Ask HN: How would you explain the blockchain (and BTC) to your grandparents? - <AUTHOR> I know how the blockchain works, in some detail (the consensus algorithm, ECDSA, transaction blocks, mining, double-spending problem, etc.) How do I explain all of this in 5 to 10 minutes to someone who does not follow tech (for example, my grandparents), as simply as possible? <comment><USER2> Bitcoin is a public ledger of agreed transactions. I give you some goods, it's registerd in the ledger that you owe me some number of "thingies". Later someone gives me some goods, and on the ledger I transfer your debt to them, and so it goes round.

At some point, someone offers to give me cash for the thingies registered against my name, I agree and thus they have the thingies, and I have cash.

The clever technical parts are how the public ledger is maintained without there being a central authority, and without having to publicly name the individuals who hold the assets.

I've used that explanation several times to good effect so far.

</comment><comment><USER3> My father in law was at a loss when I was transferring files from one computer to another via USB drive. He thought I was some magical wizard. Any average grandparent aged person will not be able to comprehend the terms you are using. I tried explaining what Dropbox was and it was lost.

So you have to relate the topic to something they know. So explain that it is like Bingo, and the order of every ball picked, every winner, for every match at their local Bingo hall has been recorded on a ledger, like a checkbook, and scrambled by encrypting it like a decoder ring that way someone can't forge the ledger. People verify each event that occurred, kinda like someone verifies a valid Bingo. You don't need any other currency because the ledger states you won match 113 for 150 BingoCoin, 3 days ago. And there are places where you can exchange the BingoCoin for USD, and that those exchange rates are fluctuating rapidly. So your 150 BingoCoin might be $100 USD or it could be $1000 or it could be $1.50 depending. But it will always be worth 150 BingoCoin.

</comment><comment><USER4> Tell them that it's just a currency, but unlike a normal currency where the government has control, nobody has control.

Then there's a big sheet of paper where the transactions with their amounts are written and shared with everybody, that way everybody knows how much each of them has. So when they receive money, they know that whoever sent them has money.

Then just raise up the simple problem of you copying that last transaction and transferring money to somebody else before everybody knows that you did the first. You can just say that there is a system that waits until that other transaction is processed and be done with it. It makes no sense to actually explain in more depth even to a savvy user...

even if you do explain, it will be like when they try to explain poverty in the third world to Americans... they can even see the picture, but they won't understand because they've never lived it.

In the end, all you do is to think that you managed to explain something but the other party didn't really understand you

</comment><comment><USER5> Four friends exchange goods between each other and keep a book of records for every transaction. The person who keeps that book can easily alter transactions to his favour, but if everyone keeps one copy of transactions record it becomes difficult to cheat unless more than 50% people cheat. The distributed record of transactions/ledger us known as block chain.

</comment><comment><USER6> The blockchain is an electronic accounting ledger. It uses some clever encryption technology to make it very hard for transactions on the ledger to be forged or changed.

Bitcoin, and other cryptocurrencies, are electronic coupons that can be bought, sold and exchanged on the electronic ledger.

The reason you've heard of Bitcoin is that it's been somewhat of a fad recently and the coupons have been changing hands for thousands of dollars.

For background, Bitcoin was invented as a political experiment to design a currency that wasn't controlled by any government or bank. In order to make this work, the blockchain has some interesting features that allow it to be used without having a central authority to manage the ledger.

One of the unfortunate things about Bitcoin is that people often conflate the technical parts, the political parts and the financial parts. This can make discussions about it very confusing indeed.

</comment><comment><USER7> It is a largely failed experiment in making _internet cash_ that has turned into a speculative bubble not unlike Tulip Mania.* The intent was to be able to make small payments online without attaching your name and other personal information to it, much like you can use cash instead of a debit card to pay for things without giving your name. But that vision really hasn't materialized. Meanwhile, it has been bid up crazily and become insanely expensive, like the aforementioned tulips.

* [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania)

</comment><comment><USER8> > I know how the blockchain works, in some detail (the consensus algorithm, > [...])

This alone shows that you don't. There's no such thing as "consensus algorithm" in blockchain. Blockchain does not work with distributed consensus problem.

> How do I explain all of this in 5 to 10 minutes to someone who does not > follow tech (for example, my grandparents), as simply as possible?

Blockchain: a service that puts so called "timestamps" under documents, so you can tell which one of two related documents was issued earlier.

Bitcoin: the documents that are timestamped by blockchain describe who sends how much to whom. (So kind of a ledger.)

</comment><comment><USER9> From a recent bitcoin thread here (apologies to the original poster, I've forgotten who it was...)

Bitcoin is multi-level marketing for millennials.

</comment><comment><USER10> You don't really understand something if you can't explain it...

</comment><comment><USER11> My constructivist explanation is as follows (I imagine talking to my grandmother):

1/ You are currently using a bank where they increase your balance when you deposit money, decrease it when you withdraw money or transfer it to another account. This money is printed by the Treasury Department.

2/ Many people with interest in cryptography and general society issues started to think about how people could make direct money transactions without a financial organization acting as a broker and without another centralized organization printing the money.

3/ Now imagine you have digital money stored in your mobile phone, USB storage, or hard drive. If you send this money (represented as files) to someone, it is obvious you can copy this money and also send it to someone else. This is the DOUBLE (or multiple) SPEND PROBLEM.

4/ A lot of smart people tried to find alternative solutions to this problem without success.

5/ In 2008 an anonymous person called "Satoshi Nakamoto" published the first known solution to this problem (under certain assumptions):

5.1/ People share a common file where they append the new transactions observed. In this way they know if money sent from person A to B was already spent.

5.2/ Now we have the following problems: (i) if there are thousand of people doing transactions, they need to communicate the transactions to all members of the network and it takes time until it propagates to everyone, so A can send a transaction to B and very quickly send a transaction to C with the same money, when B knows about the second transaction, and C knows about the first, both know that A spent the money twice but they already accepted the transactions and (ii) they don't know for sure which one comes first.

5.3/ So, we should decide who can propagate the transaction to remove this problem and give an incentive to them. We will call them miners. The protocol agreement will send new printed money to these miners plus fees that the people can add as an extra incentive.

5.4/ To decide who mines transactions (we don't need to talk about blocks) miners should find a solution to a mathematical function that requires trying a lot of numbers, one by one. The one who invest in more powerful devices solves the problem faster and earn more money.

5.5/ Now we have an extra problem, what happen when many miners find the the solution to the problem and one have a transaction using the same money from A to B than from A to C? Miners keep adding transactions as fast as they can and the longest chain of transactions wins. There are some statistics that show that when we see a transaction from A to B we need to wait until the chain has a certain length to be sure than a transaction from A to C never happens. Every person (node) in the network checks the same protocol.</comment>


9 Mind-Bending Epiphanies That Turned My World Upside-Down - <AUTHOR> http://www.raptitude.com/2010/10/9-mind-bending-epiphanies-that-turned-my-world-upside-down/

<comment><USER2> Oldie, but goodie. Reminds me of Alan Watts.</comment>


Show HN: Comments by Top HN Posters Analysed by IBM's Watson User Modelling API - <AUTHOR> http://kolinko.github.io/um-hn/# <comment><USER5> This is hilarious!

I'm ranked first in:

      Cheerfulness   (Before or after morning coffee?)
      Orderliness    (Because of my 3rd normal form sock drawer?)
      Gregariousness (Before of after my 3rd beer?)
      Agreeableness  (I disagree! Watson needs debugging.)

I'm ranked dead last in:

      Imagination (No one I know could imagine how this could be.)
      Authority-challenging (My teachers & bosses would disagree.)
      Intellect (Before or after my mother dropped me on my head?)

<comment><USER6> This could make a good movie plot. The all powerful AI analyses your characteristics, gets it all wrong and assigns you to the wrong line of work (Harry Potter?) :)

<comment><USER7> This happens in the pilot episode of Futurama.

<comment><USER8> I thought the joke was that the AI was completely correct.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Somebody please make a browser plugin that uses this data.

I know the data isn't perfect, but it would be nice to be able see who in a thread is a top HNer and which character traits are outliers from the norm. You get insulted by somebody ranked low in Sympathy? No need to worry.

I'm serious. Somebody do this. It would look great on the résumé.

<comment><USER10> Or, we could learn to do brief history searches and check out past user comments if it really matters.

I'm generally pretty suspicious of any sort of computer-generated personality profiles, and though I understand the appeal to techies of empathy-as-a- service I don't think it's something we should consider relying upon.

Hell, half the fun in life is trying to figure out who other people really are.

<comment><USER11> Empathy-as-a-service is the killer app for Google Glass. Finally!

<comment><USER12> Somewhere, an ad executive is thinking up a commercial about humanizing glassholes...

<comment><USER13> I'm sitting on a sleepy but full Tokyo train and laughed out loud... those glassholes don't have a chance do they.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I wonder if this data might be more interesting on the bottom 100 users with a longevity > 2 years. And of course it would be interesting to see the differences between the top 100 HN users and the top 100 Reddit users. That might provide some insight into the echo chamber effect.

<comment><USER15> This place is just as much an echo chamber as reddit. Often moreso.

<comment><USER14> I agree with that, one interesting question though is can you use data like this to characterize the echos. If so, then one could point it at an arbitrary forum, score the top 100 posters, and pull out a 'flavor' for the forum. That would be kind of neat.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I don't know if anyone else noticed this, but @Tichy ranks first in Emotional range, Fiery, Prone to worry, Melancholy, Immoderation, Self-consciousness and 2nd in Susceptible to stress. I haven't read any of his/her comments but this makes me wonder how distinctly each of these measurements are calculated. Given another random set of 100 users, would one user come out on top in all of these categories too?

<comment><USER17> It makes me think that a few extreme posts (or even one) are weighing the results so heavily that they win in a bunch of categories.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I first read about the "Big 5 personality Traits" in this Economist article last year. Very interesting read on how some researchers were using Twitter writings (specifically some keywords) to gauge a person's personality - [http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist- explains/2013/05/ec...](http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist- explains/2013/05/economist-explains-21)

</comment><comment><USER19> One of the difficulties this kind of output has is that it runs very quickly into issues of semantics and model labeling.

We humans each build models kind of like these when we interact with one another, so when I ask somebody, "do you think <name> is an agreeable person?" and they reply "sure I think he is!" they're consulting that model to provide me an answer. Humans can even do a kind of pairwise sorting on that model and tell you if person1 is more or less agreeable than person2.

However, even if our individual models may differ a bit, and the results of these kinds of questions to each other might differ a bit, there's an inherent "humanness" to the results because people generally have a pretty similar semantic understanding of what "agreeableness" means.

However, what does Watson think agreeableness means? I have no idea, nobody really knows. Watson can't really explain it. All we know is that there's a model that produces a scored (and thus rankable output) when asked to score a corpus on that model and somebody somewhere labelled that model as the "agreeableness" model, perhaps based on some heuristics or parameters that were intended to define that notion.

It's thus _very_ hard for humans to trust scoring like this because when it doesn't make sense, it doesn't make sense for reasons that no human would have about the matter. For example, I would personally say pg is far more agreeable than I am, yet Watson scores our respective collection of comments exactly the same. I can't explain it, Watson can't explain it, and thus it feels "wrong" and now I can't trust the scores that Watson provides me.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, the real question this tool answers is not really "do you think X is Y", but "do you think X's comments show Y".

There's also a lack of documentation from IBM as to what the results mean exactly and how solid they are.

<comment><USER19> Well, in a sense, most of us all only know each other through our comments, and that's all we can ever base an assessment like this on. By proxy we have to assume that when people's inner thoughts leak out into the Internet on a forum like this (and in a sustained enough way to make them a top-100 karma earner) that their aggregate corpus of comments will be a reasonable insight into who they are.

So for all purposes that you, I or Watson can demonstrate, "do you think X is Y" and "do you think X's comments show Y" are functionally the same.

 _edit_

I just checked what Watson thinks are my needs. Apparently I don't have many, and everybody on HN has an extreme need for Challenge.

I almost feel like these results require a lot of interpretation, and that interpretation is about as reliable as a horoscope.

<comment><AUTHOR> > I almost feel like these results require a lot of interpretation, and that > interpretation is about as reliable as a horoscope.

I got a similar feeling from this - that's why I'd love to see some hard data behind the algorithm, or at least bits and pieces about the methodology used to arrive upon it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> You may want to consider using a stable sort to list the results. Users with equal scores are shuffled each time I click the topic name.

</comment><comment><USER21> Does not seem correct. The top poster for practicality has some useless thank you posts that provide nothing useful to the reader. StackOverflow even tends to lock questions that just get a lot of useless thank you comments to prevent putting useless information on the page for people coming to find reference material.

<comment><AUTHOR> There are three users which had a word count below the minimum recommended by Watson: whoishiring, peter123 and the one you mentioned - <USER2>

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm so incredibly grateful to have this user model [https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B4xNHXtCAAAoFsw.png:large](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B4xNHXtCAAAoFsw.png:large)

2144 days into this experiement that is HN, I couldn't ask for a better analysis of myself than through empiricism. My online self may not be my "true self" but it certainly represents a portion of who I want to be.

Now to contextualize, I wonder how we trend together and apart from the median user model as individuals and the community? The distributions seem interesting -- for example at a glance we appear heavy on challenge seekers but light on stability!

</comment><comment><USER23> I learned two things from this: I'm no longer in the top 100, and I don't recognize a lot of the names that are. I must not be spending as much time here as I used to.

</comment><comment><USER24> I expected Grellas to be there, and damn, the average score per comment he has is ridiculous.

Rayiner's doesn't make sense, though. An average of 0.75? So he has 57275 comments? Wow.

<comment><USER25> The average score is limited to recent comments (for some definition of recent, no idea about the specifics).

<comment><AUTHOR> The API we used has a limit of 0.5MB data, so pushed all the recent comments up to that limit.

<comment><USER25> I had assumed ameister14 was talking about the avg shown on user pages:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=kolinko](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=kolinko)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> These results look pretty spotty...the rankings seem about as random as picking out names from a Bingo machine. User ssciafani is among the top users in Cautiousness, Openness, and Adventurousness, Stability, and Practicality. Any "Yeah, user _johndoe_ is totally _some-characteristic_! revelations may be no more the intentional result of a sophisticated algorithm than the confirmation bias that many have when reading a horoscope.

</comment><comment><USER6> That's really cool. For some reason, the ranking changes every time I click on the same category. Edit: I just realised it's probably because the position of users who have the same score is randomised.

Also, why is Libertatea ([https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=Libertatea](https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=Libertatea)) ranking so high in many categories and yet he only has 5 posts?

<comment><AUTHOR> Libertatea's score was computed on a very low number of comments so it may contain large errors, pergaps we should remove him/her or show a warning there...

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I had a small giggle at my rankings, not going to lie.

Without a definition for what each of these things are, it's a little unclear what this is actually saying. I'm assuming there's some documentation on this somewhere?

<comment><AUTHOR> IBM's/Watson's documentation is really vague on what these things are, but there's some explaination to that in Wikipedia:

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

One thing that we're wondering is whether a score 1% means that it believes that the person has little of this treat, or that it has little proof to believe that the person has this treat. If I'm not mistaken it's the former.

<comment><USER28> Yes, former. It may be useful to translate these into other systems[0] so that you see what each end of the spectrum means.

[0] [http://similarminds.com/global5/g5-jung.html](http://similarminds.com/global5/g5-jung.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> That would be fun - to see if a person is INTF or ENTJ next to his/her nickname on the page :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> on "seeks love" and "values hedonism", there was almost no commenter above .5.

For "challenges authority" all visible commenters were above .95.

</comment><comment><USER28> I think that IBM Watson expects a general text no? I admit to having done some personality classification on OKC profiles (around 200) and found that disproportionately to the average population, there were a lot of people that were classified as caring, helpful, social, popular individuals.

It fits the medium. Just like one would expect HN comments to be full of more "head-y" discussions.

<comment><AUTHOR> I didn't find such expectation in the docs, and someone else posted this, where it says that researchers from IBM were using their tech to analyse tweets:

[http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist- explains/2013/05/ec...](http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist- explains/2013/05/economist-explains-21)

I'd assume that this might be the same algorithm, but I'm not really sure of that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I'm extremely relieved that sometime in the past few months I've dropped off the list.

In case you're wondering, IBM's BlueMix is a public installation of Cloud Foundry, which is an opensource PaaS. Disclaimer: I work on Cloud Foundry at Pivotal.

</comment><comment><USER31> This is interesting. On the visualization, though, I'm not sure what the purpose of the inner ring is (it just seems to chart the first entry in the group at the next level out, which doesn't seem to be particularly meaningful.)

</comment><comment><USER32> Very nice project, thanks for introducing me to IBM Watson. I will also play with it a little bit:) I don't know how it determines Openness and stuff, pasted one of my texts in there, it gave out 'interesting' results:)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, we couldn't find any proof that the results are meaningful in any way, but I think it's a fun tool nevertheless.

One thing I know for sure is that Watson doesn't recognise irony - I posted this poem and it was marked as "cheerful" and "optimistic": [http://bukowski.net/poems/a_smile_to_remember.php](http://bukowski.net/poems/a_smile_to_remember.php)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> The algorithm finds me fiery and prone to worry. Seems about right.

<comment> chris-laffra It also places you #1 for adventure seeking, which is fitting, considering your daily bike commute through New York City :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Are there any other services that offer similar functionality to the User Modeling API? I've come across a few Sentiment Analysis services, but nothing with this level of detail.

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

You can run MBTI albeit as 4 separate API calls.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> On an iPad I cannot click on anything above extraversion and need to reload to click something else.

Not sure about the results, I'm pretty sur I value liberty more than Watson thinks I do.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not so much about what you value, but what values you project.

<comment><USER35> It would be nice to see what comments it thinks lead to certain beliefs on its part, but I am pretty sure it needs some work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> It does not match current /leaders. Is it old?

<comment><AUTHOR> We made a mistake and published a list of top 100 commenters, not leaders. But we'll be updating this in a moment.

Sorry for the confusion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I love how everybody is high in self-expression. I'm not sure, though how cperciva ended up on top in need for harmony.

<comment><USER38> I think he plays violin so it kinda makes sense ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> On a related note, how does one get access to the leaderboard data past user #100?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's the leaderboard merged with 100 most commenting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Grellas is the ideal human ^^

<comment><AUTHOR> He's last on Cheerfulness :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> [Sorted by: Intellect]

 _31\. [0.95] whoishiring (threads) (about)_

Is this a Human? Must be well rounded !

</comment><comment><USER42> I wonder if this could be used to detect shills and astroturfers.

<comment><USER43> I don't think this kind of analysis would provide any insight there. A simple look at users who have high activity on certain topics would be a good first filter, though.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Any feedback? :)

<comment><USER44> I'd be interested to learn what some of the headings really mean. For example, the only listing I'm near the top of is "Trust" (I'm #4) but I don't really know what that means in this context. I had a quick look at the IBM docs but couldn't figure it out.

Selfishly, it would also be pretty cool to be able to select a person and see their rankings across the categories :-)

Oh, and your "top 100 users" link on the front page is broken as it's not an absolute link.

<comment><AUTHOR> \- top 100 users link - fixed, thanks

\- rankings across all the categories. good idea - shouldn't be hard to do, but don't have the time to implement it today :)

\- as for what the headings mean, from what I understand they are related to [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits) \- but yes, the IBM watson docs are very vague on this subject

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Gunna have to try this one :)

</comment><comment><USER46> whoishiring leads the "Artistic interests" section.

<comment><USER47> Definitely looks like context is lacking here in some respects. I found it interesting that 'whoishiring' "needs love" more than almost everyone on the list.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Cool app! IBM is in the process of significantly updating their documentation on User Modeling, but meanwhile, here are some basic descriptions of some of the traits, as well as links to some of the research behind the service.

User Modeling analytics are developed based on the psychology of language in combination with data analytics algorithms. User Modeling extracts three types of personal characteristics from the data a person generates in social media or within their written/digital communications: Big 5 Personality - This is the most used personality model that generally describes how a person engages with the world by the following five dimensions: – Openness-to-Experience - associated with curiosity, intellect, and an appreciation for art and adventure – Conscientiousness - associated with organization and industriousness – Extraversion - associated with positive and outgoing attitudes toward other people – Agreeableness - associated with compassion and cooperation toward other people – Neuroticism - associated with a sensitivity to negative emotions Each of the five top-level dimensions has six sub-facets that further characterize an individual at a finer-grained level. Basic Human Values - this model describes motivating factors that influence a person's decision-making. Our current model includes five dimensions of human values based on Schwartz's work in psychology: – Self-Transcendence - motivated by helping others – Self-Enhancement - motivated by increasing social status – Hedonism - motivated by pleasurable experiences – Openness-to-Change - motivated by experiencing new things in the world – Conservation - <USER3> by tradition and conformity Fundamental Human Needs - this model is based on Maslow's hierarchy of needs and Ford's work on Marketing and consumer-related needs modeling. It describes, at a high level, which aspects of a product will resonate most with a person. – Ideal - the person likes high-end, finely crafted products – Self-Expression - the person likes products that express their individual identity – Closeness - the person likes products that help them establish closer relationships with family and friends – Excitement - <USER4> person likes products that provide exciting, adventurous experience – Practicality - the person likes products that simply get the job done

For more detailed information about the research and technical background behind the User Modeling service, see the following: You read what you value: understanding personal values and reading interests Gary Hsieh, Jilin Chen, Jalal Mahmud, Jeffrey Nichols; CHI 2014. 983-986. Understanding individuals' personal values from social media word use Jilin Chen, Gary Hsieh, Jalal Mahmud, Jeffrey Nichols; CSCW 2014. 405-414 Recommending targeted strangers from whom to solicit information on social media Jalal Mahmud, Michelle X. Zhou, Nimrod Megiddo, Jeffrey Nichols, Clemens Drews; IUI 2013: 37-48 Modeling User Attitude toward Controversial Topics in Online Social Media Huiji Gao, Jalal Mahmud, Jilin Chen, Jeffrey Nichols, Michelle Zhou; ICWSM 2014\. Who will retweet this?: Automatically Identifying and Engaging Strangers on Twitter to Spread Information Kyumin Lee, Jalal Mahmud, Jilin Chen, Michelle Zhou, Jeffrey Nichols; IUI 2014. 247-256 KnowMe and ShareMe: understanding automatically discovered personality traits from social media and user sharing preferences Liang Gou, Michelle Zhou, Huahai Yang; CHI 2014. Identifying User Needs from Social Media Huahai Yang, Yanyuo Li; IBM Research Report. PersonalityViz: a visualization tool to analyze people's personality with social media Liang Gou, Jalal Mahmud, Eben M. Haber, Michelle X. Zhou; IUI Companion 2013: 45-46

</comment><comment><USER49> This makes me think that new "open source" fight in the AI future will not be about source code or patents but the corpus used in the training set.</comment>


Stephen Hawking to turn 70, defying disease - <AUTHOR> http://www.heraldonline.com/2012/01/05/3638890/stephen-hawking-to-turn-70-defying.html <comment><USER2> Hate to raise a cynical tone, but in all likelihood his his longevity is mostly due to him having money. I expect, that in most cases patients with similar motor neurone diseases, their money simply runs out--unable to afford ongoing medications, care and new treatments, they die from the disease they simply can't afford to treat.

<comment><USER3> >in all likelihood his his longevity is mostly due to him having money.

I think you mean "Socialized Medicine"

 _"I wouldn't be here today if it were not for the NHS," [Hawking] said. "I have received a large amount of high-quality treatment without which I would not have survived...."_

[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/08/12/stephen-hawking- ent...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/08/12/stephen-hawking-enters- us_n_257343.html)

<comment><USER4> Yea, you don't need money to be healthy in a civilized country. Someday, America might catch on, but I'm not holding my breath.

<comment><USER5> "Yea, you don't need money to be healthy in a civilized country."

You just need enough other people's money.

"Someday, America might catch on, but I'm not holding my breath."

Why is it that anyone with any kind of money that needs urgent care comes to the US? I will give you a hint: it's not because of nationalized health care.

Our system isn't perfect and is expensive, but in my opinion, it's the best in the world (in terms of quality doctors, surgery, and hospitals).

<comment><USER6> _Why is it that anyone with any kind of money that needs urgent care comes to the US? I will give you a hint: it's not because of nationalized health care._

Many of the inbound medical tourists to the U.S. are coming from countries that don't have nationalized health care or are coming because their nationalized health care system is paying most of the cost of their care and trip. Relatively few are buying their way into better care vs. a nationalized health system.

Also, the number of inbound U.S. medical tourists is around 70,000[1], while the number of outbound U.S. medical tourists is around 650,000[2] (surgery dominates). There are many factors involved here, but as a basic matter, it would be simpler to say that people _leave_ the U.S. for medical care much more than they visit for it.

[1] 2008 number: [http://www.forbes.com/2008/05/25/health-hospitals-care- forbe...](http://www.forbes.com/2008/05/25/health-hospitals-care-forbeslife- cx_avd_outsourcing08_0529healthoutsourcing.html)

[2] 2009 number: <http://www.tampabay.com/news/health/article1079824.ece>

<comment><USER7> It's quite regular that local media in Britain will report on a fundraising drive to send someone (often with a rare condition, sometimes not) to America for treatment because the NHS won't pay - here's an example just from today, where a family's trying to raise ~$100,000: <http://www.moorlandsradio.co.uk/2012/01/help-katie/>

It's not because our health service is poor - in fact, it's excellent for general healthcare and I literally trust it with my life. The country (as in you, me, everyone who pays taxes) sadly just can't afford to treat very expensive edge cases, or send people for highly expensive experimental procedures, without jeopardising the sustainability of the service for others. Conversely in America, if you have the money, you get the treatment.

<comment><USER3> In America, insurance companies call that an "experimental procedure" and they wouldn't cover it either.

Meanwhile for every case you can find for someone traveling to America, there can be an identical case found for someone traveling to Europe.

[http://www.kulr8.com/news/local/Cerebral-Palsy- Fundraiser-10...](http://www.kulr8.com/news/local/Cerebral-Palsy- Fundraiser-102670054.html)

<comment><USER8> > Meanwhile for every case you can find for someone traveling to America, > there can be an identical case found for someone traveling to Europe.

You've found 1, which hardly equates to "every".

Do you have any actual data? I'd be curious to see what the _real_ difference is between "them" coming "here" vs. "us" going "there".

<comment><USER3> Sure, check wikipedia on medical tourism. An order of magnitude more people leave the US than enter to seek medical treatment. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_tourism#United_States>

My point in finding one was that sensational stories about fund raising for medical treatment make easy news filler. Linking to any of them is meaningless!

America has a medicore health care system. We excel in some experimental treatments, and have some great medical centers for those with money.

Meanwhile we rank equal to Cuba on life expectancy [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expec...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expectancy)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've often wondered if his sense of purpose, and ability to continue working are what have contributed to his longevity. Certainly inspiring to see what he has accomplished in his lifetime so far.

<comment><USER10> My dad died of MND in 2003 after a fairly short length of time, somewhere in the region of 3.5 years after diagnosis. I put Dr Hawking's longevity at least partially to being happy to work completely in his brain. Conversely, my dad was a very phsyical person and always had some project to build on the go. When that was taken away from him he seemed diminished.

Incidentally, he did try to carry on coding using Dragon Dictate, but it was painful to watch. I wonder if speech recognition has come on any since then? Apple's Siri seems fairly remarkable although I haven't had a chance to use it yet. Is anyone on HN coding by speech?

<comment><USER11> I completed a large fraction of my thesis by speech, including coding and LaTeX. While there are tools to help with coding (there used to be many knowledgeable people at <http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/VoiceCoder/>, but I'm not up to date since my condition has improved) I wouldn't want to wish it on my worst enemy. I'm amazed that Hawking has te patience to function like that, he must be an extremely driven individual.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If you haven't seen it yet, his most recent show on the Discovery channel is incredible. It includes a lot from his previous writings but some new stuff too and it's all set to pretty stunning effects and a great soundtrack reminiscent of scifi movies from the 70s and 80s. You can check it out here:

<http://dsc.discovery.com/tv/stephen-hawking/>

and the whole series is on netflix. It's truly amazing. Don't miss it.

<comment><USER13> His discussions and examples for why we wont be able to travel back in time are perfect for explaining the concept for people. He manages to communicate such high level stuff in such a great way on that show (well, always, but the show is much more approachable to the masses).

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think it's a combination of top notch care and an engaged mind. Even the medical establishment is acknowledging the connection between state of the mind and health (placebo effect research).

On a lighter note, here is something the great physicist cannot fathom: [http://news.yahoo.com/women-mystery-british-physicist- hawkin...](http://news.yahoo.com/women-mystery-british-physicist- hawking-135814776.html)

</comment><comment><USER15> I did ALS research in grad school and his case seems to be an outlier. Generally ALS is late onset (55+) and rapidly lethal (<3 years expected survival). That being said, early onset cases are often slower to progress and if I remember correctly his onset was in his late 20s, which is very early. There are really no medications or treatments that are effective for ALS, no matter how much money you have.

</comment><comment><USER16> As a native South Carolinian, I encourage everyone to read the comments on the original article, and compare them in tone, content, and relevance to those posted on HN.

<comment><USER17> OK. Top-voted comments from the site:

1\. "...making a killing on hypothetical theories... pie in the sky science. I'm sick and tired of these theories... Lying to keep the global warming cash cow rolling..."

2\. "When Hawking stands at The Great White Throne Judgement and asks why he (Hawking) is being cast into the Lake of Fire, Jesus will tell him... _blah blah blah_ "

4\. "I think that Mr Hawking is going to be in for a big surprise when he is standing before the throne of God..."

Etc. etc. etc.

Comparing tone, content, and relevance, I'd say three to nil HN. Was that your point?

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> What this points out to me is how little we know about ALS/MND. The majority of those diagnosed die within three years, but a handful can survive for decades.

Do bulbar onset ALS patients live longer than limb onset? What about those with familial ALS? Were patients who die sooner exposed to an environmental trigger? ALS is significantly more common among military veterans than the general public - why, and is their survival rate better or worse than civilians?

I love that Dr. Hawking has survived so long. He contributes to awareness of ALS and gives patients hope. But I sometimes wonder if it's a sadistic, unrealistic hope and if his longevity decreases the urgency of the need for research into causes and treatment of a disease that is a death sentence for the majority of those diagnosed with it.

<comment><USER15> I can answer some of your questions. The longevity and age of onset of patients with familial ALS is partially dependent on the mutation they harbor. That being said, genetic background is an important contributor. Fortunately or unfortunately, familial ALS isn't common enough to have significant statistics on the matter. To my knowledge there is no solid proof that environmental factors play a role in ALS. I'm fairly certain some will be discovered, but to date specific factors that enhance or prevent ALS are not known. On the issue of veterans, it is thought that the enhanced physical activity may be the cause for the increased risk of ALS, though the increase is merely 2 fold and once again the statistics are poor. If I remember correctly, this increased risk was present for both combat veterans and those that didn't see any combat. Once again outcomes are identical with the civilian population.

I don't believe that his longevity decreases the urgency for research into the matter. However, compared with disorders such as Alzheimer's disease, cancer, and heart disease, which combined will affect some large percentage of the population, the 1:1000 lifetime risk for ALS makes it somewhat insignificant.

<comment><USER18> Thanks for answering my questions. While the lifetime risk of ALS is (relatively) low, I feel that its high mortality rate should increase the importance of funding research.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I wonder what his life would have been like had he not have ALS?

</comment><comment><USER20> Such a remarkable human being - I hope someone can help speed up his ability to communicate. If this does not happen, we may miss out on a lot of great wisdom Hawking has to share (during the [what is sure to seem like a] short remaining he has left).

</comment><comment><USER21> As a society we are lucky to have both his intelligence and patience for all these years.

</comment><comment><USER22> Has anyone proven that he has ALS? That is, are there proven genetic or other markers that can correctly diagnose the disease? For example does he have a defective super oxide dismutate or heme oxygenase one?

</comment><comment><USER23> It raises the age old question again. I sometimes think how people achieve so much.

May be being immobile saves his energy from distraction and helps leaves time to think about black holes.

<comment><USER24> I know it's going to be a very unpopular opinion here, but I find it hard to see the worth in thinking about black holes and other physics/astronomy questions.

Is the large hadron collider really worth the money?

Can someone highlight some real world advances that this sort of thing provides? eg will it make holographic TVs possible or hoverboards?

<comment><USER25> When the Queen asked Michael Faraday of what use his funny experiments with magnets would amount to, he is reported to have said - "Of what use is a new born baby?"

From another angle, during some collider hearings in congress, the physicist RObert Wilson was asked: "Did the collider have anything to do with promoting "the security of the country""? He replied "nothing to do directly with defending our country except to make it worth defending".

In other words, fundamental research has definite technological implications, but also just satisfying our curiosity about nature is reason enough.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> He's the intellectual version of Chuck Norris.

</comment><comment><USER26> He'll outlive us all lol

</comment><comment><USER27> Is there a good reason why he isn't the intense focus of technology dedicated to reading brain signals to action results through a computer + display?

There are already functional systems that paralyzed people have used to communicate through on-screen selections in that manner. Surely Stephen Hawking can acquire the technology and afford the upkeep. Hell, surely MIT or someone out there would build a custom rig for him and focus on constantly improving it to get more productivity out of his marvelous brain while he's still here.

</comment><comment><USER28> True, I think the Hawkman is awesome, but his longevity in the face of disease probably has a lot to do with him being a groundbreaking physicist whom society deems valuable enough to keep alive at great cost.</comment>


The Emperor's Old Clothes - <AUTHOR> http://zoo.cs.yale.edu/classes/cs422/2014/bib/hoare81emperor.pdf

<comment><USER2> 13 pages of text, no upvotes. Can someone please give a TLDR? First page was all intro. Scanned the last page; didn't get the point. I'll go back and read it, if the summary looks interesting.</comment>


Magnetocapacitance - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetocapacitance <comment><USER2> This sounds vaguely similar to how electret microphones work, where the sound waves compress a dielectric and change the capacitance. If you apply a bias beforehand to put some amount of charge q across the capacitor, q=cv so the voltage v measured accross it changes inversely with capacitance. This is probably best for capturing dynamics.

An alternative method is to make the device part of an oscillator where its capacitance modulates the frequency. This would be better for precision measurements on a slower timescale. I wonder how the repeatability would compare with a hall probe.

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting not heard of that before.

There's also - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetoresistance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetoresistance) along with the hall-effect, which are used for sensing magnetic fields.

This is quite a nice video of someone making a DIY hall effect sensor - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1eLp4xfrRo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1eLp4xfrRo)

</comment><comment><USER4> How it is being used in industrial products: [https://youtu.be/aW2LvQUcwqc](https://youtu.be/aW2LvQUcwqc)

<comment><USER5> Thanks for sharing - clear as mud now! ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Not tagged as a stub, but it sure could use some love. I wonder whether it's enough of an effect to be useful. Hall-effect sensors are all over in certain types of motors and encoders; might there be cases where they're not suitable and a magnetocapacitive effect would be applicable?

</comment><comment><USER7> This is related to the idea of the memristor [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor)</comment>


On Being Smart (2009) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://sma.epfl.ch/~moustafa/General/onbeingsmart.pdf <comment><USER4> I had the good fortune of having dyslexia and ADD before they tested these kinds of things, and eventually went on to become a high school dropout. Ultimately I went to university, got five degrees including a PhD from Yale. I published two papers in Nature journals now cited together over 250 times. One, a single author paper, overturned 10 years of high profile theory and originally caused a falling out with my advisor, a MacArthur fellow and one of the giants of Yale. Having grown up never feeling smart I was always intellectually humble and assumed I was wrong. I found my new theoretical discovery because I noticed an anomaly -- apparently others had encountered before, but swept it under the carpet. I on the other hand assumed I must have done something wrong and so I kept digging until I Worked out the answer. If you're too smart you can also be too confident in your own abilities to extrapolate and interpolate.

<comment><USER5> [http://msb.embopress.org/content/4/1/213.abstract](http://msb.embopress.org/content/4/1/213.abstract) for anyone else who is interested.

Funny, I think I remember reading this paper when I was playing with a-life around 2009.

How did this Yale giant respond when you explained your concerns? And after you published?

<comment><USER4> When I reported my findings to him he told me to stop what I was doing. I couldn't even get him to read the paper. This guy was a giant, and he completely dismissed it. And so I went out and got it published solo. About 8 months later I was doing a bioinformatics analysis on what they called junk DNA at the time. We came to very different conclusions about what we would find--my hypothesis was based on my research, his hypothesis on his research. When it was all done, I was right, and that work him up. This was a couple weeks before my dissertation defense and to be honest I wasn't even sure I was going to pass. When he introduced me he got up in front of the faculty and role a story of a 'boy who slated a dragon' and praised me for my intellectual courage and apologized. Unfortunately the damage was already done. I had been a Ronin for most of my academic career, still unformed, and not as brilliant at others. It would take me months to do what others could learn in days or weeks and I didn't want to risk a life of a low paying and money post doc and so I left academia.

<comment><USER6> What a shame. With that kind of CV, you could easily have jumped straight to staff scientist or possibly assistant prof by looking outside the Ivies, as informatics skills are heavily in demand now. Also, if you're willing to collaborate with wet-lab biologists, there are nearly limitless opportunities to easily keep funded and have the respect of your peers (again, because informaticians are really needed to analyze all the data that's being generated nowadays).

But I have heard that for people who did PhDs at an Ivy, they are often unwilling to look outside them, as if it were some kind of failure. I'm not sure if that applies to you, but I think it takes a similar form of humility to the kind described in this article to realize that you can do good science and make a good career for yourself without always publishing in top-tier journals and working at top 10 institutions.

<comment><USER4> I did try. I even applied to second tier Universities in Asia. It's really not that easy. It's a very very competitive market. When you graduate you're broke and you don't have a lot of money so you can't wait around. As well, universities take a percentage of your grant money so they prefer to hire researchers that require expensive equipment. Finally to get a faculty position, even at a third tier university, you're going to have to have a sponsor on the faculty. The more novel your research is, the less likely you're going to find someone who sees you as a collaborator.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> There's a lot here that resonates with me beyond matters of intelligence.

In my spare time I'm a contact juggler. If you don't know what that it is, it involves rolling balls around the body. David Bowie in Labyrinth is usually a good reference point.

And I'm good at it. I'm good at it because I've been doing it for nearly a decade and I've put in the hours. I don't think I learned particularly quickly, or even particularly well, but I stuck with it and worked hard to improve. I'm not shy about telling people that, but many still seem to assume it's some form of innate talent, no matter how much I reassure them otherwise.

It's as though people would rather accept their own status quos rather than believe that effort and commitment is enough to improve their lot. Yes, it might take years to reach a level of skill in a given discipline, but those years will pass anyway. Wouldn't it be nice to have something more to show for all that time than a depression on the sofa in front of the tv?

<comment><USER8> That's consistent with my experience as a musician. I'm no prodigy. I don't have a musican background. When I started out, I couldn't sing in tune and I couldn't clap in time. All I did was dick around on the guitar on and off for over a decade. I've gotten pretty good at it just by sucking at it for a long time, and reducing the suckage one little bit at a time.

Professional musicians simply do the same thing, but far more intensively, rigorously, systematically. Hours and hours of practice day after week after month after year.

I once transcribed a post I read about this called The Mundanity of Excellence, by Daniel Chambliss: [http://www.visakanv.com/blog/2014/01/the- mundanity-of-excell...](http://www.visakanv.com/blog/2014/01/the-mundanity-of- excellence-by-daniel-chambliss/)

EDIT: Also, to be fair, I think what stops a lot of people is– when they start out, they really suck, and they simply can't envision the path from sucking to being good. Because it involves many qualitative transformations. The mythologizing we do of successful people doesn't help. We get told this story about how all the people at the top one day discovered that they loved something so much that they wanted to work on it really hard forever. If this narrative changed, I think more people would get good at more things.

<comment><USER7> The learning period is a good point. Contact juggling has a rather cliff-like learning curve and many people don't progress because of it.

A supportive environment makes a world of difference. I hsf people around early on to who offered constructive advice and encouragement and that made all the difference.

<comment><USER9> > A supportive environment makes a world of difference. I had people around > early on to who offered constructive advice and encouragement and that made > all the difference.

One of my dad's greatest pieces of advice he gave me came as we drove back from a wrestling match I lost, like every single one before that one. As I hung my head in tired shame, he said, "people show more character in defeat than in victory."

<comment><USER10> If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster And treat those two impostors just the same;

Rudyard Kipling, If. [http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/175772](http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/175772)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The best thing I've ever read online about 'being smart' came from a Reddit comment:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/confession/comments/nxdzz/im_not_as...](https://www.reddit.com/r/confession/comments/nxdzz/im_not_as_smart_as_i_thought_i_was/c3d91jl)

<comment><USER12> While this is a good read. I think what differentiates the top 5% of the bell curve(people at MIT) in terms of success is probably different from what differentiates the rest of the bell curve.

For instance what accounts for the variation in play between a bunch of 7 foot tall basketball players is not what separates them from a gentleman of 5'5\. Most research backs this up. The gap in achievement between an IQ of 115->130 is far large than 145->160.

<comment><USER13> There was a study posted here recently that disagrees with you: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10488998](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10488998)

The summary is that very intelligent people do not seem to have any unique genetic or environmental factors that explain that, they just happen to be at the edge of the bell curve. This is not true of very unintelligent people; there are lots of genetic and environmental factors that can decrease intelligence.

From the abstract: "We found that high intelligence is familial, heritable, and caused by the same genetic and environmental factors responsible for the normal distribution of intelligence."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I actually don't think the divide is between smartness and hard work, it is between smartness and originality. Originality is the wedge and hard work is the sledge hammer. All smartness provides is a torch to find the wedge in the darkness of our ignorance.

<comment><USER15> This is actually closer to what Grothendieck writes in Recoltes et Semailles:

"Yet it is not these gifts, nor the most determined ambition combined with irresistible will-power, that enables one to surmount the "invisible yet formidable boundaries" that encircle our universe. Only innocence can surmount them, which mere knowledge doesn't even take into account, in those moments when we find ourselves able to listen to things, totally and intensely absorbed in child play."

[http://www.fermentmagazine.org/rands/promenade11.html](http://www.fermentmagazine.org/rands/promenade11.html)

<comment><USER16> Wow! I've been looking for an english translation of Recoltes et Semailles for a while. I see now it's easily reachable by google (oops), but still, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> All my life I heard from people "you're so smart, you have so much potential, but you need to try" while I failed through school due to challenges focusing, and, frankly, giving a shit. In the end, I carried this "you're so smart, but" attitude around with me to both my benefit and detriment.

I have no CS degree but have elbowed my way (often with a distinct lack of grace, in retrospect) into the industry as a software developer. I now somehow work at a place that prides itself on intense meritocracy, famous for its grueling elitist interviews .... and the impostor syndrome is intense. But when I look around, most of the people around me do not seem so much 'more intelligent' as 'more adapted for the school-grades / work-politics system' which the interview process / promo process selects for.

To me intelligence and smartness are clearly cultural phenomenon. Yes some people are more adapted to certain types of intellectual activity, but whether those things are 'smart' or not is questionable to me.

As a parent I often get frustrated with myself when I instinctually reward my children with comments like "you're so smart". Unfortunately they struggle with focusing, behavioural compliance, etc. in similar ways to me, while their intellectual and artistic curiosity is intense -- I know they have a long uphill battle ahead of them.

<comment><USER17> I should add that one of the most frustrating things for me is to stand in the microkitchen at work and listen to the (overwhelmingly male, white, middle class background) engineering/CS grads around me bitch about garbage worker strikes or unions in general, while they snack on organic chocolate and pat themselves on the back for having run the gauntlet of HS/university/interview- process. To me, the world of unskilled labour and precarious employment seems only a mis-step or two away...

<comment><USER18> it's possible, but let's not ignore the heritable / family aspect of this. In my family noone has done unskilled labor going back to 19th century at least and possibly earlier. So it's fair to say I am not in danger of that. But I agree with your point that a bit of compassion from those more fortunate wouldn't hurt

<comment><USER19> Absolutely not fair to say you're not in danger of some catastrophic life event that'll force you into unskilled labor.

<comment><USER18> the probability of me personally having to do unskilled labor is so excruciatingly low that we can ignore it for all practical purposes. Doesn't change the need for empathy, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> "Ignorance is bliss."

The older I get, the more wise I get, the more I believe in the above statement. As in, not having the mental capacity or brain-power to muse over inequities both in personal and worldly topics is a less emotionally affective position to be in. I grew up in a protestant Christian faith, and while I don't actively participate, I do reflect often on some of the teachings (mostly the Beatitudes) and literature, and only in my 20s did I realize that "Eating the apple from the tree of life" is pretty much a metaphor for our evolutionary development into consciousness, of "knowing right and wrong" as a species.

Intelligence? It's a curse as much as it is a blessing. Folks can disagree with that assertion if they'd like. From my personal studies in literature and philosophy though, I think it's a pretty common understanding amongst a certain tier of thinkers. My apology if I come off sounding a little elitist, but intelligence is a bell curve, and, to quote the famous _Demotivational_ poster, "Not everybody gets to be an astronaut when they grow up."[0]

[0]Link to photo I found via Google search: [http://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0535/6917/products/potentia...](http://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0535/6917/products/potentialdemotivator.jpeg?v=1414017238)

<comment><USER21> I will say too, that as I got older I bit more and more into "Ignorance is bliss" being a true statement. Knowing both good and bad results in many emotional responses. The problem is that emotional responses, when they are negative, are often perceived as bad. However, the past couple of years I've begun to flip that assertion by maintaining the idea that any emotion perceived is beneficial, valuable, and makes you feel alive. Feeling alive, in my opinion, is one of those ultimate gifts that a human can have. My conclusion is that, while ignorance is bliss, I would much rather feel both the power and beauty of the spectrum of emotional responses. They are equally valuable and enlightening.

<comment><USER20> Very nice insight, and I thank you for sharing. As a musician and writer, I've never really shied away from dealing with emotions, as they can influence so much in 'tone' (in the case of sound) or 'behavior' (in the case of fictional characters). You're right about emotions being valuable and enlightening, that's a nice way of putting it. Upon reflection, I think maybe what I was striving to convey is that even as a smart person, a caring person, and with time to think things through, there's still the reality of life to confront - as in, thought and good will alone can't change the world for the better. It's difficult trying to 'fight the good fight' (in whatever form it may be - <USER2> social interactions, actions with consequences, etc), and honestly, not very rewarding in a practical sense. I guess it's the burden for some to be borne many years after they're born!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> A physics professor in college used to say "learning is a spiral" \- you go around and around a concept a few times, getting closer to understanding each time. I quite liked that as a model for learning - don't get demoralized if you don't hit the target on the first pass.

</comment><comment><USER23> What I've noticed is that hard work doesn't bear the same fruit for everyone. I worked my ass off in university. I knew others who did too, but they accomplished far more with fewer mistakes. I've also met people who were dedicated in their studies and just seemed to hit the wall with grasping some concepts in math. It was really painful to see this, they weren't lazy or unmotivated, but they often had understanding that fell short of their enthusiasm. It's not just "hard work." Innate talent exists that cannot be compensated by effort, optimistic mindset etc.

<comment><USER24> agreed. take tesla for example:

""Before I put a sketch on paper, the whole idea is worked out mentally. In my mind I change the construction, make improvements, and even operate the device. Without ever having drawn a sketch I can give the measurements of all parts to workmen, and when completed all these parts will fit, just as certainly as though I had made the actual drawings. It is immaterial to me whether I run my machine in my mind or test it in my shop."

i'm betting practice/hard work didn't give him that ability. could you imagine trying to compete with him in school? good luck.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> One must be careful of conflating the distinct effects of expectations of intelligence and intelligence itself. The former exerts psychological pressure[0], the latter is a catalyst for success. It's often possible to have one without another.

[0] [http://web.stanford.edu/dept/CTL/cgi- bin/academicskillscoach...](http://web.stanford.edu/dept/CTL/cgi- bin/academicskillscoaching/why-does-the-duck-stop-here/)

</comment><comment><USER26> While the article was interesting, I wonder if the 50% of dropouts is really caused by people feeling like they are not smart enough. I've met quite a few people who dropped out of good PhD programs, but most of them dropped out because they felt like they weren't in love with research and didn't think it made sense over going into industry and making a lot more money. I met one person who got into a top 10 program but never intended to finish his PhD; he just wanted to get a free Master's.

On the other hand I also have heard from many that grad school is the first time many students have to see a therapist and deal with depression.

</comment><comment><USER27> It's funny how it seems that only really smart people do the hard work required for winning Nobel Prizes, Fields Medals and other such distinctions. Average people are just lazy, that's why they don't succeed!

<comment><USER28> I think you've missed that part

>for succeeding in graduate school

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I think that a large part of it are psychological / personality factors - <USER3> much pleasure do you find in thinking, learning new things, solving problems.

<comment><USER30> Fear takes every kind of pleasure. So the fear of not looking smart, not feeling smart, might be already enough to dislike certain kind of things.

But there's certainly also a difference in people without fear - like you said - how much they get a "kick" from learning new things.

<comment><USER31> I'd claim the fear can be just irrational. Maybe learned behavior, you we afraid of doing homework once. The next time you remember that experience and it becomes grueling experience. After some time you have learned to fear, but there is not really anything you are afraid off.

Or there is, but you don't know it. Humans are really good at inventing explanations for their feelings and believing those explanations.

I think just acknowledging that it's fear is good first step.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> We see so much of the smart vs hard work argument. It seems heavily biased towards the argument of hard work. But, I wonder if there a way to quantify and measure so that we might be able to get an objective argument?

<comment><USER33> As a concept, "intelligence" bundles together a huuge number of concepts. In my programming job, at different times I apparently must use different parts of this bundle to be effective; using useful parts at the wrong times can lower my effectiveness.

And a lot of it is sensitive to social context. In a culture which prioritizes ads over immortality research, massive intellectual potential is unrealized because bullshit jobs are alienating. Would you work harder to serve banner ads (which you likely block), or cheat death and usher a new era of human civilization? ([http://strikemag.org/bullshit- jobs/](http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/))

<comment><USER34> I like that. But he says a couple of dumb things. Like _" It's not entirely clear how humanity would suffer were all private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers, actuaries, ..."_ Sure, some of those jobs do seem to add no value. But be careful what you include in a BS jobs list, because if you understand why insurance is important then you might realize that actuaries do something kind of important.

And then there's this _"...success mobilizing resentment against school teachers, or auto workers (and not, significantly, against the school administrators or auto industry managers who actually cause the problems)..."_ because if those bad managers and administrators would just keep giving bigger raises the unions wouldn't have to shut down businesses and schools.

<comment><USER35> Graeber included a standard for bullshit in the article: does _the worker_ feel like their job is bullshit, _knowing what they do and what the output is_?

<comment><USER34> Ah yes. So actuaries feel like their jobs are BS even though they are sort of important. Oh well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I've read similar things before, and totally agree with them, but surely 'the ability to work hard and persevere' varies a lot from person to person according to genetics and environmental factors?

<comment><USER37> To persevere is not a static unchanging quantity in itself. Its something you build over time. You start with the bare minimum, and it gets stronger with every failure.

If you look Usain Bolt and think I could never undergo such a brutal training regime, you must know Usain Bolt couldn't either. It takes a lot of tiny little failures to build that kind of mental stamina.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> According to Dunning-Kruger effect, and expert should consider his accomplishments trivial in hindsight. Grothendieck and Gauss were mathematicians, not psychologists. It's likely that the predicate of the article is then completely wrong.

Then there is also the impostor syndrome, many students are likely to feel not smart enough.

And then there is the cultural taboo around smartness. Taking pride in ones ability is socially accepted as long as that ability is not intellectual. So in a way idea like this turns into twisted logic: "I'm smart, my laziness in college shows it." And now you get to do that sweet guilt tripping for feeling too smart. There is difference between pride and arrogance. So this self deprecation seems bit needless.

What if we don't consider pride as a sin, but as natural phenomena in range of human emotion. Maybe pride is inevitable for ego? Now if that is true, what should a good student to be proud of? What if being openly proud of your intellect is healthy after all?

<comment><USER26> Why would an expert consider his/her accomplishments trivial? I thought that Dunning Kruger just implied people who aren't good think they are much better than they are, but people who are experts would already know they are better than most.

<comment><USER38> Impostor Syndrome may be a better fit for that than Dunning Kruger: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> > `The brain is ultimately just a muscle. Make it stronger by working it out.'

I like the analogy that things are "muscles". It concisely captures various phenomena that I've observed: the brain is a muscle, willpower is a muscle, trust (in another person) is a muscle ...

<comment><USER40> Even more ultimately, muscles are brains.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> One more important thing to notice is, the illusion of 'smart', 'evil genius' or 'magic' appears from the fact that beyond a point of learning your skills grow exponentially in proportion to your practice/work. The initial grunt work, which is boring, tiring and mentally exhausting without offering much results is a right of passage you need to take reach those levels.

I've had this repeatedly told to me about how some person who was an perceived an idiot/slow mover has now suddenly become very talented, achieved much or gotten rich. Oh well, that's because all exponential curves look dead until they actually start to rise, and from there on they indeed look magical in their output.

</comment><comment><USER41> This looks like a re-hash of the findings published in a 2008 book by Malcolm Gladwell called "Outliers - The Story of Success". He's the one that made the 10,000 hour theory popular.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outliers_(book)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outliers_\(book\))

Its a #1 Best-Seller on Amazon: [http://www.amazon.co.uk/Outliers-Story- Success-Malcolm-Gladw...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/Outliers-Story-Success- Malcolm- Gladwell/dp/0141036257/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1447248863&sr=8-1&keywords=malcolm+gladwell+outliers)

</comment><comment><USER42> This broadcasts an encouraging message. While I still think actual success depends on a good deal of sheer luck, we needn't despair because we're missing some irreplaceable gift. Even in this respect, all humans are created equal.

</comment><comment><USER43> I posted this yesterday: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10539083](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10539083)

It seems timezones matter a lot. :)

<comment><USER44> If you haven't already seen it, here's an interesting article about ideal times to post to HN: [http://silverman.svbtle.com/the-best-time-to-post-on- hacker-...](http://silverman.svbtle.com/the-best-time-to-post-on-hacker-news)

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> "It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer". Albert Einstein

</comment><comment><USER46> There's a book called "Thinking, Fast and Slow" that mentions some of the concepts covered here.

</comment><comment><USER44> > The brain is ultimately just a muscle. Make it stronger by working it out

This seems like such an empowering way to look at learning, and one I think many of us are prone to forget. Even masters don't just arrive at their talent, they too have to work at it, over and over, day after day.

<comment><USER47> It is, however, also ultimately wrong to state the brain is "just a muscle". In "Make it stick" they mention some research into this aspect: practice of a specific mental skill has little influence on other mental skills.

As with all analogies it should not be taken too far.

<comment><USER44> Agreed, maybe it would be more clear to take out "just" and emphasize that the brain is a muscle.

> practice of a specific mental skill has little influence on other mental > skills

Care to elaborate on this? I'm trying to imagine what you mean here.

<comment><USER48> > emphasize that the brain is a muscle.

Instead, maybe emphasize that the brain _is similar to_ a muscle. Speaking metaphorically could be confusing to some.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How Subarus Came to Be Seen as Cars for Lesbians - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/06/how-subarus-came-to-be-seen-as-cars-for-lesbians/488042/?utm_source=quartzfb&single_page=true <comment><USER2> Hmm, can't speak to this cultural association# but in my experience, Subarus in the late-80's on the US West coast were these Japanese 4x4-only cars, arriving just before SUVs made it onto the scene. They've since become popular, practical, good-mileage vehicle if someone does mountain driving in winter. All-in-all, it was clever marketing on their part because the early days didn't have much advertising to speak of (and hence little/no-mindshare) but it's interesting to see one of the transitional steps (focusing on niche markets instead of competing with commodified-incumbents directly) needed to get from low-volume curiosity to mainstream brand.

# A stronger example of brand-to-culture association would be VW which, in my experience, is/was more strongly-associated with 60's counterculture.

EDIT: another article from 2016 [https://priceonomics.com/how-an-ad-campaign- made-lesbians-fa...](https://priceonomics.com/how-an-ad-campaign-made- lesbians-fall-in-love-with/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Car buffs/tweakers have an entirely orthogonal impression of the Impreza WRX series</comment>


Spotify's dangerous game - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/p/6c41d6f0b27b

<comment><USER2> I think it's unfair to blame Spotify in this situation. The labels set the asking price and Spotify either chooses to pay it or have no music to legally stream. As a service Spotify is a fantastic service, since it debuted here in Australia I've barely downloaded music in part because I pay $12 per month for on-demand music and don't need to download.

If Spotify were benefiting from the extremely low royalty payments, then maybe I'd side with the argument Spotify is taking artists for a ride, but the matter of the fact is Spotify are not profitable whatsoever. This amazing service is operating at a loss and has been for years now. If artists want better payouts maybe they should lobby their labels to do so.

A service like Spotify costs a lot of money in terms of bandwidth and infrastructure to operate. Storing and streaming music isn't a trivial thing, the costs of operating the service are a massive percentage of Spotify's monthly expenditure fees. It's not costing the artist money to put their music on Spotify, it's costing Spotify money to put an artists music on their platform and allow others to listen to it. The royalty amount might be low, but make no mistake, the artist is still getting a better deal than Spotify currently is.

The only people currently winning out in the online music space are Apple and music labels. Services like Spotify and artists themselves are being shafted and have more in common than they think.

<comment><USER3> I think the problem is that people are looking at Spotify as a replacement for album sales, when realistically Spotify is a replacement for listening to music from torrents, YouTube, or Grooveshark. Album sales are a lost cause. If Spotify disappeared, the situation for musicians would not change. Right now, Spotify makes a convenient scapegoat because they are popular and don't pay much, but they are not the cause of the problem. I'm sure many people at Spotify want to help musicians get exposure.

To put this in perspective, $20 is a ridiculous amount of money compared to traditional record contracts, but after administrative and promotional fees were extracted, the classical record contract could often cost musicians money. The recording industry has been preying on musicians for years, but music fanss have been more than willing to pay their favorite bands for merch or buy expensive concert tickets for a live event. Ticket scalping is booming.

There are legitimate revenue streams available to musicians, but pay-per- listen is not going to be profitable.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not true that album sales are a lost cause. Look at Bandcamp -- musicians made $2.5 million via Bandcamp over the last 30 days. What's changing is the model. No longer is it "pay a set fee to listen." Now it's "support the musician directly."

<comment><USER3> Bandcamp is a good service too, but there's no way it will completely overtake the place of cheap streaming that doesn't make anyone a lot of money. I agree that direct support is the way to go, but there's a place for both models.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Missile Command in less than 1k of JavaScript - <AUTHOR> http://js1k.com/demo/657

<comment><USER2> The whole of the js1k contest has been fascinating to watch. Some truly amazing demos. Some of my favorites so far:

3d terrain: <http://js1k.com/demo/448>

pulsing beams: <http://js1k.com/demo/171>

heatmap: <http://js1k.com/demo/156>

DOM3d: <http://js1k.com/demo/326>

What I really like are the tweet-sized entries though. So much so in fact that I'm donating a copy of JS:TGP as a prize for the best <=140 byte entry :)

Here are my entries to date: [http://www.puremango.co.uk/2010/08/some- tweetable-js1k-demos...](http://www.puremango.co.uk/2010/08/some-tweetable- js1k-demos/)

</comment><comment><USER3> The real life US missile defense systems was pretty awesome - particularly the Sprint missile (0 to Mach 10 in 5 seconds!):

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprint_%28missile%29>

Video of a Sprint intercepting a RV:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZZV464z9g8>

<comment><USER4> Incredible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It was recently updated (colors and anti-missile-spam feature):

<http://js1k.com/demo/670>

Also cool to see other HNers participating (I made two 1K demos and one tweet).

Some of my favorites (not mentioned yet):

Wobbling tunnel: <http://js1k.com/demo/15>

Quaternion Julia raymarcher: <http://js1k.com/demo/49>

Twister: <http://js1k.com/demo/213>

3d snowman: <http://js1k.com/demo/224>

Hypnotic patterns: <http://js1k.com/demo/266>

Cute cartoonish platformer: <http://js1k.com/demo/635>

</comment><comment><USER6> Some pretty impressive demos there and I like the HTML5 buzz too, but, as much as I dislike Flash, its still a bazillion times faster on most browsers at the moment. It'll get there in time though.

<comment><USER7> You may like these AS3/Browser JS benchmarks: <http://jacksondunstan.com/articles/712>

<comment><USER3> Those tests don't seem to include anything graphical - Flash has a lot of higher level graphics stuff that you would have to implement yourself if you were using Canvas.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I made a neat roguelike in JS last week but couldn't fit it in under 4K :(

<comment><USER9> I made a truly marvelous proof of Fermat's Last Theorem in Javascript. 1k is too small to contain it.

<comment><USER10> window.location='<http://www.jstor.org/pss/2118559>;

1k?

<comment><USER9> If you allow that kind of thing I can make some _excellent_ games in a few bytes of Javascript!

<comment><USER8> I bet you can't make Duke Nukem Forever in JS that way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I miss the dew-dew-dew-dew sounds, lol.

</comment><comment><USER12> Not Quite Missile Command :)

I know it pretty well as I'm friends with Bill Carlton - the guy that's tried to beat the Missile Command high score a few times. The game isn't as straight forward as you might think, there's a game crashing bug for instance which has burned Bill twice now at 40 hours+

<http://www.highscoremovie.com/>

Watching Missile Command is pretty fascinating. I watched Bill's last attempt live as it streamed it on Justin.tv</comment>


Nextcloud 9 does their 2nd release with iOS client and theming - <AUTHOR> https://nextcloud.com/nextcloud-9-update-brings-security-open-source-enterprise-capabilities-and-support-subscription-ios-app/ <comment><USER2> Out of curiosity, how are they handling:

>Automatic uploading of images taken with the phone camera

Is it the locations services workaround thing?

<comment><USER3> > Is it the locations services workaround thing?

That's correct.</comment></comment>


What's your favorite OS feature of all time? - <AUTHOR> http://redmondmag.com/articles/2011/01/25/10-great-features-in-10-different-oses.aspx

<comment><USER2> My favorite is X11's select-to-copy, middle-click-to-paste feature. It bewilders me that this isn't standard on all platforms. It only takes two simple clicks to copy and paste, yet some people find it unintuitive (or even downright hate it). I think it's a huge time-saver.

<comment><USER3> This was instantly what came to mind for me, followed by tab completion in the shell (expanded by the bash-completion package to become utter perfection).

<comment><USER4> Tab completion is a good one! According to Wikipedia, "one of the first examples appeared in the Berkeley Timesharing System for the SDS 940" (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command-line_completion>).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I knew they wouldn't have mentioned my two favourite Amiga OS features: Pre- emptive multitasking and the Workbench screen model. At a time when PC users were still struggling with blocky DOS screens, the Amiga offered a virtual desktop type environment through workbench screens (which could be dragged up and down over each other or flipped backwards and forwards) and proper multitasking meaning that things in the background screens would carry on running.

The other OS feature is one that I only started playing with a couple of years ago on the ZX Spectrum. The ZX Spectrum has a fairly unique way of drawing the screen in monochrome 256x192 pixels and a 32x24 8x8 pixel colour attribute cell system. Ignoring the monochrome (which was what I used to use in the 80s) and manipulating 8x8 cells directly means that the entire screen is represented by 768 bytes of memory. This lets me play around with colourful 3d in ways I could only imagine as a kid. Sad, I know, but I'm just a big kid in the end.

<comment><USER4> Amiga is one of the big OSes I never got a chance to play with, though I know it had some innovative features and very loyal users.

Other than finding an old Amiga, is there a practical way to give it a try today?

<comment><USER5> You'll need an emulator called UAE (<http://www.amigaemulator.org/>) or a port like WinUAE (which comes with a frontend and is much easier), a Kickstart file for the right system (Kickstart is the name for the Rom and varied from Amiga to Amiga) and some floppy disk images for the games themselves. There's a WinUAE guide here: <http://www.tweakguides.com/Amiga_1.html> and a more general beginner's guide here: <http://cpc464.back2roots.org/menu.htm>

It's very different to modern OSes if you don't tweak around but as a modern alternative the Icarus AROS distribution (<http://www.icarosdesktop.org/>) provides a modern continuation of the Workbench experience.

<comment><USER4> Outstanding. I will give this a go ASAP.

PS: I'm the author of this article. Had a great time thinking about all the fun systems I've played with over the years and researching their history.

<comment><USER5> Don't get me wrong, it's a good article and I enjoyed it. Props for mentioning BeOS, $deity bless her and all who sail in her ;)

<comment><USER4> No worries. I love the feedback. Fodder for a second installment? Keep the ideas coming.

<comment><USER5> Ok, in no particular order:

* Built in BASIC on the Commodore PET

* Folders in MS DOS (CP/M didn't have them)

* The trashcan in Macintosh System 6

* The start bar in OS/2

* I can't think of a single unique thing about Atari TOS

* The stability of Windows 2000 (compared to 9x and NT)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm not sure how we want to define "OS feature", but Spotlight is amazing.

</comment><comment><USER7> package managers like Apt and Arch Linux's pacman.

<comment><USER8> Absolutely. "Oh, I need <insert obscure file> to compile this?" apt-get and 15 seconds later, I'm good to go.</comment></comment>


The Company That Invented the iPhone in 1990 - <AUTHOR> http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/08/general-magic-oral-history-of-the-influential-tech-company.html <comment><USER2> People like to point out how great the iPhone was, therefore, that's why it succeeded but the brilliance of the phone was the tie to the phone companies and the continued improvement by apple.

Magic's big problem was that it did not have a revenue model. Engineers like to point to great gadgets and products but if the products can't be monetized then don't expect them to be around for long.

Steves brilliance was that he was able to monetize a gadget from the start. The first iPhones were good but they would have failed had they not been paired with an affordable service. Had people had to pay for the phone first then the iPhone would have failed.

<comment><USER3> When the iPhone came out it was $600 for the phone, plus a 2 year contract, at&t only..

<comment><USER4> There was a loophole. Apple sold them at their stores with an (iTunes?) activation procedure. You could (and I did) buy the phone outright and never activated with AT&T. I just used a local GSM sim. Of course the visual voicemail never worked, but a small loss.</comment></comment></comment>


Twitter-bootstrap-rails pipeline - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/seyhunak/twitter-bootstrap-rails/

<comment><USER2> I've been happily using:

<https://github.com/thomas-mcdonald/bootstrap-sass/>

Is it basically the same, just using Less instead of Sass?</comment>


Tesla boom lifts Norway's electric car sales to record market share - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-norway-autos-idUSKCN1RD2BB <comment><USER2> This is a very oddly positioned story. The Nissan Leaf "lift[ed] Norway's electric car sales to record market share" before Tesla's Model 3 surpassed the Leaf in sales.

The article seems to be making out that Tesla have been the cause of the record EV sales in Norway. In actuality, Tesla have recently become the most popular EV there, but EV sales were record-breaking before that.

<comment><USER3> Tesla is the cause of the current record sales of EVs in Norway, per TFA;

> _In 2018, Norway's fully electric car sales rose to a record 31.2 percent > market share from 20.8 percent in 2017, far ahead of any other nation, and > buyers had to wait as producers struggled to keep up with demand._

> _The surge of electric cars to a 58.4 percent market share in March came as > Tesla ramped up delivery of its mid-sized Model 3..._

30% -> 60% is no small feat, and is due to the Model 3 availability, and the more widely accessible price point of TM3.

IMO the Leaf is a compromise car you choose in order to get an EV, whereas the TM3 is a better car in almost every way than anything else on the market, which also happens to be EV.

Although many of its advantages are made possible by being EV, they are not _inherent_ advantages of being EV. That is to say, being EV is necessary but not sufficient to built a car with the myriad advances of the TM3.

<comment><USER4> Tesla performs this stunt constantly. What they do is they don't deliver any cars for months at a time, whether because they can't or choose not to I don't know. Then they dump all the backorders on some small nation all at once and put out a press release about how they are the best-selling car in that place because they recognized a year of sales in a single month.

<comment><USER3> March was crazy - over 5,000 TM3s registered.

Versus 705 TM3 registrations in May, 424 so far in June.

YTD is ~8,000 TM3 vs 3,700 Leaf.

<comment><USER5> But total is ~8k model 3 VS 54k leaf. People wanting a leaf could already buy one, while model 3 customers could only preorder. So these stats over a short timeframe only tell us that newer models sell better and that delivery of preorders skews the stats massively.

<comment><USER3> Now you're comparing total lifetime sales numbers for a model car that just started shipping in a market this February with a model that's been shipping since, what, 2010?

Of course there's nothing stopping Nissan from introducing a new upgraded Leaf in 2019. Maybe they did?

<comment><USER5> > Of course there's nothing stopping Nissan from introducing a new upgraded > Leaf in 2019. Maybe they did?

Yes they did. And it starts shipping to european customers this summer as per <1>. So you're comparing preorder shipment numbers for tesla model 3 with previous gen leafs when a model refresh is coming and the new model can actually already be preordered. And the leaf still is not far behind in May.

<1> [https://europe.nissannews.com/en- GB/releases/release-90b1ce8...](https://europe.nissannews.com/en- GB/releases/release-90b1ce83155c6b12ec5c018c9a0239df-nissan-announces- leaf-3zero-and-leaf-3zero-e-limited-edition-with-higher-output-and-longer- range-2)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Well done, Norway! If only the rest of the world would follow with the same pace. At least rich countries like Denmark, Switzerland etc

</comment><comment><USER7> April story.

<comment><USER8> Musk tweeted about it 20 minutes ago, which is probably why it's here now.

[https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1138136540096319488](https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1138136540096319488)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Meanwhile, France just decided that electric cars must be producing an artificial soud out of security.

<comment><USER10> Noise makers are being added by law lots of places for good reason, but that's a bit off-topic isn't it?

<comment><USER3> It's somewhat on topic as it reduces the desirability of an EV doesn't it?

IMO, they should require _either_ a noise maker, or a sufficiently advanced pedestrian collision avoidance safety system.

I would think that at the speed and in the scenarios a noise maker would help, a pedestrian safety system should be highly effective.

<comment><USER11> Systems designed to prevent cars hitting pedestrians are not designed for extremely low speed environments where these noise makers are most effective. Noise makers make no difference at highway speed, and in examples I've seen they aren't required at those speeds anyway. But they fix electric cars to not "sneak up" on pedestrians in these low speed environments.

At 3mph your car can very easily knock me down and crush me if I don't hear it coming, but designing software to recognise that it's going to collide with me, and not pass harmlessly a few metres away (a routine event you don't want the AI to freak out over) is really hard.

These low speeds are correlated with environments where it's much harder for a machine to intuit what's going on. Consider a typical open air car park next to a Walmart. A pedestrian is in view, then vanishes, the driver selects reverse - are we going to hit the pedestrian? Where did they go? The driver knows, because they have relevant experience, that the pedestrian is between two other parked cars, and won't be struck by reversing, but how can our AI figure that's where they went?

<comment><USER3> Definitely this has nothing at all to do with highway speeds. We're talking parking lots mainly.

I don't see the need for intuition. What's the stopping distance at 3mph? Less than 1 foot with full pre-charged braking I'm sure. An effective system should be able to see a pedestrian 6-12" from the car in the direction of travel, and stop on a dime. At these speeds a false positive isn't itself a safety risk, although of course you would seek to minimize them.

It goes without saying the system will not be _perfect_. Neither are noise makers. I see no reason why such a system couldn't be made that is more effective than fake engine noise.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Keras plays Snake - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/bitwise-ben/Snake <comment><USER2> This has me thinking about taking our new powerful AI models and applying them to much simpler problems. And then, making the problems much harder than humans could do. Why not two snakes and two food dots. Or 2*n snakes n food dots on massive higher dimensional boards.</comment>


Cssdeck | Single Element Pure CSS MacBook Pro - <AUTHOR> http://cssdeck.com/labs/single-element-pure-css-macbook-pro Really impressive !
A macbook pro created with a single element.<p>What's your think about ? <comment><AUTHOR> On chrome it looks amazing ! What's your thought about it ?</comment>


Ask HN:Do you have a hack that helps you discover the best movies/books/music? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Heh, one of my personal "best" movies is Plan 9 from Outer Space... With that, here's my trick to find books/movies/music in more specific (or somewhat peculiar) genres: look for reviews or go shopping for the ones you already like/have.

IMDB has related movies/suggestions as well as Amazon (read the comments also, there might be more mentioned.)... sometimes you find other gems along the same line you were thinking.

Look at the production company, director, author and see whatever else they are attributed to.

One place I can recommend to finding a good movie blind is looking through the "Criterion Collection" videos and DVDs (Hulu has many of em, but not all), which is like the ultra-fan special edition of classic films, most of those are notable for some reason or other.

Lastly there have been several threads here on great books movies, do some searching and you will find em.

For music (besides amazon) - if you like particular genres check out some streaming radio stations - i.e. for the jazz fan Play Misty For Me radio or Luxuria... There's a streaming station for just about any interest. Shoutcast is a good place to start hunting for streaming stations.

</comment><comment><USER3> My "hack" is to ask strangers the following questions:

"I'm going to watch a movie tonight, what's a really good movie that I probably haven't seen."

This works best with strangers or people you've just met. I find that people who know me always recommend movies that I've either already seen, or decided that I don't want to see. If the stranger has any affinity towards movies, they can almost certainly come up with a gem that you've never heard of.

I discovered this works when I asked this exact question of someone on a whim and they recommended "Castaway on the Moon". It was a darn good movie, that I never would have found/watched on my own. I've since asked this question of all sorts of people with great results.

</comment><comment><USER4> Before the Kindle came out I would read the covers of books of people sitting opposite me on the Tube. If it looked interesting I got a copy. The only major fail I remember was Dan Browns The Davinci Code.</comment>


A Princess Is Making Google Forget Her Drunken Rant About Killing Muslims - <AUTHOR> https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/889kyv/a-princess-is-making-google-to-forget-her-drunken-rant-about-killing-muslims <comment><USER2> I support this right. It is a fundamental human right. With cameraphones everywhere the space around us is becoming polluted -- panopticonic -- in many senses.

Pair this with a cultural climate who's standards are changing so quickly -- anyone can be taken out of context.

Everyone get's angry when "an elite" does something ... well they are still human. My hope is that they make this process easier so that every human being can enjoy the freedom of not having their life documented and observed at every moment.

<comment><USER3> It's only a right if it applies to everyone. Also, there should be certain classes of things that one _can't_ erase that way. Should a convicted pedophile have the right to scrub the internet of references to their crime? What about a murderer? The idea is a lot easier to swallow if it's only related to things the person said.

<comment><USER4> >Also, there should be certain classes of things that one can't erase that way. Should a convicted pedophile have the right to scrub the internet of references to their crime? What about a murderer?

No, but doing that would compel law enforcement agencies to expunge all public records and the news media to erase all relevant content related to a criminal matter. No one is suggesting the right to be forgotten is or should be that extreme. As mentioned in the article, there already _are_ certain classes of things that one can't erase away, notwithstanding the fact that removing something from Google is not equivalent to removing it from the internet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's not really down to Google, it's down to the European 'right to be forgotten' law.

The BBC once posted a list of their articles which had been delisted on google:

[https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/internet/entries/1d765aa8-600b-4...](https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/internet/entries/1d765aa8-600b-4f32-b110-d02fbf7fd379)

A Guardian article about the BBC list:

[https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jul/01/bbc- wrong...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jul/01/bbc-wrong-right- to-be-forgotten)

Seems to me it's a boon for corrupt politicians and career criminals, on that basis I do not support the law.</comment>


iPhone crypto hid al-Qaida link to naval base shooting, AG fumes - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/05/feds-want-apple-to-weaken-crypto-after-al-qaida-ties-found-on-shooters-iphone/ <comment><USER2> Why not the opposite take: take the inability to identify the threat with all the privacy invasion they have a right to so far, as a rational reason to revoke those?

<comment><AUTHOR> I had the same thought. They talked about how for months before the shooter arrived in the US he was a member of AQ, but they seemed to have no idea and welcomed him onto a military base. Maybe it isn't Apple's fault for not revealing their own intelligence failure sooner...</comment></comment>