Students learn more effectively from print textbooks than screens, study says - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/students-learning-education-print-textbooks-screens-study-2017-10 <comment><USER2> Interesting tidbit, in the sentence in the article " To explore these patterns further, we conducted three studies that explored college students' ability to comprehend information on paper and from screens."

"Three studies" is linked to a single study, not three. The study is on the site tandfonline.com (Taylor and Francis), where you have to pay to read the study.

Also interesting is that Taylor and Francis, on their website taylorandfrancis.com, says "Taylor & Francis Group publishes books for all levels of academic study and professional development, across a wide range of subjects and disciplines."

So long story short, this is a study saying that books are better, that's on a site who's main business is publishing books. Not saying the study is inaccurate, but I find an article, about how books are better, on a book publishers site, somewhat suspect.

<comment><USER3> I did an in depth review of the research for a Human Computer Interaction class in college a couple years back before the Taylor and Francis study and the research then generally agreed with the idea that reading a print book was the best for comprehension (I tried quickly searching for the paper to pull sources, but no luck). However that difference appeared to be mostly related to form factor and not necessarily from the screen itself. Studies that used tablets showed smaller gaps in performance than studies that used computers. Studies that used e-ink e-readers showed almost no difference in comprehension. I was not able to find a single study that compared more than 2 or 3 different devices using the same methodology. If I were to design a study I would want to see a full range of tests including print books, e-ink e-readers, tablets with full color screens, traditional computer monitors, and e-ink monitors. Hopefully then you could better isolate the cause of the lower comprehension.

My own hypothesis (I have a comp sci degree, so take this psychology explanation with a grain of salt) is that comprehension is more dependent on the person's approach to the technology rather than the technology itself. Books are single purpose devices. When you have a book in your hand your brain knows it is time to focus on reading. When you sit down at a computer, the brain doesn't know what to expect or to focus on. It is similar to other advice about training your brain to expect certain activities such as reserving your bedroom only for sleeping or to have a dedicated home office if you work remotely.

<comment><USER4> My hypothesis is that the difference is related to how memory works by associations and spatial cognition.

I read lots of research papers and books. I have tried to switch to e-readers several times, but it never works. I learn the subject slower and I remember much less of what I read from e-reader. I use computers and e-readers to skim or check some details, but never to thoroughly study.

If I read physical book or printed article and underline it, leave coffee stains on the paper etc. I'm working with actual physical object. When I achieve the paper in a map, I can often recall where the book is stored physically and even the coffee stains and notes in the paper.

I think physical book or paper works the same way as memory palace technique. You remember stuff by working with them physically better than in abstract. Physical library might be mirrored in our mind. Ancient augmented memory technology we did not know we have and might lose. E-reader or computer associates everything to the same object.

<comment><USER5> Personally my experiences have been the complete opposite. There are a number of reasons paper books are always going to be second to ebooks to me. The idea of lugging a book/s around. Hunting for a book at a shop or library when I'm feeling the itch to read it sooner rather than later. Flipping through pages whilst looking back up at a screen breaks my concentration. etc..

When the first gen Kindle was released I ordered it right away. It was one of the most liberating devices I've ever owned. I managed to read a ton of books that had been on my read-list for ages. This obviously has much more to do with having everything you want to read immediately available and also the discrete portability to do such.

Also when I would underline text in a book it was as if my brain shutoff. Subconsciously i'm thinking 'Okay I saved this part in the book'. When I'd go back my train of thought is gone and thus the highlight is out of context. So that bit of physicality returns zero for me personally.

<comment><USER6> This feels like you're having a different conversation, there was no debate about portability or convenience.

Also, highlighting is one of the worst ways to try to learn:

[http://ideas.time.com/2013/01/09/highlighting-is-a-waste- of-...](http://ideas.time.com/2013/01/09/highlighting-is-a-waste-of-time-the- best-and-worst-learning-techniques/)

<comment><USER5> I apologize for the confusion. My response was half directed towards the post of Nabla9.

"If I read physical book or printed article and underline it, leave coffee stains on the paper etc. I'm working with actual physical object. When I achieve the paper in a map, I can often recall where the book is stored physically and even the coffee stains and notes in the paper."

Thus my response on highlighting.

So what is it about paper or e-books? The debate is between paper and lcd? I was thinking there is something more tangible that makes one more appealing than the other. No? Which is why I stated why I lean towards one more than the other. A practicality rather than a hidden nuance. Which I'm assuming is the real reason?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think the big mistake one can do when comparing digital and physical textbooks is compare then one-on-one with a level playing field. Why do that?

Digital textbooks can offer so much more than print textbooks. They can have embedded interactive content, ranging from extremely zoomable 2D content to see something in detail to rotatable 3D models. They can have videos. Or just audio, say to listen to case studies or know how a bird sounds. They can have automatically gradable quizzes and exercises. There is so much more digital books can offer.

Once you bring in these advantages, I bet the pedagogical advantages will be enormous. I'd like to see _that_ study, and I bet digital books will blow everything out of the water.

There are advantages apart from learning benefits. Errata can be a thing of a past with updatable textbooks. You can search for every single word easily and save time. There's no wear and tear. Students can get away with having textbooks on their phones, avoiding carrying textbooks weighing several pounds. Another huge benefit is accessibility. From large font to audio output, all accessibility features ever possible on a computer are possible with the textbook with minimal effort.

The publishing industry is only limiting itself because any innovation on its digital books will mean death of its money maker. It will mean much less production and distribution costs which will put in question its atrocious pricing.

<comment><USER8> > Digital textbooks can offer so much more than print textbooks.

Yes, digital textbooks can offer so much more, and yet maybe the "so much more" is their biggest pitfall: they (and/or the device serving as their platform) offer near limitless opportunities for distraction. While our attention span - or our lack thereof, trained as we are by the 3 second rule TV commercials push on us - might be able to get a major workout that leaves us exhausted and feeling like we have accomplished something (though in reality, hardly anything) - the digital format and form of delivery can rob us of our ability to freely focus. Let's face it, even with a good old-fashioned hard cover we can encounter distractions, and when we use digital, we're opening ourselves up to overwhelming levels of "opportunities for distraction" in which environment the human mind/body/condition is incapable of flourishing. Ironically, the very limitations of the physical textbook may be one of its liberating features.

<comment><USER7> I think that argument is often made because it is easy to make. Just because one reads from a paper textbook means one is avoiding distractions? What about phones and their incessant alerts?

One way you can avoid distractions is to limit the features of the device. Pull internet access. The problem here is with the student more than the device. I tend to get distracted a lot when reading a digital textbook too. It takes effort, but also does not looking at your phone when you are reading a textbook.

<comment><USER8> [https://hbr.org/2017/10/in-a-distracted-world-solitude- is-a-...](https://hbr.org/2017/10/in-a-distracted-world-solitude-is-a- competitive-advantage)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > There may be economic and environmental reasons to go paperless.

There are also practical considerations.

I much prefer physical textbooks but their bulk presents an issue. It's not fun hauling around one tome per class. I remember back in high school my backpack weighed 30+ lbs.

Last year I bought a 12.9 iPad pro as a textbook replacement. It works great (still miss the physical paper though). It has also greatly reduced the amount of weight on my shoulders during my bike commute to and from school. Nowadays I only carry my laptop and my tablet in my backpack.

Goodnotes can handle huge PDFs and enables me to write on and highlight the text. Voice Dream Reader is a great app to help slog through boring reading (Salli is the best voice I've found so far for scientific lit). I don't use Kindle-like ebooks for textbooks. Similar to what u/acconrad said, I need to be able to write on the text.

With all that in mind, my iPad pro is a designated READING device. I have notifications aggressively disabled for pretty much every app. No Facebook social media apps allowed. I won't/can't even log into Facebook on my web browser (someone else manages my password).

<comment><USER10> Do you write math or long notes, or just a few words? I have not found any stylus / tablet combination that allows me to write as freely as pen / paper, no matter how much I'd like to go digital for portability.

<comment><USER11> It's not too burdensome to add a notebook and pen to your kit.

When I was last in school, I also used an iPad (with GoodReader, GoodNotes & Voice Dream, 'cuz each is better than the others at at least one thing I care about), but I only used it for reading and annotating books & papers. I agree that it's not a great option as a replacement for a notebook.

<comment><USER9> What is your use case for GoodReader? I'm curious.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I don't know if this really matters when it's horrible vs slightly less horrible...

It's like you pay hundreds of dollars for a textbook on a subject that hasn't changed in generations, and it's filled with pictures and diagrams and asides and any other layout doodadery their software can muster, but when you get to the exercises it's a pig's breakfast.

I remember my physics textbook in college was almost $200 ($200 twenty years ago!), I'd grind out the answer with a fair degree of confidence, check the key... wrong!? Then after banging my head against it for hours and giving up, the professor would tell us the next day that the book was wrong.

Next year, we had differential equations. Smaller book, older book, more words, fewer pictures--clear as a bell! Probably learned more physics in a semester of differential equations than a year of physics. Good books make a difference. Unfortunately, the physics book was the rule rather than the exception.

<comment><USER13> I collect textbooks as a hobby. It amazes me to no end how the textbooks have changed in the last 120 years. It's especially fascinating to look at math and engineering books from the "Apollo program generation". One thing that sticks out is the huge amount of text that guides the student in building up a deep mental picture and lots of thought-associations in all of these technical books. Somehow after the 60s this approach that is fairly consistent going back a 100 years suddenly is replaced with books that feature a ton of pictures and turn into 'trick and exercise' books until they completely explode with color and small text snippets in the 90s. I have my suspicions that the earlier textual approach might have had its merits. Not sure if anyone has done a comparative study on the effects of organizing text books and their long term effectiveness

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> My guess is that this is related to spatial memory. A lot of memorizing techniques somehow use space to anchor memories on; eg the old Greeks used to walk down the city's main street while rehearsing speeches, and anchoring topics spatially onto the buildings.

A textbook is not exactly a street you are walking down, but it does have a certain physical place for every topic, and our brain can anchor it there, like "let me see, differential equations are in the last third.. ah there is this other topic, I know that diff equations come right after that".

<comment><USER15> You've conveyed the exact problem I have with ebooks for any kind of technical reference. I read novels in ebook formats and have no problem with there, but after trying several O'Reilly and other publishers works I just found somehow unable to take in the information I was reading. Quickly scanning through to look something up is just impossible and built-in search functions are just miserable.

<comment><USER16> This is a major problem for me when reading digital material, especially if not on something like a PC. On the comuter I can at least Ctrl+F for the part I'm after.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The fourth reason is that some things can't be measured? That seems suspect. I can think of two seemingly obvious inferences from this study that were not mentioned.

1\. Digital devices offer more distractions because unlike a book, you also get a slew of other apps (and the internet) at the touch of a button to distract you. Even if you are iron-willed, an OS update will pop up and break your concentration from time to time, a physical book will never present anything other than what it has already printed for you.

2\. Books can be written on. I have a Kindle and I can't imagine reading something like Skiena's _Algorithms_ book on it because the effort to take any kind of useful notes far exceeds that of a physical book. You can write in the margins, comment, highlight, all of which helps solidify your understanding. Kindles and iPads may have those things, but they are likely limited in fashion and not nearly as low of an effort to produce as with a book (unless of course it's rented for the semester and you're prohibited from writing in it).

<comment><USER18> Most of the devices out there could be equipped with write-on feature should the owner install required app for it. I'm a monthly subscriber to Adobe Creative Cloud and I must say Adobe Acrobat DC is the only reader that you'll ever require. You can do almost anything that is digitally possible using the app. I can even write Javascript over my PDF documents.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> The idea that scrolling may be jarring enough to hamper reading fits my experience. When I scroll, it doesn't feel like just my browser has to repaint the whole webpage, but it also feels like my _brain_ has to reconstitute the structure of the page via a kind of inverse-repainting, just so that I can reorient my attention, before I can resume it.

In other words, if I

\- have a (semantic) pointer to, say, the last word on a line

\- am maintaining just the single last word I read in my short-term memory/register

\- scroll and then have to look for the line I was just on before I have reoriented myself

then it feels like I have to do a kind of mechanistic attention- interrupt/syscall that locks my conscious interpretation of the text's meaning until I have returned to the index of the text that I was just at. I guess that also explains why sometimes, when I am simultaneously trying to reflect on the text _while_ scrolling, I am significantly less able to do so fluidly, as if there were some underlying deadlock, and more often than not have to repeatedly attempt finding the next line..

But if you hold a book in your hands, there is much less variation in the 'streamed/online/', structural form of the text. More or less, all that my brain knows it needs to anticipate is page turning. It can figure out how to cancel out my hand movements, background visual information, surroundings, etc. from my conscious experience because that's what we've evolved to be able to suppress from our attention.

Maybe, then, computer file viewing UIs that have page-flipping skeuomorphisms are less attention interrupting, because they would avoid these interruptions being done more than one time per page/pair of pages?

Link to the mentioned paper: [http://www.co.twosides.info/download/To_Scroll_or_Not_to_Scr...](http://www.co.twosides.info/download/To_Scroll_or_Not_to_Scroll_Scrolling_Working_Memory_Capacity_and_Comprehending_Complex_Texts.pdf)

<comment><USER20> I feel the pagination method demonstrated here is advantageous in that regard, eliminating vertical motion while allowing to see parts of two "pages" at the same time:

[http://www.magicscroll.net/](http://www.magicscroll.net/)

I would love to have that on my ebook reader, may need to hack that together some time to try. I dislike switching back and forth between two pages as is sometimes necessary; in this regard, this even seems better to me than a regular book.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I tend to find there's uses for both physical and digital textbooks;

\- Physicals you can spread out, highlight stuff, visually search much fast when you DON'T know exactly what you're looking for, and you can also re-sell them when you're done.

\- Digital weighs nothing, is cheaper, you can ctrl-f if you DO know what you're looking for, and often come with tools to bookmark/highlight etc.

Ideally if I'm dropping $100+ on a textbook I'd like to get access to both. If I'm going to a class I'll take the digital one, if I'm sat at home doing research/writing/reading then I'll use the physical one. Also I'm incredibly vain when it comes to my bookshelves, I aim to have enough books for an in- home library by the time I retire.

</comment><comment><USER22> So I wanted to have a look at the studies they did. One would cost me $36 dollar to see, the other $42 for 24 hour access and $102 for 30 days access.

tl;dr you don't want me to read your research.

</comment><comment><USER23> I didn't see anything about eink screens in that article except a mention that they exist.

They claim the cost of scrolling is the issue, which is something that I've not seen on an ereader. Page refreshes are a different animal to scrolling, despite the (potentially) distracting flicker they are deterministic: one press is one page. Scrolling is a more analogue interaction, scrolling by one page requires more focus than pressing a button once.

</comment><comment><USER24> This doesn't really seem to hold much water. For one, the study was done on college undergrads, a non-randomly selected group who have crossed a certain bar for basic comprehension (looks like the researchers are from the U of Maryland, a major university, so you can expect that the students on average will have well above-average reading comprehension compared to the rest of the world).

On top of that, as a former K12 educator, the tools matter far less than the teacher implementing them and the fidelity of execution, very little of which seems to be explored by this study. I don't think digital texts or computers in classrooms are a panacea for what ails our classrooms or that digitizing textbooks is even that exciting when it comes to EdTech -- it's just taking a 19th century tool and digitizing it. This study, however, does not effectively demonstrate that either medium is better than the other, but the Ed world is in desperate need of strong research in that regard, specifically in the efficacy of EdTech in the classroom.

</comment><comment><USER25> Assuming the discrepancy cannot be solved by simply carrying around a notepad to write with whenever you are reading something you want a deeper understanding of, the digital medium offers many benefits in my opinion that make it better overall.

I cannot stand reading on a white background for long periods of time. If I had to deal with a white background I simply would not read as much. Being able to change both font size and type is also useful because publishers do not always make a sane choice for you.

Above all, I think price is the best reason. You might be able to get away with charging $100+ dollars for a printed book but you cannot do that with printed books, therefore book prices have to come down.

Even if there actually is a loss in comprehension when actively reading and not just passive reading, the overall benefits of reading more whether its because you can now buy more books due to the lower prices or because you can change the color/text to suit your taste has to outweigh the benefits offered by printed books.

</comment><comment><USER26> I found these bullet points from the article pretty insightful:

> \- Reading was significantly faster online than in print.

> \- Students judged their comprehension as better online than in print.

> \- Paradoxically, overall comprehension was better for print versus digital > reading.

So with digital reading, you feel like you've learned more than print, but you've actually learned less. This seems pretty dangerous.

<comment><USER27> > This seems pretty dangerous.

It sounds pretty much like the Internet as a whole.

<comment><USER28> On the note of the internet as a whole displaying this, there was a study a while ago which found "searching the Internet for explanatory knowledge creates an illusion whereby people mistake access to information for their own personal understanding of the information."

[http://doi.apa.org/getdoi.cfm?doi=10.1037/xge0000070](http://doi.apa.org/getdoi.cfm?doi=10.1037/xge0000070)

(I first heard about it through the You Are Not So Smart podcast:[https://youarenotsosmart.com/2015/11/25/yanss-063-how- search...](https://youarenotsosmart.com/2015/11/25/yanss-063-how-search- engines-make-us-feel-smarter-than-we-really-are/))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> > In our academic lives, we have books and articles that we regularly return > to. The dog-eared pages of these treasured readings contain lines of text > etched with questions or reflections. It's difficult to imagine a similar > level of engagement with a digital text.

Is it? I read nearly exclusively on my kindle for exactly the opposite reason. I find it much easier to keep highlights and notes, then quickly return to them. And the note taking technology on the kindle is crude. Imagine if it was an _actually_ good experience? If note taking were easier (typing is painful). If the data were free (to be shared with other services). If it were easy to connect with others taking notes on the same topics, at the same time? If clicking on an image of a map made it interactive. There are so many possibilities, most of them untapped. I miss reading things on paper. But if our technology were to improve to half of its potential, I'm not sure I would.

<comment><USER30> Have you really tried to research that beyond the Kindle? Look at new products from Google and Microsoft or aimed at the legal market. There are great handwriting notes systems out there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> How big was this study? Did they test how well the students performed when they had to search for information?

They say that the students read much faster on the screen. What if they just slow down a bit?

The textbook industry is corrupt and will believe or promote anything to try to hold on to profits.

Wasting all of that paper and making people lug around a bunch of heavy books is asinine.

</comment><comment><USER31> A big plus that is still kind of yet to be realized is the increase in utility of notes taken on a device. I like to jot notes in the margins of books and papers while I'm reading, but I almost never go back and look at them. Every once in a while I'll end up searching trying to find where I wrote my note, and usually can never find it.

Recently I have started using Apple Pencil, Apple's Notes app and iBooks to read and jot down ideas. Apple's Notes app already supports searching for handwritten notes, and I hope that soon iBooks can support searching for handwritten notes in PDFs. These apps combined with Spotlight really increase the value of notes + a collection of books/papers, as it turns your device into kind of a personal database.

</comment><comment><USER32> This is a halfway decent article from Business Insider.

I find myself 50/50 on this issue. When I need cutting edge info, or niche info, I typically read it on a screen.

When I need offline info, or low power info, or simply a different aesthetic for some reason, I love a nice book. Especially for older info.

Surprisingly, discovery of info is pretty boundless and fun at a large University library, because books are sorted by topics. I don't need to endlessly query Google for the most authoritative resources.

Personally I really feel we need both sources of info. Both types of print have pros and cons.

I don't know if I "perform" better with one type of print though.

"Better" is very subjective, and when I was in college in 2010-13, all of my tests were written paragraphs/essays. Totally subjective.

</comment><comment><USER33> For me it's the medium itself. eBooks are ok if they're short or fiction, but for heavy duty reading, I need a wide spread, and I need to be able to annotate and flick through fast, either to preview or jump to another section. Can't do all that on a digital device.

</comment><comment><USER34> I believe it. Learning how to operate a machine to control what gets displayed is such a distraction, in and of itself. Endless diversions and digressions, even if the devic has no internet. Procrastination just explodes exponentially.

</comment><comment><USER35> This doesn't terribly surprise me, from my own experience. I either print academic journal articles or subscribe to the physical issues, because I found I never fully retained things I read on a screen, either desktop or iPad.

<comment><USER36> Likewise...

Personally, I think that the addition of tactile, flipping around, lack of distractions, etc... all the little bits add up to a more "immersive" learning experience from books.

It strikes me as an offshoot of an article recently that said that simply having a phone in the same room as a person decreases their ability to focus.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Why are we 10 years into Kindle's evolution and the renderer still does not draw pages exactly the same way every time you load the same page (paginating forward vs. paginating backward, at the same font size)? I have to expect that this will reduce spatial-visual memory where people remember what position a figure or text had on a page versus a better renderer (PDF, though impractical on small screens) or a physical book and I'd like to see a study which distinguishes this effect.

</comment><comment><USER38> This study does suggest that we are doing web development all wrong and that browser functionality is exacerbating this, instead of scrolling we could be doing something like this: [http://www.creativebloq.com/html5/create-page- flip-effect-ht...](http://www.creativebloq.com/html5/create-page-flip-effect- html5-canvas-8112798) or using any number of similar solutions in jquery.

<comment><USER39> Hard nope.

I don't have any research on this, but ergonomic concerns that apply to e-reader devices doesn't necessarily apply to desktop/laptop browsers.

Personally, I find scrolling short-length content much better than having to transition screens. For longer reads, I set my ebook app to paginate. A tacky page flip effect only adds an unwanted distraction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> As others have mentioned I would assume distractions have something to do with it. Whenever I need to learn a new language for work I always opt for a paper copy of a book, and other than photography books those are the only physical ones I have purchased in the last 10+ years. New frameworks obviously I go with a screen as that material changes pretty rapidly, but just baseline getting started with a language, physical book works best for me.

</comment><comment><USER41> > _There may be economic and environmental reasons to go paperless. But there > 's clearly something important that would be lost with print's demise_

The argument put forth in the article is fundamentally flawed. They're assuming that "screens" has a fixed meaning, to mean what it's like now.

But we're actually at very early stages of reading content off screens, and there's a lot of scope of that experience to change in the future. Better displays, better ways to interact with the content, better ways to annotate the content, better ways to deal with distractions on the device, etc etc.

Maybe in the end we'll discover print is definitively better, but we are currently a long way from being able to make that claim.

</comment><comment><USER42> Seems like there is a deeper discussion going on here. Not only Print Vs Digital, but also open educational materials Vs "History of the World version 324".

I personally prefer printed materials for extended reading, but it is really just a matter of taste. So if we see a study which says "Printed text books are better", it should really add "For SOME PEOPLE". Give students a choice! Give parents a choice!

I recall buying two copies of a 120 dollar book just so my son would not have to lug its 5kg back and forth each day from school. The sheer amount of weight students have to carry is ludicrous. Open educational materials solves so many of these problems.

</comment><comment><USER43> I'm a software developer and I still find I prefer print over screen, both when engaging in field-specific study or just simply reading for pleasure.

Most of the free tutorials I use are found on websites though so that's how I do most of my learning.

When it comes to tried and tested texts like Pragmatic Programmer, Effective Java, Web Application Hacker's Handbook etc. I will always buy the hard copy textbook and forego the use of the eBook.

I had a Kindle Paper White at one point and while I used it a fair bit when travelling, I still preferred stocking a bookshelf with hard copies for reading at home.

Something about the experience of flipping through pages makes the whole process that much smoother for me.

</comment><comment><USER44> Physical vs digital copies offer different advantages, and for someone who's serious about mastering the material, it probably makes sense to consider having both.

For overall comprehension, my feeling is that the advantage of physical books is related to spatial memory, and seems related to "memory palace" techniques for memorization. I can physically recall pages of books I've read many years ago, but I really don't get the same thing from a digital copy.

Being able to search within digital copies is a clear advantage. The markup/review software and document management system also makes a huge difference.

</comment><comment><USER45> Perhaps because screens have endless distractions whereas textbooks do not.

Personally, I prefer to read a paper book any day. It feels infinitely softer on my eyes, and it's just more pleasant of an experience to me for whatever reason.

</comment><comment><USER46> Overall I would take that study very lightly. They basically took a cohort of student that did not have to read anything meaningful until then. In highschool they may have had some text and some work to do on a laptop, but the bulk of it was paper based. They were also trained to highlight sentences instead of taking meaningful notes.

Train the next generation to mostly use digital and that small study will become a time capsule, which would incidentally be a better outcome that what it is now, i.e. an attempt to generalize a conclusion based on an oversimplistic experimental setup.

</comment><comment><USER47> I was skeptical about the claim in the title of the article to begin with. Point three and four in the article makes me even more uncomfrotable (for reasons that others have explained much better), and the article leaves _a lot_ to be desired.

A quick Google Scholar of "difference between screen and print in learning" gave me two results that immediately stand out. The first article[1] (2013, n = 72, 10th grade students, reading comprehension of texts between 1400-2000 words, print vs. PDF on computer screens) that the BI article seems to corroborate. The second article[2] (2013, n = 538, university students, textbooks that are learning material for exams, print vs. digital but device type and format available from the abstract) suggests that there is no statistically significant difference between print and screen.

Digging deeper, I found another one[3] article (2015, review/opinion based on existing research), which questions format, design, country and culture amongst other things—some of which have already been questioned in the comments.

The first thing that I find disturbing aboutthis article is that I'm not even trained in the field of education and I could find a lot of information in the literature that seems to suggest that the BI article is highgly opinionated and underpowered.

The second thing that I find disturbing is that the authors of the paper in question themselves wrote that BI article and make sensational assertions with such confidence that is, in my opinion, obviosuly flawed. It's already hard to forgive a reporter sensationalising research results that are not the whole picture, for the authors themselves to do it seems so casually and carelessly seems to be a step up and is, unfortunately, increasingly popular.

[1] [http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0883035512...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0883035512001127) [2] [http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360131512...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360131512002953) [3] [https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01207678](https://hal.archives- ouvertes.fr/hal-01207678)

</comment><comment><USER48> I can attest to this. I need big pages that I can lay flat on my desk and scribble on with a pencil. Kindle or an LCD screen just doesn't cut it for academic reading.

</comment><comment><USER49> I like print books with a website offering errata, and some minimalist recorded lectures on the material, like Gilbert Strang writing on a blackboard to further give insight to the book's material.

Even with pdf-tools in emacs, navigating a PDF is still too much wasted time compared to flipping pages plus I have to stare at a screen for hours. The SICP texinfo copy I read being an exception where it was the only time I preferred the digital copy to print.

</comment><comment><USER18> As a student of Science/Mathematics, I often make the most out of my E-books by writing out the exercises/problems/principles on my notebook and repeating the process (mostly for the Mathematics). I think the flexibility that E-books offer regarding it's digital existence is the pillar of my bias towards eBooks.

</comment><comment><USER50> Yeah, no shit.

On one hand you have large screens that emit a huge amount of light, posing a huge strain on eyes.

On the other hand you have tiny screens, too tiny to display anything remotely useful, in black and white, and slow to update.

Ebooks for learning will not take off completely until we'll have larger, faster, cheaper e-ink displays.

<comment><USER51> ... or rather until people are desperate enough to take advantage of the interactive medium. A comparison books and thei e-equivalents without taking advantage of the different mediua is actuallyleaving me flabbergasting for the right word.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Nothing about not being able to run other apps/multitask with a book? When i read a book, i cannot turn to page 123 to see who is online or get notifications that i received an email.

Less distractions, more focused, more effectiveness; doesn't really require a study in my opinion.

</comment><comment><USER53> No students learn from visuals, demonstrations, examples, comparisons, interactive content. Shoving a students head into a dry, dense volume of endlessly tasteless and monotonous text is the problem we've always had, screens or not

</comment><comment><USER54> Emotion and memory are connected. And emotion is connected with perception and pleausure of senses. All this connections was knows from many centuries in the yoga and meditation practice

</comment><comment><USER55> It's interesting that students thought their comprehension was better when reading from screens, rather than paper, when in fact the opposite was the case. What might explain that mistaken perception?

</comment><comment> d--b It'd be interesting to go into more details:

\- what if it's e-ink?

\- what if it's paginantes rather than scrolled?

\- what if there are multiple screens?

\- what if it's a very large screen?

Etc.

There must à factor that matters most than others

<comment><USER56> What if there isn't any other app (Whatsapp, Slack, Facebook, ...) running next to it :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> But do we need research or study to confirm this? We are community of lifelong learners so we should know better.

<comment><USER58> Yes, even if you Intuit something or know it from experience, it's valuable to have thus level of certainty through a carefully conducted study. Convincing someone your intuition is true is a lot harder than pointing to the research

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> maybe the screen is secondary, on a computer it is way too easy to get distracted especially for young learners comparing to a real paper-format book?

our brain might adapt to searching instead of deep-thinking from now on, using all abstracted data sets from big-data-somewhere, which also means, we will lose control and the world will be taken over by AI instead

</comment><comment><USER60> Ok, suppose this is true, why? It sounds like such nonsense to me, there must be confounders</comment>


Information Retrieval Pioneer David Waltz Dies at 68 - <AUTHOR> http://www.xconomy.com/boston/2012/03/24/computer-science-legend-david-waltz-mit-and-columbia-vet-dies-at-68/ <comment><USER2> I liked David Waltz's example of disambiguating the sentence "The astronomer married the star" in one of the papers he wrote (a long time ago!). His writing in the 1980s helped push me in some interesting technical directions.</comment>


Exploiting a Go Binary - <AUTHOR> http://codearcana.com/posts/2013/04/23/exploiting-a-go-binary.html

<comment><USER2> This is what should happen in IT. Someone looks for a vulnerability; find it. Determine if the project owners need prior warning; then go public. Everyone becomes aware of the issue and upgrades their systems accordingly. Problem solved.

Criminalizing those who are only looking to harden the security of public facing infrastructures from those who don't have good intentions doesn't help anyone. And while I'm sure that Geohot and Reece took on this challenge as more of a fun exercise, we've all benefited from the results.

So I look forward to reading more articles where hackers attempt to exploit Go binaries; and subsequently how to avoid my own Go binaries from being exploited the same way.

(i should add, this is a more generalized comment. I'm aware that this specific attack isn't a practical real-world vulnerability)

<comment><USER3> Well, to be fair, if you don't want your binaries exploited, don't write the exploit into them. I can't see a case where this could be used, unless you're letting people execute arbitrary code on your system, in which case you're screwed anyway.

<comment><USER4> > Well, to be fair, if you don't want your binaries exploited, don't write the > exploit into them.

That's a bit naive and not the point of this PoC. The exploit used a bug in the code generator. Normally, guard code would have been generated that would have caught that issue, but it just wasn't, and that's why the exploit worked.

So in theory, every program with that particular programming bug and the missing guard code (due to the code generator bug) is vulnerable.

<comment><USER3> Vulnerable to what? As far as I can see, it will crash or corrupt memory when it tries to read/write to it. An actual _exploit_ of this requires intent.

<comment><USER4> "Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence"

Imagine a programmer has a shitty day, lacks concentration, and adds code like this to his internet-facing server app:

        type Embedded struct {
           offset [0x400100]byte
           address uint32
        }

        type Struct struct {
           *Embedded
           bar int
        }

        var instance Struct

Later in the code, he forgets to initialize instance.Embedded.

When handling an HTTP request that comes from the internet, instance.Embedded.address is filled from a GET parameter. Et voila, anyone who can do a GET request can overwrite memory, possibly leading to code execution.

The bug in the code was unintentional, because programmers (like all humans) make mistakes, the HTTP request was intentional (it was done by the attacker), and the exploit worked because of a bug in the code generation.

That's what I meant by vulnerable.

<comment><USER3> Ah, okay. I think this particular exploit falls a bit too far into the "you have to work to make it useful" spectrum (the "offset [0x400100]byte" part), but I see how it might be exploitable, thanks.

<comment><USER5> It's also worth remembering that a complete exploit can often compose numerous "small" vulnerabilities into the realized breach. As such, it's easy to discount a seemingly hard-to-exploit vulnerability until you see it in action. It may be used in concert with other weaknesses or "widened" by an unforeseen technique.

As a specific example, check out the two-part wrap-up of the Pwnium browser hacking competition[1] [2]. It's a great illustration of chaining weaknesses together to achieve a desired exploit.

[1] [http://blog.chromium.org/2012/05/tale-of-two-pwnies- part-1.h...](http://blog.chromium.org/2012/05/tale-of-two-pwnies-part-1.html)

[2] [http://blog.chromium.org/2012/06/tale-of-two-pwnies- part-2.h...](http://blog.chromium.org/2012/06/tale-of-two-pwnies-part-2.html)

<comment><USER3> Oh wow, that guy exploited 14 bugs to craft the exploit. That's some work...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> To be clear: this is an attack that works if you're compiling and executing malicious Golang code, as if it were Javascript.

<comment><USER7> Or if you happen to have some fairly odd code in your executable. All that this really needs is really big array of bytes in one struct of your code. While anything that big should be unusual, you never know what crazy stuff people will write.

<comment><USER6> Odd code like that will crash your executable, and may set up the conditions for some other exploit, but this one requires the code to be very specifically written to maliciously overwrite a function pointer.

<comment><USER8> What if, instead of a function pointer, an interface happened to be at that address? Given that interfaces are extremely common in Go, it seems plausible to me that many addresses in the heap could contain interfaces (and if they don't, then it may be possible to manipulate an application to create many interfaces so that they do). An attacker could overwrite the vtable pointer to point to attacker-supplied memory, and then an indirect call through the vtable could jump to shellcode.

<comment><USER6> Sure, that's a plausible vulnerability concept for Go. Someone just has to find a way to do that. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If we are writing programs to write to arbitrary memory, wouldn't it be easier to write them in C? :)

      int main(int argc, char *argv) {
        *((char *)addr_to_write) = val_to_write;
      }

On a more serious note: this is a fun compiler bug, but I wouldn't call it a valid exploit. If you have the power to run your own binary on a system, then of course you can write to any memory the process has access to.

<comment><USER6> It's valid in the sense of, if you tried to use an in-language sandbox to keep people from running arbitrary code on your machine, this would bypass it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Non-executable heap and stack in Go 1.1 - nice!

<comment><USER11> Huh, there goes my plan to write a dynamic assembler in Go...

<comment><USER12> You can still use mmap/equivalent to allocate executable memory and package unsafe to use it; the difference is that the memory allocated normally by the runtime won't be executable.

Or I missed the sarcasm.

<comment><USER11> What sarcasm? Well, if I could mmap it, that would be fine, although it would mean that I'd have to manage the memory for the machine code fragments by hand, as opposed to having them as part of GCd values.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm really excited to see people working on security in Go. Security by default is supposed to be one of Go's "features" at some level. (The typical example: your first several C programs probably had many buffer overflow vulnerabilities, but it's very likely none of your Go programs ever will.) Still, Go hasn't been very thoroughly tested and security hardened, so I'm hoping to see many more exploits like this discovered and ironed out in the near future.

</comment><comment><USER14> For some reason, the website is not loading here and Google's cache dates from before the release of the exploit, so the post is hidden.

Anybody has a mirror or some way to access the post?

<comment><USER4> It was accidently deleted. [https://groups.google.com/d/msg/golang- nuts/wZILkqFbbus/j9Wq...](https://groups.google.com/d/msg/golang- nuts/wZILkqFbbus/j9WqQZQdaGwJ)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm a little confused, does this work on 64-bit binaries too?</comment>


Ask HN: Is it feasible to have just a REST API as a back end for web app? - <AUTHOR> Read about this approach at a few places: Have only a REST API as a backend and do everything else in the frontend JS framework.
I don't know enough about web architectures to evaluate this approach. Is it possible to develop a site/app with this approach regardless of complexity of the app, or is this only suitable for certain scenarios?
Any help would be greatly appreciated. <comment> yoz-y In our company that is what we do. We have a REST API in Flask and two frontends. One is an end user client Electron application and the other is a web portal. Both the application and the portal are React applications.

My question would be only REST as opposed to what? For example our client application also have native plugins to connect with hardware and also does lot of processing locally.

</comment><comment><USER2> Are you asking "is it okay to not use a html templating engine in the back end"?

</comment><comment><USER3> Yes, it is entirely possible.</comment>


How to Use the iPhone's Home Button - <AUTHOR> http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2011/07/13/how_to_use_the_iphones_home_button/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+IgnoreTheCode+%28ignore+the+code%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

<comment><USER2> That diagram is hilarious!

The home button continually stumps me on the iPhone. I've brought up the multitasking menu a couple of times (probably 25% of the time when I try to do it). Honestly, I stumbled upon the feature by accident once when trying to backout to the homescreen and it brought up the multitasking menu instead. Since then I've tried specifically one of: a double click, triple click, single click, click and hold; to see if I could consistently repeat the multitasking menu behavior, and I simply haven't been able to.

By comparison, the Nexus S is dead simple to use for multitasking or backing out. I really, honestly think the Nexus S benefits hugely over the iPhone by having more than one dedicated button.</comment>


Procrastination Is Mostly About Fear - <AUTHOR> http://lifehacker.com/this-video-explains-how-procrastination-is-mostly-about-1744606272 <comment><USER2> Link is a thin blogspam wrapper for this video:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QetfnYgjRE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QetfnYgjRE)</comment>


Making Your Own Custom USB Cables - <AUTHOR> https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=44924.0 <comment><USER2> "you might end up spending more than what several of the artisans out there charge for a single cable"

Artisanal USB cables? Seriously?

<comment><USER3> Geekhack is a community primarily focused around mechanical keyboards. When you spend >$200 on a keyboard, $30 for a handmade USB cable to match your keyboard isn't too bad. Given the amount of customization you could have in a USB cable, mass production isn't cost effective and that's why they're handmade.

<comment><USER4> For reference: [https://i.redd.it/l2qmqefggm0z.jpg](https://i.redd.it/l2qmqefggm0z.jpg)

<comment><USER5> What keyboard is this? It's beautiful.

<comment><USER6> Keycaps are a SA "1976" Keycap Set. You can get it on Massdrop: [https://www.massdrop.com/buy/nineteenseventysix-sa-keycap- se...](https://www.massdrop.com/buy/nineteenseventysix-sa-keycap-set)

You should browse /r/mk: [https://www.reddit.com/r/MechanicalKeyboards/](https://www.reddit.com/r/MechanicalKeyboards/) :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> In the early days of home computing and the early days of the PC it was a common requirement to roll your own cables. Getting the pin-out of a parallel port soldered up correctly was not so simple, even RS-232 serial cables were harder than the USB to get right.

I can't fully remember why it was required to make such cables on a regular basis but it happened. It seems that USB has not only made cable soldering a lot easier it has also removed the practical need to do so. Either that or I am no longer a 'hobbyist' with interest in such things.

<comment><USER8> I remember all that! I ran a BBS for awhile. For some reason, I couldn't find a RS-232 cable that routed the ring indicator correctly. I had to build my own cable with parts from Radio Shack.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> A friend of mine recently told me about his partner who has been issued with a device by doctors to manage a long term health condition. It was provided with a USB A to USB Micro B cable, which it uses for its power, but no additional peripherals (i.e. no proprietary mains-USB power supply) were provided. A week after getting the device, it's needed in an emergency while on holiday, so they run to the car to get a usb cable to power the device from a USB power bank. Surprise surprise, the device would not power on. The workaround in this case was that they fortunately had a very short 10cm usb cable stashed away in the car from an old Raspberry Pi project, and this short cable worked.

The current theory (no pun intended) is that the VBus and ground wires within the provided USB cable (which they had forgotten to bring) are thicker than standard guage and/or that the power management circuit on the input to the device has an undervoltage limit set in hardware that is set too strictly, effectively locking you out from using any standard usb cable (30AWG wires typically), even though the provided cable looks totally ordinary from the outside. I would not be surprised at this as there are many companies that make 'data block' USB cables that omit D+/D- wires and instead beef up the VBus and ground wires, but look like a totally ordinary USB cable. There are also companies that parallel the D+/D- with VBus/GND for greater current capacity, but you wouldn't know without taking it apart.

I find it astonishing that a device designed for use in potential medical emergencies could have been designed this way with no warning of this in its manual, or if if this is a hardware bug that this issue was not discovered very quickly during hardware verification tests (if indeed any were performed).

Coincidentally i was recently having issues with charging of USB power bank. Very similarly I was trying to charge the power bank with a USB A to Micro B cable from a mains USB charger and thought that the power bank was charging quite slowly. I hooked it up to a current clamp and it turns out that wiggling the micro B end of the cable when it's mated to the Micro B receptacle on the power bank swings the charge current anywhere from from 100mA to 1A. I borrowed a 'custom' USB cable that a friend had bought off Amazon and it was even worse, not budging above 300mA. Incidentally, the power bank states it can handle 2.1A charging current on its micro B input (which curiously appears to be above the specification of a micro B receptacle but that's a separate issue). Only by making a custom cable myself, using 20AWG power and ground wires, using a high quality $5 Hirose micro B plug and then epoxying the connector ends to make a tight fit was I able to get the 2.1A charging current.

I find it concerning and I'm really not convinced adding charging capability to the USB specification as early as they did was a good idea. Having said that, they were probably just trying to standardise what a lot of people were abusing USB for already.

TLDR; not all USB cables are made equal. We live in times of mass usage and abusage of USB. Be careful out there.

<comment><USER10> Voltage droop is a real issue for many cables not just USB ones. It's a much bigger issue when you use them for power, it's a pretty well known issue that cable length and gauge can have (a pretty big) effect on charge speeds. It's even a bigger issue on the higher end devices that will limit the charge not only based on voltage but also on current, basically if the cable can't deliver the the 2 amps they'll drop down to 500ma or even lower.

I've switched most of my USB charging cables to those which I know are 20AWG, the funny thing is that these cables aren't even more expensive I got mine from [http://www.portablepowersupplies.co.uk/](http://www.portablepowersupplies.co.uk/) and they are cheaper than most cables on Amazon....

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Would love to see a similar post for USB C. I've been trying to find some way of doing a right-angle with these, but without much luck.

<comment><USER9> I have found the best way to get right angled USB connection that can be repeatably and reliably wired and is robust for rugged use is to create a small interface PCB in CAD software like Eagle and use a PCB mount receptacle rather than a straight inline/wire-to variant.

The PCB only needs to be big enough to land a through-hole usb connector [1] and then bring copper traces from each pin perpendicular to the connector to the edge of the PCB. You can even make the PCB quite long If you want to you as this will give you long copper traces you can expose to land the wire ends on, which is very useful if you don't have a great soldering iron or don't have much experience soldering. You could even 3D print an overmould to make it look professional, otherwise epoxy. Using this method you can get an right angled usb that's a tighter angle than anything you'll find online because it doesn't rely on cable bend radius to make the angle.

[1] [https://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/mill-max- manufactu...](https://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/mill-max- manufacturing-corp/898-43-024-90-310000/ED1391CT-ND/5213140)

<comment><USER12> That's a pretty cool idea. However, I see two rows of pins on that connector, doesn't that matter? Are you making a two-sided PCB, or are you just soldering the pins together? I'm not sure if they're the same or not.

<comment><USER9> Credit goes to Hirose for the idea on USB Micro B, as they hint at it their ZX catalogue [1], but logically everything on USB devices is normally a receptacle_ so custom cables really is the only use for a PCB mount _plug_. If you download the catalogue and scroll to page 3 you can see example 3D renders on the second half of that page that might make it a bit more obvious what I was describing.

In actual fact for USB C you'd probably end up having to mount all connectors in the cables on tiny PCBs regardless, because of the potential requirements for signal conditioning and electronic marking ICs unique to USB C implementations. With so many pins on usb C without a doubt you'd need these tiny PCBs to be double sided to get all the traces to the PCB edge, and I wouldn't be surprised if some commercial usb C leads have PCBs with 4 layers.

I've only designed PCBs myself for the traditional USB PCB mount USB A plug (an Amphenol part) and Micro B plugs (Hirose ZX series parts) as these are very simple pinouts and are perfectly doable for a hobbyist I'd say if you want custom cabling. USB C looks significantly more complex and an in-cable PCB interface is the only way to go for that level of complexity.

[1] [https://www.hirose.com/product/en/products/ZX/](https://www.hirose.com/product/en/products/ZX/)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Where to find a good graphic designer - <AUTHOR>

And also, what should I expect to pay for a logo design?
Very simply put I am not gifted in design and due to the feedback roulette site put up a while back I have gotten rave reviews of my site's content and usability however nearly every poster has commented on my logo and graphic design skill (or lack thereof) so I have concluded that it would be of benefit to me if someone who was skilled in this field actually did this.
any suggestions or help would be greatly appreciated. <comment><USER2> How to find one - look for blogs and work. Look for good portfolios. Usually they can be found writing about logos on Top Design Blogs.

How much will you pay really depends on the kinda person you hire. There is no fixed rate.

If you go crowd-sourcing (which is very stupid) you get away with a few 100 dollars and some pros charge around 1000s of dollars so see who's work you like and all.

</comment><comment><USER3> I started by looking on yelp for good reviews and then drilling down to portfolios from there.

</comment><comment><USER4> Have you tried 99designs?

<comment><USER2> He needs a "good" graphic designer. Crowd-sourcing is the worst idea.</comment></comment>


The trajectory of a software engineer… and where it all goes wrong - <AUTHOR> http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/01/26/the-trajectory-of-a-software-engineer-and-where-it-all-goes-wrong/ <comment><USER2> Attributing that much mojo to people who create new languages seems broken to me. I'd rather see the people who know better than to write yet another programming language and instead produce useful things with the glut of things we already have.</comment>


Ask HN: Know any solid but affordable freelance mobile developers? - <AUTHOR>

I'm a designer looking for help implementing some simple app ideas. All the flows and UI are done and pixel perfect. Just checking in with the HN community to see if you have any recommendations for solid but affordable iOS and Android developers who speak great English and have built several stable apps in the past. Ideally looking for a rate around $100 / hr or lower. Happy with remote / overseas or with a firm or an individual, as long as they have good references and track records <comment><USER2> Hey,

feel free to contact me. I am currently searching for a project, would be cool to have a chat with you about yours. More details via mail or skype. just send me a mail to " info (.at.) pd-ic (.dot.) com ". Feel free to send me your contact over skype if you like, or i will reply via mail asap.

talk to you soon,

bye phlipmode

</comment><comment><USER3> you can try technicalcapital.eu</comment>


Twitter is now worth less than its Chinese clone - <AUTHOR> https://www.techinasia.com/twitter-worth-less-than-weibo-ouch <comment><USER2> People keep talking about Chinese everything. At the risk of being downvoted into oblivion let me ask you... would you use a Chinese email provider? Chinese Facebook clone? Chinese Twitter clone? I don't know about you, but I'd think twice before feeding my child Chinese formula or taking a flight in a Chinese made airplane. Physical products are one thing but informational products are clearly another.

China's reach is China. They may have a billion person market but last I checked that was only 1/7th the world. I'd venture to say that most folks would rather use some other option than something made in China.

<comment><USER3> > would you use a Chinese email provider? Chinese Facebook clone? Chinese > Twitter clone?

I'd use it more readily than I'd use the american counterpart. I have to travel to the US sometimes, but not so much in China, so China knowing things about me affects me much less.

> I don't know about you, but I'd think twice before feeding my child Chinese > formula or taking a flight in a Chinese made airplane.

As others said, yeah, you're already doing those things. Everything is made in China.

> China's reach is China.

That's why you never see "made in China" stickers on anything.

> They may have a billion person market but last I checked that was only 1/7th > the world.

That's also the largest country in the world, and it's the only market you can say that for. The US is 1/20th of the world.

<comment><USER4> > I'd use it more readily than I'd use the american counterpart. I have to > travel to the US sometimes, but not so much in China, so China knowing > things about me affects me much less.

Why does traveling in the US and the US knowing things about you affect you?

> As others said, yeah, you're already doing those things. Everything is made > in China.

Not by Chinese companies though. Individual parts are made there, but they are designed by non-Chinese companies and the manufacturing process is overseen by these companies.

> That's why you never see "made in China" stickers on anything.

See my last point.

> That's also the largest country in the world, and it's the only market you > can say that for. The US is 1/20th of the world.

Last time I checked, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram (not to mention Apple products and Google) were used outside the US as well. I don't think anyone in Europe uses a Chinese Facebook clone or Twitter clone.

<comment><USER3> > Why does traveling in the US and the US knowing things about you affect you?

Because I can be detained by a country (or denied entry) much more easily when I am in the country than when I am not.

> Not by Chinese companies though. Individual parts are made there, but they > are designed by non-Chinese companies and the manufacturing process is > overseen by these companies.

I don't believe that "Chinese company" automatically equals "crap". Xiaomi makes some of the best products I've ever used (and they definitely have the best quality to price ratio of anyone), my Huawei phone is amazing, everything I bought from Ali has been good, etc.

> Last time I checked, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram (not to mention Apple > products and Google) were used outside the US as well. I don't think anyone > in Europe uses a Chinese Facebook clone or Twitter clone.

The western world uses those products. I would be surprised if nobody outside China uses them. Maybe they don't, I don't know the WeChat penetration numbers for countries outside China...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Chinese clone" makes a catchy headline but is pretty far from an accurate characterization.

<comment><USER6> As someone who is ignorant of said "clone", I feel compelled to ask:

What would be an accurate characterization?

I'm genuinely curious.

<comment><USER5> "Microblogging platform" is pretty accurate. Calling it a clone is kind of like calling Bing a Google clone. Yes, they are both search engines, but no.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wonder if it has anything to do with the fact that 140 Chinese characters contains way more information than 140 Latin characters. Then again, even Weibo raised its character limit to 2000 characters.

</comment><comment><USER8> Comparing apples and melons.

Weibo has very strong payment system.

<comment><USER9> I wouldn't consider the Weibo payment system "strong"... it seems to be based on alipay and I've never heard of anyone using it instead of Wechat or Alipay. But other than that indeed Weibo is now very different from twitter, they've continued to evolve while twitter has staid essentially the same for all these years... 140 character limit and all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This kind of comparison is dull. It may be worth less for whatever reason, but the Twitter brand is still so much more recognizable at a global scale. When you go to a job fair outside of mainland China and you see, Twitter, Tecent, Sina and Baidu there, which one would you prefer to visit first?

<comment><USER11> Tecent for sure. WeChat is years ahead of WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. It is the future.</comment></comment>


Grafika – An image processing library for PHP - <AUTHOR> http://kosinix.github.io/grafika/ <comment><AUTHOR> Kinda discouraging that everytime I post this lib I am always asked: "there is already imagine, imageXX etc lib out there. why another lib?" I feel like I violated some code of honor or something.

Just to be clear, here's why I made it:

\- it aims to be an image processing lib. Not a an image manipulation lib which is just a small subset of image processing. Big difference. Also I fell in love with image processing. :-)

\- Smart crop. Not present in other libs. I am surprised that in PHP cropping an image is a fairly common requirement. Yet none of the existing libs have it. I found one from an obscure drupal extension.

\- Image compare. Not present in other libs. Fairly important and needed feature esp for CMS yet none existed.

\- Advance filters. The default ones provided by GD and Imagick (not ImageMagick) are very basic filters. Right now only Sobel filter is implemented, more will be added in the future.

\- Bezier Curves. Imagick is good but GD does not have it so I implemented a bezier curve algorithm manually porting it from a c++ code.

The future

\- Seam carving

\- More edge filters

\- Full anti-aliased shapes and curves in GD. GD does not support anti- aliasing on all its shapes.

\- Perhaps face detection but we'll see..

I think this is a worthy library to check out. Might not be for everyone though..

<comment><USER2> I know your reasoning is I should make a new library because X and Y don't exist in the existing ones. But really what most people think of is why not just send a pull request to the existing ones with that new functionality?

<comment><USER3> Maybe he just wants to build his own thing, or he doesn't like the code from the existing ones, or he doesn't want to commit to learn and write the code just to have his PR ignored or rejected, or he doesn't want to wait until someone notices his work and decides to ship it into the next version.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Not a big fan of the API here.

I had a teacher that called this "knocking", so that's what I call it. It's better known though as the Sequential Coupling Antipattern[1]. e.g.: Requiring methods to be called in a particular order.

The following works:

      $editor = Grafika\Grafika::createEditor();
      $editor->open( "/Users/jdonat/Desktop/Screen Shot 2016-07-25 at 11.33.53 AM.png" );
      $editor->resizeExact( 200, 200 );
      $editor->save( "edited.jpg", null, 90 );

Whereas this throws `Fatal error: Uncaught exception 'Exception' with message 'No image to edit.' in /private/tmp/grafika/src/Grafika/Gd/Editor.php on line 1056`

      $editor = Grafika\Grafika::createEditor();
      $editor->resizeExact( 200, 200 );
      $editor->open( "/Users/jdonat/Desktop/Screen Shot 2016-07-25 at 11.33.53 AM.png" );
      $editor->save( "edited.jpg", null, 90 );

Required parameters should be required on the constructor, not on a setter. That's basically just requiring someone to know your secret handshake to use your API.

I'd say in general you'd be better off restructuring this to defer GD/ImgMagick selection until it's actually needed, eg: calling save. I'd personally defer applying any of the filters until save.

Also the static factory is gross and old-school php, I'd avoid that.

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

<comment><USER5> RAII is another way of putting this. You could use a builder pattern to setup your class, build it and then start deriving value from the object.

Mutable objects that incorporate behavior are largely evil.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Does it solve some "harder problems" in image processing (at least regarding PHP) like: WebP & WebM support or resizing animated gifs? What are the supported file formats?

</comment><comment><USER7> How does one "smart crop"? The crop method only seems to allow you to crop 1 portion of a 3 x 3 grid...

Thanks for your creation!

</comment><comment><USER8> "Telling a programmer there's already a library to do X is like telling a songwriter there's already a song about love." @counternotions (seen in twitter)

</comment><comment><USER9> Does it support animated GIFs?

</comment><comment><USER10> I think someone should change the title to indicate that it is a _PHP_ library. "Grafika is an image processing library for PHP"

<comment><USER11> Aha, so that's why it made it to the front page. Had it had PHP in the title from the beginning HN would have ignored it completely (sadly).

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Does this support uint16, fp16 and fp32 channel resolution for dealing with hdr, tiff, and exr images?

Can it maintain that bit-depth while applying image operations?

I find this is where ImageMagick and GraphicsMagick falls down (it converts everything to 8bit images upon read) which was fine a decade ago, but not now.

It blows my mind that nearly all image processing libraries in wide usage are uint8 per channel.

<comment><USER13> > Grafika is an image processing library for PHP. It can be used to resize, > crop, compare, and add watermark on images. It can also create texts, > geometric shapes, and apply filters. _Its built on top of Imagick and GD._

First paragraph.

<comment><USER12> So it is just a wrapper over the inferior capabilities of ImageMagick. There are already a done of these on NPM: [https://www.npmjs.com/package/gm](https://www.npmjs.com/package/gm)

<comment><USER14> > Grafika is an image processing library for _PHP_

I don't think an NPM library helps here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> why yet another image library? what is the difference between existing solutions?

random google search results: [http://image.intervention.io/](http://image.intervention.io/) [http://imanee.io/](http://imanee.io/) [https://imagine.readthedocs.io/en/latest/](https://imagine.readthedocs.io/en/latest/) [https://packagist.org/search/?tags=image%20manipulation](https://packagist.org/search/?tags=image%20manipulation) ...

<comment><USER16> Maybe he didn't like other libraries? There are many reasons why you would want to write a new library. Fun is one of them.

<comment><USER15> It is important to have fun and to learn new things. But it is presented here as a final product, not as a learning experience. Without any explanation, it is "yet another image library" adding to the noise for anyone who is seriously looking for using some image library.

<comment><USER16> Why do you consider it a "learning experience" and what makes a software library a final product? Every software project has to start somewhere and be published at some point.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


iPhone 5 review: Marveling at the existence of the greatest phone ever made - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2012/10/iphone_5_review_marveling_at_the_existence_of_the_greatest_phone_ever_made_.single.html

<comment><USER2> With a little bit of luck, the iPhone 5 is the first of many "objects from the future". (Whether from Apple or not).</comment>


Kim Dotcom wins back cars and cash seized in Megaupload raid - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-27067102

<comment><USER2> article says he faces 20yrs? thats a bit less than what Aaron Swartz faced?

</comment><comment><USER3> good for him</comment>


Chess grandmasters: Intelligent machines are about to revolutionize the world - <AUTHOR> http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/10017/1028615-109.stm?cmpid=newspanel

<comment><USER2> Surely the whole Deep Blue thing is just a false dawn for AI. Beating a human player through brute force isn't _that_ impressive. If anything its obvious.

What would be more impressive is a capped AI that can only look so many moves ahead and uses principles (such as say Nimzovich's opinionated twaddle) to win.

<comment><USER3> In quite possibly my only point of agreement with Noam Chomsky, I think our discussions of AI are impoverished because they turn on a distinction of language not of fact. Machines that can "think" are AI, machines that can do impressive calculations but not "think" are just impressive calculators. This is not a statement about AI, this is a statement about the English word "think". It sheds about as much light as asking whether an aircraft carrier can swim. (I am informed that aircraft carriers do indeed swim... in Russian.)

A lot of the other "Oh, that's just a cheap trick" non-AI things are a) much more useful to humans than the sci-fi notions people think of when they think AI and b) actually exist in the status quo. For example, if I told you that there exists a program which can make evidence-based judgments of a human's character to tell you whether they are likely to be trustworthy or not in their future business dealings, you would probably say "Egads! That is clearly AI! Holy cow, that is lightyears ahead of passing the Turing Test, and we're nowhere near passing the Turing Test!"

But if I told you "The program is called a FICO score" then, pfft, that isn't AI, that's just clever math and good selection of data sources.

This is one of the reasons why academic AI is, ahem, pretty dead as a field: after you actually get something working we drum you out of the field. Telling the topic of a document by reading it and understanding what it is about? AI! Leveraging anchor text on the link graph to do the work for you? Boooooooring. Granted, billion dollar business boring but still boooooooooring.

<comment><USER4> _It sheds about as much light as asking whether an aircraft carrier can swim. (I am informed that aircraft carriers do indeed swim... in Russian.)_

"The question of whether machines can think... is about as relevant as the question of whether submarines can swim." \-- Edsger W. Dijkstra

 _This is one of the reasons why academic AI is, ahem, pretty dead as a field: after you actually get something working we drum you out of the field._

Even if you're really just using techniques originally developed by AI researchers. It's kind of silly.

<comment> a-priori _Even if you're really just using techniques originally developed by AI researchers. It's kind of silly._

... in retrospect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> When I graduated from an ultra-liberal California university in the mid-70s, computing technology was consistently reviled as soulless, cold, and dangerous.

It is interesting to have watched this attitude transmute over the years into a belief, typified in this piece, that such technology will so revolutionize the world as to work some great deliverance in the human condition.

Back in the day, those who criticized the "Machine" would glorify the artisans and revel in the idea of human creativity in its pure form (unaided by advanced tools of any kind). The attitude was almost anti-science and was in any event highly "humanistic."

Now creativity and technology appear to be closely coupled in the eyes of young people in academic settings, to the point where information technology, at least, is seen as having almost redemptive qualities.

Not saying any of this is profound - just wondering if others have observed this changed perception as well or have thoughts on how it might have come about. Is it because technology became "personal" as opposed to "corporate"?

By the way, don't play Fritz as a chess adversary - it is like playing a demon from hell!

<comment><USER6> Not only that, but people's relationships with each other have been changed by machines.

It used to be that the FBI keeping a file open on somebody famous was considered scandal-worthy. Now FaceBook keeps much more personal information on all of us and people don't bat an eye about it. Younger people today seem to have completely abandoned the idea that they might have a private life and that privacy might have great value to themselves and others.

The noble savage and artisan view of humanity has changed into a view that we're all mostly just interchangeable nodes on the world network.

We have become the very machines that we once so hated.

<comment><USER7> _It used to be that the FBI keeping a file open on somebody famous was considered scandal-worthy. Now FaceBook keeps much more personal information on all of us and people don't bat an eye about it._

That's a really good observation. People who are below a certain age don't have much perspective on

a) how mundane most information in FBI files always has been,

and

b) how much more pervasively personal information about most people is now shared by computerized networks than it was shared by small town gossip.

<comment><USER8> Is it not that in (a) _the FBI_ have the file that is the issue. Just as now we'd be concerned if the FBI was keeping particularly close tabs on our FB details (I mean closer than the standard trawl-net approach).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Once I had some (considerable, 3 months) spare time and decided to fulfill my ambition of writing a chess program. This one would be special - it would work to a strategy, rather than brute force. 3 months later, and having written it first in Java, then C++, then C, I realised that it could never compete with the brute-force millions-of-nodes-per-second crunching machines. This actually made me become disillusioned with chess as a whole, although the emergence of Rybka has restimulated my interest somewhat. The idea that strong chess programs mean that AI is on the march is, sorry, laughable.

<comment><USER10> Chess is not where the action's at in AI anyways, so you're right, that idea is indeed laughable. These days, poker is hot new(ish) thing for AI research, with it's stochastic gameplay and psychological twist (bluffing and calling bluffs), and wide range of strategies. See, for example: <http://poker.cs.ualberta.ca/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The author is an international grand master, the highest title in chess.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Rogoff#Chess_career>

<comment><USER12> That doesn't make him plural though ;)

(The article appears to show only his personal view, not that of others)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Well at least we still have Go <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Go>

<comment><USER14> Sure, but does it matter? Being the best human chess player on the planet is still impressive, even if millions of machines can beat you. Not even only 'still' impressive – just as impressive as it ever was. It's probably (theoretically) possible to build machines that are better at anything a human might attempt.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> _Perhaps if Turing were alive today, he would define artificial intelligence as the inability of a computer to tell whether another machine is human!_

</comment><comment><USER16> MIT recently started a general AI project <http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/ai-overview-1207.html>

</comment><comment><USER17> I am surprised Kenneth Rogoff equates chess AI with "real AI."

"Real AI" is a long way off; my definition: ability for systems to learn from their environment (physical or Internet), change their internal models, and generally evolve their own abilities without requiring external help.

Off topic: I have never met grandmaster Rogoff, but I watched my friend Carl Wagner play him in a telephone San Diego vs. Boston match in 1975. My company SAIC hosted the San Diego end of the match, and I was very surprised to see my friend Carl playing number 1 board: Carl had been clobbering me at chess during lunch time for months and I was just about ready to give up the game since I had a long loosing streak, and I am a poor loser. So, Carl was an international master, and never mentioned it :-)

<comment><USER18> I was also quite surprised to see Ken Rogoff's comment on AI. He is very smart and I think very highly of his work, but I think his comment on AI is far off the mark.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Yet another article on superior machines that then rattle on and on about chess programs. Not news for chess, and _no change_ for the rest of us.

</comment><comment><USER20> Fluffy article with absolutely nothing to add to anything other than a recollection of a small part of history in computer science.

</comment><comment><USER21> I hate articles like this. And he gets the Turing Test wrong.</comment>


Robust Physical-World Attacks on Machine Learning Models - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.08945 <comment><USER2> This paper is a fairly convincing counter-argument to another recent work ([https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.03501](https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.03501)) on physical adversarial examples for autonomous vehicles. The other paper argued there was "no need to worry" about such physical attacks.

<comment><USER3> In Design of Future Things, ex-Apple UX designer Don Norman interviews (anonymous) engineers of a self-driving car:

DN: "It sped up when we left the freeway instead of slowing down on the exit, that was dangerous. Why did that happen?"

ENG: "Car saw it was on a straightaway. We'll add a rule to handle that."

DN: "So you have to add rules for every possible situation? Doesn't that mean that the car is always at risk for what it doesn't know about yet?"

ENG: "That's Not-A-Problem. We will classify everything."

<comment><USER4> That's an incredibly stupid answer. It is precisely this kind of thinking that makes me worry about sharing the road with alpha grade self driving hardware. There is real potential for carnage here, at highway speeds it doesn't take that big of a software bug to get a lot of people killed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> i understand why we'd like to have near-perfect classification but do we need 100% accuracy in practice?

for example, the paper identifies an instance where a stop sign was misclassified as a speed limit under various conditions.

however, wouldnt applying bayesian priors ("how often do i see speed limits at intersections?") presumably negate misclassifications?

rather than chase the elusive ~100% accuracy from a single model, why not take a layered, ensemble approach?

<comment><USER6> I think the traffic sign example was a nice setting for explaining the research. But of course really good examples always risk interfering with communication as much as they assist communication. I think that might've happened here.

Concretely, I have a hard time believing that adversarial traffic signs will be the Achilles heel of self-driving cars. Vandalizing signs is already illegal, and if doing so causes or was intended to cause a crash, law enforcement will throw the book at the culprit. And this already happens to human drivers. See e.g., [http://globegazette.com/news/local/prank-turns-to- peril-vand...](http://globegazette.com/news/local/prank-turns-to-peril- vandalism-called-likely-cause-of- serious/article_ae3c15e9-f3c0-5b00-a21d-2804a4d08806.html) or [http://articles.latimes.com/1997-06-11/news/mn-2303_1_one- st...](http://articles.latimes.com/1997-06-11/news/mn-2303_1_one-stop-sign)

Besides which, you can also just rip the sign out of the ground or replace the stop sign with an actual speed limit sign. From a SDC perspective, this is kind of the equivalent of using super clever software vulnerabilities when you have physical access to an un-encrypted HDD. Impressive technical tour de force, but misses the forest for the trees if your goal is security.

Traffic sign vandalism is a social problem with a social solution. The first person who tries something like this in production with malicious intent toward SDCs will be charged with some variation of attempted or actual manslaughter/murder and opponents of SDCs will switch to strategies other than domestic terrorism to advance their agenda.

This research is still very interesting and useful, of course, but primarily for other reasons. I just don't see traffic sign vandalism intended to confuse DNNs as a serious -- or unique -- threat to self-driving cars.

<comment><USER7> > Traffic sign vandalism is a social problem with a social solution. The first > person who tries something like this in production with malicious intent > toward SDCs will be charged with some variation of attempted or actual > manslaughter/murder and opponents of SDCs will switch to strategies other > than domestic terrorism to advance their agenda.

It's tunnelvision to assume that the only attackers would be individual radical luddites. There do exist terrorist organizations and state actors who intend to run risks to do damage. And unless you're planning to monitor and respond quickly to all potential threats to all stop signs at all times (and all other possible attacks), what's to stop a group of 40 terrorists from covering their faces, stealing motorcycles, and putting 10,000 stickers on 10,000 signs in 10,000 intersections in 20 different cities in 1 night?

<comment><USER6> What's to stop 40 terrorists from covering their faces, stealing motorcycles, and clipping brake cables (whatever you get the point...) on 10,000 cars parked along 10,000 streets in 20 different cities in 1 night?

...Or just blowing up a shitload of random houses or whatever.

Basically, the exact same thing as what would stop your scenario. Is it perfect? Even good? Again, no. But striving for good security in a public setting is how you get TSA.

If there are 40 committed and sophisticated terrorists willing to act, there are a _lot_ of easier targets...

Again, I think the "clever localhost software vuln" analogy is apt. It's not that this isn't one possible attack vector. And no attack vector should be ignored. But... really?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Koding Raises $2 Million To Let Developers Program From Anywhere - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/15/koding/ <comment><USER2> Hrmmm. Maybe I'm not much of a developer, but domain setup, FTP setup, etc. comprise about 0.00001% of the time I put into a project. It looks like a really nice UI for writing, but seems like more solution than there is problem at first glance...

</comment><comment><USER3> They are solving a problem that doesn't exist. Coding from localhost is fucking fantastic.

</comment><comment><USER4> As far as I'm concerned anything extra added into the mix is too much. I love my editor, browser and DB management app. I mean, best of luck to them but I just couldn't work with it.</comment>


Avoiding Burnout as an Ambitious Developer - <AUTHOR> https://stackoverflow.blog/2020/01/13/avoiding-burnout-as-an-ambitious-developer/ <comment><USER2> I think I may have experienced a little of this. Made it to work everyday but it took every bit of will power to do the most basic of tasks. It's starting to lift now but I don't ever want to go there again.

The thing I don't get is while it had been over 5 years since I took a real holiday I wasn't working the same number of hours as my work mates. I had a brief peak of 80 hours a week + other commitments. Then I just didn't really recover. Took my first long holiday and my productivity is coming back.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've been experiencing similar exhaustion, and the problem is that even after your workload goes away, the effects may linger.

Recently I've managed to turn things around for myself by nearly eliminating carbohydrates from my diet during a short break from work (which also resulted in me eating less). I can _feel_ the change. It's allowed me to lose some weight and start exercising again, so hopefully I can maintain this.

It was an easy change to make, really; before, feeling hungry was a painful state that I had to remedy. Now, it's just my body telling me I should probably eat. My goal for now is to burn some fat, so I choose to ignore the feeling and maintain some calorie deficiency. I do try not to starve myself though.

I think if anyone's suffering from similar trouble, experimenting with your diet is an easy and low-effort way to hopefully get started on recovery.</comment>


The Best Incentive is No Incentive (In Blockchains/DLT) by David Schwartz - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fo8ZScrXFZE <comment><AUTHOR> Video Description:

This is a longer version of the talk I gave at Stanford explaining the rationale for the lack of block production incentives in the XRP Ledger design. This is the talk I wish I could have given seven years ago, but nobody would have known what I was talking about.</comment>