Home Office tells man, 101, his parents must confirm ID - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/feb/12/home-office-tells-man-101-his-parents-must-confirm-id <comment><USER2> This reminds me of my favorite bug at my first programming job.

I worked on a system that processed benefits. We generated a lot of reports, one of which being the overage dependent report, listing all children that were over the age limit for that insurance plan.

We had one case where a newborn was showing up on that report, and for end users, there was no indication why. DOB was 20-something days ago, not 20-something years ago.

Lo and behold, the paperwork was somehow filed before the baby was born, and our date calculation method was returning an unsigned int. So the logic was resulting in an age of -1 (since DOB was prior coverage start date), which wrapped around to 255, which was obviously higher than whatever the max dependent age was.

It was a fun one to debug and explain.

<comment><USER3> > So the logic was resulting in an age of -1 (since DOB was prior coverage > start date), which wrapped around to 255

I really look forward to human ages breaking your assumption that they fit in 8 bits.

<comment><USER4> If the fix was to make it signed, that might not be so far off!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As soon as it made the 1919=2019 mistake you know it's the ancient tale of 2 digit years being insufficient for dates. Wonder how systems determine if it should be 19XX or 20XX? Does it just default to the most recent year?

<comment><USER6> Having worked in the OCR world pretty much non stop for about a decade, i'd say its more just a case of there not being a lot of 101 yr olds, and there being a lot of 1 year olds; the system is likely over-optimized for switching the digits to 20 v's 19 as it's more probable that the individual is 1 than 101. Really, when the confidence is low, or the data seems exceptional, it should be flagged for a manual review.

<comment><USER7> There are many more 101 year olds than 1 year olds doing their own administration.

<comment><USER6> I'm not sure what the user experience is, my assumption is that it could be the individual or a parent scanning this data, so unless it was attached to a parent profile before entering the data, it's hard to know who is doing the administration. Having said that, if your assumption was correct ("The person is doing their own administration"), i'd agree with you.

<comment><USER8> It's not hard. In EU settlement scheme application you have to tick a box if you're applying for yourself or someone else is doing that for you.

<comment><USER6> That makes sense, thanks for the context! I've been through Canadian immigration processes (I'm from Australia), but have no idea how the UK/EU process works.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Ugh, this isn't as bad as some dental software I use all the time. "1/1/48" entered as birth date is displayed as "1/1/1948". Within minutes, that is automatically updated to "1/1/2048". Yes, this patient we're treating today will be born in 28 years...

</comment><comment><USER10> > In what appears to be a computer glitch the Home Office thought he was a > one-year-old child.

oh cool, another 2020 bug in the wild. previously: [https://www.newscientist.com/article/2229238-a-lazy- fix-20-y...](https://www.newscientist.com/article/2229238-a-lazy-fix-20-years- ago-means-the-y2k-bug-is-taking-down-computers-now/)

</comment><comment><USER11> I thought this part was interesting; > It then skipped the face recognition section which is what it does with under-12s

I'm aware that the passport photo conditions for young children are more relaxed (under 1 don't need their eyes open, under 6 don't need a 'neutral' expression) but I didn't expec that they would just skip the whole under-12s photo part.

<comment> jon-wood Face recognition has difficulty with under 12s because they're still developing so quickly, given only a single reference photo from five years ago the accuracy of facial recognition is going to be terrible.

<comment><USER12> This is a tangential question, but I'm curious how well it tends to do with adults who undergo things like weight gain/loss, emergence or clearing of acne, minor-to-moderate injuries -- the sorts of natural change that can happen quickly and make a significant difference, but rarely fool humans.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> Seb-C I worked for some time in a bank in France. Some migrants does not know their real birth date, so their civil status can officially contain a date with zeroes, like `1999-00-00`. On the contrary, the social insurance system for some reason decided to store this case as `1999-13-13`.

I discovered that in a very complex system that temporarily stored data in a SQL Server's `DATETIME` field, which ended up with people having NULL birth dates and made the whole system collapse.

The system is probably still running today by excluding those people from some fraud detection procedures.

<comment><USER13> In Holland some government organizations use Jan 1st as 'unknown birthday' and others use June 1st. Also provides hours of fun for the whole family!

<comment><USER14> In Denmark we use Jan 1st too. That turned out to be a problem because our personal identification numbers (CPR-numbers) contains the birthdate, and suddenly we started running out of them for Jan 1st some years.

The solution was to remove the checksum requirement (it was a weighted modulo 11 checksum), which is still sometimes causing problems with software that tries to verify it using the old rules. But for some reason that was thought to be better than adding another digit, maybe because it "only" requires every piece of software working with CPR-numbers in existence to be updated but not the data storage...

<comment><USER13> Ah yes personal identification numbers (BSN in Holland) don't 'spark joy' either.

In Holland every resident gets a unique BSN. So you can use it to uniquely identify a person.

Except if you also have to deal with asylum seekers, because they get a slightly different kind of number which will be _reused_ after the asylum seeker is granted/denied residency.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It puzzles me why he never became a citizen. He moved to the UK in 1966, that's 54 years now, and it was even before they joined the EEC sometime in the 1970s.

<comment><USER16> Doing so before 1992 (or as late as 2001 if notification requirements were not complied with) would have lost him his Italian citizenship, unless an exception applied. I can understand being satisfied with a stable situation for most of that time, and with not wanting to handle naturalization paperwork in the last decades of life.

<comment><USER15> Good point. I somehow assumed EC citizens would be exempt from such laws but that doesn't necessarily seem to be the case even now [1], and must have been very different before the 1992 Maastricht treaty indeed.

1\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizenship_of_the_European_Un...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizenship_of_the_European_Union#Summary_of_member_states'_nationality_laws)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Ironically, this is exactly the absurd tragi-comic way a dystopian England would try to wear out legal immigrants.

<comment><USER18> Would be a great setup for a Monty Python skit

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> He should apply to be an emancipated minor.

</comment><comment><USER20> A user below, hkt, has a comment complaining about the culture at the Home Office. It has been modded down, and fairly so, as this comment is not helpful in its current form. Nevertheless I feel it has an important point, so allow me to talk about the Home Office, which, after all, is the reason this 101-year-old was filing paperwork to begin with.

The Home Office presently maintains a "hostile environment" policy. Wikipedia summarizes its goal: "to make staying in the United Kingdom as difficult as possible for people without leave to remain". Here are some examples of how this works in practice.

Once upon a time the BBC did a little investigative journalism and discovered that some international students were faking their English proficiency exams (the TOEIC). The Home Office, quite reasonably, said that they'd do something about it. What they ended up doing specifically was make the environment as hostile as possible; they:

\- looked at 58,458 test results

\- declared that 34,000 of them were obviously definitely cheaters

\- declared that 22,600 of them were probably cheaters

\- declared only about 2000 as probably legit

\- sent letters to the 34,000 students denouncing them as frauds and demanding they leave the country

Needless to say these numbers are completely bunk. Nevertheless thousands of the students were scared away, or detained, or deported.

Here is some coverage of the Toeic scandal: [https://www.theguardian.com/uk- news/2019/apr/27/home-office-...](https://www.theguardian.com/uk- news/2019/apr/27/home-office-investigated-over-english-test-cheating-claims)

An astute reader will note that the coverage I have specifically linked describes this as potentially "bigger than Windrush", a separate scandal in which refugees were admitted to the UK, decades later various records of their admission destroyed, and then the government demanded they demonstrate evidence they were allowed to be present in the country.

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

Now, personal anecdote time: I got a job in London the same day they voted for Brexit. I later found out that as family of a European citizen, the form to get a proper residence card was 97+ pages. This is basically as a way to make the environment more hostile. (Rather than deal with that and the economic uncertainties of Brexit, including its impact on the tech sector and general political uncertainty from subsequent governments, I instead moved to New York and literally doubled my salary, thanks in no small part to the low pound).

In summary: This particular story is just the latest insult in a parade of injuries. Fear not, though! The behavior of the Home Office has not gone unnoticed. For instance, the USCIS has recently been taking a page from the same book:

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-trump- administra...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-trump- administrations-kafkaesque-new-way-to-thwart-visa- applications/2020/02/13/190a3862-4ea3-11ea-bf44-f5043eb3918a_story.html)

> The American Immigration Lawyers Association has collected [over 140] > examples of allegedly "incomplete" forms: an 8-year-old child who listed > "none" for employment history but left the dates of employment field blank. > An applicant who entered names of three siblings, but the form has spaces > for four.

Further links (with only minimal libertarian commentary) at [https://reason.com/2020/02/14/how-the-government-is-using- no...](https://reason.com/2020/02/14/how-the-government-is-using-nonsense- rules-to-keep-out-immigrants/)

Thank you for your time.

<comment><USER21> Not to detract from the rest of the comment, which is broadly correct (speaking as somebody who actually had to go through those 97 pages to get indefinite leave to remain, pre-2016), but the description of Windrush as " _refugees_ [who] were admitted to the UK" is just _wrong_.

The Windrush migrants were not refugees - they were explicitly _invited_ by the UK government, through a policy that promoted migration from "old colonies" (particularly the Caribbeans), in order to kickstart a postwar British economy dramatically short of manpower. The policy was so lax that there were no controls of any sort; on landing, people were barely handed a piece of paper that certified they had disembarked from a certain ship on that day. For all intents and purposes, these migrants were then treated like British citizens, but were not issued passports or other documents unless they demanded them (which was often a complex procedure). This was not seen as unusual, in a country that famously has no national ID scheme and where identification is still largely achieved through utility bills.

The Home Office kept a copy of the landing records for 50 years, which helped whenever someone from the Windrush years had to make his or her position official. In 2010, the HO decided these records took up too much space and just _destroyed them_ , without even trying to digitize them. This happened a few months after the Tory-LibDem coalition government was installed, in October 2010, with Theresa May as Home Secretary. Anybody from Windrush subsequently found themselves unable to prove their citizenship status, resulting in deportations, lack of health assistance, and massive discrimination.

For the record, Mrs. May was also the inventor of the "hostile environment" policy, which was supposed to deliver on the Tory manifesto promise of pushing net migration under 100,000 a year. That indicator was around 250,000 at the time. After 10 years of "hostile environment", it's now around 280,000.

<comment><USER20> Thank you: a useful correction. I would edit the comment, if it were still within the editing window.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Did I miss something, or did this journalist completely fail to mention that the MRZ does not include the first two digits of your birth year?

Obviously this is going to happen.

> it was not a small mistake because the computer system "only recognised the > last two digits of his year of birth"

This is bizarre, blame the passport for only having the last two digits and not the computer reading it.

<comment><USER23> > This is bizarre, blame the passport for only having the last two digits and > not the computer reading it.

I mean, the passport only showing 2 digits is worth mentioning. But I doubt this 101-year-old got much choice in exactly what format his passport contained his DOB - so the software needs to handle it. So if in doubt (e.g. both possibilities yield an age younger than oldest person on the planet) the software should be asking to confirm the century.

If you want to get really fancy, check the issue date first. If this is before the supposed 20xx birth date, the birth date must actually be 19xx. People aren't issued passports before they are born.

<comment><USER22> That's clever, but still leaves a significant edge case. I'd hazard to guess that 101-year-olds don't travel very much and are therefore rather likely to be forced to get new passports for this specific purpose. (But perhaps the home office accepts expired passports?)

>But I doubt this 101-year-old got much choice in exactly what format his passport contained his DOB

I'm sure he didn't, this definitely isn't his fault.

> so the software needs to handle it

Does it though? It's a rare edge case that should be trivial to solve with minor human intervention.

<comment><USER24> Seems fair to guess most 1-year-olds don't travel much internationally either.

<comment><USER22> Sure, but I can't see how that matters here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> He should bring an ouija board to the office.

</comment><comment><USER26> Fuck international standards right? [eyeroll]

<comment><USER27> Relevant XKCD for that: [https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1179:_ISO_8601](https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1179:_ISO_8601)

Title text: ISO 8601 was published on 06/05/88 and most recently amended on 12/01/04.

"The title text provides a perfect example of the kind of ambiguity that can arise when non-standard formats are used. The ISO standard was in fact published on 1988-06-05 and amended on 2004-12-01. This is mentioned in the title text in MM/DD/YY format; however, there is no way to naturally figure this out, particularly with the second date. With the year truncated to two digits and all three numbers at 12 or lower, the date referring to December 1, 2004 may well be interpreted as 12 January 2004, or as 2012-01-04."

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> tl;dr Write tests, people!

</comment><comment><USER29> Rules are rules :)

</comment><comment><USER30> Well, Dana Carvey always did maintain there was little difference between a baby and a 100-year-old man...

</comment><comment><USER31> Clearly the solution here is to make sure people don't become older than 99. A slight prod will probably do the trick.

</comment><comment><USER32> The Home Office is a den of mad, evil bureaucracy. I'd honestly have believed it even if it hadn't been anything to do with a computer. The people who work there are especially twisted, the culture needs flushing down a toilet.</comment>


Sky-blue-pink. A colour never before seen? - <AUTHOR> http://richarddawkins.net/articles/479563-sky-blue-pink-a-colour-never-before-seen <comment><USER2> I hate when I'm reading an article and become completely distracted with an irrelevant detail.

In this case, his traffic violating cyclist was full of shit. Even the color blind know _which_ light in the arrangement is the stop light, regardless of its apparent color.

EDIT: Removed bonus apostrophe

<comment><USER3> [http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3071/2519282653_737a56be03.jp...](http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3071/2519282653_737a56be03.jpg)

I was riding shotgun with a colorblind friend when he approached one of these somewhere around Pleasanton, CA. He started freaking out a bit as we approached, asking what color the light was.

Turns out that the standard is that red goes on top or on the left, but he didn't know that since he had never come across a horizontal stoplight before (neither had I).

So saying "I'm colorblind" is usually BS, but it is possible (especially if some designer went and got all cute with the stoplight).

<comment><USER4> A few horizontal lights remained in the small towns of my state when I got my license, so I did have to learn this. I've long forgotten, though. A color- blind guy I worked with said that he worried about forgetting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Some people have seen that sort of "impossible" color: [http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=seeing- forb...](http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=seeing-forbidden- colors)

Basically if you have areas of different incompatible colors next to eachother, and they're the same subjective brightness, and you use fancy eye- tracking equipment to make the border stay in exactly the same place on your retina, then your brain gets confused and shows you some impossible combination around the boundary.

</comment><comment><USER6> I am surprised Dawkins did not touch on the connection of language and color. Aside from physical ability, people "see" colors simply based on the language they speak. As someone who grew up speaking Russian where light blue and dark blue are 2 separate colors as different as green and yellow, I've often been surprised by English speakers' inability to distinguish between those colors. Similarly, some languages do not distinguish between blue and green, or blue and black, or have no purple, etc.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Color_Terms:_Their_Univer...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Color_Terms:_Their_Universality_and_Evolution)

So the question is, even before physical ability, what part of the difficulty in recognizing a color can be attributed solely to lack of prior experience? In other words, if you subject a color-blind patient to brain stimulation, might they _still_ not see a color simply because they haven't been acculturated to it?

Incidentally, I _have_ seen sky-blue-pink, at sunrise on the Haleakala volcano on Maui.

<comment><USER7> There must be a psychological component of processing color that can be influenced by language. But is there an actual psychosomatic effect to the extent that the actual neurological processing of color is influenced by the mind, whether consciously or subconsciously?

I remember as an infant perceiving blue and green as being two "shades" of the same color, and being surprised that no one else thought of them that way. My early intuitive understanding succumbed to habit, and I no longer make that association, but my physical perception of the colors has never changed.

<comment><USER8> This is precisely why L and R are hard to distinguish for Asians, or why Americans are confused by the Korean distinction of more than 2 phonemes in the D to T spectrum and G to K.

<comment><USER9> My American-English ears also can't hear certain distinctions along a S-Sh- Sch-Tsh spectrum that at different times Hebrew and Japanese speakers have tried to highlight for me.

So I don't buy Dawkins' conjecture there are unused 'qualia' waiting to be stimulated; the brain adapts itself to the sensory ranges available from its body and environment, discarding those distinctions rarely needed. Perhaps years of exposure would slowly grow back the sensitivity -- but there'd be no surprise moment of new experience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The 'label' would have likely atrophied.

Kittens raised in an environment without vertical lines don't develop the ability to perceive vertical lines. These sensing cells would have developed in the retina, but it seems reasonable for the same effect to occur on any cells that are tightly connected with vision - such as colour _qualia_. Though I doubt that many neurobiologists take that philosophical term very seriously.

</comment><comment><USER11> There's an easy way to experience a small range of colors you haven't seen before.

[http://www.skytopia.com/project/illusion/illusions.html#Ecli...](http://www.skytopia.com/project/illusion/illusions.html#Eclipse%20of%20Titan)

Documentation on the physical phenomenon behind this:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imaginary_color#Perception_of_i...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imaginary_color#Perception_of_imaginary_colors)

</comment><comment><USER12> Well, he's not a Tetrachromat so he can still volunteer for a study:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrachromacy>

<comment><USER8> Yes, and if only a small minority of the population has this mutation, then words for the other colors they perceive would never become part of the language. In fact, it would be almost impossible for Tetrachromats to discover others like themselves.

<comment><USER12> I think the standard way a tetrachromatic person would discover they are that way is they walk around all day wondering why everyone is wearing mismatched colors and nobody seems to notice or agree with them.

<comment><USER8> Don't a lot of women already wonder about a lot of men in this way? (Tetrachromacy gene is on the X chromosome, and seems to express more often in women.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I like Dawkins quite a bit, but I like him most when he sets aside his "mission" and just thinks (and writes) interesting thoughts.

<comment><USER14> He's a smart guy with an intense passion for science and he writes very well. We need more scientists like him and Sagan. Their curiosity is infectious.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The assumption being made here is that the labels are fixed categories, immutable and the same from person to person; and yet we know that's not always the case. It seems to me that we have the capability of deriving labels from experience, but don't (especially in the case of the colour-blind) all have the same experiences. I know there has been a fair amount of research on colour names in cross-cultural contexts and that for the most part there is a pretty clear similarity between the colour names employed in different cultures, but that not all cultures distinguish between blue and green for instance.

</comment><comment><USER16> Like so, so many arguments in philosophy of mind, the argument requires there to be a distinction between subject and object. Without this distinction, the argument is not disproven, but its semantics completely break down; i.e., not "Without this presupposition, Dawkins is false when he says X" but rather "Without this presupposition, Dawkins has said nothing at all when he says X; he may have said 'blippity bloo blah bleem bam' instead."

Without a strongly reasoned argument for subject-object distinction, one may as well be proving things with the presupposition that God exists.

</comment><comment><USER10> Some people can see infrared, due to their cornea being replaced by an artificial plastic one which does not block infrared as the natural one does. However, this isn't an entirely new colour, but just a more red red.

<comment><USER17> I've heard that some patients with artificial lenses in their eyes can see slightly into the UV range, as the natural lens filters it out. The drawback to this is increased possibility of damage to the retina, so I wouldn't be surprised if most artificial lenses were designed to filter as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> As a child I wondered what it would feel like to 'discover' a brand new colour. I'm was delighted to find that I'm not alone in that impossible quest. =)

<comment><USER19> If you like this sort of thing, you should check out David Hume's thought experiment about a theoretical "missing" shade of blue.

Wikipedia has a decent-looking article, as a start: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Missing_Shade_of_Blue>

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Apparently there is a colorblind synesthete somewhere who 'sees' colors (triggered by numbers) in his mind that he cannot see in the real world. <http://j.mp/9I6XwH>

<comment><USER21> Don't use URL shorteners here. That link points to [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary%27s_room#Ramachandran_and_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary%27s_room#Ramachandran_and_Hubbard)

<comment><USER20> My bad. Initially I tried using the straight link, but HN automatically removed the apostrophe in "Mary's", breaking the link.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> nice thoughts. Now, I have no idea what I'm talking about, but i imagine the brain of a red-blind person wouldn't have a fully developed pathway to "see" red. I'd guess that after being exposed to a new stimulus, the pathway would slowly develop, but I don't think the patient would immediately see a new color.

Does anyone know what happens to a deaf-from-birth person gets a cochlear implant late in life?

<comment><USER21> They can't make any sense of the sound. They can mange to hear sound, but not understand language. Those pathways close during childhood and don't open back up.

There are no "unused tags" like he imagines. The brain is not pre-programmed. It gets programmed based on how it's used. You give it a sense that is distinct from other senses, and it finds a way to use it. If you don't then that sense simply doesn't exist in that brain - there are no unused spots.

If you have ever used a tool, or played a game to the point that when you think "do this" the tool or game just does it, without you consciously thinking of the actions, then you have experienced this. The tool becomes a part of you. The brain simply opens another "channel" for that. Or the sounds a game makes. You don't think "this kind of beep means this", no, you just "know" that the game is doing something based on the sound.

The brain is very flexible, and unlike a computer it does not have fixed input/outputs.

Another example is someone who wore a belt that always vibrated on the side that pointed north. After a while he had a new sense! He just "knew" where north was. He did not feel "oh a buzz on my front left". No, he just knew north is there. He brain integrated this new sense with the visual sense, and he experienced that a particular street points in a particular direction.

Just like you would tag a house with a color "red", he tagged it with a direction. What did this "northiness" look like? I don't know - I guess it looked like north.

<comment><USER23> The extendability of our sensory modes does not disprove that we and other animals come pre-programmed in various ways in both our input and output. I went into a developmental neuro-biology course thinking much as you seem to be, trying to tear all the "it's inborn" B.S. away from the functionally super-flexible neurons. But the experiments and scientific observations just don't support that project in all cases.

To name two: brain regions fully formed for spatial management/processing of visual signals in the absence of any signals from an eye being allowed to ever reach them, transplanting the song/chirp patterns from one species of bird to another by splicing neurons from a developing embryo of the first to the developing embryo of the second. How are these to be explained if not by something that clearly qualifies as some form of "pre-programming" of the neural substrate for sensation and behavior?

Extendability and plasticity are not necessarily defeaters to innateness. They can coexist.

<comment><USER24> What you say is true, but it's worth noting that, as a rule, phylogenetically "higher" organisms do tend to have more plasticity and (perhaps as a consequence) less ability to regenerate neurons).

Your songbird example is a good one. There are many species of birds that develop near normal song repertoires in the absence of con-specifics (or even, in some cases, hearing!) but trying to extrapolate that to human speech processing, or even mammalian auditory processing, is fraught with problems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This reminded me of the incredible feeling of epiphany from reading _The Giver_ in elementary school.

<http://www.amazon.com/Giver-Lois-Lowry/dp/0385732554/></comment>


How to Recruit the First Technical Talent for Your Startup as a Non-Tech Founder - <AUTHOR> http://blog.taskpigeon.co/technical-talent-startup/ <comment><USER2> _You have to show value first._

In lieu of "value", it can also help to just show a good pile of cold, hard cash first. That's the part where a lot of founders come up short.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, having a past exit as a founder, money to back the startup yourself, etc all show "value".

I also believe that all startup founders need to show they have skin in the game. I.e. Put some cash and time into your startup before you ask for a VC's money or someone to work on your team for free.

I have written about this previously, but its a good point worth mentioning again</comment></comment>


Seneca: On the Shortness of Life - <AUTHOR> http://www.forumromanum.org/literature/seneca_younger/brev_e.html <comment><USER2> For a very accessible and practical guide to Seneca (and other stoic philosophers), check out "A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy" by William Irvine

The title is a little cheesy, but the content is gold. It's one of the books I re-read (or re-listen to via Audible) multiple times a year. I find the repetition is really valuable since I can slip so easily back into my old thought patterns.

When I count books that have been most helpful to me, this one is at the top of the list (followed by "War of Art" by Pressfield).

For a synopsis, check out Derek Sivers book notes on it: [https://sivers.org/book/StoicJoy](https://sivers.org/book/StoicJoy)

Derek's intro to the notes: "Rating: 10/10\. Almost too personal for me to give an objective review, because I found when reading it that the quirky philosophy I've been living my life by since 17 matches up exactly with a 2000-year-old philosophy called Stoicism. Mine was self-developed haphazardly, so it was fascinating to read the refined developed original. Really resonated."

<comment><USER3> I agree with you. I re-read it multiple times and doing it again in these days. The content has been so helpful in critical situations in my life like the death of my father. I should probably buy the Audible version too...

Another great book that I would like to suggest is Meditations by Marcus Aurelius.

<comment><USER4> +1 for Meditations

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Seneca sounds extremely privileged to me. His advice might be useful to rich people, but not the vast majority of people (in his time, or ours) who have to work hard just to survive.

His main complaint is against rich people who "squandered in luxury and carelessness", the various ways in which "riches [are] a burden", how men care too much about the "limit of their lands". Almost every sentence seems spoken to someone too rich for his own good, with too many slaves, mistresses, clients, and land.

It fits in with my picture of Rome as having a strong class hierarchy (and up to 30% slaves!). This are the words from the "optimo iure" to themselves.

<comment><USER6> Your comment is so out of line. You are still wealthier than him by vast amounts. So no matter what you think he sounds like. You can still benefit from his advice.

<comment><USER7> I agree with your sentiment, but I doubt this is true. Seneca was just about the richest man in Rome. He ran the empire from behind the scenes, along with Burrus for several years.

There were certainly many things Seneca didn't have access to from our time. But I think on any sensible measure he was wealthier than almost anyone alive today.

We've made many advances, but we forget that whatever we have often merely replaced an older version that did the job well enough, especially for those with means.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seneca_the_Younger#Imperial_adv...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seneca_the_Younger#Imperial_advisor)

<comment><USER6> You are still incorrect. The average wealth and rate of innovation is richer you have more aggregate wealth in all the forms that matter to you(Dental) except possibly status.

I'm pretty sure he wish he had dentistry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is why it is so valuable to preserve the writings across centuries.

I always find a deep sense of joy being able to read such interesting thoughts that were put on paper, papyrus, wood, stone so many centuries ago.

In a similar timeframe will anyone be able to read our digital thoughts?

<comment><USER9> > In a similar timeframe will anyone be able to read our digital thoughts?

Lots of famous writing from the ancient world doesn't survive in the original and had to be copied; what we have is copies of copies of copies, etc. And plenty of ancient works are lost.

We will need to copy to newer media what is important for archival purposes even now it seems.

<comment><USER10> Once concern is that while we still discover ancient works, with digital if something is lost, it's 99% lost for good.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> k-mcgrady I recently started reading "Letters from a Stoic" [1] and I'd highly recommend it. It's a collection of letters, each a few pages long, written by Seneca. I read one a day and have a pen nearby as I'll typically find at least 5 useful pieces of advice or useful ways of looking at things differently.

[1] [http://www.amazon.co.uk/Letters-Stoic-Epistulae-Lucilium- Cla...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/Letters-Stoic-Epistulae-Lucilium- Classics/dp/0140442103)

Edit: in fact the letter I read yesterday was, like the one posted here, on life. Some things I liked from it:

"...death ought to be right there before the eyes of a young man just as much as an old one. [...] Every day, therefore, should be regulated as if it were the one that brings up the rear, the one that rounds out and completes our lives."

"To live under constraint is a misfortune, but there is no constraint to live under constraint."

"Whoever has said 'I have lived' receives a windfall every day he gets up in the morning."

</comment><comment><USER11> I wrote some notes with choice quotes, etc, on this book several years ago: [http://peterc.org/pedia/seneca-shortness-of- life/](http://peterc.org/pedia/seneca-shortness-of-life/) \- it might whet the appetite of anyone without the time to read the full thing right now.

</comment><comment><USER12> This is why I keep coming back to HN. Everyday I find weird and wonderful surprises on the front page.

<comment><USER13> I really enjoy the writings of the Stoic philosophers. If you enjoyed Seneca, you should check out Marcus Aurelius' Meditations[1] and Epictetus' Discourses[2]

EDIT: changed the links to Project Gutenberg links on jwdunne's suggestion

1: [http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2680](http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2680)

2: [http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/10661](http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/10661)

<comment><USER14> Because of age of the writings, you can probably find free digital copies on Gutenberg.org. I'm sure that's how I got Meditations.

<comment><USER13> Good idea. Edited to include them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Stoicism is an interesting way to look at things and it certainly does make for some engaging mental exercises .. but I'm not sure how much actual value it can provide to everyday life.

One major problem with it, speaking as a 30-year old, is that it's not trivial to come up with some "ultimage goal" or "prime principle" for life. But maybe that's just me being unimaginative and isn't necessarily a flaw of the philosophy itself.

The real issue is that being consequent about stoicism seems to always result in contradiction given mankind's current state of knowledge. On one hand stoicism is concerned with not wasting time (on indulgences) and at the same time it ignores that a market economy (embedded in a democratic society) is the only way we know of, that can reliably force a larger population to strive for efficiency.

Of course the market economy isn't free - we pay for it by e.g. giving up moral values. It still allows for huge bubbles of inefficiency to form - things like complicance regulations that provide zero real value and only serve as market barriers. And of course we're all just fallible selfish humans, so there's no shortage of people studying and abusing these processes. But all these points are, practically speaking, irrelevant, seeing as how there are no (better) alternatives (yet).

So what is a stoic to do? Give up on a proven path to efficiency because he doesn't want to be a "tool"?

Just imagine how much more of our time would be wasted if there weren't an army of "tools" out there, working 8 hours a day towards the "indulgence" of ensuring that there is allways enough fresh milk stocked in the supermarkets of our cities.

<comment><USER16> Stoicism is a personal philosophy. It doesn't concern itself with the whole of human kind but with you. That much is clear in that stoicism advise you against the temptation for fame, power, money, vice.

It's a philosophy that embraces fatalism and keep you on the path of finding your nature and then keeping on that path, just being yourself, without regards for external influences.

The notion of duty is however very strong in stoicism: social duty is part of your nature. You have to accept your obligations and perform them the best you can, without search for external rewards.

All in all, stoicism is a search for personal tranquillity, inner peace. It's not even a philosophy of efficiency, at least I've never seen it described as such.

Stoicism doesn't rely on "tools" either. You can be a milkman and still adopt stoicism as your personal philosophy of life.

Duty is a very big part of stoicism: it acknowledges that we live in a social world and that our nature, our role, requires that we perform our duties to the best of our abilities. This is the only way to achieve some sort of peace, by removing the fact that you need something eternal to yourself to find satisfaction about what you do.

So, you can be a janitor, collect rubbish, be a developer, a manager, an office worker, a CEO, it doesn't matter. You'll only achieve peace if you find your own way to derive satisfaction in whatever fortune you find yourself in at a given instant. In short: accept what fate threw at you, don't sweat what you can't control, and learn to make the best of it.

I'd say it's a perfect philosophy for today.

<comment><USER15> > accept what fate threw at you, don't sweat what you can't control, and learn > to make the best of it.

Yes, that's what drew me in at first too. But the details seem sketchy.

> It's not even a philosophy of efficiency

I believe that ultimately it is.

What is the point of giving up on deriving happiness from external sources, if not to make the path to happiness a shorter and easier one? What is the point of not worrying about things outside your control, if not to help focus your efforts on the things you can actually impact? What is the point of tranquility, if not to allow for more concious rational thought? How is that not efficiency?

> you can be a janitor, collect rubbish, be a developer, a manager, an office > worker, a CEO, it doesn't matter

By being a "tool" I didn't mean someone engaging in menial jobs. One can have a prestigeous well-paid job, and still be bored to death, because his heart isn't in it, or because tasks are perceived as too repetitive or too petty. (I hope I'm not offending anyone by saying this, but just think of e.g. divorce lawyers if you need an example.) Yet at the same time that individual might be, because fate saw fit that way, the perfect person for that particular job in a given society.

How can one both accept the fate (or duty?) he was dealt (or that his younger self chose for him), and at the same time still stop wasting his life? How can one find meaning in a process, that over the years has evolved to become devoid of meaning, because ultimately that's what is necessary for it to achieve peak efficiency? E.g. Like lawyers and doctors detaching themselves from their clients and patients, because they'll burn out otherwise. (Again, no offense intended, this is just the first thing to come to mind.)

> Stoicism is a personal philosophy. It doesn't concern itself with the whole > of human kind but with you.

That doesn't invalidate any of my original points. The market economy benefits the majority of it's participants. I.e., someone feeling like a tool, wouldn't just quit because of some overall concern for society, but simply because he's still wasting less time this way.

Another concern also is that if we advocate to some broader public to adopt some "new" philosohpy, I think it's a prerequisite that that philosphy be one that ensures the wellbeing of a society as a whole. Otherwise it might prove difficult to engender support.

(By "new" I mean currently unknown/unpopular amongst that broader public.)

<comment><USER16> > I believe that ultimately it is.

Then we'll have to disagree. Being more "efficient" may be a by-product of stoicism, but it's not a measure of it and it's not a stated goal. At any rate, stoicism is not a shortcut to happiness. It's a arduous one because it takes practice and conscious effort.

Stoicism isn't about removing external pleasures either, the philosophers warn us about the dangers of seeking pleasure where it could trap us. They never said you shouldn't enjoy what surrounds you, on the contrary, they urge you to take pleasure in the things that are accessible to you instead of lusting for things that you believe will bring you pleasure.

You can call that efficiency if you wish, but that's a strange way of putting it.

>Another concern also is that if we advocate to some broader public to adopt some "new" philosohpy, I think it's a prerequisite that that philosphy be one that ensures the wellbeing of a society as a whole. Otherwise it might prove difficult to engender support.

I think this is a delusion: billions of people believe in mainstream religions that have encouraged bigotry, hatred and wars. Countless have died in the process.

Stoicism doesn't promote intolerance. It promotes reason, compassion, an awareness of our personal place in the world and our responsibilities to it. In terms of well being for the world, I'll take that over most other forms of philosophies. You are perfectly free to wait until something better (for you) comes along.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Also a good read is Ciceros Cato Maior de Senectute: [http://www.bartleby.com/9/2/1.html](http://www.bartleby.com/9/2/1.html) A philosophical story about aging and death

<comment><USER18> +1 for de Senectute. Very insightful work

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Those who feel they have discovered a treasure here should consider reading Seneca "On Anger" and Musonius Rufus also.

</comment><comment><USER20> I would not have expected Seneca to be the top result. Good on you HN.

</comment><comment><USER21> Those interested in Stoicism, and who are curious if and how its ideals might be "baptized" and employed in a Christian philosophy of life, ought to look into the writings of Fr. Alphonsus Rodriguez, who has been described by some as a "Christian Seneca":

 _Practice of Perfection and Christian Virtues_

[https://archive.org/details/PPCV-Manresa](https://archive.org/details/PPCV- Manresa)

<comment><USER22> Not to mention the church fathers called him "our Seneca"

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Perhaps I just need to keep reading, but he seems to be speaking against squandering time, being engrossed, attached (hints of Buddhism here), etc., but he does not offer any advice other than seizing the day and tending to your own desires, which sounds a lot like the hedonism he is denouncing at the very same time. Are there some activities that are not vices, and are not "giving away" your time?

<comment><USER23> Skip to Chapter XIV, if you must.

"Of all men they alone are at leisure who take time for philosophy, they alone really live; for they are not content to be good guardians of their own lifetime only".

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I am currently reading Letters from a Stoic, somehow the style resembles except the fact that it is not written to Lucilius

<comment><USER25> Letters from a Stoic is one of my favorite books on life in general. Almost everyone I gave the book found something applicable for his/her life - definitely a recommended read!

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'm not sure why this is on HN today, but in a Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon kind of way, I just came across it yesterday. It was in this commencement speech at University of Minnesota College of Liberal Arts by musician/artist/writer Dessa. It's 22 minutes long, so maybe you'll skip it, but it's a surprisingly inspiring and motivating speech: [http://youtu.be/u38ue- XxHtw](http://youtu.be/u38ue-XxHtw)

<comment><USER27> Yeah, read about Seneca yesterday. I like the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon, makes things feel special.

<comment><USER28> Went thru an e-mail yesterday from Amazon that my wish-list book by Seneca:Letters from Stoic was on discount, but couldnt buy it on time. BM Phenomenon again!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> (49 CE)

</comment><comment><USER30> Of course, in practice Seneca was considered rather hypocritical. But I guess being an important aristocrat during the reign of Nero does that to you.

The best book I have read on the Stoics is the Cambridge Companion to the Stoics, by the way, which has articles on every aspect of the philosophical movement.

</comment><comment><USER31> I have read this, and my question is, what kind of activities does Seneca consider NOT wasting time?

<comment><USER32> Philosophizing?

<comment><USER31> That's it? So sex is a waste of time? And what is the point of philosophizing?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> crazy how the stoics and buddhists never met .

<comment><USER34> I was going to say, there are so many wonderful parallels between the two philosophies. No reason not to merge them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Summary: An unexamined life without art and wisdom is short.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is an essay I will always remember. It helped me get through a burn-out, and contains a lot of wise lessons. One quote specifically touched me:

"The part of life we really live is small."5 For all the rest of existence is not life, but merely time.

Cherish the moments you really live. The moments you create your memories.

<comment><USER36> I like: "You squander time as if you drew from a full and abundant supply, though all the while that day which you bestow on some person or thing is perhaps your last. You have all the fears of mortals and all the desires of immortals."

<comment><AUTHOR> There are so many beautiful gems in there. This one might be particulary good for the HN community also:

"Can anything be sillier than the point of view of certain people—I mean those who boast of their foresight? They keep themselves very busily engaged in order that they may be able to live better; they spend life in making ready to live! "

People, here on HN also, are so busy planning their future life ("I will retire when I'm 40!"), that they spend all their life planning their life, without actually living their life.

Ah... I could give a seminar about this essay. It helped me in so many ways.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Yup, the printed version of this book is always a go to favorite read of mine. Highly recommend. Among Stoics I found this most easy and good to read repeatedly.

In some ways Benjamin Franklin's autobiography also feels similar, not sure why.

</comment><comment><USER38> And imagine how wise he would be now if still alive. Fight Aging.

<comment><USER39> Seneca: "Death: There's nothing bad about it at all except the thing that comes before it - the fear of it."

Insofar as death is oblivion, the destruction of the self, it is rational to be unconcerned about being dead. You won't exist to have feelings on the matter - which is exactly the same situation as for all time prior to the point in your development at which you like to think that you became yourself.

Equally, it is rational to be very concerned about being dead at some point in the future. Humans are creatures of action. We like to achieve, observe, and experience. We place value upon these things, and death will stop us from gathering that value.

So the world of people might be divided at any point in time into (a) the group that is horrified by the prospect of oblivion, and (b) the group that is unbothered by personal extinction. It's a very sharp dividing line, not often explored in casual conversation, for all that one person's views might cross back and forth between camps over the years. Try a poll of the folk you know at some point in time: I think you'll find the results interesting.

Whatever your opinions on oblivion, however, it seems near universally agreed that the process of becoming dead is something to be feared - so much so that we work to hide the ugly reality from daily life, we put it from our mind, and we even rise up in anger to confront those trying to do something about it by fighting aging through the development of new medicine.

Terrible pain, injury, and degeneration are not on anyone's wish list. But we'll all be receiving these dubious gifts anyway - unless something is done about it. The difference between our age and the age of the Greek stoics is that we have the chance to do something about it: defeat aging by repairing its damage, improve our biochemistry, and ultimately replace our bodies with superior technology that is immune to all that plagues us now.

<comment><USER40> > Insofar as death is oblivion

But that's the rub, right? When we have shuffled off this mortal coil...</comment></comment></comment>


Russians Desperately Try to Save Mars Moon Probe - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2011/11/09/world/europe/AP-EU-Russia-Mars-Moon-Mission.html?hp&pagewanted=all

<comment><USER2> Gotta love the reporting angle - it's not that Russians launched a Mars moon lander for crissake, the first major space exploration project for them in ages, but it's that they screwed up. Yay.

<comment><USER3> From the article: _It is arguably the most challenging unmanned interplanetary mission ever._

<comment><USER4> Risk v Reward

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Russian sources [1][2] don't tell us much more besides that the error is probably in software, the people responsible are preparing for the worst-case scenario and that the damage to the budget is in ballpark of $160MM (of which ~$40MM are insured).

[1] <http://www.kommersant.ru/doc/1812141>

[2] [http://www.vedomosti.ru/newsline/news/1415670/situaciya_s_fo...](http://www.vedomosti.ru/newsline/news/1415670/situaciya_s_fobosomgrunt_mogla_proizojti_izza_programmnogo)

</comment><comment><USER6> A few years ago a satellite was falling to earth[1], and although it supposedly had much less dangerous materials onboard than this thing, every nation was hurrying to blow it out of the sky. And eventually they did. Why can't they do that with this one when it falls ?

[1] [http://articles.cnn.com/2008-02-19/tech/satellite.shootdown_...](http://articles.cnn.com/2008-02-19/tech/satellite.shootdown_1_uss- lake-erie-spy-satellite-sea-based-missile-defense?_s=PM:TECH)

[http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/world/2010-07/19/content_101211...](http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/world/2010-07/19/content_10121179.htm)

<comment><USER7> You have confused "what a national defense agency has said their reason for doing something is" with "why they are _actually_ doing something".

The _stated_ reason is not terribly compelling. Deorbiting satellites are very small, the Earth is very large. As the article correct points out, nobody has _ever_ been injured by space debris, or even killed. Dozens of people are killed by cars every day, yet each automobile fatality does not make it into the New York Times.

Note the timeline of the two ASAT tests. China shoots down a satellite in January. One month later, the United States does the same thing, presumably in response. Why are the Chinese shooting down satellites?

A critically important piece of context is that China really, really hates satellite-guided bombs, such as the American JDAM. This is because the Chinese embassy in Belgrade was hit by five JDAMs during the 1999 NATO operation in Yugoslavia, killing three people, and injuring twenty others.[1]

The American position is that this was a simple mistake in targeting, as they were attempting to strike a Yugoslavian arms warehouse 180 metres away. The Chinese maintain the Bill Clinton personally ordered the attack, possibly while drinking the blood of Chinese infants, as a part of his mad genocidal urge to destroy the entire Chinese race. (The reaction of the Chinese media to the bombing was remarkably hysterical; it's essentially their 9/11, only they didn't have the option of invading the US)

Various cynical independents have pointed out that, five weeks earlier, the Yugoslavians had actually managed to shoot down a F-117, the only combat loss ever sustained by a stealth aircraft, and that the Chinese had been seen buying recovered debris from locals. You could make an amazing jump in deduction here, and conclude that they had been storing debris in their embassy, in the hopes that the Americans wouldn't bomb it in retaliation.

The JDAM depends on GPS satellites, which have to be in a fairly low orbit, for accuracy, and so that the receivers can use small antennas; where they are fairly vulnerable to ASAT missiles. (I don't believe any current ground-based ASAT missiles can hit targets in geosynchronous orbit, which is 15,000 kilometres higher than MEO. This is an educated guess, not a certainty: governments are chary about giving out details on the performance envelope of missiles.)

An ASAT weapon isn't something you want to use at the drop of a hat. Blowing something up in orbit produces a _lot_ of debris, most of which hangs out in space for years. There's various doomsday scenarios, of varying plausibility, where blowing up a satellite produces high-velocity shrapnel which destroys other satellites, which in turn fragment, producing a cascade of destruction, throwing us back into the stone age.

In conclusion, you _can_ blow it up, but you probably don't _want_ to.

1: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._bombing_of_the_Chinese_emb...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._bombing_of_the_Chinese_embassy_in_Belgrade)

<comment><USER5> I am not sure, what point you are trying to prove, but there is a Chinese satellite YH-1 [1] onboard of Fobos-Grunt.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yinghuo-1>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is really sad, and I hope that they ultimately regain control of it.

However... in my mind, it raises some serious questions about Russia's ability to safely ferry US astronauts into space over the next few years.

<comment><USER9> I don't think that it should. This was a completely different stack than what the Russians use for launching people, the Russian manned mission success rate is _damned_ impressive, and the US has had a fair number of their own failed probes.

<comment><USER10> It's oddly satisfying to see the word "stack" used so literally on a website where most news is software-related.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I sure hope it doesn't crash. Hydrazine is not nice stuff.

<https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Hydrazine>

</comment><comment><USER12> Even if it never heads off to Mars, if they can just get it into a stable orbit, having all of that fuel up there could come in handy later.

<comment><USER13> Without power to fire the maneuvering thrusters its orbit will probably degrade fairly rapidly. Also, it's probably more expensive to get the fuel out during a complicated docking operation than it is to just get up new fuel for new missions as needed.

This sucks. It would have been a very cool mission.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> It would clarify headlines like this if there was a different name for Earth's moon. Thoughts like "I thought its name was Lunkhod or something, not Mars" filled my head until reading this was a mission to Phobos.

<comment><USER11> > It would clarify headlines like this if there was a different name for > Earth's moon.

What about Luna?

<comment><USER15> That's just "moon" in another language. If you rename Earth's moon you're just shifting the problem into the Romance languages.

<comment><USER11> The only problem is one of ambiguity. So long as each language has their own convention to resolve that ambiguity, there's no problem.

Not all languages use the same names for stuff, after all. Abroad, the USA may be called les États-Unis d'Amérique, アメリカ, or a great many other things. And we use our own names for other countries that they don't use for themselves.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Why the hell is "falling stuff from the sky" the new "terror"? Can we please not launch shit into space without knowing where it'll fall? I know it's hard, but it's not impossibru!

<comment><USER9> To say that calculating the trajectories of decaying orbits around earth is hard is kind of an understatement. There are too many factors, you have to remember we're basically talking the air resistance of a possibly tumbling abstract shape that will soon be tumbling rather chaotically once any appreciable atmospheric effects take place. And that's just the start.

<comment><USER16> Picture this: an 11 ton tank of gas falls into your house and burns it to the ground, and all you're told is: "There are too many factors, you have to remember we're basically talking [about] the air resistance of a possibly tumbling abstract shape that [was] tumbling rather chaotically [when] any appreciable atmospheric effects [were taking] place. And that's just the start".

<comment><USER17> I'm sorry you don't like it, but it's a fact. Predicting orbital decay to such accuracy is simply impossible.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Is It Wrong to Lie? - <AUTHOR> http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/new-ebook-lying/

<comment><USER2> If you are seriously interested in the ethics of lying, I recommend Sissela Bok's _Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life_. It is one of the few books I gave 5 stars to on Amazon.</comment>


Uselessd – the useless daemon, or the daemon that uses less - <AUTHOR> http://uselessd.darknedgy.net/

<comment><USER2> From the website:

> uselessd (the useless daemon, or the daemon that uses less... depending on > your viewpoint) is a project which aims to reduce systemd to a base initd, > process supervisor and transactional dependency system, while minimizing > intrusiveness and isolationism. Basically, it's systemd with the superfluous > stuff cut out, a (relatively) coherent idea of what it wants to be, support > for non-glibc platforms and an approach that aims to minimize complicated > design.

<comment> vezzy-fnord The page has a very quirky feel. I kind of like it, wish these guys luck. This might be useful for people who use systems like OpenWrt and Alpine, but want systemd any way.

<comment><USER3> OpenWRT is an interesting setup, and right now uses BusyBox init. Switching init systems would probably not work out well in terms of firmware size and/or build system complexity.

But OpenWRT also has its own system bus daemon and network configuration daemon, amongst other things. Besides BusyBox, the whole system is quite unique amongst Linux distributions.

<comment><USER4> It did use busbox init, it uses procd now which by reading the code is horribly tied into openwrt.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Users spend more minutes per day in Pokémon Go than Facebook - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2016/07/13/pokemon-go-tops-twitters-daily-users-sees-more-engagement-than-facebook/ <comment><USER2> I would be very happy if Niantec releases an in-depth write up on the how the backend was implemented and what measures they took to make it scale to handle this kind of traffic.

I don't care much for the game, but details of why the servers weren't (aren't?) able to handle the traffic interests me immensely.

<comment><USER3> I look forward to what they can further do to improve things.

For instance they don't cache pokestop images, my phone keeps redownloading the same images from pokestops and gyms, if it just cached the top 10 most visited pokestops and gyms that would be a decent reduction in data use.

Also it would help if they offloaded some of the work of the GPS onto the local phone steptracking/direction trackers it would help.

I can understand if they don't want to send coordinates of "nearby pokemon" down to the clients because that would inevitably get hacked, but the phone has to repeatedly poll.

If the phone tracked more locally it could not poll GPs until it detects locally that it's moved enough, so if you weren't moving you wouldn't be updating your position very often.

Also I read something that reckons that the game servers are currently all hosted in the US, which would explain the laggy battle experience in Europe. (Freezing at 1hp left, never being quite sure what's hit your character or good times to attack).

<comment><USER4> Offloading the GPS work to the step/direction trackers in the phone would also be great for those of us that work in big old buildings that do a great job of blocking my GPS position.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> tuna-piano A few thoughts:

1\. I tried playing this game, but really don't enjoy it. It feels to me it's not about strategy as much as it's "the one who puts in the most hours of playing wins". Felt actually like work to me.

2\. I don't see this game being a long term super success, as it is now. I'd imagine cohort analysis would show the first cohorts waning in usage in the next several weeks. I imagine as more people begin playing, the overall popularity of the game will continue to rise for a while, but that hides the fact that the game has a limited shelf life with the masses.

<comment><USER5> 1.) Agreed. 2.) The way I see it, they really brought a new game category into the mainstream. I foresee thousands of similar games coming shortly except instead of games, they will teach us about neighborhoods, history, architecture, health or figure out how to help us do more outdoor activities without walking around like zombies looking at our phones.

<comment><USER6> not many other apps would have the crowdsource data like this game though

</comment></comment></comment><comment> obj-g Seems obvious to me -- it's a game that takes time to play. Most people check Facebook for, like, 30 seconds at a time. It's like saying people spend more time playing Overwatch than checking their email? There's probably a better analogy. A bunch of interesting data in the article though.

<comment><USER7> The thing about Facebook is many people dwell on it, rather than checking it for 30 seconds. The timeline becomes a time sink for many people.

<comment> obj-g Some people, for sure. In my experience, I usually see people checking it for 30 seconds or so but _many_ times daily. Even if you're right, it still seems like a no-brainer that the average Pokemon GO player would spend more time playing than the average Facebook user is on Facebook.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Considering how many people get serious exercise out of this, I think they're wise to spend their time on Pokemon Go rather than Facebook. And then there's stories like these: [http://www.thememo.com/2016/07/14/autism-advice-asd- advice-p...](http://www.thememo.com/2016/07/14/autism-advice-asd-advice- pokemon-go-mum-thanks-nintendo/)

Just watch where you're going, okay?

<comment> saiya-jin as a non-player - by serious exercise you mean walking around or is there some real exercise involved?

<comment><USER9> One could argue that walking around - kilometers at a time, in the case of getting an egg to hatch - is serious exercise compared to sitting in front of a computer or on a couch.

<comment><USER10> Not saying walking is not good for you, but walking is very energy efficient. Your heart rate is probably higher reading HN, at least for me. Doing some sprints and other movements, like playing football, or moving the lawn, will give you a good workout though.

<comment><USER8> If you want to burn fat, walking is one of the best ways to do it. It you want to build muscle, there are better options. But long walks are absolutely good for certain kinds of exercise.

<comment><USER10> you also burn fat while eating pizza, but you put in lots of more calories. Walking doesnt use many calories. Its still healthy though, and better then nothing at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Which is great! People go out and start new relations with other people instead breaking them on facebook!

<comment><USER12> Yeah, its almost like Pokemon is a truer social network than Facebook.

You're finding common interest (but in real life). You're connecting (but in real life).

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Flappy Bird flaps more than the average paper plane!

</comment><comment><USER14> The success of Pokémon Go as the first breakout AR "belief circle" certainly seems like a victory for the Scooch-a-mouti. I wonder how the Librarians Militant will respond?

<comment><USER15> ...what is Scooch-a-mouti ?

<comment><USER16> I had to Google it too. It's something out of a Vernor Vinge novel, Rainbow's End.

<comment><USER14> Actually the title is: _Rainbows End_. No apostrophe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> hmmm is anyone else essentially finding the game unplayable due to server issues? Or is this perhaps a region specific issue?

<comment><USER18> My own experience is that the game freezes after catching a Pokemon about 70% of the time. It's really annoying.

I'm playing in Germany.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Do people really spend an average of 22 minutes/day on Facebook? That's astounding....I find it hard to believe unless that's including Messenger or something (which not a lot of my colleagues even use since there are better, more secure chat alternatives)

</comment><comment><USER20> Yes! Another arbitrary metric that pokemon go passes an arbitrary company.

We get it, Pokemon Go is popular. Seesh.

<comment><USER21> Why so snarky? Don't you think it's an interesting phenomena?

<comment><USER22> Not really, it seems just like any other fad. The technology involved has been around for a while, and nobody paid much attention to it before.

I'd be interested to see articles detailing technical difficulties that they may have overcome, but I've seen way too many articles just saying "Pokemon GO now has more X than Y".

<comment><USER23> I'm curious about the social consequences of mass adoption.

I'm already seeing groups of random people gathering around gyms when they see they are taken by their team/in the process of being taken away.

The meta-game that might develop is interesting, and only possible due to wide adoption.

<comment><USER24> [https://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/4stnx4/how_can_we_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/4stnx4/how_can_we_reduce_the_number_of_pokemon_go/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> duh.

call me if that's still the case in 3 months.

<comment><USER26> I hope it's here to stay, maybe, since it uses a lot of battery power, phone manufacturers will start prioritizing that.

<comment><USER27> "Start"? Battery power is one of the primary complaints people make about their phones. It's been a priority for... ever.

<comment><USER28> While it's one of the primary complaints (after purchase), the market would seem to suggest that people prefer smaller/thinner phones in terms of purchasing decisions.

<comment><USER29> I'd happily have a 1-2 inch thick well made premium phone with a battery that lasted days.

<comment><USER30> Sounds like Pentagram Monster series. The one I have with 4100mAh battery lasts for over 20 days, if I'm not using it heavily. And while it is heavier than typical smartphones, it's only about 1cm thick. As far as I know there's also a newer model with 6000mAh battery.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I'm tired of those articles "Pokemon Go is bigger then X", they contain no useful information besides the fact that Pokemon Go is really popular, yeah Ok we got it, now please tell us something interesting that ain't obvious ;) ... Don't get me wrong, I'm happy Pokemon Go is such a success because it's good for Nintendo as it is their first mobile game (even though they haven't developed it inhouse) and this success will help them to stay afloat

</comment><comment><USER32> I don't have the game, but it sounds like GPS power drain is the big problem. Is there not some way to improve that? Maybe only turn on GPS intermittently and use accelerometers, wireless signals or the camera to track your position from the last known point and any landmarks?

<comment><USER9> Just from using the app you can tell there are optimizations to be made that would dramatically save on battery life before even getting to the power draw from location services. Pokestops for example don't appear to locally cache their images and descriptions for long.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Well, I am honestly waiting for WarcraftGo.

I'd love to instance that local shopping mall :).

<comment><USER4> I'm the opposite... I would love a Pokemon MMO (imagine WoW with Pokemon!)

<comment><USER34> It's frankly stunning that Nintendo never attempted this in the mid 2000's when MMO's were the hot thing. I've seen the idea floated so often of the past decade.

<comment><USER35> Remember this?

[http://www.gamespot.com/articles/iwata-customers-do-not- want...](http://www.gamespot.com/articles/iwata-customers-do-not-want-online- games/1100-6102100/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> technically 0>= 0

</comment><comment><USER37> Well yes ofcourse?

</comment><comment><USER38> Let's give it a minute.

</comment><comment><USER39> I wonder how much is the valuation of Nintendo now the Pokemon Go is out

<comment><USER40> Last I saw, Nintendo's market cap was up $9B since the launch of PG.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I always feel uneasy by viral marketing, like paying professionals to like it. Compared to the user engagement of say Flappy Bird.

</comment><comment><USER41> Can we have a moratorium on Pokemon Go posts? It is getting really annoying, especially since submissions regarding it have absolutely no value.

<comment><USER42> Why? Pokemon Go is the most talked about topic in tech at the moment. Considering this a tech news site, it would seem more than appropriate to show this content.

<comment><USER41> That's a stretch. This is like any other HN fad, like the 2048 variants, javascript frameworks etc.

<comment><USER9> You must be deluding yourself. It's the most popular mobile game that's ever existed, and it's an ARG at that.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Witcher 2 is getting a Linux port - <AUTHOR> http://steamdb.info/sub/40356/#section_history

<comment><USER2> Oh wow I had to stop playing the Witcher 2 after switching full time to Ubuntu at home, this is great news!!!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This seems to bode well for a Witcher 3 game being multiplatform right from launch.

</comment><comment><USER3> I wonder about the rest of us who bought it on disc.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good question! I bought it on GOG myself, so I hope they'll make it available there too for Linux after their news yesterday.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Pinnin – A simple Pinboard client for iPhone - <AUTHOR> http://pinninapp.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> Would love some feedback on this. Pinnin is a simple Pinboard Client for iOS, and includes an iOS8 app extension to add bookmarks to Pinboard from any app. It's written in Swift and I plan on open sourcing sometime in the coming weeks once I get the codebase cleaned up a bit more.

I know the marketing site could use some work, but any comments on the app itself would be much appreciated!

</comment><comment><USER2> I'd recommend a short video on your site showing what kind of workflow it promotes. I'm interested in the app looking at the screenshots but I'd like to see it in action before spending 2.99

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll work on getting something up on the site (and in the app store since Apple now allows app preview) but here's a quick demo video of the extension in action: [https://www.dropbox.com/s/havs9kvvy087jj0/pinnin- extension-d...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/havs9kvvy087jj0/pinnin-extension- demo.mov?dl=0)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Cool app. Maybe you could change the label to be more in line with the other ones and say "Add to Pinboard", instead of just "Pinboard".

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the suggestion - I might give it a try and see how it fits.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have a question, is it possible to pin to pinboard using ctrl+d shortcut of browser of your liking? I have been wanting something like that but not knowledgeable enough to able to create something.

</comment><comment><USER5> Personally I'm a big fan of Pinswift. I've tried several of these Pinboard apps and like it the most. [http://pinswiftapp.com/](http://pinswiftapp.com/)

<comment><AUTHOR> I haven't tried pinswift, but it looks cool. The main difference with Pinnin is that you can add bookmarks to pinboard directly from Safari or any app on your iPhone with a webview, in the same way you would add a bookmark to mobile safari.</comment></comment>


The zen of gradient descent - <AUTHOR> http://blog.mrtz.org/2013/09/07/the-zen-of-gradient-descent.html <comment><USER2> How do these and other variants compare to simple Hill Climbing with random restarts, because I feel that gradient descent, simulated annealling etc are just local searches within the local search space.

<comment><USER3> Nesterov's method attains super-linear convergence on Convex functions. They don't really (if I remember right) work otherwise; but then this is okay, since Convex problems are really the only ones we can solve in poly-time (esp. if P/=NP and UGC is true).

SA/RR are global optimization methods which come with very little (if any?) complexity guarantees.

<comment><USER2> "on Convex functions"

Ah thanks, I thought I missed something. That makes total sense.

"SA/RR are global optimization methods"

RR is definitely global, but (depending on your cooling function I guess) I would say SA is not.

<comment><USER3> It should be noted that things like momentum etc in DNN training are inspired directly from Nesterov, and apparently work very well.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Conservative groups spend up to $1B a year to fight action on climate change - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/dec/20/conservative-groups-1bn-against-climate-change <comment><USER2> Here's a much better write-up by the Guardian: [http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/dec/20/conservat...](http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/dec/20/conservative- groups-1bn-against-climate-change) (not a fan of Wired's so-called "exposé" that is only a few paragraphs long and links to the Guardian article anyway)

</comment><comment><USER3> Exposed: a US-based 77 billion dollar climate alarmist network:

      https://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R43227.pdf

(NB: My research has about as much bearing on the legitimate disagreement over the causes and extent of global warming as the original article.)

<comment><USER4> Well, one pot of money goes towards grants and publications subject to peer review, and scientific datasets that are publicly accessible, while the other comes from shady origins with no review whatsoever, for purposes that are clearly marked as PR, lobby and obstructionism...

<comment><USER5> With the series of exposes about the shortcomings of the peer review process it seems odd to lean on that very much. This seems particularly true since this topic is so politically charged and there would be virtually no funding available for climate change research absent government spending.

<comment><USER4> You don't throw the baby out with the bath water. That certain journals aren't doing peer review correctly, or that there is politics in the academia isn't a reason to not have peer review at all. And it does seem to work for some (PLoS One, for example). A flawed peer review system to validate knowledge is still better than a propaganda system driven for short term corporate gain.

Also - most academic scientific research depends on government spending. That's the whole point of academia, no? To work on problems companies don't want to fund because of no clear short-term impact on the bottom line. Not everyone is a Bell Labs or Google.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Funny thing is that they burn through all this money to publicize the thing that isn't true but they wished it was. As if this wasn't physical reality but some sort of soft, social thing like if allowing non-whites have same rights or women to vote is good idea or not.

In the end you can't bribe physics.

<comment><USER5> It would a stretch to equate the current state of climate science with the current state of physics in terms of the reliability of its' predictive models.

<comment><USER7> This creates a false dichotomy between climate science and physics. Researchers studying the climate use physical models to do so. And their accuracy is not bad--100 years ago they predicted that burning fossil fuels would warm the climate, and that matches what we measure today.

The precision is low, though. That is a result of the chaos created by the immense complexity of the systems involved. We can't predict the precise path of an individual electron through a bar of copper either.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The fundamental question on climate change is whether you trust the academic- and government-funded ecosystem of scientific research. Structurally, it's not substantially different for research into the climate than it is for research into any other scientific subject.

If you believe such a structure is incapable of producing objectively supportable results on climate, then you must at least be skeptical of other scientific results.

If you feel different levels of trust for the results of different areas of scientific research, then you should engage in some introspection about the criteria you're using to make those distinctions. Is it because you have a deep working familiarity with those areas of research? Or because of some other factors?

<comment><USER8> It's possible for just about any scientific field to get stuck in an error cascade and take a while to climb out of it. Medicine has pretty much the same problem as climate - lots of scientists are doing good work but some are finding bogus results and we have very poor mechanisms for making sure the _good_ work is what bubbles to the top. Even if many of the individual studies are fine, politically organized _summaries_ of those study results are problematic - they can rather trivially be manipulated to show any result desired by controlling the timing of the inputs.

Good discussion of "error cascades" here: [http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1642](http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1642)

This research study finds that most research findings are false: [http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal...](http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> With elementary school knowledge of history we can know that the the earth was warmer 1000 years ago than it was today. It's sad that it takes a billion dollars to get this simple truth out, but in the face of the billions of dollars at stake for special interests, governments, and UN beauracrats, it's sadly the case.

<comment><USER10> Can you (a) back this up and (b) explain why it's relevant?

<comment><USER5> I think the commenter is referring to the "Little Ice Age" which we do have a substantial amount of evidence for.

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

It would suggest that the climate fluctuates even during periods where carbon emissions from humans was far less than today.

<comment><USER11> Another term to search for is, Medieval Warm Period

It has been warmer before on Earth while people have been around. There have been articles as early from 2003 I can find in the Telegraph but like all views not following the "common consensus line" they are mocked, derided, or ignored.

From where tree lines ended on some mountains covered by snow, to the Vikings being able to navigate areas of the ocean that have ice this day. From where crops were grown then to today, there are many identifiable items from that period which point to a warmer climate than any we have.

If anything this article could read, 1 billion dollar network goes up against the 1 trillion or more dollar Global Warming industrial machine. There is a lot of money in GW and those making it don't want it threatened.

<comment><USER10> If that's true, it still doesn't follow that human activity isn't warming the climate, or that we can take the additional warming right now without enormous disruption. I call non-sequitur.

<comment><USER12> This information is provided to plant some reasonable doubt to anthropomorphic gw and to suggest there's larger forces at play here than greenhouse gasses.

It is relevant but it is not "proof" of anything on it's own, aside from the Earth's climate can shift substantially within short periods without any human contributions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> >"This is how wealthy individuals or corporations translate their economic power into political and cultural power."

>He added: "They have their profits and they hire people to write books that say climate change is not real. They hear people to go on TV and say climate change is not real. It ends up that people without economic power don't have the same size voice as the people who have economic power, and so it ends up distorting democracy."

This guy is really onto something. I hope is next exposé is of George Soros, the SPLF, the ADL and other groups with wealthy backers who push their own political agenda.

</comment><comment><USER10> The original paper is here: [http://www.drexel.edu/~/media/Files/now/pdfs/Institutionaliz...](http://www.drexel.edu/~/media/Files/now/pdfs/Institutionalizing%20Delay%20-%20Climatic%20Change.ashx)

</comment><comment><USER14> " _However, Brulle admitted that tracing the funding back to its original sources was difficult, as around three quarters of the money has been routed through trusts that assume anonymity to their donors._ "

Doesn't that basically invalidate the entire thesis of this little article? If he can't prove that there's a denial machine funded by specific entities, then maybe there isn't one. Maybe there's just a bunch of skeptics out there who don't buy into the claims of global warming.

Now, I do think there are macro changes happening that we can and should do something about. Personally, I like ozone and I hate skin cancer; I think we should do everything we can to restore the ozone protection layer in the upper atmosphere. I also hate poison ivy, which has been thriving in this CO2-rich era. I think it is a good idea to cut back on CO2 emissions and push for more reforestation across North America, and preserve the rain forests of South and Central America. Africa, too -- somehow, they need to control population growth and do some reforestation. This would probably help improve the quality of life for inhabitants of the planet over the next 50-100 years. But warming -- not sure if it's even our fault, let alone what we can do to slow it down. We're coming out of an ice age; it's not clear we want to or can reverse that process.

<comment><USER15> He said it was difficult not impossible, so that invalidates your little comment.

<comment><USER16> No, it doesn't. It also tends to imply that he _didn 't_ do it, so this is just "Look! Lots of money! Surely some of it is going here!" when you really get down to it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Is this the logic here? Organization X received $Y in funding. Organization X in some part denies climate change. Therefore $Y is spent on fighting climate change.

This seems analogous to someone on the right looking at Planned Parenthood's budget $Z and saying that PP spends $Z on abortion.

Am I missing something?

<comment><USER18> Well two things:

1) "Organization X in some part denies climate change"

Organization X in _totality_ denies climate change

2) "This seems analogous to someone on the right "

The difference (at least in your quote) is that espousing the benefits of abortion is different from actually performing abortion, and no one is claiming that the organizations mentioned are actually burning coal with the $Y in funding.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do think about hierarchies in terms of vectors, dimensions? - <AUTHOR> I'm not a mathematician so this is not rigorous by any stretch.<p>so too me a dimension is a the same as a datatype which is the same as a feature. a point is a record which is an object. a space is all the possibility unconstrained in multiple dimensions. a projection is an object along less dimensions. which is also an abstraction. so how do hierarchies fit into it?  a lot of structured data seems to be in hierarchies and graphs. Languages, paths, folders, etc.  is there an intuitive way to think about graphs and hierarchies and spaces? <comment><USER2> All your examples are describing various aspects of the space itself, i.e. all objects that you listed are just different collections of points/records/objects.

A hierarchy, or a graph in general, is different in that, in addition to describing a set of nodes/objects/records/points, it additionally describes _relationships_ among these things.

So a hierarchy (graph) is two sets: points (objects/etc), and edges (relationships) among the points.</comment>


Hacking with the OWASP ZAP HUD - <AUTHOR> https://segment.com/blog/hacking-with-a-heads-up-display/ <comment><USER2> good improvement delighted to start using it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks :) Let me know what you think of it - feedback very much appreciated!

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> good improvement delighted to start using it</comment>