your situation.</comment>


2 states take aim at distracted walkers, runners - <AUTHOR> http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110124/ap_on_re_us/us_distracted_walkers <comment><USER2> ... and thus, Arkansas finally got their heart's desire. They outlawed evolution.

</comment><comment><USER3> Do these people realize they are making a caricature of themselves... how does this stuff get past any sort of filter...

Next it will be reading a book, and then talking to a friend, and then carrying something big and heavy, and then tending to children...

</comment><comment><USER4> Long live the nanny state.

</comment><comment><USER5> I've always thought that it should be illegal to pick your nose while driving. It can be very distracting.</comment>


Microsoft quietly snuck an ssh client and server into latest Windows 10 update - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/12/microsoft-quietly-snuck-an-ssh-client-and-server-into-the-latest-windows-10/ <comment><USER2> The server component sounds really promising - will it do Powershell? Windows command line over SSH will be much more useful than RDP....</comment>


Google I/O 2012 - <AUTHOR> https://developers.google.com/events/io/ <comment><USER2> I wish they'd take a small number of tickets (10? 100?) and auction them off, with the surplus over retail price going to charity.

In general I think all sold out/exclusive events should do this kind of thing; it raises hype, makes the people who get a ticket for normal price feel like they got a deal, and helps the charity. Anyone willing to spend e.g. $10k of their own or a company's money to attend is likely to have some value at the event as well (investor? lawyer?).

You don't want to do this for all the tickets, or even a large number of tickets, because having all 5k people be from Fortune 500 companies willing to spend $5k/ticket makes it a lot less interesting than an event with mostly independent developers, but 100 out of 5000 isn't going to change things much, either.

<comment><USER3> The best way to make developers go is to lower prices and _not_ give away fancy, unique, unavailable elsewhere hardware.

You can also make passing a small programming test a requirement.

<comment><USER4> > You can also make passing a small programming test a requirement.

But you also want a few key journalists, and you want designers and other non- programming types: you can't make exceptions for them re: this hypothetical test, because then it calls into question the purpose of this test.

I think they should just sell the tickets, first-come, first-served. Keep the price reasonable, but high enough to discourage people from buying them "just because".

<comment><USER2> Journalists are almost always special cased to events in general -- it's assumed they're not participating in the same way as everyone else, are generally poor/without budget, but are key to the event. Taking care of journalists (with a press room, a senior enough contact to help them with things, etc.) is key to making your event a success. The hard part is credentialing journalists -- it's a great hack to say "I'm a blogger" or "I have a YouTube channel" and get into a conference for free and be treated as a VIP. I've had great fun at an arms fair doing that :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Looks like no preregistration for past attendees like previous years:

[https://plus.google.com/111395306401981598462/posts/Ty3M5UDd...](https://plus.google.com/111395306401981598462/posts/Ty3M5UDdtVZ)

 _Ruben Orduz - +Google Developers No pre-registration for past attendees? Also confirmation about no test for registration would be much appreciated._

 _Google Developers - Just to confirm, registration will be first come, first served on March 27th. We spent a lot of time thinking about this and decided that first come, first served is the fastest and fairest way to give everyone interested a chance to attend._

<comment><USER6> I agree with this policy -- why should past attendees get preferential treatment?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Academic price:

2010 $100

2011 $150

2012 $300

I mean, hey, I'm not complaining but wow. Take a look at that inflation. I only mention it because when I was forced to sign up for Google Wallet they presented me a list of my transaction history. And there it was staring me in the face in all its inflationary glory. Maybe they will mandate that people must wear only Googly colors or use their gmail emails to sign up... Oh, right.

<comment><USER8> $50 increase, every year, but it was a 2-day conference. So add 50% to account for it being 50% longer, and you get $300. Seems to make sense.

<comment><USER9> I think your math is a little wonky. From 2010 to 2011 was a 50% increase in price with no corresponding duration increase; From 2011 to 2012 was a 50% duration increase with a 100% price increase.

<comment><USER10> He was suggesting that if price increased $50 per year, then this year it would be a 2-day event for $200, or $100/day. Then, since this year is a 3-day event, $100/day * 3 days = $300. Or, to look at it another way: the cost per day went up $25 between 2010 and 2011. If we assume the same increase per day this year, then $300 makes sense.

Percentage-wise it doesn't work out, but there is a (possible) method to the madness.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> might be nothing but i found traces of "vipcode" on the javascript of the building game here:

<https://developers.google.com/events/io/input-output/>

code here:

<https://developers.google.com/js/script_foot.js>

search for "vipcode"

<comment><USER12> digging through that stuff, if anyone does get to register at least we know he or she will get a shirt

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Anyone have a guess as to why they use a jpg sprite instead of an animated gif for the bouncing orb? Is it just a color space thing?

<comment><USER14> No need to guess. Here's a very complete and detailed article about precisely why and how this particular animation works the way it does:

[http://awardwinningfjords.com/2012/03/08/image- sequences.htm...](http://awardwinningfjords.com/2012/03/08/image- sequences.html)

<comment><USER15> That only explains why use a sprite sheet. But not why use jpg instead of gif. Neither it talks about the alternative of gif animation. Does the javascript dom method really offers better performance than a simple gif animation? Or were gif animations taken off the equation before that comparison for other reasons?

<comment><USER16> Animated GIFs max out at 8 bits of color (per frame, but still). The animation cycle of GIFs starts when the image is loaded and can't be controlled via JS. Yes, if you just wanted an 8-bit orb bouncing, it's a fine choice. For a game sprite, it's less so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Think about this... Google charges you $900 to attend a conference that they will "teach you" how to build apps that work on their systems which benefit them way more than you.

I know Apple charges a developer fee as well.

Amazing how this hacker/developer world works - pay for access to their app stores, pay for conferences to learn how to make apps for their app stores, etc.

<comment><USER18> this amount includes the gadgets that they give to people. last year there were three if i remember correctly. one was for game devs only.

<comment><USER19> There were bunches of gadgets given out @ every IO, some to everyone, some to attendees of specific talks.

Also, said developers are planning to make money with these new skills, in addition to networking, I think most people find it well worth it or they wouldn't attend.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Good to know I can fax them if I have any questions. <https://developers.google.com/events/io/register>

<comment><USER21> That's as techy as Sacramento gets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> PS: if you are complaining about the price, it's time to show your entreprenerial spirit and organize a free unconference at the same time and nearby. Don't complain, do something!

</comment><comment><USER23> Thats the thing that sucks about such events; $900 is very expensive.

If anyone wants to sponsor a fellow HNer, I'll give you a bunch of digital Karma :)

<comment><USER24> Cheaper than WWDC and it's likely you'll get a bunch of free hardware.

<comment><USER25> Which means any healthcare related company isn't likely to attend, since this "free hardware" is against gift restrictions relating to healthcare related businesses.

<comment><USER2> I don't see why it would be -- couldn't you characterize it as development kit? I assume it belongs to the employer not to the attendee, but that's just a company rule. I thought the rule was you couldn't pay "kickbacks", not that you couldn't receive them, and a phone is hardly a healthcare service itself anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Double the price of last year.

<comment><USER26> there is a bright side to it - the 'sold out in a hour' situation last year was ridiculous. While i would have preferred a coding challenge to eliminate that problem, a price increase is another method of fixing it.

<comment><USER27> Another way would have been to announce that they won't be giving away any hardware, that would have kept away the "it pays for it self and I get some cool goodies" crowd away so real developers could go.

<comment><USER8> The last two years, Google has said "There are no plans for giveaways." And of course, attendees actually got about $1000 worth in stuff in 2010 (Droid phone, EVO, Google TV), and $1200 worth in freebies in 2011 (Galaxy Tab 10.1, Chromebook, Verizon hotspot).

They could say there are no giveaways, but nobody's going to listen to the boy who cried wolf anymore.

<comment><USER27> I do not remember any such announcements.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> A bit annoying they force you to sign up for both Google+ and Google Wallet to attend.

<comment><USER21> Why? They'll probably give you a phone integrated with Google Wallet, so it'd make sense to have you using it beforehand.

<comment><USER28> It's obvious Google wants people to use Wallet, but I would argue it's indicative of weakness, not strength, to _require_ its usage (as opposed to letting the strength of the product _draw_ people to use it).

Similarly, shouldn't they make us excited to try Google Wallet on these phones, as opposed to forcing us to prepare ahead of time? I mean, if they are still going for a non-evil not-just-another-BigCo vibe.

<comment><USER29> What system does Google have for collecting money other than Wallet? They're not forcing you to use it because they're trying to push a product -- Wallet is simply the UI for typing in your credit card information.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> This was going to be my first year at IO until I saw the ticket price. $900!!!

<comment><USER31> Same here I thought it was going to be free. Wishful, naive...

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm trying out the demo chrome experiment on the page. It seems there's a bug that the "Keep trying" pop up just won't go away after the tutorial. Or is it just me? I'm using Chrome 17.0.963.65.

<comment><USER32> Some bugs I noticed (Chrome 17.0.963.79):

\- There seems to be several bounding box issues for collision detection. Specifically, the track component affects the surrounding space in odd ways.

\- If you move a small component inside the radius of a larger component, there appears to be no way to select the smaller component without moving the larger component back out of the way. I was expecting a "click again to select the next object in the z-order" functionality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> $900 is not that much, I'm actually surprised it's so low.

A GDC All Access pass is $1,950, and a GDC Main Conference pass (typical) is $1,350.

<comment><USER34> Agreed.

And Joel Spolsky's "Business of Software" conference is $1600 for two days, and Microsoft's PDCs were $2200 for 3 days.

This is about 1/2 of the market rate for major multi-day tech conferences.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> MVP?

[https://developers.google.com/events/io/input- output/ahNzfmd...](https://developers.google.com/events/io/input- output/ahNzfmdvb2dsZS1kZXZlbG9wZXJzcg0LEgVCb2FyZBik8zUM)

edit: looks like you might need to open up in incognito to go straight to the machine I built (2 parts)

<comment><USER36> Nice idea. I built a one part device.

Sadly it looks like there's a bug in Google's saving code, so there's an extra (completely unnecessary) wall.

[https://developers.google.com/events/io/input- output/ahNzfmd...](https://developers.google.com/events/io/input- output/ahNzfmdvb2dsZS1kZXZlbG9wZXJzcg0LEgVCb2FyZBirszMM)

If you're going to share your output, make sure that what you're sharing is what you saved!

Edit: And on top of that, it depends on your screen size. Hopefully the registration system doesn't have as many problems!

<comment><USER37> It also appears to have a random? element with regards to ball behaviour. Each run of this [https://developers.google.com/events/io/input- output/ahNzfmd...](https://developers.google.com/events/io/input- output/ahNzfmdvb2dsZS1kZXZlbG9wZXJzcg0LEgVCb2FyZBjm-DYM) ends up different. Sometimes it hits the wall, sometimes goes over it and sometimes it makes in into the output. (should be two items on your screen - resize until you see a Track and a Wall)

Seems difficult to design and share if ball behaviour changes run to run. Unless that is part of the point - simulating real world user input ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Does anyone know if high school students qualify for academic pricing? I'm assuming they don't, as most places that offer a education discount only offer it for university students, but maybe I'll get lucky.

<comment><USER39> I attended I/O twice in high school and received the academic pricing without incident. I do know that not having been 18 either time, I had to get my parents to sign some sort of a waiver form, but it wasn't a big deal.

<comment><USER38> Okay, thanks! I might attended I/O in that case. Just have to make sure it doesn't happen at the same time as my exams.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> [https://developers.google.com/events/io/input- output/ahNzfmd...](https://developers.google.com/events/io/input- output/ahNzfmdvb2dsZS1kZXZlbG9wZXJzcg0LEgVCb2FyZBjsgC8M)

</comment><comment><USER41> Anybody notice how the io machines are completely resolution based? i.e if you don't run it at the same resolution it was created, it won't work?

</comment><comment><USER42> Google tax! Hail to our new Google overlords.

</comment><comment><USER24> So much for a coding challenge to get tickets. "Registration will be first- come, first-served so make sure you're online promptly at 7AM PDT on March 27."

<comment><USER43> Well, you could code a script that registers for you, before any human.

<comment><USER25> Right, sight unseen of the registration form...

<comment><USER44> A master scraper sees with his mind, not with his eyes.</comment></comment></comment></comment>